Autumn

by Vina Jackson

  But it was too soon for that. Far too soon. I wanted him inside me. We would fuck, before he came, even if it meant pushing him to the floor and straddling him in front of the bay windows, for anyone to see, if they happened to be holding a pair of binoculars at the window of a nearby tower block.

  I did not yet know enough about Antony to conclude anything about his sexual proclivities, besides the fact that he was clearly ready to fuck, whether or not we would be working together and despite the fact that I’d walked in on him with another woman barely 24 hours earlier. I was submissive, in my sexual nature, but only with someone who I considered to be my dominant. With casual encounters, emotion-free fucks, I was as eager to find fulfilment on my own terms as my partner.

  I caught the drop of his juices, withdrew my hand from his jeans and sucked him from my fingers. He was not wearing boxers, I registered. He was as nude beneath his clothing as I was.

  He groaned.

  ‘Summer,’ he said, as I wrapped my hands around his neck and pulled him down to kiss me again. ‘Your music … it was perfect. Incredible.’

  I stopped the flow of his speech with my mouth. I had never been one for talking during sex. It was too easy to ruin a perfect moment with the wrong words.

  He cupped my arse with his hands and lifted me up and I wrapped my legs around his waist. It was a movement better suited to the perfection of sex scenes in Hollywood, I thought, as he stumbled backwards and we half crashed into the glass coffee table before tumbling over together onto the couch. I laughed, and before the sound had travelled the full length of my throat he had slipped his arm beneath my torso and flipped me over so that abruptly I had a face full of cushion.

  I stopped, caught my breath, registering this new, fervent exhibition of lust and he responded to my pause by lifting my leg at a higher right angle so that I was face down and none the wiser as to what he was planning next although I hoped and expected to feel the full length of his cock inside me. When he finally breached me the moment of his entrance felt sublime, his cock so thick and large against the tight circle of my hole that I gasped. He thrust into me and I pumped back against him, letting the peculiar angle of my body and the quickness of my thighs clenching around him be his guide. I was frantically eager for him. Desperate to feel full, brimming, to have the emptiness inside me pummelled away by the rigidity of his cock.

  Antony fucked me until every thought in my head had disappeared and I was nothing but cock and cunt, and just as I began to feel as though I might come if the frantic thrusting against my cervix continued uninterrupted he pushed my leg up even higher, right up past my waist, so that my knee was close to my ear and then he drove his dick into me, hard, and then even harder. I could barely utter a breathless sound besides frantic panting as my regular exhalation was strangled in the cushion that my face was by necessity pushed into and he responded by wrapping his hands around my throat to choke me as each stroke of his penis hit the wall of my cunt.

  By the time he came, finally, we were a mess of sweaty limbs and deep hiccups of breath, but instead of just rolling over and leaving it there he withdrew and in one swift motion hitched my hips up, moved back behind me and pressed his face against my pussy and the hot fluid that must have gathered there, my juices mixed with his, and lapped. The weight of his tongue pressed against my clitoris until I cried out and then he pulled away, waited not more than a moment or two and pressed his face again between my legs.

  Antony, it would seem, liked to be in charge. Or at least, he liked to bring his partner pleasure, not necessarily before he found his own, but certainly before he ceased.

  The sensation of his nose against my cunt was relentless. I twitched, jumped away, and he held me down so that I was unable to escape the intensity of his flesh pressed against the most sensitive parts of mine. I began to jump uncontrollably and he seemed pleased, and still more intent on his objective.

  ‘Aah,’ I moaned. The silent Summer was communicative. It was impossible not to be, with the tip of his tongue teasing my clit as it was. Though I knew that each lap of his tongue was nothing more than that, he had me in such a state of frenzy that every minute touch of his mouth to my cunt felt a million times more intense than it ordinarily would.

  ‘Ohh, fuck,’ I said. It felt good. It felt better than any mouth against my pussy had ever felt, as much as I might want to deny it. His tongue played a magical tune against my most sensitive parts, and I let him.

  I was taken aback.

  He lapped at me again.

  Spread my legs even further apart and ran his tongue all the way from the base of my pussy to the apex of my arsehole. Not just once, but again, and again. He cupped my cheeks and pulled my buttocks apart and then manoeuvred his tongue into one firm length and probed the fullness of my anus until his tongue felt as long and as firm as a finger.

  My face was still directed into his sofa and my breath consequently interrupted by the fabric of the cushions that I sucked partly into my mouth with each in-breath. He was taking me right to the knife-edge that separated blissfulness from over-stimulation, eliciting sensations so extremely pleasurable they verged on pain. My limbs began to twitch and I scratched and bit at his innocent soft furnishings to try to stop myself from crying out. I wasn’t sure how thin his walls were, or how conscious Antony was of the neighbours, but I didn’t want to come off like the lead in a porn film on my first time with him.

  It occurred to me then that I was already thinking there might be a second time.

  Antony slid the flat of one of his hands beneath my hip and found the base of my mons, and then my clit, and he began to rub his fingers in circles while his tongue continued its exploration inside my cunt.

  His fingers moved faster and faster and his tongue thrust in and out, in and out, until I could not hold back any longer. I began to grind my pussy against his face, a response which only made him bury his tongue even deeper inside me.

  He continued to play clockwise laps around my clit despite the unlikely position that he must now find himself in. His jaw must be hurting, I mused, weakly, but my body was too much alight for my mind to hold on to any single thought for more than a fraction of a second and in the next moment I was moaning, tearing at the sofa with my nails and then coming in one enormous, roaring orgasm that felt as though it went on for minutes although it was probably only seconds.

  With each spasm of my body he licked my clit, drawing out each shock wave to its maximum. I continued to shudder and jolt and stretched my arms out behind me, airplane style, to reach for his hands. Right then, I needed the intimacy of his touch, to ground me, to bring me back to earth again.

  He responded by turning my arms up to right angles, threading his fingers through mine, and pulling himself back on top of me. As he did so his cock bounced against the inside of my leg; he was hard again. I pushed my arse up and tucked my pelvis under, to assist the angle of his entry. He brushed a hank of my hair aside, pressed his face against mine, squeezed my hands in his and in the same movement, thrust his cock inside me. He was so hard, and I was so tight, so slick and so sensitive from my orgasm that he felt even bigger than he had the first time he entered me, as if his cock inside me had knocked all the air out from my body.

  I twisted my face up to meet his and we kissed. It was an awkward kiss - with my body trapped below his I could only meet him halfway – but that just made me more desperate to feel his lips against mine, and I wriggled beneath him to try to find a better angle. His cheeks and jaw were wet with my juices and he smelled of pussy, of me at my most primal. The scent and taste triggered another surge of desire in me and I bucked back against him with all the force that I could muster, once, twice, three times until he shuddered and collapsed onto my back.

  He pressed his cheek to mine. Both our faces sweaty, sticky, a peculiar mix of my sex mixed with his and combined with saliva and perspiration. His hands remained threaded through min
e and he kept them there. He showed no signs, as many of my other lovers had, of wanting to disentangle himself or seek his own space, now that the most physical part of our lovemaking had ended. He seemed to still want to feel my body held tightly against his, which was fine by me, although there was a little voice in my head that persistently reminded me that this kind of intimacy, his torso against my back, his now soft cock nestled in the dip of my buttocks, our fingers threaded, would inevitably pull my heart strings if it carried on.

  When I woke, night had begun to fall. I had drifted off to sleep nestled against him, and at some point during the afternoon he had peeled himself away from me and replaced his body weight with a soft grey blanket.

  I twisted, and produced that strange squeaking sound of bare skin moving against leather.

  Antony sat in the armchair nearby, his face a picture of concentration. He was furiously writing notes onto A4 pieces of thick, unlined computer paper. When one sheet was filled, he dropped it over the arm of the chair onto the haphazard pile that was growing on the floor.

  I recognised his mood. I’d seen it in Dominik, and often saw it in myself, in Viggo and in Lauralynn, in fact, in just about any creative person when they managed to tap into a rare vein of inspiration, unbidden, and the words, or the music, or images, or whatever it was that fuelled them rose seemingly without effort, as if they were simply a conduit for some kind of creative higher power, as if Antony had plugged into a theatrical surge conducting his hand by remote control to transform ideas to reality.

  Nothing short of a fire or a tornado would have led me to rouse him from that state. I knew how precious and wonderful such moments were.

  Instead I watched him work. He was naked, but sat with the demeanour of someone clothed, one leg draped over the other, like someone who would be entirely at home in a smoking jacket, with a pipe. One elbow leaned on the chair’s arm rest, the other grasped his pen, an ordinary black Biro, and scrawled in large, cursive strokes on the sheet of paper that rested on top of the book that served as his writing table, balanced on his knee.

  I could not make out the title of the book. Nor was I sure if he was a reader. Besides the mess that I had seen in his bedroom which I believed had been entirely Alissa’s work, his apartment was neat. Spartan. Beyond minimalist. I hadn’t seen any piles of books, or even a bookshelf. Perhaps he kept it all on some electronic device. I guessed that his tidiness was due not to personal taste but rather a lack of interest in anything besides his work. He evidently did not have much love for ‘things’.

  My eyes roamed over his body. He was lean to the point of thinness. His legs were long and the lack of fat on them made his muscles even more pronounced. The curve of one side of his buttocks was visible, as was the dimple that delineated his glutes. When he moved his arm, he revealed the slight bulge of his bicep. He was not a gymgoer, I guessed, or a rower or swimmer. A runner for sure, maybe a skier as well, though he seemed like too much of a workaholic to ever take a vacation. His body hair was blond and fine and just a dusting of darker hairs decorated his chest. He was left-handed.

  His face avoided gauntness, but only just. Instead he displayed the sort of high cheekbones that would make a cat jealous. His lips were neither thin nor full, but merely average, however they were unusually deep red in colour, like a plum begging to be bit into, and his mouth was wide and slightly upturned at the ends in a permanent smile that made him look as though he always had sex on his mind.

  At least, every time I looked at him, I could not help but think of kissing him, or more. His nose was long, narrow in the middle and flared at the base with a pointed tip. I wondered if that anatomical characteristic had contributed to his skill at cunnilingus. It occurred to me that Antony’s face was perfectly suited to sitting on, and I nearly laughed aloud at the obscenity of my own thought, which caused a pang of desire to twist in my groin.

  Antony was an interesting man, I decided. Different in some way from the other men that I had fucked over the past few months. I felt as though I hadn’t entirely worked him out yet. But, I would fuck him again, of that much I was sure.

  I raised my arms over my head and stretched. The sofa creaked beneath me. Antony raised his head and gave me a lopsided smile. His eyes held the same expression as his mouth. Affectionate, approving, mischievous.

  ‘You have the most appalling bed hair that I have ever seen,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I replied. I sat up, spinning around so that I was leaning on the edge of the sofa with my legs curled up behind me. I ran my hands through my hair, clumsily attempting to flatten out some of my curls.

  ‘No, don’t,’ he said, ‘I like it.’

  There was a brief pause. Our mutual silence was palpable, and I sought for a way to break it.

  ‘Have I been asleep long?’ I asked, although I knew from the darkness outside that it must have been several hours.

  ‘Most of the afternoon,’ he replied. ‘You must have needed it.’

  His eyes narrowed and his crooked smile turned into a wide grin. I had the feeling that he was talking about more than the nap.

  ‘Would you like some food?’ he asked. ‘Or a drink?’

  My stomach rumbled, which he took as an assent.

  ‘I don’t have much,’ he said, putting his pen and half word-covered remaining piece of paper down and pushing up to his feet. His cock and balls dangled invitingly out of my reach.

  He returned with an opened bottle of red wine and handed me a glass. As I poured, he walked back to the kitchen and began opening and closing cupboards, shuffling packets of food around and in the end bringing back just a jar of olives and a fork.

  We ordered pizza.

  By the time it had arrived, we had finished the half bottle of wine and opened another, and by the time we had finished that, I was feeling relaxed and merry. Arguably, drunk. My dress still lay in a heap in the corner. Neither of us bothered to dress, even when the food arrived. We balanced the pizza box between us on the sofa and ate leaning over it, careful to avoid splashing hot cheese or chilli oil down our bare chests. Antony had ordered extra jalapeños with his already spicy pizza, and he ate every one of the tiny pepper slices without so much as a pause. Sometimes he swallowed his food without chewing, like a man who hadn’t eaten for a week. Maybe he hadn’t.

  ‘Do you mind if I use your shower?’ I asked him, after licking my fingers and noticing that they still carried a lingering coating of grease.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. He produced a clean towel for me, and offered me the use of a spare toothbrush.

  I pulled the fluffy navy robe from the hook on his bathroom door and wrapped myself in it as I padded back into the living room where he lay on the couch, finishing the last of the red wine.

  He stood as I walked into the room and pulled the robe from my shoulders.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I prefer you naked.’

  He took hold of my left breast and squeezed, hard.

  ‘The bedroom, this time,’ he whispered, between kisses, pushing me backwards.

  His sheets smelled faintly, though not unpleasantly, of his cologne and the scent of his skin. Mingled perhaps with what remained of Alissa’s fragrance from the night before. Should it have bothered me that he had so recently spent the night with another woman? Maybe. I knew that some would believe so.

  But it didn’t bother me. If anything, it spurred me on to ride him even harder, to rid the thought of her from his mind with my own body. There was something else there too. The memory of her long legs, her bare breasts, the faint smell of her perfume. All these things aroused me.

  We fucked again.

  There was no mention of my catching a taxi home. Not that night, and not the next morning.

  We slept entangled and unwashed.

  7

  This Man

  And so it began.

  When I had been living with
Dominik, our work lives had of their own accord remained strictly segregated. He was a man of words, and I was a creature of the music, and never did the twain meet. We coexisted by allowing each other full liberty to indulge in our respective occupations and stayed at arm’s length from the other when the call for inspiration or work called. He was something of an early morning bird when he spent endless hours at his word processor, while I still lounged lazily between the bed sheets. I mostly practised or rehearsed in the afternoons, so he came to occupy that particular time researching or just reading; I could just not bear to work with anyone present, unless it was a piece I was set to play with other musicians, in which case we would normally emigrate to a rehearsal studio or the actual empty stage where we would be performing later, if it proved available.

  With Antony, collaborating of necessity meant working together at closer than close quarters, so whenever we

  weren’t fucking we were in the same room. Him expounding, improvising ideas, jotting down notes, attempting rough sketches he would later ask the set designer to perfect and me picking up a thread here and there and attempting to match it in the language of music and navigating through endless melodic tangents which he would dissect with forensic attention to the details, constantly interrupt, query, contradict, sometimes approve and most of the time try to influence in ways I failed to initially understand. It was hard, concentrated work and full of vigorous disagreements and frustrations.

  Antony was always careful never to raise his voice, but often I could see him seething, quietly furious, whether at my lack of understanding or the inevitable infelicities of my improvisations when my attention snapped and I lost focus.