Yearn (22 page)

Sensing her distraction, he looked up suddenly and their faces almost bumped. Then just as suddenly he reached across and kissed her, pushing her back onto the couch as his tongue found her tongue. His lips, intelligent in their exploration, took her lips, softly biting, catching at her tongue, both of them now swallowing each other in an orchestration of promised lovemaking, of technique, of knowing how to fuck, how to make love, how to lose oneself in the pure sharp heat of good sex. His hands reached down into her blouse to cup her breasts, both of them forgetting themselves entirely in that instant rush of eclipsing lust. It was one of those moments that so easily could not have happened, a decisive act of courage, one that would change lives.

He led her up to his bedroom, a small room off the landing. Sheets were draped across the window and there was a mattress on the floor. Piles of books rested up against the walls, which were painted black: a young man's bedroom—a very young man's bedroom.

In fact, she told me, only a few months ago, that at this point she found herself suddenly wanting to run, as if sensing that perhaps this might be more momentous than she consciously realized. “What am I doing here?” she'd thought to herself. “Why now do I want to run and from what? Uncomplicated blinding pleasure? From possible heartbreak? From the sheer vulnerability of nakedness, emotional and physical?” These and a hundred other doubts flashed through her mind in a kaleidoscope of apprehension.

She stood in the middle of the room not knowing what to do next. There was nowhere to sit so she stayed standing, wondering how many other women had stood there feeling just as anxious—a shadow line of past conquests trailing from her trembling hand. Seth, oblivious, lit some candles, slipped a CD into the player in the corner, then led her to the bed.

He began to pull her clothes off in clumsy haste, wanting her right then, but, a little put off, she stopped him with a smile. And what a smile. I still remember it, a tantalizing half smile of experience, a smile that said, “I am going to lead”. Teasingly, she slowly lifted her dress up over her shoulders, now regretting the rather functional white cotton underpants she'd worn that night, but thankful for the push-up bra, which displayed her full bosom to advantage.

Taking charge, she pushed him back so that he knelt opposite her. His green eyes, captivated by her body, glinted in the candlelight. His cheekbones and mouth, she later told me, looked like a prism of sharp planes all promising sensual assault. Tigger could smell his sweet young sweat mixed with a salty tang, as if he might have been swimming or surfing earlier that day. It radiated off him and filled her nostrils with forgotten memories of youth, of fucking in sunlight in some beach house, blond hair and sandy skin of eons ago, and in that faded memory Tigger forgot who she was and where she was. Everything now narrowed down to one sharp point of pure desire, both of them so fiercely in the moment. To Seth's delight she suddenly wrenched his T-shirt over his head and flung it to the other side of the bed.

Of classical proportions, his shoulders were broad, his chest and stomach a washboard of compact youthful muscle. There was a faint dusting of chest hair between his dark but pronounced, erect nipples. Tigger had forgotten how hairless and smooth-skinned younger men were. Tigger thought this man was beautiful, as beautiful as he would ever be. Awe rose in her throat like sorrow and she paused, rocking back on her heels.

Seth reached across and pulled the sheet from the window. Moonlight flooded the room and settled like white snow along the curves of his chest and thighs. They were both now kneeling face-to-face. He was watching her like an animal, knowing there was nothing in his gaze except the need to fuck. He lifted one hand and unbearably slowly ran a finger across her lips and down to one breast. Lifting it out over the bra cup, he teased the nipple, a slow tracing circle followed by a sharp pinch that sent a taut spike of erotic excitement down to her groin.

“Don't move,” he commanded, watching the growing excitement in her face like a professional. He ran his fingers down her torso, tracing her moist clit through the thin cotton. Tigger closed her eyes. Her thighs were trembling. Her breasts ached as if they wanted to be bitten, to be taken into his mouth, the nipples hard for him. She opened her eyes again. Seth was smiling at her, his fingers pressed into the wet crack of her vagina through her panties. He was still wearing his jeans, the bulge of his erection straining against the cloth.

“Your turn.” His voice was almost a growl. He moved even closer, so that they were now only centimeters apart, and suddenly she understood the game he was playing; he was manipulating the erotic charge between them like an invisible balloon that swelled and grew tauter according to how aroused they were. It was the kind of heightened foreplay you could only have with strangers, when there was nothing at stake except the sex you were about to have—no emotional expectation, no history, no guilt or secrets. Tigger couldn't remember the last time she'd felt as excited, or liberated.

She leaned forward. She could smell him now, a delicious perfume of sweat and musky cologne undercut with the smell of excitement, of the sex pheromone. His eyes were narrowed like a lion's, a sheen on his skin glistening in the light. She pulled his lower lip into her mouth and pressed her teeth down gently. He groaned. She then raked her nails across his shoulders, over his nipples, and down the center of his midriff, hard enough to let him know who was in control. His skin was impossibly soft, impossibly youthful, but she wanted his cock. Her fingers found the buttons of his fly; for a moment her clumsy fumbling made the invisible balloon of erotic tension between them deflate. Finally she released him, the weight of his cock falling against her palm. His cock was long and of decent girth, like his capable fingers. She couldn't believe her luck.

He arched his back, pushing his groin proudly toward her like a gift, but in those days he was arrogant like that. She hauled his jeans down over his hips and, falling back, he wriggled out of them, now naked and gloriously erect, his cock appearing thick against his slim hips, his mouth and hands now greedy in their abandon. After burying her face in the sweetness of his testicles, she took him into her mouth. The length of him almost made her gag. After circling the bulbous, sticky tip with her tongue she took him deep into her throat, feeling his excitement rise like sap.

“Stop, I don't want to come like this.” He pushed her head away and sat up. “Come here.”

She moved toward him as he pulled her underpants off and, reaching behind her, undid her bra, her breasts falling heavy against his chest. He then pulled himself beneath her so that his face was under her sex.

“No, stop,” she groaned, but he didn't stop.

Tigger pressed her hot face against the wall, faintly appalled at his obvious sexual prowess and experience. This was no virgin. She could feel her own excitement building and building down in the kernel of her body. She couldn't remember the last time a man had served her like this. Certainly sex with the ex in the last months of their relationship had deteriorated into her serving him, a warning sign Tigger should perhaps have heeded. But here, now, Seth was an entirely different proposition.

Close to coming herself, she pulled her hips away from his mouth. Lowering herself down, she was relieved to find him as hard as before, if not harder. The tip of his cock now rested just inside her lips. This was a moment Tigger always relished in lovemaking, a tantalizing, lingering tease, the moment before bearing down and being filled by a delicious tightness. Tigger had always regarded this as the litmus test of sexual compatibility—whether the man filled you or not. For her it was a harbinger of what was to come: she was convinced that a sensible woman should take heed if they did not, for inevitably this misfit would sooner or later become an issue in the relationship.

Slowly, she pushed down onto his cock. The sense of being filled was overwhelming, a visceral reminder of what it was to be female, to be the receiver. She rode him faster and faster, clasping herself tightly around him. Then suddenly he pushed her up and after slipping both his hands under each of her buttocks, lifted her up first onto his knees then, with her legs curled firmly around his back, into a standing position. Carrying her, still inside her, he walked over to the wall and pushed her hard against it as he slowly began thrusting, getting faster and faster. Their mouths pressed together, his tongue thrusting in and out in time with his cock. The power play was reversed; now he dominated, abandoning himself to his own pleasure. Paradoxically, this excited Tigger, who was so used to the self-consciousness of lovemaking with her ex, both of them too involved with the necessity of pleasing each other to the point of ridiculous sacrifice and some disingenuousness. But this was different. Immediate, primal, unabashedly self-serving, it was as if they were there to serve some invisible god—ancient, wild, instinctive. Seth slowed his pace, then paused, allowing the ripples of sensual throbbing to vibrate through their bodies. They both came screaming.

 • • • 

She watched him sleeping, his fluttering eyelids a veil of surrender across his face. Suddenly he looked younger than his twenty-one years, and it was hard not to feel that she had exploited him. Apparently she took solace in deciding that his sexual prowess had indicated a decadent and far from innocent lifestyle—at least that's what she told me.

Tigger glanced at the window, the sheet now hanging down, the moon half in, cut by the diagonal edge. There was a promised timelessness in the faint scent of night jasmine, the distant roar of traffic. Her whole body was abuzz with the warm afterglow of orgasm, her deliciously aching muscles languid in their pain. She felt alive, capable of anything. She felt, for the first time in years, as if her whole future was stretched out before her and, more important, contained every possibility imaginable.

Over her shoulder she heard Seth groan and turn in his sleep. She looked around, surprised that the thin blue light of dawn had already begun to illuminate the student squalor of the room: the pile of dirty linen in the corner, a pair of worn-down runners still filled with the ghost of feet at the end of the bed. An ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and screwed-up cigarette papers, the stained and worn carpet, the dust piled up in the corners. And all those one-night stands she'd had as a student came flooding back—the sexual conquests, some of which were the climax to an elaborate courtship, some not, but all of which she remembered. And all those early mornings she'd wasted lying there, watching some young man sleeping in a postcoital stupor, her own eyelids pinned back by hope, praying that he would want to stay for breakfast and then perhaps even the whole day, and then after that who knows . . .?

Dawn had now crept along the bedcovers and was minutes away from falling over Seth's sleeping face. Tigger suddenly caught sight of herself in the chipped mirror resting up against the wall. Her body looked flushed but voluptuous, her soft middle-aged belly a curve of an earlier aesthetic, her breasts now pendulous. She examined her face: the makeup from the night before was smudged down both cheeks and those crow's feet that now came from not sleeping and were impossible to conceal had appeared like the lines on fine parchment. The morning would not be kind, so as silently as she could manage, Tigger slipped out of bed and grabbed her handbag, underwear, and dress, not daring to dress in the bedroom in case she woke Seth. Standing in the musky corridor just outside the door, she slipped on her clothes and tiptoed out of the house.

Outside the air was alive with a chorus of birds. Stepping back into her rental car was like stepping back in time, to “before.” She started the engine up, jolting the radio into life, and as she drove through the sleeping city, accompanied only by garbage trucks crawling like giant beetles through the dawn streets and the occasional cab driver racing to get off his night shift, she realized she hadn't felt this free in years.

And this is where I come in. I remember I slept through until about one in the afternoon that day only to be woken by the afternoon sun streaming in. I remember reaching across the bed in that half-awake daze, hoping to find her, hoping she'd stayed. Even thirty years later I remember the intense sense of loss and, more than that, the overpowering sense that I had to follow her, to make her mine.

 • • • 

Seth looked up from the fireplace. A handsome man now in his early fifties, bereavement had nevertheless made its recent mark. May hadn't deliberately prompted such an intense confession but had stayed back after the wake of Joanna Wutherer, her old anthropology lecturer, sensing that Joanna's younger husband needed to talk, to exorcise some memory of the woman he loved. What she hadn't counted on was the power and sensuality of the story of the couple's first night together. It was embarrassing, moving, and confronting all at the same time. But then what did she expect from a painter famous for his erotic drawings?

May glanced across at one of Seth's drawings hanging above the artist's head. It was a recent one of Joanna—even as she was dying, Seth had captured the seventy-year-old's beauty and vivaciousness. He really was a great artist.

Somewhere in the house the female voice of a computer announced the time. It was nine p.m. and May knew she had to get a ten o'clock flight back to Sydney and her family, but there was something both poignant and faintly seductive about Seth's grief. He was the kind of man that you wanted to comfort, to hold, even. . . .

“Thirty years, May, thirty years of happiness. What do I do now?” He asked softly.

 

Where I live has kind of closed down the past two years, a little like me. I've closed down. I now wear my life on the inside, like a second, luminous skin no one else can see. Unless they know me another way. The only way. My name is Cassandra Whool. Kind of a fancy name for a 310-pound, thirty-eight-year-old woman you wouldn't look at twice. I mean, hey, I wouldn't look at me twice. But I guess my parents didn't know that when they named me. Cassandra, I believe, was some crazy Greek mystic. There ain't nothing mystic or mysterious about me, except in my head. In my imagination.

I live in Southern California, in a new development north of San Diego. We were one of the first to move in five years ago. It consists of rows and rows of small white stucco houses, each with identical garages and a small yard at the back. It's gated and just off the I-5 freeway. They call it the Greenways Community, which is surprising to me because I ain't seen much community except for the FedEx guy and the Mormons who sometimes knock on my door, and since the drought there's nothing much green except the golf course next door.

I moved in with my mom, but she passed three years ago, leaving me with a forty-thousand-dollar mortgage and a room full of them porcelain heritage dolls that she collected. I have no other family except one sister who lives in Encinitas—she married a hippie artist and now has seven children. We argued about God years ago and I ain't seen her since, except for Mom's funeral. None of her kids have amounted to anything, 'cept for the youngest, Seth, who's living in Australia. Seth. I used to babysit him before me and my sister quarreled. Cute kid. Now it's like I'm alone since Mom died. I still ain't cleared out her bedroom and her clothes are still hanging in her closet. Sold the dolls, though. I hated them dolls. But Mom, she left a hole in this house like a runaway train. Sometimes when I'm sitting here in the evening I hear her calling out from her bedroom. It's the strangest thing.

Like I said before, around here things have kind of closed down. People are losing their homes, their houses repossessed before they even have time to put their own furniture into the place. It's getting ugly and I'm happy I have kept my job, thank the good Lord. I mean, it ain't a career, but it's a living, a place where I get money for just answering the phone—but that's more than most folks have got these days.

The Tolgate Call Center, head office, La Mesa, Southern California, is where I work. It's called the head office because I guess it once was the head office. Now it's about the last call center left in the United States of America. The rest of them have moved to Mumbai or Delhi or one of them places that are economically blossoming, while here in God's own they're saying Capitalism is dying with a big groan and a small c. As if I care.

My workplace? It's a big old building in the back of a shopping mall that looks like every other shopping mall north of the Mexican border. In other words, a large, anonymous concrete building, open plan, with about a hundred of us at our switchboards, headphones on, answering them calls from all over the country. Plastic palm trees inside, real ones outside. But the building has air-conditioning and the job health insurance and the boss is a relaxed kind of guy. The partitions around my desk are placed so that my computer is concealed from the other workers. I am the only one there to have a third partition. This is my privilege as the longest-serving employee. Twelve years I've been answering phones in that building, day shift only. I even have a plaque on my desk that reads “Cassandra Whool, C.C. La Mesa, employee of the decade”—C.C. standing for call center of course, but the dumb thing is that I am the only employee of the decade, considering the other workers that come through only last six months or maybe a year. There's too much echo coming off the white walls, bouncing back all their personal grief and misery for most folk. See, I have something they don't. I have Second Life.

Second Life is where I do my living: every lunchtime and from seven to eleven every night at home. Why, I even eat my dinner in front of the computer screen, but that being said, putting real-life food into my real-life body is secondary to booting up the computer. In truth booting up is more important. That machine is my window into happiness, into forgetting myself. Since I became a member of the Second Life community on May 13, 2006, my real life has faded away into periods of gray time, of waiting until I log on again. Second Life is my ecstasy and my salvation. It allows this great hefty body of mine to escape gravity, to soar. It gives me a portal through which there is hope, light, color, and best of all—sex. Yep, you heard me, sex: great, forbidden, pornographic dreamscapes in which I am queen and hallelujah to that.

Okay, I can hear you all preaching at me already. I mean for all I know you could be a born-again Christian or even a charismatic. Lord knows there's enough of them around here, but the way I see it is that a woman is a woman. And even if she don't look like it, don't think there ain't a thread of desire in her. Call it sin, call it what you like, but that drum is gonna keep beating. And what could I do? I ain't had a man since 1990, and that was a drunken one-night stand. I'd given up even talking to the opposite sex with any romantic intention because I'm a realist—no man is going to take on a big heifer like me, not in this world anyway. I wanted to meet people, but not like this, not like me in real life—IRL.

It started innocently enough. I think my first visit to Second Life was to Holiday Paradise Island, kind of like a futuristic Club Med where everyone is beautiful, slim, and young, and some of them even had tails and wings, but everyone was kind of nice and friendly—and best of all, no judgment. My avatar was cute but she was no great shakes. So when I was approached for sex, I could not wait. I immediately went to Xcite and got me some genitals and nipples and upgraded my skin. And suddenly that thread of desire in me began to take shape and became my avatar now—Tasinis—everything I am not in real life. Let me put you in the picture: the real me, Cassandra Whool, has short brown hair that is too thin to grow long, small brown eyes, and pasty skin that is discolored by large sun spots. My mouth is my best feature but at my size it's kind of buried by my cheeks. My dress size is 22, I can't remember the last time I saw my feet, my breasts hang down to my waist, and I'm five foot one inch tall.

The “skin” that I originally used to construct Tasinis cost me over four thousand Lindens and I got a Second Life artist to design her specially to my instructions. My avatar is six foot tall, with waist-length strawberry-blond hair that flows down in those Barbie doll waves. She has wide hips, a narrow waist, broad shoulders, and DD breasts. I gave her super long legs with the latest Xcite interactive thighs, which cost me half a week's pay. I've also got Tasinis a special edition clit and long X3 nipples that can actually get erect. Finally I gave her this really sexy deep voice, kind of like Aretha Franklin meets Eartha Kitt—with a growl. Okay, some might find her kind of a gender bender, but I like it. It's the kind of voice that makes men hard and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Constructing Tasinis was like playing God. It was like giving birth. It was the most creative thing I have ever done in my whole miserable goddamn life. I swear it.

I had five outfits designed for her but my favorite is an armor-like corset that cuts above her thighs, exposing her crotch and ass, and thigh-high stiletto-heeled leather boots with silver spurs that can convert into small silver wings. There's a clip-on belt she wears on special occasions that has pockets for Xcite toys such as a silver dildo, a small silver-handled whip, steel handcuffs, and an Xcite Violet Wand. The only nonhuman addition I gave her was a small pair of silver horns that poke up through her thick blond hair. I'm telling you, she is mighty fine looking.

Tasinis is twenty-three—she hasn't had a birthday since I enabled her three years ago, while in real life I'm thirty-eight going on fifty. And I can't remember the last time I stood in front of the mirror naked. In truth I can't remember the last time I was aware of feeling anything more than cold and warmth on my human skin. In Second Life Tasinis orgasms all the time, which is ironic because I don't reckon I've ever had an orgasm—not by myself, not with anyone else IRL, not once. I mean, it's not like I don't feel anything. I get excited when Tasinis comes, but my body—well, it's asleep, dormant like some huge hibernating animal that's never been woken up. Maybe I don't like myself enough to let go. You know, even when I was young I found the feel of my own body revolting. I've never even masturbated. I tried once in the shower when I was about sixteen, but Mom walked into the bathroom and told me I was committing a sin. It was real traumatic. I started to eat big after that. It was like I was punishing her by not growing into one of those perfect petite china dolls she collected. Wow, I've never told anyone that, not ever. Now I'm making up for it big time through Tasinis, through my avatar. And, Mom, if you're up there in heaven I hope you can hear this, because my Tasinis is the most sinful kick-ass dirty-chick doll you're ever gonna see. And she has no trouble pleasuring herself—or anyone else, for that matter. I even gave her labia that light up when she's aroused to let the other avatars know. I made her the goddamn sexiest avatar in the whole wide Second Life, and it worked. She's a star, a cyber idol, while out here in the real world I am less and less visible. I mean, hey, I could die of a heart attack in my bed one day and I don't reckon anyone would come looking, but if Tasinis left the net there would be a riot. I swear it. She is that famous.

I'll never forget the day I introduced her to the dark side of Second Life. I clicked on Gothic Dungeon Sex Island and flew Tasinis in. As soon as I saw her there floating like a huge love goddess in the perfect blue sky, I was her. A horde gathered to watch me as I hovered over the dark forest that stood in front of a gothic castle, breasts heaving and long blond hair undulating in the cyber wind like tendrils. It was Kali meets Barbie and the Ice Queen all in the same massive sex doll, and it felt like total power, total adoration. And for somebody who was used to people averting their eyes from them, this was enormous; it was the nearest thing to love I'd ever experienced.

I made Tasinis yell, “I have arrived!” and the crowd roared. She didn't even make it to the huge wooden front door; I couldn't resist all those arms reaching out for her. I floated her down and let them pull her to the ground. In seconds Tasinis was involved in a group orgy that was a hundred times more exciting than anything I'd thought up in my imagination. It was kind of shocking yet thrilling. It was like civilization stripped back to the bone, to raw instinct. But I wised up. Next time I visited the island I equipped Tasinis with a whip twirling wildly in one hand and a nightstick raised in the other. Immediately several avatars flung themselves down, begging Tasinis to flagellate them. I've never felt so powerful or so wanted. That pure feeling of control and dominance charged through me as I sat at my desk, my waistband cutting into my belly, the loose T-shirt hanging down to my knees to conceal my weight, the heat sticking the cotton to my back and armpits.

It had been a really bad morning—some of the workers were away sick and the boss had shouted at me—but I swear, when I logged on to Second Life that lunchtime, watching Tasinis standing victorious over the other groveling avatars, the curling lash of her whip coming down again and again, was the most sexually exciting thing that had ever happened to me. It was like I was finally somebody. I was finally visible.

Just before I left for home that day my boss came in to tell me he had taken on a night worker who was to share my desk. “A guy called Hector Lopez, a Latino, a nice guy. A loner like you; I think his wife's passed recently. Not that you'll ever get to meet him,” he joked.

 • • • 

Lately I've been spending more than six hours a day on Second Life, on Xcite and Gothic Dungeon Sex Island. Maybe I have an addiction, but hey, it's not like I'm doing drugs or crime. All I can think about is getting back inworld, to the chains, the whipping posts, the pain/pleasure on my victims' faces, the flashing pose balls, and the creak of the dungeon doors played over and over again. Tasinis has become top bitch, the ultimate dominatrix. Folks fly in from all parts of Second Life just to be whipped by her. There is even a fan club that meets every month to exchange stories. And last month a Second Life rock star named Lassorow composed a song about Tasinis; it's number five on the Second Life charts.

But the really weird thing is that I should feel good, I should be firing, but lately when I've gone in I haven't got the same kicks watching my avatar blindfold and humiliate some blond avatar, erect penis flashing. Something's missing. I feel it and Tasinis feels it.

 • • • 

The night worker who shares my desk, this Hector Lopez, he starts at seven p.m. and then leaves at five a.m. I start at nine a.m. and leave at five p.m. We haven't met and we won't ever meet. I can't get a read on him, and why should I, given that he's nothing but a seat warmer. There's nothing on the desk that's personal. Nothing. Unless you count my collection of souvenir pencils with different sands in them I bought in Tijuana. But he hasn't messed with my things. To me he is like a shadow, someone who flitters across my space and is forgotten by the morning. Of course, no one at work, including Hector, knows about Tasinis or what I'm like on Second Life. I only ever play on my laptop and I take it everywhere I go.

So there was this day and it would have been like any other day in that I got up and ate my usual oatmeal, maple syrup, and blueberries, 'cept when I looked at the calendar on the fridge I realized it was my birthday. “Shoot,” I said to myself. “Cass, there's no one left to know that since Mom died three years ago,” and it promised to be another hollow, dry sort of day only maybe a little sadder.