Affection (19 page)

Paul and those girls. Just a handful of them, but enough for me to think that we could not be friends. Last night, I felt myself closing off, an irritable stepping away. But we are participating in a workshop together this morning and I said that I would give Paul a lift. So here I am right on time.

My motorcycle is high at the pillion and he has to climb up, tugging at my shoulder, but when he is seated there is a pleasant pressure of his thighs around me and he holds me gently. There have been pillions who have hugged so tight I couldn't breathe or lean into a corner. There have been pillions who are taller and bigger and shift the balance subtly but unpleasantly. Paul touches me on the waist, but without pressure. His weight settles the bike more steadily on the road.

I once said that if my bike likes my pillion then I will like them, too—like someone with a beloved dog who helps them make informed decisions about their friends. A good pillion will be a solid friend. But perhaps it has nothing to do with friendship, because last night I felt the pricking of anger and I have decided that after this trip I will not waste my time on someone who is friends with the only three people in the world that I have difficulty liking.

It is Paul's first time on a bike and I feel him tense as we pull away from the curb. The first stretch is always the most difficult and he settles quickly. When we speed up for the highway I think about how sexual the whole thing is, the reality of sitting behind someone, gripping their ass with your thighs, the trust that is involved in the whole process of riding pillion. I find myself softening to him.

We have barely been going fifteen minutes before there is a spotting on my helmet. It is going to rain. There is nothing to do but sit and let it soak through us: riding into it there is no way to keep it out. It gets in. Even with wet weather gear, which I have not brought, it gets in through your gloves, into your boots, trousers damp and sticking to your knees. I can feel twin rivulets of rain over my chest, finding a circuitous route around the swell of my breasts, puddling in my panties, a cold finger of water teasing me toward thoughts of sex. Paul will be getting wet. He will be cursing, he could be warm and dry inside a car.

His hands are on my hips. The warmth of his fingers burns
against the chill of the rain. Despite the fact that I am still irritated with him, I feel his legs rub against mine on every bump, I imagine his hands sliding forward and I am ready for this possibility if it happens. I remember the nice clean smell of him over drinks, the musky body heat. Some people are just like that, sweating out their sexuality for the world to smell.

I know that if we stopped now I could turn around and taste him, lapping sweat and rain from his skin. I know the wetness isn't just from the rain pooling in my lap. I so rarely become damp with desire, but I feel the little flutter low in my groin. The rain, the vibrations from the engine, the open road, and the memory of the smell of him.

At some point I realize we are lost.

I'm not sure I would have gone out with Richard if he had been straight.

I knew he was gay and that made me look at him twice. He was sweet, thin in that helpless way I like. Hips like a girl, cute in an awkward, beaky manner. And then there was his history, the magic of all the men he had loved before me. The secret slideshow of them flicked past in my imagination, a pornographic film with this boy as the star of every frame.

This boy could be my boy. He liked me. He didn't like girls but he liked this odd girl-boy who seemed to like sex as much as he did, if not more. We could become a team. A wonderful sexy team.

I made love to his previous indiscretions. There were other men in the room with us. I imagined them all into existence. I introduced
myself to them while I was in bed with him. I turned him over and I became them, telling Richard's stories back to him as he rolled onto his stomach and closed his eyes. I inhabited the young boy who lived upstairs. I lifted Richard's hips with the boy's hands and reached for the lube and I entered him with slow fingers, prizing him apart and finding a cruel rhythm just as the boy upstairs had done. I felt the power of it, the joy of being completely in control. I liked the stillness of his body beneath me.

“I want to watch you make love to a man,” I told him, and he was in no position to refuse.

 

 

It was easy. I found the first man in the café. I served him coffee and he stayed and made notes in a paperback that he bent back, cracking the spine. He had been there for an hour.

“Another coffee?”

He nodded. I wasn't sure that he did want another coffee, but he wanted some more time with his cracked book and his blue pen and his furrowed brow. I chose the music for him. He had a Cure T-shirt on and I put the Cure on the stereo and watched his head nod in time to the rhythm of it.

I brought him a coffee and perched on the stool next to him. “You got much left to do?” I nodded to his book.

“Maybe half an hour. Not so long.”

“I'm off work in forty minutes,” I told him. “Perfect timing.”

“Yes.” He sat back and looked at me and I wondered what he would be seeing. A short girl, round, not particularly attractive.

Still.

“I live with a gay man,” I said. “We share partners. No strings, just sex. I'm thinking we should sleep with you this evening.”

I could see him struggling to find a response.

“Do whatever it is you're doing. Drink your coffee. If you decide against it you can just walk out in half an hour and we'll probably never see each other again. If you want to stay, then stay. Easy as that.” I went back to the dishwasher and the food preparation and the endless table servicing.

I noticed him struggling with his reading. At some point he stopped trying. He put his pen down and closed the book and smoothed its cover. I saw that it was something by Dostoyevsky. I wondered what he was studying, but I wouldn't ask him. I didn't want to ask him. I didn't want to know his name.

He told me anyway. David. He told me as I was walking past him with two cappuccinos balanced in my hands.

“I finish in five,” I told him. “And my name is Krissy.”

A name wasn't anything really. I could call myself anything I wanted. I could be anyone. We caught a bus to my house and we barely said a word.

“Do you do this sort of thing often?” he asked me then.

“We will,” I told him.

This was our first time and I thought it should be special, but it was nothing really. It was sex. It was fun. I liked watching Richard kiss him. I liked watching more than participating. Still, we were in this together and I let him touch me wherever he wanted and enter me wherever he wanted. I didn't orgasm, but I did later when he had left and it was just me and Richard replaying the scene from beginning to end. I kissed Richard. I came with him. I came remembering Richard's mouth on the boy's penis.

“Swallow him,” I said.

“Yes, I'll suck him dry.”

And then I came and it was good. Better than good. It was the kind of feeling that tingles in your limbs for the longest time.

When it had faded we rolled toward each other and hugged, and I felt safe and satisfied and alive for the first time in so very long.

“I think I love you,” I told him.

And that made him cry.

We take the wrong exit off the freeway. We end up amongst the shopping centers and the run-down fish and chip shops. I smell burning fat and damp and rubber. Paul slips off the bike and he is wet, but grinning.

“I was so nervous when we started out,” he says, “but then it got better.”

“It is wet,” I tell him, “wet and cold.”

Paul nods, sniffs as if testing for the smell of rain. “Ah well, we're almost there.”

But are we? We ask at a service station but the directions are complex and I am unsure.

“No, I'll remember them,” says Paul.

“Okay, but tap me when we need to turn. Tap me on the right side to turn right and the left to go left.”

It seems simple enough, but there are taps to both shoulders simultaneously. There are taps to the center of my back. Paul yells directions at my helmet, as if I could hear what he is saying. When we leave a side road and rattle up a horror of slippery wet grass and loose gravel I am cranky with him yet again. I do not care how good he smells and how my body wants to roll him into the mud and nuzzle into his flesh. For once my anger is more true and clear than my sexual urges; but at least we have arrived where we are supposed to be. I leave him to struggle out of his helmet and his gloves while I drag my soaking clothing up to the front door.

There is a quick tour of the house, the gorgeous excesses of each room, the bookshelves with their familiar paperbacks, books that make me feel accepted and at home. And there is a spa.

We settle in the lounge, a group of us. I perhaps have more in common with the others, middle-aged women like myself, and yet the fact that Paul and I are both dripping wet seems to mark us as similar. The others talk about the difficulties of parenting, schools, motherhood, childbirth. I sit beside Paul and he draws me into a conversation about the structuring of documentary films.

I sip my wine and I keep thinking about that spa bath, big enough for two, perhaps even three. I would not even have to remove my bra and panties. Our clothes are wet already, we could sit there
fully dressed and discuss the difference between a short story writer and a novelist, whilst sipping the good wine.

The rain grows heavier. There is talk of sleeping the night. I would sleep the night. I don't want to ride home in this weather. They ask Paul what he wants to do and he pauses, looks toward me. I shrug. I could stay the night. I think about the spa bath. I try not to, but I think about the spa bath.

We could stay.

It was all about the sex, and the sex was always fine. There was a lot of it. I was constantly buoyed along in the afterglow of one orgasm or another. I walked in a fog of sex. I was distracted by it. I bumped into things. There were always bruises. I looked at everyone as a potential partner and it was right to feel this way. Finally my world had caught up to me. I no longer felt like a secret predator, hiding my lust behind a friendly façade. I felt more honest like this. I flirted with intent. I reeled the bodies in and played with them and set them free unharmed.

 

 

On this occasion, it was all about the timing. I was at the Ryan Street house, our house, clothed in evening wear. High boots and a dress that billowed. There was opera on the stereo. All this because I couldn't bear the idea of washing up, a job I hated and rarely completed without the
theater of the dress and the music. I made a performance of it, treating myself to sips of chilled wine between each burnt-bottomed pan.