Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  I noticed him struggling with his reading. At some point he stopped trying. He put his pen down and closed the book and smoothed its cover. I saw that it was something by Dostoyevsky. I wondered what he was studying, but I wouldn’t ask him. I didn’t want to ask him. I didn’t want to know his name.

  He told me anyway. David. He told me as I was walking past him with two cappuccinos balanced in my hands.

  “I finish in five,” I told him. “And my name is Krissy.”

  A name wasn’t anything really. I could call myself anything I wanted. I could be anyone. We caught a bus to my house and we barely said a word.

  “Do you do this sort of thing often?” he asked me then.

  “We will,” I told him.

  This was our first time and I thought it should be special, but it was nothing really. It was sex. It was fun. I liked watching Richard kiss him. I liked watching more than participating. Still, we were in this together and I let him touch me wherever he wanted and enter me wherever he wanted. I didn’t orgasm, but I did later when he had left and it was just me and Richard replaying the scene from beginning to end. I kissed Richard. I came with him. I came remembering Richard’s mouth on the boy’s penis.

  “Swallow him,” I said.

  “Yes, I’ll suck him dry.”

  And then I came and it was good. Better than good. It was the kind of feeling that tingles in your limbs for the longest time.

  When it had faded we rolled toward each other and hugged, and I felt safe and satisfied and alive for the first time in so very long.

  “I think I love you,” I told him.

  And that made him cry.

  PILLION 2

  Brisbane 2008

  We take the wrong exit off the freeway. We end up amongst the shopping centers and the run-down fish and chip shops. I smell burning fat and damp and rubber. Paul slips off the bike and he is wet, but grinning.

  “I was so nervous when we started out,” he says, “but then it got better.”

  “It is wet,” I tell him, “wet and cold.”

  Paul nods, sniffs as if testing for the smell of rain. “Ah well, we’re almost there.”

  But are we? We ask at a service station but the directions are complex and I am unsure.

  “No, I’ll remember them,” says Paul.

  “Okay, but tap me when we need to turn. Tap me on the right side to turn right and the left to go left.”

  It seems simple enough, but there are taps to both shoulders simultaneously. There are taps to the center of my back. Paul yells directions at my helmet, as if I could hear what he is saying. When we leave a side road and rattle up a horror of slippery wet grass and loose gravel I am cranky with him yet again. I do not care how good he smells and how my body wants to roll him into the mud and nuzzle into his flesh. For once my anger is more true and clear than my sexual urges; but at least we have arrived where we are supposed to be. I leave him to struggle out of his helmet and his gloves while I drag my soaking clothing up to the front door.

  There is a quick tour of the house, the gorgeous excesses of each room, the bookshelves with their familiar paperbacks, books that make me feel accepted and at home. And there is a spa.

  We settle in the lounge, a group of us. I perhaps have more in common with the others, middle-aged women like myself, and yet the fact that Paul and I are both dripping wet seems to mark us as similar. The others talk about the difficulties of parenting, schools, motherhood, childbirth. I sit beside Paul and he draws me into a conversation about the structuring of documentary films.

  I sip my wine and I keep thinking about that spa bath, big enough for two, perhaps even three. I would not even have to remove my bra and panties. Our clothes are wet already, we could sit there fully dressed and discuss the difference between a short story writer and a novelist, whilst sipping the good wine.

  The rain grows heavier. There is talk of sleeping the night. I would sleep the night. I don’t want to ride home in this weather. They ask Paul what he wants to do and he pauses, looks toward me. I shrug. I could stay the night. I think about the spa bath. I try not to, but I think about the spa bath.

  We could stay.

  THE PRIZE

  Brisbane 1989

  It was all about the sex, and the sex was always fine. There was a lot of it. I was constantly buoyed along in the afterglow of one orgasm or another. I walked in a fog of sex. I was distracted by it. I bumped into things. There were always bruises. I looked at everyone as a potential partner and it was right to feel this way. Finally my world had caught up to me. I no longer felt like a secret predator, hiding my lust behind a friendly façade. I felt more honest like this. I flirted with intent. I reeled the bodies in and played with them and set them free unharmed.

  On this occasion, it was all about the timing. I was at the Ryan Street house, our house, clothed in evening wear. High boots and a dress that billowed. There was opera on the stereo. All this because I couldn’t bear the idea of washing up, a job I hated and rarely completed without the theater of the dress and the music. I made a performance of it, treating myself to sips of chilled wine between each burnt-bottomed pan.

  When he arrived the last of the dishes was dripping foam into the precarious pile by the sink. The door was open and he stood in the lounge room and the muslin cloth was flapping in a hot breeze and I turned around and it was like a scene from some movie. Him so beautiful, me in my evening gown and my rubber gloves, the opera screaming to an exquisite climax.

  I almost laughed, the poetry of the moment struck me as comical. I had given him my address but I didn’t expect he would find me. He was a customer at the café and every time I spotted him perched on one of the cane stools I became inept. I dropped cups, fumbled cakes off their plates; once I even dropped a whole tray, hot with dishes just washed.

  So I didn’t try to speak to him when he stood in my lounge room. I took my clothes off, standing in boots and bra as the opera quietened to a duet.

  I walked past him into the bedroom where our king-size futon kissed three of the walls and when he stumbled out of his trousers I noticed that his penis was too large. He was a tall man, and I was short enough to approach it warily. I could only fit a fraction of it in my mouth. I rolled the condom part of the way using my lips, but I was forced to back off, finish the job with my fingers. It was the first time this had happened to me. I wondered if it would hurt.

  I was wet, which was unusual. I am not the kind of girl you read about in pornographic magazines, oozing juices. My excitement leaves me perhaps a little damp. Even after orgasm there is no more than a discreet slick, just enough to give a slippery edge. I like the feel of lubricant and face cream and spit, but I am like a desert, hot and fierce with passion but with only a hazy glimpse of moisture, a mirage.

  On this day, perhaps because of the heat or the opera or the hours standing at the sink in high heels, there was little need for lubricant. I used it anyway, the size of his penis made a little knot in my lower abdomen. Too big for me. I thought he might hurt. I squeezed the clear stickiness onto my palm and marveled at the distance traveled by my fist, each stroke a journey all the way from the tip to the flat of his belly which was surprisingly pale and soft, like something newborn and desperate for protection.

  I lay him on our bed, this man that I had wanted for so many weeks. I straddled his hips and settled myself down gently, only a small way.

  How could I take much more of him into me? I measured the uncharted territory with my hand. I would need both hands to cover it. I stroked the vulnerable length with my fingers, my hand an extension of my cunt, massaging all the length of him. With my other arm steadying myself I wondered how I would bring myself to orgasm without loosing my grip on him completely.

  The door was still open and there was Richard, standing in the doorway, grinning. I had brought him a prize, hunter-gatherer. It could have been anyone, a stranger on a bus, someone I met at work last night, anyone. He wasn’t to know that the soft groans from b
eneath me were the sweet chinking sounds of a jackpot paying out, the one I had wanted for so long.

  He joined us without introduction. His hand linking fingers with, then replacing, my own on the generous length of penis, my body impaled on top of it, slowly relaxing to consume more of it. I felt his fingers edging into me, stretching the flexible skin, thickening the load. I felt him reach up inside me with his spidery hand and measure the length to the tip of the cock, marveling (I assumed) at the size and shape of it.

  Then the fingers withdrew and I felt his tongue lapping around the boy, touching my clitoris briefly before making the long journey down to that tender pale flesh of the man’s belly. I kissed the boy. He had a sensual mouth, wide and warm. His spit tasted of oranges. His tongue was long and it pushed up between my teeth and the soft underside of my lips. I wasn’t sure if he had felt Richard’s arrival, if he knew that the soft squeezing pressure was not some internal muscular sex-worker’s trick, but the excited fingers of my lover. I had told him about Richard of course, warned him. If you find me at this address you will find Richard there as well. I kissed this new-found prize and there was a gentle pressure on my anus, a tentative testing with a fingertip followed by the cold nozzle of the lubricant and a sudden icy trickle shooting inside me, slipping around the edges, readying me for the next part of this strange dance.

  It is easy to disappear when there are two penises entering you. This is what I liked most about the double entry. As long as the smaller one is in the back there is barely any physical discomfort. It is easy to become a conduit, bringing the two men together, feeling them touch through the delicate internal membrane.

  There was no pressure for me to perform. The men performed for each other. I was free to watch them find each other’s mouths over the slight obstruction of my shoulder. When their tongues lapped, I was there to watch. I joined the kiss only so that my tongue could see like a snail’s probing feeler, sticky eye. I saw them exploring the wet cavities of each other’s mouths. I felt their cocks butt up against each other. I felt them change their rhythm so that their thrusting would be synchronized.

  They sucked my breasts, each tongue eager to prove itself more ardent. It was a competitive consumption of my body, their wrestling for position was half in earnest.

  Richard was triumphant in the battle because he was, as always, privileged to have my anus. The grip was tighter. The position was dripping with fascination for the other lover, who was forced to content himself with a more conventional entry. I felt the new lover reach around with his extraordinarily long arm just to check that Richard really was fucking my ass. I felt him stroke the sensitive muscle with his fingertips, slipping on lubricant, forming a perfect O around Richard’s penis. The extra pressure was too much for Richard. We felt the pulsing start, the two of us, this new lover and myself. We felt the uncontrollable spasms of his hips as he relinquished any thought of gentleness and pumped hard, forcing himself into me in a jerking rhythm.

  The new lover thrust his head backward to expose his throat. He was about to come, too. I tried to lift myself off him to attempt a subtle retreat, but Richard was still collapsed on my back, his hips twitching in an echo of his orgasm. The boy bucked forward and it hurt, but it was also, surprisingly, pleasurable. He thrust high and hard against the shrinking swell of Richard’s penis. I was flushed with the effort of taking him in. I felt the pumping of it stretching me and I pressed my thumb against my clitoris, scratched it back and forth. I wanted to come. When there was a new lover in my bed I never came. I would save it up for later when Richard and I could be alone and have more time to reflect. But this was my prize, the boy who made me spill milk, drop cups, fumble cakes into customers’ laps. This was that boy and he was hurting me in his uncontrollable pleasure and I climbed with him. Richard was still inside me and the contracting must have hurt him, too, because he winced, eased himself away.

  When we were done he held the base of our lover’s penis, keeping the condom on while he withdrew. He peeled it off the man and felt the length of him all slippery with sperm. He slipped his lips over the head and tasted. This was against the rules of course, but I watched him do it, felt the prickle of arousal begin anew. We could go again, the three of us. The possibility was in the air. We licked the taste of each other off our skin, gently. There was time. It was barely dark. There would be time for tea or wine, or perhaps some conversation. Although when I saw their mouths meet, teeth clinking awkwardly off each other, sharing the taste of our lover’s sperm, I felt my stomach lurch and I was not so sure that there would be time enough for chatter.

  LAURA

  Laura, like all the girls I worked with, was beautiful. They were hired for their blond hair and their beautiful figures. They were the honey for the customers and the customers came and sipped polite little glances over their macchiatos. Some afternoons when Laura played Nina Simone on the stereo she would clamber up onto the table and dance. She wore short skirts which she made from her own patterns and plunging necklines, and her breasts were about the best I had ever seen. When I told her how much I liked them she took both my hands in her own and pushed them onto her chest.

  “Feel them,” she said and I did. “Feel how hard and firm they are. My mother is sixty and she still has breasts like this. I get them from my mother.”

  I felt her breasts and her skin was so pale and beautiful and her hair fell like silk threads long to the bottom of her skirt. She brushed it on her breaks and I could feel how wonderfully soft it was before she rolled it up and pinned it in a flirty little bun on the top of her head. She had strong hands and strong legs and she was as short as I was, but tiny, with a waist that I could almost encircle in my hands.

  I didn’t like to be touched, but she walked straight up to me and stroked my shoulders and rubbed my neck and I found I liked it. She smelled sweet, like honeysuckle, and had an abrupt honesty that reminded me of me.

  “I like black men,” she said one day when the Somalian man had stood at the counter chatting over a short black. “I like their cocks. Big fat uncut cocks.”

  I told her about Richard and she laughed and said that it sounded like a beautiful relationship.

  “How do you do anal sex?” she asked. “I’ve tried but it hurts too much.”

  “Well you don’t do it with fat uncut cocks,” I explained.

  We became friends.

  “Will we ever sleep together?” I asked her one day when the shop was empty.

  “I don’t know. Do you sleep with girls? ”

  “I haven’t, but I’d like to.”

  “I think I’m heterosexual.”

  “I don’t believe in that stuff. We are just sexual, not one thing or another, just a preference, not a definite line.”

  “Well, I prefer boys.”

  If we slept together we might fight. But I liked her, and I liked her body. When she invited me back to her place, she took all her clothes off and plunged naked into the pool. When I joined her she hugged me, lifting her legs, wrapping them around my waist, pressing her perfect breasts against my own, which seemed saggy in comparison. She compared our bodies without any hint of shyness. She pointed to her pink nipples and my brown ones. She held her pale and lightly freckled skin up to my sallow flesh, so oily and brown when I sat in the sun for any length of time. I found that it was enough just to touch her. She opened her thighs to me and made me shave her pubic hair and I touched her labia.

  “I get so wet. Feel that,” and slipped my finger inside along with her own.

  I masturbated, dreaming of her labia or her breasts or her hair, but it was never the whole person. I loved her too much to break whatever special thing had grown between us. She was always chasing after one boy or another and we shared our stories and touched and experimented with drugs occasionally but without much commitment.

  She watched me leave work with one man after another.

  “I admire the way you can do that,” she said to me one day.

  “What?”


  “Just have sex for the sake of it. I always have to invent some kind of undying love.”

  It was true, she was tormented by her lovers, who played with her affections. She was always just recovering or just falling. It seemed so poetic, and yet so tiring. I was glad for the safe haven of my life with Richard, and for the day-to-day excitement of the next man, and the next.

  THE VIRGIN

  It was a fishbowl, the café we worked in. Punters rushed, flinging money across the shiny metal counter. I spilled coffee on them in return, anemic coffee, mostly milk, froth like hairdos used to be, high, air-filled. Crap coffee. They weren’t paying us enough.

  “They’re not paying us enough,” he told me, the boy who pulled the coffees, and I agreed.

  He was gay. He didn’t know it, but he was gay.

  “I don’t know if I’m gay,” he’d say when we dragged ourselves out into the oily inner-city air and filled our lungs with the thick sludge of nicotine and gas fumes. I’d roll my eyes.

  “My partner’s gay,” I told him, which just confused him. The very idea of sex was complex enough for him. Now he had layer upon layer of complications for his imagination to deal with. He puffed away on his cigarette and glanced at me, an accusation.

  “I’ll never find love,” he moaned. “I’m too shy. I’ll never go to bed with anybody, ever. I can’t even have a conversation with someone in a bar.”

  I took him to a bar. We had a conversation.

  “See?” I told him. “Easier than you knew.”

  Later, after, I didn’t kiss him. I knew him from the fishbowl; he was a friend of mine. He laughed because he had never been naked with anyone before and he was nervous. I laughed because we might have been drinking tea together or baking scones. Richard wasn’t laughing. I could feel the slight tremor in his hand as he stroked my friend’s solid hip with his fingertips. I had always brought straight boys home for us to play with. Now there was this man, my friend, my virgin gay offering.