Thirty (12 page)

I think she is beautiful.

I want to kiss her.

We kiss, and our lips part, and our tongues touch. We slide deeply into a kiss, her tongue in my mouth, our arms around each other. Our breasts touching.

I am filled with a sudden longing to see her body. I want to look at her breasts and between her legs. I want to see all the parts of her body.

And to do what with them? To kiss, to touch, to—what?

She reaches out, opens a button on my blouse. I sit, legs curled under me, while her hands work idly, undoing each button in turn. She puts both hands inside my open blouse and takes my breasts in her hands. I have long since stopped wearing underclothing. Her hands settle on my bare breasts like birds on their nests, and I start to close my eyes but force them to remain open, and my eyes meet hers, and we drink each other like glasses of spiced wine.

“I am in love with you, Jan.”

“Oh, Susan.”

“Mommy. Sister. I love you.”

“God!”

We undress each other, slowly, lingeringly, with many stops to cling together in urgent kisses. I am kissing a girl, my mind notes. I am kissing a girl who is saying that she is in love with me.

Her body, revealed to me in stages, is incredibly beautiful. Skin like cream and honey, like warm living velvet. So rosy pink and clean. Breasts, beautiful luscious pears, and oh, I touch them, and oh, her nipples stiffen against the palms of my thin hands, and oh, she gazes into my eyes, moved by my touch, soft and liquid in her eyes and in her flesh.

Her pubic hair is a tangle of the finest golden fluff, neatly confined to her private parts, not sprawling all over as mine tends to do. I love her body, it is so clean and neat and precise, it has fresh little girl smells to it, I love it.

I want her.

And this revelation, echoing in my head in verbal form, is somehow far more shocking than the fact itself. The
idea
of wanting a girl is jarring; the reality that one is confronted by this delicious body, that one is healthy enough to respond to its appeal—is acceptable enough.

Life is infinitely easier without words and those thoughts which form in words. Animals fuck in the forest and walk away in stolid contentment without putting words to their actions. Only people need words, and only people have invented the sickness of civilization.

We should all fuck in the forest, like animals.

Nude now, both of us, in the bed, his bed. We have established, through words and gestures, that I am to lie still, that I am to be done to. I am to be the fuckee, the ballee, the suckee, as you will. I am to be soft and moist and passive, and Susan, sweet Susan, is to make love to me.

And so she does.

(Odd, this. I want to put down what happened and how it happened and what it was like. I feel certain that it is very important that I do this. That it is altogether fitting and proper that I should do this. But something stops me. As if this were private—and somehow more private than all the other private things which I have dutifully described and recorded on these pages.

(Do I fancy myself in love with this girl? I don’t think that’s it, and yet, and yet, there is something there, something between us unlike anything between me and, oh, anyone else. Does this mean in some strange way that my fears were well founded, that I have opened myself up to a possibility I dimly foresaw—what stilted prose comes today from this pen!—and that I am indeed a lesbian? No, no, nothing of the sort. Labels are nonsense anyway, and I’m not.

(I am, though, a little different than I was a day ago. Which is understandable, but which also seems in some way to inhibit the flow of ink from this pen.)

To press onward—

I lie on my back, eyes closed. She is partly alongside me, partly on top of me, and we are kissing, or more accurately she is kissing me, her mouth on mine, lips so soft, so infinitely softer than ever a male mouth could be, and our bodies are together, and her breasts touch mine, and our flesh merges all the way down. She is shorter than I am; when she extends her feet, lying on top of me like this, her toes reach to my ankles. I feel the contact there, and the joining of our thighs, and the sweet warmth where our loins do not touch, and the sensation of her pubic hair so beautifully golden, against mine, brushing me, and our bellies touching, fitting one into the other, her convexity into my concavity (or is it the other way around, I confuse the words, concave is like caved in, no?) and her breasts against mine, and our mouths, giving and receiving.

She gives a small pelvic thrust. I arch to meet it, and we touch.

It is like—I was going to write that it is like a plug going into a socket, but the phallic connotation of that metaphor is utterly wrong here, is it not? It is, rather, like the contact of two sockets, but with a great interchange of energy. I think that is what I mean. I am not too sure what I mean.

(Perhaps, Giddings, you ought to let the facts speak for themselves. Metaphor is not your forte, Metafor is not your phorte. Just give us the facts, ma’am.

(Ma’am.
Who called me that? Oh, the schmuck with the snow shovel, half a hundred years ago. The connections, unbidden and unwanted, that the mind makes.)

Again and then again she works herself against me, works her pretty blond pussy against me, and then her body glides down mine, but moving so slowly that I would not be aware of the movement were I not so overwhelmingly aware of everything being done by her to me.

She moves downward, and rains kisses on my neck, and kisses the deep hollow of my throat. Her tongue touches the pulse there. She licks me like flame. My hands want to touch her but remain at my sides as if weighted down, as if nailed in place. She moves lower. Her hands are on my breasts and her mouth kisses their tops. She uses her tongue on my breasts, drawing wet lines from the outside to the center, starring each breast with lines radiating outward from the nipples. Each caress is not merely preparation but an act, satisfying and delicious, in and of itself. She spends a long time with my breasts. She becomes wildly involved with my breasts, and while her mouth and hands delight me and excite her as well, her legs straddle my thigh and I feel her pussy against my thigh, wet and warm, and she fucks herself gently against my thigh, so gently, that little moist open clam sucking at me as she rocks herself against me while she sucks my breasts, my breasts.

Oh, God.

I cannot recreate this scene. It hurts me to write it. I can summon up everything, every moment, every touch, every gesture, and I could fill this book all the way to the last page simply with the recollection of her progress down my body with mouth and hands until she magically reaches my secret place and eats me for months until I come like a star going into nova. I could write all of this and use thousands upon thousands of words and still not exhaust what I can recall. It is all still going on in my mind, it is all still happening as it happened then, but I cannot write it.

I must, then, summarize.

So.

She kissed and licked and sucked her way down my body and then she ate my cunt until I nearly died from pleasure.

See how much time and space we save that way?

But oh, oh, how fantastic it was. On a purely physical plane there should not be very much difference between being eaten by a man and being eaten by a woman. It is, after all, the same general thing. One’s eyes are closed, and it could be any disembodied head gobbling away between one’s thighs. There are few things nicer than being soundly eaten by a man who enjoys that sort of thing. It is best, of course, if he is either immaculately clean-shaven, or, praise God, equipped with beard and moustache. (Whenever I see a man with beard and moustache I find myself assuming that he likes to eat cunt, and is considerate of his partner. But I’m sure there must be some men who wear beards and moustaches because they like the way they look. Odd.)

A girl’s face is softer, and her mouth is a little softer, and that should be all the difference there is.

Not so.

How to explain it? How can I tell you about it, Mirror Girl, when I don’t understand it myself?

Never mind. It happened, it was divine, and I know as much as I need to know about it. Afterward, while I bubbled blissfully in afterglow, Susan’s sweet face lay briefly on the pillow of my loins. Then she came up and rested her head on my breast, and I put a hand on her back and a hand on her head and rocked her, cradled her, and she purred and told me she loved me, and I told her I loved her, and she purred some more. I patted her head, stroked that silken hair. Those earlier inhibitions seemed so utterly foreign to me now, just as her presence in my arms seemed completely natural.

(Once you jump in, and find the water fine, you wonder why you shivered so long on the bank.)

“Oh, Jan,” she says.

“And to think I didn’t want this to happen.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t let it.”

“I almost didn’t.”

“We didn’t even need drinks.”

“No.”

“We could have them now. You don’t need it, you showed that much, so now it would be all right to have them just to give us that extra drive, don’t you think?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll get them.”

“No, let me.” She rolls off of me and lies on her back, eyes wide, smiling sleepily. I get up, then bend over to kiss her mouth. She tastes deliciously of me, of my cunt. I do not turn from the taste but kiss her deeply, my tongue working past her lips and into her mouth, tasting myself as I taste her. How good the taste of sex, of men and women!

(When I first learned to suck men’s cocks I lived in horror that some of their seed would be swallowed before I could spit it out. How awful, to spit out the essence of a man! Now, a new woman, I greedily suck up and swallow every precious drop.)

I leave her reluctantly, leave the bedroom, go to the kitchen. There is a decanter of the red liquid on the counter top. And two glasses. I fill the glasses. In the living room I stop to gather up my cigarettes and a pack of matches.

I return to the bedroom. I hand her a glass, keep one for myself. We drink them straight down. It is the same liquid he has given me before. The scent is of rose petals, the taste sweet and sour.

I set my glass aside and light a cigarette.

“Susan?”

“What is it?”

“I want to make love to you.”

“In a few minutes.”

“Would you like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wish I knew what was in this drink.”

“Something kicky.”

“Some kind of drug.”

“Uh-huh. You really never made it with a girl before?”

“Never.”

“It’s good, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“It’s not as powerful as with a man, you dig what I mean? No thrusting and heaving and everything. Nobody getting under your skin. Can you dig it? A man gets inside of you, he gets under your skin. Girls, it’s different, girls just get themselves together, like.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know which is better. You were so many things when I ate you.”

“What do you mean?”

“In my head, like. The different hats you wore. You were my mother and my sister and my daughter, you know, all those female roles.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I tend to trip out that way. Role playing and sex. I’m a little crazy, I guess.”

“Who isn’t?”

“There’s a question. Nobody I know.”

“Eric?”

“I don’t suppose you could really understand Eric. Not you, personally. I mean like anybody.”

“Do you understand him?”

“Not for a minute.”

“You’ve known him a long time.”

“All my life, it feels like. Three years, not quite. More like three hundred years. I don’t know him at all.”

I draw on the cigarette, inhale. The smoke unaccountably makes me slightly dizzy. I breathe out, butt the cigarette in an ashtray on the bedside table.

I say, “What does he do?”

“Eric?”

“I mean for a living. Does he work?”

“No.”

“Did he inherit money or something?”

“I don’t think so. I think—”

“What?”

“He never said this, it’s just a guess, and maybe I shouldn’t say anything, so if you’ll keep it quiet that I said it—”

“Of course.”

“I have the feeling, it’s just a feeling, that he’s like some kind of a criminal.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Really?”

“But I don’t know what makes me think so.”

“Neither do I. He goes away on these trips. He doesn’t say anything, he just goes away. And then he comes back. I get the feeling that he steals money on these trips, or gets money illegally one way or the other. Maybe it’s just that I couldn’t picture him doing anything else. You know, he’s a man who when he wants something like he takes it.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And I don’t think he would do anything respectable. He would never work for somebody.”

“God, no.”

“And he wouldn’t have a business. He’s not the type. I’ll tell you one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I would never cross him.”

“No.”

“I would not want him to be upset with me.”

“I have the feeling, Susan, he would just kill anybody who displeased him.”

“He could do that, yes.”

“Without a second thought.”

“Don’t even say it, it gives me chills. I can’t stand that.”

“What?”

“Talking about that kind of thing. About killing or dying. The whole idea of death. I wouldn’t smoke a cigarette because of the idea that I might die of cancer fifty years from now. Fifty years is like forever but even that far off I can’t stand to think about death. And when you say like that about Eric, and I think about him killing a person, and then inside my head it becomes me that he’s killing, and it does things to me, it makes things happen in my head. Look at me—” holding out a hand, straight out, the fingers spread, and the tips it is true are trembling “—look at me, I’m actually shaking, that’s what this kind of talk does to me. Now that’s not normal, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“To be that frightened. I mean you would have to be sick not to be frightened of dying, but to be this frightened of it for no good reason, that has to be a kind of a sickness too, right?”