Just Like Any Other

She slept. Did she sleep well? The question is inapt. Exhaustion claimed her. She slept like the dead; that's only enough to drag someone back to life. She needs more, but she won't get it for a while.

She's mostly awake. I've been nuzzling and petting her for twenty minutes, because I just don't know what else to do.

"Kisses," she murmurs. She can't hide the hurt in her voice; my selfish soul lurches. What if I'm the reason for it? It's unlikely today, but a man in love can't help the thought.

Still, she's asking. She wants. She desires. It breaks my heart, but also gives me hope.

I try to hide my eagerness. I move in slowly. I give her exactly one kiss in a place that isn't her favorite -- closer to the ear. Then I hit the neck. It's very good for her. She's a sensual and honest being; she knows how to communicate. In defiance of physics, she moves backwards gracefully, making me her spoon and her blanket, just like she does virtually every other morning. If I could fall asleep with her like that, I would. If I could fall asleep buried inside of her, I'd do that, too. Reality's a little stubborn. Her long, auburn hair is breathtaking, but rather in the less-optimal way during the night. My cock deflates before it inflates again, and neither of us are inclined to wake up, get things sorted, then try to fall back asleep. We did try once. The result was an amazing third round, but that only brought us back to step one.

She lets me cuddle, caress, and kiss her. She doesn't use her words, but encourages me in every other way. Finally, though, she lets her upset peek out.

"You never wear bottoms," she says. It's a petulant accusation. "You know I like to feel you. Take them off."

That breaks my heart all over again, and gives me even more hope. That's going to be the day's refrain. I had a feeling it would be ever since we got the news. I had a better handle on what this day would be like than the past five, right then.

An inchoate cloud of objections is already rumbling inside of me, but I can't pull one together -- at least not yet. I slip off the fuzzy bottoms. My cock is flaccid, but it won't be for long. Her thin cotton panties are its soft seduction. The response would be Pavlovian by now, even if I didn't savor the sensation itself.

"Tits," she says. It's accusatory again, which means it's also an order.

I shift myself -- so much less gracefully than her -- and fulfill another part of the ritual without objecting. When my fingers touch, she sucks in air and squirms.

"Cold!"

"Shhhh, it's okay, baby. Just a little wake-up, then comes the warm-up. God, your tits are incredible. I can't get enough of them. I could play with them all day."

I almost choke and sob instead of getting the words out. It's her mother, but she was my friend. It hurts me too. Her pain wins, though. What kind of monster would I be to think otherwise?

Her body starts to move in familiar, predictable ways. Mine does too. She feels too good; that cloud just won't coalesce. My cock is almost fully hard.

"No you couldn't," she says. I can hear her smile every time she does. Today that smile is weaker and sadder, but it's still there. Cue once more the day's refrain.

"I could!" I insist.

"Mmmm, you'd never be able to keep them out of your mouth," she says. She's reaching out to the nightstand. God, I have no idea how her morning movements can be so smooth and subtle, even though I know exactly what she's doing.

"Well that is true," I admit. "I could play with and worship your tits with my mouth all day. I'd suck on them until milk came out."

"Ew!" she says, just like always. "So gross. Such a perv."

She passes me the lube; I accept it. That cloud of objections is finally coming together. I just wish one of them sounded intelligent or convincing, instead of like some bullshit theater to make myself the good guy -- the nice, sensitive guy. Our morning ritual gives me so much pleasure, though, and today, that feels wrong.

"I think I might like that, though," she muses. "I always feel so close to you when you do it. I think the milk would be even more intimate. A part of me inside of you, nourishing you. Making you mine."

Well, that's new.

She squirms again. "I like it when you make me yours."

That's familiar.

Her perfect ass is becoming insistent. I don't feel the moment. How could any moment be good for anything today, except grief? I feel a window closing, though; bad will become worse. I need to say something. I just don't know what -- to say, to do, to be, to deny myself.

"Baby, are you sure? You don't have to force--"

"Please," she whimpers. The tears start flowing -- from me. Love is feeling another's pain more acutely than your own. "I need to be yours. I need to belong to someone. I want it to be you."

Jesus Christ. She's a fucking poet, even today. She's a poet on her way to a funeral -- and no, that's not poetry.

"I love you so much, baby," I whisper to her. She's about to guilt-trip me again, but she feels my hands drift down to her panties. That placates her immediately. That's the routine. I'm cooperating.

"I love you too, Daddy," she says.

We both tense up. Today, of all days -- and she realized it too, as soon as she said it. I have a choice to make. If I make the wrong one, I'm the villain, even though that isn't fair at all -- just like how it isn't fair that my grief is irrelevant just because hers wins. Love is just like that sometimes: unjust. Meanwhile, a billion men all across the world are lined up to punch me in the mouth and remind me what the fuck is happening in my bed: the most beautiful woman in the world, with the greatest ass in the world, is begging me to gently, lovingly, and authoritatively sodomize her, just like I've gotten to do almost every single morning for the last three years. Never mind what we get up to at night on top of that.

In a flash, I remember all the times I've shouted at the TV or the computer screen -- being one of those billions of guys to a fictional character whose strings were being pulled by shitty writers who only care about drama. It was a music video yesterday, actually -- though of course I didn't say anything out loud. We'd already gotten the news. I just thought it really, really hard: she wants you, you stupid idiot. She's hot. She's kind. In a heartbeat, you'll be old and gross and dead. Make a fucking move, for fuck's sake!

I think you'll find that listening to a throng of horny men -- real or imagined -- is almost never the wise course. Today, I think they have a point. It helps that my fiancee seems to agree with them. I kiss her like I always do. I hook my fingers into her panties, and tug just enough to make it a command.

"I love you too, baby girl," I say. "Now be a good girl for me."

The release of tension is nigh-orgasmic. The return to routine excites her as much as it soothes her. She raises herself up just enough, and bends a little to demonstrate submission. I slide the panties down, but not off.

"Such a good girl," I say. "Do you want kisses there?"

We press together again. I kiss her weak spots -- the ones up top, anyway -- relentlessly. I even fake-bite near her collarbone. We both move in time to a primal inner rhythm. It's sex, except for the single technical requirement. It's that intense already. We're deep in foreplay and past it simultaneously.

"Always," she sighs, "but I need you."

"Okay."

I take just enough time lubing myself to make her impatient. My wet finger finds her rosebud. She sucks in air again, but this time, everything warms up fast enough so that it transitions, without pause, into a shuddering sigh.

"Here it comes, baby," I tell her. "Just the one."

She nods. I penetrate. She lets me know she feels it. I reward her obedience with more kisses, shushes, and coos. I tease and stretch from the inside. She flexes on purpose and twitches involuntarily. It's two different kinds of submission together, and both are divine.

"Do you need more, baby girl?"

"Mmmm," she says. Again, the usual playfulness is dampened, but she won't let it be drowned. "Yes and no."

My cock knows what that means, and so do I. I lose the lube, wipe my hands, and grip her topmost cheek. I knead it, claiming it as my own, then pull it up and away. She groans like I'm the world's greatest masseuse. I gracelessly line everything up. She effortlessly assists me. Somehow, she keeps moving to that primal rhythm, but finds new steps so that the dance can reach its climax without undue interruption.

"Daddy," she asks, "can I touch myself?"

I give her a playful nip. "You know the rules, baby girl," I say. "Once you've submitted to Daddy's cock, then you can have all the fun you want. Why is that?"

"Because submitting to Daddy is good," she says. "It makes me a good little girl."

"And?"

"And good little girls get to cum as much as they want."

I push my swollen, throbbing head against her slick, warmed, stretched entrance. She knows exactly what to do to make sure I slip in. She also knows it's not the right time yet. There are a few more lines on the page.

"As much, as long, as hard, and as many times as you want," I correct her, adding a kiss to let her know it's perfectly all right that she skipped a bit. "Now, let's remind you who you belong to."

"I belong to you, Daddy," she says.

I kiss her again. "You're very sweet to say it," I reply, "but you need to feel it."

She nods her head. Her breathing is getting heavy. I can imagine her nostrils flaring and her dilated pupils staring off into nothing -- or, perhaps, looping all the way around the universe, to me and through me and through her own skin and bones, until she's bearing witness to her own animal lust from the inside.

"Make me feel it," she hisses urgently. "Make me know it."

I assert my claim. She submits completely. Years of practice pay off again. I'm inside of her to the hilt, and she groans and grunts that ultimate validation -- that merest of homages to Sade. She makes me believe that I'm just long enough, just thick enough, and just forceful enough so that it's not mere sex. It's conquest. She needs that feeling just as much as I do. Perfect complements need not be equal.

I claim her whole body after that, though secretly it's a grief-stricken man holding on for dear life. Her long, wavy, auburn hair is so easy to twist and grab; in her mind, I'm sure, it's a makeshift leash. To me, it's the braided polypropylene of a life preserver.

Either way, grabbing crosses just over the line to pulling; massaging becomes mauling; hugging becomes crushing. Kissing becomes biting, licking becomes sucking... that line more divides human and vampire. Two years ago, I hit a beauty mark just-so and blood flowed. I freaked out. She didn't at all. 'Just over every line' is a compromise. Once a month, give or take, she gets more. For all the in-between times, I manage to make my desire for gentle service a dominant demand. When she's on her knees, looking up, I want to die, because I simply cannot imagine anything on Earth being better than seeing her sincere desire to serve, please, and obey her daddy in those big, wet, hazel-flecked brown eyes.

Then, of course, I remember her perfect ass, and decide I need to live another day.

There's lovemaking. There's weekday-night sex. There's angry sex. There's breakup and make-up sex. There's hate sex, or so I've heard. Today we discover grief sex, and pretend it isn't so. I discover guilt sex and do the same. My desire for her feels wrong and selfish. My need for her feels like weakness. By her beauty; by her grace; by her twitching ring and inner warmth; by her furious pursuit of her own pleasure; by the blind luck of the universe that brought us together and made her want me, I don't cry. I act like a big, strong man, and use my little girl for my own pleasure.

"I think this is my favorite hole, baby girl," I seethe in her ear. "So hot. So tight. So well-trained. I just love that I'm going to feed you my cum through it. You're going to be able to taste it, and we're going to make sure it stays inside of you all day."

She doesn't -- can't -- make words, but her body tells me everything. It lets me know she wants the full experience. She doesn't want anything to be different -- unless it's even more extreme.

"You have no idea how hot you are, even after all these years. Your tits, your mouth, your eyes, your tight little body, your smooth little pussy... but it's the ass, baby. That's what they all want. Any man who's ever wanted a woman wants your ass, baby girl. Any woman who's ever wanted a woman wants it too. They stare at you. They hunger for you. They hate me, because they can't have you. They know I've claimed you. They know I've marked you inside and out. They know you're all mine, forever."

I bite her neck. She starts cumming, and never truly stops until the end. She tries to yell out the magic word, but can't even manage it. My cock feels like it gains an extra inch, and I cling to my precious, alabaster life raft so hard that there's no line anymore between dominance and desperation. Just before my own moment arrives, I feel the primal urge -- the deepest, craziest, worst one. I want to consume her, and that feeling is dangerously literal. I don't bite her again, because I know that if I do, I'll kill her. I shut my mouth tight and press my chin into her so hard that it hurts me too. I growl, and it catches in my throat. I cum. She's on her third or fourth orgasm, but when she feels the blast, she gets deathly quiet. Her eyes stay shut, but her mouth opens wide. It's her victory cry, and a perfect paradox at that. I claimed; she receives. I conquered; she wins.

It takes us both a while to recover. After that, there's one more exchange on the page.

"Who do you belong to, baby girl?" I ask. It's loving and gentle. There's no challenge or demand. I'm wholly satisfied, and hardly have the strength.

"I belong to you, Daddy." It's a beatific sigh.

"I love you so much, Nat."

"I love you too, Matt."

We don't really have the time, but we make it anyway. I kiss and caress her for as long as she needs, and I call her a good girl so many times I swear she'll finally tell me to cool it. She doesn't. She never does. It feels terrible to call out a bottomless pit of need, but I actually love it about her. I have one too, and I think each of us possesses a bottomless well right next to it. Our desires to fill and be filled exist side by side, and, with just a few graceful and graceless movements, we match well to pit, and pit to well.

***************

It's my turn. I'm feeling all the horrible things I expected to feel. I'm a fraud. I'm a fake. I'm a narcissist. I'm not technically family -- just missed it by about a year, give or take. I'm also grateful that nobody's done a remarkable job so far, and that's fucked up. Here I am, about to eulogize a friend, and I'm running political scenarios in my head. If I play it right, nobody will peg me as a tryhard or a drama queen. They won't resent me for upstaging family.

I glance at the girls' father -- the ex-husband of the deceased. He's a wreck in a decent-enough five-year-old suit that used to fit him better. It's too big in the shoulders and tight around the belly. The pants hide his bony legs well enough. He's been a functional alcoholic for over a decade, and he's aging quickly; today, he's not functioning, because he decided not to drink. That means he's not going to say a few words. He's going to sit there and try to hide his tremors until he can pass them off as part of his grief. The family -- mostly hers, but a few of his too -- are more relieved than ashamed, but they are both.

He's actually not a bad guy. I trust Natalie on that, and that's her take.

My fiancee knows me very well. She doesn't squeeze my hand or offer any words of encouragement. She knows I get in my own head, and that that's the best place for me to be when I need to get through something -- when I need to deliver. I stand and make the interminable journey to the front. Some performers don't know what to do with their hands when they start up. That's me beforehand. Same with my legs and my face. I don't know how to do anything naturally. Once I start, though, everything clicks.

I try to lose myself in the speech. What's an act? What's sincere? Do I know? Does it matter?

I'm not going to lay it out line by line, step by step. There's a reason for that. It's coming. It's a bit of a twist that, ironically, is about a parallel.

I dodge the landmines. I keep it brief. I limit the scope -- humility, or the appearance thereof. She was my friend and colleague for about four years. The assembled crowd is full of people who knew her more, longer, first. I nod to that. It's a theme, actually: all of us only get pieces of each other.

If you'll let me get clever for just one line: I say my piece about my friend -- the small piece for which I am so grateful, and that I am so sad to lose. Most of the assembled crowd feels the weight of what I don't say. If somebody else wants to mention the old scars on her wrists, the disease that took her, the deep disappointment of a marriage that lasted too long, or how any or all of those may have done harm to the two people she cared most about in the world, well, that's their piece. It's not mine. I lay no claim to the whole of her. It's strange enough that I was her friend, but young enough to be her son.

I have to talk about how I never would've met Natalie if I hadn't met her mother first. I have to. Natalie probably doesn't want me to. I hate to upset or disappoint her, but this time, I have to get what I want. I have to express my gratitude alongside my grief for that one-in-a-million second-degree connection that has changed my life forever -- and so, so much for the better.

The conclusion is heartfelt and fairly strong. I lose the right amount of composure, give or take a quaver. I get a few tears and a few sobs from the crowd. When I return to Natalie, she takes my hand and squeezes it. If there's anything to forgive, she does. The eulogy is a formality, as far as the two of us are concerned. She knows I loved the piece of her mom I got to see. She knows I won't try to tell her anything about hers.

Call it self-absorption or exhaustion; I tune out the next two speakers. Then Natalie's sister says her bit. It's good. It's raw. The crowd definitely reacts. She doesn't mention the scars, but she does bring up the booze. That makes her brave in my book. Then it's Natalie's turn.

She stands tall; she's only a bit shorter than me, actually. On any other day, her understated black dress would be driving me crazy. Today, it's humble and elegant. She even wore a bra, which she hates and rarely needs, and that was another weird thing that made me think that she was going to be okay. It told me she was taking the ritual seriously. It was her little bit of self-flagellation for her mom, even though Janet Remington, take-no-bullshit feminist, wouldn't have minded her daughter going top-commando at all.

Natalie gets up to the lectern and produces a piece of paper. It's old-school -- spiral notebook style, torn right out. It's a poem -- one of hers.

Jesus Christ. Now that's brave. That's an Olympic dive that gets attempted exactly once before the ban comes down. You either walk out with a gold medal and a world record, or you get carried out with a broken neck.

In the realm of prose, I call us equals. I have slightly more experience -- more ambition, too, I think. She's strangely serious in paragraphs and missives; she values clarity -- sometimes to fault. Sometimes my reach exceeds my grasp, and sometimes she misses too many opportunities.

In poetry, though, she far surpasses me. My second-place finish, out of two, is just barely within the bounds of respectability. I get too clever. I play silly games. She's a laser calligrapher -- all human, all by hand. She performs heart surgery on herself and everyone else. Whatever outcome she wills, she gets.