Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  “Pussy, pussy, pusssssssy. I will fuck your pussy,” he didn’t know what possessed him to talk like that. He watched the slimy hole pucker and clench like it was saying words his ears could not hear.

  “Come on, lover. Let me see what you can do.” Her eyes widened. Ejike was pleased. He knew she would die before she complimented him but that small sign was enough. Her finger moved faster and faster. Ejike pushed it aside. He sucked the nub deep into his mouth and chewed on it. The woman’s thighs smacked on the floor as she opened herself to her widest. She grabbed him, pulling his groin towards hers, rising to impale herself.

  “No,” Ejike said. He could feel the dizziness building up again. He was going to lose it. It was like sinking into warm oil. It felt better than his hand coated with Vaseline, than all the girls ever played with combined.

  “Ahhhhhh... ahhhhhhh!” The woman pulled out a breast from the neck of her dress and shoved its nipple into his mouth. Ejike clamped on. He could feel the waves on the flesh as he screamed into it. It was all over. He grabbed her shoulders and reared back, shooting, his waist jerked to spasms he couldn’t control. Again and again he jerked, slamming into her. His pubic hair was slick with her wetness. Ejike felt himself collapsing.

  “Is that it?” She adjusted so that Ejike settled deeper into her. “After all your boasting? One would think it was your first time.”

  “It was my first time.”

  She started laughing again. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “This is your last year of school and that’s all you can do? Were you sleeping while your mates were sowing seeds in the farm? You have a lot to learn. Don’t fall asleep; you have to finish me up. Let us move to the room. And try not to scream again before the neighbours call the police.”

  *

  Ejike thought he was better the second time. He had her years of experience with her own body and that damn finger to compete against but he held his own. By the third time, she was no longer laughing. But it wasn’t until the fifth try that she finally screamed herself.

  *

  “Why did you ask me to come back at this time? I could have met you during long break as usual.”

  “My husband was around.”

  “I saw his car.” Ejike picked at the skin on his face.

  “So why did you ring the bell? Why didn’t you knock on the back door like you always do?” The woman was looking at him, twirling the curls in her pubic hair with one hand.

  “Why do you stay with him if he treats you like dirt?” He reached out and fondled her nipple. It looked minuscule flopping to the side of her chest but in reality it was almost the length of his thumb. Ejike swallowed.

  “Spoken like a true man,” she said. Ejike smiled. She ignored him. “You think I can just leave him like that? Who would want me?”

  “I would want you. I do want you.”

  The woman laughed. “You like me because I have showed you what your body can do. Stop talking nonsense.”

  “I can please you.” He took the nipple into his mouth and licked around it as he suckled. The woman reached for his hand and placed it on her pubic mound. Ejike took it away, smiling.

  “That is my point.” The woman resumed twirling her curls. “I do not doubt that you can please me, but that is not all that makes a man.”

  “It is enough. It is more than you had before you met me.”

  “And so I should bow down and worship you? I should leave the life that I have with my husband and follow you, a mere boy who has nothing in life but his youth? And what happens when you get older, eh?”

  “But...”

  “But what? You think everything is black and white. That is not the way the world is. Who do you think will be shamed? It does not matter that the useless man I married, the man who could not even plant a seed in my belly has been fooling around with anything with a hole in the middle, no. It will matter that I seduced a small boy...”

  “You did not seduce me. I came by myself...”

  “...A small boy,” the woman sat up in bed, chest heaving. “With a widow for a mother no less. They will curse me. They will gather outside my door to burn me if they can.” She shook her head. “You think you know something just because you can make a woman forget herself for three minutes.”

  “It was more than seven minutes the last time,” he said finally. The bed shook and he knew she was laughing. “Hey what is the matter?” Ejike sat up as well. The woman was laughing but the tears falling down her cheeks did not look happy.

  “I will miss you, you know,” she said.

  “Where am I going?”

  “I cannot see you any longer.”

  “Why?” His hand curled around his throat.

  “My husband knows.”

  “And so? I have taken you. You are mine. If he wanted you, he should not have gone with others.”

  “What you came here to do is done. Now we must do it one last time, and after that you have to go and never come back.” The woman reached for him but Ejike pulled away.

  “Tell me why you are doing this,” he said.

  The woman let her hands drop. She cleaned her face. “I have told you why. What you choose to do next will determine how our last time will be.”

  “You are going back to him? Just like that? After all he has done to you?”

  “What does it matter? He is no longer with your mother from today.”

  “Wha... ?”

  “And he will soon be back, so please do what you need to do. Leave. Fuck me. Whatever. Just do it fast.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re going to give him another chance... after... after...” Ejike shook his head, clasping his slight erection that had risen at the profanity. “He and my mother...” He grabbed the woman. “Do you know what he has been saying to her? That he loves her? That they will be together until they both die? She wanted me to start calling him ‘Father’ but I will never.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. He will never do it again. I have his assurance. I am vindicated.”

  “He will never do it again? Don’t you have any self-esteem?”

  The woman shook her head. “Small boy still playing at being a grown-up. Have you never wondered why all the women my husband buzzes around are of a certain age?” She laughed. “That man does not take unnecessary risk or else people would know...” She rubbed her eyes. “It doesn’t matter now.” She reached up to stroke his face. “I will miss you. You have saved me.”

  Ejike shook his head. He wanted to tell her he did not understand her but he rather suspected that he never understood her, that he never would. He braced himself on his knees and let his head fall into his hands. The woman stroked his back like she would a wounded animal. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter. Come. You must go.” She tugged on his arm. Ejike allowed the momentum to propel him. He straddled her. The woman’s nostrils flared and she spread her legs, grabbing him by the hips and attempting to position him where she needed him the most. Ejike planted his knees by her side and refused to move. She raised an eyebrow. Ejike kept his eyes on hers as he kissed her. He could taste the salt from her earlier tears. She thrust her tongue into his mouth, withdrawing before his own tongue could meet it. Ejike’s erection jolted with the need to copy her, leaving trails of clear stickiness all over her middle. He dipped into her, coating the head of his dick. Ejike pumped into his fist, ignoring the puckering coming from below.

  “Please don’t be angry,” the woman said. Ejike pumped harder into his fist, meaning to deny her. The woman grabbed for him again, but instead of guiding him to lower, she pulled him upwards until he was almost across her chest. She gathered up her breasts on both hands. It was as if his body knew what to do even before he could finish thinking. He sunk into her breasts.

  “Do you like it?” she asked.

  Ejike could feel his reply in the million points of pure sensation bursting in his head as his balls grazed her stomach. He re
placed her hands with his, wanting to leave an imprint of himself on her skin for all eternity. He thrust deeper, faster. The woman licked the end of his penis as it emerged under her chin.

  “Ngh! Ngh!” His words refused to come out right. Her hands free, she started to finger herself and soon she was joining him, saying words that meant nothing and everything. Ejike could hear the slapping, squelching sounds as she teased the climax from her body. He moved her hands away and slid down. The woman put one nipple in her own mouth and offered him the other.

  “Ejika, odowu m, nwoke m, teach me a lesson,” the woman’s voice rose. She tweaked his nipples with wet fingers.

  “Yes, yes,” his head cleared at her praise names. “I have marked you. Drunk you like wine, nke m ka i bu!” He recaptured her breast. Her moans told him he spoke the truth. He placed her legs on his shoulders and gripped her waist. “I am a man; I am not a small boy. I am a man.”

  *

  The car was in the shadow of a wall, some way away from the compound gates when he emerged. He knew that car anywhere. He kicked the stones in the path as he went up to the vehicle and rapped on the window. The man in the driver’s seat regarded him for a moment through red eyes and wound down his window.

  “Yes?” the man asked. The man reached for the volume on the radio and twisted. The music blared. He scrambled for it and twisted again, cutting off the sound. In the absence of music, the toads increased their night-time chorus. “Yes?” asked the man again. In his left hand was a child’s stuffed toy whose belly he rubbed almost absentmindedly. In the back seat was an infant bath and some more toys.

  Ejike stared at it, understanding, feeling more grown up than he had his whole life. He had done it. But he could never again come back to the woman.

  “Nothing,” he shook his head. “I just wanted to say good evening, Sir.” The man nodded and wound up his window. He did not reach for the radio. Ejike walked off, allowing the toads to guide his steps away from the pools of water in the potholes dotting the street.

  LOVE ME, LOVE MY WIFE

  Malachi O’Doherty

  Malachi O’Doherty is a journalist, author and broadcaster in Northern Ireland. He was one of the longest-running commentators/columnists on any Irish radio programme, having been a regular on Radio Ulster’s Talkback from its creation in the mid-1980s until 2009. He writes frequently for the Belfast Telegraph and is a contributing editor to the Erotic Review. His sixth book, On My Own Two Wheels, was published in May 2012 by Blackstaff Press. His biography of Gerry Adams will be published next year.

  I don’t like my brother Danny. When we were children he always wanted to be the senior twin, the boss. He’d decide what games to play. He’d be the striker and I’d be in goal. But he is better than me in lots of ways. If we tangled he would put me down. But then as a dancer he trains a lot. And he is clever with words. He writes ad copy for alternative medicines and press releases for a wee publishing house he runs on the side, turning out nonsense books on knowing yourself and keeping your bowels regular.

  I bristle like an angry dog when he comes near. We should try and get on. He said he had a plan and I said I would listen.

  “We’ll swap wives.”

  We had met for lunch in Greens and Things. He had ordered a bulgur salad with yogurt and I had settled for imitation sausages made of celery and aduki beans. And he had waited until my mouth was full.

  Twins know each other’s bodies like their own. That’s one of the most annoying things. I look at the way he rubs his nose and it is my way of rubbing mine.

  “And you think they’d agree to that?”

  I should have killed the idea.

  Instead, I was thinking about his wife, Joanne. There is something that happens when you meet your twin’s wife. She looks at you as if she knows what you are like in bed. Imelda looks at Danny the same way. We have talked about it.

  She said once, “I wonder if he makes the same noises you do when he comes. He does when he’s eating or when he coughs.”

  “I’ve never seen him come,” I say.

  “And you have to wonder if twins are attracted to the same kind of woman. Is Joanne like me in bed? We’re about the same build.”

  “She has bigger tits.”

  “Would you prefer it if I had bigger tits?”

  But now Danny was looking me straight in the eye as if he was selling something. “Why do men get jealous about their wives sleeping with another man? Psychologically, the other man has come into the marriage bed. But we are not like other men.”

  “No?”

  “No. We shared a womb and a mother’s breast and we grew up like pups in the one litter. I want us to love each other again the way we did when we were little boys.”

  Now he was making me squirm.

  “Have you put this to Joanne?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. I think if she was relaxed and enjoying a glass of wine with you and knew that I would never call her out on it – and I wouldn’t: I think she’d fuck your brains out.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “Afterwards, we’d go back to the way we are. No recriminations. This is not about them anyway; it’s about us. But it suits them too because of that wee bit of curiosity they have about the twin of the man they love and sleep with.”

  Which left me feeling that I was the only one who was really against this idea. But that should have been enough to prevent it anyway. I wasn’t going to go home and tell Imelda I’d like her to sleep with my brother? Wife swapping is wife swapping. It’s about sex. Couples who are bored with each other agree new parameters. But I wasn’t bored with Imelda. She wasn’t bored with me. Was she?

  “I’ve been talking to Danny,” she said.

  “Christ.”

  “He said you didn’t say yes and you didn’t say no.”

  “Well then I didn’t make myself clear enough.”

  “He knows how you think. He’s your twin.”

  “That’s crap.”

  “Well, tell me,” she said, “what do you think?”

  “I think we are in a marriage that is exclusive to the two of us.”

  Maybe she didn’t think that was a strong enough declaration of my love for her. Maybe I should have sneered at Joanne, mentioned how annoying she is. But I’d said what I’d said.

  She said, “I think he has a point.”

  I felt the ground moving under me. And yet I’d just been given permission to shag Joanne, and that prospect started looming larger in my imagination.

  “Joanne feels it about you the way I feel about Danny, as if we are already intimate. It would not feel like infidelity to sleep with Danny. It just wouldn’t.”

  “But wouldn’t you feel it was infidelity for me to sleep with Joanne? She’s not your twin.”

  “In a way maybe she is; she is another woman who loves exactly what I love in a man.”

  “This is the sort of thing that breaks marriages. What if you got pregnant by him?”

  “Even that wouldn’t matter; his genes are no different from yours. You wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was his or yours, not even with a blood test. But if you are that worried, darling, let the thought pass. We’ll do nothing about it.”

  And then I went into the kitchen and started chopping vegetables and she went upstairs to write an article about love and the home.

  So how then did something that we had agreed would not happen come to seem inevitable?

  I got an email from Joanne that night.

  “What do you think of Danny’s big idea?”

  “I think it isn’t going to happen. Sorry.”

  Why did I say sorry? I suppose, because I was taking on trust that she wanted it to happen. But whatever she wanted, she would read that as regret on my part – so she’d think I wanted it to happen?

  “He thinks it would be good for his relationship with you.”

  “It could pull us all together o
r it could tear us all apart.”

  “But there is something wrong, isn’t there?”

  “Some twins keep what they had as children, can go on sleeping and bathing together as adults, are closer to each other than to their partners; some don’t even need partners; they have each other. You wonder if it is incest, even. Other twins just go off each other. That’s what happened to Danny and me. It’s part of becoming an individual.”

  “But what if you have lost something precious? I see you both as nearly the same person. It seems weird that you wouldn’t be close.”

  “That’s what Imelda says, that it wouldn’t be like infidelity for her to sleep with him.”

  “I would love to sleep with you,” she wrote.

  And from there, in my mind, it all became about the question of whether I would sleep with Joanne and whether the risk of losing a bit of Imelda was a fair price to pay. It was nothing at all to do with Danny.

  That night in bed I turned to Imelda and said, “Why don’t you just admit that you fancy Danny. There is something you see in him that you don’t see in me.”

  She kissed me on the lips. She said, “There is nothing I see in him that I don’t see in you. That’s what this is all about.”

  And she made love to me that night in the reassuring way she does sometimes when she wants me to be at ease and content and takes nothing for herself. But lovemaking is lovemaking and you always feel better, whatever subtle messages are implied in the manner of it.

  *

  When Joanne suggested that we all have a joint birthday party for me and Danny, no one demurred. We would go to a country house hotel in Ireland. I think she wanted it as far as possible from home to avoid the risk of our meeting anyone who knew us.

  Imelda and I did not discuss Danny’s wife-swapping plan. If we had done we could have killed it. By staying silent on it we were keeping alive the prospect of a sexual adventure, whether we admitted that fact or not.

  On the day before our birthday, Imelda and I flew to Dublin and hired a car there and drove five hours to Donegal. The hotel was beside Lough Eske. It was an old Irish mansion house run by an English couple who had restored it according to their notions of how the Irish gentry had lived. It was beautiful. The menu included vegetarian dishes I had never heard of, so it would suit Danny.