Second Skin Read Free Page A

clinked his glass against hers, took a sip, watching her all the while. He liked seeing her this way: nervous and a bit unsure. But then he liked to engender those emotions in everyone he met.
    ‘The nights I would call you up, after he beat me, raped me, spit on me.’
    ‘And you came back for more.’
    ‘He always apologized. He was so repentant, like a little child.’
    Mick hid his disgust behind the mask he had perfected, thinking of what was to come.
    ‘You took it all.’
    ‘Not all,’ she said defiantly. Now she downed the brandy in two hard swallows. Her eyes watered. ‘Not now. I made my stand. He’s dead and I’m glad of it.’
    ‘So you did.’ Mick nodded. ‘Long life and health to both of us,’ he said, then took more brandy into his mouth and savored it. One thing you had to say for old Rodney, he thought, he did know how to live.
    ‘And so,’ he said, putting down his empty snifter and rubbing his palms together, ‘to bed.’
    Mick took her in his arms, feeling her melt against him. He was a man who believed himself to be, in the words of Nietzsche, predestined for victory and seduction. Like Nietzsche, his wartime idol, he understood the profound connection between the two. He was a man bent on controlling and outwitting himself. Like two of Nietzsche’s own idols, Alcibiades and Napoleon, he had the craftsmanship and subtlety for war. He was, in sum, continually challenging life.
    She tasted like burned sugar and he crushed her to him. He stripped her of her clothes and inhaled her musk. As usual, she wore no underwear. Her breasts reared into his hands and she moaned deep in her throat. He lifted her by her buttocks and her legs wrapped around him. Neither of them could wait for the bed. Her fingers, which had so skillfully cracked the prawn’s translucent shell, now deftly unbuckled his belt, pushed down his trousers. She brought him hotly against her, her eyes flying open with the sensation, then closing slowly, languorously, as they began their rhythm.
    Quidquid luce fruit, tenebris agit, Mick thought between mouthfuls of dusky flesh. Whatever is started in the light continues in the dark. It was one of Nietzsche’s favorite sayings, and his as well. How true it had proved itself in his life!
    He pushed her roughly against the wall – just here – where he had made the first thrust with the push dagger, where the arrogance on Kurtz’s face had been supplanted by disbelief and, then, fear. Oh, the ecstasy of it! He, the true Nietzschean superman, bringing down the Aryan prey.
    He was grunting now, not with the effort but with the images flooding his mind. Giai licked his ear and hunched frantically against him. While his body worked, his mind sang! Of course Kurtz was tormented, of course he beat his wife regularly. There are countless dark bodies that must be inferred to lie near the sun; we shall never be able to see them, Nietzsche had written. Kurtz was one of them. Obviously, in marrying Giai he had crossed the line. Dissolution, the base shuttling and rearranging of the races, was intolerable to the proud and pure Aryan in him. Yet he would not leave her. So he beat her, punishing her for the sin he dare not admit to himself he had committed.
    Giai was soon to reach her pinnacle. She groaned, her eyes rolling, her belly rippling, the muscles of her thighs and buttocks clenching furiously. And, like a house plucked up by a tornado, he was brought along with her. She stroked the nape of his neck, his damp hair, crooning wordlessly like a child in delirium.
    It was Mick’s firm and abiding belief that morality was merely timidity tricked out in a philosophical overcoat. Even if he had not read this in Beyond Good and Evil, his own experiences in the war in Vietnam would have taught him the same thing. As it was, they merely made Nietzsche’s words resonate in his mind all the louder. And like all men of prey, he thought, I am misunderstood. What was morality but a recipe against