Genevieve

by Eric Jerome Dickey

  She growls. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.”

  She is there, leg trembling then straining, grabbing sheets, eyes tight, biting her lips. Her vagina so wet, so hot, so alive. I kiss her humid skin, bite her, hold her backside, my own inner fire consuming me, taking me closer to nirvana. But I control my orgasm, make it slow, let it burn.

  Her body tenses, jerks. Her whines tell me that she’s coming again.

  “Don’t stop hurt me don’t stop fuck me hurts so good so good harder fuck me.”

  Her moans and groans and guttural sounds are loud enough to wake the dead.

  That excites me more. We are connected from the souls out to our skin.

  Her back arches and tears river from her eyes.

  She shudders and sings my accolades, makes more vocal sounds than I can count.

  Another orgasm heats her skin, makes her chant for me to not stop.

  I stroke her harder, struggle to catch my breath, but I don’t stop, clamp my hand over her mouth to muffle the sounds, still the echoes of our sin refuse to let her stop coming.

  She comes again.

  My orgasm rolls through me in waves, so strong, feel the muscles move under my skin, so much heat, I stroke and float, strain, close my eyes and experience phantasmagoria.

  My orgasm reverberates.

  Then we are done.

  ***

  Kenya takes one hard breath after another, wipes her eyes, clears her throat, finds the strength to shift me away from her. My skin slides across hers. We breathe out of sync.

  I can’t move. Out of breath. Legs are numb. Heart is fluttering. Brain is Jell-O.

  Time stands in the corner, shaking its head before finally walking toward the future.

  Kenya finally rises on one elbow. Her hair looks insane. Her expression, worn.

  She drags away from me, her breathing as hot as the sun, as silent as sin. She gets up, legs wobbly, and runs into a wall. She shakes her head and staggers away. I hear her in the bathroom, water running, cleaning herself. She comes back with a towel, cleans me, then takes the towel back into the bathroom. She returns, sits on the bed. I want to go, but I do not know the etiquette for departing after a moment such as this. I want to leave, but I want to wait for the right moment. Leaving too soon could offend her. Offending her could be my demise.

  So I stay.

  Insanity evaporates with my drying sweat. Reality storms into the room.

  I ask, “What now?”

  “Feeling guilty?”

  “Concerned.”

  “Because I have nothing to lose and you have everything to lose.”

  “Maybe. Because Genevieve deserves better than… than this.”

  She moves across the room, her steps still wobbly, opens her purse, puts a cigarette to her lips. Then her Zippo lights up her face as smoke plumes around her satiated expression.

  I say, “It’s a nonsmoking room.”

  “I know.”

  “This room is in your sister’s name.”

  “Now you care about Sister. I see.”

  “Those things kill.”

  “So do crazy men.”

  “Not going to argue with you.”

  “Been smoking off and on since I was thirteen.” She inhales and blows smoke out the side of her mouth. More wobbly steps across the room. “Stress relief, relaxes me, keeps me from stress eating. A model can’t eat when she wants to. Have to smoke and imagine eating.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And not to mention my oral fixation.”

  Silence while she finishes her smoke. Her eyes come to me.

  “You love Sister?”

  “Yes.”

  She asks, “Why did you fuck me?”

  Her severe tone stills my heart, puts cotton in my mouth.

  She moves away from me.

  She repeats, “Why did you fuck me?”

  I shiver.

  She is analyzing me. Analysis is condemnation. She judges me without judging herself, the kind of woman who looks out the window and never in the mirror. She gives herself an ambiguous victory while she gives me a vague defeat.

  She repeats her question.

  I refuse to defend my desires, what has been done can’t be undone, would rather understand than judge. It is part of my own personal struggle, the struggle to become a person, to understand the injustice of life. I’m a carbon-based life-form made of mostly water, affected by the moon’s gravitational pull, influenced by the energy of all other beings. I’m addicted to something, something beyond carnality, something I have to have to survive. I fear abandonment. That fear causes me to cling, but not in a suffocating way. I have to be loved in the physical and the spiritual. Not by many women, just one who can give and receive on the same level as I.

  I say, “We’re complicated creatures.”

  “More.” Then she smiles. “Give me some more of that intellectual mumbo jumbo.”

  “Our emotions and needs are more than black and white.”

  Her smile widens; a vixen in control. “Uh-huh.”

  “So many shades of gray cover the human soul.”

  She comes back to me, her smile now gone. I am her defense mechanism, her way of avoiding something deep inside herself. She watches me consult my feelings. I want to be more than I am at this moment, but I have become less. As always the rainbow is more beautiful than the pot at the end. I feel like a failure. A rat in a laboratory experiment, its end predetermined.

  I ask, “You think I’m a bad person?”

  “You fucked me very well. Thought that you wouldn’t be good in bed.”

  “It was nice.”

  “No, that was incredible. You fucked me like you were trying to claim this pussy. Haven’t been fucked like that in a long time. I’m going to hate you for that. Fucking like that, the way you move, bet you could make me come if I were in a coma. I came like that and I was nervous.”

  “Couldn’t tell, not the way you opened the door.”

  “You have the perfect dick. Nice girth. And long. You sure know how to use it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was a shock to my system to have that big dick inside of me. I wanted you very much. Didn’t you feel how wet I was? Unbelievable. I came the first time with you. I’ve never come the first time with any man. We’re in alignment, our bodies.” She takes a breath, pulls at her wild hair. “Never been with a smart man. Not your kind of smart. Maybe that’s what’s been missing.”

  My weakness magnifies, the desire to touch her again grows.

  She sees what I cannot deny.

  She puts her cigarette down, comes over, mounts me, moves up and down.

  She rides me, shakes her head, swallows. “God, you fill me up. And you hit my spot.”

  I rise and moan.

  She tells me, “Don’t come again.”

  I don’t question her, just catch my breath and hold onto her. She moves up and down in slow motion, with smoothness, her vagina so tight around my penis, as gripping as a handshake between boardroom adversaries. She rises and falls in a slow motion. Her breasts come to my mouth. I suck her nipples. Breathing stutters. Toes curl. Eyes close tight. I drown in pleasure.

  She moans. “Your body is so beautiful.”

  Her mouth covers mine. She gives me her tongue ring. I suck it over and over.

  She says, “I’m really gonna hate you for making me feel like this.”

  She kisses me for a long time.

  She tells me, “Open your eyes.”

  Even that simple act seems impossible, but I do. She is sweaty and beautiful.

  She smiles, moves up and down as she whispers, “What’s all that noise you’re making?”

  I struggle with my breathing, no longer in control of the orgasmic sounds I make. I take her breasts in my hands, clutch as if they are the preservers to keep me from going under.

  She says, “That’s it, squeeze my nipples… yes, yes… I’m about to… ooooo.”

  I watch her find her way through the ga
tes of nirvana. Her legs tense, she strains, eyes tighten. I wonder if it’s possible for her to come with her eyes open. The sensation hits her hard. She curses, jerks in waves. So remarkable and orgasmic that it astounds and intimidates me.

  She catches her breath. “Did you?”

  The fluid way she dances steals my breath, can only slap her butt twice and moan.

  She reminds me, “Don’t.”

  “Don’t come?”

  “No. Don’t get me sprung.”

  She rides me, gives me agony to prove a point, that she refuses to be dominated.

  She closes her eyes, bites her lips, flesh slapping as she rises and falls with enough passion to make the bed speak in tongues, then she whines and comes again, comes hard, then falls away from me. I catch my breath while she does the same. Again she wobbles across the room and lights a cigarette. She inhales and runs her free hand through her wild hair.

  I inhale our scents, the combination of sin and satisfaction.

  I stare at her. Right now I could love her with all her faults.

  I have missed feeling a woman come while engaged in congress. I love that as much as I do my own orgasm. It’s been too long since I have felt what I feel now, with this intensity. With Genevieve I had been feeling as if I had become part of the Peter Principle of sex—had risen to my level of sexual ineptitude, that no matter how I tried I would never be able to please her, not like this.

  Kenya’s cellular sings that song by Usher. It sings and glows. She stares at it until it stops its show, then shakes her head in a combination of anger and disappointment.

  Kenya says, “I did sexy things for Deuce. Fed him mangos. Rubbed his body in oil. Gave him slippery sex in an incense-filled room. Oral sex at the movies. Sex on rose petals with candles all around. Sex in a black light with his hands tied and his eyes blindfolded. Me licking and kissing and sucking him, sucking and fucking him. Sucking him and making him come.”

  Her eyes stare down at me searching for the truth.

  She asks, “Would you cheat on a woman like that?”

  I close my eyes without answering, let her question become rhetorical. My body is numb, my penis still erect. Blood lives in all the wrong places.

  Then the hotel phone rings. She leans, grabs the phone, and answers.

  She thickens her voice, feigns a yawn, says a rugged, “Good morning, Sister.”

  I swallow. Stop breathing.

  She grumbles. “I’m still in bed. Rough night for me too. Don’t have anything for a headache. Maybe you should eat. It’ll be okay. Everybody should be at the trailer in a couple of hours. I know, beef and pork, so you better eat before. Okay, I’ll meet you in Odenville.”

  I watch her, a master at deception.

  She hangs up and stares at me, almost grins at the uncertainty and terror in my face as it fades, but my dread does not vanish. Kenya lowers her head, her fingers pulling at her wild hair.

  I say, “Genevieve doesn’t orgasm. Not that often. She’s a wonderful wife. I love her. But in bed… I need… what you gave me… I need that. It’s selfish, but I need what you gave me.”

  It is not easy to articulate that, not easy to tell our most sacrosanct of secrets.

  I want to continue to voice my frustration, announce other things about Genevieve.

  She will give head but never craves oral sex the way I crave tasting her goodness. I think she can do without. Sometimes she hates the mess, doesn’t want me to come inside her. She’s kind in the way she says that without saying that, asking me to come on her skin, says that she loves it when I come on her skin. She asks me to pull out and come on her body—never on her face, she would have an aneurysm—just on her breasts or stomach, but never above the breasts.

  I want to say that we rarely make love two days in a row. It’s not flowcharted that way. I want to say that in public we are a wonderful couple, but behind closed doors, when the candles are lit and all inhibitions should be thrown to the wind, we are not equally yoked.

  I want to say that she used to shower immediately after sex, but we had a talk and that came to a halt. She would wash me away like a whore does when she sleeps with a John. She didn’t notice until I brought it to her attention. She cleaned after sex without a thought. Very ritualistic. Watching her hurry to shower while I rested in her scents made me feel tainted.

  But I dare not say those things to Kenya, to my wife’s sister, because as each word leaves my mouth, I will sink in my own putrid shallowness. I have spoken of Genevieve’s sexual shortcomings without claiming my own faults, of which I own enough to fill a room. Still Genevieve accepts me as I am.

  Kenya says, “Sister doesn’t have orgasms?”

  I pull my lips in.

  Kenya knits her brow and glares at me, testing to see if I am lying. She sees I am not and her expression changes to that of a different type of disbelief. She regards me with pity, as if what I told her were a tragedy amongst tragedies, as if she can’t envision life without orgasms.

  What I have said, I should not have said. But once said, the damage is done.

  Words written are erasable. Words spoken are irreversible.

  I question myself, why I felt the need to confess something so personal.

  My answer is that I seek a nullification of my crime. If not nullification, forgiveness.

  What I have said does not leave me immune to moral responsibility.

  She says, “Sister doesn’t call me, not often. She ignores me. Chastises me when she sees me. No matter what I have accomplished, it’s not good enough. That hurts. She ran away and left everybody… left me behind. I told her my father died… she didn’t even respond.”

  “Not everybody is good at dealing with pain.”

  I think Kenya is going to cry. My insides feel her energy. She pushes her tears away and I do the same with my sadness. Our vulnerable moment evaporates, as if it never were.

  “How do you promise anyone fidelity?” She asks me that without looking me in my eyes. “How do you promise someone forever? I mean, all you know is right now, that moment. How can you tell someone what your state of mind will be three years from now? How?”

  I don’t respond. I don’t know if she is questioning her own life, or Deuce and their issues, or what I have said, or our transgression. If it is a question for me, it too shall become rhetorical. There is no answer, not from me, not for me. I don’t pretend to know everything.

  She says, “The love that’s described in the Bible, I mean, people should love like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can talk now.”

  I take a hard breath. “I can talk now. What love is described in the Bible?”

  “The love Paul spoke of in Corinthians.”

  I laugh, uncomfortable with my ignorance. “What did this cat Paul say in the Bible?”

  “Paul spoke of a love that always trusts, keeps no records of wrongs, isn’t self-seeking.”

  I laugh. “Who loves that way?”

  “You think that’s a lie?”

  “A woman not keeping a record of wrongs?”

  She looks at me as if she exists on a spiritual plane that leaves her aware of things I will never be able to comprehend, shrugs away my ignorance, and glances at the clock. That’s when I see it, the remorse crawling across her skin, frustration clouding her eyes, the love she had in her heart going cold and stealing her warmth.

  She puts her back to me, her goddess-like figure in a sensual silhouette.

  While I stare at her mystery, at her arrogance, at her pain, she glowers off into a world only she can see, whispers, “Wash your dick before you leave, before you go to Sister.”

  That is my permission to leave. I stand.

  I ask, “Are we okay?”

  “Make sure you make love to Sister so she will be none the wiser.”