by Bella Voz
(12/03/03)
I watch him as he sits across from me, devouring a rack of ribs. He's heedless to the sexuality of it, but it's not lost on me. Not a drop. The sticky sweet sauce clings to his fingers, and he licks it off deftly -- tugging with the silent rasp of a tongue I know so well. He sucks the meat off the bone and it disappears into his moist mouth.
I am transfixed.
I am also unsure what it is about this scene that appeals to me so. It is sexual, of course, but also a bit vulgar. Well, more than a bit. Primitive, perhaps even grotesque.
No. It is cannibalistic. They look human, these ribs, nearly indistinguishable from the first cadaver I ever saw, and every open-heart patient since. They could be from Adam. Or Eve..
It should repel me. I am a vegetarian. He is a hunter, and his choice in dinner fare is just one of the many dichotomies of our relationship. We are mates from opposite ends of the food chain.
But I know that our relationship is more than that, really, and less: I am his quarry, his prey, as surely as the ribs he sucks clean as I watch.
He spies me staring as he takes a long sip of beer. More likely, he's realized it all along, but only now lets on. Hunters are like that. They're wily. They have to be.
I look away, but it's no good. In the periphery which is actually the dead-center of my cosmos, I can see his smile slowly spreading upwards. I call it his cowboy's smile, languid and cocky.
He would just call it a grin, something that straightforward -- nothing more, nothing less than evidence of his amusement. Beneath the table his long leg snakes toward mine, and I shudder as he presses the hardness of it against the inside of my thigh, just as he will later, just as he has nearly every night since we met.
I try not to melt, but it is no use. I look back at him. Under the table cloth, my hands twist the white napkin on my lap into helpless coils but I might as well wave it over my head, the symbol of surrender, intelligible even by combatants who share no language.
But he doesn't need that, doesn't need a symbol or a word or even a gesture of acquiescence, because he has me and he knows it.
"C'mon," he says, dropping excess cash on the table and standing.
It is not a request, and I obey. What it is about him, or about me, or about our chemistry that renders me so utterly obedient I will never know.
He holds the door for me and as I walk through he reaches down and grabs my ass, hard. It almost hurts but turns me on, too. One gesture of confidence and self-assuredness and ownership, and I am wet.
He opens the car door for me, too, and leaves me stewing in the front seat for the deliberate eternity it takes him to make his way around to his side. Then he slides in next to me and makes no pretense of turning the car on, but slides his hands roughly up my skirt.
I gasp and he laughs. The sound of it is far away, echoing somewhere away from me into the night. I wonder if passersby can hear it, if they turn and look through the quickly steaming windows to see the whiteness of my thighs and the dark sticky barbeque prints of his fingers.
I decide not to care. He kisses me and I kiss him back, loving despite myself the sweet taste of animal flesh on his tongue. His hands encircle me and pull me down under him.
He knows how wet I am. He knew it -- I am sure -- long before he touched me, long before his fingers found their insistent way under my panties and into my sex. He could smell it, I know, before we even left the light of the restaurant. He's a predator; predators are like that.
I am writhing beneath him now, trying to escape my own inexorable arousal and at least feign control. His voice is a growl in my ear and when he says, "Take off your panties so I can taste your pussy," I do.
The window is cold behind my head and something hard and inhuman, a seatbelt maybe, digs into my lower back but I don't care. It's a pointless restraint. My entire body, every single humming nerve, quivers with pleasure.
He is licking me. I guess. I can't tell anymore. I lose the ability to distinguish between my own body parts and his as soon as he tastes me. It is just us -- the essence of every part of my sexuality and his appetite, hot and liquid and undifferentiated.
I try to push him off -- for pretense mostly -- mumbling incoherently about how this isn't the place, a well-lit parking lot outside a strip mall eatery. In the back of my mind I am sure I hear the sirens coming already, but he doesn't care. He just pushes me down a little harder. A little more irrefutably.
He is groaning with pleasure, and I can't hold back now, never could really. I am warmth, that's all, warmth spreading slowly from the center of me outwards and by the time it reaches my fingers and toes and I am coming, coming so hard, thrashing up against him as if I were trying to shake him off or take him in.
Later he will savor my lingering flavor, licking it off his fingers and tasting it on his goatee. And gloating, smiling silently to himself and letting me know that he's ready for round two anytime, anytime at all.
For now he just turns on the car and drops it into gear, pulling out as the police pull in, driving as if nothing happened. I try to catch my breath, though, because I know soon we will be home and what he gives, he also takes back in spades.
But all I can do is rest my head against the glass, breathing hard and feeling the aftershocks of my orgasm. Under my clothes and over my goosebumps it lingers: the sticky fingerprint evidence of our dichotomy.
And unification.
