“I want to be in you.”
“No. We can’t. Don’t worry, don’t worry.” She gripped me harder. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and slid it down the length of me. Gripped the base, and then pulled up.
“You’re bigger,” she whispered.
“No.”
“I think so. But maybe it’s just I…” she was probably going to say it had been a while since she’d made love with a man.
I felt suddenly annoyed, jealous, shy.
She moved up and down me, slowly, at the same pace I’d stroked her. I was trying not to come, trying to gather the courage to insist again that she let me enter her. But then she touched the side of my face and kissed me—lightly, like an infatuated stranger—and everything began to fall away. I felt myself coming without experiencing any real pleasure. I discharged a long unbroken ribbon of burning semen. It was shooting somewhere or other and then Jade turned my penis toward me and I felt the come against my belly, my biceps, my collarbone.
Now the pleasure, long moments after the release, seeped through me, honey from a broken jar.
“God,” Jade said, “you got it all over me.” She sounded vaguely pleased. She was still holding my cock. “But you’re still hard.”
“Yes,” I said. I was on my back; I thought of a patient waking in the middle of an operation.
“You’re still like that?” she said, letting go.
“I don’t know. I’m with you, that’s all.”
She sank into her pillow, letting out a sigh and drawing it around her like a curtain. She folded her pillow in half, drew her knees up. “We’ve got to sleep,” she said. “I’m so tired I can’t even follow my own thoughts. Really.”
Suddenly she slipped out of bed, gathered up her underwear and pajamas, and then got her travel bag and took it all into the bathroom. I lay there for a moment wondering what to do with the come that was all over me, but then I sprang up and before I could think my hand was on the bathroom door.
I turned it. Unlocked. I threw it open.
Jade had the tops of her pajamas draped over her shoulders. She held a rectangular sanitary napkin and her underwear. She stood with her thighs pressed together and her pubic hair grew out in long fern-like curls.
“This is it?” I said softly. I touched the door, to show I hadn’t meant to make the frightening noise.
“What.”
“We can’t do this,” I said. “I should have stayed on the floor. No. You should have stayed in the lobby, or caught your bus. We can’t have this be the way we get back together. Jerking each other off? I can’t do that.”
She held her pajama bottoms in front of her. In the watery glare of the bathroom light I saw they were orange.
“We were just helping each other, David. Like old friends.”
“Helping each other what. Go to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to be with you. It’s been a while, right? It’s been a long goddamned while.”
“I couldn’t sleep and I need to,” said Jade. “Think of me for a change.”
“I do think of you. All the time.”
“I wonder.”
“No, you don’t. You know I do.”
“I want to end this day, David. I want to pull the plug and let it all go down the drain.”
“We’re naked together,” I said. I stepped forward, reached for her. My cock was absolutely erect. I remembered there was come all over my belly. Too bad. I reached for Jade’s hand and got her wrist. The gesture seemed much too aggressive. Only her coming toward me, throwing her arms around me could have salvaged it.
“Please,” I said. “Come back to bed. Don’t put your clothes back on. Don’t go to sleep yet. Be with me.”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
I put my arms around her, kissed her hair, her forehead, the sides of her face. They were the most adulterated of all my embraces: I wanted to make her want me. I pressed myself against her, some distant surviving remnant of mating ritual. I presented myself to her.
“Go into bed,” she said, as I tried to kiss her mouth. She put her lips onto mine, briefly. “I feel like you’re forcing things. I want to think.”
“Come with me,” I said.
“In a minute. I’m scattered all over the place.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. My knees puckered with impatience.
“In a minute. Just let me think. I want to decide. OK?” She moved out of my embrace, back a step.
I got into bed and turned on the lamp. I waited for Jade, but I don’t know how long. It seemed like quite a while but there’s no reason to trust myself in this. It could have been thirty seconds. It was its own time, separate, like the inestimable durations of dreams. I was at the bathroom door again, having spliced away those instants of consciousness I would have used for reflection. I opened the door carefully. Jade, naked, sat on the edge of the undersized tub, her head in her hands, weeping.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m afraid of you. I’ve got too much to feel right now. I can’t let myself go too far.”
She looked up at me. There were white fingerprints on her face.
I thought: We must be out of our minds. Haven’t seen each other in years. Standing naked in a hotel toilet, weeping, shivering, cock pointed straight up.
“It’s all right,” I said. “We can just go to sleep.” I stepped forward, put my hand out to her. She took it, brought it to her moist, flushed face.
“I have this voice in me,” Jade said, “and it’s a very small, simple voice. It keeps on saying, ‘My daddy’s dead.’ It doesn’t even sound like my voice. I never called him Daddy.” Her voice broke; she tried to smile but that broke too. “And I keep thinking of Keith and Sammy and what they’re going through. And Ann, too, damn it. Ann, too. All of them are with me and I can’t handle it. I’ve done everything to get out of this family and the smaller we get, the more I’m in it.” She paused, covered her eyes. “I just wish my father were still alive,” she said, sobbing.
I brought her to bed and kept my arms around her. She was trying not to cry. I could feel her impatience with herself, her exhaustion with her own grief. Soon she was quiet.
“I wonder what time it is,” she said, just when I was wondering—with a certain dread—if she’d fallen asleep.
“I don’t know. Late, I guess.” My arm was beneath her shoulder and it had fallen asleep but nothing could have made me want to move it.
“Everyone knows all about you, you know,” Jade said.
“Who?”
“Everyone I know. I tell everyone about you. What it was like for us. You know, stories about the house and Chicago and being like we were.”
“I don’t know that many people,” I said.
“Everyone in Stoughton knows you. I’ll bet—well, you look a little different but not that much—I’ll bet if you walked across campus, all by yourself, a lot of people would know you were you.”
“Honestly?”
“And I don’t have pictures or anything. It’s all from talk. Sheer description. I talk about you and remember, and when I want to I let myself feel what it was like to be me with you. But God, David, this is something I never thought would happen. It just never seemed like it could. Even when I was in the elevator coming up here, I didn’t believe I’d actually see you. Do you know what I mean?”
“But I saw you yesterday.”
“A dream. So fast, then poof. It didn’t count. It seemed impossible to be with you ever again. And wrong.”
“It’s not, though,” I said. “It’s really not. I don’t know why it’s been so hard for us, everything going so wrong all the time. But I know we can’t turn back. That’s true. I’m sure of it. Whatever is being put in front of us, we have to walk through it.”
“Everything’s so different,” Jade said.
I didn’t know what to say. Jade didn’t say anything and the silence continued. J
ade took the lamp off the table and placed it on the floor, still burning. It toppled over and threw long flat shadows across the room like railroad tracks.
A little later, Jade sat up and pulled her Tampax out and dropped it beneath the bed. I stayed on what had become my side of the bed and she sidled next to me, pressing herself against my hip and squeezing my chest as if I had breasts. For some reason I tried to lift myself on my elbows but she pushed my shoulder to make me lie flat. She seemed to be looking down at me from an enormous height.
“I want to do this,” she whispered. “But I don’t want it to…” she trailed off.
“It’ll mean whatever it means,” I said. I reached up for her.
“Or nothing. It’s just this night. Seeing you again on top of everything else. I don’t want us to hurt each other, David.”
I knew I didn’t much care if we hurt each other. No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her. But I didn’t want to frighten her away. I nodded.
We kissed and stroked each other for a while. Jade straddled me and I thrust up to enter her, but missed. She took hold of me and guided me in. She felt a little dry and her discharge was thick, viscous—the result of her period, the blood mixed with her normal secretions. She winced as I entered her—it’s awful, really, how stirring men find those small signs of pain. She lifted herself up a little and I popped loose of her. She came back down until the knobby bones of our hips touched and the bow-shaped curve of my cock pressed into the cushy heart of her genitals, sinking until it hit a ridge of cartilage. I pressed her at the small of her back; her hips were locked around mine now and I felt her pubic hair brushing against me, as soft as breath on my belly. I pulled her down, made her bend from the waist and crushed our chests together.
I whispered her name and when she didn’t respond I felt a moment’s panic.
I held her face and kissed her mouth. Her tongue felt huge, soft, and unbearably alive in my mouth. I breathed her breath. It was the night’s first real kiss. Precise, enormous.
She was up on her knees, her small breasts dangling a little, the light on the floor illuminating each strand of down. I put my hand between her thighs and cupped her vagina and Jade opened herself to me, posing for my fingers. She was open at her center and it was at least ten degrees warmer there.
Then, suddenly, I was inside her. I would have wanted to stop, to absorb the moment. She was straddling me, her hands on either side of my head, her forehead pressed against mine. She moved slowly, with her eyes screwed tightly shut, until I was all the way inside of her, and then she rocked back and forth, pressing herself against me with such huge power that I thought I might cry out. Yet it was not pain, of course—the intention of her pressure was specifically sexual and so potentially ecstatic that my nerve ends could only disregard their habits of response. The power with which she ground herself against me was awesome; it was all I really felt. I could sense the division in her genitals yet I could feel myself inside her only indistinctly.
To keep her balance, Jade planted the heel of her hand in a wedge of soft muscles beneath my shoulder. I felt surrounded by a membrane of pleasure, a huge, incandescent cocoon, brilliant and opaque for the most part but diaphanous at this curve or that. And through those patches of pleasure from which the color had somehow drained, I was intermittently aware of the shadows on the wall, the creak of the bedsprings, the peevish nuzzle of one prominent mattress button. Then, like a slowly revolving dome, the pleasure surrounded me in all of its opacity and I was lost again.
I was covered in sweat; my muscles ached as if knotted by fever. Someone somewhere in the hotel flushed a toilet and the sound roared through the thicket of my senses.
Jade moved back and forth, back and forth. I could tell she was not altogether with me. I’d never remembered, never thought of making love as something so private. The only commitment was one of need, but it seemed to stop there.
Jade kept one hand on me to hold her balance and placed her free hand on her belly. I noticed it dimly and wondered if she were in pain—a menstrual spasm, perhaps. But her hand slipped down, led by her extended index finger, and headed straight for her clitoris, lodging itself in that small space that existed between my pudendum and hers. She stroked herself with a rapid, circular motion while she raised and lowered herself on me. It seemed devastatingly expert of her. I could imagine it diagrammed in a book, explained at a symposium. Perhaps that sounds humorous, but it wasn’t at the time. Her up and down motions were steady but incomplete: she had somehow calculated the degree of withdrawal and repenetration that best accompanied her finger’s masturbatory spiral.
She was even too expert to forget me. She fixed her eyes on mine for a moment and then closed them, as if in a swoon. She bent low to touch my face with her lips—so dry, as if she were lost in a sexual desert and my face was only a mirage. But she did kiss me, and when I captured her retreating mouth with my own kiss she lingered, breathing the air out of my lungs and exhaling into me the pungent blend of our combined redolence—the flat red wine, the long night, and the radiation of our nervous systems.
The dome of pleasure my senses had crouched beneath was no less opaque but it seemed to have risen: it no longer enveloped me like a blanket but now sheltered like a tent. I could feel my own orgasm moving within me but it would suddenly dart in some new direction, like a fish hiding within a coral reef.
When her climax came—and it appeared suddenly, like an accident—Jade trembled and made a high whinny, as if in distress. Then she was absolutely still, like a startled animal etched in the brightening beam of speeding headlights. Her mouth was open; it seemed as if she might drool but she closed her lips and lifted her chin, breathing out so heavily that her belly swelled and made her look pregnant for a moment.
Of course when you love someone it is a tireless passion to experience their pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. Of all the many perversions, the one I found myself most capable of succumbing to was voyeurism—as long as the object of my voyeurism was Jade. I never failed to be moved by her expressions of sexual pleasure. When we were first learning to make love and I had some trouble in controlling myself, she had to be careful to keep as quiet as possible. Even heavy breathing would speed my climax, not to even mention moans. Later in our life together, when we were making love three, four, and five times a night (for our passion grew with our prowess), Jade would sometimes become impatient for my final orgasm—which would come with more difficulty than hers, because of the natural differences between the genders—and to bring us safely home so we both might fall asleep she would feign groans of pleasure with her lips right next to my ear, or say my name. It wouldn’t really take anything more than that.
And so it was that night. As soon as her body began to jerk and shudder in response to her climax, I found myself astoundingly moved—as if by choral music that surprises you, or a kiss from behind bestowed by your lover on tiptoes. Jade let out her high keening call and I felt an abrupt rush of my semen, racing through me like twin rivers, turning with an acidic twist but not slowing down. I grabbed hold of her back, instinctually afraid she might leave me, and I arched myself toward her as I came. I could sense my pleasure passing through me almost unnoticed and I tried to fix my entire concentration on it. A perceptual lunge—like trying to discover the silver arc of a shooting star whose dive through the sky you’ve just caught out of the corner of your eye. When Jade felt the blurry warmth of my climax, she moved up a little and tightened herself for a slow, deliberate slide down. Whatever semen I had surrendered at the coaxing of Jade’s fingers had left a prodigious storehouse behind—almost a creepy abundance. My scrotum, feet, hands went icy cold and my mouth—moments before filled with the slosh of desire—was dry as a wafer. My muscles were collapsing, my lungs shriveled like burst balloons, but I continued to come.
Jade looked down at me. Smiled. Her eyes were glassy, indistinct, like someone who has breathed in smoke. A burning
room. She was about to say something but she didn’t. She leaned forward until I was no longer inside her and then she was flat out beside me. She was breathing deep, easy breaths and I suppose I was too, but the silence between us was troublesome, dangerous. It lay coiled like a sleeping cat, graceful in its way but liable to claw if stroked indelicately. I could feel Jade considering and rejecting possible things to say. Her leg touched mine but then moved away. She sighed: relaxed, slightly pleased.
I began to plunge into the static blackness of sleep, like someone who is staggering along and walks into a ditch. But I pulled myself short, dug my nails into my palm.
Jade reached down and switched off the fallen table lamp.
Finally, she broke the silence: “My bones feel like lead.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. I had prodded myself into a state of wakefulness and I was just realizing how furious I was. Then I whispered, “That was the first time I made love since the last time I was with you, you know.”
“Amazing,” she said, rather quickly.
“Why?” Because it’s so pointless? Because you’ve made love so many thousand times since?
“Because you’re so good.” She stretched her body and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Propaganda for sleep. Getting me used to the idea; pointing everything toward it. It was how my parents used to put me to bed. Arthur would check the time. Eight o’clock and both of them would break into extravagant yawns…
“Good? “I said.
“Yes.” She seemed to regret bringing it up.
“That’s funny,” I said. “I didn’t feel like I had much to do with it. Where’d you ever learn to do that?”
“Do what?” There was a real edge on her voice now.
“That thing with your hand. You were making love to yourself, weren’t you?”
“Oh God, David,” Jade said in an older sister accent.
“Well, weren’t you?” I loathed my voice. Consciousness roamed the circumference of my brain, turning like a lighthouse beam, stopping here and there when a dense patch of darkness threatened to swallow the light, extinguish it. Unexpectedly, I found myself wading through that stream of unconnected images that surrounds the heart of sleep like the rings of Saturn. I had only a slight hold on myself and I realized that Jade must be in much worse shape: it wouldn’t take all that much to have us screaming at each other. “You weren’t making love to me. You were just fingering yourself, for Christ’s sake.”
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