Fucking Daphne (19 page)

Daphne nodded, then tapped the books as she returned them. “My number is in there,” she said.

I waited to call Daphne. I waited as long as I could stand—until the need to hear her voice burned more than the pleasure of waiting. As I dialed each number, my cock stiffened, pressing uncomfortably against the seam of my slacks. She picked up after the first ring. Without waiting for Daphne to say hello, I said, “This is the bad man.”

“The one who's taking me to dinner?”

“The one and only. We could have takeout in my office.”

“Are you too cheap to take me to a restaurant?” Daphne asked. “Ashamed to be seen with me?”

“I want to fuck you over my desk.”

There was a pause. “Where are you?”

I gave Daphne my work address and continued waiting. I watched the administrative assistants and low-level analysts streaming toward the elevator, fluorescent lights flickering off as the emptied office settled in for the night. From my window I watched the sun set. I took delivery of several greasy cartons of Thai food that I set on the conference table in the corner of my office. I refused to look at my watch. Fifteen minutes before I expected Daphne, I took off my jacket, straightened my tie, and sank back into my chair, crossing my legs, still tender from the most recent poem, “Dirty,” tattooed on the back of my left thigh. While my eyes were closed, Daphne appeared in the doorway, wearing a short, silky dress with straps that crossed from her chest over her muscular shoulders. Her multicolored dreadlocks draped down her back and her lips were painted bright red.

I cracked my knuckles. “I'm not so much bad as I am determined.”

Daphne took a seat at the conference table, inspecting the food. “Can't you be both?”

“I can be whatever you want me to be,” I said sharply, realizing as the words fell from my mouth that I sounded too eager, desperate.

Daphne's face fell. “What makes you think I want anything from you?”

She opened the carton of
goong gah tiem
with her fingernails, picking idly at pieces of shrimp. She popped a medium-size shrimp into her mouth, then licked her fingers clean. I stood and approached Daphne. I slid a hand behind her back and began wrapping her locks around my fingers until my hand was lodged against the back of her neck. I crushed my mouth against hers, tasting garlic and cigarette smoke. Her lips parted and I growled deeply. My grip tight, I moved
our bodies toward my desk and I pushed her down, wondering how my stapler and telephone and paper-clip dish felt beneath her back. I lifted her skirt and slowly slid my hands up her thighs, marveling at the strength I felt in her body. I did not speak kind words. I pulled her panties to the side and stepped closer, unbuttoning my slacks and letting them fall around my ankles. I spit on my hand and lifted my cock toward Daphne's cunt. I let myself fall into her body and I fucked her. I was, despite my best intentions, both eager and desperate.

When I came, I shouted her name and then lay on her motionless body, feeling sweat soaking my dress shirt. After a long while, Daphne pushed me away and straightened her clothes. I could see sweat stains from my body across her torso. “That was interesting,” she said. She took the opened carton of
goong gah tiem
and she left. She said nothing about her words, my body, but I saw the flicker of recognition and then the revulsion and fascination as she realized, I hope, who I really was.

I pulled my pants up, grabbed my keys and jacket, and followed Daphne home. She walked fast, as if she knew with certainty what was behind her in the darkness. I practically had to run to keep up yet stay hidden. I spent the night crouched in shadows, watching her windows. I murmured her poetry under my breath and, inexplicably, I cried. When the sun rose, I went to my tattoo shop and had the name Daphne tattooed over each rib. I waited, again, until these new wounds were healed, then I called her again.

“It's the bad man again,” I said when she answered. “I want to fuck you in my bed.”

“Where are you?” Daphne asked.

I gave her directions to my apartment. I didn't bother with food or other pretenses. I made sure her books were displayed prominently on my end table, and I changed into a worn pair of jeans and a white T-shirt. As I waited, I paced the wooden floors in bare feet, rubbing my toes along the spaces between each slat. When she knocked on the door, I inhaled deeply, running my fingers through my hair. I padded to the door, stepping aside as Daphne entered. She smirked at me and began undressing, stepping out of her shoes, black satin pants, black leather corset, and white shirt, as she found her way to my bedroom. She stripped until she was wearing nothing but ink and heavy silver rings on her fingers and a handful of black bracelets around her right wrist. Daphne lay on my bed, covered in soft white cotton sheets, and spread her legs. She pointed to the space between her thighs and I climbed up, kneeling as I looked down. I saw her ink heart quivering and I bent down, pressing my lips to the bright red, then up the column of her throat, flicking my tongue against the underside of her chin.

I pulled her lower lip between my teeth, chewing, not so softly. I traced her cheekbones and dark lower eyelids. I kissed her forehead and slid my tongue into her mouth, rudely, until she gagged and dug her fingernails into my shoulder. Our teeth and lips tangled until they were bruised. I paused and removed my T-shirt. I sat up so Daphne could see our latest work. She hissed, pulling me back to her. I slid my hands between our bodies, grasping at her breasts, heavy in my hands. I brought my teeth to her nipples, pulling them away from her body until she winced and arched her back. I turned Daphne onto her stomach and licked the length of her spine, using my fingers to spread her thighs, sliding two fingers inside her, wanting to reach
farther than I thought possible. I unbuttoned my jeans and pulled my cock out, stroking it softly as I stared at naked Daphne, her head to the side, eyes wide open.

“I'm going to fuck you now,” I whispered harshly. Then I penetrated her and waited, feeling the blood rushing from one end of my body to the other. Daphne lifted herself toward me and I began to move my hips slowly, leaving the tip of my cock near the pulsing entrance, slick and warm.

I wove my fingers between her locks, pulling her head back so that the muscles of her neck strained, reddened. I sank my teeth into the exposed skin there, biting until her body shifted in protest. She reached back and grabbed at my side, holding me against her. I slid deeper into her body, imagined my chest merging with her spine, our organs coalescing. I fucked her harder and harder until her head was pressed against the wall and our bodies could move no farther. Her ass and thighs trembled beneath me. Each of her words throbbed and swelled, the canvas of my skin a mass of sensation. I felt her cunt opening wider. I was moved by the violence and tenderness of it all. I could feel something building in my feet, crawling up my legs and into my cock. Again I cried her name as I came, then slid off, lying on my back, one arm tossed over my head as I tried to catch my breath. I told myself that she had come, too.

Daphne rolled onto her side, facing me, and took in for the first time the extent of her words on my body, without trying to hide it. Her eyes widened as she absorbed the dark inks, the bold lines, so little skin left untouched, words upon words in a book of flesh. She inhaled sharply and reached for my rib cage, tracing the letters of her name over and over again. “This intrigues me,” she said. “And it
scares me. It really scares me.” She inched closer and began flicking her tongue against the first word of each stanza, making me shiver, leaving no poem untouched. I fought the tears welling in the corners of my eyes, felt a hot streak slide down the side of my forehead and into my ear.

When she was finished, I placed my hands atop Daphne's head and, using the pads of my thumbs, began to draw my fingers over her body. When I reached her breasts, Daphne sat up abruptly and I stilled. “Fucking me isn't the same as knowing or having me.” There was no malice in her voice. There was, in fact, a certain kindness to her words. She grabbed my chin and stared into my eyes until I was forced to turn away. Then she lay back down, offering me her body once again.

“I only need the reverse to be true,” I said, when I was able to breathe again.

 

 

I
f you want to know where my words have gone, ask Daphne. For all I know, she hasn't even used them, still has them pressed between the queer, translucent pages of the huge, strange book that she pages through at night, perched on her windowsill under the complicit gaze of the Pacific moon. I don't begrudge her them. I don't even begrudge her cutting me off, deciding that I could no longer be trusted. I probably can't, not with her. I just wish that she still spoke to me now and then, so that she could whisper the lost words into my ears and let me feel their thrilling echoes deep inside me, in the places where they used to live.

I miss those echoes most of all. That was the ultimate prize for letting Daphne take my words away, the heart-stopping gossamer instants in which she would share with me the precious weight of the syllables she took. Not that I disdained the more plebeian kinks we
shared on the occasional evening we could manage together. But you can read about those kinds of things elsewhere. As for me, I can no longer write them anywhere at all. But Daphne still can.

She is the reason I have retired from writing erotica. Many people, publishers included, have asked me when I will write more smut, another book perhaps, but until now I could not bring myself to tell them that I never shall. Who would've believed me, anyhow, if I said that I
would
write, but that I cannot, that a tall beauty with a feral tongue bewitched me with a magical paradox, the ecstasy of loss? Who would believe that she took—no, that I gave her—bouquets of words, plucked whole from the deepest parts of me?

Who will believe that even now? I didn't believe it either when I first heard of the poets who loved Daphne, then vanished from the scene, saying they couldn't write anymore. Like everyone else, I shrugged: Breakups come, breakups go; it couldn't possibly be a literal thing. But now and then, I take up one of my own books from the shelf and I start to read. I know, intellectually, that the words are there on the pages because I put them there; that once I had them for my very own, as much a part of me as my eyes or my fingers, and I used them whenever I pleased. But now there is nothing in me where those words used to live, save a tiny shimmer of memory if, when I read, I imagine the words in Daphne's voice.

Being with Daphne was different from being with anyone else I'd ever been with. Knowing that you have what it takes to give a girl like Daphne something she wants is heady stuff. Knowing that it will cost you to do it turns it into a challenge. Actually doing it, playing consort to the goddess of vandals, is another thing again. She glorified me with everything she ripped away. What else could I do but let her?

Each time I'd visit San Francisco, I would email her, taunt her, tantalize her with what bits she might have of me this time. She liked adjectives best, things like “slick” or “wet” or “hungry.” I would write and offer her bouquets. Would she like “turgid”? Or perhaps Madame would prefer “torrid” or “desperate” or “throbbing” or, as a special two-for-one, something hyphenated, like “heavy-lidded” or “cum-soaked”? The replies came cool and hungry. She didn't want those words. So I still have them. But there are plenty I don't.

We would set a date, a time. Her place, always. Riding BART through the TransBay Tube, I would torment myself with memory and longing. Me on my knees, trying to speak the words she'd taken before, the toe of her boot wedged up between my thighs as she spoke them and taunted me with my inability to repeat. Rubbed raw, starving, daredevil, I resisted the urge to grind against turnstiles, parked cars, city cops. I walked toward her house, thinking of her scent and at the same time contemplating things I told myself I dared not think about, things that would find me lying limp in a pool of the sweat and slime of strangers. It would be simpler. Less dangerous, in some ways. But unacceptable. And all of it, the unthinkable urgency of all of it, made me hotter. I gasped out loud at the filthy, lubricious sliding of wet fabric against the thick, puffy flesh between my legs. It was unlike me, such a reaction in public, uncanny, revolting. I ascended her steps and threw myself into her arms.

There was no romance with Daphne, no pleasantries. What pillow talk there was came later, usually via email, after there was once again a safe distance between us and we dared to try to use words like civilized people. We couldn't do that in person. Not after we began. Daphne made that clear. She said it would only make
things more complicated if I spoke, would create chain reactions, like dominoes falling over and over. My voice would link the words together inside me, so that if she plucked one they would all come out, a magician's silk scarves pulled hand over hand from a helpless, silent pocket.