The Dark Space (12 page)

But good, not sparking, urgent, not easy, but good. Usually it was all I could do to be around Cal and not spread and finger myself, cross my legs so the seam of my pants pulled tight and gave me some relief. In his room, all that seemed a long way off, and every time he touched me it was like it skidded against my boundaries, tightened me unbearably before I let go.

But good. Another thing I’d never had before.

“Lick it again,” I whispered.

He did, slower. His hand came up, and he put his thumb against my other nipple. It felt like cold butterflies rushing through me, then tight and pinching, but like it was pinching my clit, too.

“Suck it again.”

He waited, licking, thumbing so, so, so soft until I thought he wasn’t going to, and then his next lick sucked my nipple and half my breast into his mouth.

My hand raced between my legs. I hadn’t anticipated the way it would look and feel, his wrinkled brow, the pressure. He didn’t let up, either — he sucked and tongued my nipple inside his mouth, which is a thing I didn’t even know could be done. It felt wet, hot, until he slid off and then blew over the mess he made and hundreds of thousands of chill bumps prickled out all over my body. I penetrated myself with a finger.

I
had
to.

“
Shh.
” He pulled my hand gently from my cunt and then sucked the finger that had been inside of me into his mouth, all of it, right to the base, rubbing his tongue over the underside of my finger, slippery, slippery, and I showed him that image again, of Jason tonguing Finn, wanting to torture him. He groaned, loud, and slid to the tip of that finger and bit it.

Hard.

Looking at me.

“Fuck,” I said. It was involuntary, more a sound than a word, and he grinned his Cal Darling grin.

“Look.” He brought his hand down over my hip. My skin looked pink and gold, flushed. When he raked his hand over my belly, the color swirled and thickened between his fingers.

I watched him play. He painted over the sides of my thighs, over the soft inner skin of them. He went back to my breasts, squeezing them until they felt tight. I started to roll my hips because it hurt not to.

“Face me, scoot down, and put your feet on my thighs.”

When I did, my heart slowed, and my face got hot, so hot. This was real.

I don’t know how else to explain what I felt facing Cal, naked, his shoulders holding me wide, but that it was so real I ached and could feel the memory burning into my mind, writing this indelibly into everything that had ever been and would be
Winnie Frederickson
.

He looked at my pussy. Wedged his hands under my ass and pulled me closer.

I don’t know what I expected him to start with, but when he licked me, licked me from the bottom, slow, right into where I was so tight at the top, I made a sound that was so loud and so
womanly
, deep and big and stuttering.

He did it again. Harder, deeper, I could feel the sandy bristles on his face, and then he pushed his chin into my clit and every muscle in my thighs contracted, let go, energy banging though me on its way out.

He kissed, soft, while I trembled. “You taste so good.”

His praise was something I didn’t even know I wanted for this until he gave it.

He spread me open with his thumbs, and I could feel my come dripping down, over my asshole. I shivered.

“I’m going to lick you and suck you, Winnie.”

I arched my back, his voice in that serious range that made me feel experienced and worldly and hot.

“Fuck my face, okay, baby? Just fuck it.”

I remember I had this thought, right before I couldn’t think at all, that Cal Darling ate pussy like it was entirely for himself. Like you weren’t even there, and it’s hard to explain, but it meant it didn’t matter how long you bucked and hitched your clit against his sucking, licking, biting mouth, because coming wasn’t the point. The point was coming until you didn’t want to come anymore ever again.

When he slid fingers inside of me, I grabbed his hand and pushed them deeper. When I came the first time, his tongue flicking my clit, I bit my own fingers, hard,
had
to. He just kissed my thigh, pressed his palm over me, steady, firm, and rimmed my asshole until I said his name through tears.

The last time, it was so slow, soft, I felt open, a little empty, even with his fingers inside of me. I was moaning on every breath, drenched in sweat, pushing my hands against my forehead.

The words, they were so sweet in my mouth, gathering into their shape, it was so easy to breathe them into the room.

“I love you, Cal. I love you.”

He hummed against me, stilled. I propped up on my arms again, and he looked at me, kissed over me soft, and I realized he was shaking.

He reached down and yanked the tongue of his belt out of the buckle. I went from lax to feeling the oppressive tightness of our energy all over again. I was spilling light.

He shoved down his pants. His cock was hard, so hard, the skin tight, the slit honeyed.

He leaned over, bracing his arm by my head. The underside of his cock brushed over me, and I started shaking.

“Winnie, Winnie, Winnie-girl,” he breathed. I could smell myself, and it was perfect — Cal plus the excited tang of my body.

He started showing me things, showing himself pushing into my swollen entrance. I could see the puffy edges, hot pink, dripping, how he would nudge, then push, then wait, then push harder, pull out. I could feel the way it would
fill
him, how he would shout with it.

He slid back, the heavy crown of his dick dropped, was
there
.

He pressed his forehead against mine, waiting. I was supposed to show him, show him,
show him
.

Cal needed me to show him that I wanted what he had shown me, so beautifully.

I couldn’t. I couldn’t make what he had shown me get inside of me, to show him back.

So he raised up, took himself in his hand. I remember focusing on the bone of his wrist, strong-looking but exposed, his bones. His
bones
. How much of him that I couldn’t even
see
, that there was to mourn.

He pumped himself over my breasts, with long pulls. He shook. His voice was agonized.

Then he curled up in the
C
of my body.

Held my hand to his chest and wouldn’t let it go.

Winnie and I spent spring break together — every second of it. Days, we hung around my house, watched movies, went for long walks, wandered into my dad’s home office and touched all his stuff while he was trying to work, did the streusel topping so my mom would agree to make her cardamom streusel muffins because I wanted Winnie to have them right out of the oven, hot and buttery, to taste what happened to the flavors on her tongue.

Nights we spent in my bed, naked, quiet as two little mice leaving bite marks on each other’s thighs, shoving energy into our hands, over our stomachs, into Winnie’s purple hair so it stood on end, every strand electrified as she bit her lip and came and came and came against my fingers and tongue.

I got tongue cramps, for fuck’s sake. I could’ve lived in Winnie’s cunt. Purchased a La-Z-Boy for my tongue to rest on between spirited sessions of pie-eating. I’d have been happy in that recliner, too. Fat and sated and perfectly fucking content.

She got bold enough to suck my dick, and I died. No man could survive Winnie’s spirited inaugural dick-sucking after waiting three and a half months for it. I shot spunk down her throat like some kind of hell-demon in a Brueghel painting, palms clamped over her red-hot glowing ears, gorging myself on the sight of her ass in the air, the image of her wet cunt lips inside my head.

It was fucking glorious, that week, gilded and shimmering in my memory even now.

The end of something, and the beginning of everything else.

Cal’s dad decided I was interesting sometime around the third day of break. The shift in his energy — his attention — was palpable, and actually, sexual, although I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who knew it.

It was the morning I’d given Cal my first blow job. I did it under the covers, sleepy-warm and relaxed enough to think it sounded like a perfect idea, the perfect timing, in the six a.m. quiet of his parents’ house in his childhood bed, and it was, actually.

It was.

So perfect that I showered and dressed and took some time to pull my energy back in before I went downstairs to breakfast, preening like a cat. Licking my paws, slicking down my ears, purring with my own prowess.

I dropped sausages onto Cal’s breakfast plate like so many birds I’d batted out of the air, and I picked the choicest muffin on the platter for myself.

That’s when John Darling started asking me questions.

He has this casual professor voice — a little nasal, but slow and melodious. I can remember him reaching for my name in class,
Ms. . . . Frederickson, let’s hear your thoughts on the role of the gods here. Ms. . . . Frederickson, what do you think, does Fate make choice meaningless?

I used to get nervous stomachaches in his classroom, unable to read his mildness or sort out what was important from what wasn’t in his offhand remarks. I’d sit there writing down everything he said,
everything
, and then when we had a take-home exam I would flip through my notebooks and highlight until I cried, once, despairing because every sentence was orange. Every word too important to forget. Or too unimportant. I couldn’t tell.

When I was taking Humanities 101, I had bad dreams about mild-mannered Professor Darling calling me
Ms. . . . Frederickson
, but at Cal’s house, I was always Winnie.

So, Winnie. How do your father’s contracts work? Do they go month by month, or are they a fixed-term thing?

What about you, Winnie? What’s been your best class so far?

I think he really believed I couldn’t hear his eagerness, and it was a struggle not to smile at Cal’s mom when John would start in with his inquiries. He strove for casual exactly the same way Cal does, and succeeded not at all — also exactly like Cal.

John Darling asking me
What was your favorite place you lived?
sounded like Calvin Darling kissing my neck and saying
So how would you feel about trying out sixty-nine?

These boys.

Becky told me while we peeled carrots in the kitchen that the best ages for men were their twenties and their forties, so if I was going to stay with Cal I’d probably get about nine good years out of him before he turned into a neurotic baby for a decade. Then I’d have to figure out how to endure him until he came back to himself in middle age.

I loved that she said stuff like that, as though me and Cal twenty years from now was a safe assumption to make.

No one else assumed it.

Not even me.

John Darling put butter on his bread and asked,
What’s the farthest west you’ve lived?

John Darling wanted to know how I felt about U.S. policy in Egypt. If I had an opinion about the wisdom of reproducing in light of the whole global warming situation. If I listened to music, and which music, and how did I feel about digital formats generally? Because in his view they were garbage, the quality was garbage, he wouldn’t have anything to do with it — but maybe I felt differently.

The Tempest.
Nietzsche. Solitary confinement and the state of the prison systems. These were the things John Darling wanted to hear my opinions about.

This is how John flirts
, Becky told me when I was helping her gather up the trash and recycling for the Thursday-morning pickup.
It’s insufferable, I know.

Cal suffered. He got quiet, then recalcitrant, then downright grouchy.

I pushed him into the dark hall closet against the coats and sucked him off until he was whistling again.

But I liked John Darling’s questions. They floated across the dinner table in soft lavender bubbles, so tender — he was such a tenderly oblivious man — it seemed impossible that everyone couldn’t see it.

Impossible that there was a time when I hadn’t seen it.

Tenderness made him ask me, “So Winnie, what are your plans for next year?”

He didn’t even know, you understand. Hadn’t noticed that it was a taboo subject.

Cal had told me the story about the Gurkha, obviously annoyed on his mom’s behalf that his father had strung her along for four years, and I thought,
But he didn’t know. He didn’t notice.
Cal believes his father goes off somewhere inside his head, but the truth was, he’s always
here
. In his own home, his own office. He’s more
here
than most people, but his
here
is his own — a rich tapestry of poetry and theory, memory and truth, reality and ideas.

He is horrible at people, to be fair, and ridiculously blessed to have snagged Becky for a wife. But he is here. All the time.

“Lay off, Professor,” Cal said, and when his dad shot him a baffled look, I smiled.

I let the soft purple bubble of John’s question nudge against my cheek.

I opened my mouth and swallowed it, because I was curious how it would taste now.
What are your plans for next year?

It tasted ripe, that question. It had the exact texture of a perfect grape, and I crunched down on it, pointed incisors cutting through the tension of its skin into the sweet heart of it.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I applied to grad school.”

“You did?” Cal asked, at the same time John Darling said, “What program?”

“Economics,” I admitted. “At Chicago.”

John wanted to know if I’d gotten in.

I had.

John wanted to know if I got a fellowship.

I did.

John wanted to know if I would accept.

So did I.

I picked at my risotto, separating the golden raisins into a pile. Spearing them with the tines of my fork, one raisin per tine, one bite of juicy warm sunshine at a time.

Cal’s gaze burned a warm red spot against the side of my head, a pleasing contrast to the purple color of my hair — a color that still washed in lavender runnels down my body every time I showered.