Endless Love

take anything more than that.

And so it was that night. As soon as her body began to jerk and shudder in response to her climax, I found myself astoundingly moved—as if by choral music that surprises you, or a kiss from behind bestowed by your lover on tiptoes. Jade let out her high keening call and I felt an abrupt rush of my semen, racing through me like twin rivers, turning with an acidic twist but not slowing down. I grabbed hold of her back, instinctually afraid she might leave me, and I arched myself toward her as I came. I could sense my pleasure passing through me almost unnoticed and I tried to fix my entire concentration on it. A perceptual lunge—like trying to discover the silver arc of a shooting star whose dive through the sky you’ve just caught out of the corner of your eye. When Jade felt the blurry warmth of my climax, she moved up a little and tightened herself for a slow, deliberate slide down. Whatever semen I had surrendered at the coaxing of Jade’s fingers had left a prodigious storehouse behind—almost a creepy abundance. My scrotum, feet, hands went icy cold and my mouth—moments before filled with the slosh of desire—was dry as a wafer. My muscles were collapsing, my lungs shriveled like burst balloons, but I continued to come.

Jade looked down at me. Smiled. Her eyes were glassy, indistinct, like someone who has breathed in smoke. A burning room. She was about to say something but she didn’t. She leaned forward until I was no longer inside her and then she was flat out beside me. She was breathing deep, easy breaths and I suppose I was too, but the silence between us was troublesome, dangerous. It lay coiled like a sleeping cat, graceful in its way but liable to claw if stroked indelicately. I could feel Jade considering and rejecting possible things to say. Her leg touched mine but then moved away. She sighed: relaxed, slightly pleased.

I began to plunge into the static blackness of sleep, like someone who is staggering along and walks into a ditch. But I pulled myself short, dug my nails into my palm.

Jade reached down and switched off the fallen table lamp.

Finally, she broke the silence: “My bones feel like lead.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. I had prodded myself into a state of wakefulness and I was just realizing how furious I was. Then I whispered, “That was the first time I made love since the last time I was with you, you know.”

“Amazing,” she said, rather quickly.

“Why?” Because it’s so pointless? Because you’ve made love so many thousand times since?

“Because you’re so good.” She stretched her body and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Propaganda for sleep. Getting me used to the idea; pointing everything toward it. It was how my parents used to put me to bed. Arthur would check the time. Eight o’clock and both of them would break into extravagant yawns…

“Good? “I said.

“Yes.” She seemed to regret bringing it up.

“That’s funny,” I said. “I didn’t feel like I had much to do with it. Where’d you ever learn to do that?”

“Do what?” There was a real edge on her voice now.

“That thing with your hand. You were making love to yourself, weren’t you?”

“Oh God, David,” Jade said in an older sister accent.

“Well, weren’t you?” I loathed my voice. Consciousness roamed the circumference of my brain, turning like a lighthouse beam, stopping here and there when a dense patch of darkness threatened to swallow the light, extinguish it. Unexpectedly, I found myself wading through that stream of unconnected images that surrounds the heart of sleep like the rings of Saturn. I had only a slight hold on myself and I realized that Jade must be in much worse shape: it wouldn’t take all that much to have us screaming at each other. “You weren’t making love to me. You were just fingering yourself, for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh shut up, David. You don’t know anything about it.” She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling for a moment and then closed them again. I could feel her thinking: Why did I come here? But I didn’t know if it was what she really felt or if she was just wondering if she might say it, for its effect. She needed to push me back, that much was certain. And I would rather have us end up with our hands on each other’s throats than to drift apart now, to descend into the privacy of sleep with our makeshift pleasures clutched to our breasts. The kind of junk jewelry that turns you green.

“Jade…”

“Let me alone. I’ve got to sleep.”

I was silent. I put my hands on her.

“You make me feel really stupid,” she said, accusingly. “I could prove to myself backward and forward and inside out that it was fucking stupid to come here and really stupid to make love with you—but no one could prove it the way you are doing right now. You really prove it, David. How stupid I am. You really do.” She was up on her elbows, looking at me.

“But that’s not how we make love,” I said. “We don’t do that, that business with your hand. It’s not our way.”

She sighed as if finally realizing she was attempting to speak rationally to a madman. She fell back on her pillow and then said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and sat up again. “I’m bleeding,” she said into the darkness. “I almost forgot.” She patted the mattress between her legs. “Oh God. I blew it.”

She swung her legs out of bed, bent down, and turned on the light. The fallen lamp reflected directly into the grimy window, in that three inches of black glass between the hastily drawn curtains. Jade peeled the covers down to see what had happened. An oval of blood, bright and sticky, rather more brown than red, the color of an apple bruise. “Lovely,” she said, shaking her head. There were little wisps of bloodstains here and there, but most of it was in that oval—the size of a bar of soap.

I happened to look down at myself. My cock was glistening and red with blood. There was a little blood on my belly and quite a bit of it on my thighs.

Jade shook her head.

“It’s glorious,” I said. I touched my fingers to the blood on my legs. Some of it came off and I brought my fingertips close to my eyes.

“We better strip the bed,” Jade said. Her legs were close together and slowly she was beginning to fold her arms over her breasts: the blood was making her ashamed.

“No. We don’t have to.” I wanted to tell her I liked that blood a lot more than the orgasm she’d given herself with her finger when she was supposed to be making love to me.

“Well, I’m not going to sleep in that goo,” she said.

“I will,” I said, sliding over. I reached out for her, took her around the waist. The hair around the opening to her vagina was dark with blood; I pressed her close to me and kissed it. I was leaning out of the bed in a twisted, uncomfortable position; my erection was nuzzled right into my belly. Jade put her hands on my head. I thought she might pull me away from her but she gripped me with both hands and dug her fingers into my scalp and then, moments later, discreetly yet unmistakably, she inched her hips forward, moving herself closer to my mouth, opening herself to me.

I pulled her into bed. I wanted to go into her immediately but I was frightened and I could feel her fear, too. It wasn’t a matter of inhibitions, or shyness, or doubt. The resistance of our bodies had already been broken down. The unfamiliarity of nakedness—gone. Even Jade’s twinge of embarrassment at her own blood had been quieted by my drinking it. The fear we felt was that terror you experience when the possibilities of your life begin to match the full range of your desire. It was the great fear the first pilots must have felt when their planes nosed slowly off the ground, the blinding anticipation of a treasure hunter with his hands finally trembling on the half-buried chest of gold. I ran my hands lightly over her and she trembled: it was not, for the most part, a shiver of pleasure. She stretched herself out, arched, but it seemed almost involuntary. She said nothing; her breath was not even loud. But I was certain that I was now approaching her, the part of her that had remained alive to the possibility of my return.

I kissed her. I felt the fog burning off within both of us, could see the origins of her feelings, deeply into her, like those ten-mile vistas in the farm country. Back, back so far, through the heart of Illinois, following the fertile rows, hazeless, almost airless sky, and where the vision finally ends is where there is simply nothing more to see. A pulse beat in her forehead; the veins along the inside of her arm were hard, almost like little delicate bones. Our mouths were open wide, as if we wanted to swallow each other. Cannibalism and kissing, I thought, trying to stand back from it for a moment, oddly theoretical, the way you might seize upon a passing fascination with blood after