Slow Hand (22 page)

Really, this analysis isn’t getting anywhere. I share my sexual fantasies with you, and you sit there saying “ah, ah, ah ha.” I don’t get any satisfaction, and I don’t think you do. Although I must admit I can’t see your hands, and they could be working away, jerking off left, right, and center. If that’s true, then I’m paying you to jerk off. Seems a bit unbalanced. Don’t you think? You know, if I had an affair, I bet I’d stop coming here.

Right now I know what I want, and I know how it should feel. Do you want to know? Don’t really have any choice. Got
to listen, don’t you? I don’t really want any more kisses and stale breath and too-hard hugs and big fat penises pushing their way inside me. A finger—the middle one with short fingernails—must run ticklingly down my naked side and around my armpits over and over and just brush the edge of my crotch and occasionally almost by accident stray into my pubic hair and then immediately move off and start again. This has to happen for about five minutes, and each time the accidental brush with the pubic hair lasts two seconds more. Over and over this occurs until the side and the armpits are forgotten and only my crotch starts to move on its own. It takes off from the rest of my body and arches, strays, and moans with each soft stroke of this one finger. Sometimes this finger actually moves in and out of me and circles my ass, but mostly it just strokes—not rubs. I keep whispering to this finger “Don’t stop, don’t stop.” I just want this finger to go on and on forever. No rough stuff. No heavy-handed movements, pushing or throbbing stuff. Funny that. You men all think and talk about throbbing, pushing, explosions—none of that interests me. I just want softness and tenderness and an unconnectedness. You probably underrate the mouth also. I want to lie back and kiss for hours.

I don’t really want to be a part of the action. I want it done to me, and I want others—the unknown others—to watch. You know, even when I talk to you and I try to shake you out of that stupor you inhabit, I talk about throbbing and juicy and use words like “cunt” and “penis.” But that isn’t really what I’m thinking. I don’t think you could ever really know what I’m feeling when I see myself, our mouths, and this finger in a soft gray-lit room with shadows dancing outside the windows. Nope. You and I, man and woman, inhabit two different sexual spaces. We need each other, but we can’t really see into each other’s ecstasies. How do you do it? Do you take my stories home at night? Does my rambling help you in bed?

Take these magic fingers I’m telling you about. Unfortunately, they have personalities attached to them, and sooner or later the finger is replaced by a word or a tongue or a penis, and the rhythm is interrupted and I lose it. Everything gets mundane. Stroke one, two, three. Lick one, two, three. Suck
one, two, three. And, again. Repeat. As soon as the personalities enter the scene, I dry up and pleasure rapidly changes to boredom. I start to create shopping lists, listen to the radio, hear the voices next door. I don’t want to give pleasure. I don’t want someone sticking their tongues and penises in me. I just want to sail away on this wet island of a soft middle finger playing with my crotch.

I suppose even better than doing this with my neighbor is to do it with a stranger in a hotel in Manchester and have the bed next to an open window so that the people (whom I don’t know) living across the way can actually see what is going on. Yeah! I would like to give them pleasure so they could watch us—without my knowing they are watching me—and they start doing it also. And after a few minutes this would spread up and down the street until every window is steamy and every woman is getting a tender middle finger stroking her crotch and every bed is wet with vaginal—I bet you don’t like that word—drippings. And, even now, telling you about it, I feel this drop in my stomach and whimper in my throat, my eyelids drop, and my crotch does it own version of a banged funny bone jerk, and I want to have you come over here, from behind that goddamn fucking pretentious desk of yours, clip your fingernails, and take your beautifully manicured and buffed middle finger and start to get to work and earn your money.

Like other contributors to
Slow Hand,
Sabina Faye uses geography as an aid to stimulation. Additionally, as anyone who has ever eaten a ripe mango knows, there are few experiences more deliciously sensuous. So, having let herself be initiated into one sort of tropical ritual, Faye’s heroine is definitely ready for others. And, thanks to the author’s lush imagery, this story of erotic adventure far from home could just as easily be termed armchair travel into the realm of the senses.

O
f all my senses, touch is the one that operates strongest; steering a course through my life from some deep primitive place and moving my hands to feel even before my brain registers sight. Nothing is real to me until I touch it I choose my clothes by the feel against my skin. I recoil at nylon and have near orgasms over certain silks. At home I eat with my fingers, for nothing tastes the same off a fork—a utensil as thin and cold as its name. I think I was meant to live in caveman days, with my bed a pile of skins on rock, my feet bare to the ground, and a haunch of fire-roasted beast in my hand. I walk
into a room and cannot settle anywhere until I have swept around touching each thing, the wood of the table, the fabric of the draperies. Art galleries make me nervous. Museums don’t exist for me, with everything cased and distant.

But I was born in the waning 20th century, into a world of shrink-wrapped produce and climate control, in the most untouchable country on the planet, England. I came to Australia looking for wind. Free-falling into the far tropical north, I was not disapointed. I found a land where the air was plump and the ground vibrated under my feet; where it rained in heavy drops and the night sky stung my face, and there I found a man of the most incredible skin.

I cannot think of him even now without a shudder, without this sensation like butterflies in the back of my heart. I had never felt skin like this before. It was soft as a newborn’s tongue, smooth as a pond. It was like chocolate and moss, violas and black ice. He was a dark-haired Swede and rarely wore more than shorts and a silver ring on one toe. Beyond that, if asked what he looked like exactly, I could not tell you, so lost was I in his pure glorious flesh. I could touch him anywhere, his arm, his foot, the back of his hand, and feel my juices start to flow. There was a current beneath the softness. I had never been so aroused by simple touch before.

I had come from England to work on a distant relative’s boat, a job arranged in the proper British manner, through family connections, as a way to deal with an unruly daughter of nineteen who intended not to go on to a respectable university or at least secretarial school, but hitchhike to Istanbul or anywhere. But my family was burdened with the lingering bondage of a respectable name in society (although like most such families, an inversely respectable fortune), and it would have meant tiresome scandal. So it was decided that father’s second cousin, from the seafaring side of the family (which now consisted mostly of shipping clerks), who skippered a charter yacht on the Coral Sea, should take me on as cook.

And that is how I came to be squeezing mangoes one Saturday in the farmer’s market in Cairns. It was my first attempt at provisioning the boat, and I had already finished with the
ordinary. Bags of potatoes, onions, cabbages, carrots sat waiting, but now I was lost in the fruit. I had never seen half the fruits offered here, not personally I mean, and I was a little delirious with the smell and feel of them. There were whole pineapples, with their tantalizing patterns of prickles. There were hard hairy coconuts and furry kiwi fruit. There were papayas, one cut open on each stack to show the fleshy orange-pink inside.

I picked up a mango. It was a soft heavy weight, the skin like glove leather, mostly green with a deep scarlet blush on one end. I turned it over a few times.

“What is this?” I asked the woman behind the stall.

“What IS it?” She squinted at me and stepped a little closer as if looking for signs of antennae or something. “It’s a mango. You never seen a mango, luv?”

I shook my head. “What’s it taste like?”

She shrugged. “Like a mango! Tastes like a mango.” She laughed and picked one off the stack, stabbed a side tooth through the skin and peeled it back, exposing a bright orange pulp. “G’wan, try it,” she nodded toward the mango in my hand. “Y’re a pom, eh?”

I had only been in Australia three days, I didn’t know what a pom was, but she looked friendly enough that it couldn’t have been too insulting, so I nodded. I brought the mango up to my mouth when I felt a touch on my arm. “Not that end,” a man’s voice said. But I hardly heard him because I was immediately taken by his touch. It was the softest touch, as if a small bird had brushed its chest against my wrist. I turned and saw the man who belonged to the touch.

“This way,” he said, and I felt his fingers curve around mine as he turned the mango in my hand. The softness of the two skins around my hand sent my poor brain spinning.

“The tree sap drips down on the stem end and stays on the skin,” he told me. “If you bite the wrong end it can make your lips swell and sting.” As he withdrew his hand my fingers clutched harder around the fruit, and as I punctured the skin with my tooth, warm sweet juice squirted out and ran down my chin. The man laughed as drops of it landed on his chest. I
reached instinctively to wipe it off and had my first real touch of Deyan’s skin. It was hot but dry, smooth as the moon, like suede and caramels. He did not move away but looked at my bold palm on his chest, then I noticed my hand was covered with sticky juice and pulled it back.

“They say the best way is just to take off your clothes and eat them in the bathtub.” His voice was also rich, deep, and melodic. “Come on, there’s a tap over here.” He led me through the stalls to a faucet on the outside of the building, and we rinsed our hands. He took off his shirt, which, in the manner of most men in this tropical place, was light cotton and hung unbuttoned, soaked it under the tap, rang it out, and put it back on.

I am not usually struck dumb with men or anybody else, but I was having trouble getting any words out through the sensory storm in my brain. All I wanted was to touch him again, to stroke that flesh, to rub my face against that skin, to lick it, touch it, anywhere. I had never felt skin like this. Out there in the light I could see that he was older, in his thirties at least. He was slim and muscular, of average height, or maybe even less, but he had a smooth tall way of moving.

The sun was hot, shimmering through the dust of the parking lot as we sat on some milk crates and I finished the mango, leaning over to let the juice fall. We had told our names, but little else when my cousin pulled up in the truck to load the groceries.

It was a long week at sea as I learned to cook in the tiny galley, handle the sails, and chat with the guests. I swam every day in the clear tropical sea. The water was so salty I could float effortlessly, feeling the warm sun on my face and the soft water lapping against my skin, and remembering Deyan’s skin. I thought of him often, gently rocking on the boat at night, or feeling the warm sun on my body. One night I sat alone on deck, eating a mango, the sweet juice dripping on my leg. I thought about what he had said, about eating the fruit naked in the bathtub. I sucked one finger clean and wiped the juice off my thigh. What did his thighs feel like?

The night breeze was cool, and I lay back and spread my
legs a little, lightly stroking the soft skin between my own thighs, slowly easing my fingers up under the shorts to stroke my softest place, as the memory of Deyan’s skin grew too over-whelming.

As we sailed into view of the harbor at the end of the week, I stood at the bow of the yacht and felt the warm breeze on my face. It was soft and all-surrounding, soft as Deyan’s skin. A shudder of anticipation rippled down my back. I had two days off, and I would die if I did not feel him. I did not know where he lived, except on the beach north of Cairns.

I walked down the esplanade, wearing only a cotton sarong with no underwear, licking an ice cream cone—another supreme sensory pleasure. Pelicans glided in low over the mud flats as the clouds edged with the first gilt of sunset. After a week at sea I loved the feel of solid ground and cool grass, the strange buzz in my head from the windless silence—these were land pleasures.

It was late spring and the frangipani bushes along the esplanade were in full bloom, the air heavy with the scent. I sat on a bench, spread my legs a little to cool myself off, closed my eyes, and smelled. It was a unique smell, sweet but urgent, like the perfume on a gown, discarded but still warm. The ice cream was cool, and I licked it as slowly as I could, boldly imagining it was not a double scoop of strawberry but the velvet skin of Deyan’s cock I was wrapping my tongue around. I was jolted from thought as a brilliant storm of lorikeets rose up from the trees, chattering and shrieking.

I opened my eyes and there he was.

“Miss Mango. I saw your boat come in,” Deyan said, a hint of amusement on his face at my posture. He sat down next to me, some inches away where I could barely feel the heat of his body.

“How was it? Did you get seasick?” He still had a slight Swedish accent, and a deep rich voice. The voice matched the skin, resonant, like a drum.

“No,” I laughed. “Just lonely.” We sat in a comfortable silence for a while. A dog left its jogger and ran up to our bench for a petting. Our hands rummaged his ears and each other.
Our legs were touching with the movement. When the dog bounded off again, Deyan made no move away, but the thin cotton of my sarong was still a maddening separation. He asked me about the trip, and I learned he was a biologist working mostly up north in the rain forest. He had to come to town today to mail off some spore samples.