Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [55]
“No!”
Her thumb is in the hollow of my throat. My own pulse roars in my ears. Her laughter is soft, too soft.
“Stop,” she says and it comes from very far away. Too far. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
“I’ll take a pill.”
“Junkie.” She laughs again. Her pleasure in being able to say that to me almost makes me laugh back. “You take too many pills.”
That is too much. I go limp again and look up into her black, black eyes. “Oh, Mama,” I giggle.
“Ooooh, Maaamaaaa.” Her mouth draws the words out delightfully, rich with lust. She rocks against me, and I can feel her, the flesh hard and cold and powerful.
“I’ll make it interesting for both of us,” she promises. Her nails rake me lightly. Goose bumps radiate from every burning pinprick. I am not afraid. I burn. I want her so badly. Like a mad-woman, I don’t care anymore what is real.
“You move,” she tells me, “and I’m gone.” The cloud of her lifts and it is all I can do to hold myself still until she comes back down.
“You must hold yourself absolutely still. Absolutely.”
Her skin burns me where it touches. I stiffen, holding myself for her. Her weight comes down until I shudder with pleasure. Instantly her body lifts, becomes again a cloud. Her phantom laughter is rich and close. I bite my lips and hold myself still again. She comes down again. So cold. So hot. I groan. She lifts, laughs, and rises again. It goes on and on.
Do you love me? Do you want me? Do you remember me? Do you hate me? Do you love me? I love you, love you, lover you, come all over you, come up into the dark of you, the pit of you. Pull me down into the pit of you. Memory and touch and taste. You are never alone, never going to be alone. If you cry, I will. If you scream, I will. If you are, I am.
“I love you,” she says.
I am drifting. I have come so much my bones have turned to concrete. Their weight immobilizes me. Katy’s hot skin presses all over me. It is so dark, so still. It is the pit of the night, and I am drifting off into sleep. I want to wrap my arms around her and pull her down with me, sleep in the luxury of her embrace. But hours of conditioning stop me, and I do not move. I just slide further down into sleep. She says it again.
“I love you.”
“You’re dead,” I mumble.
Her weight increases, presses down on me. I open my eyes.
“Doesn’t matter.” She has spread out, filled the room. She is enormous, masses of dark all around me. I am afraid. Suddenly I am deeply, deeply afraid, and when she laughs I feel the cold.
“Doesn’t matter at all.”
Her Thighs
I was thinking about Bobby, remembering her sitting, smoking, squint-eyed, and me looking down at the way her thighs shaped in her jeans. I have always loved women in blue jeans, worn jeans, worn particularly in that way that makes the inseam fray, and Bobby’s seams had that fine white sheen that only comes after long restless evenings spent jiggling one’s thighs one against the other, the other against the bar stool.
After a year as my sometimes lover, Bobby’s nerves were wearing as thin as her seams. She always seemed to be looking to the other women in the bar, checking out their eyes to see if, in fact, they thought her as pussy-whipped as she thought herself, for the way she could not seem to finally settle me down to playing the wife I was supposed to be. Bobby was a wild-eyed woman, proud of her fame for running women ragged—all the women who had fallen in love with her and followed her around long after she had lost all interest in them. Hanging out at soft-ball games on lazy spring afternoons, Bobby would look over at me tossing my head and talking to some other woman and grind her thighs together in impatience. The woman was as profoundly uncomfortable with my sexual desire as my determined independence. But nothing so disturbed her as the idea other people