Mortals

He got out of everything except his loafers. He wanted to kiss her. He put his hand behind her head. She turned her face away. She was weeping softly and helplessly, not making anything of it. He wanted it to stop. Everything is impossible, he thought. She was beautiful, naked. Her breasts were like what, some perfect imaginary kind of fruit, like that platonic idea behind some paradisiacal fruit not known on earth, something like that. He was full of lust, which was hardly surprising, he was in a deprived state. She looked silvery. They had moonlight. Widely scattered strings and points of light burned in the landscape below them and the blur over Pretoria was visible.

He said, “We’re going to stay right next to the car, and I mean right up against it.”

She nodded. He would dispense with his socks and loafers and put them in the car where they would be safe if they had to leave in a rush. His experience of enforced barefootedness had left its mark on him.

He reparked, changing the heading of the car so that it was angled toward the mouth of the access road. He would see that the afghan was placed within the lee of the open doors on the driver’s side. They would be shielded from the vantage of any approaching vehicle, but headlight beams would alert them before any intruder actually arrived.

They were out of the car. With the side of one shoe Ray knocked away the largest pieces of gravel on the ground immediate to the car. He opened the car doors. Iris spread the afghan out. He could see that her nipples were hard.

“We don’t have to do this,” he said. It seemed odd, saying it, considering his erection, the state he was in. It was not going to seem sincere to her, but it was. Her weeping was less, at least.

She shook her head vehemently. The silence protocol was still in effect.

“And you’re not cold?” Her response was as before.

He said, “I’ll go with you if you want to pee.” He had the torch ready. He escorted her to a spot behind the toilets. He couldn’t believe that they were taking care of business naked in South Africa, but they were. He lit her up, as she squatted, but just long enough to see that there was nothing threatening in the vicinity. He stood guard. He couldn’t remember what the name of the odd duckbill bone at the base of the spine that showed when anyone squatted was. Delay was only making him more adamant, his penis more adamant. Iris made Ray turn around while she used some towelettes. She was so fastidious.

They returned to the afghan. She knelt and she motioned to him to do the same, facing her a foot apart. He did. She had some inner plan for this.

They touched palms and then interlocked fingers and gripped hard. She had touched her what, her introitus, briefly. He didn’t want to think pussy at that moment, he didn’t know why. It was only an opening in a human body but it was, in her case, so nice. Her pubic escutcheon grew in a neat compact bar over her introitus, with almost no growth to the sides. It was like art. He was not going to be pushed, once they began. She was going to wait. He needed to be superb, if he could.

Without warning she pulled him over and down, to the right, to get him on his back. Her touch was like fire, as she guided him. Why did he have to lose her, he wanted to know. She was unusual. He remembered her observing at an embassy event when the subject under discussion was the food choices available at Kopano’s Market that certain avocados here smelled like semen when you cut them, which was true, but not the thing to say. Other people had mentioned lame things like the teardrop-shaped potatoes and fluted tomatoes.

She straddled him. Her hair was loose. It was cut straight across at the level of her shoulders. It was hanging forward, hiding her face, except for her eyes, which she was holding shut tight. She was being careful about his cock, leaving it alone so far. On his back meant fun for him, Iris taking her time.

He had to push his anxiety away. It would be easier for him to get up and take care of an emergency if she weren’t on top of him. He had to forget about that. Some of their best sex had been with her on top, using him as a dildo, taking her sweet time.

One thing he loved that she sometimes did was to align their nipples and rub. Hers would be hard and his would be too. He didn’t know if she would do that. In an ideal world she would do everything she had ever done with him, in farewell, a variety show, had they but world enough and time, which they didn’t. There was too much.

She was dragging her hair across his eyes. Kiss me, he thought, anguished, because she wasn’t going to, he knew. She lightly bit his shoulder. She was lowering herself more. She was brushing her breasts across his face. He wanted to take one of her breasts into his mouth, either one. He was frantic. He wanted to get as much of one of her breasts into his mouth as he could. Her breasts were killing him, her blunt instruments. He had called them that and she had laughed, long ago.

She was kissing his eyebrows, licking them and kissing them. He didn’t want her to do anything tonight that they hadn’t done before, anything she had learned elsewhere. He couldn’t tell her that. But he could will her to stay within those lines. He felt pathetic. He was sure she had kissed his eyebrows before, maybe not as dedicatedly, though. When they got to it, she would come first. In a second or minute she would be using the head of his cock to open the lips of her pussy and that would be perilous. He would imagine a knot in the base of his cock. He would make it tighten as she tried to draw it loose, undo it and make him drown in her, which he would not do.

He wanted to turn the torch on her, to look at her. He couldn’t do that.

She was pressing her pubis against his right hipbone. In a minute she would use his knee against her labia, hard. She was sweating lightly, despite the temperature. Her parts were perfect. In time of course they would go the way of all flesh, and he felt tender toward the body he would never see. He wondered if Morel would still appreciate her. Months back when she had described herself as perimenopausal he hadn’t paid attention, hadn’t linked it up with all the other medical jargon creeping into her conversation since she’d gotten in with Morel. She would be good for the long haul. It was genetic and it was never smoking and drinking and just by instinct keeping out of the sun. She was a genetically advantaged person. And she had been his. The world is a desperate place, he thought. Overhead the stars were like salt in the wound that he was, as the band played on, she played on, teasing her cunt with the head of his cock, like old times. She was very wet. He tried to touch her there and she slapped his hand away. It was going to be no kissing and no hands sex. He would take it. She had an idea about this encounter and whatever it was would be okay.

He was going to remember every second of going into her, this last time. He had told her more than once in the past that he wished she could be him long enough to know the unspeakable pleasure of going in, hot, going in, being let in, rather, being allowed.

She wasn’t ready for him to go in. She had his penis where she wanted it. She was sliding hard against the underside of the shaft, sliding her labia hard along it. His heels were in the gravel. He wanted a pillow. He would do better if he had a pillow. There was no pillow.

She was sweeping the wings of her hair across his mouth, her hair dark as death. In junior high school the words Eat hair had been a dire male-to-male insult. That was when oral sex was considered a perversion. She was sitting up higher again and he wanted her not to stop bending closer to him. He caught her hands and pulled. She resisted. He pulled again and she resisted again, harder. For a moment it felt like rowing.

He thought, We are all rowing toward death, keeping it behind us but rowing toward it and not looking at it while we study our pitiful accomplishments receding. In sex you might forget death. He could feel drops of something on his chest, tears or it could be sweat. She was being rough. He didn’t think she was trying to make him come, really, before she did, to make some kind of point about his stamina, a mean point. No, she was doing the cooperative thing they did. He hoped that was right. But she was being rough. She knew his limits, or thought she did. Tonight was different.

She had raised herself up and was touching herself again. That was almost too much for him. When she masturbated she always wanted him to hold her free hand, which made it love and not sex, only, not only sex. She wasn’t masturbating now, she was teasing herself, for him, he knew. She stopped. He wished she would say something.

This was not going to be dawdling sex or karezza or any halfway sex fun practices they had fooled around with. Here is my body and the things we can do together with it, was what she was also going to be saying to somebody else.

One thing she knew was that his cock could take pretty substantial provocation outside the snug sanctum it was aiming for. She was using that. But going in, the first minutes after that, were delicate, but if she helped they would pass and the band would begin to play and that would be fine, it could play on.

She was letting him in, just, and stopping there, and then bending over again and dragging her hair all over