Scott Spencer - Endless Love

She put her arms over her head. There was hair in her armpits now. Long. Curled at the bottom like the toe of a Turkish slipper.

The last time it had been time to shave, she’d let me do it. I took at least an hour, working at the biscuit-colored stubble with a care made up of equal parts of caution and sensuality. “From now on,” I’d said, when it was over, “this is my job.”

“That’s it,” said Jade. Her hands were tight fists. Her mouth twisted, grim: not that spacey, surprised look. She gripped my hand and pressed it harder against her, lifted herself up toward me, sawed back and forth. She made a “mmmmnn,” sound, rising in pitch.

Her muscles were rigid and she held her breath. Ribcage turned into two parallel rollercoaster tracks. Rump puckered. You’re not supposed to hold your breath when you have an orgasm. Jade learned that in a book and taught it to me. “It’s living, not dying,” she said, then.

She held her frozen pose and then collapsed. A light film of moisture appeared on her skin; her breaths reappeared, heavy and slow. Her eyes were closed.

She rolled over on her side for a moment but then remembered her manners and rolled onto her back.

“That sort of sneaked up on me,” she said. “I thought I was further away.”

I let myself down onto the mattress without bringing my head up to the pillow. I was eye level with her belly, rising and falling. She’d left her legs wide open but now she slowly brought them together again. Her pubic hair was much coarser than it had been before. The triangle had swollen, increased its domain.

A memory of Warren Hawkes persecuting me with his fantasies in Rockville: “Ah yes my brother, the sweet fuzz of a truly girlish cunt. We are evolving away from the great pleasures. When the sunlight can get through the hair. By the time we’re out of here, we’ll have to risk arrest to sample that sweet girlish cunt. Sweet, sweet, sweet girlish cunt…”

Jade placed her hand on top of my head. I thought she was going to guide my mouth onto her, but she stroked my hair and the pull of her magnetism was upward, away from her.

“I forced that, didn’t I?” she said, when I was next to her.

“That? No.”

“I did. I don’t know why. It seemed logical and right but it always does, doesn’t it? When you want something. A pleasure. Or anything, I guess. Now I feel a little…”

“I love you,” I said. I stroked her cheek.

“I feel so much better. I have to admit.” Suddenly, she sat up and patted the sheets.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Blood. I thought I felt myself leak. I’m not in the mood to bleed all over these sheets. Well, it’s all right. For now. Shit. I’m going to have to get up anyhow and get in my monthly swaddling clothes. I’ve got the heaviest flow of anyone I’ve ever heard of.” She slumped down and rolled onto her side, facing me, our noses almost touching.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not forgetting you.” She reached down and laid her hand on my stomach. Kissed my chest. Then with a falsely light touch, a delicacy that was terribly exaggerated, she put her fingers over my erection.

“Not like that,” I said.

“Yes. It’s all right.”

“I want to be in you.”

“No. We can’t. Don’t worry, don’t worry.” She gripped me harder. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and slid it down the length of me. Gripped the base, and then pulled up.

“You’re bigger,” she whispered.

“No.”

“I think so. But maybe it’s just I…” she was probably going to say it had been a while since she’d made love with a man.

I felt suddenly annoyed, jealous, shy.

She moved up and down me, slowly, at the same pace I’d stroked her. I was trying not to come, trying to gather the courage to insist again that she let me enter her. But then she touched the side of my face and kissed me—lightly, like an infatuated stranger—and everything began to fall away. I felt myself coming without experiencing any real pleasure. I discharged a long unbroken ribbon of burning semen. It was shooting somewhere or other and then Jade turned my penis toward me and I felt the come against my belly, my biceps, my collarbone.

Now the pleasure, long moments after the release, seeped through me, honey from a broken jar.

“God,” Jade said, “you got it all over me.” She sounded vaguely pleased. She was still holding my cock. “But you’re still hard.”

“Yes,” I said. I was on my back; I thought of a patient waking in the middle of an operation.

“You’re still like that?” she said, letting go.

“I don’t know. I’m with you, that’s all.”

She sank into her pillow, letting out a sigh and drawing it around her like a curtain. She folded her pillow in half, drew her knees up. “We’ve got to sleep,” she said. “I’m so tired I can’t even follow my own thoughts. Really.”

Suddenly she slipped out of bed, gathered up her underwear and pajamas, and then got her travel bag and took it all into the bathroom. I lay there for a moment wondering what to do with the come that was all over me, but then I sprang up and before I could think my hand was on the bathroom door.

I turned it. Unlocked. I threw it open.

Jade had the tops of her pajamas draped over her shoulders. She held a rectangular sanitary napkin and her underwear. She stood with her thighs pressed together and her pubic hair grew out in long fern-like curls.

“This is it?” I said softly. I touched the door, to show I hadn’t meant to make the frightening noise.

“What.”

“We can’t do this,” I said. “I should have stayed on the floor. No. You should have stayed in the lobby, or caught your bus. We can’t have this be the way we get back together. Jerking each other off? I can’t do that.”

She held her pajama bottoms in front of her. In the watery glare of the bathroom light I saw they were orange.

“We were just helping each other, David. Like old friends.”

“Helping each other what. Go to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to be with you. It’s been a while, right? It’s been a long goddamned while.”

“I couldn’t sleep and I need to,” said Jade. “Think of me for a change.”

“I do think of you. All the time.”

“I wonder.”

“No, you don’t. You know I do.”

“I want to end this day, David. I want to pull the plug and let it all go down the drain.”

“We’re naked together,” I said. I stepped forward, reached for her. My cock was absolutely erect. I remembered there was come all over my belly. Too bad. I reached for Jade’s hand and got her wrist. The gesture seemed much too aggressive. Only her coming toward me, throwing her arms around me could have salvaged it.

“Please,” I said. “Come back to bed. Don’t put your clothes back on. Don’t go to sleep yet. Be with me.”

“You don’t understand,” she said.

I put my arms around her, kissed her hair, her forehead, the sides of her face. They were the most adulterated of all my embraces: I wanted to make her want me. I pressed myself against her, some distant surviving remnant of mating ritual. I presented myself to her.

“Go into bed,” she said, as I tried to kiss her mouth. She put her lips onto mine, briefly. “I feel like you’re forcing things. I want to think.”

“Come with me,” I said.

“In a minute. I’m scattered all over the place.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. My knees puckered with impatience.

“In a minute. Just let me think. I want to decide. OK?” She moved out of my embrace, back a step.

I got into bed and turned on the lamp. I waited for Jade, but I don’t know how long. It seemed like quite a while but there’s no reason to trust myself in this. It could have been thirty seconds. It was its own time, separate, like the inestimable durations of dreams. I was at the bathroom door again, having spliced away those instants of consciousness I would have used for reflection. I opened the door carefully. Jade, naked, sat on the edge of the undersized tub, her head in her hands, weeping.