Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“I want to torture you first,” he said.

She burrowed her face into the crook of his neck and they moved around her living room, their thighs and groins pressed together, moving with raunchy intent, breathing in unison. They had both stopped laughing. Teddy was swooning against him, liquid. They were like two wax figures joining together in the heat.

She had felt so different with Oscar. His body had been bulkier and more solid. Sex with him had been like wrestling with a big, hungry bear; she had always felt very small and fragile with him. Oscar had been blunt and carnal and boyish in bed. Lewis was built exactly like Teddy, aerodynamically sinewy; being with him felt incestuously kinky. He was inventive, ardent, almost feminine in the dexterous subtlety of his hands on her flesh, but the way he moved inside her was not feminine at all.

Remembering that now, craving it again, she stumbled a little in their dance. “To bed,” she said, her words half plead, half command.

“What’s wrong with right here?” he asked her. He let her go and, bending down, took off his shoes and socks, stepped out of his trousers, unbuttoned his shirt and took that off, too. Then he stripped Teddy’s dress off. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. She was barefoot. They were just about the same height; he was possibly an inch taller than she was. His hard-on pressed against her pelvic bone. She reached down and felt it and her eyes closed; her hand tightened around it.

“Even better than last time,” she said, breathless, trying to joke, strangely embarrassed by her own lust. “Have you been taking those pills?”

“No,” he said, “just the result of years of anticipation.”

He put his hands on her hips and held them still while he entered her, bending his knees slightly until he was inside her, then straightening up to his full height. She felt herself expand to take him in, then enfold him tightly.

“We fit perfectly,” he said, his eyes blazing blue, inches from her own.

She was speechless. They swayed to the music, rocking, arms around each other.

“I have no food,” she said.

“But you invited me for lunch.” He lifted her with a small grunt, her thighs in his hands, her feet crossed behind his back, and carried her over to the green velvet couch. Still holding her, he slowly sat and lay back on the couch so she was straddling him. “I may never eat again,” he said with his mouth on hers.

She was suddenly nervous about this new position, the shift he’d made so impetuously in their connection, suddenly protective of him in case it didn’t work. “Let’s just stay like this till we starve and they find us skeletons overgrown with cobwebs,” she chattered. “Actually, Benny might knock on the door sometime tonight if you don’t go out and send him home.”

“I drove myself,” said Lewis. He didn’t seem nervous at all, which thrilled her. “Benny is far away.”

She stretched along the length of him and felt the rasp of his body hair on her skin. Their bellies were pressed together; they both breathed for a moment, getting used to this.

“Mmm,” he said. “Now this I like.”

“Remember when I worked for you?”

“You were a slave driver.”

“I still am,” she said, driving him deeper into herself and resting her open mouth on his shoulder. Many pulses went by as they fucked each other hard.

“Aggh,” she said. “If I had only known before what this would be like …”

His voice was as easy as ever, right in her ear. “Oh ye of little faith.”

“Will you spend the night?”

“Fuck it,” said Lewis, “I’ll stay here till I die of sexual exhaustion.”

“Don’t talk about death,” she said.

More pulses went by in silence. Then she felt him shaking with laughter underneath her.

“What?” she asked, pulling back to look down at him.

“Death,” said Lewis. “What a joke.”

Teddy convulsed with a completely unexpected orgasm, which left her gasping with a residue of tears against his chest. She watched his slack-jawed, helpless face as he came.

They looked at each other.

“Look how perfectly beautiful you are,” he said. “You look about twenty-five years old.”

“I’m so hungry,” she said.

“You’re hungry?”

“I’m starving.”

“What should we eat?”

“I know you came expecting a home-cooked meal,” she said. “But I can’t move. There’s a new Peruvian place that just opened nearby; they left a delivery menu on my stoop yesterday.”

“I have a bottle of champagne in that briefcase, too. I meant to put it on ice before we got carried away. Should we call now and order up a feast?”

“Use your cell phone,” said Teddy. “I can’t possibly lift that heavy receiver right now.”

“Helpless thing,” he said.

She looked at him suspiciously.

“Just the way I like you,” he added, and got up. While he ordered food and opened the champagne, Teddy lay on the ancient bottle green couch and inhaled its decades of smells. How extremely odd, to be madly in love with Lewis. How extremely odd, to be lying here naked, inhaling the smell of her old couch and luxuriating in the memory of babies’ diapers changed, Oscar’s sweat, Samantha’s childhood vomit, Ruby’s high-school incense and pot, fur and dander from a succession of cats. How odd, to be calling out for Peruvian food. What was Peruvian food, anyway? And Teddy didn’t normally drink champagne, but right now she craved it. She was zooming inside, her brain zipping and popping. Funny, she had fallen in love this way twice in her life, and both times the experience was intensified by the knowledge that this could never be a whole love. The barrier with Oscar had been circumstantial, but the one with Lewis was temporal, and that was much harder to bear. If she’d made a different decision, she and Lewis might have had a long life together of fellowship and adventure…. Well, at least it wasn’t over quite yet. At least they had this now. There was no point to regret.

Lewis sauntered in naked with two glasses of champagne. She gazed at him through the pearly summer light.

“Hello, old boy,” she said.

“Drink your champagne, old girl,” he replied. “I hope you like steak with eight different kinds of starch.”

“I’ve never heard of anything so perfect in my life,” she said. “I’ll answer the door when they come; I’ve got a bathrobe somewhere.”

“They’ll think you’re a senile old shut-in.”

“They’ll think I’m somebody’s abandoned great-grandmother.”

He landed next to her on the couch. They floated together in the sea of her living room, drinking and eating, talking and listening to music, until much later, when they resurfaced and found themselves cross-legged, naked, looking at each other in the dim yellow light from the streetlamp outside.

“Your house is crammed as full of stuff as mine is,” said Lewis, surprised, looking around him as if for the first time.

“I was hoping you’d never notice.”

“Do you ever find yourself perversely thrilled by accumulating so much junk?”

“No! It’s just been this way since Oscar died. I haven’t had the energy to keep on top of it all. Frankly, I’m horrified at myself for it.”

“It comforts me,” said Lewis. “As death approaches…”

“You’re obsessed with death!”

He smiled. “Not anymore. Suddenly not.”

“Well, you talk about it an awful lot.”

“Yes, but now I feel it there in the abstract. Until recently, it was ever present and painful as an open wound. Now it seems far off and unreal.”

“What’s made the difference?”

“You,” he said. “My fixation with death was caused by loneliness.”