by Simone Temple
(01/29/03)

I wake up in your bed and don't know who you are.

You're asleep, in your 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets with the care tag still crisp. The art deco clock, a black half-dome on your bedside table, says it's 8:00 a.m., but it'd be easy to doze through the morning with these windows smothered in amethyst velvet drapes, a lone sliver of gray light peeking in. Your room is a balcony above a warehouse loft, closed off by black curtains. Drunk, we climbed a wooden ladder last night to come up here.

I should have been scared -- entering this building through an alley door that smelled of urine, beer, and damp newsprint. Ten minutes after last call, just the two of us in a drafty freight elevator with clashing metal doors.

When I first saw you, sitting at the bar with your friends, I pictured myself crouched between your knees, my hair spilling over your lap, my mouth full of you, right up to the back of my throat. Your hands on the back of my head.

I didn't ask to see this, don't know why I wanted it: to be with you one night, to be a warm mouth for you. Because that's how this will end -- after one night. It's almost over now. 8:05 a.m. You'll wake up soon, and as I leave you'll say, to be polite, I'll call you.

Last night, wanting you so much almost made me hate you.

I often see visions of myself with strangers. The only way to make the visions stop is to act them out. I saw myself with every man I passed on the street yesterday.

In the bar, you laughed at something your friend said, the chubby man with glasses. A reluctant laugh; you held it until your companions were roaring, then released it with a shake of your head. I liked the way you held your bottle of beer, dangling it by the neck, your wrist loose, one finger stroking the sweaty glass. As if you were thinking of something delicious or painful, with a carnal perfume. I liked the tilt of your head, the way your lips met the bottle's mouth. I liked how your jaw rocked forward, and how your bleached-blonde hair, half-spiked and half-messed, cast a shadow on your forehead when you finished your drink, dropped your head down, and set the bottle back in its puddled ring. In the middle of that bar, you were thirsty.

You made me thirsty: the thumbprint shadow at the base of your throat, your eyelashes when you looked down, the three open buttons of your silky grey shirt. The nails of your pinky and ring fingers were painted green.

I sat at a table with vodka and soda in front of me. Not my usual martini, not in a place like that. I wore my flimsiest summer dress and my most expensive high-heeled sandals -- no purse, no wrap, no girlfriend.

It took you almost an hour to talk to me. That's how it's done, no matter what anyone says -- I scare men away if I approach them first, especially ones who only stand as tall as my chin. You didn't ask if I was a model, like everyone else does. I'm not quite pretty enough for you. But you had no complaints about my body.

I'm not a model. Who wants to be a human clothes hanger?

Waiting for you to notice me, I passed the time by imagining your apartment: when you finally took your motorcycle boots off, would you drop them onto a bare wooden floor or a Persian rug?

You didn't look the Persian rug type. But the small luxuries here surprised me. Verbena soap in the bathroom, crystal wine glasses. Yet the kitchen nook is plastered with four peeling layers of old wallpaper.

The green velour bathrobe in your closet was a handy luxury. I borrowed its sash to tie your hands this morning. You slept through it. I kissed the insides of your wrists -- tender skin, salt, submerged blue veins -- as I bound you to the iron headboard and tightened the knots.

Last night I dreamed I tied you; that's why I tried it. My dreams are as relentless as my visions. If I ignore them, they come back stronger. I get so I can't sleep at all, but the dreams are still there before my eyes.

I just want to rest. It's more comfortable this way, with you tied up:

You can't make me continue.

You can't interrupt me.

Last night I fell for your voice. You asked, with the hint of a drawl, if you could buy me a drink; I liked the lazy way your tongue tasted every syllable of my name. Back here in your bed, you licked me like I was butterscotch. Later, you said Sweetheart into my hair as your back tensed like a fist and your skin ran with sweat. That's how it's done the first time with someone new: me underneath, my legs around your waist and your breath hot in my ear.

It's not your fault I didn't do the thing I wanted so much I could taste it. I couldn't. Not with that vision of me so fresh in my mind, the one where I was a moment's convenience for you.

Now, though, I pull the sheet back and trace a map of you with my fingertips: the baby-soft skin on the head of your cock, firm and exotic as some wild mushroom; the vein that pulses underneath the shaft; balls the size of hens' eggs.

How does it feel, to wake up hard? Such delicate machinery, out here for me to admire, and every morning it displays itself in full glory like this while you sleep. Automatic and inescapable. You have to wake up now, with my fingers stroking and teasing. Time for you to part those brown eyelashes and turn on the charm.

I get on top of you, cradle your ribs with the insides of my thighs. Can you feel me against your solar plexus? I'm wetter now than I was last night. I draw a mustache under your nose with my own honey.

"Good morning," I say, and kiss your eyelids.

Your fingers clench and relax. You make a soft noise in the back of your throat, move your head to one side, and wrinkle your nose, then arch your back to stretch but come up short, unable to bring your hands back to your sides.

Your eyes snap open.

Brown. Your eyes are brown velvet. They ask what's happening, but all I say is "Shhh" and kiss your temple, the stubbled field of your jaw, your neck. You smell like cigarette smoke, cologne, sweat, the cottony sheen of sleep. My fingernails scrape the thickets of hair under you arms, raising a cloud of scent, a coded message of who you are.

You flinch, then try to make it a joke: "That tickles. Sweetheart..."

You say, "Let me up" and "Sweetheart, I have to take a piss."

But I don't let you go.

You don't ask what I'm doing. You don't speak at all, because now we both know that you've forgotten my name. For some reason this excites me, and I touch myself, fingers stroking. Before I come, I raise up off you just enough that you can catch a glimpse of me: a red jungle bloom, spiked with dew -- but you can't touch.

"Should I leave now?" I whisper, when I catch my breath. "Sweetheart?"

You say nothing.

I push my fingers into your mouth, the ones that taste of me, then close my teeth on your nipple. Flick it with my tongue, suck and pull. You try to twist away, but both nipples are hard as buckshot.

Suck...slide...pull...nip. Your skin is laced with salt, your belly is a field of golden grass leaning in one direction, toward the marshy scent of sex and rut. The ends of my hair must tickle you as I work my way down. You've closed your eyes. Your belly quivers under my mouth; your cock strains toward my face.

So I stop, eye-to-slitted-eye with your sex, which has a perfect, pearly tear forming. I feel a playful wine in my veins, the kind that cats must be drunk on when, all sweet eyes and ready claws, they roll on their backs to present their bellies.

"What do you want?" I whisper.

Last night, I was the one who waited and hoped.

You groan and raise your hips a fraction. I breathe against your skin, and the grasses ripple.

"You," you say. "I want you." Your throat moves as you swallow; you flex your bound hands.

"Please," you say, and I reward you with kisses on the insides of your thighs.

Incredible, that I've never thought of doing it this way before. The vision of you with your hands in my hair, guiding my mouth, vanishes. It won't return.

There's no hurry. It might take me hours to get where I'm going. The pouch between your legs, filled with riches: each golden egg fits in my mouth, one at a time, over and over. Nips and kisses up the length of your cock, up to the swelling crown, which I swirl with my tongue. Sweet, glazed with the taste of us both. I scrape you with my teeth as I take you in, and press down around the base of your cock hard with one hand. It must hurt, but you only buck once and chew the inside of your lip. I relent and curl my lips over my teeth, reward you with a long, sucking rhythm, steady as rain, with a tongue flicker at the top of each stroke. Too slow for you, but you say nothing -- unwilling, I imagine, to risk making me stop. My jaw aches, but my mouth still waters for you.

I slide my middle finger into my pussy, then press the finger against your asshole. You jump, but you're sweating and tensing now, pushing upward with your hips each time I move my mouth away, your belly a knotted plain of muscle. This makes me slow down further, give you a taste of my teeth again. I work my finger into you as the head of your cock nudges the back of my throat. Every nerve in your body must be alive to the inside of my mouth now, a tingling prayer for me to withhold the pain and continue sucking. The smell of you is sharp in my nostrils. You groan. I imagine you'll dream of this later, of me. Right now you feel filled and tormented, unbearably alive.

You won't last much longer. I press my fingernails into your stomach and move my head faster. You sigh and cry out, and I feel the warm pulsing throb move against my tongue as you come and fill my mouth with milky heat. I swallow everything I take from you.

I untie your hands. The sweetest thing of all is that when I'm dressed and ready to go, I'll smile and say, as I walk out the door, I'll call you.

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