Robert Silverberg - The Longest Way Home

But he must have fallen asleep somewhere along the way, because he heard the door of his room opening and sat up, groggy and confused as one is when one is abruptly awakened, with the fragments of an exploded dream still floating through his mind. Someone had come in. Joseph could see very little, what might have been a figure at his threshold, a mere outline, darkness against darkness. “Who’s there?” he asked.

“Shh! Quiet!”

“Thayle?”

“Shh!”

Footsteps. A rustling sound, as of garments being thrown aside. This was beyond all belief. I am still asleep, Joseph thought. I am dreaming this. He was aware of movements close by him. His coverlet being drawn back. She was joining him in bed. A warm body up against his flesh, too warm, too real, to be a phantasm of the night.

“Thayle—what—?”

“I told you I’d show you tonight that you could trust me. Now be quiet, will you? Please!” Her hands were moving boldly over his body. Joseph lay still, astonished, wonderstruck. So it was going to happen at last, he realized, the thing that he had read about in so many books and plays and stories and poems, the thing that he knew he would experience eventually, but which he had not thought would be coming to him so soon, here, now, tonight. Perhaps it had been inevitable that his first time would be with a girl of the Folk. He did not care about that. He did not care about anything, just now, except what was unfolding in this bed. Her touch drew shivers from him. He wished he could see her, but there were no moons tonight, not even much starlight, and he dared not break the flow of events to light a lamp, nor did he think she would want him to.

“You can touch me,” she said. “It’s allowed.”

Joseph was hesitant about that for a moment, but only for a moment. His hand hovered over her, descended, found her. A thigh, this was. A hip. That sturdy body, that strong wide-hipped Folkish body, here against him, naked, willing. The fragrance of her flesh, delighting him, dizzying him. He slid his hand upward, meeting no discouragement, until he found her breasts. Carefully he closed his fingers over one of them. It was a firm, heavy, resilient globe; it filled his entire hand. He could feel the little hard node of her nipple pressing against his palm. So that is what breasts feel like, Joseph thought. He had expected them to be softer, somehow, but perhaps the softness happened later, when a woman was twenty or twenty-five, and had had some babies. He wriggled around to a better position and glided across the valley of her chest to the other breast, and caressed them both for a while. She seemed to like it that he was touching her breasts. Her lips sought his, and found them, and he was astounded to find her tongue slipping between his lips. Is that what people did when they kissed? Tongues? He felt impossibly innocent. Surely she must realize, by this time, how totally innocent he was. But that was all right, Joseph thought, so long as she does not laugh, so long as she leads me along step by step, so long as she teaches me what to do. As she was doing.

On his own initiative he moved his hand lower, sliding it down her body, reaching her belly, now, the deep indentation of her navel, halting there, running the hand from side to side, from one hard upjutting hipbone to the other. Then, emboldened, he went onward, found the soft, dense patch of hair at the meetingplace of her thighs, touched it, stroked it. She seized two of his fingers and thrust them inward. He felt moisture. Warmth.

And then everything was happening very quickly. He was on her, searching, thrusting, suddenly inside her, enveloped in that moist softness, the tender velvety secret place between her legs, moving. It was an astounding sensation. No wonder, no wonder, that themes of desire and passion were so central to all those books, those plays, those poems. Joseph had always supposed it would be something extraordinary, the act itself, but he had never really imagined—how could he?—the actual intensity of the feeling, that sense of being inside another human being, of being so intimately linked, of having these exquisite ecstatic feelings spreading outward from his loins to the entirety of his body. They built and built with irresistible force, sweeping him away within moments: he wanted to hold back, to savor all this a little longer, but there was no way he could do that, and as the spasms rocked him like a series of detonations Joseph gasped and shuddered and pressed his face down beside Thayle’s cheek and clung to her strong sturdy body until it was over, and then he was lying stunned against her, limp, sweaty, drained, trembling, ashamed.

Ashamed?

Yes. In that first moment of return from his climax it astonished him how quickly he had traveled from unthinkable ecstasy to dark, exhausted, bewildered guilt. The whole descent had taken mere instants. Now that Joseph was able to think coherently again, his thoughts all were bleak ones. He had not expected that. There had been no chance to expect anything. But now, now, in the surprisingly harsh and chilly aftermath, looking back at that frenzy of eager grappling, he could not help but focus on the question of what sort of pleasure there could have been in it for her. Could there have been any, any at all? She had merely served as the instrument of his own delight. He had simply entered her, moved quickly, used her for his own gratification. Master and peasant girl, the old, old story, disgusting, shameful. He had never hated himself so much as in that moment.

He felt impelled to say something, and could not, and then did. “It all went so fast,” Joseph said, speaking into his pillow, his voice rough and frayed, sounding unfamiliar in his own ears. “I’m sorry, Thayle. I’m sorry. I didn’t want—”

“Shh. It was fine. Believe me, Waerna.”

“But I would rather have—I would have liked to—

“ Shh! Be still, and don’t worry. It was fine. Fine. Just lie here beside me and relax.” Soothingly she stroked Joseph’s back, his shoulder, his arm. “In a little while you’ll be ready to go again.”

And he was. This time it all went much less frenziedly for him. There was none of the crazy heedless swiftness of before. He felt almost like an expert. He had always been a quick learner. He knew now what to expect, had a better understanding of how to pace himself, how to hold himself back. Thayle moved skillfully beneath him, a steady pumping rhythm, delightful, amazing. Then the rhythms grew more irregular and she dug her fingertips hard into his shoulders, clung to him, rocked her hips, arched her back, threw back her head, and he knew that something was happening within her, something awesome, something convulsive, although he was not entirely sure what it was; and a weird throaty sound emerged from her, deep, throbbing, not even really a human sound, and Joseph knew that her big moment must have arrived. Somewhere within it he had his own, not as overwhelming as before, not nearly, but nonetheless an immensely powerful sensation.

There was no guilt or shame this time, none of the terrible bleakness of that earlier aftermath. He felt only a calm sense of accomplishment, of achievement, an awareness of pleasure given and received. It seemed to Joseph that he had crossed some border in this past hour, stepping over into a strange and wonderful new land from which there would be no returning.

They lay tangled together, spent and sticky, breathing hoarsely, saying nothing for a long while.

“It was my first time,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“Ah. Was it that easy to tell, then?”

“Everybody has a first time sometime. It’s not anything you need to explain. Or to apologize for.”

“I just want to thank you,” Joseph said. “It was very beautiful.”