Sensing her distraction, he looked up suddenly and their faces almost bumped. Then just as suddenly he reached across and kissed her, pushing her back onto the couch as his tongue found her tongue. His lips, intelligent in their exploration, took her lips, softly biting, catching at her tongue, both of them now swallowing each other in an orchestration of promised lovemaking, of technique, of knowing how to fuck, how to make love, how to lose oneself in the pure sharp heat of good sex. His hands reached down into her blouse to cup her breasts, both of them forgetting themselves entirely in that instant rush of eclipsing lust. It was one of those moments that so easily could not have happened, a decisive act of courage, one that would change lives.
He led her up to his bedroom, a small room off the landing. Sheets were draped across the window and there was a mattress on the floor. Piles of books rested up against the walls, which were painted black: a young man’s bedroom—a very young man’s bedroom.
In fact, she told me, only a few months ago, that at this point she found herself suddenly wanting to run, as if sensing that perhaps this might be more momentous than she consciously realized. “What am I doing here?” she’d thought to herself. “Why now do I want to run and from what? Uncomplicated blinding pleasure? From possible heartbreak? From the sheer vulnerability of nakedness, emotional and physical?” These and a hundred other doubts flashed through her mind in a kaleidoscope of apprehension.
She stood in the middle of the room not knowing what to do next. There was nowhere to sit so she stayed standing, wondering how many other women had stood there feeling just as anxious—a shadow line of past conquests trailing from her trembling hand. Seth, oblivious, lit some candles, slipped a CD into the player in the corner, then led her to the bed.
He began to pull her clothes off in clumsy haste, wanting her right then, but, a little put off, she stopped him with a smile. And what a smile. I still remember it, a tantalizing half smile of experience, a smile that said, “I am going to lead”. Teasingly, she slowly lifted her dress up over her shoulders, n
ow regretting the rather functional white cotton underpants she’d worn that night, but thankful for the push-up bra, which displayed her full bosom to advantage.
Taking charge, she pushed him back so that he knelt opposite her. His green eyes, captivated by her body, glinted in the candlelight. His cheekbones and mouth, she later told me, looked like a prism of sharp planes all promising sensual assault. Tigger could smell his sweet young sweat mixed with a salty tang, as if he might have been swimming or surfing earlier that day. It radiated off him and filled her nostrils with forgotten memories of youth, of fucking in sunlight in some beach house, blond hair and sandy skin of eons ago, and in that faded memory Tigger forgot who she was and where she was. Everything now narrowed down to one sharp point of pure desire, both of them so fiercely in the moment. To Seth’s delight she suddenly wrenched his T-shirt over his head and flung it to the other side of the bed.
Of classical proportions, his shoulders were broad, his chest and stomach a washboard of compact youthful muscle. There was a faint dusting of chest hair between his dark but pronounced, erect nipples. Tigger had forgotten how hairless and smooth-skinned younger men were. Tigger thought this man was beautiful, as beautiful as he would ever be. Awe rose in her throat like sorrow and she paused, rocking back on her heels.
Seth reached across and pulled the sheet from the window. Moonlight flooded the room and settled like white snow along the curves of his chest and thighs. They were both now kneeling face-to-face. He was watching her like an animal, knowing there was nothing in his gaze except the need to fuck. He lifted one hand and unbearably slowly ran a finger across her lips and down to one breast. Lifting it out over the bra cup, he teased the nipple, a slow tracing circle followed by a sharp pinch that sent a taut spike of erotic excitement down to her groin.
“Don’t move,” he commanded, watching the growing excitement in her face like a professional. He ran his fingers down her torso, tracing her moist clit through the thin cotton. Tigger closed her eyes. Her thighs were trembling. Her breasts ached as if they wanted to be bitten, to be taken into his mouth, the nipples hard for him. She opened her eyes again. Seth was smiling at her, his fingers pressed into the wet crack of her vagina through her panties. He was still wearing his jeans, the bulge of his erection straining against the cloth.
“Your turn.” His voice was almost a growl. He moved even closer, so that they were now only centimeters apart, and suddenly she understood the game he was playing; he was manipulating the erotic charge between them like an invisible balloon that swelled and grew tauter according to how aroused they were. It was the kind of heightened foreplay you could only have with strangers, when there was nothing at stake except the sex you were about to have—no emotional expectation, no history, no guilt or secrets. Tigger couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt as excited, or liberated.
She leaned forward. She could smell him now, a delicious perfume of sweat and musky cologne undercut with the smell of excitement, of the sex pheromone. His eyes were narrowed like a lion’s, a sheen on his skin glistening in the light. She pulled his lower lip into her mouth and pressed her teeth down gently. He groaned. She then raked her nails across his shoulders, over his nipples, and down the center of his midriff, hard enough to let him know who was in control. His skin was impossibly soft, impossibly youthful, but she wanted his cock. Her fingers found the buttons of his fly; for a moment her clumsy fumbling made the invisible balloon of erotic tension between them deflate. Finally she released him, the weight of his cock falling against her palm. His cock was long and of decent girth, like his capable fingers. She couldn’t believe her luck.
He arched his back, pushing his groin proudly toward her like a gift, but in those days he was arrogant like that. She hauled his jeans down over his hips and, falling back, he wriggled out of them, now naked and gloriously erect, his cock appearing thick against his slim hips, his mouth and hands now greedy in their abandon. After burying her face in the sweetness of his testicles, she took him into her mouth. The length of him almost made her gag. After circling the bulbous, sticky tip with her tongue she took him deep into her throat, feeling his excitement rise like sap.
“Stop, I don’t want to come like this.” He pushed her head away and sat up. “Come here.”
She moved toward him as he pulled her underpants off and, reaching behind her, undid her bra, her breasts falling heavy against his chest. He then pulled himself beneath her so that his face was under her sex.
“No, stop,” she groaned, but he didn’t stop.
Tigger pressed her hot face against the wall, faintly appalled at his obvious sexual prowess and experience. This was no virgin. She could feel her own excitement building and building down in the kernel of her body. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had served her like this. Certainly sex with the ex in the last months of their relationship had deteriorated into her serving him, a warning sign Tigger should perhaps have heeded. But here, now, Seth was an entirely different proposition.
Close to coming herself, she pulled her hips away from his mouth. Lowering herself down, she was relieved to find him as hard as before, if not harder. The tip of his cock now rested just inside her lips. This was a moment Tigger always relished in lovemaking, a tantalizing, lingering tease, the moment before bearing down and being filled by a delicious tightness. Tigger had always regarded this as the litmus test of sexual compatibility—whether the man filled you or not. For her it was a harbinger of what was to come: she was convinced that a sensible woman should take heed if they did not, for inevitably this misfit would sooner or later become an issue in the relationship.
Slowly, she pushed down onto his cock. The sense of being filled was overwhelming, a visceral reminder of what it was to be female, to be the receiver. She rode him faster and faster, clasping herself tightly around him. Then suddenly he pushed her up and after slipping both his hands under each of her buttocks, lifted her up first onto his knees then, with her legs curled firmly around his back, into a standing position. Carrying her, still inside her, he walked over to the wall and pushed her hard against it as he slowly began thrusting, getting faster and faster. Their mouths pressed together, his tongue thrusting in and out in time with his cock. The power play was reversed; now he dominated, abandoning himself to his own pleasure. Paradoxically, this excited Tigger, who was so used to the self-consciousness of lovemaking with her ex, both of them too involved with the necessity of pleasing each other to the point of ridiculous sacrifice and some disingenuousness. But this was different. Immediate, primal, unabashedly self-serving, it was as if they were there to serve some invisible god—ancient, wild, instinctive. Seth slowed his pace, then paused, allowing the ripples of sensual throbbing to vibrate through their bodies. They both came screaming.
• • •
She watched him sleeping, his fluttering eyelids a veil of surrender across his face. Suddenly he looked younger than his twenty-one years, and it was hard not to feel that she had exploited him. Apparently she took solace in deciding that his sexual prowess had indicated a decadent and far from innocent lifestyle—at least that’s what she told me.
Tigger glanced at the window, the sheet now hanging down, the moon half in, cut by the diagonal edge. There was a promised timelessness in the faint scent of night jasmine, the distant roar of traffic. Her whole body was abuzz with the warm afterglow of orgasm, her deliciously aching muscles languid in their pain. She felt alive, capable of anything. She felt, for the first time in years, as if her whole future was stretched out before her and, more important, contained every possibility imaginable.
Over her shoulder she heard Seth groan and turn in his sleep. She looked around, surprised that the thin blue light of dawn had already begun to illuminate the student squalor of the room: the pile of dirty linen in the corner, a pair of worn-down runners still filled with the ghost of feet at the end of the bed. An ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and screwed-up cigarette papers, the stained and worn carpet, the dust piled up in the corners. And all those one-night stands she’d had as a student came flooding back—the sexual conquests, some of which were the climax to an elaborate courtship, some not, but all of which she remembered. And all those early mornings she’d wasted lying there, watching some young man sleeping in a postcoital stupor, her own eyelids pinned back by hope, praying that he would want to stay for breakfast and then perhaps even the whole day, and then after that who knows . . .?
Dawn had now crept along the bedcovers and was minutes away from falling over Seth’s sleeping face. Tigger suddenly caught sight of herself in the chipped mirror resting up against the wall. Her body looked flushed but voluptuous, her soft middle-aged belly a curve of an earlier aesthetic, her breasts now pendulous. She examined her face: the makeup from the night before was smudged down both cheeks and those crow’s feet that now came from not sleeping and were impossible to conceal had appeared like the lines on fine parchment. The morning would not be kind, so as silently as she could manage, Tigger slipped out of bed and grabbed her handbag, underwear, and dress, not daring to dress in the bedroom in case she woke Seth. Standing in the musky corridor just outside the door, she slipped on her clothes and tiptoed out of the house.
Outside the air was alive with a chorus of birds. Stepping back into her rental car was like stepping back in time, to “before.” She started the engine up, jolting the radio into life, and as she drove through the sleeping city, accompanied only by garbage trucks crawling like giant beetles through the dawn streets and the occasional cab driver racing to get off his night shift, she realized she hadn’t felt this free in years.
And this is where I come in. I remember I slept through until about one in the afternoon that day only to be woken by the afternoon sun streaming in. I remember reaching across the bed in that half-awake daze, hoping to find her, hoping she’d stayed. Even thirty years later I remember the intense sense of loss and, more than that, the overpowering sense that I had to follow her, to make her mine.
• • •
Seth looked up from the fireplace. A handsome man now in his early fifties, bereavement had nevertheless made its recent mark. May hadn’t deliberately prompted such an intense confession but had stayed back after the wake of Joanna Wutherer
, her old anthropology lecturer, sensing that Joanna’s younger husband needed to talk, to exorcise some memory of the woman he loved. What she hadn’t counted on was the power and sensuality of the story of the couple’s first night together. It was embarrassing, moving, and confronting all at the same time. But then what did she expect from a painter famous for his erotic drawings?
May glanced across at one of Seth’s drawings hanging above the artist’s head. It was a recent one of Joanna—even as she was dying, Seth had captured the seventy-year-old’s beauty and vivaciousness. He really was a great artist.