He did, but he didn’t. The breeze of her great wings was strangely intimate, that smell more intimate than his touches or the moment in which he’d glimpsed her fine, weighty breasts with their texture of stretch marks and underwire grooves. He was awkward, foolish feeling.
“I don’t think I do,” he said at last. “I think that we should save some things to tell each other for later.”
She blinked, slow and lazy, and one tear rolled down and dripped off her nose, splashing on the red T-shirt and darkening it to wineish purple.
“Will you sit with me?” she said.
He crossed the room and sat on the other end of the sofa, his hand on the seam that joined the two halves together, crossing the border into her territory, an invitation that could be refused without awkwardness.
She covered his hand with hers, and hers was cold and smooth but not distant: immediate, scritching and twitching against his skin. Slowly, slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder like a blanket or a lover’s arm, head coming to rest on his chest, breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.
“Alan?” she murmured into his chest.
“Yes?”
“What are we?” she said.
“Huh?”