Yearn (16 page)

Sitting at her desk later that evening, May booted up her computer and posted a “Flatmate wanted” ad on the university website. Shadow, who was endowed with great feline beauty, sat curled by her feet. To her relief he seemed to be remarkably self-contained, which was just as well, as May was neither a cat person nor even a dog person. Pets worried her: they merely embodied more responsibility and expense, and cat food was one cost she knew she couldn't afford.

She picked the animal up, placing him on her lap. He was large for a cat, almost the size of a dog, with huge thin-skinned ears rising up from a noble, narrow skull. His only flaw was that part of his left ear was missing, as if it had been bitten off in a fight. Apart from that he was perfect. His eyes were large and green and unfathomable. His whiskers, feathery and long, seemed to quiver in the slightest breeze, and his fur, although dense and short, had a texture and touch that reminded May of very expensive silk. It was a dense black with hints of what almost looked like purple under the light. And the animal didn't seem to purr so much as growl—a low, almost mechanical sound, like an engine running. She stared down thoughtfully, caressing him under the chin and behind the ears, his eyes half-closed in ecstasy. Shadow butted his head against her breasts as if to say, “More, more . . .”

The animal seemed a strange legacy for Mitch to leave. They'd never talked about having a cat, and, like her, he'd always seemed indifferent to pets. Now that he'd left, the reality of his departure had begun to dawn on May—a growing melancholy infused with a sense of both guilt and futility. Should she have fought harder? Should she have been more active in finding him help?

Casting a cold anthropological eye over the situation, she wondered at her own callousness and reluctance to get involved. The childhood trauma of her brother's own breakdown flooded back. She had been nine at the time and her brother, older by some years, had suddenly started to hoard silver milk-bottle tops obsessively, convinced that laid out in the right order they would send psychic messages to aliens. Eventually May's parents had him committed to a psychiatric unit. He returned a few weeks later, sluggish and dim-witted on the drugs they had prescribed. He'd never really recovered and May had withdrawn from him, having little to do with him as a teenager, but she now remembered the faint revulsion and her unutterable fear that she might later develop whatever her brother had. Was this why she'd been so ruthlessly pragmatic with Mitch? Had his mental illness awoken a hidden terror of her own?

Unable to concentrate on her studies, May glanced over into the sparse bedroom. Mitch's cupboard door had swung open, forlorn and abandoned. The bed was stripped and the side table that had housed Mitch's collection of knickknacks—a framed photograph of Donald Trump, a school rugby prize (a small battered silver cup), a Rabbitohs footy scarf, a salt shaker he had stolen from a restaurant as a memento of their first date together, and, most telling, his first issue of
Warlock
, with Marvel comics character Adam Warlock on the cover circa 1975—were all gone, swept away in his disappearance. She glanced back to the bed; the prospect of sleeping alone was daunting.

Resigned, May settled down on the couch to watch TV, determined to exorcise the emptiness that had now begun to slip into the shadowy corners. The cat followed her and after leaping up beside her in territorial fashion, curled up against her as she reached for the remote. Comforted, May turned the television on. Immediately images of another teenage witch series filled the screen. With the sound muted, May watched in fascinated horror as a young man in a suit turned into a warlock in a flash of white smoke. He looked nothing like Mitch, she noted, but the idea that such a prosaic storyline could have triggered Mitch's breakdown was depressing in itself.

She switched channels and wasted an hour watching a documentary on the seasonal migration of stingrays from Mexico to Florida—thousands of them—cow-nosed rays flying through the sea, their elegant yellow fin wings arcing slowly through the ocean depths in a timeless aquatic flight, a soothing distraction for May's overwrought emotions. Watching them made her want to be one of them. She imagined there would be great security in being one of many swimming along, seamlessly integrated into both their environment and their species, the cool ocean rippling across one's fins. No madness there. No unexplained warlocks or material greed rocking the world.

Around eleven p.m. she decided she would have to confront her fears and sleep in the empty bed. As if guessing her reluctance Shadow stretched his back, then leapt down. The cat padded silently on his long, elegant legs toward the bedroom as if he already knew the way and had taken that path a thousand times before. Bemused, May followed him. By the time she arrived at the door he was already on the bed, laid out in an elegant arc across the side Mitch used to sleep on.

She switched on the bedside lamp and began undressing with her back to the cat. Suddenly she stopped. Unease swept across her body like a shiver as she was filled with a strong sense of being watched. She swung around. The animal was sitting upright staring directly at her, his eyes filled with an extraordinary human intelligence. It was uncanny.

“Stop looking at me, you fur-covered pervert.” May spoke out loud in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere. But the animal took no notice whatsoever. Instead his gaze panned slowly down her half-naked torso with the kind of appraisal May would normally have associated with a man. It was both disturbing and highly intrusive. May pulled an old dressing gown off the hook on the back of the bedroom door and covered herself, then retreated to the bathroom, making sure the door was closed behind her. She stared into the bathroom cabinet mirror.

“This isn't rational,” she told her reflection, the stress of the past two days now beginning to show in her eyes and thin-lipped mouth. “It's only a cat, May, a harmless feline, incapable of anything remotely like human emotion. You're being paranoid, and even if your nut of an ex-boyfriend who thinks he's a friggin' warlock gave you the beast, it doesn't mean the creature itself is bewitched,” she finished, failing to convince herself. Was she losing her sanity, the way her brother had? Was Mitch's condition contagious in some strange way? After all, she was also under similar stress, her own finals looming in a month or so, with no prospect of employment. Was it possible his breakdown could trigger one of her own?

“Stop it,” she told her reflection firmly. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

Determined to bring some normality back into her routine, she brushed her teeth, washed her armpits and face, and thoughtfully massaged some body lotion into her skin. Her future suddenly loomed up as blank as her face looked cleaned of the heavy eye makeup. Then, hoping to shock herself out of unease, she splashed herself with some cold water and turned back to the bedroom.

Shadow was now lying stretched out on Mitch's empty side of the mattress. Somehow to shoo the cat off felt like surrendering to her fears, so, after locking the bedroom door, May slipped in between the sheets and, with her back to the cat, switched off her bedside lamp, plunging the room into a velvety darkness.

She closed her eyes, lulled by the sound of distant traffic roaring down Parramatta Road and the chirping of a lone cicada that hadn't realized it was nightfall, and was just dropping off when suddenly she felt the caress of fingertips running across her bare shoulder. She froze. The touch was so light, so delicate, that she wondered whether she hadn't imagined it. But then, just as she'd started to relax once more, it happened again, this time more firmly, more definite—the warm trace of human fingers running across her shoulder and then sneaking down and around to the hollow between her hip and waist. She lay there paralyzed by shock as another hand slipped around the other side of her torso to cup one full breast and play one nipple. May opened her mouth to scream, then, remembering the neighbor upstairs and his tendency to complain to the police at the slightest provocation, stopped herself. She had to be imagining the caress; she must be. After all, she had locked the bedroom door, the window was barred, and she was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. There was no room under the bed for anyone to have hidden and no possible way for a man to have entered the flat.

Mustering all her courage, she switched on the bedside lamp and looked down at her body. No hand, no fingers, just her naked torso—thin, pale, and horribly vulnerable. She rolled over and glanced at Shadow. The cat's face was tucked onto its paws and it seemed to be softly purring in its sleep, indifferent to the external world and any crazy hallucinations of her own.

Had she started to fantasize due to the shock of Mitch's sudden departure? Was this some weird manifestation of loneliness? May rolled onto her back and stared up at the peeling ceiling. Somewhat disconcertingly, buried beneath the fear was a kernel of erotic pleasure, a kernel that had now started to unfurl somewhere between her belly button and groin whether she liked it or not. Should she masturbate? Would this relieve her stress? Somehow such an action felt wrong in front of the cat.

Sighing, May switched the light off again and began to doze. Five minutes later she was woken by an intense shooting of pleasure from one nipple down to her groin. As her brain flipped back into consciousness (or had it?) she became aware of a soft nibbling of one nipple while a strong and undeniably masculine hand slipped its way firmly between her thighs. Whoever was making love to her knew what he was doing.

“If this is a dream I intend to stay sleeping,” she told herself as soft full lips made their way up her body. Reaching down, she cupped the sides of his head, running her fingers across his face to read his features in the dark. High cheekbones, a flat wide nose, full lips, hair tight whorls set against a long narrow skull—there was a sculptural symmetry that suggested beauty and an African heritage, May realized with a jolt as her fingers traced the muscular shoulders, the smooth, almost hairless skin on his chest and lower down his stomach. I should be frightened or at least shocked, she thought to herself, but the silvery darkness of the bedroom felt as if it had transformed into some netherland between dream and conscious life, as if they were making love underwater, in a subterranean world of shimmering light that was itself a manifestation of pleasure.

May lifted his face up to hers, her hands holding his high cheekbones, then, after retrieving one from her bedside cabinet, lit a small scented candle. The flame flickered across his dark features. He looked young, around twenty—a couple of years younger than she. His features were slightly aquiline, as if he might herald from as far north as the Sudan, but his skin was so black it almost looked blue in the shimmering light. His eyes were long and almond shaped, and so bottomless that when May gazed into them she had the sensation of tumbling into outer space. They wore an expression of languid sensuality, of drawn-out, unhurried sex. A wry smile danced across his lips, and somehow May knew that if she ended the silence between them, this tacit erotic contract would be broken. She would either wake up or he would flee or vanish.

Without removing his gaze from her face, he worked his fingers up her thighs in ever decreasing strokes as he circled her sex, the rough skin of his fingertips making her skin flame up in erotic yearning, until everything he wasn't caressing began to burn with the anticipation of his touch.

Suddenly reaching down while arched over her, he lifted her legs over his shoulders, forcing her thighs wide apart. He paused for a moment, then, without any inhibition, licked the side of her face, nuzzling her neck as he made his way down to her sex, licking her skin furiously all the way. May fell back on the pillow, surrendering to the intense pleasure. She was already dripping wet, her hands clawing the sheets, wanting him to take her between those full soft lips, wanting him to fill her, pierce her, be in her completely. But he was in no rush.

Her skin was moist with his saliva as he bit her inner thighs, gently getting closer and closer, his fingers spreading her to the light, to the warm glow of the flickering flame of the candle now dancing over the plaster ceiling. His tongue pulsed with the same flame, building and building to a climax. Within seconds the cries of her orgasm resonated throughout the empty room, bouncing back off the walls. They sounded to May almost like another woman's cries, one she hadn't known was inside her until now. Illusion or no illusion, sex with Mitch had never been this good.

Before she had a chance to catch her breath he flipped her over so that she was crouching on all fours, arse up. He leaned down and bit the back of her neck, then plunged into her. His thick cock filled her, pounding into her wildly without any decorum or want except for his own pleasure. His groaning desire reinflamed hers and as he rode her, plunging in and out, in and out, over and over, faster and faster, something even deeper, another buried inhibition, fell away inside May and she lost herself in total abandon as thrusting and bucking they became one beast, until both of them came in one long great shout before collapsing together on the mattress. Afterward she was lying there drifting off when she was startled by a small purr from the other side of the bed. She glanced across. The man was lying on his back, eyes closed, a smile upon his face. Sighing, she turned and fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning May woke up with a pounding headache; it almost felt like a hangover. The sun had bashed its way through the blinds, heating the room in yellow bars of light. Half-asleep, she opened one eye and reached across for the reassuring presence of Mitch's back. Instead she touched fur and heard a tentative meow. The events of the past two days swept through her and then she remembered the lovemaking during the night. Surely it must have been a dream, some kind of psychological reaction to being abandoned—perhaps even an unconscious desire to get a new lover as soon as possible. May, a pragmatic young woman, was not given to erotic dreams. In fact she'd learned to regard the pursuit of Eros with suspicion, the result of several early love affairs that, based on sexual desire, had, nevertheless, ended up breaking her heart. Even taking Mitch as a lover had been a reaction to those earlier affairs—she had thought him a profoundly sensible choice. What an irony, she thought to herself, and now I am reduced to bizarre sexual hallucinations.