Affection (24 page)

“Does Laura know about this?”

She nodded and giggled. They had spoken about it in my absence. I tried to imagine the conversation. I tried to imagine how they had come to the idea. Perhaps it was at the Living Game, the sex seminar. I could imagine Laura talking about my adventures with my various boys. She had always been interested. Perhaps she had brought it up in a group situation, all of them sitting around and disclosing the intimate details about their sex lives. My sex life. I didn't mind, I had nothing to hide. But I wondered how it would work, this choosing a boy by committee. In the other time, with Richard, it was all my choice and he rarely vetoed any of them, he was just happy to be supplied with new lovers night after night.

“So,” she hovered in my doorway. The light loved her. She caught it beautifully, her hair, her skin, her subtle curves. I watched the way the last of the sunlight found its way through my window and could not keep its hands off her body.

I nodded. “Sure. I'm in if you are.”

She grinned and was gone, but I had the scent of her sex captured under my bedcovers. I had the fading heat of her. One day soon, if we could manage the correct combination of components, I would have my fingers inside her. I sighed and pulled the blankets up over my head and breathed in deeply.

I had agreed to it because I wanted to sleep with them. Both of them, but mostly with her, Jessica. They were both beautiful, though Jessica was blond and Laura a sandy brown and my hair was a darker chestnut color. Something for everyone I suppose. I looked at the two of them, breasts so pillowy that it was all I could do to stop myself touching them, easing those breasts out of their twin plunging necklines into my palms. I wanted Jessica with a kind of dull ache deep in the guts of me, and Laura would take some of the edge off it. She would keep it light, a game.

“But not until we find a man who will sleep with the three of us together. Someone we all three agree on. It has to be someone we agree on.”

We listed names one after the other. Men we all wanted (one
name). Men we could all tolerate (two names). Men one or the other of the girls would absolutely refuse to sleep with (a whole list of names stretching out over four blank pages) . I didn't veto anyone. I just wanted to sleep with the two of them together. The identity of the man seemed like a detail.

 

 

One of the tolerable two found himself at our kitchen table with Jessica and me. We told him the plan and I did the talking, as always. She watched him carefully and I watched her, my heart an erratic mix of beats in my chest. I would sleep with her. Soon I would sleep with her.

The boy seemed amenable to the idea, and he, like myself, wanted to ease Jessica's plunging neckline down just a little. I watched as he reached across the table, fumbling with the sheer fabric and I wished I had just got right down to it without waiting to be invited. His head fit snugly between the rise and fall of them. I saw peach fuzz, a flash of nipple-pink. She giggled. She seemed to enjoy the attention for a moment, then slipped away from the kneading of his fingers and settled herself back inside her dress. I felt a shot of saliva wet the inside of my mouth. I could almost feel the hard little nub of pink nipple butting against the back of my throat. It took me a moment to realize I had stopped breathing.

She told him to wait. We would wait for Laura to come around after work.

The boy leaned back in his chair and locked eyes with me and
lifted an eyebrow. I knew what he meant and he knew that I knew and I had found an unexpected ally in all of this. I could already see us down at the pub with a postcoital beer, discussing the ins and outs of the thing, comparing notes as if we had just sat through a game of football.

 

 

When we were finally in bed, he gave me a wink as if to say, “How good is this?” It was indeed fine. The girls were like unwrapped presents, pink and drenched in perfume and with hair that spilled out over each other's chests. Every part of them was fragranced. Each strand of hair dripping sweetness, the smooth shaved skin under their arms, the underside of the necks, both blooming with scent.

I would be a contrast to them. I would underline their femininity with my musky skin. My nipples olive, my flesh a dirty tan, my hair too rough and wiry to run fingers through. I kissed them each in turn, soft kisses scented with Cointreau, orange blossom tongues, the hard line of their teeth, and suddenly it was his mouth against mine. The boy that we could all tolerate. A battle of lips and cheeks and the roughness of his re-emerging stubble. He measured the generous bulk of my breasts in his palms and I wondered suddenly if he had chosen my mouth because I was a relief amongst this paradise of girl-flesh. He moved behind me and he was inside me in a second. I suppose I was the easiest beginning for him. I was his place of entry and he took it. No preamble, no negotiation, just a sliding inside, a reaching
over my shoulder. In this position he would not be in my way, and I returned to the promise of breasts, with an animal urge to suckle, an overpowering need to bite down on the pillowy swell. I felt his finger pinch the flesh that I was licking, I felt a thumb in my mouth. He was reading my actions like Braille, touching the hard nipple, the soft wetness of my tongue. He was there at the point of our connection. He entered me and I entered her, just a finger at first but I was surprised by the moisture, a deluge. She was so wet and pink and open to me and I wanted to be inside her. I arched my back and bent my head down and she filled up my senses. I pressed my fingers together as if I were about to dive and some of them slipped inside her as I traced the little protrusion of her clitoris. The boy behind me pushed with a rhythm that was not mine and I shoved back at him, as if trying to kick aside the annoyance of a puppy, bouncing and spilling things. I had completely lost track of Laura but she was there somewhere, doing something. It didn't matter to me. I was buried in Jessica.

And then . . .

My face felt a cold rush of air and the girl was gone. She had slipped out from under me. I felt the void rushing toward me, like when you are small and you lie on your back on the grass and look up at the night sky contemplating the size of the universe. The disappointment of her loss was universal. I couldn't be sure what had occurred but they were gone, both of them, the girls. There was just me and him and he didn't even pause in his pounding. The hot space where her
body had been touching mine turned icy in a second. I kneeled in the bed and watched them leave the room as the boy continued to grunt and sweat and paw at me.

I strained to listen to the conversation playing out in the kitchen. I wouldn't be able to come. I knew that this thudding of bodies had nothing to do with my pleasure. I wanted to be in the kitchen with the girl talk, but there was this boy and the disappointment of a plan abandoned and I settled back into the comfort of simple, uncomplicated girl-on-boy coupling.

I turned over and brought my feet up onto his chest and felt the place where his penis connected with my flesh, pressed the palm of my hand hard onto my clitoris. My hand smelled of her. My hand was wet with her. I covered my face with one hand and there was her pink sex open to me and my tongue snaking out onto my fingers to taste her and I came so violently that he was forced to dig his fingers into my hips to hold his place.

He spasmed and he was coming and in the hazy place after an orgasm I fumbled vaguely for a name to call him by. He opened his mouth and would have spoken, but I held a finger to my lips.

We rolled apart and listened. It felt as if we were having an affair and the wives were in the next room drinking tea and debriefing (endlessly debriefing) what we had begun together but were finishing without them. We dressed quietly and when we stood in the door of the kitchen we could tell there had been tears and talking, but they
glared at us, red eyes dry, mouths stitched shut. They pulled their satiny robes around their soft pink bodies. I wondered why I didn't have a satiny robe. I sat beside the tolerable boy and listened as they explained the impossibility of it all to us. We nodded and made calming sounds, little grunts and sighs that made us seem understanding and sympathetic. They started from the beginning and explained it all again and again but none of it made any sense.

We had done something wrong. Something had happened to contravene some rule or another. I tried to think back to the moment when it all fell apart, but all I could see was her sex, wet and open and the scent of fruit and flowers and something more true and earthy hidden beneath it.

“It's not a particular thing,” Laura told me. “It's just the energy of it.”

I caught Jessica's eyes, expecting a knowing a cknowledgment of what had passed between us, but there was just fire and steel and silence.

“But what exactly went wrong?” I was confused. “What actually happened?”

They looked toward each other, exasperated, and shook their heads to show that I would never understand even though it was perfectly obvious.

Eventually I yawned. “I should walk him to his car.” I rested a sympathetic hand on both of their shoulders. They said nothing.

I would never understand the complicated pattern of quickly shifting emotional threads that girls spin quick as spiderweb. I would never be a real girl. Not like these girls.

“I feel like a beer,” I told him when the door was safely shut behind us, “and a cigarette.”

He nodded. “The pub's just down the road.”

 

 

We sat at the pub and I lit his cigarette from the end of mine and we drank beer.

“Well, that was something,” he said, and I grinned.

We sat and drank beer and said nothing until I remembered something I'd read in the paper about experiments with rats and mazes, and he had read it, too. We talked about that until our glasses were empty. We hugged awkwardly, like blokes hug, stiff bodies bouncing off each other, and then he got in his car and drove home. I tried, but I couldn't remember his name.

“I'll see you later then,” I told him.

“Yeah, matey. See you then,” he said.

Something had subtly changed. We still cooked elaborate dinners. We still dressed in evening gowns and set the table with candles. We still went to work at the café and shared our shifts, one of them or another crowded beside me in a cramped space, but it was different now. I watched her more closely. She knew she was being watched and played a fascinating game.

She invited me to bathe with her. I lowered myself into the scented bubbles with shaking hands but she kept her knees clamped tight against her chest and I only caught glimpses of her. She barely spoke a word to me the whole time we were soaking.

We were asked to be in a music video and the director told me to reach over to her, to fondle her breasts and then to kiss her. I couldn't seem to pull away when the director yelled cut.

Sometimes when we were walking in the street, a boy would pass us on the other footpath and she would reach for my hand, or nuzzle into my shoulder or even kiss me with her lips parted, locking her fingers into the crazy wire of my hair until the boy was out of sight and she could walk on without comment.

I watched her when she wandered down the hill to the city, the sunlight outlining her legs under her white skirt. I watched her sit in front of the television with her knees lolling wide and a little damp line at the center of her pristine white panties. I admired her, I was envious of her, I wanted to be her. And I wanted to fuck her.

 

 

One day she came to me. There was sunlight on my bed. It touched my naked legs and I noticed that it didn't reach to where she was stretched out in the dark. Strange that I was all lit up and she was not. On any ordinary day her beauty cast a shadow that obliterated me. We were side by side and we hadn't really touched since that night.