The woman opened her mouth and grabbed at Jana’s breath.
*
The woman’s hand was on Jana’s stomach, wedging under the waist of her trousers, her fingers unclasping them and pulling the zipper down. Her hand was working beneath, reaching into Jana’s underwear, then inside, to where her middle finger pushed into the soft flesh, rolling her fingertip around the ballpoint, and smiling at her, and whispering, “Does that feel good?”
Jana moaned with her mouth closed and the woman slid her index finger down along her slit towards the opening, circling the place within Jana where she could, at any moment, go deeper.
*
The woman was lowering herself to the floor, pulling Jana’s trousers down, then her underwear, ringed at her ankles. She reached one arm around her legs, and grasped her thigh, the fingers of her other hand opening up the slit, then she lowered her warm tongue inside the folds. Jana’s knees softened, but the woman clutched the flesh of her thigh as she pushed her face into Jana’s wetness, letting her tongue rub down from the top of her slit towards her opening.
Jana held onto the woman from above, squeezing her shoulders.
*
Aimée stretched the muscle of her tongue, inserting the tip into Jana’s opening and licking the rim as Jana gripped her shoulders tighter.
*
Jana was reaching down towards Aimée’s face, pulling her up now and kissing her, her fingers running through the woman’s mouth, Aimée’s tongue weaving through Jana’s fingers.
*
Aimée was on top of Jana on the bed, her flexed hand in between Jana’s legs, sliding her fingers into Jana as her thumb circled the outside.
*
“Come for me . . .”
*
Aimée’s knuckles were rimming the opening with each jut, and Jana swerving into her clutch.
*
“Come for me, come for me, come for me!”
*
The blue vapour seeped from the large white bookshelf, gathering itself into a cloud and moving down the dim hallway towards the opened door of the bedroom.
U there?
Dominxxika_N39: Sexy Amy . . . ? U there?
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I’m here! I’m here!
Dominxxika_N39: O I so happy u r online!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Me too! I’ve been going on like every chance I get! But u’re never there!
Dominxxika_N39: My husband is hang around so much since he get back from business trip. Now he gone but he come back soon.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Did he lock the door and windows again?
Dominxxika_N39: Yes . . .
Dominxxika_N39: And . . . he . . . chain me . . . to bed post . . . on my ankle.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: WTF?! Serious??
Dominxxika_N39: He just get sweaty and nervous. But do not worry, my beauty, I drag whole bed to the doorway, and chain long enough for me to use living room computer.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Omg. We gotta get u outta there.
Dominxxika_N39: Lock and chain is iron. This is not possible.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: It is possible! Stop saying that, we’ll figure out a way.
Dominxxika_N39: I’m scared . . . there is no way. I cannot break free and meet you at Jewish cemetery anymore.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: That doesn’t matter. I’m coming.
Dominxxika_N39: What?
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I’m coming to Prague and I’ll get up to Zelevcice and I’ll save you!
Dominxxika_N39: This is high ambitious plan.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I have almost 800 dollars in my savings account. And my mom is always forgetting her wallet around the house. And I’m gonna be 18 next week.
Dominxxika_N39: Your birthday? O my beauty, my love, how I want to wish you happy birthday with my kisses.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: You can. You can!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I’m getting outta here and I’m coming to Prague! I’ll take out the 800 next Tuesday. Then use my mom’s credit card to buy the ticket for Friday. Which is also my birthday. So, whatever, no one can stop me, I’ll be 18.
Dominxxika_N39: O my dream, I am waiting for you!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Send me your adrs. And the times your husband is away each day.
Dominxxika_N39: O you are such brave girl!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I love you, Dominika. And Archangel Michael told me, it’s all going to be alright.
Dominxxika_N39: I love you million times from my throat, in my eyes, and on my fingertips!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Don’t lose hope! One week!
Dominxxika_N39: I will touch your whole body with mine and I will hold you in my arms and you will be my angel.
Someone is going to come
“They want me for the part!” Aimée and Dominique were jumping up and down, holding onto each other.
*
The play was at the prominent Théâtre National de Chaillot near the Eiffel Tower, in their epic Jean Vilar auditorium, seating 1,250, moreover it was that famous Polish director, the one who, a couple of years back, did Goethe’s Faust vertically, meaning he hooked all his actors into rock-climbing ropes. It was about mortal gravity, and the devil. The critics loved it.
For his next production he decided to simplify. He was suddenly done with concepts. It was his theatrical homecoming. He wanted good actors. He wanted to feel that feeling, when you watch someone experience something, breath by breath. Instead of backing up, he longed to get closer. And so the Polish director went with none other than Jon Fosse, the Norwegian playwright hailed as the contemporary Beckett, the purified Ibsen, the master of silence.
It’s true that the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe in the Left Bank, one of France’s six national theatres, already did Fosse’s Autumn Dream, appropriately last autumn. But quite frankly, both Chaillot and the Polish director thought that they could do Fosse better.
They chose Fosse’s very first play, Someone Is Going to Come, about a man (HE) and a woman (SHE) who buy an old house in the middle of nowhere so that they can get away from everyone and everything, and be alone together. As soon as they get out there, though, the anxiety begins between them that someone is going to come by. The man assures the woman that they are finally alone now, no neighbours, no friends, no distractions, they can relax, and just . . .
SHE
A beautiful old house
Far away from other houses
and from other people
HE
You and I alone
SHE
Not just alone
but alone together
[. . .]
HE
And no-one is going to come
But then, someone comes. A younger man to whom this house belonged in fact, who had sold it and moved into a more suitable place for himself, ironically becoming their nearest neighbour. He came by just to say Hello and see the house . . .
*
“They want me they want me they want me!” Dominique was clenching her fists.
Aimée put her arms around Dominique.
They were kissing now.
They were on the bed now.
Through the window, Die schönen Berge, with those seventy-two waterfalls and the braggart gods in the clouds.
*
They went out to dinner that night at the restaurant called Oberland, recommended by Klaus, who urged them to try the potato rösti. Dominique even put on her favourite heels that she was always packing and never wearing, the shiny leather pumps.
*
Although the younger man, the previous owner of the house, is the only one in the near vicinity, his visit unravels the anxiety further. He could come back at any time and say Hello again. He could invite them over or invite himself over. And did one of them, within the couple, secretly hope that someone would indeed come?
*
On the train back, Dominique fell asleep in the crux of Aimée’s shoulder.
*
When she woke up she said she had had a dream where she tasted something sweet, so
sweet . . .
“Do you ever taste in your dreams?” she asked Aimée.
*
“. . . so sweet, like honey, but somehow . . . bitter . . . at the end.”
Then Dominique told Aimée about Homer’s Odyssey, when Telemachus, Odysseus’ son is depressed after failing to find his father, and Helen comes to him and mixes a substance into their wine so that “. . . all sense of woe delivers to the wind.”
*
I Am the Wind
*
Dominique started rehearsal, and she was a completely different person it seemed, always in a whirlwind of her thoughts and ideas and explanations.
“It’s my favourite Fosse play,” she kept adding when she explained what she was working on, “excluding, of course, his most recent, I Am the Wind, but that’s for two men stuck at sea, and the casting is not flexible apparently, they have to be men, because only men can be lost souls, women – women are ghosts . . .”
*
One afternoon, after having lunch with her father in the 16th arrondissement, Aimée passed by Café du Trocadéro. On the terrace, she spotted Dominique sitting with Claire, two espressos on the table. Dominique was speaking with so much light in her face and Claire was listening with delicacy, sliding her hand up and down Dominique’s forearm.
*
“It’s not like that, Aimée . . .”
Dominique explained that Claire was doing the make-up for this show as well.
Aimée bit her tongue and dreamt that she was trapped in a car sinking into the ocean. She was pounding at the windows but they wouldn’t break. Then she looked over and in the passenger seat, buckled in, already unconscious, was the platinum blonde scalp and freckled face. Claire!! She was shaking the body. Claire!! Where is Dominique?
*
Dominique’s 42nd birthday was in March. They invited everyone over and Dominique wore her favourite heels with a new tight-fitting wine-coloured dress, the fabric sleek, almost rubbery, with a heart cut out at the chest.
“Hope I’m not too old for this dress . . .” she mumbled to herself in the bathroom.
Aimée snuck up behind her, slipping her hand up her skirt, whispering, “You make me so wet . . .”
Dominique pulled her hand out and readjusted her dress.
“Baby please . . .”
*
Dominique took her pills and slept like a log. Aimée sat up in the darkness and leaned over towards her. She kissed Dominique on the mouth very lightly, so as not to disturb her, then licked her own lips, trying to see if she could find the sweet taste.
*
“I’m not going to explain myself every time I come home!”
*
Aimée closed the bathroom door and pulled down the thick grey towel from the rack. She pushed her face into the bunched terry-cloth she was gripping and screamed into folds.
*
“Baby, baby, baby – guess what? I have a surprise for you . . .”
*
Dominique was rehearsing the whole end of spring and early summer, but they decided to take advantage of the small holiday before the opening night, as a treat for all the hard work (for the show and between them as a couple). It was their last chance to be together before the show went into intensive rehearsal for its première at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, late September.
Dominique brought up Portugal, she hadn’t been in years and Aimée had never been.
“But not the city, I don’t want to go to any city,” Dominique insisted. So they booked their tickets to Estoril, a resort town in the south of Portugal.
*
They landed just before noon, slammed the door to their hotel suite at the Albatroz Hotel on the beachside, which they had booked disregarding the price, and ran straight down to Praia da Conceição. The sand was yellow and warm, already filled with colour-blocked umbrellas and towels. Children sank their small feet into the swampy sand of the waterfront and shrieked, then fell onto their butts and spotted a shell and stared at it. Groups boozed in the sun. Parents rested. Tan people tanned. Aimée and Dominique dropped their blue and white striped unrolled towels and hurried forth, over the sprawled resting bodies, towards the water, which was rising in its lenient waves, folding towards them, foaming in greys and whites. The women nudged each other forwards, saying desculpa for each other when they stepped on someone’s towel edge, then pushing the other again. Around them curved the bumpy mountains, which were thinly coated with the fur of low plants, boulders sticking out this way or that, as the women sauntered right and left, and Aimée slapped Dominique on the side of her thigh and Dominique turned around and managed to flick her back right between her legs. Aimée shrieked and the children on the waterfront turned their heads, but they both ran forwards into the water and by the time they were swimming, they were already reaching into each other’s swimsuits.
Dominique swam away. Aimée called out for her, but Dominique dunked her whole body under and pushed herself far through the thick water into glimmering blindness.
*
Through the tall, open windows of their hotel suite, the sun was setting heavily as if being ground into the horizon, leaving amber shards of light inside the salon, on the dark-wood table and the cushioned footstool and the glass-tiled lamp.
*
Their swimsuits lay abandoned and sopping, Aimée’s red and white striped bottom and stringy top soaking over each other in a pile on the lime and red carpet of the hallway, and Dominique’s one black clump in an outline of water on the white tiles of the bathroom floor.
In the salon, Aimée was naked, wet hair on the floral sofa, her hand grabbing the oval coffee table next to it, trying to grip it, her fingertips sliding off. Dominique on top of her, her dark hair letting go of droplets of water down her back, as she was twisting into Aimée, kissing her neck, biting her flesh, reaching for her mouth, which fell open and Dominique licked the contours inside.
*
The heavy bronze curtains were pulled to the side, the golden tassels from them swung with each bit of breeze, the palm trees cut into the setting sun.
*
Aimée’s head was tilting off the sofa, her mouth open, catching the sky. She was glancing over at Dominique, watching her brim with eagerness. She felt elated by Dominique’s breath, by her touch, the wetness of her tongue upon her skin. It was almost like falling in love again. I forgive everything, the phrase raced through Aimée.
But when she reached her hand between Dominique’s legs, there was a dryness there. Before she could find her eyes, Dominique had pulled Aimée’s hand out and flipped her over.
“Shh . . .” Dominique whispered in Aimée’s ear, “let me . . .”
*
Aimée’s forearm knocked the TV remote and the hotel magazine to the floor, the pages flipping and caving into each other. She was spread over the coffee table, her arms wide and her breasts pressed into the waxed tabletop.
Dominique grabbed Aimée’s hips, and pulled her back with a thrust, Aimée’s buttocks spread and pressed into Dominique’s pelvis.
The ocean rolled and cracked beyond the window, greys and whites, lined with the water’s orange rind. A thin amber light cut across Aimée’s back.
Dominique took her fingers and began crawling them around Aimée’s cunt, as Aimée was moving into Dominique’s fingers, which crawled down further, dipping into the crevice of Aimée’s ass. Dominique placed the tip of her finger at the centre of the tightest hole and began to push inside. One push, one more, and Aimée’s anus took her in, the muscle squeezing around Dominique’s finger in its silky coated choke. Then she pulsated her finger in that tight space, sliding deeper with each jut.
*
Aimée came in a torn voice and flipped around, reaching out for Dominique just as she was leaning back. Aimée’s hands grabbed the air and fell back down to the floor empty.
Dominique was still, going over Aimée’s face – her resting cheekbone, the shine upon her jaw, the lenient pull o
f her throat, her blonde hair clinging to her neck, and in the centre, the vulnerable dip between her collarbones. Dominique reached out her hand and put her fingertips upon that spot, feeling the fall between the two bones and the thin skin there.
Aimée was peering at Dominique’s irises, the black pupils wide, and the dark mahogany around them glazed, but there were thin traces within that rich brown circle that she had never noticed before, they were almost invisible, fine lines of a bold blue. Dominique let Aimée look at every thread of her iris. She could feel her wife going over the incremental colours like a finger over a row of book-spines, but her touch couldn’t read the stories, it could only grope at their bindings.
Dominique inhaled and broke their gaze. She crawled on top of Aimée, moved some of her blonde hair away from her neck and put her mouth there, and lay breathing her humid breath as Aimée swallowed the sky.
The weight of Dominique on top of her felt like a mass of water and she thought of her dream in the sinking car, hunched-over Claire with her blonde hair and blue skin, the empty back seats, the bubbles from her mouth. Where is Dominique?
*
That night, Dominique slept without waking up or mumbling, holding Aimée tightly in her arms.
It was Aimée who woke up. It was not yet dawn. Dominique was peaceful with a consistent breath. Aimée was surprised she was sleeping through the shouting. It was coming from the window they had left open in the adjacent room. Next door, a couple were arguing on their balcony, their voices carrying into Aimée and Dominique’s suite.
She carefully took Dominique’s arm off her, got up and went to the balcony windows. She closed them discretely, and then tiptoed back into bed.
*
The next morning, there was a knock on the door. Dominique got up, put her robe on, then came back with a plastic bag with her shined leather pumps in them, held together with a large rubber band.
“They shined them for me.”
“Are you going to wear them tonight?”
*
Though Dominique had promised no work during their holiday, she convinced Aimée to take a walk for an hour or two, as she just wanted to go over a couple of scenes, that’s it, she said, she wouldn’t do any more after that.
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