I slip my tongue between his lips and the taste of him is so familiar and necessary that I am suddenly weak. I fall into Yves, kissing him so hard that I know my lips will be bruised in the morning. I want them to be. Yves pulls away first, drawing his lips roughly across my chin down to my neck, the hollow of my throat, practically gnawing at my skin with his teeth. I moan hoarsely, tossing my head backwards, a gesture of acquiescence and desire. My neck throbs and I know that here, too, there will be bruises. He sinks his teeth deeper into me and I can no longer perceive the fine line between pain and pleasure. But just as soon as I consider asking him to stop, he does, lathering the fresh wounds with the softness of his tongue, murmuring sweet and tender words. Such gentleness in the wake of such roughness leaves me shivering.
The weight of my breasts rests in Yves’s hands, and he lowers his lips to my nipples, suckling them. He looks up at me as he suckles, and it is unclear whether this is a moment of passion or a moment of comfort for him… for me. And then I cannot look at him so I rest my chin against the top of his head, my arms wrapped around him, my hips slowly rocking back and forth. My cunt brushes along the length of his cock, hard beneath me. I am wet already, and I want him inside me, but I wait. This moment, whatever it is, demands patience. He turns our bodies so that I am lying on my back and slowly, almost too slowly, he draws his tongue along my torso, inside my navel, the round of my belly. He is reverent in his touch and I can feel the tension in my body easing away as I surrender my trust and fear and hope to this one man.
His hands massaging my thighs, Yves places a cheek against the soft, wiry patch of hair covering my mound. And then he is tracing the lips between my thighs with only one finger. His touch is tentative at first, and then it is possessive and insistent as he covers the most sensitive part of me with his mouth, tasting and teasing me with his tongue, that one finger sliding inside me so subtly that I gasp, and clench around him and hear a distant voice begging him for more. It is agonizing that at a time like this, Yves is making love to me in such a manner when all I want is him fucking me so hard that I feel everything and nothing at all. His tongue is moving faster, so fast that it feels like a constant, and then I cannot take it any more.
“Fuck me,” I say harshly, and he blinks, looking at me as if he, too, is seeing me for the first time.
“Oui, ma chère, he whispers, crawling up my body, kissing me as he slowly slides his cock, inch by inch, into the wet heat of my cunt.
Yves takes hold of my knees, spreading my legs wide and pushing them upward until they practically touch my face. I rest my ankles against his shoulders and shudder as he pulls his cock to the edge of my cunt and then buries himself to the hilt over and over again. I am intimately aware of his pulsing length; his sweat falling onto my body, into my eyes, mingling with mine; the tension in his body as I claw at the wide stretch of black skin across his back with my fingernails. Tomorrow, he, too, will have bruises. My cunt loosens around his cock and Yves groans, hiding his face in my armpit, trying to stay in control.
“Let go,” I urge him.
Then, he is fucking me faster and harder, so much so that I cannot recognize him, and my chest heaves because I am thankful. A cry that has been trapped deep in my throat is finally released and the sound of it is peculiar. It is a sound that only a woman who has known what I have known can make. I can feel wetness trailing down the inside of my arm. It is Yves’s tears. My thigh muscles are screaming, so I wrap my legs tightly around his waist. I am tender inside but I don’t want Yves to ever stop, because with each stroke of his cock he takes me further away from the geography of our grief and closer to a cool dry place.
Bacon, Lola and Tomato by Susannah Indigo
The first time Lola found out that Keith had cheated on her, she gained ten pounds almost overnight. I love you and I will wait for you, my sweet tomato, his email note had said when she accidentally read it on his computer, which was cute, except that he certainly never referred to her as any kind of fruit or vegetable. Its nobody, he offered with a guilty shrug as she sat slurping her second bowl of ramen noodles, just a way to waste time online and avoid working on my novel.
“I am not a tomato,” Lola Maria Estonia pointed out to him, just in case he had forgotten. She flipped her long black hair in the way that made men crazy and wrapped it around his wrists as though she could hold him that way. “But you do always wait for me.”
They laughed; she forgave him; they made love; she got up afterwards while he slept and made herself a big bowl of Apple Jacks with raisins and four teaspoons of sugar.
The day Lola found his cell phone bill she discovered the joy of a box of Krispy Kremes, fresh and warm off the rack, half of them eaten directly while she was still in the bakery, the rest of the dozen melting in her mouth on the drive home. It appeared that the sweet tomato lived just one area code away and received almost daily calls ranging from ten minutes to two hours.
“I love you, Lola Maria,” Keith swore that night when they crawled into their four-poster bed, the same bed they had shared for one year, two months, and twenty-three days. He whispered as he slid inside her and gave the extra soft flesh on her bottom a spank: “You are the voluptuous overflowing lush root of every desire any man has ever had.”
This was why she had moved in with him in the first place, because he had the words that could change the way she breathed. But now his words seemed to be adapting to her new body – he used to only call her my fragile princess, my little girl.
“I’m sorry I’ve hurt you,” he whispered as they laid in bed with their legs entangled. “Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”
She hated to think of fighting with him, or worse, to hear him lie again. “I’m hungry,” she finally answered, sure that more carbohydrates would make her vision of telephone bills disappear into sated bliss. So Keith got up and made her his special omelette with sausage and potatoes, no tomatoes, and for once she ate every single bite on her plate.
Lola Maria Estonia was up to a size 14 from her former size 8 when she finally went to visit the mysterious tomato. The sun was growing hotter and hotter as she stood on the sidewalk across the street from the address she had tracked down from the phone number. Lola was so fascinated that she took up more space in the world than she used to, even in the middle of the sidewalk, that she only smiled as the warmth grew under her red leather jacket, newly purchased from the Coldwell Collection in a comfy size for the plus woman. She had thrown out all of her old skinny jeans, although Keith had suggested that perhaps she should keep them because she would need them again soon. Lola had just smiled and gone shopping.
It didn’t seem that Keith spent much face-to-face time with the tomato, because he was usually at home at his computer, or at his part-time job at the bookstore, or out with Lola. She wasn’t about to ask Keith any more questions – she just monitored his email and phone calls, as though she was a detective. She also checked up on his novel that he said he was almost done with, and realized he hadnt written much of anything in a long time. Why is it that I live with this man? she wondered on her bad days, but then she remembered all the words, and how he made love to her with such passion, and how she was almost sure he was her soulmate, not to mention a good cook.