Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

Then she would be next to him, and he could hear her sighing, smell her perfume, feel her body brush against him, the rub of the older looser skin of her arm or her belly.

“Don’t move,” she would say. “Keep your arms to your sides.”

He stood like a small soldier, obedient and blindfolded in the middle of the wooden floor, its rough-cut timbers still so new they held the tang of the saw blade. Even blinded he knew that Tom’s mother was standing in her shorts and bra, and could see her long legs rising into her loose shorts. Damp wisps of hair framed her face, which was bright with the blush from the day’s heat. With gentle attentive hands she undressed him, helped him to put on the panties, reminding him that they were her best ones, expensive ones, and how lucky he was, as she brushed her fingers across the loose silk.

His mouth was gummed shut in panic and pleasure, for there were just the two of them in the house, and he knew that he was part of something illicit — his very desire was a proof of it. In the pistol imagery he associated with desire, he sensed the hammer was cocked on his libido in those hot afternoons with Tom’s mother.

“I have to change,” she said. “I have to get ready. You can help me. It’ll keep you out of trouble, won’t it?”

He could tell from her voice that she was bending over. He heard her shoes drop, and then the plop of her shorts, and the tearing sound of her panties skidding down her long legs, and the soft lisp and release of her bra; how her voice changed and strained as she reached behind her to unhook it.

“I need a shower,” she said, and he heard her bare feet on the planks as she walked past him to the shower stall. He listened to the water coursing over her body. She was back in the room moments later, drying herself with a towel, gasping a little from the exertion, and he could hear the towel chafing her skin.

“Help me,” she said, and put the damp towel into his hands.

His head rang as he pressed the towel on her smoothness, feeling her curves give, a new sensation to him, soft flesh. And all the odors — her perfumed soap, the sawn planks, the fragrance of the bedroom, the humid afternoon air still holding the lunchtime aromas of hot dogs and mustard — mingled with the distant yelling of children.

“Do you like doing that to me?”

Unable to think of a reply, he concentrated within the darkness of his blindfold and dabbed gently with the towel, loving the heat of her skin.

“Because you’re so good at it you must have done it before.”

“No,” Slade whispered, wiping blindly at the woman’s body.

“You’re a fast learner,” she said. “Can you see me?”

Slade made a solemn sound of denial in his nose that was more negative than the word “no.”

“And don’t peek. Peeking’s against the rules.”

Her voice was receding slightly. She had moved away from him and he stood still, holding the damp towel and listening hard. From the sounds, the same on every occasion, he took her to be kneeling and bending, sliding drawers, clattering coat hangers, and he gathered that she was looking in the dresser and in the closet, choosing clothes.

“Come here.”

He went gladly, to please her, to please himself, but he stumbled, twisting the towel, as though for balance.

“Careful,” Tom’s mother said. “Over here.”

The same game every time, one he loved. She was moving, there was laughter in her voice, and he could hear the throb of her desire in that laugh.

“You can’t find me.”

She spoke in such a teasing way that he laughed, too, and was aroused. He relaxed and in this mood of pleasure seemed to see Tom’s mother as a big warm upright glow, giving off heat from across the room. He went forward with his arms extended, following the wisps of her fragrance, the creak of a floorboard, discovering that every perfume had its own heat.

“You’re no good at hide and seek.”

“Yes sah,” he said, as though responding to a playmate, though a bit short of breath from shyness. “I’m wicked good.”

“Then find me,” she said.

“Why should I?” he said, so that he could hear her voice again.

She said, “If you find me, you can dress me.”

He loved this game with his whole body. The blindfold over his eyes was silken, soft, fragrant, the odor of this woman’s skin. He loved the darkness on his face, the soft weightlessness of her panties stroking his cock — that, and the summer afternoon of sunshine and pillowy heat in the small cabin bedroom, the hot tang of the wood planks, the whiffs of nakedness and perfume, the teasing girlish voice. It was all warm on his skin, and the blood in his head seemed to gag him with its heat.

He smiled, realizing that the blindfold helped him know so much: he could see, hear, and smell the whole enclosed room. In a silence that was rich with odors he turned his head and reached with his fingers. She had freed him and made him blameless by blindfolding him.

He touched warm smooth silk and moved his hands to the edge and raked his fingers across the stitched ribbon of elastic that lay tight against her flesh. He let his finger pads graze the length of the narrow band of lace that fringed it, caressing its netting, the fretted texture of its line, the lip of elastic, the scoop of loose silk. He felt there and found her hip, where her panties fitted her closely. She sighed and canted her body and thrust herself into his fingers, offering him a whole handful of soft silk, her warm body beneath it.

“French knickers,” she said softly, keeping the words in her mouth and making them gummy as she savored them.

Her panties were warmer, more slippery than her skin, and when he touched her with his other hand he understood the little miracle that each part of her body was a different temperature. Had he not been wearing a blindfold, he would not have known that. And another revelation of his darkness was that she was breathing harder than was audible — he could feel the pulses of blood and air in the smallest muscles beneath her skin.

“I guess you found me,” she said.

Encouraged by the smile in her voice, he traced with his fingers again and followed the strap binding her bra to the little clasp, played with it, and then found her breasts. He cupped them as he had imagined when he had first seen them and lifted slightly, feeling their weight in the thickness of stitches and ribbing, until his thumbs discovered them plumper where they swelled above the cups.

His face was so close to her bare stomach, her breathing was a repeated sweetness of soft pressure on his cheek, and when she spoke the words purred in her body.

“Want to help me get dressed now?”

Slade nodded, his nose nudging her skin.

“First we have to get some stockings on.”

Just her mention of knickers and stockings filled him with a desire to taste her clothes, to have them in his mouth, but the thought was so extravagant he was too shy to tell her. He could not imagine overpowering her, and though he was aroused he had no idea of penetrating her but only of holding her. He wanted to nuzzle her, to smell her body through her clothes, to nibble her and nip them with his teeth — so near to him now, so delicious in her underwear, she seemed edible. He licked the edge of her panties with his tongue and then sucked on the silk.

One word from her and he would have stopped. But there was nothing, only her shallow breathing, her tightened muscles, the encouragement of her sighs, her fingers in his hair. He knelt like an acolyte before a decadent priestess, blindly, his mouth against her.

She pressed the stockings to his cheek and eased his face away.

“This is a garter belt,” she said. She encircled her waist with it and hooked it. “Now you’re going to snap my stockings on.”