Lou Milner - The End ?

The End ?

by Lou Milner

"Talk to me," she said, rolling over on her side away from him. "Tell me a story."

She was in love with his voice. Cloaked in grey velvet timbre, he began:
Like a log freed from a boom, causing ripples in a dead-calm sea, he saw her, floating peacefully, ethereally: arms spread, legs limp, eyes closed. Behind the eyes, dreams perhaps. Dreams of days beyond and before.

She was lolling to and fro between the tides. Her mind in flux. Always wishing she were somewhere else, with someone else. And so she traveled. Forward and back.
He too drifted, momentarily, and gently tugged her long, sandy rope of hair, as though changing tack before continuing:
What was this mystical ability of his to know her mind? The mind she did not seem to grasp herself. It was at first enchanting to be understood so intimately; later, distressing. She felt naked, public, exposed; and longed again for privacy, aloneness, solitude. No one should know another the way he knew her.
He stopped. Inhaled her lemon-orange scent. And with his manicured index finger, plied the arcs of her ear, her nape, her shoulder. She angled her head, slightly, toward him. "Is that what you think?"

"It's what I know. Is this new?" said he, referring to a never-before-spied mole, so tiny a less-sighted man would need a magnifier. She herself, bending and twisting, was unable to catch sight of the new "this."

"That's not really a story, and stop trying to make me break it off. If you want out, simply say, 'Alisha, I'm sorry, but I must away.' "

A disturbingly heavy silence blasted the air between them.

She turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees to meet him face-on."Alisha ...." he recited.

Suddenly she hated the texture of his voice, and needed desperately to feel the fervor of his yesterday words.

The End?