by Michael O'Mahony
(11/10/04)

I can wing around your Saturn smile,
shut out the moon.

Can't get that song out of my head. It slams my aural reality into the background and the song rises inside my head; Michael Stipe singing about lust and obsession while I revel in the disorientation of dropping into the clouds from 30,000 feet. The fall feels like an ascent, an inversion of all those childhood days spent staring at the sky: California dreaming, a plastic smile through a scratched perspex window, all azure sky and cotton candy clouds. It's strangely comforting to finally be able to pick out toy cars crawling through the streets, reassurance that everything's still there, that she's going to be waiting for me.

Still I'm insecure, nervous. Whatever happens, this will be a moment of revelation.

I close my eyes when gravity clutches my stomach, when we're close enough to the ground to give the illusion of massive acceleration. This is the part of flying I don't enjoy. I can't dismiss the thought of disaster. It's too fast, too easy to imagine the finality of impact. I see myself torn and scattered like a doll, tumbling and bouncing across the asphalt. These fifty-seven passengers with their lives and their dreams, the skeletons in their closets and the secrets they've never told, reduced to a postmodern artwork of clothes and flesh, jewellery and teeth, possessions and bones. I see myself as a footnote to a hysterical headline, a name on a list, a coffin left empty because they couldn't separate the pieces of me from the pieces of the others.

The soft bump of rubber meeting the runway. Sweet relief. The plane slows and I open my eyes. I'm soaked in sweat.

Did I dream you were a tourist in the Arizona sun?
I can see you there with lunar moths and watermelon gum.

In a climate like this, few places are hotter than an airport. The first touch of air is like a soft push from boiling hands. I plant my feet instinctively, rocking back, disappointed that the breeze I'd anticipated is absent. My skin won't dry in this place. My outraged pores will cry rivers. I'll be slickened and coloured and inflamed, marked as an outsider.

I walk to the terminal like I'm on a chain-gang, fighting to hold my place in line and begging for shade. Nothing but blue sky and grey concrete. Overwhelming heat. Inside, the air-conditioning is a gift from God. I want to fall through the doors and just lie there for a while. The crowd shuffles me onward, past the blank faces of customs officers and into the hall where we reclaim our luggage. I sit for a while, content to watch my bag go around and around while others snatch desperately for so many similar suitcases, as though they cannot bear to be parted from their possessions a minute longer. I close my eyes and see the imagined crash again, the luggage lying stripped of meaning in the sunshine.

Most of the other passengers are gone by the time I drag my tired body to the carousel and shoulder my bag. As I do, it strikes me that I'm probably torturing her. I can picture her waiting, twisting her hands and watching others hug relatives or kiss partners. Maybe she's wondering if she's missed me -- or if I'm coming at all. So many possibilities, and at least some of them must paint me dishonest, as someone other than I've claimed to be. I start walking, quickly now.

Let the sun beat through the clouds.
Let me kiss you on the mouth.
All my childhood toys
with chewmarks in your smile.

I spot her straight away. She stands out so clearly it's almost funny, or it would be funny if I had the breath to laugh. All the conversations we've had, the lyrics we've shared, the promises, they've all pointed to this moment that's coming at me so fast I can't process it.

She sees me. She smiles and starts walking. I feel my own smile only as a contortion of facial muscles, my feet moving only as instinct, the same instinct that carried me these thousands of miles to a virtual stranger.

"Hey," she says. It's the first time I've heard her voice, here in an airport that's much emptier than I imagine airports being.

"What up, dawg?" I hear myself reply, some distant part of my brain engaging wit, engaging memory.

She laughs and she's beautiful, so fucking beautiful. She hugs me and I have to hug her back with one arm, the other weighed by the strap of the bag. I can smell her, feel her slim, fragile body against me. She must be able to feel my reaction.

"This is..." she says, drawing back and looking at me.

I kiss her. I have to. It's a nervous kiss, arid and cautious as the heat haze over the runway, lips closed, mind racing. Her arms tighten around me, go up to my neck. She opens her mouth and takes us suddenly to a place of possibility and fantasy. God, I've dreamed this so many times, of tasting her this way, having her against me, falling into a prelude to all the things I've told her I'm going to do.

"This is the part where we fuck in the toilets," I say, when her mouth slips from mine.

"In my car," she replies. "In the car park."

And then she takes my hand and leads me away across the deserted concourse while I wish for people because I have this sudden urge to grab a complete stranger and ask them if this is really happening.

And I want you like the movies,
touch me now.

Out in the sunshine, all the cars look the same. I can't look up. You think of the sun as yellow, but here it's a great white eye, impossibly bright, washing colour from every surface. My hand is warm and slippery in hers. Her grip makes me think of sex. The back of her neck makes me think of sex. The way she walks and her hair make me think of sex.

Every culture reference we share, all the things we've absorbed and how they've dragged us together: her thoughts are already inside me, mine in her. I want to make that invasion physical, to consummate our meeting of minds in every possible configuration of intercourse my mind can conceive. Every image in my mind is obscene.

A sea of cars in every direction, distant cities barely visible in the reflected glare of all this chrome. I feel unclean with sweat and frustration. I look at her and see only pornography -- the ways I want to bend her over and fold her up, to penetrate and impale. The ways I want to make her mine.

Her car...it's just a car. It's a surface for her to lean on, a background she's superimposed against. All I'm seeing is black hair and blue eyes and white skin. All I'm seeing is her face as she comes to me and we kiss again, this time with all caution thrown aside. I hear the thud of my bag dropping to the ground; an empty, dry sound; there are no acoustics here.

My mouth finds her lips, her jaw, her neck. I grab at the thin straps of her top and strip them from her shoulders. My hands claim her bare breasts. I can't even pretend to be gentle. She murmurs in seeming assent to my clumsy caresses. She lets herself fall back against the car as my mouth finds a nipple and traps it between my lips, my tongue snaking out to flick at its swollen tip. I feel her working my belt open, negotiating all the buttons and zips of my clothes by touch alone, finally trapping my cock in a tight, clammy fist, stroking so hard it almost hurts.

"Do I need protection?"

She laughs and shakes her head, her pale face coloured by arousal, her breath coming in quick, sharp bursts. I grab at the hem of her skirt and pull it up over her hips, explore the hot skin beneath, surprised by the underwear she isn't wearing.

"Fuck," I say, and she laughs again.

I love you crazy, just keep on.
I love you madly, just keep watch.
You wipe my lips, you turn me on.
My attentions are turned to you.

She pulls me to her and kisses me hard. She lifts one leg and I grasp at her thigh, lift her, feel my cock dragged across slick, aroused flesh. I reach down between us, find her, divide her, inhaling her gasp as we finally share that most intimate embrace.

She grips me, surrounds me, pulls me in and holds me. Her heat is greater than the heat we are bathed in, more intense. I feel faint. She wraps her legs around me, booted heels crossed at the small of my back. I'm thrusting against her, in her, lost on wave after wave of delicious friction, senses drowned in an ocean of her, falling, willingly, into the abyss of sensation and scent.

You, you, you.

She says my name. Finally she says my name. I've been waiting to hear those two syllables from her mouth for so long, since before I heard her voice, since before I'd even guessed what it might be like to actually be inside her. She gasps, repeats it, takes it up like a mantra, lifts her hips towards me, holds my eyes with hers until she has to squeeze them closed, until she has to bite her lip and let her head fall back, fingernails digging into the back of my neck, thighs clinging desperately to my waist.

Seeing her in extremity, saying my name this way, seeing her driven to orgasm by my touch and my invasion . . . it's more than I can take. I lose my grip on all those fantasies and find myself trapped and caged in this moment, locked tightly to my Maybe Girl, high and burning on the sensations she sends racing through my body, on the pulsing, twitching, spasming impulses that pull at muscles and nerves, that gather for one final assault that drags a climax from my weary body, stealing the last of my strength.

I fall against her.

I walked the tension wire line,
and I learned to disrespect the signs,
and I want you like a Pisces rising.

We don't speak for a while, just adjust our clothes and climb into her car.

Motion gives us anonymity. We're just another couple on another journey, just another red cell in the arteries of America.

She’s wearing sunglasses, hiding those blue eyes behind Audrey Hepburn lenses, watching the white line while I watch her. I have so many words. Too many words. It isn’t a matter of being speechless so much as having too much to say.

Our permanent collection of erotic stories