Quiver

by Tobsha Learner

  Dee lies with his full body weight resting on Simon. Nipple to nipple, cock to cock. He loses himself in the green of Simon’s irises. A clear deep green, freckled with gray. He closes his eyes and feels Simon’s lips on his, his tongue entering him like a cock, probing his mouth, his throat. He lifts Simon’s legs high over his shoulders. Reaching into his back pocket for a condom, he pins Simon down as he rolls the condom carefully over himself.

  “We could get caught any minute,” Simon’s voice is thick with lust.

  “Isn’t that what you want?” Dee whispers hoarsely into Simon’s ear as he enters him, plunging deep into his taut ass.

  THE GIRLFRIEND

  We’ve been lovers for eighteen months now. How would I describe him? Silent, one of those working-class Australians—you know, not really trained in the art of being emotionally expressive. I guess that’s what I liked about him in the first place. His difficulty. His toughness.

  Dee works with his hands. You can tell straightaway by the way they hang down, strong, veined.

  He’s a landscape gardener, works for the council. I’d sometimes see him in the botanical gardens in his dark cotton overalls, on his knees, weeding a flower bed or attending to the herb garden. Then later, at my place, he’d make love to me with the soil still under his fingernails, smelling of eucalyptus.

  We met at a dinner party. I didn’t mean to fall in love with a landscape gardener. But, as much as I’d like it to be, love is not logical. My colleagues at the law firm think I’m a control freak. I like things to be neat—everything in its place. Dee is my only exception. He refuses to fit anywhere: not into my longterm plans, not into my social activities, not into my definition of what a lover should be. He sets his own terms and I acquiesce. After all, arbitration is my forte. Is this love or masochism?

  He took me once, at night in the park. It must have been about 100 degrees, too hot to sleep. We were drunk, the moon was bright. One of those nights, where you have an objectivity about being human, being part of the human race, as if you could stand out there on some nebular body and look back at earth. And then, if you’re lucky, you get lifted up and thrown headfirst into the meaning of eternal.

  I remember the moonlight falling onto the stone statues as we walked along—magical, blue, casting shadows over granite angels, waxy night jasmine, huge white magnolias curling up in the night, a blue shower of jacaranda petals fluttering down across our hair.

  I turn, laughing, to find him gone, completely disappeared into the shadows. Suddenly sober, I call out his name. It returns echoing, the tremor in my voice scaring me. Above me bats chat and cackle. I stumble toward a huge elm, its trunk veined and phallic, soaring stoutly up into the black. I lean against it, momentarily comforted by my own invisibility.

  Then I see him, stepping out into the blue-white of the moon. Phantomlike, his pale skin reflecting the light. He walks slowly toward me, his sex swaying heavily. He is nothing of this world, so alien in his beauty. I cannot see his face—the shadows transform him into a stranger. He snaps off a small branch of scrub. Then, with rough primitive gestures, he begins to rub the honeylike sap onto his cock. Around us the cicadas begin their chorus. I am still in my evening dress. He lifts my skirt and rips a hole in my pantyhose. I am naked underneath. The cool night air caresses the lips of my sex. He lifts me up onto the branch of a tree and carefully starts to anoint me with his finger. The sap burns like tiger balm, making my blood rush. He parts me wide open, placing a dab of it onto my clitoris and the heat rises from my center. He steps back, looking like a demented Bacchus, the sap glistening on his body. I am left pinned, my legs spread between two branches, my breasts pulled free. I feel like a sacrificial offering for the moon, watched by a stone audience of goddesses and shadowy trees.

  Dee runs his tongue slowly across the inside of my thighs, then bites the flesh gently back down to the knee. I am burning up. I want him inside me. I struggle but he holds me down. I can feel my lips and clit swelling to gigantic proportions, as if my body is centered there and nowhere else. Leaves and twigs tangle up in my hair as I push my hips down toward his mouth, his cock, anything to fill me, to intensify this delicious heat. My head falls back in pleasure, and I open my eyes to an upside-down world, night for day.

  Something darts from one shadow to another, an open glade of grass surrounded by a canopy of pungent tropical vines. A statue of Diana the huntress stands in the center of the clearing. At her feet crouches a naked satyr, a beautiful youth of about fourteen. In my drunken, drugged state I see the satyr bury his face between Diana’s virginal legs. His hands grip her pale buttocks as his long animal tongue parts her delicate, hairless sex. She drops her quiver of arrows, arching her back like a gymnast. A stone flower turning to a rosy blush.

  Hands grasp my breasts and lift me down to the ground. We crouch opposite each other, Dee’s eyes black with lust. Wrapping my legs around his hips, I slip onto his cock. Skin on skin, the burning mounts. He feels huge. The moon and the stars dance over my shoulder as I bury my face into his chest. We slip across each other, drenched in sweat, and I can feel each rib of his cock as he slowly pulls out. I throw him down onto the fragrant grass, squatting over him like some primeval fertility goddess. I clench the tip of his cock, teasing him as I move backward and forward, and then plunge down onto the whole length of it. Then together, the moon, the stars, the trees and the flowers all swoop and disappear inside us as we come in unison.

  Like I said, Dee wasn’t just your average landscape gardener.

  THE BOYFRIEND

  I lost my virginity to a house burglar. True story. I was house-minding my uncle’s mansion in Sandy Bay. It was late, about two in the morning, and I woke to the sound of breaking glass. By the time I got downstairs he was rifling through the family silver. I was sixteen, dressed only in my pajama bottoms and clutching an old tomahawk, an antique of my uncle’s. He was about twenty, dark, tall. He turned around and stared, and then started laughing.

  “You going to kill me with that?” he asked in a broad Aussie accent. He was the sexiest thing I had ever seen. Afterward I had to beg him to replace the silver but he insisted on taking all the insured items and I insisted that he tie me up.

  I’ve done apartments, houses, houseboats and caravans. I’m addicted to that moment when you first push open the door and you’re standing in the dark, the scent of a family, of completely unknown lives all around you, just before you switch on the light.

  Ever since then I’ve found myself seeking out the unfamiliar. Maybe I want to get back to that instance. To be him. The housebreaker in a strange but intimate environment.

  THE LOVER

  We were running down a back lane. I knew it was close to her house, but I didn’t realize just how close. Anyway, I wasn’t going to let him know about that side of my life. I like to keep things in separate boxes. You’d never find me planting orchids next to foxgloves.

  Next thing I know, Simon’s over the fence and into the backyard. He moves like a professional: a quick, silent leg swung over, then a big jump, like a cat. It turns me on, makes me an accomplice.

  “Why this place?”

  “Because it looks so straight…virginal.”

  Then he puts his fist through the very window I’d fixed only the week before. The light in the kitchen is on. Please be out. Please. The cat rubs itself against my leg.

  “Should have guessed you’d have a way with animals.”

  He grins wryly. I shrug. This time the two satellites are orbiting out. This time my heart is beating so fast I’m frightened it will show in my voice.

  He pushes me up the narrow stairs toward the attic bedroom. He’s playing rough tonight, short man gets tough. I let him use his weight against my frame as I walk ahead of him, his hands grabbing at my ass.

  In the darkness of the room I turn a photo of myself flat against the desk. The scent of her comes up through the sheets as he pushes me down onto the bed and straddles my chest.

  “You mak
e me hard just to look at you.”

  “How hard?”

  “This hard.” His cock pushes against my lips.

  My head floods with images, her hair, his hair, all mixing up as he reaches down and pulls me free. In the dark, this dark I know to be hers. He takes me into his mouth as he pushes down hard into the back of my throat. His fingers plunge into me, and soon there is nothing but this, the pleasure of the moment. He draws me closer and closer and then pulls back, holding me tightly at the base, stopping me. Sweat welds us as we slip across each other’s bodies. Somewhere in the distance I hear the click of the front door.

  THE GIRLFRIEND

  As soon as I opened the front door I felt the draught coming in from the kitchen. The house is small, a worker’s cottage from the last century. It was Dee who suggested that we strip the floorboards and convert the attic into a bedroom. I loved those times with him; I’d be in one room, he’d be in the room next to me. I’d be hammering a nail in while, on the other side of the wall, he’d be painting. It was like we could feel each other through the plaster.

  I love the size of my house. I can feel its perimeters, it’s manageable. I have always felt safe. Until now. Fragments of glass lie scattered across the kitchen floor. There’s blood on the edges of the smashed window.

  Above me I can hear the creaking of bedsprings. I creep up the stairs, step by step, placing my feet carefully to avoid the loose floorboards.

  Groaning. I know that groan, that quick intake of breath. Dee. For one mad second I think that maybe he’s broken in to masturbate in my bed. The groaning gets louder. Another voice joins him, male. Something twists inside my body. But I have to look. I have to know.

  LOOKING FOR STRANGE

  She stands at the end of the bed, her eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. Dim light falls across two bodies, transforming them into pale ribbons of moving flesh. She holds her breath. It doesn’t make sense to her at first. It doesn’t seem logical. Her lover lies stretched across the white sheets, his dark skin in stark contrast to the pale, smaller male. Long ginger hair falls across the black tendrils of his groin. She thinks of centaurs. Of war. Of the beauty of the masculine back, glistening with sweat and gripped by hard hands. Angry in its energy. She does not recognize the man on the bed as her lover. She has never seen this passivity, this demure arching of his body as he is entered. She has never even imagined it. But there is a reverberation, an expression her body echoes: to receive. And in that she finds him beautiful, with the blood high in his cheeks, his hair pulled back violently as the smaller man rides him, drives himself further and further into his body.

  “Dee?”

  His eyes slowly draw focus. Her voice is left hanging between the groans and the sound of flesh hitting flesh.

  “Dee?” She lifts her hand and touches his face. The scent on her wrist jolts him back into the present.

  “Get out!”

  “But I don’t want to.”

  “Who’s she? How does she know your name?”

  “Get out!” His heart beats unbearably fast as his two worlds collide. He feels Simon pausing, throbbing inside him, so close to the skin.

  She steps out of her dress. The shadow of her sex fascinates Simon. He cannot remember the last time a naked woman stood before him.

  “Dee?” She leans forward and runs her hand down Simon’s back, pausing at the base to push against him in assent. Simon slides back into Dee. She wants to watch. She wants to see Dee’s face as he is being taken.

  She reaches down to find Dee’s cock erect, hanging like fruit as he crouches on all fours with Simon above him. She pushes her sex against Dee’s mouth. He finds her clit with his tongue. She swells and traces his nose, his mouth. She has the power now; he services her while being taken on all fours. She watches Simon’s cock slide in and out. Each time Dee is taken, his mouth quickens against her cunt.

  A translation of pleasure, a medium of sensation.

  She wants to be drawn nearer into the triangle. She lowers herself beneath the men, sliding along Dee’s sweat-drenched body, trying to find a hold by wrapping her legs around his moving torso. There is something so dangerous about this, her intrusion into this male world. She is both frightened and exhilarated. She pulls Dee’s mouth down to hers, kissing him deeply.

  He tastes of her, as he takes her tongue deeply into his mouth. His cock nudges gently at the lips of her cunt. She wants him in her. Now. She pulls him down and he thrusts into her. So big, so excited, that for a moment it is like she is with a different man. Dee enters her as Simon enters him. Simon bites the back of Dee’s neck as he sucks her tongue deep into him. A circle of penetration. Of give and take. Of fuck me fuck me I’m yours, the feminine and masculine flowing into each other as one receives while the other takes.

  She watches as Dee lifts his face. She knows he is close to coming. He grabs her ankles and pushes them high above her shoulders. Simon’s small, soft hands, strangers to her, hold her apart, pinning her down as the full weight of both men plunges into her. From above Simon watches her, her raven hair spread across the pillow, her face flushed, her lips swollen and parted. He wants to reach her, this female shadow of Dee, this mirrored love. He touches her breasts, so soft; her nipples harden and grow erect between his fingers. His face buries into Dee’s hair, his shoulder. It’s almost as if he can feel his own cock in her, gripped tight by Dee’s ass. She loves the feel of this strange man’s hands touching her, the power of the men combining as one enters her while the other caresses her breasts, her face. Simon’s long hair falls across Dee’s face, twisting up, entwining with the black, the red and the gold. Close, he pulls back ready for a final thrust. Then in to split, to fill, to burst, as Dee screams his own climax, rushing like a train, rushing like a million spurting gushes into her, feeling him coming, feeling another about to come, her cunt hot, a thousand vibrations shooting down from her nipples to her womb, seeing white, as in heaven, as in to lose oneself in the microcosm of the interior, of cunt, cock and skin, of the distance between female and male as all fuse into one, trembling, as pulsating, a tsunami beginning from out of her heart, from the back of the head ebbing out farther and farther, faster and faster, purple, white, crimson pulsating like a star, like the sea itself, as pinned down, revealed, peeled back in all her glory, she screams out, her cries echoing with them.

  THE SHORT MAN IN CRIME

  Stacey didn’t like to think about her childhood or adolescence. It had been too painful, too traumatic—she was unable to dwell on even the briefest memories. As far as she was concerned, life had begun when she’d met Jock.

  Stacey! Stacey! All loopy, large and spacey!

  Although she came from a tiny family, she was six foot five in her stockinged feet. Since the age of eight she’d towered over the whole family, having to tolerate the jokes from her father (himself only five foot six) about Stacey, our resident giantess. She always felt like some weird genetic throwback, hunching over the dinner table, stooping down to kiss her mother, fixing the basketball net for the local boys, all the time wishing that the growing would miraculously stop.

  She even hunted through the vast collection of family photo albums, searching desperately for that one tall relative who had handed on her gene. To no avail—the Müllers came from a long line of German Lutherans. Exile had left its mark in the pinched and shrunken frames of her ancestors. It was an unavoidable fact: Stacey was a freak. Lying there in her tiny attic room, bumping her head on the ceiling every time she sat up suddenly, she felt like the cuckoo egg laid in the wrong nest, gawkily perched over her sparrow parents rushing around frantically finding food to feed their monster chick.

  Sitting at the back of the classroom, forever slouching over her desk, she watched in envy as other girls flirted effortlessly with the boys, who only ever seemed to treat her with a brotherly respect for her size. They would offer to arm wrestle with her, or recruit her for the basketball team, but they never acknowledged her femininity. It was agony for Stacey
, who had a crippling shyness. She could have compensated by becoming funny or successful academically, but the cruel reality was that there was nothing outstanding about Stacey except her height.

  On one particularly anguished day, after her best friend had seduced the boy she’d been secretly fantasizing about for months, she sent away for a restraint to stop growing. She’d found the advertisement in the back of a comic: “The gawkiest in the class? Frightened of never finding a boyfriend you can see eye to eye with? Try McKay’s growth restraint. Guaranteed to control unnecessary height. $15 plus postage.”

  The gadget came in a plain brown box. She rushed up to her bedroom, locked the door and drew the curtains. She carefully tore off the tape, frightened she might break the mysterious equipment that would be her salvation. In the box were two heavy elasticized ankle binders along with a roughly photo-copied page of handwritten instructions: “Fasten around each ankle every night for a month. Reduced blood circulation will decrease the flow of growth hormones around the body. No refund available.”

  She wore the ankle binders for a year, until her mother noticed the bruising. In that time she’d grown an extra four inches, reaching five foot ten at fourteen—with the rest of adolescence still to come. By twenty she was six foot two and still growing, resigned to a cranelike existence bombarded by unwanted views of hidden nests of dandruff, shiny bald patches and toupées. It gave her a definite angle on masculinity, one that made men very nervous.