Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  She told him to wait. We would wait for Laura to come around after work.

  The boy leaned back in his chair and locked eyes with me and lifted an eyebrow. I knew what he meant and he knew that I knew and I had found an unexpected ally in all of this. I could already see us down at the pub with a postcoital beer, discussing the ins and outs of the thing, comparing notes as if we had just sat through a game of football.

  When we were finally in bed, he gave me a wink as if to say, “How good is this?” It was indeed fine. The girls were like unwrapped presents, pink and drenched in perfume and with hair that spilled out over each other’s chests. Every part of them was fragranced. Each strand of hair dripping sweetness, the smooth shaved skin under their arms, the underside of the necks, both blooming with scent.

  I would be a contrast to them. I would underline their femininity with my musky skin. My nipples olive, my flesh a dirty tan, my hair too rough and wiry to run fingers through. I kissed them each in turn, soft kisses scented with Cointreau, orange blossom tongues, the hard line of their teeth, and suddenly it was his mouth against mine. The boy that we could all tolerate. A battle of lips and cheeks and the roughness of his re-emerging stubble. He measured the generous bulk of my breasts in his palms and I wondered suddenly if he had chosen my mouth because I was a relief amongst this paradise of girl-flesh. He moved behind me and he was inside me in a second. I suppose I was the easiest beginning for him. I was his place of entry and he took it. No preamble, no negotiation, just a sliding inside, a reaching over my shoulder. In this position he would not be in my way, and I returned to the promise of breasts, with an animal urge to suckle, an overpowering need to bite down on the pillowy swell. I felt his finger pinch the flesh that I was licking, I felt a thumb in my mouth. He was reading my actions like Braille, touching the hard nipple, the soft wetness of my tongue. He was there at the point of our connection. He entered me and I entered her, just a finger at first but I was surprised by the moisture, a deluge. She was so wet and pink and open to me and I wanted to be inside her. I arched my back and bent my head down and she filled up my senses. I pressed my fingers together as if I were about to dive and some of them slipped inside her as I traced the little protrusion of her clitoris. The boy behind me pushed with a rhythm that was not mine and I shoved back at him, as if trying to kick aside the annoyance of a puppy, bouncing and spilling things. I had completely lost track of Laura but she was there somewhere, doing something. It didn’t matter to me. I was buried in Jessica.

  And then . . .

  My face felt a cold rush of air and the girl was gone. She had slipped out from under me. I felt the void rushing toward me, like when you are small and you lie on your back on the grass and look up at the night sky contemplating the size of the universe. The disappointment of her loss was universal. I couldn’t be sure what had occurred but they were gone, both of them, the girls. There was just me and him and he didn’t even pause in his pounding. The hot space where her body had been touching mine turned icy in a second. I kneeled in the bed and watched them leave the room as the boy continued to grunt and sweat and paw at me.

  I strained to listen to the conversation playing out in the kitchen. I wouldn’t be able to come. I knew that this thudding of bodies had nothing to do with my pleasure. I wanted to be in the kitchen with the girl talk, but there was this boy and the disappointment of a plan abandoned and I settled back into the comfort of simple, uncomplicated girl-on-boy coupling.

  I turned over and brought my feet up onto his chest and felt the place where his penis connected with my flesh, pressed the palm of my hand hard onto my clitoris. My hand smelled of her. My hand was wet with her. I covered my face with one hand and there was her pink sex open to me and my tongue snaking out onto my fingers to taste her and I came so violently that he was forced to dig his fingers into my hips to hold his place.

  He spasmed and he was coming and in the hazy place after an orgasm I fumbled vaguely for a name to call him by. He opened his mouth and would have spoken, but I held a finger to my lips.

  We rolled apart and listened. It felt as if we were having an affair and the wives were in the next room drinking tea and debriefing (endlessly debriefing) what we had begun together but were finishing without them. We dressed quietly and when we stood in the door of the kitchen we could tell there had been tears and talking, but they glared at us, red eyes dry, mouths stitched shut. They pulled their satiny robes around their soft pink bodies. I wondered why I didn’t have a satiny robe. I sat beside the tolerable boy and listened as they explained the impossibility of it all to us. We nodded and made calming sounds, little grunts and sighs that made us seem understanding and sympathetic. They started from the beginning and explained it all again and again but none of it made any sense.

  We had done something wrong. Something had happened to contravene some rule or another. I tried to think back to the moment when it all fell apart, but all I could see was her sex, wet and open and the scent of fruit and flowers and something more true and earthy hidden beneath it.

  “It’s not a particular thing,” Laura told me. “It’s just the energy of it.”

  I caught Jessica’s eyes, expecting a knowing a cknowledgment of what had passed between us, but there was just fire and steel and silence.

  “But what exactly went wrong?” I was confused. “What actually happened?”

  They looked toward each other, exasperated, and shook their heads to show that I would never understand even though it was perfectly obvious.

  Eventually I yawned. “I should walk him to his car.” I rested a sympathetic hand on both of their shoulders. They said nothing.

  I would never understand the complicated pattern of quickly shifting emotional threads that girls spin quick as spiderweb. I would never be a real girl. Not like these girls.

  “I feel like a beer,” I told him when the door was safely shut behind us, “and a cigarette.”

  He nodded. “The pub’s just down the road.”

  We sat at the pub and I lit his cigarette from the end of mine and we drank beer.

  “Well, that was something,” he said, and I grinned.

  We sat and drank beer and said nothing until I remembered something I’d read in the paper about experiments with rats and mazes, and he had read it, too. We talked about that until our glasses were empty. We hugged awkwardly, like blokes hug, stiff bodies bouncing off each other, and then he got in his car and drove home. I tried, but I couldn’t remember his name.

  “I’ll see you later then,” I told him.

  “Yeah, matey. See you then,” he said.

  THE GIRL I ONCE LOVED

  Something had subtly changed. We still cooked elaborate dinners. We still dressed in evening gowns and set the table with candles. We still went to work at the café and shared our shifts, one of them or another crowded beside me in a cramped space, but it was different now. I watched her more closely. She knew she was being watched and played a fascinating game.

  She invited me to bathe with her. I lowered myself into the scented bubbles with shaking hands but she kept her knees clamped tight against her chest and I only caught glimpses of her. She barely spoke a word to me the whole time we were soaking.

  We were asked to be in a music video and the director told me to reach over to her, to fondle her breasts and then to kiss her. I couldn’t seem to pull away when the director yelled cut.

  Sometimes when we were walking in the street, a boy would pass us on the other footpath and she would reach for my hand, or nuzzle into my shoulder or even kiss me with her lips parted, locking her fingers into the crazy wire of my hair until the boy was out of sight and she could walk on without comment.

  I watched her when she wandered down the hill to the city, the sunlight outlining her legs under her white skirt. I watched her sit in front of the television with her knees lolling wide and a little damp line at the center of her pristine white panties. I admired her, I was envious of her, I wanted to be her. And I wante
d to fuck her.

  One day she came to me. There was sunlight on my bed. It touched my naked legs and I noticed that it didn’t reach to where she was stretched out in the dark. Strange that I was all lit up and she was not. On any ordinary day her beauty cast a shadow that obliterated me. We were side by side and we hadn’t really touched since that night.

  My skin was heated in a sun pattern. I settled my knee against hers. She didn’t shift away. My hand was close to her buttons and I touched one with my finger. I struggled it through the tight enclosure of the buttonhole. When it was open I eased my finger into the space, feathered it back and forth. Maybe she felt the gentle rustle of it so close to the swell of her breast.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t shift away when I eased my fingers upward to where another button held the delicate fabric closed across the generous proportions of her breasts. I eased her shirt away and her bra was revealed, thick and delicate as an orchid, her flesh rising above the albino petals.

  I unbuttoned my own shirt and gazed down at the inconsistencies of our flesh. Her pale and delicately scented breasts. My generous dark oiled flesh. I wondered if I would ever tire of comparing myself to her.

  I eased the cups of my bra down and there were my brown nipples, enlarged areolas, the tight nubs clenched at their peaks. I wished I had thought to pluck away the scattering of dark hairs before revealing myself to her.

  She still hadn’t moved. I looked to her face, the heavy-lidded eyes gazing down toward those now-erect stray hairs. She hadn’t asked me to stop but she hadn’t invited my attentions either.

  I wanted to show her what to do. I wanted to lead by example. I clutched one of my breasts in my fist and raised it out of the loose droop of my bra cup. I bent my head toward it and I licked the nipple so she could see the flesh grow taut. The nipple ached out toward the touch of tongue like an accusing finger. I took it all into my mouth. I suckled, a show for her, a demonstration. She could lean down and lick it, too, alongside my own mouth. She could replace my attentions with her own. I lifted both of my breasts toward her mouth, so close that her breathing disturbed the fine pale hairs that lined the swell of them. If she were to yawn she would swallow a nipple, but her mouth remained firmly closed. She sighed and settled closer to me. I felt her hips brush mine. My knee was caressed by the fine swell of her calf. She raised her legs.

  My hands released my breasts back into their holdings. My fingers traveled the swell of my stomach and touched the elastic of my panties. Her crotch was somewhere down there. I stretched my index finger out and there was the tight press of white cotton, slightly damp but perfectly laundered.

  She nestled closer, pushed her crotch against my fingers, closed her eyes and settled where she was within reach of my shivery finger. It was all I could do not to tear away the pretty white cotton, but I restrained myself. I eased my finger under the elastic. She was wet; I felt the same pleasure at this discovery as I had in our brief tussle with the chosen boy.

  I wondered whether I dared shuffle down her body and taste the nectar once more. My mouth watered at the thought of it. Her breath was sweet, her skin was sweet, her hair was sweet. I was hoping that her cunt would add a savory edge to a palette that was otherwise all pales and pinks and sugary pastel hues. I moved my fingers into the nest of fine cropped hair. I imagined she trimmed it with scissors. It was so fine and neat, manicured like expensive lawn. I opened her as I had opened her buttons, easing my fingers under the delicate fabric of her skin, fluttering my finger back and forth, making space for the rude invasion of my own flesh. She opened to me, moist and soft and I remembered that she would be seashell pink like the inside of some spidery white mollusc. My tongue itched for mussels, oysters, pipis.

  The phone rang. She opened her eyes and stretched and my finger was abandoned to the harsh cold Sunday afternoon air. I shifted back away from the darkness into the spotting of sunlight. She rolled off my king-size bed and I heard her little bird voice from the next room as she answered the phone.

  “Hello? No, nothing much. Now’s good.”

  I sniffed my finger, licked it. Sweet. She was sweet. There was no hint of a base note. She was all sugar, all the way through. I shuffled over into the darkness where I smelled her sweat and perfume sweet on the pillow and I curled my damp finger around a single, abandoned, blond hair.

  THE STRAIGHT GIRL

  There was, of course, her boyfriend. I think he knew that she was flirting with the idea of a lesbian lover. He glared at me jealously across the dinner table whenever we were alone together. There was rarely any conversation between us. Sometimes he would talk about the Living Game and about how only the unenlightened would refuse to take part in it. He kissed her in front of me, open-mouthed.

  One afternoon I was reading Alice in Wonderland naked in her bed. She was barely clothed. It was summer and our clothes were abandoned by the doorway. I felt her held breath close against the bare skin of my breast. My nipple pulled tighter, inching closer to her slightly parted lips.

  I was all wound up. I was reading to her and wondering if we would make love. I needed to make love. This time, I thought, this time we would definitely make love. Then there were his footsteps on the stairs and he was with us.

  He had never seen me naked before. She had been naked with us, dripping out from a shower with her hair all dark with scent and water. He had once lifted her onto the kitchen bench and then there was that thing he did with the Lebanese cucumber and I watched, pretending this was the sort of display that all my roommates had treated me to. But he had never seen me even partially unclothed. Now, he was watching from the doorway.

  I sensed her turn toward him like a sunflower photosynthesizing. She never turned like that in my direction. The few times that we had made our odd uncompleted kind of love, it had been all me. She might sigh and part her thighs just a little farther, making those little dove sounds at the back of her throat that made me want to bite down on the pillow, tear the sheets, force myself into the perfect peaches and cream of her skin.

  So—the sunflower thing, the gentle movement of her body, and there at the apex of her attentions was the boy. Looking at me naked for the first time, my body pressed close to hers, my nipple almost, but not quite, entering her mouth, the pages of Alice closing, dropping to the bed beside me.

  There was a leveling up, a squaring off. I know I settled my shoulders more firmly on the bed. It was her bed, smaller than my own but with nicer sheets and the scent of roses. I held my ground and he held his, pulling up straighter in his casual lean, filling his chest with air, tensing his shoulders just a little, making him look stronger than he had a moment before. All this alpha stuff that we share with dogs and lions and rats. We might have stayed that way all night if she hadn’t snuggled just that little bit closer, latching on to my breast like a suckling child, with that full red pout of her lips that both of us had kissed at one time or another.

  He took his clothes off. He settled down beside her, pressing his hips into her. I might have rolled away then and left them, but she was licking my breast and cooing like she did and I knew she wanted me to stay. I wanted to stay. I wanted to leave. I saw him lift her thigh and slide himself into her and I felt an acid burn of jealousy rage through me. I was her show and tell. I was here for her to wave before him and as he started to push himself into her in a rhythm, I hooked glances with him and I could see that same jealous spark burning in him like lust.

  He fucked her, and I was aroused by the fucking. I stretched my finger toward her delicate pink cunt and I felt his penis entering her, bare, no condom anywhere to be felt and I remember thinking that I would never let him ride me bareback. I would have to be certain of his fidelity before I opened myself up to that kind of risk. He went to the sex seminars. He played with nonmonogamy. How could she let him be inside her like that, pumping his diseased juices into something so sweet and clean and perfect?

  But there was excitement in that kind of risk. I held my fist against my clit
oris and rubbed against it. I inserted my fingers into her alongside his penis. I felt his rhythm and timed my own movements to it. When he paused I was close to coming. I kept on at it. I pushed my fingers into myself and rubbed myself and moved my fingers into and out of her. I felt his penis tighten and then pulse. I came. My head kicked back and I squeezed my eyes shut and I wondered if the openness at the moment of orgasm was some animal signal of submission.

  When it was over I slid my hand out of her. I couldn’t tell if she had come to orgasm. All my attention had been diverted to the palpitations of my own flesh. My fingers were coated in stickiness. It might have been her juices, but perhaps there was some of his semen on them. I wiped them on the sheets. I stood and gathered my clothes and I was at the door when I heard him.

  “Sorry,” he said to her. “I couldn’t stop myself. Someone was moving.”

  Someone moved now. Down the stairs and into the bathroom and under the scalding heat of the shower I rubbed at the paint stains on my fingers until my nails gleamed and my fingers were prunes.

  PICNIC IN A VACANT LOT

  I needed to see other people, I thought. I needed to stop obsessively following Jessica from work to home to the supermarket to her bed. I needed a romantic project. I had seen this boy at the restaurant where he worked and I liked the look of him. There was perhaps a moment of flirtation. I wrote the address on a note card. Meet me at—a time and a place. Dress: Formal and had it delivered to him by one of the other staff. High romance.