The moonlight through the blinds forms stripes of shadow across her pale flesh. She burns in the darkness, a sex candle, filling the room with her scent and the heat of her need.

If the gag were removed she would curse me. Even with the small rubber penis pressing her tongue flat she IS cursing me with her eyes.

“Tiger Tiger burning bright.”

I know she hasn’t come in days.

I know, though she does not, that she came to me to come to herself again.

Yet she fights it. Hands bound behind her back, spreaderbar pushing her legs wide, she twists at the waist, lifting her shoulders off the bed, drilling her eyes into my flesh in rage.

The vibrator is very small, a little cylinder rounded at each end, about an inch long. It looks so harmless taped to her clit. It is set at low. It has been set at low for thirty minutes. Her tiger stripes are slick with sweat. Her hair is a damp mane I find irresistible.

Her eyes narrow as she sees me finally undress.

She must have known I would do this.

Mustn’t she?

Must have known how her energy would stiffen my resolve?

The spreaderbar is tied across the headboard. She has been watching me in the mirror at the foot of the bed. I have been sitting silently in the bedside chair. Now my pale, hair-strewn flesh shines in the mirror, looming towards her from out of the darkness.

She thinks, perhaps, that I am the match for her candle. I feel I am the moth for her flame.

The first touch sears us. Her nipple so hard between my lips. Her shoulders moving so that she could be struggling from me or into me. My fingers close around strands of sweat soaked hair, pulling her face to mine, kissing the space between those flaring eyes.

I straddle her. She looks disappointed or maybe disgusted. Another man after a cheap blowjob or a titfuck fantasy?

I undo the gag. She sputters and licks at her mouth and swears at me. She stops briefly when I put the gag, still wet from her, in my own mouth.

I slide down her, between her parted legs. I don’t listen to the meaning of the words she throws at me. They are like the first fierce drops of rain against my skin in a thunderstorm that may last for hours, shockingly direct and promising much.

“Bastard,” she shouts as I rip off the vibrator taped to her.

With the gag I can’t lick her. Instead I push my cheek against her labia. So much heat. The smell slides over me and into me. My cheek glistens. By the time I run my nose softly over her clit and down between her sex the first torrent of words has slowed to a drizzle of abuse.

There are a few seconds of clumsy fumbling as I untie her ankle-cuffs from the spreaderbar and then push her ankles, still spread wide, up towards her head. When she is split below me, her knees almost touching her breasts, we both pause.

We ought to be able to see the lightning that flashes between us. We both know it is there, pinning us in this moment of brightness. She with all the fury of arousal, me pointed directly at the eye of the storm. The pounding of the blood in my ears sounds like thunder when she finally pushes upwards just enough to suck the tip of me into her, completing the circuit and making the energy flow.

Sex always surprises me. I try not to channel it, just to ride the flow. When I bound her, I had a flickering thought that I would be above her drilling her into this bed. Yet instead I slide slowly, like a ship coming gratefully into harbour, gliding through the softly rippled water until I come to rest against her. She sighs or perhaps just groans at my weight.

More fumbling as I reach behind her and unclip one cuff from the other. She hadn’t expected that. But she doesn’t wait. Even as the blood returns to her arms, her hands are in my hair, clawing at my head. She could bite me now. She could rip at my throat.

My cock pulses inside her.

She rips off the gag and kisses me, sucking out my tongue. My hands slide behind her back lifting her. Her legs wrap around my waist, pulling me downwards.

I’m not sure which of us starts the roll that brings her out on top. Already it seems that the idea of our bodies as separate things is absurd. The tiger has us both now.

Her fingernails rake my chest as she drives down onto me, head back, breasts being licked by the moonlight. My head is off the foot of the bed. I watch us in the mirror.

“Tiger tiger burning bright In the forest of the night What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

It seems to me we are moving to the slow beat of Blake’s poem.

What immortal hand or eye?

This moment. This union. This confluence of need. This is what makes us immortal.

That seems like a truth for me just before the second when all words lose meaning and my body releases itself from my mind and does its best to merge with hers, flowing into her, filling her, until both of us are released from mortal need.

Afterwards I watch her, curled on the rumpled sheets, sleeping. The tiger has left us. She is all woman again now. She looks strong and vulnerable.

There seems to be a cord binding my guts to the beat of her heart. Each breath tugs at me with an emotion we never name, demanding a word we never use. Maybe, when she wakes, I can persuade her that we are more than the tiger. Maybe in the morning, in the light of day, I can ask her just to love me. Maybe I can explain that she has already everything I can offer but I still want to give her more.

I settle in behind her, sliding my hand between the concavity at the top of her thighs. I let myself relish the warmth of her skin and the scent of her sweat.

As sleep pushes me downwards I accept that, in the morning, things will continue as they are, questions unasked will remain unanswered, but in the night, in that dark forest, we will again seek each other out. It is a good thought on which to yield to sleep.

“Tiger, Tiger” by Mike Kimera © 2002. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.