Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  “But,” nervous, giggling, “see, I don’t know if I’m gay or straight or anything.”

  “Don’t be so prescriptive.”

  I settled my hips, my legs straddling his wide lap. He was all de Lempicka edges, solid curves. I almost kissed him out of habit. It’s easy to kiss someone when you are on their lap and their penis has slipped inside you. It’s comforting. But tomorrow we would go out for a smoke and there would be a kiss hovering between us and it would make for awkward conversation. Instead I set up a rhythm, kneeling up, settling down and soon Richard was behind me and inside me, too, and leaning over and around and the two of them nuzzling at my breast, using my nipple as an excuse to brush their lips together, their tongues shy as anemones, venturing out to lick and suck and pretending that the kiss they eventually came to was some kind of accident.

  At some point I became superfluous. I rolled aside and my body was no longer the point at which they collided. I watched their twin condoms, both moist with the scent of me, tapping against each other, little wet kisses of their own. I lay back and watched and felt fond. Nice men, both of them, and I was glad that now, briefly, through the thin veil of my skin, they had found each other. There was still wine, and I sipped at it, leaning back against the cold sweat of the concrete wall.

  When Richard moved too fast, forcing my friend back against the pillow, making clumsy excited lunges too quick, too soon, I leaned toward them, placed my hands on both their chests and felt their wildly beating hearts slow a fraction. Mistress of ceremonies. Nothing more. But I took care. Care with the lubrication. Care with the contraception. Care with the postcoital hugging and the herbal tea by the bed, with three mismatched teacups painted with flowers.

  Careful, too, not to wake Richard when my friend crept away before dawn. Careful not to say a word at smoko. Lighting his cigarette from the tip of my own. Smiling, winking, a little nudge with my hip to make him smile, my transient friend who never again wondered about his gender preference and who never again found himself naked in my bed.

  I NEED TO TALK ABOUT FRANK’S PENIS

  We never mentioned the size of Frank’s penis. It was there before us, thicker than it was long, a little stump of a thing, so wide that the condom barely stretched to fit around it. I’d never seen a penis like it. He took off his jeans and there it was and there was nothing to be said about it, this little mushrooming of flesh.

  We paused, Richard and I. The sight of it broke our rhythm. We were used to the routine with each new lover. I would be there first, the comfort of the familiar female flesh pressing and touching and licking my way across the stranger’s body. Richard would follow the path that I had cleared for him. Richard was always more gentle than I, easing our lover into the idea of the two of us together, one after the other, my rough urgency, Richard’s gentle patience.

  Now with the sight of this penis, I faltered. It was uncomfortably wide. It was as thick and oversized as something that Robert Crumb might draw in his pornographic comics, but hacked off short like someone had taken the scissors to the thing, some furious girlfriend, jealous wife, keeping the better part of it as a trophy.

  We didn’t mention his penis. Richard found the lubrication, gentled the man, what was his name? Yes. Frank. Eased Frank up behind me. The thing felt like a fist, pummeling, butting up against the resistance of flesh. Without the lube it would have been impossible, and yet, with each breach of the battlements, there was a quick retreat, little fist, pounding away like that. I was too startled to find any kind of pleasure.

  When it was done, Richard eased him away from me and I watched him change the condom, slipping the thing on with his teeth like a whore. He had learned that trick from me and he had mastered it. I watched the stretch of his mouth. No chance of a gag reflex this time. I wondered how he could do it with a penis like that. It must be like suckling an amputated limb.

  Afterward, when Frank left, grinning, touching, kissing too eagerly at the door, we didn’t mention his penis. I sat with my cup of tea cooling in my lap and wondered if he even knew how startling it was. How did men get a sense of proportion anyway? It was easy for me, easy for Richard, too, to measure one against the next in the cup of our palms. I had no preference, as long as the thing was not big enough to tear me. Smaller gave us more options. More room for play.

  Frank’s penis wasn’t exactly small though. Huge, from one perspective, and then barely there from a different angle. I wanted to talk to Richard about it but it is difficult to discuss the size of a man’s penis.

  “He has a good sense of humor.”

  Richard nodded, sipping, curling back into the lounge chair. His own penis had subsided now and lay like a fat and sated worm in his lap.

  “Nice cologne. Expensive. Did you smell it?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “Very nice.”

  “And a particularly nice shirt. Good taste. Frank has good taste.”

  It was impossible to mention his penis. Richard talked about Frank’s shoes and his underpants and the way he danced and somehow, reducing the man to the size of his penis seemed petty to me.

  “Yes,” I said. “He was a good dancer.”

  “I’d like to see him again.” Richard smoothed the little piece of paper out on his knee. There was a telephone number scrawled across it. His number. The man with the little fist of a penis, what was his name? Frank. Frank’s little stub of a penis. Already I couldn’t remember the way he danced or his cologne or his underwear. All of it obliterated by the blunt fact of his penis, fisting me.

  “I think we should invite him over for dinner.”

  I nodded, calm. Didn’t you see the size of his penis? I screamed silently, and, Penis, what about his penis!

  We didn’t talk about it. We finished our tea and lay politely side by side on the king-size futon with enough distance between his back and mine so that we would never need to mention Frank’s penis.

  MEETING BRIAN

  Richard wouldn’t like him. I didn’t like him. He was older than us, late forties perhaps, but he dressed like we did. Op-shop clothes, badly fitting, barely ironed. He ordered cappuccinos and the froth crept up onto his upper lip and stayed there. He smiled with his whole face but somehow his eyes were untouched by it. I kept my distance and he kept coming back each afternoon, ordering cappuccinos, glancing over his frothy moustache, grinning at me.

  “He wants to sleep with you,” Laura whispered under the shriek of the coffee grinder.

  “Richard would hate him.”

  And I was only vaguely interested. I had never slept with a much older man, but I assumed that Brian would be well practiced at his age. He could perhaps teach me a few things. I was not ready to completely discount the possibility.

  He asked me to sit down with him and I couldn’t find a reason to refuse. I had finished my shift. I was almost ready to walk across the bridge and home to West End. It had been days since our last conquest and we had begun to tire of our coupledom. The same conversations, the same easy meals. We had started to snipe at each other out of boredom.

  He sat and stared and waited; I was expected to say something to him. He was like a particularly attentive puppy hoping for a treat. I was supposed to ask about him, and I did. His name was Brian and he sold coffee to offices for their filter machines and he worked out of his car and he lived out of his car. He did not have a house to go to. I felt the thaw begin. There was something poignant and vulnerable about the man. He was gormless. People didn’t really like him. I didn’t really like him, but somehow that made me like him. He seemed nice enough in his own way. He seemed to like everybody. He ordered me another coffee and insisted that he should pay.

  “I live with a gay man and we share partners,” I heard myself saying. “You can sleep on our couch.”

  Laura raised an eyebrow as I left with him and I shrugged. This was the way it worked, no conscious decisions, just a floating between things. He led me to his car which smelled of aftershave and hair products and just a hint of sweat.
He kept it neat, the blankets in a pile folded onto one seat. Too neat perhaps. He held up his key ring with a single key dangling from it.

  “One key,” he said. “Simplicity.”

  I jingled my little stash of keys at him. “Shop, house, garage, gate, briefcase, I don’t know what that one is, I think that’s the key to the last house I lived in and maybe that’s the one to the house before.”

  He shook his head at me, slipped his one key into the ignition, and started the car.

  Richard didn’t like him. I lay with Richard in our cold king-size bed and there was space between us. My hand snaked out and held his hip, thin as a teenage girl. Sometimes I imagined I could suffocate him if I chose the top position.

  “So you won’t have sex with him?”

  “No.”

  We kept our voices low because Brian was asleep on the couch just outside. We weren’t used to this kind of whispered conversation. Richard reached out and hooked his fingers into my vagina. He did this for comfort. I didn’t expect it to be the beginning of anything but it was possible. I imagined that it would be fun to keep our lovemaking a secret. It would add an extra thrill to the play. I shuffled closer and cradled the flaccid curl of his penis in my palm.

  “This is the first time you’ve said no, Richard.”

  “Well he’s old. I don’t like that he’s old. Old enough to be my father. I couldn’t possibly fuck an old man.”

  “Not so old. You’ll be that old one day.”

  “Okay, I’ll fuck him when I’m fifty.”

  “He’ll be dead when you’re fifty.”

  “Do you want to fuck him?”

  I thought about that for a while. The possibility. Not something I was longing for, but not so bad. He was older, but he wasn’t an old man yet. He smelled all right.

  “I want to fuck you,” I said.

  He could have. I felt his penis begin to stiffen in my fist, but he didn’t. He turned away and shuffled his tiny hips so that they were cradled in my generous lap.

  “I just want to sleep,” he told me.

  We lay like that as the night set in and I heard the creaking of the couch as Brian shifted one way or another. I was awake. Wide awake. I wished we had made love, Richard and I. I felt like this might have been some trouble between us and I needed some assurance, flesh to flesh, a quick kiss and make up.

  PILLION 3

  Brisbane 2008

  Of course we will not jump in the spa bath together. This will not happen. I am not even sure that I like him very much. We sit and we drink wine and we talk and the rain gets heavier and heavier.

  “I think I’ll ride home after all.”

  Which is ridiculous given the weather and I see Paul cast around frantically for an escape. There are women with cars. He quickly negotiates an alternative to the motorcycle and I am glad, because it will be suicide to ride in this weather, no visibility, dodgy tires, no wet weather gear. I am also disappointed because somewhere on our trip back it would become impossible and we would be stranded at the side of the highway and we would have to huddle together for warmth.

  I gather my still-sodden jacket and helmet. I glance at the room with the spa, which is right there near the entrance to the house. I wave goodbye. I do not hug Paul although I feel perhaps we should shake hands. I move out toward the bike and clip the forlorn spare helmet onto the side. The lining will be soaked by the time I have found my way home.

  The rattle of tires skidding on wet gravel. I can’t see a thing. My right index finger becomes a windscreen wiper for my visor. Even this just makes the world a blur of light and shade. I flip open the visor and the rain pierces my eyeballs. I will look into them and see the bruising on them, on the skin around them, when I am safely home.

  Safely home after an hour and a half of breathless terror. It was never worth the risk. I should have stayed the night.

  But then there was that spa bath. I dream it. It becomes a recurring theme for the next few nights. We come to it fully clothed, Paul and I, drinking, laughing, acting like children in the early hours of the morning.

  Still. I barely know him and I barely like him. Perhaps I don’t like him at all. I see Paul’s little green light pop up on the Internet and I could talk to him. I could ask him how his lift home was. Instead I close my computer and reach for my sodden book and ease the pulp of pages apart. Tonight I will not chat with him. Tonight I will read, or I will write. Anything but chat.

  I close my eyes and all I can see is a spa bath, a glass of wine, and bubbles.

  CRACKS

  Brisbane 1989

  Richard bought a car at an auction although neither of us could drive.

  He was always buying things. He had a way of making money disappear. I was barely capable of keeping track of the rent but he was worse than I was.

  “Let’s eat out,” he’d say, meaning a fine restaurant and perhaps a new shirt to wear to it, and the most expensive meal on the menu. He bought me gifts that I didn’t want. Kitschy little things, oil burners and homoerotic prints and subscriptions to expensive gay porn magazines. I felt myself digging my heels in, feeling responsible. I was not his mother and yet he made me like a mother to him, always setting boundaries, the voice of reason.

  “It’s always up to me to find our partners,” I complained to Laura one day after a shift. “I never see him put any effort in. If it were up to him it would be just him and me.”

  Just him and me. I could see the humor in it. Just him and me should not be so bad really, but when I thought about this possibility, all the life seemed to escape out of the relationship.

  “You love him, don’t you?”

  I couldn’t be sure I really loved him at all. I loved what I did with him. I loved the potential of our relationship. We had fun. It was exciting, but I had lost my drive to go out every night in search of fresh blood, and our evenings alone together left me irritable.

  Brian moved off the couch and into the spare room. We didn’t charge him rent but he brought us food and vegetables and I began to enjoy the distraction of him being around. He did the washing and helped with meals. Sometimes when I snapped at Richard in frustration, Brian would be there to pull me aside.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” he said one particularly restless Sunday afternoon.

  My final assignments were due and I should have been working, but I was raging about one thing or another and I knew that the afternoon would start to plummet if I didn’t leave the house. It had been days since we’d had anyone. I felt cooped up, I had started to pace in the evenings.

  “You look like you need your fix.”

  Brian parked at the edge of the Botanical Gardens. We would walk, he told me. We would smell the herb garden and maybe steal some cuttings to plant in our own.

  “What fix would that be?”

  “Someone to distract you from the problems with your own relationship? Sex. Sex with some complete stranger to make you guys feel like you are not all alone with each other.”

  He seemed like a wise man then, someone twice my age and just as perceptive. He had been in our home for a handful of days and he had put his finger right on the problem, our problem, that we didn’t love each other enough.

  I felt his hand on my knee and it was a comforting weight.

  “I’m tired,” I told him. “University is almost over. I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”

  When his finger inched inside the elastic of my panties it was unexpected. I hadn’t felt any kind of sexual energy between us. I didn’t find him attractive and I had decided that he didn’t find me attractive either, but here was his finger inside me, teasing me, changing my mind about my own attraction to him so easily.

  “You want to sleep with us?” I asked him, shifting my hips closer to the driver’s side of the car and spreading my knees for him. He slipped a second finger inside and slid it back and forth.

  “No,” he said. “But I wouldn’t mind sleeping with you alone.”

  This was agai
nst the rules, our rules, the rules that I had set for both of us. The rules that Richard had agreed to.

  When Brian removed his finger he held it to his nose and then he sniffed at it and he wanted me. This made me want him back.

  “Have sex with me,” he said then and I could hear the desire in his voice.

  “I won’t break our rules,” I told him. “I won’t sleep with someone without telling Richard first.”

  “Are you going to tell Richard?”

  “I think this thing with Richard might be over.”

  “You won’t regret it.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see.”

  MOVING HOUSE

  My assignments were due all at once and I was moving house. This is how university ended for me. This is how Richard ended for me. There was no struggle, but he cried and I felt responsible. I was fond of him. We had shared so much and with such good humor. We packed our things and I hid myself away in the library at night. I needed more time for my work. I was doing too many things badly, and I watched my relationship crumble and I thought perhaps I should have put more effort in.

  “We’ve had fun, haven’t we?” And of course we had. So much fun.

  There was a twinge of terror in me that this would be the end of sex. We had shared a new partner every week at least and the game had lasted a year. I could have counted them out, averaged them, but I was never good at counting and it wasn’t about the numbers, it was about the game, the variety, the smorgasbord. Richard was the safe place from which to begin our adventure. Now it was time to climb back down to the world where everything might be more ordinary. I thought perhaps that I was making a mistake. Brian lurked in the other room, watching us pack, whispering to me that I was making the only choice I could under the circumstances.