For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: Installment 3
I was staring at my boss’s closely cropped beard as he started talking about how he’d noticed I’d been out sick a lot lately. He didn’t mention that it was usually (always) on Monday, and he wasn’t really calling me on it. Instead he was kind of speaking in code. He said he was worried that I wasn’t feeling well lately and that maybe the job was getting me down.
It’s true that I didn’t care about the job much, but I sort of played along as he tried to explore ways to make the job more interesting. I was kind of surprised. The firm had been tightening its belt, letting a few architects go lately.
But I also wasn’t surprised. He was a young guy on the go. He wanted to modernize the place. My facility with spreadsheets and recordkeeping on the PC was part of his vision of a high-tech architecture firm. He asked me if I’d like to be trained on a computer-aided design program and discussed how maybe I could do some of the basic layout work for the cookie-cutter hospital-bathroom type blueprints.
“Sure,” I said. “That might be interesting.” But my mind was wandering.
Two days later, Cecilia called me at work and said, “I got it,” and then hung up.
I felt relieved, I realized, that I wasn’t going to have to tell anybody in my family about this.
I called her back and said maybe I could come up to Marin that night, maybe we could celebrate.
“Let’s wait till the weekend,” she said.
I swore to myself I’d never take that risk again.
The near-miss left me with a jumble of emotions. With all the risk gone it felt safer to indulge the macho side of my reaction: the feeling of potency. We had ducked the Catholic-guilt punishment for our shenanigans that rainy day. We got away with it. I was a stud. Or maybe I was infertile. Hmm, forget that line of thought.
When I got up to Cecilia’s sister’s house on Friday night she was waiting for me in bed, wearing a purple satin-y teddy. I pounced on her. Goddammit I was going to make her come once and for all. I told her that. I was kissing her neck, nibbling her ear. I said, “You’re going to come tonight. I’m not going to give up till you get your orgasm.” I growled. She clutched at me.
I went down on her. She got close, so close that with another woman I’d probably have believed she’d made it, but again — right on the threshhold — she pulled away. Her thighs spasmed, she clenched them together. She rolled onto her side and groaned.
“What is it?” I said, almost yelling at her. “What’s the matter? What am I doing wrong?”
I acted like it was about me.
“Nothing. It’s not you, she said. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We have to talk about it,” I said. “I can’t stand it like this. Even if you don’t care, it matters to me.”
“Oh, I care,” she said. “Believe me. I want to come, I do.”
I did believe her. I didn’t want to make her feel bad so I just held her for a long time. My pants were still bunched around my ankles so I kicked them off and pushed them over the edge of her bed. I held her in a spoon position. She sort of cried but without tears. Her face got puffy and her shoulders heaved.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s OK,” I said. I hummed Ripple in her ear.
If I knew the way
I would take you home
La la la-la
After a while she said, still turned away from me, “Let’s talk.”
“OK,” I said. “One question: Have you never had an orgasm?”
“I think maybe, once, I did,” she said.
“When was this?”
“When I was little,” she said. “We were staying at our cousins’. I was about eight. I was flirting with one of the boys, who was a teenager, probably about 15. He was flirting back. He made me feel really pretty.”
“Oh, man,” I said. “What happened.”
“Well, everyone fell asleep and it was just us left sitting on the couch in the livingroom. There was a fireplace with the end of a fire in it, I remember.
“I think he had a beer and gave me some of it. I felt very grown up getting all of his attention.
“He said, ‘Look what you’re doing to me,’ and he showed me he, like, had an…. He had a hard-on. He showed me through his pants, like. He said I was turning him on.”
“Did he act like that was your fault. Like you owed it to him to help him get off?”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” she said. “He was sweet about it. Let me tell this.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I won’t interrupt.”
“I wanted to touch it, you know just through his pants. I though it was kind of amazing that I would have an effect on him like that. He said no. He said that would be wrong.”
“Good,” I said.
“Shut up. You said you wouldn’t interrupt. He said it was OK for us to kiss, though. I said, ‘But we’re cousins,’ and he made a joke about ‘Kissing cousins,’ so he kissed me and it was nice.
“Then he said, ‘Let me show you something cool.’ He told me to lie on my stomach, and he pushed my skirt up to my waist. I remember I was hot from the fire but that the air also felt cool on my legs. He started sliding my panties down a little. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said ‘Just wait— it’s a surprise.’
“Then I felt something wet— his mouth I guess, maybe his tongue… down there.”
“On your puss?” I said.
“Actually, I think he was kissing my butthole, or licking it. I’m not really sure. My memory of that night isn’t as clear as I’m making it seem. I’ve only told a few people about this.
“At one point, his mom came downstairs and we were both afraid. He put a pillow over my butt and told his mom we were just hanging out talking. She only got partway down the stairs. She just said that I shouldn’t stay up too late and told us to make sure the fire was out before we went to bed.
“Eventually, I think he made me come. I felt something like I’d never felt before. It was kind of amazing, but it also freaked me out. As soon as it happened I felt kind of sick. It’s like I knew what we were doing was wrong and I felt like it was my fault, like I had seduced him.
“He told me I had been teasing him all day. I don’t think I was, but maybe I was flirting.”
“It couldn’t be your fault,” I said. “You were eight, for God’s sake.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m just telling you how it felt.
“Right after he made me come — I’m sure he did — I pulled away. I pulled my underwear back up and I told him I had to go to bed. I went to bed without brushing my teeth, without peeing, without wiping myself where I still felt wet from his mouth. I was lying awake in bed feeling like I was going to get in trouble in the morning, but nothing happened.”
Then she was quiet.
After about ten minutes of letting it sink in, I said, “Man, that is really rough. So you’ve never been able to come since then?”
“Yeah,” she said. “When I started fooling around for real, in high school, the first time I got close I remembered that night just when I was about to come and I felt sick to my stomach and I couldn’t do it. That happens every time now.”
“Jesus,” I said. I felt an unfamiliar form of rage. I’m not a violent person. I usually try to talk my way out of fights, but I was consumed with the urge to find this cousin asshole and beat the shit out of him. For what he did to Cecilia and to what he was still doing to my sex life.
Yeah! The story is back!
Posted by: maeve921 on January 4, 2006 7:43 AM