Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (16 page)

When I turned around it
was into a deep longing yearning kiss. I felt her reach behind me
to turn off the stove. She pulled back and looked at me now with
the hope-filled eyes of a lover. No more ambiguity. Why? Because I
had money? Because the apartment was nicer than she’d expected? Why
did it even matter?

If only she had kissed me
in Union Square.

I stepped forward and she
stepped back and we waltzed like that kissing to the bedroom. On
the bed we shoved ourselves together and opening her jeans I
ventured fingertip toward the prize. I refrained from slipping a
finger inside her, partly out of respect and partly from fear of
rejection. Instead, I very gently traced that beautifully trimmed
seam for what seemed like an inordinate length of time. The silence
became tangible as if our futures depended on the next infintesimal
motion of my index finger. Had she known she would let me proceed
this far? Was I just catching up with what she had already decided?
Either way, the moment of immersion was audibly
welcomed.

I can’t say for sure but I
think she might have come right there on my fingers. I say this
because as I continued to touch her very gently she shivered
involuntarily and moaned deeply like she was on very strong drugs.
I was pleased with this of course and congratulated myself on
having thawed her out at last.

After a moment she
arranged herself on top of me and lay there kissing and breathing
warmly on my neck and ear. Her jeans were opened even more now and
her groin was positioned directly over the hot bulge in my
jeans.

“
Let me
introduce you to somebody.” I said, trying to be casual but I was
already drunk with lust. Deftly, she opened the top two buttons of
my jeans and exposed only the tip of my cock and began flicking her
fingers across it so maddeningly I almost came. I had to stop her.
I wasn’t ready for such an upheaval and I was enjoying the gentle
unrushed atmosphere that had led us to this point. But I didn’t
want her to think her skill was unappreciated

“
I just don’t
want to come yet.”

I was amazed at her skill.
Amazed, thrilled and worried. If she was this good and that
beautiful then I was in danger of…well…yes…of falling in love. But
there was one area where she was still untested. If her ass turned
out to be a misshapen mess then I could let myself off the hook,
breathe a sigh of relief that could be presented as sexual
satisfaction and turn my thoughts to the next online contestant. I
let my hand stray downwards.

“
Oh
fuck.”

She laughed but I couldn’t
have been more serious. It was perfect. Having all my criteria met
was unsettling. I was like a castaway inconvenienced by
rescue.

*****

I had only just arrived in
front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I saw Marian approach
in scuffed boots, woolen tights, leather mini-skirt and an open
coat. For a moment I didn’t even recognise her because she looked
like one of those girls I was accustomed to seeing on the way to a
date with some lucky bastard other than me. That she looked that
good was in itself something to celebrate but the realisation that
she had dressed like this specifically for me elevated my senses to
such a degree that I gushed with gratitude.

We sauntered between the
Greek and Roman statues that merely confirmed for me how
well-proportioned and beautifully-made she was. Surely the music to
which we moved was temporarily on mute. I pointed my camera at the
statues but the pictures I took were of her. Smiling. Standing.
Pointing. Walking.

“
It’s because
you‘re so well-made, that’s why you have such a feel for
three-dimensional objects. You instinctively know when something is
beautiful because it meets the standards of craftsmanship that you
yourself represent.”

Yes, I actually said that
to her.

She beamed at this and
stepped effortlessly into a rockstar pose with one hand on her hip
and her head-tilted in mock-defiance. I took the picture that so
many men would later drool over and I realised at that moment I was
in love with her. It had been creeping upon me like the flu but now
it was full blown. Almost as suddenly things started to
disintegrate. We couldn’t find a place to eat. All the cafes and
restaurants were overrun with little nasal gnomes from the Upper
East Side and the lovely Marian was starting to show signs of being
seriously dissatisfied. Pissed even. Couldn’t she at least pretend
to be polite? Was this her real character showing through? Had
everything else just been an act? At last we ducked into Casimir,
which was far too pricey for my newly bohemian tastes but worth it
in the end because after a burger, the cheapest thing on the menu,
she was fine again.

“
What would
you like to do now?’ I said, fully prepared to walk her to the
subway.

“
Lets have
some more of that tea we never end up drinking.”

There was only one
response that.

Lying there afterwards I
felt as if a huge magnet had been lowered over me and all the sharp
metal filings and ground-down iron fragments that had been
circulating in my body and mind had been magically lifted out and
replaced with warm honey.

“
You’re like
a teenager.” she said, blushing at the sight of my cock hardening
again. Wearing nothing now but her dark gray woolen thigh-high
tights she looked exactly like an ad for underwear I’d once seen on
the Paris Metro.

“
Hold that
thought.” I said, taking the camera from the bag on the floor by
the bed. She arched her back and turned slightly sideways and this
was when I took the second soon-to-be-celebrated picture. I stared
into the camera transfixed.

I’d lost all interest in
other girls. I hadn’t even checked my messages for days. An
uncomfortable notion presented itself. If I had a girl like this
then I didn’t need to be online any more. I could remove my profile
form datemedotcom. I had always imagined I‘d end up with a French
girl, preferably in France with children that spoke French and yet
it was ironic that Marian should look more French in this picture
than Yvette ever did.

Surely I wasn’t about to
settle for an American?

I wasn’t in the bag yet.
There was still
The Phone Thing
. This was our shorthand for
my inability to chat on the phone without becoming enraged. As soon
as I heard Marian’s voice I’d feel something like dirty water rise
inside me like a tide; an inexplicable urge to throw the phone at
the wall or out the window or just hang up. When she gently
enquired what the matter was I blamed it on the gappy cell-phone
service saying it was just too frustrating not being able to hear
her properly and that anyway I preferred it when we talked in
person. This was only partially true. The real reason was
unutterable.When she was physically present the combination of her
scent, beauty and dress-sense, created a halo-effect that knocked
her less attractive qualities into soft-focus. Those impossibly
slender thighs extending from the ever-present knee socks countered
any upsets caused by Americanisms like
hey you
or
goofball
. On the phone she had no such ambassadors. Her
dismembered voice offered no protection from the fact that I was,
for the first time in my life, not just in love, but in love with
an American.

And it had become almost
impossible to bring her to orgasm. She’d repositioned my fingers
over an area that seemed so far north of where I would normally
have set up camp I thought she was joking. On more than one
occasion she removed my hand altogether not so much in disgust as
resignation. Didn’t she realise she was discarding techniques that
had worked for a large number of satisfied women? Apparently the
“very pretty, very rich, very tall guy” she dated before me had
actually gotten angry with her because she was taking so long to
come. I feigned surprise.

“
Angry?
Really? Why?”

“
Yeah, right?
I mean, after all, it’s my body.”

Secretly I knew exactly
what he meant. How insultingly boring it was to be down there
lapping away on god-knows-what for god-knows how long, each moan
from head-office just another false promise of promotion. But even
as I made them I knew such protestations were merely last-ditch
attempts at denial. I was in love.

Drama sought her out.
Hardly a day seemed to go by without some new micro-castastrophe
befalling her. The frequency of these mishaps would have been
intolerable if she hadn’t insisted on being spanked for her part
causing in them. Each new incident quickly became synonymous in my
mind with the image of her beautiful pale quivering buttocks.
Parking ticket, (Spank!) cracked phone, (Spank!) lost wallet,
(Spank! Spank! Spank!) I thought about hiding her keys just to
encourage matters along but as it turned out I didn’t have to. She
locked us out of her apartment one freezing night and as we waited
for her upstairs neighbors, I decided to cut my name out of a piece
of card and spank it onto her ass until it was legible enough to
photograph. I really was in love. Maybe next time I’d cut out a
heart-shape.

And then the hints began
to be dropped. If only her roommate wasn’t always so depressed. How
draining it was to have to continuously talk her off the ledge. Yes
the rent was cheap and yes they were old friends but she was
starting to feel like an unpaid live-in therapist. This was my
chance talk about us moving in together. When she began smiling at
babies and old couples I could have at least feigned interest in
starting some sort of family or supplied her with some sort of
assurance about our future. But I didn’t. Looking back I can see
that my continued presence online was a misdirected attempt at to
forming fulsome sort of fall-back relationship in case Marian left
me. Insurance against injury. Or maybe I was just addicted to
online dating. One night, after checking my messages on her
computer I forgot to sign out.

LAURA

Laura ...there
you are… unsocked and depanted and all alone on a saturday
night...wouldn't it be interesting to imagine your hands were
suddenly my hands? We might need to discuss this further over the
phone…are evenings good for you?

It was particularly
galling of course because I had never have invited Marian on a
phone-date like that. But the tele-sexual inference was nothing
compared to the spiritual infidelity. I have since asked myself a
thousand times how I could have let it happen. Maybe at some level
I wanted her read it. She was getting too close. Or maybe I yearned
for the familiarity of unhappiness. Preferring self-destruction to
uncertainty. It’s obvious now in retrospect that we were finished
the moment she read that email but it took a year to sink in. To
all appearances we were still together and she’d laugh and smile
and even agree to help me reach an orgasm from time to time but she
wasn’t necessarily in the room when she did it. She made a point of
staying clothed and if I tried to unbutton any item of clothing her
free hand would involuntarily push mine away. A hand-job is a great
way to keep a guy at arm’s length.

I tried to explain that I
hadn’t been looking for girls so much as customers for my book. She
thought about this for a moment. She was trying to be fair. Why not
give me the benefit of the doubt? Maybe I wasn’t so bad, I had some
good points. But how could I do such a thing? Didn’t I realise how
much I’d hurt her? She was forcing herself to try on my ill-fitting
skin. To look at the world though my eyes.

“
If that’s
true, then why don’t you use me to sell your book?”

Was she was trying to
smoke me out? Call my bluff? If I really was just selling books
then I didn’t need to be online at all and especially since the
book was supposed to be written anonymously. I imagined what it
would be like to click on Marian’s pictures in a datemedotcom
profile.

FRANCOISE

“
Likes
literature, cinema and sex. Maybe even all at the same
time.”

This was the headline for
a new profile featuring some of the sexier pictures I’d taken of
Marian. Her face was either cropped out or in shadow so that there
was no chance of her being recognised and I was careful to ensure
there were no reflections on any surfaces where her face might
show. There were one or two pictures I’d taken of her standing in
front of a glass doorway in the West Village where she was gently
back-lit and in her boots and shorts she looked gorgeous. In fact,
I flattered myself that the four shots I selected for this new
fictitious profile were of a sufficiently high standard that the
photographer who took them might at least be considered
semi-professional.

USERNAME

Beautifullylit

BODYTYPE

Thin/Petite (I get most of
my clothes from the children’s section of Old Navy)

LANGUAGES

French/English/Italian

OCCUPATION

Photographer-Assistant-Model-Writer

LAST GREAT BOOK I
READ

Diary Of An Oxygen Thief
by Anonymous it's a little scary but brilliant too!!

I highly recommend
it.

WHICH SUPERPOWER I WOULD
MOST LIKE TO POSSESS