by Krissy Kneen
‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘See this body? Worn out.’
‘Not yet.’ I take a step towards the pool. I put my foot on the first slate step. The water is cool and soothing on the ball of my foot. ‘Is it too much to ask?’
‘Ask?’ She exhales sharply. ‘You don’t have to beg me to have sex with a beautiful young body like yours. Look at you.’
And she is looking at me. She is watching me take slow steps down the stairs and into the sweet cool of the water. She watches as my genitals touch the surface; the water slowly flows around the vulva, kissing it like an icy mouth, then the cock, my little almost-cock, which slips into the water, hard as an arrowhead, filled up with the blood of my rising desire. The truth is I do desire her. This surprises even me now that I am confronted with her vulva at eye level. The folds of her skin there look like the curls of a paper nautilus. Her skin is that luminous jellyfish pale. She is a creature right out of the ocean and when she walks the little distance to the stone steps I follow her footfalls. I see the effort it takes for her to lift her feet out of her heavy boots. When her feet are as naked as the rest of her I watch her place each gnarled foot carefully. Her feet are like the roots of an old tree, misshapen, unsteady on the ground, pulling away from it in places and plunging towards it in others. She reaches the stairs and loses balance. I rush towards her in case she falls, but she steadies herself and she is climbing down towards me. Naked, wizened, proud. I raise my arms and she walks into them. She is butterfly soft. She crumples against me. She smells faintly of flowers, of an old lady’s garden, heritage blooms.
I want her. I do want her. To be honest I want anyone, but she is here and I like her and it might just be happening. My first time might be happening. I have to remind myself to be gentle. She is a delicate flower that I might crush with my ardour. I can feel the swelling, hot in the cold water. I reach for her hand and she lets me take it and I place it against the throb at my groin. Her fingers curl around it. I thrust forward. I hold myself back, but it feels too good and I press my hips forward again. She stumbles and I hold her upright. She is a fragile collection of bones. I need to be careful with her. I am afraid I might kill her.
‘I’m not sure what to do,’ I tell her, surprised by the change in my voice; it has become raspy, deep, like I have been standing too close to an open fire.
‘Let’s go all the way into the water,’ she says. ‘It will do some work for me, support my body.’ And she holds my shoulders and walks with me into the shallow end. We lean back together against the moss-covered bank. I can feel her chest trembling.
‘Are you cold?’
‘Nervous,’ she says. ‘I haven’t done this for quite a while.’
I feel her fingers back on me, circling me and one finger of her left hand gently exploring my swollen vulva. She finds the space between the lips. I can feel how slippery I am. Her finger slides easily inside. She tests the tightness of my hymen. I push forward, taking her finger deeper into me, making her hand slide around the shaft at the same time.
‘I really want to put my mouth on you,’ she says. ‘I want to remember what it tastes like.’
I groan. The image of her taking my clitoris into her mouth, the heft of it stretching her lips, flashes into my mind and I feel a quick lurch in my groin. I groan a second time and press back into her grip a few more times, pumping myself into the palm of her hand, enjoying the way it makes her finger slip up and down inside me. ‘I could get up on the edge. Then you could take me in your mouth.’
‘Soon,’ she says. Touches a second finger to the lips of my vulva, wiggles it back and forth until it slips inside. I feel myself stretched out as far as my hymen will allow. I push forward again. I want it broken. I want more of her in me. I think of her little swollen clitoris. In a few weeks it will be big as two fingers, maybe fat as three. It would feel like this if she were to put it inside me. We could take turns. Her in me. Me in her.
I know what I want now. I gently push her hands away and I hug her to me. Her nipples rub against mine as I walk her back against the bank. I carefully hold the cheeks of her arse in my hands. Jellyfish skin. It ripples against my fingers. I lift her and she is light as a piece of tissue billowing up with the movement of the water. I rest her down against me, shift my hips from side to side and her thighs float upward, exposing her to the press of me. I gently ease her down and my eyes close as her cunt closes around me. In her and out of her and in her again. Warm and cold. Alive and dead. Alive. I press up into her. I am in her. I have to be sure; I move one of my hands to where our bodies have melted together and I follow the tip of my penis-clit as it pushes up into her again. I fumble with the soft folds of her genitals. I can feel myself pumping into her. One of my fingers touching the base of my protrusion, one of them slipping into the thick viscosity of my own cunt and I feel myself begin to pulse around my own finger. Each pulsation forces me higher up into her body. Her extended clitoris is rubbing gently against the thatch of hair on my pubic bone. I feel her tilt her body slightly and bounce there. I am in and out, in and out until the excitement subsides in my own body but she is still bouncing there on top of my deflated member. I give her my finger instead, slicked as it is with my own excitement. She pushes hard against my pubis, she presses down onto my hand, and there it is, that jellyfish propulsion, that wave of pleasure and her nipples clipping harder against my chest as she comes. We float in the rise and fall of the water for a long while. We say nothing. Her arms around me, my arms around the brittle body that she is living in.
After what seems an age she says, ‘I want you to sit on the edge now.’
‘Yeah?’ I can feel the excitement building already.
‘I want you all over my face.’
These words must be the most exciting thing anyone has ever said to me. I am half out of the water already. I am making towards the stairs.
‘I’ll do it to you next,’ I say as I slide down onto the mossy bank and let my feet push down into the water, feet like hands pulling her close.
‘You don’t have to,’ she says.
‘Are you kidding? Why wouldn’t I want to do that?’
Then there are her lips, and her tongue, and her lips and tongue and her fingers and the palm of her hand and more fingers and they are in me and slipping in places I would never have imagined. She is good at this. I suppose that’s what happens with so many years of practice, but there is something else too. She wants me. I can tell by the way she puts her lips around me. She is hungry for me, or for my youth, or for the memory of her youth. Whatever it is, it is working for me. I lie back on the rocks and I lift my hips a little so she can get into all the places. At one point I push down on her fingers, I reach down and stuff three of them into me. I want my hymen gone. She pulls her hand away.
‘It’s going to hurt you,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you to associate what we did here with pain. She takes her finger out and it is wet with me and I feel her lubing up the other hole and she bobs forward and opens her mouth and takes my whole cock in between her wet lips and when I blow I might be ejaculating into her mouth like a man, or pulsing like a woman and it doesn’t really matter because she holds on with her lips and strokes with her tongue and her fingers and it feels like all of my body has gone into and through her so that even the muscles in my shoulders are pumping my life force down into the rocks and the dirt.
I sit up and grin at her and she is grinning back. I can’t believe that it is happening. I grab a handful of reeds in each hand just to know that I am here and we are doing this right now. It all feels so solid. I feel so alive.
‘Now you.’
‘Only if you want to,’ she tells me. ‘I don’t need…’
And then I am submerged. I plunge down to the bottom of the pool, hold my breath, push my face up to the delicate flesh between her legs. My lips part and I take her little cock into my mouth, I rub it with my tongue and it gets bigger. One day, if she makes it to centre, it will be as big as mine. I want it
inside me. I want it in my cunt, but for now my mouth will have to do.
My tongue in her, around her, in her. My fingers stroking her. There is a scar, a pale line across her upper thigh and I kiss it while I push my finger inside her. She doesn’t have the same lubrication that my body makes so naturally and so I put my hand between my own legs and scoop up my own juices, which I push inside her. There is spit and there is vaginal juice and there is soft nautilus flesh and there is nothing but her in my face.
I open my eyes to sex. I blow bubbles up into it and have to surface to take another quick gasp of air before going back to the cave to play. If I laugh under the water she will not hear me. If I speak her name into her own orifice there is nothing but the tickle of air in water. If I tilt my body I can bring my reinvigorated cock up between her legs for a quick push inside her. I am in her and around her and I can feel her excitement building. It is in the way she moves, the sudden roughness of her fingers grabbing at my hair. I am quick with my hand and my tongue and she comes into my palm and around my tongue and into my mouth and around my finger and I laugh up into her cunt. My bubbles of joy. I have never felt more like myself. I have never abandoned self-awareness in quite this way. When she finishes her orgasm I burst to the surface of the water, gasping and laughing, and there is her mouth, thrown open and the squeal of her laughter is like some sound an animal might make, the pure scream of pleasure.
‘Thank you,’ we say at exactly the same time, then we laugh and hug and thank each other with our voices and our hands and our mouths. I feel the buzz at my wrist of a message coming through but I ignore it the first time. A second buzz and I am panting, but I reluctantly let the message seep into my consciousness.
Darling—my mother—do you think you could come over to the hospital? In your own time. No hurry.
We are somewhere on the journey towards death.
I hold my mother’s hand while she vomits. I don’t suppose I will ever get used to the violence of this purging. I shift uncomfortably on the plastic chair. Liv was right. It did hurt. But I don’t mind the sting of it. I am glad I got to feel her swelling so big inside me. At one point, lying beneath me, pushing up as hard as she could, before the tearing of flesh and the sharp pain of it, she stopped; panting, coughing a little, obviously straining to complete the act. ‘I might go all the way to the other side,’ she said. ‘Do you think? What kind of a man would I make?’
I looked down into her sweet, sweating face. I felt my heart and my cunt stretching wider and wider around her. ‘You would make a really beautiful man.’ I said it, and I meant it. Her age is nothing to me anymore. I was staring down through her skin. I was staring at what would be left when the flesh was gone and I saw her. That’s when it happened, at the moment I saw her, the beauty of her. I winced and the flesh tore and I bled onto her new little cock and slipped lower and closer to her and she knew she had done it but she couldn’t help herself. She had been close and that slight slip, up further into me, set her off and I watched her face change with the consummation of her pleasure and I knew something new. It was a calmness. A peace. It would be all right.
I hold my mother’s hair back from her face. It is coming out in patches but she won’t let me shave it off.
My mother and I have resolved nothing. I wait till her breathing returns to normal. I look at her face, which is similar but different to my face. We will never completely resolve everything that is bad between us, but L was right. We are coming to terms with each other. In that way this has brought us closer.
I send the text to Liv again and she is still not answering. I had such a lovely morning. Thank you.
But the words float out into the void, unheard.
I know she is dead, or transferred. She said it would be soon, so I suppose it has happened. A few weeks ago I would have been inconsolable but now I just feel like it is the way things have to be.
My wrist buzzes, but it isn’t Liv.
Where are you? L asks.
Hospital.
Need some company?
Want, I reply, not need. But want.
Glad you want me. L is teasing. We both know that L’s definition of ‘want’ is something different from the way I might use it. I’ll be over in a few minutes.
‘L’s coming round,’ I tell my mother.
She nods.
‘Are you sleeping with L yet?’
‘Don’t you dare say that when L is here.’
‘I won’t. You know I won’t.’
I know she won’t.
‘But I still think you should be.’
‘I’m happy with L,’ I tell her. ‘For now I am happy.’
‘But I want you to experience passion, sexual passion. It really is wonderful, M. Believe me. There is nothing else like it.’
I clamp my knees together. I feel the sharp pain of the tear which has not yet healed. I smile. A little sad smile that lingers on my lips for the longest time. She is right. For once my mother and I are in agreement. But I say nothing to her. I just hold the bowl close by because there is always a second wave of nausea. When it comes I will be ready for it.
PART 5
LIV
I AM BEAUTIFUL.
I have never before been beautiful and this first glimpse of this body in the mirror startles me. That was not part of the deal. I didn’t even think about the aesthetic dimension. Male, Female, Ungendered. These were my choices. I ticked the box out of habit. Easier to continue as I was for most of my past; and yet I did not expect this.
It is difficult to believe that someone who looks like this does sex work. The world is still so kind to the beautiful, even more so than when I was a kid. This woman could charm her way into any job and yet here she is.
Is it okay if you turn around? I ask. She sees the words, or perhaps she hears them, as if they have been cut loose from her thoughts to echo in her skull, but there is no real sound.
She turns. A slow reveal of a waist that is nipped in neatly, a tight, high arse, an elegantly curved back. When she comes back around to the front I see her breasts again. The nipples are very pale and very pink. Her breasts seem too heavy for so slight a frame. They sway a little when she turns but they are firm, pert, the nipples pointing upwards. Perhaps she has had some work done, made them bigger and higher. If she has I can’t tell. They seem just as soft and pliant as the rest of her.
‘Do you want me to turn around again?’ she asks out loud.
Hahaha my laughter is translated to the actual word like letters on a screen, I can feel the shape of it. This also surprises me. I smile, imagining the software developer who decided to subtitle this emotional response as well. Liv smiles—I wait for the letters to form in our shared consciousness, but no. There is just the feeling of smiling and I doubt that it is something she shares.
Her name is Laura. She works as a prostitute. She prefers the archaic term for it, because that is what she put on her profile. Laura. Prostitute. Twenty-three. Female.
Yes. She is indeed female.
You are beautiful, I tell her, and now she smiles along with me. It feels good to smile, to really smile with skin that tightens and lifts. To match a mouth to the way I am feeling. She flicks her long blonde hair away from her shoulder and I feel it brushing against her skin.
‘Thank you,’ she says.
You don’t have to speak aloud, I remind her.
Thank you, she says without words.
I am paying for eight hours of her life each week. The numbers are there in the corner of my mind, the seconds ticking over. I have already used ten minutes of her time.
I need to feel the space your body takes up, I tell her. I still feel disembodied.
Do you want me to have sex? she asks.
No. Nothing like that, I say too quickly. I am not quite ready for that. I am still remembering what it is to be in the world. Would you take a bath?
She scowls. It is an automatic response, this ugly impatience marring her exceptional face. I’m not sure
I would have liked her if I were not here inside her, but she is all I have for now.
‘You want me to take a bath?’
If that’s okay.
She shrugs. ‘I’m on the clock.’
I remember everything. I remember the smell of bubble bath. I used to use a brand called Relax, from Herb Farm. It smelled of the ocean. She uses a sharper scent, cheap, but even this minor assault on the senses is a pleasure. I drink in the heady waft. The smell is being filtered in through her experience, and it’s strange to smell something through someone else. I know it is a smell that would have irritated me when I had my own body to experience it through. Her sense of smell seems different, though. The edges of it dulled.
I didn’t realise how strange this would seem. She tests the water with her fingers, the sweet, thick resistance warm, honey-like. She lifts her leg. She steps easily into the tub.
In my old body I never trusted myself to climb into a bath like this. Even when I was young I would hold on to the towel rail. My legs were stiff, my balance unreliable. I had one too many mishaps with soapy water and clean tiles. She is surefooted as a heron, her limbs long and steady. She curls herself into the bath and I am there with her. I find the edges of myself through the water. The hug of warmth defines the body, makes me suddenly three-dimensional. I feel unreasonably long and thin. I feel snakelike.
I try to move my arm but there is nothing except a twitch of her index finger. I strain to stretch my left leg out; for the longest time there is no response. I am exhausted by the effort of will. I concentrate all of myself on that single limb and then it shifts, stretches.
She shifts it back into her body. ‘Fuck,’ she says out loud.
Did I just move your leg?
‘That’s so weird,’ she says.
You don’t need to speak out loud.
‘Do it again,’ she says aloud and I am tempted to use my mother’s words. ‘Inside voice!’ I want to shout. But I don’t. This must be just as strange for her as it is for me.
