by Stypa Czech
(08/20/08)

When Lucy had to pee, she'd sometimes hold the urge until her bladder throbbed and relief came as a hot wave of salvation. When Lucy got hungry, she'd sometimes wait until her mouth was so needy the first bite of food ravished her tongue. For the same reason, when Lucy felt the beginnings of an itch in the soft folds of her vulva, she'd sometimes let the condition worsen.

Then when her husband made love to her, his engorged penis would ravage her swollen genitalia, a trowel digging deep, then deeper, into her moist earth. She'd rub and rock atop him, her hands gripping his hairy chest, making him wince, yet laugh, too, at her ferocity. Giddyup cowgirl, he'd say. You ride that bull.

She'd hold off until she had no choice. She couldn't look at him and couldn't speak, every thought sucked into a vortex where nothing existed but the building pressure.

She'd hold off until she had no choice. Then the muscle in her pelvis would spasm, shooting a high to her brain that rivaled divinity. When she could, she'd drop her head, breathing hard, to whisper, Fuck. And Dom would laugh, amazed.

Lucy married Dom because after their fifth date, he threw up his hands and admitted defeat. He'd expected that with enough study, he'd understand her basic structure and reduce her to a theory he could explain. She'd laughed at that, and laughed, too, at the look in his eyes the first time they made love, with a wonder that turned her into Aphrodite before the cattle herder Anchises. Dom, she knew, would never fathom the depth of her and yet never stop trying. He made her feel like both his goddess and personal porn star. That was what allowed Lucy to accept an inconspicuous life in the suburbs with Dom and their two boys.

But then Dom died on a dark October morning when a motorcyclist struck his bike. He was forty-two and Lucy forty. Shock wrapped her in a cocoon. She listened in a haze to the muted world in which her exterior self performed. She heard just enough to understand what people wanted, for her to talk about her tragedy and read their books about grief. But more than that, they wanted her to capitulate, because when she did -- when she purged the poison of her upset -- she'd feel so much better.

Lucy knew otherwise, that when she released her grief, she'd release Dom, too, and he would be gone. So Lucy did what she did best.

She held on.

Lucy expected to burst within a month. But she didn't. More surprisingly, the pressures within her seemed to dissipate rather than grow, leaving an unfamiliar stillness. She lived in earthquake territory, where the tectonic plates released pressure through countless small tremors. Had she lived anywhere else, she might have been fooled by the calm. But when movement stopped, that was the time to worry about the Big One. So Lucy bolted down her psyche and her routine, and tied herself to the wellbeing of her two teenage sons.

A year passed, a winter of rain and cold blowing into a spring of glowing orange poppies along the freeways. The rainless summer passed into an October of dust and sun.

On the third weekend of the month, Lucy found herself son-less and alone on a Saturday morning. She bent over to blow dry her hair and said, "Fuck." She buttoned her white silk shirt -- "Fuck." -- and pulled on her black pants and boots. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." Another infection had come on fast and strong, making her crotch throb. And this time there was no Dom to stroke her labia or scratch her vagina, so irritable and hot.

Fuck, Lucy said.

She drove to the city, trying not to rock side to side, because the urge had grown wild, to scratch and keep scratching. It felt good, desperate and lecherous. Yet the Web sites prattled about a hell of burning, oozing and smell. But what Lucy experienced was like death by orgasm, a constant state of near climax. How could a malady -- an invasion -- do that, create a desire for intensity, for a wanton orgy that flamed and flickered in her imagination?

She gripped the wheel, her pelvis still, straining not to remember how Dom's penis had pumped her swollen walls. Of how every cock-thrust had shocked the open socket of her insides, making her scalp tingle, breath labor and clit scream.

In San Francisco, Lucy spent the next three hours talking about annuities and capital growth strategies while trying to ignore how the seam of her pants rubbed her inflamed lips. Sitting, she had to stop herself from pressing her inner thighs together in a rhythmic drum.

When the last attendee walked away, Lucy stood. Now that no one was here, she could reach down and --

"Lucy!"

She spun around, and there was Dante, the father of her oldest son's best friend. Dante and Lucy had had polite chats over the years, but he looked at her now as he might confront abstract art he didn't understand but found amusing, hands in the front pockets of his jeans, blue eyes a bright shock against white skin and black hair.

"I didn't know you did this kind of stuff," he said.

Lucy smiled and slipped her hands into the front pockets of her trousers, safely arranged so that her fingers couldn't reach her tender vulva. "Got to make a living somehow," she said. "What are you doing here?"

And he told her, something about a charity run and visiting with friends. Lucy tried to pay attention, but couldn't. She needed every ounce of energy to keep herself from scratching and rocking.

"You look pretty hungry," Dante said. "You want --"

"I do?" Lucy said.

Dante paused then smiled. "Yeah, you do."

Lucy couldn't hold the smile anymore. "Shit."

Dante's eyebrows shot up.

"Sorry," Lucy said.

"You okay?"

Lucy nodded too vigorously, a gesture that obligated the other person to treat the lie as truth.

"Want to get something to eat?" Dante said. "Maybe go to that little retro diner down the street for a burger and shake? Something to cool you down."

Lucy drew a hand across her sweating forehead. She closed her legs tight and looked at her watch. "It's kind of late, and I --"

"But it was a burger. Just a burger."

"Yeah, okay."

They walked into the champagne city dusk. The lights of the East Bay Bridge stretched across the water; brightness flamed from the topmost thrust of high-rises. Lucy and Dante went to a diner on the Embarcadero where they sat on the smooth, red vinyl seats. When the food arrived, Lucy picked up her burger and took a bite. She closed her eyes and chewed -- slowly -- her tongue stroking the textures, picking up every flavor. When she opened her eyes, Dante was staring at her with an intensity that made her careless. The moment she rocked her pelvis forward and back and lightning struck her brain, making her ears ring.

She reached with a shaking hand for the frosted glass of her strawberry shake and closed her lips around the straw. She sucked, her cheeks pulling in, the cold an explosion in her mouth.

Lucy set down the glass and looked at her watch. "I --" but for the first time had no idea what to say. Maybe this was a test to see how badly she could torture herself for being alive when Dom wasn't, or to gauge her resolve in keeping him with her. If so, she'd play and win, for Dom. So when Dante asked if Lucy wanted to go to a jazz bar, she held the no in her throat and followed.

They walked to the bistro and sat on hard chairs in a tight brick building, its interior streetlights on chrome. Lucy kept her hands on the tiny table where she could see them. A blue-banged woman of petite demeanor and full-breasted sound sang on the little stage while a man behind her played the piano. Lucy slipped her eyes to Dante. She imagined his clasped hands as a nest of entwined fingers hanging between his legs.

She excused herself and walked to the restroom where wooden fish hung from the ceiling, wriggling in the ventilated air. She stepped into one of two stalls and unzipped her pants. She hooked one hand over the side of the stall and buried two fingers of her other hand in her bulging vulva, the skin soft and wet as the underbelly of a stingray. She rubbed forward and back, first one side then the other, then slipped three fingers inside as far as they would go. The motion helped, but not enough. Not nearly enough. She pulled out her fingers, slick with her warm, sharp, tantalizing smell.

Back with Dante, the singer hipped her way offstage and last drinks were called. Lucy and Dante walked out into the chilled air, past old shipping piers, the java shacks dark, the night that late and the morning that early.

They meandered down a stairway of crumbling concrete that led to the brackish bay. Why the stairs disappeared into the water, Lucy didn't know. She lodged her back against the stairwell wall that hid them from any derelict walking the otherwise abandoned street. Dante propped his elbows back on a step, legs spread. The color of the sky had risen to sapphire, dawn a hair's breadth away.

"All night we've been talking," she said.

Dante nodded, his eyes on her.

Lucy opened her lips, then closed them before her question slipped out. But the words wouldn't leave her mouth, words that on any other day, in any other context, would be inappropriate to outrageous. But here with the cool breeze against her lips and the lapping water four steps down, and in the lateness/earliness of the hour, her mind closed and her mouth opened. "What is it you want?" she said.

Dante didn't move. "To make love to you."

She couldn't take her eyes from him, from the way he could remain so still when the earth shook so violently. The descending moon, the reflection of light on water, her body; all were thrown into chaos. Too much pressure, too much friction. Lucy trembled while all the men she'd turned down since Dom died flashed through her mind. Now here was Dante, at the moment her itch had become unbearable. How close could she go and still not give in?

She rose to one knee and looked down into Dante's eyes. There would be no getting without giving. No answer without action.

She lowered her trembling mouth to his. Her world rocked to the rhythm of heartbeat and vagina. Her hands, and his, removed her pants from one leg so she could straddle his lap, her knees grinding into the crushed concrete of the step. When he slipped into her, the earth exploded, one shockwave after another.

She held a cry in her throat, the sound strangled and desperate. A rift had opened; she might fall with no chance of rescue. Though her knees grew slick with blood from the rock, the pain only accelerated her mania, her desire. Dante wrapped his arm around her waist and she ground her pelvis against him, the harsh friction everything. He unbuttoned her shirt and slipped her nipples free and sucked them, one, then the other, and not sweetly, either. Each thrust of her hips loosed pleasure so concentrated she saw stars on the black screens of her eyelids. Even if she knew someone -- several, hundreds, the whole city -- was watching right now, she couldn't stop. She rocked side to side, forward and back; nothing could appease her. She could hold out, then, and would, not only now, but forever, hold Dom safe.

But then Dante gripped Lucy's lower back and without thinking she arched and threw her head back. She squeezed her eyes shut. She could feel it, feel the relief close, close. Relief she didn't deserve, something inside her whispered. She twisted her face away, but Dante pulled her lips to his and kissed her, his tongue leaving nowhere for her to hide.

Her body became a wave that grew taller, gaining in power. Her hips beat quicker, every motion divine. She could pull out, and would, but even as she commanded herself to hold, goddamnit, freedom called, and with his voice. Dom's voice.

Do it.

She thrust harder, her vulva swelling, her vagina burning, Dante's grip on her tightening.

No, she said, hearing the thought the rush of air against his ear. No.

But Dom pulled her closer, kissed her harder, pulled her higher, pitiless. Until her clit quaked and finally, shaking, jerking, heaving, Lucy lost her balance and fell over the edge. And in that moment, he was gone.

Lucy dropped her head to Dante's shoulder and sobbed as dawn came to Pier 2. She struggled upright, but couldn't look at Dante. He pulled her shirt closed and wrapped his jacket around her. Then he lifted both her hands and kissed each scraped palm.

"You do this all the time?" he said, his voice a quiet, gentle tease.

Lucy looked at him, at this man not Dom, and smiled, strands of hair stuck to her lips. "Sometimes."

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