Her body was electric, charged to the hilt by the movement of his hands, which were light enough to evoke tenderness yet potent enough to produce static. Her skin was silk under which glowing embers burned. Her fingertips tingled with light. He was dark and heavy against her. She felt herself being thrust upon, and her hips moved up in cadence, as if on cue, as if in accord, as if in perfect complacency.

She moaned, rolled her head against the pillow, and his head came down to nuzzle her neck. Over his back she could see the ocean, rendered luminous by the moonlight. The curtains billowed in the wind. Like the curtains, she felt gauzy and tender, swayed by a force that was red and dry, yet dripping and viscous.

She rolled her head again, but his hands gripped her head to hold it steady. In their closeness, and in the fuzzy image of his iris, she could see a vast crater, roiling with magma, pulsating with jets of hot air, pulsating in rhythm with the thrusts of his hips.

Then he started going circular, moving her right, down, left, up, right, down, left, up. She felt the electric charge grow hotter and heavier, and she started to pant. He was grunting, too, all the while, as he moved her right and down and left and up, at first gently, and then a little harder upwards. She looked at the magma-filled crater in his eyes. She felt herself being buoyed up by the steam – right, down, left, UP. She closed her eyes, and her fingernails dug into his back. She was being moved, like a wave being rolled into shore, like a cloud being pushed into the horizon, like an entire field of poppies being buttressed by the wind. And then she exploded in heat that was so intense that it was white, and then all she could see was white, and all she could feel was white, and all she could be was white.

***

“I never know when to stop with you,” he said. He reached for his pack of cigarettes, took one, and lighted it.

“Hmm? What do you mean?” she asked, snuggling close to him. She inhaled the dry, papery scent of smoke as if it were lavender.

“This,” he waved an arm around. “This whole thing.”

“This whole thing?”

“Yup. Us. The whole enchilada.”

“Is that bad?”

“Which one? Us, or that I don’t know when to stop?”

“Not knowing when to stop.”

He took a long drag on his cigarette and absently smoothed her hair from her forehead while looking at the ceiling.

She waited. She shifted against him and rubbed her leg along his thigh, reveling in his smoke.

“No,” he said after a while, then puffed on his cigarette.

“How about us?” she teased. “Bad?”

He looked at her wryly, his eyes squinted at the swirl of smoke around his head. He raised an eyebrow, lifted a corner of his mouth in a grin, and snorted. The gust of air that blew at her face felt like dove wings.

“Race you to the beach!” he blurted out. He got up from her embrace and trotted out through the french doors, across the beige stretch of Siquijor sand. His yellow shorts bobbed up and down in the half-light, and from between his fingers the cigarette glowed. It dangled there like a reminder of how she was just a while ago beneath his fingers.

She got up from the bed, picked up her slip, which had been lovingly discarded in a heap on the floor, and eased into it. She glanced at the bed. Its sheets were rumpled, and the amber light that spilled from the lamp made the furrows on the sheets look like sculpture crafted expertly by bodies made into hands by some wanton glory. She smiled, svelte with the remains of the white that was now turning as golden as the lamplight. She walked out to the beach.

When she reached him at the waterline, her was looking up. She looked up, too. Above them she sky was awash with stars, uncharacteristic for early November. There was a dedication to the pattern of them that extended into the horizon, as if the sky that night could not endure empty space. Points of light throbbed white and very pale blue, pink, and yellow, like tiny souls in the throes of an orgasm happening far out into the cosmos. He lifted an arm up and traced a sprawling question mark in the sky.

“Look at that,” he said softly.

“What is it?”

“Scorpio.”

***
The guilt always used to come in the dead of night, always used to come when the force field created by their conscious union was gone because they were asleep and unjoined and vulnerable. She used to wake up terrified, and then she would wake him, and they would cleave together in the dark, a heavy ball of anxiety hanging by a thread over their heads, threatening to crash down any moment, and then out would swarm a million stinking worms with poison oozing out of their legs.

After a while the crippling guilt seemed to grow tamer. The worms faded into visions of impotent little clumps of sour milk. In time even the ball itself disappeared altogether, and was replaced by a vapor of unease that settled over her skin like humidity.

She remembered nights of pure agony, when she wanted him but could not have him. She would float in a limpid pond of unrequitude. She would smell the acrid smoke of desire unsated. She would feel her heart ache so smoothly it would not even break. When they were together in familial territory, it was all she could do not to keep turning towards him out of habit. But then she would catch him looking at her and he would raise a hand or wag a finger, and then her eyes, repentant, would draw themselves towards a picture on a wall, or to a potted plant.

There were times when the all-consuming wanting and needing of him seemed too convoluted for her to grasp, and she considered diving into a body of water somewhere and never rising out of it again. Then she would wish that he would die at some freak accident at the same moment that she would have been drowning, so there would at least be no distinction of who left who. In the deepest pit of despondency she even questioned the purpose of their births, and that of their parents and their parents before them, in an endless, exhausting chain of blaming that had its roots in the incommunicable chambers of a woman’s heart. She used to ask why their mother had to be sent to the sanatorium only to hang herself from a sheet twisted over a bathroom rod when they were eleven, and then why their father had to beat them so violently, as if everything was their fault.

She remembered nights when she was still very young, and she would wonder who was crying behind the locked bedroom door of their parents. Surely it couldn’t have been their bright and happy mother, who used to write songs for them with their very own names written into the lyrics. She also remembered their father, and then the beatings. She remembered one night when she saw her brother, only thirteen years old, being flung towards the kitchen and then his head being bashed into the stovetop by a father so drunk he was insane, and she, a physically futile adolescent herself, clawing at this insane, drunken man’s back until her flung her, too, in the direction of the refrigerator, where her shoulder his the steel handle hard. Blood was streaked and splotched all over the kitchen floor and walls, and she was crying, her right shoulder being seared with such exquisite pain that her arm hung limp and numb. Her brother was curled up beside the stove, moaning and holding his head, blood dripping through his fingers in a slow, sticky series of drops like interminable seconds. Then their father stood tall and proud in the middle of the room, pointed an unwavering finger at her brother and said, “You, poet as your teachers may call you, never talk or write about your mother again.” His voice was so firm and so sure that he almost sounded like a real father, a father who did what was best. But there was blood on the floor, and blood on the walls, and they cowered there, small and young and pale amidst the blood, and this monster they had for a father coolly strode up of the kitchen door, like a predator leaving his lair to take a walk while his prey slowly cried and bled to death.

Once, their father came home and went straight to sleep right on an old couch with new bloodstains, and never woke up again. Six years passed between the death of the two parents. There were six years filled with indescribable violence, of emotional battering and physical abuse in a house that had never known tenderness for long, with a father that turned a wife into a psychotic suicidal case and children into poor, wandering souls afraid to look out into the world. And for the longest time she wondered if they were living a tautology.

All these thoughts, all these feelings and memories, they were last had years ago, and she remembered them now only in passing, strangely wistful at the memory of what a bag of nerves she used to be. Once she had resigned herself to the primordial pull between the two of them, all other things seemed to fall into place, like leaves fluttering to the ground to form an unexpected mosaic in sepia.

***

Now, though the recurring unease had settled over her again, with him asleep and clutching her on the daybed in the porch, it somehow felt different. It wasn’t prickly anymore. It wasn’t prosaic anymore. It was as if the anxiety had attained a kind of voluptuousness, a certain fleshy feeling that was grounded, low, and wide. Now she didn’t feel that the unease was alien as worms or putrid as rotten milk. She started to feel a kind of union with her anxiety, as if, in its new curvaceousness, it could now afford to meld to her own body, pour over her curves almost lovingly.

She looked at him and stroked his temples. There was that scar from the stovetop bashing, and she trailed her fingers over the ridge, following it from his brow into his hairline. How like their father he looked, although he had their mother’s nose. He stirred.

“Is it midnight already?” he murmured, opening an eye.

“Could be,” she answered. “Should we care?”

“I’m trying to figure out if it’s already our birthday.”

“Could be,” she said, smiling. “Should we care?”

“Well, if it means technically growing a year older…”

“Taken in the context of poetry,” he said, sitting up on the daybed, “it is a cycle of twelve moons, a slice of eternity hidden in the pull of the tides, one round of solo tango of fire first, then water.”

“Way to go, poet. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She giggled, and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Happy birthday,” he whispered, and kissed the tip of her nose.

“Happy birthday. Where’s our cake?”

“In the morning.”

“It could be morning already.”

“Oh, please,” he rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. “We had dinner just a while ago.”

“But I’m hungry again!” she cried, and then she was pushed down onto the daybed.

“I bet I can make you feel full,” he said.

“Hah! My money’s on the cake.”

“Denial queen!” he tickled her sides.

“Ouch! Stop it! See?” she said between laughs. “I told you the cake would be more effective.”

Then he stopped, still on top of her. He propped his head up on his elbow and looked at her.

“Would you rather have it another way? Us, I mean?” he asked, looking thoughtful.

“Actually, no,” she sighed. “And I don’t know why.”

“I wouldn’t have it another way, either, and I can’t really explain why. Maybe the world really is chaotic. And all our problems come from the delusion that we have rules and laws. Because if we really do, divine intervention and all that, then we would have been struck by lightning a long time ago.” He paused. “Maybe God is dead.”
There was silence, but it was neither uncomfortable nor pregnant. It was merely silence, as the last loose strings of their uncertainty were twisted back into the weave of acceptance, like a tapestry making its own necessary adjustments.
Then she smiled and said, “My twin brother, Freidrich Nietzsche. And I, Wagner.”

“My twin sister,” he smiled back. “Looks almost as good as me.”

“What’s that non-sequitur doing there in that sentence?”

“Almost? Just being a non-sequitur, I guess. Don’t ask me, ask the word.”

“I thought you were the poet here.”

“I thought you said I was Nietzsche.”

“Whatever.”

“Fine. But around you, woman, I am just a man.”

She laughed at that, and he kissed her. His hands started to work on her again. She peered past him into their reflection on the shiny tiled wall, and she saw the two of them, silver-blue in the moonlight, almost melting into each other, as if fulfilling the prophecy of their beginnings, when they floated together as a single cell in their troubled mother’s womb. A warm feeling cushioned the remains of her doubts until they had all but dissolved into a thick, watery limbo, and she felt happier than she had in years.

He moved down to kiss her neck, and she moved underneath his hands. She felt sparks of blue and red building up from inside her. From where she was she could see the stars still glimmering in their long-running cosmic orgasm, and she further warmed in anticipation of hers. From her vantage point under him she could see Scorpio, covering them like a shroud of blessing, like a shield against immorality, like a reminder of a birthright.