by Anna Premoli
“Sorry if this is going to be shorter than I would like,” he murmurs in a low voice.
I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about - my body is on a super-fast highway of bliss. And it’s so close to his goal that there’s no way of stopping. No time for pit stops on this racetrack!
“Ari, shut up...”
My orgasm manages to take me by surprise, even though I had been ready to welcome it. It is a sea of colours and smells, mixed with just a hint of madness. It would be nice to enjoy Ari’s delighted expression at my surrender, but I just can’t stop my eyes from closing.
When I finally regain control of myself, I realize he too is about to reach his destination. He grabs me by the neck and kisses me desperately, biting my lower lip at the exact moment he finally lets himself go. His open wide eyes are lost in mine.
After a long, long time, our breathing returns to normal. He passes a finger over my lips and only then do I realize that his bite has actually made me bleed.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, Giada...” he says, sounding mortified. “I really don’t know what came over me.”
The same thing that came over me, I fear: the intensity of possessing this person in a moment of absolute madness. But while it lasted, it felt like the most special moment in the world.
But what follows intensity like that, though, is the most total embarrassment.
“Is everything okay?” he asks. He seems to be endowed with some sort of sixth sense, and often guesses things before I get around to thinking about them. He’s so far ahead that I always seem to be lagging behind.
“That was... wow... In fact, that was more than wow! But I know I’m going to start thinking about everything and overanalysing it all and that I’ll end up having an existential crisis,” I confess in a mortified voice.
“Existential?!” he teases with a benevolent smile. “Jeez, I didn’t realise I was that good.”
“Cool it with the jokes, Bertha - I’m having an existential crisis here, so stop making fun of me.”
Ari’s eyes become serious and his expression determined. “You and I are fine. Period. Whatever ideas to the contrary you’re having, let them go. Or, at least, wait until you’ve had a couple more orgasms before you start getting paranoid, okay?” he asks. I would have bet on him saying something like that.
“Did I hear someone promising orgasms?”
“First, we need to look for that box of condoms in my suitcase, Ms. Spikes,” he reminds me.
“You’ve got ten seconds, dear,” I challenge him. “Let’s see you put your back into it.”
Ari shoots off like a 100-metres runner. “If I do it in eight, you’ve got to pay a penalty!”
But just for the record, it only takes him six.
*
I wake up quite early, when the sun is just rising. Partly because the light that filters through the windows has always had this effect on me, and partly because my heart is beating wildly and doesn’t seem to have any intention of going back to a normal rhythm. The reason for my agitation is sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the thoughts running through my head. He is lying on his stomach, his arms wrapped firmly around the pillow, his head resting on the end closest to me, his breathing slow and regular. Being very tall, he occupies most of the bed. I allow myself the luxury of observing him undisturbed: that rich shade of brown in his hair, that perfect little nose, that well defined upper lip. The more I think about it, the harder it is to understand when exactly I allowed him to slide into my head and then into my heart. If, I mean, I actually did allow it.
Because to be honest, Ari knocked down every obstacle I managed to put up and overwhelmed me. No doubt about it. He was like a wave that dragged me off into the water with him.
Afetr a seven-year relationship I should be used to intimacy and sharing things, but that’s not quite the truth: when I was younger I had a phase of being so in love that it felt as though Fil and me were the same person, but I was still a kid then, and things are very different when you’re a kid. First of all because I lived with my parents and my boyfriend lived with his, so our shared life came up against the limits of our everyday lives. And for years now - more precisely, since I moved to Milan for university – I’ve been used to having my own space and my own solitude and to only having myself to answer to.
This new existence with Ari is a half-disaster, though: he’s in my life from morning to night and he’s in my thoughts even when I’d rather he wasn’t – he’s a person I risk becoming too dependent on.
It is never a good thing when your happiness depends on a single person: it’s obvious that the chances of everything falling to pieces are very high. It’s a mere question of statistics. No one could live up to all those expectations, not even the best human being in the world.
Ari sighs and reaches out, as though seeking me in the bed. He did it several times last night. He communicates physically, his arms round me all the time. Forget about keeping a distance...
Ariberto definitely won’t be happy about it, but when he wakes up we are going to establish some basic survival rules, like ‘you and I are two distinct entities and we have to remain such’. Sex between us was a heavenly experience, I’ve never experienced anything like it. Really, nowhere near. Of course, it’s not really fair to compare my early experiences as a young woman to this night, but damn if it didn’t all feel about a thousand times more intense. I suspect that the biggest difference is the way he makes love: nothing escapes him, not a sound, not an erogenous zone, not the way I react more powerfully to one thing than to another. It’s like all his attention is focused on me, and that kind of meticulous concentration is just... well, incomparable.
Perhaps sensing how hard I’m looking at him, Ari suddenly opens first one eyelid and then the other. There are no two ways about it, he’s gorgeous, so much that sometimes his beauty seems even a little over the top. Or maybe I’m the one who can’t look at him objectively anymore: every time I see him, it just feels as though he’s better than anyone else. I’m starting to worry I’m losing my marbles about half a century early. Well, I have always loved being different.
“Good morning,” he greets me, lifting his head from the pillow. On his lips, a sensual smile shows he is still thinking about the night we just spent together.
“Good morning,” I answer, in a formal tone.
His relaxed expression instantly turns into a frown. “Have you been getting paranoid again?” he asks me reproachfully.
I could lie, but I don’t see why I should. “A little...”
“Seriously, you have got problems with your life priorities...” he laughs, and so saying reaches out and pulls me to him. The view from his chest is not too bad, actually. He brushes my hair out of the way and starts stroking my neck.
“Ari, I need to take a shower first...” I say, trying to worm out of his grip. Ok, I’m not exactly putting my back into it, but it’s the thought that counts.
“You need to? Oh no, what you need to do is give me a decent kiss...” he corrects me, then captures my head and slowly begins to lower it in his direction.
“I haven’t even brushed my teeth,” I protest weakly. His mouth is a remarkable distraction, especially at such close range.
“Me neither,” he whispers to me. “I’ll forgive you if you’ll forgive me.”
When his lips touch mine, my only lucid thought is to get as close to him as possible. For some reason, Ari possesses the enviable talent of being able to turn me on in less than half a second. There’s something about him, something I can’t quite put my finger on, that touches me deep inside.
Fortunately, it seems that I trigger the same reaction in him if a certain part of his body, which had already shown how happy it was to see me a few moments earlier, is to be believed.
“Up with the lark?” I laugh as I pull away from him.
“Up with Giada, more like: the combination is lethal. I hope you don’t mind,” he sighs, kissing my neck. Since when has anyone ev
er minded being kissed by a handsome man clad only in pyjama bottoms and with a mad passion to unleash his desires on them?
“No, but I really have to take a shower...”
I really need one, plus I want to run for cover for a bit before throwing myself back under the sheets with him.
A dangerous glimmer appears in his eyes. “We could do it together,” he proposes. I’ve never heard anyone make washing themselves sound so sexy.
“You don’t want to take a shower with me, Ari,” I correct him, “you want to have sex in the shower.”
“Why should one thing exclude the other? And I can assure you one hundred percent that I’m dying to wash your back, your legs...”
“Yes, OK, I get it!” I cut him off before he can add other anatomical details.
“And you could wash me,” he suggests lasciviously. To be honest, the idea of soaping him all over and running my hands over his body is pretty tempting.
“Hmmm... ok,” I agree, unable to resist any further.
Ari smiles at me as he gets up from bed, takes off his pyjama bottoms and, completely at ease in his nakedness, holds out his hand to me.
“What do you want to do?”
“Carry you to the shower.”
“But I can walk.”
What was I saying about a tempting expression? Right now Ari is my personal devil, and he could probably even convince me to sell him my soul.
“I never said you couldn’t, but I’d like to do it anyway...” And he holds out his hand towards me again.
Well, if he really insists... I steel my nerve and take off my nightgown, trying to ignore his fiery eyes, then allow him to take me in his arms. He picks me up with a certain reverence, as though I were an extremely precious piece of bone china, and carries me to the bathroom, where he turns on the super-technological shower.
“Are you kidding me, this thing can do chromotherapy and hydromassage?!”
He laughs and then pushes me inside. There’s plenty of room and the jet of water spraying on me is absolutely perfect, both in terms of intensity and temperature. I close my eyes and enjoy the feeling of warmth.
“So, do you like it?” a satisfied-sounding voice asks me.
“Jeez, Bertha, this thing is orgasmic,” I murmur.
I open my eyes just in time to see him laugh.
“It’s not the only thing around here that’s orgasmic...” he says, and then takes me in his arms and leans against the tiled wall. I put my legs around him and kiss his neck. The contact between our bodies feels wonderful.
“By the way, I noticed you have two tattoos,” he points out. I have a small star under my belly button and a moon on my ankle. It’s amazing he was lucid enough last night to notice such details.
“And you haven’t got any.”
Not many people nowadays have immaculate skin.
Ari kisses my breast and then raises his wet head to answer me. “I’m not a big fan of needles and I’ve never felt the need to have anything so permanent in my life.”
“I’m not much of a fan of needles myself,” I find myself confessing.
His expression grows confused. “You don’t like needles but have two piercings and two tattoos?” he laughs.
“That’s exactly why I have two piercings and two tattoos. It was a way of strengthening my character, of overcoming my fears,” I explain to him.
“And you’re not afraid anymore?” he asks. He’s not trying to provoke me, he’s genuinely curious.
“I wish. I’m just as terrified as ever,” I have to admit. “That’s why I thought I’d get maybe get my nose pierced.”
I wait for him to tell me not to or to express horror, but he doesn’t flinch. And I know, because I am observing him with such concentration that not even the slightest movement of his eyelids would have escaped me. His gaze is surprisingly relaxed. For a brief moment I no longer know what to feel: whether I should be relieved at the idea of not being criticized for once, or disappointment that I didn’t manage to elicit the usual result.
“Just out of curiosity, how did you hide from your parents your tongue piercing? Didn’t it swell up?”
“I just told them I’d had an allergic reaction to some medicine I was taking. I couldn’t speak for days...” I can laugh about it now, but at the time it wasn’t that pleasant.
Ari looks at me with amusement, but from the way his body holds mine, all this talk of tattoos and piercings and needles is not primary on his mind.
“Do you know what I like about you?” he whispers in my ear as he runs his hand over my backside.
“That I’m cheeky?” I guess.
“That too. But I really like the way you can open up to me. I wasn’t totally sure there would be all this complicity between us...” he confesses, with a moan of pleasure
Well if he wasn’t sure, I was pretty certain there wouldn’t be.
We go on kissing and touching each other for a few more minutes, but then our bodies take over and soon he’s inside me and I’m headed gloriously towards heaven.
“We don’t have a condom,” I remind him, closing my eyes and enjoying the slow intensification of his rhythm.
“I know. But I had the test done recently. I’ve got a copy of the results with me, if you want to see them.”
Of course he has - he’s Mister Perfect, nothing gets left to chance.
“I have a copy too,” I confess with a laugh. I wasn’t sure what the rulebook for sexual relations prescribed nowadays, but I thought I ought to be responsible. Even though I’ve slept with only one boy in my whole life and have always used protection. But the way I see it, an extra test is better than an extra worry.
“And anyway, I’ll pull out before it’s too late,” he reassures me hoarsely.
I’m about to tell him not to bother, since I’ve been on the pill for years because of my teenage acne, but I’m not sure I want that kind of intimacy with him - that taking it for granted that whatever is between us must necessarily be something serious. That would imply an assumption of responsibility for both of us, and I’m wary, naturally inclined to think the worst of people.
That he’s inside me with nothing separating us is so amazing that it borders on the miraculous, but he doesn’t know, and I would rather he continue to remain ignorant of the exceptional nature of the event. For me it’s the first time ever. He would certainly make a big deal out of it, and I don’t want that, even though it’s such an intense experience that I feel myself rushing towards pleasure. I wish it would last forever, but instead my orgasm is already here. I feel it being born in a place inside me that is hard to specify and then spread through my whole body, overpowering me and enveloping me almost like Ari’s arms. His mouth glides over mine and his tongue thrusts inside at the precise moment when I let myself go completely, muffling a scream that would otherwise have been epic. And I never scream. Until last night, that was a rule too.
Ariberto senses what’s happening and he follows suite, pulling himself out of me at the last moment. He closes his eyes and embraces me as I feel him tremble.
We stand there for a long time, holding each other and letting the shower jet spray over us. If this heat and sweetness had an aroma, it would certainly smell of Ari.
“Oh God...”, is the only thing I manage to say. I’ve never been excessively romantic, which is why I don’t really know how to handle the feelings I’m experiencing. I’ve always been an anti-romantic, the one who made fun of people who were too much in love, the one who looked at the couples she bumped into around town with terror. Fil knew and respected that. He never - and I mean never - gave me a flower in all those years, because I’m not the kind of person who inspires certain feelings or invites certain gifts. No one would think of treating me like a princess, or of constantly carrying me about in his arms.
Or, rather, nobody would have before Ari.
He smiles at me and then kisses me again. And again. He doesn’t seem able to stop.
“I swear I never though
t it would be like this between us physically. I had a suspicion after that first kiss, but this... This is really intense,” he murmurs, laying his forehead against mine.
I don’t know about him but I’m still having problems believing that it actually ended up happening. On my risk scale, this weekend was way more dangerous than nuclear bombardment. North Korea’s hydrogen bomb is peanuts compared to Ari.
And that, if I may use a refined French expression, is some deep shit.
Chapter 11
As we have dinner, Lavinia sits staring at me with a vaguely ironic and slightly incredulous expression. For her part, Alessandra doesn’t even try to hide how deeply shocked she is by my unusually larval state; her enormous dark eyes are so wide that they look as if they’re about to fall out of their sockets. Well I’d like to see what they’d be like in my position: I’ve just got back from a long weekend where sex was more or less the only thing I did. It’s a good job that Ari fed me up at that dinner in Portofino, because after that evening, food was pretty much irrelevant for us. And so was sleep. I don’t even know why we bothered going to Santa Margherita, to be honest, when we could have just locked ourselves up in a room in Milan, given how much of the local scenery and the spring sun we saw while we were there... Once we started, we just weren’t able to stop. The whole time we were there. We were like vampires, practically never seeing the sunlight. I mean, it filters through the curtains, doesn’t it, so what was the point in going outside?
“Did you get a nice tan, then?” says Lavinia mockingly.
“As if you’d have done it differently...”
“I acted the good girlfriend, my dear, and went with Seb to a weekend of live action role-playing games. It was some futuristic Matrix-style thing, and Seb did look pretty hot dressed as a postmodern sorcerer, so obviously we took advantage of the opportunity, but at least we met people, talked to each other and actually ate something from time to time.”