The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [79]
She would wait. She had indeed a furry-animal look. She’d be wearing a T-shirt and corduroys, eyes wary and eager at the same time.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
She was sitting on her bed. There was nothing else in her room but the little bed. I couldn’t believe it. She, so fleeting and squeamish before, was now here waiting, a furry prey under my dominion, finally, after all that, in my grasp.
I shook myself, the water dripping off my scales.
“I brought you something,” I said. I gave her a little pinkribboned bag. In it was one of those mini chocolate cakes she loved.
“Oh!” She was happy.
She looked at me as she bit into the cake. This too was new. She, queen of action, was now watching, waiting to see what I would do.
I sat down. Very delicately, I pulled her dark hair aside and bit the back of her neck. First the sound she made, strangled, surprised, seemed genuine, then, as I moved my mouth farther down, biting along the tender muscles, she began to groan. It sounded like the groan she thought she was supposed to make, that she’d learned in the movies.
“Shh,” I said.
She shut up, surprised.
There was a moment of awkwardness. In an attempt to combat it, she turned and pulled her shirt up, offering her breasts to me. Her breasts, weighty, womanly, with their submerged blue veins, belying the girlishness of the rest of her form. In another moment, I would have eaten them hungrily, but that was not the plan. I stood up and smiled.
“I only have a moment today,” I said.
“Wait!” Breasts bobbing.
I waved and turned away. Tempt and torture, that was my idea.
The next time I came by, she was wearing a robe. She had put on false eyelashes. The pair on the left side now hung by a thread.
She was quiet, waiting, breathing. Her shallow breath was raucous. I had her lie down and moved my hands over her back. Her body, I could feel it, was very tense. This was difficult for her, I knew, to lie there and let herself be touched. But, while on other occasions she’d squirmed away, now she let me. I brushed the hair back from her forehead, caressed her sleek, shining seal head, the same caress over and over again. Very, very gradually, I felt her relax.
Then I lay down with her on the bed and held her until I had to go again.
The next time, I decided to try something else. I gripped her wrists behind her and turned her over. She was wearing violet underwear and I pulled them down. Her nimble little butt shone. I spanked her. She cried out in surprise, squirmed. The rosiness spread. She grew still again, waiting for more.
Each time beforehand, I imagined in my mind’s eye what I would do. Once I found a notebook. She too was keeping a record, writing down, each time, what we had done.
Sometimes the street outside her little room was silent, sometimes it was filled with a throng. I pictured a thronging mass on the cobblestones.
She had decorated the room, put a colored scarf over the light. She must have been touching herself before I arrived. Her pussy glistened in the colored light. It looked swollen, pinkish, reminding me of a mouth smudged with lipstick after it’s been kissed. All over Buenos Aires you see that, in the plazas, on the streets, the smudged mouths of women and teenage girls. I remember especially the jeering, smudged mouth of a girl who rushed past me out of a plaza, hands high in the air. She seemed to have achieved some victory by being kissed, was advertising it to the world.
A fragile shower of pollen was settling over the streets when I stepped out, like the fine gold dust on the inner edge of her ear, which I had rubbed off with a finger.
“Are they dirty?”
“You should clean them.”
She started to get up. I pressed her back down. “Not now.”
We were lying there quietly. Finally, after all this time together, we could be quiet. I had a longing to stay, but I knew I couldn’t.
Outside on the streets everything trembled, the