The Children of Hamelin (20 page)

“Are you? Really
here?
Look, you’ve never had a real thing with a man, have you? So maybe that sense of certainty you’re knocking yourself out chasing is something a woman can only find with a man. How would you know?”

She stared at me; her lower lip trembled. Then I felt her body relax. “I think I understand,” she said. “I... I push men away, don’t I?”

“You don’t exactly welcome them in. Did you ever think that maybe you don’t have a sex problem?”

Blank stare.

“Know what I think?” I said, riffing the wisdom of the universe off the top of my head. “I think you’d be just fine in bed if it weren’t for this ‘center’ bullshit. It’s not that you can’t let yourself go, it’s that you don’t want to. You think you’re empty inside so you’re afraid of really letting a man in all the way because you’re afraid he might just fill the void inside with himself.”

She stared at me, real wonder in her eyes. “That’s the deepest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she whispered.

“Even Harvey?”

“Even Harvey,” she said humorlessly.

“Okay, that’ll be fifty bucks for the first hour. I’ll even carry it a step further. You’re hung up in a circle. You won’t let a man all the way inside because you’re afraid he’ll fill the void. Thing is, he
would.
But that’s what you’re really looking for. You need a real lover, is all. A woman needs a real thing with a man at her center; it
is
her center. But you’ve gotta go into the center of your fear. You’ve gotta trust a man.”

Wow! I knocked
myself
out. Where in hell did all that come from? The words just seemed to pour out, as if... as if that certainty she claimed I had at my core really existed and had done the talking. Christ, we were really into it now: drawing things out of each other that neither had believed was there.

“Trust me,” I said, taking her hands.

“I’ll try. But I’m afraid... I’m really afraid....”

So am I, baby, so am I. Magic was loose in the world.

“That’s a good sign,” I told her. “If two people don’t scare each other a little, they’re not really alive to each other.”

“Are you afraid too?”

I nodded, feeling naked before her for the first time. It felt scary. It felt good.

“Let’s go into the bedroom,” she said, her lower lip trembling, her eyes moist and shining.

I got up, pulled her gently to her feet. I kissed her ever so lightly on the lips. “I dig a woman who can scare me a little,” I said.

For the first time since Anne, I felt myself poised on the brink of the infinite possible, walking naked into a situation with a woman where I was really vulnerable, not in control. And grooving behind it.

No words as we went into the bedroom. The alarm was set for eight, and she knew it this time; the magic building in the air between us did not have to be broken by logistical hassles.

When I turned on the night table lamp, her hand moved toward the switch, then hesitated, went back to her side. She smiled at me; a sardonic little smile. I smiled back, letting her know I understood what a little victory that moment was for her, for us.

We stood facing each other beside the bed for a long, still moment, eye to eye, just the palms of our hands touching. I felt strangely lightheaded, almost high; ready to slip my control of the situation, myself, give it all over to that certainty at my core that she believed in and I didn’t.

Then she turned from me, her hand reaching for the zipper at the back of the green sheath dress: a graceless gesture, a turn-off, a renunciation of the openness building between us.

I reached for her shoulder, spun her around to face me as gently as I could, pulled her arm down to her side. Her eyes widened in confusion (maybe in fear?); her jaw tightened, then her mouth opened in a big protesting “O”.

I sealed her lips with my finger, smiled and said: “Dig.”

I began to unbutton my shirt. She looked at me as if I were crazy, as if a male strip were some kind of ultimate perversion. But as I threw off the shirt, took off my undershirt and bared my chest, her face relaxed and she kept her eyes on me all the way as I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my socks.

I unbuckled my belt, unzipped by fly, paused for a moment and smiled at her, digging her digging me. And she
was
digging me; her eyes were openly hot and she gave me a brave little smile that swelled my groin and made me vibrate deep inside.

She moved closer. We were almost touching, eye to eye, as I let the pants drop and stepped out of them.

I reached for the shorts, but she pulled my hand away, smiled at me and drew them off herself. It was a strangely beautiful feeling, standing naked before her and she fully clothed. We made no move to touch each other; she stared openly at my cock as if she had never seen one before in her life. And in a peculiar way, I suppose she never had—never had taken a long, lingering look between a man’s legs. It was almost like capturing her virginity.

Then, still facing me, not taking her eyes from mine, she unzipped her dress in an awkward behind-her-back motion, kicked off her shoes and stepped out of the dress, letting it lay where it had fallen. She wore no stockings, just a white bra and functional white panties. She unhooked the bra, threw it to the floor, and her breasts hung free, the nipples pink and erect. I reached out with both hands and rolled the panties down her thighs, feeling the warmth of her flesh beneath my palms.

We stood before each other truly naked. I knew that we had just won a kind of victory together, and, aroused though I was, I felt a curious asexual tenderness behind it. Or could it be
sexual
tenderness—discovering for the first time that such a thing could be?

We took each other in our arms, gently, as if each of us believed the other were made of transparent, fragile crystal.

I kissed her, closed-mouthed, softly: a child’s kiss. Her lips were closed against mine but there was no resistance to them. I parted her lips with mine and inhaled her sweet breath, then sighed my own breath into her. In, out, in out; just our breaths, our essences, mingling in sexual rhythm. Then I let my tongue pour lazily into her mouth—and tasted her groan of pleasure as her arms suddenly tightened around my waist. Our tongues met inside her mouth, caressing each other in the warm moistness. As our tongues’ juices mingled filling the place between our mouths, blurring my sense of what was her body and what was mine, I felt a switch close somewhere inside of me, heat coursed up through my body, and I pulled her tight against me and my tongue began thrusting deeper, deeper, faster, faster, and I felt her mouth contracting around it rhythmically kiss-kiss-kiss.

Then her weight pulled me forward with her down onto the bed, on top of her, our mouths still a separate fused universe, where I tasted her tasting me tasting her.

I felt her hand moving down the valley of my spine, over the cheeks of my ass, up my belly and down, and then she held the very root of my cock, fingers stroking it while her palm lightly touched the softness of my balls.

My mouth tore itself from hers in a moan that seemed to pulse up my whole body from the base of my spine where my hips began to move before I knew it to the coaxing of her hand. I ran my hand down her belly and between the silk of her inner thighs and was rewarded with an answering moan as her legs clamped my hand to her and her hips began to undulate beneath me. Her hand began to work faster and faster and I felt myself building building building up to a quick crest. I remembered last time and a pang of fear went through me—too quick! too quick!

I looked down at her face: eyes rolling behind half-closed lids, mouth open and groaning. I kissed each of her eyes in quick succession; they opened, she smiled, and I felt we were in contact now at both ends of our beings. She ran her tongue cat-like over her lower lip as if acknowledging the moment and—

In one smooth motion, she thrust me into her and clamped her legs around my waist. I groaned, screamed. Too beautiful! I slid my arms under her body and hugged her to me.

I began moving my hips in a slow-grinding rhythm—she bucked under me, faster and faster, half a beat ahead of me, throwing me off-stride. I kept to my rhythm but began moving my body harder, more forcefully, trying to break her to my moves. But she kept bucking harder and harder, faster and faster, off in some turned-inward world of her own.

A savage rage tore through me: I wasn’t going to let this happen again! A feral wisdom took hold—I bit her on the breast, hard, tasting the salt of her skin on my tongue.

She screamed in pain—but I felt her rhythm break under the shock and I started thrusting harder and harder, but slowly, majestically, grinding my hips in a circle with each thrust.

And her scream faded into a deep moaning and she was with me, her hips moving with mine in sweet counterpoint. I let myself go, turned off my mind as our bodies moved with each other, flesh dancing with flesh in perfect rhythm, building and building and building, our moans mingling feeding our bodies feeding our moans feeding each other building building building—

A scream! A tremendous earthquake of flesh against me, a spasm from the very bowels of her being, a total contraction of flesh sound soul—

That flipped over every synapse in my body into a white-out pleasure-flash that shot through my body up my balls into my cock and then through me as the universe exploded through a beat of nonbeing...

A moment later, I opened my eyes and met hers, warm and bright and heavy-lidded in the dim light. I kissed her lips tenderly, gently, a child’s kiss, ending up as it had begun.

“Oh yes...” she sighed. “Yes... yes... yes....”

Lying under the covers together, warm and toasty, naked hips just barely touching, staring up dreamily at the ceiling, then at each other.

“That was...” Arlene sighed.

I touched a finger to her lips. “It just
was,
is all. Let’s leave it at that.” I ran my hand down over her chin, across her collarbone, smoothed the bite I had made on her breast. Feeling the welt made by my own teeth, I felt a pang of shame—but I also felt myself swelling a bit under the covers. Not now, I thought, maybe later.

“Un... about that...” I mumbled uneasily, “I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of sadist....”

She laughed at me with her eyes. “If you’re a sadist, I’m a masochist, because I loved it... No... I didn’t like the pain... but it... you know... set me free....”

I nodded. The warmth of Arlene Cooper’s body in my bed, the smell of her in my nostrils, all’s right with the world. It was something much more delicious than just the afterglow of a fine fuck. Once, maybe because I was very stoned, I had been able to make a Celebrated Nymphomaniac come for the first time in five years of very heavy trying. Now I remembered how good that had felt; I had had that with Arlene but I had had something even better: the feeling (whether I deserved it or not) that I had achieved what I had not because of how good I had been but because of what I
was.
I may have had as tasty moments in the act of fucking, but I had never felt
this
good afterward.

“Funny...” Arlene was mumbling, “pain doing that for me...”

I stroked the soft mound of her breast, snuggled closer to her. Was this love I was feeling now? Who knows what the word means? I knew I had walked an extra mile for Arlene, and would probably walk a mile beyond that. Was I
in love?
I didn’t think so. But yes, we were
lovers
now....

“Maybe it’s just a physical reaction... pain at the right moment transmuting into pleasure—”

Skin to skin, the emotion I felt was too complex to have a name. I didn’t want to name it, but I wanted to recognize it somehow with a symbol—like a class-pin or a ring. But what was the right symbol for a thing like this...?

“...maybe it
is
masochistic—”

“Hey,” I said, suddenly inspired. “I’d like to give you a key to my apartment.”

Arlene looked at me, seemed to come back from someplace she had been all by herself:
“What?”

“I said I’d like to give you a key to my pad.”

She shrank away from me slightly, looked at me as if I had flipped.
“The key to your apartment?”
she said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I smiled at her. “Well, in the square world out there, a guy gives a girl an engagement ring when he’s decided to think seriously about marrying her. So I want to give you the key to my pad to show you that I’m thinking seriously about asking you to live with me.”

She screwed up her face and shook her head. “That’s the screwiest thing I’ve every heard!” she said. She did not seem amused.

“Don’t you dig sentiment?” I said. Then, seeing that she was starting to smirk as if it were a joke: “I’m not putting you on; I really mean it.”

She looked at me; her eyes narrowed. “You
do
mean it seriously, don’t you?” she said.

I nodded.

“Then I should consider it as a serious matter, shouldn’t I?”

I nodded again.

“Well look,” she said, “if you really mean it as a commitment to think seriously about living together sometime, then accepting the key means I agree to think seriously about it too.”

“Exactly.”

“Then accepting the key is a serious step in itself.”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, then, I can’t accept the key.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I’m not really sure what happened tonight,” she said.

“What do you mean you don’t know what happened? We made love, is what happened,
we made love.
We finally got through to each other.”

Her jaw clenched, a muscle began twitching at the hinge of her jawbone; she drew her body away from me under the covers. “I felt something with you that I never felt before,” she said. “But how do I know it wasn’t just an animal reaction? Maybe you just did something to my body—”

“Oh shit! Can’t you even tell what you feel?”

“I know what I felt, but I don’t know what it means. I’m not in love with you, Tom.”

“I didn’t say I was in love with you.”

“Then what?”

“You mean something to me, is all. There’s a way to say it in Spanish:
mi casa es tu casa,
my home is your home. That’s what the key is supposed to say.”