Skip called me yellow because I wouldn’t strip in the field for him. He wanted me to. They all did.
“You’re nothing but yellow, aren’t you?”
“I’m not.”
“Are too.”
He chased me across the field and I was panting. Panting is what I did over “Lady Chatterley” all that Spring and into Summer thinking about men and the kinds of flowers they were going to weave between my thighs. Men who weren’t boys. All summer I waited. Waited and waited and waited until I wanted to scream my longing into the wind, as if there was a man out there for me who could hear.
He brought me wildflowers called Owl’s Clover.
He brought those to me the summer of my twenty-sixth year under the sun when the fresh breezes of May swept the hills after rain, and after the men who brought roses had gone. They came and went, did the rose men. Their hands were full of flowery promise as they pried my petals apart looking for something prizeworthy.
The Owl man quoted Wordsworth, and he brought eventual daffodils. He took their yellow cups and made little hats over my nipples. He took violets and curled them into my pubic hair. It took me years to admit I loved him. Broken things can’t love, and the rose men had done that, one by one.
He took my hand and led me to the fields of lupines up by the old church of tumbled stones. He spread a picnic cloth and laid a table and cracked a bottle of champagne and I still didn’t trust his hands, and I didn’t trust his heart.
He brought daffodils year in and year out and we learned to plant them together as his brown fingers burrowed into the soil that was my heart, little by little, in the sideways silence that is love that unfolds in a next-door-soul sort of way, that figures out the toast and jam and worries whether your feet get cold and tells you to borrow a sweater because you might be freezing.
“Skip, these are beautiful,” I said.
“You were the one in the poem.”
“What?”
“Wordsworth.”
By then he had quoted it to me over and over. By then we’d swum nude in the creeks and camped in tents and sailed on the sea and had many adventures.
The flowers opened pure as butter freshly churned. The squeaky clean of yellow into purity the way that birds hum and bees buzz over the grass and clouds sweep the sky in billows against blue, and I kept trying to convince myself that it was all enough until there was the everything of You.
You came on a dark guitar strum with strings that underscored the loneliness in me. You came bearing chords of music I’d heard alone, before. You came full of dissonance without anything sweet and all of a sudden my curiosity peaked and there was nothing except the dark and the red and the places we would roll and the way I couldn’t stop your fingers as they snapped apart my bra, pulled it apart until it tore, actually. It was heathen.
I couldn’t trust you either.
Not even when your eyes met mine.
Not when you held me to your lips and I had to watch your eyes as you devoured the place between my thighs, as you upended me against you and your strong fingers played my every corner into chords and glissandos. I watched you from afar, not unlike a jaguar ready to pounce and claw.
“You’re yellow,” you said.
“I don’t fall for cruelty anymore.”
“You’re yellow aren’t you?”
“I learned my lesson about pain.”
“I’m interested in flogging you.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“You’re yellow.”
You wanted more of the same like the men with the roses had. You didn’t care about what you inflicted, did you? It was a passing fad. Your wife didn’t quiver and you wanted to take that out on me.
“Strip,” you said.
“Little Miss Yellow.”
“No,” I said.
I meant it with the finality of a thousand thorns. Every long-stemmed rose I ever got.
“Yellow.”
Once upon a time my curiosity might have gotten the better of me. I might have fallen for the way you spoke about mastery as if all women were a landed thing with pussies like hooked gills. Like fishes gaping, caught. Your iron hooks and iron bars and iron fingers prying.
That’s when you started to tell me how many you’d ridden and how you liked to slap them silly with your pale slim hands. I picked up your flogger and landed it in one fell blow where the zipper held your bungled phallus tight behind pretend facades.
“Poor bugger.”
I watched you wince, as tables turned.
“Crawl,” I said.
You shook your head in disbelief.
“Crawl.”
Suddenly you were on your knees. I patted the top of your head.
“Good.”
You didn’t say a thing, but you began to move on hands and knees across the floor. I could hear you as you scuffled along. Almost panting.
“Yellow,” I said to you. “Pull down your pants.”
You stuttered.
“Do it.”
Every single little begging word you uttered made me laugh. I knew I had you by the yellow hairs that grew along your arms. I watched them quiver as you shook from somewhere deep within.
“Yellow,” I said stroking them softly.
I put your toy down on the desk. I pulled you to your feet, unzipped your fly and lifted out your cock in one fast move.
Your head fell backwards into space as I slid my hand along it, curving my palm just so exquisitely the way the men of the roses had taught me. I didn’t intend to be your thorn.
I didn’t intend to be your thorn unless that was what you really wanted.
“Suck me,” you whispered. “Please.”
“Why should I, yellow man?”
“You were born to serve me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I read that.”
“Really?”
“You were born of my rib.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I just am.”
“It’s not convincing.”
“I’m trying to do what’s fashionable.”
“Go backwards.”
Your face formed a question mark.
“I brought you something.”
“What?”
“This book.”
“Why?”
“So you can understand.”
“Lady Chatterley?”
“Yes.”
“What did he know?”
“Gardens. The key to my heart is flowery,” I said.
“So?”
“I need those.”
“If I got you some would you?”
“I might.”
“You’re so difficult.”
“I’m experienced.”
“I’m not sure it’s worth my time.”
“Nor am I.”
The next time you came round you brought some riotous brilliant blooming velvet pansies in a pot. They made me smile. They hadn’t any thorns at all. I used them to make you a cake, which we consumed naked in bed. We licked the chocolate from each other’s hands. When I went down on you you screamed into the starry universe. I had to pull you back. I let you weave them in my hair. I let you coax ten smiles. I let you make the past recede, the pain recede, the others recede. You did that too, and then we were a couple.
© 2013 Valentine Bonnaire. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.
Bio: : Valentine Bonnaire’s work can be found in the archives at Cleansheets.com as Adrianna de la Rosa and Valentina Bonnaire, and at ERWA in the galleries and Treasure Chest. “Flowering” will appear this year in The Mammoth Book of Quick and Dirty Erotica edited by Maxim Jakubowski. Three chapters of “Man in the Moon” appear in From Porn to Poetry 2 edited by Susannah Indigo.