Authors: Jessa Hawke
“You don’t want me, do you? I can’t touch you the right way, so you pushed me away.”
“Never,” he said, gently, but firmly. “You touch me exactly the right way, every time. You just don’t need to rush.”
“You mean to do this? Oh God, is it because I have not been with a man before?”
He laughed, and a flash of annoyance came over me. “Oh, and now you laugh at me.”
Continuing to laugh, he took my hands in his. “I laugh because you are so adorable. I meant that we do not need to rush right now. We have all night to do this, and we will do it right.”
He undressed me with care, I remember that. He unbuttoned the dress that my Mama had made, loosening each button as if it were a precious pearl. When the dress pooled around my ankles, he helped me step out, and when I did, I was new transformed. He pressed me to him, and there was that magic again, that visceral feeling of a man and a woman joining, our bodies pressing together, our lips mingling, his hands all over my body.
He kissed me for hours, and when he pressed his face into my neck and began to lick lazy circles against my skin, I gasped aloud without shame. I had never experienced something so wanton, something that unbuckled me everywhere where I had been tight before. I ran my fingers through the light fur on his chest, each strand scraping against my nerve endings until I was heated and bothered all the way through. He slid off my underpants and undid his belt. In the moonlight, he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, a boy, just a boy, but his touch was so tender that I knew in the moment he entered me that he was my boy, and as we bucked together, whatever was lost inside me was found. Perhaps it is overly poetic to put it like that, but perhaps I may be forgiven given my literary background. He joined me and I became a woman, not just because I was finally with a man, but because now I knew of what my girlfriends whispered, what secret it was that crept around the dark corners of everyone’s psyche.
I knew the secret and it was not so dark anymore.
In the morning, I woke tangled in white sheets. The rumpled bedcovers beside me were empty and cold, and I rolled my heated body over, enjoying the sensation. Where was Arkadii? I wanted someone to know how happy I was that I had stepped outside of myself, why should it not be him? And I was scared, too, scared at the new person I had become, and I needed to know that he was not like the others, that there would be no judgment for what had happened last night.
A low voice muttering from the kitchen attracted my attention. I dragged the bedsheets around my nude body and crept slowly into the hallway, hoping to surprise him, to press my chest against his back and to feel his welcoming kisses once more. I could make out only a little more clearly what was being said near the kitchen, a few words here and there, and when I peeked in through the crack, I saw him leaning his face against his hands and speaking into the telephone.
“Of course I miss you, Dasha,” he was saying.
My blood turned to ice in a second, but I tried to thaw it out, telling myself that this meant nothing. It could be a cousin, a niece—did he not tell me he had sisters?
What possessed me to do it, I will never know. I crept back into the bedroom to pick up the other phone, the one that adjoined the line. I pressed it to my ear with a fearful heart, and what I heard was a woman’s voice.
“Slushai Arkasha, listen. I do not think that it takes a whole three weeks to order goods from the vendors by the sea,” she said, and she sounded tired, hoarse even.
“I told you, there was a problem with the distributors. I have to stay here this long to work out the kinks.”
“I don’t believe you! I don’t believe you! Who are you fucking, you svolach, you son of a bitch?” she cried, the frustration in her voice so apparent that instead of the ice in my veins, I felt sympathy for her.
“No one, my dear, no one,” Arkadii said soothingly into the receiver, his voice like a balm. “You know I love only you. Would I have married you otherwise?”
I suddenly felt sick to my stomach, but could not put the phone down. Wife? So it was true. It was all true. This was quickly turning into the quintessential train wreck—how badly I wanted to speed up past the wreckage, and yet I was unable to stop.
“Don’t you give me your stories, asshole. You just let her know what I did to the last girl!” Arkadii’s prodigal wife yelled, and slammed down the phone.
When I walked into the kitchen, Arkadii was sitting at the table, his shoulders hunched over, an open beer by his hand. I was fully dressed, unwilling to be vulnerable in his presence ever again. He did not hear me walk in because I walked in on intruder’s feet, light as air and just as much a secret.
“What did she do to the last girl?” I asked him softly, dangerously.
He looked up in shock. “Were you spying on me?”
“Answer the question. I did this, or rather we did, it takes two to tango after all. I should at least know what happened to the last one.” I was a stone woman.
When he looked up, his bright blue eyes were red-streaked and devoid of any of the warmth or tenderness I had become accustomed to. This was the real Arkadii, then, the one who took money from prison inmates, who cheated on his wife, who took everything in his life as if it was his due.
I will spare you the details of what he said. Let it suffice for you to know that the last girl was penniless and thrown out by her parents, shamed by her community, and destined to work forever in a tailor’s shop for a mere pittance. Apparently, Arkadii’s wife held much sway and was the whole driving force behind his business; he would never leave her.
The story that I tell here is as banal and old as time itself. How does a gently bred girl, from an intelligent family, who believes in integrity, get dragged through the mud?
As it turns out, all it takes is one good-looking son of a bitch with a well-turned tongue.
We parted because we had to, because I could not even stand to look at him and he could not be with anyone who knew the truth behind his slick moves. You know the rest. It was only later that I caught him talking to a well-known criminal freshly released from prison, and by that time, I had realized that the tenderness in my breasts and stomach were not the symptoms of any kind of indigestion. When I told him, proud, beautiful Arkadii fell to his knees, begging me not to tell his wife or anyone else about it, that he would lose everything, that she may actually kill him this time.
I would not have told a soul, except for my Mama. And the rest of it?
Well, I suppose that is my sad story to live, my sad lesson to learn.
Such lessons come to us all.
THE END
Proposal Temptations
The long line of sleek water bottles at the supermarket creates a glare. She runs her finger down the horizontal line of them, feeling the smooth plastic underneath her fingertips. Mary Anne wonders what it would be like if she slipped a condom onto one of these babies and inserted it straight into her pussy.
She wonders this often, usually with food. A cucumber or a firmly frozen banana. Though maybe that would be too cold. Although the peel would mimic the silkiness of cock skin, which is the whole point, anyway. She heard a story, once, about a man who would buy honeydew melons at the grocer’s, come home, heat them up a little, and put his dick into that. Maybe it’s about the center part, the one that is rough with seeds and soft with strands of fruit tissue. Why are people into that sort of thing? Mary Anne muses this as she pushes her little silver cart down the aisles, pretending to read the labels on cat food. What a joke. Mittens will eat anything that’s put in front of her, even if it’s laced with arsenic. She doesn’t need antioxidants and electrolytes. She’s a cat, God damn it.
Mary Anne has bones like those of a bird. They are slim and hollow, making her a real feather-weight. If you were to look at her from the back, you would be able to claim that you could see the slight elusiveness of the thigh gap, encased in the crumple of chinos. The breathable fabric of her cardigan clings to her naked skin, because Mary Anne does not wear anything underneath it when she goes grocery shopping. She likes that the minute she steps into the store, the air conditioning perks her nipples right up, tightening them into peaks that the eyes of the bag boys follow. She’s buttoned it almost to the top, but the pale chinos and the light pink sweater are almost blending with her skin tone, giving her the appearance of being simultaneously naked and clothed. This is something Mary Anne knows.
She pushes her cart in front of the berries and considers their tender flesh. They say that berries are ripe with juice, and all the rest of those little sayings. Pop a cherry. Squeeze those melons. Strawberry-colored nipples. These are the words that Mary Anne whispers to herself in a low voice as she brings the perforated plastic basket of blueberries to her nose and smells them. The best part, to her, is the exposed starburst of their stems. It brings, almost unbidden, the image of herself splayed on the sheets at home, on all fours like an animal, the pucker of her anus bared to the world, vulnerable and begging to be taken.
Mary Anne is dating Roger, but she doesn’t think about him now.
Two years ago, shopping with Roger was the most exciting thing she could think of. Mary Anne has plenty of thoughts and opinions, but she doesn’t necessarily like to voice them out loud; she does, however, appreciate people who do. Roger was one of those people. Average build, dark blond hair, and blue eyes that snapped as he talked. Roger is an EMT, and he thrives best in high-powered, high-stress situations; he does not shy away from work, dirt, or mess. He was the first person Mary Anne knew who took her to dinner and didn’t shy away from telling her about the time he found an old man dead in his bath after falling asleep with the water heater on. He had a heart attack and the organ in question was boiled through by the time Roger’s team had arrived.
Mary Anne lost her appetite, but wondered what Roger’s mouth tasted like.
There’s something about the good man in the storm. For their second date, Roger took her to a museum opening of Beautiful People, where he commented ironically on the value of their beauty to the models themselves. It was amazing to her that Roger, who didn’t inspire many fantasies with his looks alone, could open his mouth and instantly transform himself into an incredibly desirable individual. What this fast-paced, quick-talking, witty guy say in her, she didn’t know. She thought maybe it was that she served as sort of a neutral background for him, letting him shine.
Still waters run deep, after all.
They had that verbal banter that serves as its own version of foreplay. Everything was a buildup. Jokes about the museum, talking about their parents, the way she licked ice cream off of her finger. She felt dirty and charged all at the same time, and when he talked about EKGs and the patients he had lost at work that day, she wanted to climb across the table directly into his lap and feel his cock pressing into the crack of her ass.
So she stopped wanting and started acting.
Later, after Roger had heaved off of her and they lay side by side, chests heaving and lower bodies thrumming with sexual exertion, Mary Anne got the strange feeling that sex did not affect Roger in the same way it did her. He could go with it or without it, losing himself only in the moment itself, but for her, an entire day could be filled with a series of tiny erotic charges that would get her juices flowing. When he leaned over and kissed her, leaving the taste of her pussy on her lips and the smell of it in her nostrils, she figured she didn’t care that much. How much of a problem could it be, right?
Now she’s in the supermarket smelling fruit.
It started slowly, she supposes, trying to ignore the crushing weight of the feeling those memories evoke in her chest. She remembers buying all the lingerie, feeling unbelievably glamorous and adult because now she finally had a reason to step into Frederick’s of Hollywood without feeling like an imposter. All the silks and the lace, all the colors, all the sheer teddies you could see her round little breasts through. Getting waxed had a purpose now; she saw a comedy sketch once about a lady who got shamed into realizing she didn’t need to wax because she wasn’t having sex and it stained her memory for a long time. Now she arrived at her appointments with the bag of lingerie, knowing that no technician in the world would ever ask her to lift out the little aqua-blue lace G-string as proof of her upcoming sexual escapades, but it made her feel better knowing it was there.
She liked the little things. The way Roger’s lap was always warm and solid underneath her thighs. The way he would laugh whenever she nuzzled his ear, but would get immediately distracted from whatever he was doing if she put the tip of her tongue around the delicate whorl of the outside of it. She sucked his earlobes and neck because she liked the texture, the idea that her mouth allowed her to have power over him and make this absolutely controlled person just lose his shit. She lived for the groans that would come from somewhere deep inside of his throat and the way he would eventually stop clicking as those groans would deepen and intensify, until finally, he would growl, pick her up, light as air, and throw her on the bed, followed by an exploratory journey of her body with his mouth.