Close Too Close (4 page)
Now ravenous, I pull up, push you against the wall and drop onto my knees and face your stomach. My hands occupied with your hands, I have only my head to explore with. Again, the beauty of the flat muscles reaching up and under your breasts takes me by surprise. The perfect straight line above your belly button. I use your hands to clasp your bum and pull you, with you, onto my face.
With a second to hold still and contemplate the scene, I gather my breath, readying myself. Dazed by what I had managed to accomplish. Limp in my arms you are waiting for me. How quickly this had all happened.
I push my chin against you, feeling you wet, and slip myself between your legs. I let go of your arms but you still hold them behind your back. That suits me, I don’t want any distractions, don’t want you to touch me. I hold you steady as I pull your legs apart. Pointing my tongue, I carefully touch your clit with the mere tip.
Shaking now, your legs are easing apart, begging me to move further in. I gaze at the glistening pinkness of you, inside. Remembering the stolen glimpses of you escaping from your costume, how I had followed you from the lengths of the pool to here some many moons ago, I hold my hands under you and ease my face up and under you.
Now all of you is available to me. I run my tongue lengthways up and down you. Warmth moves from me to you. I taste the pool in you. You are so wet I cannot feel you. You move your leg onto the shower tap, high in the cubicle, widening yourself to me, willing me into you. I want to hold back. But cannot. Pressing your lips apart, I look at you. Red eases into pink and I can see the full you. Smooth and clean and shaven, your colours are open to me.
I turn you around quickly and you gather your balance by pressing against the wall, your face squashed flat against the tiles. I push your leg back up onto the wooden bench as you sway from side to side. Then I lay my hand flat against you.
I start to work myself into you, one finger at a time. I can slip into you easily. You open up to me so quickly. The warmth shocks me. My hands are cold from the changing room and swim. My fingers are encased and numb within seconds. Relief starts to spread through me and I can start to concentrate on listening to your breathing and feeling you from inside.
I am looking up into you and watching my fingers disappear and reappear. You start to push greedily onto me. Angry. Wanting. I start to chart the waves of pleasure pushing and pulling you in and out of letting go. The ups and downs of the laps. Meditating on you. I stand behind you and muffle your sighs with my other hand. I don’t want us to have to leave now.
We are building up a cycle of pleasure that I control. I like the occasional sound of other showers being turned on, lockers being closed. I stand up, take my costume and pull your hands behind your back and make the elastic hold them tightly. I harshly tie my speedo tightly around your hands and them tight against your back. I am biting your wet hair, pulling small strands with my teeth. I cautiously chart your pleasure against my own.
I have you now.
You are starting to buckle under me. With relief. Your knees suddenly weak. I’m holding the weight of you now. You are helpless with erotic charge and trapped with my speedo.
And now I want this finished. Without talking. No exchange.
I want to shower, get to work and be gone.
I want to quickly stop being lost. To come back to earth. Not to be responsible for your desire. Harshly, I move more quickly in and out of you. You are squealing, wiggling, buckling on my hand. I’m surprised by my own breathing, by the hard work. At last you squeak your final muffled cry and we feel a breaking of this pressure.
I can’t get away quickly enough.
The awkwardness of leaving the cubicle. Rushing for the shower curtain. The light blush that rises up your throat and through your face. Trying to look for a connection.
You start to speak. Open your mouth and close it again. I know you want to make this safe in your way. They all do. Or want to give it a verbal future. It’s the yearning that spoils it. I look away.
Her denial last night has been your undoing today.
I leap out of the shower. Without looking up, I know the attendant is watching. I scour myself with the towel. Pull the hard pile across my back and legs. Squash my damp towel back into the into my drawstring bag, harshly pushing it through the string.
I take one look back. You are calmly creaming your legs. You look up direct into my eyes. You try to bounce my mercy back at me. Then, tip your right eyebrow at me but I recognize that look of yearning.
I can see a blush rising. I pity it.
Hurriedly, I swoop back across the now warm lawns. Head down into the street through the crowds of schoolchildren. Jump quickly into a rickshaw. He pulls sideways out into the relief of the busy road. My thoughts move easily to my first coffee of the day.
T
o escape the flames of Delhi in May for the hills is to leave hell for heaven, and even dirty and congested Shimla feels heavenly that time of year. But this May I was heading further north to Srinagar, to see Mahmood. It would be my second trip to Kashmir, but the first time I’d see him on his home turf. We met a few years back during a gaydar moment, a double-take while passing one another on the Corniche in Doha, where he runs a shop selling Indian textiles in one of the bazaars and waits for summer and his yearly trip back home. We hit it off immediately that first scorching Qatari afternoon, when we had memorable conversations that were his initiation to the novel idea that one could be gay
and
be happy and proud. He’s swung through Delhi on his way home each year since, to spend a couple of days at a time with me, mostly in my bed.
I guess poor Mahmood’s been in love with me since that first day. He goes into small depressions each time we part. He’s a good man, not bad looking, the right age (thirtyplus), and he’s great sex. I like him plenty, but the love thing, sadly, never fell into place for me. It’s a familiar theme that runs through my long, bungled relationship history: liking a chap, a few intensely, but still never
enough
to go all the way and walk confidently into the future with him by my side. Mahmood brushed off my regret for coming up short as unnecessary. We’d be friends, with benefits. Though wounded, he put up a brave front.
Three Octobers ago, on the first trip to Kashmir, I’d landed quite accidentally on the ramshackle houseboat of seventeen-year-old Shahid, after finding that the boat I’d originally reserved was being waterproofed and reeked of brain-crushing fumes. His father deceased, Shahid was the teenage man of the family, taking care of his mother, three elder sisters, the houseboat business, all while going to school. He was born on the boat and had spent all his life on the boat. His family’s only social contacts were with other boat families. It’s a thick culture. Two of his sisters were to be married to men who also live on the lake, in a double wedding that was certain to be financially ruinous. Shahid said they would need 400 kilos of meat for several hundred guests because after eating everyone was supposed to take home meat. I’m vegetarian and I shuddered when I heard that.
That October, for three days Shahid didn’t leave my side. I’m a passionate traveler and a very independent one at that, so I politely resisted the violation of my freedom at first, but when he insisted that it was his duty to take care of me, a man more than twenty-five years his senior, I was charmed. It didn’t take long for me to like him, platonically of course. It would be easy enough to dream up Kashmiri affection and hospitality as a different kind of intention, especially if the one offering it is a handsome and athletic young man and the one receiving it is me. I didn’t think he was gay or even bi, but even if he was, my personal hands-off policy toward the under-eighteen crowd is non-negotiable, no matter how cute, smart, or sexy, and Shahid was all of that.
After my return to Delhi he kept in touch with regular phone messages. Before long, he was writing that I should have a profile on Facebook like everyone else, counsel I had resisted successfully from others in the past. He said we could be
friends
there, though I thought we were friends already. Like that, I became a reluctant, but never-to-turn-back social networker. Shahid found me and we were connected. In every SMS and Facebook chat over three years I could count on two questions aside from
how r u
. One was when I was coming back to Kashmir. What I couldn’t figure out was whether it was my company he sought, or business for the boat. We did have three good days together, crisscrossing Nagin Lake in cushioned and canopied shikaras, taking pictures with the flowers in Shalimar Gardens, and walking the mountains above Gulmarg. But his family also needed guests. The wedding took place last year. They were probably broke.
The other dependable chat question was when I was getting married. I usually answered with a crisp
not
yet
, which wasn’t a lie, but one day the moment arrived when I decided I wasn’t going to be asked that anymore, and I told Shahid that if and when I did get married, it would be to a man. Maybe it was risking a parting of ways, but I was out across the board everywhere else in my life. That I would continue to withhold this basic fact of my existence from someone who was no longer a kid at twenty, and supposedly my friend, stopped making sense to me. I reasoned that he should learn something about the world beyond the lake. So I threw the dice and let the chips fall as they may. His reply, a wish that I have a happy life with whomever I wanted to be with, astonished me because faulty belief in my vast and superior experience had me convinced that I’d already heard it all, and that no surprises were left. I thanked him for the wish.