The sheets were itchy. I knew they weren’t really itchy, but they seemed itchy. I turned on my back. I thought I should read something. I turned the light on, found the page in the book I was reading, but couldn’t concentrate on it. My eyes rolled over the words without taking them in. I put the book down and shut the light back off. The clock read 3:17. I needed to sleep. Why couldn’t I?
Two voices drifted in from my window. Both male. I’m very close to my neighbor and when someone gets in between our buildings, the voices shoot straight up like they’re in the room.
“Take your pants off,” the deeper voice said.
I heard the smacks and moans of kissing, then the zipper. Then another moan.
“What do you want me to do?” the deeper said again.
“Suck it,” said the other one, his not really higher, but just less of it. More air in it.
I thought, in a slightly panicked moment, about how I was going to get the two of them out of there. If I said something, they’d know I’m just a girl and wouldn’t take me seriously. They might even be armed. I tried coughing loud. It had no effect. I could call the cops, but I didn’t want to get them arrested. I just didn’t want them doing that right outside of my window. I didn’t want to listen to it.
I slowly, carefully, leaned out to look over them. I’d never seen it before in person, never seen two men with each other. When it’s in a movie, I just close my eyes until it’s over. I found the strength to watch for a little while. It wasn’t too bad. Just another type of head bobbing on a man’s midsection. I moved more of my body over the pillows and looked over them straight on. The lighter-voiced man, probably about twenty-three or so, fantastically good looking in a way that gay men seem to have a monopoly on, leaned on the opposite wall with his eyes closed, biting his lip. His head bent back a second and I leapt back, worried that he would open his eyes and see me. I gave it a few seconds, wondering what I was doing, and went back out.
I waited to be disgusted. I was sure I’d be disgusted, but I wasn’t. There was something about it, not sexy, but I wasn’t sure what. The deeper-voiced man slowed and stopped, making the pretty young man look down at him. The man crawled up his front and caught his face in a deep kiss. They breathed heavily, some cracked breaths knocking up the bricks to my room, some passing through their vocal chords. As I watched them, misgivings and discomfort passed. There was something about it, two men together suddenly, something that made my stomach drop. I felt naughty for watching it, felt that they were naughty and what did that make me?
“Fuck me,” I heard, suddenly, in the light voice. “Fuck me.”
The deeper voiced man looked up and down the narrow passage and I jumped back in again. I realized that I was breathing hard, moving slowly, that my pussy was getting wet. I pulled my pajama pants and underwear down and checked. Dear God.
“Fuck me,” I heard again. Then, “Shhh.” I split my pussy apart and rubbed at my clit with my other hand. This was going to happen. I had no choice.
I leaned out over the men again. I could see the deeper-voiced one now. He, too, was beautiful, but in a more masculine, Mediterranean way. His face was red but open. He was kneeling on the ground behind the exposed ass of his pretty boy. My hands went below again, down my tummy, my legs spread, face down on the bed. Pussy juice coated me and dripped directly down to my clit. The darker man spread the butt-cheeks of the pretty boy and worked the hole open with his fingers, a bottle of some sort of lube in his other hand. Then, very slowly, he pressed his penis down and slid it in. The pretty boy quaked. He groaned, his hands in fists over the strip of grass. “Shh,” the other man said again, settling his knees into position. “No, don’t shh,” I thought. The pretty boy reached around and took the darker man’s ass, letting him know what he wanted by grinding him.
The darker man took the pretty man’s arm and put it back on the grass. Then he took his hips and began to thrust. He made love to him hard, fast, deep. My fingers entered my pussy at that rate to match it. It was good. I flicked my clit some more with my thumb, trembling, my wrist sore, pressed into the bed. What was I doing? How could I do this?
The darker man pressed his hands into the other’s back as he went, almost seeming to use him, impersonally just thrusting against him. The pretty boy’s arm waved in the air at his side. He was masturbating. I was masturbating. I wanted to be under him. To help him. To be screwed just as hard as he was getting screwed. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see his hand on himself. Then, with a muffled wail, the younger one’s back arched and his head threw back. He was having an orgasm. The man making love to him slowed for it, watching him like me, his mouth open. He leaned over and kissed his back, then bit it, his hips still moving.
A wave started at my toes, pure ecstasy, and flew up my back and shoulders. I locked up in an arch, my mouth open. I came and came and came, harder than I ever have, struggling not to make a sound, not a whimper or a gasp or a simple “Jesus Christ!” though I mouthed it. I lay there for a few moments, my head swimming, and when my eyes opened, the men were gone. Only a dent in the grass where their knees had been.
I crawled back inside, put a pillow between my knees and fell asleep before I could think.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Thursday, June 7, 2007
My Problem
Just now put in links. Look, I know I'm slow, but it's entirely out of trepidatiousness. I just don't want to fuck up. I don't really know a lot about the community so far, and I'm just a little "Wait, what?" I'm glad to get in here a little bit though.
It's a short list right now, but I just really haven't had the time, though I've definitely had the inclination, to catch up on all the goodness. If there is something you'd like to bring specifically to my attention, I'm there and looking. Comment here or email me.
All links tried and true. Enjoy.
It's a short list right now, but I just really haven't had the time, though I've definitely had the inclination, to catch up on all the goodness. If there is something you'd like to bring specifically to my attention, I'm there and looking. Comment here or email me.
All links tried and true. Enjoy.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
The Diva and the Demon
There was a beat, a thudding beat, one that you could feel make ripples in your ribs that end at your breastbone, whacking it hard so that you might think you’re having a heart attack, or falling in love, or there’s an earthquake, or you’re getting beaten up. But this beat was on purpose, to make the room around us seethe, to make us sweat enough to steam up the mirrors and each other, to ruin our clothes and make us want to take them off. The beat, something probably sampled from a jackhammer, a single hit with a jagged retreat, a bassline tracing a circle around it, up, down, up, down, and above it all a light tune, a happy zipping rubber band, accenting another layer, something taken up by a guitar and a keyboard, toyed with by a singer, a drone, a crackling effort to put into it what he was feeling when he wrote this.
This was followed, quickly and repeatedly, by a saccharine taste, bitten under by a medicinal, celebrational sack of flour to the head, vodka and Red Bull. Oliver can make fun of me for drinking it, but he forgets that he was the one who got me into it, one night after work, when we didn’t want to go home but couldn’t stay there. That there was a club in a strip mall of a small town down the coast of North Carolina, off Route One, under a canopy of kudzu and insects that snapped each other. You could forget that you were anywhere in particular until there was a break in the traffic behind you, and you, turning your car off, getting out and shutting the door, you heard a wrestlemania of insects, louder than the beat inside the club.
Oliver told me to drink a vodka and Red Bull, that it would keep me up, but I would still get drunk, drunk but alert. It did. I got over the taste after the first one and downed the second way too fast. Then I was there on the floor with Oliver, because he asked me to, a glimmer caused by a strobe in his eye showing the layers in it, black pupil, yellow ring like a tiny sunflower, thick brown, then an outline, a stroke of black again.
I was already sweating, the lines of it coming down around my neck and back, tickling me, but wiping did no good. The music slowed, got shaggier, messier, and the brave continued to dance, somehow knowing where the deejay was going, somehow knowing where he was going to mesh these beats per minute into the next and at what rate. Oliver knew, took it from his knees to his hips, slower, a roll of the body with no snap. A voice exploded over the music again, a woman’s, but a dark and broken nerve-rubber. She knew what the vodka was doing to my knees, and teased me for it, calling me a fool with that voice, and then walking back to her friends to make fun of me, her ass shaking with it. Oliver’s ass shook when the beat picked up again, the not-so-brave dancing again, listening to see if the next beat would be where they thought it was. The woman’s voice grew, became enormous, bigger than us all, and she sucked us into it, the tempo her heart, and it was breaking.
The vodka crawled up my legs, made them woozy and limp, but warm and delicious, fearless too. Arms came up in the air, hands open to take whatever joy they could from the woman’s pain, they waved, fingers spread, until she stopped wailing and lost herself somewhere in the tune and the thudding, the army of emotion coming to clean up her mess.
The lights got excited, began to twist and swoop, making Oliver purple, then pink, then blue. They flashed in his eyes for a second each time they passed, a reflection off of his retinae, a pupil-sized flashlight in my face, making contact with my pupils and then gone. He was sweating too, his shirt wrinkling and sticking to his chest and back, like a wet towel over the face of a sick man. It made his skin show through. Funny how water can do that, make white things translucent. He raised his arm and ran his fingers through his hair, to try to discipline it not to stick up in odd spots. His arm showed through the shirt, wet with his sweat, you could see the bicep, far too much force for this hair-arrangement business, but there all the same, an orange-sized bulge under his skin, creating different wrinkles on his sleeve. When he put his arm down, finger-sized comb-lines appeared in his haircut, the hair wet and twisted around them, a strand coming down to badger his ear, almost, but not quite touching it.
I’d been looking at him too much, and he noticed it, so I turned to look at someone else for a while, almost, but not quite missing his little smile at me. I decided that another vodka and possibly Red Bull was called for and abruptly stopped dancing, plotting the best route through the mob. A stream was forming to my left and I decided to join it, figuring it was at least headed in the right direction. I got to the service area, waited calmly for my turn and noticed in a quick sweep of the room just behind me and to the left that Oliver was there, that he was watching me but not saying anything. Probably because I’d never hear it. Probably because there was nothing to say. Or maybe he didn’t really notice that it was me in front of him.
I got up there, between two bent brass rails, a tall garbage can keeping me from leaning into the bar, the threat of a waste liquor pond trapped in a rubber mat on the bar enough to deter me anyway. The mat read “Orders Only.” Fingertips touched the small of my back and I knew they were Oliver’s when he appeared at my side. My mouth opened and I fought to breathe. The fingertips pressed in only slightly and slid away. Words, conjugation and purpose left me for about thirty seconds. I explained it away with a vodka and Red Bull, but my back, as if someone had sprayed fingernails of pollen, turned red and itchy where he was, and the heat spread, its fuzzy borders expanding. I finished the drink before I got my change and headed back to the dance floor, the brass rails apart just enough for me to get around Oliver without touching him. If I touched him again, I’d have another swath of blush to deal with, and if it covered more of my body, I’d do something about it.
I unbuttoned my shirt one more button, another two and half inches exposed to the elements, just as the vodka took another whack at my legs and shoulders. I closed my eyes for a few moments and fought for the simplicity of the beat, and found it, the bassline in this one spiraling it down this time, each rotation a little lower than the last. My knees seemed to take this as a hint and bent a little lower with each orbit and I went slower, not snapping on this beat but the other. I opened my eyes and saw that the crowd was down here with me, that their seethe had turned to swish and slow rapture, that Oliver was there again, on my level too, his knees in between mine, the mesh of a new song, or the twist confession of the corporal.
The warm disease spread from my knees now and moved into my hips, and they met his on a downbeat, a syncopated delirium tremens, our arms around each other’s backs, each move of his fingers on me creating another wave of rush circling out from its epicenter. All of what had happened on my back earlier, mere warning shots. His fingers went into my sweaty hair and I felt them make the same ropes against my scalp, the same thick hashmarks. His sweat on his neck mixed with mine and itched more. I wiped, but it didn’t help. Our knees went lower, lower, as the beat slowed, the deejay taking us straight to hell, hot enough already, and we thrust against each other a couple of feet off the floor. Our faces released from where they had been, the balance between us fine now, being handled by our shoulders, our mouths opened to the side of each other and I couldn’t hear his breathing. I could only feel it, a concentration of the steam and sweat in a fragment.
Oliver, I breathed, um, Oliver.
The tempo picked up again, meeting with another that had started somewhere else, almost imperceptibly, then overtook like a passing car and made the new focus, a ticking, fluttery nervous system swell that was joined and abandoned and joined and abandoned. I was following Oliver through another stream, this one to the coat check, a skinny too-cool in charge of our belongings. Oliver opened the half-door in front of him, mentioned the name of someone or other and led me, tripping, down the stairs. It was a small room barely occupied by a few thin jackets and heavy shirts, a couple of purses and backpacks, some stools stacked in a corner, a few kegs, the caps still on them, waiting to be rotated into the coolers. He rolled one on its side and bent me over it, rolled it forward a bit, the giveless aluminum pressing my body weight into my hips.
I was about to protest, the cool metal absorbing my heat just as quickly as I could ooze it out, when he pushed me still further, pressing into the back of my thighs so I didn’t roll into the ground, but my fly reachable. He unfastened me and yanked the pants down. The air of the room on my ass and pussy gave me goosebumps. There were some sounds, liquid and rubber and a hand grasped a pipe in front of my head and to the right. He rolled me forward again, my face inches from the floor and I felt the tip of him, of his rhythm, begin its slow climb.
It was huge. It was painful. It was hell in heaven’s despite, the two agents of pleasure and pain fighting for my tingles. I wanted to yell loud, gutteral, but had left that option up on the dance floor, would be heard here, would be rescued like someone’s Coach purse. He rolled me under him, no weight on me, must have been tensed between pole and toe, and it was easier because the keg was doing it, even though it was Oliver, it was completely free of my input, and immune to my response.
He turned me over anyway, legs up and bent in the air, my head polishing the floor only to be rolled forward again. The exposed planks of the floor above blurred. I could hear every footstep, some with the beat over there, some just a trod to the bar over there, the streams, but mostly it was the friction of soles against rubber matting, the dust the only thing crackling, and the beat only a beat down here.
The pain, Oliver stretching my pussy like a battering ram, never went away, but simply turned unimportant, the demon from hell shrugging his shoulders as the angel filled me with fire. The ceiling was also redundant, the ruthless keg too. I closed my eyes and felt this strange rhythm, Oliver’s cock creating a new level of ecstasy, something adult and mean, but beautiful because of that. Every time I felt his hips make contact with my ass I knew how deep he was, and I gripped his cock tight with my pussy. I looked at his face. It showed.
That was what made me come. That look and what it meant sent the demon off to fuck the angel and somewhere deep inside of me, somewhere Oliver had been rubbing against turned huge and detonated, my back bending into the keg I let all of that out and rumbled, rumbled enough to make bells ring miles away. Oliver watched and his own neck tore back and forth, his arms full strength quivering on my thighs, the beat slowing down upstairs, chaos settling into order in my head and moving onto his. He let it out loud, a grit-swiped wail, a male version of the diva in the first song. I held my hands out to him, just short of his arms, the fingers spread, just to feel his skin through his shirt.
This was followed, quickly and repeatedly, by a saccharine taste, bitten under by a medicinal, celebrational sack of flour to the head, vodka and Red Bull. Oliver can make fun of me for drinking it, but he forgets that he was the one who got me into it, one night after work, when we didn’t want to go home but couldn’t stay there. That there was a club in a strip mall of a small town down the coast of North Carolina, off Route One, under a canopy of kudzu and insects that snapped each other. You could forget that you were anywhere in particular until there was a break in the traffic behind you, and you, turning your car off, getting out and shutting the door, you heard a wrestlemania of insects, louder than the beat inside the club.
Oliver told me to drink a vodka and Red Bull, that it would keep me up, but I would still get drunk, drunk but alert. It did. I got over the taste after the first one and downed the second way too fast. Then I was there on the floor with Oliver, because he asked me to, a glimmer caused by a strobe in his eye showing the layers in it, black pupil, yellow ring like a tiny sunflower, thick brown, then an outline, a stroke of black again.
I was already sweating, the lines of it coming down around my neck and back, tickling me, but wiping did no good. The music slowed, got shaggier, messier, and the brave continued to dance, somehow knowing where the deejay was going, somehow knowing where he was going to mesh these beats per minute into the next and at what rate. Oliver knew, took it from his knees to his hips, slower, a roll of the body with no snap. A voice exploded over the music again, a woman’s, but a dark and broken nerve-rubber. She knew what the vodka was doing to my knees, and teased me for it, calling me a fool with that voice, and then walking back to her friends to make fun of me, her ass shaking with it. Oliver’s ass shook when the beat picked up again, the not-so-brave dancing again, listening to see if the next beat would be where they thought it was. The woman’s voice grew, became enormous, bigger than us all, and she sucked us into it, the tempo her heart, and it was breaking.
The vodka crawled up my legs, made them woozy and limp, but warm and delicious, fearless too. Arms came up in the air, hands open to take whatever joy they could from the woman’s pain, they waved, fingers spread, until she stopped wailing and lost herself somewhere in the tune and the thudding, the army of emotion coming to clean up her mess.
The lights got excited, began to twist and swoop, making Oliver purple, then pink, then blue. They flashed in his eyes for a second each time they passed, a reflection off of his retinae, a pupil-sized flashlight in my face, making contact with my pupils and then gone. He was sweating too, his shirt wrinkling and sticking to his chest and back, like a wet towel over the face of a sick man. It made his skin show through. Funny how water can do that, make white things translucent. He raised his arm and ran his fingers through his hair, to try to discipline it not to stick up in odd spots. His arm showed through the shirt, wet with his sweat, you could see the bicep, far too much force for this hair-arrangement business, but there all the same, an orange-sized bulge under his skin, creating different wrinkles on his sleeve. When he put his arm down, finger-sized comb-lines appeared in his haircut, the hair wet and twisted around them, a strand coming down to badger his ear, almost, but not quite touching it.
I’d been looking at him too much, and he noticed it, so I turned to look at someone else for a while, almost, but not quite missing his little smile at me. I decided that another vodka and possibly Red Bull was called for and abruptly stopped dancing, plotting the best route through the mob. A stream was forming to my left and I decided to join it, figuring it was at least headed in the right direction. I got to the service area, waited calmly for my turn and noticed in a quick sweep of the room just behind me and to the left that Oliver was there, that he was watching me but not saying anything. Probably because I’d never hear it. Probably because there was nothing to say. Or maybe he didn’t really notice that it was me in front of him.
I got up there, between two bent brass rails, a tall garbage can keeping me from leaning into the bar, the threat of a waste liquor pond trapped in a rubber mat on the bar enough to deter me anyway. The mat read “Orders Only.” Fingertips touched the small of my back and I knew they were Oliver’s when he appeared at my side. My mouth opened and I fought to breathe. The fingertips pressed in only slightly and slid away. Words, conjugation and purpose left me for about thirty seconds. I explained it away with a vodka and Red Bull, but my back, as if someone had sprayed fingernails of pollen, turned red and itchy where he was, and the heat spread, its fuzzy borders expanding. I finished the drink before I got my change and headed back to the dance floor, the brass rails apart just enough for me to get around Oliver without touching him. If I touched him again, I’d have another swath of blush to deal with, and if it covered more of my body, I’d do something about it.
I unbuttoned my shirt one more button, another two and half inches exposed to the elements, just as the vodka took another whack at my legs and shoulders. I closed my eyes for a few moments and fought for the simplicity of the beat, and found it, the bassline in this one spiraling it down this time, each rotation a little lower than the last. My knees seemed to take this as a hint and bent a little lower with each orbit and I went slower, not snapping on this beat but the other. I opened my eyes and saw that the crowd was down here with me, that their seethe had turned to swish and slow rapture, that Oliver was there again, on my level too, his knees in between mine, the mesh of a new song, or the twist confession of the corporal.
The warm disease spread from my knees now and moved into my hips, and they met his on a downbeat, a syncopated delirium tremens, our arms around each other’s backs, each move of his fingers on me creating another wave of rush circling out from its epicenter. All of what had happened on my back earlier, mere warning shots. His fingers went into my sweaty hair and I felt them make the same ropes against my scalp, the same thick hashmarks. His sweat on his neck mixed with mine and itched more. I wiped, but it didn’t help. Our knees went lower, lower, as the beat slowed, the deejay taking us straight to hell, hot enough already, and we thrust against each other a couple of feet off the floor. Our faces released from where they had been, the balance between us fine now, being handled by our shoulders, our mouths opened to the side of each other and I couldn’t hear his breathing. I could only feel it, a concentration of the steam and sweat in a fragment.
Oliver, I breathed, um, Oliver.
The tempo picked up again, meeting with another that had started somewhere else, almost imperceptibly, then overtook like a passing car and made the new focus, a ticking, fluttery nervous system swell that was joined and abandoned and joined and abandoned. I was following Oliver through another stream, this one to the coat check, a skinny too-cool in charge of our belongings. Oliver opened the half-door in front of him, mentioned the name of someone or other and led me, tripping, down the stairs. It was a small room barely occupied by a few thin jackets and heavy shirts, a couple of purses and backpacks, some stools stacked in a corner, a few kegs, the caps still on them, waiting to be rotated into the coolers. He rolled one on its side and bent me over it, rolled it forward a bit, the giveless aluminum pressing my body weight into my hips.
I was about to protest, the cool metal absorbing my heat just as quickly as I could ooze it out, when he pushed me still further, pressing into the back of my thighs so I didn’t roll into the ground, but my fly reachable. He unfastened me and yanked the pants down. The air of the room on my ass and pussy gave me goosebumps. There were some sounds, liquid and rubber and a hand grasped a pipe in front of my head and to the right. He rolled me forward again, my face inches from the floor and I felt the tip of him, of his rhythm, begin its slow climb.
It was huge. It was painful. It was hell in heaven’s despite, the two agents of pleasure and pain fighting for my tingles. I wanted to yell loud, gutteral, but had left that option up on the dance floor, would be heard here, would be rescued like someone’s Coach purse. He rolled me under him, no weight on me, must have been tensed between pole and toe, and it was easier because the keg was doing it, even though it was Oliver, it was completely free of my input, and immune to my response.
He turned me over anyway, legs up and bent in the air, my head polishing the floor only to be rolled forward again. The exposed planks of the floor above blurred. I could hear every footstep, some with the beat over there, some just a trod to the bar over there, the streams, but mostly it was the friction of soles against rubber matting, the dust the only thing crackling, and the beat only a beat down here.
The pain, Oliver stretching my pussy like a battering ram, never went away, but simply turned unimportant, the demon from hell shrugging his shoulders as the angel filled me with fire. The ceiling was also redundant, the ruthless keg too. I closed my eyes and felt this strange rhythm, Oliver’s cock creating a new level of ecstasy, something adult and mean, but beautiful because of that. Every time I felt his hips make contact with my ass I knew how deep he was, and I gripped his cock tight with my pussy. I looked at his face. It showed.
That was what made me come. That look and what it meant sent the demon off to fuck the angel and somewhere deep inside of me, somewhere Oliver had been rubbing against turned huge and detonated, my back bending into the keg I let all of that out and rumbled, rumbled enough to make bells ring miles away. Oliver watched and his own neck tore back and forth, his arms full strength quivering on my thighs, the beat slowing down upstairs, chaos settling into order in my head and moving onto his. He let it out loud, a grit-swiped wail, a male version of the diva in the first song. I held my hands out to him, just short of his arms, the fingers spread, just to feel his skin through his shirt.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Pour
Full glass. Full glass. Full glass. Getting there. Empties placed. Tip taken, unfolded, stuffed into jar.
Man. “What can get for you?”
He turns around and asks his buddies, waited this whole time in line and is just now asking what they’re drinking, two Jack and Cokes, two Miller Lites, a Tanqueray on the rocks and a Corona. Beer in cooler behind me, remove caps. Miller Lites open easily, Buds are the worst. Corona needs my key. They’re placed on the mat. Two tall glasses and a rocks glass, ice, the scoop jammed into the bounty, just filled and spilling onto the rubber mat, the ice new and still crunchy and white, chilling parts of the rocks glass now, Turn for Tanqueray, pour one, two, three, four, five, six. Jack in the well just a bit out of reach, seated customer glass now empty and on the rail. Jack in hand, ribbed neck and square body, pour one, two, three, four and one, two, three, four. Coke, not diet, little red C in the upper right hand corner of the gun, adjust for slight kickback by holding the gun deep over the lip of the glass. Couple more squirts and bottles returned, straws in place while they lose their fizzy, grumpy bubbles, ready to be topped again. Math done in head. Beers: Miller Lite four fifty apiece, together nine, Corona five fifty, fourteen fifty. Drinks: Jack shots seven each, fourteen, twenty-eight fifty, Tanqueray, rocks call, nine. Empty customer glass was Ketel and cranberry.
“Thirty-seven fifty.”
“Keep it.”
Forty dollars. Derrick at the register. Start seated customer drink. “You ready?” glass shaken in front of him.
“Please”
Ketel, Cranberry. Money taken from pile in front of seated customer. Needs change. Derrick still at register.
“Sammy,” he says, one finger raised in the air behind him, pointing vaguely at where he guesses I am, “I can feel you when you just stand there, you know.” I walk up to his finger, rub my cheek along it, then lick the tip. “Where…,” he continues, “is the goddamn Campari on this thing?” I suck in the rest of the finger. It relaxes immediately in my mouth. I rub it with my tongue. “You think this is the first time I ever got my finger sucked by some straight boy? Show me the fucking Campari.” I slip back to the third joint and bite in.
“Ere,” I say around his fingertip, pointing with mine, “in de aperteefs.” The barback bumps into me and slams me into Derrick. His face turns and he looks at my lips, removing his finger. He rubs it on my neck, my own saliva cooling my skin. I push him away from the register by the hips.
Change made, two fifty in tip jar, thirteen for the seated customer.
The night patters on, a swirl of repeated customers, most I know, some I don’t. Some I only know by what they drink. A girl or two, neither pretty, but both friendly. I smile deep for them, stretch my t-shirt across my stomach wiping my palm. Derrick’s hands on me, his fingers into the skin of my forearm, or leaning on my back to clarify someone’s order. He’ll say “Behind you” as he passes, the service industry standard warning. I stick my ass out sometimes when he says it, just to feel his hands on my hips, to watch the customers swoon when he dry-grinds me, finishes it with a spanked ass for being naughty. When we pass face to face, me reaching for the J&B, him for the next bottle of Citron, we slow together, our lips close to each other, close enough to feel it. It’s busy tonight and he smells like sweat, looks like sweat. He opens the Citron with a yank, bursting the plastic seal. He whips the cap onto the floor, takes a pourer and shoves it in, all while watching me, all while he’s just inches away, shiny glass rivers curling around his chin, headed for his neck.
An angry drunk is ignored until he goes away, calling Derrick a little queeny prison bitch and me, once he found me, a closeted fucking cocktease. Another angry drunk finally just passes out when he’s ignored, his head down on his arms on the bar, like an ANgel, Derrick says into his walkie-talkie. The angel is woken by a bouncer, who is elbowed in the face for his troubles. There is noise, constant little roaring, the peas and carrots of the English language, broken by an occasional shriek, all over it, the thumping techno beat, a swirling heartbeat, we put glasses on the mats in time.
Shots are bought for us. Shots are bought for the regulars. We ignore the newcomers for this ritual, let them line up. We pour each other Jameson and drink it fast, keep a plastic bottle of the cheap stuff in the cooler for the customers, something I whip up with all the ignored strawberry schnapps, cans of juice and the well vodka before the doors open. I shake it, my thumb over the pourer, while Derrick watches me. Little bits of the sweet stuff christen my clothes for the night, escaping through the seal.
Derrick pours me a few shots of the Jameson without taking any himself. “I like you lubricated on Thursdays,” he says. I drink the first, but ignore the rest until he finds ways to force it on me, tapping me on the shoulder and shoving it to my face, or making the customers insist. They always do. They’re good like that. I drink one facing Derrick, and while my face is in the air, inhaling it, Derrick runs a hand up the inside of my thigh. I don’t react. He grabs my balls. I put the shot glass down and stare at him, arms akimbo until he lets go. He smiles after a little, disappointed pout.
The lights come up, last call, the bouncers finding and rounding up the leftovers, the arguments and the nice guys and the cruisers with their finds. The spills and the stick appear on the floor and the silence hits like a gong, Derrick and I talking too loud, used to talking too loud. A beer for me and one for him, cool in the bottle, the silent jealousy of the seated customer forgiven. I count the drawer. He counts the tips and places them in even piles on the bar. He doesn’t talk and neither do I until we’re done counting, until I’ve counted three times and made the final drop.
“You tease too much,” Derrick says, ashing into thin air. The ashes fall and seem to dissipate before they hit the floor. Maybe it’s because they don’t make any noise. I put the bottle down and slide off of the stool. I try to make him look at me, but he won’t, just stares ahead of him, eyelashes thick like palm fronds blinking slowly. I reach out for his chest, but he doesn’t flinch, simply exhales, a grey fog into the orange lights. I let my hand drop to his stomach, then ascend to his nipple. I flick it with my thumb and rub gently, almost imperceptibly.
“What are you doing, man?” he says, and takes my hand away.
I move in closer, slide my arm around his chest. His head turns to watch it and I go to his neck, under the short dreads and the sweat lines, under the curve of his jaw. A strong neck, large muscles and very dark skin that I lick sweetly. He puts up with it for a while and bends his head to me, pushing me away, forearm against my breastbone.
“Sammy.” I try to kiss him. He holds me away. “Sammy, you’re fucking straight, alright?”
My palm makes contact with the inside of his thigh and slides up, gripping at the deepest part, the backs of my fingers against his balls. He drops his arm and shakes his head, smoking and flicking the ashes with purpose. I kiss his neck again, raise his shirt in the front, over the stomach, flat and precise like a diver’s. His cigarette is over and he flicks it away. The butt skids into a sticky corner and stops.
“Don’t…,” he says, or almost does. I interrupt him at his cock, thick and straight, searching for release in his jeans. I let out the smallest laugh, a little pfft through my nose and pull his shirt up in two hands. He’s panting a little, the chest expanding and contracting deep and quick. I put my fingers in his belt, in his button, in his fly and then on his cock, over the underwear, something expensive and tight. Soft to the touch over his biting hard on. “Sammy…,” he says, more breath than voice, and turns finally to kiss me, to lay his mouth on mine, hot and strong and strange. His tongue in my gums. His lips, his lips like their own creatures.
He takes me by the shirt, bunched in his fist, and pulls me behind the bar. I almost trip on the mats. He presses me into the backbar, unstoppable, heavy and lean. His hard on is in my hip, the button of his jeans rolled into my stomach. He kisses me more, having taken over now, my shirt over my stomach, my jeans opened, my cock manhandled. He knows what to do with it, where to go. My back buckles at the first touch. He takes my shoulders and pushes me down to my knees. I’m confronted with his cock, enormous and uncut. I slide my lips over the tip, lick the foreskin between my lips and suck on it. He gulps air between his lips and grit teeth and stands on the balls of his feet. His fingers enter my hair and he grips tight. I let go and he lets up, then finds a new, stronger but less cruel hold of my head and pulls my face to his cock.
I let it in.
It’s massive and wrenching and awful. It chokes me, muffles me, gags me. He doesn’t relent. My jaw starts to ache. My cock aches too. He fucks my face hard, using long, deep strokes and grinding. Spit and precome drip from my mouth. I wipe my palm in it and start jerking off.
He makes two quick thrusts, yelps and the come itself arrives, explodes into my mouth. I spit it out quickly and return to my work. I haven’t been this hard in years, this desperate and shaky. He pulls out of my mouth, his cock still hard, waving above his zipper. He walks backward and trips a little, falling against the coolers. He watches me, shivering on my knees, my mouth agape. When he sees me begin to grimace, he slides off the cooler and bends over me on the floor. His tongue twists at the tip, little sweet flicks. I look down at the back of his head, amazed that this is finally happening, amazed that I’ve just sucked a man off, let him fuck my mouth. But there is no distraction from the tongue, nothing but an electric current and a panicked grab at the air. I come, pressed into the backbar enough to move the mat, my fingers dented by the corner of the backbar.
When I open my eyes, he is watching me. He smiles and pushes a drip of stray come between his lips with his thumb.
“No, Sammy,” he says, and puts his forefinger on my lips. “This does not mean that you get to keep the tips for the night.”
Man. “What can get for you?”
He turns around and asks his buddies, waited this whole time in line and is just now asking what they’re drinking, two Jack and Cokes, two Miller Lites, a Tanqueray on the rocks and a Corona. Beer in cooler behind me, remove caps. Miller Lites open easily, Buds are the worst. Corona needs my key. They’re placed on the mat. Two tall glasses and a rocks glass, ice, the scoop jammed into the bounty, just filled and spilling onto the rubber mat, the ice new and still crunchy and white, chilling parts of the rocks glass now, Turn for Tanqueray, pour one, two, three, four, five, six. Jack in the well just a bit out of reach, seated customer glass now empty and on the rail. Jack in hand, ribbed neck and square body, pour one, two, three, four and one, two, three, four. Coke, not diet, little red C in the upper right hand corner of the gun, adjust for slight kickback by holding the gun deep over the lip of the glass. Couple more squirts and bottles returned, straws in place while they lose their fizzy, grumpy bubbles, ready to be topped again. Math done in head. Beers: Miller Lite four fifty apiece, together nine, Corona five fifty, fourteen fifty. Drinks: Jack shots seven each, fourteen, twenty-eight fifty, Tanqueray, rocks call, nine. Empty customer glass was Ketel and cranberry.
“Thirty-seven fifty.”
“Keep it.”
Forty dollars. Derrick at the register. Start seated customer drink. “You ready?” glass shaken in front of him.
“Please”
Ketel, Cranberry. Money taken from pile in front of seated customer. Needs change. Derrick still at register.
“Sammy,” he says, one finger raised in the air behind him, pointing vaguely at where he guesses I am, “I can feel you when you just stand there, you know.” I walk up to his finger, rub my cheek along it, then lick the tip. “Where…,” he continues, “is the goddamn Campari on this thing?” I suck in the rest of the finger. It relaxes immediately in my mouth. I rub it with my tongue. “You think this is the first time I ever got my finger sucked by some straight boy? Show me the fucking Campari.” I slip back to the third joint and bite in.
“Ere,” I say around his fingertip, pointing with mine, “in de aperteefs.” The barback bumps into me and slams me into Derrick. His face turns and he looks at my lips, removing his finger. He rubs it on my neck, my own saliva cooling my skin. I push him away from the register by the hips.
Change made, two fifty in tip jar, thirteen for the seated customer.
The night patters on, a swirl of repeated customers, most I know, some I don’t. Some I only know by what they drink. A girl or two, neither pretty, but both friendly. I smile deep for them, stretch my t-shirt across my stomach wiping my palm. Derrick’s hands on me, his fingers into the skin of my forearm, or leaning on my back to clarify someone’s order. He’ll say “Behind you” as he passes, the service industry standard warning. I stick my ass out sometimes when he says it, just to feel his hands on my hips, to watch the customers swoon when he dry-grinds me, finishes it with a spanked ass for being naughty. When we pass face to face, me reaching for the J&B, him for the next bottle of Citron, we slow together, our lips close to each other, close enough to feel it. It’s busy tonight and he smells like sweat, looks like sweat. He opens the Citron with a yank, bursting the plastic seal. He whips the cap onto the floor, takes a pourer and shoves it in, all while watching me, all while he’s just inches away, shiny glass rivers curling around his chin, headed for his neck.
An angry drunk is ignored until he goes away, calling Derrick a little queeny prison bitch and me, once he found me, a closeted fucking cocktease. Another angry drunk finally just passes out when he’s ignored, his head down on his arms on the bar, like an ANgel, Derrick says into his walkie-talkie. The angel is woken by a bouncer, who is elbowed in the face for his troubles. There is noise, constant little roaring, the peas and carrots of the English language, broken by an occasional shriek, all over it, the thumping techno beat, a swirling heartbeat, we put glasses on the mats in time.
Shots are bought for us. Shots are bought for the regulars. We ignore the newcomers for this ritual, let them line up. We pour each other Jameson and drink it fast, keep a plastic bottle of the cheap stuff in the cooler for the customers, something I whip up with all the ignored strawberry schnapps, cans of juice and the well vodka before the doors open. I shake it, my thumb over the pourer, while Derrick watches me. Little bits of the sweet stuff christen my clothes for the night, escaping through the seal.
Derrick pours me a few shots of the Jameson without taking any himself. “I like you lubricated on Thursdays,” he says. I drink the first, but ignore the rest until he finds ways to force it on me, tapping me on the shoulder and shoving it to my face, or making the customers insist. They always do. They’re good like that. I drink one facing Derrick, and while my face is in the air, inhaling it, Derrick runs a hand up the inside of my thigh. I don’t react. He grabs my balls. I put the shot glass down and stare at him, arms akimbo until he lets go. He smiles after a little, disappointed pout.
The lights come up, last call, the bouncers finding and rounding up the leftovers, the arguments and the nice guys and the cruisers with their finds. The spills and the stick appear on the floor and the silence hits like a gong, Derrick and I talking too loud, used to talking too loud. A beer for me and one for him, cool in the bottle, the silent jealousy of the seated customer forgiven. I count the drawer. He counts the tips and places them in even piles on the bar. He doesn’t talk and neither do I until we’re done counting, until I’ve counted three times and made the final drop.
“You tease too much,” Derrick says, ashing into thin air. The ashes fall and seem to dissipate before they hit the floor. Maybe it’s because they don’t make any noise. I put the bottle down and slide off of the stool. I try to make him look at me, but he won’t, just stares ahead of him, eyelashes thick like palm fronds blinking slowly. I reach out for his chest, but he doesn’t flinch, simply exhales, a grey fog into the orange lights. I let my hand drop to his stomach, then ascend to his nipple. I flick it with my thumb and rub gently, almost imperceptibly.
“What are you doing, man?” he says, and takes my hand away.
I move in closer, slide my arm around his chest. His head turns to watch it and I go to his neck, under the short dreads and the sweat lines, under the curve of his jaw. A strong neck, large muscles and very dark skin that I lick sweetly. He puts up with it for a while and bends his head to me, pushing me away, forearm against my breastbone.
“Sammy.” I try to kiss him. He holds me away. “Sammy, you’re fucking straight, alright?”
My palm makes contact with the inside of his thigh and slides up, gripping at the deepest part, the backs of my fingers against his balls. He drops his arm and shakes his head, smoking and flicking the ashes with purpose. I kiss his neck again, raise his shirt in the front, over the stomach, flat and precise like a diver’s. His cigarette is over and he flicks it away. The butt skids into a sticky corner and stops.
“Don’t…,” he says, or almost does. I interrupt him at his cock, thick and straight, searching for release in his jeans. I let out the smallest laugh, a little pfft through my nose and pull his shirt up in two hands. He’s panting a little, the chest expanding and contracting deep and quick. I put my fingers in his belt, in his button, in his fly and then on his cock, over the underwear, something expensive and tight. Soft to the touch over his biting hard on. “Sammy…,” he says, more breath than voice, and turns finally to kiss me, to lay his mouth on mine, hot and strong and strange. His tongue in my gums. His lips, his lips like their own creatures.
He takes me by the shirt, bunched in his fist, and pulls me behind the bar. I almost trip on the mats. He presses me into the backbar, unstoppable, heavy and lean. His hard on is in my hip, the button of his jeans rolled into my stomach. He kisses me more, having taken over now, my shirt over my stomach, my jeans opened, my cock manhandled. He knows what to do with it, where to go. My back buckles at the first touch. He takes my shoulders and pushes me down to my knees. I’m confronted with his cock, enormous and uncut. I slide my lips over the tip, lick the foreskin between my lips and suck on it. He gulps air between his lips and grit teeth and stands on the balls of his feet. His fingers enter my hair and he grips tight. I let go and he lets up, then finds a new, stronger but less cruel hold of my head and pulls my face to his cock.
I let it in.
It’s massive and wrenching and awful. It chokes me, muffles me, gags me. He doesn’t relent. My jaw starts to ache. My cock aches too. He fucks my face hard, using long, deep strokes and grinding. Spit and precome drip from my mouth. I wipe my palm in it and start jerking off.
He makes two quick thrusts, yelps and the come itself arrives, explodes into my mouth. I spit it out quickly and return to my work. I haven’t been this hard in years, this desperate and shaky. He pulls out of my mouth, his cock still hard, waving above his zipper. He walks backward and trips a little, falling against the coolers. He watches me, shivering on my knees, my mouth agape. When he sees me begin to grimace, he slides off the cooler and bends over me on the floor. His tongue twists at the tip, little sweet flicks. I look down at the back of his head, amazed that this is finally happening, amazed that I’ve just sucked a man off, let him fuck my mouth. But there is no distraction from the tongue, nothing but an electric current and a panicked grab at the air. I come, pressed into the backbar enough to move the mat, my fingers dented by the corner of the backbar.
When I open my eyes, he is watching me. He smiles and pushes a drip of stray come between his lips with his thumb.
“No, Sammy,” he says, and puts his forefinger on my lips. “This does not mean that you get to keep the tips for the night.”
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Salt and Sweet
Breakfast is served in the living room. He puts one plate on the coffee table, but when I sit up to reach it, he presses me back down. He sits on the floor next to the couch and pulls the table, the over-easy eggs rippling, toward him. He turns his back to me and slices the eggs into little squares. The yolks are unleashed and the yellow slides out to coat everything. He shakes out salt and pepper and balances an egg bite, dripping, on a fork. He turns behind him and aims it at my mouth. I try to sit up again, but he pulls the fork back and pushes me back. He opens my mouth with my thumb and drops the egg in. Yolk spreads across my lips and drops down my cheek. He leans over and licks it off. He does it again before I’ve completely finished the first. I swallow hard and get my mouth open just a beat too slow and the egg is all over my face. He licks this too away. When the egg is finished, he’s eaten as much as I have. He drags a buttery piece of toast around my lips to sop up the rest, lets me have a bite, then takes it himself.
He pokes a fork into the end of a sausage link, dips it in maple syrup and holds it above my mouth. The syrup drips onto my tongue, stuck out for it, pointed as far out as I can get it. He lowers it so I can just touch it and smiles as he pulls it away.
“Nick, let m-“
He muzzles me with the sausage, dropping it in quickly. I manage a bite before he pulls it out. He reaches out and pulls my thighs apart. He wraps his hand around my panties and yanks them down. He looks, smiles and then turns and quietly eats a few more bites of another egg.
“Nick.”
He spears three sausages and turns around. He runs their tips along the inside of my thigh. They’re still hot and it burns me a little. He raises my t-shirt and circles my nipples with them. It hurts, but they stand right up. He turns and dips the sausages in syrup and circles them again. He traces his circles with his tongue. “Mmm.” He finishes and holds them over my mouth.
“Don’t bite,” he says. “Just clean.”
I lick the syrup off, tongue and lips, eager and smiling. He lowers his pajama bottoms and pulls his cock out, half-erect and beautiful. He leaves it there. I don’t care about breakfast anymore. I want to eat his cock, feel its salt smooth in my mouth. He reaches back, the fork still loaded with the sausages, opens my pussy with his fingers and slides them inside. “You’re wet,” he says. “That’s good.” The sausages have cooled a little, but they’re still warmer than me, heating me. He pulls them out and licks one of them. He bites the one and takes it whole off the fork. His cheek bulges with it and a stream of grease escapes his lips. He holds the other two above my mouth and I can smell myself on them. He pushes them down, and I’m made to lick again. I taste good, musty and earthy. He smiles and adds three fresh sausages to the fork, making a round, short cock. He pushes these inside of me, fucking me slowly, then just leaving them inside.
He gets the syrup bottle and pours some, still cold from the fridge, onto my clit. He dives in. My toes curl, my body shaking, his tongue licking slow and thorough. Heat and cold fight it out on me, all balanced and heightened with every swipe. “Niiiick. Oh God, Niiiick.” I have a look at his cock. It’s full-on hard now. I think of it inside of me. He seems to notice me noticing and he pours some syrup on it. It twitches. He strokes it. “Nick.” His tongue finds a new rhythm and I jump. Fuck. He begins to work himself, syrup everywhere, lending a brown sheen to him. His stomach contracts, his ankles twitching.
A sweet nausea builds in my stomach, fiery need. A question about to be answered. Nick’s hand twists around him. Fuck. My leg kicks the air. Fuck. The world goes black and a cool, silent breath of an orgasm plunges into me, my back arching, my mouth open, a single gasp escaping. He quickly stops and jumps up, syrup in hand. He holds his cock over my face and pours more on. I drink the excess. His face, strong, but with the worried look of pleasure, hovers in the distance. He jerks off quickly, foaming white at the tip. I leave some syrup in my mouth, a pool of it held up by my tongue. “Jesus! Jesus!” he yells and presses his cock to my teeth as he comes, squirting salt and bitter into what was painfully sweet. I mix it as he watches and swallow it, finishing it with a sticky smile at his gaping face.
He pokes a fork into the end of a sausage link, dips it in maple syrup and holds it above my mouth. The syrup drips onto my tongue, stuck out for it, pointed as far out as I can get it. He lowers it so I can just touch it and smiles as he pulls it away.
“Nick, let m-“
He muzzles me with the sausage, dropping it in quickly. I manage a bite before he pulls it out. He reaches out and pulls my thighs apart. He wraps his hand around my panties and yanks them down. He looks, smiles and then turns and quietly eats a few more bites of another egg.
“Nick.”
He spears three sausages and turns around. He runs their tips along the inside of my thigh. They’re still hot and it burns me a little. He raises my t-shirt and circles my nipples with them. It hurts, but they stand right up. He turns and dips the sausages in syrup and circles them again. He traces his circles with his tongue. “Mmm.” He finishes and holds them over my mouth.
“Don’t bite,” he says. “Just clean.”
I lick the syrup off, tongue and lips, eager and smiling. He lowers his pajama bottoms and pulls his cock out, half-erect and beautiful. He leaves it there. I don’t care about breakfast anymore. I want to eat his cock, feel its salt smooth in my mouth. He reaches back, the fork still loaded with the sausages, opens my pussy with his fingers and slides them inside. “You’re wet,” he says. “That’s good.” The sausages have cooled a little, but they’re still warmer than me, heating me. He pulls them out and licks one of them. He bites the one and takes it whole off the fork. His cheek bulges with it and a stream of grease escapes his lips. He holds the other two above my mouth and I can smell myself on them. He pushes them down, and I’m made to lick again. I taste good, musty and earthy. He smiles and adds three fresh sausages to the fork, making a round, short cock. He pushes these inside of me, fucking me slowly, then just leaving them inside.
He gets the syrup bottle and pours some, still cold from the fridge, onto my clit. He dives in. My toes curl, my body shaking, his tongue licking slow and thorough. Heat and cold fight it out on me, all balanced and heightened with every swipe. “Niiiick. Oh God, Niiiick.” I have a look at his cock. It’s full-on hard now. I think of it inside of me. He seems to notice me noticing and he pours some syrup on it. It twitches. He strokes it. “Nick.” His tongue finds a new rhythm and I jump. Fuck. He begins to work himself, syrup everywhere, lending a brown sheen to him. His stomach contracts, his ankles twitching.
A sweet nausea builds in my stomach, fiery need. A question about to be answered. Nick’s hand twists around him. Fuck. My leg kicks the air. Fuck. The world goes black and a cool, silent breath of an orgasm plunges into me, my back arching, my mouth open, a single gasp escaping. He quickly stops and jumps up, syrup in hand. He holds his cock over my face and pours more on. I drink the excess. His face, strong, but with the worried look of pleasure, hovers in the distance. He jerks off quickly, foaming white at the tip. I leave some syrup in my mouth, a pool of it held up by my tongue. “Jesus! Jesus!” he yells and presses his cock to my teeth as he comes, squirting salt and bitter into what was painfully sweet. I mix it as he watches and swallow it, finishing it with a sticky smile at his gaping face.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Charlie and Bess
Note: This one is a little more harsh than what I normally write. It's not what it looks like if you read it right. Go with an open mind.
She knows everyone at the party and he knows no one. She works the room, introducing her husband, always with an uncouth poke in his chest, “This is Charlie,” she says to everyone, “that husband I’ve been telling you about.” He smiles and shakes their hands, when they offer, these strangers that hardly look at him. They tell her how beautiful she looks tonight, that dress, always the perfect dress! They take her arm and swing her to see it flip in the air. He lets go of her hand to let her do it, looking down at his drink and faking a smile for anyone who might be looking. He wants to tell them that he bought the dress, in another effort to get her attention, he sat outside of the changing room and waited for her, staring at a fleur-de-lis pattern in the carpet, avoiding the lingerie section just to his left. She didn’t come out to show it to him as she used to do, to stare up at him with those doe-eyes, “Do you like it, my love?” She simply popped out with the saleswoman and walked right past him to the cash register.
She flirts with all the men, always has, probably the only way she’s ever gotten to know them. She touches the ear of one and his eyes shut involuntarily. He’s relieved to see the man annoyed until the man’s jaw drops for a moment, a partial orgasm right here in front of him! She whispers in the ear of another, something about him, Charlie, and the man smiles more than he should before he catches it. Charlie runs his hand down his wife’s back, sure that no one is looking, and fires a warning shot, his thumb in the valley of her ass. He feels her smile. He gets himself a drink, another bourbon on the rocks with a splash of soda. She says he drinks too much at parties. He doesn’t know why else he should be there.
“This is my first husband,” she says to a howling group of white-hairs, all republican haircuts and beer bellies. He’s managed to keep himself in shape over the years, his stomach flat and his ass round. He probably looks at himself in the mirror too much, but who cares? The young girls in his proximity, at the grocery store or at church or crossing his front lawn, they take a look at his wedding band and get that drape in the side of their eyes. He notices, and he wonders if he’d ever have the guts to go through with it. He feels desired for a moment, only to feel like half a man the next. It’s what she’s done to him over the years, made him love her, a wooden stick sharpened and whittled by her knife. What would make him do it? What would be enough?
“Bess,” he says to her, at an angle over her ear that tells her he’s angry, “let’s go get some dinner.”
“You said you weren’t hungry,” she says, all bile across smiling teeth.
“I know what I said,” Charlie responds, and slides his hand around the small of her back, this territory still his own, full of wild, thorny blackberry brambles, but his anyway, his name on the gate. She sighs and rolls her eyes before she makes another, final round in the crowd. He goes outside for a cigarette before he has to take the jokes, the sighing hands-in-the-air exasperation about this half-man that she married, who still imagines that he has some sort of clout with her and what she does.
The drive home will be long and silent. He taps his thumbs in a drumroll on the steering wheel and looks at her legs in the side of his eye. He sees a turnoff in a few miles, a scenic overlook, closed at sunset nominally, but everyone knows is unpatrolled by anyone but tourists consulting their maps and teenagers steaming their windows. It looks from one mountain to another, a black void with bacterial towns in growth on one pass or another. They flash and wobble in the heat, their little lights orange and graded from center to fuzzy circumference. He thinks of the scenic overlook as a grain of joy, some sort of reminder that there are couples out there still in earthquake mode, still trying to get their jagged sides to fit instead of rubbing them raw.
“You said you wanted to eat,” Bess says, predictably.
“I know what I said,” Charlie says, just as predictably.
He makes a cursory glance for Important Things around the lot and picks a spot without the best view, but far enough away that there won’t be a fight for privacy. He can still make out her legs, a little blue-white in the phosphor of the far-away floodlight. She pulls her dress tight around them and he takes her hand away. He’d do anything to make her look at him, anything for the doe-eyes again.
“Come with me into the back,” he says, he thinks politely enough, though he’s aware that any suggestion on his part will be met with deep skepticism. She laughs. “Bess,” he says, “come with me into the back.” He takes her hand tight to his crotch, a bulge due entirely to her loose and hot in his pants. She does not fight this, but doesn’t grip either. She breathes to the side of him, facing forward, staring at the evergreens which block her view of the landscape.
“Don’t be silly, honey,” she says finally. “You want to fuck me in this car? Why?”
“Please, Bess, for me.” Charlie leans into her neck, the form of yellow white steel foundation and the curve of her earlobe. “I want to.”
Bess pulls her hand away and crosses her arms. “What are they going to think?” she says to the evergreens. “We’re there and we just leave for no reason and now I’m here, me and you, pretending we’re seventeen years old!”
“Come on. Please.”
“No!” she says. He decides that she’s managed to have a couple more drinks than he noticed, quick to start a fight and sour when she doesn’t get it. He regrets, then, parking where he has nothing to look at, nothing to change the subject with, just a few unremarkable evergreens and a bitter wife.
He turns to look at her instead, her profile, the bottom lip out like it wants to be kissed, but it doesn’t. He tries anyway.
“Charlie!” she says, pushing him away.
“What? You’re my wife!”
He kisses her neck, the little baby hairs up the back of it that have grown since her last haircut. He loves her still.
“Charlieeeee.”
Impatience finds its way into him, a spike of rage with it. He sweeps his hand up the inside of her dress and pulls at the pantyhose. Fucking annoying things too. He reaches around her and pulls her pelvis to him. She tries to fight, but has no luck. “You don’t want the back seat?” he hears himself say. “Fine.” She reaches for the door handle but he’s locked it. “Fine. We’ll do it here.”
“Charlie, no!” she says, but she not fighting enough for him to believe it. All part of her sickening martyrdom, he says to himself, all part of her whittle. Well if he’s going to pay the fucking piper, might as well enjoy the tune. He rolls the pantyhose down her thighs. They grip her knees tight, tying up this part of her body anyway. She puts one arm back to push him away, but he takes it. She foolishly reaches back with the other and he simply adds it to his grip, both of her little wrists between thumb and palm. He reaches into the back seat, groceries that he’d bought that day, hoping she’d agree to ditch the party for a nice meal. When he got home she was already dressed. He removes a bottle of olive oil, extra virgin, still green and expensive. He nudges her dress up with his face over her hips and pours oil over her asshole. She’s having trouble balancing, one knee in the storage area below the radio, the other on the lid of the console, its lock no doubt jabbing into her. He puts the bottle down, takes his pants down and picks it up again. He drips some oil onto his cock, this gift to her, signed in a contract and on file down in city hall, that she rarely opens.
He twists his fingers in the excess oil around her asshole, coating them shiny in the blue-white light. She’s hoping he’s only going to fuck her pussy. She doesn’t know a fucking thing. He sweetens her little pucker with them, glazing the entrance, the thing pink even in this light, and darker too. She cracks out a “no,” but not a believable one. She doesn’t expect him to do this. She thought she carried his balls around with her in her purse. He looks at his nails and pushes his forefinger, slippery and bent, into her ass. She jerks. She says, “I hate you Charlie.”
“But I love you,” he says, and he means it.
He puts another finger in and twists it. She whines. A convincing one, but he’s seen her crocodile moans before, knows the real ones. He holds her a little open and pushes his cock down to her asshole. It’s burning. He can feel it. She squirms, her hands free now, but doesn’t make for the door or her dress. She just feints. He pushes in. She yelps. Her moans get more guttural as she loosens up to take it. She grips the glove box and the armrest on the door. She shakes. He pumps.
“I hate you, Charlie,” she says. “I hate you so fucking much.” She’s pumping back. Her right hand disappears below and he can feel the twitch in her muscles when she makes contact with her clit. He pushes her head into the door and fucks harder. “I hate you, you fucked up little piece of shit,” she says. “What the fuck do you want from me?” She grunts. “What the fuck is this? You think I’m a fucking boy or something, you little fucking pervert?” She puts her hand between her forehead and the door so it doesn’t hurt so much. Her body vibrates, involuntary half-calls to God escaping beneath him. Finally, her shoulders give and her back arches violently, her ass gripping him so hard she pushes him out. He goes back to her, but finds her slipping away, climbing the door and one knee falling into the footwell. He comes anyway, a buckshot of white dot on her right thigh, dripping, useless, his face vexed and delirious. He falls on her back, his face in her thigh, thinking of how he’s going to have to roll the come off later when it dries.
She knows everyone at the party and he knows no one. She works the room, introducing her husband, always with an uncouth poke in his chest, “This is Charlie,” she says to everyone, “that husband I’ve been telling you about.” He smiles and shakes their hands, when they offer, these strangers that hardly look at him. They tell her how beautiful she looks tonight, that dress, always the perfect dress! They take her arm and swing her to see it flip in the air. He lets go of her hand to let her do it, looking down at his drink and faking a smile for anyone who might be looking. He wants to tell them that he bought the dress, in another effort to get her attention, he sat outside of the changing room and waited for her, staring at a fleur-de-lis pattern in the carpet, avoiding the lingerie section just to his left. She didn’t come out to show it to him as she used to do, to stare up at him with those doe-eyes, “Do you like it, my love?” She simply popped out with the saleswoman and walked right past him to the cash register.
She flirts with all the men, always has, probably the only way she’s ever gotten to know them. She touches the ear of one and his eyes shut involuntarily. He’s relieved to see the man annoyed until the man’s jaw drops for a moment, a partial orgasm right here in front of him! She whispers in the ear of another, something about him, Charlie, and the man smiles more than he should before he catches it. Charlie runs his hand down his wife’s back, sure that no one is looking, and fires a warning shot, his thumb in the valley of her ass. He feels her smile. He gets himself a drink, another bourbon on the rocks with a splash of soda. She says he drinks too much at parties. He doesn’t know why else he should be there.
“This is my first husband,” she says to a howling group of white-hairs, all republican haircuts and beer bellies. He’s managed to keep himself in shape over the years, his stomach flat and his ass round. He probably looks at himself in the mirror too much, but who cares? The young girls in his proximity, at the grocery store or at church or crossing his front lawn, they take a look at his wedding band and get that drape in the side of their eyes. He notices, and he wonders if he’d ever have the guts to go through with it. He feels desired for a moment, only to feel like half a man the next. It’s what she’s done to him over the years, made him love her, a wooden stick sharpened and whittled by her knife. What would make him do it? What would be enough?
“Bess,” he says to her, at an angle over her ear that tells her he’s angry, “let’s go get some dinner.”
“You said you weren’t hungry,” she says, all bile across smiling teeth.
“I know what I said,” Charlie responds, and slides his hand around the small of her back, this territory still his own, full of wild, thorny blackberry brambles, but his anyway, his name on the gate. She sighs and rolls her eyes before she makes another, final round in the crowd. He goes outside for a cigarette before he has to take the jokes, the sighing hands-in-the-air exasperation about this half-man that she married, who still imagines that he has some sort of clout with her and what she does.
The drive home will be long and silent. He taps his thumbs in a drumroll on the steering wheel and looks at her legs in the side of his eye. He sees a turnoff in a few miles, a scenic overlook, closed at sunset nominally, but everyone knows is unpatrolled by anyone but tourists consulting their maps and teenagers steaming their windows. It looks from one mountain to another, a black void with bacterial towns in growth on one pass or another. They flash and wobble in the heat, their little lights orange and graded from center to fuzzy circumference. He thinks of the scenic overlook as a grain of joy, some sort of reminder that there are couples out there still in earthquake mode, still trying to get their jagged sides to fit instead of rubbing them raw.
“You said you wanted to eat,” Bess says, predictably.
“I know what I said,” Charlie says, just as predictably.
He makes a cursory glance for Important Things around the lot and picks a spot without the best view, but far enough away that there won’t be a fight for privacy. He can still make out her legs, a little blue-white in the phosphor of the far-away floodlight. She pulls her dress tight around them and he takes her hand away. He’d do anything to make her look at him, anything for the doe-eyes again.
“Come with me into the back,” he says, he thinks politely enough, though he’s aware that any suggestion on his part will be met with deep skepticism. She laughs. “Bess,” he says, “come with me into the back.” He takes her hand tight to his crotch, a bulge due entirely to her loose and hot in his pants. She does not fight this, but doesn’t grip either. She breathes to the side of him, facing forward, staring at the evergreens which block her view of the landscape.
“Don’t be silly, honey,” she says finally. “You want to fuck me in this car? Why?”
“Please, Bess, for me.” Charlie leans into her neck, the form of yellow white steel foundation and the curve of her earlobe. “I want to.”
Bess pulls her hand away and crosses her arms. “What are they going to think?” she says to the evergreens. “We’re there and we just leave for no reason and now I’m here, me and you, pretending we’re seventeen years old!”
“Come on. Please.”
“No!” she says. He decides that she’s managed to have a couple more drinks than he noticed, quick to start a fight and sour when she doesn’t get it. He regrets, then, parking where he has nothing to look at, nothing to change the subject with, just a few unremarkable evergreens and a bitter wife.
He turns to look at her instead, her profile, the bottom lip out like it wants to be kissed, but it doesn’t. He tries anyway.
“Charlie!” she says, pushing him away.
“What? You’re my wife!”
He kisses her neck, the little baby hairs up the back of it that have grown since her last haircut. He loves her still.
“Charlieeeee.”
Impatience finds its way into him, a spike of rage with it. He sweeps his hand up the inside of her dress and pulls at the pantyhose. Fucking annoying things too. He reaches around her and pulls her pelvis to him. She tries to fight, but has no luck. “You don’t want the back seat?” he hears himself say. “Fine.” She reaches for the door handle but he’s locked it. “Fine. We’ll do it here.”
“Charlie, no!” she says, but she not fighting enough for him to believe it. All part of her sickening martyrdom, he says to himself, all part of her whittle. Well if he’s going to pay the fucking piper, might as well enjoy the tune. He rolls the pantyhose down her thighs. They grip her knees tight, tying up this part of her body anyway. She puts one arm back to push him away, but he takes it. She foolishly reaches back with the other and he simply adds it to his grip, both of her little wrists between thumb and palm. He reaches into the back seat, groceries that he’d bought that day, hoping she’d agree to ditch the party for a nice meal. When he got home she was already dressed. He removes a bottle of olive oil, extra virgin, still green and expensive. He nudges her dress up with his face over her hips and pours oil over her asshole. She’s having trouble balancing, one knee in the storage area below the radio, the other on the lid of the console, its lock no doubt jabbing into her. He puts the bottle down, takes his pants down and picks it up again. He drips some oil onto his cock, this gift to her, signed in a contract and on file down in city hall, that she rarely opens.
He twists his fingers in the excess oil around her asshole, coating them shiny in the blue-white light. She’s hoping he’s only going to fuck her pussy. She doesn’t know a fucking thing. He sweetens her little pucker with them, glazing the entrance, the thing pink even in this light, and darker too. She cracks out a “no,” but not a believable one. She doesn’t expect him to do this. She thought she carried his balls around with her in her purse. He looks at his nails and pushes his forefinger, slippery and bent, into her ass. She jerks. She says, “I hate you Charlie.”
“But I love you,” he says, and he means it.
He puts another finger in and twists it. She whines. A convincing one, but he’s seen her crocodile moans before, knows the real ones. He holds her a little open and pushes his cock down to her asshole. It’s burning. He can feel it. She squirms, her hands free now, but doesn’t make for the door or her dress. She just feints. He pushes in. She yelps. Her moans get more guttural as she loosens up to take it. She grips the glove box and the armrest on the door. She shakes. He pumps.
“I hate you, Charlie,” she says. “I hate you so fucking much.” She’s pumping back. Her right hand disappears below and he can feel the twitch in her muscles when she makes contact with her clit. He pushes her head into the door and fucks harder. “I hate you, you fucked up little piece of shit,” she says. “What the fuck do you want from me?” She grunts. “What the fuck is this? You think I’m a fucking boy or something, you little fucking pervert?” She puts her hand between her forehead and the door so it doesn’t hurt so much. Her body vibrates, involuntary half-calls to God escaping beneath him. Finally, her shoulders give and her back arches violently, her ass gripping him so hard she pushes him out. He goes back to her, but finds her slipping away, climbing the door and one knee falling into the footwell. He comes anyway, a buckshot of white dot on her right thigh, dripping, useless, his face vexed and delirious. He falls on her back, his face in her thigh, thinking of how he’s going to have to roll the come off later when it dries.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Empathy Part Four
The minutes on Sunday sandbag past me. I read in a Tom Robbins book a while ago that it’s impossible to make Sundays go by fast, like it is with February, the shortest month, and yet it takes forever. Sundays for me are made up of guilt trips in the park, indignant television and dread. This Sunday is no different. This Sunday adds the sting of a needle-sick email out in front of that boy I think I’m falling in love with, and the convention of our society that unlike conversation, email won’t, in fact, must not, be answered right away. I have confined myself to a bread-box of embarrassment, but it is the only alternative to no chance at all. So I spend the day trying to focus my eyes on a chapter that I should have read last week, finally deciding to memorize the study notes by rote, finally unable to make them anything more interesting than the curvy lines on paper that they are. In short, I spend my Sunday completely freaking out.
My roommate, assuming that I’m asleep, if she’s even remembered that she lives with someone, forces herself on her bed with her boyfriend at 3:24 in the morning. She is drunk and barely makes it. Her boyfriend, following the rule that objects fall at the same speed no matter what their mass or weight, flops simultaneously on her. They make out furiously in an alcohol-blue flame that I can smell from the other bed. It surprises me that I can smell it because I am, of course, drunk too, my eyes pinned to the glo-stars that some previous occupant put the effort into installing onto our ceiling. They only put them on the metal rails of the acoustic ceiling tiles, ruining any random effect. My eyes look for clumping, unfair weight of yellow-green clustering in one area while another is neglected, but, as I’ve found out before, the previous occupant seemed to have just as much to avoid thinking about as I do, and really planned this glo-star arrangement out. They’re uniform and maddening.
Lucia and her boyfriend, from the advanced state of rustling and moaning coming from that side of the room, have been crossing bases left and right. Envy rises in my chest as it always has, just as misconstrued as the rest of me. My “prudishness” is nothing but mortified longing and indignation. I crawl out of bed and knee-walk across the floor, a single hand ahead of me.
Max, in an outfit that I’m sure I’m making up, appears in my dorm lounge Monday, just as I’ve just about started to re-dread seeing him in class. I decide that he’s there to see someone else, and think of how to nod at him politely, when he stands up and looks at me, holding his hand out.
“Psychic people should know when they’re about to ditch class,” he says.
“You’re right,” I say, after a guffaw, “I’m probably making the whole thing up.”
I take his hand. It feels like happiness.
The lecture room is enormous and empty. Wooden seats perch ever higher in a downright fetishistic voyeurism at a single card table that sits center stage before a black slate chalkboard. The card table is laughingly out of place. All around it are limestone columns and carved tile. It’s like watching a crowd of dignified elderly couples in tuxedos come to worship a fifteen-year-old boy in a torn blue bathrobe. I wonder if Max brought the young card table in here, moving the veteran podium, squeaking, off to the side.
“Do you…. Do you mind being photographed?” he asks without looking at me. He squints nervously at the table, as if regretting it.
“No.” The word comes out louder than I thought it would, knocking around the room like a stray bullet. Max quells a smile.
“Good,” he says, pretending to distract himself with his tripod.
“As long as they’re off the record.”
He doesn’t dignify this with a response, but instead looks around the room with purpose, shuffling here and there. He’s dressed in safari gear, khaki and many-pocketed. It wobbles when he walks.
“Why are you dressed like that?” I ask him.
“To make you more comfortable with unusual things.”
“Ah.”
“Is it working?” he asks, pulling the sides of the jacket down in his fingers.
Definitely. “I can’t tell. Why don’t you give me something else that’s unusual to test it?”
He holds a light meter to my face and throws the flash.
“I think I believe you,” he says from behind a new pink and blue light-bruise in my eye. I’m too stunned to say anything. He throws the flash again. Something in my heart loses its grip and falls, twisting gracefully, gliding in ether. He asks me to lay down on the table and guides me without actually touching into a pose. It feels different, his hands above my legs, cupping the air and moving them into a lotus position. It’s almost as if I can feel them, or as if I want to feel them, or can imagine, even without the contact, what it is that he’s feeling. He silently backs toward the camera, presses a button and takes the photo. I’m temporarily blinded and at home only with my other senses. He takes a few more shots, completely distracted, then finally removes a gauzy sheet from his bag.
“I want you to wear this,” he says.
I choke up, but manage a laugh. “Guan Yin?”
“The goddess of empathy.”
He was paying attention in class.
He leans very close to me as he hands the sheet over, getting as close as he can without touching. I feel him again, through myself and not my oddity, and I’m still so scared I’m unable to do anything but what he says. He backs away and it hurts. I want him to touch me so bad part of me is yelling inside. I think he’ll turn around in some sort of girl-worship bullshit chivalry, but he sits in the first row of desks instead, his ankle over one knee, watching with dark eyes. My fingers go to the bottom of my shirt and lift in one brave move. He blinks in a tiny jolt and exhales. I look at him seriously, my heart a twittering jello sex organ, reach behind and undo my bra. My breasts fall, the nipples in a shock at this sudden, chilly exposure. I giggle a little despite myself, but Max doesn’t return it. He hasn’t looked at my face recently. I stand and unzip my jeans, kick my shoes off, hook my thumbs in my waistband and drop jeans and underwear to the floor. I have never been naked in front of a boy like this, and even though I have no doubt that my body is welcome, it’s nerve-wracking all the same.
“Say something, Max.”
“You’re going to know this anyway, so I’ll tell you now.” He raises his eyes to my face and his expression droops. “I’m falling in love with you.”
I bite the inside of my mouth. “That was the right thing to say.” I put the sheet on, a whisper-thin cheese cloth of a thing, hung around me like a sari. My breasts show through, the tacky cloth scratching at the nipples. I sit on the edge of the card table, awaiting instructions.
Max stands suddenly, shaking a thought or two from his head, and picks up his light meter again. He holds it to my face and throws a flash.
“You’ve never had sex?” he asks.
“Not really.” Flash.
“Not really? Meaning what?”
“I did something weird last night.”
“Okay.” Flash. “You’ve never physically let another person cause you to have an orgasm.”
“Um.”
Flash. He examines the meter and I can see some sort of outline of him blink from it and look at me.
“No,” I finish.
I feel his arm around me and a sudden rush of affection and desperation. It hurts, really, but it’s wonderful. It matches perfectly everything I want and all of the horrible high-strung wistful joy that’s been rolling in my body since he showed up in this outfit. He kisses me, his mouth open, his breath in mine, his hand around the back of my head and for the third time, someone else’s feelings are welcome in me. Someone else’s emotions are there because I want them to be. He pulls himself away with a terrible force of will and stands in front of me, hitting the flash again.
“You’re blushing,” he says.
“You’re in love with me,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I am.”
He stands back and purses his lips for a couple of seconds before urging me into a pose. My arms cross my front, cradling my breasts between them. One hand is held palm up. My eyelids are rolled forward and a loving smile, this part my own contribution, is hinted on my face. Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash.
He mimes me on my back, my torso twisted around to face him, my pelvis gently back. He almost takes a picture, but stops to remove the safari jacket. He’s wearing a white undershirt, again covered in paint stains, holes in certain areas revealing beautiful skin. He tucked it in, and wrinkles form above his belt. I want to untuck it. He sees me looking and blinds me quickly with another flash.
“Do you paint too?” I ask.
“Houses.”
“Oh.”
Flash.
I hope to God that he’s going to stop being a gentleman sometime soon. When my eyes clear of the last flash shadow, they land on his safari pants, the loose fit only hinting at a slight bulge. Flash. He comes close to arrange me again and I force a touch, a slide of my thumb on the heel of his hand. It sends me reeling. He’s so full of sex it aches. I’m aching too. He hovers his fingers above the bottom hem of my sheet and raises them. I pull it up slowly until he stops just below my pussy. He looks, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly. Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
“Max?”
Nothing.
“Max?”
“Yeah?”
“Touch me, okay?”
The latest flash is only a pink warp somewhere above my main focus and I can just make out the look on his face. He blinks slowly, puts the camera down and reaches to my face. When he makes contact it’s ignition, pure jet fuel and burning, his and mine. He kisses me deeply and strokes my hair through his fingers. “Sarah,” he whispers in my ear, “I believe you.”
He pulls at the inside of my thigh and it’s a new rush, the focus of all of this almost unbearable bliss and need blurs and spreads, from toe to face, across the ridiculous card table, all sweet jitters and love. I sit up as he pulls my legs down off of the card table, feel his entire body on me. “Do you feel that?” he asks.
“Yes. Of course.”
I reach down and touch his penis, the only one I’ve ever touched. I feel my own touch and what it does to him. He wants me so bad it’s almost bitter. He lets go of me for a moment to get to his jacket and I feel only me, finding that I’m just as bad now, just as dizzy and throbbing, air like lighter fluid on the fire. He comes back to me and spreads my legs, kicking the card table out from the back of me and pulling us to the ground. The material of the sheet slips back and my lower body is exposed to him. He drops his pants on the way down.
The empty seats fill with ghosts of the kind of life I could have had up until now, inspected and rejected for not good enough. I smile at them over Max’s shoulder, kissing his neck and then closing my eyes on them. A condom is put on, his intensity more blunt than sweet now, and he grasps my nipple, flicking it with his thumb. He lays between my legs, buries his face in my neck and slides his penis inside. I yell out, unable to wait, two people at once now, twice the fuck, my neck twisting my head and come, my face twisted, my body jolting, I come, right away. But there is more. There is his too, blurred and basic, just a rise of a mountain, a purple moan with each thrust and his feeling pours into me. We come together, because I am him, in sweat and sex and affection. He understands me. He believes me. And I’m not afraid of a fucking thing anymore.
“I love you too, Max,” I say to him, from a warm fetal position in his arms, feeling him change from sweet curiosity to blessed relief. “I love you too.”
My roommate, assuming that I’m asleep, if she’s even remembered that she lives with someone, forces herself on her bed with her boyfriend at 3:24 in the morning. She is drunk and barely makes it. Her boyfriend, following the rule that objects fall at the same speed no matter what their mass or weight, flops simultaneously on her. They make out furiously in an alcohol-blue flame that I can smell from the other bed. It surprises me that I can smell it because I am, of course, drunk too, my eyes pinned to the glo-stars that some previous occupant put the effort into installing onto our ceiling. They only put them on the metal rails of the acoustic ceiling tiles, ruining any random effect. My eyes look for clumping, unfair weight of yellow-green clustering in one area while another is neglected, but, as I’ve found out before, the previous occupant seemed to have just as much to avoid thinking about as I do, and really planned this glo-star arrangement out. They’re uniform and maddening.
Lucia and her boyfriend, from the advanced state of rustling and moaning coming from that side of the room, have been crossing bases left and right. Envy rises in my chest as it always has, just as misconstrued as the rest of me. My “prudishness” is nothing but mortified longing and indignation. I crawl out of bed and knee-walk across the floor, a single hand ahead of me.
Max, in an outfit that I’m sure I’m making up, appears in my dorm lounge Monday, just as I’ve just about started to re-dread seeing him in class. I decide that he’s there to see someone else, and think of how to nod at him politely, when he stands up and looks at me, holding his hand out.
“Psychic people should know when they’re about to ditch class,” he says.
“You’re right,” I say, after a guffaw, “I’m probably making the whole thing up.”
I take his hand. It feels like happiness.
The lecture room is enormous and empty. Wooden seats perch ever higher in a downright fetishistic voyeurism at a single card table that sits center stage before a black slate chalkboard. The card table is laughingly out of place. All around it are limestone columns and carved tile. It’s like watching a crowd of dignified elderly couples in tuxedos come to worship a fifteen-year-old boy in a torn blue bathrobe. I wonder if Max brought the young card table in here, moving the veteran podium, squeaking, off to the side.
“Do you…. Do you mind being photographed?” he asks without looking at me. He squints nervously at the table, as if regretting it.
“No.” The word comes out louder than I thought it would, knocking around the room like a stray bullet. Max quells a smile.
“Good,” he says, pretending to distract himself with his tripod.
“As long as they’re off the record.”
He doesn’t dignify this with a response, but instead looks around the room with purpose, shuffling here and there. He’s dressed in safari gear, khaki and many-pocketed. It wobbles when he walks.
“Why are you dressed like that?” I ask him.
“To make you more comfortable with unusual things.”
“Ah.”
“Is it working?” he asks, pulling the sides of the jacket down in his fingers.
Definitely. “I can’t tell. Why don’t you give me something else that’s unusual to test it?”
He holds a light meter to my face and throws the flash.
“I think I believe you,” he says from behind a new pink and blue light-bruise in my eye. I’m too stunned to say anything. He throws the flash again. Something in my heart loses its grip and falls, twisting gracefully, gliding in ether. He asks me to lay down on the table and guides me without actually touching into a pose. It feels different, his hands above my legs, cupping the air and moving them into a lotus position. It’s almost as if I can feel them, or as if I want to feel them, or can imagine, even without the contact, what it is that he’s feeling. He silently backs toward the camera, presses a button and takes the photo. I’m temporarily blinded and at home only with my other senses. He takes a few more shots, completely distracted, then finally removes a gauzy sheet from his bag.
“I want you to wear this,” he says.
I choke up, but manage a laugh. “Guan Yin?”
“The goddess of empathy.”
He was paying attention in class.
He leans very close to me as he hands the sheet over, getting as close as he can without touching. I feel him again, through myself and not my oddity, and I’m still so scared I’m unable to do anything but what he says. He backs away and it hurts. I want him to touch me so bad part of me is yelling inside. I think he’ll turn around in some sort of girl-worship bullshit chivalry, but he sits in the first row of desks instead, his ankle over one knee, watching with dark eyes. My fingers go to the bottom of my shirt and lift in one brave move. He blinks in a tiny jolt and exhales. I look at him seriously, my heart a twittering jello sex organ, reach behind and undo my bra. My breasts fall, the nipples in a shock at this sudden, chilly exposure. I giggle a little despite myself, but Max doesn’t return it. He hasn’t looked at my face recently. I stand and unzip my jeans, kick my shoes off, hook my thumbs in my waistband and drop jeans and underwear to the floor. I have never been naked in front of a boy like this, and even though I have no doubt that my body is welcome, it’s nerve-wracking all the same.
“Say something, Max.”
“You’re going to know this anyway, so I’ll tell you now.” He raises his eyes to my face and his expression droops. “I’m falling in love with you.”
I bite the inside of my mouth. “That was the right thing to say.” I put the sheet on, a whisper-thin cheese cloth of a thing, hung around me like a sari. My breasts show through, the tacky cloth scratching at the nipples. I sit on the edge of the card table, awaiting instructions.
Max stands suddenly, shaking a thought or two from his head, and picks up his light meter again. He holds it to my face and throws a flash.
“You’ve never had sex?” he asks.
“Not really.” Flash.
“Not really? Meaning what?”
“I did something weird last night.”
“Okay.” Flash. “You’ve never physically let another person cause you to have an orgasm.”
“Um.”
Flash. He examines the meter and I can see some sort of outline of him blink from it and look at me.
“No,” I finish.
I feel his arm around me and a sudden rush of affection and desperation. It hurts, really, but it’s wonderful. It matches perfectly everything I want and all of the horrible high-strung wistful joy that’s been rolling in my body since he showed up in this outfit. He kisses me, his mouth open, his breath in mine, his hand around the back of my head and for the third time, someone else’s feelings are welcome in me. Someone else’s emotions are there because I want them to be. He pulls himself away with a terrible force of will and stands in front of me, hitting the flash again.
“You’re blushing,” he says.
“You’re in love with me,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I am.”
He stands back and purses his lips for a couple of seconds before urging me into a pose. My arms cross my front, cradling my breasts between them. One hand is held palm up. My eyelids are rolled forward and a loving smile, this part my own contribution, is hinted on my face. Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash.
He mimes me on my back, my torso twisted around to face him, my pelvis gently back. He almost takes a picture, but stops to remove the safari jacket. He’s wearing a white undershirt, again covered in paint stains, holes in certain areas revealing beautiful skin. He tucked it in, and wrinkles form above his belt. I want to untuck it. He sees me looking and blinds me quickly with another flash.
“Do you paint too?” I ask.
“Houses.”
“Oh.”
Flash.
I hope to God that he’s going to stop being a gentleman sometime soon. When my eyes clear of the last flash shadow, they land on his safari pants, the loose fit only hinting at a slight bulge. Flash. He comes close to arrange me again and I force a touch, a slide of my thumb on the heel of his hand. It sends me reeling. He’s so full of sex it aches. I’m aching too. He hovers his fingers above the bottom hem of my sheet and raises them. I pull it up slowly until he stops just below my pussy. He looks, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly. Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
“Max?”
Nothing.
“Max?”
“Yeah?”
“Touch me, okay?”
The latest flash is only a pink warp somewhere above my main focus and I can just make out the look on his face. He blinks slowly, puts the camera down and reaches to my face. When he makes contact it’s ignition, pure jet fuel and burning, his and mine. He kisses me deeply and strokes my hair through his fingers. “Sarah,” he whispers in my ear, “I believe you.”
He pulls at the inside of my thigh and it’s a new rush, the focus of all of this almost unbearable bliss and need blurs and spreads, from toe to face, across the ridiculous card table, all sweet jitters and love. I sit up as he pulls my legs down off of the card table, feel his entire body on me. “Do you feel that?” he asks.
“Yes. Of course.”
I reach down and touch his penis, the only one I’ve ever touched. I feel my own touch and what it does to him. He wants me so bad it’s almost bitter. He lets go of me for a moment to get to his jacket and I feel only me, finding that I’m just as bad now, just as dizzy and throbbing, air like lighter fluid on the fire. He comes back to me and spreads my legs, kicking the card table out from the back of me and pulling us to the ground. The material of the sheet slips back and my lower body is exposed to him. He drops his pants on the way down.
The empty seats fill with ghosts of the kind of life I could have had up until now, inspected and rejected for not good enough. I smile at them over Max’s shoulder, kissing his neck and then closing my eyes on them. A condom is put on, his intensity more blunt than sweet now, and he grasps my nipple, flicking it with his thumb. He lays between my legs, buries his face in my neck and slides his penis inside. I yell out, unable to wait, two people at once now, twice the fuck, my neck twisting my head and come, my face twisted, my body jolting, I come, right away. But there is more. There is his too, blurred and basic, just a rise of a mountain, a purple moan with each thrust and his feeling pours into me. We come together, because I am him, in sweat and sex and affection. He understands me. He believes me. And I’m not afraid of a fucking thing anymore.
“I love you too, Max,” I say to him, from a warm fetal position in his arms, feeling him change from sweet curiosity to blessed relief. “I love you too.”
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Booths
Hello. I'm going to be out of town for a while, so this place will be unattended for about ten days. Behave yourselves. I'll be back.
Drunk and stumbling home one night, the language around me fading from the one I’ve studied and felt that I have come to own, back to the bellowing and feminine gibberish that it was when I first arrived here, I heard the words “Come inside, sir,” in English, by an affable-looking barker in front of a blacked-out door. I went inside, in a hypnotic state brought on by the essential trustworthiness of one’s own language, the heft of the door unable to dissuade me. There was, of course, a short price list and a long list of don’ts, in several languages, the second of which was well-translated English.
Watch: €60
Participate: €100
Not Negotiable.
I glanced over the list of don’ts, which made me more comfortable, though I was hardly uncomfortable before, and handed over my credit card, an erection warming and tightening my pants.
They’d gone with a fin de siecle look, all red velvet and yellow mood lighting. Vinyl overstuffed chairs with well-hidden drains where buttons would have been. The few higher-tech items were cloaked as nickelodeon machines and large iron switches, needlessly solid buttons and time-machine ornate. It put one in mind of a cocktail, but I was there for the sex. I showed my receipt to a slyly good-looking man in a tailored white shirt and black pants. He nodded, letting his hair slide forward, and showed me to my curtain.
“You may watch until there is a vacancy, sir,” he said, in only the slightest accent. I almost teared up at the welcome, and entered the curtain humbled and flattered, grinning like I’d just gotten a love letter. He closed the curtain behind and left me in the beveled and etched confines of a two-way mirror and a vinyl chair.
Immediately, the vinyl still squeaking and settling under my ass, I felt that I’d wasted my money on the participation portion. I’d just simply never make it. I stood up again and resettled, the chair reclining, with my knees out, the better to manage the erection. In front of me, almost uncomfortably close, a man knelt, his pants loose and belt half out. Knees shook on either side of him, the pants that had once covered them in an accordion pile on the floor. The kneeling man bent over between them and bobbed, hugging one leg to his torso. The other arm occupied itself in front of him. The rest of the prostrate man was hidden behind a screen where muscular dryads and satyrs frolicked and fucked.
I got over the initial shock of the sight in a few seconds and glanced above me. Two monitors, both designed to look like portholes, showed the scene in front of me from different angles. The one on the left showed the man doing the work, the other the man enjoying its benefits. Each porthole had two buttons within easy reach. They were labeled in arching, serif script, “Above” and “Side.” I played with them absently, dazzling my eyes with the views provided, one man, hollow-cheeked and sweating, filling his mouth with the cock of the other and sliding it out, the other’s face distorted, fingers toying with his nipples, mouth open to thank whatever gods brought this down to him.
“Fuck,” I heard myself say, and white-knuckled the curtain behind me to keep my hands busy.
The man behind the screen, the view abandoned in “Side,” arched his back and began to writhe. He was about to come. The other man slowed his efforts and pulled the orgasm out of him sweetly, eyes watering with exertion. A light came on in the booth and flashed a yellow, low-tech announcement, “Position Available.” I ignored it. The man came in huge waves, his back snapping against his bench. The light pulsed more rapidly. A voice outside said, “Sir, there is a position available now.”
I inhaled deeply and said, “Okay.”
I was lead to a booth at the end of a hallway of the same length as the curtains outside. I would not be in the same booth as the one I watched. I was told to stand near the mirror. The screen was shut in front of me and I waited a few moments until a pair of legs and a medium-sized cock was presented to me, uncut, as the Europeans prefer. I spread his knees, knelt, took off my shirt and bent over it.
I felt a need to blow him away, to service him with skill and tenaciousness, to make him make sounds I’d never heard, loud enough to penetrate the other booths, so that they could be envious. I teased him for more time than was really necessary, sucked his balls with tickle and force, pushed him deep into my throat and held there until he’d just about given up. I wondered what he looked like, whether his face was as twisted as the one I’d seen just a few minutes before, if he was fighting to stay in it as long as possible. I wondered if we had a watcher, if he was passing time like me, or whether he was jerking off now, getting off on watching me. I trailed my tongue below my lips a few times just in case.
My own cock was branding my pants, working its way to my pockets, a seething, needy, whimpering thing, begging to be released and relieved. I sadistically made it wait, made it settle for whatever friction it could find in my underwear. It continued to bash my thoughts, but it didn’t know that things would only get better.
Then I heard him moan, the man behind the screen. I heard him growl and felt him kick. He got louder, and I glowed in it. I wanted them all to know I was the best. Everyone in the whole place. I wanted whoever was on the other side of that mirror to know it. He mumbled in the local tongue, my mind clear enough to hear it as if it were my own again, “That’s fucking good, fucking good, don’t stop.” His legs twitched and he settled into a guttural gush. My mouth froze and I gently licked his orgasm out of him, swishing along the tip. “Jesus!” he said. “Oh, Jesus!” And he locked under me, though I held him in place by the legs, my face riding him like a toboggan down an icy hill, my mouth filling with salty bitter.
When he stopped shaking, stopped tensing and shoving and his legs went limp in my arms, I let him slide out of my mouth and stood up, wiping my face and huffing. The legs slid away and I turned around, lifting my shirt to the mirror, so that the watcher could see what I had resisted.
I heard the door open and shut and soonafter the screen was pulled back, the dryads and satyrs fucking more thin before they disappeared, and the man who’d looked at my receipt appeared behind it. “Go through this door and wait until I open it, please,” he said. How this man survived this job without getting tackled and fucked by the clientele twice a day was beyond my understanding. He was suddenly aggressively good looking, and I was sorely tempted to grab his face and push it down as I walked past him, but I reminded myself that I was about to be relieved as it was.
Beyond the door was a room only large enough for a comfortable chair, and side table with a lamp and an ashtray. I sat in it and covered my face, wondering how long it would be, the ashtray, though I don’t smoke, tempting me to start.
It wasn’t long before the door was opened again and the beautiful employee lead me back into the room and exited. The screen had been replaced. I lay down on a vinyl but comfortable bench, slid my knees forward, and felt eager fingers on my cock through my pants. The erection returned full-force and I cried out the minute that it was freed, touched, and swallowed into a warm mouth. When he’d settled into a rhythm, the see-sawing disembodied pair of lips on the other end of the bench, I found the strength to open my eyes and found yet another pair of portholes on the ceiling, one of the man on the other side of the screen, another of the curtained booth, the luxury cocoon of the watcher. Two buttons again for each were within my reach on the walls, “Above,” “Side.” While I was distracted by these, the man changed rhythm, and I found the next level of pleasure rush into me. I jolted. The watcher, a decent-looking man in his forties, squinted and exhaled. His hand grasped his cock tightly and he paused before stroking again, his cheeks filled with air.
“Mmm, aw shit, that’s good,” I said in English, the only language I use in ecstasy. The man on the other side of the screen looked up in the side-view portal, smiled a bit and redoubled his work. I watched my cock slide in and out of his mouth, its anonymous exhibitionism blush-worthy, shocking that it was connected to me at all. It made the heat emanating from it that much more foreign and tantalizing. I fucked his mouth for a while, amazed by the circuit, my order to move my hips ending in this video above me, my hips moving, my cock, shiny wet, forcing its way in and out of a stranger’s mouth. My eyes closed against my will and I went passive again, focusing on the feeling, this bliss I had no control over, rising in my body.
I looked again and saw the watcher, his eyes smoky and glazed, his neck tense, watching me in the porthole, his hand pounding away. I turned and saw the worker, bent painfully over me, struggling against me, his own eyes turning lazy dark, as needy as I was, on this side and that one. He too controlled his speed and licked, sweetly burned his energy away, plugging for all his might at me. I became overwhelmed, cars crashing in my head, and fell into pure stinging joy, an oxygen-sucking fire rising in my belly, swallowing my balls and headed out.
“Goddammitttttt!” I wailed and flailed on the bench, its soft support handling it fine, my hands grasping at the air and came so hard I could feel it in my gums, the natural disaster of my body in chaos, beautiful fucking chaos. When I opened my eyes, the watcher bit his lip and shot out silently, his face contorted and his soul open to the world. The worker held and waited until I’d stopped shivering before he released me. I coughed, my head still full of magic soup, and leaned forward for my pants.
Drunk and stumbling home one night, the language around me fading from the one I’ve studied and felt that I have come to own, back to the bellowing and feminine gibberish that it was when I first arrived here, I heard the words “Come inside, sir,” in English, by an affable-looking barker in front of a blacked-out door. I went inside, in a hypnotic state brought on by the essential trustworthiness of one’s own language, the heft of the door unable to dissuade me. There was, of course, a short price list and a long list of don’ts, in several languages, the second of which was well-translated English.
Watch: €60
Participate: €100
Not Negotiable.
I glanced over the list of don’ts, which made me more comfortable, though I was hardly uncomfortable before, and handed over my credit card, an erection warming and tightening my pants.
They’d gone with a fin de siecle look, all red velvet and yellow mood lighting. Vinyl overstuffed chairs with well-hidden drains where buttons would have been. The few higher-tech items were cloaked as nickelodeon machines and large iron switches, needlessly solid buttons and time-machine ornate. It put one in mind of a cocktail, but I was there for the sex. I showed my receipt to a slyly good-looking man in a tailored white shirt and black pants. He nodded, letting his hair slide forward, and showed me to my curtain.
“You may watch until there is a vacancy, sir,” he said, in only the slightest accent. I almost teared up at the welcome, and entered the curtain humbled and flattered, grinning like I’d just gotten a love letter. He closed the curtain behind and left me in the beveled and etched confines of a two-way mirror and a vinyl chair.
Immediately, the vinyl still squeaking and settling under my ass, I felt that I’d wasted my money on the participation portion. I’d just simply never make it. I stood up again and resettled, the chair reclining, with my knees out, the better to manage the erection. In front of me, almost uncomfortably close, a man knelt, his pants loose and belt half out. Knees shook on either side of him, the pants that had once covered them in an accordion pile on the floor. The kneeling man bent over between them and bobbed, hugging one leg to his torso. The other arm occupied itself in front of him. The rest of the prostrate man was hidden behind a screen where muscular dryads and satyrs frolicked and fucked.
I got over the initial shock of the sight in a few seconds and glanced above me. Two monitors, both designed to look like portholes, showed the scene in front of me from different angles. The one on the left showed the man doing the work, the other the man enjoying its benefits. Each porthole had two buttons within easy reach. They were labeled in arching, serif script, “Above” and “Side.” I played with them absently, dazzling my eyes with the views provided, one man, hollow-cheeked and sweating, filling his mouth with the cock of the other and sliding it out, the other’s face distorted, fingers toying with his nipples, mouth open to thank whatever gods brought this down to him.
“Fuck,” I heard myself say, and white-knuckled the curtain behind me to keep my hands busy.
The man behind the screen, the view abandoned in “Side,” arched his back and began to writhe. He was about to come. The other man slowed his efforts and pulled the orgasm out of him sweetly, eyes watering with exertion. A light came on in the booth and flashed a yellow, low-tech announcement, “Position Available.” I ignored it. The man came in huge waves, his back snapping against his bench. The light pulsed more rapidly. A voice outside said, “Sir, there is a position available now.”
I inhaled deeply and said, “Okay.”
I was lead to a booth at the end of a hallway of the same length as the curtains outside. I would not be in the same booth as the one I watched. I was told to stand near the mirror. The screen was shut in front of me and I waited a few moments until a pair of legs and a medium-sized cock was presented to me, uncut, as the Europeans prefer. I spread his knees, knelt, took off my shirt and bent over it.
I felt a need to blow him away, to service him with skill and tenaciousness, to make him make sounds I’d never heard, loud enough to penetrate the other booths, so that they could be envious. I teased him for more time than was really necessary, sucked his balls with tickle and force, pushed him deep into my throat and held there until he’d just about given up. I wondered what he looked like, whether his face was as twisted as the one I’d seen just a few minutes before, if he was fighting to stay in it as long as possible. I wondered if we had a watcher, if he was passing time like me, or whether he was jerking off now, getting off on watching me. I trailed my tongue below my lips a few times just in case.
My own cock was branding my pants, working its way to my pockets, a seething, needy, whimpering thing, begging to be released and relieved. I sadistically made it wait, made it settle for whatever friction it could find in my underwear. It continued to bash my thoughts, but it didn’t know that things would only get better.
Then I heard him moan, the man behind the screen. I heard him growl and felt him kick. He got louder, and I glowed in it. I wanted them all to know I was the best. Everyone in the whole place. I wanted whoever was on the other side of that mirror to know it. He mumbled in the local tongue, my mind clear enough to hear it as if it were my own again, “That’s fucking good, fucking good, don’t stop.” His legs twitched and he settled into a guttural gush. My mouth froze and I gently licked his orgasm out of him, swishing along the tip. “Jesus!” he said. “Oh, Jesus!” And he locked under me, though I held him in place by the legs, my face riding him like a toboggan down an icy hill, my mouth filling with salty bitter.
When he stopped shaking, stopped tensing and shoving and his legs went limp in my arms, I let him slide out of my mouth and stood up, wiping my face and huffing. The legs slid away and I turned around, lifting my shirt to the mirror, so that the watcher could see what I had resisted.
I heard the door open and shut and soonafter the screen was pulled back, the dryads and satyrs fucking more thin before they disappeared, and the man who’d looked at my receipt appeared behind it. “Go through this door and wait until I open it, please,” he said. How this man survived this job without getting tackled and fucked by the clientele twice a day was beyond my understanding. He was suddenly aggressively good looking, and I was sorely tempted to grab his face and push it down as I walked past him, but I reminded myself that I was about to be relieved as it was.
Beyond the door was a room only large enough for a comfortable chair, and side table with a lamp and an ashtray. I sat in it and covered my face, wondering how long it would be, the ashtray, though I don’t smoke, tempting me to start.
It wasn’t long before the door was opened again and the beautiful employee lead me back into the room and exited. The screen had been replaced. I lay down on a vinyl but comfortable bench, slid my knees forward, and felt eager fingers on my cock through my pants. The erection returned full-force and I cried out the minute that it was freed, touched, and swallowed into a warm mouth. When he’d settled into a rhythm, the see-sawing disembodied pair of lips on the other end of the bench, I found the strength to open my eyes and found yet another pair of portholes on the ceiling, one of the man on the other side of the screen, another of the curtained booth, the luxury cocoon of the watcher. Two buttons again for each were within my reach on the walls, “Above,” “Side.” While I was distracted by these, the man changed rhythm, and I found the next level of pleasure rush into me. I jolted. The watcher, a decent-looking man in his forties, squinted and exhaled. His hand grasped his cock tightly and he paused before stroking again, his cheeks filled with air.
“Mmm, aw shit, that’s good,” I said in English, the only language I use in ecstasy. The man on the other side of the screen looked up in the side-view portal, smiled a bit and redoubled his work. I watched my cock slide in and out of his mouth, its anonymous exhibitionism blush-worthy, shocking that it was connected to me at all. It made the heat emanating from it that much more foreign and tantalizing. I fucked his mouth for a while, amazed by the circuit, my order to move my hips ending in this video above me, my hips moving, my cock, shiny wet, forcing its way in and out of a stranger’s mouth. My eyes closed against my will and I went passive again, focusing on the feeling, this bliss I had no control over, rising in my body.
I looked again and saw the watcher, his eyes smoky and glazed, his neck tense, watching me in the porthole, his hand pounding away. I turned and saw the worker, bent painfully over me, struggling against me, his own eyes turning lazy dark, as needy as I was, on this side and that one. He too controlled his speed and licked, sweetly burned his energy away, plugging for all his might at me. I became overwhelmed, cars crashing in my head, and fell into pure stinging joy, an oxygen-sucking fire rising in my belly, swallowing my balls and headed out.
“Goddammitttttt!” I wailed and flailed on the bench, its soft support handling it fine, my hands grasping at the air and came so hard I could feel it in my gums, the natural disaster of my body in chaos, beautiful fucking chaos. When I opened my eyes, the watcher bit his lip and shot out silently, his face contorted and his soul open to the world. The worker held and waited until I’d stopped shivering before he released me. I coughed, my head still full of magic soup, and leaned forward for my pants.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Empathy Part Three
Max backs up from me with his hands in his pockets and nods at me. I guess he did hear about the screaming, pottymouthed madwoman at his party.
“I’m not crazy,” I blurt out feebly. “I’m not. It’s a physical thing.”
“What’s it called?”
“Um.”
“Look, Sarah, I like you a lot. And I want to kiss you again, but not if it’s going to be some sort of drama for you every time.”
“It might be a drama for me every time.”
He cocks his head, squints at me and turns around, his foot stamping in a pivot on the concrete. I feel so bad for him, but I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m being selfish somehow, or dishonest, but I swore to myself that I would let it happen next time, that I wouldn’t let the next one just leave. Besides, suddenly the thought of Max being with anyone else ever again is the worst thing I’ve ever wondered. I close my eyes, trying like I have since I first read about it, think that maybe I can control things too. “Max will not leave,” I think. “Max will understand.” I reach out in front of me to touch his arm, see if it worked, but I open my eyes and he’s gone.
Stage one: Sure that Sarah will admit she’s lying or exaggerating and wait for it.
Stage two: Sure that Sarah is insane even though she seems so normal.
Only my parents have gotten past these two stages. Not even doctors believe me. I should know by now. But this is different now. I’m different now.
Max nods a curt hello at the beginning of class every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next two weeks. I do my best in each class to act sane. Very smart people are often insane, so I keep my responses to the professor’s questions simple and shallow. Insane people don’t blink or blink too much. I guard my blinking. Insane people obsessively toy with their hair or their pens. I keep notes with mild interest and leave my fingers against the desk.
When we’re forced to be in a study group together, our desks pushed against each other, the square of void between the four of us tangible, our legs swinging under it, he leans his leg on my ankle for a few seconds, one, schadenfreude, two, guilt, three, sex, four, concern, five self-righteousness. I move my leg. He apologizes, says he thought it was the leg of my chair. I think about giving him a sarcastic look, but control myself. He’s not doing anything wrong, or even un-called for. I wish he could see that I’m being honest, that this was a transmitter as well as receiver, but I’ve had more than enough time to get used to that.
to: maximaxmaxmax@yahoo.com
from: empie.sarah@gmail.com
Max,
I’m not crazy. (I put down my drink as I’m writing, drunken emailing almost more acceptable than drunken dialing, and besides, I don’t have his phone number.) Full disclosure.
When I was a small kid, I couldn’t stand letting anyone touch me and my parents took me to the doctor. He did some tests on me and declared that even though I don’t show any of the physical signs of it, or many of the mental ones, that I must have some sort of autism. I was left in normal schools in normal classes, but had no friends and very little physical contact with anyone. (I take another sip, and consider what I’m doing. Better to say something. Take advantage of the drinks.) When I turned thirteen I began to spend all of my time on the internet, and even though I have a lot of friends, none of them know what’s wrong with me. When talk turns to sex, I sit back and watch. I think they think I’m just a prude, or scared of men, or a lesbian. I assure you I’m not. Sometimes I want to touch so bad I could die, but I don’t. I haven’t until that one night.
You have no idea what that night means to me.
I’m scaring you, but I’ve never taken a chance like this before because I never thought it was worth it before. Do you know what I mean?
Anyway, I’m different than I was in high school now. I different than I was a month and a half ago. You changed me. I thought you should know. I’m not scared of you. I don’t think you’re scared of me. If you like me, you should know that I can do this with you. If you’ve decided I’m crazy, or at least not worth it, then let me just thank you. Thanks for the hope. I didn’t think it was there before. (I take a deep swig. I’m really drunk. I’m beginning to cry.)
Thank you.
Sarah
(555-3314)
I press send before I can change my mind about it, and leave it for the inevitable embarrassment of tomorrow. I am my own drunk friend, daring myself.
“I’m not crazy,” I blurt out feebly. “I’m not. It’s a physical thing.”
“What’s it called?”
“Um.”
“Look, Sarah, I like you a lot. And I want to kiss you again, but not if it’s going to be some sort of drama for you every time.”
“It might be a drama for me every time.”
He cocks his head, squints at me and turns around, his foot stamping in a pivot on the concrete. I feel so bad for him, but I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m being selfish somehow, or dishonest, but I swore to myself that I would let it happen next time, that I wouldn’t let the next one just leave. Besides, suddenly the thought of Max being with anyone else ever again is the worst thing I’ve ever wondered. I close my eyes, trying like I have since I first read about it, think that maybe I can control things too. “Max will not leave,” I think. “Max will understand.” I reach out in front of me to touch his arm, see if it worked, but I open my eyes and he’s gone.
Stage one: Sure that Sarah will admit she’s lying or exaggerating and wait for it.
Stage two: Sure that Sarah is insane even though she seems so normal.
Only my parents have gotten past these two stages. Not even doctors believe me. I should know by now. But this is different now. I’m different now.
Max nods a curt hello at the beginning of class every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next two weeks. I do my best in each class to act sane. Very smart people are often insane, so I keep my responses to the professor’s questions simple and shallow. Insane people don’t blink or blink too much. I guard my blinking. Insane people obsessively toy with their hair or their pens. I keep notes with mild interest and leave my fingers against the desk.
When we’re forced to be in a study group together, our desks pushed against each other, the square of void between the four of us tangible, our legs swinging under it, he leans his leg on my ankle for a few seconds, one, schadenfreude, two, guilt, three, sex, four, concern, five self-righteousness. I move my leg. He apologizes, says he thought it was the leg of my chair. I think about giving him a sarcastic look, but control myself. He’s not doing anything wrong, or even un-called for. I wish he could see that I’m being honest, that this was a transmitter as well as receiver, but I’ve had more than enough time to get used to that.
to: maximaxmaxmax@yahoo.com
from: empie.sarah@gmail.com
Max,
I’m not crazy. (I put down my drink as I’m writing, drunken emailing almost more acceptable than drunken dialing, and besides, I don’t have his phone number.) Full disclosure.
When I was a small kid, I couldn’t stand letting anyone touch me and my parents took me to the doctor. He did some tests on me and declared that even though I don’t show any of the physical signs of it, or many of the mental ones, that I must have some sort of autism. I was left in normal schools in normal classes, but had no friends and very little physical contact with anyone. (I take another sip, and consider what I’m doing. Better to say something. Take advantage of the drinks.) When I turned thirteen I began to spend all of my time on the internet, and even though I have a lot of friends, none of them know what’s wrong with me. When talk turns to sex, I sit back and watch. I think they think I’m just a prude, or scared of men, or a lesbian. I assure you I’m not. Sometimes I want to touch so bad I could die, but I don’t. I haven’t until that one night.
You have no idea what that night means to me.
I’m scaring you, but I’ve never taken a chance like this before because I never thought it was worth it before. Do you know what I mean?
Anyway, I’m different than I was in high school now. I different than I was a month and a half ago. You changed me. I thought you should know. I’m not scared of you. I don’t think you’re scared of me. If you like me, you should know that I can do this with you. If you’ve decided I’m crazy, or at least not worth it, then let me just thank you. Thanks for the hope. I didn’t think it was there before. (I take a deep swig. I’m really drunk. I’m beginning to cry.)
Thank you.
Sarah
(555-3314)
I press send before I can change my mind about it, and leave it for the inevitable embarrassment of tomorrow. I am my own drunk friend, daring myself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
