Threesome - Lawrence Block [22]
I rolled her gently over. She lay now on her back, legs slightly parted, pubic bush (that same red-brown shade, almost chestnut, how divine) moistened with her juices, glistening like morning dew on new-mown grass (how I carry on, but I can’t help it, I can’t help it, it truly was like that, it was poetry, it was lush imagery), her eyes lightly lidded, her lips slightly parted, her breasts full, and fully firm, their tips stiffened in excitement.
I pinched my own nipples into excitement, cupped my breasts, squeezed them. I leaned forward, my long hair flowing down in front of my face and over her face like the Modigliani statue of the woman washing her hair, that same liquidity of line, and I brushed my long hair over her face, my blonde hair over her face, and I brushed her breasts with my hair, teasing, and teasing us both, and moved to press my breasts to her breasts and kiss her mouth with mine.
I licked her all over. I sucked her breasts. I was, in turn, a baby at the breast, then Harry making love to me, then alternately Rhoda and my own self receiving these caresses. I was all of us, with space and time in disarray.
Harry and I (How the mind skips, from bed to bed, from lover to lover!) have always been exceedingly oral people, hung on loving by mouth, greedily hungry for either role. And so in eight years of marriage he has eaten me perhaps five hundred times. It is then by no means a pleasure I have had to forego. These attentions of his are usually by way of prelude, but in the sense of a full first course, not a pass-around tray of hot hors d’oeuvres. His tongue would take me to a sharp clitoral orgasm, and after coming divinely I would at once want him inside me, to complete the act.
And yet (I think there is a point to this, if I can find the yellow brick road that leads to it) there was often the tiny frustration in the course of this process, the frustration a retired ballplayer must feel while watching a game in the grandstand. (A game on the field, I mean, that he watches while he himself is sitting in the grandstand. For Christ’s sake, you all knew what I meant, didn’t you?)
The frustration, that is, in watching someone else play a game—however well—at which you used to perform admirably and enjoyably yourself. I could be eaten, and I could dig it, the way it was being done, the way it made me feel. But I also wanted to do it.
I seem here to be proving that Priss is at least as inarticulate and featherheaded as everybody thinks she is. This will never do, friends. Let me see—
Look. I think a penis is a beautiful thing, no argument whatsoever. But I also think a pussy is a beautiful thing, all convolutions and secret pathways a thousand times more intricate than the inside of an ear, all shades of pretty pink and red. Salt-water mussels are abundantly available here, and reassuringly cheap, and I like to steam a few dozen at a time in fish stock and apple cider until the shells open wide and the little bivalves present themselves for eating.
And not the least wonderful thing about the mussels is that they look like cunts. They really do. Inner and outer labia, and cunning little clitorises, and I always sense that each of them has a secret if you can only think of a way to make it open itself, but the secret must remain forever so. They make me horny, mussels do. Clams have a good deal more taste to them, but mussels have more charm, and are just more fun to eat.
Rhoda, you were more fun to eat than mussels.
Rhoda, I came deliciously, shivering, trembling, the instant I opened your thighs and put my mouth to you. I tasted you, I breathed you in, and without any preparation I quietly exploded