A memory of Warren Hawkes persecuting me with his fantasies in Rockville: “Ah yes my brother, the sweet fuzz of a truly girlish cunt. We are evolving away from the great pleasures. When the sunlight can get through the hair. By the time we’re out of here, we’ll have to risk arrest to sample that sweet girlish cunt. Sweet, sweet, sweet girlish cunt…”
Jade placed her hand on top of my head. I thought she was going to guide my mouth onto her, but she stroked my hair and the pull of her magnetism was upward, away from her.
“I forced that, didn’t I?” she said, when I was next to her.
“That? No.”
“I did. I don’t know why. It seemed logical and right but it always does, doesn’t it? When you want something. A pleasure. Or anything, I guess. Now I feel a little…”
“I love you,” I said. I stroked her cheek.
“I feel so much better. I have to admit.” Suddenly, she sat up and patted the sheets.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Blood. I thought I felt myself leak. I’m not in the mood to bleed all over these sheets. Well, it’s all right. For now. Shit. I’m going to have to get up anyhow and get in my monthly swaddling clothes. I’ve got the heaviest flow of anyone I’ve ever
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not forgetting you.” She reached down and laid her hand on my stomach. Kissed my chest. Then with a falsely light touch, a delicacy that was terribly exaggerated, she put her fingers over my erection.
“Not like that,” I said.
“Yes. It’s all right.”
“I want to be in you.”
“No. We can’t. Don’t worry, don’t worry.” She gripped me harder. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and slid it down the length of me. Gripped the base, and then pulled up.
“You’re bigger,” she whispered.
“No.”
“I think so. But maybe it’s just I…” she was probably going to say it had been a while since she’d made love with a man.
I felt suddenly annoyed, jealous, shy.
She moved up and down me, slowly, at the same pace I’d stroked her. I was trying not to come, trying to gather the courage to insist again that she let me enter her. But then she touched the side of my face and kissed me—lightly, like an infatuated stranger—and everything began to fall away. I felt myself coming without experiencing any real pleasure. I discharged a long unbroken ribbon of burning semen. It was shooting somewhere or other and then Jade turned my penis toward me and I felt the come against my belly, my biceps, my collarbone.
Now the pleasure, long moments after the release, seeped through me, honey from a broken jar.
“God,” Jade said, “you got it all over me.” She sounded vaguely pleased. She was still holding my cock. “But you’re still hard.”
“Yes,” I said. I was on my back; I thought of a patient waking in the middle of an operation.
“You’re still like that?” she said, letting go.
“I don’t know. I’m with you, that’s all.”
She sank into her pillow, letting out a sigh and drawing it around her like a curtain. She folded her pillow in half, drew her knees up. “We’ve got to sleep,” she said. “I’m so tired I can’t even follow my own thoughts. Really.”
Suddenly she slipped out of bed, gathered up her underwear and pajamas, and then got her travel bag and took it all into the bathroom. I lay there for a moment wondering what to do with the come that was all over me, but then I sprang up and before I could think my hand was on the bathroom door.
I turned it. Unlocked. I threw it open.
Jade had the tops of her pajamas draped over her shoulders. She held a rectangular sanitary napkin and her underwear. She stood with her thighs pressed together and her pubic hair grew out in long fern-like curls.
“This is it?” I said softly. I touched the door, to show I hadn’t meant to make the frightening noise.
“What.”
“We can’t do this,” I said. “I should have stayed on the floor. No. You should have stayed in the lobby, or caught your bus. We can’t have this be the way we get back together. Jerking each other off? I can’t do that.”
She held her pajama bottoms in front of her. In the watery glare of the bathroom light I saw they were orange.
“We were just helping each other, David. Like old friends.”
“Helping each other what. Go to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to be with you. It’s been a while, right? It’s been a long goddamned while.”
“I couldn’t sleep and
“I do think of you. All the time.”
“I wonder.”
“No, you don’t. You know I do.”
“I want to end this day, David. I want to pull the plug and let it all go down the drain.”
“We’re naked together,” I said. I stepped forward, reached for her. My cock was absolutely erect. I remembered there was come all over my belly. Too bad. I reached for Jade’s hand and got her wrist. The gesture seemed much too aggressive. Only her coming toward me, throwing her arms around me could have salvaged it.
“Please,” I said. “Come back to bed. Don’t put your clothes back on. Don’t go to sleep yet. Be with me.”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
I put my arms around her, kissed her hair, her forehead, the sides of her face. They were the most adulterated of all my embraces: I wanted to make her want me. I pressed myself against her, some distant surviving remnant of mating ritual. I presented myself to her.
“Go into bed,” she said, as I tried to kiss her mouth. She put her lips onto mine, briefly. “I feel like you’re forcing things. I want to think.”
“Come with me,” I said.
“In a minute. I’m scattered all over the place.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. My knees puckered with impatience.
“In a minute. Just let me think. I want to decide. OK?” She moved out of my embrace, back a step.
I got into bed and turned on the lamp. I waited for Jade, but I don’t know how long. It seemed like quite a while but there’s no reason to trust myself in this. It could have been thirty seconds. It was its own time, separate, like the inestimable durations of dreams. I was at the bathroom door again, having spliced away those instants of consciousness I would have used for reflection. I opened the door carefully. Jade, naked, sat on the edge of the undersized tub, her head in her hands, weeping.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m afraid of you. I’ve got too much to feel right now. I can’t let myself go too far.”
She looked up at me. There were white fingerprints on her face.
I thought: We
“It’s all right,” I said. “We can just go to sleep.” I stepped forward, put my hand out to her. She took it, brought it to her moist, flushed face.
“I have this voice in me,” Jade said, “and it’s a very small, simple voice. It keeps on saying, ‘My daddy’s dead.’ It doesn’t even sound like my voice. I never called him Daddy.” Her voice broke; she tried to smile but that broke too. “And I keep thinking of Keith and Sammy and what they’re going through. And Ann, too, damn it. Ann, too. All of them are with me and I can’t handle it. I’ve done everything to get out of this family and the smaller we get, the more I’m in it.” She paused, covered her eyes. “I just wish my father were still alive,” she said, sobbing.
