6. Journeys
I woke prone in the v-berth cabin, in the bed Callie and I made together yesterday, Callie lying on her side next to me, one of her hands on my back, breathing deep and slow, her long lustrous wavy hair spread on both sides of her, soft and flowing, but it seemed like mostly on me. It smelled wonderful and she was so beautiful, it was like waking from a good dream to a better one. I couldn't remember anything of last night beyond when I adored her underwater, even after spending a couple minutes trying (not) to. It was like something dim in peripheral vision, something I could just perceive the outline of if I didn't look directly -- focusing just made it go away. And there was also something that told me I didn't need to remember right now, that everything would be fine if I just let it unfold in its own time. But it was clear that Callie had established something more like control over my body and mind than I would've thought possible. I remember how Mari and Sati tried ... I hadn't really trusted either of them but I did trust Callie, the love of my life. I let it go and rolled out of bed, found a swimsuit, walked through the cabin and the galley, where Mariano was chopping vegetables. He seemed a little surprised -- and relieved -- to see me.
"Can I help?" I asked.
"No, I'll do breakfast," he said, and I nodded. It was early morning, maybe 6:45 AM, as cool out as it would be today. There was A/C on low in the v-berth so it was cooler than it might've been otherwise, but here in the saloon there were only a couple small fans.
"Callie wants to eat at 7:15," Mariano said as I started up the companionway.
Topside, the deck and rails and furled sails were slick with dew, an evaporative haze all around, the water dead flat, a few fish breaking the surface the only motion or sound. I hurdled the transom and went deep.
"... we find [the study of physical phenomena's] noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments."
-Alexander von Humboldt
I swam. Hard and long. Maybe a kilometer and then back again, feeling like I could've gone harder, but I was enjoying the mindless repetitive exertion while my brain looped and spun. I was barely breathing hard.
"It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying, which is one of the prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. ... all things are one thing and that one thing is all things -- plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time."
-John Steinbeck & Ed Ricketts
I practically flew out of the water onto the swim platform -- I did
*not*
want to be late. I jumped into the shower to rinse off, but for some reason I kept tasting salt. I realized I was trembling. I was at the table by exactly 7:14.
"You're late, my love," Callie said as she emerged from our cabin. I knew I wasn't but I hung my head, feeling overwhelmed, almost hopeless, and as I did I realized the reason I kept tasting salt: I was streaming tears.
"I'm sorry," I said. Callie saw my tears, came close and took me in her arms, a gentle, loving embrace.
"I'm sorry," she whispered into my ear, caressed tears from my cheek. "I love you. I'm so pleased with you, so proud of you." Then she kissed me, gently, on the lips. "Let's eat breakfast," she whispered, her warm breath on me.
"There's so much I don't understand," I said. "Something's happening to me, there are so many gaps in my memory, it's like something inside me is changing, more than one thing, things I want to understand, but ... I can't. Am I the only one?"
Get me to the point where the truth will unfold
I wanna know
"You started down a new path yesterday," she said. "You need to let it happen, let that new path join the one you're already on, become the rare, precious, truly gifted man you're meant to be." She smiled. "Now be quiet ... I'm hungry."
Mariano made tacos and huevos rancheros with another half-filet of last night's wahoo, and between those and the chilaquile fixins he'd bought yesterday, we had another wonderful meal together, Callie sitting close enough that her firm strong silky legs were in near-constant contact with mine. Then she and Mariano did dishes below while I remained topside. We were in the island's lee so I motored us half a kilometer away and unfurled the sails. Winds were light at this hour so progress would be slow, but I much preferred sails to the engine and I figured the wind would pick up. The day was turning much less humid than yesterday, the wind shifting to north-northeast, off the desert, almost opposite yesterday's. Callie joined me after about 20 minutes, put her arm around my waist and her head on my shoulder and we silently gazed over the ultramarine sea together. I turned into her and she pressed herself to me, kissed me deep, put her hands behind my neck. The wind was picking up nicely, and between that and our beam reach, our return would be quicker than yesterday's journey out.
"the climate felt quite delicious, the atmosphere so dry and the heavens so clear and blue with the sun shining brightly, that all nature seemed sparkling with life."
-Charles Darwin
"I want what you want," I said.
"You need to let yourself take control," she said.
"I love it when you control me," I said, surprising myself -- I don't know where the words came from.
"You're supposed to, you are under my power," she said. "But you need to grow past that. It's time." My cheeks were wet again ... something between us was changing, a realization that made me very sad.
"You're the one I want," I said.
"Come get me," she said. "Your way this time, not mine. Sweep me off my feet, I've always wanted that from you." She placed one of my hands on her lower back where it flowed into the upper slope of her fabulous bottom, took the other in one of hers, began swaying against me, moving her feet, slow dancing. She sighed. She was wearing her bikini and thin white blouse knotted at her waist and the extravagantly impractical barely-there 4-inch heels she'd gotten from Morgan, her nearness and bounteous presence overwhelming, intoxicating, captivating me, fixating me, her ears and thin sharp nose, smooth oval chin and light freckling, her beautiful warm hazel-green eyes, the fine hairs on her arms and the nape of her long slender neck, her scent, the feel and close experience of her a deep emotional journey for me. She was sighing in pleasure at the way my strong arms and taut-muscled chest enfolded her, held her close as if protecting her, as if I might lose her, as if I might subordinate her if that's what she wanted, if that's what it would take to keep her. I was getting really hard in a way she couldn't miss. Mariano emerged from the companionway.
"Your watch," I said to him, and he took the wheel.
"Let's go down," I whispered into Callie's ear, still holding her close, then pulled away, my arm around her waist, and walked her there, closed the door to our cabin behind us, and took her in my arms.
"Lie down on the floor, honey," she told me. "I want to show you something."
I lay down on my back and she stepped over me. I was staring up her long smooth legs past her heels to her bikini bottom, to her prominent beasts standing out so proudly, to her lovely face peering down from above them. She bent over and stretched her arms down to those heels, her long fingers and nails tracing gently over her ankles, her feet, held a pose there for a few seconds, smiling. Then those long fingers moved between her feet to my chin, my cheeks, my forehead, my shoulders, tracing so lightly. She removed the white blouse, dropped it onto the bed.
"Be still, let your body react however it will, I want to be your fantasy girl, the girl of your dreams," she said. "I want to make all your dreams come true, even those you haven't dreamed yet. I want you to take me when you're ready, just how you most want to, which is how I'll love it most." Then she bent lower at the waist and then at the knees until her warm breasts touched my chin.
"Take my top off," she told me, and I reached to loose her bikini top, my face in her cleavage, and as it came loose I went deeper, the soft warm pressure of her breasts against my eyes, nose, chin, mouth, so there was nothing to see or smell or feel but her. I licked one and she moved a nipple to my mouth.
"Mmmmmmmm," she said as she moved and I could see again, "I like that."
Her nipple receded, not because she was moving away but because her breasts were shrinking, though still quite a bit more full than when I first knew her.
"Watch," she said, and as I complied her nails and lips lightened from burgundy to red to something closer to pink, her hair shorter but still waist-length and wavy, her nails as they rested on my shoulders less sharp but just as long.
"You taught me how to do this," she said. "I did it for you, but we both knew it wouldn't be forever, it's just not who I am ... now gaze at my legs, so long, so strong, so smooth ... I know how much you like them."
Callie's wonderful legs seemed even longer now with Morgan's heels on, more muscular than before, but as I watched, appreciating their shapely sculpted curves, I saw some of that muscle melt away but not much -- she hadn't ever become sharply cut like a bodybuilder the way Mari had. I was extremely aroused, of course. She reached down and caressed my erection through my swim trunks, which I felt change until they'd become a skimpy lycra suit, my erection pushing hard against it, pushing out from beneath it, her touch making that erection jump. Then one of her feet stepped back between my legs and I felt the point of her toe slip under my balls, lifting them, caressing them from underneath. She slipped her thumbs into her bikini bottom, on either side of her hips, began sliding it down and bent her knees further, lowering herself toward me until it reached my nose.
