by Abbie Gallagher
(07/02/08)

The drum was missing.

That much Catherine noticed right away as she pulled the sheet and comforter from her body, as she sleepily untangled her feet and swung them to the floor. For weeks now, on awakening, her eyes automatically went to that space on the wall between the wardrobe and the window where Sean hung his bodhrán and beside it his tipper in its pouch. That was gone too.

Or at least it wasn't hanging on the wall, for when she gathered her watch from her bedside table she found it there, sitting on top of its pouch. But why would he leave it behind, unless...?

She felt a sudden flush of embarrassment. Which was silly, of course. Why should she be embarrassed? She was a grown-up, in full possession of her faculties, and what she did in her own private...Still, she wondered what he'd think.

She picked up the tipper and ran her fingers over the bulging disc at the center, the smooth knobs at either end. She had held it in her hands this way every morning for the past week. But now that it seemed to have been placed here, at her bedside, on purpose, she held it more tentatively. She brought the tipper up to her face, sniffed it. She'd been careful each day to wash it afterward. But now she thought she detected a faintly incriminating odor. It must be her imagination. Yet she set the tipper down abruptly on its pouch.

She had thought very little about it when Sean said he was going to take up the bodhrán, take lessons, maybe even play at a local session. Good for you, boyfriend, she told him. I hope it works out. Besides, she had enough on her plate to worry about. She was stressed, and the fact he'd found himself yet another pastime only made her feel envious. It was easy for him. He was a stress-free techie. He parachuted into a business, mystified everyone with his network magic, tinkered everything into a new rhythm, and was gone and on to the next gig without a second thought.

For her it was different. Sales wasn't like that, she told him: It was a way of life. The competition was serious. It was for full-time professionals, not amateurs, even the good-for-you kind of sales she was in, educational supplies, books and software.

To Sean this was a foreign language. He just didn't get it. But he did understand when she told him that it was getting to be too much for her, that she needed to take a bit of leave, a few weeks at least, just to decompress.

With time off and time to reflect she realized it wasn't just quotas, long hours and competition that stressed her. It was the whole process of sales. Deep down, it didn't feel like productive or legitimate work. She didn't make anything, or provide any essential service. There was nothing unwholesome in the kind of software and textbooks she sold. Still, sales was sales. Subtle and not-so-subtle coercion, manipulation, self-serving shadings and shapings of the truth -- in short, she had a bad conscience.

Sean laughed at her misgivings. You're a peddler, a drummer, Sean told her, an old and honorable profession. Go with it, and be happy. It's just another set of protocols. You learn the protocols and you play. It's the rules of your art. People expect you to play by those rules. No matter how much people claim they don't want to be gamed or sold, they expect, even demand that you play. At the start of her career she tried total transparency and unvarnished truth. But it was like making a movie with no sound track, no melodies and rhythms. No sale.

She didn't pay a lot of attention at first to Sean's own sort of drumming. He practiced almost constantly when he wasn't at work. But he was considerate, playing upstairs in the bedroom with the door closed, or on the main floor of the townhouse when she was in the bedroom. Or he tucked a towel inside the drum to mute the sound. So his drumming almost always sounded distant, in the background.

His drumming became a quiet accompaniment, a pulse for the daily routine, fading almost to white noise. Yet she began to miss it when it stopped, found herself actively listening for it to begin again: the single strokes, the doubles, the triples, the now familiar Celtic rhythms. Sean's drumming began to seep by stages into her consciousness, at first only inducing a kind of feeling of comfort and relaxation, but later morphing into well being and pleasure. Lying in her bed on a weekend morning, hearing the sound of Sean's drumming rising up the stairs set her hands wandering over her newly responsive body.

She was a little puzzled by this change in her. Was it Sean's drumming, or simply the consequences of being off work? She wasn't sure, but she wasn't going to complain. Nor was Sean. Her more-ready arousal flowed into their lovemaking, which became more intense, more frequent, more inventive.

Sean's first session at Dagda's Pub settled the question. Being only a recent convert to the practice, he hardly had a starring role. He drummed to the side, next to more experienced drummers, trying his best to keep up and keep in time. It was a good start, everyone agreed. But for Catherine it was so much more.

Seeing Sean up on stage, seeing him embrace that round goatskin drum in his arm, roll the tipper across its surface in those familiar rhythms: it sent a jolt through her most intimate places. She felt an intense craving to do Sean, right there, on the stage.

Afterwards, she could scarcely restrain herself. She endured the long minutes of packing up the stage, putting the instruments away, exchanging greetings. On the long ride home she kept these intense feelings to herself. But halfway up the stairs to the bedroom, she suddenly grasped Sean's hips, turned him around, unzipped his pants, and pulled out his cock. She engulfed him in her thrilling mouth, brought him alive, wet and electric from root to head. She sucked with a lust and enthusiasm that couldn't be taught, or even explained.

He'd been rock hard in seconds. In seconds, he came. Instantly, he brought her around, set her on the step above, hiked up her skirt, pulled down her panties. He fell as if famished onto her pussy, sucking and licking from bottom to top, striving she knew to give back as much or more of what she had just given him. He pushed two fingers inside, pressing upward, settled his mouth on her clit, sucked it between his lips, licked it rapidly, ecstatically. She too came in seconds. They sat a little dazed afterwards on the steps, wondering what had just happened. Later they went upstairs and made love in a more attentive and leisurely fashion.

They both thought it a little crazy. They laughed at the idea that Catherine had become a "Celtic groupie." But neither was interested in over-analyzing this gift or in turning it down.

Every Friday that summer was session night at Dagda's, and every night afterward the real session began, each night more urgently, so that they didn't even make it to the stairs but coupled on the floor just after closing the door, or even with the door still open. By the end of the first month, Sean hadn't even left the curb in front of the pub, hadn't even started the car, before she had undone his pants and pulled his cock into her wet mouth.

Just as Sean's drumming at home had insinuated itself into her consciousness, now the sessions at Dagda's became the axis around which her week turned.

Weekday mornings and afternoons began to drag, to weigh on her a little. She made a point of getting out in the afternoon, using up time shopping, browsing at the library or at the bookstore, or having coffee with friends.

It was good to reconnect with two of her co-workers, square-jawed Beatrice, the office manager, and the perpetually sad-eyed Margaret. Hearing all the familiar minutiae of the game made her again feel the pulse of her work life. For the first time since her leave of absence, she could see herself wanting to go back. She wondered if Beatrice and Margaret ever thought about work in this way, or whether they would understand. But she didn't know how to ask.

Still, she wasn't quite ready to go back. The bodhrán, hanging on the wall next to the wardrobe, drew her attention. It became the first thing she glanced at when she entered the room, and when she woke in the morning. She began to take it down every day, even before she was dressed -- to dust it off, she told herself, gliding her hand over the smooth goatskin.

One morning she took down the pouch with the tipper inside. She slid the tipper out and with it came a small foil packet of bodhrán conditioning cream. Essential Cream, it was called. According to the packet, it made the goatskin supple and well-tensioned; it allowed for the quick release of that tension. Bodhrán cream. Not for personal use, it said.

Not for personal use. It was as if...She smiled to herself. It was unopened. The treatment was obviously overdue. Following the instructions on the packet, she turned the bodhrán over, tore the packet open and squeezed the cream out onto the inside surface of the skin. Removing her cotton underpants --- it was all that she had yet managed to put on --- she used them to rub the cream into the drum, again as instructed. She covered every inch inside.

Tentatively, she turned the drum back over, tapped at it with the tipper. She jumped at the resonant sound.

She reached into her bedside table and brought out her lubricant, her personal lubricant, with its tingle of peppermint. She squeezed it out along the whole length of the smooth wooden tipper from knob to knob, massaging it over the wood. She lay back on the bed, naked but for the drum, which she placed flat across her hips.

Trailing the tipper up between her swelling breasts, she tapped each of her long pink nipples with a slippery knob. Sean's drumming ran through her mind, along with a wet, tumbling series of their most recent encounters.

She burrowed her hands under the drum, the left hand holding the tipper between her fingers by the raised disc in the middle, the way she had seen Sean do it, the other hand free to stroke her pussy, gently swelling the lips, exploring the edges of her hardening clit.

Now wet, warm, and panting for breath, she pushed one knob into her ready cunt, probing up and forward, then pulled it out again, sounding the drum from inside with the tipper's other knob. She was past being alarmed by the drum's booming sound. She went on stroking with one hand, plunging and drumming with the tipper in the other, ever faster, going from single to double, to perhaps the edge of a triple beat, until she came hard, intensely. She discovered in the aftermath that, for the first time on her own, she had left a wet spot on the bed.

That was a few days, a few delicious private adventures ago. Now the bodhrán was gone. But the tipper was there on her night table, lying on its soft pouch.

She dressed, had her coffee, went out for a paper, whiled away her morning returning again and again to all that happened this summer, to the bodhrán.

Did Sean know? Was he unhappy? Or was it simply an accident that he'd taken the drum and left the tipper behind? And if he'd left it on purpose, why? Late in the morning, she returned to the bedroom and looked at the tipper.

And suddenly, she knew.

With the tipper lubricated in her hand, she undressed in front of the mirror, ran the tipper down over her firm hips, her strong thighs. With her free hand she cupped her large breasts, squeezed her nipples. She rolled one knobbed end of the tipper over her pussy, over the hood of her swelling clit, and gently pushed it in.

On the bed, with pillows arranged to support her head, to raise her ass above footboard, she lay back, legs spread before the mirror on the bedroom door. She wet her fingers in her mouth and made her nipples glisten in the subdued light of the bedroom. She squeezed and stroked them erect. Still gently probing her cunt with the tipper, she explored her pussy with her fingers, memorizing as if for the first time each turn and fold, reading her pussy like a blind woman using Braille.

She listened intently, stroking her clit. Her ears picked up the distant sounds of the neighborhood: a horn, the hazy rattle of a jack hammer, the chirps of starlings, a dog barking. Against this fragmentary counterpoint, sounds closer at hand: the careful opening and closing of a door, some steps, some shuffling, the faint thudding of objects falling to the floor, a single drumbeat.

She groaned at that opening beat, stroked herself faster, listened eagerly as the drum took up a steady rhythm in single marching strokes. The floor creaked under the weight of a bare foot.

The drumming increased in speed, began to beat in doubles. It rose up the stairs as she matched its rhythm, working faster with tipper and hand, taking herself tantalizingly closer and closer to the edge.

Triple beats began to mix with doubles. The rhythm split, reformed, rose from many places at once it seemed, from inside the room and out, waves beating against her body, flowing out from her body.

The door swung open with a sudden breath of air. Like a curtain rolled aside on stage, fully opening to the sound of drumming, fully displaying a naked Sean, his usually calm, open face flushed with excitement. He rolled his tipper -- a second tipper -- along his bodhrán, which he gripped hard against his strong chest, his tight stomach, while his cock stood straight up, bobbing as he marched to her bed.

She pulled the tipper from her cunt -- her tipper -- and guided his swollen cock inside, raised her smooth legs up to straddle his hips. With her legs she steadied and guided his thrusts. He drummed as they fucked, his cock larger, hotter than she had ever felt it, probing, filling everyplace in her resonating inner surfaces. It was a long, hot fucking, and when every place in her had been touched, when she was at the point of erupting, she reached up and grabbed Sean's arm as it drummed.

She slid her hand down to where his hand was so rapidly working. Instantly, he understood. He let her take the tipper from his hand. With the tipper she banged, hard on the bodhrán, in loud slow beats, and moaning, came in a convulsive hot rush along the length of her body. Her moan sent an overpowering pulse through Sean's body, and with a deep groan he too exploded, spurt after spurt, thrust after thrust, overflowing her pussy and pearling her soft, swollen lips.

In the morning, the bodhrán was back in its familiar place on the wall, the tipper in its pouch hanging beside it. Her tipper or his, she wondered. She lifted the sheet from her naked body, swung her feet to the floor. She stood and stretched, raising her tender breasts as she did so. She felt between her legs, felt her patch of hair still sticky and warm. She ran a finger along her lips, gently, as if to groom its ruffled folds; she pushed inside to feel the thick fluids of the night before.

Taking the drum from the wall, she tapped gently on the goatskin. She took down the pouch with its tipper and slid it out into her hand. With it came the packet of conditioning cream, essential to keeping a drum well-tensioned, supple, susceptible of quick release.

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