Best of Best Women's Erotica (9 page)

And then Trevor kissed me the way a man kisses you when he is not on the couch but is in your bed. I unbuttoned his thin blue shirt, but when I lifted his T-shirt he seized my wrist. “You know that thing you've been feeling on my chest?”

I nodded. I was curious but had never asked about the long ridge along his sternum. Trevor pulled his T-shirt off, placed my hand on the hairless scar between his ribs. “I had open-heart surgery when I was ten. I had a leaky valve.”

“Wow.”

“I was too young to be scared,” he said. “I was mostly mad I couldn't play at recess. Mom was freaked out, though.”

He let me touch the scar, answered questions. I sensed it was a routine with him, introducing the new lover to this medical event; I also sensed that it was fresh, that this exchange was unique to us.

“I'm okay now. Don't worry—I won't die on top of you.”

There is nothing like a man taking your clothes off when you haven't had sex in three years. There is no feeling like nudity. There is nothing more precious than an erection against your thigh, the exquisite waiting. There is nothing like a man's tongue tilling the field of skin below your navel, his hands moving to spread your thighs apart. He spreads you with abandon, reverence, curiosity, destruction, like a boy running through mustard flower, arms flung, forging a trail for himself in something wild and weedy and tall. There is nothing like a man's tongue moving down and toward, as his hands pry at the opening to what you can't see. His eyes are on you now, and you try to imagine what he sees, but it's not like the books, you know. And a man has a point of view you'll never have, not even with a mirror, his cheek to your mattress, looking up and into your weird oyster complexity—this strange, gilded
lily-thing. I propped myself up on my elbows, stopped thinking, and submitted to the greater wisdom of his tongue and fingers. Sexual Maoists, listen up: this man had knowledge to lord over this woman and I yielded to it and it felt
good.

“You are so wet,” he said, and licked me, and wedged his fingers inside and, pressing my G-spot with two strong fingers, fairly lifted my pelvis off the bed to meet his mouth. For a while Trevor seemed to be eating persimmon with both hands tied behind his back, interrogating the ineffable borders between fruit and wall, and my fingers reached out for his, but it didn't last long before he stopped and knelt upright. He stroked his penis even more erect than it was already, and I looked at this marvelous thing,
a big hard dick! And a man's hands on it!
And he was stroking it as if to say, “Behold this, girl,” as if he didn't need a woman, so content was he to hold his own hard cock. And I beheld: the dark bush of hair at his groin, his cock upright, the tip of it pink and smooth with a drop of moisture at his urethra, and then his smooth hard stomach—a physique groomed on brown rice and bubbly water—and his bottom rib, and then the violent white scar between his nipples (“cracked open” is the slang cardiologists use to describe sawing through sternum and butterflying the rib cage apart). His collarbone. His neck. The tilt of his chin, the usual smirk, his eyes checking me out sideways as he stroked himself for me, and when I shifted in reeking wet lust, my walls glazed against each other slickly.

By now I was open and pliant, hot with syrupy martyr agony—that suffering when it's four in the morning and there's no one, not ever anyone, and flat alone on your bed, you clench your legs against it—only now I had Trevor there, doing something about it.

“You're gorgeous,” he said—not to my face. And as much as Trevor's gaze made me feel exposed and unfairly known, I saw in his eyes how badly he was hooked. Yes, behold
this,
boy, because I know that every political ideology and armed revolution, every campaign speech, every manifesto written about theater or art or music, the gunning down of JFK, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Intifada, the Taliban, your disgust for wealth, when you boil it all down, is somehow about the creepy loveliness of this, my Great Wet Equivocator.

When he moved for me, his smell, the airborne ineffable presence of sex, swirled around me like hot water, when eddies of volcanic water elicit cold goose bumps of pain, and it was like that as Trevor came near me, crawling toward me in the candlelight, him and his raging hard-on, the bearing down on a woman by a man, the lowering of his torso on mine, the clouds of his scent that cleared away as the distance between us diminished, the great big
Yes you are going to get it now, it is going to happen and there's nothing you can do to stop it now, I am going to enter you and I am going to fuck you, Ma'am and don't look at me like you don't want it, like you're not sure. Like all men are potential rapists—that insulting trash—because we are, and we aren't, and that's what makes us burn so splendidly in your lonely bullshit fantasies every night. Isn't that right, Ma'am?
and I said aloud, “Yes.”

“Far out,” Trevor replied.

He braced his legs and positioned himself, and I tilted to accept him, and he pushed pretty hard but it didn't go in.

“Damn,” he said with a big smile. “It
has
been a while.” It took real effort to get in there, which only made him sigh, “You are so tight,” and it was worth those many moons as finally Trevor pushed past the forbidding muscle, the moat of the
castle, the drawbridge, the mah-daddy's-gonna-kill-yew muscle, ramming his way past that and inside, and for a second both of us were stunned by the fullness, and hardness, and wetness, the utter totality, and we looked in each other's eyes not like strangers anymore, and he kissed me tenderly, the smoothness of his chin against me (nothing more flattering than a close shave, the ritual preparation for me—and take note I was a lover now, not just a woman-flesh-thing who bought tampons once a month and inserted them, but a
lover
) and with six zillion nerve endings rejoicing I said, “Why did I do that to myself?” and he said, “I can't imagine.”

I rocked beneath him the better to feel him against my furthest reaches, though I had no idea where that was. It's the coolest part about being a woman: you have no idea what's really going on in there. Then Trevor kissed me as if he were trying to talk me off the ledge of a building (“For the love of God, please…”), and heat spread out from me and I had to turn my face, but he tracked me, kissed me while I made noise, eased in and out slower than I could take it. It felt like dragging a wet string in honey, and all my thoughts converged in meditation with Trevor's tongue, my brain sinking against the floorboards, blank now, zeroing out. The bed creaked and rocked (would anyone hear?) and I hadn't come like this in years.

He breathed in my ear, “You like it when I open you like this?”

“Yes.”

“You like my cock all the way inside you?”

“Yes.”

“Come for me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I want to see you come. I don't want one of those shy
orgasms either, I want you to come
hard,
come like we're all going to get blown up tomorrow.”

And then the images of the ninjas crept into my head, the default fantasies so hardwired in me by now. The coldness at my throat; on a ritual floor mat, the sword puncturing my neck as Trevor assaulted me from behind; the sight of myself as a bloody corpse. As usual, next came a wave of low-grade fear and asthmatic shutting down, the part where I floated away from my body like a rusty, abandoned screen door flapping in a wind, and I felt nothing anymore, just a man on top of me doing his thing. So I turned my head to the side and made sound.

But Trev noticed. “Get back here,” he said, and cranked my chin toward his face.

“I'm here,” I said.

“No you're not. You're spacing out.”

I met his eyes, then looked at his shoulders. They reminded me of my father's. Like at the beach when I was little and he played with me, resting me on his chest. “I can't believe you're my daughter,” he'd coo. He tickled me and snatched off my baby bikini. Which maybe was fine: I was six, and some of the other girls weren't wearing tops either.

So lost was I in this memory that I didn't notice Trevor touching me, still hard inside me, waiting for me to speak, kissing my cheek and temple with something like tenderness, but I thought,
I can't come and I can't deal and I want to crawl under the covers and start over as another person.

“You need to let go,” Trevor said, and stopped moving. “I don't know what's up with you, or why you had to go celibate for five years or whatever, but you're in bed with me now, so…” He rested on his elbows and twisted a strand of my hair, softening inside me. “We all have our shit,” he said.

I wanted to shout, “Some more than others!” To deflate the conversation, I tried to think of a line to feed him, but his expression was too generous and unafraid for me to steal from him like that.

“Whatever issues you got, I don't know—you seem pretty open to me, legs all over the place—you seem a lot less burdened than you think you are.”

Which was not anything I expected to hear.

“Really?”

“You're a fine lay,” he joked, and I would've been pissed if it hadn't been the perfect thing to say.

He stretched out his arm for me to rest my head upon. “I'm only guessing, but you act like you're really damaged, and maybe you are, but everyone's messed up about sex.” As he spoke, he brushed his fingers across my chest. “Like they are with money, family, religion—all the bigs. People are even more demented about money than sex because we think our psycho spending habits are actually reasonable, like I criticize
everyone
and then blow it on bike gear, and then I'm all, You
have
to have this gear to ride!”

I laughed. “You are definitely weird about money.”

“I'm impossible. I think with sex, it's the opposite: most fall within a happy bell curve of malfunction, but we're all convinced we're more damaged than everyone else.”

I curled around a pillow and shut my eyes. “I think I've got that in spades, Trevor.” With a sense of defeat, I said: “I'm sorry. This was supposed to be light.”

He touched my back. “Sex is never light.”

And through this intermezzo, he kept touching me, kept vibing me, and soon we were kissing, and soon Trevor was rock hard again, and it was true that I was craving a bigger
O
than
the puny ones I usually settled for, the kind where I tamped it down so as not to scare the guy off with what I saw as the sexual and emotional gigantism of women. Now, with Trevor, I gave myself a break, and it was
fun.

And that's how a quasi-Marxist blowhard led me back to my womanhood after nine hundred seventy nights, and after the heavy conversation we were laughing again, and he couldn't help but pound at me, saying, “I can't hold out much longer,” but I promised him that if he did I'd come for him like Midwestern hail. He worked his ass on me until the sheets were wet, until I was in pain and then he slowed, and made sure I felt every nerve as written by himself inside me, made sure I didn't drift off, and after nine hundred seventy nights and two hours, this woman's halves dissolved like the ripe fruit of audacity in a young man's mouth, which is to say that at long last, I came better than I ever had before.

 

Three weeks later Trevor was ending it over Indian food.

“Work,” he said. “Getting some direction in my life.”

As I stood at the window, I assumed Trevor would dress and split, but instead he waited, picked up the
Adbusters
on the nightstand and flipped through. Childhood memory smarted in me. Though it was a moot point to tell Trevor what all the fuss had been about—his jeans lay in the corner, ready to be put on and walked out in—I knew that there's no substitute for words, for voicing in plain English the shames that gnaw at us. In bed that first night, I'd never actually told him what was wrong. And why did I need to tell Trevor of all people? Not Jeremy, not girlfriends, but this guy. I figured it was part of the intensity of that period—one of those times in life when perspective fritzes out and you become a disembodied, photonic light-storm of
emotion, when you'll say anything to anybody. But I think I'd actually handpicked Trevor. Like I said, he had acceptance going for him.

“It's not a big deal,” I started. “So many other girls have had worse.”

“So?”

He put the magazine away and stared at the wall, which at first I took as a sign of ignoring me. He said, “I'm listening.” I addressed the rug at my feet.

“I was around thirteen, and I was…there was a guy I liked in school who I wouldn't shut up about, and he lived a few streets away but he was over at the neighbor's one day, so I went outside to hang around and be noticed. I had on shorts and a white T-shirt with satin trim on the sleeves which was simply the shirt to have at the time, and my dad was watering the front yard, but he kept staring at my chest. Staring at it. When he turned to the bushes, I looked down thinking I had spaghetti sauce on my shirt, which, in front of this tall eighth-grade boy would have been the end of civilization, right? And I realized what Dad had been staring at—I had those itty-bitty tits that girls get. Mosquito bites. It dawned on me that that's why other girls wore tanks under their shirts, and that's when the boy came outside on the driveway, him and this other guy, and I waved at them and said something I thought was very sassy. And my dad turned to me with the hose and nailed me, and was laughing, and he shouted, “Wet T-shirt contest!” And the guys busted up. I stood there topless, basically, with a see-through shirt clinging to my dark skin.”

I stopped and looked up. “That's it,” I said, embarrassed. “I ran inside. It sounds stupid,” and then I started laugh-crying.