Silk and Give

“So, uh, do you, you know, do you think that maybe you want to experiment with another woman?” Jade is asking me this almost nonchalantly while we’re in the shower, though his dick is half-hard as he speaks, betraying the apparent spontaneity of the question, and I’m standing there under the stream with a yellow-orange Shick in my left hand while my right juggles a wobbly bar of Irish Spring.

“Oh really?” I say, tilting the razor toward my right armpit, almost nonchalant myself except the question seems to have come out of nowhere, throws me. I’m wondering if he’s got someone in mind already or if it’s more of a theoretical thing, like anal sex, which we’ve been discussing recently. This is something we’ve never talked about, though, not something I’ve ever mentioned even casually, or coyly for that matter, and though it’s occurred to me, yes, but occurred to me as a vapor of a thought, a wisp of a fantasy, something too intangible to hold in the palm of my mind, his saying this out loud unglues me.

“Why do you say that?” I continue, attempting coolness and a little bristle, eyes down though, focusing a little too hard on the razor tracks I’m making.

“You know, because of your parents,” he says and I can sort of see why he’s saying that, given the situation, given the fact that they’re both gay, or - as I like to say - became gay, they were married so long before they came out. “Don’t you think it’s something worth exploring?” His dick edges up a notch, his voice a little shaky now, breathy, and my hand holding the soap drops its cargo when he reaches out and touches my pubic hair lightly, passing the tips of his fingers through, floating over my cargo there. “Whaddya think, hmmm?” His voice lowers, and I look up to see his eyes watering in the heat of the shower and in anticipation of the sex I now see we’re going to have if I put down this razor blade. But no, not yet. I want to see where this is leading.

“Is there someone you have in mind?” I can be such a flirt sometimes, love knowing that sex with Jade always comes down to the moment when I’m ready, then the power of waiting and holding the moment open for as long as I can bear it.

“What about Tanya? She might be up for it. Plus she’s gay already,” he parries back, alert, erect, and I laugh at his readiness with the answer, and redden just a little. Tanya is my latest tentative friend, someone I know very little, have just begun to know, the ex of a woman I used to play basketball with, and not a sexual possibility, no, not at all, uh uh, it’s just a straight girl-has-a-casual-acquaintance-with-a-lesbian scenario, that’s how far it’s going, yessiree.

“Hmm...I don’t know about that” I say, but I’m smiling into Jade’s neck now, tongue reaching down to his collarbone, razor flung somewhere else, done with his question at the moment, not worrying just yet about what it could mean, his asking it, no not yet, my insides wet now from something other than the shower head’s torrent, and that part of me reserved for Jade’s marvelously complicitous cock announces itself at last, my hips out and open and ready to rock. And under the stream of water we fuck the rest of our shower away, bodies slipping on spent soap, and Tanya an inkling bubble in the wreckage.

Later, though, days later, I find myself at the movies with her, and the memory of shower sex revisits me, and we are there in the dark of the theater and out of nowhere the ephemera of her scent hits me, I won’t know what it is yet but it catches on my right shoulder, trails upward to my nostrils and lingers there while the reel spins its last scenes. And that brief discussion with Jade coils itself in, an insidious question mark, and when Tanya and I leave the theatre for our separate cars, it wraps itself around our goodbyes until I notice her jaw for the first time, how angular it is, until I feel the grace and startling strength of her back as we embrace, and somehow a piece of her follows me home, alone, in the tiny red lights of the odometer’s rise.

That same week we are talking on the phone, she and I, and there’s this odd glee, on my end at least, this thrill, this imprecise thrill in my chest, I don’t know what the feeling is exactly, nothing’s happened has it, nothing to write home about anyway, nothing to report to Jade, who has more than once mentioned this again, proposed the question, insinuated a discussion, and I have not given anything up, and not about to, no, nothing to say really, nothing I want to say to him just yet as I sit here with the phone hugging my ear with her on the other end. Where is she? In the kitchen? In the living room? Lying down? Is her cat nearby? What is she wearing? We are casual on the phone, oh-so-casual, I am easy and light and thoroughly unprovocative, but my own room darkens and I see her torso in repose, the cord twisting around her long, thin fingers, and her scent conjures itself up just like that, a spontaneous combustion of the telephone wires and memory, and I decide it’s sandalwood, yes definitely sandalwood, it must be, and I’m lying there, awkward and aching in my jeans, mind wandering onto the lanscape of her face, that jaw again. And there’s more now, red plum mouth smoking an Indian Spirit, eyes from somewhere mythic, indecipherable, the slight twinge of a Texas drawl. The phone call does all this and I go to sleep trembling.

Then later again, a weekend dinner, just dinner, and halfway through the salad I find my hands clasping my wineglass in an odd, vague hope, the curves of her smile becoming the parentheses of a secret, mine I suppose, and I can’t taste my food, don’t want to, some other, nameless, timid hunger rises out of my skin instead and the meal metamorphoses unexpectedly, feeling like a date now, like a first date, like the first date I ever had. And I’m thinking of Mickey Richardson, and the squash courts of high school, and feeling our way around in the dark towards that first kiss, the magnetics of it altogether, and how my mouth stung from the pleasure, my tongue unleashed from its virginal hinges and it was like gulping down the sea, yes, at 17 gulping down the sea of him, of me, of us, and I remember how the night turned frothy with unrecognized desire, and now I wonder, wonder as I pluck through my mixed greens and champaigne vinaigrette, if I could have that kind of beautiful rage again.

And dinner goes on forever, goes on beautifully forever, until it is late, late, later, and she drives me to my car, pulls to the side of the road just behind it, the engine running, running, my palms sweaty, oh what is going on. She is the same, though, not giving me an ounce of clue, conversation buoyant and safe as ever but I realize I don’t want to leave, don’t want to leave this haven of a car, don’t want to leave this August night perfume of her, that dizzying sandalwood, don’t want to move a muscle.

And my hands, indeed, stay limp at my side, and she turns off the light, yes, turns off the headlights, just the engine purring now, she turns the heat up a notch, and the breath of the vents hits my cheeks and suddenly out of nowhere it is over over over, I am forgetting myself, or remembering myself I don’t know which but I am saying, can you believe it, “I feel like I should kiss you,” so polite, first-date polite, what’s this about “shoulds” who knows but it comes out that way, imperfect, awkward, pubescent as a pimple, and she looks at me teetered between confusion and invitation and says “You do?” and Jade’s question mark wags its finger at me for the last time.

Because I reach for her face, and it feels like slow motion even though I know it’s not, and my mouth arcs towards the plum of her mouth, my left hand whispering around her jaw. And I sink into the kiss with my eyes shut tight, it is that unbearable to watch and besides, I just want to feel it anyway, want to just feel it happening, don’t need to see it. And it is like kissing the air, it is so light, like kissing the air where powder was, a silk and give to her lips I didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t have known to hope for, and it is sheer heaven, that moment of shimmery impact, I forget where I am until I see that she is there on the other side of me. And for a second, some dreadful second, she doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, doesn’t say yes or no, just hovers there, within my kiss, terrifyingly indecisive.

And then something in her mouth or mind or wherever these decisions get made, something just parts, unsteels itself, unpeels itself, and I feel her palm on my knee and her neck turns towards me, mouth pushing back now, intent, conspiratorial, and the yes finally comes, yes, yes, yes, and I unpeel/unsteel myself, too, my knees doing that first-kiss buckle, my torso trembling in relief and fear and a kind of adolescent virility and I am 17 again, deliriously 17, more 17 than 17 ever was.

But I do go home that night, alone, go home to find Jade asleep in my bed, and I nudge him awake, giddy, unbound, and terribly horny, and I tell him about the kiss in Tanya’s car, tell him what it was like to kiss a woman, to kiss her in particular, tell him the outlines of the story, the barest minimums even though he pushes me for more, even though he gets hard and reaches for me in the dark, reaches towards something other than my body, whatever secret cupped by the move of my mouth against Tanya’s, her mouth against mine, he reaches for it, impatient, impertinent, wanting to know, wanting to feel it, wanting to be in the dark squash court of her car, too, wanting that first-kiss uncertainty and daring, wanting to know what I felt, and what did I do and what did it make me want to do? But no, I won’t let it go, won’t give it up, won’t give it away, don’t need to, don’t want to, this is private, mine, no one else’s, not even his, and so I’m lying there not telling much of anything, just the snippets to satisfy, I’m lying there in the dark, a gorgeous, ominscient kind of dark where I get to keep the story safe and warm.