The Pisces(40)

He was waiting for me when I got to the rocks. He was still in the water and was holding on to a rock, his chin resting on it.

I sat down on the rock and leaned forward. With my hand, I lifted up his face to mine, kissed him wetly, our tongues in each other’s mouths. He moaned in my mouth and the moaning set off shudders inside me. I realized for the first time that he didn’t just like me or think I was pretty, but that he wanted me. In a flash I felt myself get wet inside.

“I just want to take off your fucking wet suit,” I said.

He looked me in the eyes.

“Lie down,” he said. “With your legs over the rock.”

I lay down. He took off my flip-flops and began kissing my feet, sucking my toes.



“Oh my God.” I laughed. “Aren’t they sandy? Sorry if they taste weird!”

He just moaned more and stroked one of my legs. I was wearing a long flowing skirt and he had one hand up it, his other hand still holding on to the rock. Then his head was up my skirt and I felt him kissing my calves, giving me licks on my knees, and then nibbles on my thighs. He kissed my pussy over my underpants. I was wearing terrible, grandmotherly cotton underpants. He breathed on my pussy through the fabric and it felt warm and wet. Then he licked the skin on the sides of my undies, kissing back into the center and out again, moaning with his warm mouth open on the fabric. He pulled my underpants to one side and gave me a long lick, starting with my hole and slowly tracing over my clit. He did this again, back and forth, bringing the moisture from inside me over my clit. I was shaking. I looked up at the sky. It felt so good, but I was nervous.

“Theo,” I said. “It might take me a little while. Is that okay? Will you tell me if you get tired?”

He took his head out from under my skirt.

“I want you to take as long as you need,” he said. “Take the whole night. Take forever.”

I lay back down. The stars were beautiful but I closed my eyes. I focused on the feeling in my pussy entirely and not what was going on around us or even him. It was a sustained goodness and I felt that in my sexual relationships with others I had missed the point. Had it ever been solely about pleasure for me? Maybe I had missed the point of what having a pussy was for entirely. It was not for having babies or pissing, but simply a locus of pleasure—its own purpose. Now a growing confidence was there, like a crystal inside it or maybe a whole ocean. Perhaps the crystal had always been there without me seeing or knowing. Had I always glowed from there but never realized?

Right above my pussy, my whole pelvis felt full—not of piss or pain—but self-sustaining, pulsing. I felt glad to be alive. Or not even glad, just alive. I was in my is-ness and was not going to fight it. So this was joy. Like my pussy, this part of my pelvis felt like it had existed forever but had disappeared years ago. I remembered feeling something like this as a young child, but somehow that feeling had been eclipsed and forgotten until now. It had been eclipsed by all the matter on Earth. I saw that all of that matter was just emptiness. It accrued and accrued to nothing.



My chest, too, was warm, as though it sought to open, like a light in there was pushing through rusty doors. This I resisted. I was scared, afraid to let the doors swing open fully. But my throat felt like the throat I had known as a child, when all language was new and words hadn’t hurt so much. In the past when I made sex sounds, I tried to imitate what I saw in porn. But now what I heard was way deeper, guttural, without the formation of my mouth. It didn’t resemble syllables and definitely not words. It was the sound of the planet rotating.

I didn’t even think about Theo. For once I was not thinking. Maybe for the first time ever. I felt space in my mind, in my skull, which I had never felt before. Had that too always been there? If it had always been there, then life, it seemed, could have always been beautiful, redeemable, sacred. But if it had always been there, it was strange that I had never found it before. If something so beautiful and pure existed right between your ears, why wouldn’t you stay there forever? Why wouldn’t you live there?



* * *



—

I started to laugh. I couldn’t tell if I was coming, or if I had already come. But then the laughter subsided and I felt a darkness crawl over me—a cool darkness that was dead serious—and I realized that I had not come yet and was going to. His tongue was like a dog’s tongue—a little rough—so unlike my fingers or vibrator. It was like a magic carpet or something, in that I came and came and came. It was like the orgasm began, then stopped, then started a couple of times and I felt that I was able to control it, before I rode the carpet all the way up to where it crested and then exploded. I stayed in it longer than I had ever experienced. And just as I came I became aware of him again. I said his name out loud, I heard myself say it. But I also felt a connectedness between me and something bigger—beyond him—as though there were a split screen. He was on one side of the screen and the universe was on the other. I felt love for both of them.



I lay there on the rock and stared up at the sky, silent, for a long time. He kept his face in between my thighs and I hugged his head with my knees.

“Would you like me to come out of the water?” he asked.

“What?”

He took his head out from under my skirt, looked me in the eye, and smiled.

“I said, ‘Would you like me to come out of the water?’?”