I caressed his back, shoulders and moved to his chest. He had had a crevice where pecs met breastbone and I wondered if that lovely spot still existed. It did, but it had lost some definition. Good. That evened things up. I buried myself in dedicated kissing, losing myself in arousal, trying to forget the weight of aging.
He pinched my nipple lightly between two fingers. “You still like to go bra-less,” he noticed, pulling away from my kiss.
“Even at work, if I can get away with it.”
“You use to drive the guys nuts, you know, with the way your nipples use to show through.”
I giggled. “Womanly badges.”
He started nibbling on my ear. “And still arresting.”
I hoped with age came wisdom, once our clothes came off.
A jolt between my legs told me to stop worrying and start enjoying. A jolt like that had started it all, years ago in younger days. I was wedged between him and his roomie in the front seat of roomie’s car, cruising, and, as we turned a corner, I leaned into him. He put his hand on my knee, as if to balance me. An electric touch, it had forced me to make up my mind about him, lose the boyfriend, and make myself available to him.
His touch was still electric enough to make me available.
We peeled our tops off and our torsos pressed the flesh. His warmth and the feel of his now plentiful, now salt-and-peppered chest hair were familiarity, renewed. We rubbed our bodies together – petting body slams – and his hands strayed back to my breasts. Fingers tugged at nipples while his mouth travelled downwards for its follow-up. He remembered, rightly so, that his mouth upon my nipples would flare the fuel between my legs.
I went for the belt buckle, then the zipper, to free him. His cock, firm and ready, and my hand, grasping and eager, raced to meet each other. I remembered the spire that he was, the girth that had satisfied, but as I caressed his length, I realized I’d forgotten the actual feel of him – soft, with a stiff inner core. He moaned, still sucking. I swayed backwards onto the bed, wanting him to explore more of me, wanting him to reclaim what he’d once known well.
Letting go of each other, he helped me shimmy from my skirt, surprised to find me pantiless and shaved.
“No bush,” he smiled. He lingered, looking at me, slowly bringing his fingers to my pussy, touching my hairless cunt, examining the mound and crevices as if he’d never seen them before.
“You remember that time I shaved, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I thought you were being weird and I was embarrassed. Of course, years later, I realized that I was the weird one.”
“No, no you weren’t. I was the weird one. Still am.”
“So you claim.” Ah, his old habit of discounting me. The stiff inner core in another form.
Unaware of his subtle attitude, he smiled gently and focused on my pussy, examining me. He placed a finger on my clit, pressed down, making me groan.
“I understand how to work this better,” he told me, gazing into my eyes briefly, then returning to my cunt. His finger began to circle it, rubbing, pressing on occasion, working my arousal. But he was also intent on exploring the nuances of my folds and he spread me with his other hand. There, he found a little surprise.
“Whoa!”
“Labia rings.”
“I see.”
“Go ahead, touch them. You can even tug on them.”
He was tentative in his approach, in that initial touch, so, like a new lover showing him the ropes of my pleasure, I demonstrated, tugging, rotating the rings, then directed his hand back into place.
“I love having small weights hanging off of them and being taken from behind,” I confided.
He gulped, shocked, much the same as he had years ago when he saw me shaved. I laughed softly but sensitively. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to do that stuff. Make love to me the old way and I’ll be more than satisfied.”
He relaxed into a slight smile and, without further ado, went down on me. His tongue knew more now than then, so much so that it forced me to stop comparing past and present. He concentrated on my clit, swirling, pressing, lips gently nipping now and then for added effect. Fingers wandered to my slit and played there with the rings, then found their way into me. Wet, my cunt accepted them.
I remembered how he would sometimes eat me to such arousal that I’d beg him to bury his fingers in me, all of them, deeply. He’d cater to my craving, sinking as much of his hand into me as he could to appease me, four fingers to the knuckles, enough to make me come and, when he pulled out, to feel empty, voided. Then, we had been too inexperienced to know we were toying with fisting.
Now, imagining the possibility of completing that play – my greedy cunt engulfing his hand, his every little twitch threatening me with orgasm; the very thought of grabbing him, squeezing him and squeezing one off in the process – imagining all that, while his tongue and his fingers played with me, I came.
And a new eagerness exploded with that orgasm. “Let me suck you,” I begged.
He pulled away from me, shed his pants completely, and climbed on top of me. “No,” he said in my ear as he hovered over me.
“Please.”
“No.”
He sank his length into me. “I want pussy,” he said by way of explanation. He started fucking me and observed, dispassionately, “You’re wetter than I remember.”
“Things change,” I managed to say before caving to the feeling of his full cock.
“Good, you feel incredible. Just right.”
My cunt throbbed back its own acknowledgments.
He took a nipple in hand, pinching it to go with the motions.
“And you taste delicious, you know that?”
He kissed me to prove it.
He knew how to mix me just so: deep strokes, long and succulent; drawing the head of his cock to the edge of my kissing labia, teasing me; shallow, swift ones to test me, wear me down. I neared, he knew it. He plunged into me.
“Grab my ass,” I begged him. “Please.”
He did and I cried out, bucking at the feel of his fingers grabbing my cheeks, nails digging into my flesh. He reached down, took my nipple in his mouth, sucked, then bit.
I exploded around him, aware only of his cock in my spasming clutches, his bite, and my own lightheadedness as the bed rocked and creaked its complaints. I collapsed beneath him and he freed me from his grip. He watched me as I rested and returned to lucidness, slowly fucking me the whole time, as if it were some minor habit.
“Roll over,” he said, withdrawing.
I did and he uttered, “Good God.”
Now he saw why I jumped when he grabbed my ass. I sported bruises, compliments of a recent paddling.
“You really did become a masochist.”
“I warned you I had.”
“Yes, you did.”
He touched my bruises gingerly and, though I flinched fully and suddenly, I also moaned with the same passion I had expressed with other touches. He knew it but still waxed serious, the past catching up to him.
“I did this to you,” he said, remorseful. “I made you a masochist.”
“Love made me a masochist,” I declared firmly, sparing him the details. “Come on, forget it. Fuck me.”
I backed my still wet cunt up to his cock and pressed him into business. He aimed himself at me and entered. It felt reluctant.
“You can’t hurt me,” I counselled him. “Just do me.”
He took me by the hips and slowly worked me, testing me. I made noise about how big he was, how good he felt, how much I wanted it. Stroke by stroke, he convinced himself that, indeed, he would not hurt me. He relented, finally, and indulged himself by plundering me. I upped the dialogue, begging him to fuck me harder, to tear me up. Ruin me, I said.
In times past, that would’ve sent him and he would’ve come. But that was then. Or maybe it was my poor choice of words. Ruin me, I guess, only works on a sadist.
“Roll me over,” I offered.
I did. He climbed aboard again and I wrapped my legs around his waist. While he resumed his fucking, I played with his nipples, pinching and pulling. An old trick, my failsafe.
He started shaking, head to toe. He was nearing, just like old times.
“Oh, God,” he muttered. The signal was the same, timeless.
He slammed into me repeatedly, relentlessly, shivering, groaning, finally holding his cock still so he could better feel each ejaculation. Wet warmth flooded me, making me shiver.
Just like old times.
Downtime followed. Lying there, we resumed looking at each other’s bodies, memorizing them. Our skins were softer, our bodies bulging a bit in spots, yet his cock, my cunt looked essentially the same. And they spoke to each other in the same hurried sentences of long ago.
But we weren’t just cock and cunt. Our entireties had changed, bodily in countless little ways, soulfully in ways profound.
He looked at me now, wanting to revel in the body before him but too perplexed by what he saw. There, in that look, I had my answer: happiness couldn’t be had here; the gulf between the unattached bohemian and the widowed married was too large for anything but solace and respite.
You can’t go home, I wanted to tell him but words failed me, so I drew his head to my chest, held him, caressed his hair.
Solace, then, I decided silently.
He sighed and started, “I wish . . .”
“Shhh,” I consoled. “I know. Sometimes I wish too.”
Long ago, though, I learned that wishes don’t sustain; dreams do. And, laying there, with him in my arms, I realized that the sudden harshness of widowhood had dashed his dreams, dreams he had yet to replace, dreams that, when they came, wouldn’t include me because I was incapable of embracing them. Because years ago, after him, I had abandoned my own chance at sustenance and gypsied my way through life, forever too skittish to trust in dreams, forever eluding them.
Now, I could be a weigh station at best, a momentary rest as he moved through life. And, despite my own longing to have him and have him often, I could live with those limitations. Love had, indeed, made me a masochist and a good one at that. The only problem was, from what I could tell, he didn’t like to make me flinch.
A John’s Story
Samuel R. Delany
Lately I haven’t spent that much time down on that strange fold in the city that seems to collect so many crumbs and so much lint: 42nd Street itself? Well, there’s pretty much the same collection of Puerto Rican loose-joint dealers and pill hawkers, in their tank tops or with their shirts off for the July afternoon, with their homemade tattoos and their endless deals and arguments, laughing in little bunches, now one running out after this score or that one, or half a dozen of them standing around, squinting in the sun, while the white or black policemen amble by, with pretty much the same dazed look as the dealers. Now and then, in jeans and a too-tight top, or in some theatrically short skirt high over heavy, greyish thighs, one of the white or Puerto Rican prostitutes strolls through with a friend or stops to laugh or argue with this or that dealer.
Like a streaming veil, across it all rush the hot, sweating, ordinary people, the guys in shorts, the guys in gym suits, the office women in loose, dark dresses and the waitresses in tight, light ones, the black couples on their way to the movies, the five eleven-year-old Puerto Rican boys feeling grown-up and expansive because they’re disobeying parental orders (“Don’t you go down to that place, today! Hear me?”), the younger cousins from some Hispanic family with a kiddie stroller and a blue canvas bag for the baby bottle, the fried chicken, and the pasteles, him in a white T-shirt and grey-brimmed hat, her in a red-striped top and orange pants, them and the four kids going to Conan the Destroyer at Brandt’s Lyric, or the three fourteen-year-old white girls, coming out of the subway by the newsstand, vigorously chewing their gum and wandering through it all, wide-eyed, in from Brooklyn, on their way to one of the (slightly) better movie-houses up on Broadway.
Around the corner, the Puerto Ricans still give way to the black grifters. About half the time, the middle-aged black shoe-shine guy is there by the phone booths, in his baseball cap and glasses, with his portable stand, still with his gaffes and goofs on all the passing women, white, brown, yellow, and black: “Oh, darling, you are so beautiful I don’t think I can stand it!” Immediately, he tips his cap to her boyfriend, who’s looked back, surprised: “Take care of that lady, sir. She’s a truly good woman . . .! Want a shine?” The Beer & Burger on the corner right now is in the process of being changed into a fried-chicken joint; its glass windows are covered with plywood; the construction involves some digging in the sidewalk on the Eighth Avenue side; for the last two months, the plywood partition – on that busiest corner of the city – has taken up half the sidewalk, so that the pedestrians must veer out, around the wire trash baskets, over the clotted gutter, breaking at the phone booths, some squeezing in front, some striding behind and into the street, before swinging back onto the sidewalk to continue up by the gay burlesque house (“Hot! Gay! Kinky! Bizarre!”), the peep-show, the green front of the Irish hot-plate bar and toward the blue awning of the Barking Fish, the Greek pizza and souvlaki joints, and the corner liquor store and tobacco shops with their glassed-in inner walls, the little overpriced delis.
At 46th, beyond the porno movies, out in front of the blue wall and wrap-around glass window of McHales [I still think of it as Your Spot], it’s a lot calmer than it used to be. Further up the Avenue, the Haymarket has been closed for getting on a year now, if not two; that’s what used to bring in the serious hustlers, with the Fiesta, on 46th, and O’Neal’s, on 48th, taking up the overflow spilling in either direction. But since then, O’Neal’s has become the bar for the hard-core working men – myself, I never did like the atmosphere; and if, in the last year, I’ve walked in and out of there three times, just to see what’s going on, I’m surprised. And the Fiesta, which used to be able to offer at least three or four 20-year-old junkies for the Johns to choose from on a good day, doesn’t even attract that much trade any more. The men who want a couple of beers’ worth of relief from the high pressure of O’Neal’s just come to sit and relax, with or without a trick. I’ve only had half a dozen beers there in twice that many months.
Still, it’s the strip in the city where, for years, it’s always seemed to be happening – and yet, if we’re honest, it never happens enough at any particular hour, day, or season . . .
I’d gone into that Eighth Avenue porn theatre, the Cameo. In the lobby, in his blue uniform, cap and a brown sweater, the bored security guard sat on his stool, his billyclub over his lap, and didn’t look up, even when I went over beside him to look at the poster in the glass case above his shoulder: Seka and Mai-Lyn were sharing some new Oriental sex-opera. Coiling over the four-color poster, a scaly dragon spread huge wings from one side of the glass case to the other, flicking a forked tongue above the two stylized bare-breasted skin stars.
“Hello, honey . . . want a blow job?”
The security man still didn’t look up. I did, though: Wearing a gray, sequinned blouse with the shoulder torn, and torn-off jeans, a very tall, very black queen – at least a head-and-a-half taller than I am – nodded at me from the door to the orchestra.
“No,” I said.
He flashed me a wicked look. “Don’t know what you’re missing, honey.” His lips were maroon. His eyes were touched with gold glitter about the lids. “I give a truly beautiful blow job. Five dollars. Complete with Kleenex, wipe-up service, and a cigarette afterwards – if you smoke menthol . . .?” He held up a pack of something I sure wouldn’t smoke.
Whenever one of these characters comes on to me, I’m always torn between saying, “Take a walk,” and laughing.
He said: “You ain’t gonna do too much better than that in here. We’re under new management, you know.”
“I don’t have any money.” And I laughed.
He raised his chin as if to say “Ahhh . . .!”, put away the p
ack, and moved to the steps that lead up to the Cameo’s balcony, where the serious hustling goes on, anyway. As he walked up beside the pay telephone, grinding his buttocks at me dismissively in his frayed cut-offs, I shook my head – for the benefit of the security guard. Who still didn’t look. So I went into the door to the orchestra.
In darkness I walked to the side aisle and gazed down over the scattered and flickering heads of the all-male audience.
The dozen committed jack-off artists were seated widely down towards the front. Most, however, were divided between the bored and the business-like, each of whom ignored the other, and none of whom would make use of what he’d watched till back in the privacy of his own bedroom or bathroom.
On screen, blonde Seka closed her china blue eyes and caught her breath as Mai-Lyn dropped her face into the bulge of a shaved cunt, black hair falling forwards over high cheekbones touched with Revlon blush, so that you could just see her tongue, through the dark strands, trolling like a red mouse between the folds of plump pussy-flesh as Seka moved her thighs.
An occasional young black queen or aging white faggot drifted listlessly in the aisles, while, big as Thanksgiving Day balloons, the two women’s hands, their thin fingers and long red nails brushing, joining, entwining, suggested something between lust, friendship, and a film editor’s whim. Then, from another angle, Mai-Lyn pushed her other hand down between her legs, as, from behind, the camera caught the melons of her buttocks. She spread her cunt-lips, and – once – quivered as though she’d hit something inside her moist envelope, igniting a pleasure momentarily beyond that called for by her $300 per day contract.
Out of the light I found a seat towards the side of the theatre, put my hand between my legs, moved my knees up against the back of the wooden seat ahead of me, and looked at the screen . . .
The thin kid who slipped in to sit two seats away wore grey sweatpants and a grey sweatshirt with the hood up – which the Cameo’s air conditioning, always on minimal, just doesn’t warrant in mid-July. I glanced over and thought: Now here’s some seventeen-year-old Chinese queen, going to try and hustle me.
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