The Night I first knew you

The night I first knew you

The night I first knew you, you hushed my lips. I was talking too much. You said so without saying.

You presented me with a bottle of champagne. You interjected with assistance, as I fumbled to remove the cork. Following a satisfying pop, I filled your glass. The golden liquid fizzed with tiny iridescent bubbles. Momentarily, a white foam filled the flute, before vaporizing in effervescence.

You drank until your glass was half empty. The room was beginning to spin around me. You knew how to drink. I was an amateur. You figured that out hours earlier as we drank beer in a bar getting to know each other.

You rose. Follow me, you said. You broke the silence. I obliged. I followed you down a dim, narrow corridor.

You led me to your bedroom. You left for a few moments. You returned in plaid pajamas. They were comical in a sense—nothing provocative in the fabric or design. But your wearing them made a statement. We were going to sleep together. There was no pretense. Intentions were clear.

As you sat down on your bed, I stood before you. I was speechless. You laid down.

You made the first move, revealing yourself quickly, undoing three buttons from your neckline down. You gave me a hint of your curves, your chest gently rising and falling. Your arms reached out to embrace. Mine did, too.

I approached you with my neck inclining. I felt and heard your breath. We kissed. For the first time. Our lips and tongues locked. The three remaining buttons on your shirt were undone by my fingers without help from my eyes. My chin opened your pajama top like a curtain, grazing your breasts as my lips came to rest.

For moments, our lips vibrated gently as breath blurred with breath in the way that the water of ocean converges with stream at shore, eddying in fleeting separateness before fusing.

The moistness of your lips became mine. Enhancing your own delight, your eyes shuttered. The cool of the night air was broken. On your pillow, your black hair was spread like a paint brush awaiting emersion in color.

You removed my shirt as I peeled off what was left of your pajamas, as your hips preceded your legs and ankles in assisting with your full undressing. My heart, not alone, palpitated. Before me, you were naked. Except for your dark eyes, which were sealed. Except when peaking to confirm the shapes of me that you quietly explored.

I admired the curves of your hips, the strength of your thighs, and the soft triangle where they met. I smiled at the fullness of your breasts, irresistibly drawing me to your nipples, stiffened, as I sensed with my lips, lightly tugging with soft, slow kisses. My hand rested just beneath your navel, my fingers pointing down, sensing warmth and the softness of your trim mound, black threads of silk.

I was as inebriated as I was aroused. You did not resist my fingers. They deliberately walked the curves of your body, the most deft taking the lead like two legs wandering a new landscape. They gently found their way around. They found their way inside, too, oscillating, maybe too aggressively, perhaps too quickly, feeling a moistness dawn.

A fog of sorts clouded the windows, shuttering us behind curtains of vapor. The air was thick, as in a greenhouse, like the flower conservatory we visited hours earlier together as strangers. If my hand had been free, I could have drawn on the window panes, just out of reach. Below, strangers walked up and down the sidewalk, their echoing voices unaware of the copulation unfolding behind your drafty, Victorian windows. Had they listened, they would have heard wordless sounds giving away our conjunction.

Your back lifted and arched. As you did, the palm of my hand came to rest under you, as your hand encircled me in gripping strokes. My fingers remained steady in motion, stirring you, as if trying to stoke you. Until you would allow it no more, either because it was vexing, ineffective, or overpowering. I know the answer now.

As I knelt beside you, you pulled me nearer to you before you inched downward. Your hands controlled me. Your lips obliged, consuming me. All I could see was the crown of your head and occasionally the compression of your face, the gaping of your mouth, the curled grip of your two palms and fingers holding tightly. You were doing magic—making me appear and disappear right before my eyes. With your prowess, you were trying to impress me. It worked.

Sensing a surge in me and masterful with pacing, you disengaged. Simultaneously, your impatience and eagerness manifested—a rush of hot and cold. You returned your lips to mine. We kissed again. Slowly now, an interlude. The sweetness of the champagne that was on both our tongues yielded to a hint of saltiness and musky fleshiness that I discerned to be my own on your tongue.

In invitation, your hips lifted. I climbed on top of you. We kissed again. I was still only partially undressed, left in my blue boxers. It resulted from a haste that echoed an evaporating modesty. We kissed as my hands fumbled. I was not sure how to proceed, whether to go any further than this. Sensing the uncertainty, you proceeded. Uninhibited and seeming to want to move the night along to its inevitable conclusion, your hands connected us, drawing me inside.

I had not expected that sensation. It was overpowering. I experienced a burst of heat as I penetrated, sliding easily into you, without any inching inside. I felt like I was being pulled quickly into you, wondering how far I would go. It felt more like gravity than propulsion as our flesh joined. I was lost in a moment of pure curiosity and ecstasy as I felt the walls of your vagina constrict around me, pulsing. Your tongue flicked against my tongue at the same time, playing with me, feeling my desire expand from within.

Instinctively, I thrust forward and back as your hips gyrated—competing motions that were simultaneously awkward and alluring, while kissing and stroking and groping, completely unchoreographed. It was a full body experience that did not exclude my mind's internal monologue scattering words in unspoken hums across my inebriated brain: "Holy Fuck!" "I can't believe this." "She's amazing." "Is this really happening?" "She's fucking amazing." "I love her body." "I love how she moves." "I don't want to stop."

After a time that seemed more like rehearsal than performance, you directed me to my back as gentle as forceful can be. You rose to your knees and positioned yourself lower. You towered above me, centering above my center. The fullness of your breasts invoked one word in my stimulated mind: voluptuous. You took all of me inside in one motion as you kneeled perfectly. It was clear you knew what you were doing.

In a flash, my mind realized your body was well versed in this art form, flowing freely in positioning and fluid movements. You were unabashed, willfully seductive, liberally offering and taking pleasure, an exchange that was less calculated, than impulsive, fully natural. I was both impressed—even awed. I became more voyeur than participant as I scanned your body, trying to read your mind, watching you in motion.

For a minute or two, I felt a strange sense of being jealous and insecure, wondering about all your other lovers, pondering the number and who they might be, how they looked to you from this same saddled vantage, how they fit with your body, how, at some level, your experiences with them made you to be like this, wonderful. Mired in blank comparisons, I worried I might disappoint you in every way. I wondered if I could satisfy you and how. As I enjoyed you, my fears gave way to an inflamed desire and temporary calm flowing from seeing how alluring you were and a sense of the obvious truth that resonated: your life before this moment forged the beauty I was seeing and experiencing—a truth that would echo beyond the four corners of your bed and beyond this night.

You owned my body. You rooted yourself to mine. Your iron-wrought bed squeaked. It shook against the wall. It rattled upon the hard-wood floors, little tremors spreading like little earthquakes below. The windows were completely a fog.

You were strong and steady in your cadence. You were riveting to the end. The middle and index fingers on your hand glued together as a small wand, spiraling quickly in circles between the folds of the two lips that enveloped me. My eyes were hypnotized, unable to decipher the pattern, the rhythm, or the pressure your fingers applied to the puffiness of your engorged clit, a mystery to this day. How did I fit into this process, I wondered to myself.

Your eyes remained shuttered. Your cheeks were red, as was your neck. Your breath quickened as much in the moments that you rose, as in the moments you descended. Strands of your hair teased your face in a vexing way, as you brushed them aside with your free hand and snap movements of your neck, rotated slightly towards your door. I held on at your hips, mesmerized by the rhythm of your body, shaped perfectly for this—your hips, your breasts, and your bottom overwhelmed my exploring hands with a need to grip and fondle and hold. If only I had more hands and fingers to please you and feel you being pleased.

Until you froze upon me. Your undulations suspended. Your body quivered for a minute in anguish's opposite. You gasped as if the air were taken, leaving nothing behind. Your face was flush. You changed hues. You were pink except where you were black. Your eyes remained shuttered.

Then you resumed your cadence. This time, with more urgency. You quickly relived your pleasure at least twice. You fucked as an ocean wave. You rose and you fell in a rhythm that was more in surges, pulses that had neither a time signature nor beat, some movements stronger than others, curling in a progression, as a tide makes its way to break on shore.

Seeming exhausted and clearly done, you pulled away, dismounting. Without words, you invited me to position myself over you where we began. We kissed momentarily, as your moans amplified almost pornographically as your hips rocked, inducing my end. I gasped as you sighed. Our bodies still, connected in stickiness. My eyes, which had been wide open, finally shuttered. I knew you, experiencing you fully. Before dissolving, like snow in the earth.