I waited for a response, hardly daring to breathe, unsure whether to expect outrage, incredulity, or calm acceptance. She smiled, and after a moment said, “Well, at last I get to sleep with him, if only vicariously through you!”
I smiled, pleased that she was so accepting. I knew that I could share how special that relationship had been to me. “Only you and he have ever made me feel an orgasm like that,” I said. “Make me tingle. Too often it’s just an ejaculation.” I looked at her, and said, “Thank you.”
She ran her hands across my chest and said, “I’m glad. You deserve it.”
I chuckled and asked her, “Remember when Jo Ann said I looked like a young Brian Coney at the reading in Boston? Right before you said he was so sexy that you couldn’t talk in his presence? Oh, how I was biting my tongue!”
She was curious about everything, then, asking questions about him, and my relationships with men in general. The questions were never accusatory, rather pure curiosity. I believe the notion may have even excited her, especially when I spoke of Brian. She did not ask me which I preferred, making love to a man or a woman, but rather what I thought were the best things one could do with either sex, and what I enjoyed most from each.
I spoke of finally learning to receive pleasure with Brian, of how before I had simply been going through the motions of sex, with either men or women, without enjoying it. How sometimes a need for physical intimacy will well up inside me until it’s unbearable. How I need to touch and be touched, the feel of skin and skin. How sometimes I have to go through other things I don’t want, or enjoy, to get those. When it builds up inside me like that, I almost don’t have a choice. And there’s almost always a man who wants to get me into bed, and I go with him, for the brief moments of foreplay – before he has my pants off, and his own, his large erection pressing against me – and afterwards, as we lie together, our bodies touching.
I think what I like most is lying in a lover’s arms afterwards. I can never fall asleep like that – I’m too sensitized to the feel of warm skin against my own – but I relish it for as long as I can. But one has to go through sex to get there. Even if I don’t enjoy the sex along the way, I’ll go through with it, for that luxurious sensation afterwards.
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been avoiding writing about the event which made me need to write this account. It’s so much easier to wallow in the background, spewing forth endless, easy details. There’s no emotional stake involved. Even talking about sex is easy, although revealing my desires and fantasies starts to get slightly uncomfortable. That’s why I just realized, as I was writing the above, how much I’d been avoiding the issue.
Enough of cold feet.
Laura is a portrait photographer, by profession, and we began taking photos of me, to try and reveal my inner self. I’ve never been terribly aware of what I look like, and a comment to this effect made Laura decide on this project. I readily agreed. I was curious what she could show me. I’d produced a body of work as a writer that was much more familiar to me than my own body.
I hadn’t been photographed in a long time, and was very nervous as we began. For one thing, I truly had no idea what I looked like now. Until I had begun to grow my hair out a year ago, my image had not changed in the last seven, eight years. I’d shown Laura two photographs of me, one taken when I was thirteen, the other at twenty, and both looked identical. Now, with shoulder-length hair, and the start of a beard, I had no idea who I was. I’d still been using those photographs of my younger self as my mental image of myself. It’s how I’d always defined myself. That’s how I imagined I looked to other people, since I had no other way of seeing myself. Laura was going to show me who I was now.
The first session went awfully. I’d taken the train out to her place after work Friday, and after a quick dinner, we went upstairs to her home studio, on the second floor of the house. I was so tense that it made Laura nervous as well, and seeing that she was now nervous only made me more so. It fed on itself in a vicious cycle, until the air was thick with uncomfortable frustration, and we finally called it quits. We went downstairs, leaving the studio set up in hopes that tomorrow we’d manage a better session. We made love that night, tension dissolving as slow caresses gave way to deeper passion.
Waking the next morning, I felt contented as a cat as I stretched in her bed as she moved around me. “I wish you’d been this comfortable last night,” Laura remarked.
“You should run get your camera,” I teased. “Or rather, you can walk. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes, you are, dear,” she said, tugging me upright and kissing me on the lips. She dropped a white terry-cloth robe in my lap. I smiled as I noticed the Hilton insignia embroidered onto it, and wondered if it had been stolen after a tempestuous weekend with one of her previous lovers, like something from the story she’d let me read. I put the robe on and followed her upstairs.
She positioned me in front of a large free-standing oval mirror in her studio, and stood behind me. Reaching around my waist, she undid the sash of my robe, letting it fall open. “I want you to look at yourself, touch yourself, until you know what it feels like from the inside,” she said. “Until there are no boundaries between the you in the mirror, and the you inside here.” She tapped her knuckles against my chest, and squeezed me gently from behind. Then, taking my hand in her own, she began guiding my fingers across my chest, pushing the robe from my shoulders until it fell to the floor. She released my hand and stepped back as I continued exploring, running my fingers over my arms and torso. I watched myself in the mirror, studying my body as my hands passed over each area. I felt the double sensation of touch, in my fingers and skin, not trying to analyse but simply feeling it.
I explored every inch of myself, running my hands along the muscles of my neck, even exploring my scalp, the fingers running through my own long hair as they felt their way along the curves of my skull. I ran my hands down my chest and back, onto my legs, crouching down to reach all the way to my feet. I stood again, my hands always in motion, exploring new areas – my thighs, my buttocks. I caught sight of Laura in the mirror, noticing that both she and the camera were watching me. I smiled, and did not stop my exploration. I grew hard, reveling in the multiple voyeurism: looking at myself in the mirror, looking at Laura looking at me. I could tell she was turned on by our voyeurisms as well, and began tantalizing her, staring into her eyes through the lens as I moved my hands over my body, grabbing my erection with one hand as the other circled a nipple or explored elsewhere.
And suddenly, I turned and looked at her over my shoulder, directly, no longer through the mirror. The camera clicked, the shutter winking open and shut like the lips of her labia moving apart and together again in fast motion. She put the camera down and I went to her, almost giddy with desire. We kissed fiercely. I undid the sash of her robe, and she shrugged out of it so quickly, like from one of those tales sailors tell of seals who shed their skins and become women. As her hands explored all the areas where my own had just been, I thrilled at the difference in the feelings. I remembered the mirror and looked up, to see my hands running up and down her back. I snorted with amusement, and pointed to the mirror. Laura turned towards it, and in that moment I leaned down to kiss her neck, her breasts, the entire time watching myself perform these actions in the mirror.
I took the café chair she used for portraits and positioned it in front of the mirror. I sat down on it and held my arms for Laura to come to me. She eased my knees apart with her hips and kissed her way down my neck, her breasts surrounding my erection. She licked my nipples, sucked on them, then began to drop lower, towards my cock. I stopped her, pulling her to her feet. “I want to be inside you,” I said.