Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  “And, I suppose, there’s another element, which is sex without commitment. Why men think that’s their exclusive domain bewilders me. It’s men who are the romantics far more than women. I think men believe that Barbara Cartland mush much more than we do. What’s their pornography but that mush gift-packaged with reams of unlikely sex?

  “That had been what we were supposed to be about, Mike and me: sex without commitment. And, sitting there on the side of that bed, that’s what I still thought it was about.

  “Oh, I was conscious by then that I wanted to be treated specially, princessly, but I still thought that I’d have this weekend of being pampered and then I’d walk away. Back to my ‘happily-ever-after’ with Al.

  +++

  You looked so lovely, sitting there on the bed. You were the most desirable thing I’d seen in God knows how long. The curls in your hair were … tousled, I believe the word is. Those huge psychotically blue eyes of yours were peering up at me with a mixture of affection and fear, attraction and curiosity, warmth and an odd kind of quizzicalness.

  I noticed for the first time that tiny beauty spot above your left eyebrow. I’d known you for all that time, and this was the first time I’d seen it! I saw the line of your cheek-bones, the almost cherubic uplift of the end of your nose. Your neck was craned to look at me; it stretched the skin and it lifted your breasts. Those magnificent breasts. Which were pulling me to them, I don’t know, like a baby or something.

  Not in the least bit like a baby. Whatever am I talking about?

  I was standing in such an awkward position. I took your hand, I remember. And then your mouth opened. Just a crack, just a sliver.

  +++

  “I wanted to talk. I don’t know what I wanted to say, but I needed to say something. Anything. I needed to make a joke or something. Lighten – Jeez – the atmosphere.

  “Only thing was, I opened my mouth and nothing came out. It was like my tongue had gotten stuck to the roof of my mouth. No, worse than that. Because it wasn’t even that mumbles came out. It wasn’t a cat that had gotten my tongue but a whole pride of lions. This – I remember this so well, oh God – this sort of pathetic and virginal whimper scurried out. A sort of a wimp of a whimper. An apology even for a whimper – even for a wimp.

  “He’d taken my hand. I was trying to look him in the eye, trying to see what lay below the eyes. You know how I like to read eyes. But I was all misted up. Like a windshield, you know, on a frosty day.

  “My heart was racing. I wanted to still it, put my hand on my breast, the way you do. But I wasn’t sure what body-language he’d misinterpret from the gesture.

  “There I was, doing my best goldfish impersonation. And he? He was doing nothing. Oh, in real time, we’re talking nanoseconds here, but in mine – my time – several more universes had been born and died.

  “I think I may have given his hand the smallest of tugs or something. Finally he leaned forward to kiss me and he swivelled himself at the same time to sit down next to me.”

  +++

  That was our first kiss in private. Doesn’t one of Shakespeare’s characters compare a kiss to honey? Well, that kiss – that first private kiss – that was so much sweeter than any honey.

  The softness of your tongue, its watery, its pliable softness, its tiny ridges, the nodules of its taste-buds, the liquid rose-buds that were your saliva …

  +++

  “No stiff upper lip now. This wasn’t accomplished kissing, this was diploma stuff. ‘Summa cum laude’. Master-class making out. It wasn’t the kind of kissing either you got to acquire via fidelity. It was a kiss embossed with the influence of several great kissers – a great many great kissers, in fact.

  “You’re going to want me to describe it to you, and I can’t. Not really. I mean, describe how Yo-Yo Ma plays a cello, as opposed to, I don’t know, Jacqueline du Pré on the one hand, and on the other, the thirty-fifth cellist of the Timbuktu Second Symphony Orchestra.

  “Oh, I’d been kissed by a virtuoso before, by a Jacqueline du Pré – Al himself was a Jaqueline du Pré kisser. He had been. In the early days. And Mike wasn’t better. Just different. But of equal virtuosity. – Is that a word: virtuosity? – And the kisses I’d had from the thirty-fifth cellists … well, I guess they could have formed an orchestra all by themselves. Several, if you count all the school-time kissers.

  “I wasn’t bla-di-blahing any longer, I was, you know, dah-didahing. Christ, honey, you know what I mean. And it wasn’t that attractive a sensation. He was wearing a real good after-shave. French, I’d put money on it. And his hair smelt great as well. These were being mixed with the musk of his arousal. It was becoming a heady bouquet. Almost high-making. But all these perfumes were drowned beneath the smell of my own blah-di-blah. And that wasn’t that attractive a sensation. I was beginning to get quite self-conscious about it. You know, as if I’d let off some kind of thunderous … well, fart or something.

  “Women, we’re supposed to be discreet, aren’t we? Secretive, mysterious. The smell I was exuding – leastwise as it seemed to me – was about as secretive and mysterious as a red London double-decker bus.

  “He was still kissing me. Oh, passionately, sure. But still with great gentleness, great delicacy. Yo-Yo Ma manages to play fortissimo still without being strident. Same deal.

  “It was like my mouth was that cello, and his tongue was the bow. He was testing every string of my instrument, every note, every chord. Seeing how each sounded, hearing how they resonated – separately, together.

  “He wasn’t gulping down a pint of beer. He was savouring a Mouthon-Rothschild. That is a wine, right?

  “Married women don’t get kissed like that. Well, I guess you know that as well as I do. Not after day three of the marriage, ‘any rate. You ever been married?

  “Trust me. It had been so long since I’d been kissed like that. So long. I started to know then that I had to be careful. Because although it wasn’t then that I wanted to be with Mike, it was then that I wanted to be the me that Mike was then kissing. The young me. The desired me. The me that was desired because I was desirable.

  “I’d started to squirm by now. I couldn’t … you know … blah-diblah any longer or keep my legs still. Jesus, I wanted him, this man. Jesus, I did.

  “His finger by now was stroking my cheek, tracing a line across my chin, under it. Gently – Christ, so gently –, holding the back of my head as you would a baby’s, he lay me back on the bed. He stopped his kissing to look at me.

  “I didn’t know it, to begin with. I had my eyes closed. I just knew, suddenly he wasn’t kissing me any more. He had one hand on the nape of my neck, the other was still etching the line of my jawbone, but he’d stretched away from me. Panic. My smell was … you know … pretty la-la-la, you know. Had it turned him off?

  “Or maybe, Jesus, I had. Maybe he’d taken off those rose-tinted glasses, and suddenly I wasn’t lamb any more, but wizened and wrinkly old mutton. Stringy and rancid frigging mutton.

  “I flashed open my eyes. And there were his eyes blazing down at me, so full … well, of adoration, I guess. Does that sound incredibly vain? Well, shit, I feel a bit vain about it. Because it was adoration – not love, you understand – adoration. Adoration and desire.

  “You know what a turn-on it is to be desired? You know how hard it is not to desire someone who desires you? I was already on fire for the want of … da-di-dah … ‘sex’: there I said it! … now I was not only on fire with desire for him, but I’d climbed to that level of desire beyond fire, whatever the hell that is.

  “I pulled him to me. And I kissed him. Nothing delicate or gentle about that kiss, though. It was savage. I had to inflame him too. Conflagration is not a solitary activity. I pressed his mouth onto mine, gripped his head in some kind of arm-lock.

  “He’d climbed on top of me now. I could feel him beneath his pants. – His trousers, I guess I should say. – I bit into his lower lip. He winced. I wouldn’t release his head. I kissed the b
ite better. I half wanted there to be blood, so I could drink his blood. He was beginning now himself to whimper.

  “He was scraping his tongue over the top of my teeth. He was exploring within me, every crevice within me. The back of my teeth, the underside of my tongue. I was going to be allowed no secrets.

  “I didn’t care about my smell any longer. No, more than that: I started being turned on by my own smell. I could also now smell the perfume I’d put on for him. And his after-shave and shampoo. Even his deodorant. And now the musk exuding from him, that was becoming obvious too. It wasn’t unpleasant. To the contrary, even. But it was strange that it wasn’t unpleasant. There was nothing fragrant about it, nothing rose-buddy or bottled. Horses’ sweat, more, or sort of wet dog. Very animalistic. No, very primitive.

  “As language had become primitive. A few grunts, the odd snort or mewl or whimper. Nothing as tangible as words. Nothing, like words, which required the use of a mouth. Our mouths were too busy elsewhere.

  “Busy?! Frantic! Kissing, nibbling, licking. Lips, ears, neck, cheeks, nose. Chin. Forehead. Eyebrows, eyelids. Our hands on each other’s faces, recognising the other through touch, a blindman’s recognition. And an expert fingering a Dresden bowl. At one and the same time.

  “He was squirming now too. His hand left my jaw. It stroked my ear-lobe for a bit. And then, his nail lightly scratching my flesh, his hand eased over my neck, through my shoulders, down the side of my torso. At my breast he wavered.

  “Oh, it wasn’t, this, the wavering of uncertainty or immaturity. It was a deliberate teasing. He left his hand on the side of my breast, the merest whisper away from the object itself. And he crushed my breasts into his. He made me feel his hardness through his clothes, he wanted to feel my softness through mine.

  “My nipple, still protected by bra and blouse, was screaming for release. It wanted to feel his flesh. It wanted air, freedom. It wanted its own nakedness. And I wanted it to be naked.

  “His hand went to the clasp of my bra. ‘Here’s where it begins,’ I thought. ‘Here’s where the clumsiness begins.’ I don’t know how he did it, though, but he unclasped the bra in one movement and with one hand. And my breasts felt free. They were still covered by the cups, but there was no pressure now beneath them. Within them, there was pressure sufficient to fuel the whole Côte d’Azur, but … Panic again. Soon he’d see those breasts. There was not much more of hiding them from him.

  “I’d agonised over those breasts. For a solid fortnight I’d been gazing at them, coming out of the shower, changing into my night-clothes. They were a crone’s breasts, I’d decided, a hag’s. What did Shakespeare call them? ‘Dugs,’ was that it? ‘Dugs,’ I’m sure of it. Just as I was sure, Mike, he would not dig those dugs.

  “I was still squirming from passion, then, and from blah-di-blah, but (just for that moment) I started to squirm almost from … not embarrassment … shame, I guess. Isn’t it awful? I was ashamed of my own breasts. Now, I’m ashamed of having been ashamed of them.”

  +++

  Those beautiful breasts of yours. Those beautiful, beautiful breasts.

  Aureole, isn’t it, is a curious word? It means both that aura around an angel, and for the ring around the nipple. But suddenly, in that moment, not curious, Trove. Not at all curious. Your beautiful nipples embedded in those aureoles – pert nipples, sensitive ones, preening and stretching towards me: This was no earthly stuff, this was the fabric of angels.

  And, God, the first touch of those nipples, that was the carnality of gods. The sweetness of that touch, the glory of it, the nipples’ softness, such a contrast with, such a complement to, the callous skin of my finger-tips.

  That little groan of pleasure – I think it was pleasure! – when I first took that nipple – the left nipple – in my mouth. First felt that soft and spongy skin on my tongue.

  +++

  “He did a thing – I never told anyone about this! – later he did a thing on my back – I never did quite figure out what it was – it shot darts through me. Not altogether pleasurable, and yet hugely, enormously pleasurable. Kind of at one and the same time. Know what I mean? Well, the first time he blah-di-blahed on my … blah-di-blah … oh Christ, sucked on my breast … it was like that too. ‘Sucked’, did I say? Maybe suckled would have been closer to it. Oh, not in the cranky-baby way of a lot of guys – presumably who had comforters shoved in their mouth at an early age and who therefore think the human nipple can withstand the kind of gnashing of a rubberised one. Don’t laugh! You never had a man like that in your life? Sister, you have no idea how lucky you’ve been.

  “He didn’t even pounce on it. You know, the cheetah on the deer, kind of thing. He took it in his hand, let the … you know … nipple creep between each finger as he lightly nipped it. He took my whole breast in hand until just the nipple was showing through –in that hole, kind of thing, between thumb and index-finger. He stroked the outside of it, but he just gazed at the nipple. To begin with, I was disconcerted. It was as if it was, I don’t know, a specimen or something.

  “Then I looked at him. I saw that his eyes were now full, not of adoration, but of love. Oh, not for me. And not that kind of love. He was loving what he saw. He was … I don’t know … a snuff-box collector and what he had before him was the finest snuff-box he’d ever seen. It was that kind of love.

  “Do you know what that does for a girl’s ego? You know what kind of a turn-on that is? Don’t you agree? Me, that makes me more horny than three quarters of the annual supply of Uganda’s rhino horn. Hey, is that where ‘horny’ comes from, do you suppose? You know what I mean, hon?

  “He loved what he saw, Mike. Just loved it. And I was, as I said, well … gratified by his admiration. But I was also real embarrassed by it. You know what I mean? I mean, he was no mean catch himself, Mike. Not too hard on the eye, and to talk to … well, just easy-peasy. And here he was, gazing at my breasts, enchanted by them, knocked out by the goddamn things.

  “There was still a hot spring … you know, yadi-yadahing … there below, craving attention. I found myself straining towards him almost involuntarily. I was aching for release. I was yearning for … well, it didn’t matter what … but some contact, some touch. Just … you know.

  “But he was in no hurry. And there was another part of me not wanting him to be in any kind of a hurry. I just wanted to freeze him in time at that moment: looking at my breast like that, loving it, lusting after it, hankering and hungering for it.

  “I took his head in my hands, started stroking the hair above his ears, urging him downwards. Please to kiss it, to suck it – that breast he loved so much. ‘Oh, make it yours, my darling one. Consume it. Please kiss it, my darling. Please … oh please … oh please.’

  “His mouth eased into a little and impish grin. It was the naughty boy about to steal the cherry from his elder sister’s ice-cream sundae.

  “He leant down, kissed it. A quick peck. And then he pulled back.

  “Ten thousand volts tore through me. I think I did judder. I couldn’t help myself. I put my hands now behind his head. Pulled it down to my breast. My poor, aching, desperate breast.

  “As his mouth sealed over the nipple, it was as if someone had quenched a fire there. The relief was enormous.

  “He loves women, Mike. I’d suspected that of him, but I hadn’t realised just how much. He loves every bit of them, you see. Oh, I don’t flatter myself that’s only me. And so he relishes the feel of every part of a woman. Not just the naughty bits or the bits some biology teacher told him ninety years ago were ‘erogenous zones’ – makes them sound, doesn’t it, as if you need residents’ parking permits for them?

  “His left hand was tracing patterns all over my trunk, my butt, my outer thighs.

  “And his tongue was still dancing the light incredibly fantastic on … oh, on my nipple. And every time it darted over the top of it, another five thousand volts tore through the entire of me. It was like there was an electric eel slithering over my bre
ast. A beautiful eel, though. An angel eel.

  “My body was jerking all over the place, kept going almost into small spasm. Like an epileptic fit, almost.

  “And, like I say, some of it was not even pleasant. But it was alive. Shit, it was that, alright. Alive with a capital ‘A’.

  “I was alive. That was it. Responding and reacting like a live person. I was Pinocchio come to life. Well, Pinnochia, I guess. Very definitely, in fact, and very dah-di-dahly, Pinnochia.

  “That was when I became really scared. Because if I was alive then, that meant that I hadn’t been. Which, okay, didn’t mean that I had been dead – I knew I hadn’t been dead – but it did mean that I had been atrophying. I may not have been Lazarus – Lazara – but I was too close for comfort.

  “It made me fearful because those brought back to life tend to do stupid things around their saviours. Like fall in love with them and stuff. They also feel grateful to them.

  “Finally what made me fearful is that life is incredibly addictive. Get a little bit of it you just cannot wait to get more.”

  +++

  I had such a ******, it was getting painful. I was trying to be gentle, subtle. And I was also desperate to prolong the moment.

  +++

  “I just couldn’t stand it. I threw him off of me. Screw what he thought of my breasts. He’d have to see them sooner or later. I tore the blouse off of my back, let the bra just slide off. He was yanking now at my skirt. He’d unzipped it God knows when. It just slid from me. I couldn’t get his goddamn pants off. I’d undone the zipper, but … it was one of those pants you need a Masters in de-panting to get the suckers off. Which meant he had to take the frigging things off himself. Which meant he had to divert attention from my panties to his pants.

  “I just wrenched the knickers from me. And I squatted, panting, above him, like a dog slavering over a bone, as he manoeuvred out of his ridiculously complicated pants and then his undershorts.

  “I couldn’t wait.