Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

Then she says the weirdest thing of all, just out of the blue. What do you think about pain? she says.

I play it cool. Don’t like it, I say. And it’s true. In my life I’m all dom all the time. I have no interest in any other role with women.

Not even a little? Like when you get a back rub and they hit a really sore muscle and it hurts where they rub it but you just can’t get enough—what about that?

Now, that shit is funny. Delayed-onset muscle soreness—DOMS—is the pain and stiffness that your muscles feel for hours after exercise or even a massage if your body isn’t used to it. The soreness is strongest for up to seventy-two hours after the exercise.

Well, I guess everybody likes that. Th’ fuck? Is she messing with me or what?

And what about fear?

Now the tools are kind of slippery in my hands, and I start sizing her up, thinking if I see her raise her arm at me even a centimeter, I can swing this monkey wrench around into her stomach, just hard enough to scare her; after all, I’m bigger than she is, could pin her to the garage floor easily. But the second I imagine her really trying to hit me, I realize that I’m wet and throbbing and she’s just setting the tools back down like the most normal person in the entire universe.

What do I owe you?

She stares at me.

My thighs ache, and it makes me feel like someone besides myself.

Why did she do it? I would say that she did it out of love, for me. But not your ordinary kind of love. She is a very selfish person. Probably the most selfish I know. For example, I’m not sure how conscious she was of the despair I’d experienced in those years. I don’t think she understood what I was going through at all. But she always had a kind of primal intuition about pain. Even when she was a kid, if someone was suffering in some way, she’d run in and try to save them. Injured people, cats, dogs, moths caught inside trying to get out, someone crying or just lonely; once she even designed a sling for an old oak tree with a broken branch. And if you were to look her in the eye and ask her for something, I mean even if a stranger did, I don’t think there is anything she wouldn’t do. Homeless people on the street had big nights because of her. Once she helped a crazy guy get loose out of a side gate at St. Mary’s. So when I asked her, there was a logic to it.

The day I asked her, I had no idea in hell where to get the equipment I needed. I had a book with directions on proper procedure and a list of things I’d need: plastic cooking basters, syringes, tubing, rubber, oil. She had several different sizes of syringe. I don’t know why I didn’t think more about that. I only felt lucky not to have to go and purchase one. She had one that was the perfect size. We did end up having to buy this plastic-cap gizmo with a hole in it that fit over my cervix. To contain the little devils and increase the chance of success.

Another item that turned out to be incredibly useful was her vibrator. When she asked me if I wanted to use one to get off first, I just looked at her blankly. Don’t you know what a vibrator is? she said. I didn’t. That figures, she chuckled, younger sister has to teach older sister how to use a sex toy. We laughed. When she brought it out, I blushed. What are you supposed to do with that thing, I asked, stick it up there or what? and then we laughed some more, and she told me that when the time came, she’d show me.

If a woman is going it alone, there are several strategies she can use to increase her chances of success. I didn’t have the money to set up a procedure at the clinic, so I was giving it my best shot. One thing that helps is to stimulate the organs, as during intercourse. The increased mucus and swelling help to prime the vagina and cervix. You know, like motor oil. Another thing that helps is to get into a position where your feet are higher than your ass. Like yoga. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Mixing the semen in warm water in a cup helps the semen collect so that it sucks up into the syringe well and disperses evenly into the vagina. Once the semen is inside, it also helps if you remain in that inclined position so the little fellas don’t leak back out. Details.

My sister’s husband was in the bedroom, watching TV. I was propped up in my reverse incline on the living room couch. She’d bought this great deep red blanket for the occasion, and I nestled down into it. She’d arranged candles, incense, and flowers everywhere; the room was heavenly. She convinced me to take all my clothes off. I just need to be naked from the waist down, right? I said, but she said, You may as well get some pleasure out of this, and that seemed right. She put on some Celtic harp music, which made the room a little dizzy, unless it was the red wine she convinced me to drink. My skin was warm. Sweat was forming underneath my breasts and between my legs. She brought the vibrator to my hands and turned it on. I didn’t really know what to do with it, so she guided my hands. At first she touched my lips with it, and I had a deep and to-the-bone tingling sensation throughout my body. She pushed it down to my clitoris for a few seconds, and my entire body spasmed; then she withdrew it quickly and touched it to my breasts, my nipples, one at a time. She then moved it down again, and at a certain point she let go so that I was guiding the movement. My eyes were closed, my hands were alive. I was breathing very hard. At a certain point, I opened my eyes; they felt puffy—my lips too—and I looked at her. I was rocking my hips and moving my hands, and my scent rose up between us, and I was looking at her. She was smiling and staring between my legs, and I liked her staring there; then she looked into my eyes, and I felt the deepest need for her to say something, and she said, Touch your tits with it again, and I did that, and then she said, Now put it back in your pussy, move it around… and then I closed my eyes again. I think I heard her whisper that she would be in the bedroom and that I should keep going.

While she was there, I heard moaning, and I came shortly after that. When she returned she had the cup full and I was wet and flushed and filled with my own desire turned in on itself.

She nestled herself between my legs in a kind of kneeling position. She filled the syringe without my noticing. She told me to close my eyes. She tickled an imaginary line down my body from my breasts to my pussy with her finger. Then two of her fingers entered me, and she rubbed around in circles. She said, Can you hold your lips apart, wide apart? I did. I throbbed so hard between my legs I thought it must have looked like a mouth opening and closing. I closed my eyes again. I felt her fingers there still, and then I felt the syringe enter me, but she had her fingers around it in such a way so that it was unbearably gentle. I bit the inside of my cheek. I felt the overwhelming urge to beg her to do it harder, then I felt crazy, then I shot that thought out of my brain. I did not feel her expel the syringe, but she was moving her hand and the syringe in and out when she did it.

When I opened my eyes, I had tears. I saw her head and face between my legs, the light of her blond hair, the heat of her skin, her mouth, open.

Later we all had dessert and watched a movie.

I remember the day she was born.

His face has the look of a boxer’s mug, but only in certain light, particularly in winter, when shadows and darks and lights stand out in stark contrast to one another. Only when winter gives way to a single barren tree against an almost white sky, or a boulder shoulders its own outline against snow. His fighter’s face emerges or recedes according to the light. So do his eyes, the cups of fatigue underneath each yielding to the flattened spot just above the nose, the jaw clenching and unclenching itself while he’s eating or fighting or fucking or sleeping. You wonder where you’ve seen this face before, and then you think it looks like the faces in those movies, men beating back the world, De Niro in Raging Bull , Stallone in Rocky , Brando in On the Waterfront . The more you watch him move, at night, working out, pushing the body against darkness and winter cold, the more it’s true, it is the film of a man and not the man, or it is the man caught on film repeating himself. Any image of a man that is against itself, that you suddenly see is any image of a man. In some ways men are always fighting the image of themselves in the world.