Non-Smoker

From his open-eyed performance in bed I had high hopes of this one. His name one of the few pre-coital words tossed beathlessly in my direction. Was he genuinely laconic, rather than struck dumb at his luck being in? Now was the period for such revelation. No longer one flesh, our torsos cloven apart. Our legs however were still intertwined like pit vipers. He, head slumped against my shoulder, me, stiff backed against the headboard, fingers buttressing a lit cigarette overhanging the sheet. I’ve no intention of bringing it to my lips. It measures out time for him, embers in place of grains of sand. The span of two such kindlings will determine whether he is reignited, or rolls over to sleep. I have found this chronometry unfailingly meters the male metabolism.

I glance over towards him, unable to determine whether the look in his eye expresses confusion as to why I am not putting it to my mouth. Or suppressed concern as to the impulse of the hot ash. The modern day version of barefoot and blindfold. He tilts his torpid head as a prelude to inquiry, but I nimbly raise the index finger of my left hand and gently transect his lips. Uh-uh, if we no longer are able to retain the disarticulations of earlier, the sonorous squalls coitally quarried from our deepest seams of self, then better we are held together under silence’s shroud. I shake my head for added emphasis and already I detect his purpose is lost in the undulations of my tresses against his exposed cheek.

Suffused in my ruminations, I was unaware that my murmuring Medusa’s locks had ceased their stroke. He was unconsciously rubbing his delicately flayed skin and I ventured some sort of vocalisation was bound to follow. Again I placed my finger across his lips and spiked their unsheathing. Tentatively he edged the tip of his tongue out against my tapered digit and hastily withdrew it again. He had tasted my resolve. Through the conduit of his lips, I felt his whole body flinch as he gathered himself up towards defiance of my circumvention of all speech. I unfurled my middle finger and laid it with great deliberation next to her sister, across the crevice of his mouth. The muscles at the corners of his lips, measuredly retracted their charges into a crooked grin. My dactyls now like twin colonnades, bracing open his stupid wide aperture. I lent forward and mutely kissed the extended knuckles of my own fingers. I withdrew my digits but maintained their sentinel trajectory. He was seemingly transfixed by the sight of two caryatids rigidly posted just beyond his orifice. He was beyond coherence right now. Veritably speechless. He jutted his chin forward and slithered out his tongue, to reel in my goading extremities. I waggled them out of range. He distended further forward. My fingers spun away. He was shaping to cast again, when my left foot snakes across and presses him back down across his chest. He is about to protest verbally, when my twin fingers reassert their superintendence across his portals of locution. His body sags and crumples back to the mattress. Though I can tell his mind has been wracked by a bolt of delicious tautness.

After a circumspect period, I detach both my leg and my fingers. He does not stir. I light my second cigarette and resume my vaulting. Leadenly, he pitches on to his side and scrabbles for something on the floor. He resurfaces with a burgundy towelling robe. Now he reclines back towards the headboard. Half pinioned, awkwardly he shrugs himself into the robe. He gropes around his back for something, with clumsy, sightless nips. I surmise that he seeks the belt of the robe, but it is nowhere to be found. He submits and his head slowly sinks back down the surface of the headboard. His pincered long locks, momentarily maintain their station like creeping ivy. Before they descend to unseam his now less than immaculate coiffure. I fix him there, framed unflatteringly by the knobbly towelling. At the angle he lies, his glorious sixpack is almost completely submerged by the flesh collected under gravity. There is even the hint of a rucking of flabby skin just above his hips. Why on earth has he donned this garment and broken the spell? I deflect my gaze and peer through the rising cigarette smoke as if for augury.

I must have sensed something in the corner of my eye and snapped my focus back. To intercept him about to tumble words into the air. This time it’s my cigarette-cradling fingers that drape themselves over his mouth. His eyes start to water, from the proximity of the smoke, or from more internal fusillades I cannot be sure. I know the prosaic reason for the robe of course. The poor lamb’s cold. His lips are quivering. He manoeuvres them to siphon some superficial heat from my cigarette, his irises scuttling to their extreme margins scanning for any repercussion. Good boy, maybe we’re getting somewhere after all. I cant my face away so that my jagged smokey laughter does not exhale over him. My perspiration went west long ago. Evaporated, since my temperature’s still rising with the afterglow.

I take pity on him and place my two unencumbered fingers on his lips again. He is surprised, since he was not attempting to challenge me. But this time they do not crest the vertex, but bow in supplication at the lower ridge. They wait a while, before he hesitantly lifts the labium and gently skims the pads of my twin votaries. Emboldened, he grazes them with his gums, before eventually, he throws off his reins and engulfs them. He laps at them with bulbous slurps and satisfied tiny suction pops. So I flick his teeth with one of them as scourge. He responds obediently and laps at them regularly, up and down in a spiral. First one, then his tongue nudges them apart so he can acquire the second. Sure enough, he soon slots into a mechanical, insipid servicing. His thoughts off elsewhere, because he’s too blunted to assert what he wants. Wordlessly that is.

His problem, like so many of his kind, is he will not just live in the timeless moment. He’s all sweaty, He’s cold. He’s lying in a viscous, cloying pool (of his own making and one in which I am happy to cleave to me, to adhere me to the sheet. To anoint us together). And, he wants to prate about it. Ask asinine questions towards self-aggrandizement. Or to record and log proceedings. To minute them. To compare with the past and to carry forward amendments into the future. Where he has already projected himself. It was as if he was narrating the entire event. The circumstance. An episode. He is keen to march me back into the mundane and I am not at that double quick pace. He wants to return us to the formally structured relations, of speaker and listener. Chatterer sizing up and chatted sized up. The one inside and the one outside, of intent. He cannot wait for the sperm pellicle to mark out time. By receding to a light, dried crust. There’s premature ejaculation and then there’s premature post-ejaculate. Cos intimacy ought not have departed with consummation.

Our bodies had already spoken, but they ought still to be communing with one another in mute elation. Interwoven, flesh blended with flesh. Who knew or cared where you ended and I began? So what of your slight edge on me in hirsuiteness, or my darker pigmentation? It was all awash in the sensual maelstrom, the perceptual overload. Our fallible vessels, cause of so much anxiety in the workaday consciousness, had been temporarily uplifted. So we could quaff of mutual veneration and adoration. And we should seek to prolong those feelings for as long as possible. For eternity. To remain conjoined, even in stillness. Indeterminate and undifferentiated. Equals.

Until that is, he clad himself in his burgundy fleece. Now our separateness is clear. Our demarcation evident against the hues of the sheet pointing up our contrast. A chasm between us, yawning in your case, yearning in mine. Me beached on dry land, you still shivering in the shallows. Conspicuously other. Another species almost. A reimposition of the way of things. You satisfied. Content. And me? Striving with all my might to hold the moment. The feeling. But now solely dependent on my own resources. And yet far too aware of this reliance, so it slips from my grasp all the while. In closing the aperture of his reporting mouth, I have sealed the portal of our connection. As if rolling a huge dolmen across the exposed fissure of his self. Occluded any and all light of disclosure from emanating from his hollow being. God damnit!

My cigarette had burned away to nothing. On the stroke of its expiration, he rolled over on to his side and curled into himself. Somehow, his unsecured robe, his aqualung to earthly life, had managed to adhere to him throughout his quarter revolution, his waning crescent, and still mantled his modesty. I was now fully excised from his company. Tossed into his Lethean moat, as the drawbridge to sleep was raised. I took a pinch of the robe between my fingers and lightly peeled it from his skin. I had a clear view of his ribs gently rising and falling with his quieted breath. The upswing seemed to take an eternity, as they manfully bore aloft their own weight against gravity. The downswing seemed to presage a relieving collapse. But each time caught itself from shuddering and instead relented into modulated repose. How does he sleep so easily? I bent down to softly kiss them in salute. My lips left a glistening imprint upon them, which I watched undulate for a couple of cycles. Insufficient moisture to model a tidal effect beneath his zephyr breath. Then I leant over and smashed my balled fist into the centre of my mark and was rewarded with a satisfying crack. I took my reappropriated rib back from him ...




Excerpt from Kindle novel "A,B&E"