Jake & Mimi (3 page)

I stand and reach for my wallet. I look at her.

“The crossover?” I say. “You made it okay?”

She looks at me, then down, pauses, and lifts her purse and jacket from the chair. The crossover is what we ex-pat kids call
the move back to the States. Most aren’t ready when it comes, and some — girls, especially — it marks for good.

“Pretty well, Jake,” she says. She fingers her ring and smiles. “But this
is
my second.”

I pay the bill, and we walk out and back across the street. A taxi corners too fast, before we quite make the curb, and I
take her elbow until we reach the sidewalk.

“Which way are you?” I ask, and then, before she can answer: “The scarves.”

“Jake. You never got them.”

“My sister’s birthday is tomorrow,” I say. We’re silent a second. “I can come back. What time do you open?”

“Come on.” She smiles. “It’ll take two minutes. I know just the ones.”

“You sure?”

“Of course.”

She unlocks the door and we walk in, the sound of the bell loud now in the quiet, dark store. She quickly turns on the light,
and we walk to the rack of scarves. She flips through them, stops, unclips a silken yellow one, and holds it up with one hand
while smoothing it out with the other.

“What’s her complexion?” she asks.

“Like yours.”

She slips it over her neck and the two sides fall evenly over her breasts. She tosses one around her neck again with a flourish,
laughing at the gesture.

“It’s perfect,” I say. “I’ll take two.”

“Two of the same?” she asks.

I nod. She pauses. “Let me get the other one from the back.”

The only sound in the place is the rattle of the hanging beads as she walks through them into the back room. I wait one minute.
Two. I walk to the doorway and look in. The small back room is filled with clothes, dresses and blouses hanging along the
wall and sweaters and leggings stacked neatly on the counter. Melissa stands at a small folding table, looking down at the
two scarves she has folded and laid in a box lined with soft tissue. She doesn’t look up, though she knows I’m in the doorway,
and I see that her small hands are not in the box but gripping the edge of the table. I walk to her and stand behind her.
She turns slowly, her eyes rising to mine, and in one smooth motion I pick her up by the waist and sit her on the edge of
the table. Her lips open in surprise and her palms go to my chest, but her eyes give her away.

“You don’t have a sister, do you, Jake?” she asks quietly.

“No.”

I turn and walk back into the front room and to the door. I turn the lock. I switch off the lights. I step back through the
beads again. She hasn’t moved. I hit the switch in here, too, and she is a vision on the small table, lit only by what little
light from the street filters through the beads. I walk to her and whisper into the back of her neck.

“You have five seconds to tell me to leave.”

I can hear just her breathing and the last gentle click of the beads. One. Two. Three. Four.

“Leave.”

I lift her sweater off her trembling shoulders. She closes her eyes and grips the edge of the table tightly, at first resisting
against my hands, then letting me pull her down onto her back. She closes her legs and holds her dress to her knees. The narrow
table is just wide enough for her, and I lift her hands off her dress and let her smooth, golden arms fall over the sides.
I take the yellow cloth from the box and, kneeling, tie it in a tight knot around her slim wrist, then pass it under the table;
she gasps as I tie it around her other one. I rise, take the second scarf from the soft tissue, and lay it across her eyes.
She is shaking.

“Jake,” she whispers, but she is with me now, and she knows I know it.

She lifts her head and lets me knot the scarf. I slide her hair-band off and run my fingers hard through her long hair. She
wants to come up off the table, but the strong silk holds and all she can do to slow the surge in her is bring one knee up
to her body and then down again. I walk around the table and take a long look at her before touching her again. I take off
her clogs and run my hands up her calves and back down. I can see under her dress now, all the way up her legs to the white
mound of her silk panties. They are wet already.

I lift a pair of scissors from the counter, and she gasps again as I start the flat edge of the blade up her legs and over
her dress. At her shoulders I cut first one thin strap and then the other, then pull the dress down and off her and let it
drop to the floor.

It isn’t pleasure but the promise of it that takes women to the edge. She is in just bra and panties now, and desperate to
be touched, but I step away and slowly undo the buttons on my shirt, watching her as she strains to listen, her lips parting
as I pull my leather belt through the loops.

I leave her dressed that way for ten minutes, tracing my fingers from her face all down the length of her and then back, and
so lightly that when at last I put true pressure on her taut belly, I think she’ll come apart. Her skin smells better than
any I can remember, the faintest trace of light spring perfume on her neck and wrists.

Her strapless bra opens in the front, and the click of the clasp brings another gasp from her. I’m careful not to touch her
hard, beautiful breasts as I gently lift the soft bra off her and pull it out from under her back. All those years ago, at
the lake, I’d seen only the outline of her nipples through that wet top. Now they are just beneath me, soft and pink, and
when I breathe gently on them, she turns her cheek hard into the table. Her eyes, I know, are shut tight under the silk.

“Please,” she whispers.

Still I don’t touch them. I look down at the small white triangle of cloth that covers her softest spot. It is all she wears
now, and it is soaked through. I roll it slowly down her thighs, over her knees, past her calves, and off her ankles, then
trail it back up her skin and swipe it back and forth across her breasts, watching the nipples harden into the silk.

“I can’t take it,” she says.

But she must. Because these are the minutes each week that I live for. The edge, I call it, and Melissa Clay is about to hit
it. If she knew how long I will ride her along it, she would faint dead away.

I run my fingers between her breasts and just around them before finally taking both in my hands and pressing them hard together.

“God!” she gasps, her small hands fists now, jerking against the taut scarf.

She wants to grab her hair or beat the table with her hands. To release, somehow, some portion of the pressure I’ve built
in her. She can’t, and then I put my lips on her, her neck first and then hard on her breasts, and all she can do to hold
herself off is lock her ankles and squeeze her thighs tight together. It is her last defense, I know, against the pleasure
coursing through her, so I take even this away, lifting her left ankle off her right and holding them, a foot apart, to the
table. “Damn you!” she gasps. She is helpless.

Women almost never lose themselves completely. Even in sex, they show you what they want you to see. Until you get them to
the edge. At the edge they are past all that. Past any scheming. Past all reserve, even. Their social side vanquished. Melissa
is reaching it now, a sheen of sweat on her cheeks, her breathing all soft cries. If Steve walked in now, she wouldn’t recognize
him.

And I’ve barely started on her.

Guys reach our mark and that’s it, but women — handled just right — can crest and crest. Melissa has reached the edge, so
I ride her along it, touching her, finally, where she needs it, but not with the pressure she requires. A little pressure,
then none, then more pressure, then none, then still more, then none again. Thirty seconds of this, forty-five, a minute.
She hangs in only because she can’t believe what she feels. Still I keep on, watching her soft face slam from side to side,
and only when I see that she is at her end, truly at her end, when I’m afraid I’ll lose her or someone will hear her from
the street, only then do I grab her thighs, pull her down to the edge of the table and lift her thin ankles up onto my shoulders.

“God, please, God, please, God, please,” over and over from her now, and still I take my time. I’m past ready, too, but I
lock her legs against me, holding her still, and as she cries out, arching her back in one last effort to stem the rush, to
survive just one second more, I drink in the full measure of this night.

Melissa Clay
lies beneath me. The first crush of my adolescence, my first true fantasy, and not just beneath me but at my mercy, helpless
with pleasure and begging to be finished off.

I ease into her.

Her first cry is of relief. She can give in at last, surge and feel the hard answer she needs. Just a few seconds of this,
yes, a few seconds and she can die in peace. She is in spasms now, but I keep a firm grip on her and build to a rhythm, and
as I step into it, I hit something in her and she gasps. It can’t be, she won’t believe it can happen, not after all this,
but yes, she starts to come back at me, then to arch again, and then she’s got it, moving in time with me. It can’t be, but
it is — she’s not finishing at all, not set to collapse but rising again, rising and turning back, back toward the edge for
one final, crimson ride.

Her sounds are magic now, and her face, even with the silk over her eyes, so beautiful that it takes all my training to stay
steady. And then I break one of my rules. I close my eyes. Always I watch a girl until the end — always. Watch her face, note
every last detail of her finish so the memory of it can carry me through the week to come. Tonight, though, I close my eyes.
Close them and go back in my head to the lake. I’m fourteen again, watching young Melissa dancing barefoot, watching her small
feet and smooth arms and watching, too, Tim Crockett’s hands as they rise up her belly. I can see her so clearly, see her
just as she was
, even smell the lake air, and feel in my spine the weight of all those nights, the nights in the cabin dreaming of her, the
crushing innocence of us both, gone now but mine again — for an instant — when I close my eyes.

We live first in our heads and only then in the world around us. Well, I’m living in both, and right now I’m having them both,
too. Both Melissas, the innocent princess of the lake and, opening my eyes again, the thirty-year-old beauty in the last golden
hours of her looks. She’s peaking now, outside herself with pleasure, and her cries and her sweet fucking take me to the turning
point and past it, until finally I lean hard into her one last time, put my hands on her breasts, the same beautiful breasts
denied Tim Crockett all those years ago, and join her, at last, on the edge, along the edge, and then over.

•     •     •

The bell rings softly behind me as I step out onto Amsterdam again. The cool night air greets me like a friend, and I start
for home. A comedy is just letting out at the corner Loews, and I walk for a block through the happy throng, past young couples
twined together as they wave for cabs and by college kids shouting the best lines at one another as they head in packs into
bars or simply out into the New York night.

I turn onto Eighty-first Street, away from the din of the avenues, and walk the last quiet block to my building. I should
be all done in, but I feel clean and electric, the spatial world around me trim and strong, the edges of buildings pressed
close against the sky.

She was tremendous. The best I’ve had in the year I’ve been doing this. Her sounds alone — Jesus.

A suit walks by me, his cell phone pressed to his ear, querying some distant party about stock quotes. Stock quotes on a Saturday
night.

I reach my building, climb the stairs, and let myself into my one-bedroom. I pour a half glass of Absolut, strip to my shorts,
and step through the window out onto the fire escape again, to end the night as I began it. I sip my drink and lean my arms
on the metal railing, letting the night air chill me.

Everything in our modern world is designed to protect us from true contact. The most we get of it is the jostling on the subway
on the rush-hour ride to work. All day at our desks we speak to the business selves of others, saved from honest talk by our
suits and our titles and our client relationships. And once home? We can order in our food, get our entertainment from a box,
pay our bills by phone, and then, before bed, log on and reinvent ourselves on the Internet, sharing fantasies in chat rooms
with people we’ll never see and pretending that’s intimacy, contact. It isn’t.

True contact is the moment you drive inside her. You are face-to-face, with no escape for either of you. It is the one true
moment of each week for me, the one I live for.

I look out at the lights in the quiet buildings across the street, and above them at the golden moon, which tonight seems
to hang over New York alone. Next week’s beauty is somewhere under that moon. Stepping lightly to a swing band maybe, or browsing
in a late-night bookstore. She might even be asleep already, her slip riding up her pale leg as her soft lips part in dream.
Who is she, I wonder, and how far along the edge will I take her?

T
he angels’ share.