I spoke a page too soon; our little Daniel finally does have sex…I think…with his friend’s sister, Bea.
A thousand times I’ve wished to return and lose myself in a memory from which I can rescue only one image stolen from the heat of the flames: Bea, naked and glistening with rain, lying by the fire, with open eyes that have followed me since that day. I leaned over her and passed the tips of my fingers over her belly. Bea lowered her eyelids and smiled, confident and strong.
"Do what you like to me," she whispered.
She was seventeen, her entire life shining before her. (p. 200)
"Do what you like to me," she whispered? Bea knows damn well that this is Daniel’s first time and likely doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do much less what he’d like to do.
And what’s with the She was seventeen, her entire life shining before her.? What’s that got to do with the moment? Is he about to wreck her prospects by getting it on with her?
But author Zafon has already presented us with a penny-romance novel moment, when the 16 year-old Daniel sees the object of his adoration doing it with her music teacher:
Clara’s naked body lay stretched out on white sheets that shone like washed silk. Maestro Neri’s hands slid over her lips, her neck and her breasts. Her white eyes looked up to the ceiling, her eyelids flickering as the music teacher charged at her, entering her body between pale and trembling thighs. The same hands that had read my face six years earlier in the gloom of the Ateneo now clutched the maestro’s buttocks that were glistening with sweat, digging her nails into them and guiding him towards her with desperate, animal desire.(p. 48)
Again with the glistening, the trembling and the flickering eyelids.
Oh yeah, hot sex.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology