Fear Itself

by Duffy Prendergast

  “Nothing you could say could keep me from wanting you lover.” She whispered. She was seated directly across from where I was standing and she uncrossed her legs and lifted her skirt and smiled seductively before re- crossing her legs.

  After dinner we watched an old movie until Sarah fell asleep. Then we retired to the bedroom where Amber had her clothes off before I could close and latch the door.

  “Now tell me what’s so important that it can’t wait until after I fuck your brains out Mathew.” She laid down across the end of the bed with her head hanging down over the side and her hair dangling down touching the floor, the weight of her breasts flattening them to the sides so that they looked swollen in comparison to her areolas, and her tanned slender torso reached out across to the center of the bed where her lithe legs were divided by the accented “V” of her crotch, that with her legs crossed, concealed her more sensitive parts, and she pulled me to her, “You talk and I’ll play.” She said.

  “I slept with Melanie.”

  She let me slip slowly from her grasp and then she sat up abruptly and spun herself around until she was sitting Indian style with her legs open and her feet pressed together.

  “You what?”

  “I knew you’d be pissed.” I took a step backwards.

  “Pissed! Darling I’m ecstatic! That’s wonderful.” She seemed genuinely pleased.

  “Why is that wonderful? She’s your best friend. I’ve been feeling like shit all day.” “How was she?”

  “She was okay.” I said cautiously trying to keep private the intimacy that Melanie had shared with me.

  “Well she’s a little rusty you know. She hasn’t slept with a man in a few years, and that doesn’t really count unless you call being raped by her father as sleeping with a man.” She stood up and stepped toward me, empowered by her own brashness, and started to unbutton my shirt, “You have to tell me everything. How did she taste?” her tongue seemed to stick on the tail end of the word taste.

  “What?”

  She pulled me close to her by the collar of my tee-shirt so that our lips were almost touching, “How–did–she–taste?”

  “Fine.” I whispered, feeling threatened. “Did she cum for you?”

  “Yes. I mean I think so.” I still wasn’t sure if I was answering correctly. I felt as though I were confessing my sins to a priest. “She tastes wonderful doesn’t she?” she purred.

  “Is shhhe the one?” I stuttered. I knew that Amber had had a female lover at one point and I thought it might have been Melanie, but she had never said so.

  “Yes. And if you want in on a little secret,” she let loose my collar and pulled my shirt up over my head, “she’s like an ever- lasting-gob-stopper. You can eat her for hours.” I could tell that Amber was reliving the moment in her mind, “If you go down on me for five minutes I’d have to put you through a wall. I’m much too sensitive down there.”

  “That explains a lot.”

  “What does?” She seemed to misunderstand my meaning. She thought that I was referring to her sensitivity when I was still focused on what she had said about my being Melanie’s first lover. Amber unbuckled my trousers and pulled them to my ankles along with my boxers and she turned me around and shoved me backwards on the bed so that my feet were still touching the floor.

  I hesitated, fearing that I was disclosing too much; exposing Melanie to Amber’s critical eyes, “She said that she wants exclusive rights.”

  “To what?” she kneeled down on the floor in front of me and then leaned forward.

  “Exclusive rights to me.” I cringed as I said this.

  “You told her no, right?” then she raised herself up and leaned over me and wrapped her teeth around my penis and she bit down on me playfully, “Right?” she said the head of my prick suspended against the insides of her teeth.

  “I sort of,” I gasped as she sank her teeth in a little deeper, “Yes!” I said and she loosened her teeth and consumed me and I felt the tickle of her uvula as she suspended me there in her throat, her teeth once again gouging my flesh, like a cat finishing a kill, until I was near my limit, then she slid her mouth from me. “There now, you’re ready.” She pushed me backwards onto the bed and then slid her long blond hair up over my body as she crawled atop me until we were nose-to-nose, “You tell her that I’ll share you with her, but that’s it.” She lowered herself ever-so-slowly, the iris’s of her eyes rising up into her head as if she were watching a movie on the inside of her eyelids, “She can even join us if she likes, ooohh.” She rocked softly, stirring herself like a martini, “But I’ll be damned if she’s going to keep you to herself.”

  She rocked herself up and down upon me gently for a long while, finished with her verbal foreplay, undulating, losing herself in the bliss of our carnal act, and then, like a kitten playing with its prey, she held her pose buried deep against the throbbing epicenter of the storm, her face rippling with expression, until she fell upon my chest as though released from an invisible set of chains. She, like a man, was as prideful in the dispensation of pleasure as she was greedy in the reception of it.

  After Amber had finished her slow dance of enchantment she fell back onto the bed, adjusting her body so that we were close but not touching.

  “She’s infatuated.” She said breathing a little heavy as though she had been running, “You’re the first man she’s ever had. She had been sleeping with only women until you came along. She’ll get over it.”

  “She said she’s going to quit stripping.” “She didn’t!” Amber turned her head to face me with a doubtful but surprised expression.

  “Yes.” I swallowed feeling a lump swell in my throat, “That was sort of my fault though.”

  “Why? What did you say to her?” she smiled, intrigued.

  “I told her that I was the jealous type.” Amber laughed out loud,

  “What?” I smiled, “I am. Besides, I thought it would make her back off a little.” “Don’t be funny lover. I go home to my husband for a week at a time and see you only on the weekends. Are you jealous of my husband?”

  “A little.” I said with indignation.

  “You know what the solution is, don’t you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ll get Melanie to join us. It’ll be a ball. The three of us! The things we could do to each other.” She grinned and her eyes grew a little distant as if she were visualizing the three of us together.

  I gave her a disbelieving frown. “Why not?”

  “She’s infatuated. She’s in love. She said she’s been hoping that we’d sleep together since I moved in with her. I mean she wants me to dump you to be with her. I don’t think she’d be willing to share me, especially if as you say I’m the first man she’s been with.”

  “You won’t know unless you ask.”

  “If I ask her she’ll be insulted. She wanted me to break it off with you tonight.”

  “Well we just tore one off…that’s not quite the same thing, is it?” she smiled her Beautiful playful full-tooth smile.

  At that moment guilt overcame me. I had agreed to fight for my freedom, and for Melanie, and yet I had folded like a monopoly- board at Amber’s first intimidation. I felt ashamed of myself for letting myself be bullied and for failing to defend the position of Melanie.

  “She’s a sweet kid. I don’t want to hurt her.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means…” I was trying to be delicate,

  “It means that maybe we shouldn’t see each other…intimately anymore.” I cringed in anticipation to her response.

  “Well that’s not your choice to make, now is it?” She reached down and cupped my genitals in her open hand and squeezed until I gasped.

  “Okay…I get it…I get it…let up already.” She loosed her grip, “I only meant that you’re not going to leave your husband for me.” She rolled her eyes. “And our relationship has become purely sexual. I need something more fulfilling. I want someone
who is going to be there in the morning. I want someone who is going to be there for me…all the time.”

  “It seems to me that you have it pretty good. You have every man’s dream. You get your brains fucked out every weekend, no strings attached.” She squeezed me and played with me as she spoke. “Most men would kill for what you have.”

  “Well it’s not enough for me anymore.” I made my voice sound firm pretending not to take notice of her reference to my precarious position. “What I mean is…”

  “What you mean is you don’t want to stop fucking Melanie.” Her voice was playful now, trying to steer our conversation in a more mischievous direction to avoid the impending confrontation and to get on with her weekend copulation. “I bet she was tight huh?” she grinned.

  “I was drunk.” I didn’t feel comfortable talking about Melanie and I hoped my curt answer would convey this message. I felt as though I were violating Melanie’s trust. Melanie wasn’t dirty like Amber; dirty like I felt that I was. I felt as though I had symbolically taken Melanie’s virginity and I saw symmetry with her and Catherine, I having literally taken Catherine’s virginity.

  “That’s not something you’d forget even if you were drunk. Was she tight, lover?” Her grin grew into a demanding sneer.

  “Yes.”

  “Like fucking a little girl?”

  “I wouldn’t know!” I said crossly as I turned and looked up at the crack in the ceiling. “Sorry! Did I touch a nerve?”

  “It’s all right.” I sighed.

  She propped herself up on her elbow. “Are you ready to go again? I have to leave early tonight.” She sounded so practical; so antiseptic; like the time when Catherine and I were trying to make a baby and we had to screw on a schedule to increase our odds of impregnation. It took the intimacy out of sex, not that there was any intimacy anymore in the acts that Amber and I performed. Where at first she came to me at night to sleep with me, and at least in my mind to make love to me, she now came to fuck me; to get her rocks off; to take her orgasm as from a restaurant menu, to choose her desired positions: appetizer, entrée and dessert.

  I answered with my silence. I didn’t want to have sex with Amber anymore. I felt vile for having given in to her pressure and at having included Melanie in our dirty sexual banter. I was also disgusted with myself for being the passive submissive. I was the blackmailed man-whore serving the satanic bitch who held my life in her hands. I wondered how I could ever have taken Amber for the sweet misunderstood housewife. She was cheating on her husband just as Catherine had cheated on me. She was no good, but she had a hold over me and for the first time since I had come to Kansas she had clarified our roles; had all but stated her position of power over me. For the first time since I had slept with her I felt cornered…like a mouse.

  “Well lover, are we gonna fuck or what?”

  * * *

  I changed the bed sheets and sprayed air freshener in my bedroom before I climbed into the tiny tub and tried to wash Amber’s musky balm from my body as I bathed in the stubby tub filled with scalding hot water. I may have been paranoid but I couldn’t seem to escape Amber’s tincture and I new that Melanie would be stopping by to see how Amber had taken the news. I was such a coward. I wanted my freedom but I was willing to settle for tranquility. Not that I necessarily felt that I was ready to commit to Melanie; but I felt trapped, like a ping-pong ball being batted in an unending volley.

  I heard the kitchen door open and close followed by soft footfalls and then the bathroom door opened.

  “Can I join you?” Melanie said with a teasing tone.

  “Sure there’s room on the spigot.”

  She kneeled down next to the tub and then reached into the water. “Yes, there is room on the spigot.” She leaned into me and kissed me prying my lips apart with her tongue. Our kiss lingered for a moment before she released my lips.

  “You’re going to get wet.”

  “I hope so.” She stood up and grabbed a towel from the chrome-plated towel rack that was slowly pulling away from the yellow plastic wall tiles and she held it open for me as I stood.

  “How did Amber take the news?”

  I drew a breath and toweled myself dry, “She didn’t take it at all.” I said dejectedly.

  “What do you mean?” Melanie’s voice carried a mixture of agitation and deflation.

  “I mean she refuses to give me up.” I looked Melanie in the eyes so that she could see in my eyes that I felt helpless.

  “It isn’t her decision. It’s yours.” She crossed her arms.

  “If you’ll remember, she has something on me.” I draped the towel around my waist and tied it at the side, “I’m not saying that she would turn me in, but the truth is she might. She made it quite clear that it was not my decision to make. I can’t be with anyone if I’m in jail. I can’t take care of Sarah if I’m in jail.” My voice was as of a child pleading for mercy.

  “What did she say about us?”

  “She was happy for us. She wished us much sex and happiness. She wants us to have a little orgy with her.”

  “That cunt!”

  “Well you did sleep with her before didn’t you?” I knew it was a low dig but I wanted to put things into perspective.

  Her eyes widened in surprise. I could tell that she felt betrayed by Amber for revealing such a private tidbit; and she felt stung by me for saying it.

  “That’s what she said anyway.”

  She turned away, her face filled with disgust, and walked slowly and broodingly toward the kitchen but I ran, dripping a trail of water behind me, and caught up with her midway to the door and grabbed her by the arm and turned her toward me. I looked into her pretty green eyes and found not a stripper but an injured child. She was willing to strip in front of men, but at heart she was an innocent. She was a victim. I felt a close connection with her. She really had fallen for me. She had been sitting back quietly while she watched Amber come and go and all the while she had been waiting for me to put aside playful things and come to her. I was both flattered at the level of her commitment and warmed that someone so young and Beautiful could feel a genuine love for a wretch like me. I was twenty years older than she. I was an accused murderer with no real prospects and yet she wanted me. And I found, in that moment, that I wanted her too.

  “I’m just telling you what she said. Please don’t be upset with me. I’m a little trapped here.” I suddenly longed to have her warm body next to mine for the night. At that moment Melanie reminded me of Catherine in the way that she had exposed her vulnerability to me. And I was a romantic at heart. I wanted and needed her love and comfort and understanding, and I wanted to give her the same.

  I tugged her hand but she pulled it away, “You’re playing me.”

  I turned to her again and held her hands, and spoke softly, “I don’t know where we’re headed. My life is a complete train wreck right now, and I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I’m not playing with you.” I drew a deep sigh, “I would like to be with you tonight. I would like to take it slow and see where this leads if you still want to be with me. I don’t have any control over the rest. All I can tell you is that Amber means nothing to me anymore. You, on the other hand, mean a great deal to me.”

  She studied my eyes for a moment and then she pulled herself to me and kissed me. I led her to my bedroom and closed and latched the door and I made gentle love, for the first time in my life, with someone besides Catherine. And afterwards we spooned and I cupped her breast in my hand and I slept peacefully for the first time since the night Catherine died.

  11

  For the next few months Melanie spent her nights with me, except on the evenings when Amber would stop by for her sexual servicing. Amber would call me after work on a Friday or early in the day on a Saturday and she would inform me of what time she would be arriving. She never came out and directly coerced me but whenever I would make an excuse as to why I could not keep my appointment with her she would retort with a veiled threat such
as: I don’t think that would be wise of you, or more directly, That detective Bergant called me again today looking for you. Do you think we should invite him to share our bed?, and I would ultimately capitulate

  I must admit that at first I was a little confused at Amber’s obsession with me; at her unwillingness to relinquish control over me. I was nothing special. I’m sure that I was an adequate lover and I was by no means hideous, but I am equally as sure that given Amber’s firm young body, her long alluring blond locks and her undisputable beauty, that she could have slept with any man she wished if she had plied her wares publicly; but upon reconsideration I think she got off sexually on the whole power trip. She just seemed to enjoy the manipulation. She had, in her mind, a sexual slave in me whom she controlled under the guised threat of incarceration. Her orgasms were no doubt heightened with each session in which I acquiesced to her primal demands. She grew bolder towards the end as she brought sexual toys to spice up her play. On the last night that we spent together, at my most degraded moment and despite my fervent protest, she tethered me to the bed with my own neckties (the only four I had). Then she pulled out a strap-on dildo and dangled it in front of me while I shook my head from side to side (my mouth was gagged) then she strapped the device to her body and she raped me while I cried like a little baby begging her to stop with every violent thrust of the un-lubricated plastic prosthesis. Had I known what she had in mind

  I never would have let her tie me up. I was so humiliated that I never confessed the violation to anyone, not even to Melanie.

  By that time Melanie had all but moved in with me. She had quit stripping altogether and she lived off of her apparently vast savings and she spent her time with Sarah shopping and cooking and cleaning for me. During this time she experienced a strange but understandable emotional pattern in which she would be sweet and loving at the beginning of the week but would day by day grow listless and finally she would become malicious towards me only to become loving and sweet all over again, overnight, in the early part of the week. Beginning Sunday morning Melanie was as sweet to me as a girl could be going out of her way to do the little things to show me that she loved me, like baking chocolate-chip cookies, my favorite, or stopping out at my jobsite with a thermos full of hot coffee, or by simply making love to me in the most tender fashion. But as the weekend approached, knowing that Amber would soon be calling, Melanie would become agitated and short tempered. How could I blame her? For all she knew I was enjoying the sexual sessions with Amber. That is not to say that I deny experiencing orgasms with Amber; I did, but at what price? I was a victim. I had been systematically raped and sexually abused much as she had been as a child. But Melanie probably thought that given our history of a years worth of titillating phone conversations that I actually looked forward to being Amber’s subject. Nothing could have been further from the truth.