by Krissy Kneen
It was too cold for love. Perhaps she could run back to her snug room and abandon the hunt for sex before it had truly begun. She was frightened, she thought. It was different with Mandy. Mandy was a solid rock of a woman, a cliff to cling to. This hunting for strangers in a strange land made her shiver.
It was just the cold, of course. Holly could hide her fear under the weather. She thrust her hands into the great woollen pockets. She picked out each step carefully. Walking on cobblestones felt precarious, like negotiating the deck of a ship, the ground twisting and turning beneath her as she stumbled blindly down a spiral of tiny alleys. She lost track of direction. Holly wished she had brought a map but she had left with only her copy of Little Birds and her credit card. Beneath her dress she was naked.
A man walked towards her, his hat pulled low over his face, his waisted overcoat making him womanly. He walked with a slight lilt, like a catwalk model, and stared at her as he passed. She turned to watch him watching her. She could open her coat to him. She could lift up the flimsy golden silk of her skirt. She could be done with her hymen right here in a nameless Parisian alley.
He stopped. He stared, unblinking, and Holly turned and fled. She tripped on a loose cobble, righted herself, and hurried on around a corner into an alley lined with little shops. Her heart was racing, urging her on, and yet she forced herself to stop. She turned and searched for the man, panting, certain that he would be chasing after her.
A figure rounded the corner. A woman. Holly noted her stylish heeled boots, red fur sprouting from the leather at her ankles. She shivered. God, she needed a hat.
Holly hurried into a clothing shop. A row of hats. A French beret, perhaps? A beanie? She touched the edge of a blood-pink fedora; steeled herself for a transaction in a strange, opaque language. She stepped up to the counter, held out her credit card.
To her relief the shop assistant nodded and said just one word. ‘Oui.’
With the warm felt of the hat perched on her head, Holly strode more confidently out of the shop. She reached the end of the street and turned a corner and there the world opened up to an unexpected vision of wonder. A square spread out before her, an otherwise empty space filled with tourists pointing cameras up towards the gothic turrets of a cathedral.
Notre Dame.
Holly gasped. Her mouth fell open. It was something wondrous, a miracle of stone and effort, a truly awe-inspiring stretch towards perfection. Small creatures crouched at the top of each reach of stone.
Holly stood staring up towards the highest turrets of the cathedral until her neck began to ache. She waited for traffic, crossed over into the square.
Paris. She was here in Paris. Holly felt a sudden ache in her stomach. The crouching gargoyles gazed down at her. Again she paused; the minutes slowed. Time made no sense in the presence of such great beauty. A long black car pulled up at the edge of the square. The rear door opened and a figure stepped out. She saw the neat, dark suit, the cuffs and collar a blinding white. He walked directly towards her and she saw as he approached his soft, sallow skin, his dark, almond-shaped eyes. The face flattened, moon-shaped, skin so soft that it seemed he must be carved out of butter. A Chinese man with perfect hair parted on one side and slicked back around his face like freshly poured tar.
Here it was. The moment of seduction. She could feel it in the way he moved steadily towards her, crowds receding, pigeons taking flight clearing a path for him to stride through.
As he walked towards Holly she practised her words. Hello, she would say, I have been waiting for you. She imagined him taking her hand and leading her back through the parting waves of tourists, back to the black limousine. The seats would be finished in soft calf. She would feel the silkiness as he pushed her back and lay her down. Her hymen would tear, the blood would stain the pale seats but it wouldn’t matter. He was rich, much richer probably than her parents, he would replace the seat covers. Or keep them as a trophy.
He was in front of her. Two more steps and she would be in his embrace. She knew how she would appear to him, her coat, her hat, her ill-advised shoes. She knew the power of her own beauty, too. She was ripe, low-hanging fruit. He reached out to her.
She stepped towards him and he pushed her to one side.
The Chinese man joined the growing queue waiting to climb to the top turrets and the gargoyles grinned down at Holly, laughing. For a moment she had touched the skin on the back of his hand. She felt a wave of disappointment. His skin felt like a new kitten, soft and sweet as custard.
She felt a flush of relief and bereavement. She would never touch the naked skin under his expensive suit. She would never discover the secret of his anatomy, the gentle uncurl of his penis, the smell of his sweat as he laboured above her. For a moment she contemplated hiding herself in the back of his limousine. He would climb the cathedral and find his way back to the vehicle, elated by the wondrous view of Paris spreading out beneath him. He would find another kind of wonder spread behind the tinted windows. She started to move towards the big black car but just as she reached it the limousine pulled quietly away, disappearing into the crowded streets of the 4th Arrondissement.
She was defeated. She had failed the first test. She was vanquished as surely as if he had turned and plunged a knife in her heart and laughed as she bled out onto the ancient paving.
Holly looked quickly around, then up at the mocking sprites carved in stone and perched in the ornate alcoves of the cathedral. They alone were witness to her humiliation. They alone had seen her first stumble. She turned and walked away, back into the quiet anonymity of the narrow alleys.
It was not enough, then, to place herself in plain view. She would need to harvest her own meal. She would need to recast herself as hunter, not prey. Back in Brisbane she had learnt that a man should pick a woman. That was the natural order of things. And yet in the pages of Anaïs Nin’s book women prowled the Parisian streets. Girls took their boys, women lunged towards hesitant men. There was a lesson to be learnt from story after story of female wantonness.
Holly tripped on a cobblestone, and felt her ankle twist beneath her. If she were to become a huntress of men she would need substantially sturdier shoes.
The Delta of Venus
by ANAÏS NIN
She saw a man at a nearby table. She was alone. He was alone. They had this in common. He was a little older than her, not unappealing, his hair fashionably disarranged. She saw him stare at the waitress with a naked hunger. So he and Holly had something else in common. He ate his sliced beef rather theatrically, smearing the sauce around his plate as if he were slaughtering the beast with his own hands. His French, what she could overhear, was sonorous and beautiful, as if he were performing opera. She listened as he engaged the waitress. Their banter seemed flirtatious. He spoke, and she tutted and skipped away from him with a giggle.
Holly ordered a second glass of wine. She said the words in English, too nervous to experiment with her phrasebook French.
The fairly attractive man had noticed her. He let his gaze linger on the stretch of her legs, crossed one over the other under the table. Perhaps he would not be able to read her English, but this was a risk she would have to take. She wrote the words carefully on the napkin. Simple words:
Behind the restaurant ther
e is a phone booth. I will meet you there. 5 mins. I want to have sex.
Anaïs Nin would have been appalled. Her note was quite without poetry; if this was an Anaïs Nin story there would be words of lust and longing. But Holly was afraid that any poetry would be lost in translation. How could he misunderstand I want to have sex? Perhaps she should have told him she was a virgin. Should a hymen come with a warning? So many things for her to discover. She rubbed at the pale band of skin on her ring finger.
She stood and walked past his table, placing the folded napkin on his empty plate.
It was dark back here behind the restaurant. Holly wished she was a smoker. A character in one of Nin’s pornographic stories would light a cigarette. She fidgeted, her shoes crunching on a scatter of broken glass. The lowest panel of the phone booth was shattered. The phone itself was crusted with black spray paint. The word merde sprayed across the upper glass panel. She picked at the edge of a theatre flier stuck crookedly on the metal behind the phone. She remembered the first time she had stepped into the phone booth that would turn out to be the bookshop. Here she was, stepping into yet another phone booth. For a moment she imagined that if she picked up the handset, she would hear Mandy’s comforting voice, but there was only the dull tone of a dead line. She set it back gently into its cradle.
She would give him his five minutes, no more. There would be other men. She wouldn’t wait for this one.
Holly saw his shadow before he rounded the corner. His hair, elongated by the streetlight, seemed like the head of a wild beast. His fingers were claws. But the person who rounded the corner was a pale parody of the bestial shadow, just an arrogant middle-aged man with a swagger. He leaned on the door of the phone booth. He smiled with one side of his mouth but the other side was frowning as if he couldn’t make up his mind if this was a good idea. Was Holly worth the effort, he seemed to be wondering. He assessed the length of her from her new high-heeled boots to her neatly styled hair.
Holly didn’t really care what he thought of her. It was time. She had to act now or she would lose her nerve completely. She reached out to his crotch and pressed the palm of her hand there. Yes, a definite pressure. A growing hardness. She could feel her own sex filling with blood, the lips beginning to pulse with the beat of her heart. She was excited. She was ready. It would be here, now, with this stranger. She unzipped his fly. She felt all the blood rush away from her head, flowering between her legs; the petals down there were opening, yearning towards the brightness of the moon. She let herself fall to her knees, felt the sharp tearing of her stockings on the broken glass. But the pain was just another delicious sensation. A sudden jet of saliva wet her mouth. She was hungry. Her mouth seemed obscenely empty. She reached out towards his open fly, snaking her fingers in between the metal teeth.
‘Formidable!’
His hands tangled in her hair. He pushed her head forward and she was already inclining in that direction.
His underwear was a frustrating barrier. She wanted to feel flesh in her fingers but instead she seemed to be confronted by nothing but tangles of white cotton. She struggled with it, plucking at the fabric, and finally found a little slit in the cotton through which she was able to pull the stiff dart of a penis from his pants. Her mouth descended on it almost as soon as she had seen it, like an albatross nipping up bait fish. She liked the way it sat on her tongue, the fat lozenge of flesh twitching as she lapped at it inexpertly but with enough desire to make up for any lack of skill.
Her world narrowed to a kind of tunnel vision. Her eyes were closed and the world contracted to the very specific scent of him, a warm damp smell of baking bread, coffee beans, port, and just a hint of urine. Now a slightly acid slipperiness on her tongue as a drop squeezed from the tip of his penis and slipped easily down the back of her throat. He was pumping her onto his cock, pushing her head with his palms so that her lips rubbed against the cotton of his underwear. She had heard of people gagging; since his penis barely reached the back of her tongue she concluded it was of modest dimensions in the scheme of things. That didn’t trouble her. The feel of it slipping in and out of her lips seemed to be wetting her other lips. She was not wearing underwear herself, and the juices slid easily down the inside of her thigh. It would be glowing down there, Holly knew. She remembered the bubble of bright desire that had escaped her cunt when she tried to touch herself. It made her pause for breath.
She pulled her head back to gulp air and slapped his hands away from the back of her head. She must not lose heart. Holly dragged at the denim of his faded jeans till he stumbled and fell hard against the edge of the phone booth, then climbed him like a playground toy, scrambling up over his knees, soaking his clothing with her juices. She knew she would be leaving a glowing trail like a radioactive snail, and she reached into the plunging neckline of her dress and pulled out her breasts to distract him. He dutifully locked eyes with first one and then the other nipple. His hands clamped around them, squeezed the firm round globes. In a second his face was obscured by her breasts, which he hungrily stuffed into his mouth. She remembered the way he’d attacked his bloodied beef and thought her breasts might be like another offering, a third course for him to gorge on.
‘Saperlipopette!’ he mumbled through a mouth full of mammaries. ‘Merde!’
Holly had no idea what he was saying and not much interest. She was, however, enjoying the feel of his breath on the clenched buds of her nipples. She liked the slide of his tongue hot against her flesh. She felt as if her breasts were swelling every time he latched onto them with his teeth, as if they were flesh-coloured balloons and his breath was somehow inflating them. They seemed to have grown in her imagination till they took up most of her body.
She shifted higher, pausing to find the condom that she had slipped into her garter belt. She lifted it to her mouth and tore open the plastic packet. She needed to hurry. She could feel the throbbing of her cunt, gnashing at empty air like a hungry mouth. She slipped the condom onto his discreet cock. She had practised on a banana in her hotel room and was satisfied that she’d got quite good at it—now she didn’t even need to look to know that she had unrolled the sheath all the way down to his balls. His balls—she hadn’t seen them at all. She slid her fingers back inside his underwear and felt them tight and high and hairy, two succulent lychees in their skins. She hovered above the rubbered protuberance and felt her cunt dripping bright juices down onto the head of it. She reached down and lubricated his cock with her own juices, slipping her fingers up and down until his penis was slicked all the way to the base. Then she lowered herself, spreading her own lips with her fingers, felt the head of his cock butt up against the narrow opening.
‘Baise-moi!’ he grunted into the pillows of flesh pressing up against his lips. She bounced down onto his cock and gasped. Even this small nub of flesh seemed too big for her. She shifted her knees on the grit of the floor. She lifted her hips and slammed them down onto him.
The fortress of her vulva seemed bolted, the door shut tight. She tried a third thrust of her hips and felt a sharp pain. She screamed, a high little yelp. Now, finally. Holly reached down between her legs to feel the head of his cock lodged just inside her cunt. She wriggled her hips, trying to get a better purchase on the thing but it seemed there was no room left inside her for more than just the tip. She panted, grunted, pressed down, and then, when she had almost despaired of making
any more headway, the man began to thrust up into her, his hips trembling, his teeth nipping at her tits. She knew, somehow, that he was close to coming, which meant he would be useless to her in a matter of minutes.
She timed her own hard thrusts to his. She plumped down onto the pounding of his penis. She stretched her mouth wide, hoping that her cunt would widen in sympathy. He fucked her hard and she heard the noise from her own throat as the tearing pain of it hit her like a scythe. He was inside her. She reached down and felt the sticky fluids of her cunt spilling out onto his cotton-clad balls. She cupped them as they began to pulse, as he began pumping his seed into her. They felt like jellyfish propelling themselves through thick mud. She moved her fingers to her clitoris, a swollen slippery thing. She slid her fingers around her own tiny shaft, pressed her thumb against it, pinched it gently, pumped it like she had pumped his cock with her lips, like he was pumping his come inside her. She felt his flesh pulsing in between the lips of her cunt. His seed was shooting up into the condom.
Inside her.
A cock right up to the balls inside her. Her body began to twitch. She felt her swollen clitoris twitch to its own frantic rhythm, her head snapped back, her mouth wide. She felt as if all the air in the alley were being sucked into her. She was becoming something other than flesh. She was a vortex, a universal conduit, the stars pumping their uneven light into her mouth. Her body was swelling with starlight. Her cunt ballooned, poised at maximum stretch, and then it burst. The sun and the stars and the moon turned liquid inside her and burst out from the lips of her vulva, extinguishing the heat of the man who was trembling beneath her. The contractions were so furious that she was afraid she had damaged his cock. She fell back, exhausted from the release of such great pressure. His penis slipped out of her with a disappointing sound, the last little popper going off alone when the party is over.
