Yearning (32 page)

He was careful not to touch her too much, letting the tension between them build, knowing full well that her anticipation would do most of the work for him. Inside, he poured a splash of chilled wine into two frosty glasses, even though it was early in the day.

‘Go and lie on the bed. It’s through that door.’

He indicated the open door of his bedroom with the glass of wine before he handed it to her. ‘Take your top off. And your underwear. Leave your skirt and shoes on.’

Bright and bubbly Anna had fallen silent. She was hypnotised and he knew it. He listened to the quiet sounds of her in his bedroom. He walked over to where he could watch her surreptitiously. Her chiselled body, hard with exercise, defied gravity, defied her age. She looked like a model in his white room, punctuated by warm reds and browns and backed by the bare window looking out to the
ocean. He could still smell the cinnamon and cedarwood he’d put in the oil burner before he left, expecting she’d find her way into his bed today.

‘Your room, it’s beautiful,’ she called out to him.

He didn’t answer her. He watched her arrange herself on the bed, unsure whether to lie right back or sit up on the pillows. Her nipples stood to attention in the warm air. He entered the room slowly, carrying his glass all dewy with condensation. She was breathing heavily, waiting for him, her legs barely parted. He sat on the edge of the bed and he tapped his glass against hers.

‘To new adventures,’ he said. She smiled and took a sip with him, holding his gaze.

‘Now, Anna, would you be a good girl and spread your legs for me?’

Wide eyed and giggling she opened her thighs. The moisture between them made her skin sticky. She gawped at him, helpless. He allowed Anna’s imagination to arouse her. Without touching her he lifted her skirt high, exposing her bare mound struck through with a glistening pink lick of flesh. Sighing, he stroked a single finger on the outer lips of her vulva and traced slow circles around it. He watched her clitoris rise and redden. He took a sip of wine and rested the cold base of the glass against her tight stomach. She gasped. He traced the glass up between her breasts, glancing over her upright nipples. She had begun to writhe and sigh.

‘You look delicious,’ he murmured and he bent to envelope a hard brown nipple in his mouth.

She seethed beneath him as he sucked and licked one nipple, then the next. He was waiting for the moment
when the knot within him would drive him forward to take her. His cock was stiff but not hard. This was unusual. It had never taken him long to catch up with his women. He ignored it, devoured her and waited for the full erection he expected to come upon him at any moment.

He pulled away from Anna and took another sip of wine. She was squirming under him and panting.

‘Sol,’ she said, ‘Oh God. I should have checked. Do you have a condom?’

He hated it when people shortened his name. He sat considering her, her reddened cheeks, her glistening slit, her eyes half closed. This must happen. He couldn’t let a little thing like ‘Sol’ get in the way.

‘Open your legs, Anna. Wide.’

She did as she was told. He blew the cool air of the room against her skin, a snail trail of sticky wetness shining across her inner thigh.

He reached over to his drawer and pulled a square of plastic from it, laying it at the ready on the bed next to him. He stood and stripped, draping his clothes over the back of a chair. He was enjoying her obedience. He avoided her eyes as his cock fell from his pants, half soft, half hard. Placing his hands on her thighs he knelt before her and pushed her knees down to the bed, running his fingers lightly down the muscular shape of her legs. Her body was so tight under his hands, Barbie-doll hard. There was no softness to her, no yield. He searched for something in her that would ignite him.

Anna had pushed her head back among his pillows, her hands pressing hard against the wall. He spread her
vaginal lips wide with his fingers and inhaled her scent. Juices were running from her vagina down the crack between her buttocks. Slowly he began to lick her. She moaned deeply, thrusting her pelvis towards his mouth. He placed a wet finger against the opening of her anus and probed her as his tongue explored her hairless pubis. She cried out in frenzy.

‘Let’s fuck! C’mon, Sol. Give it to me!’

There it was again. Sol. The sound of it soured him. He wanted desperately to enter her but his penis remained lifeless. The more he bent her to his will the less inclined it seemed to oblige him. He devoured her hungrily and she began to yell for him to fuck her. She thrashed around on the bed, out of breath and shrieking as an orgasm stormed through her body.

Gasping and desperate she sat up and pushed his face away from her. The strength of her took him by surprise. She forced him onto his back and climbed astride him, taking his half-hearted penis into her hands. She pulled and tugged at him ruthlessly and ripped the condom open with her teeth. But when she tried to slide it over him it slipped and slid under her fingers. Wordlessly she gave up and sat on top of him, gyrating and grinding into him, smearing his groin with thick fluid. He felt her heels pinching his skin and he winced in pain. He tried to concentrate on his inner drives but it was useless. After ten minutes of pounding him in a punishing crush she gave up and collapsed panting on the bed beside him.

Solomon didn’t know what to do. He was humiliated. His libido had never failed him before. All his erogenous power seemed to vanish in that moment and he wanted
to cry. Knowing she was still aroused and wanting more he reached over to massage her but she moved away from him.

They lay silently beside each other staring at the ceiling.

‘Did I do something wrong?’ she whispered.

Solomon was lost. He had no answer. He could see Anna was winded with lust and hopelessly shamed that she couldn’t entice him to a full erection. Broken and bewildered he turned away from her to look out of the window. She sat up and ran her fingers through the luxuriant hair on his chest. He stiffened involuntarily and she withdrew her hand. Anna sipped at her wine and made a face.

Solomon forced himself to deal with the situation with dignity. ‘I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you, Anna.’

‘No. No. That was the greatest orgasm I’ve had in years. I just thought, um, you wanted to fuck.’

The anti-climax of their encounter hung between them, neither able to move beyond it.

‘Maybe another time,’ he replied with a half-hearted smile.

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Anna picked herself up and, holding her head high, walked resolutely back to her clothes. He admired her then. Perhaps he’d underestimated her.

‘Can I give you a lift?’ He was being polite, hoping she would decline.

She sighed. ‘No thanks, I could do with a walk to wind down. I’ll see you ’round.’

He chewed on the inside of his cheek as he listened to the door close behind her and the crunch of her heels marching across the stones in the driveway. He never let a
woman leave his house without seeing her to the door. His body had never betrayed him so completely. He lay adrift, his hands behind his head and his gaze resting on a cobalt sky blistered with purple clouds.

He tried to unravel what had just happened. This had to be an anomaly. A freak event. A product of his age perhaps? Or another form of writer’s block? Or maybe it was just Anna? The first woman ever who couldn’t inflame his passions? But that didn’t make sense. Anna was beautiful, if not a bit crass. Crass had never gotten in the way before.

He’d never imagined this happening to him. Ever. He wondered if there was something was wrong with him, maybe he was ill? His prostate or something. He’d heard of it happening to other men, but couldn’t believe it would happen to him. His sexuality was his power, it was what he was good at. What had his mother said? A magnificent lover of women. He’d lived up to that. Made sure of it. So why this? Why now?

He got out of bed and stood to stare out of the bare window across the dunes to the seaweed and driftwood straggled along the shoreline.
Flotsam regurgitated with the bile of the sea
– he could still put words together. A notebook lay open on the armchair by the window. He picked it up and flicked through the pages to find the words he’d written a week ago. The day he’d sent the postcard. Ever since he’d been struggling to shake off thoughts of her, the one he’d run away from to save himself. Twice.

Deep within the silence of a windy night, at the calm centre where the stars dwell, a wisp of memory haunts me.
On nights like this, when the wind wrestles passionately with the trees, when the very air is restless with love, I am reminded of these scars on my heart. Beloved scars, treasured scars, scars of longing and faith. In this private world I trace them again, furtively, secretly. No one shall discover this quiet and delicious reminiscence of my abandoned love for you. It is mine and mine alone to hold close, to cherish in my mind’s eye, to nestle in the seat of my soul.

Solomon looked out towards the beach again. The heat of the morning was dispersing into a cool change. A southerly was blowing away the bathers peppering the lonesome beach. Sandcastles, forlorn and abandoned, dissolved into the wash of hungry foam. A red hat waggled wantonly in the wind, beckoning to him. ‘Take me,’ it seemed to say. ‘Nobody wants me. Take me. I’m yours.’

Solomon felt weary to his bones. He was so tired of taking. For once he wished he could be taken. For once he wished he could give himself over to another who had chosen him. A gust of wind caught the hat and it stumbled stupidly across the sleepy sand. He watched it as it lurched from towel to esky to beach shelter, seeking a kindly pair of hands to claim it.

His mind kept returning to the same memories. Through the decades they raced, heading straight for him, accusing and challenging, reminding him that there had always been more to his sexual conquests than the lonely pursuit of an orgasm. Two points in time where something precious was lost.

First when he was a young teenager, barely more than a boy, laughing with his mother and her friends, later
fighting off a drunken man’s intruding hands, feeling the sharp edge of a belt buckle against his skin, wishing his mother would come, please come. Second, and more tender, a brown-eyed girl wearing pink lipstick standing uncertainly in his long ago drive-way, sitting on the edge of his couch grasping a milky cup of tea, staring at him through the drops on the shower curtain, spread motionless and panting across his crisp, white bed.

Two isolated memories digging into his pores, burrowing under his skin, making him bleed inside. A lump rose in Solomon’s throat. There was a common thread between them, he saw that now. How could he have missed it? The innocence he’d taken from her was what he’d lost too. It was what he’d tried to claim from her. Yet in claiming it, he’d ruined it. The very thing he wanted from her, the light purity in her eyes when she’d looked at him, he’d soiled with his own hands. But in all the times he took her he never saw her as soiled. That’s why he kept returning to her. To him she was always sixteen, always innocent, always the sweetest, kindest, most open, most loving woman he’d known.

Denial, brittle with age, crumbled around him, leaving him as bare and eroded as the cliffs behind the headlands. Reluctantly he confronted a desolate and thorny truth. Perhaps this was the purpose to his empty journey: the reclamation of that which he had lost to cold lime tiles and a flower of virginal blood on his sheets.

Solomon sat on the armchair, the notebook hanging from one hand. He pulled absently on his goatee and swallowed hard, willing the hard ball in his throat to go away. He wouldn’t cry, not about this, not now after all this time.

Love. It was all she talked about back then. And later. Love, love, love. What could a sixteen-year-old country girl know about love? Then again, what could a tired, fifty-two-year-old teacher with a promiscuous past, losing hair and potency, know about love? Could it be that he loved her? Could it be that the love she tried to claim from him had always existed in his lonely bones?

Solomon watched people running in from the water, grabbing up towels from the sand. The wind had picked up and white horses galloped across the surface of the darkening sea. Through all the many lovers, all the affairs, all the sexuality he had sampled, she stood apart, a rescue flare across his stranded heart. It was clear to him now, almost a relief to find the courage to let go and admit it. It wasn’t just sensuality that had inspired them that first night they were together, or the nights that came later. The driving passion he found with her, the vibrations in his body that shook him down to his toes, was love. It could be nothing else. Unlikely and inconvenient as it was, he loved her in a way he’d loved no other.

Solomon stood and pulled on a T-shirt and tracksuit pants. He wandered barefoot out the front door and down the sandy path to the beach. With his hands hidden in his pockets he saw the hat again. It was tumbling towards him. People were packing up umbrellas and beach bags in the chill wind. He stood facing the sea, the wind whipping his curls back from his face. Invisible hands lifted the hat and, in a sudden act of fury or delight, hurled it directly at his legs. It caught there, pressed hard against his shins, flapping joyfully that it had found a mooring at last.

I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.

The Song of Solomon

It was ironic. The very day she sent her letter to Solomon, a smooth, thick envelope arrived in her letterbox. She recognised the handwriting immediately, the careful scroll of her name in black ink across its front. She didn’t open it. She left it resting on the dresser, against the Japanese teapot, for later, when she would have time to digest it.

All night she was aware of it, Solomon’s words all jammed up in a neat paper parcel. As she fried fish fingers for Josh’s dinner, as she sang ‘Five Little Ducks’ while Poppy played in her bubble bath, as she tucked her soft-bodied children into their beds, the letter was never far from her thoughts. He’d never written to her before, other than the postcard she’d received two weeks ago. Whatever it was he wanted to say, it must be important. He wouldn’t bother otherwise. Words were too precious
to waste on, ‘Hi, how are you?’