Quiver

THE LOVER

I met him at La Cage. I go there occasionally. It’s just part of my personality. I don’t question it. I reckon there’s a lot of heartache out there from people living through their head and not their hearts. Me, I just live.

I noticed him straightaway—I guess it was his longish ginger hair. Not many men have good hair like that; it made him stand out. He looked a little less fashion-conscious than the rest. I liked that—a bit frayed around the edges, a little vulnerable. I walked up and stood next to him, and ordered a drink. I could feel him checking me out. His eyes running around the edge of my shirt and burrowing in between my legs. I’ve always liked this moment best. There’s never any doubt in my mind that they won’t want me. Some people just embody sex, and I’m one of them. I cultivate it. I’m not being arrogant or anything. It’s just plain fact. One that’s never failed me.

So he turns around, and finally I see his face. Late twenties, aquiline nose, good skin, a full mouth and green eyes, with a heap of irony glittering in there. My kind of boy.

“Simon,” he tells me. “Simon. But don’t tell me yours. Let’s stay strangers for a while at least.” And I know I have to have him.

LOOKING FOR STRANGE

They break into a commission flat, an ugly place just behind the club. Dee’s heart is thumping, despite a pretense of indifference. He doesn’t know this man, but he wants him, and the danger of the si

tuation thrills him as much as it thrills Simon. It is Simon’s idea to come here. He does it regularly, he tells Dee casually. You just break in and fuck in the bed. It’s wild, and totally alien—plus there’s the added thrill of the possibility of being caught. He wets his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. The gesture is deliberate but slight enough to seem natural. It gives Dee an immediate erection.

Small rooms, damp walls, small town poverty. Simon takes Dee’s hand and quickly leads him to the bedroom.

A single futon on the floor, an old cot pushed up against the wall, the wooden bars broken in places.

Simon throws a teddy bear off the bed, and suddenly drops to his knee in front of Dee. Biting the skin around his waist, he unzips the tight jeans. Dee’s cock springs out, proud and rudely pink under the naked lightbulb. He looks down and weaves his fingers through a mass of ginger hair, as Simon takes his cock into his mouth, tasting the ridge, then greedily taking it deep into his throat. Dee tilts his head back, luxuriating in the sensation of being sucked, Simon’s hands reaching so confidently around his waist and gripping his ass.

There is a poster pinned to the ceiling, an old one of Tom Cruise. I’m going to come staring at Tom Cruise, Dee finds himself thinking, and wrenches himself away. He pulls Simon down onto the bed, tugging off his T-shirt. Tracing the fine down of golden hair around his nipples, he buries his face into Simon’s armpit, filling his nostrils with the pungent smell of male sweat: stronger, sweeter—younger than his own. He reaches down and roughly pulls off Simon’s beaten leather pants. Simon’s cock, smaller than his, rubs against the shaft of his own thick member. A valley of white freckled skin, the testicles covered in sparse golden hair. Dee holds Simon’s cock and rubs it gently across his lips and eyelids. It never ceases to amaze him, this similarity of flesh. The same, but different. The knob is slightly wet. He teases him by using it to trace the outline of his lips, his stubble. Simon gasps, and pulls Dee up to his face.

Dee lies with his full body weight resting on Simon. Nipple to nipple, cock to cock. He loses himself in the green of Simon’s irises. A clear deep green, freckled with gray. He closes his eyes and feels Simon’s lips on his, his tongue entering him like a cock, probing his mouth, his throat. He lifts Simon’s legs high over his shoulders. Reaching into his back pocket for a condom, he pins Simon down as he rolls the condom carefully over himself.

“We could get caught any minute,” Simon’s voice is thick with lust.

“Isn’t that what you want?” Dee whispers hoarsely into Simon’s ear as he enters him, plunging deep into his taut ass.

THE GIRLFRIEND

We’ve been lovers for eighteen months now. How would I describe him? Silent, one of those working-class Australians—you know, not really trained in the art of being emotionally expressive. I guess that’s what I liked about him in the first place. His difficulty. His toughness.

Dee works with his hands. You can tell straightaway by the way they hang down, strong, veined.

He’s a landscape gardener, works for the council. I’d sometimes see him in the botanical gardens in his dark cotton overalls, on his knees, weeding a flower bed or attending to the herb garden. Then later, at my place, he’d make love to me with the soil still under his fingernails, smelling of eucalyptus.

We met at a dinner party. I didn’t mean to fall in love with a landscape gardener. But, as much as I’d like it to be, love is not logical. My colleagues at the law firm think I’m a control freak. I like things to be neat—everything in its place. Dee is my only exception. He refuses to fit anywhere: not into my longterm plans, not into my social activities, not into my definition of what a lover should be. He sets his own terms and I acquiesce. After all, arbitration is my forte. Is this love or masochism?

He took me once, at night in the park. It must have been about 100 degrees, too hot to sleep. We were drunk, the moon was bright. One of those nights, where you have an objectivity about being human, being part of the human race, as if you could stand out there on some nebular body and look back at earth. And then, if you’re lucky, you get lifted up and thrown headfirst into the meaning of eternal.

I remember the moonlight falling onto the stone statues as we walked along—magical, blue, casting shadows over granite angels, waxy night jasmine, huge white magnolias curling up in the night, a blue shower of jacaranda petals fluttering down across our hair.

I turn, laughing, to find him gone, completely disappeared into the shadows. Suddenly sober, I call out his name. It returns echoing, the tremor in my voice scaring me. Above me bats chat and cackle. I stumble toward a huge elm, its trunk veined and phallic, soaring stoutly up into the black. I lean against it, momentarily comforted by my own invisibility.

Then I see him, stepping out into the blue-white of the moon. Phantomlike, his pale skin reflecting the light. He walks slowly toward me, his sex swaying heavily. He is nothing of this world, so alien in his beauty. I cannot see his face—the shadows transform him into a stranger. He snaps off a small branch of scrub. Then, with rough primitive gestures, he begins to rub the honeylike sap onto his cock. Around us the cicadas begin their chorus. I am still in my evening dress. He lifts my skirt and rips a hole in my pantyhose. I am naked underneath. The cool night air caresses the lips of my sex. He lifts me up onto the branch of a tree and carefully starts to anoint me with his finger. The sap burns like tiger balm, making my blood rush. He parts me wide open, placing a dab of it onto my clitoris and the heat rises from my center. He steps back, looking like a demented Bacchus, the sap glistening on his body. I am left pinned, my legs spread between two branches, my breasts pulled free. I feel like a sacrificial offering for the moon, watched by a stone audience of goddesses and shadowy trees.

Dee runs his tongue slowly across the inside of my thighs, then bites the flesh gently back down to the knee. I am burning up. I want him inside me. I struggle but he holds me down. I can feel my lips and clit swelling to gigantic proportions, as if my body is centered there and nowhere else. Leaves and twigs tangle up in my hair as I push my hips down toward his mouth, his cock, anything to fill me, to intensify this delicious heat. My head falls back in pleasure, and I open my eyes to an upside-down world, night for day.

Something darts from one shadow to another, an open glade of grass surrounded by a canopy of pungent tropical vines. A statue of Diana the huntress stands in the center of the clearing. At her feet crouches a naked satyr, a beautiful youth of about fourteen. In my drunken, drugged state I see the satyr bury his face between Diana’s virginal legs. His hands grip her pale buttocks as his long animal tongue parts her delicate, hairless sex. She drops her quiver of arrows, arching her back like a gymnast. A stone flower turning to a rosy blush.

Hands grasp my breasts and lift me down to the ground. We crouch opposite each other, Dee’s eyes black with lust. Wrapping my legs around his hips, I slip onto his cock. Skin on skin, the burning mounts. He feels huge. The moon and the stars dance over my shoulder as I bury my face into his chest. We slip across each other, drenched in sweat, and I can feel each rib of his cock as he slowly pulls out. I throw him down onto the fragrant grass, squatting over him like some primeval fertility goddess. I clench the tip of his cock, teasing him as I move backward and forward, and then plunge down onto the whole length of it. Then together, the moon, the stars, the trees and the flowers all swoop and disappear inside us as we come in unison.

Like I said, Dee wasn’t just your average landscape gardener.

THE BOYFRIEND

I lost my virginity to a house burglar. True story. I was house-minding my uncle’s mansion in Sandy Bay. It was late, about two in the morning, and I woke to the sound of breaking glass. By the time I got downstairs he was rifling through the family silver. I was sixteen, dressed only in my pajama bottoms and clutching an old tomahawk, an antique of my uncle’s. He was about twenty, dark, tall. He turned around and stared, and then started laughing.