Vixen

"Did you say something?"

She shook her head.

"Can you speak?"

She shook her head again.

"But you can moan."

She did nothing, and my hand moved toward her veil. She swatted it away viciously.

"Bitch."

I reached up again, and again she hit my hand away.

"Don't," she said, her voice low and shaking with anger or fear.

"You lying cunt."

She laughed. I was startled by her laughter. It stirred something in me, some memory that I pushed beneath the surface of my consciousness as she moved toward me and began to unbutton my pants. Her cool hands slid around my dick and I forgot my surprise and my anger and began to feel around the sides and the back of her dress for the zipper. I found it down the middle of her back and pulled it down as she stroked my cock slowly. I pulled her dress down over her shoulders to reveal her breasts. They were large, more than a good handful each, with small pink nipples standing erect. I filled up my hands and rubbed her nipples in small circles with my thumbs. She sighed deeply and tilted her head backwards. The muscles under her neck stretched taut and I felt compelled to fuck her immediately. I pushed her against the nearest wall and lifted her up, my hands under her ass. I entered her easily, and she gasped, the fabric on her veil sucked backwards and then blown forward as she released her breath into the sensation of my dick filling her tight, wet snatch. Her muscles clamped down around me and for a moment I thought my dick was going to explode from the pressure. I waited for her to release me and then began to press into her more deeply, pulling back just a bit, only to press further with the next stroke. Her hands feel limply to her sides and I drew one up over her head and pressed it against the wall and watched in awe as the fabric of her veil blew back and forth beneath her ragged breathing.

She came once, and as she did I spoke to her, my voice low.

"That veil makes me want to fuck you and then leave you, shrouded like the dead." Her moans escalated into desperate cries as her orgasm continued to roll through her body heading for some exquisite crescendo, and I continued to watch her quivering veil, holding off my own orgasm with my fascination. I pulled out of her and released her legs. Her back slid down the wall until she found her feet, my hands on her waist to steady her. When she was standing again, I pulled the dress down around her waist leaving her naked—all except the veil. It might have looked absurd, but I was too transfixed with the beauty of her body to notice. Her round breasts stood proudly over her slender waist, just a hint of muscles showing through her abdominal skin. Her wide hips opened over a bush of curly auburn hair and her long muscular legs ended in thin, arched feet.

I stared at her for a moment, drinking in the buzzing pleasure of her beauty and she leaned back against the wall to let me look, her arms folded behind her back, her hands resting in the space between her lower back and the wall. I moved toward her compulsively, needing to touch her, to feel the warmth of her skin and her firm flesh. I felt awkward when I reached her, however, having nothing to do with my mouth, as she kept hers covered, obstinately under that infuriating veil. I lowered my mouth to her neck and she began to unbutton my shirt, slowly tracing her finger down the opening in the front of my shirt until it hooked over the next button and then slowly working it through the eyehole. Her hands felt cool on my skin when she pushed my shirt off my shoulders as I pulled my mouth away from her neck to look down at her. She hooked her fingers in either side of my pants at my hips and pushed them away toward the floor. I stepped out of them, staring at her pleadingly. "Please take of your veil."

"No."

"Why?"

She didn't answer. I moved toward her. "What are you hiding under there?"

She laughed again. "Something extremely ugly." She spoke softly, her voice deep and somewhat raspy as if she had just awoke. "I assure you that you are not yet ready to see it."

She moved toward me and pressed her finger into the notch below my throat then traced her fingers across my collarbones and circled them lightly around my shoulder, moving behind me. She placed her hand in the middle of the small of my back and brushed it up my spine, at the top, I felt the fabric of her veil against my neck and then her lips and tongue pressed into the skin over the top of my spine. She moved around my other side and wrapped her fingers around two of mine, pulling me behind her toward the couch. She placed her hands on either side of my chest pressed me down to sitting and sat next to me. She leaned over to put her mouth next to my ear, her veil tickling my cheek, her tits rubbing up against my arm: "Early will I seek thee," she whispered, her voice humming low in her throat.

"My soul thirsteth for thee," she paused to slide her tongue around the outer edge of my earlobe, and then pulled it into her mouth and sucked on it softly for a moment before she released it again. "My flesh," she whispered, her lips brushing the rim of my ear as she spoke, "longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is." She pushed her torso up and swung her leg around to straddle me, and hovering a few inches above my lap. "To see thy power and they glory as I have seen thee in the sanctuary," She continued to whisper warmly as her glance turned down toward my lap and she took my dick into her cool, thin hands. "Because," she whispered slowly, her head tilting up to look at me again as her hand stroked me gently, "thy lovingkindness," she purred with a particularly suggestive tug "is better than life." She slid backwards of my lap to kneel on the floor in front of me. "My lips," she lowered her face toward my erection, "shall praise thee." She circled her tongue slowly around the edge of my head, and took me into her mouth, her tongue sliding up and down slowly. She pulled away slightly, and seemingly addressing my dick she continued to whisper, "my soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips." She took me into her mouth again and continued to slide my entire erection into and out of her small mouth, till I could feel it hit the back of her throat. I moaned forgetting almost as soon as she stopped speaking that she had certainly just recited a Psalm to me, easily forgetting the horrible sacrilege that poured from the very mouth that now gave me the most delicious and illicit pleasure I had experienced in some time. The irony nauseated me, but my stomach churned with something more than sickness as my head grew quiet and I approached orgasm. She pulled away just before I came and straddled me again, rubbing her lovely wet snatch slowly over the length of my cock, lubricating it by rolling her hips back and forth, her hands resting on my chest. She spoke again, in a conversational tone: "when I remember thee upon my bed, I meditate upon thee in the night watches." She took my hand and moved it toward her clit guiding my fingers in circles for a while and then bringing her hand back up to rest on my chest. "My soul followeth hard after thee," she gasped. Her head tilted backward and I could imagine her beautiful eyes sliding shut as I continued to massage her. "Thy right hand," she began again, her breath bated, "upholdeth me."

I moved my hand to my dick and began to guide it into her dripping snatch. She settled onto me with a luxurious sigh. Her hips remained still for a moment as she pulled me in deeply with her inner muscles and released me shortly only to pull me in deeper still. Then she began to roll her hips back and forth slightly. I watched her move, almost feeling now like she couldn't see me, as if I had a veil on and could now watch her in this intimacy without exposing myself to her at all. Her head tilted back, she seemed completely oblivious to my presence, and I watched her heart beat flutter in the notch below her throat. Her sacred distance, her separation from me, her unassailable, impregnable beauty behind that impenetrable veil, the intrigue of her disguise, the slow, sultry rise and fall of her hips, the pressure of her hands on my chest and my shoulder, the flutter of fabric over her heavy breathing: for one moment, like a beautiful but devastating flash of lightning, it occurred to me that there are things in life that are worth burning for. This moment, this sensation, her beauty, her mystery: worth burning for. I came like the burst of a long over due realization, my seed filling her like a great idea fills the mind in an explosion of insight. She gasped sharply and I felt her insides spasm around me as her hands gripped my shoulders tightly and she moaned, almost sobbed a little, and then her head dropped forward. She breathed deeply for a moment and then her voice came up to me from beneath her hanging head: "but those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth. They shall fall by the sword."

Guilt rose up in my stomach like nausea, my hand fell still, and I pulled back from her slightly, dizzy from the blow she struck. She was quoting Psalms to me while she lead me skipping and singing down the path to destruction. "Why...what are you doing?" I stuttered at her.

"I'm trying to hurt you." She said laughing.

"Why."

"Because it gives me pleasure. Because it's so easy for me. Because you have set yourself up for failure by choosing to deny your will to live and attempting to mortify your desire to do so. Because you will never be completely pure until you are dead, either physically or spiritually. Because you can't ever say no to something you really truly need, but you, with a kind of Herculean heroism, have chosen to say no to everything you really truly desire, without realizing that your desires are far more powerful than your delusions. Because you think that you are invincible with the god of creation on your side, and I can reduce you to self-revulsion by providing you with something you need: my body. I know the secret to your strength: you believe that you have chosen righteousness, that you should be living a life of purity, that your god demands it of you. And you feel justified in your decision because you have built up a fortress around yourself to block out every other reality but your own delusions. But a fortress of ideas cannot stand against the reality of your body, the breath in your lungs, and the blood pulsing through your extremities, especially this one," she said, squeezing herself pointedly around my now soft dick.

She pulled herself off of me and moved over to her dress. She pulled it up over her waist, facing me. I watched her, feeling sick, feeling stupid for thinking just seconds ago that I might spit in the face of god for the sake of this horrible woman. She tossed my pants at me and I pulled them on quickly, feeling enormously awkward and embarrassed. I moved to where she was standing and bent down to pick up my shirt as she was pulling on her shoes. I felt a slight prick in my cock again at the sight of her long, strong legs, but shook my head as if to dislodge the recognition of her beauty.

"You said that you were giving me something that I need, but I know that's not true." I said to her softly, driven by some compulsion I do not understand, some need to set things straight. "That was just a snare of the devil: I know because for a moment I was thinking to myself that there might be things in life that are worth burning for. I know that is the devil trying to trip me up and lead me astray. And maybe you think that have really hurt me by telling me that you did that just to hurt me, but it snapped me out of my delusion. Because I can see how painful this sort of shit can be, how it is ultimately worthless, how it makes you suffer so much, how silly it is to trade eternity for just a few seconds of joy. I'll pay so much more for this than it was worth."

"I think you can only say this because you don't know how to put a price on joy," she said as she moved her hands up to the back of her head under her veil, working at some sort of clasp or tie. "You think that you have access to some sort of eternal joy, not because you have any good reason to believe that might be possible, but because it makes it easier for you to deal with the fact that you don't have the strength or will to purchase pleasure in this life. Because pleasure comes at a high price: it is never cheap, it is never easy, it is certainly never free. Because you choose not to accept the great responsibility that pleasure entails, you would rather follow rules that disallow you any kind of "worldly pleasures" and that allow you to believe that God will compensate you for your weakness and lack of courage by showering you with an eternity of the joy and emotional heights that you haven't the stomach for here on earth." She pulled her veil off, and by this time I wasn't even really surprised to find the face I had loved for those many years, the face that had become hateful to me, the expression of the mind that had walked away from the belief system that I myself could not escape. I reached out absently to touch her face, thinking vaguely that she might be some sort of illusion. Her eyes slid shut at my touch and my stomach lurched with something very different than lust, something that felt like remorse, like longing, something like love.

"Jayce," she said to me, her eyes opening, her expression earnest and sincere, "life is hard. Every height of joy has a corresponding depth of pain that lasts longer and takes more from us than the joy could ever replace. And most people need someplace to run from that knowledge: they need drugs, or drinks, or sex, or, in your case, religion. But I swear that your spirit becomes stronger as you choose to deal with your pain rather than run from it. I know that you are better than this life that you have chosen. I know you have the capacity to bear so much pain and thus, the capacity to experience such great pleasure. Your religion teaches that Jesus will bear all your burdens for you: I'm telling you that you don't need him to. You are strong enough to go at it alone and you are worthy to have authority over your own soul. Life is hard, and disappointing so often, but it is beautiful for all its indifference and it makes me sorry to think that you might miss it all by sacrificing your self to a delusion."

I dropped my eyes so she would not see the tears that filled them. I felt like puking, I didn't want to hear what she was saying, because I had heard it all before from the little voice in my head that I had worked so hard to silence. I sat down on the couch, my elbows on my knees, my hands in my hair, my head hanging. She knelt before me.

"Jayce," she murmured, "I love you." She pressed her mouth into the top of my head. "Not in such a way that I don't ever want to see you hurting, or in such a way that I will support all your delusions. I don't love you because I'm supposed to, because you are a fellow human, or because of our past. I love you because I see strength in you that I haven't found in many other people. I used to see a pride in you that most people do not possess, and it makes me ache to think that you are squandering all of your vitality on trying to suppress the very pride and sense of self-worth that might give you the strength to enjoy and to suffer life on a grand scale."

I looked up at her, and she took my face in her hands and kissed me deeply, her tongue pressing into my mouth eagerly, her fingers raking through my hair. She tasted so good, and I thought I might forget the tightness and the burning in my stomach if I could just keep the soothing taste of her in my mouth. She pulled away from me slightly and whispered into my lips, "I love the feeling of your hands on my body, and the way you smell. I miss that."

And she pushed herself to standing and walked out of the room. I heard the front door shut behind her softly. I wanted to chase her. To hold her courageous body in between myself and the wave of fear and panic that threatened to wash me out into the infinite sea, unsupported and alone. But she could not save me, I knew, she could not love me if she saved me. She herself was adrift on the same vast ocean. I lay back into the couch and closed my eyes, imagining her naked body floating supine on the wide, blue sea, daring the dangers beneath and drinking in the light of the sun from above.

Men as a gender have an opinion of women as a gender that depends entirely on their opinion of themselves. If they believe they are set toward some higher purpose than that of living and procreating then they will view women as a trap, as a distraction, as a detour—and often a harmful at that. If their aspirations are more earth-bound (and I am sorry to have to sound contemptuous when I use that phrase), then their view of woman will differ.