Innocents (21 page)

‘No.’ I smiled lovingly. ‘Let's do it again.’

It took an hour, I knew, between one time and the next.

I covered your hips with the sheet. I didn't like to see that flaccid thing lounging shrunkenly between your legs. It made you seem too much a creature made of the same stuff as me.

A sudden high-pitched concern flooded your voice. ‘What've I done?’ You stroked my breast gently, your eyebrows twisted with worry.

‘It's all right.’ Magnanimously, I forgave you the smarting, the sharpness.

‘Oh, baby!’ You measured the extent of the damage between your thumb and forefinger. ‘I'm so sorry.’

Afterwards, a deeper, duller pain replaced the initial sting. Looking into the mirror, I saw a dark spreading bruise. Against the carefully guarded whiteness of my skin, it came as a shock. Then I realised that it was your mark, a tangible record of your passion.

When you saw it again, you clicked your tongue in disapproval.

I wore it with pride, observing it carefully each night until it faded away.

It was a kind of game; but you wouldn't speak of it, outside the ring.

I experimented with disconcerting bluntness.

‘Wow!’ I said, after another of the slightly dangerous sexual encounters had left me breathless and bruised. ‘I'd never imagined it could be so
good
!’

But you did not reply. Chewing your lip savagely, you lowered the lids of your eyes halfway, irritated.

So I had to encourage you in silence, with signs and signals.

It became my delicate business to seem modest, good and vulnerable, while doing my best to encourage your basest instincts. So I'd get changed with my back to the open door, pretending I had no idea that you were standing in the doorway. Absorbed in my homework, sprawled out on the lounge room floor, I'd absently scratch my stomach, lifting my shirt higher than was necessary; then laugh a little, blushing, as though I'd just realised that you were watching.

In bed, I read. You lay on your back beside me, your hands behind your head, thinking. It was a very hot night. We had the window open, but no air moved through it.

‘I wish there'd be a storm,’ I told you suddenly, tossing my book shut onto the bedside table.

‘Mmmm.’

‘I'm hot!’ I threw the sheet back off my body, pointing my toes towards the ceiling.

‘Me too.’

I blew on your face, and you smiled, abstractedly. I liked that abstracted smile of yours, when you thought you were worrying about something too important for me to understand and I did something cute and naive.

‘God, it's boiling!’ I sat up, cross-legged. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, taking off the sleeveless shirt I used as an improvised pyjama-top.

‘Hey!’

‘It's okay,’ I placated you. ‘I'm decent.’

‘No you're not!’ You looked irritated and tired. ‘
I
wear pyjamas.’

‘So do I!’ I held out the waistline of my boxer shorts to demonstrate. It was my unashamed-primeval-nakedness persona. ‘
You
sleep topless! So now we're the same.’ I yawned expansively, as though yawning took up all my attention and I had forgotten all about my body. ‘I just want to be like you.’

I quite like this irritable prudishness in you. It meant that I was having an effect. Driving
you
to hypocrisy was quite an achievement.

I leant over to kiss your forehead and smooth your hair with my hand, pretending that the proximity of my breasts to your eyes was the last thing on my mind.

There was the faintest tightening of the muscles in your face, a creasing around your eyes and a tension in your jaw, that showed me what I was doing was working.

You took a shallow apprehensive breath, trying to ignore your arousal. But on your face there were these little downwards flicks of your pupils, that betrayed the little worried calculations taking place behind them. I could see you wondering whether it would be plausible to pull the sheet over yourself. It was unbearably erotic.

I pulled the sleepy-little-girl act, snuggling up to your side and burying my face in your neck. I willed my cheeks to expand and soften, my lips to become big and unconsciously red, like the lips of a child startled from sleep.

You smiled a little in acknowledgement of my gesture. I saw through one of my falsely heavy eyelashes that you were reluctant to move.

‘Gimme a cuddle,’ I demanded sleepily, with just a touch of sulkiness.

Then you were obliged to turn your body towards mine, weren't you? and when you held me stiffly, holding yourself away from me so that there was a centimetre's open air between us, I wriggled forwards, closing the gap. I seemed already half-asleep; it seemed a somnambulist's movement. There was nothing you could do.

Long seconds later, I felt your fingers along my cheek and your sibilant whisper: ‘Are you asleep?’

In answer, I kissed you, still feigning half-sleep. I yawned into your mouth.

You moved downwards, kissing the tops of my breasts, regarding my face cautiously every moment. I cast narrow sleepy eyes at you, moving my back against the sheet as though settling into a more comfortable position for sleep. You kissed my belly hard, your chin scraping my navel.

And now I seemed to wake with a certain surprise. I breathed in sharply and raised my arms above my head, stretching, guiding you further down my trunk than I think you had intended to go.

Before you quite knew what was happening, I had, through a series of opportunistic wriggles, manoeuvred you off the bed entirely, so that you stood, all dazed and burning, on the floor. I guided your hands to the hems of my shorts, and smiled as though at a bright dawn when you tugged them down over my feet and off.

My lower half dangled off the bed. My legs cast about in the air like tentacles. Like tentacles, I wound my arms up and around your neck. A sea anemone closing around my prey, I manoeuvred you inside me.

You thrust a few times, unobtrusively, your mouth open against my shoulder in a toothless, impotent bite.

I didn't want things getting routine. You weren't allowed to just
have
me, just like that. Without displays, oaths, tears, turmoil.

I turned my mouth to your ear. I asked you, very quietly, ‘You gonna fuck me, darling?’

It was a challenge. Go on. Prove yourself.

‘Mmmm,’ you said, quickening your pace a little, digging your toes into the carpet.

It wasn't enough.

‘Do it harder.’

I must make it clear—I didn't want you to do it harder for any
sexual
reason, not today. I just knew by instinct that to seem aroused by dominance and aggression would serve to disconcert you. And a disconcerted man was easier to control.

‘Do it harder.’ To emphasise my point, I opened my legs wider. Come on. Be a man.

I felt you tense. Okay then. You straightened up, with me still wrapped around you like a monkey. I felt you scrabbling at my clasped hands, undoing them. You laid me down flat on the bed. I sat half up, resting on my elbows.

You twisted your fingers into my hair. It didn't hurt. It was satisfying, like scratching an itch. Your face was scarlet. Your breath came in convulsions. Your cheeks were taut red spheres. The light of battle was in your eyes.

Bending your wrist, you made me look down, between our bellies. You rested your sweat-slicked forehead on mine, looking down also. We watched my triangle of duck's down. We regarded my open legs.

‘
See that?
’ you hissed, desperately. ‘You
see that?
’ I saw you enter me, again and again.

‘Mmm,’ I said shortly under my breath: a timid assent.

In my heart, I crowed with triumph.

How is it that, beneath you, under you, ruled by you, penetrated by you, I revelled in my victory?

By arousing a passion that you were a slave to, I had won an easy mastery. I had demanded an offensive, and made myself the commander. Your manhood—this grunting, sweating masculinity—was a gift that only I could bestow.

You tensed, you went rigid, you bit your lip.

‘I'm gonna
come
. I'm gonna come in
you
.’ The words were so laboured as to be hardly comprehensible. And I lay there and looked as your eyes scrunched up and your mouth opened like a fish's and you whimpered and you ejaculated.

You were all, all mine.

You hated being tickled, though you tickled me all the time.

I'm not especially ticklish, though I still don't really like being tickled.

I used to tickle you to make you tickle me. It was a game with a slight power-edge to it, because you really were bigger and stronger than me.

I remember once I made you pin me to the ground, just by tickling you relentlessly as we watched the news together.

‘Don't!’ you admonished, slapping my hand away again and again.

I kept on trying, until finally you stood up and crossed the room.

‘What?’ I was in my naughty toddler mood, standing behind you in an instant, reaching under your arm, blatantly tickling as you tried to shrug my hand away.

Stooping over, you shoved your hands into your armpits, crossing your arms over your stomach. ‘No, really,’ you appealed to me sadly from beneath your hunch. ‘I really don't like that.’

‘I'm not,’ I said, tickling you again.

‘Don't!’ You wriggled absurdly, trying to escape me. I stroked my fingers, feather-light, down over your stomach.

And then you stretched your arms out and before I knew it you had both my forearms in your grasp. You felled me easily. I lay with my back against the rug.

‘Haha! Pinned!’ you crowed. I jerked under your weight, lips pursed in an appearance of determination. You grinned down at me. ‘Pinned and not liking it!’

My wrists tingled. Your fingers were tight bracelets. I lay as if exhausted, as if gathering my strength for another struggle. I wasn't tired at all.

I must have looked pretty piteous.

‘Oh!’ You were gently anguished. ‘I
want
to let you up.’ You laid your head on my stomach, holding your spine stiffly so that you didn't rest all your weight on my midriff. I arched my back, squishing my belly into your cheek. You explained: ‘I just don't want you to tickle me.’

I said nothing, jutting my chin resolutely. I rejoiced in the strength of your grip, in my genuine inability to move. The rest of the world was blissfully removed as an option. I had nowhere to go but deeper into you.

*

Sometimes you surprised me.

I'd been used to waking to find you propped on one elbow, staring down at me, drinking my sleeping child's features greedily.

I used to glimpse you through narrowed eyes, while pretending to still be asleep. Then I could control my twitches and stretches and half-yawns. One arm flung above my head, I could ensure that my unconscious body showed itself to you, while my little heart seemed innocent of all manipulation. I could be certain that, at the end of the performance, you'd desire me.

That morning was different.

I was oblivious, then I seemed to dream you pressed hotly against me, clutching, desperate. I was nowhere, then I was under you, soaked in sweat, the sheet damply twined around my ankles. Your mouth was wide over mine. Patches of moisture gathered at the corners of my lips.

Each breath you took hurricaned hotly in my ear. Your arm around my neck haltered me as I tried to twist away from that uncomfortable, too-sudden assault. Your hand ran roughly along my leg, seeking to weasel between my knees.

I was taken aback. Being awake without my wits, my precious schemings, was like going out without clothes on.

You rolled onto me. I could hardly breathe under the weight of you. The heat in the air caught in my lungs like water vapour.

I didn't wriggle against you for long. I was awake, you were aroused, everything was as it should be. But I wasn't ready for you. All my gasps and sharp breaths were afterthoughts only. It hurt when you took me. I had your face to watch, and that was good, but it
hurt
.

And then came the day's best prize, which chased all concern for pain far from my mind.

‘Um—’ you sobbed, sweating, gasping, driving—‘sorry!’

I had thought there could be no pleasure more exquisite than that of seducing a shy man. But this debauching of a decent one was more compelling than anything I had ever experienced. The expressions I used to catch on your face! The naked desire was always chased quickly away by your luscious, sensuous shame. I grew taut with desire when I saw you close your eyes, trying to draw on some inner strength that wasn't there. I imagined what you'd be thinking: She's only a girl. Be careful. Be gentle. Restrain yourself. But of course, when I desired it desperately enough, I could always overcome that resolve. I delighted in the weakling that lust made of you.

I grew less and less interested in the world.

I couldn't do my schoolwork. I mean, I literally
could not do
maths or essays. I could hardly read. My mind kept wandering. I'd look at my homework, in the evenings, and then my attention would just slide off it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor at your feet, books open on my lap, I wormed with desire.

If I sat still for too long, alone in the room, I got dizzy. My ears were filled with a noise like static. If I closed my eyes, the static got louder. I felt sick. My stomach felt as though I were in an elevator, falling jerkily. I suppose it was because I didn't eat enough.

I couldn't eat much. My stomach wouldn't let me. It was like being nervous all the time. Eating seemed like inferior sensuality. Why should I put lukewarm noodles in my mouth when I could be kissing you?

Everything I touched felt clammy, except you. I didn't even like doing up my buttons or tying my shoelaces. There was a sheen on me like Vaseline. Everything felt coarse, sticky, except your skin. Maybe I was imagining it. But my hands sweated, even though they were cold. I sweated all over.

There was a kind of itch over all my skin. It could only be relieved by contact, by rubbing, by rhythmic touch. I think that's how cats' heads feel. It's why they move their necks the way they do, against your leg.