Grit, a novel.
for my family, who are all things
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.” ~ Louise Erdrich
Part I Sobriety Games
Ch 1 “Threshold Learning”
She invents games for him. The first game she calls "Threshold Learning". It involves him giving her one hour's notice and any specific requests. He gets to decide whether there's talking or no talking, and which one of them gets to talk or not talk during the game. Most rounds of the game last ninety minutes, including the one-hour notice. A lightning round. Like doing a shot of Beam. That’s the point of the game. The reason to play at all, ostensibly, is to do something other (better) than take that shot.
He texts to give her one hour’s notice but asks for less, and she agrees. No talking for her, she agrees. Regular clothes, nothing fussy. He hangs up.
It takes him 15 minutes to get there, during which time she brushes her teeth and fusses her hair into a cute messy-bun. As soon as he arrives, he pushes her into the bedroom and bends her over the bed. He pulls her pants off and kicks her legs apart. As he unbuckles his own jeans, he notices her trying to find stable footing. He grabs her pussy with one hand and lifts her up, shoving a pillow under her stomach so only her tippy toes reach the floor, then kicks her legs open again and pulls her roughly toward him by the haunches. She's always wet for him, but he pushes inside her balls deep on the first thrust, shoving her shirt and bra up half over her head, intentionally tangling her up by her hair and whatever else his fists finds to grab. She yipes and grabs the bedspread tightly, her knuckles turning white.
Breathe, she thinks. Yes, she thinks. Wanted, she thinks. Monosyllable affirmations. She lets go, fingers spread wide, surrender. He growls satisfaction and gentles his thrust, then licks his thumb and slides it into her ass. She spreads her fingers wider, presses her palms into the bed, surrending harder. Oxymoron, she thinks.
When he comes, he roars into her neck, relaxes his grips but leaves his weight fully on her, puts his face on her back, his eyes leaking onto the large one eye tattooed between her shoulder blades. This round had urgency and is over in under an hour.
As he is leaving, there is a moment of tension between them because she wants to kiss him, which she doesn't say, she doesn't say anything, she is just going to stand and wait to lock the door behind him. But he knows what she wants, and this time he compromises, kissing her but roughly, taking her by the throat to pull her lips to his. Then he puts his forehead to hers for a long moment, and he leaves.
Ch 2 “Just One”
They’d been through shit before. Dark days a decade prior when they were trying to stay together, and each trying to stay in one piece, and failing at both. Flailing at both. They began to really talk again recently, about that, about survival (how to). They had always kept up a semi-annual official-ish brain-activity check to which they have been faithful-mostly – “You okay? Yeah, you? Breathing.” But times had changed again.
They remembered some of the games they used to play to get through the darkest times. Trust falls. In a series of texts, they reminisced about her gag reflex and his cuckhold fetish, how they played that game a lot through an emotionally hard year, toys and wordplay, suction dildos lined up along the headboard. "Can you imagine a not-sad gangbang?,” she asks him. “Not sure actually, it might be tears all around." They giggled and imagined going back to their fave Pandora’s Boxxx for miserable dildos – surely someone had invented dildos to reflect the times they lived in, dildos of malaise.
They talked and played like this when they believed their suffering was relatively parallel, before they understood their afflictions had almost nothing in common and neither did they, currently, except for half a lifetime of knowing each other.
Now they were playing a game she called "Just One".
It was still true that she had something terrible stuck in her throat. Right where she could put her finger in the divot from the outside, she could feel him inside her if she wanted to, which she still often did. To accommodate her desire, he had had to withstand extreme edging. She would be allowed to push him to the point of anger. And then she would come quickly multiple times, melting onto his tongue like sugar cubes. “You’re a pez dispenser,” he said once, laughing, wiping the slick off his face that reached his ears. When he came, once, finally, his whole spine emptied of agitation and he slept like the dead, half thrown over her. They’d both survived for years like that. Now he said, “All I remember is my leg thrown over you. I remember being able to sleep.”
They were so frayed, then, and were relearning how to hold steady. Withstanding edging was good exercise. She believed in good exercise as a cure for everything. As was trusting each other with fantasies that accommodated those exercises. She had faith in practice makes perfect, including being okay. Her faith in that was put to the test many times since, and failed. Flailed.
Now he was already on the edge always, making the exercise more useful, perhaps, but their capacity for it much less. So, just once.
All he has to do in this game is let her service him orally without using her hands for as long as he can take it, and to try to push her to her limit at least once. If it's her limit that he has to find, it's not his edge, not where his nerves are shot. Logically. That is how she presents this game to him: logical under the circumstances.
She is on her knees, her ass in the air, her eyes soft focused. His hands are gripping the bedclothes on either side of him. She puts one hand on one of his and spreads her fingers out, and otherwise doesn't move, just holds him deeply in her mouth and breathes. While he holds his breath. He unballs his hand, wraps his fingers in hers and balls them tightly again, making a shared paw. "Look at me," he exhales quietly. Her face is smeared with snot and spit. She meets his eyes, tears streaming shamelessly.
Ch 3 “Choking”
They don’t text at all for days sometimes. Weeks. It’s kind of a loud silence they both have.
Among all the other shit weighing on him, so is she now and she knows it. But she can see no way around that. And it's mutual, she thinks, exasperated. She could simply let him go again, or he could let her go again, but they each seemed to “fail to thrive” rather dramatically. She, for one, did not want to fail to thrive dramatically unless a hot-air balloon and a sexy tick named Bourbon were involved (what were the chances?).
She knows where he is today.
She tries not to picture it too precisely, but the details come anyway—his mother's dining table, the sound of the children, wall-to-wall plush carpet. He is not a large man, but he always seemed to take up a lot of space inside that home. He stands while others sit, or he perches at the edge of the couch, his restless energy in tension with the familiarity like an animal that both owns and paces a cage.
She puts her phone face down and leaves it there. Picks it up. Puts it down again. She knows he knows she is thinking of him, so there is no point in texting him. Finally, she does it anyway.
"good luck today"
He texts back “thank you”
He always makes her laugh.
------
When he finally reaches out, it’s blunt.
You around.
Not a question.
She doesn’t ask anything.
Yes.
-----
When he gets there, he is quiet. Not the charged quiet she’s become recently used to, the kind that gathers itself and then breaks open. This is flatter. Thinner. Like something already used up. He doesn’t hug her hello.
He looks around the room like he’s orienting himself, like he’s come back from somewhere far enough away that it takes a second to remember what things are for.
She waits.
That she knows how to do.
She has replenished the wood next to the fireplace, and without talking he sets about making a fire so he can chain-smoke Marlboros into it. No one is allowed to smoke here but him. No one else is allowed anything that he is allowed with her.
“Just one,” he says finally.
Not a question.
Not quite a decision either. More like reaching for something familiar and hoping it still works.
She nods, assuming he doesn’t want her to talk, though he has not said that. She takes her place where he gestures in front of his favorite armchair, the yellow velvet, settling into it the way she always does—deliberate, unhurried. Giving him time to arrive, or catch up, or make new requests.
As she begins to touch him, she moves slowly, giving him places to pause or to stop entirely. She can feel a churn in him, almost a writhing though he doesn’t move. Whatever that is, she wants to make room for it. An extra second to unbuckle his belt, a pause to kiss him through his pants before unzipping them.
He has to come to her, surfacing from inside himself. He is drowning in there as she tries to siren him to the shore of his own self through his own pleasure. Alive, she thinks. She wishes him to be happy to be that much, Alive. Too often, he is just not. “Come home,” she thinks.
He watches her. But his focus drifts, comes back, drifts again. Like he’s trying to stay but something keeps pulling him under. He reaches out and pulls on his favorite of her curls, lets go and watches it bounce back, like a cat idly playing with an old toy.
She doesn’t interrupt it. She leans into the game instead. Let it do what it’s supposed to do.
He doesn’t set a pace.
So, she finds one. Slow. Consistent. Something he can rest against.
Her breathing steadies first. That’s usually how it starts to work. If she can regulate, he can follow.
His hands find the arms of the chair, gripping the fabric on either side of him. Not tight at first. Then tighter. Then loosening again with a frustrated sigh. She shifts slightly, adjusts, tries to find where he is.
There’s a moment where she thinks it’s working. His body aligns with hers. His breath catches, then syncs. His focus sharpens, lands fully on her.
There you are, she thinks. Stay.
It doesn’t last.
Something moves through him—too fast to track, too internal to name. His hands leave the armrests abruptly, tightly grabbing her skull when she is on an upstroke, pulls out of her mouth barely, letting his half hard cock tap her now slightly parted lips. She stills around that. Lets it happen. Take what you need, she thinks.
“Look at me.” It comes out quieter than before. Not command. Not even quite intention. More like bottom-of-the-barrel effort.
She lifts her eyes. And there he is. Not the version of him that plays games well. Not the man that compartmentalizes all too well. This is something else. She feels it before she understands it. Whatever he has been containing all day has slipped its moorings and found a way through. He can’t control it, the feelings of it coursing through him and flashing across his face – frustration, confusion, sadness. Anger. He is looking at himself in her eyes.
His grip changes. Not tighter. Uncertain. Like he is not sure if he is going to let go or hang on. She doesn’t look away. His gaze flickers through her, past her, away from her toward the crackling fire. He moves his hands around her hair, pulling strands out of her mouth, smoothing it away from her face as he focuses on her again. Her hands are resting on his thighs. She spreads her fingers wide, adapting the game. He notices, smiles weakly, draws one hand behind her head and the other under her chin, his thumb and index finger on either side of her jaw.
He has kissed her like that before, a rough rider swagger kiss, but he just holds her gaze now. And squeezes his thumb and index finger more tightly. His palm is pressing against her throat, so she can’t swallow the spit in her mouth. She takes shallow breaths through her nose. He squeezes more tightly, eyebrows furrowed, staring into her as if to make her understand. What? She raises her hands to either side of her, fingers still spread, and leans into his hand hard, feeling her own face turning red.
He could kill her. His expertise is trauma care. He knows and has seen just about every way a living person can become a dead body. She leans into his hand harder. She opens her legs slightly wider, surrendering every way his containment of her allows for. Staring into his eyes, she streams love at him like her soul is leaving her body and going into his. They are as safe where they are right now as they can be anywhere. But it occurs to her as her vision blurs at the edges: alive and left alive are two very different things. As soon as she thinks it, he lets go and pulls her off the floor and into his arms. He is hard as a rock, tear streaked. This time the game is she gets to hold him as long as he can let her, which is not long. They make love like the people they are to each other, whatever that is. As he put it recently, because she is now uncharacteristically cautious of what she says, “I know what your asshole tastes like – what could you be afraid of?” A lot, but not right now.
Afterward, she knows he will leave as soon as he starts being helpful, banking the fire, cleaning up his cigarette butts. He feels bad leaving, but he doesn’t want to be there. He doesn’t want to be anywhere except alone. She tries to make it lighter for him by joking – “That’s one way to shut me up ha ha”. And she hands him a sandwich without asking, knowing he will say no - eating and running is impolite, he thinks. He needs to eat something, she thinks. He eats and stares at the fire.
“They’re getting so big so fast.”
Earlier that year, her father had died. He was also not an easy man. In many ways, he had made her childhood a hellscape of chaos. But when she walked into a room, every time, her father’s eyes would light up. It hurt her terribly that she would never see that look again. As she’s cleaning up for bed later, putting arnica on a bruise that is coming on her jaw, she hopes that in her face he saw that too, a girl who loves her dad. Something he is painfully missing right now, and something that she is.
Ch 4 Reverse Cowgirl”
When he wasn't around, she talked to herself by explaining things to him. As if at the front of a classroom wearing a skirt and shitkicker boots, which he always got off on watching her do. Whenever her back was turned to a crowded room, he would scan her ass for panty lines and usually finding none he would picture a thong. He was wrong. She wasn’t wearing underwear at all usually. She did this on purpose, leaving a wake of pheromones behind her as she stomped around her work. All her life, she had not liked to be touched much, even casually, and would lean away from friendly hugs with a “pat pat pat” to end them quickly. Like cats, to which she was allergic, this made people want to touch her. She was aware of that and used it to capture attention, not to attract lovers but to demand audience for what she had to say.
She had no social media presence at all. She was followed in real life.
And that was not an exchange, really. It was her commanding and getting what she wanted. Needed. She needed a witness.
“Imagine this from the female's character's point of view”, she said out loud to her ever-attentive shih tzus, standing in front of the full-length mirror she had in her kitchen, looking at herself in her underwear. She looked good. Healthy. She wanted him to want her to send him a picture. She wanted to flirt. She wanted to play with him.
But what would be the point of sending such a photo now? He didn’t much care what she looked like, he had told her recently, “it’s about how you feel.” She wouldn’t bet a dollar on being able to interpret that correctly. Besides, what she looked like to herself went beyond him. The prior year she had gotten sick. Very sick. The kind of sick that had to get sicker before it gets better. The treatments and cures can fail or kill you. Now she looked healthy as a little horse.
She was explaining to him: I was mean too. I said mean things. I ghosted my partner and kept his dog. At least you're sorry. I'm not. The things I said were mean, but they were also how I felt. Somebody had to care about that. (And only I ever took care of the damn dog.)
He wasn't a bad person. He had been living sickly and he chose his own health at everyone else's inconvenience, including hers, which was his god given right as a human fucking being. It was the same choice she had made, so she knew what it cost.
They had talked all of this through before, but he didn't remember. They had agreed that they wanted to get better together. Not get back together, get better together. That would be new territory for them, and she was always into exploring new territory. He had called it "fixing each other". They would love each other and fuck each other like crazy until they felt better. The whole plan was to have no plan but that. They said "I love you" again because it was nice to able to just mean it, straight up. Simple.
She knew damn well they would hit a wall. But. She was expecting a honeymoon period at least. She didn't get it. They didn't get it. He got sick instead. Very sick. Scary sick.
She was not going to be one of the people who pitched a bitch because she was inconvenienced by his illness. She supported him absolutely because she said she would. That was all he seemed to remember, and she remembered everything else.
But that was not quite true either. His body remembered.
He had also lived, was living still with his illness, so his body remembered being his body. And if she had to talk at all, she’d prefer to talk to his body. It made sense. She remembered all the rest of him also, but it made very little sense to her right now. She just held onto the thought of it for him, a bucket of pieces to put back together once he knew he had collected them all.
“He’s the goat being beaten by the shitty old man,” said her son of him now, remembering an old Adam Sandler bit that he would do to make them all laugh. Yea, life really “whizzed that thing” sometimes, eh? And they laughed, but without him.
One of the strangest things to her was that he seemed not to remember that he was funny, very wickedly constantly funny. He did not remember the funny things had said and done, phrases that had become part of her whole family’s vocabulary. Even though it had been a long time ago, her family did remember because they still used his vocabulary. As he faded away, they retold these stories as if to keep him alive. But they stopped eventually, depressing like a running bit turned eulogy. (All but her elderly mother who would keep it up forever all jumbled in her head with all the other wonderful funny stories that she retold of people who had gone into the ground and who lived only inside her anymore.)
He was fucking impossible currently. He would go out of his way to tell her that he didn't want her. He would talk endlessly about things he wanted to do without her, places he wanted to go without her. He'd stop talking to her at all for weeks at a time, seemingly cycling through other women on his support group list.
She found it very but merely irritating. There is only one of her, and she knows it. He was still sick. She dealt with much of what he said like it was word vomit, as if she was doing the equivalent of holding back his hair.
Her phone dings. Breakfast? The dogs start going apeshit. His truck is already in her driveway. No notice. She clenches and braces herself. Typically, more haste means more distress, and he clearly doesn't care what she looks like since she is still drinking morning coffee in her underwear. What could have upset him already? It’s just a Tuesday, like any other. She scoops her mop of hair into a clip, a little dignity, and answers the door, expecting to be taken roughly and left quickly for reasons known and suffered only by him.
“This ok?” He is holding eggs and a box with something in it. She just opens the door wider, and gestures for him to come inside.
She shuts the door, stands there in her boyshorts and ratty sweater, watches him stride through the living room into the kitchen. “You should light a fire. No, I’ll do it, I need to get the hang of that woodstove.” She follows him. The dogs are all over him, tripping him up with their frantic happiness, “Ok ok, wait a minute” he says, looking around for something, grabbing a pair of scissors from the knife rack. He lets the dogs out the back door and follows them, comes back in with chives from the potted kitchen garden she keeps. He takes an electric wok out of the box and sets it on top of her electric range, unplugs her toaster and plugs it in. “It has to get really hot, but you don’t have flames, so. You’re going to love this, it’s very simple.”
She’s stupefied. But like always now, she is just going to wing it, whatever this is. “Can I take a quick shower?,” is all she asks. Since this isn’t going to be a smash and grab, apparently.
“Sure! Just relax.”
He reduced her to emoji faces, the stupefied one in this case. “Okay.” Relax. Has he met himself? But okay.
The eggs were good, she must admit. Both their bodies being still a little unsure of food, they lie down after eating, letting the calories land gently. They drift into light sleep. She lets herself be lulled by his uneven snoring, and she does relax a little. It doesn’t feel romantic. It feels like reprieve, likely temporary. But she’ll take it.
When they are fully awake again, they lie next to each other quietly for a spell. She thinks he is going to stand up and leave, and the longer he is alone with his thoughts the likelier that is. She can make a choice. Maybe it would be for the best if she just let him go now …
The divorce wasn’t real. Not yet. Maybe not ever. A handle of Jim Beam and whatever else he could get into himself could kill him still, any day. Tremors. Blood pressure. Blackouts. His mind was half-gone and his body…
His body was right here.
So, she made her choice. Relief, immediate and absolute, clicks inside her. If she thinks too much, it will take everything with it and all she will feel is afraid for his life again. She is sickened by that feeling.
Instead, she stands and quickly takes all her clothes back off.
When they reunited the first time, having found it physically painful to be apart, words failed her. To make herself understood, she straddled him and rode him. “Wait” was the only thing she had said, and she took his fingers into her mouth, then his whole hand, and kept pushing, clenching his forearm to keep it steady against which she could push until she retched. He put his face to hers, letting her eyes water into his own mouth, and said “oh, baby” from the bottom of his heart.
That worked. Works.
Naked and unadorned, she climbs back onto the bed next to him. It’s chilly; her nipples tighten and he immediately reaches to play with one.
He stands, takes all his clothes off, even the socks. She almost laughs, a small, involuntary snort caught in her throat. That’s a new development. The thought flickers, absurd and domestic.
She lets it go.
Lying down facing her, he runs his fingers up her throat to the fading bruises. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Which hurt. That could mean too many things. She swallows down any answer, lifts her chin instead. “It’s not about that.”
If he starts explaining, they’ll be gone. Words are landmines. She slides on top of him, letting her body answer for her. Another thing that always works is her body for him. Her already wet pussy. In all the things they have played with, lube has never been one. He loves that about her.
She moves slowly, rubbing herself up and down on him, feeling for him to come back to her and now. There, his breath shifts, his hands find her hips. She focuses on his breathing, how it is quickening. Not the other kind of listening for breath to make sure it’s still happening.
As she does this, she kisses him and runs her own hand up his throat, like he had on hers. His pulse is there. Fast. Alive.
“You would have to use both hands,” he says, and she feels his cock fully harden under her, immediate, involuntary.
She sits up, still straddling him but not letting him inside her yet, reaches down without looking. The belt slides free from her jeans on the floor.
For a second, just a second, she’s back there on the phone with him as he cleans the bore of his chosen suicide pistol. She puts a hand on his chest to steady herself for a moment. His heart is beating just fine. She slides the belt through the buckle. She makes a noose.
“You don’t have to.” But he just raises his head and lets her slide it over, then tighten it under his chin. Not tight, just there. “Hold this for me for a minute?” He takes the end of the belt and she lets it go. He has talked so many times about suicide. But this is different. This is -
She takes him inside her all at once in a decisive sit. He makes a surprised pleasure sound. Now she has his full attention. She rides him slowly, then gets off to lick her own juices off him, then repeats versions of that until balls are dripping with girl drool. Building something they both recognize. Containing all of him at that edge leaves no room for anything else. That is its magic.
She feels it. The shift into momentum he won’t be able to stop. He tightens the belt.
Not so fast.
She is tiny, but surprisingly strong. And she knows her own body now in a way she never did before. What it can take. What it can do. What it can survive. She adjusts, angles him, takes him into her mouth, one hand finding his on the belt.
She looks at him. Really looks. Color rising. Breath changing. The edge he lives on all the time now brought closer on purpose. Where she can see it. A quick bolt of something like panic moves through her. She holds her hand more firmly over his on the belt. She has him. Nothing bad is going to happen.
She watches closely where he has the belt around himself. Studies how tightly he is pulling it. Going to pull it. She takes his cock out of her mouth for a second, meets his eyes, “you’re going to come now,” she says, like instruction, like she’s at the front of the room explaining a complex equation in simple terms. He pulls the belt tighter.
She slides his cock back down her throat and moves her left hand to his ass. Tiny hands, tiny fingers, one pinky and he’s going to go off like a rocket. She knows this is a risky thing to do, that it touches on one of the many terrible things they both know about: how a digestive system fails. It’s not just painful, it’s humiliating. She pauses. He opens his legs wider.
Not play. Understanding.
She is watching his face and throat, above and below the belt, as he tightens it more and his face begins to turn red. Now. He comes bucking up into her mouth, his jizz comes flying out her nose, his unusually loud orgasm a kind of long strangled howl.
She lets go of the belt, sits up laughing. “Seriously? ‘Angry dragon’, that’s what it’s ‘about’?” They both are giggling like kids again. It has been a long time since she has giggled. He was her first and only playmate, like that. “Welp, you do always make me laugh,” she says, blowing her nose.
He makes that sound – half laugh, half disbelief – that used to wreck her. “Jesus Mary and Joseph.”
“Nope, I’m an angel not a saint.”
That was one of her sayings through the detox vigils. He laughs a bit more ruefully. She nuzzles his belly fur. He flips her over and puts his face between her legs just the way she likes, slow, like there is nowhere else to be.
“I want two,” she says. He smiles genuinely, slowing down even more, nose-kissing her clit.
“Fair. You’ve been through a lot. Remember when I got you to five?”
She relaxes. Closes her eyes. Sees a prayer candle flickering behind her eyelids. “Yes.”
ch 5 “Sex Chair (Mid-Century Modern)”
He sees the chair next to the bed as he passes her bedroom. She’s using the sex chair as a stepladder onto the bed for the dogs? He ducks his head into the room to look closer, sees that the chair is against the bed but facing the full-length mirror she seems to have in every room. A surge of horny jealousy. She didn’t put that there for him. It’s an Eames thing, armless vinyl, wide seat, low to the ground – it was a completely impractical chair for anything but sex. He looks more closely, sees a faint outline of a sweaty ass print on the seat. Scenarios to explain that rush through his mind, making him hard, making him something like angry.
It was not a reasonable reaction. Good thing they had agreed that feelings didn’t need to make any sense right now, just uncrunched data. They had been working on the whole “cousins” mojo – like family, but you don’t fuck your brothers, you might play doctor with a cousin though, so, something like that. She had invented a game called “Aftercare Only”, which was just being nice to each other, making each other dinner, care taking in little ways. It was nice. But. Looking at the chair, he didn’t feel much like her cousin.
The chair was facing the mirror because of another man, but not in any scenario he could imagine. The local ED doc who was featuring a friend’s recent Etsy venture, Dick Butter Industries, on his Facebook page told her that women came to him to have their labia “puffed back up”. She had never heard of that and couldn’t imagine why anyone would think to do it. Was it functional in any way? She had just been thinking of getting a Brazilian wax. She had read that it might give her a whole different range of sensations, so she was toying with the idea despite being pretty au natural leaning in general. But puffing labia was for aesthetics, the doctor informed her. It had never occurred to her do anything to make her genitalia comelier. But apparently, puffing up your labia was as common as any other kind of lip plumper (which she had also never considered).
When she got home that day after restocking the butter at the doc’s, she put the chair in front of the mirror and inspected the situation. She found that, like the shock-of-white hair on her head, she had a white streak where she had never looked before. She thought that if she were in love with a person with that streak, she would be in love with the streak. And otherwise, she found the inspection to be further proof of one of her theories: humans are the dumbest species. Yes, they had invented nuclear fusion and stuff, but had that made anything better? This was the kind of stupid shit that humans did. You’d never see a swan spreading its legs in front of a mirror worrying about how its cloacae was looking these days. Plants just lived – even a weed in a sidewalk crack was smarter than a human.
But then again, this is how he saw her. It was a perspective that she had not ever deeply considered. A memory rose up of her being in this position, him giving her a “barber shop shave”, very sharp razor, warm lather, him laughing as her arousal made the lather run, him telling her this took time to do right, the baby smooth skin she had after, the much gentler he was all day that day after that, only lightly grazing her and making her crazy for him. He had said he liked the way she looked, bare or not, her “dusky” coloring.
Rather than dwell and go from “this is stupid” to “this is hot”, neither useful, she got up and went about her day, leaving the chair where it was absent mindedly.
Now he was sitting in it.
She noticed him sitting there as she was walking by with lemonade for her mother, who was sitting in the yard on the new garden swing. She looked at him for a second, “I am going to give this to her.” He just nodded, stayed there.
Her mom was sleeping on the swing. It was wide enough for her mother to tip over into it like a couch – that is why they chose it. And then he and her son had put it together, setting it where the breeze current rocked it gently most of the time. It flitted across her mind that her mom might have died right there, because that was how her mind worked now, randomly hiccupping bubbles of dead-dread. She let it go – if that were true, it would be the best death ever – so why let it ruin her day or her mother’s nap?
She went back inside to where he was still sitting. The look on his face was … she was determined not to be afraid of him, which meant afraid for him. He was looking in a mirror, which might trigger a bout of self-loathing, and maybe that was the brooding look. She did Bikram yoga, she knew all about staring yourself down in hot mirrors, maybe that was what he was going. She came smiling into the room, “She’s sleeping.”
“Good,” he said, and stood and closed the door quietly, locking it behind him. He pushed her onto the bed. He pulled off her boots and sundress. He left his own clothes on and she found that exciting as he kissed her, pushed his cock against her hard through his jeans, moved up and down her body arousing her, flicking his tongue teasing. He breathed in deeply the slightly summer salty she was, humming with hunger. When she reached for him, he swatted her hands away, stayed fully dressed.
When she was nearly deranged with want for him, he suddenly let her go, stood up and sat on the chair facing the mirror. “Come here.” He undid his pants and pulled himself out. She got off the bed and kneeled in front of him, but before she could do anything, he held her face still by her hair and hit her lightly on the face with this dick. On the mouth. On her eyes and let her tongue just graze his balls. Then he pulled her up, faced her toward the mirror, and told her to mount him. He held his cock up for her to do so and kept his jeans on otherwise so that they didn’t impinge him spreading her legs wide with his own. That lifted her toes off the floor, leaving her no way to gain purchase to balance herself. How was she supposed to ride…. But that wasn’t what he had in mind. He wanted her helpless. He steadied her with one hand on the back of her neck, and reached around with his other hand to rub her clit. He’d always wanted to force her to come, liked forced orgasm porn, but she was as allergic to vibrators as she was to cats (why would anyone want to fuck their toothbrush? was her opinion of vibrators). He’d made her masturbate for him before, he knew the circular motion she made with her fingers, and he mimicked that now but pushed down hard.
Everything on her worked backwards – instead of more, barely touching her is what set her off. But he was going all the way the other way, pressing the circles very firmly. He tipped his hips forward, which put his cock against the back of her clit inside her, and he held her there, rocking very slightly, using his cock like he often did with his fingers, forcing her forward as he pushed her back with the circling fingers at the same time. He was watching her body in the mirror. She had never had an orgasm in this position, nor a forced one, but he was about to change that. He pressed the circling fingers harder, not over her clit, but moving her clit against his cock parked behind it, and he rocked just a little more. She put her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes, focusing on only the sensations he was causing. When she came, he watched it all over her, her nipples harden into sharp points, goosebumps on all over skin, her bucking and flailing to the right, him there to catch her by clamping his hand over mouth and letting her scream into it.
While she was still catching her breath, they heard her mother on the back stairs. “Go,” he said. She slipped the dress back on and went to help her mom up the steps safely. He pulled his shirt down to hide his hard-on and went into the bathroom to give it few minutes to abate. His stiffness didn’t wilt readily, he could smell her on him and it made him want her. He didn’t want to be relieved of this. All the damn apologies he owed, she insisted he owed her not one. But if she were a man, the blue balls he had given her over the course of a year would be worth remarking and he knew it. And what the hell was she going to do with “sorry” – fuck it? – no wonder she didn’t want that. He wants to make her feel good.
He was back with his wife again.
