by Emma Becker
Two months later, the heat is oppressive and I am sitting at my desk, wearing the nightie I had with me that Tuesday. Writing is a slow chore and it’s silly that the moment of penetration is all I remember with absolute clarity. I have forgotten everything about our first embrace, apart from its beginning and end, overtaken as I was by wonderment at being filled by that man, filled by the hardness of his cock, hard for me. I was too busy surrendering myself to the moment and have no memory of pleasure or pain, only that, gasping wildly against him, I knew I wanted to see him again, and again, and again. There was a fire burning inside Monsieur, offering me glimpses of worlds unknown through half-open distant doors. Flash memories: me, sitting in his lap, panicked at the thought I had exhausted him. Me, crawling over his stomach, sniffing him; his flat stomach, the firm, soft skin of a thin man that the passing years had barely altered, just blemishes here and there that only I could feel against my cheeks, beneath my fingers.
I know I gazed at Monsieur before I took him in my mouth; I stared at his body, fascinated as always by the shamelessness of a man’s erection, the pride he displays in his spectacular nakedness. Monsieur’s legs were wide enough apart for me to find refuge between them, and through the curtain of my eyelashes I could see the brown silk blanket through which his cock surged. His taste blended with mine. This was mostly new territory for me. As much as I would have liked to impress him with my appreciation and knowledge of a man’s body, I didn’t want him to think that, at only twenty, I was as wanton as he.
Another flash memory, so crude: after just a few seconds, he pulled out of my mouth and turned me onto my stomach, so fast I almost bit him, as the stream of cum he had been unable to hold back flew down my throat. I heard him speak, but I could barely understand a word he was saying, moaning as I was, lying in the gutter of my mind with the filth of his voice, that still ownerless voice for I hadn’t yet looked at his face . . . I was mortified to realize that Monsieur was silent, watching me calmly, listening to the broken rhythms of my breathing. What I had taken as an insult was the sound of his cock sliding rapidly in and out of me, his belly thumping against my arse. I had to strain my neck to see the evidence for myself: my arse quivering like jelly with every thrust while Monsieur held me pinned down, his hands outstretched, his nails digging deep into my flesh. Even from that awkward angle, I could see his cock sliding inside me, and the sound it made as it slammed against the back wall of my cunt was loud enough to take physical form and colour. I was embarrassed but crazily excited, and I began to moan louder, if only to drown those sounds. But what came from my throat was more like an echo of Monsieur’s movements inside me, mimicking their strength and depth, their powerful vibration. The sounds of a bitch in heat.
Monsieur pulled away from me, and I was left gaping, pink and vanquished, my body still shaking convulsively, flat on my stomach. Before I closed my eyes, I glanced for the first time at his face as he held his cock and leered at my body.
I had known the taste of his cum before I had seen him properly. Now I opened an eye and he was there. His large grey eyes were full of the sensuality he shared with his eldest son (I had come across a photograph of Charles a few days earlier) and the soft curves of his mouth betrayed his enjoyment of love. His nose was perfectly positioned between eyes and mouth, a nose made to ferret between my thighs and tango across my neck. All of Monsieur invited me to purr like a cat in his presence. Or maybe I was already triumphantly corrupted by the submission that ran from my cheeks to the aqueduct of my mouth.
Who were you, Monsieur? Who were you really? What did you conceal in yourself to make that ordinary Tuesday morning what it became inside my head? Had I been in your shoes, I’m almost certain I would not have pushed open the door to that room, or at any rate not with your poise, as if you felt you already owned me. You looked at me as if you’d hungered for me all of your life. I saw how you moved around the bed, how you took control of me. I allowed myself no protest: that room would always be ours.
Do you remember the twenty minutes after we had made love? I was stuck against you, your torso weighing down on me as I wiped the cum on to the sheets. Thinking I was trying to move away, you tightened your grip on me: ‘Stop fidgeting!’
Further captive caresses. I only truly got used to them much later, after the time for tenderness had passed. How sad.
For a long time we didn’t talk. I was scared of looking into your eyes. I was studying the structure of our silence. I was the first to speak.
‘So, you came.’
It was all I could think to say. I was still surprised, shocked that you’d had the guts to leave your flat and journey through the streets separating the Latin Quarter and Convention to climb the twisting stairs of the tiny hotel to our room after four days of holding your hard cock in your hand and reading our texts.
I can’t summon the subtlety of the dialogue we exchanged, and it’s a pity: I’d give anything to be able to screen in my mind the film of my first morning in your arms! I listened to the tone of your voice, echoing like music. The perfect voice of the hundred faceless lovers who had hitherto kneaded my body for ten minutes before I fell asleep each night. Until you held me down for the first time.
‘You didn’t imagine it would happen as it did?’
‘How?’
‘That I’d be like that. Did you think it would be so gentle?’
(So gentle, Monsieur. How true.)
‘That I would enter the room silently, that I would caress you and wait for you to wake? I could have rushed in, jumped on you and raped you. Torn your stockings apart and sodomized you.’
Sodomized me? Monsieur! How crude! I have only a faint memory of the moment, but I think my ears shrivelled to hear that. I felt a brief spasm of disgust, thinking that ‘arse-fucked’ would have sounded so much better from your lips (as we soon discovered when you whispered the dreaded word into my ear on another Tuesday morning). Anything but ‘sodomized’. One day, Monsieur, I will be accepted into the Académie Française and I will expunge that word from the dictionary, if it’s the last thing I do.
Do you remember, later that morning, you released me reluctantly and I put on a Liberty slip rolled down to the waist? I lit a cigarette, leaned back against the cast-iron bed posts and displayed myself, like a tramp, as you watched, constantly caressing the tips of my breasts. I could see myself reflected in the large mirror facing the bed and, fag hanging from my lips, I postured, talking about books, university, the friends I’d been with the previous evening. A veritable ballet of open thighs, studied lazy stretches all the way down to my toes, contortions against the bed posts, then bending over in a pretence of picking up my hair slides so I could show off my bum. Your smile was both sexual and paternal, just right for the situation, blessing the spectacle of my youth and your maturity with perfect insolence: Monsieur sprawled in a hotel bed with his naked, post-adolescent Lolita still gaping from his ministrations.
It was one of those mornings you only get in May. The sun rising slowly while time stands still, immutable.
From time to time, you would interrupt to say: ‘You’re so beautiful!’
And I felt like a star among stars. (Much later you would ask yourself how I could have surrendered myself so completely and develop such a passion for you. The spiky adoration I had for you surprised you: you were unable to determine at which stage our traditional roles had switched. I don’t know. But I’m sure that the compliments and love in your seductive eyes had a lot to do with it.)
I lay down against you, between your arms and knees, and you cupped your hand around my right breast.
‘This little tit is going to be lonely when I leave,’ you predicted.
The truth is, it took me a week to miss the caresses and the rest. Remember: attraction, repulsion. You fascinated me. There was something highly toxic about my unholy attraction to vice. As my hands neared your hips without touching them, I was almost fearful of looking you in the eye. You held me tightly against you, stroking
my hair, quietly calming me. As if there was nothing wrong with you freely coming over my face, then being playfully tender with me. Lying motionless by your side for a few minutes, I felt as if my whole body was burning from the inside. You didn’t understand: my frequent little treks from bed to window annoyed you as time ticked on and you were growing hard again.
You must have known how much in awe of you I was. The day before, I had sent you a truthful text message: ‘It’s all a bit scary.’
You had answered: ‘Don’t be scared, I’m the gentlest of them all.’
But, Monsieur, you knew that was wrong. You knew all too well that your softness and tenderness were unconnected with your illusory gentleness. You were just readying yourself to jump. I could see it in your eyes as we talked, as we began some sort of competition to see who would lower their gaze first. A competition I lost.
You allowed me to escape, with a grin of amusement. While you still can, your eyebrows seemed to say. Faced with silence, you took an old edition of Mandiargues from your medical bag. It was encased in a dainty ultramarine cardboard box. Oh, Monsieur, the way you made me feel just then! As if all my Christmases had come at once. OK, so I had reached out to you for your love of erotic literature, but for this to be confirmed with such elegance . . . Father Christmas had turned up in the middle of May. I hardly dared turn the yellowing pages, shrieking like a kid at a Disney movie, eyes wide. Then I handed it back to you, almost sad at having had the privilege to glimpse your world of rare books and limited editions. I worked in a flower shop for four hundred euros a month and slept surrounded by paperbacks, which was all a student could afford. And you said to me: ‘No. Keep it. It’s for you, a gift.’
I protested, squeaking like a piglet, as I handed it back to you, but you pushed it towards my chest with a smile, and I was forced to accept it. Later I would slip it into my overnight bag between my laptop and sponge-bag. It would share the space with a tube of toothpaste.
(Do you know what I did as soon I got home, far from parents in my pink basement room? I tore off a piece of paper and, between the divine pages of Mandiargues, I slipped a note I had scribbled with a ballpoint pen: ‘Given by C.S., on 5/5/09’. Just like a junior courtesan.)
For a brief moment, I might have felt like a whore. But then I changed my mind: even Zola had never imagined a whore being paid for her services with rare books.
And then you mounted me again, doggy-style, and all I could smell was the overripe mango I had brought with me, its fragrance gliding over my skin like oil, its heady odour of turpentine and alcohol blending with the Guerlain on your fingers (the persistent sweet fragrance of men who love women). I barely dared open my eyes: to see would have detracted from the magic conjured by the sensation of fullness. I felt like sobbing every time you withdrew from me. How could you know our two bodies would fit so well together? Before I knew you, the possibility of such osmosis was just a pleasing idea. It wasn’t lust that was blinding me, but the fluid way we fucked, the communion of movements orchestrated with a hypnotic sensuality, the perfect conjunction of your breath and mine. Me, Ellie, twenty, a tiny plump body still trying to get rid of its baby fat, and you, Monsieur, with so many years of caresses, together in a clandestine bed, at the time of day when all the people we knew were leaving for work. You came inside me with a final gasp, while I held you tight as a nutcracker, every muscle in my body straining.
‘Good thing I have a coil,’ I said later, with a smile, as I sat in your lap. ‘A good thing I take precautions. You didn’t even ask if it was safe to come inside me.’
‘I was confident you were careful,’ you replied, pinching my nipples.
‘You can’t be sure I’m clean. Maybe I sleep with all and sundry without using condoms.’
‘But you don’t,’ you concluded.
I was flabbergasted by your adolescent carelessness. I decided to be like you: forget about Andrea, the risks, your wife. I would have to trust to the fact that you were married and that, in theory, you couldn’t allow yourself to catch an STD. My mistake.
‘You should come and watch me perform an operation,’ you suggested, a few minutes later, nibbling my neck.
It would be so risky to join you at my uncle’s old clinic in that pretty part of the Marais, where hordes of nurses might recognize me as the little girl with flat shiny shoes running up and down the corridors when nice Dr Cantrel visited. I would have to invent university coursework to justify my presence and lie to at least twenty people to drag the sexual tension and sheer wrongness of our affair into the aseptic operating block.
‘That would be so cool!’ I answered.
And then you left, in the middle of a fascinating conversation rudely interrupted by your damn phone. I jumped from the bed, scattering cushions and pillows, shrieking wildly, ‘No! Stay a little longer!’ In truth, I was strangely anxious to be alone so that I could examine my memories with forensic attention. There was little I could do while still in your presence: I could store away precise images of you, fragments of conversations and the sound of your velvet voice. Maybe I already knew how much I would miss the aura that surrounded you.
‘I can’t, sweetheart. I have to go to work. But believe me . . .’
Another meaningful gaze.
‘. . . it’s the last thing I wish to do.’
I would hear many similar excuses, punctuating the course of our narrative. Weren’t we characters in a script? Remember how you took flight, that final, pensive look in your eyes as you reached halfway down the stairs, me standing with naked breasts on the landing, framed by the door, still steaming with lust. As if you were exiting stage left. Once I returned to the room, traumatized by your departure, I went through the motions of an actress after a show, packing up my makeup, folding my clothes, bone tired but happy. I smoked, sitting on the bed, facing the open window, absolutely starving. Physically, it felt much like the first time, the same recognizable lassitude; a deep craving to fill myself with pasta, chips, peanuts, shandy, to feel complete again.
But when I got home, having hurled my bags onto the bed, I couldn’t even summon the strength to walk up to the kitchen. Spread out beneath my bed cover, I closed my eyes, trying to muster the energy to heat a saucepan of something, and woke at five o’clock, refreshed. My sister watched me drown a whole packet of biscottes in cold milk and frowned. Perhaps she’d noticed the purple rings of makeup and fatigue around my eyes.
‘What’s up?’ I queried, somewhat aggressively.
She was sitting next to me at the table. I could hear the distinctive murmur of her breathing.
‘Nothing,’ she answered, without looking at me, and I knew that she knew.
Something had betrayed me.
ELLIE
I’m writing to you from the large, cold bed in my small room, at my parents’ flat (such a pity you can’t come here, much too dangerous – I have an immense mirror on the wall facing my bed, and the images we could reflect in it would be so amazing).
I was going to proceed with a full debrief of this morning’s events, but whatever I come up with will lessen what I treasure in my mind. I have no intention of cheapening the sensations with a series of superlatives and stupid adjectives. It was all superlative, anyway.
I’m filled with diabolical ideas. Especially since I read Irene’s Cunt. I have a limitless admiration for men who truly appreciate cunt, having listened to so much crap from men of my own generation (or even older ones, in truth). I would not have tolerated a single negative comment about my own, but I know from having discussed the subject with many twenty- and twenty-five-year-old men that they find it ugly. So, maybe I’m being subjective, having lived for twenty years with one between my legs (and having no intention of changing, as its uses can be so delicious), but I’ve decided I’ll never go to bed again with men who are incapable of tenderness for that part of the female body. If I am to spend the rest of my life literally worshipping men’s bodies, I expect the same in return. Further, if I were a man,
before I fucked any girl I would spend at least five minutes just gazing at her from top to toe. I mean truly looking at her. If only for safety reasons. It astounds me that so many of them are willing to stick their cock in without any idea of what might be lurking inside. Like sharp teeth. Not only is it rude, it’s also annoying.
If I tell you I’m distracted now, it’s because a previous lover of mine was attempting to chat about sex on Facebook a moment ago. I disconnected for fear of what I might say. Today I have no intention of pleasing him.
I’ve been thinking, it’s best I don’t tell my uncle if I come to the clinic on Wednesday. He’s in England at the moment and can’t be contacted anyway, but he’d probably say I can’t watch an operation because he no longer works there. And it would be awkward to persist – ‘But surely if you asked your friend they’d let me in . . .’ Tell me what you think. I doubt that any of the anesthetists or nurses will phone him to let him know I was at the clinic. Anyway, I’ll do what you want me to do. As far as Uncle Philippe is concerned, I’m still four years old with a strawberry lollipop in my mouth and spend my days frolicking in the Luxembourg Gardens with a helium balloon. He has no idea.
At any rate, tell me what you think. You might have a different perspective on it.