I nodded. They had had the conversation already. She’d asked all her questions; Jesse had asked all of ours. I should have been satisfied with that. But when Kim had called yesterday, telling us it was time, I suddenly regretted being only a vicarious part of the discussion. I wasn’t vicarious tonight, and I wasn’t going to be vicarious later on, either.
I put my fork down and took a deep breath. I’d learned that much. I’d learned how to shut off the racing of my mind. But at times like this, it seemed like a full-time job. I refilled everyone’s glass as an excuse to drain my own.
I fetched another bottle from the sideboard and poured. The Pinot felt smoother on my tongue than the tart Chardonnay. It went down more easily.
“I just want the experience,” Kim said at last, her features softened by the third glass of wine. “And time’s slipping by. I’ll be thirty-five in June, you know. I just want to know what it’s like. Is that crazy?”
“No,” Jesse said. “That makes total sense. Hell, if I could do it, I would. I’d love that experience.”
I laughed. “Honey, if you could do it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Kim still had a crush on Jesse – that much was obvious. The way she looked at him now, the way her eyes glowed when she turned from me to him didn’t help my anxiety at all. It was as if there was an understanding between them, an agreement that I hadn’t signed. I took a deep breath and told myself that I was not the third wheel this time.
As if reading my discomfort, Jesse looked up from his plate and smiled at me, his eyes bright and hopeful. I unfolded my leg beneath the table and touched his foot with my own. His smile broadened.
“It’s time for dessert,” he said, rising from the table. He gathered the plates into a pile, Kim deftly scooping in one last bite before it vanished from in front of her.
I sat back in my chair. I hadn’t eaten much. Even though my stomach was churning with hunger, I hadn’t been able to get down more than a few bites. I took another sip of wine. My insides would be all liquid before long.
Jesse returned in a moment and settled dessert plates in front of us – our casual set, the ones with lithe dancers drawn on them in silhouette, striking various ballet poses. Each plate bore an eclair from our favourite neighbourhood bakery, huge chocolate-drenched pastries that ordinarily made my mouth water. I took another breath to avoid throwing up.
He unscrewed a bottle of orange muscat and began pouring it into liqueur glasses. I picked up mine as soon as he’d lifted the bottle away, but he gently slapped my hand. “Not yet,” he said. “We have to toast.”
I dutifully put the glass down. Kim was already digging into her eclair, the cream oozing on to her plate, obscuring the extended leg of a ballerina in arabesque.
“To the gift of love,” Jesse said, his glass in mid-air. Kim and I lifted ours towards him and clinked.
I’ve always hated double entendre.
I sat. I drank. I waited. The éclair sweated, untouched, before me.
“Well,” said Jesse at last, wiping a drop of cream from his lip with a napkin, “now what?”
I stared into my glass – through it, to a world painted orange.
Kim giggled and settled her fork on to the empty plate. “You boys are so coy,” she said. “Can’t we just say it, for heaven’s sake? We all know why we’re here. It’s the most natural thing in the world.”
“Not for me,” I said, still gazing into the muscat.
She laughed. “But you have done it before, haven’t you?” She paused. “Sleep with a woman, I mean.”
“Longer ago than I can remember,” I replied. “I think it was the Pleistocene epoch.”
“Otherwise known as high school,” said Jesse.
“And even then,” I said, “it took a great deal of effort. I swear, I must be a Kinsey 6.”
“Not even a 5?” she asked. “For me?”
Jesse chuckled from the other side of the table. “Between the two of us,” he said, “I’d say it averages out to a 4, so you’re in luck.”
Kim pushed her plate away and stood up. “Come on,” she said, reaching for me. “It’s like riding a bike.”
Her hand hung delicately in the air, waiting. “I was never particularly good at that, either,” I said, finally taking hold of her fingers. They were long and full of energy, and I recalled Jesse telling me that she’d played piano as a child.
And then we were all standing, spooling away from the table and across the room, holding hands like a chain of children on their way to recess.
It was dark in the bedroom, but thankfully no one bothered to flick on the lamp. The light from the living room filtered in hazily, just enough to turn the blackness to grey.
Jesse stood behind me, hands on my shoulders, chest pressed against my back – warming me, keeping me safe. Kim, before me, had kicked off her shoes, and now the top of her head barely reached my collarbone. I marvelled at how “the most natural thing in the world” could happen between such mismatched creatures.
She stood a foot or so away and lifted her hands to caress my chest. The fabric of my shirt crinkled softly against my nipples and I let my head drop back, into the crook of Jesse’s neck as she worked on the buttons, as her fingers found their way inside.
Jesse nuzzled me. His tongue flicked teasingly against an ear lobe, and then his mouth moved down, kissing my neck, closing softly against the skin and sucking. I called it his vampire kiss, pulling life from my throat. It was usually all I needed to give in to him completely.
Kim’s hands, cold at first against my skin, began to warm as she traced her way down to my belly. She unbuckled my belt, undid the button on my jeans, and a shiver rode my spine. I closed my eyes and breathed in the darkness. The zipper was just a sound in the night, the falling of my jeans just a burst of cold air against my skin.
She held me, still soft, in her hands – patiently, the way I held eggs to warm them before placing them into boiling water, to keep them from breaking against the heat. Her lips were full when she kissed me, opening against me to give me their warm undersides. Jesse’s teeth bit gently against my ear and suddenly I felt electricity around me, and my cock flickered to life.
And then, as if by magic, we were all naked, all on the bed – six hands softly caressing whatever they found, three pairs of lips gently kissing in turn. Jesse continued to kiss my neck, as his fingers roped their way through my chest hair, down to my navel. He clenched my cock in one hand and kissed me as Kim’s fingers followed his lead, tracing circles around my nipple.
I lay back and Jesse planted himself above me, holding his body aloft with outstretched arms, and smiled down at me as Kim took me back into her mouth. He lowered himself slowly, as if he were doing push-ups, and kissed me delicately on the lips.
We moved spontaneously around the bed, our gestures fluid, changing with no apparent reason – like children again, always in the moment, always ready to be surprised. At one point Kim lay back against the pillows, knees bent in the air, and Jesse sidled up between her legs. He buried his face against her, and she moaned, tossing her head from side to side. I stroked her face to gentle her and dropped my head to her breast. It was my turn to suck now, my turn to return to the buried memory of my own first nurturing. I licked the hard nipple hungrily and drew it into my mouth. Suddenly, this spot became for me the most erotic, the most essential place in the world.
She arched her back and I noticed that Jesse had slid away from her crotch. He was kneeling before her now. I looked up and saw the concentration in his eyes.
He scooted slowly forwards, hands resting on her thighs, and his cock – the head purple, fully engorged – flicked against his belly as if in invitation. He pushed against her, into her, inch by inch, as her gentle murmurs turned into moans, cries – the growing pleasure I so easily recognized. I knew what she was feeling, had felt it, lived with the incessant craving. I watched her face as the breath came faster, her cheeks flushing, her eyelids fluttering against her skin, and I knew at last what my face looked like when Jesse became a part of me, when he held me this close, when he pulsated inside me.
Kim pulled him closer and ran her fingernails down his back, cupped his ass cheeks with both hands – pushing him deeper into herself. Jesse arched his back in response, and suddenly we were eye to eye, our faces only inches apart. He pulled me with one hand against him and pressed his lips on to mine. His tongue forced its way into my mouth, fucking me as his cock fucked her. He groaned deeply, in that way of his, and my arm against his back traced the bucking of his body as he came.
I held him like that for a minute or so, until the last shudder, our lips still sealed against each other, our hearts pounding.
When I drew away, when he pulled out, Kim was rocking gently beneath us, like something bobbing on the waves of a once turbulent sea.
We rested for a while, the three of us, holding one another, leaning our heads together, sharing the warmth. We said nothing for a long time, until Kim rolled her face towards mine and leaned in close. “I need
you
now,” she whispered.
It was my turn. We were taking turns.
It was a shock at first – the moistness, the effortless way Kim and I moved together. I had forgotten how different it felt – those soft folds of female flesh, the way they mould themselves around a man.
We were using her, I thought suddenly, uncomfortably – not for sex per se, but for the anticipated result.
It was her gift to us, she’d said. An anniversary present, a love offering.
You guys are meant to be parents,
she’d told us the night she’d first made the suggestion – planted the seed, so to speak.
You’d certainly be better parents than me. And you love each other,
she said,
you should conceive your child in love – not with a turkey baster
.
I lifted her towards me, her ass warm as I pulled it away from the sheets. I rocked with her, sliding myself in and out of her – slowly, tenderly. I was afraid to do it as forcefully as I fucked Jesse, afraid she might shatter beneath me.
She closed her eyes and threw her head back, a smile warming her face. I looked up, and it was now Jesse’s face I saw – Jesse’s blue eyes just inches away, his lips open in that familiar ellipse of passion. And he leaned forwards, pressed his lips against mine again, reached around my neck to hold my mouth close to his.
Someone’s hand stroked my side, another squeezed a nipple, still another gently swatted my ass. I kept kissing, kept fucking, eyes closed. It could as easily have been Kim I was kissing, Jesse I was fucking. In the darkness, it didn’t matter. In the darkness, we were simply making love. Literally
making
love – as if love itself were a thing, a product of sex, something we created together in the act of fucking. We were making this thing called love, this creature that would one day cry us awake in the middle of the night, skin a knee on the pavement outside, borrow the car and keep us up all night with worry, hold our hands years hence and let us go.
Jesse’s fingernails dug into my neck. His teeth closed gently on my lower lip, and I cried out – coming, pouring out my love, coming into the spot still wet with his own seed, mine now mingling with his, my sperm racing his for the prize. I was panting and sweating and smiling, imagining them all, millions of them, swimming together – a team, cheering one another on, not really caring which one made it to the finish line as long as one of them did. They – we – were all in this together.
Hot Springs
Carol Queen
It was Sunday morning before I finally got out of the city, leaving the piles of books and notes that were my dissertation on my desk and closing the apartment door firmly on them. By the time I’d driven an hour north into the valley, I’d begun to relax. The leaves on the grapevines were beginning to turn, great clusters of soon-to-be-harvested fruit everywhere, but the October day was hot as summer. It was beautiful, and got more so as soon as I’d left the valley towns behind and began the drive up the old wild mountain, the road narrow, one switchback after another, and a slightly hazy vista of hill and valley and hill at every turn. Little enough traffic up there that I could take the mountain curves fast, two-handed, my car and I like one creature. I love this feeling, that I’m half man, half machine. Soon I reached the hot springs.
I was ready for a two-day soak, ready to sleep under the mountain stars, ready to be away. The springs were old sacred land, one place where the vast geothermal soup bubbling under the mountain broke through to the surface, appropriated lately as a kind of New Age resort. Still a powerful place, though, and its proprietors now tried to reinforce that sense of the sacred by dotting the place with little shrines, a Buddha here, a goddess there. Its specialness was most apparent in the demeanour of its visitors, all of whom seemed to sense and respect that it had been a healing place long before any of us were born. I lost no time in choosing a place to camp and then sliding into the warm pool, and my dissertation, already well out of mind, retreated a little further still.
I’d left the water to sun myself on the nearby deck when I saw her, unloading her car with her companion, probably her lover, by the way she spoke to and touched him familiarly, almost absently, for she seemed more absorbed in her surroundings. Perhaps a newcomer here. I caught her eye, and she let a small, wary smile slip; then they climbed the steps to the lodge. Not campers, then. I watched them leave their room to explore, strolling the grounds, locating the pools and the showers, passing me once or twice. Then they went back inside. I imagined them undressing, falling on to the bed.
But he was out before long and in the pool, and it was an hour or more before she emerged, clad in a towel. Their room key hung from one of her hoop earrings, and when she turned or shook her head, it grazed her neck, making a tiny jingle, I imagined, that only she could hear. The pool was so deep that the key’s tip touched the water, making a little wake as she glided through.