Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [29]
The rain of leather hailstones on my buttocks excites me beyond my power to resist him. The humiliation is more mental than physical, since it is not so much the crop that is hurting me as it is my knowledge that he has been with another woman for however many days he has been gone. I urge him on with cries and apologies as he stings my rear. (I am apologizing to him for his fault—as women in love are wont.) As he whips me—first lightly, then harder and harder—my cunt begins to ache for him, heat for him, swell for him. Not a moment too soon does he pull me to the floor and cover me, black leather against black lace, cold metal zipper against warm white belly, and at last his hard pronged cock probing inside me, finding my center, finding his home.
“Witch,” he hisses.
“My man, my fit, my mate,” I moan.
I bite his ear, draw blood, bite his lip, growl, claw his back beneath the lipstick-stained white turtleneck he wears under his motorcycle jacket.
When he is deep within me, he stops, holds me very tight, bites my neck, draws blood, then starts moving in me again.
“My witch, my mate,” he mutters, plunging into me again and again and again. And I see that contorted look his face gets just before he comes.
“Give me all of it, baby, all of it,” I moan, and he comes inside me in a convulsion so strong it shakes the canvas above us.
“I love you, Leila.”
“I know.” I cup his head, like a baby’s. And I do. I know I will always be his lady, his love, his Guinevere. But whether I can bear the pain of that, I do not know.
And a small part of me—the part that is still Louise Zandberg, perhaps, the part my analyst would call my sane mind—is standing off at a distance, saying, This must stop or I will not survive.
He stays with me all weekend. And it is a weekend as devilishly sweet as weekends were at the very start of our idyll. We spend hours in bed listening alternately to Mozart and Tom Waits, with the dog—now not so depressed—nestled at our feet. We cook together, take long walks—only to stop by a stream and fuck in the woods. We swim in a beautiful lake near my property. We picnic. We talk. We commune.
I am starting to unwind, to feel loved again, to feel that life is not so bad, that I can work again, feel again. The clenched fist of my mind begins to relax.
And just as that begins to happen, Dart picks it up with his warlocky sixth sense. He feels me opening to him, loving him, loving myself—and so he looks at the gold Rolex I bought him (we have just made tender love on the couch in the living room before an open fire, and it is ten o’clock on a Saturday night) and says, “Baby—I have to go.”
Wrenched out of myself, whipped and whiplashed, I get up with him—my face as contorted with pain as his was at the moment of coming—and walk with him to the bathroom, where I watch him shave (admiring his own face through my eyes as I watch him), splash on Vetyver (a scent I introduced him to—which suits him), and gird his loins in black leather to leave me again.
I offer no protest. I am determined to open my hand to let him go, because I know that only if I do not hold him may he be drawn back of his own free will.
He is waiting for me to beg and plead with him, but I will not give him the satisfaction. He is waiting for me to ask him where he’s going, but I will not. My jaw clenched, my brow knotted, I merely attend him in his toilette, helping him dress, knowing he will in all probability be undressed by somebody else.
All my considerable will and discipline is focused on letting him go, on not showing my pain (though how he could fail to see it, knowing me as he does, is a mystery to me). Boner howls in pain, as if on my behalf. “Shh, puppy,” says Dart, nuzzling him as I wish he would nuzzle me.
I watch Dart dress in black leather jeans with no underwear. (“I hate underwear—the restriction of it,” he once told me. Oh, beware of men who wear no underwear—your mother warned you about men like that!) I watch him pull on a black silk turtleneck (he has left the lipstick-stained white one