“Maybe.” I smile. “I hope so.” Even though I don’t know if that’s true or not.
That’s the last thing I say, because then Jason comes in, triumphant and sportsmanlike. “Dude, you ready to bust?”
I nod. In that same dreamlike state I entered with, I leave the office and we get in the car. We pull onto the highway and drive until the building fades into the millions of office buildings around us, recedes under the ominous landscape of the hills.
Jason recites his play-by-play, eager, and then says, “Hey man, what happened after I left?”
I shrug. “Same thing, more or less.”
He nods. He keeps talking. The radio plays, the car moves, and we move on, together, in his car, in our strange, beautiful brotherhood, the kind that stands naked in front of itself, unashamed.
Blinded
Donna George Storey
I kneel down and he ties the blindfold over my eyes.
Strictly speaking, it isn’t a blindfold, it’s a silk scarf. My brother and his wife gave it to me for Christmas, a pretty thing with a floral design in crimson, deep blue and gold. But when I opened the gift, I was thinking: When will I ever wear this?
But I gave it a try. When we got home, I spent a good fifteen minutes in front of the mirror attempting to knot it into an appealing fashion accessory. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched smugly – my brother had got him some Charlie Parker CDs.
Then I got the idea to wear the scarf as a headband, to keep my bangs off my face. Another failure.
“I can’t do anything with this thing. I’m sure it was expensive, too. Do you think they’d get mad if I took it back?”
He walked over to me. “How about this way?” He pulled the bottom edge of the scarf down over my eyes.
I could still see him hazily through the single layer of loose silk. He looked at me for a moment, his head tilted to one side as if he were deciding what to do. Then he kissed me. Hard.
When we finally came up for air, my lips felt tender, a little swollen.
I said, “Now tie it on so I can’t see.”
That was the beginning. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve done it since then, but it’s got us through this long winter. Sometimes he blindfolds me. Sometimes I blindfold him. It all depends on who comes up with a new idea. It’s never the same. That’s our unspoken rule.
Not that it’s entirely unpredictable. He seems to prefer that I wear some sort of clothing: one of his shirts or a teddy, something he can eventually slip off. After more than a year together, it still excites him to uncover my breasts, weigh them in his hands as if he is touching them for the first time. That’s one of the things I like about him.
I prefer him to be completely naked. The first time I blindfolded him, I was the one who was trembling. Although it was my idea that he kneel on the bed wearing nothing but the blindfold, when he actually began to undress with a cool smile, I almost told him to stop. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see his big body so exposed, a band of flowered silk over his eyes with the long, loose ends falling softly down his back. I thought it might somehow diminish him.
But I was wrong. I’d never realized how beautiful his body was. Not that I hadn’t appreciated it before, but I’d always focused my gaze on his eyes, his expressions. The rest of him I knew better by touch. But now, with his eyes hidden, I could see him with a new clarity: the rich, taut curves of his arms and chest, the hint of soft flesh at his waist that I found oddly pleasing. I noticed that the hair on his belly fanned out more luxuriantly to the left, and, by contrast, his right thigh was slightly more muscular, a legacy of his college fencing days. It didn’t take long for him to get hard – it never did when we used the blindfold – and I got to watch that, the delicate jerking movements of his penis as it rose and thickened, drawn upward by invisible puppet strings which, I imagined, led straight to my hands.
I felt like a thief.
I felt my own desire grow within me in a completely new way. This time the familiar ache seemed to originate from behind my eyes, from the very sight of him unseeing. Then it seeped downward, bringing a warm flush to my cheeks and neck, making my nipples grow erect. It finally reached my belly, pooling there as a sharp, shimmering hunger.
I bent closer to feast, on the smell of him first, the cuminy scent of crotch, sharply male, yet intimate, intoxicating. I’d never studied a cock so carefully, the web of tiny veins embedded in the skin like red lace, the puckered ridge below the head, as if the flesh had been pinched when it was still fresh and soft. With no eyes glowing down at me, urging me to lick and suck and swallow, I could gaze into that other eye, slit vertically like a cat’s, or maybe it was more like a tiny, hairless cunt, what they’d have on Barbie if she were anatomically correct. I pressed my tongue against it, lightly, tasting bitterness and salt, the tang of soap, then took the whole smooth helmet of the head into my mouth.
He moaned.
At last I had the sound of him.
Music.
When he decides the game, he often feeds me things. A dish of rice pudding in baby-sized bites from a spoon. Morsels of praline truffle he pushes through my lips with his tongue. And most often, his cock. I don’t know why, but his semen tastes sweeter when I am wearing the blindfold.
One time he slipped a tiny wedge of soft paper between my lips, struck a match, and instructed me to inhale. It was a joint. Where did you get this? I wanted to ask, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk – he had a way of letting me know such things – so I just lay quietly next to him on the bed and took long drags whenever he held it to my mouth. It must have been good stuff, because soon I was tingling all over just this side of numbness, floating off the bed into the past. It had been years since I’d smoked a joint. I never bought drugs myself. They were always presented to me as an offering from a boy in exchange for what I could offer him in return. So many things had changed since then, but it took me back to a time when I was so dumb about men, I might as well have been wearing a scarf over my eyes.
It’s been a difficult winter for both of us. I know things aren’t going well for him at work, but I didn’t realize how upset he was until that day when I came home to find him practising with his saber.
Once, when we first started going out, he gave me a demonstration of fencing moves. I liked the way he looked in that white jacket, the single leather glove on his right hand, but I wasn’t so sure about the wire-mesh mask. I thought it made him look like a huge insect. Or an executioner.
“Forget The Three Musketeers,” he told me, “what you want to do is keep the blade within an imaginary frame around your body, to move as little as possible and still protect yourself. The most important part, though, is reading your opponent. It’s like a game of chess, move and countermove,” he said. “And when you get it just right, it’s the best feeling in the world.”
But as I watched him, so graceful on his feet as he advanced then retreated, I thought it seemed less like a game than a strange and beautiful dance.
This second time, it was different. He wore no mask and his T-shirt was stained with sweat. There was a fierceness in his concentration, his brow furrowed, his lips pale. I don’t even think he saw me at first. Again and again he lunged at his imaginary opponent: a feint to the chest, then the quick and fatal strike to the head. I could see the metal meet flesh, then the cold satisfaction in his eyes as he watched the body crumple to the floor. Whoever it was died several times over.
Finally he turned to me. He was too far away to touch me with the blade, but he extended his wrist towards me as if he were pointing me out to some unseen stranger.