Now that he’d said it, held nothing back, Isabella would leave him with his cock dancing in the air. Something prevented him from seizing his straining dick, which beseeched the stale bar-room air like a blind man extending his cane over a bluff. One clench of his fist and Orlando would add to the stains on the floor, he hovered that close to the edge of primal fulfilment. Isabella hadn’t told him not to touch himself, though she often commanded him in bed. Orlando himself was never comfortable articulating what he wanted done to his body, and he graciously accepted what was offered. But right now he wanted his satisfaction – if she planned to give him any – to come at her hands, the gift of her body. He’d had enough of his own fist since she kicked him out a month ago.
As Isabella brought up the rhythm section behind him, the logistical success of this joint venture amazed Orlando. But, then again, they’d always enjoyed the challenge of different body sizes. He tended to forget how small she was. Her ass gave her such solidity, a gravity-hugging mass – like a steel girder that holds up a delicate bridge, one of those impossible pieces of architecture that tourists traverse the world to see – that he often forgot that his long fingers could nearly span her petite waist. Sometimes when he spied her tiny shoes kicked off at the front door, he wondered who’d come to visit.
Isabella’s ass. Now there was a show fit for stadium concerts. Forget the rules about facing the audience. Her magnificent flesh danced in multiple directions when she moved. Some law of physics or aerodynamics caused one hemisphere of her buttocks to return from movement while an opposing quarter gained momentum in the opposite direction, the way two stones tossed in a pond throw concentric circles into delirium. Her gluteals were like tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface, the mountains above them trembling and quaking when they shifted.
When Orlando was still a young man, years before Isabella backed her ancient Cadillac into his Toyota, one of his dates had blubbered over the televised royal wedding of the worthless second-in-line son to the worthless British throne. Somewhere in her tears Orlando saw the crushed belief that even though the first-born prince had escaped her, the second son had still roamed in her fantasies as a distinct possibility. She, an American. From Detroit. He had waited impatiently for the “I Do’s” so they could head to dinner. And then he’d caught sight of the bride’s well-padded ass behind an oversized satin bow. He could have watched the princess march up the aisle for miles. He wanted to reach up inside her gown and caress those buttocks, to crawl after that fanny through the church and into eternity with his hands groping. Her ass wasn’t even that big, except in comparison to Barbie dolls like her new sister-in-law. When radio deejays made cruel Mount Everest and Twin Peaks remarks about her behind, Orlando knew that not one of those men voicing loud derision over the princess’s flanks would turn down the chance to feel her ass bouncing against his belly, his cock lost in the valleys only mountains like hers could provide. A guy’s dick could seem awfully small and insignificant rutting around a generous ass, and Orlando suspected their taunting was born of that insecurity. Orlando thanked whatever cosmic force had blessed him with the long and narrow cock ideal for such excavating, a highly evolved instrument honed for intricate manoeuvres.
Orlando and his date never did get to dinner that night. They ordered in, and he had barbecued rump roast right in her bed. It wasn’t the start of a fetish, exactly, or even an obsession. Orlando liked women of all sizes – but big-hipped women became synonymous with royalty in his plebeian mind. That bow on a princess’s palatial behind tied a permanent knot around his preference, and he remained married to the idea of someday finding his own monarchical mounds to worship.
But Orlando soon learned that these splendid endomorphs didn’t crave worship of the twin-buttressed cathedrals on their backsides. Rather, they wished to crush these sacred temples, as ancient peoples had smashed shrines glorifying opposing religions. They wanted to destroy these icons of femininity, praying for the holiness of honed and toned hind-ends. They wanted him not to pay homage to the bouncing, mirrored embodiment of his faith, but to ignore them, converting to a belief in lean and inhospitable flanks.
When the princess crash dieted later on and became the spokesperson for a diet product, Orlando composed a dirge. Her lost flesh symbolized the war waged upon the tortured landscape of women’s asses, a genocidal campaign for the extermination of something holy. His lovers all felt rotten about not being Twiggy. He craved the sight of their haunches wriggling, but these ripe, succulent women extinguished the lights and crawled under the covers, face up in the dark. Which is why, with the passage of years, he seldom followed through on his attraction for them. He swore them off, a gluteal abstinence, the way friends with wheat allergies had given up gluten. Their constant need for reassurance wore him down. They vacuumed up his repeated compliments, and then ceased to believe them precisely because of their repetition. Ah, the trickiness of words.
Then Isabella had climbed out of her mammoth automobile a few years ago after reversing into his hatchback. When she leaned across the seat to dig her insurance card out of the glove box, her derrière sticking out of the car door, Orlando swooned. Such an ass could sing opera. No little Mimi or Butterfly pining for her straying dude, either, but a ferocious and tender Turandot demanding the severed heads of unworthy suitors. Orlando stuttered so ferociously when she approached that Isabella thought he’d had a concussion from the minor accident. He’d bruised his forehead on the steering wheel with her lurch into reverse, yes – but all he wanted was to smash his face against those cheeks, just the way his hood had crumpled under the staggering weight of the Cadillac’s trunk. He wanted bumper imprints ground into his deliriously smiling front grille. He reminded himself that he had given up on these women, swore them off in a permanent Lent. The simplicity of a glorious derrière had too often trapped him in complicated and ugly arguments. When he wanted a fistful of those mounds, he usually got an earful about his inability to understand. He didn’t blame them for their insecurity; they were the victims of a modern witch hunt for body fat. But despite his devotion to their ample order, Orlando could not resurrect a religion based on his cock alone, and so went on a flesh fast.
He could have abstained, he lied to himself, if Isabella hadn’t spoken in that damned accent, refined aristocratic education crossed with Monty Python crass in her Oxford gutter mouth. A dethroned British queen had backed into him, and he wanted her to keep backing up, rolling her glorious bulldozer of a behind right onto the cock pulsing in his lap. He bulged so prominently that he refused to get out of his squashed bug of a car. She feared that he couldn’t extricate himself from the interlocking, twisted metal of the two cars, and it was true in a way, his heart remained trapped by her rear end. His lustful frame of mind was permanently bent to her shape.
The dreadful sound of the two vehicles wrenching apart, Isabella with her foot on the gas, this time in first gear, was not as painful as the silence after she drove him out the front door last month, suitcase and guitar in hand.
She drove him home that first afternoon, but said she was so rattled she needed to stop for a drink. She declared he looked like he needed one, too. She drank her double whiskey in regular cola, “None of that diet crap,” she warned the bartender.
After three beers himself, Orlando couldn’t help it: he began to hum Londonderry Air. Making the words up on the spot, the revised London Derrière began spilling out. She might have socked him in the jaw, but instead she laughed, delighted. She dragged him onto the dance floor and gyrated, her back against him. This time he could not hide his eager gear shift behind a bent steering wheel. They hooked together like a tow-hitch and its load. He wrote her a new song on each anniversary of their crash. Do the Locomotive With Me. Fanny Fandango. Mother Goose Your Caboose. Let’s Cause a Rumpus. The songs were for her only, hymns performed during private services to her body. But on their fifth anniversary, she didn’t want a song. She wanted a three-word sentence.
He admi
red the way she dressed – or didn’t. Not attired in a flowery potato-sack to hide her figure or a blouse tight on the boobs to distract from the rest of her. No obvious and generally futile attempt to disguise the fact that she wore a jeans size in double digits, twice her blouse size. “Vertical stripes aren’t going to fucking fool anybody,” she said, not that she cared to. She wore bright, bold colours and patterns, and snug fits. Not tight or restrictive, but contoured to her shape. Mostly, though, Isabella went naked, stripping with relief as soon as the front door closed behind her.
Isabella didn’t need convincing or wooing to bend over for him. After cocktails, she took him to her house without asking where he wanted to go. Bedroom curtains open, Isabella offered herself like one of those monkeys on the Discovery Channel. He approached the twin celestial planets that orbited around her fiery core with reverential hands. Just as he had once caressed Jimi Hendrix’s left-handed guitar, the curves so like Isabella’s; as he had stroked the Buddha’s belly in China; as he had held his first erection in wonder and terror. He spread her cheeks apart. He broke Lent. He lost his cock in her cosmic folds, a tiny spaceship careening through her vortex. The puckered crater of her asshole winked up at him from between her double moons.
With the lights blazing, he got to watch his fingers digging into her hips, circles of white spreading from his grip. It was like denting a tender peach, or watching the impression of his foot haloing out on wet sand. He seized that jiggling ass to hang on, like a roller coaster handle, wanting to bruise it with the force of his grip. He reached around to lolling breasts and thighs spread just right for easy access to the magic spot so many men, apparently, ignored. Why? It was so easy. He’d seen the way women worked over his dick, with mouth, hand, or body. Jesus, making him come took effort. But he could just lay back, one arm under his head, and move a single finger. Even a pinkie. Even a goddamn toe positioned just right, though it tended to cramp up on him if she took awhile – and Isabella was never one to hurry. Yeah, sometimes it was an afterthought – face it, he could be as quick and eager as the next guy, he was no god – but the gesture was one they sure appreciated.
Orlando carefully kept one of his fingers uncalloused. His love digit, Isabella christened it. All it takes is one, his first girlfriend had taught him, a piece of knowledge that had served him better than anything he’d learned in college. Keep it clean and well-trimmed, she’d said, and that way you can put it just about anywhere. Later, after he’d picked up the steel-string and welts of protective skin cropped up all over his hands, he left one fingertip smooth. Only good for picking his nose, he told his vapid-eyed music students. It hampered complicated riffs, but the sacrifice was worth it.
Like the perfect lyric, Isabella continued to surprise him. Unlike the girdle-ish contraptions he found other women trapped in, Isabella wore thong underwear – when she wore any at all. She claimed panties wouldn’t fit her, other than the suffocating type she had no interest in wearing. Instead of plucking at elastic that climbed uncomfortably, she let it all hang out. Her undies were no more than a swatch of fabric that cupped her mons, and a string that nestled where Orlando wished his tongue could take up permanent residence.
Isabella let him watch her shower, the soap disappearing between the cleavage of her thighs. She bathed belly-down in the oversized tub she’d remodelled the house around, her ass mounds looking like twin atolls rising out of the bubbly deep. Amelia Earhart’s plane could vanish in that landscape. Isabella declared she would never need a tattoo, since Orlando’s ass hickeys permanently decorated her. He couldn’t help nibbling his devotion, a taking of the sacrament. As soon as one love bite faded, he replaced it with another. She backed up to mirrors, contorting impossibly as she tried to find Rorschach meaning in their patterns.
On the rare occasions when Orlando refused to be distracted from practising by her undulating waves of desire, Isabella practised naked yoga in his line of vision. Her wide-hulled boat continually capsized during the balancing poses. His will power couldn’t surmount such a tidal effect, and before she’d toppled over a third time, he gave in to temptation and righted her with his sturdy mast.
He’d been surprised when she’d packed his things a month ago. (There was no question as to who would stay, as he could never ask her to give up the bathtub.) She abdicated the throne he’d constructed beneath her. Left him a country-less peasant, an expatriate wandering through the pages of disappointing swimsuit issues. All because of one word. One stupid word. What a tragic irony, fit for an opera, that his song lyrics had wooed Isabella to him, but his silence in response to her demand had driven her away.
Dumping him looked good on her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her once he’d spotted her precariously perched on a barstool. He wanted to metamorphose into that stool. She looked like she’d swallowed the goddess she always sprinkled into casual conversation. She looked powerful. She looked like trouble. Dressed to kill in a red Empire-waist dress that cinched her bodice but flared out at the hips and fell past her knees, she looked like the Great Pyramid. Not one of the Egyptian queens mummified inside, no, but a live monument pulsing with desert sunlight, stretching to the sky yet rooted on earth, radiating heat.
Isabella always looked damned hot walking away. Trailing behind her at the mall or the market, admiring her bouncing globes, Orlando often felt he would have been a better student with such visual aids.
But Isabella looked even better coming towards him.
“Isabella.” He spread his hands when she approached him after the last song. She needn’t have waited so politely – she was an audience of one.
“You’re an asshole,” she said in her irresistible accent.
“I know.” He would do or say anything tonight to get her back.
“No, you don’t. I’m going to make you feel the meaning of asshole. So that next time you’ll think twice before using it on someone else.”
“Hey, I did not shit on you.”
“No, because you’re emotionally constipated.” She seemed surprised by her own wit.
He spied the crack in her slammed door, the thin moment where he could sneak in and make her forget her anger. “Can I use that in a song?”
“Always a joke. Always your music.” She hung on to her resentment, levering herself against the other side of the door, her side of the argument. “Always detachment. Reserve. Calculation. Tonight I’m breaking your barrier. Drop your pants, asshole.” But she lifted her skirt, exposing herself to the waist.
“Jesus.” His mouth dropped open, not his 501s. Instead of damp and minuscule panties, curlicues of wiry hair escaping along the creases of her hip, Isabella had sprouted a penis. It seemed as if their entire courtship had been a build-up to the lyrical surprise of the pink and white swirled cock springing from beneath her uplifted dress. Strapped on with a complicated series of belts and buckles, the cock appeared lifelike in shape, if not in colour. The straps looked damned uncomfortable, cutting into her generous flesh. He admired her ease with the contraption. Most women of her build wouldn’t be caught dead in a bikini, much less this get-up. Her thong was proving entirely inadequate to the task of restraining the hungry beast.
“Isabella, what the hell do you want?”
“I want your hymen.”
Hi, men! His mind spun spellings and alternate definitions. His mental word play always got worse when he was nervous, a subconscious tic he couldn’t control. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
“I want your cherry. Your maidenhead.”
He stepped backwards, away from the threatening member. “This is a joke, right?”
“You’re looking at the punch-line.” She took the hefty pink cock in her small fist. “Take a good look while you can, because you’re not going to be seeing much of it the rest of the night.”
Ironically, Isabella had never seemed less womanly than with this jutting member thrusting forward from her thighs, her queenly power visibly concentrated in this vengeful scepter. Orlando was hot. Inflamed.
Also terrified.
“Isabella. Christ. Here?” He glanced around the deserted bar. The bartender had started to set the chairs on the tables halfway through Orlando’s last set. His mediocre and distracted performance once he’d caught sight of Isabella in the audience had encouraged few to remain through to the last number. The bartender had waved goodnight before Orlando’s last note faded, calling out for him to lock up on his way out, adding that he’d mop in the morning, unless Orlando wanted to do it for extra cash.
“All the better if someone sees you for the asshole that you are,” Isabella said.
“Fine! Fine.” Orlando tore at his belt buckle and thrashed his pants to his ankles. “I’ll play your little game. Whatever you want, Isabella.” He turned his back to her before lowering his boxers, so she couldn’t see the eager state of his cock. Orlando didn’t know if he was angrier at Isabella or at the betrayal of his own dick, which rose up in direct opposition to what he thought he didn’t want. But he did know that he wanted her to stay, to connect with her. On any level. He bent over the barstool he’d perched on for his show and reached around to spread his ass cheeks. “Come and get it.”
Her dress rustled as she stepped close behind him. He smelled her, an oasis of bubble bath clean in a stale swamp of cigarette smoke and beer.
“You know what I want,” she said, the tip of her dick hovering in his delicate pucker.
“Why is it so important?” he shouted over his shoulder. “Christ, you know how I feel. Isn’t it more important that I show it? Express it? Don’t I do that?”
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