by Michael O'Mahony
(01/04/06)
He can't ever get enough of these beautiful moonlit midnights, an autumn breeze fattening the curtains and teasing the paper that litters the floor. A fickle reader, it turns pages at will, showing him fragments of word and picture, occasionally tossing a sheet aside as though disgusted. He smiles to himself like a man with a secret, that same breeze caressing his hair with the lightest of lover's touches while he lets his eyes follow the words and pictures as they dance across the bare floorboards. He loves the nonsensical sentences the wind constructs, the illustrations it chooses. He's tired of all these dull and linear stories.
She watches him from the doorway, silhouetted -- if he bothered to look up -- in moonlight from a window down the hall. She fancies herself striking, if not especially womanly; slim legs going up to taut thighs, hips and crotch hugged by these lacy French knickers just a breath away from sheer. She's a girl from the waist down, but above she lacks definition, wrapped as she is in one of his suit jackets, loving the feel of the silk lining on her bare skin. Short hair, face in shadow -- perhaps a pretty boy playing dress-up. He knows her, she thinks, but if he didn't...
He's thinking of stories without plots, heroes without goals, that ghost of a grin just hinting at inner amusement. She goes to him with paper grabbing at her feet, coming into the light and into his gaze, standing before him so he has no choice but to look at her, to see how she's dressed, the curiosity in her eyes. She strikes a pose and finally draws both a real smile and his hand, his index fingertip tracing lines and loops, perhaps a word, on her belly. He flattens his hand there, lets his thumb slide beneath the thin, coarse material of her underwear, where it explores the patterns and indents on her skin. She thinks of refugees crawling beneath barbed wire, wriggling from repression to freedom.
She loves how concentration creases his brow just a little, how she can see him hard through his boxer shorts, how she can watch his eyes go up over her body and know what he's thinking. She stands perfectly still, content to let him take his time.
He loves the contrasts; the black against her pale skin, the scratch of lace against her soft warmth, the calm of her body against the thoughts he's sure must be racing through her mind. He lets his hand go lower, savouring the intimacy she allows him without comment, his palm tickled by her wiry pubic hair, his thumb going still further. In the dim light, in the stillness, in the near-silence, he is quietly amazed at the intricate geography of her flesh, how he can find the place he needs to be so easily when not fumbling in the throes of passion. When the pad of his thumb finds the bud of her clit where it nestles at the junction of her labia, he hears her breath catch in her throat, sees the muscles in her abdomen jump as though startled. This is different; slow and subtle, like caressing an itch instead of scratching it. He focuses on her face, how she breathes, how she blinks, how she seems to frown a little, feeling what he imagines are hot little tendrils of pleasure climbing up into her belly.
When she sighs, it seems loud in the quiet room. She can feel her heartbeat and how she's trembling a little, each breath coming more quickly than the last. That feeling that's like anticipation and like fear swells inside her, and she can almost feel the rushing blood that hardens her nipples and colours her face. She laughs then, though she's not entirely sure why. She leans forward and kisses him lightly on the lips, tasting cigarettes, scenting aftershave, dropping one hand into his lap to squeeze his hardness, trying to imagine how the friction of cotton on his cock must feel. He gives this exaggerated little groan that makes her giggle again, and she pulls down the front of his boxers, breaking the kiss to bend all the way over, wondering how this must look from the doorway, how it would look on film, wanting excited voyeurs. She makes a fist around his shaft, startled out of her amusement by how hot and hard and real it is, suddenly aware of how the temperature in the room has gone up, how it smells of sex and fresh sweat.
And then his cock is in her mouth, her hands resting to each side of his thighs. His one hand is right down inside her knickers, two fingers inside her, making her move her hips a little like she's riding them. The other is reaching inside the suit jacket, and for a moment she thinks of him wearing it to work, making this exact same gesture to reach for his mobile phone or his cigarettes. She wonders, as he greedily claims her breast, if he has that same sense of misplaced intensity. Random, dizzying thoughts, vague before the first stirrings of her climax. He's breathing hard, straining upward towards her. She's getting off on all these tiny liquid sounds; the percussion of penetration. She wants him in her.
He's thinking of a threesome. The way she's bent over with her legs straight, he imagines another guy taking her from behind, another girl kneeling down with her tongue where his fingers are. The jacket she's wearing hangs open, brushing his thighs as her head bobs up and down, and he's having voyeuristic fantasies not a million miles from hers, picturing a camera shot from the floor that shows how his hands work her tits while the imaginary third buries his cock in her time and time again.
"I'm gonna come," he murmurs, breathless.
She raises her head, bites his lower lip, whispers, "Inside me."
She stands straight and he rolls those French knickers over her hips and then down her legs, taking his time, investing these moments with the quality of ritual. She steps out of them, straddles him, all eye contact as the tip of his cock presses against her and she reaches down to make an adjustment with the tips of her fingers before she lowers herself and they exhale into each other's air, he feeling the resistance and then grip of her flesh, she feeling his hot hardness inside her, so much larger than in hand or mouth.
"Still," he says. "Stay still."
Anything more than this will take him over the edge. He must be dead from the waist down. He looks into her eyes and sees that she knows, that she's enjoying how it's almost uncomfortable for him. A twitch of her hips and she would defeat him somehow, claim first blood. He smiles and it feels like a grimace. He strips the jacket from her shoulders and lets it fall as far as her elbows, catching it there to hold her arms behind her back so that her tits are pushed up and out. He leans forward as far as he dares and captures one nipple between his lips, sucking its swollen tip into his dancing tongue. His free hand goes back to her crotch, to its familiar resting place, thumb extended to once again find her clit, this time with anything but playful intent.
She can feel how tense he is, how close. Where their bodies meet, his trembling makes her want to kiss him. His mouth is otherwise occupied, though, and she's not disappointed. His desire to see her climax is so arousing to her as to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. She doesn't need him to fuck her, she just wants his cock there, wants his orgasm to paint her insides. She's shaking now, breaths becoming sighs becoming moans, struggling to maintain the control that has her almost motionless in his lap. Blood comes to her skin like a tide; her cunt feels hot and swollen, her breasts heavy, her nipples almost numb save for the insistent friction of his tongue. She puts her arms around his neck and hears herself say his name.
Her climax triggers his. When she comes, her whole body tenses, muscles contracting. In that moment, she tilts her hips just a little, as though trying to take him deeper into her. Caught by surprise, he actually cries out, mouth and eyes suddenly wide as the tight heat he was holding in his stomach suddenly breaks, stealing strength and coherence until he's aware of almost nothing save for his twitching, pulsing cock. He gasps her name as though in reply, and when his eyes fall closed, he finds himself dizzy to the point of nausea. He falls back.
Tired and fulfilled, she follows him down, pressing her breasts against his chest and laughing as she bites his ear and then kisses the side of his face. He lets his head roll to one side and she kisses his slack lips, mmming at the way he runs the very tips of his fingernails over her hips.
Silence between them then. They can hear autumn tugging at the trees outside and slipping beneath the curtains like an uninvited guest, cooling the sweat on their skin. Stillness between them as they fall slowly into sleep and the breeze lets them be, returning to its dance with the words and pictures beneath the bed, the sound of paper rushing across the floorboards like whispered laughter.
