Untold Scenes Of A Love That May Have Been False

From the darkness of a quiet rooming house, in a small city on an island someplace in the pacific, comes the soft, sweet whisper of a woman’s voice.  They lay naked together, sat up in each other’s arms; a single thin white sheet covers them. The outlines of their legs and hips and her arm across his waist are like hills of a rolling desert or barren canyon, left after a small snow fall, in another place far away. She lifts her head for their eyes to meet. She tells him she loves him. He kisses her but saves his response. Their skin glistens with sweat against the moonshine. The only window of their room is open. She slips from his arms and leaves the bed to stand by the window. He follows her, wraps his arms around her stomach from behind and holds her. She squeezes his embrace and scans the stars. His eyes are on the footprints left in the rain-damp dirt road below �" small fingers of steam rising from the humidity that remains.

            Aren’t they beautiful? She says of the stars.

            He dismisses this.

            I love you. He says.

            She drops her head and the trace of a smile curls from a corner of her lips and then falls away.

            You know that don’t you?

            I know

            I want this more than anything Aliana, I do

            Emilio, She sighs, there is so little that you’re afraid of in this world yet you’re full of hesitation now! You have been since we left Cebu. I could feel it.

            Aliana �"

            Emilio, turning to face him, everything is going to be fine Emilio.

            Aliana. Have you not a clue what we’ve done? Have you no remorse?

            She shoves him onto the bed and smacks him in the face and her finger slices like a knife through the air and stops just before his turned cheek.

            You need to get it through your thick skin, Emilio �" it’s done.

            Calmly, he takes her hand by his and eases it behind his neck. She climbs onto his lap and straddles him.  They sit there on the side of the bed like this, bare, each trying to interpret the others’ glassy brown eyes. With her other hand she reaches down, beneath, between. Keeping their gaze, she grabs what’s there and begins stroking slowly and squeezing and loosening and pulling and tightening her grip.

            You need more, says her breath and her voice and her warmth and her wetness.

            Baby, he says.

            She adjusts her hips and scooches up and then begins to gently lean back, thrusting down and inward, hard and low. Her hips draw ovals in his lap and rock forward and backward, tight and smooth. A breath. Another. She exhales. He inhales.

            Aliana

            She tosses her head back toward the window behind her and rocks like a saw carefully and roughly cuts down a tree. The bed creaks. Relaxing his eyes, shut in defeat, he whispers.

 

            Alright Aliana… but when you’re father �"

            Keep my father off your tongue while I’m screwing you, Emilio

            When he comes…

            He’ll never find us, Emilio

            …He’ll kill me.

           

            They f**k themselves to sleep.

 

            Three hundred mornings later a bloody sun rises from the pink lips of the horizon, delivering it from where it came.    

            The child whimpers and gags in its fathers hard hands but doesn’t cry. Blind and restless is the boy. The father sails it to the harbor of its mother’s arms. They look at one another. They smile but the child can’t see this. They kiss his forehead but the child only feels a touch �" a push above his eyes. In twenty-five years of touches and kisses, these ones will not be remembered.

            He’s perfect, Emilio. The mother says. The bulb of a tear races down her cheek for the boy but is brushed away by the back of the father’s fingers. She looks up and through her blush and sweat and salt-swollen eyes, smiles the widest, happiest smile.

            He is amazing, Aliana. With your beautiful eyes and my handsome looks

            She laughs through the liquid and the grin.

            Emilio kisses the spot on her cheek where the tear had been wiped away and climbs into the hospital bed beside his love.

            Aliana �"

            I know, she says.