Love and Whiskers

by Olivia Myers

Suddenly he flipped them over, pressing her against the bed. Her legs stayed wrapped around him. His fingers knotted in her hair, and she moaned, feeling an intense climax approaching. He continued thrusting into her as her toes curled and she bit her lip, and then he lay still on top of her, both of their breathing coming in ragged gasps.

  They lay like that until their breathing began to slow, and then Drake rolled off her. Elle grinned over at him, and he returned her smile with one of his own. She could tell that he knew she had chosen, and he liked her choice.

  Elle yawned and stretched, enjoying the cool feel of the clean sheets against her sin. Suddenly her hand touched something soft and furry, and her eyes snapped open. She relaxed when she saw that it was just Rex. “Hey buddy,” she said. “Where’s Drake?” The dog sniffed her, his cold, wet nose making her giggle. He moved his muzzle along her jaw and down, to her neck. His warm tongue lapped at her, evoking a familiar feeling in Elle. Sudden realization stabbed through her.

  She pushed the dog back and held onto the thick fur of his neck so that she could look into his eyes. “Drake?”

  THE END

  Lovers of Poetry

  Whenever Jane O’Darragh taught the poetry of John Keats, her heart was filled with an immense and stormy longing, as if the poet awakened in her something that she hadn’t known existed, but was there only to be touched by his words.

  “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

  No hungry generations tread thee down.”

  She read the lines of the poem a second time for the students in the lecture hall. It was a large room but not densely crowded. There were no more than twenty students sitting in the area, and less than half of them looked to be paying much attention to Jane’s lecture.

  It didn’t matter to Jane. She didn’t read the poetry for her students or for her paycheck, but because of the deep and complex longing it inspired within. They were words for her alone—words chosen long before she had ever existed, but meant solely for her to read.

  “No hungry generations tread thee down.”

  “The nightingale is beyond death,” Jane said, her book of poems in one hand as she paced back and forth in front of her desk. “His act of singing has brought him beyond the things of the world that our poet suffers. But his bird does not suffer. His bird elevates him, brings him along until they are both rising above death, ascending, as it were.”

  Someone in the lecture hall coughed and the distraction threw off her thoughts. She paused, and tried to recollect herself. “Risen above death,” she said, “because of love. Love and beauty. For our poet they are one in the same, and in the poem you can see how they are married together to create something transcendental.”

  She relished the word: transcendental. A word filled with such promise and grace. When she thought of the word she felt the promise of a different life, maybe a life like John Keats’s that, although it was marked by disease and tragedy, was ineffably beautiful, filled with love. And what love! Love that had inspired the most divine poetry since Shakespeare. A love that married itself perfectly to art and became, like the nightingale, immortal.

  “Our nightingale has given our poet a glimpse of the world beyond death, a glimpse of the immortal,” Jane addressed her silent lecture hall. “The immortal is love, love and beauty, and what more beautiful a marriage can you imagine than the one that our poet describes here! But, of course, it doesn’t last. All good things pass away. Although I don’t know why I need to tell you that—you’re all young and beautiful. You already know. You’ve had the life experience.”

  There were a few chuckles from her audience. Jane O’Darragh was a good professor. Her students liked her even if they didn’t always like Lord Byron or Percy Shelley or John Keats. She understood her students in ways that the other professors could not. She understood that they simply wanted someone to relate to, not a teacher, really, but a colleague who knew more than they did. And wasn’t it in some way exactly what Jane wanted, too? Someone who could teach her something she didn’t already know? Someone with whom she could share something new?

  “Yes, all good things pass,” continued Jane, “and although the beauty of the nightingale’s song has clouded the understanding of our poet, he comes to his reasons eventually.” She closed the book in her hand and recited the last stanza from memory:

  “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

  To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

  Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

  As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

  Adieu! adieu! they plaintive anthem fades

  Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

  Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep

  In the next valley-glades:

  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

  Fled is that music: —Do I wake or sleep?”

  “If that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye,” Jane smiled, “then you probably belong in mechanical engineering, or biology. Any place but Romantic Poetry 301.”

  Her students laughed. Jane stole a glance at the cell phone resting on the desk. She’d gone over time, again. Oh well. She’d wrap it up soon.

  “My friends, poetry is beyond logic. It is beyond the rational answer. It is nothing less than the cry of the soul from within us. The beautiful philosophy of the soul that loves beauty and mystery and yes, even that supreme mystery, death, where we all end up one day or another, like it or not. Poetry is the language of the soul, and it is eternal. But it is also the language of mystery, so it speaks from the world of the dead, or if not the dead, the place between death and life—a place where we have no control, where we know nothing but feel everything. And for want of a better word, my friends, we call this love.”

  -- -- -- -- -- -- --

  The students rushed out of the lecture hall, probably trying to find some place to eat lunch before they had to attend their next lecture, and Jane sat down wearily in the chair at her desk. She didn’t have any idea if what she said had gotten through to any of the students and the thought saddened her. Although she read the poetry for herself and herself alone, it was exhausting to pour her soul out each and every day and not to receive the slightest indication that what she was saying was being appreciated, or understood, or even listened to.

  Jane was exhausted with teaching. She was exhausted with life. Poetry—the dim call of love from men who’d been dead for two centuries—was her only shaft of light now through the grates of the prison that had become her life.

  Immersed in these thoughts, it took Jane a full twenty seconds to realize that her phone had been ringing. She looked at the name. Christine O’Darragh.

  “Hi, Sweetie,” she said.

  “Hi, Mom! Listen—I’m going to keep this short. International minutes are expen-sive!”

  “You can always write me an email, honey. I’m a professor. If I don’t check my mail at least two hundred times a day then I’m out of a job.”

  “I know! I know. But this—well you see, it’s kind of important. The kind of thing that I can’t really say over an email without it coming out lame and inconsiderate.”

  “Nothing you say is lame or inconsiderate, honey. You’re a perfect John Keats in your art of conversation. A genius of the spoken word.”

  “Mom, that was snide. But I’ll forgive you. And I’ll try to talk slower. I’m just so, so…happy! I can’t really control it!”

  Jane held the receiver a fraction of an inch from her ear. Her daughter’s words were coming out half as squeals and half as shouts. What on earth could she be so excited about? Jane wondered, not without a trace of envy. Her daughter was succeeding in life. Twenty-five and working as a studio designer in Paris—in Montmartre of all places, the most fashionable and prestigious square in the city—Christine had done inconceivably well in her young life. Not to mention the fact that she was stunningly, absolutely gorgeous and had had a bevy of young men tailing her before she was a teenager. Christine had everythin
g in life going precisely her way. And now, from the sounds of it, she was about to have even more.

  “Well honey you’ve got to say it sooner or later—from the sounds of it it’s about to burst out of you.”

  Christine giggled helplessly. That was another thing about her daughter: unlike the annoying, high-pitched giggles of the college girls Jane knew, her daughter had a cute giggle.

  “Okay, okay, Mom—I will, I will—but, well, there’s no one in the room with you now, is there?”

  “Only me, myself, and I. And we’re going to be running soon. Got another class to teach,” Jane lied, hoping to speed her daughter along.

  “Okay. Let me take a deep breath first.”

  “In…,” Jane counseled, “out—”

  “I’m engaged!!”

  Jane felt a buzzing in her ear from the squeal her daughter had made with the news. But wait—had she heard correctly?

  “Honey,” she said, a little breathless, “did you say you were—”

  “Engaged!” the news reverberated back, unmistakable. “Mom! You can’t believe how happy I am! How happy we are! It’s like—I don’t even know what it’s like! I don’t have your words to describe it. I don’t think anyone has the words to describe it! Maybe he has the words—he’s a literature professor too, Mom. Can you believe it? I think he even mentioned before that he’d taught at West Rourke. What a coincidence! But I’m not even surprised! Isn’t that amazing! The most incredible things in the world are happening, and it’s all completely natural for me! It’s like I’m floating. I’m completely in the clouds—I’m soaring.”

  “Oh my God,” said Jane a little carelessly, but she corrected herself quickly. “Congratulations, honey! What a beautiful surprise! How—how unexpected!”

  A thought, small and wicked, entered Jane’s head. “Honey,” she said, “tell me you’re not pregnant.”

  “I’m not pregnant!” Christine said, indignant. “I’m just happy, so dearly, wonderfully happy!”

  Jane was becoming exhausted with her daughter’s happiness and she decided to wrap things up. “Okay, honey, I’ve got to run. You’re going to tell me all about it later, okay? Congratulations again!”

  She waited for her daughter’s response before powering the phone down. Then she put her head on her desk and burst into tears.

  -- -- -- -- -- -- --

  Twenty-five years. It was hard to believe it had happened twenty-five years ago. Jane was just seventeen, and Johnny eighteen. They’d been no more than kids, younger than Christine. Ignorant. Stupid. Madly, obsessively in love.

  Johnny O’Darragh came from Ireland. A musician living in County Galway. He ran a music shop with his uncle and played the fiddle in two bands and the guitar in a third. But the summer that Jane knew him, he was driving a moving van in Toronto with his cousin. The job meant long hours, hard work, and menial wages, but Johnny had been pleased with it. He hadn’t had so much money all his life, he said. He felt like a king. An Irish king driving a moving van, strumming a guitar in the municipal gardens during the late hours of the night when his voice and the voices of the insects’ mingled.

  It was the summer Jane found it impossible to sleep. The summer she arrived at the inevitable and frightening conclusion: that she was a remarkable human being, more committed to the pursuit of life and love than anyone else that she knew. Only the poets and the writers she’d read about could match her, and the comparisons between her heroes and herself filled her with a tingling, affirming energy that made wasting even a second of life seem like the gravest insult to the tremendous power that had been given her.

  She introduced herself as Emily when she first met Johnny. Emily Eliot. A marriage between her two favorite poets at the time. Both of them incredibly, indescribably sad.

  She recited poems from heart while he played his guitar. They invented songs together. They wrote together. Jane improvised songs on the spot and Johnny set them to music, and together they composed the world around them. The golden splash of the water in the fountain. The warm buzz of the insects that brought life to the still forms of the trees. The smooth, damp sweep of wind over the stone steps around the fountain where they played. The world belonged to them. The days belonged to work but the night was their domain, and in the deserted gardens, they owned the night.

  They spoke and sang and watched the stars and gave them names. Jane called Johnny her Orpheus. “Orpheus who ventured into the Underworld to save Eurydice, who’d been taken from him by Pluto,” she whispered. “And then he lost her a second time, because he couldn’t keep himself from looking at her. But he couldn’t help it. He loved her too much. My Orpheus,” she said, smoothing back the long, brown bangs that partially covered his eyes. Green eyes, speckled with gold. She wondered if Eurydice had seen eyes like that before she fell back, back into the Underworld.

  “The night is our Underworld,” whispered Johnny. “And Emily is my Eurydice.”

  “And for as long as he was able after saving his love, Orpheus kept himself from looking at her. Close your eyes,” she whispered. The green and gold vanished beneath his eyelids.

  Jane raised herself from his side and snuggled close to him. She looked at his still, breathing face and kissed him lightly on the lips. It was a soft, lingering, beautiful kiss. Her first.

  Johnny opened his lips slightly and Jane opened the kiss more, sucking his delicate upper lip, slipping her tongue tentatively into his warm mouth. Johnny opened his mouth further and Jane inserted her tongue all the way, pressing it as deep as it could go. She closed her eyes and imagined that she was the kiss, entering into his warm mouth, and this thought gave her an intense pleasure. She felt herself go warm. Her whole body was warm.

  Jane positioned herself on top of Johnny so she could give herself more fully to the kiss. She laid herself down on top of him and felt his manhood pressing against her through his jeans. It excited her to have him so close to her and she moaned deeply as they kissed. But she was so warm. She couldn’t believe how warm it had become. It was stifling, as if her skin was too much of a covering for her.

  And, kissing Johnny, tasting the sweetness and the warmth of his lips, she felt how warm he had become as well. His flesh was scorching her, but she wanted to be closer to it. She wanted to live in the heat of his skin, to put herself into Johnny and dwell in him. Lifting her body from his, she took his shirt by both hands and gingerly but firmly slipped it off, revealing his firm, sturdy torso—finely chiseled from a summer spent lifting heavy materials from the truck. The sight of his bare chest filled her with a renewed, tingling excitement. She wanted to taste his skin. She wanted to taste his pale, finely sculpted body.

  Jane kissed his cheeks and his chin, lightly fuzzed with the beginnings of a beard, and then she moved down and kissed his strong neck. She planted strong, wet kisses on his body, marking it as her possession. She kissed the moon-shaped birthmark on his shoulder and moved down, down. She wanted more. She wanted to taste him. She wanted him in her mouth.

  Jane let her tongue glide down his body, wet and firm. She licked his body as she descended, drinking him in. She tasted the salt of his flesh and ran her tongue over his abdomen. Johnny opened his mouth and gave a slight, barely audible moan. “Don’t you dare open your eyes,” she whispered, resting her chin just below his belly button so that she could feel his member pressing up against her throat. “If you open your eyes, you lose me forever.”

  Jane planted a garden of kisses just below the belly button. She wrapped her arms around his lower body and moved her tongue down until it was teasing the flesh beneath the elastic of his boxers. With one hand she undid the loop of his belt and unbuttoned the four studs that held his jeans. She was breathing faster, in incredible excitement, unsure of what exactly she was doing but knowing that whatever it was, it was supremely, utterly right.

  She slipped his jeans down past his buttocks. The sight of his protruding penis, causing the elastic of his boxers to teepee, filled her with an insatiable an
d ravenous hunger, but she restrained herself. She dared not touch his boxers, letting all of the feeling go through her tongue. Teasingly close, the tongue ventured further and further beneath the elastic, running this way and that. She tasted the salt and sweat of his skin and felt herself go mad with desire.

  With one hand she drew down his boxers and revealed at last his proudly erect penis. She took him in her mouth like a wanderer in a desert takes a drink of water. She was sure she had never desired anything so much as she desired to have as much of him in her mouth as she could withstand.

  Johnny emitted a low, satisfied moan. The sound ricocheted through Jane’s being, filling her as his penis filled her mouth, with the full, complete satisfaction of her desire. Her lips surrounding his firm stalk, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth more, sliding herself down until she came nearly to his pubic hairs. Jane felt him pulsating, quivering and alive in the back of her throat. She slid herself back up and began drawing herself over his stalk and covering it with her warm, wet tongue. She took him in her mouth again and let herself sink down until he was again a firm bulge in the back of her throat.

  Johnny gasped when Jane took him in her mouth a third time. “Emily,” he managed between gasps. His hands on her back suddenly flexed to his sides and transformed into white-knuckled fists. “Oh, dear God,” he gasped as she slid once more up his penis and planted a delicate kiss at its top.

  Pushing back down on him again, Jane felt him quivering in her mouth. He was about to come. The idea thrilled her. She wanted to receive his seed. She wanted to taste all of him, not just his skin and his lips but his essence. She licked his penis and then closed her mouth and felt Johnny tremble. A warm, sticky fluid exploded in her mouth. She sucked furiously, drinking all of him in, not daring to spare a drop of his precious self.

  “Dear God,” Johnny gasped. “My God, Emily.” She closed his jeans and positioned herself once more on his chest. “Open your eyes,” she commanded. “Orpheus. Look at me. You can’t lose me now.”