Saline Solution (8 page)

One night, as I was sitting on the john and Miriam was crouched in front of me, sucking my cock, I looked in the mirror behind her and saw her cunt contracting spasmodically between her spread arse cheeks. Each time she got the head of my cock into her throat and gagged, her cunt clenched. As her tongue worked the length of the shaft and her head bobbed up and down and I felt the stretch of her lips to encompass the meat in her mouth, I imagined what it would be like if another man were to come up and fuck her from behind. It seemed to me that the excitement engendered in her cunt would ripple up her spine and feed the activity of her mouth, and vice versa. The image of her as a warm pulsating series of sensual apertures being fucked from many angles sent me into paroxysms of sharp pleasure, and I reached over to thrust my fingers into the moist space between cunt and arsehole, words of aggression pouring from my lips. I came volubly into her waiting mouth.

'We have to get another man/ I said afterwards.

'I don't want anybody else,' she said.

Heinlein's jargon came to the rescue. 'A water-brother,' I said, 'to expand the nest.'

Her eyes misted over. 'Oh, yes,' she said, 'that would be beautiful.'

But when we went over the names of all the men we knew, she found one reason or another to reject all of them. I grew exasperated, then angry, and we ended the discussion with her insisting that I was the only man she wanted. And then we fucked. It was one of the first times I tasted the sweet and guilty pleasure of fucking a woman who was in tears.

A few days later, however, she told me that a man had tried to pick her up on the street, and she had rapped with him. 'He seemed nice,' she said. 'Maybe we can do it with him.'

My jealousy flared. 'You must really dig him,' I said.

'Well, you're the one who wants to bring another man in,' she said with one of her rare flashes of independent emotion.

I wasn't yet sophisticated enough to know the difference between active and passive manipulation, so I agreed to meet him, feeling as though I bore complete responsibility for the scene we were mounting. And the following Friday he came over.

He was a chubby black man with a soft and unobtrusive manner. His entire persona seemed to suggest that he wanted nothing from anyone, and would simply be mutely grateful for whatever crumbs fell his way. I was disarmed, and conned, although I wasn't aware of the latter. We talked for a bit, but all of my energy was involved with the sexual tensions in the room and we might as well not have been speaking English. Harry sat on a pillow, leaning against one wall, while I sat a dozen feet away, my back against the opposite wall. Miriam sat next to me, reclining against my side, her head on my shoulder.

I took a deep breath and let one hand drop on her left breast. His eyes flickered to the movement and flicked back again to a spot somewhere around the bridge of my nose. We talked some more, unintelligible sounds. My feet were sweating, and I began to rub her nipple between my thumb and forefinger. She flinched, relaxed, and let out a soft sigh. I shifted my weight under her and she slid down, simultaneously turning towards me, burying her face in my chest. With my other hand I pulled her skirt up, revealing her heavy chalk-white legs; up past her thighs to her hips, her pale blue panties causing an abrupt change in tone. Miriam made a tiny sound that might have been a 'No', but I swept past it and slipped my hand under the elastic and down the crack between her cheeks.

Harry watched, unmoving, and only when I slid one finger into her cunt did he come across the floor on all fours, he looked at her, and he seemed to be sniffing, like a dog at a strange object, and then suddenly his hand was alongside mine, abruptly digging into her flesh, knuckling his fingers into the wet warm crevice between her legs.

For several minutes we were lost in a silent frenzy. Miriam lay on her back, showing no response to what we were doing to her. Perhaps it was because we were doing it
to
her, using her body as fuel for our sexual intensity. We worked, oddly enough, as a team, without words, without a preconceived plan. In short order we took off her panties, her blouse, her bra, until she lay there, eyes closed and mouth pursed in apprehension, waiting. But Harry and I were fixated on breasts and cunt and arse. We didn't notice Miriam's total state. Amateurs that we were, we had no sense of the complexity of rhythm involved in a threesome, nor of how to keep the tension-relaxation cycle flowing smoothly. If we had simply stopped to find out where we were with each other, to check what we were feeling and how we were blocked, something lovely might have happened. But we pressed on, and Harry and I threw ourselves on Miriam's body, massaging, caressing, kissing, licking, sucking.

Suddenly my energy dropped, and I lost interest in what we were doing. I continued my activity, but inside myself a second level of awareness crystallised; I began to watch myself watching myself. I noticed that Harry was grabbing her cunt very hard, and I knew that that turned her off, being hurt before she was properly softened up. I got angry with him not only for mistreating her, but for destroying the delicacy of the operation. I put my hand under his and felt her cunt. She was dry. Everything was wrong. She should have been sopping at this point, writhing in unfulfilled desire, taking his cock in her mouth, twisting her pelvis in a silent supplication to be fucked. All the stereotypes were demanding to be recognised and I couldn't even manage an erection.

A spasm went through her body and she rolled over on her stomach. And the sight of her shining, white immense buttocks overcame even the mechanicalness of our actions. Harry and I caught each other staring down at her with slavering lust. My cock got hard. I straddled her thighs and prodded my way between her legs until I could feel the heat from her cunt, and then pulled her hips up to make it easier for me to penetrate. I sank slowly into her, the dryness of her cunt making my entry almost excruciating. She bit her lips, but in a minute began to lubricate. For the first time that day I flushed with a solid genital connection, but just then became aware of the man sitting at our side. An absolute stranger, and ironically, I didn't want him there. A sickening vibration swung through the room, and I felt my cock get soft. I was encrusted with confusion and I got off Miriam's limp form and sat by her side.

And Harry jumped to, without ambivalence or conscience. He had a much larger cock than mine, and I almost collapsed from fears of inadequacy as I saw him mount her and ease his tool between her cheeks and into her now wet cunt. To my horror I saw her arse move. I suppressed what I saw and dove into my negative sexual flow. I moved forward until her face was at my crotch and brought my cock against her lips. And for a few sizzling minutes, the magic happened. She let herself open and respond to Harry's fucking, and sucked at my cock with astonishing abandon. He rolled and bucked into her, making her shudder with a sort of tense pleasure while her head wobbled in response to his movement, making her mouth describe circles around my prick. The sight of black and white bodies churning into each other, the power of his male insistence and her wanton yielding, and the crushing beauty and energy of the eternal number three, whipped me into a thoughtless climax and I let the frantic sperm spill out of me and into her mouth.

And even as I saw her throat working to swallow the come, I was filled with dread. For Harry was still roaring. He pulled out and turned Miriam over and entered her from the front. He was past caring about my presence. He hooked his arms under her knees, spread her legs wide, and dived frothing into her cunt.

She cast her eyes towards me imploringly, asking for some kind of guidance. She didn't know how to respond in relation to my possible jealousy and to the fact that I had allowed, encouraged, things to get this far. She reached her hand towards me and I held it while he ground his hips into her, his arse rocking, and his back glistening with sweat. Then, terribly, I felt her fingers twitch. I knew that her awareness was leaving the point of contact she was making with me. And her hand went dead and began to slip from my grasp.

Then he arched back, made one decisive movement, and she groaned with pleasure. He had her. Her hand left mine completely and went up around his back. She wrapped her legs around him. And they were fucking. And I was dead. He started grunting as she pumped her cunt against his cock. She began that long keening wail which signals the onset of her orgasm. And then she let it all hang out, writhing against him, her tits crushed to his chest, her fingers in his hair, her toes curling in the air. He shouted once and came inside her, and her plevis jumped reflexively, three times, four times, five times, six times to his tune, and then she subsided, whispering, 'Oh God,' into his throat.

They lay there, oblivious of their surroundings, like two lovers who had at last found one another, as indeed they were, but I was too sour to bless their pleasure. 'Water brother!' I thought. 'Shit!' I thought.

They separated and became aware of my presence again.

I got up and went into the kitchen to put water on for a cup of tea. I was disgusted with both of them, with myself, with everything. He dressed, and once again seemed soft, apologetic, and awkward. I focused on his blackness, and the very things which would ordinarily seem sensual and exciting now seemed alien and threatening. I faced the fact of my prejudice, and realised that it made no difference at all. Hatred was inside me, and it didn't matter who the object of it was, whoever happened to be in my field of involvement when I felt it. He stood at the door. 'Well, so long,' he said. I turned my back on him.

Miriam lay in the next room, frightened. I sent her vibrations reinforcing her fear. I drank my tea slowly, smoked two cigarettes, and after a long time in the bathroom, went in and lay down next to her. I waited in stony silence as she made several attempts to say something. If she were a more centred woman she would either have gone to sleep or left and not worried about my private melodrama. But she was young and filled with Jewish upbringing, and was quite prepared to feel extremely guilty. The more I punished her, the more I touched her cultural cunt.

Finally she put her hand on my cock and began stroking it lightly. Finding no resistance, she began pulling on it until it was hard, and then she climbed on top of me. I let her fuck me for a very long time before I came, and immediately afterwards I fell asleep.

We didn't talk about the incident for an entire week. Harry called once and I was curt with him. I considered the matter closed and was somewhat pleased that I had seemingly suffered as little jealousy as I had. She went back to school for four days and returned on a Thursday. We fucked in the afternoon and at night we went to see
Rashomon.

When it came to the husband's version, I began to get uncomfortable. And when the scene flashed showing him tied to a tree, looking down as the rapist fucked his wife, I began to sweat. The camera shifts to the rapist's back, the wife's hands beating against the rough cloth of his shirt. Gradually she hits him more softly, then stops. Her fist opens, and very very gently her fingers extend and just rest lightly on his back. The delicacy of the description took my breath away, and in a flash the awful feeling of abandonment I had felt when Miriam's hand slipped from mine returned full force. I turned to her and saw her staring at me, wide-eyed. My face screwed up in anguish.

'YOU CAME!' I shouted at the top of my lungs, scaring all the other people in the theatre.

If I had been ready to recognise that the instinct to plunder is a mark of man, I would have used Miriam for what I wanted and, when I was bored, dropped her, or come to terms with the exploiter in myself and stopped using my energy to pretend I was an angel. So I could neither continue smoothly along the path to sexual cynicism, nor break through into honest confrontation. Like so many before me at this particular crossroads, I toppled over into a futile effort to attain respectability. I decided that we should get engaged, regularise our relationship, tell her parents we were in love and sleeping together, have her come live openly with me in the city each weekend, and prepare for marriage upon graduation. She thought it was a bad idea, but let herself be persuaded.

'I'm tired of sneaking around,' I said, 'I'm not ashamed of anything we're doing. We should tell your parents.'

'You don't know my parents,' she said.

'Oh, I know they're prejudiced,' I said, a bit too glibly, 'but, after all, they're educated people. They ought to be happy to have their child tell them the truth about things. They may not like your fucking me, but they should prefer that to your lying to them.'

And so, on Friday the thirteenth, we rode to Jersey, past the oil refineries and the pork processing plants, to play out the drama of confrontation. It might have been obvious to an outside observer that I was in the way of punishing Miriam and her parents, and inflicting some form of penance on myself. We had dinner, exchanging polite hostilities, and I listened to a long Semitic tirade on the evils of mixed marriages. They didn't know specifically what was about to happen, but were stringing barbed defences just on general principles.

⁴
We have something to tell you,' I said, over after-dinner coffee.

⁴
Oh dear,' her mother said.

I smiled. 'Miriam and I are sleeping together,' I said, 'and . . .'

But I never got a chance to go on. Her father clenched his teeth and the fingers of his right hand closed spasmodically, crushing the napkin he was holding. Her mother turned chalk white and stiffened. Then she retched violently, jumped from the table, and ran down the hall to the bathroom where she heaved up the evening's meal in great voluble gushes.