by Amber L. Cohen
(07/11/07)

When they fucked, she always felt that she should be a man. That the difference between their bodies got in the way.

The trembling she felt as he laid open her clothes or crept inside them was no romance-novel cliché. It was real, a kind of terror at spreading open her long-neglected body to be desired. Her upturned breast in his splay-knuckled hand was as stylized as a Chinese opera. Her orgasm, waning into tears, held a desperate wonderment. He wants me. He's inside me. I'm causing him pleasure.

Her own shuddering breaths were deafening in her ears, as if she'd been plunged suddenly underwater.

He's infatuated by novelty, she thought. Any hot under-breast would do. Any cunt that would flutter around his long finger as he made clit-circles with his broad thumb. If beauty was a woman's job she couldn't do it. If desire was, she made up for beauty in spades.

But desire is a man's prerogative. She felt like Stella Kowalski, running her hands down Stanley's broad back under the ripped cotton, in thrall to a beauty she could not match. The ferocity of that beauty, preening, self-aware. It showed in his stance, how he'd sit cocked on one hip, how he'd reach under his shirt to scratch his stomach. Nonchalant. She'd grit her teeth.

Sometimes he'd ignore her utterly. Other times, he'd engulf her thin hungry mouth with his own thick plushy lips -- into which she wanted to slide her own swollen cock. But instead she'd push her first two fingers in while lapping the column of his neck and the curving rim of his ear. She'd swing a leg over him and he'd hold her wrists bound behind her. His mouth would close around her nipple and an invisible fist would close around her womb.

She remembers first feeling like a boy the year she was seventeen. A sleepover at a friend's house turned sweet when she first felt what it was like to be wanted by a woman. The surprise of softness under her mouth and hands. Stoned and incompetent, she'd never been so easily aroused, wallowing in Summer's flesh, pinching her nipples. No beginnings of a beard, no hard insistent lips, only this hot wet amorphous swallowing of her swirling tongue. She came instantly when Summer cupped her crotch through her shorts.

Is this what it feels like to be male? She'd wondered, to enact such fierce desire on this soft thing? To try not to lose oneself in it?

Those were the days when she'd dry-hump with a boyfriend in her parents' basement, feel his hard cock underneath two layers of jeans, his and hers. Now, adult, free to fuck everywhere, she'd occasionally miss that groping desperation, the purpley love bites, the come stain soaking the denim.

He'd switch to the other nipple, sucking and pumping the whole breast in his fist as if to milk her. He thinks the word suckle is sexy, but it makes her think of some sow, pink and swollen and flopped on her side to show her double rows of teats -- piglets blind and squirming. She hates it. Better the violence of just plain suck: like Sylvia Plath said, "every woman adores a Fascist." A bruise is evidence of having been touched by something, hard. Pleasure would zing from nipples to clit like cow's milk shooting from udder to pail. Her breasts would feel about to burst. She knows what it would be like to come like a man, to ejaculate. The arc and spatter of it, the sticky drying, the stain. Desire made evident.

When she had her first orgasm she didn't have breasts.

It was an accident. Until then the rubbing had been just been instinctual and comforting. Then one night after a sudden surge of tension she had release so strong she had to press her thighs together with each throb, praying she wouldn't wet the bed.

Each night afterward, she worried about how to rub for comfort without the pee-thing happening, but soon she relaxed into it, this utterly new thing, and it became masturbation proper. She began to pretend to nap in the middle of the afternoon, rub herself off on a lumpy pillow or with the stiff rubber nipple of a Cabbage Patch doll's baby bottle.

And still today, it was best for her when sex still felt that way: easy. Like a child. Like when she woke up alone after the dream of the boy with the shaved head and the broken legs -- a wounded soldier maybe? In the dream the two of them clung to each other in a swirl of starched hospital sheets; she licked down his ridged belly and tried to tuck his cock into the back of her throat, but it hurt him. She woke up aching, bladder distended, but even after she peed, the ache in the kidneys was still there, her cunt thrumming. She splayed on her back like a pinned frog, knees bent and spread. The ball of one foot notched into the arch of the other, like a Bharata Natayam dancer, the muscle drawn up high and tight in the calf. Her pubic hair was getting too long again, it sewed her together. She had to scissor through the nested brambles to find herself. Pressing two fingers to her clit, she could come by turning out her thighs.

She rarely inserted a finger into her vagina, and when she did it was not for the sake of pleasure but curiosity, to see what the inside of herself would feel like. Her finger curved there like a caterpillar, snug. The contractions of orgasm felt stronger when they closed around nothing, and her arches would cramp viciously. Sometimes the orgasms started there, in the feet. Sometimes at the roof of the mouth. Sometimes in the rectum, sometimes the center of the forehead. She couldn't explain this, how all different parts of her body could come, as if she were literally making love to herself, as if her cunt alone couldn't hold all the pleasure.

When he was there she'd salaam, cheek and shoulders pressed to the sheet, ass in the air, slack-ankled like a sleeping toddler, missing only the wetted thumb loose in the mouth, and he'd enter her that way, rolling the condom down his cock and then sliding in, reaching under her to rub her clit or clasping a hand around the back of her neck. Or he'd roll her over gently and hold her ankles one-handed in the air, like diapering a baby, putting the other hand on her stomach for stability. She couldn't ever come that way but would relish the fullness, the fit of him, how he notched into her cervix again and again. Finally he'd sigh and pull her over on top of him, fitting his fingers into her sternum as though about to pull it apart.

Easing down onto his cock, she'd wish she could split him as he split her. Like a fish. Feel his ribcage cracking moistly open. Crawl in and hold his bloody, pumping heart in her mouth.

When he was socked fully into her that way she'd slide her clit over his pubic bone and think, if we were two men, it would be more honest. It would free me. Imagine being able to suck him off as capably as a man could, with a man's capacious ravenous mouth, to clutch his ass with the spread of a man's broad hands and draw his hips against her face. She'd once read a story where one man fellated another, and the man giving the blowjob was so aroused by the taste and smell of his lover's cock that his own, untouched, shot all over his belly and chest and dripped onto the floor. Imagine being able to forget your own body this way.

The first time they'd had a sexual encounter it was purely women's work, wrist whipping, spinning out the thick white skeins of sperm like wool. She liked to watch his cock as it purpled, feel it jump in her hand, see his face go into its rictus of bliss. She liked also to hold his cock in her mouth, swirling her tongue around the firm smooth head and flicking the little hole. She'd cup his testicles with one hand, feel them draw up tight against his body right before he came. Sometimes his hands would flutter helplessly about her hand, stroke her hair, her ears, shoulders, trying to reach for her breasts as though he didn't deserve pleasure without giving her some too.

She liked being out of reach this way. She'd stroke his perineum with two fingers and feel him surge into her mouth, rope after rope, then thread after thread, until there was a calming and a softening. She'd catch the come in the hollow of her tongue and knock it back all at once like medicine. She once sucked off a virgin and the come was thick and rich as jelly or clotted cream. But his taste was thin and vulnerable, like too much vodka, like a baby's milky spitup.

She wanted to cradle him. Sometimes he'd let her, or sometimes he'd slide exhausted down her body to her cunt. It didn't matter how many times they'd fucked, he'd go crazy with the smell. Sometimes he'd just bury his face in it, but then he'd latch on to her clit and suck it meticulously up and down as though it were a tiny penis. Sometimes with a finger inside. Sometimes pressing a fingertip against her asshole, fluttering there like a moth at a bulb.

She felt something being drawn from her when he sucked her this way. Maybe this is what it feels like to be a man. To have pleasure issue forth from you. To not be able to help it.

She'd grasp the headboard as though invisibly lashed there. Coming this way she felt she knew what it was like to come in someone's mouth, to come not against him or around him but inside him. I want to come inside you. She'd burst between his lips, against his tongue, down his throat. She'd relish the sight of his slick chin when it surfaced.

Evidence: the taste of herself flooding her mouth on his lips and tongue.

She'd sprawl then, pleasantly ravished, lying in her disheveled hair like a maiden tumbled in a hayloft, and he'd mount and fuck her missionary style, vanilla and vigorous. She'd lock her ankles in the small of his back, or unlock them and he'd double her thighs against her torso. Sometimes he'd stop and hold still in her, and she'd clutch her Kegels around him and release, clutch and release, with their mouths pressed together so that she felt like mating insects must feel. The male deposits his sperm. No thrashing human lust, just clutch and release, and she could feel his cock widen and narrow in return. Like Morse code. An internal semaphore.

It was better that way, without language. When she'd bring her legs back down she'd press them together, push his thighs open, and then the cock moving between them would feel like her cock, protruding from her body, thrusting not into her but forth from her.

She'd release him then, feel her body reopen, more deeply than before. Feel him stroke in deep and long and then stay, lodged fully in her, and rock there, over and over, as if trying to climb up into her, riding her clit with insistence and precision. Infinitesimal at first, and focused, the pleasure would build in her, alarming in its speed. It was then he'd speak, urging her to come, his urging was like an air raid siren, heralding the inevitable.

Unlike a siren, he'd whisper. Like an air raid, she'd come utterly without stealth. She could come silently, but wanted to enact it for him. So that he knew. So that he would see and hear and understand what she was feeling. She'd hold her breath and come, then release and let her body flop and gasp. Come so hard she felt the blood surge blindingly in her forehead. She'd come jerking and yelling and tasting on the back of her tongue the mineral tang of pheromones releasing. She'd come all over him. She'd come so hard, it was like weeping. Sometimes, she'd actually weep.

He too held his breath just before he came. His mouth dropped open as though in disbelief at the orgasm welling like an oncoming train. In movies when death happens the breath escapes the body completely on an exhalation, the death rattle goes out, not in. But orgasm happens when the body fills with breath, and fills, and fills again without emptying, fills and holds -- like death, the limbs hold rigid. He'd gasp, eyes wide, wide open.

What was the phrase that Margaret Atwood used? "His spine jerked him like a hooked fish." Sometimes he'd jerk out of her just before orgasm, as though she were sharp on the inside, and he'd clutch his cock and bite her shoulder. She'd clutch it with him, feel him shooting the thick copious come into his own hand. Sometimes he'd lurch forward against her and cry out, and she'd feel the condom heat and balloon against her inner walls. When he knew she wanted to see it, he'd withdraw suddenly, regretfully, take her face in his hands, his lips on her forehead, and spill all over her with a sigh. He'd drag his cock up her belly as it spurted cord after cord of come, drawing a pearly line up her torso, fountaining up between her breasts and filling hot little pools in her navel and in the hollow of her throat.

Poor men. To have to give so much of themselves. She couldn't help but think of the millions and millions of sperm marooned on her body as on a desert island, cooling, drying, dying. Soaked in and absorbed into her skin, or mopped away as he'd straddle her knees and tenderly stroke her down with a huge soft towel.

She'd want to be thus depleted. To hold his soft cock and emptied testicles in her mouth while he slept, to incubate them. To feel his cock lie moistly, like a living creature, along the back of her thigh as they spooned. To drift off with his mouth around her nipple like a baby, watch the rhythmic sucking slow and stop.

To be inside him and surrounding him.

To be everywhere with him at once.

To be of him.

To be him.

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