Now that he’d said it, held nothing back, Isabella would leave him with his cock dancing in the air. Something prevented him from seizing his straining dick, which beseeched the stale bar-room air like a blind man extending his cane over a bluff. One clench of his fist and Orlando would add to the stains on the floor, he hovered that close to the edge of primal fulfilment. Isabella hadn’t told him not to touch himself, though she often commanded him in bed. Orlando himself was never comfortable articulating what he wanted done to his body, and he graciously accepted what was offered. But right now he wanted his satisfaction – if she planned to give him any – to come at her hands, the gift of her body. He’d had enough of his own fist since she kicked him out a month ago.
As Isabella brought up the rhythm section behind him, the logistical success of this joint venture amazed Orlando. But, then again, they’d always enjoyed the challenge of different body sizes. He tended to forget how small she was. Her ass gave her such solidity, a gravity-hugging mass – like a steel girder that holds up a delicate bridge, one of those impossible pieces of architecture that tourists traverse the world to see – that he often forgot that his long fingers could nearly span her petite waist. Sometimes when he spied her tiny shoes kicked off at the front door, he wondered who’d come to visit.
Isabella’s ass. Now there was a show fit for stadium concerts. Forget the rules about facing the audience. Her magnificent flesh danced in multiple directions when she moved. Some law of physics or aerodynamics caused one hemisphere of her buttocks to return from movement while an opposing quarter gained momentum in the opposite direction, the way two stones tossed in a pond throw concentric circles into delirium. Her gluteals were like tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface, the mountains above them trembling and quaking when they shifted.
When Orlando was still a young man, years before Isabella backed her ancient Cadillac into his Toyota, one of his dates had blubbered over the televised royal wedding of the worthless second-in-line son to the worthless British throne. Somewhere in her tears Orlando saw the crushed belief that even though the first-born prince had escaped her, the second son had still roamed in her fantasies as a distinct possibility. She, an American. From Detroit. He had waited impatiently for the “I Do’s” so they could head to dinner. And then he’d caught sight of the bride’s well-padded ass behind an oversized satin bow. He could have watched the princess march up the aisle for miles. He wanted to reach up inside her gown and caress those buttocks, to crawl after that fanny through the church and into eternity with his hands groping. Her ass wasn’t even that big, except in comparison to Barbie dolls like her new sister-in-law. When radio deejays made cruel Mount Everest and Twin Peaks remarks about her behind, Orlando knew that not one of those men voicing loud derision over the princess’s flanks would turn down the chance to feel her ass bouncing against his belly, his cock lost in the valleys only mountains like hers could provide. A guy’s dick could seem awfully small and insignificant rutting around a generous ass, and Orlando suspected their taunting was born of that insecurity. Orlando thanked whatever cosmic force had blessed him with the long and narrow cock ideal for such excavating, a highly evolved instrument honed for intricate manoeuvres.
Orlando and his date never did get to dinner that night. They ordered in, and he had barbecued rump roast right in her bed. It wasn’t the start of a fetish, exactly, or even an obsession. Orlando liked women of all sizes – but big-hipped women became synonymous with royalty in his plebeian mind. That bow on a princess’s palatial behind tied a permanent knot around his preference, and he remained married to the idea of someday finding his own monarchical mounds to worship.
But Orlando soon learned that these splendid endomorphs didn’t crave worship of the twin-buttressed cathedrals on their backsides. Rather, they wished to crush these sacred temples, as ancient peoples had smashed shrines glorifying opposing religions. They wanted to destroy these icons of femininity, praying for the holiness of honed and toned hind-ends. They wanted him not to pay homage to the bouncing, mirrored embodiment of his faith, but to ignore them, converting to a belief in lean and inhospitable flanks.
When the princess crash dieted later on and became the spokesperson for a diet product, Orlando composed a dirge. Her lost flesh symbolized the war waged upon the tortured landscape of women’s asses, a genocidal campaign for the extermination of something holy. His lovers all felt rotten about not being Twiggy. He craved the sight of their haunches wriggling, but these ripe, succulent women extinguished the lights and crawled under the covers, face up in the dark. Which is why, with the passage of years, he seldom followed through on his attraction for them. He swore them off, a gluteal abstinence, the way friends with wheat allergies had given up gluten. Their constant need for reassurance wore him down. They vacuumed up his repeated compliments, and then ceased to believe them precisely because of their repetition. Ah, the trickiness of words.
Then Isabella had climbed out of her mammoth automobile a few years ago after reversing into his hatchback. When she leaned across the seat to dig her insurance card out of the glove box, her derrière sticking out of the car door, Orlando swooned. Such an ass could sing opera. No little Mimi or Butterfly pining for her straying dude, either, but a ferocious and tender Turandot demanding the severed heads of unworthy suitors. Orlando stuttered so ferociously when she approached that Isabella thought he’d had a concussion from the minor accident. He’d bruised his forehead on the steering wheel with her lurch into reverse, yes – but all he wanted was to smash his face against those cheeks, just the way his hood had crumpled under the staggering weight of the Cadillac’s trunk. He wanted bumper imprints ground into his deliriously smiling front grille. He reminded himself that he had given up on these women, swore them off in a permanent Lent. The simplicity of a glorious derrière had too often trapped him in complicated and ugly arguments. When he wanted a fistful of those mounds, he usually got an earful about his inability to understand. He didn’t blame them for their insecurity; they were the victims of a modern witch hunt for body fat. But despite his devotion to their ample order, Orlando could not resurrect a religion based on his cock alone, and so went on a flesh fast.
He could have abstained, he lied to himself, if Isabella hadn’t spoken in that damned accent, refined aristocratic education crossed with Monty Python crass in her Oxford gutter mouth. A dethroned British queen had backed into him, and he wanted her to keep backing up, rolling her glorious bulldozer of a behind right onto the cock pulsing in his lap. He bulged so prominently that he refused to get out of his squashed bug of a car. She feared that he couldn’t extricate himself from the interlocking, twisted metal of the two cars, and it was true in a way, his heart remained trapped by her rear end. His lustful frame of mind was permanently bent to her shape.
The dreadful sound of the two vehicles wrenching apart, Isabella with her foot on the gas, this time in first gear, was not as painful as the silence after she drove him out the front door last month, suitcase and guitar in hand.
She drove him home that first afternoon, but said she was so rattled she needed to stop for a drink. She declared he looked like he needed one, too. She drank her double whiskey in regular cola, “None of that diet crap,” she warned the bartender.