Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

He slept. For an instant the narrator was silenced and he floated unconscious in her. Someone sang. No! Moaned. It’s me! It’s me! Oh God! I love, I love, I …

He absolutely lost control: he bucked against her like a wild stallion, making sounds of joy and triumph to the hotel walls, an animal seeding its mate with blind, agonized joy.

When he fell against her again, utterly drained, and noticed the sweat, the color of the carpet, he felt himself again. He understood he was in the Sherry Netherland, lying on the floor of a room with his pants cuffing his ankles. He could picture what the sight would look like to an audience: an automatic laugh, the sight gag to be revealed to a cuckolded husband or a shrewish wife: or the automatic reveal in a drama, the scales falling from the eyes of a betrayed husband, or the ultimate humiliation of a neglected wife. He felt stupid. Small. An easily dismissed category of human. The arrogant, self-serving bourgeois artist, without scruples or shame. He felt shame at his lack of it; he felt belittled by his own condescension to himself. Appalled that he felt appalled. Guilty that he was guilty. And, finally, remembering how completely he had lost himself, howling like an animal while his prick jerked its liquid into her, as though she were merely a vessel, he felt embarrassed.

He glanced at her shyly. Lois was smirking proudly. There was love in her eyes, but there was also pride, the look of someone who had secret knowledge. The confident look of a person in power.

Tony laughed. “I guess I enjoyed that.”

“It was great,” she said, her proud smile widening even more.

He realized she thought of it as her achievement, a tribute he had paid to her. He had been shamed by the revelation that he loved sex so much, that it could so overpower him. He didn’t think of it as having much to do with Lois.

“Do you always come so loudly?” she asked playfully.

Tony wondered at this strange moment. There was almost nothing in his memory (at least at that moment) of life with Betty that could compare to the nakedness of this. Lois was asking if she possessed him, owned a greater percentage than his wife’s holdings. He had spent only a few days with Lois, and this was his first sexual experience with her, and yet she could ask him that. And he felt perfectly at ease answering: “No.”

The seriousness of tone wiped Lois’ smile away, replaced with a look of openness and interest.

“You don’t come like that with Betty?”

“No,” he said again in a sonorous tone, like a Shakespearean ghost.

“Ever?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

Lois hugged him and whispered in his ear with undisguised greed: “Good!”

Suddenly Tony felt lost. He had come to the hotel thinking he understood everything about the action. That he could foresee every possible result, understood the boundaries. But now he was lost. Surprised at the outset, and baffled by the future.

Patty cupped his balls in her hand when he pushed her head to take more of him. David was big, far too long for her to comfortably attempt total consumption. She had often goaded herself to try, especially after reading something— was it How to Please a Man, or Helen Gurley Brown’s book, or a Dear Abby column? — that claimed the gag reflex was responsible for making women think they couldn’t do a large one. Patty responded to such challenges. She studied the suggestions for overcoming the gag reflex (gradually taking more and more, relaxing through the initial urges to choke, reminding herself that no harm could result, that ejaculation involved a small amount of liquid, and so on, in a comforting pseudoscientific rosary to buck her up against the dread of being killed by a monstrously huge penis) and had patiently practiced on David, achieving terrific results in terms of pleasing him, but not even coming close to the Olympic glory of her lips reaching the base of his organ. Indeed, such a stretch seemed utterly beyond hope — judging from his length, surely it would pop out through the back of her head! So when he pushed at her, as if he too had read those damn books and had decided it was time for her to go for it, she took his balls, fighting against his hand, and lightly tickled the smooth skin behind them, knowing from experience that that often triggered David into climaxing.

And, of course, to her relief, he came instantly; like pressing a water fountain’s button, the mechanism worked predictably. How dismaying the human body is, she thought. There was a definite spot (she had pressed David’s finger there one night when she became impatient to come) which if rubbed lightly crosswise, alternating with irregular, harder pressure, resulted in an orgasm for her in minutes. That the dark mystery of passion had so dull a solution seemed to impoverish life. Despite her loathing for romance novels, Patty had to admit the impulse that attracted their fans, the desire for seduction and satisfaction to become oblique, shadowy, vaguely frightening, and finally benign, was something she too longed for. Bring back the priests of darkness, shatter the mirrors that teach us what our vaginas look like, let us think that the rare man who accidentally moves so the clitoris is stimulated is special, not someone blessed with dumb luck. She forced herself to drink his puddle of sex and let him shrink in her, licking the drops that were left, because those ridiculous books said these touches were important, making oral sex tender … or something. It’s true, she had lost her horror of semen. But it hadn’t become her favorite malted milk either. She had learned dutifully, and of course the actions had become duties as a result.

Before she had resorted to technique — when David had first silently approached and roughly kissed her, his hand rushing up and down her belly, her breasts, his lips touching hers lightly, then angrily — she had become excited. She sensed he was playing at something, angry at her, or himself, or just frustrated at life. There was so much passion in him, though, while he felt her possessively. His hands played on her like a baker kneading dough, treating her body like a senseless thing whose malleable qualities were merely a means to an end. He didn’t even demand surrender; there was no acknowledgment that she had a say in his actions. He touched her as if she were a sexual Ouija board designed to summon ungodly things from another world. It was so appropriate to her writing. She closed her eyes and could see him in riding boots, his cheeks flushed, grabbing her by the waist in a Victorian drawing room and kissing her furiously, his crop pressed against her back, preventing an escape.

The more she stretched against the world, the harder Patty fought for a sense of herself apart from men, the richer her fantasies of being sieged and controlled became. While his index finger rubbed her clitoris — so well! he had learned so precisely how she liked to be touched — she moaned and swiveled to encourage more. He used to kneel at this point and take her panties off (furiously, as though they were made of iron and demanded extreme force to remove), mouthing at her vagina devouringly. In the early months of their relationship, he liked her to come to orgasm with abject totality, as she had that first night, but she had been unable to repeat its intensity. To be sure, the climax would happen, but a part of her stayed back to report the joy, note its individual changes, observe David’s technique, and measure the force of the final quake.

She blamed the diminished involvement on him. She tried to pinpoint what he had altered from that first coupling. She decided at last that it was the fact that he had come first. That night, when he turned his attention to her, he had already been serviced. His penis sighed like a weary flag in the wind. She knew that everything he then did was for her. His enthusiasm for her body, knowing he had been drained of the natural excitement for lovemaking which always exists, that he wasn’t merely trying to sell her on making love to him, relaxed her utterly: secure in the seduction, trusting his flattering tongue and worshipful lips. She had surrendered that evening to sensation, not to him; given herself up to the power of her body’s lust to enjoy itself.