The Long Highway Pt. 25

"Girl from Hunan"

I had a dream about you last night that I think came from Mitchell talking about our trip to the country and his buying condoms on the way.

You were visiting China for an extended stay. A family met you when you arrived. They were with their daughter, nineteen, a young woman just starting her independent life as a university student on her own. The family left you in her care for the day to guide and help your orientation. She was beautiful, like the landscape around you.

You sat together and you asked her, "This part of China, Hunan" (in the south) "is very beautiful, isn't it? There's a movie, 'Girl from Hunan,' isn't there?" About a beautiful pure young woman in a beautiful pure landscape. You hadn't seen the movie but thought it was about that.

Your guide, the young woman, didn't answer your question at first, said instead, "It's getting expensive."

"Is it?" you asked, a little disappointed she would focus on the prosaic while your thoughts were all poetry on arriving there, seeing her her loveliness, pale pink complexion from the fresh air.

The place had abundant nature, flowering orchards in the mountains, wide green plains brimming with sunlight. Wind and sun caressed farmland in a rush of brilliant motion.

Your guide said, "Where you're staying is thirty miles away."

"That far?" you asked. "How can I see you? I guess I can ride a bicycle."

"Or take a bus," she said. She didn't understand why you would want to come to her. That wasn't your purpose in being there. She didn't realize yet that you were enamored of her but sensed your feeling.

She answered your question finally. "Yes, it is beautiful." She hadn't especially thought of the surrounding countryside as such because she lived there, to her it was just home. But she saw that as a visitor you might respond to the freshness of the view, the soft but intense colors of fields, the villages cloistered before mountains half-hidden in haze.

Southern breezes would bring the fragrance of spring, of blossoms, of green. It was a lyrical landscape and she was its lyric, a song brought to you, you felt, newly arrived and knocked out by the newness, by her, her innocence, artlessness through which beauty came unalloyed, as yet untouched.

She was wearing a black mesh sweater like one I have that you like. The sun cast shadows of the net pattern through it. Light and shadow danced on her. The sweater was abbreviated. She had little on underneath. Her midriff was exposed to the hot sun.

You and she held hands. You initiated the contact and she accepted it as a custom where you were from, something two people who'd just met might do.

"Is it okay?" you asked.

"Your hand is sweating," she said, smiling, seeming not to mind.

"I guess because I'm nervous about you." Admitting your excitement, the effect she had. She'd never met a man who told her that. She'd been cloistered in her family, hardly saw herself as a woman yet. You wanted to show her.

She was scarcely aware of her beauty, or maybe just accepted it as natural, unremarkable like that of the place where she'd grown up, lived all her life till then, where you'd just set foot.

Her skin was as fine, downy as new fruit. You could feel from her complexion the frost of the cold winters there. She had rounded high Chinese cheekbones that you loved. Her eyes were dark but showed the openness, awesome strength of the blue sky.

You wanted her. You felt a little ashamed of your thoughts about that unworldly, open-hearted nineteen year old but accepted them and were determined to act if you could, with her consent, not force yourself on her but woo her, win her over, bring the outside world to her, break open her sanctuary.

You kissed, just on the lips at first. Platonic. You realized she'd probably had no experience at all with men, never even kissed before. You wanted to kiss her open mouth, with your tongues, wanted to do everything with her.

You asked if there was a bathroom near there. She gestured in the direction of the town close by, on a gentle downhill grade.

"On the first block on the corner." She pointed to a blue green square-shaped building (a little similar to the gas station Mitchell saw- remember? on the road he walked during our day in the country, the one where the police stopped our car and then left and didn't return).

You went to town, though your purpose wasn't to use the bathroom but to buy condoms. You found a drugstore quickly. Inside some teenage boys teased you that they had influenza and all of them would get it since they were hanging out together, good friends. Somehow they knew enough English to tell you that. They were cheerful, good-natured like the young woman waiting for you on the bench at the hump of the road where you'd left her and would return.

After you picked out condoms, on your way out, you suggested to the group of boys still in the front of the store that they get vaccinated for influenza, Covid and RSV, all going around now. You even said you would pay for them.

Maybe that came from your visit to me, when you said you'd just had Covid.

It was such a funny, good dream. I like dreaming about you so much. And I want you to come here with condoms!

Waking up and thinking of the Girl from Hunan I thought about me with you, a big American man, hugging as maybe you and she did, your strong hands on my back, at my waist, sliding my panties down, bringing your thick thing in, picking my legs up around you. You're strong enough to carry me that way, to move me.

You're slow, steady, in no hurry, reassuring because you're experienced.

My hips in your hands flex, pucker. I'm experienced as she isn't, so nothing you do can surprise me, yet everything does. You're so hard! You compare my body to the quicksilver motion of a fish, to a wriggling eel. You kiss my breasts and make my nipples hard so they point at you, only at you.