Contours of Darkness (3 page)

'Yes,' he whispered.

The simple word was like a lash across her legs. She began to fuck him. Her knees dug into the bed and she rocked her cunt into him with a heavy beat. His knees came up to balance and grip her, and he put his arms loosely around her back. With each thrust he moaned, the sounds bubbling up involuntarily. Her own sounds began as excitement flushed her entire body and she started to flop around, her breasts slapping against each other, her head thrown back, her arse churning in all directions.

'She's going wild,' he thought.

The image, titillating and distracting, had the effect of a grain of sand dropped into the delicate works of a fine watch. At the high velocity at which they were operating, the thought upset the timing of their act. He was ripped away from the immediacy of his involvement like a child being torn from its mother and the extraordinary fucking which had seemed so intensely real, became at once an obscure activity indulged in by people with whom he had only a faint acquaintance. Like a careless participant at a peyote ceremony glancing up at the stars and introducing cosmic insignificance into the drama, he tasted, at the peak of his sexual pleasure, the fear of his own nothingness. Immediately his cock softened and shrivelled into itself. As she felt it leave her she panicked and tried to grab it by contracting her cunt. But the sudden movement startled him and he turned his face to one side as he lost his power once more.

The disgust he felt at himself was mirrored by the expression on her face. Before her humanitarian instinct made her understanding, she gnashed her teeth in frustration. Then she lay down on top of him and held him tightly. They moved into an embrace with the loving knowledge only possible between those who have fought many sexual wars together and have learned compassion through necessity. Without ever having articulated it as such, they shared a deep respect for the difficulties that man and woman share in any attempt at joining together.

1 can't do any more of these tonight,' she said at last. 'You'd better come now.'

She edged off him and lay on her stomach next to him. She was offering her body to be used for his climax, knowing that when he became totally selfish in his fucking he was like a stoker pouring coal into the flames, and she was more than happy at having her cunt be the oven he built his fire in. They looked into each other's face with the knowingness of ghouls. They grew serious. His eyes smiled. Her mouth pursed. He slithered on top of her, adjusting his position until her buttocks slipped perfectly into the hollow of his groin. She continued to hold his gaze, turning to peer at him from over her shoulder. She did not exhibit the least change of expression as he dangled his cock between her cheeks and trailed it over the entire curve. It hardened as he moved, and when it was stiff he slid it between her thighs. Still watching him, she tilted her arse up and altered the cant of her cunt to meet his desire. He pushed forward and the thick organ entered the pink hole. As he penetrated, her lids began to fall. She looked deeply into her, and she let him watch as the overwhelming power of the sensations in her cunt flooded the lighthouse of her associative intelligence. She went under, and until the very end watched him watching her succumb.

Her head dropped forward and he gently bit the tendons along her neck. She raised her haunches until she was on her knees, her thighs pressed along the tops of her calves, her back a long ski slope, her arms along her sides and going inward to her fingers which fondled her cunt lips and rubbed her clitoris. She gave up all thought of everything, including the man who was fucking her, and stepping bravely into the most frightening solitude, the loneliness of bliss.

She was wracked by four orgasms, each a jagged peak of tension which brought her to a pitch of paralysis followed by a long fluttering release. Like a man tipping his hat in the presence of a funeral procession, he toned down the raucousness of his thrusts into her bottom after each of her climaxes, but did not drop his rhythm. When she had spent the fourth time, he knew he would come soon, and pulled out all the stops. Each breath exploded in a harsh bark, his hands formed fists and flew apart into planes again and again, like a man grasping and letting go, grasping and letting go. He fixed his stare on the sight of his cock sloshing in and out with such vigour and her cunt completely relaxed, taking his fiercest plunges crazily.

The trembling began in his thighs and swept up his pelvis and then his spine, until he shivered from his knees to his head, the whole sinuous movement transmitted to her through the single energy focal point of his cock, which fucked her until she was white with screaming. He reared back like a man attacked by the flailing hooves of a maddened horse, and let the sperm shoot from his cock in a series of bursts, spill out, and subside to a dribble, and finally he squeezed out as his pumping reflex continued and she gripped the shaft with her cunt, sucking out the last drops of fluid. He felt the exquisite pleasure that comes to the vampire's victim, the thrilling transfer of energy from one body to the next.

Before he closed his eyes and collapsed beside her, he looked at her round mysterious arse and realised that if there were a dozen men in the room she could kneel like that for the entire night, taking one after the other, letting each fuck her until he came, allowing each of them four and five orgasms, until they were exhausted, and could then just rise, stretch her cramped legs, and feel as though, for once in her life, she had been properly satisfied.

In The Middle Of A Middle

'I did it again/ he thought. Tell asleep after fucking.'

He had fed on fantasies on Cynthia's body for the entire day as he shepherded twenty-nine eleven-year-olds through the prison-like paces of sixth grade. He was in his fifth year of teaching, having started in the Hunts Point ghetto and finding that when he had enough seniority to switch to one of the white middle-class schools, he preferred the black children, discovering in them a capacity for vitality which made the dreary routines of his day tolerable. Cynthia had wondered at his refusal to take a position in one of the 'better' schools. As he sat at his desk, overseeing an inane exercise from the back of one of the reading books, he pictured her at her office, her knit dress clinging to the most delicate curves of her waist, the bulge of her breasts, the cleft of her arse. He had visited her there once, and knew that the other men who worked there watched her whenever she passed their desks, projecting their own desires into the inviting woman. For a moment he pretended he was one of them, and felt the fierce frustration at so badly wanting to touch and lick the sensuous flesh, and having no access to her. And holding on to the feeling of mounting unfulfilled passion, he pictured her naked body under his, as it would be that night, and exulted in the joy of having her. One of the things his relationship with her had taught him was that jealousy was merely the resistance against admitting how much he wanted other men to want her, and have her. In his mind he allowed her to be fucked by everyone, and the more he was free to imagine her with his stable of fantasy-men, the more exciting became her fidelity to him.

He looked at the clock. It was eight-thirty. There were noises coming from the kitchen, and a man's voice. He felt the tension in him building as he woke up further. Some powerful force was working inside him, appearing in his mind as aggressive and violent thoughts, and in his body as a constant restlessness, an amorphous impulse to move, to do. But he had no external goal to fix upon. His energy was flowing, and his psychic gears were meshed, but he lacked a direction. Like so many he was dissatisfied with his job, and had effectively removed himself from all connection with any community beyond his neighbourhood, treating all world and national and state politics as some distant obscene melodrama being worked out among humourless and petty creatures. An older age would have called him disaffected; he thought of himself as alienated.

T live in an alien nation,' he once wrote on the wall above his bed after an evening of smoking grass and letting his brain explore new patterns of linking the information in his memory banks.

He knew that when fucking between two people was total and honest, the exchange did not end abruptly at ejaculation but subsided into a deep throbbing as the bodies lay with fullest contact between the surfaces, the skin seeming to melt, and their groans and blood floating into one another, their minds homing in on the same vibration and rocking in unison. But the sense of undirected urgency which plagued him had begun to undermine even the sexual act, and fucking was no longer sufficient to dispel accumulated tension.

'Dinner's ready,' Cynthia called from the next room. 'And Conrad's here.'

Aaron was not sure whether he liked the boy, one of the long-haired quasi-students who haunted the

Berkeley campus, and their neighbour of five months. He was nineteen, twelve years Aaron's junior, and openly on the make for Cynthia. His rhetoric was radical, and he assumed a knowingness about the state of affairs in society that Aaron found both offensive and compelling. He inevitably felt dull in his presence, a reaction he resented.

As he rolled off the bed and reached for his trousers he caught a glimpse of himself %n the mirror. 'I look like a Marine,' he thought, staring at his closely cropped hair. And he felt a surge of hatred for the youth in the kitchen, whose bubbling conversation he could already hear.

It'll get cold,' Cynthia shouted.

The table was a palette of colour and smell. An unvarnished wooden bowl filled with fresh vegetables sparkled with a dressing of safflower oil and cider vinegar. Next to it a black lacquer bowl of brown rice rich with tamari and sesame salt. Alongside that, a platter of succulent soy beans, simmering in their own juice, cooked with garlic and onions, garnished with half a dozen herbs. A loaf of sourdough bread ranged beside it, while two mugs held chilled apple cider mixed with cold mu tea. Under the cover of a casserole sat a heap of steamed broccoli dripping with melted cheddar cheese. Cynthia wore a thin cotton shirt-dress that came halfway down her thighs. Her nipples were dark and pointed under the fabric; when she moved the faint aroma of recently fucked cunt stung the air.

'Has he got you converted to macrobiotics?' Aaron said. His tone was heavy and quarrelsome.

'Actually, a purist would consider her a revisionist,' said Conrad, his voice lilting in counterpoint to the dense mood. 'The people who run the food shop would shudder if they saw this spread. They all shave their heads and wear steel-rimmed glasses and are as fanatic over food as their ancestors were over revivalist religion. It's just American Gothic in Eastern drag.'

Cynthia smiled at the conceit, the quiet expression she showed only when she was deeply pleased. Aaron veered towards the deep end of his black mood. The bond between Cynthia and Conrad was palpable, and he found it easy to resent their friendliness. A single sharp suspicion exploded in his mind, like a glass shattering on a stone floor. Ts it possible they are fucking and I don't know about it?' he thought. He entertained the idea for a few seconds; he found it both frightened and titillated him.

Through the window, the sky glowed purple, and the light of the Bay Bridge stretched out towards the towers of downtown San Francisco. For a moment his interior monologue was captured by the external environment, and he experienced a margin of relief. He took shelter in the image of himself as a young man, earning a good salary at a secure job, living in a beautiful urban area, in a deep and complex relationship with a handsome woman, about to enjoy a healthy meal which had been cooked with care and concern, and entertaining a somewhat bizarre schoolboy.

'Americans don't know what good food is anymore,' Conrad was saying. 'We've forgotten. We can't just eat wholesome fresh food without giving it some esoteric or fashionable name, linking it to a movement. Health foods are the new kosher. It's almost subversive not to buy prepacked foods. When they start rounding people up for the concentration camps, not having DDT on your lettuce will be as incriminating as having mat-zohs in Germany.'

'Smash the state,' said Cynthia, smiling again.

'Coming to Berkeley has turned you into a revolutionary,' Aaron said. 'We should have stayed in San Francisco.'

They gave their attention to the food, not talking, relishing the texture of each of the dishes, getting high on simple taste and nutrition. A silence pervaded the space, a quality that sustained
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the sounds of wood hitting glass, tooth grinding against tooth, the unceasing hum of the refrigerator, the occasional noise from outside. Conrad, who was feeling the first rushes of the mescaline he had taken earlier, read it as the sense of psychic pressure which always builds up prior to the full onset of the drug's effects. Aaron rationalised the experience by considering himself in a serious mood. Cynthia sat in perfect solitude, feeling herself equidistant from the two men, tasting the flavour of Aaron's cock and Conrad's mind, exciting at the memory of the bulge in the younger man's jeans when he stood up, and wondering whether she would ever penetrate the fog that seemed to surround Aaron's understanding of life. She had changed since their move to the college town, in ways she was still too frightened to look at in all their implications. She knew Aaron to be a good person, sincere in his efforts to lead a blameless life, but he lacked a certain sharpness of insight which Conrad, for all his youthful pretentiousness, possessed in large measure. She had gone to several of the countless meetings that were always being held in Berkeley, once to a group that called themselves Radical Psychiatrists, and then to a poetry reading, and twice to seminars held by a women's liberation organisation. She had come to disdain the large city newspapers, and now regularly perused the underground periodicals. One night, when Aaron had gone to Big Sur for a few days by himself, she read all the sex ads in the back of the
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and with a burst of surprising courage, called one of the numbers. It had run: 'Super hung black stud. Wants white woman under thirty-five. 546-8739. Charles.'