Innocents

by Coote, Cathy

  Dismissing my affections as unnecessary, you exclaimed, ‘Oh, be quiet!’

  ‘No.’ I was a petulant little girl, with her lower lip protruding. ‘I do …’ I made the easy declaration seem difficult, pretending to fumble for words that were readily available, ‘… care about you too. I really do.’ Big eyes again.

  I saw you swallow, a snake gulping a guinea pig. You didn't take your hand back. Instead you left it to sweat gently on mine.

  This was the moment. Biting my lip, making my face tentative, I asked out of the blue, ‘Will you kiss me?’

  You jumped as though stung. ‘Oh!’ It could have been a gasp of physical pain, or surprise, or shock. Flustered, you shook your head; let your hair flop down over your face; avoided my gaze. But you betrayed yourself: you did not snatch your hand away. You left yourself in my grasp.

  ‘Please?’ The little girl, saccharine, insisted upon her own way.

  With a deep breath and a saint's stern gathering of composure, you explained: ‘It wouldn't be right … There are some things a teacher and a student just can't … however he might feel … however I might feel …’ Your voice was level, but I saw your knees quake. I saw you tighten your legs, bend forward—oh, so slightly—to hide your erection.

  I dug about for your pity. ‘Don't you fancy me?’

  You exhaled by way of a laugh, shaking your head: ‘Oh, my dear girl—’ savouring those words, as though often in your mind you had said them to me—‘you have no idea.’ And you shook your head again.

  With one swift flowing movement, like a snake doing ballet, I knelt up, so as to have my face close to yours.

  You would not look at me. You kept very still. Your breath shivered in and out. I put my fingertips against your cheek. You yielded under the tiniest pressure, and turned to face me.

  I crouched tense, a predator in the long grass. Once I had your eyes in mine, you were my creature. You couldn't hide your passion—indeed, you presented it to me, showed me with your face: This is how much I want you. Your eyes, seeing me, shouted, Oh, please! I coasted forwards, and in a single long, smooth motion, placed my lips on yours.

  You yelped—then surrendered. Kissed me back, hot mouth on mine, tremulous breath on my tongue. Then wrenched your head backwards, away, shaking it from side to side in slow bewilderment.

  I didn't pursue you. Your face was stark, panicked, your eyebrows knotted together in terror. ‘We can't,’ you said. ‘We mustn't.’

  I hoped your scruples were not so strong in you that you'd relinquish me. I worried that you'd leap to your feet, run from the room, slamming the door behind you. You dug your top teeth into your bottom lip, shaking your head. Your face was red.

  ‘I'm sorry. Have I embarrassed you?’

  But none of this was my fault. ‘Don't be silly … it's me,’ you told me gently. I gazed at you, eyes wide, lips a sensuous half-inch open, suddenly aware of the marvellous, theatrical effect of the tear streaks on my cheeks, the blood-red scratches on my thin hands. You saw all this, and I saw you melt. Looking old, filled with pity, you said, ‘Oh, you poor little thing, you should be able to come to someone for help without him…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I'm sorry,’ you said, firmly.

  I played an ace, and started to cry.

  I wasn't hysterical; not hiccuping with anguish, as I had been when you opened the door to me. I shot you a look of distress, confusion, loneliness, abandonment, and let the water come sliding down my cheeks.

  These silent, helpless tears left you no choice but to swivel your body to face me, to come closer, to put your arms awkwardly around me.

  ‘Come here. Come on. It's okay. It's all right. I've got you. Don't cry.’

  I put one hand on your shoulder and buried my face in your neck, trembling with tears. ‘Don't cry. It's okay. Don't cry.’

  You rested your chin on the top of my head. I sensed that you were savouring that touch, my soft hair against your face. I took a deep, shuddering, sorrowful breath. Pulling back, turning my face up to look at yours, I wiped my eyes impatiently with the heel of my hand, and begged to know: ‘Don't you like me?’

  ‘Of course I like you!’

  ‘But you don't fancy me?’

  Silence. Your hands tensed against my back. ‘I do,’ you admitted, levelly.

  I grinned for joy through my tears. ‘Well, that's okay then!’

  ‘No, my dear, it isn't—’

  ‘Please?’ Leaning forward, I kissed your cheek affectionately. ‘Please?’

  You took a breath, looking for a moment as though you were trying to frame complex, rational arguments in your mind. You wanted to spout pros and cons, tick things off on your fingers. Then, with a funny, tragic little half-smile, you brushed the fingers of one hand down my cheek.

  Again, we kissed. You slid your hand onto my neck. We kissed like proper lovers. I pressed close into you. I liked the feel of your warm body.

  I wanted your hand on my breast. I reached behind, took your hand, showed it. ‘Oh, darling—’you said, your hand hovering half an inch above—‘are you sure?’

  ‘Yep,’ I confirmed, fiddling with the unfamiliar pyjamas. Forcing them through the holes, I delicately wrenched the top two buttons open. My small breasts were there, just below the flannelette. I took your hand again, and introduced them. ‘Is that nice?’

  You cupped my breast, your cheeks ticking with the effort of your surrender.

  Seeing the fresh-red five-fingered bruises on my collarbones, you whined, ‘Oh, angel…’

  ‘It's all right.’ I was Orphan Annie, dismissing my difficulties with a grin. ‘Come on,’ I said, shuffling over, patting the bed beside me. ‘Please?’

  Snorting with disbelief, you complied, sliding, a little awkwardly, beneath the sheets.

  Now that we were two bodies in the same medium, so to speak, you abandoned yourself to the experience.

  I lay on my back, and you propped yourself on your elbows above me, looking down. Your body seemed to understand mine, to mirror its actions through the activity of some force as natural as gravity. When I wriggled free of my clothes, a snake shedding her skin, you did the same without a word. We ejected our clothing onto the floor.

  Big-eyed, you touched me so delicately it tickled.

  Your lips closed around my nipple and it felt warm, reassuring. You touched my thighs lightly, with the whole inside of your hand. You stroked the curve between my hip and my underarm.

  ‘Is that … nice?’ You blushed, smiling a little, ruefully, at your own discomfort.

  ‘It's lovely.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to—’

  ‘Yes! You boring man! Stop asking me that!’

  ‘I can't believe this.’ You were staring at me, amazed.

  The ghost of a thousand American movies made me say, as I kissed you briefly, fiercely, on the mouth, ‘Believe it!’

  You found in my nakedness a miracle, a sacred trust.

  I found yours very interesting.

  I had never seen adult male genitalia, and I told you so.

  ‘Well?’ you wanted to know, squinting with embarrassment and delight. ‘What d'you reckon?’

  I was surprised by all the hair. Reaching below the covers, I touched your penis, tentatively. I saw your eyes close, your mouth twitch, helpless as my hand closed around it.

  ‘It's very silky,’ I whispered, without letting go.

  You nodded, and said with an effort, ‘If you want to stop—’

  ‘I don't want to stop.’

  ‘…just say so. I won't be. I don't expect.’

  Lifting the blankets, I peered down, intrigued, at the seat of your desire. ‘Balls are bigger than I thought.’

  In the midst of your profound discomfort, you laughed. ‘Are they?’

  ‘Can I touch?’

  ‘Be very gentle.’

  I touched. The sacks of skin in which they hung were wrinkly, prickly with hair. ‘They're like eyeballs,’ I pronounced with childish
solemnity, cupping one carefully. ‘Or mushy eggs.’

  Your skin seemed to tremble around your flesh. ‘Are they just?’

  Sitting up, I pulled the covers back, doubling them over our legs. As I bent forward, you explored my spine with one heavy finger.

  ‘You're so little,’ you told me, approvingly.

  I nestled back down beside you, my face a few inches below yours, my toes against your calves. ‘You're so big.’

  We lay for ages, side by side. Your hips moved backwards and forwards. Your face above your body was strained, abashed at the antics going on down below.

  It's funny, isn't it? I'd never once fantasised about having sex with a man, yet I knew what to do by instinct. I knew where to touch you and when to kiss you, even though all of this was completely foreign to my experience, alien to my imagination.

  Gradually—I forget quite how, it all blurs into a general impression of milky skin and fuzzes of hair—I found myself underneath you. You balanced on straight arms. Your face was a foot from mine, but I could feel your breath hot on my forehead, as though I'd opened an oven.

  You said, red-faced, ‘You're sure, aren't you?’

  I felt your penis at the door, a strange bulbous stem.

  ‘Oh—I don't want to hurt you.’

  It seemed like something far too big to ever fit inside.

  ‘Don't worry.’ I pulled my legs right up, my knees by my ears.

  Closing your eyes, fumbling with one hand—I felt your curled fingers against my thigh, very high up—you forced yourself inside.

  And with that thrust, you dealt the death-blow to those battalions of tortured bodies in my mind. The chains fell from their wrists and ankles. They pulled on cloaks and walked out of me, away into the night.

  Your eyes were closed. I winced. Withdrawing, you opened your eyes, and watched my face as you came sliding back in. I smiled, biting the inside of my lip surreptitiously.

  ‘I'm trying to be gentle,’ you told me, anxiously. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘No,’ I lied, smiling wider, patting your forehead affectionately with my child's hands. ‘It's lovely.’

  My hands on your broad back enjoyed the sweat that welled there.

  My ears enjoyed your laboured breathing, the little grunted half-words that broke from your throat against your will.

  My eyes, turning downwards, feasted on the sight of your stomach, as it tensed and scrunched itself repeatedly, shivering down towards my flat belly, then gathering itself away, pulling back for another approach.

  Your face was bestial, lips drawn back over your teeth in a chimpanzee's grimace of aggression. Shifting rednesses beneath your skin grew and burst like supernovas. And your eyes were bright like bits of glass with the sun shining through them.

  ‘I love you,’ you hissed between your teeth. You lowered your head onto my shoulder, your breath like fire in my ear. ‘I love you!’

  I wondered how long this usually took.

  More desperate now, you raised your head, arching back your neck, breathing like a horse. I felt a new, stiffened determination pulsing inside me.

  On either side of my face, the insides of your arms were streaked with coiling tendons, bulging veins.

  I stretched my arms above my head, showing you my chest more clearly. You gasped, shaking your head, and bit your lip.

  With fascination, I watched your face. It was you who was incoherent now. It was you who were helpless and speechless and without hope. Faster you slammed into me and faster, impotent before the urgency of your body's demands.

  At last, you tensed and shuddered and your eyes went wide and glazed like a dead man's. You seemed to flutter and fall, your big body deflating down over mine, melting onto me, welding itself to my skin.

  I presumed that was the end.

  Your collapse left your curly head on my shoulder. I could feel your hot fast breath blowing over my breasts.

  I said, tenderly, ‘Oh, you darling.’ Snaking my arms beneath yours, I folded them around your exposed back. Enclosing you like that felt so primordially right that I almost giggled with triumph. Controlling myself, I pressed my lips against the crown of your head.

  As though it were bowed down by a great weight, you lifted your head.

  Looking up at me—looking up, from your reduced condition—you told me: ‘Oh.’

  In a forlorn gesture of compassion, reaching down between our four legs, you patted my pubic hair softly. ‘I've hurt you, haven't I?’ You looked worried and upset and helpless.

  ‘Don't be silly.’ I reassured you. I did feel sort of scraped—grated-up—inside, and there was a sharp stinging pain like a deep papercut where my legs met, which throbbed with every beat of my heart. But this evaporated into nothing beside the steady, reassuring weight of your body on mine.

  ‘Am I squashing you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I must be heavy!’

  ‘It's all right.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes! You're like a blanket.’

  ‘I must have hurt you.’ There was a film of moisture, brought on by pity, glazing your exhausted eyes. ‘I'm so sorry.’

  I said, ‘It's all right. It's all right.’

  Comforting you against my pain, I knew that it was I who was old and weary and corrupt. I knew that you were the child.

  Lying on your stomach, one of your hands cupped over one of mine, you wove in and out of sleep. Several times, I heard you forget yourself and begin to breathe raspingly, unconsciously, but I found that the slightest involuntary movement of my hand under yours prompted a reassuring ‘I'm still here’ squeeze of your fingers. You stroked my wrist with your index finger. Your warm hip nudged against mine, that sticky contact undulating with each breath either of us took.

  I lay tensed with strangeness, remembering you as you were half an hour before, powerless before the onslaught of—as it seemed to me—an uncontrollable madness. Beside me, your skin a gentle gold in the lamplight, you began gently to snore.

  When I woke up, I was alone. There was a rumpled look to the sheets next to me. They seemed compressed, dimpled. They were warm and they smelt faintly of sweat, in a comforting way.

  I'd never slept naked before. The smooth cotton against my skin felt good. I wriggled luxuriously.

  I couldn't hear you. I hoped you hadn't panicked and run off somewhere, leaving me to face the morning alone.

  I dressed quickly in the pyjamas I'd worn the night before. It was cold. The sky beyond the window was still festooned with the shreds of last night's storm.

  Afraid to stomp in your churchlike house, I tiptoed out the door (turning the handle gently, slowly, silently) and along the corridor.

  I used the toilet, and found a long bright smear of blood on the toilet paper. I assessed the damage, and found no great cause for worry. It stung a little, but on the whole I didn't feel too bad.

  Flushing the toilet to announce my approach, I headed down the stairs.

  You sat, all dressed, at the glass-topped dining table, reading the newspaper.

  ‘Heya,’ I said. ‘Is there any breakfast?’

  There was a miserable edge to you, though you smiled widely in welcome. Mournful-eyed, you said, ‘There's cornflakes. Or toast. You can have some muesli if you like.’ You didn't meet my gaze. You were shadowed with worry, outlined in edginess.

  I wondered if this was a one-night stand dismissal. Measured against the holy intensity of the night before, your standoffishness seemed very odd.

  In the kitchen alone I fixed myself breakfast. In the lounge room with you I ate it in silence. I sat chewing, a demure two places away from you. I swung my legs back and forward. You didn't look up once from your paper. The cornflakes turned to cardboard in my mouth.

  I was deathly afraid that you didn't want me.

  Finishing my food and laying down my spoon, I said, ‘Do you want me to go?’

  Your answer was too quick. It overlapped with mine. ‘I think you'd better. Come on.�
� And you led me upstairs again.

  We stood in the bedroom, our dishevelled nest still unmade, the faint salty whiff of sex rising from the sheets. The space between us seemed to echo with emptiness. I didn't quite know where to put my body. I sat it on the foot of the bed, out of harm's way. Standing alone, you seemed stooped, diminished, bowed down by a terrible weight.

  I wanted to feel sorry for you, but I didn't know where I stood.

  ‘Now …’ you murmured, avoiding my eye. ‘What are we going to dress you in?’

  ‘I can wear my uniform,’ I suggested helpfully, hugging myself.

  ‘It was filthy. I put it in the washing machine. It's still wet.’ In the end, you loaned me jeans, a T-shirt, and a grey cardigan. Everything was far too big for me.

  At the doorstep, I turned and kissed you on the cheek.

  ‘Thanks for everything,’ I said lightly, willing you to make some declaration, tell me how you felt, tell me what was going to happen.

  You said nothing, strangled by guilt. There were tears on your cheeks and fear in your eyes. You squeezed my hand and, snatching it to your mouth, kissed it fiercely, silently declaring everything: I love you, but we can't, we can't…

  You slammed the door—so you thought—on your One True Love, and went to do the crossword, your heart breaking.

  My heart sang with certainty.

  Walking home, I was conscious of a palpable absence.

  In the winter cold of my small bedroom, I used to sit with my back against the wall and my knees raised over the central-heating grate, letting the warm air gradually bake my legs. The temperatures were set by my uncle. They were not mean; I didn't freeze. Nevertheless I was conscious, whenever the heat shuddered and wavered and died, of a middle-class moderation; an economy where I would have preferred excess. So it was with this sudden deletion of your hands from my waist and my hips, the vast expanse of your warmth from my side.

  The fact that, as far as home life went, I had nothing left to me, soon became painfully obvious. My aunt and uncle simply withdrew themselves from me; turned from solid presences into vague whispering abstracts: a distant slamming of doors; a television murmuring to itself in another room; faint smells of aftershave and garlic lingering in the air. I could have been the only live being in a houseful of phantoms. Every space I stepped into seemed newly vacated.