Slow Hand (17 page)

“That dipwad threw me out!” I snatched off my jacket and dropped down on her bed. Like most Serling College students, she didn’t have a bedframe, just a mattress on the floor.

“He’s such an asshole,” she said. I didn’t even have to tell her who I was talking about.

We thoroughly trashed Joel, which took a while because we wanted to extract every bit of pleasure we could from the task. When he’d been reduced to a gob of wombat slobber drying to a crust on a rock somewhere in the Australian outback, I said,“I mentioned your proposition to Gabe.”

“Yeah? What did he say?”

I filled her in. She already knew my reservations.

“Well, actually, I’ve reconsidered that too.” Apparently this was the week for Cass to totally reorder her cosmology.“What if I was more actively participating?”

“Define more.”

“Everything but exchanging fluids.”

“Whose fluids?”

“His.”

“Hm. Okay, yeah, I’d be more comfortable with that. Ill talk to him again.” All semester I kept expecting Ricardo Montalban to step out from behind some piece of furniture and hand me a drink in a hollowed-out pineapple.“Where’d you get this idea?”

She made her eyes even more huge and innocent and chocolate-brown.“Weeellll … Gabriel is very attractive.” This was true.“And you’re very beautiful.” This was debatable. Cassie snuggled closer to me.“I thought it’d be fun.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Gabriel saw an ulterior motive in everything.

I kissed her neck. She was lying on her back, and I was curled up beside her, her arms around me. For some reason we wound up that way a lot. I kissed her some more, and she didn’t tell me to stop. I didn’t stop.

“Why, Liz,” she said with delight as I nibbled her earlobe, afraid to move below her neck for fear she’d tell me to cut it out,“I do believe you’re horny.”

I hate that word, especially in reference to me, so as a matter of course I deny any connection with it. But I didn’t stop kissing her either.

“Ooh, that feels nice.”
Nice?
I was about to come just kissing her above the shoulders.“I think living in that apartment has been good for you.”

“Yeah? How?”

She sat up. I sat up.“Mm, more comfortable with your body. You’ve gotten a lot more aggressive,” she said.

To prove her right, I lunged at her.

“Oh, Natasha,” Cassie giggled in her sexy Russian accent.“You do such things to me!”

This is the way things were with Cass: I never knew what, if anything, was going to happen until it was in progress. It was always slow, cautious. Which made it almost painfully hot. I was afraid she’d change her mind any second. Cassie asked,“Are you okay? Are you sure?” every five minutes. Making love to her was like finding my way along the edge of a cliff in the dark. Like falling over the edge. Like spreading purple wings and catching an updraft. All at the same time.

“Hey, Natasha, want to exchange fluids with me?”

“Well, Anastasia … if you insist…”

And as I said, this was the first time we’d done more than kiss and nibble and roll around.

“You probably won’t be able to make me come,” Cassie said.

Ha! She obviously didn’t know who she was dealing with. She’d told me, of course, that she almost never had an orgasm during het intercourse—it had been a while since she’d
scrumped with a woman. Clearly her memory needed refreshing.

The first kiss on the mouth always sent a few pebbles skittering over the cliff edge. Her skin was butter-soft. She liked her nipples sucked so hard I was always afraid of hurting her. My shirt got unbuttoned and stripped off; her loose green dress and the wool leggings underneath; we struggled me out of my jeans. It’s a scientific fact that women’s underwear is more appetizing than men’s. Anyone who’s ever had a hard time keeping a straight face (or concealing disappointment) at ratty semiwhite Fruit of the Looms knows it. Of course Cassie never wore a bra—she had Teflon Tits worthy of Ripley’s“Believe It or Not.” Not being so blessed, my personal lingerie collection ran toward black and purple lace bras, and bikini underwear flowered like Hawaiian shirts.

Maybe it was the uncertainty of it, the feeling of being bad and getting away with it—unless I got caught. Maybe it was the unexpectedness of her deciding it was okay. For some crazy reason it reminded me of those old Impulse cologne commercials:“If a man you’ve never met before suddenly gives you flowers …” That close to orgasm, any wild thing might fly across my mind. Usually in a matrix of purple swirls, thick flocks of birds, or bursts of exploding color … it’s very depressing to me as a writer that I have such clichéd mental images during sex.

Cunts are most often compared to flowers, to butterflies, to seashells. I’m guilty of doing it myself. You can compare labia to petals, clitori to pearls from here until next Tuesday, but trust me, kids, when you’re up close and personal a cunt is a cunt. The Goddess be praised.

Everywhere she touched drew fire to the surface. I was shaking. My hands and mouth grasping—

“Oh my,” she said, giggling.

“Shut up.”

She had on a Cocteau Twins tape and three candles burning on her dresser. Oh my Lord, she felt good. She pushed my thighs open, and her tongue was hot although not as hot as the flesh it was touching. Colors and colors. How sad it would be to have orgasms in black and white.

“You taste so good,” Cass said, grinning over my belly.

That had been called to my attention before.

After my eyes uncrossed I kissed my way down her stomach and up her thighs, and she reminded me again that it would take an act of God or Congress to make her come. I had a mental image of a mechanic spitting into her palms and pushing up her sleeves, a pianist cracking her knuckles with a flourish. Two fingers, tongue, and she shrieked up the scale as she came. Nine minutes flat by the clock on the dresser, at the head of the bed with the candles and box trilling
“The Pink Opaque.”

“Oh, God, stop, stop.” She sat up, gasping, eyes saucered.

I’m sure I looked smug.

“Oh, my God. How did you
do
that?”

I sat up and wiped my mouth on my shoulder.“I’ve been worshiping at the Shrine of Cat.”

“Thank her for me.” She curried her fingers through her hair. It made utterly no difference. Her hair was a soft bowl-shape, the same brown as her eyes.“I can’t believe you did that. Oh my God.” She hooked her arms around me and kissed me with markedly more respect.

I felt like calling the
Enquirer.

“Living with that group has been good for you.”

“Certainly educational.” I neglected to mention the oral art I had performed on Patricia when she joined Gabriel and me in bed the morning after the last dance party in our apartment. It occurred to me that Cassie had deliberately waited until I wasn’t a blushing baby dyke paralyzed at the very thought of initiating sex.

When the phone rang at 1:30 that morning I was in the kitchen, gathered with Gabe and Patricia around a bubbling vat of chickpeas like the three witches in
Macbeth.
We were making hummus.
Knowing
it was Joel, I let Gabe answer.

I listened to Joel with the steam from the pot saunaing my face,“… and we had dinner and then we got really really stoned and watched
2001
on the VCR …” No more first year students, I vowed. No way. And Lord, no one else from Los Angeles,“… it was really really fun. She just left. So can you come over now?”

“No, I don’t think so.” We Southerners have politeness knocked into us from the womb. Fortunately for him.“It’s late.”

“I could come over there.”

“Joel. It’s 1:30 in the morning. I’m going to bed.” Total lie.“Have a good break.”

“Will you write to me?”

“Right, sure.”
Please.

I did, in fact, go to bed around three, after pounding out my aggressions into the mush of chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, and way too much garlic, gleefully fantasizing Joel’s brain squipping through the octagonal holes in the potato masher. Gabe and Patricia accompanied me, and none of us got much sleep—but despite that morning’s educational and entertainment value, I’m taking the liberty here of substituting another event from later in the week. With those two I always felt like I’d been conked over the head and woken up in a bad porno movie. Also, I promised Cat she’d be in this story.

Monday and Tuesday, Gabriel and Patricia went to visit Doug in Plymouth and Alan in Boston, Gabriel oozing garlic from every pore after all the hummus he’d consumed in the intervening thirty-six hours. Wednesday I sat in the kitchen windowseat reading
Interview with the Vampire
and watching the entrance to the Amphlett Place parking lot for his return. Just as I was positive the only thing I wanted for the rest of eternity was to be a vampire, I realized I’d deliberately sought out the sunniest spot in the apartment to read. The view of the parking lot was a factor too, of course. But naturally I didn’t see him drive up. He must have walked from Greenvalley Village, where Patricia lived; they’d taken her car.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“How was it?”

“Okay.” The apartment door closed behind him, and he checked the message board before hauling his stuff to his room. I put down my book and followed him.

He dropped his duffel bag and backpack onto the floor, turned, and put his arms around me. We didn’t have the kind of
thing where I could call him baby and tell him I’d missed him. I did it anyway.

“I missed you too,” he said, looking faintly surprised.

Standing on my toes and stretching, I just barely reached his shoulder. For that reason I generally stood on his bed when I was in his room—when I wasn’t lying on it. Gabriel’s room tended to be a gathering place and most evenings saw at least one and up to five bodies sprawled on his mattress (no frame, and he’d added a foam pad). What form of entertainment said bodies engaged in varied. I kissed his neck, still vaguely garlicky—amazing how bodies get so familiar so fast. Much easier to get to know a body than the person living inside it. It could have been just a consequence of the living conditions that I knew Gabriel liked the web of his thumb and first finger bitten before I knew the names of his brothers and sister.

After—what, a month and a half?—I knew him by taste, smell, the texture of his skin. I knew the way he kissed and the weight of his hands. The pattern of his breathing. I could identify his step on the stairs.

Knowing the parts of him that were covered with more than clothes was a different story altogether.

Of course Gabriel had groupies on twenty-four hour call, snatching each others’ hair out for the chance to kiss and bite and fuck and suck and give him backrubs. He didn’t think it was at all amusing when Alexa or Cat or I suggested he put a sign-up sheet on his door.

When standing-up kissing got old, he scooped me up as easily as picking up the cat (admittedly the cat, Gandalf, was the biggest, baddest beast this side of the Pecos), carried me down the hall to my room, and threw me down on my futon—more room than his bed. One-oh-one Amphlett Place, where fantasies come true. Sometimes, at least.

“Missed me, huh?” I said, grinning up at him.

Gabe dropped to his knees beside me on the futon.“Goddamn, you are so hot.”

“Why, thank you.”

One arm plunked down by my left shoulder; him half bridged over me.“No problem.” Slowly his face came down
until our lips brushed. Just barely touched. That one point of light friction, more a tease than a kiss. I raised my head and hooked my arms around his neck to draw him to me, lips and tongue, tasted him deep as his hands at the small of my back pulled me to sitting up.

He had on that look, the one that could scrape electric fingers across the back of my neck from the other side of the room with Sarah and Alexa chopping veggies for burritos, Kyle reading aloud from a chemistry book, and Alan blasting his music from upstairs. I could never hold that gaze for long. Predatory, feline; eyes hardening from blue to green. Stone cherub’s mouth. Gabriel knew how to ride the thin edge of fear, push back the borders. No one had ever done that to me before.

Slow hand outlining cheek, lips, neck. The curve of his smile. His hand rounded my shoulder as if he were drawing me in silhouette. I took one of his hands and carefully circled the index-finger joints with my tongue, the webbing of his palm, sucked his fingers. He practically purred.

“Lock your door,” he said.

This struck me as mildly insane.“Nobody’s going to come in the apartment except for Cat,” I said, getting up to humor him,“and we’d invite her in anyway.”

When my room was locked I knelt behind him, pushed aside his mane to kiss the sweet nape of his neck and rub his back, working his shirttail out and my hands underneath to warm skin. We rarely made love in the daylight. My room glowed white with sun reflecting off the snow outside.

Gabe, I had discovered, had not actually reached a Buddhalike state of Sensitive New Age Guy-dom. He merely channeled that macho energy into socially acceptable directions. Like … sex. He bit, he grabbed, he said“fuck.” All endearing traits. Fucking Gabriel was being sucked into a cyclone headed for an Oz where Glinda is a drag queen and the Wicked Witch of the West is a hot Top in tight black leather. (Remember when all the Munchkins prostrated themselves before her?) And they don’t sing that dippy“Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead” bullshit. The soundtrack is by Prince—and the Yellow Brick Road leads to Erotic City.

Like they say, getting there is half the fun. This was a cyclone of hot breath in hair, open mouths, arched back, wet fingers. Tell me you want it. Hands held over my head—

“Don’t move,” he murmured roughly and kissed me soft as a baby’s mouth, licked the salt from my eyelids.

Cyclone of blood draining, drawing to the center. Falling in a spiral. Tell me you want it. Pulse in my cunt; when we finally stripped all my pores opened their mouths and greedily tasted air and skin. Ah, the joys of sensitive nipples.

His teeth locked firm on the side of my neck, the skin of his stomach against my back. Condoms in the top desk drawer. Gabriel could (did) pick me up and move me like a doll. As far as I was concerned, he was jungle gym, roller coaster, water-slide, and concession stand all in one.