My Dark Vanessa(34)
“Ok,” he says. “Is there anything else you want?”
I nuzzle against him, slide my leg over his. I can’t say it. He asks if I want to be kissed, and when I nod into his neck, he takes a handful of my hair, draws my head back.
“My god,” he says, “look at you.”
I’m perfect, he says, so perfect I can’t be real. He kisses me and other stuff starts to happen fast, things we haven’t done before—pushing the tank top over my breasts, pinching and kneading, slipping his hand under the pajama shorts and cupping me down there.
For everything he does, he asks permission. “Can I?” before pulling the pajama top all the way over my head. “Is this ok?” before pushing my underwear over, slipping a finger inside so quickly that, for a moment, I’m stunned and my body plays dead. After a while he starts asking permission after he’s already done the thing he’s asking about. “Can I?” he asks, meaning can he tug the pajama shorts down, but they’re already off. “Is this ok?” meaning is it ok for him to kneel between my legs, but he’s already there, letting out a groan and saying, “I knew you’d be red here, too.”
I don’t understand what he’s doing until he starts doing it. Kissing me there, going down on me. I’m not an idiot; I know it’s something people do, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it’s something he would want. Wrapping his arms under me, he pulls me closer, and I dig my heels into the mattress, reach down and grab a fistful of his hair so hard it must hurt, but his kissing and licking and whatever else he does—how does he know exactly what to do to make me feel good? how does he know everything about me?—none of that stops. I bite my bottom lip to keep from crying out, and he makes a slurping sound, like sucking up the last of a soda through a straw, which would embarrass me if it didn’t feel so good. I drape my arm across my eyes, fall into swirls of color, ocean waves rising to mountains, the sensation of being so small until I come, harder than when I do it to myself, so hard I see stars.
“Ok, stop,” I say. “Stop, stop.”
He recoils as though I kicked him away—sits back on his knees, still in his T-shirt and jeans, hair mussed and face shiny. “Did you come?” he asks. “Really, that fast?”
I squeeze my legs together and my eyes shut. I can’t talk, can’t think. Was that fast? How long did it even take? A minute or ten or twenty, I have no clue.
“You did, didn’t you? Do you know how special that is?” he asks. “How rare?”
I open my eyes and watch him wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, then pause and hold that hand to his face, take a breath, and close his eyes.
He says he wishes he could do that to me every night. Pulling the comforter up with him, he lies down beside me and adds, “Every single night before you fall asleep.”
Him cradling me feels almost as good as him going down on me, his chin resting on top of my head, his big body curled around mine. He smells like me. “We won’t go further than that for now,” he says, and I turn liquid-warm at the thought of sex being nothing but him doing that to me.
He reaches over and turns off the nightstand light, but I can’t sleep. His arm grows heavy across my shoulders as I replay in my head the way he said “oh no” when he saw me in the pajamas, the way he wrapped his arms under my legs to pull me closer to his face when he went down on me. The way he, at one point, reached up and held my hand in the middle of it all.
I want him to do it again, but don’t dare wake him to ask. Maybe he’ll do it again in the morning before I leave. Maybe we’ll be able to do it after school in his classroom sometimes, or go for drives off campus and do it in his car. My mind won’t quiet. Even as I eventually doze, my brain still schemes.
When I wake a couple hours later, it’s dark outside. Hallway light streams in through the bedroom doorway, across the floor. Beside me, Strane is awake, his mouth hot on my neck. I turn onto my back, grinning, expecting him to move his face down between my legs, but he’s naked when I roll over. Pale skin covered in dark hair from his chest all the way down his legs, and in the center his penis, enormous and erect.
“Oh!” I say. “Ok! Wow. Ok.” Small, stupid words. When he takes my wrist and guides my hand to it, I say them again. “Oh! Ok!” He closes my fingers around it, and I know that I’m meant to do the up-and-down stuff, and my hand immediately starts pumping away, dutiful as a robot, disconnected from my brain. It’s loose skin sliding over a column of muscle, but rough, halting. It’s like a dog hacking up garbage that’s been sitting in its stomach for days, that violent, full-body gag.
“Slower, baby,” he says. “A little slower.” He shows me what he means, and I try to keep the pace even though my arm is starting to cramp. I want to tell him I’m tired, to roll over and never look at the thing ever again, but that would be selfish. He said me naked is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. It would be cruel for me to counter that with disgust. It doesn’t matter that my skin crawls from touching him. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. He did that to you, now you do this to him. You can handle a few minutes of this.
When he guides my hand away from it, I worry he’ll ask me to use my mouth next and I don’t want that, I can’t do that, but instead he says, “Do you want me to fuck you?” It’s a question, but he isn’t really asking.