Fucking Daphne (30 page)

 

Italicized lines/phrases from
Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,
by Julia Kristeva, Columbia University Press, 1941.

 

 

T
wo in the morning. It's hot and humid as hell. A thick breeze wafts through my open bedroom window: dank overturned earth, the subtle and cloying perfume of pot, saltwater, voices of late-night partiers. I'm wired, still keyed up from dancing for hours. At the ironic goth club, kids wearing torn white clothing sprayed fake blood on each other. Grinding and go-go dancing, they made streaked red messes on their clothes and the floor. I was the only one in black. I danced the longest, and now I am still restless and sweating in this heat. Fake blood is dried in crusts here and there where it's smeared on my cheek, collarbone, hip. No one threw blood on me, but dance hard enough, and it rubs off.

The others left with each other, in twos and threes, in red and white, wearing matching gleaming, bloodied white shreds, and I walked home alone in my encrusted black. Now I am sprawled on
a dirty black sheet on my bed, alone, horniness flashing through my toes, cunt, tits, and all I can do is stare at my tattoos and touch them over and over. I should be asleep, but instead I'm wide awake and touching them, up and down from arm to arm, collarbone, hips, tracing the ink, remembering the deep rolling pain of the tattoo needle: blue waves, stark goddesses radiating flames, crossed sailors' daggers, and the newest, on my chest: an eighteenth-century medical textbook's cross-sectioned heart, aorta, and ventricles etched in black and filled in living, bleary red.

As my fingertips graze the scabbed tattoo edge, I remember the pain of the needle lancing my skin and I press hard, until the tattoo twinges. It's still healing. I wince as the ache ricochets through my frame, straight to my cunt. I stretch my toes to the end of my bed, lie back on my hair so it's pulled from the roots; the deep pain arches into my brain and my mouth waters, wanting to be full. My clit is a hot coal under my black cargo shorts. My fingers are on the seam to press sweetness from my clit, remembering the pain, skin aching in the spots that remain bare, my hips, my inner thighs, the most sensitive places, aching for the bone-deep pull of pain and desire.

I rub against the seam of my shorts with my right knuckles; it's dull and rough. At home in my room, I'm still tense and restless. Voices filter in from outside, exaggerated laughter. I feel self-conscious, as if they are watching me and laughing. But the laughter is for the people outside, not for me, not in here. Rubbing against the space my cunt presses against, feeling full, frustrated, it's not nearly enough.

But then, nostalgia doesn't leave much room for new experiences. And there's so much I'm still hungry to do. Right now I need to be a long distance from this humid room with its thin walls and outside laughter. I need to be away from the harsh thud of boots now pacing back and forth one floor up. I need to be far away from my single-occupancy bed, from my own fingers pressing what I can out of my cunt.

Harsh laughter from outside banishes the leathermen. It's me and my right hand again. It's inside my cargo shorts and it's rubbing my clit. Faster. Desired, defiled.

I press harder against my fingers. I am almost there, but my desires are more complicated than only abasement. I kick off my
cargo shorts and reach to my bedside table to the black and red- swirled acrylic cock, holding its cool tip so it barely grazes my hole.

I press my cock inside slowly, imagining myself wrapped in rubber and leather as I push the tip of it against me, my curves compressed and ready for

A breeze rushes through my bedroom window, hot like his breath. I grip my acrylic phallus harder and nudge it inside, just a little more.

Alone in my bed, I slide the acrylic cock inside me just a little more, tangle my bedsheet in my left hand. It's torturously slow. Delicious. The tattoo on my chest burns.

I am thrusting my hips, gripping my acrylic cock inside, and

I am thrusting my hips, gripping it inside, drawing it within me. I'm fucked how I want. When I want. By my cock.

I reach down to touch my clit and feel it stretched over the cock, rubbing it hard as

The partiers outside have quieted. The leathermen come and kiss me on the forehead, smooth my damp hair. My phantom boy curls up at the end of my bed to warm my feet. I toss the cock on a towel on the floor to wash in the morning, nestle my head into my pillow, and turn out the light.

The first time, Daphne seduced me. She came to my door with a grocery store rose and a bag of Hershey's Kisses. “Sweets for the sweet,” she said. I was young enough to be charmed. I was twenty years old. I had never had sex with a woman before.

The Violent Femmes were on the stereo. For years afterward, on car trips, we would shout out the lyrics to the entire album, song by song, laughing and smoking and driving to late-night diners with bad coffee, dead ends where we'd make out. I was the passenger. Daphne drove.

That first time, I was living in a large wood-paneled room in a converted boardinghouse with a shared kitchen and bathroom. I had a refrigerator, a bookcase, a desk, a single bed. No bed frame. Daphne sat at the head of the bed, and I sat at the foot. She was so thin, I could see her ribs when she pulled off her tank top. She had almost no breasts to speak of. She looked like a boy. We were such
a contrast—her, slight and blond; me, chunky and black-haired—except for our skin. We were both so pale, our skin almost glowed in the low light of my room.

This is the part I remember best: I didn't know what I was doing, so I let her lead, let her touch me and explore my body with her hands and her mouth. I leaned back, let her undress me. This is the part I remember second best: I did not reciprocate. If she had indicated she wanted me to, I would have. Instead, she offered me chocolate.