Edward Aubyn - On the Edge

He was astonished by the innocence of his feelings. Just for now he was purely defined by making love to Crystal. There was no sense of debt created by the extravagance of his words, no sense that they were being converted into promises. With her, every gesture was made to give life to the moment.

Looking down at her body, he was filled with passion to see her open like a flower. He leant down and kissed her quietly on the lips of her cunt, as if he were kissing her sleeping forehead and didn’t want to wake her. And then he parted those lips with his thumbs and ran his tongue along the furrow between them, and when he reached her clitoris he arched his tongue and let it circle and slide over her softly.

Crystal pushed her hips further forward to show him that he could have all of her. Every movement was perfect, there was nothing to add and nothing to take away, nothing to quicken and nothing to slow down. How did he know her already? How did she already trust him? She could feel the clear glass of her meditating mind being stained by the sudden richness of her sensations, but clear or stained it remained translucent.

And now he was slipping his middle finger inside her and at the same time stroking her navel ring with his thumb, as if he were stroking the rim of a glass to make it hum. Their bodies were perfectly intelligent: they knew what to do; they had always known what to do. She breathed in deeply, drawing the excitement upwards, letting it rise through the centre of her torso like mercury in a thermometer. She let out a sigh of delight as Peter’s tongue quickened and flickered; she felt the ache in her third eye as the pleasure flooded her skull through the open gate of her throat, and then, fountaining against the inside of her crown, curled round and streamed back down through every nerve in her body.

And now he was slowing down, slowing right down. She relaxed all her muscles and subsided into his palm, which rested at the base of her spine, waiting to receive her. And then he touched her on the clitoris again with the tip of his tongue, as carefully as if he had crossed a wide desert without a drink, and was fetching the last drop of dew from the petal of a rose. And he rested his tongue there, and imagined all the love he was capable of — no, that was not enough — all the love he was not capable of as well, streaming into her.

And then they both lay still. But everything around them was streaming and everything inside them was streaming.

After a brief eternity, he looked up at her and they both laughed in astonishment at the intensity of the lightness they were feeling.

‘God,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing…’

Crystal’s cheeks were flushed. She looked rejuvenated and entirely beautiful. She ran her hands up the centre of her body and said, ‘Whoosh.’

‘Yeah,’ said Peter and, following the same line she had described with her hands, he kissed her belly, and kissed her between the breasts, and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat, and kissed her chin, and kissed her lips and, as he kissed her forehead, he slipped the head of his cock between the lips of her cunt.

‘Ahh…’

‘God.’

He held the head of his cock inside her, his eyes in her eyes, her eyes in his eyes, resting. Slowly, so slowly, because each millimetre was a new plane of intimacy it would be foolish to rush past, he moved further inside her. They gazed into each other’s eyes as if they were witnessing a miracle rather than performing an act.

Crystal felt him move from her swollen and sensitive lips up towards her womb, and she felt the same journey taking place from the excited part of her mind towards its silent centre. She felt the reconciliation of everything that was said to be deep and everything that was said to be high; the vertical dimension disappeared and she felt herself disseminated through an infinite horizon.

And then he drew back slowly and she felt herself drawn back into a zone of crowded sensations, of pleasure and the habit of deciding what was pleasurable. But by then she was not herself any more, she was just a woman, and he was a man, and they might as well have been fucking for a thousand years, because she couldn’t remember doing anything else.

He got up onto his knees and she hooked one leg over his shoulder and tilted sideways, and he started to fuck her hard, looking down on the spread of her legs and seeing his cock disappear into her wet cunt and reappear glistening and slide back in again. And he became just fucking, not a thought in his head except fucking, and the feeling was so meant to be, first of the tribe lay there, yes, there, yes, there, and he was there, and she was there, and it was there, and there it was, fucking.

He was, he could feel it, he was going to, he could feel it, he was going to come. Stop everything. Breathe in hard. Clench everything. PC muscle, buttocks, arms, pectorals, abdomen, chin lock. Breathe in further, the last sip of air through taut nostrils. Just in time. He felt the desire reversing and rushing up the centre of his body and flooding his head. He sat back on his heels and closed his eyes.

She felt the walls of her cunt softening and expanding, and then in a series of contractions she gushed amrita onto their intermingled pubic hair.

* * *

The yab yum had been a big success. Jason still couldn’t help thinking that it would make a great title for a song. ‘No need to rush/ No need to run/ Just stay where you are/ And yab yum/ ya-ba-di yum.’

He could just imagine himself on MTV with a touch of the Kama Sutra art direction and the whole band in soft-focused yab yum. It could be huge. A little ripple from the sitar, a pelting from the tabla, and his gravelly and laid-back voice singing, ‘Yab yum/ ya-ba-di dum.’ It would be bigger than ‘Be Bop A Lula’ and ‘Do-Do Run-Run’ put together. A world music sound with a neo-sixties message. Perfect.

‘I’ve got to write it down,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Angela sweetly.

‘I’ve got this song running around in my head,’ said Jason.

‘You see,’ said Angela. ‘Sexual and creative energy are really from the same source. Stimulate one and you stimulate the other.’

‘Yeah, definitely,’ said Jason, getting up to find pen and paper. Under his breath he composed. ‘Line up your chakras/ It’s time to have fun/ Yab yum, ya-ba-di yum/ Yab yum/ Ya-ba-di dum.’

* * *

‘Gee,’ said Stan, admiring the perfection of Sabine’s body, her small voluptuous breasts, her wide tanned belly, and her artfully trimmed pubic hair. Awestruck as he was, he noticed that her wonderful body did not entirely make up for the impression of mental illness which pulsed from her like a lighthouse beam.

‘This is your lucky day, old man,’ she said, sprawling on the bed and stroking her thighs with her fingertips.

‘It was already my lucky day,’ said Stan calmly. ‘I got to make love to my wife for the first time in eight years.’

‘Oh, that’s so sweet,’ said Karen.

‘Well, it’s the truth,’ said Stan. ‘I don’t even know this young lady’s name.’

‘My name is Poly,’ said Sabine.

Jerome had stripped down to his lime-green silk boxer shorts. Strangely orange skin hung loosely on his bony frame. From a chaos of serpentine curls, he leered angrily at Karen. He figured that Karen was the price he had to pay for the demented intensity of Sabine’s alter ego.

Karen drew strength from the thought that she was not only deflecting the blow of Jerome’s sexual attention from poor fragile Poly, but also giving Stan the opportunity to celebrate his rediscovered potency with a beautiful, if mad, young woman. The only thing that could make this blossoming of self-sacrifice utterly perfect would be to avoid any physical contact with Jerome. Perhaps she could find some tactful way to let Stan have his fun while she chatted with Jerome.