She was leaning against a pillar, facing him, one hip slouched lower than the other. She was nearly four feet tall; her proportions had not altered, nor did her increased size reveal any imperfection. He was shaken by the same mixture of awe and lust, admiration and avidity.
When he showed her the fish she went to the table and taking the scrap left of the first one, threw it out. The emeralds and rubies lay disregarded on the furs, the pile of withered vines was as he had left it. He waited with diminishing hope for her to give some further recognition of his presence. "I have been all around the island," he said, knowing she would not acknowledge his speech.
He cleared the vines away, wondering if she approved his industry. He explored the woods until he found a plant on which gourds had dried. He kicked one, broke off the neck, filled it at the pool. There were no signs of her people. The gourd did not leak at all as he carried it back.
She had divided the fish in half, skinned and boned it less wastefully than he had the other. She was able to work at the table now, though with some difficulty. Tall as a very small woman she yet retained the tantalizing, provocative, shameful appeal of her original size. He set the gourd down shakily.
She took it up as though it had been there all along and she had only now come to need it, and poured half its contents over herself. It seemed to him, weak with longing, that she displayed an added, lazy insolence as she smoothed the water over her breasts and under her arms, moving in studied tempo, reveling in the pleasure of her own touch. She walked slowly to the vines and dried herself carefully, over and over. She neither concealed nor displayed her body; she acted as though she were alone.
He put his hand on her arm, she looked up at him in the simulated surprise of cold inquiry. Her lips were pressed together, but not so firmly as to disfigure their symmetry. Her eyes were gray, with green and golden flecks; the slight droop of the lids emphasized her look of disdain. Her skin was smooth as glass. He could wait no longer. He was consumed with desire for her.
He clasped her, lifted her, threw her on the couch, began kissing her gluttonously. He tried, first with cunning, then with violence, to part her lips, to move her arms from their rigid position. She remained completely passive, her eyes wide open in their implacable scorn. He paused in his onslaught, begged her to forgive him, to say something, to voice even a rejection. She lay silent, unmoving, unresisting as he wept and shouted.
His hands dug into her shoulders, caressed, gripped, pulled at her body. His mouth smothered hers. He closed his eyes to shut out her derision, opened them again to see if she had relented. He pressed himself against her, forced his body into hers. The shock telegraphed back to him.
She became wild and wanton and responsive. She was avid, insatiable, shameless. She exhausted him, drained him, wore him into incapacity, then invited, teased, coaxed, compelled him into fresh lechery. The element of the perverse, inherent in her size, her captivity, her unveiled loathing, added the final touch to their ecstasy. They came together again and again without concession in a rape of the courtesan, wringing joy out of their enmity.