Decker #48

He was dreaming of being chased into a desert cave by a small horde of phantasmagorical Jurassic creatures. He could feel the wind of leathery wings; smell the fetid breath of the great beasts, and their roars and screams shook him like the ague. Trapped in a shallow, crumbling hole in the bluff, he cowered against the farthest wall, but the groping claws scrabbled ever closer until he felt their grip on his shoulder... "Decker...Decker!" It was Lizzie, and she was shaking him awake. "Hey, Decker... come on, it's a dream. It's a dream!" "Unhh... shi-, er, sheesh!" He spasm-ed into a sitting position, almost bumping heads with her. "I, er... umm, hi! S'looking for you. Where...? She'd found a floral print wraparound sun dress somewhere; it covered her very tan and very obvious nudity. "I've been playing the beach bum since you left, spearing fish, surfing, getting a tan..." she arched her eyebrows teasingly. "You wanna see?" Still groggy and tongue-tied, Decker reached up to scratch his head. "Well, um, you... I mean, we... we maybe ought to talk, I think..." His scalp felt strange, and he looked at his hand, which was dusted with a few dozen short cream-colored hairs. "Shedding?" She reached to brush his scalp with her fingers, and he instinctively jerked away. "Ah, maybe." His forehead creased as he rubbed the pelt on his chest; nothing loose there. "Hmm. Anyway, I came back here because... um, because Tut has this plan, see, and I'm supposed to go home to try to duplicate the scene where all this crazy stuff started happening... we went and found some peyote, and..." The story tumbled out of him helter-skelter, out of order, semi-coherent. She sat next to him as he babbled on, listening, nodding. "But anyway," he concluded, the words now starting to slip into a more sensible pattern, "I wanted to come and find you, see what you wanted to do, where you wanted to be, in case... um, in case things get... y'know, weird." "Oh, yeah, like things aren't already weird!" She beamed a bemused, ridiculous smile at him. "Well, Mister Decker, I see no evidence of any other human life anywhere around here. Unless a whole bunch of humanity turns up in my general vicinity real soon, I'd say the options are kinda limited. And lucky for me, I'm kinda drawn to that one particular other human that I've been seeing around. Sooo... I guess it comes down to, um, whether you're okay with seeing me around, and I really hope you are, because a girl can get mighty lonely out here with just the sun, the surf, and some sea bass." She edged closer to him on the bench; he could smell the perfect mingling of the sea and her skin. is hear was beating fast and hard again; the doubts and the desire were a whirling inferno inside his chest, his head. "Shittle-de-shit sticks," he mumbled under his breath, slowly succumbing to the heat of her skin, the depth of her eyes, the delicate gleam of her teeth between slightly parted lips... "Awww, hell," he moaned, "I've been fantasizing about this moment for way too long." He raised a trembling hand to her cheek, touched her ear with an outstretched index finger, then leaned into her, letting the soft fur of his cheek brush her neck before he turned his lips to hers. Their ragged breathing syncopated, melted into one, and they were in each others arms, locked in an electrifying, exhilarating embrace, hungry mouths nibbling, pressing, submerging in each other. Rapt in each others passion, they did not break their embrace for long minutes, barely took time for breath. Finally, as the stars of surrender were flashing before his eyes, he pulled back. "Here?" he looked down at the stone bench, hardly wide enough for one of them. She giggled, brushed her hand across his thigh, letting the sun dress flap open. "Silly... follow me." She stood, bent down for another ecstatic, sense-drowning kiss, took his hand and pulled him to his feet. He staggered along with her, their ambulations broken by frequent, mind-thundering embraces, down several flights of stairs, out the great front doors of the hotel, and down to the beach, where her blankets were laid on the warm sand, where the sun was in its death throes on the horizon, spewing its blazing blood across a deepening blue sky; she pulled him down then, and they ravaged each other tenderly, mercilessly, until the stars had gotten a good long eyeful, and then they rolled up together in her sandy blankets and fell into the heat-forged, satiated sleep of satiated angels.