Tremble (23 page)

Gavin pulled the bicycle away to reveal the rest of the tramp’s body, still huddled within its ancient parka. The cloth fell open with the movement, exposing blackened skin that had begun to split, showing the desiccated muscle beneath. There were two distinct marks on the
old man’s chest, one above his heart. Gavin knew it immediately: the same imprint of a leaf that had appeared on his palm. Gavin lifted his camera. A moment later his knees gave way to a terrible trembling.

“Saturday! Saturday!”

Saturday Honeywell was crouched in a deep ditch, carefully brushing down a layer of fossils. Part of Boral Mining Corporation, the limestone quarry was massive and located some ten miles out of Brisbane. Saturday had been called in when one of the stonecutters unearthed a vast cross section of stratification: layer upon layer of fossils.

Oblivious to everything around her Saturday was immersed in the world she was bringing back to life with the fine hairs of her brush, each stroke pushing the dust aside to reveal another feathery leaf etched into the lime, tendrils still arching out toward a sun that had shone over 200,000 years before. She prized the stone from the wall of the ditch, squatted back on her haunches, and flipped the magnifying glass that was strapped to her forehead over her eye. She peered down at the lapidification.

Gavin leaped off the back of the jeep that had given him a lift out to the ditch. He stood silhouetted for a moment against the wheel of one of the tractors, his head barely reaching its hub.

“Saturday!” he bellowed again.

“The hippie chick?” one of the workmen asked. Gavin nodded. The workman grinned a gold-toothed gappy smirk and pointed in the direction of an open cut marked with flags.

Ignoring his leer Gavin began to stride, then broke into a full pelt toward the ditch. He reached the edge and peered down.

The sun divided the space into a checkerboard of dazzling white and blue shadow. At first he didn’t see her; she was kneeling in the shade of the cut side that plummeted down about sixty feet.

“Saturday!”

She looked up, hand shading her eyes, then pointed to a ladder leading down the side of the quarry. In his polyester suit now creased with grime, Gavin climbed down as fast as he could. It was instantly cooler in the shade.

“Fuck, you look terrible!” Saturday shoved a flask of cold water at
him, unable not to feel sorry for the man. Gavin drank thirstily, then looked at her, eyes glittering dangerously.

“I found something I want you to look at. Real evidence!”

“Listen, Gav, I read about your wife. Looks like she stands to get the lot, that can’t be easy—”

“Saturday, I found him! I found the tramp!”

Saturday assessed the man in front of her. A nasty rash crept up from the neck of his shirt and extended as far as his earlobes. He didn’t appear to have any eyebrows and at the ends of his trousers his naked feet, covered in mud and greenish mold, were bruised and bleeding.

“You’ve been missing for over a week. Your mate from the City Council rang me looking for you; reckon he was frightened I’d chopped you up and fed you to my worm farm. Where have you been?”

“I’ve found something and I need your help. Now.”

He stared at her, the desire to touch her battling with his fear. If she’d lost faith in him he knew he was doomed.

“Hey, you’ve caught me between the Mesozoic and the Paleozoic, my most favorite place in the world….”

“Please.”

He grabbed her dust-covered glove. Sighing, she bent down and picked up her tool bag.

“Evidence? What kind of evidence?” Saturday muttered as she pushed open her front door.

She was still dressed in dusty dungarees and desert boots. Gavin couldn’t help noticing the sweat stains etched in two great patches under her thin cotton T-shirt. Saturday unhitched the dungarees, letting them drop to her waist as she pulled off the headscarf dusted white with limestone. Braless, her prominent nipples were completely visible under the fabric. The rolls of flesh rippling down to her waist ballooned out under the denim. She crossed to the stove and put the kettle on with a slam. She was irritated. Access to the quarry was limited and it was important to catalogue the fossil find as soon as possible to ensure the site got a protected listing. But Gavin had looked so forlorn, so desperate, she hadn’t been able to help herself.

Vulnerable men were her weakness. She was forever picking up the
recently divorced, the bereaved, or simply the lost, all of whom were drawn to her warmth and reassuring bulk. Sometimes she wondered whether she wouldn’t be better off abandoning the search for a man who actually wanted her for herself and just opening up an orphanage. Where had her plans for discrediting the property developer gone? The irony was, now that he seemed bent on a path of self-destruction all she wanted to do was save him. Was it a genetic flaw or some kind of evolutionary paradigm she would never be able to escape?

Saturday gave Gavin a suspicious penetrating stare, then walked up to him. Gavin could feel the warmth radiating from the vast expanse of glistening olive skin—a mixture of sweat, coconut oil, and something far fruitier. He traced a droplet of sweat as it ran from the edge of her armpit down the underside of her arm. Suddenly he knew what he had to do, recognized the act that would ground him, would give him back his strength to battle whatever it was that was trying to destroy him. He lifted her arm and ran his tongue down her skin. Saturday froze in shock. Gavin, amazed at himself, tasted the salt at the tip of his tongue and his hormones launched a full-frontal assault on any remaining rationality.

He yanked up her T-shirt. Her brown nipples seemed to stain the whole of her humongous breasts, orbs veined and covered in a multitude of thin white stretch marks. They hung down to her waist. Overwhelmed by the desire to topple this mountainous body and penetrate it there and then, Gavin buried his head in the soft pendulous flesh.

“Gavin, please, this will ruin my credibility as a serious environmentalist. Frankly, it would be more acceptable to sleep with the head of the National Party,” Saturday whispered hoarsely, fighting the waves of desire that swept up from her groin. In lieu of an answer he lifted his head and pulled her into a deep penetrating kiss. She tasted faintly of chamomile tea and garlic. Much to Gavin’s amazement he didn’t mind—in fact, the very humanness of her excited him even more.

Standing at full height he had to lift his chin slightly to reach her mouth. He had never felt this equal with a woman in his life. She stood with her eyes closed, tongue on tongue, tasting him with short flickers, working her way up to a full sucking—a kind of miniorchestration, as if just letting him know what she was capable of. At the receiving end of
her tongue Gavin felt all that defined him evaporate away. He wanted this. He wanted her. He wanted to drown in that avalanche of flesh, to lose his particularity, his need for control, his fear.

He pulled up his shirt and pressed against her, nipple to nipple. The size of her was overwhelming. He had never been with a woman who was both wider and taller than himself. He lifted her hands and placed them on his rock-hard cock.

“Well, thank God you’re to scale,” she said and laughed, a full-throated sexy gurgle.

Inspired, Gavin wrapped his hands around the cheeks of her massive arse and tried to hoist her up onto his hips. Instead, overcome by her weight, he stumbled backward and fell flat on the ground, pulling her down with him. Saturday landed across him, winding him considerably and miraculously missing his erect penis and testicles.

They lay on the kitchen floor like a bizarre starfish. Watching critically, one of Saturday’s six cats turned up its nose and walked off in disgust, tail twitching as if to indicate what ridiculous creatures humans were.

Gavin was in bliss; a breast was pushed against his cheek, another against his ear. Courageously and utterly undeterred he lifted it and searched for the nipple, almost blinding himself with half an inch of erect tissue in the process. God, this feels good, he thought, sucking down hard. Somewhere in the distance he heard Saturday groan.

He rolled her over onto her back and, with a powerful tug, managed to pull off her dungarees. The ginger pubic curls extended as far as her navel and a great pale roll of belly hung over her pubic area. He pushed it up. The swollen lips of her sex were a vivid slash against the tightly swirling hair. It was like the mouth of Mother Earth herself, a great moist cavern. He pressed his mouth against her and filled his lungs with her pungent scent.

“Keep going like that and I’ll come way before you,” Saturday murmured and yanked him by the ears back up to her face. “Besides, I want you inside of me,” she finished, then bit into his lip deliciously. She reached down and freed his cock. Her grasp was firm, knowing. None of the tentativeness of Amanda’s touch. Saturday caressed him as if his flesh was her own, making him grow harder, bigger, than he’d ever felt before. She reached farther down and cupped his burning balls. Her hands were deliciously cool. Gavin let out a long sigh; it was as if he’d come home.

“Jesus, Gavin, you’re like one long plucked chicken. What happened?” Saturday gazed at the ugly rash that extended from his groin to his chest.

“I cleansed myself, made myself pure.” His voice thickened as her strokes telegraphed quivers of ecstasy down each thigh. She hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he was mad, literary or merely poetic. She decided to gamble on the latter.

“You’re one crazy bastard.”

Without answering he slipped his fingers into her and searched for her clit. He found the hard button and started caressing it, pulling until it grew between his fingers. Watching her face as he pleasured her he catalogued its features: the heavy-lidded eyes, a blue the azure of dusk, he thought; the blemished pores showing that she must have had a troubled adolescence; the sunspots that peppered the round cheeks; the crinkling at the corners of the eyes as she smiled back at him, humor threatening to burst from her. Every living flaw excited him. She was the embodiment of Nature. She was his catharsis. The seduction of her would be his liberation.

Saturday’s breathing grew faster; a slow flush flooded her skin until it seemed almost as red as her hair, which spread around her like an angry cloud. Removing his hand she pulled him far up above her so that he straddled her chest. Then lifting her breasts, she placed his cock between them and pushed them together so the flesh tightened around his penis. Close to losing control he began rubbing backward and forward, then, worried about the political correctness of such a gesture he peered down at her face.

She smiled back at him, a slow wicked grin as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. “Faster,” she commanded, cupping his balls.

He obeyed, resting his weight on his knees, but although the dominant nature of such a position would usually excite him, at this moment he found it did not. He wanted to please
her
, to see the wave of orgasm sweep across those broad features, to hear
her
cry out. He turned his body and took her sex into his mouth. He closed his eyes and drank in the scent and taste of her until she permeated every pore. Meanwhile Saturday ran her tongue down his shaft, glorying in his girth, his hardness. Both of them quickened, close to climax.

Gavin paused for a moment, resting his cheek on the soft expanse of her belly. Suddenly he felt something rubbing against his foot. Arching
down he peered across the length of their bodies. One of Saturday’s dogs—a diminutive mutt that looked like a cross between a Jack Russell and a Chihuahua—evidently inspired by the human activity had mounted Gavin’s leg and was busy humping his foot. Horrified, Gavin rolled off Saturday and kicked the enthusiastic beast away.

Saturday cracked up laughing. Gavin, sobered, looked at her, then began to smile, eventually breaking into a deep chuckle himself.

The paleobotanist rolled herself to sitting, her body wobbling as she threw back her head with laughter. Watching her breasts shake made him want her again. He slid over and began kissing her wildly, from her belly to the tip of her nose, then, pushing her back down onto the ground, he entered her finally.