Your car is like your cock, you’ve always said. But the girl in the passenger seat gets the best ride.
WHEN YOU CALL
Sharon Wachsler
I cry out. She shoves her cock into my mouth. “Give it to me, baby, oh, you need it, you need it.” I choke on her soft hardness and suck and open and tears fall down my face for wanting her, for loving her, for giving her this release. Something clatters to the floor as she fucks my face, her hand in my hair, and suddenly she is yanking me off her and reaching between my legs—“So wet, so wet.” She slides two fingers in before I can say, “Stop, yes, no, I want more. I was feeding you.” Here, like this, my words don’t have to make sense.
She wants me and I want to give her all I can. There’s so little else I can give. She can take all of me, every hole; she can fill and I’ll give. That’s why she fucks the water from me, so my cunt is gushing—and yes—“Yes,” she reassures, pushing me down, reading my frantic words. “I put the towel down. It’s okay. Let go. Give it to me, give it to me.” And I fall back and open, and liquid drips from my nipples from her sucking, and my cunt streams onto the folded cloth cradling my ass, and my eyes tear, and my nose runs. I am streaming for her, I am screaming for her.
And then a terrible pause: Whose name did I scream?
And it takes me a real minute—sixty ticks of the second hand—to sift through past lovers, recent conversations, common phrases: Caren, Carla, car, Connie, Con. Con. Yes, she is smiling. She is full of herself and of sating me. I must have said Con or Connie. I slump back onto the pillows. She stretches over me like a bridge and retrieves my glasses from the floor. “Oh,” I say, laughing, “so that’s where they went. I didn’t even notice they were gone. You look so good blurry.”
“I can always see you.” She taps her temple, then pulls herself away. “I need to take a shower.” She is coated with me, everywhere. My hair sticks to my forehead and neck. My ponytail must have come loose. I scrounge for a scrunchie to scoop the loose strands into a knot.
I try to swallow the knot in my throat. I focus on her eyes—handsome, expectant—her glasses too far down her nose. Her lips are moving: “Okay?” She pats my knee. “Do you remember now? In the car I told you I was going out with Caren to that new French film? That I needed some ‘me’ time? And you said, ‘Okay.’ You sort of waved it away, like it was no big deal.”
“Yeah, vaguely.” I said. “Reading all those subtitles would give me a migraine?” It’s true. It hadn’t seemed important because when she told me, it made perfect sense, then. As long as I know what’s going on, I can relax. I trust her. Neither of us trusts me. No, I recite to myself, not me, the disease.
“Yes, I’m sorry.” My face burns. Why do you always have to be right? I had felt so indignant, enjoying my anger, when I’d accused her: “I understand why you need to go out sometimes without me, but you could at least have told me ahead of time, so it wouldn’t feel like you have to sneak around, like I’m some sort of encumbrance—” I’d stopped to swipe the tears and snot off my face. “Like I’m too stupid to understand. I could have made plans, too, you know.”
Now she pats my hand. “It’s okay, sweetie, it’s not your fault.” She sighs.
“Don’t feel guilty.” Just a little. I pull my hand away, pick at my thumbnail. She’s patting my hand like a child’s. When this fist is in your cunt, you’re giving over to a woman.
“I don’t,” she says flatly. “I know I need this. I also need to shower. I smell like work.” Con reaches across the couch to hug me, whispering, “I love you,” but I pull myself away. I’m not your charity.
“Go change,” I say. Don’t change. She heads to the bathroom and the sag of her spine strikes me: haggard. Where is her swagger? I hear the shower blast, water hitting the tub. “I’ll get your coat,” I call, my hair pulled back, neat.
I’m sucking her tongue hard in my teeth. “French kiss” wanders into my mind. Why, when, the French are so fastidious and controlled, do they call jamming this organ into someone else’s mouth, “French”? My tongue babbles against the roof of her mouth, rolling across her teeth. Enamel on enameclass="underline" I love it when we scrape at the rough edges, where pieces of ourselves might break off into each other. I am straddling her, she grunts beneath me and I flatten myself on her, so warm. “Lu—” I start to say, but stop, keep swiveling my hips. “Love,” I morph it. “Love, Conileh.” I bite her neck. They both loved me to bite their necks. Both fat and butch and computer engineers. Both needed lessons in how to interpret their feelings. I taught Lu to dance with my ass pressed against her groin. That got her onto the floor. Soon Lu wouldn’t even leave the floor. Then she left. Connie already knew how to dance. She regrets—regrets for me—that I can’t dance anymore. I brought it up once, that I recall. She said, “We dance our own way.” But I know she misses moving that way, the right way. I dance on Connie’s dick, though. I shimmy all over her. I told Connie to learn to put herself first, to figure out what she’s feeling, to fulfill her needs. Now she is, goddammit. Now she’s using phrases like “me time.”
I flop down to watch TV, loud, even though the noise makes me nauseous. I don’t ask when she’ll be back. If she’ll be back.
Con grabs my hips, pulls me roughly toward her. I feel her dick slithering, bumping inside of me and lean back so it rubs my G-spot. I can’t stand how good it feels. I almost fall over. She groans and grunts, pulling me against her, my breasts swaying, hair swinging into my eyes, hips burning from being stretched so far apart (she has no idea how much this hurts, but so much hurts me that I don’t tell her; it’s too much) my clit banging against the harness ring. God, how I love her.
“Uhn, uh, uhn,” she grunts as she drives into me. I open a blurry eye to adore her sweaty face, her intense—almost angry—look of concentration.
She asked me once, “Are you fantasizing about someone else?” Startling. “No. What on earth made you think that?”
“Because you keep your eyes closed.” Do I? “Oh, I guess I didn’t know I did that. You keep yours open?” Before she answers, I know: “Yes, I love to watch you.”
“I love to be watched. I love you to watch me,” I purr in her ear. She moans. Sometimes I open my eyes to see her watching me. I straddle her lap. Her eyes roll back and I grab her by the nape, pull her in, biting her lower lip. I roll into my mind, my hips rocking against hers. “I guess I just can’t concentrate with my eyes open. All the sensation, I want to feel it, with my body.”
I know she’s there, looking at me. The way into my mind is with hands and words and sounds, grunts and sighs, and a dick between my thighs and fingers digging into my hips. Make me yours. Pull me in. My mind is the safety. The fault lines, too.
“I’m entering this—you—with my eyes wide open,” she told me in the beginning. But nobody really knows me until they’ve entered me, my illness, my life. That, I remember. She tells me we’ve had several conversations about it—that the illness won’t drive her away. Then why don’t I remember? Something like that, I’d remember, wouldn’t I? She says she wrote it down, but I can’t find the scrap.
I’m trapped in the middle of a suspension bridge: I can’t believe she’ll stay; I can’t ask her to keep telling me she will. I don’t want her to know that I lose the pieces I write down. She might look at me that way—too much sympathy, like how her friends look at her when they say how good she is, how brave, how strong. They tell me how lucky I am. I know I’m lucky. Why don’t they tell Connie how lucky she is? They don’t hear her groan or feel me grip her when I come; they don’t watch us giggle on the couch or smell my lamb stew simmering on the stove. I know she is lucky, sometimes. Sometimes, I forget.