“Nefertari is right!” Luigi exclaims. “We humans are subjective, emotional beings and this is what makes us so beautifully creative!”
“Yeah, just look at all the wonderful things we’ve created,” Nick throws in dryly. “The atom bomb, biological warfare, global warming. Humans are great.”
“So what do you think of Egypt, Nick?” Lucia immediately changes the subject before it can turn to politics.
He suddenly looks uncomfortable. “It’s cool, I guess.”
“He just graduated from college,” Elizabeth remarks.
Lucia smiles at her before giving Mark’s brother her full attention again. “What did you study, Nick?”
He avoids her eyes. “Just business,” he says, shrugging off his education with his overdeveloped shoulders.
Luigi yawns dramatically. “Please, I beg pardon, but it was a very long day.” He sniffs.
“Nefertari takes a lot out of him,” Elizabeth remarks, carefully examining her salad as if she is afraid something might be hiding in it.
“I thought Nick should see a little of the world before settling down to some dull old job,” Mark explains.
“Yeah, but I wish we’d gone to Japan instead,” his brother mumbles. “They have ruins there too, you know.”
“Yeah and gorgeous little geishas. Sorry, bro, maybe next time.”
“It is painfully dull here in Luxor.” Elizabeth pushes her plate away. “Maybe we can get together sometime, Lucia.”
“I’ll be showing her the sites, if you want to come along, Liz,” Mark says.
“Thank you, darling, but I’ve had my fill of rocks and you know I like to stay out of the sun.”
Luigi caresses his wife’s hair. “She goes for walks along the river at dawn and at twilight, like a delicate fairy.” He is careful not to disturb a single strand.
Mark asks her, in a private aside, “Do you like your stuffed vine leaves, Lucia?”
“They’re all right.” Unfortunately, she’d left her appetite in the museum’s dark gallery. “What exactly are they stuffed with?”
He leans into her and whispers, “Nothing but good things.”
“What made you pick Egypt over other popular spots on the globe, Lucia?” Lori asks her abruptly.
“The fact that I’ve always wanted to come here. I nearly studied Egyptology.”
“Really? What stopped you?”
Lucia has never liked being interrogated and so she adopts Nick’s laconic attitude. “I was too lazy to learn hieroglyphs I guess.”
Luigi laughs.
“What do you do for a living instead?” Lori persists.
“Nothing,” she answers defiantly, even more annoyed now. “I’m free to simply contemplate the nature of the universe.”
Luigi raises his wineglass. “A most noble activity,” he declares.
Lori seems about to say, “Doesn’t that get boring after a while?” but then realizes such a comment will only backfire on her.
“And have you concluded anything about the universe so far, Lucia?” Elizabeth asks her politely.
“I’m still studying,” she replies shortly. Growing doubts about her mental health are making mundane conversation even more of an ordeal than she normally finds it. In the back of her mind she cannot stop reliving those impossible moments in the museum, yet part of her is also increasingly worried that she only imagined them.
“Are you okay?” Mark asks her in another private aside, refilling her wineglass. “You don’t seem very fond of your hamam mahshi.”
“I’m just not very hungry tonight. It’s not a Cornish hen…what is it?”
“A grilled pigeon.”
“Oh God.” She puts her fork down.
“What are you two whispering about?” Luigi demands happily. “I am jealous.”
“Nothing.” She smiles over at him, wondering how much Mark has told everyone about her.
“You do not look the kind of woman to speak of nothing,” the Italian replies seriously. “I am sorry for your loss, Lucia. It is good you are here, but you should visit Italy next. I promise you will be…what is the word? Restored.”
“She’s a woman, love,” his wife reminds him, “not an old painting you can get your hands on.”
Nursing his Coke, Nick mumbles, “I would have liked to go to Italy.”
Suddenly it seems unreal to Lucia that she is surrounded by people when less than forty-eight hours ago she was completely alone. She reaches for the anchor of her wineglass, wishing Mark was not sitting so close beside her because she desperately wants to focus on him rather than on the shadow haunting her mind. Only Lori’s oddly fixed stare burns the thought of Richard away for a moment as she attempts to identify the emotion smoldering inside the other woman.
Mark senses her discomfort. “I’ll get the check,” he says.
“No, Mark,” Lucia says, anxious to make up for her lack of social skills. “I’ll get it.”
“Nefertari is paying for the feast,” Luigi informs the table.
“Cool!” Nick says with feeling.
* * * * *
Sitting on a loveseat in one of the lobby’s cozy, lamplit nooks, Lucia watches Mark and his friends disappear into the surprisingly cold Egyptian night.
Richard had been as antisocial as his books were popular, and their dinner parties had been rare, intimate affairs usually involving just one other couple.
Mark reappears and walks casually back toward her as she stares at him hungrily.
“Your friends are very nice,” she tells him as he seats himself on the couch beside her.
“They’re all crazy fucks,” he disagrees fondly, “except Nick, who’s just dull. I tried pumping the Nile into him like an IV but his imagination’s a hopeless flatline. He deserves the cubicle he’s doomed to.”
“You love him,” she translates, “and I get the feeling you’re like a father to him…even though you’re not much older than he is.”
“Dad took off when I was thirteen and Nick was eight. Mom was always there for us but she cried a lot. I swore I’d never hurt a woman like that.”
She cherishes this statement for a silent moment. “Your mother was really lucky to have you, Mark.”
“She still lives in the same house in Virginia.”
“That’s a beautiful state.”
“And lonely as hell, but she says she has her memories of us and her friends, not to mention her cat… You’re fucking beautiful, Lucia.”
She looks away shyly. “For now.”
“Forever.” The warm breeze of his whisper stirs her hair. “Do you hear me, sweetheart? Forever!”
“Oh, Mark!” She looks down at her clenched hands. “I don’t understand what’s happening here.”
He pries her fingers apart gently, takes one of her hands and pulls her to her feet. “We’re happening.”
* * * * *
They have an elevator all to themselves tonight, yet he lets go of her hand and does not even look at her as the car glides up toward the ninth floor without pausing, leaving her free to study his handsome profile. Like the same shadow cast by different bones, his hard and confident expression reminds her painfully of Richard.
He finally glances at her. “Do you like what you see, baby?” He makes the question sound like a threat.
The elevator doors open slowly.
“Yes,” she replies softly, stepping out into the corridor.
He follows right behind her, grips one of her wrists and bends her arm up against her back. “Do you like what you feel?”
She gasps, “Mark, you’re hurting me.”
“No, I’m not.” His tone is even more threatening now. “Not yet.” He maintains an implacable grip on her wrist as his other hand reaches into her purse, finds her key and opens the door to the room. He kicks it closed behind them and makes her walk ahead of him to the bed.
Still standing behind her, he pushes the purse off her shoulder and lets it fall to the floor. “Bend over,” he commands,
finally letting go of her wrist so she can obey him.
She immediately does as he says, bracing herself on the edge of the mattress.
He caresses her dress up over her back slowly, letting her feel his warm hands through the fine silk as they follow the smooth curve of her bottom. His thumbs dig into the sensitive tail of her spine and he makes a small, hard sound of approval that registers excitingly inside her. She holds her head up and closes her eyes, arching her back for him.
“Beautiful,” he comments quietly.
She moans from the pleasure he gives her before even penetrating her.
He leaves her dress resting in soft drifts around her waist and then the fingertips of both his hands just barely touch her as he slowly pulls her panties down her legs.
His patience is excruciating and makes her black silk panties feel like ash drifting down from her pussy’s urgent, burning need. But he is deliberately making her wait, making her want him so much she moans and hangs her head in despair that he is not inside her yet. Her legs are spread just wide enough apart that her panties remain around her knees like a soft rope and, finally, she hears him unzip his jeans. The sudden hard smack he gives her ass surprises her into crying out and turns her on even more. Her cheeks burn painfully when he spanks her again and then again as she whimpers in protest. She was already so hot for him, how much she wants him now really begins to hurt.
“Please,” she begs, not expecting him to show her mercy so soon. It stuns her when she feels his cool, dry head parting her pussy’s aching wet lips. He penetrates her slowly, forcing her to savor his full length even though all she wants is to absorb him all at once, hungrily. But he makes her suffer the profound truth of how empty she is without him by sliding his rigid penis into her so gradually every nerve ending inside her seems to bloom and cling to his generous shaft. He sinks all the way into her tight sheath but then her sigh of contentment as she experiences the exquisite caress of his ball sac against her vulva turns into a desolate gasp when he pulls all the way out of her again.
“Mm, you have such a tight little pussy, princess.” One of his hands grips her hip as he holds himself with the other, tormenting her with just the teasing taste of his head again. “Touch yourself,” he commands.
She does not want to. All she wants is the pure joy of his cock stroking her and getting bigger and harder until it starts pulsing and sending shock waves of pleasure through her whole body, electrifying her with the almost dangerous power she sensed in him last night as he fucked her.
“I said touch yourself, Lucia. Do it! I want to feel you come.” He gives her half his erection but it isn’t enough. She is dying to feel all of him inside her again. Yet the second she obeys him and begins caressing her clitoris an orgasm surges in like a tide responding to the moon’s glowing pull and dissolves her around him. She rubs her clit feverishly but it is the thought of Richard meeting her eyes across the museum’s dark gallery that makes her heart seem to burst with the beautiful hope that floods her pelvis and breaks against her flesh in a devastating climax. Mark dives into her then as if unable to resist the undertow of her pleasure, which instead of ebbing swiftly begins cresting again as his cock plunges deep into her pussy faster and harder until she comes again. And this time her inner muscles clench around him and pull him into ecstasy’s violent wave with her.
Chapter Three
A scattering of soft, round clouds is reflected in the sheet of the Sacred Lake, like pillows on which to rest the eyes from en endless expanse of stone and sand.
Mark lets her pause for a moment beside the water while continuing his amazingly detailed lecture on the temple. “Notice the wavy courses of masonry in the wall encircling the lake, Lucia. The different layers of stone recreate the hieroglyph for water.”
“You mean that’s not just erosion?”
He clutches the shirt over his heart and rolls his eyes up into his skull. “Sacrilege!”
She laughs as a perfectly temperate breeze wafts across the lake like a sense of well-being, impossible to define. It caresses her even as the sun’s warmth penetrates her, which keeps her aware of her body’s sensual horizons and how they mysteriously define her perceptions.
“So, Nefertari, do you remember what this lake was used for?” Mark follows her gaze across the water. “Doug says it played an important part in purification ceremonies. Personally, I think it was just an excuse to party around the pool.”
She looks up into his eyes and for a breathless instant glimpses the unfathomable energy behind his irises as they glimmer like hot blue stars burning through the atmosphere. “Will you show me some of your work tonight, Mark?” she asks him almost urgently.
“Sure. Now rub the scarab for luck.”
At one end of the sacred lake in the Temple of Karnak sits a large stone statue of a scarab, one of four that originally guarded the primordial waters of Nun, symbolized by the pool. The beetle’s monstrously large body is worn smooth from centuries of exposure to the elements and to tourists stroking it for luck.
“The scarab is the symbol of the transforming quality of the sun, Lucia. ‘The light that becomes out of the darkness’.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“Courtesy of Lori’s better half, although people tend to consider him her intolerable half.”
“Most people are idiots.”
“Yes, but you have to admit that it takes quite an imagination to equate rolling eggs around in a ball of dung with the sun’s passage through the sky.”
“Not really.” She rises to the defense of the culture she has loved since childhood, “Not when you consider that the sun is surrounded by the universe just as the scarab’s eggs are surrounded by dung and buried in the Nile mud just as life is latent in the black emptiness of space. It actually makes sense, since life and light sprang out of darkness.”
“Okay, I get it, now make a wish and rub the bug.”
The scarab perches on a pedestal level with her chest. Lucia rests her palms lightly against its round body and says reverently, “This is the One that became Two when it grew conscious of itself, which then became Three as it created a realm for its own experience, the legs emerging from its body the laws of matter and manifestation.”
“Cool.”
His irreverent response does not annoy her. She knows he is deliberately echoing his brother in an effort to lighten her mood, yet it is proving difficult to live merely for the moment’s pleasure because she wants it to last and this naturally leads to all sorts of worrisome thoughts.
Making their way back out of the temple, they pass through the Hypostle Hall again, where rows of massive columns stretch for almost as far as the eye can see, all of them carved from top to bottom with hieroglyphs. Originally they were all vividly painted and the hall was covered so that the sun’s rays penetrated the temple only in isolated shafts, which would have made the colorful writing appear to flower across the stone stalks in a shadowy atmosphere evoking the mystery of creation. The roof has long since vanished however and sunlight now streams down between the columns, on which only ghostly traces of color remain.
“What you’re looking at here, Lucia, is a stone papyrus swamp. See how the central columns are taller and have open capitals, while the rest are smaller and look like closed buds? They represent different stages of growth. Please also notice how Amon is shown here in his form of Min, meaning with an erect penis and holding the flail of power.” On this suggestive note Mark drifts away from her, framing shots with his hands. He did not bring his camera with him today, which she considers a compliment.
There are always tourists in the Hypostle Hall but because it is so immense no one else is actually visible as she walks around slowly, occasionally throwing her head back to admire a phallic pillar outlined with the almost unreal clarity of a cartoon against the vivid blue sky. Ankhs, the symbol of life, are carved everywhere and almost always two together. They resemble a child’s stick figure drawing of the human form and when placed righ
t next to each other give the impression of two minds merging. A distant, melodic laugh strums her way along the massive strings of the columns as Richard steps out from behind one a few yards away. He walks toward her wearing a white shirt and white slacks that bleed into the sunlight so her heart sees him more clearly than her eyes.
“Hey,” Mark is suddenly beside her again, “are you okay? Don’t tell me you’re coming down with Pharaoh’s revenge.”
She stares fixedly at the space between the pillars in which the vision of her husband has been replaced by black spots floating like sinister, single-celled creatures in the air’s luminous sea.
“What’s wrong, Lucia?”
“I don’t know…” She does know, however, that he will shoot Richard down as her own delusion and the last thing she wants is to clip her lover’s supernatural wings with rational fire. “I’m not sure, Mark, but I think I just saw…” Her vision blurs strangely. “I think I just saw my husband.”
“Excuse me?”
“I just saw Richard!” She closes her eyes as the extreme clarity of the air cuts painfully into her brain.
* * * * *
When Lucia opens her eyes what feels like only a second later, she is stunned to find herself lying on the bed in her hotel room. She sits up in disbelief just as the door opens and Mark walks in.
“You’re awake,” he declares, sounding intensely relieved. He perches on the bed beside her and grasps one of her hands reassuringly in his as another man appears and pauses on the threshold. His light brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail and the skin of his gaunt face is both tanned and burned by the sun in a way that makes her think of chocolate with a cherry filling oozing out in places. A faded pair of jeans and a black T-shirt hang from his thin frame much as they might from a mummy who stole them just after escaping from his tomb.
“Lucia, this is Doug Eastman.” Mark introduces the apparition. “He has some medical training so I went for him instead of a local doctor.”
“What happened to me, Mark? How did I get here? We were just in the temple…”
“You passed out, Lucia.”
“I fainted?” She falls back against the pillows again. “I’ve never fainted before in my life.” But then she had never seen a ghost before either.
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