One glass, two glasses, we chat, he and I dressed, she naked to the tips of her toes—a Déjeuner sur I’herbe shot inside, with the same intentions to follow, no doubt.
Then I notice that J. P. is completely dressed in black.
“How do you see the scene, Florence?” he asks.
“I want to photograph you together,” I say. “You dressed like that, her naked. On the black side of the comforter, first. Then you’ll take it off the bed and we’ll keep just the white sheet as a background.”
“In short, black-and-white in color, if I’ve understood you?”
“What else?”
I photograph their faces, looking eye-to-eye, approaching each other slowly, a quarter of the frame each time, then intertwined, as in Rodin’s Le Baiser. I do a first series in full lighting, then move all the lights nearly to the ground. Stretched out on the bed, they look as if they belong in an Expressionist film, replete with immense looming shadows and violent contrasts.
“Kiss her again,” I say.
The zoom lens allows me to take a close-up of their joined mouths, their tongues shamelessly seeking each other out, his hands playing with her breasts, her very pale hands on the dark fabric of his shirt.
“Keep going,” I say between clicks of the shutter.
He buries his face between her breasts, licks them, sucks them, clutches them. She throws her head back in a moment of cinematic ecstasy.
“Take off your clothes,” I say to J. P.
His skin is much darker than hers, making for a very satisfying contrast of tones.
He has a hard-on.
What do I feel? I don’t know. The camera feels it for me.3
Because I am watching everything through the lens, I can distance myself—all the while confusedly knowing I can stay fifteen feet away only for so long...
And then, at the precise moment at which I ask myself what I want next, she leans over on her stomach and takes his stiff cock into her mouth.
And sucks it much better, much more greedily, than I ever could.
Her hair falls in two cascades over her cheeks, hollowed out by the back-and-forth movement. Her lips are shaped by the luminous object of her desire: shrinking to a little doll’s mouth when she flutters about the glans, her brows knit as she gathers its nectar; then open and refined by the effort when she entirely swallows it; and eventually lost in the brown pubic hair rubbing against her face, as if she wants to make a furrow in his belly with her nose.
As always, watching, I feel a violent emotion. As if I were getting a hard-on.
But anyway, doesn’t a woman get hard?
From that moment on, I shoot only close-ups.
He crawls under her and gently bites her labia, drowns his mouth between her thighs, sticks his tongue into the wetness and drinks.
She sucks him, as I often see her do later, as if she were desperate to drink jism, as if she were a whore who has another client waiting. Each time she swallows his tense dick, ready to explode, she inhales the flesh, then comes back up nearly to the tip of the glans before going all the way back down the pillar.
He kneels behind her and penetrates her without ceremony.
I place the tripod in the diagonal formed by their haunches. He plunges into her sex as he has ravaged her mouth earlier; with each thrust driving into her very depths, then almost pulling out as if he might abandon her altogether.
She reopens her eyes and stares at me, silently panting, her lips half-open.
He pulls out of her cunt, repositions himself slightly above her, and sodomizes her, with the same irrepressible élan, without preparation. Very briefly she shuts her eyes and contracts her forehead a little, and then she looks at me again and smiles.
It’s the smile that does it. I undress and join them.
Just before, I put the camera on automatic. I have thirty seconds.
A brief, very brief hesitation.
She kisses me, and from the first kiss in which her lips clasp mine, I know she has decided to be as much a woman for me as for J. P.
A sudden burst of six photos triggered by the motor. Like firing a Winchester.
Then the silence cut by the groans of the mattress, the rustling of fabric.
I drink her kisses. Her tongue is like an animal’s—incisive, disturbing.
Little by little I slip beneath her. I lap at her breasts as I have drunk from her lips. She skims over my chest in the same way, but her hands are already descending towards my cunt.
The texture of her skin is extraordinarily taut, which gives it the feel and savor of barely ripened fruit.
She engulfs her face in my sex before I dare confront hers. I have never been sucked like that: practically eaten alive. I try to use my hands to slow down her mouth, but without success, so I bite her. I spread her sex with my fingers and look at her as I never have a woman. She has well-formed, very regular labia, and the entrance to her vagina, even as dilated as it is, is not the abyss mine seems to be when somebody wants to fuck me.
Two inches from my forehead, J. P.’s cock thrusts furiously between her upraised buttocks...
I explore her sex with my tongue, coming back up to play with her clitoris. So that’s what female pleasure looks like, viewed from below? I don’t have time to dare to do more, because I am coming—one of the most rapid orgasms of my life.
I close my eyes. I feel displacements on the bed, then suddenly a cock pierces me...
I love being penetrated right after I have come, and he knows it, the creep.
Again I investigate that marvelous pussy, still offered to me, manhandling it with the tips of my teeth, my mouth full. So that’s what a woman tastes like? Well, it tastes a lot better than a man does...
Her cunt, a mouth of dilated shadow, calls to me. I stick in my tongue.
J. P. raises my backside, spreading my buttocks, then takes my ass from behind.
Nathalie pulls away from my vulva and moves to kiss me at the same time as my other lover, lower down, fucks me to the depths.
I drown my face between her breasts, held above me, and push back with all my strength the orgasm I feel mounting in me.
He must have guessed my difficulty because, whether from compassion or a desire for suspense, he pulls out of my ass and ejaculates in long jets on my belly and breasts.
Nathalie leans forward and carefully laps up the traces of burning sperm. Then she kisses me again, infusing me with a nearly sweet mixture of sperm and saliva, all the while masturbating me very quickly—and very quickly I come again.
We rapidly empty a second bottle of champagne. J. P. puts his pants back on and photographs us a second time as we kiss and rub against one another, like two hands soaping each other.4
Is it me, or is it us? Our loins are nothing but sweat and vaginal juices. I bury my fingers in her, she plants hers in me, and we sit stuck together, rooting about in each other’s sex with one hand, stroking our breasts with the other. Never has a man taken such good care of my breasts. It’s simple: before her, I didn’t think; about having any.
By the time we detach ourselves from each other, as two halves of a nut might come unstuck, J. P. has already stopped photographing us for a pretty long period of time and finished another glass of champagne. He fills our glasses, holds them out to us, and smiles.
That smile... Our first contact, our first toast to our union.
Several flashes survive in my memory, like the following scenes:
He is standing between us; kneeling, we are playing at nibbling on his cock. Regularly our mouths join about this phallic pretext, held like a lure before us.
We are lying down next to each other on the bed, both of us on our stomachs, and he runs his hands over us, one after the other, stopping wherever he finds his next, provisory haven. Nathalie’s mouth is always fresh on mine.
He comes in my mouth, but she leans over and immediately drinks, in the kiss that follows, all the sperm he ejaculated in me.
How can he still be hard
—or was it much later? We are lying down head-to-tail, our faces buried between each other’s thighs. I am above, she is below, and J. P. pirouettes around us, passing from my raised ass to Nathalie’s vagina, tucked away beneath my lips, before rinsing himself off in my mouth and beginning all over again...
Pleasure...
In the beginning there was only pleasure.
It was on our second date that J. P. tied her up and, in front of me, beat her three or four times on the back with a whip, then handed it to me and asked me to continue. At first I did it awkwardly, then with a debauch of energy and an absence of restraint that stupefied me.
As I was doing it, it occurred to me that it was not Nathalie I was beating. She was only the reflection of my own body—a reflection magnified, embellished, and tortured.
That it was not Nathalie became clearer as soon as we two got together without the alibi or transaction of a cock between us, susceptible at any instant to install another hierarchy—one in which she treated me as I treated her.
Here’s the strange part: although I crushed myself against her, came under her tongue or fingers, and in spite of my clumsiness, made her come, too, not for an instant did I imagine myself a lesbian. I was an altered, bastard form, a hermaphrodite. I even sometimes experienced a sort of repulsion, a horror of the female sex; then the instant afterwards I would cover her with kisses. She would get enormously wet and I would get drunk on her.
Very quickly one of our favorite games became tying her up, her legs hanging halfway over the headboard, her ankles tied to the frame, her legs spread wide apart. For a long time I would whip her on her open thighs, sex, and belly.
She would never cry out during this period. When the pain was too fresh, she would let out a sort of whimper, a sound more animal than human. She would contract her legs, as if to close them, but would immediately reopen them very widely. Soon I no longer needed to tie her up when I whipped her. I only had to order her: “Push out your breasts! Open your asscheeks! Spread yourself wider! Use your fingers! There—”
Invariably I end up leaning over and kissing her, and her tongue is always gracile and sweet. I fall into the habit of telling her I love her. She says it to me, too, in many ways, and yet I do not manage to believe her.5
Notes
1The only person who inadvertently profited from the spectacle of Florence’s marked skin was a friend of mine staying the night with her. Without it being an accident—that is to say, very intentionally—Florence paraded about nearly naked the following morning when she emerged from the shower. My friend was so horrified she was at first unable to say a word; then she was so fascinated that she bombarded her with questions on who, why, how, and if it hurt. She touched each one of the welts, and neither one of them dared to say how excited she was. When Florence told me about the scene, it pleased me a great deal.
2Nathalie usually wore very sophisticated Italian lingerie, mixing the pieces, like a very fitted brassiere, or a bodysuit sheathing her bust in complicated lacework, with a negligible pair of panties—a mere formality of satin. When we appeared astonished at these expensive fripperies, she laughed and offered to give them to Florence to make her shut up. Now that she is no longer with us, I often ask Florence to wear these silk souvenirs for me, and for her—as if we could resuscitate her in an imperfect mirror.
3Everyone knows, obviously, that there is something phallic in the lens of a camera—especially when, if you’re using a zoom, it suddenly lengthens toward the object of its desire. There is no doubt that photography was a substitute for Florence. As for me, my fascination with photography was more complicated. Why had I always associated it with the taste I had for a woman’s ass—as if I only dared to be homosexual with women?
4Nathalie was left-handed, and as soon as they were intertwined, it was like seeing a doubled image, as if one were approaching the other from the other side of a mirror.
5As long as Florence thinks of Nathalie in the present tense, she is still with us. Nathalie is in her, in her head, her heart, her belly, like an immortal fetus one is never rid of. She is there, at night, between her empty hands. She skims over her skin, always, the phantom vessel of her memory. She is in the least of her silences. And sometimes, in mine.
Chapter V
November, Continuation
J. P. would see me sometimes, either in order to fuck me or to work with me on the Sophocles text, as I have already said.
“Why Sophocles?” he asked, and never, “Why Oedipus?”
“Because Cocteau is too simple and Seneca too dark. Sophocles is a pure tragedy, one of misunderstanding and recognition—but Aristotle said that well before I did.”
He would see her, too, but I heard only bits and pieces of what happened.1
I had given her a set of keys, telling her she could come and go as she liked. She would drop by, sometimes between classes, whether I were there or not.
I would find a rose in a metal vase, an open book on the bed, or simply the unreadable imprint of her body on the comforter. Or else I would be there, and she would come by fresh from the rain and kiss me, or ask me sometimes, in very crude terms, to make her come. Standing before me, she would lift her skirt. I would drop to my knees, take off her underwear (when she was wearing any), and eat out her ass. Very quickly her cunt would weep with pleasure, and I would make her come, my thumb bored deep in her vagina, my fingers on her clitoris, my tongue buried in her asshole. She would have strong anal contractions that would push me out and suck me in by turns. Then she would leave as quickly as she had arrived.
She would sometimes disappear for a whole week, and no one would run into her. Then she would show up one morning, her hands full of croissants.
“Your hair smells of the sea,” I said to her one day.
“Really? It’s possible.”
And I never knew more than that.
Twice she arrived very late. The first time, she forced herself not to wake me—the discreet princess who did not want to disturb her sleeping beauty. I had fallen asleep while reading, and by the light of the reading lamp, through the hypocritical filter of my eyelashes, I watched her undress in silence and slide in next to me. Taking off her skirt and sweater, she had the grace of a cat. There was a movement in her arms I always found captivating because each time her breasts seemed to burst forth like snow.
This time, in the uncertain light, I thought I had not seen correctly. But when she leaned forward to undo the straps of her shoes, I realized I had not been wrong: she had been beaten on the breasts with a brutality I had never dared. Deep horizontal stripes, the proof that someone had slept with her before beating her. One nipple, darkened with blood, was nearly torn off. The creases of scars, the rectitude of gashes, evoked the imprint of a hard lash: a riding whip, perhaps.
She laid down next to me and kissed me lightly on the temple. The instant afterwards, she was asleep. For a long time I remained awake with my nightmares.
She did not try to hide the marks the next morning. “What? Oh, that. Who did it? It’s not important.” But ten minutes later, I surprised her in the bathroom looking in the mirror with an evident satisfaction at the gouges on her skin, touching the swellings of her laminated flesh with her fingertips.
I knew who did it when, three days later, J. P. treated me in the same manner. But with me, he took care to tie me up head-to-toe first. I cried out; I begged like a madwoman for him to stop. He struck me twelve times, very hard. Then he came in my mouth. He loved that—after he had made me cry, he loved giving me his cock to suck, knowing I was halfstrangled, between his dick gagging me and my nose stopped up with tears.
One afternoon...
I needed her so much, had so much hoped she would come by that I leapt upon her as soon as she entered and, laughing, she let herself fall to the bed. I lifted her skirt, took off her underwear with an authoritative movement...
The black lace was sticky with fresh sperm, as were her sex and asshole. I lifted my head.
&
nbsp; “Who was it?” I asked.
“J. P.,” she said. “At school. On a table, between classes. Without even locking the door.”
He had once taken me the same way, stretched me out upon a desk, my ankles around his shoulders, my skirt hiked up to my waist, my panties hanging at half-mast from the heel of my sandal—and him passing, with an insouciant air, from my cunt to my asshole. He did it often, and each time I would try to guess where he would come, even tried to provoke him, through the contractions of my sphincter, the suction of my cunt, to forbid him from moving from one to the other, from making me pine even longer. Come where you want to, but come!
When Nathalie opened her thighs before me, I had the impression he had found the strength to ejaculate in both her cunt and her ass.
I slapped her on principle, then was immediately ashamed, asked her to forgive me, took her in my arms...
That was one of the only times she took power, briefly. She sat astride me, squeezing my face between her thighs, and made me lick her sex and ass for a long time, telling me to miss nothing, to forget nothing, to bury my tongue in her as far as it would go. Her cunt tasted like seaweed.
During this period, I whip her nearly every day. Why, then, do I think I didn’t want to kill her? I would like to kill her; I could die from wanting to kill her so badly.
Moments like these were a constant with Nathalie, and became more and more marked as we neared the end: moments when I would confusedly sense the end coming without having decided anything. It was like hearing a blues fragment that echoes on the last note and refuses to let itself be reduced to silence.
The blows, the humilations, even the tortures I made her suffer, were for her, each time, new opportunities to be more tender, more sweet. She was my negative reflection, or rather, the positive reflection of the negative image I had of myself. The whip revolted me. My whole body rebelled against the blows, yet seemed to ask for more, as if to punish me for an ancient rebellion of uncertain origin. Nathalie, however, seemed to grow more perfect under the whip, as a river stone will be slowly polished until it arrives at its definitive form—a pure oval, a grain of sand, nothingness. Her torn flesh would bleed, and she would keep that half-smile, completely interior, that fourteenth-century Italian painters tacked on the faces of their martyred saints. I only struck her harder; I only loved her more; and I hated myself for loving her so, yet tearing her apart.
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