I frowned. “Hey, watch out, you could hurt someone with that.”
His mouth curved into a slight smile. “That’s the idea,” he said, tilting the saber back in salute.
I’ve been having troubles of my own. My father was in the hospital with another heart attack, and there was talk of surgery. The first time I went to visit, he came with me. As we walked through the corridors, the pallid fluorescent light and muted antiseptic smell began to make me feel ill, so I reached for his hand, the only warm, real thing in the whole place.
He waited in the hall while I went into the room. My father was sleeping. He looked so old, his body sprouting tubes and wires, his face all creases and shadows. My mother was sitting by the bed staring down at the book on her lap. I glanced back at him, leaning against the wall across from the doorway, arms crossed, gazing straight ahead. His expression was patient, blank. I knew he didn’t see me then. I wanted to be where he was – far, far away – but my mother pulled me back with her cool lips on my cheek, her anxious reassurances.
When she saw him, she stiffened, but, ever courteous, walked out to greet him. I watched them come together in a brief, guarded embrace, watched his lips move as he said something to her, watched her nod without really looking at him.
I’d known from the beginning that she didn’t really approve of him. Does he love you? she asked me once, quietly, almost under her breath. I shrugged because that was the only answer I could give.
I wonder if she could have understood the attraction better if I had told her about the blindfold?
Strangely enough, one of my best ideas came from my mother. She was going through her sewing scrap box, when she pulled out a square of deep-red velvet and said, “Remember this? It’s from that dress I made you for Christmas when you were – how old – eight or nine?” The fabric was soft with age and I instinctively rubbed it over my hand, up over my wrist. It felt especially nice when I ran a velvet-covered finger along the inside of my arm. I was so lost in my sweet memories of that dress, how grown-up and glamourous I felt when I wore it to church on Christmas morning then over to my aunt’s house for dinner, that I didn’t realize for several moments that I held in my hand the perfect surprise for our next game.
It was a good one. After I blindfolded him, I had him lie face down on the bed and guess what I was rubbing over his skin: the tip of my nose along his spine, the loose end of blindfold across his shoulders, my finger in the valley of his ass, my breasts across the back of his knees. I saved the velvet until last and stroked the length of him with it like I was polishing a precious, breakable object. He usually didn’t make much noise when we made love, but by the time I was done with the back of him, he was almost mewing. And more than ready to turn over.
I dusted his chest and the discs of his nipples, then forced myself to linger at his belly, soothing the skin in small circles, ignoring his cock that reared up and twitched with each new caress. At last I wrapped the velvet around it and began to burnish it like a newel post, with careful attention to the glossy knob. It was then I told him about the dress, about how I wore it with white tights and patent leather shoes and had a bow with holly on it in my hair, and about how thrilled I was when all of the adults told me I looked so pretty.
“I’ll bet you were cute,” he said with a smile, as I lowered myself onto him and started my slow ride.
So cute, I told him, that even my oldest cousin – the one I had a crush on, the one who lives in Texas now – gallantly offered me a turn with his train set. Before I’d always had to beg and whine. But that day, I felt like a princess. And in trying to figure out what was different about it, I had my first inkling that the way to get something from boys is to look pretty. Then they’ll do anything for you. Isn’t that true? I asked him.
“Uh-huh,” he replied, arching back into the pillow.
Not long after that he asked me to kneel when he put on the blindfold. Then he went on to position my body with his hands, telling me to keep my back straight, my shoulders down, my chin up. He told me not to move, not even to smile. He proceeded to caress me, starting at my cheeks just below the edge of the blindfold. He traced my lips with one fingertip, drew ovals on my chin, brushed my neck and collarbone with feathery strokes. I managed to hold myself still until his hands moved to my breasts. That’s when he had to remind me of the rules and rearrange my body in the proper position. He even reprimanded me for breathing too quickly. “Slow, baby, nice and slow,” he whispered, smoothing the tension from my lips and jaw until I was quiet.
But then he started up again, rolling my nipples between his fingers like he was fine-tuning a radio, rubbing one breast then the other with a spit-moistened palm. He knew my body. I had my proof then, if there was any doubt before. And all I could do was squeeze my eyes shut tighter and tighter under the blindfold as my cheeks began to burn and a fine sweat rose like lubricant on the skin beneath his hands. Soon my chest was throbbing so violently, my ribs ached. By then he’d moved down to my belly, drawing strange shapes that sometimes – just sometimes – extended further down. Then he’d come back to tease my belly button with a wet finger, stroking, circling, slipping softly inside.
All the while my clit was growing heavy and hot. I imagined he could see it, poking out between my lips, flushed scarlet and shameless in its need. When he finally did touch it, I shuddered, earning me another scolding.
“Now, now. Don’t you remember? Good girls keep still and quiet while their wet, swollen clits are being rubbed.”
By then there was nothing I could do to stop myself from whimpering, Please, oh, please, I think I’m gonna come, but I guess the rules suddenly changed, because he pushed me back on the bed and entered me with an urgency that surprised me, that tiny part of me that was still capable of coherent thought. How could just touching me – a statue – excite him so much? But his breath was coming as fast as his thrusts, and I was not far behind.
The experience of orgasm in general is something I can easily conjure in my mind, but specific ones elude me. Even when I remember the circumstances of the lovemaking, the things we said and did, the climax blurs into a vague sensation of bliss. An ending. But that orgasm is one I still remember in my body, a searing rush of pleasure as my desire finally burst free, my skull blasted open to the rush of night wind, the chilled fire of the stars. And I remember marvelling afterwards that we had done it: we had found a way to make each time better than the last.
Of course it couldn’t go on for ever.
Earlier tonight I convinced him to watch an episode of an English TV series about a king with too many wives, because it was one of my favourite shows as a child. I had fond memories of sitting before the television with a notebook, sketching the Tudor gowns. But as I watched it again, I realized there was a lot I didn’t remember. The growing sense of doom, the ugly marital quarrels, the political intrigue, the scene where the queen’s musician was blinded under torture with a knotted rope. It was altogether too gloomy and talky, so I didn’t complain when he started reading something halfway through. I decided to be satisfied he was there with me, idly rubbing my toes with one hand, holding the magazine with the other.
I noticed, however, that he started paying attention again when the queen was imprisoned on trumped-up charges of adultery. When it got to the execution scene, he put down the magazine. And so we both watched, transfixed, as the queen glided over to the scaffold, made her poignant farewell speech, kneeled down before the block. The lady-in-waiting tied a narrow, snow-white blindfold over the kneeling woman’s eyes. In that one moment, before the sword, the actress looked more beautiful than ever, at least those parts of her set off by the blindfold above and the low-cut dress below: her pouting crimson lips, her fragile neck and the swelling of her breasts that rose and fell with each breath. I remembered something else from long ago, my brother and cousins in the back of the station wagon on a hot summer day, talking about that same television show. The only part of interest to them was when the queen “got her head chopped off”. At the time, I didn’t understand the edge of excitement in their voices.