“Well, weren’t you?” I loathed my voice. Consciousness roamed the circumference of my brain, turning like a lighthouse beam, stopping here and there when a dense patch of darkness threatened to swallow the light, extinguish it. Unexpectedly, I found myself wading through that stream of unconnected images that surrounds the heart of sleep like the rings of Saturn. I had only a slight hold on myself and I realized that Jade must be in much worse shape: it wouldn’t take all that much to have us screaming at each other. “You weren’t making love to me. You were just fingering yourself, for Christ’s sake.”
“Oh shut up, David. You don’t know anything about it.” She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling for a moment and then closed them again. I could feel her thinking: Why did I come here? But I didn’t know if it was what she really felt or if she was just wondering if she might say it, for its effect. She needed to push me back, that much was certain. And I would rather have us end up with our hands on each other’s throats than to drift apart now, to descend into the privacy of sleep with our makeshift pleasures clutched to our breasts. The kind of junk jewelry that turns you green.
“Jade…”
“Let me alone. I’ve got to sleep.”
I was silent. I put my hands on her.
“You make me feel really stupid,” she said, accusingly. “I could prove to myself backward and forward and inside out that it was fucking stupid to come here and really stupid to make love with you—but no one could prove it the way you are doing right now. You really prove it, David. How stupid I am. You really do.” She was up on her elbows, looking at me.
“But that’s not how we make love,” I said. “We don’t do that, that business with your hand. It’s not our way.”
She sighed as if finally realizing she was attempting to speak rationally to a madman. She fell back on her pillow and then said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and sat up again. “I’m bleeding,” she said into the darkness. “I almost forgot.” She patted the mattress between her legs. “Oh God. I blew it.”
She swung her legs out of bed, bent down, and turned on the light. The fallen lamp reflected directly into the grimy window, in that three inches of black glass between the hastily drawn curtains. Jade peeled the covers down to see what had happened. An oval of blood, bright and sticky, rather more brown than red, the color of an apple bruise. “Lovely,” she said, shaking her head. There were little wisps of bloodstains here and there, but most of it was in that oval—the size of a bar of soap.
I happened to look down at myself. My cock was glistening and red with blood. There was a little blood on my belly and quite a bit of it on my thighs.
Jade shook her head.
“It’s glorious,” I said. I touched my fingers to the blood on my legs. Some of it came off and I brought my fingertips close to my eyes.
“We better strip the bed,” Jade said. Her legs were close together and slowly she was beginning to fold her arms over her breasts: the blood was making her ashamed.
“No. We don’t have to.” I wanted to tell her I liked that blood a lot more than the orgasm she’d given herself with her finger when she was supposed to be making love to me.
“Well, I’m not going to sleep in that goo,” she said.
“I will,” I said, sliding over. I reached out for her, took her around the waist. The hair around the opening to her vagina was dark with blood; I pressed her close to me and kissed it. I was leaning out of the bed in a twisted, uncomfortable position; my erection was nuzzled right into my belly. Jade put her hands on my head. I thought she might pull me away from her but she gripped me with both hands and dug her fingers into my scalp and then, moments later, discreetly yet unmistakably, she inched her hips forward, moving herself closer to my mouth, opening herself to me.
I pulled her into bed. I wanted to go into her immediately but I was frightened and I could feel her fear, too. It wasn’t a matter of inhibitions, or shyness, or doubt. The resistance of our bodies had already been broken down. The unfamiliarity of nakedness—gone. Even Jade’s twinge of embarrassment at her own blood had been quieted by my drinking it. The fear we felt was that terror you experience when the possibilities of your life begin to match the full range of your desire. It was the great fear the first pilots must have felt when their planes nosed slowly off the ground, the blinding anticipation of a treasure hunter with his hands finally trembling on the half-buried chest of gold. I ran my hands lightly over her and she trembled: it was not, for the most part, a shiver of pleasure. She stretched herself out, arched, but it seemed almost involuntary. She said nothing; her breath was not even loud. But I was certain that I was now approaching her, the part of her that had remained alive to the possibility of my return.
I kissed her. I felt the fog burning off within both of us, could see the origins of her feelings, deeply into her, like those ten-mile vistas in the farm country. Back, back so far, through the heart of Illinois, following the fertile rows, hazeless, almost airless sky, and where the vision finally ends is where there is simply nothing more to see. A pulse beat in her forehead; the veins along the inside of her arm were hard, almost like little delicate bones. Our mouths were open wide, as if we wanted to swallow each other. Cannibalism and kissing, I thought, trying to stand back from it for a moment, oddly theoretical, the way you might seize upon a passing fascination with blood after accidentally cutting yourself, choosing to concentrate on the bright gush rather than the pinwheels of pain. But this was not pain, and nothing like it; I sought refuge from softer feelings, softer and more vast. If it was only pain, then I would have been able to imagine its wretched conclusion, but what I felt with Jade seemed the beginning of something with no known limits, the unknown parts of the body and the spirit. Out of the perceptual prison! Storming the barricades! But really: storming the barricades! A journey into unexplored space. Not to the moon, not to Venus or Saturn, but outward toward the universe’s most outward curve, up and around the horn of time.
“David,” she said, when I put my finger inside of her, as if now, this instant, was the first time I’d touched her. Her arms were around my neck and she squeezed me with the unexpected strength of someone who is drowning. She brought our faces together, not in a kiss—our mouths were slippery inches apart—but in an indiscriminate crush. My forehead was on her cheekbone and I think if she’d pressed me against her with any more power I would have broken it.
I tasted blood in my mouth. It was Jade’s and it was mine: I’d broken the flesh on the inside of my lip.
She held me down below and tried to push me into her. When I touched her near her opening, she let out a small cry. I slipped away from her.
We turned to face each other. Our bodies were fluttering. Birds caught in a cold chimney. I humped back and forth. My cock was against her belly but we were both so wet now that everything seemed a prelude to penetration. Our smell rose from the mattress, flapping like a wet sheet. The bedsprings were whistling, twittering, groaning. The sound of our bodies in all the wetness like footsteps in morning grass, crushing the tiny air bubbles of dew.
Down between her legs, on my knees, with my hands on her thighs, I licked her more like a dog than a lover. I ran my long lilac tongue over her thighs, the skirt of flesh at the bottom of her rump, her pubic hair, inside her vagina, her belly. She flexed her legs in and out as if treading water. I felt something lodge on my tongue. A pebble-sized clot of blood. I removed it and then wiped it off my hands onto my chest.
She was making a high-pitched moan. Distant. A voice locked in a box at the back of her throat. It became higher, more present. Her pubic hair was so wet that the skin around her opening was bare, unprotected; dilated enough for a premature birth. I kissed it fully as if it were a mouth. Her thighs were rigid now, trembling, ticking like a clock. Lifted herself toward me. Her legs were off the mattress now, lifted straight up. I crawled toward her on my knees, keeping my mouth on her. I was kneeling directly in the center of her blood now. Her breaths were coming fast, with a pneumatic wheeze at the end of each one. Her hands clawed at the mattress; though it pierced nothing but the air between us, I felt an enormous pressure in my sex. I heard the sheet rip beneath Jade’s fingernails.