Pulaski Square

"Ah, I can feel you are interested," he murmured. "Very good. I will take you to the club. But right now . . . now I wish you to turn over, your belly on the arm of the sofa. On your knees and present for me."

As he stroked me deep and I sighed for him, I felt contentment flowing over me. Until this moment all I could think of was how to break away from Pulaski Square and the continuing agony of trying to make it work with Kathy and remaining in aching isolation. Now you couldn't have pulled me away from Pulaski Square with a crowbar.

Chapter Five: Donna Davis

So, that's what it is with him. It wasn't me. I was making a fool of myself just giving myself to him like that, and it turns out he twists another way. Too bad, he's a real looker.

I was sitting in the outdoor section at the General's Café with the regulars on Pulaski Square, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather to kick off April, and Caleb had just plowed through—all loud accusations, although I can't be faulted for not paying attention to what they were because I was preoccupied by how sexy he was—and had been coaxed into the interior of the café by Mr. Tinley. I was being as casual about being here for the first time with Mark since he'd finally fucked me and then just run off and hadn't contacted me since.

Mark—I liked to call him Paul—was a good fuck. Nice hard body—not anything like Caleb's, of course, but nice in his own way. And nicely hung. Again, nothing like Caleb, of course, but without the cockiness and roughness Caleb could display.

But I could tell that Mark was holding back when he fucked me in the laundry room, just as he'd done when I lured him into the apartment before that.

Well, I thought that was OK, if a bit deflating. But it also made me think. Guys—and some girls—at this, I looked over at Tracy, but she was talking with Mark's live-in, Kathy, which was fine with me—had treated me like an easy bimbo for so long that I realized, when it didn't click with Mark, that, fool that I'd been, I had fallen into that role.

But Mark had been different from most guys. I really wanted it with Mark. It wasn't just that he was a hunk and a half young Paul Newman double and a nice guy to boot. It was because he had looked beyond my surface and had shown interest in the deeper me and in my work. No one else honed into my work as a cartoonist. Not even Tracy could sustain interest in it, and she was doing everything she could to impress me.

When I said I was a cartoonist—a political satirist—most just smiled and looked down into my cleavage, bedding me on their mind, and just let my art interests float over their heads. Not Mark. Maybe it was the feminine streak I saw in him. For most that would be a turnoff. But for me it was different and intriguing. I really wanted to know how it would be to be fucked by a sensitive guy. It had been OK. More than OK. The black panties and bra were a surprise—but an interesting one. This was an art colony. I was as open-minded as the next person.

But Mark had backed right off. Now I knew why—and it wasn't just a cross-dressing fetish.

I knew that the novelist Terrence Rowland, who lived on the west side of the square and who was at the café that day was gay. It was the first time I'd seen him anywhere but taking constitutional strolls around the square, all dapper and slim height. He was turned from us all, though, and not participating in either of the conversations. He wasn't tuned into either the lively one of the younger crowd in the center of the café or the one Ms. Goodwin, the queen bee of the square, was holding in her usual corner with her usual serfs. I'd heard all the rumors about the marriage between those two dinosaurs, Rowland and Goodwin, being broken up by his sexuality. And I knew what he had going for the young, quiet black porter from over at the hotel, Jaivon Johnson. I thought Rowland was turned away from us because he was watching Caleb working, shirtless, in the gardens in the square. Good luck to him there, I thought, knowing full well why there was no hope for him in that direction.

And now, as I caught glimpses of him turning in his chair and looking at and smiling at Mark—who was returning the smiles—I knew what he wanted from Mark and what Mark wanted to give him in return.

I realized now that when Mark had fucked me in the apartment house laundry room when I had enticed him there, it was a Mark who was struggling with his sexuality. Well, no, not with that, I don't think. I think Mark realized what he wanted. I think he was struggling with getting what he wanted without upsetting the apple cart of how he wanted others to see him.

When Mr. Rowland stood from his table at the café, he looked around at Mark. I think he expected Mark to follow him. And when I looked at Mark, I thought he might. But he didn't. I remember feeling a bit sad then for both of them. But two days later, when I looked out of our living room window into the square to admire the flowers Caleb was planting to the beds there—and, yes, to admire the shirtless Caleb as well—I saw Mr. Rowland sit down on a bench beside Mark briefly. I did a little incantation for them in my mind, and then was cheered to see them rise, walk away together, and enter Mr. Rowland's house. I think I'm as open-minded as the next person. I hoped they both were getting what they wanted—and needed—behind those shuttered windows of the formidable Rowland castle.

Mark seemed genuinely fond of Kathy Kimbel, the woman he was living with. But in the short time I'd known them, I didn't think he was comfortable with her. Well, I liked him . . . still. And hoped him well in finding what he wanted. That was easier for me because I didn't think Kathy was comfortable with the arrangement either.

I had every reason to know what Kathy wanted, even though she tried hard to hide it—and to fight it. Just the way she looked at me from time to time and the way she was reacting to her conversation with Tracy at the café and Tracy's reaction to her told me everything I needed to know about that. About both of them.

I knew exactly what Tracy was interested in in terms of a sex partner. There were nights when she entered my bedroom in the dark, pulled the covers off me where I slept in the nude, and worked her hands and mouth down my body. I always let her have her way with me in those nights. She could induce an orgasm as well as any man I'd laid with. And she was good to me in the rest of our living arrangements. Not that we ever spoke of her visits to my bed in the night.

The sex with her—more from her—was not disturbing to me. I took such pleasuring of my body from wherever I could get it and from whomever attracted me. I made no bones about being bisexual. What was becoming disturbing to me was her efforts to merge into being me. She couldn't do it fully, of course. I was petite and slim and she was more of an athletic build. But she increasingly was effecting my mannerisms and speech patterns, and as we met at the café that day, I saw that she had had her hair colored and cut to match mine.

So, when she showed more interest in talking with Kathy at the café than to me, I was relieved. She was getting close to smothering me. I would encourage her interest in Kathy. Kathy needed Tracy more than I did, I thought. I wouldn't be here long. I was peddling my cartoon portfolio around to the syndicates. I knew the cartoons were good. My course at SCAD was just about completed. It was time for me to be something other than the easy bimbo.

And, as long as I was here, I found my ultimate satisfaction in Caleb Freeman, the landscaper.

We usually met at the carpenter shop he kept in the old carriage house behind Ms. Goodwin's house. He had it fully outfitted as a shop and, behind a carved screen he'd made himself, he kept a double bed for trysts with the few women he let into his world. Not that he only fucked a few women—but I didn't know any other than me who knew about his carpentry workshop.

I believe I was one of only a few on the square who knew he was a master furniture maker. His furniture, all to his own studied designs, was worthy of the SCAD training that also very few knew he had. He hid well that he had a college degree. I think his hunky black landscaper persona got him into more women's panties than being a trained master furniture maker would have.

I perhaps was one of only a few who also knew that he spent his nights in Ms. Goodwin's bed—servicing her in exchange for room and board and full use of the carriage house. Certainly no one would have known that from the way she treated the man during the day—like an untouchable and a black field hand from the years before what she also referred to as the War of Northern Aggression on the South. I don't think he was fully mercenary there. He took who he wanted and would, I thought, always find a way to get what he wanted. In some complex way, I think he enjoyed fucking her.

I knew he was a womanizer and would screw any who would let him—and most any woman would let him. But I was confident that he would always want to screw me. And he did it superbly. I was so small and he was so large. I enjoyed watching as he entered me. He always was in awe that he could.

"It amazes me each time, darlin'," he'd say each time, "that you can take me in so easily. You're just like a china doll. I'm always afraid I'll break you. But you take me, such a large dick in such a tiny hole, and stay with me every time."

It was the china doll fucked by a hulking, hung black bull that always did it for me. He always did it for me, and I didn't resent who else he was doing it for as well. This was just a passing phase for me. In my next life—my syndicated cartoonist life to come—I'd be something else altogether. Probably a hard-nosed businesswoman in severe, mannish clothes.

For now I would play my role as blonde bimbo and just enjoy the pleasure that both Tracy and Caleb gave me—and try not to regret that Mark had slipped out of my hands—and into Terrence Rowland's bed. At least Mark had seen deeper into me than the easy fool image.

Chapter Six: Kathy Kimbel

Where did this euphoria come from? How could I repress it? Should I even try to repress it? It just wasn't working with Mark. I had tried a whole new venue and he continued to drift away from me. Our families couldn't remain blind to it forever. Why should I continue being the martyr just to live our families' dream?

I was waiting for her on a bench in Pulaski Square, facing the Casimir Inn. I couldn't help it, I was trembling from the anticipation of the meeting. I didn't know where we'd go, but it had to be someplace private—just for the two of us. And it had to have a bed. But that was silly, a sofa, a chair, even the hard floor would do. She'd already shown me she could give me an orgasm standing up against the wall with her pressing her body to mine and making creative use of her fingers.

But there was nowhere here in the square. I briefly thought of the bushes—but then laughed, when I thought of Caleb Freeman finding us. He was always working on the flower beds and on trimming the bushes in the square. Wouldn't that be something? For that big, black stud to find Tracy and me rolling around in the bushes. He'd probably offer to do us both right there.

Especially as I'd already tried him out, having done so when I wondered if it was just Mark who I couldn't respond to satisfactorily in the world of men. He scared the shit out of me and I was sore for days.

I had known what I was trying out at the time. It was less than a week after Mark and I had moved to Savannah—a warm day in late February, after I'd settled into my new job at SCAD for the spring semester. As can happen in the fickle Savannah weather, it was warm enough that Caleb was in the square, raking leaves that had fallen from the trees since the fall cleanup and had his sweatshirt off. He was wearing an athletic T shirt, but that drooped so much in the arm holes and the neckline that his magnificent physique and bulging biceps were quite evident.

I had already heard that he'd screw any woman who took his fancy and that most of them would let him do it—and then would let him do it again. He was just what I needed to test the possibility that my incapability was just with Mark, not with men in general. Mark was handsome and in good form too—and left nothing to be desired with what he was working with in bed. His heart just wasn't in it. We both knew why. But Caleb was strikingly different in demeanor—cocky and aggressive and forceful—and, if what I heard was true, more than Mark in every department of malehood.

That was a basic problem between Mark and me. I already knew how Mark leaned. I'd known it before the arrest and the photos on the Internet. But I certainly had every reason to know it now. It not only diminished me—it also scared me concerning my own uncertainties of my sexuality.

I visited Caleb in the square the day Mark was doing his final evaluation interview for his own position at SCAD. I knew he'd be gone all day—even that the department head was taking Mark to dinner. And, truth be told, I knew Mark wouldn't be home that night. I knew that the textile department head was aggressively gay and was attracted to Mark's type. I'd already worked behind the scenes in getting Mark the job—despite what had happened in Richmond. That he got the job was probably because of what had been put on the Internet. The department head was beyond interested in that.

I was outrageously flirty with Caleb. He responded, dragged me into the bushes, and would have taken me there, I'm sure, if I hadn't told him I had a perfectly good—and empty—apartment across the square—that Mark was gone for the night. We had most of the night and it was only then afternoon.

He didn't take the night. He didn't take more than forty-five minutes from the time we headed over to the apartment until he'd showered and was gone.

He fucked me on the living room rug just inside the door, pushing me down to the carpet on my back, fumbling at my clothes, squeezing and sucking on my breasts when he'd freed them while a hand roughly worked in my maidenhead. He was rough and insistent, but he also was expert. And he was so damn big and thick. When he thrust inside me, causing me to cry out, arch my back, and claw at his bulbous buttocks, I was open to him as no man had ever made me—certainly not in such a short period of time.

He was longer and thicker than I'd ever had before—my first black stud. The classic cliché, I know. But so true in this case. He fucked me fast, hard, and deep, without mercy. Within fifteen minutes of deep, hard stroking, he'd come, bounced up and away from me, and was off toward the bathroom to shower.

When he passed me on the way out with the remark, "That was nice, darlin'. I'll be having you again," I was still lying there, moaning, unable to close my legs. I don't think so, I thought. I'd been plowed harder and wider than ever before, but I hadn't had an orgasm of my own. I hadn't even had a chance to fake one as I usually did with Mark. And Caleb had given me no reason to feel like I should fake one. Mark did. With Caleb, it was all his pleasure and his power. Even his foreplay obviously was only designed to open me enough for him to get inside me. I knew now that Mark at least tried to be an attentive lover.

So, now I knew. It was just men in general I didn't respond to.

Not like I had responded to Tracy that day after we'd all met at the café and she'd engaged me so deeply in conversation. The day I saw the rich novelist from the west end of the square, Terrence Rowland, eyeing Mark, and Mark eyeing him back. Seeing that might have been what made me give up all pretense too—what had thrown me into Tracy's arms.

I knew then that moving to Savannah wasn't going to change what Mark had been in Richmond. For some reason it left me euphoric rather than frustrated and angry.

It left me vulnerable too, so that when Tracy visited me in my SCAD office the next day, closed and locked the door behind her, and gave me the look she did—spoke to me of her desire as she did—I let her lead me to the studio couch in the corner of my office, shielded from the door, which was locked anyway, by a metal bookcase stuffed with books. I let her lower me to my back on the couch, undo my blouse and lay her hands on my breasts. Touching them and then squeezing them. Putting her lips to the nipples and sucking them, laughing musically at the deep moaning that brought out of me. I shuddered as she unzipped my skirt and pulled it down my legs, and then, while still working my breasts with her lips, set her fingers dancing inside my folds, pleasuring me as a woman knows far better to do than any man.

I had my first orgasm even before she'd disrobed and covered my body with hers and writhed on top of me as I writhed under her, her lips possessing mine, one of her hands still between us, still working my cunt and clit . . . to another orgasm.

And here I was, on a bench, in the center of Pulaski Square, facing the Casmir Inn, waiting for Tracy. Already wet inside my panties. Waiting for her to take me somewhere private and to do with me what she'd done three times since that first afternoon in my office—what I wanted her to keep doing to me forever. What I was gradually learning to do for her too.

But as fate would have it, just as Kathy arrived, all rosy cheeked and smiles—now having a hairstyle that matched mine in style and color—so also arrived an ambulance, its siren screeching and its lights flashing.

It stopped in front of the Casimir Inn. Two EMTs rushed into the hotel, leaving another one to open the back of the ambulance and pull out a mobile gurney, which the EMT rolled up the handicapped ramp to the hotel's front door and then inside.

Kathy and I clutched at each other, transfixed, holding our breaths for the brief moments it took for the gurney to reappear. The young black hotel porter, Jaivon Johnson, was walking beside it. The hotel manager, Martin Lewis, was standing in the hotel doorway, looking worried and at a loss as to what to do next.

"It's Muriel Roberts," Kathy said. "I knew it would come to this. I think I need to go with them."

"Muriel Roberts?" I repeated, dumbfounded, lost. "You need to go with the ambulance?"

"Yes. It's her kidneys. I'm a registered nurse. Worked in ERs before deciding I wanted to be a photographer and enrolling at SCAD. Muriel didn't want others to know. But she knows I'm a nurse. I've been doing what I can."

Kathy turned and looked at me. "Could we . . . later?"

"Of course," I answered. "If they let you go with her, do so, by all means. If nothing else, you'll have answers to questions they'll have. And she'll be comforted that you're there."

"You sure?"

"Go, go. Now."

"You're a doll. But then I already knew that. I know every square inch of you."

Chills of pleasure ran up my spine as I watched her hustle across the square and to the ambulance. The stretcher already was inside and Jaivon had climbed into the back of the ambulance as well. Martin Lewis was still standing at the hotel door, stunned and wringing his hands. Kathy talked with the EMTs briefly and then, with a look back at me and—I was stunned too—with an air kiss, she was in the ambulance and it was pulling away, its siren once more screaming across the square.

To no one in particular, I said in a small voice, "Yes, go. Do what you can, Kathy. We have eternity, and who knows how long Mrs. Roberts has?"

It struck me then that I'd crossed the river, made my decision. I wouldn't make other living arrangements immediately, but my arrangements with Mark had to change. I felt a flood of relief. If I'd read the glances that had gone between Mark and Terrence Rowland in the café the other day, I'd have to say that Mark was at the same place I was.