“Come,” she said, pulling me next to her again, placing my hand on her vagina, moving it back and forth for me once and then letting go, closing her eyes, holding her breath in anticipation.
Her pubic hair was thicker than before. Also dry. Along with the sanitary napkin, she wore a Tampax and it absorbed the moisture.
She reached up and lightly touched my shoulder. Head turned on the pillow, eyes away from me. She was whispering something, but I couldn’t understand it. I leaned my ear closer to her but it upset the rhythm on my hand and her legs gave a flutter of impatience. I resumed my original position and pace and her thighs parted still wider. A low groan of encouragement. The whisper louder now: “I want to,” she said. My hand was on myself, my hardness, gripping it with imbecilic force. A drop of semen seeped out, quivering on the head of my cock like a drop of hot wax. Waves of hot and cold. A sense of phosphorescence, X-ray consciousness. I rubbed her mound. The lips opened at the pressure but very slightly. Her legs were open wider than seemed possible. Her willingness, her hunger—they terrified me. She terrified me.
“Want to,” she said, her chin up, her head all the way back, pressed against the wooden headboard.
I twisted the string of her Tampax around my finger and began to remove it.
“No,” she whispered, grabbing my hand. “Can’t. Too much blood.”
I nodded and continued to move my hand over her. I wanted to touch her everywhere but I didn’t dare leave her sex and my other hand supported my weight. I leaned over her, kissed her breasts.
Her teeth chattered. A wave of coldness came over me. I thought of the lights coming on in a city viewed from the air. Then the darkness again. Warm and dense. The sound of her breathing, rapid now, frayed at the edge. Her knees were raised, wagging back and forth. Her moisture seeping through, mixing with the perspiration. Her pubic hair slick, though nothing compared to what I remembered.
She put her arms over her head. There was hair in her armpits now. Long. Curled at the bottom like the toe of a Turkish slipper.
The last time it had been time to shave, she’d let me do it. I took at least an hour, working at the biscuit-colored stubble with a care made up of equal parts of caution and sensuality. “From now on,” I’d said, when it was over, “this is my job.”
“That’s it,” said Jade. Her hands were tight fists. Her mouth twisted, grim: not that spacey, surprised look. She gripped my hand and pressed it harder against her, lifted herself up toward me, sawed back and forth. She made a “mmmmnn,” sound, rising in pitch.
Her muscles were rigid and she held her breath. Ribcage turned into two parallel rollercoaster tracks. Rump puckered. You’re not supposed to hold your breath when you have an orgasm. Jade learned that in a book and taught it to me. “It’s living, not dying,” she said, then.
She held her frozen pose and then collapsed. A light film of moisture appeared on her skin; her breaths reappeared, heavy and slow. Her eyes were closed.
She rolled over on her side for a moment but then remembered her manners and rolled onto her back.
“That sort of sneaked up on me,” she said. “I thought I was further away.”
I let myself down onto the mattress without bringing my head up to the pillow. I was eye level with her belly, rising and falling. She’d left her legs wide open but now she slowly brought them together again. Her pubic hair was much coarser than it had been before. The triangle had swollen, increased its domain.
A memory of Warren Hawkes persecuting me with his fantasies in Rockville: “Ah yes my brother, the sweet fuzz of a truly girlish cunt. We are evolving away from the great pleasures. When the sunlight can get through the hair. By the time we’re out of here, we’ll have to risk arrest to sample that sweet girlish cunt. Sweet, sweet, sweet girlish cunt…”
Jade placed her hand on top of my head. I thought she was going to guide my mouth onto her, but she stroked my hair and the pull of her magnetism was upward, away from her.
“I forced that, didn’t I?” she said, when I was next to her.
“That? No.”
“I did. I don’t know why. It seemed logical and right but it always does, doesn’t it? When you want something. A pleasure. Or anything, I guess. Now I feel a little…”
“I love you,” I said. I stroked her cheek.
“I feel so much better. I have to admit.” Suddenly, she sat up and patted the sheets.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Blood. I thought I felt myself leak. I’m not in the mood to bleed all over these sheets. Well, it’s all right. For now. Shit. I’m going to have to get up anyhow and get in my monthly swaddling clothes. I’ve got the heaviest flow of anyone I’ve ever heard of.” She slumped down and rolled onto her side, facing me, our noses almost touching.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not forgetting you.” She reached down and laid her hand on my stomach. Kissed my chest. Then with a falsely light touch, a delicacy that was terribly exaggerated, she put her fingers over my erection.
“Not like that,” I said.
“Yes. It’s all right.”
“I want to be in you.”
“No. We can’t. Don’t worry, don’t worry.” She gripped me harder. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and slid it down the length of me. Gripped the base, and then pulled up.
“You’re bigger,” she whispered.
“No.”
“I think so. But maybe it’s just I…” she was probably going to say it had been a while since she’d made love with a man.
I felt suddenly annoyed, jealous, shy.
She moved up and down me, slowly, at the same pace I’d stroked her. I was trying not to come, trying to gather the courage to insist again that she let me enter her. But then she touched the side of my face and kissed me—lightly, like an infatuated stranger—and everything began to fall away. I felt myself coming without experiencing any real pleasure. I discharged a long unbroken ribbon of burning semen. It was shooting somewhere or other and then Jade turned my penis toward me and I felt the come against my belly, my biceps, my collarbone.
Now the pleasure, long moments after the release, seeped through me, honey from a broken jar.
“God,” Jade said, “you got it all over me.” She sounded vaguely pleased. She was still holding my cock. “But you’re still hard.”
“Yes,” I said. I was on my back; I thought of a patient waking in the middle of an operation.
“You’re still like that?” she said, letting go.
“I don’t know. I’m with you, that’s all.”
She sank into her pillow, letting out a sigh and drawing it around her like a curtain. She folded her pillow in half, drew her knees up. “We’ve got to sleep,” she said. “I’m so tired I can’t even follow my own thoughts. Really.”
Suddenly she slipped out of bed, gathered up her underwear and pajamas, and then got her travel bag and took it all into the bathroom. I lay there for a moment wondering what to do with the come that was all over me, but then I sprang up and before I could think my hand was on the bathroom door.
I turned it. Unlocked. I threw it open.
Jade had the tops of her pajamas draped over her shoulders. She held a rectangular sanitary napkin and her underwear. She stood with her thighs pressed together and her pubic hair grew out in long fern-like curls.
“This is it?” I said softly. I touched the door, to show I hadn’t meant to make the frightening noise.