“That’s right,” he said finally. “That’s what I’m talking about. Now you can come over here next to me.”
He guided me down onto the bed and pushed my hair back away from my eyes. I expected him to more or less attack my breasts and mouth at this point, but he didn’t go near them. His lack of urgency was driving me a bit wild. He didn’t even kiss me again. He just smiled at me. “Hey, Vivian Morris. I’ve got a big idea. You wanna hear it?”
“Yes.”
“So, here’s what we’re gonna do now. You’re gonna lay back on this bed and let me take off the rest of your clothes. And then you’re gonna shut your pretty little eyes. And then you know what I’m gonna do?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m gonna show you what’s what.”
—
It might be difficult for someone of your age, Angela, to understand how radical a concept oral sex was for a young woman of my generation. I knew about B.J.’s of course (that would’ve been our term for “blow jobs”—which I’d done a few times and wasn’t sure I liked or even exactly understood), but the idea of a man putting his mouth on a woman’s genitals? This was not done.
Let me amend that. Of course I’m sure it was done. Every generation likes to think that they discovered sex, but I’m sure that far more sophisticated people than me were experiencing cunnilingus in 1940, all over New York City—especially in the Village. But I’d never heard of it. God knows, I’d had everything else done to the flower of my femininity that summer, but not this. I’d been palmed and rubbed and penetrated, and certainly fingered and probed (my heavens, how the boys liked to poke about, and so vigorously, too)—but never this.
His mouth had ended up between my legs so fast, and the sudden realization of his destination and his intent had shocked me to the point that I said “Oh!” and started to sit up, but he reached up one of his long arms, placed his palm on my chest, and firmly pressed me back down again, without once stopping what he was doing.
“Oh!” I said again.
Then I felt it. There was a sensation occurring here that I didn’t even know could occur. I took the sharpest inhale of my life, and I’m not sure I let my breath out for another ten minutes. I do feel that I lost the ability to see and hear for a while, and that something might have short-circuited in my brain—something that has probably never been fully fixed since. My whole being was astonished. I could hear myself making noises like an animal, and my legs were shaking uncontrollably (not that I was trying to control them), and my hands were gripping down so hard over my face that I left fingernail divots in my own skull.
Then it became more.
And after that, it became even more still.
Then I screamed as though I were being run over by a train, and that long arm of his was reaching up again to palm my mouth, and I bit into his hand the way a wounded soldier bites on a bullet.
And then it was the most, and I more or less died.
When it was all over, I was panting and crying and laughing and could not stop shuddering. But Anthony Roccella just smiled that same cocky smile as ever.
“Yeah, baby,” said the skinny young man whom I now loved with all my heart. “That’s what’s what.”
—
Well, a girl is never really the same after something like that, now is she?
Here’s the extraordinary thing, though: on that night of our remarkable first encounter, Anthony and I did not even have sex. By which I mean—we did not engage in literal intercourse. Nor did I do anything to Anthony that first night, to offer him pleasure in return for the potent revelation he had just delivered unto me. Nor did he seem to need me to do anything. He didn’t seem to mind in the least if I just lay there, as immobilized as if I’d just fallen out of an airplane.
Again, this was part of the charm of Anthony Roccella—that incredible lack of urgency. The way that he could take it or leave it. I was beginning to understand the origins of Anthony Roccella’s immense self-confidence. It now made perfect sense to me why this penniless young man strutted about as though he owned the whole town: because if you’re a fellow who can do that to a woman without even needing anything in return, why wouldn’t you think awfully highly of yourself?
After he’d held me for a while and teased me a bit for having screamed and cried in pleasure, he’d gone to the icebox and come back with a beer for each of us.
“You’re gonna need a drink, Vivian Morris,” he said, and he was right about that.
He never even took his clothes off that night.
That boy had ravaged me right to the point of unconsciousness without even removing the jacket of his cheap, cute suit!
—
Of course I was back there the next night to writhe around once more under the magnificent powers of his mouth. And the next night, too. Still, he stayed fully dressed, without asking for anything in reciprocation. On the third night, I finally dared to ask, “But what about you? Do you need . . . ?”
He grinned. “We’ll get around to it, baby,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”
And he was right about that, too. We got around to it—boy, did we ever—but he waited until I was famished for it.
I don’t mind telling you, Angela—he waited until I was begging for it.
The begging bit was somewhat tricky on my part, because I didn’t know how to beg for sex. What sort of language does a nicely bred young lady use to plead for access to that unnamable male organ, which she so dearly wants?
Could you kindly . . . ?
If it’s not any trouble . . . ?
I just didn’t have any of the terminology required for this sort of exchange. Sure, I’d been doing a lot of dirty, filthy things since my arrival in New York, but I was still a nice young lady at my core, and nice young ladies don’t ask for things. For the most part, what I had been doing over the course of these past few months was allowing dirty, filthy things to happen to me, at the hands of men who were always in a big hurry to get it done. But this was different. I wanted Anthony, and he was in no hurry to give me what I wanted, which only made me want him more.
When it got to the point when I would stammer things like, “Do you think we might someday . . . ?” he would stop what he was doing, rise up on one elbow, grin at me, and say, “How’s that, now?”
“If you ever wanted to . . .”
“If I ever wanted to what, baby? Just say it.”
I would say nothing (because I could say nothing) and he would just grin wider and say, “Sorry, baby, I can’t hear you. You gotta enunciate.”
But I couldn’t say it—at least not till he taught me how to say it.
“There are some words you need to learn, baby,” he told me one night while he was toying with me in bed. “And we ain’t doin’ nothing more till I hear you say it.”
Then he taught me the nastiest words I’d ever heard. Words that made me blush and burn. He made me repeat the words after him, and he relished how uncomfortable it made me. Then he went to work on my body again, leaving me splayed and flayed with longing. When I had reached such a peak of desire that I could scarcely draw a breath, he stopped what he was doing, and turned on the light.
“So, here’s what we’re gonna do now, Vivian Morris,” he said. “You’re gonna look me dead in the eye, and you’re gonna tell me exactly what you want me to do to you—using the words I just taught you. And that’s the only way it’s ever gonna happen, baby doll.”
And Angela, God help me, I did it.