Elliot Mabeuse (29 page)

I pushed her away and fixed the ropes so they were tied to her wrists with a good two feet hanging down from each one, then I pushed her back, making her stumble ‘til her bottom bumped against the edge of the kitchen table and I crowded up against her.

We didn't notice the trains now, or the people on the platform. My hands were on her breasts and I was squeezing her, kissing her, and she was kissing me and showing me her teeth, biting at my mouth and whimpering, pressing her chest into my hands, holding onto the edge of the table.

"Do you see now, Emma? Do you finally understand?"

She didn't answer. She was frantic. Naked, overpowered, just the feel of the rope on her wrists set her off. She knew by now not to touch me when we were like this, but she clung to me like a punch-drunk fighter, knowing instinctively if she let me get away, things would get worse for her. So she pushed herself at me, kissing, biting, licking.

But I did get away. I pushed her back against the table and held her there as I got down on my knees and started to bite and lick her thighs in my frenzy. Emma gasped and threw her head back. She tried to close her legs but I got my hands between her knees and spread them apart, finding the ropes to her wrists. I pushed up, taking the weight of her thighs on my forearms and resting my hands on the table so

that she was spread on my arms, her hands pulled behind her back, and then I shoved my face into her pussy.

"Oh! Oh God!" she wailed.

She was spread wide, her back arched as she fell back on her shoulders, her nipples still standing up like minarets, her knees coming up and clamping around my head to try and hold me, but she was entirely at my mercy. I found her pink and juicy slit, puffy and bruised from last night's sin, wet with her hot flash flood of excitement. Try as she might to protect it, her clit couldn't hide and emerged like a berry sticky with dew to be sucked between my lips. Emma was like summer fruit at the peak of ripeness, existing only to be enjoyed. It was her destiny, her purpose, and it was all I could do to restrict myself to just licking the sweetness oozing from her surface and keep from devouring her entirely.

"Tell me you understand, Emma! Tell me!"

I pulled on the ropes holding her hands, making her arch even further and forcing her body into a twisted bow. Her stomach fluttered in prelude to orgasm and she moaned, trembling on my tongue. She gasped and twisted and I felt her thighs quiver, and then without warning she was there. She cried out in protest, in denial, as if she could stop herself or refuse her body's demands but she couldn't. Her cry choked off into a sob of shame and frustration as she jerked against me and gave me what I wanted, spilling a tickle of her hot release into my mouth, her whole body shaking.

And again, it was her responsiveness that did it, that female helplessness reacting to my male aggression with total surrender, offering herself, inviting me in spite

of all the barriers she tried to put up. She wanted them knocked down, she wanted the windows smashed, the doors kicked in. She wanted me to find her and drag her into the light. She wanted this rage and I wanted it too.

No sooner had she stopped trembling than I was on my feet, my face a mask of intense lust. I let go of the ropes and grabbed her and roughly flipped her over onto her stomach, then took the whole table and pulled it out from the wall, the legs grinding against the floor making the breakfast dishes dance. Emma looked at me in fear as I went to the other side and grabbed her wrists and hauled her across the table, yanked the ropes tight then bent and tied them off to the legs with no more respect than a cowboy ties off a rodeo calf. When I stood up, she was stretched across the table widthwise, her toes barely touching the floor.

I walked back and her eyes never left me. Her ass flexed nervously, twitching in fear, tensing and relaxing. I started taking my clothes off.

"Don’t even say anything, Emma, because you know there's nothing to say. You know you're in this as deeply as I am. We're in this together. Both of us."

I was hard, aching, dripping. I planted my hands on the table on either side of her and set my bare feet on the floor between hers to lean over her and there was nothing she could do but wait. The ropes held her wrists to the legs and her toes barely touched the floor. She tried to look back over her shoulder but she couldn't. She put her head down on the table and made a pitiful whining sound of frustration and impatience, then I shuffled forward and touched the head of my cock against her and she cried out, yanking at the ropes so they snapped tight as guitar strings.

I paused, froze, and she froze too, her body rigid. I didn’t dare breathe, then I exhaled, shuddering with the exertion of control. I pressed against her slit so I just opened her, just barely spread those tight lips and felt their hot, sticky adhesion against my flesh, the expectant trembling of her inner passage and Emma mewled again, tightening her buttocks convulsively, trying to draw me in. I held myself there, paused on ecstasy's doorstep, throbbing against her at the very entrance to her body, quivering like an arrow in a drawn bow, waiting for her, waiting for her to tell me. I wasn't going to move.

"Whenever you're ready," I whispered.

The cloudy sunlight poured in as Emma trembled beneath me, breathing fast, and it seemed like the whole world hung on the very tip of my prick. She squeezed her legs together and moaned through her teeth, pressing her forehead against the table and pushing her ass up at me but I didn't move a muscle, setting my jaw against the urge to thrust into her quivering cunt.

Then, when she couldn't stand it any longer, she raised her head.

"Oh fuck, Conner! Fuck me! God damn it! Fuck me already!"

Breathing a prayer of relief, I shoved forward, moaning as my prick slid into her tight, wet, fleshy sheath, into her tense and quivering body.

Emma gasped. She groaned. She rocked back and forth to feel my prick as it entered her, then slowly she managed to relax. Her legs fell gently apart. Her pussy softened. The tension left her back and shoulders and her face relaxed, her nostrils flared and her eyebrows lifted. All of her softened, opened, accepted, blossomed to take

me and her fingers found the ropes, curled around them, gripped, and pulled them tight as she held on and prepared to get fucked.

I watched my prick slowly slide into her and I leaned forward, whispering in her ear, "For God's sake, Emma, in the whole fucking world, what else is there but this?"

I grabbed her buttocks and spread them apart, holding them like handles and pulling my hips back then snapping them forward and sending my cock ripping up into her, thrusting deep and filling her with myself, overpowering her and taking her totally so her head fell forward and she banged her forehead against the table and screamed and came at the same time, one great fusion of body and feeling: "Do it! Fuck me!"

Then there was just the hard, violent friction, the pounding of flesh in flesh, her feet leaving the floor, the legs of the table leaving the floor as I fucked her with the strength of both of us. I stood behind her and shoved it into her as if I were just following my cock into her, following it down every dark and twisted place it might have to go to follow her and Emma flew on ahead, always ahead of me, stopping and exploding in ecstasy and showering me with her wetness but always fleeing, always caught and always escaping, that part of me I could experience but never possess.

* * * * It should have been enough. I thought, showing her what I'd shown her, it would have been enough to make her see what she thought was something shameful was a gift and it meant everything to me, that it was enough to build this relationship on. But it wasn't. I could tell it wasn't enough.

I could tell as soon as I untied her from the table—always an awkward business, having to clean up the aftermath of passion. I took her in my arms and we kissed. I was truly grateful, astonished as always by the things she did to me, and Emma was moved too, I could tell. You can't live through the kinds of emotions we did and not be moved, but it was still just sex. It was still just those parts of us below our necks having their way, and we already knew how dumb and unreliable they were.

I sent Emma to the shower while I took care of the kitchen and then went into the front.

The chains were still hanging from the hoist on the ceiling. The chair where I'd sat last night and held the rope that sent her rocking gently was parked nearby. At three in the morning, after a night of passion and emotion, having Emma tight and hanging like a spider's prey had made such perfect sense to me I thought she'd understood too, and she had understood something. She'd gone along with it eagerly, hungrily, and she'd derived some deep satisfaction from it. But now in the light of day there was no way to put those feelings into words and present them to her. It had just been some bit of deviancy, some bit of perversion. I could hardly hold that up as a reason we should be together.

But it was these kinds of feelings, these kinds of images and experiences, this kind of meaning and depth she brought to things—that was the entire point. Emma was my link to a whole new erotic realm and that's why I needed her. She was like a lens I could see things through, a filter coloring everything, and that's what I had to make her see.

And just before, in the kitchen, as the train came through and my lust for her had flooded me, the way my desire had enfolded and interrelated with the change in light and the arrival of the train, the people moving on the platform… In some way I was dimly aware of, some sense outside of my normal senses, my feelings towards Emma were spilling over and reaching out, connecting with the world outside, weaving and interlacing in some sort of web of connection so everything was becoming charged with this delicious erotic energy.

As I sat at the keyboard, I called up the word processor and heard Emma yell in glee from the shower as the powerful jets cut loose and I just couldn't write. I couldn't.

Joy. Happiness. I felt things boiling up from the streets outside the windows, from off the rooftops and the bricks of the buildings outside and the confused currents of life. I walked over to the big windows and looked down to where Jimmy Vu stood down in the street looking this way and that, bobbing his head to an invisible tune, looking for something, something, and I knew what he was looking for now. I knew because I had it in my shower. I could hear her singing, and I thought—has it all come down to this?

Has it all come down to this?

* * * * I had to take her to the museum, the Field Museum of Natural History, downtown, down by the lake. I knew I had to do it. I'd planned on it since before I'd brought her into town. I wasn't sure why or what I thought it would accomplish, but I knew it was essential, almost like a mission. Emma was amused, told me she hadn't been there since a grammar school field trip, but she was willing to go along, happy to do whatever

I wanted. For her, it was a sightseeing trip and I was still showing her around. At least it would get her mind off David and his clan.

At the time, I was doing some freelance work for the museum, mostly catalogs and bulletins for shows, but I'd gotten to know some of the staff there too, and they let me poke around and help out in the collections on the grounds that I was a writer and I might actually write something about what they were doing there.

The bottom line was I had a pass that could get us in free and get us behind the scenes. The Museum had always been special to me, almost sacred, and I'd always been enthralled by the place. As a child, it had seemed like the most important building in the city to me, the place where they kept all the information and all the stories, the entire history of the planet and man's time upon it. That's what had always seemed important to me, not tax records and lists of voters. I suppose I still felt that way, and many days I went down there even when I didn't have to, just to browse and hang out, soak up the smells and the atmosphere of the collections and books. Thousands of years of human effort and dreams and guesswork, and I had a pass.

Clouds had moved in and the sky was low. I took Emma back to Dee's and bought her a raincoat and umbrella to protect her, looking her over critically, admonishing her as if I were outfitting her for some great expedition. She wore it over a linen skirt and a little top. I worried about her.

"Look, you know, we're going to the museum, Emma, and you're traveling with me now. You've got to be aware."

"Conner, give me a break? I can take care of myself."

"That's not what I'm talking about. You're traveling in poet's country now, Emma, moving in erotic space, and you're loaded. Everything
means
something now. I'm going to be your guide, but there's no telling what might happen when we travel in erotic space."

She laughed and I smiled too, but I was serious. I held the door for her and locked it as we headed out onto the street.

"Okay," I said. "But just watch it, and see if I'm not right. You just watch what things look like when you're expecting them to mean something. It's a different world, Emma."

It was good to get out and go. She was excited to finally mix with the people and get on the El and find a place to stand near the back, feeling the train lurch forward and start to roll past the rooftops and buildings, over streets and alleys. She was eager see it all unfold, the views over the neighborhoods, the startling closeness of the windows of stores and apartments, the little vignettes of urban life caught like snapshots from the windows of the train. People got on and got off, and I saw Emma's eyes take on that city wariness, alert and distant at the same time. She slipped on her sunglasses and turned beautiful and mysterious, urbane and knowing. I found us a seat and gave her the window, slid in and pressed my thigh against hers.