Chapter 22

• "I don't need you," Michele shot back. Her voice sounded like a choked howl. "I know." Annie soothed. "I don't." She sounded plaintive. "I know. It's okay." Annie promised, petting her. Her hand felt cold against Michele's burning furrowed brow. She kissed her cheek, tasting the tears. Even as her own eyes brimmed with sorrow she was lifting the tears off the stronger girls cheeks with her lips. Annie thought of a half-forgotten movie she'd watched with her mother when she was much younger. Japanese peasant woman kneeling on the ground, weeping and picking up individual grains of rice out of the dirt with chopsticks after their village had been attacked and pillaged. She hadn't understood what was happening, why the women were doing that. "It's because they are so poor," her mother had explained, "they're desperate."
• As her tears mixed with Michele's, and she continued to eat both their sorrows with her kisses, she could feel Michele's arms still masturbating beneath her. Less frantic, but mechanical, nothing in her movements expressed pleasure. "Let me do it." "I can't." "It's ok." "I don't need-" "I want it." Annie whispered. She was scared by the sound of her own voice, she could hear how true the words were, hear her own desperation. 'Because I am so poor?' she wondered. She felt Michele's arms grow still beneath her. Raising herself up onto her knees she looked down on Michele. Her eyes still closed, she had turned her face away. 'Hiding' Annie thought. She reached between her legs and took hold of Michele's wrists, lifting her arms up and over her head, letting them rest there. As Michele hid her eyes in the crook of her arm Annie lifted one knee over the other girl's upraised thigh, and then the other, taking her place between the stronger girls long powerful thighs.
• Standing on her knees she had studied Michele for a moment. Her torso looked sculpted in its perfection, but also in its abject wretchedness; like one of Michelangelo's slaves, laid out before her in the dark. She touched the smooth hairless skin of Michele's armpits. Smoothed her hands over the insides of those joints. The powerful muscles that emerged and met there. Michele hadn't showered after her run. Her skin felt tacky from dried sweat and she smelled strong. Annie took her breasts in her hands, hardly able to hold half of what Michele had to offer. Wondered at how firm they were, how arrogant they looked rising off her chest. She pinched Michele's nipples.