“Stop it,” she told her reflection firmly. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
Determined to bring some normality back into her routine, she brushed her teeth, washed her armpits and face, and thoughtfully massaged some body lotion into her skin. Her future suddenly loomed up as blank as her face looked cleaned of the heavy eye makeup. Then, hoping to shock herself out of unease, she splashed herself with some cold water and turned back to the bedroom.
Shadow was now lying stretched out on Mitch’s empty side of the mattress. Somehow to shoo the cat off felt like surrendering to her fears, so, after locking the bedroom door, May slipped in between the sheets and, with her back to the cat, switched off her bedside lamp, plunging the room into a velvety darkness.
She closed her eyes, lulled by the sound of distant traffic roaring down Parramatta Road and the chirping of a lone cicada that hadn’t realized it was nightfall, and was just dropping off when suddenly she felt the caress of fingertips running across her bare shoulder. She froze. The touch was so light, so delicate, that she wondered whether she hadn’t imagined it. But then, just as she’d started to relax once more, it happened again, this time more firmly, more definite—the warm trace of human fingers running across her shoulder and then sneaking down and around to the hollow between her hip and waist. She lay there paralyzed by shock as another hand slipped around the other side of her torso to cup one full breast and play one nipple. May opened her mouth to scream, then, remembering the neighbor upstairs and his tendency to complain to the police at the slightest provocation, stopped herself. She had to be imagining the caress; she must be. After all, she had locked the bedroom door, the window was barred, and she was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. There was no room under the bed for anyone to have hidden and no possible way for a man to have entered the flat.
Mustering all her courage, she switched on the bedside lamp and looked down at her body. No hand, no fingers, just her naked torso—thin, pale, and horribly vulnerable. She rolled over and glanced at Shadow. The cat’s face was tucked onto its paws and it seemed to be softly purring in its sleep, indifferent to the external world and any crazy hallucinations of her own.
Had she started to fantasize due to the shock of Mitch’s sudden departure? Was this some weird manifestation of loneliness? May rolled onto her back and stared up at the peeling ceiling. Somewhat disconcertingly, buried beneath the fear was a kernel of erotic pleasure, a kernel that had now started to unfurl somewhere between her belly button and groin whether she liked it or not. Should she masturbate? Would this relieve her stress? Somehow such an action felt wrong in front of the cat.
Sighing, May switched the light off again and began to doze. Five minutes later she was woken by an intense shooting of pleasure from one nipple down to her groin. As her brain flipped back into consciousness (or had it?) she became aware of a soft nibbling of one nipple while a strong and undeniably masculine hand slipped its way firmly between her thighs. Whoever was making love to her knew what he was doing.
“If this is a dream I intend to stay sleeping,” she told herself as soft full lips made their way up her body. Reaching down, she cupped the sides of his head, running her fingers across his face to read his features in the dark. High cheekbones, a flat wide nose, full lips, hair tight whorls set against a long narrow skull—there was a sculptural symmetry that suggested beauty and an African heritage, May realized with a jolt as her fingers traced the muscular shoulders, the smooth, almost hairless skin on his chest and lower down his stomach. I should be frightened or at least shocked, she thought to herself, but the silvery darkness of the bedroom felt as if it had transformed into some netherland between dream and conscious life, as if they were making love underwater, in a subterranean world of shimmering light that was itself a manifestation of pleasure.
May lifted his face up to hers, her hands holding his high cheekbones, then, after retrieving one from her bedside cabinet, lit a small scented candle. The flame flickered across his dark features. He looked young, around twenty—a couple of years younger than she. His features were slightly aquiline, as if he might herald from as far north as the Sudan, but his skin was so black it a
lmost looked blue in the shimmering light. His eyes were long and almond shaped, and so bottomless that when May gazed into them she had the sensation of tumbling into outer space. They wore an expression of languid sensuality, of drawn-out, unhurried sex. A wry smile danced across his lips, and somehow May knew that if she ended the silence between them, this tacit erotic contract would be broken. She would either wake up or he would flee or vanish.
Without removing his gaze from her face, he worked his fingers up her thighs in ever decreasing strokes as he circled her sex, the rough skin of his fingertips making her skin flame up in erotic yearning, until everything he wasn’t caressing began to burn with the anticipation of his touch.
Suddenly reaching down while arched over her, he lifted her legs over his shoulders, forcing her thighs wide apart. He paused for a moment, then, without any inhibition, licked the side of her face, nuzzling her neck as he made his way down to her sex, licking her skin furiously all the way. May fell back on the pillow, surrendering to the intense pleasure. She was already dripping wet, her hands clawing the sheets, wanting him to take her between those full soft lips, wanting him to fill her, pierce her, be in her completely. But he was in no rush.
Her skin was moist with his saliva as he bit her inner thighs, gently getting closer and closer, his fingers spreading her to the light, to the warm glow of the flickering flame of the candle now dancing over the plaster ceiling. His tongue pulsed with the same flame, building and building to a climax. Within seconds the cries of her orgasm resonated throughout the empty room, bouncing back off the walls. They sounded to May almost like another woman’s cries, one she hadn’t known was inside her until now. Illusion or no illusion, sex with Mitch had never been this good.
Before she had a chance to catch her breath he flipped her over so that she was crouching on all fours, arse up. He leaned down and bit the back of her neck, then plunged into her. His thick cock filled her, pounding into her wildly without any decorum or want except for his own pleasure. His groaning desire reinflamed hers and as he rode her, plunging in and out, in and out, over and over, faster and faster, something even deeper, another buried inhibition, fell away inside May and she lost herself in total abandon as thrusting and bucking they became one beast, until both of them came in one long great shout before collapsing together on the mattress. Afterward she was lying there drifting off when she was startled by a small purr from the other side of the bed. She glanced across. The man was lying on his back, eyes closed, a smile upon his face. Sighing, she turned and fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning May woke up with a pounding headache; it almost felt like a hangover. The sun had bashed its way through the blinds, heating the room in yellow bars of light. Half-asleep, she opened one eye and reached across for the reassuring presence of Mitch’s back. Instead she touched fur and heard a tentative meow. The events of the past two days swept through her and then she remembered the lovemaking during the night. Surely it must have been a dream, some kind of psychological reaction to being abandoned—perhaps even an unconscious desire to get a new lover as soon as possible. May, a pragmatic young woman, was not given to erotic dreams. In fact she’d learned to regard the pursuit of Eros with suspicion, the result of several early love affairs that, based on sexual desire, had, nevertheless, ended up breaking her heart. Even taking Mitch as a lover had been a reaction to those earlier affairs—she had thought him a profoundly sensible choice. What an irony, she thought to herself, and now I am reduced to bizarre sexual hallucinations.
She glanced back over to what had been Mitch’s side of the bed. Shadow the cat was curled up, both eyes closed, the end of his tail twitching. If she didn’t know better she would have been convinced the animal was just pretending to sleep. Tentatively she reached down and touched between her legs. She was sticky. When she lifted her hand to her face, it felt and smelt like semen—had it been more than a dream?
May glanced over at the alarm clock—it was past eleven; she’d slept in and was running late for her first lecture. She remembered there was nothing in the house that resembled cat food, and Shadow must be starving. She leapt out of bed and ran for her dressing gown.
The fridge was empty except for one carton of milk and an opened tin of tuna. She pulled out the tuna and swung the fridge door shut. The calendar above the fridge had rent day circled in red felt pen. May couldn’t help noticing it was now only three days away and she was short at least two hundred dollars, and that was before paying for food. She wondered whether she would be able to sell some clothes or possibly some furniture on eBay to raise some cash. For a moment she thought about an old record player her dad had given her, then remembered she’d already sold it six months earlier to a vinyl freak to make one term’s fees. All May could think of selling was a leather jacket that she might be able to get fifty bucks for if she was lucky.
Depressed, she reached for a plate and emptied half of the tuna onto it. Shadow was already circling her bare legs, rubbing his fur backward and forward against her bare skin, his back arched in anticipation. Last night’s dream seemed a lifetime ago—today May just felt tired, abandoned, and overwhelmed by a multitude of financial commitments, none of which she could meet. She thought about borrowing the rent money from her sister, but May knew she was also in financial trouble, and the last time she’d borrowed money she hadn’t been able to pay it back. No. She would try not to worry too much about the looming rent day, while trying to conjure up some other radical methods of making some cash. She put the plate on the floor and Shadow began eating hungrily.
She watched him—he was a very good-looking cat. Perhaps he might be worth something, even on eBay. If not him, maybe his fur. As if sensing this sinister turn of mind, the cat looked up from his eating, his eyes wide and pensive. There was something about his expression that was strangely familiar to May.
“It’s okay,” she reassured the animal, “I’m not going to sell you to a furrier just yet. But you’ll have to do something to earn your keep and you’re eating my lunch.” As if in reply the cat meowed a protest, then leapt up onto the counter and sat angrily swishing his tail. Shrugging, May grabbed her bag and left the apartment.
• • •
It was during her morning lecture—given by her favorite tutor, Joanna Wutherer, on the cultural fallout and impact of Joseph Banks’s visit to Polynesia—that May found her mind wandering back to the events of the night before. The lovemaking had been so real she was finding it hard to believe it was a fantasy, or perhaps it was one of those rare, stress-induced hallucinations that occur between sleep and wakefulness. As she gazed up at the whiteboard, onto which were projected romanticized eighteenth-century images of native Polynesians, she found herself remembering the touch of her fantasy man’s skin, the smooth ripples of his torso, her hand trailing down to the hairless nest of his cock and balls, the wondrous weight of him cupped in her palm.
“May!” The sound of the lecturer’s voice jolted her back into the lecture hall. May opened her eyes to the sound of laughter.
“Would you like to tell us which part of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage made you groan and why? Preferably from a twenty-first-century postcolonial perspective?”
May glanced around, embarrassed; several students grinned back.
“Was I groaning?”
“You certainly were.”
May thought furiously, then finally answered: “Involuntary disgust at the British exploitation of the unfettered sensuality of the locals. . . .” She was counting on the approval of Joanna Wutherer, who she knew was politically sensitive to such issues.
“And quite rightly so—within decades the local population of Polynesia was decimated by syphilis, a gift from both the French and English sailors, who had begun to regard the islands as a sexual paradise free from the mores of their own worlds,” Joanna concluded dramatically.