She was Amarind. But he didn’t know that yet.
He saw her and nothing came to him and he looked away. Then back.
The sort of chick you meet at a bar and at first sight you know her and know everything about her – what she thinks and wants, the what-she-did-yesterdays and the who-she-did-yesterdays and the last lover and the future lover and what makes those pretty eyes smile and what makes them sliver with hate, and what it is that can make her tilt for a kiss and why she makes those tiny noises when something has excited her. You know what she thinks of the freckled birthmark next to her nose. And you know why she doesn’t cover it.
You look at her and you know everything. Except what she thinks of you.
He didn’t think all this with words. It was a sensation. Weary. Bored.
Hopeless. A cold, trickly sensation that made his fingers reach for the beer in front of him because that’s what his fingers did whenever they felt hopeless. When there was nothing else, right now, worth doing. But it was a sensation that turned his head. Again.
Just talk to her.
Can’t do that. She’s a Butterfly. On Oyster. A Pirate.
He was chicken-shit. One bad woman had turned him to chicken-shit. And there was this – thing – at the bar next to him dangling a long slender leg off the stool, swinging those sexy little buckled-up toes, screwing her ass around like she had an itch in the cunt and she wasn’t going nowhere till she met Mr. Fuck. Tonight.
But that wasn’t strictly true: not chicken-shit. Not of all women. Only the smart ones, but damn these days if the whole fucking world wasn’t full of smart fucking chicks and they parted around him like the Holy Seas and that’s why he was here alone fingering a cold wet beer instead of a warm wet cunt.
And her – the butterfly at the table – she looked real smart.
So just talk to her. Her – The Pirate.
He did. He said hi. And she said hi back. And kicked out a chair for him.
Bought him a drink. Made him tell her everything. Told him nothing. Then grabbed her bag and backed out her chair and hooked her hair behind an ear and said, ‘Can you be interesting?’ She wanted his number. ‘I’ll call you.
Maybe.’ ‘Maybe,’ he thought. Maybe she wasn’t so smart.
‘Hey. It’s only eleven thirty. I thought…’ ‘I’ll call you.’ Fuck. She had been sitting there – right there, and the seat wasn’t yet gone cold – and she’d kept leaning back in her chair. Way back. She leaned way, way back and put her hands behind her head and ruffled up her hair and shook it out in long silky waves and kind of arched so those captious eyes of hers peered at him over lid and cheek and her singlet went real tight on those hard-to-say-how-big tits. One nipple was erect and one wasn’t. What the fuck does that mean?
She would call. Certain of that. Dying for it.
Who was dying for it? Did he say? He needed to get home. Needed to get nude and spread on the bed and finger his beer-hot balls. Cock hard for her. For Amarind. Hand up. Hand down. Go slow now, my boy. Real slow. Nice and slow.
The bedroom of a man lazy, underpaid, enslaved by intention. Books by the bed, unread. Coffee cups glued to the carpet by sludge. Pizza box. Comics.
Computer litter. One pile of dirty clothes. One pile of dirtier clothes.
Wardrobe spewing stuff. A stink.
Out there the livingroom just the same as the bedroom except with a couch and a tv in it. The couch with one clear cushion, a dent in it the shape of an asshole. The floor unvacuumed since a year ago Dragon vacuumed it, tore at it with the clattery upright, chanted ‘Fuck’ through her teeth then said nothing and blushed red because she had pulled the vibrating handle up under between her legs and come on it, and then she cried because now every day she was making love to household appliances and she wanted real love, mad-wild-meaningful-love, and for the seventh but last time she filled a suitcase and took one last look at this… this… Fuck.
He loved it when she talked dirty. He loved her when she talked dirty. He could take all her billowing red-haired bullshit when she talked dirty.
Dragon. If she didn’t like it, why did she let him do those things? That time at the cafe she was looking-at-him and saying nothing and looking-at-him and screwing up her lips and looking-at-him with those huge chestnut eyes getting bigger and wetter and shinier and then she leapt across the table and knocked over the coffee and kissed and tongue-fucked him so hard and pulled his hair so hard and this was the same morning he’d masturbated her with a tablespoon on the kitchen table.
She hated her cunt and he loved it. She loved his cock and he loved it. They built a romance on this.
He took pictures of her with her legs open and she let him but he never noticed that snap-by-snap her big glassy chestnut eyes became ever more tomorrow-less. The morning of the day she walked out he was in the kitchenette running the hot water thinking about nothing waiting to fill the kettle and she exploded out of the shower in a towel and slapped him hard across the ear because for the two hundredth morning in a row he’d made the water go cold in her shower and she’d just about had fucking enough. She called him an asshole but he didn’t hear because he was deaf. He never saw her again. She did the vacuuming and left.
Go slow. Real so slow. Take care of my darling boy.
Amarind. Wants to fuck her. Can’t believe it – nearly missed out. Nearly didn’t say hi because some red-haired Dragon put poison in his eyes. Man, what a find. Kept leaning back, way back. What does it mean – that – when a chick leans way back and puts her forearms behind her head and shows you a long sloping length of openness and vulnerability. What colour was her hair.
Christ. Brown. Brownish. Who cares. Eyes? Fuck knows. He was looking at her tits whenever she looked away. And when she was wasn’t looking away her eyes had his eyes on kind of little threads and each time they wandered too near her tits she let them get a bit closer then jerked them back: ‘No you don’t.
Not until I say so. Never until I say so.’ But he had. Whenever she wasn’t looking. He was saying, ‘You know, Amarind. That’s a beautiful name.’ And he laughed and said, ‘Who let you get away?’ And he said, ‘Yeah well. I was married once but the cock-sucker dumped me for a twenty-year old.’ Dragon was never married. She didn’t dump him for a twenty-year-old. She had had sex with a vacuum cleaner and realised she felt for that hard-cock-of-plastic much the same feelings as she had ever felt for him-the-asshole she lived with, so she cried and she left. But really, these things are never simple. She had never loved herself.
Amarind. The Oyster. A hard flinty shell. He thought about her and watched his knob go plum-blue. Let it go. He loved his penis, made love to his penis. Cupped it and stroked it underneath with crooked fingers and never got tired of knowing he was bigger than any other prick he’d ever seen.
Thankful for that. Proud of that. A fact that excused him from achieving anything. A fact that he never let Dragon forget because she too loved his cock. She liked to lie with her chin on his leg and watch with big chestnut eyes the tenderness of his fingers going up and down his lumpy, veiny shaft.
She wondered, ‘How come…’ – he never touched any part of her body like that.
But right now he wasn’t thinking Dragon. Wasn’t thinking anything but stripping Amarind nude. An Oyster. A hard stony shell. Ah but yes, inside that shell, a wet sliver of succulence. He imagined it. That moment when he cracked her open.
She called and he said so sweetly, so honestly, ‘I was thinking of you last night.’ And she said, ‘I was thinking of you while my husband screwed me.’ But she didn’t say it like that. That’s just what he heard. Amarind wouldn’t say Screw or Fuck. She had had a fantasy – a fleeting, goosebumpy, tingly sort of fantasy – when she leaned way back in her chair, that he – him – the guy whose name she didn’t know yet – pulled open the front of some kind of flimsy gown and licked her from navel to breasts, from navel to asshole. She had fantasies. Lots of them. Always, anywhere. She had dreams that made her ashamed. But she wouldn’t say Fuck. She had said Clitoris. But never Clit.
Never Fuck. Never Cunt. Some words were too precious to be wasted out loud.
She wore a cross and kept it warm between her breasts.
She had run her fingers through her hair because when she felt tingly there was a deliciousness about it. The silkiness pouring through her fingers. Not just any silkiness. It was her own.
She loved her hair: the weight, the way it poured because she washed it every day. When she needed its silkiness, it was there. The man whose name she didn’t know yet ripped open her gown and licked her from belly to clit and she was reclined in some exotic place with warm scented breezes and sapphire skies and her hair poured through her fingers with the same hot-liquid luxury as his tongue, as it poured across her clit. She had watched him, closely, purposefully. She thought she’d seen the glimmer of something in his eyes – when he wasn’t trying to stare at her tits. She didn’t have a word for it yet, but it was there all right, in his eyes.
She couldn’t see it this night across the wires connecting their ears, but she hoped she heard it in his voice. She had to ask one more time, ‘Can you be interesting?’ He was a long time answering. She heard a little squeak and wondered blankly if he was masturbating.
‘Yeah honey. I can be interesting. How interesting is up to you. What kind of interesting is up to you.’ No. If he had to ask then this was all wrong. She needed the kind of interesting she didn’t know she wanted till it happened. She was already fucking a man who did it like that and that’s why she was hanging around bars until just before he got home – looking for the someone who could do it to her and she’d cry out, ‘Jesus Fucking Christ…’ real loud because, that
– what he was doing to her right now – whatever it was – well, it really did it for her…
She hadn’t sworn like that for any man. Yet.
But then he said accidentally, ‘I used to do things to my ex. All sorts of things.’ She wanted to know what kinds of things he did and he read her whisper right and said, ‘Uh-huh sweetheart. You don’t get that for free.’ And he heard a silence on the phone and then a kind of squeak and his cods went as hard as an old tennis ball and he thought, ‘Huh. She’s wanking.’ And he thought, ‘The horny bitch.’ But she wasn’t wanking. She was praying. She said, ‘I’ll call you.’ She rang off and he held the phone and stared at it.
Darling Amarind. My darling Amarind with the sweetest wettest hottest tightest cutest little pussy. He danced in circles, slipped on a plate and cracked it and stabbed his foot. Didn’t care. My Darling Amarind. Not like Dragon. Yeah, yeah, Dragon got wet. Damn. She’d get wet at a funeral. Tried to think. Couldn’t remember ever sticking his hand down the back of her underpants and she wasn’t a little bit gooey down there and he’d whisper over her shoulder, ‘Been thinking about me.’ And he’d rub his gooey finger on her nose and she’d screw around for a kiss and tell him there wasn’t a single waking moment of any day since she met him that she wasn’t thinking about him. And he’d say, ‘That’s my girl.’ That was Dragon. She learned fast.
Amarind called. He was dancing, foot bleeding, and the phone rang and he knew it was Amarind. He smiled because it wasn’t five minutes. She said, ‘You’re ugly.’ He grinned. ‘Took you that long, huh?’ She said, ‘Really ugly.’ He licked his lips and sucked a breath and said, ‘Say, Amarind…’ He grinned into the phone the same way he had grinned into the face of That Woman. He was nineteen and That Woman was forty-six and she told him she was thirty-three but it didn’t matter coz when your nineteen then anyway twenty-two is so fucking old it all looks the same after that. She put him on the bed, on his knees. She got on the bed, on her knees. Came real close so her knees were touching his knees and she ran hot, itchy fingers up and down his arms, up and down his newly developed chest, made her fingers like tines and raked them down through the hair around his balls. Then up the shaft, going slow, coming to a halt, circling him, squeezing him. Her face went red, her eyes bright and black. He grinned. It was the first time he’d ever heard the squeaky-sobs, a woman panting. But she screwed his knob and that made him suck through his teeth. And she said, ‘You are so ugly.’ And she said getting angry, ‘You are one ugly cock.’ And then real horny she pulled his balls so he cried out and she said, ‘But it’s the lips. Know that lover? The lips.’ He didn’t know that. But he did now. And understood. Ugly lips, the kind of muscular curly cushion-cruel that the right sort of woman knows are going to burn her skin with their heat, and she puts them on her own lips until she can’t take it any more, and she puts them on her nipples until she can’t take it any more, and she sits on them and claws at the wall and cries real tears because she’s going to have to come or die and if she can’t come, she’s gonna die. But she comes.
Amarind had seen them. His lips. She felt them as they said into the phone, ‘Say, Amarind. How bout dinner. You and me. Tell your old man.’ She said, ‘Why should I tell him anything?’ He said, ‘Because he’s a shit-head asshole who’s got the most fuckable piece of pussy and he’s so dumb because he lets her out. And he doesn’t fuck her right. So tell him.’ She said, ‘Well fuck you.’ And he could hear her blushing.
It had come out like that and she was sitting away from the phone, stunned, wondering if he knew she was naked. He seemed to know everything else. He knew she wasn’t being fucked right. She blushed all down her neck and in patches between her breasts. He must know that too. She had a finger hooked inside and had squeezed so hard that she felt the pulse. And he’d said those things to her – called her a piece of pussy – and she hadn’t expected that.
It took her breath away, and her body had tremoured on her finger and she knew this was the one. She said quietly, ‘Just tell me when. Just tell me where.’ She thought about it. ‘But never tell me how.’ Day two of their life together and Dragon had said, ‘You are so beautiful…’ And kissed him. And after that she thought she had to kiss him always. So beautiful. So kind. So generous for loving her, wanting to love her. No one had loved her before, not like that. He loved her enough to want to put his finger in her. He loved her enough to pull her open, pull her lips. He pulled her pussy wide open and whispered into it, ‘God, I love you…’ and she nearly cried. Instead she told him softly, ‘Here. Let me hold it for you.’ Day ninety he came home and she was on the floor curled up and shivering and he said, ‘Hey, Baby. Huh? What are you doing.’ She tried to get up and was so drunk her head swayed and her eyes rolled and she looked at him and tried to focus, tried to get up, needed to kiss. Ever since day two she had been remembering. She dropped to the floor, red hair billowing like a tangle of Dragon-fire licking at the rug. White skin. Freckled shoulders. Nipples the colour of bright Spring-white sunshine only tainted with the sin of a tiniest drop of blood. He went close. ‘What are you doing, huh.’ She said, ‘I’m lonely.’ He put a finger in her. ‘You’re not lonely Baby.’ Took her to the bed. Spread her. Fingered her. ‘Tell me you’re lonely.’ Made her come and he said, ‘See. You got me.’ And she stared at him from the pillows. He was an option and she stared at him like an option. And when you are not beautiful, it can seem like there aren’t too many of those. She hadn’t come but the asshole believed it. In a future not far away she would start fucking appliances because she was lonely. That was an option. And oh yeah, he showed her the two-dollar lipstick on his cock. He said, ‘See? She meant nothing Baby. Couldn’t even get me off. You’re the one…’ That proved he loved her.
Couldn’t believe it. Found a shirt and the iron and ironed the shirt on a towel on the floor and still couldn’t believe it. Amarind. The Butterfly.
Never give a butterfly a second chance. There are no second chances. He sat back on the floor and his cock was hard and he pulled it till it sang. Let go. Decided, Fuck it. And pulled till it throbbed and he remembered Amarind and had to decide – yes or no. Got his hand away, but damn he was dribbling-close now and he showered and was hard the whole time. Thought of Amarind and sat on the bath and masturbated and the first squirt went the whole way down to the plug hole. Hey – he chuckled. Amarind was the one.
Never shot that far before. He grinned and washed his hair and sang tunelessly, ‘Yeah Honey… measure my love in yards…’ A basket of fruit between them. A table and table-cloth. Stains of wine-red crescents stamped into the virgin white. One napkin screwed. One napkin pristine except for a crease where a finger had twisted on it.
She was telling how as a girl she’d wanted to be a ballerina but was too tall. How as a teenager she’d wanted to be a model but was too short. At nineteen she’d wanted to study Law but got pregnant and miscarried, and you know how it is, she married him anyway. She blushed, gosh, nineteen was so long ago, and she was in Love and she’d nearly had his baby and that kind of changed her in the way of Softer Love and the man who-did-it-to-her wanted to care for her, so she let him. Her Momma left her when she was seven coz Poppa was a drunk and she lived with a fundamentalist aunt and uncle and her aunt found a Romance and a sticky hair-brush under the seventeen year-old’s bed and the aunt and uncle took turns a whole evening beating the Sin out of her. They made her cry. Eventually. But she cried because they had beat the Sin into her. She met the man who-did-it-to-her at a party and he asked her if she had one wish, what would it be, and she said World Peace or some damned stupid unselfish thing like that. She asked him the same, what would it be, and he said, ‘You.’ She went home with him and he layed on her and neither of them yet knew enough to use hands but Nature is Nature and his cock made it anyway just because he was hard and she was wet. She said, ‘He loved me for so long…’ And she lowered her eyes and straightened the dessert spoon on the table-cloth. She confessed, ‘There were no more babies.’ And the ugly man sitting opposite over the wine-stained table said, ‘Are you wearing underwear?’ He was thinking: The lips give these promises. Each demand is a promise. The giver gets the reward of that body. The lips. The nipples. The hair. The odour. The first sensation of that skin. Hand skin. Lip skin. Breast skin.
Furry woman-skin.
His fingers reached for the wine glass.
It didn’t make any sense because Amarind didn’t make any sense. Wanted to fuck her. Hid his erection under the tablecloth like lust under a smile and watched her pull away from the table and rise to her feet and without taking her darkly-frowning-angry eyes off him, reach over and grab her bag and tuck it up under an arm. She nearly said something. Twice. Then she said, ‘I won’t be in a minute.’ He loved that: furry woman-skin. God he loved that. Sometimes alone in bed he stroked pictures. Imagining. Remembering. Or Dragon, the way she tickled him and rubbed her fiery bush beneath his chin, back and forth, over it and under it, reeking of Floris the perfume of the huge-nippled aunt who always seemed so friendly and warm and bent over at the stove a lot and repeatedly put her hands in his shorts – and he’d close his eyes and reach around Dragon and fondle his penis and breathe the perfume of her pussy-hair.
There’d be an ache in his balls that throbbed all up the underside of his cock. It made the pee-hole burn. And just before he ejaculated, with Dragon like this, he felt like he needed to cry. Strange that. The needing to come and the needing to cry so much like the one and same sensation of pain.
Amarind was gone a long while and he watched the room looking for pussy. His pee-hole burned and Amarind was in a cubicle with a wad of paper in her mouth, biting on it so no one could hear the whispered ‘God… God…
God…’ and a woman had washed her hands and the dryer roared and Amarind’s head hit the wall behind her. She hadn’t come. But she knew she could, with him. That was the difference. The important difference. She went to him and stood by his chair waiting for orders. She stood because right now she couldn’t sit. He said, ‘Sit down. We’re not finished.’ And he made her wait.
She sat and wet the inside of her skirt and watched and waited and said, ‘I want to see the fireworks.’ And he said, ‘Fine.’ He remembered her phone calls: The last phone call. Take me out. The lips were saying, Excite me –
Do it to me – Give it to me – Want me – Desire me – Satisfy me, if you can.
He said, ‘We can see the fireworks.’ How is it possible to desire a woman utterly, but not want her? He watched her ass, the way it twitched under a long slender body propelled through the crowd on the street by rapid legs, how she never once turned back to see where he was, that she twisted her ass and swung an arm and clutched her bag like a woman in a hurry. A real hurry. He watched the legs, shimmery black in hose, the knees kind of knobby and inward so they bumped, the way her thighs parted just before disappearing up under the skirt betraying the fist-sized gap around her pussy, a woman built just right. A gap between her two front teeth and a gap around her cunt. But the hose. Fuck. Stockings?
Bare pussy under there? Or not. It mattered because his cock said it mattered. His cock said, ‘Hey shit-head… How can I know how horny I’m supposed to be, huh?’ It mattered.
The Butterfly. He caught her up and said across her shoulder, ‘Stockings?’ And she said, ‘Panty-hose,’ and she got in front of him again. He let her go. She knew where she was going, he thought. Should have turned right at the clocks but she’d paced herself and as the lights turned red she dashed onto the road and had to skip around the accellerating traffic, left him no opportunity to follow. He saw her once more, the back of her head. Then she was gone.
But a butterfly will return for nectar.
The Oyster. He grunted. Four blocks later and there she was, standing on something so her head and shoulders were elevated above the crowd on the bridge. Visible to him. So where was her mind just now? Was she really up there amongst the fire in the sky? He didn’t think so. This chick had cock on her mind. For sure.
Closer. She jolted with every aerial explosion. Face aloft, lips apart, eyes lit with fire. The fireworks were for her. Amarind. The woman of the crowd.
A huge fireball and the crowd aah-ed and Amarind glowed and was serene in their adulation. She was on a railing plinth, swung back, hands pulling on the rails. He touched her hips and pressed his chin between her shoulder blades and another firework filled the smokey sky and she trembled, and laughed. He thought, This is the first time I’ve touched her. She was thinking, If he does it right I’ll never masturbate again.
Standing like that on the plinth she was his horizon and they were pressed all around by bodies and everyone was looking up and his arms went round her waist. Everyone was looking up and his hands went under her sweater. He found skin. Swirly yellow fire-crackers sputtered in the air and his fingertips found the first warm under-swell of hard-to-say-how-big tits and he felt a motion in her body like a swallowing motion. A breathing motion. A little squirming touch-me motion. She laughed and danced and said, ‘Did you see that Honey…’ and as the child in her danced, her woman’s breasts dipped among his open fingers and she said, ‘This is so nice…’ His cock bulged and the crowd aah-ed and he intruded a hand between her legs. Under her skirt. Now he understood. Panty-hose. But Amarind was Amarind and she’d torn a ragged hole down there: Amarind naked in the way of Amarind.
‘Yes darling. This is a lovely night for fireworks.’ Damn-fuck-damn. She wasn’t furry. She was as prickly as a desert cactus. And now what? A wedge of squishy pussy skin hanging down her middle and he pulled and teased and used his fingertips kind of like eyes. They told him her shape. A flat pubis, nearly-shaved, a thick dangly wedge that was her punishment for masturbating. She hadn’t noticed it till one night the man who-did-it-to-her was pretending not to notice and when he was gone she got a mirror. She went cold. She cried. A female Pinnoccio. And she prayed and promised God that if He took them away she’d never do it again, and while she prayed she showed God what He had done to her – and that felt so damned nice – and she showed Him from whence sprung all the Sin of Woman – and that made her so damned hard – and deadly ashamed she promised to scrub the Sin away, and she scrubbed it on the old pillow that had already been a thousand times a man to her. And it went away in a Sin of Pleasure. And God said…
Yeah, right.
The crowd ooh-ed and Amarind gave a tiny squeal and pressed her bottom against the ugly man’s chest and his finger went in her. She threw a smile over her shoulder and was thinking that when she fingered herself she felt the finger. When her husband fucked her she felt the fuck. When she squatted on a bottle she felt the bottle. When she pushed inside a tampon she felt the tampon. When she was empty she felt the emptiness. When she walked she felt the closure. Tonight she smiled, eyes bright, hopeful, kind-of-surprised, kind-of-delighted, kind-of-in-love, kind of swelled with giddy thankfulness that when the ugly man fingered her she felt her Cunt.
She’d never felt that before.
She whispered, ‘Fuck.’ Reached behind and hoisted her hair in a huge shimmering plume and let it slip away through her fingers and scooped it all up and let it slip away and her face was upturned to the flickering sky, seeing beyond the sky, seeing to infinity. Her mantra. A wordless mantra that went through the air.
And the ugly man’s cock throbbed and oozed. Just another kind of mantra. He said, ‘Say, Amarind…’ Scooped her off the plinth and into his arms. Her hair spilled. Cool night breeze on naked skin. The oyster breeched. He said, ‘Say Amarind. Fireworks is fireworks.’ And she whispered, ‘Uh-huh.’ He said, ‘You and me.’ And she said, ‘Uh-huh.’ He said, ‘Time we fucked.’ And she said, ‘You know nothing about me Sweetheart.’ He said, ‘I know you need fucking right.’ He didn’t see the little flag that went up in her eyes.
The city got dark then darker. They walked hand in hand like lovers and he was saying, ‘You and me. We found each other.’ And he was saying, ‘Yeah, well, my cousin’s staying at my house right now and he’s such a loser.’ And then he was saying, ‘You a nature lover?’ The city got dark. Then darker. And silenter. And he said, ‘Here will do,’ and she wasn’t hearing anything just now and the grass was wet and that was the first thing she noticed and didn’t care. The sky was lit in the fractures of parkland leaves and spaces and the crowd way-over-there-somewhere aah-ed and she didn’t care. There was a city hush.
Someone crying out. Someone beyond their senses tooted a horn and yelled, ‘Fucking asshole,’ distant and echoey and her legs went up. City echoes.
City hush. He said, ‘Here honey.’ And put her bag under head so her hair wouldn’t get wet on the grass and he unzipped his cock and showed it to her in the blackness. And another horn tooted and some other guy yelled, ‘Fucking asshole.’ No ordinary cock. Put her hand on it. Slipped her hand right along to the drooly end like saying, ‘This is no pipe-cleaner Honey…’ He said, ‘Gonna visit the girl a while.’ Fuck if Dragon wasn’t a red-head and had a pussy like a squished-up donut and he had to really dig around in there to get at the goodies. This was no donut. Fuck if she didn’t pucker like Granny. He went down. Kissed her. And fuck if the damned thing didn’t just kiss him right back. And he pushed up her skirt real respectful. No light. Just lots of radiant heat and an irresistable distraction. Kisses. Pecks. A long flat Hmmmm-nah lick.
Something else, Man. She said, ‘Here it is…’ and held it for him and he stared right into it and said, ‘God, I love you…’ He saw the hand go back but didn’t know what for until she stung him like a viper. ‘Hey! I said I love you!’ And she slapped him across his ear and his ear went throbbing red. ‘Hey cut it out. Huh? I said I love you, huh?’ And she hit him again so hard that her hand ached because he had a thick bony skull, and his ear was throbbing numb and his cheek stung. His mouth was open and nothing but air came out. Didn’t dare say it again. Air went in, air came out.
He sat up on his knees and real slow he was saying, ‘Yeah, well Amarind. I screw a chick a week…’ And he tore off his belt and was saying, ‘Amarind’s a nice name, you know…’ And he got himself thigh-nude and pulled up his newly ironed shirt and pulled his foreskin right back and was whispering, ‘Just be a Dragon for me…’ And she said, ‘Just get on with it.’ A firework went off in the sky way over there somewhere. The flash. Two bodies in crepe shadow. One staring down from a pylon of arms. One staring up from her connection with the earth. The one staring up was thinking, ‘This is it. This is the one.’ The connection with the God. It prickled her ass and senses. This was natural. There was Earth on her skin and Water in her eyes and Air in her lungs and Fire in the sky. Then the fire went into her. And at the centre of this universe she felt the vessel of her cunt. She sighed. Silently. It was real after all. After all the lies and philosophical abuse and tortured logic and the storms inside other people’s heads, it was real. She felt her cunt. She felt visited. She felt violated.
She felt touched. She felt fucked. She felt the rolling thunderous frightening exciting demanding aching murdering screaming engulfing tide of a simple human peacefulness. She let go. She sighed. She understood.
The ugly man on the pylon of arms went over her and inked out the sky and her world was black and he pushed and her eyes were filled with a strange new light and explosions of colour and he was whispering, ‘…just be my Dragon…’ She didn’t know why he said that. And he went high above her and pulled up hard and her head jarred on her bag and pulled her hair and she needed to lick the one who was doing it to her, and he was stammering, ‘…coming…coming…’ and she felt it swell so far up inside near her heart that she knew this was the one. She felt the silent eloquence of the warming, the wetting way up inside near her heart and the sensation so absorbed her and took her and carried her that she forgot to come. But then she did come and needed to laugh. Simple joy that came from somewhere so far away inside that she stared at it like a stranger. The joy made her moan and the ugly man interrupted his come to grin and stroke her hair and he was saying, ‘…yeah come baby…’ and she wasn’t. It was more than that.
Superior to that. And she whispered, ‘Don’t move. Stay there. Keep it there.’ And she held him until like she knew it would, sooner or later, the repulsion exceeded the joy and she nudged him off with a leg. Her cunt collapsed like the air hole of the whale as it goes under. It collapsed for life.
She left him, immediately, inconsiderately, and the cold air on his cock was lonely. He was a donor and nothing had changed. She sat away, pulled her bag around, kicked up her legs and pulled on her panties. Sat for a while. She contained something precious.
“Say, Amarind…’ He stroked her. ‘All that stuff about the other chicks.
You know. Coz you hit me. That’s all.’ She said, ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He said, ‘Does matter.’ And she said, ‘Screw all the chicks you want. Nothing to do with me. Can’t affect me. How can it?’ She brushed her hair. Pulled it over a shoulder. Snatched at the knots. Flicked it back and pulled it over the other way and tossed it up and brushed it till it flowed right.
He watched her shadow. He said, ‘I reckon you and me Amarind.’ And she said, ‘Maybe.’ He said, ‘No really. We got the same kinds a brain, you and me.’ And she said, ‘Maybe.’ He said, ‘I fucked you right, didn’t I?’ And she hesitated – a long while – and then said, ‘Time will tell.’ He said, ‘Look. That Dragon chick…’ She said, ‘I-don’t-give-a-fucking-damn.’ He shut up.
He was watching the fireworks and when he looked down again she was gone.
The Pirate.
“Amarind.” © 2000 by Robert G.S.K..