Elliot Mabeuse (6 page)

She was quiet for a while, then said, "He's really a great guy and he's got a great job. We're just waiting for him to finish his training. He's with—" and here she mentioned some outfit I guess I was supposed to have heard of—UniServe or TeleCom or UniTel or something— "and he's doing three months of training in Atlanta. Then he'll be

assigned to San Diego and we'll probably move out there. If we get married here first, then the company will pay to move me too, but I'm not real sure yet. I don’t know if we'll get married here or there, or maybe somewhere else, like in Mexico, you know? I mean, I'm not really sure of the details yet, but I thought you should know."

"Un-huh. And when's he done with his training?"

"About six weeks."

Silence. I wasn't sure what she wanted me to say. I had no plans for her that extended beyond the length of my dick. I was determined not to lie about that.

"He doesn't know about me," she said. "The kind of things I like. I mean, I tried to get him to do some of that stuff but he just laughed. He couldn't believe I was serious.

He thought it was sick, 'cause I guess he's kind of straight. That's not good, is it?"

I shrugged but she couldn't see it. "You're not married yet, right?"

"No."

"Not even engaged."

"No. Not officially."

"Do you love him?"

The pause. The fatal pause. "Of course. I mean, we're practically engaged. He comes back and sees me every couple of weeks."

"Well what do you want me to do, Emma? You want me to not see you anymore?"

"No," she said. "No." There was no pause now. "I just thought I should tell you."

"Un-huh. Well, it bothers you. I can understand that, but you're an adult, honey, and you have to decide what you want to do. Just let me say I don’t want to interfere with your happiness or your life. I have no intention of asking you to break up with your boyfriend or do anything else you don't want to do. This is a physical relationship, Emma, physical and sexual, and beyond that, I don't expect anything from you and I'm not asking for anything. I want your body, Emma. I want you as my lover, that's all."

I was surprised to hear my own words, so clear and unambiguous, so reasonable.

I was even more surprised to hear the response from her lips a few heartbeats later—the hurried whisper, almost a sigh: "God! Why does that make me so hot?"

* * * * We didn't talk much more that night. A roommate came home and she didn't want to use the phone, and we hadn't yet exchanged e-mail addresses. I didn't hear from her again until the Monday night before class.

"Hi, it's me. Emma. Did you miss me?"

"Like the sky misses the stars." I smiled, and in truth I had. The last phone call had only increased my desire, and now that I knew she loved being talked to over the phone, I let the words pour out of me. "I miss the feel of you on my cock, your body writhing against mine, your hair in my hands, the way you shiver when I shove my dick into you, the blinding ecstasy as I jet my cum into your hot pussy."

I laughed as I heard her catch her breath. She hadn't been expecting anything like that. "Am I going to see you after class?" I asked.

She suddenly grew grave, her voice quiet. "Oh God. I don't know, Conner. I really don't know. I've been thinking about this all weekend and I don't know what to do."

I felt like an idiot for my dirty talk and it came out as coldness. "It's your decision, Emma," I said. "But, 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'."

"What?"

I recited: "
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
,
Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to-day

Tomorrow will be dying
.

"Robert Herrick, seventeenth century poet, 'To the Virgins, to Make the Most of Time."

"I get it," she said. "But I'm not a virgin."

"Oh yes you are," I replied. "More than you know. A lot more than you know."

I hung up and got a beer and went out on the roof. Despite my smart-ass little sign-off, I was really upset. I'd meant what I said about keeping our outside lives out of this, but I didn't want to lose her. I didn't have much at that point, and Emma was the most exciting thing in my life. I didn't like being at her mercy but there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it.

When she walked into class on Tuesday, it was impossible to tell from her clothes what her decision about us had been. She wore a white cotton boat-neck top and a short denim skirt, unusually casual attire for her, and I didn't know if that meant she was comfortable with me now or she just didn't care. She kept her sunglasses on

during class, but again, that might have meant she was hiding from me or it might have meant she was trying to conceal her lust.

In any case, I'd already decided to try and ignore her as much as possible during the lecture. What else could I do? But at the same time, it was impossible not to be aware of her and what had happened between us. Thankfully, I'd rescheduled things so the lecture was an easy one for me, just playing recordings of various poets reading their own work.

It was legitimate—I wanted the kids to hear the poems as the poets heard them when they wrote them, the cadence and music of the language, something that doesn't always come across on the printed page—but I didn't have to do much. I'd have the students read a poem to themselves from the handouts, paying attention to how they heard it in their heads, and then put on a recording of the poet reading it in his or her own voice—the elderly, scratched brogue of Yeats, Eliot's eerie prissiness, the roiling madness of Ezra Pound, the ecstatic jazz of Kerouac, Gregory Corso's exuberant word salad, Edna St. Vincent-Millay's repressed and sublimated sexiness.

The words rolled out and at the end I just turned down the lights and played recordings at random and we sat and listened. The power of the spoken word seemed to turn the cold auditorium of that third-rate community college into someplace special—

a kind of campsite or temple or clearing under the stars where magical things happened, where evanescent feelings were captured and preserved in words and things were shown to us we'd otherwise never see. The poets were magicians or priests giving us things we hadn't had before simply by seeing and describing them. It always

humbles me how they chisel emotions and ideas from the raw stuff of the world using just words and imagination and the intimate sound of their voice The poetry ended, the voices faded away, and the silence seemed like a vacuum left in the room, as if a big train had just passed by. In the silence, I heard someone softly snoring from one of the upper rows but I didn't mind. These kids worked hard.

Most of them had jobs. But sitting there and listening, I was reminded of why I'd chosen to try and write myself, and I was proud of my decision. That didn't happen very often. I had goose bumps on my arms.

I didn't want to break the spell by turning on the lights, so I just stayed where I was and announced, "That's all for tonight. Class, you're dismissed."

I turned off the CD and the class gathered up their things and shuffled for the exits. I looked up and saw Emma sitting in her usual place, four rows up. She was slumped slightly in her seat as if she'd been thrown there, as if stunned. Her shoulders were back, and even in the darkness of the hall the shadows of her erect nipples were visible against the thin white fabric of her top. Her sunglasses were pushed up on her head and she was looking directly at me with a weird intensity, as if trying to cast a spell on me or maybe just capture my attention. Beneath the table her knees were spread apart quite plainly and her denim skirt was hiked up to mid thigh. It was too dark to see all the way up her skirt but there was no mistaking that gesture. She was offering herself to me, awaiting my instructions.

The room emptied as I took my time, winding up the cord on the CD player, putting my notes away. Emma stayed in her seat, motionless until the door closed on the last student and their voices faded in the hallway. I looked up at her.

"Are you staying?"

"Do you want me to?"

"Yes," I said. "Very much."

I put the CD player away beneath the lectern. "Lock the doors. Take one of those folding chairs and jam the legs under the push-bars."

I'd discovered this trick on my own. The doors could still be forced from the outside, of course, but it wouldn't be easy. I liked the feeling of being locked in and the added security , and I liked the idea of making Emma do the locking.

She stood up and smoothed down her skirt. I watched the tight roll of her ass as she climbed the broad stairs towards the back and almost disappeared into the shadows near the exits, then picked up a chair and slid it into place. She turned, pushed her hair back behind her ears, and started walking back down.

"Slowly." My voice echoed in the empty room. "Walk slower. I just want to look at you."

I could adjust the lights from the podium, and I set them now so the auditorium was in complete darkness. There was only the spotlight over the lectern and on the whiteboard behind it. There was just enough light to see her. Emma walked slowly down the steps, her shoulders back, her eyes flickering from the stairs before her up to my face to see my reaction as I watched her in the simple act of approaching me, an act suddenly so full of portent.

She was getting excited. I could sense it from her, the way she had to restrain herself as she stepped down the stairs, pausing at each one, and the sense of power I

felt was turning me on just as much as the sight of her. She was bringing herself to me at my command, and the very act was arousing us both, alone in that vast empty space.

She descended the last stair and came to the podium and I was going to talk to her, ask her if she'd made her decision, when I realized it was best not to say anything.

She was here. What else was there to say? I looked into her eyes and took her hand and brought her close to me, so close I could feel the warmth from her body and smell her, so close that our bodies touched. I let the impending kiss hang in the air for what seemed like forever, ‘til the tension became too much, over-ripe and swollen, and then I brought my lips down on that warm mouth and took her sweetness.

This was Emma—who belonged to another man now. Emma—who was going to marry someone else in six weeks. I had asked her for her body and that's what she was giving me, and inside I knew that wasn't enough but I wouldn't let myself think about that. I'd taken enough women for their bodies, surely I could do it again with her, and in the midst of sex, that's all you think about anyhow, isn't it? In the midst of sex, everyone's in love.

She kissed like she was in love. Or rather, she didn't kiss so much as she just surrendered, just melted under my lips. I don't mean she went all loose and slack. I don't know how to describe what she did except to describe it as a surrender, a capitulation, an invitation, something devastatingly female, and my first thought was a surge of resentment over whether her fiancé would appreciate her kiss. Her surrender brought forth a surge of male hormones in me, a rush of blinding sexual desire that made me feel like a conqueror—an emotional acceleration that turned me into an animal who seized her hair and held her mouth to mine like it was some life-saving cool

and nourishing fruit in the middle of hell's own desert. She shuddered before my onslaught and melted still further, leaning into me as if her bones were dissolving, as if passion were making her weak, and the more I took, the more she wanted to give until I felt like I was ready to crawl into her mouth and have her from the inside. She drove me insane.

Call it love or call it lust but it was good enough for me–it was more than good enough. It was exactly what I wanted and it was exactly what Emma wanted taken from her. I pushed her back until I had her pressed up against the whiteboard, never breaking that kiss, and I grabbed her wrists and held them against the board to let her know I owned her now and she was under my control. I leaned against her to show her how hard she'd made me. It was her fault she was being treated like this.

The whiteboard was covered with my own scribbles of the poetic emotions we'd been discussing—love, hate, joy, fear, sadness, anger, desire, shame—and now I held Emma against it and worked her white cotton top up over her naked tits as she turned her face to the side to gasp for breath. She grabbed my hands to try and stop me and I shook her off angrily and grabbed her wrists again, pressing them against the board.

"You know the rules," I growled. "You don't touch me without permission!"

"I thought we were just going to talk," she said fearfully. "Someone could still come in."

"I don't give a fuck who comes in. When we're together, I'm in control. You don't touch me or interfere, understand?"

She nodded and I went back to lifting her top over her tits. I wanted her naked and exposed under the spotlight, pinned against the whiteboard, but the top was snug.

Halfway up I slid my hands under her breasts and ran my thumbs around her nipples, kissing her, and again Emma opened her mouth to me in submission, closing her eyes and sucking on my tongue with meek supplication. Her nipples were wildly sensitive in a way I didn't remember from last time, possibly from being braless all evening, and rubbing my thumbs against them caused her to push her hips out at me and moan into my mouth. When I pinched them, she gave a little shriek.

I knew I was going too fast for her, making her confused and dizzy with my sudden attack, but I liked it this way. I shoved her top up and lowered my head and took a nipple into my mouth, sucking and lashing it with my tongue. She knew now she wasn't allowed to touch me, but she didn't know what to do with her hands, so all she could do was hold them up and squeeze them into frustrated fists or spread her fingers wide—lovely fingers with beautiful nails, the kind of nails that got a lot of attention. The shine of her nails got to me. For some reason they made me want to bite her breasts.

She was all so perfect. I squeezed her tits in either hand ‘til the nipples stood out, then I licked and nibbled them ‘til she hissed like a cat, arched her back and gave a little cry.

I reached down and grabbed the hem of her skirt and started working it over her hips but it was snug, too, and she had to help me, moving her thighs together and rolling her hips. Soon enough I got it high enough I could feel her panties between her legs. I was surprised. I thought we had a kind of agreement she wasn't supposed to wear underthings to our sessions. I touched her pussy and she stiffened. So she'd been right. She really hadn't known whether she was going to go through with this tonight.

"Panties?" I asked. "You wore panties tonight?"

"I wasn't sure," she said nervously. "I wasn't sure if I was going to…"

I leaned back and looked at her, my anger flaring. "You weren't sure? You really weren't sure? Are you sure now, Emma? Or do you want to think about it some more?"

"No. I'm sure. Really, I'm sure. Conner, don't…"

I pulled her skirt up and shoved my hand down the front of her panties, hooked my finger beneath the soft crease of her pussy and parted her lips. She was smooth and wet and I could feel her greasy little clit lick at my finger like a tongue as I rubbed back and forth. Emma moaned and gasped and dropped her hands to her sides, clawing at the walls as if trying to hang on.

I leaned against her and the feel of her pussy in my hand made me hot with lust and hunger and a feeling of ownership, a sense of power and control. I loved the way she came alive at my touch, the way she responded. At the same time, the idea that she'd even considered denying me what was so clearly mine filled me with anger. I slid my finger into her as if to remind her who she belonged to, pushed into her without apology as my thumb played with her clit. My face was right against hers and I stared directly into her eyes, daring her to tell me no, just daring her—almost hoping she would. The idea she could have someone else—a boyfriend, a lover, a fiancé, even a husband—who could touch her the way I did or feel about her the way I did, just infuriated me.