Грэм Мастертон - Famine

She kissed his chest, and then took one of his nipples gently between her teeth. ‘I could bite it off,’ she said. ‘Would one of your miracles glue it back on again?’

He kissed her hair. He could smell the sun and the coconut oil on it. He kissed her blonde eyelashes, her nose, her lips. Then, as if he was a sculptor unveiling his latest work, he gathered her kaftan in his hands, and lifted his arms, so that she stood in front of him naked.

‘I’m looking for myself, you know,’ she said simply. ‘I’m not necessarily looking for you.’

He said, ‘I don’t care,’ and bent his head forward so that their foreheads touched, blond hair against blonde hair, they could have been twins, erotic gemini. His hands ran down the length of her back, clasping the rounded cheeks of her bottom, and then he held her very close to him, so close that for a moment she wondered if she was going to be pressed into him completely, and become part of his body. Her friends, looking for her, would stare into his eyes, and see something that was elusively her for ever after.

She unbuckled his belt, and he stepped out of his slacks. His plain white undershorts showed the rigid outline of his penis, the cupped curve of his balls. She pulled them down, and his erection rose red into the diffuse sunlight.

‘I never imagined priests could be like this,’ she said. ‘I never even imagined men could be like this.’

‘I’m not ordained,’ he told her.

‘No,’ she whispered, as she lay back on the bed. ‘But you’re holy.’

The sheets were soft pink. She felt as if she were melting amongst them. Lying on her back, with her thighs slightly apart, and her knees slightly raised, she closed her eyes and imagined she was travelling through time and space, to a world where nothing mattered at all but rest and flowers and laughter.

The first lick of his tongue on her bare clitoris came almost as a shock. But then he licked again, and again, and gradually she opened her eyes. She couldn’t believe the sensation of it. It made her body thrill as if she was watching something terrifying and exciting and stimulating all at once, and her muscles suddenly tensed in spite of herself. She raised her head and looked down, and there was Granger’s fair head moving rhythmically between her parted thighs, his tongue lapping at the flesh of her vulva, pink tongue between pink lips.

She watched him in utter fascination as he licked her faster and faster. Sometimes he would play on her clitoris for half a minute at a time, stirring her deeper and deeper towards an orgasm. But then he would guide his tongue into her vagina, or around her urethra, playfully changing the tempo until she longed for him to return to her clitoris again and give her the deeper feelings she needed.

It was strange. It was all technique. She wondered whether it made any difference to him what woman he did it to. After all, one cunt must be very much like another. She watched him lick, and lap, and tickle her, and the more she watched the further away her feelings of excitement receded.

Three or four minutes passed. He kept on licking at her. She lay back, and stared up at the ceiling. She felt like another joint. Perhaps that was her problem. She wasn’t relaxed enough. Wasn’t spaced out enough. She idly wondered what would happen if Vee were to walk in through the door, and see Granger kneeling between her legs. Nothing, probably. She would say, ‘How was the studio?’ and Vee would say, ‘Okay. Do you want a glass of wine?’

She was just wondering how long it would be before Sally got back when Granger slapped her. Crack! Across the face – so hard that it jerked her head to one side.

She stared up at him, wide-eyed, shocked, her cheek blazing crimson and her ear throbbing with pain. He was glaring down at her fiercely, his eyes furious, and his jaws were working as if he was about to throw a fit.

‘You bitch!’ he hissed at her. ‘You high-and-mighty languorous boring bitch!’

She whimpered, and tried to roll away from under him. But he clamped his hand on her shoulder, and shoved her forcefully back on to the sheets.

‘You hit me,’ she said, and her voice was trembling. It sounded like someone else’s voice altogether. ‘For no reason at all, you hit me. You total bastard.’

‘I hit you and I’ll hit you again,’ he said. He seized her shoulders and shook her violently. ‘You think you can send your tedious mind off on some spiritual errand while the rest of your body lies around here and spends its time with me? I took you to bed, you bitch, not half of you. I took you to bed, and I want all of you!’

She shrieked, a high, off-key shriek. He slapped her again, on the other cheek, harder.

‘You dare!’ she screamed. ‘Oh, god, you dare!’

He turned her over on to her face, and twisted her arm behind her back. She could feel his heavy crucifix swinging against her shoulder. He was lean, but he was so much stronger than she was that she could scarcely move, and when his brown muscular knee wedged itself between her thighs, opening up her legs, there was nothing she could do to prevent it.

Panting, cursing under his breath, he roughly parted the lips of her vulva with his free hand. Then he leaned forward, giving her arm another savage twist to prevent her from squirming away, and pushed the head of his erection up against her.

‘Granger!’ she begged. ‘No, Granger! Not like this! No!’ He grunted once, and his thick penis forced its way up inside her. She felt the prickly curls of his pubic hair up against the bare cheeks of her bottom, and his tight balls deep between her legs.

He thrust into her relentlessly, harder and harder. Her twisted arm was agony, and he was hurting her vagina with every thrust. But he went on and on until she couldn’t resist the feeling of having him right up inside her again and again and again; and though she swore into the pillow in the filthiest language she knew, there was a moment when she could feel him approaching the edge of his climax, and when she was certain that it was going to be impossible for her to suppress an orgasm of her own.

He came. She felt him fill her. And then her face was squeezed and her fingers were clenched and her nipples were rigid with overwhelming sensation. She said: ‘Ah!’ and then ‘Aaaah!’ and then she screeched out loud and shook like a woman in some nightmare convulsion. It took whole minutes before she could be still, before her nerves stopped jumping, before she could open her eyes.

She was aware of birds singing outside in the garden. She raised herself on one elbow and looked blearily across the bedroom. Granger was standing a little way away, buttoning up his shirt. His penis, limp now, was still shining.

‘Granger?’ she questioned him, softly.

He watched her without answering.

‘Granger?’ she repeated. ‘What happened?’

He stepped into his undershorts, and found his slacks. ‘A miracle,’ he said, sharply. ‘A practical miracle. Something which you should have experienced a long, long time ago.’

Mary’s Drive-In Diner was a small green-painted building with a sun-bleached shingle roof and a hand-painted cut-out sign above the door that showed a smiling dark-haired woman holding up a plateful of amateurishly rendered sausages and beans. It was situated just off Highway 60, in La Lande, New Mexico, and it had originally been built in the 1930s to take advantage of the automobile trade that drove past on its way to see Billy the Kid’s grave.

Mary, the dark-haired woman on the sign, was still running the place, although she was grey-haired now, and her husband had long since gone to join William Bonney under the hard-packed soil of De Baca County. On the Saturday evening that Ed Hardesty was preparing to give his broadcast from Shearson Jones’s house in Kansas, and Season Hardesty was sitting at the kitchen table at Vee’s house eating an early supper with Sally, Mary was wiping over the top of her red laminate counter, opening up catering-sized cans of hot dogs, and setting out catsup bottles, salt, pepper and ashtrays, in readiness for her ‘Saturday evening rush.’