The pond was lit by its own collected luminescence — a thousand years of Void Return ambient qi in the water, the flat, dark, perfect-mirror surface broken at its near edge by the specific, churning disturbance of two bodies in motion.
She was above him.
He had positioned himself against the bank, half-submerged, the water at his waist, and she was on him — the specific, full, bouncing, comprehensive geometry of a woman who had been placed onto a lap and whose body had taken the arrangement and was now expressing an opinion about the arrangement through every available channel.
No.
The thought arrived in his chest before his brain.
No. No. Not her.
The water.
