I brought her to bed and kept my arms around her. She was trying not to cry. I could feel her impatience with herself, her exhaustion with her own grief. Soon she was quiet.
“I wonder what time it is,” she said, just when I was wondering—with a certain dread—if she’d fallen asleep.
“I don’t know. Late, I guess.” My arm was beneath her shoulder and it had fallen asleep but nothing could have made me want to move it.
“Everyone knows all about you, you know,” Jade said.
“Who?”
“Everyone I know. I tell everyone about you. What it was like for us. You know, stories about the house and Chicago and being like we were.”
“I don’t know that many people,” I said.
“Everyone in Stoughton knows you. I’ll bet—well, you look a little different but not that much—I’ll bet if you walked across campus, all by yourself, a lot of people would know you were you.”
“Honestly?”
“And I don’t have pictures or anything. It’s all from talk. Sheer description. I talk about you and remember, and when I want to I let myself feel what it was like to be me with you. But God, David, this is something I never thought would happen. It just never seemed like it could. Even when I was in the elevator coming up here, I didn’t believe I’d actually see you. Do you know what I mean?”
“But I saw you yesterday.”
“A dream. So fast, then poof. It didn’t count. It seemed impossible to be with you ever again. And wrong.”
“It’s not, though,” I said. “It’s really not. I don’t know why it’s been so hard for us, everything going so wrong all the time. But I know we can’t turn back. That’s true. I’m sure of it. Whatever is being put in front of us, we have to walk through it.”
“Everything’s so different,” Jade said.
I didn’t know what to say. Jade didn’t say anything and the silence continued. Jade took the lamp off the table and placed it on the floor, still burning. It toppled over and threw long flat shadows across the room like railroad tracks.
A little later, Jade sat up and pulled her Tampax out and dropped it beneath the bed. I stayed on what had become my side of the bed and she sidled next to me, pressing herself against my hip and squeezing my chest as if I had breasts. For some reason I tried to lift myself on my elbows but she pushed my shoulder to make me lie flat. She seemed to be looking down at me from an enormous height.
“I want to do this,” she whispered. “But I don’t want it to…” she trailed off.
“It’ll mean whatever it means,” I said. I reached up for her.
“Or nothing. It’s just this night. Seeing you again on top of everything else. I don’t want us to hurt each other, David.”
I knew I didn’t much care if we hurt each other. No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her. But I didn’t want to frighten her away. I nodded.
We kissed and stroked each other for a while. Jade straddled me and I thrust up to enter her, but missed. She took hold of me and guided me in. She felt a little dry and her discharge was thick, viscous—the result of her period, the blood mixed with her normal secretions. She winced as I entered her—it’s awful, really, how stirring men find those small signs of pain. She lifted herself up a little and I popped loose of her. She came back down until the knobby bones of our hips touched and the bow-shaped curve of my cock pressed into the cushy heart of her genitals, sinking until it hit a ridge of cartilage. I pressed her at the small of her back; her hips were locked around mine now and I felt her pubic hair brushing against me, as soft as breath on my belly. I pulled her down, made her bend from the waist and crushed our chests together.
I whispered her name and when she didn’t respond I felt a moment’s panic.
I held her face and kissed her mouth. Her tongue felt huge, soft, and unbearably alive in my mouth. I breathed her breath. It was the night’s first real kiss. Precise, enormous.
She was up on her knees, her small breasts dangling a little, the light on the floor illuminating each strand of down. I put my hand between her thighs and cupped her vagina and Jade opened herself to me, posing for my fingers. She was open at her center and it was at least ten degrees warmer there.
Then, suddenly, I was inside her. I would have wanted to stop, to absorb the moment. She was straddling me, her hands on either side of my head, her forehead pressed against mine. She moved slowly, with her eyes screwed tightly shut, until I was all the way inside of her, and then she rocked back and forth, pressing herself against me with such huge power that I thought I might cry out. Yet it was not pain, of course—the intention of her pressure was specifically sexual and so potentially ecstatic that my nerve ends could only disregard their habits of response. The power with which she ground herself against me was awesome; it was all I really felt. I could sense the division in her genitals yet I could feel myself inside her only indistinctly.
To keep her balance, Jade planted the heel of her hand in a wedge of soft muscles beneath my shoulder. I felt surrounded by a membrane of pleasure, a huge, incandescent cocoon, brilliant and opaque for the most part but diaphanous at this curve or that. And through those patches of pleasure from which the color had somehow drained, I was intermittently aware of the shadows on the wall, the creak of the bedsprings, the peevish nuzzle of one prominent mattress button. Then, like a slowly revolving dome, the pleasure surrounded me in all of its opacity and I was lost again.
I was covered in sweat; my muscles ached as if knotted by fever. Someone somewhere in the hotel flushed a toilet and the sound roared through the thicket of my senses.
Jade moved back and forth, back and forth. I could tell she was not altogether with me. I’d never remembered, never thought of making love as something so
Jade kept one hand on me to hold her balance and placed her free hand on her belly. I noticed it dimly and wondered if she were in pain—a menstrual spasm, perhaps. But her hand slipped down, led by her extended index finger, and headed straight for her clitoris, lodging itself in that small space that existed between my pudendum and hers. She stroked herself with a rapid, circular motion while she raised and lowered herself on me. It seemed devastatingly expert of her. I could imagine it diagrammed in a book, explained at a symposium. Perhaps that sounds humorous, but it wasn’t at the time. Her up and down motions were steady but incomplete: she had somehow calculated the degree of withdrawal and repenetration that best accompanied her finger’s masturbatory spiral.
She was even too expert to forget me. She fixed her eyes on mine for a moment and then closed them, as if in a swoon. She bent low to touch my face with her lips—so dry, as if she were lost in a sexual desert and my face was only a mirage. But she did kiss me, and when I captured her retreating mouth with my own kiss she lingered, breathing the air out of my lungs and exhaling into me the pungent blend of our combined redolence—the flat red wine, the long night, and the radiation of our nervous systems.
The dome of pleasure my senses had crouched beneath was no less opaque but it seemed to have risen: it no longer enveloped me like a blanket but now sheltered like a tent. I could feel my own orgasm moving within me but it would suddenly dart in some new direction, like a fish hiding within a coral reef.
When her climax came—and it appeared suddenly, like an accident—Jade trembled and made a high whinny, as if in distress. Then she was absolutely still, like a startled animal etched in the brightening beam of speeding headlights. Her mouth was open; it seemed as if she might drool but she closed her lips and lifted her chin, breathing out so heavily that her belly swelled and made her look pregnant for a moment.
Of course when you love someone it is a tireless passion to experience their pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. Of all the many perversions, the one I found myself most capable of succumbing to was voyeurism—as long as the object of my voyeurism was Jade. I never failed to be moved by her expressions of sexual pleasure. When we were first learning to make love and I had some trouble in controlling myself, she had to be careful to keep as quiet as possible. Even heavy breathing would speed my climax, not to even mention moans. Later in our life together, when we were making love three, four, and five times a night (for our passion grew with our prowess), Jade would sometimes become impatient for my final orgasm—which would come with more difficulty than hers, because of the natural differences between the genders—and to bring us safely home so we both might fall asleep she would feign groans of pleasure with her lips right next to my ear, or say my name. It wouldn’t really
