One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed

by Melissa P.

  This is obviously the bad news.

  He didn’t give me any time to respond, to make him aware of my uncertainties, my misgivings. What he’s done seems so rash to me. I had intended to go to bed with him one more time and then arrivederci and grazie. I don’t want to become the lover of some married man with a daughter to support! I don’t want him, his apartment, his gigantic screen for porno films; I don’t want him to buy my complaisance as if he were buying his high-tech gadgets. I’ve suffered enough with Daniele and the arrogant angel, and now, just as I’m restarting my life on my own terms, this fat, necktie-wearing ogre comes along and tells me he wants to commit himself sexually to me. Yet punishment always hovers over our heads, the sharpened point of the sword is poised there, ready to pierce our skulls when we least expect it. The sword will strike him as well, because I shall seize the hilt.

  Now for the good news.

  The phone call arrived and ended punctually.

  I was naked, sitting on the floor, my skin touching the cold marble in my room. As I held the phone, the voice I longed to hear reached me fluid and sensual. He told me one of his fantasies. We were in a classroom, and I was following one of his lessons. At a certain point, I asked him if I could go to the bathroom, and on my way out I gave him a note that contained two words: “Follow me.” I was waiting for him in the bathroom; when he arrived, he ripped open my blouse. With the tip of his finger, he gathered some of the drops that dribbled from the tap in the sink and dabbed them on my chest, where they slowly trickled down. Then he lifted my short pleated skirt and penetrated me, as I leaned against the wall and gathered his pleasure into my viscera. The droplets were still trickling down my body, wetting it, leaving thin trails on my skin. We regained our composure and returned to the classroom, where from the first row I followed the chalk flowing across the blackboard in the same way that he was flowing inside me.

  We touched ourselves while on the phone. My sex was swollen as never before, and Lethe was flooding the Secret in waves. My fingers were impregnated with me, but also with him, I felt him close by, despite the circumstances, I felt his warmth, smelled his scent, imagined his taste.

  At 10:15 he said, “Good night, Lo.”

  “Good night, Professor.”

  20 February 2002

  There are days when I don’t know whether to stop breathing once and for all or to suffer recurrent attacks of apnoea for the rest of my life. Days when I breathe beneath the covers and gulp down my tears and discern their taste on my tongue. I awake with my bed a mess, my hair unkempt, my skin violated. Naked, before the mirror, I examine my body. I perceive a tear fall from my eye to my cheek; I wipe it away with a finger and scratch myself slightly on the jaw with a fingernail. I pass my hands through my hair, draw it back, pull a face, just to be likable to myself, to laugh at myself. But I don’t succeed, I want to cry, I want to punish myself.

  I head for the top drawer of the dresser. First I scrutinize everything inside it, then carefully select what I must wear. I place all the garments on the bed, folded, and shift the mirror to a position that faces me. I again examine my body. The muscles are still taut, although the skin is soft and smooth, pure white like a baby’s. And I am a baby. I sit on the edge of the bed and slip into the stockings, pointing my foot, sliding the thin veil over the skin till the lace band reaches the thigh, exerting a slight pressure. Then it’s time for the corset, black silk with lace and ribbons. It encircles my bust and tapers my waist, which is already quite thin, accentuating my hips even more, making them too shapely, too curvaceous and buttery for men to refrain from releasing their bestiality there. The breasts are still small: they are firm, white, round; they can fit in a hand and warm it with their heat. The corset is tight, the breasts are squeezed close together. This still isn’t the moment to examine myself. I put on shoes with stiletto heels, slipping in the foot as far as the ankle, and I feel my short stature suddenly gain a few inches. I go to the bathroom, take the red lipstick, and colour my soft, succulent lips; then I thicken the eyelashes with mascara, comb the long, sleek hair, and spray the perfume that sits above the mirror, three times. I return to my room. There I shall see the person who thrills me deeply, body and soul. I examine myself, enchanted, eyes glistening, nearly in tears. A special light sketches the contour of my body, and my hair falling gently on my shoulders invites my caress. The hand falls slowly from the hair, toward the neck, almost unawares; it caresses the delicate skin, and two fingers encompass the circumference, pressing gently. I hear the sound of pleasure, still virtually imperceptible. The hand descends a bit farther and begins to caress the smooth hair. The baby attired as a woman appears before me. Her eyes burn with desire (for what? sex? love? real life?). The baby is sole mistress of herself. Her fingers slip into the folds of her sex, and the heat makes a shudder rise to her head. A thousand sensations invade me.

  “You’re mine,” I murmur, and at once the excitement takes over my desire.

  I bite my lip with perfect white teeth, the dishevelled hair makes my back sweat, pearly beads adorn my body.

  I pant, the sighs increase … I close my eyes, my body ripples with spasms, my mind is free and takes wing. My knees buckle, my breathing is laboured, my tongue passes wearily over my lips. I open my eyes and smile at the baby. I draw close to the mirror and offer her a long, intense kiss. My breath fogs the glass.

  I feel alone, abandoned. I feel like a planet around which three different stars are now orbiting: Letizia, Fabrizio, and the Professor. Three stars keep me company in my thoughts, but not in reality.

  21 February

  I accompanied my mother to the veterinarian to have my kitten examined. He suffers from a slight case of asthma. He meowed softly, frightened by the doctor’s gloved hands; I caressed his head, consoling him with sweet words.

  In the car my mother asked me how school was going and what was happening with the boys. I gave vague responses to both questions. At this point, I ordinarily lie; it would feel strange if I stopped.

  I asked her to come with me to my maths tutor’s house, since it was time for a lesson.

  “I’d be delighted. I’m finally getting to meet him!” she said with enthuasiasm.

  I didn’t respond because I didn’t want her to suspect anything. Besides, I was certain that Valerio was expecting to meet my mother sooner or later.

  This time, fortunately, his clothes were more presentable, but strangely, when my mother asked me to escort her back to the elevator, she said, “I don’t like him. He’s got the face of a pervert.”

  I gestured dismissively and told her he’d only be giving me maths lessons, we weren’t going to get married. My mother has this obsession about knowing people from their faces; it’s something that really gets on my nerves!

  Once the door was closed, Valerio hurried me to get my notebook and start immediately. We didn’t say a word about the phone call, nothing but cubes, squares, binomials … His eyes were so impenetrable as to leave me in doubt. What if he made that phone call just to mock me? What if I didn’t matter at all to him, if he just wanted an orgasm over the phone? I was expecting some sign, a brief exchange, something!

  Then, while he was handing me the notebook, he looked at me as if he had understood everything and said, “Don’t make any plans for Saturday night. And don’t get dressed till I call you.”

  I stared at him, astonished, but I didn’t say anything. Trying to feign an absurd indifference to his words, I opened the notebook and saw what he had written. Amid the x’s and y’s in tiny letters I read:

  I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise – a paradise whose skies were the colour of hell-flames – but still a paradise. Professor Humbert

  Once more I did not speak. We said goodbye, and he reminded me again about the appointment. As if I could ever forget about it …

  22 February

  At one pm I received a call from Letizia, who asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her. I answered yes, partly because I didn’t have e
nough time to return home: the rehearsal for the play would begin at 3:30. I longed to see her; at night I often thought about her before going to sleep.

  In person she was even more beautiful, more real. I watched her soft hands pour the wine and then immediately examined mine which, thanks to the cold I brave every morning on the scooter, had turned red and chapped like an ape’s.

  She talked to me about everything; in an hour she managed to tell me her entire life. She talked about her family: her mother, who had died prematurely; her father, who had emigrated to Germany; and her sister, whom she rarely sees since her marriage. She told me about her teachers, her years at school and the university, her hobbies, her job.

  I gazed at her eyebrows and was overwhelmed with the desire to kiss her. Eyebrows are such bizarre things! Letizia’s move with her eyes and are so lovely as to induce you to kiss their perfection, then descend to her face, her cheeks, her mouth … Now, Diary, I do know I desire her. I desire her warmth, her skin, her hands, her saliva, her whispery voice. I would like to caress her head, visit her island and breathe in its air, thrill every inch of her body. And yet I obviously feel blocked, it’s such a new thing for me, and I certainly can’t pretend that she is experiencing the same sensations, or perhaps she does have them but I’ll never know. She looked at me and moistened her lips; her look was ironic, and I felt myself surrender. Not to her, but to my whims.

  “Do you want to make love, Melissa?” she asked me as I sipped some wine.

  I placed my glass on the table, looked at her, unsettled, and nodded my assent.

  “But you’ll have to teach me.”

  Teach me how to make love with a woman or teach me how to love? Perhaps the two things compensate for each other…

  23 February

  5:45 am

  Saturday night or, better, Sunday morning, since the night has already passed, and the sky has brightened. I feel happy, Diary: my body is saturated with such euphoria, although becalmed by a sensation of utter bliss; a sweet, unbroken tranquillity engulfs me completely. Tonight I learned that letting yourself go with someone you like, someone who overwhelms your senses, is a sacred thing. It’s then that sex ceases to be merely sex and begins to be love, while nuzzling the scented skin on his back or caressing his strong, soft shoulders or smoothing his hair.

  Not for nothing was I agitated: I knew what I was about to do. I knew I was deceiving my parents. I was getting into a car with a twenty-seven-year-old guy I scarcely knew, an attractive maths teacher, someone who inflamed my senses. I waited for him outside the house, beneath the awesome pine tree, and I saw his green car slowly approach. He wore a scarf around his neck, and the reflection from his glasses thrilled me. Contrary to what he said a few days ago, I didn’t wait for him to instruct me on what I should wear. I chose the lingerie from the top drawer, put it on, and then donned a little black dress. I looked at myself in the mirror and pulled a face, thinking I was missing something. I slipped my hands under the dress and slid down my panties. I smiled, whispered, “Now you’re perfect,” and blew myself a kiss.

  When I left the house, I felt the cold seep under the dress, and the surly wind grazed my bare sex. After I’d got into the car, the Professor looked at me with bright, enchanted eyes and said to me, “You didn’t put on what I asked you to wear.”

  I directed my gaze toward the road before me and replied, “I know: disobeying teachers is what I do best.”

  He gave me a slightly noisy kiss on the cheek, and we set off for a secret place.

  I kept running my fingers through my hair. He may have thought it was tension, but it was really desire. The desire to have him there, at once, without any preliminaries. I don’t know what we talked about during the journey because my mind was fixated on the thought of possessing him. I looked at his eyes as he drove. I like his eyes: they’re intriguing, magnetic, with long, black lashes. I noticed that he cast furtive glances at me, but I acted as if nothing were happening. Then we arrived at Paradiso, or perhaps the Inferno, depending on your point of view. His car continued down deserted, narrow streets that seemed impossible to navigate. We passed a dilapidated church covered with ivy and moss, and Valerio told me, “Keep an eye on your left: you’ll see a fountain; the next turn is the place.”

  I peered down the street, hoping to spot the fountain inside the dark labyrinth.

  “There it is!” I exclaimed a little too loudly.

  He switched off the engine before a rusty green gate, and the headlights illuminated some words written on it. My eyes rested on two names inserted in a heart so shakily drawn that it seemed to be quivering: Valerio and Melissa.

  I looked at him, stunned, and pointed out what I read.

  He smiled and said, “I can’t believe it!” Then he turned toward me and whispered, “You see? We’re written in the stars.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant. Nonetheless, the “we” reassured me and made me feel part of a team where the members were matched instead of mismatched like me and the mirror.

  I was afraid of this paradise: it was dark, steep, almost unattainable, especially since I was wearing boots with very high heels. I tried to catch hold of him as fast as possible; I wanted to feel his warmth. We kept on stumbling over stones. On those dark, narrow, walled-in streets the only visible thing was the sky, tonight dense with stars, and the moon coming and going, playing just as we were. I don’t know why, but this place filled me with gloomy, macabre sensations. Stupidly, or perhaps legitimately, I thought that somewhere nearby a black mass was unfolding, and I was the designated victim. Hooded men would bind me to a table, I would be surrounded by candles and candelabra, they would rape me one by one and finally kill me, using a dagger with a sharp, sinuous blade. But I trusted him; perhaps these thoughts were due to my absorption in the magic of the moment.

  The alley that provoked such fears led us to a clearing that juts out over the sea. You could hear the waves foaming on the shore. There were huge rocks, white and smooth: I immediately imagined the purpose they could serve. As we approached each other, we stumbled yet again. He pulled me closer to him, drawing me to his face. Our lips grazed without kissing, as we inhaled our scents and listened to our breathing. We joined and devoured our lips, sucking and biting them. Our tongues met: his was hot and soft; it caressed my mouth like a feather, making me tremble. The kisses turned red-hot till he asked if he could touch me, if it was time. Yes, I replied, now’s the time. When he discovered I wasn’t wearing panties, he froze, and for a few seconds he remained motionless before my bare flesh. Then I noticed his pressure, as he began to massage my erupting volcano. He told me he wanted to taste me.

  I sat on one of the enormous rocks, and his tongue caressed my sex as a mother’s hand caresses a newborn’s cheek: slowly, gently. The pleasure I experienced was continuous, relentless, dense and fragile at the same time. I was melting.

  He rose and kissed me, and I tasted my juices on his mouth, and they tasted sweet. I had already brushed against his member numerous times and felt it hard and meaty beneath his jeans. I unbuttoned them, and he offered me his penis. I’d never been with a circumcised man before; I didn’t know the glans would already be exposed. It was like a velvet tip, smooth and soft, and I couldn’t help but approach it.

  I rose, and drawing close to his ear, I whispered, “Fuck me.”

  He too wanted it, and as I was rising from my kneeling position, he asked me where I had learned to give head like that. My serpentine tongue had driven him crazy.

  He asked me to lie face down against the rock, my buttocks in full view. Then he examined them, a bizarre gesture to my mind, yet sensing his gaze upon my curves really excited me. I awaited the first thrust, my hands placed on the cold, smooth stone. He approached and aimed for the target. I wanted him to tell me how I was offering myself to him: a little slut who never gets enough. I uttered a moan of assent that accompanied an abrupt, well-positioned thrust. Then I separated myself from that pleasing puzzle, and gazing at hi
m imploringly, wanting to feel him inside me again, I told him that pausing a few minutes would intensify our pleasures.

  “Let’s go back to the car,” I said. “We’ll be more comfortable there.”

  We again traversed the dark labyrinth, but this time I wasn’t afraid. My body was being traversed by a thousand sprites that delighted in chasing after each other and making me feel by turns distressed and euphoric, ineffably euphoric. Before climbing back into the car, I again observed the names written on the gate and smiled, letting him get inside first. Right away I stripped, completely; I wanted every cell of our bodies, our skin, to touch and share exciting new sensations. I straddled him and began to ride him ardently, alternating gentle, rhythmic thrusts with ones that were abrupt, hard, grinding. As I licked and kissed him, I heard him moan. His moans were killing me, I lost control. It’s easy to lose control with him.

  “We are two masters,” he said at a certain point. “How shall one be forced to submit to the other?”

  “Two masters,” I answered, “who fuck and take turns enjoying themselves.”

  I machine-gunned several sharp thrusts, and magically I seized the very pleasure I thought no man could ever give me, the pleasure that I alone was able to procure myself. I felt spasms everywhere, in my sex, my legs, my arms, even on my face. My entire body was electrified. He removed his sweater, and I felt his naked, hairy torso, burning hot on my creamy breasts. I rubbed my nipples against that marvellous discovery, caressing it with both hands, making it all mine.

  I got off his body, and he told me, “Touch it with your finger.”

  I did, astonished, and saw his member weep. Instinctively my mouth drew near, and I swallowed the sweetest, most sugary sperm I had ever tasted.

  He hugged me for a few moments, and for those moments, which seemed infinite to me, I felt as if I had everything. Then he tenderly rested my head on the seat while I was still naked, curled up and lit by the moon.