Go: A Surrender (6 page)

I took a deep, trembling breath. The smallest movement. And
I wanted him—I wanted to clench around him, to feel his sweet firm flesh inside
me like a thing that belonged.

It was the knock from room service that brought me halfway
to my senses. I froze, and he nodded to me to go answer.

I climbed off the bed and wrapped myself in the bathrobe
again, then went to the door. A young man—a boy, practically, golden and slight—handed
me the heavy tray, and I had this flash of a thought—the continuation of the
first evening—that I could just fuck him. He was doubtless eager and would
muster endearing enthusiasm, if only I asked.

But I didn’t know how to ask.

Jack was right. I was too hungry. Too full of fantasies I
hadn’t let myself enact. And as for my desire for Jack himself, there he was
also right—I wanted him, yes, but the need was still just animal,
indiscriminate.

We had to keep playing.

To my great boredom and annoyance the following day I found
myself back in Houston, and at work. Jack had suggested I go in and take care
of whatever needed to be done before taking a short leave of absence. This
broke with the flow of fantasy, perhaps, but after all he himself was a working
professional and seemed to expect that I would comport myself similarly,
despite my eagerness to proceed with our game.

As it happened, I worked at a university, and this was the
last week before Spring Break, so my timing, for a change, was fortuitous. I
planned to take stock of things and then cut out mid-week for some sort concocted
“family emergency” which I predicted would be practically forgotten when we all
returned to work a fortnight later.

Still, that left me with Monday and Tuesday to muscle
through. As I walked through the stairwells and corridors of the labyrinthine
administrative building, all I could think of was the fact that barely 24 hours
ago I’d been ravished by a bar full of lustful strangers. It was a gleeful,
wicked secret, and I couldn’t keep the little smirk from creeping across my face
as I passed unsuspecting students and colleagues alike. Not that they noticed,
most likely—I was merely staff here, thus practically invisible.

At lunch, I stood in line for my wilted salad, then went
searching for a shady spot in the courtyard where I could consume it. The heat
in Houston had already turned soupy and close, and in the sticky stillness I
even had a fond, brief memory of my minutes in Edmonton without a coat.
Thankfully, I only had to endure this weather a day and a half longer.

Another woman spotted me and to my dismay headed right
toward me with her tray. This was Beatrice, ten years my senior, too much
makeup, hair dyed an unflattering red. She was a gossip with a wheezing,
over-loud laugh, but worse was the fact that we did the exact same job for the
school, helping students format their theses in accordance with the
university’s arbitrary standards, which she believed conferred upon us some
sort of secret, girlish kinship.

She plopped herself down beside me. “Can you believe they’re
allowing sans serif type?” she exclaimed. “What’s next, all caps?”

“I think our species will survive the shift,” I offered,
instantly a little sorry at my own snarkiness.

But I needn’t have worried—it sailed right over her head.
“Any big plans for Spring Break?” she asked. “I’m dropping a wad on a spa
week.”

“That sounds nice,” I said.

“There’s a great deal right in town if you’re interested,”
she said. “It’s at the _____ Hotel.”

She’d named the place where Jack and I had started our game.
I flushed a little at the memory. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I don’t think I can, anyway.”

“I know that tone,” she said, “that’s the
I-have-a-secret-boyfriend tone.”

That she was even half-right bothered me—was I so
transparent? And if so, could other people look at me and see even more? “I’m
afraid it isn’t,” I corrected her. Though clearly, Jack wasn’t my boyfriend.

Fortunately she took my lack of conviction for dejectedness.
She gave my thigh an unwelcome squeeze. “I’m sure you’ll meet someone, dear,”
she said, trying to reassure me. “Men these days are just confused, you see.
They don’t know if they want to marry a virgin or a whore. And most of us are
somewhere in between.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. How could I not think of Jack? He
didn’t
seem
confused—quite the opposite—but was he? He was only human,
after all, successful and smart as he might be. He kept saying this game was
about my desire, but obviously that wasn’t purely the case. Was I running the
gauntlet of his fantasy? Then again, supposing I was, did I really mind?

After lunch I spent two numbing hours explaining acceptable
margin widths and figure notations to a string of PhD and Masters’ candidates
who made no efforts to conceal their opinions that these sorts of considerations
were beneath them. The last one, a lanky Drama Studies student from Tennessee, kept rolling his eyes as I pointed out spots where his formatting failed to
conform to the standard.

“You think this is stupid,” I said, annoyed.

“Essentially,” he agreed.

“Well, it might be, but you’re still being a little shit.”

This got his attention.

“I’m sorry?” he said, perhaps actually unsure of whether
he’d heard me right.

“You think you’re better than me because you’re a doctoral
candidate and I’m some lowly secretary telling you what font you can use.”

He blushed dark, then, and I knew I was right.

“I’m sorry,” he said hastily. “I’m just—it’s a lot of stress
finishing all this, and the formatting stuff, well it just seems dumb.”

“I understand,” I said, and before I even knew I was going
to say it I was adding, “Do you want to fuck me?”

“Um,” he said, “what?” And he blushed again, which showed
he’d heard me and was answer enough.

As for me, I was excited by my own boldness. He stared,
transfixed, as I stood up from my chair and reached up under my skirt to pull
down my underwear. Then I walked around the desk, and hopped up onto the other
side, hiking my skirt up to my hips but not taking it off—not taking anything
else off. This one, I was calling.

He looked between my legs and then lifted his eyes to mine
but still he didn’t move. I could see his cock straining inside his
pretentious, tight corduroys.

I could also see it was enormous.

“Take off your pants,” I said, and he paused for only a
second before beginning to do so. He peeled them off, and then stepped out of
his brightly colored briefs, and his lovely, ridiculously huge cock stood out
beneath the front tails of his shirt. It was always little jackasses like this
who were the biggest, I thought to myself ruefully. And no wonder they
reproduced so successfully.

No matter, though—for the moment he’d be mine.

He stepped toward me then, taking hold of himself and
pressing the head of his cock against the soft entrance to my body. Reaching
behind me, he scooted me forward, and I felt him about to plunge into me.

“Wait,” I said, and he looked at me, that same half-gone
look in his eyes that I knew must be in mine. We all of us were hunger’s
creatures, I saw—or were if hunger wanted us.

But he was listening, exercising some final shred of command
over the volume of his body’s prerogative. “Will you make me come?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said, breaking into a smile, “absolutely.”

And he rocked his hips back and then moved forward to bury
himself in me as deep as he could. Then slid himself out again, then plunged
forward. Slowly, slowly, and with each new slow thrust I cried out.

I laid back on the desk now, onto a pile of incorrectly
formatted thesis samples, and he hiked my skirt up to my waist so he could rub
my clit while he continued to slide himself in and out. I yelped in
pleasure-pain as he kept filling me, only to withdraw. Filled me again,
withdrew again.

It was nearly impossible that people couldn’t hear us in the
hallway outside my office.

But also, in barely a minute, I was climaxing, my yelps
turning to helpless, outright cries. I felt him nearing his own orgasm as my
own contractions tightened down on him—saw his face as he strained to hold
back.

“Are you—”

“No,” I said quickly, “you have to—”

And with a groan he pulled out, his cum spilling onto my
thighs, onto the inside of my skirt. He straightened himself unsteadily, then sat
down heavily in a chair.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sitting up again and reaching for a Kleenex
to wipe myself off, “I should have said something sooner.”

“Probably,” he said, “but hey, I guess it all worked out.”

I laughed, and so did he. Then I stood, and handed him his
pants.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It was very much not a problem,” he said, amused and still
rather taken aback. “And I’m sorry about before. I’ll make sure the margins are
one and a quarter inch, like you said.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, “I think I’m quitting this job. Or else
I’m about to get fired.” As he pulled on his pants he looked at my office door
with trepidation. “There’s a fire escape outside my window,” I told him. “Feel
free to take that.”

An hour later I phoned Jack. “It looks I can leave a day
early, if you like,” I told him.

It was still dark out the next morning when I locked my
apartment and headed out to the waiting car.

Jack was none too pleased when I told him about quitting my
job. Of course, I didn’t tell him everything about the circumstances
precipitating the decision—I felt like keeping a secret.

“It was an epiphany,” I said, holding out my glass so the
flight attendant could refill it. We were flying first class to Tokyo.

I looked at his subtly downturned mouth. “Please, stop
frowning like that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m just concerned, is all. I don’t
want your life to start crumbling around you and for me to be the cause.”

“It was already crumbling,” I muttered.

“Pardon?” said Jack.

“I hated that job, is what I mean,” I said. “It was petty
and boring and I didn’t have any friends. University payroll is 90 percent
snobs.”

“Including you,” he jibed.

“Not the same way, though. Not like the professors. Or the
students, for that matter. They treated me like a half-wit.”

“So why’d you stay?”

“Laziness,” I admitted. “Or…”

“Or?”

“I mean, what could I get that was really any better?”

“What a ridiculous question,” said Jack. “You’re smart,
attractive. You could pursue any career if you were willing to work.”

“I’m willing to work,” I said, hesitatingly…

“You’re afraid.”

“Maybe.”

“ ‘Maybe’ is a fearful answer.”

“Maybe,” I said again. It frightened and thrilled me the way
he could read me. And that he wanted to, and did. I felt valued, valuable—like
my life, my mind was some fascinating novel, or some shining curiosity he’d
found in the desert. A moon rock.

The first man I’d ever been with had made me feel that way,
too, but he was 17 and I was 16 and we were idiots. Joyful idiots carefully discovering
all the sensations our bodies could produce, and mistaking that for love. We’d
take pictures of ourselves fucking. I’d follow him around with my fingers
hooked in the waistband of his jeans. I baked him cookies all the time, because
whenever he wasn’t around all I could do was think of him and it gave me a way
to ignore the ache. Maybe it was love, of a sort. All I know is I woke up one
day and realized we had nothing to say to each other. The moment I got admitted
to college out of state, I dumped him, and he cried like a little kid and
called me a bitch and a slut and all the things men in pain call the women who
have caused it, no matter how many cookies we have baked them. And the
following week he had a new girlfriend and last I heard they were still
together, now carting around a passel of kids.

That evidence fell soundly on the side of it never having
been love.

And this was its poison, I think—this realization that I was
not very special. Women who men loved, those women were special. I had never
been one of those women. There was something about me, I became
convinced—something drab and sad and ordinary. And even as I got older, and
better at making myself attractive to men, better at letting them take me out
to dinner and then home to their apartments so they could fuck me—it would
never last. Sometimes it might take a while—a few months, a year, but they’d eventually
figure out my ordinariness—I wasn’t sure, exactly, how I always gave it
away—and then they’d move on to someone more glittering.

“Are you alright?” said Jack, cutting off my bleak nostalgic
exercise. I looked at his face, so intelligent and tender, and hated imagining
the moment he would finally find me ordinary, too.