|
|
 |
The next day, I felt like myself again. I went to work, nodded through a few meetings, wrote a slew of tag lines for the new fabric-softener company we'd taken on as a client. The women in the office seemed prettier than usual, glowing skin, sparkling eyes. The sexual creatures wrapped deep beneath their business clothes seemed to be pressing toward the surface in ways I hadn't noticed before. I chalked this up to June and the freshness of summer. I did my work. I thought about Claire.
During my lunch hour, as I walked through the farmers market in Union Square, a slight breeze kicked up, blowing through the linen pants I was wearing. The hair on my legs tingled. I imagined Claire blowing ever so lightly on my inner thigh. I felt myself becoming slightly hard. Then the breeze died down and the sensation went away. It was nothing, I figured, a happenstancial thrill.
"Have you touched yourself yet?" she asked when we spoke that night.
I told her I hadn't.
"Neither have I. It's been hard, hasn't it?"
"Do you mean difficult or — "
"Sure, both. I haven't been able to think about anything else."
Then she went on to describe in luscious detail the tingles and squirms of her flight to Ohio, the half dream she'd had while twisted in her seat — arms and legs splayed and bound in leather restraints, head pitched back and bobbing, water gushing behind her like her naked body was a hydro dam, the only thing holding the mighty river back. She told me about the afternoon she spent with her mother, listening, or anyway acting like she was listening, to the stuporous, encyclopedic wanderings of her mom's gossip-filled consciousness, all the while unable to stop her mind from floating
When she arrives, I'll tell her, "I know what you mean about feeling like a virgin."
|
back to the moment the night before when she'd measured the contours of my cock through my pants — that, or the final second, as we stood in her doorway and my body swayed fractionally toward her heat like I was being sucked in, like she was sucking me in, before I jerked away and disappeared down the stairs. She said she still wasn't sure when she'd be back, but she'd call me with updates, she'd call to hear my voice. Just the sound of my voice on the other end of the line made her feel like she was going to explode. "I almost feel like a virgin again," she said.
"Me too," I said, though I wasn't sure if this was true.
Since then, I've come to understand what she meant. We've talked everyday, sometimes three, four, five times, and with each conversation, my desire has spiked higher. It's omnipresent now. My five senses are more alive than they've been since I was a child. Textures and tastes and the folds of sound in the air convey mystery and erotic potential. My sense of smell, dulled by years of smoking, has reawakened. Everything reminds me of her. The polished steel of subway cars conjures her patent-leather shoes. The blue sky in the photo on an ad wheat-pasted outside a construction site reminds me of her eyes and how they looked at me that last night before she left. The calves on the woman in front of me at the deli call out to be caressed, to be raised above her head; I want to whisper Claire's name in her ear. I catch a glimpse of a glossy magazine at the newsstand and wonder if Claire might be reading it right this second. Each passing taxi might be carrying her toward me. I see a woman nursing her baby in the park and think that could be Claire, that could be our baby.
In withholding herself, she's brought me back to the world. I walk around with a perpetual hard-on and all I can think of is her. I don't know how it happened. I don't want to analyze it.
Claire.
She's coming home tonight, taking the Super Shuttle straight from the airport to my apartment. When she arrives, I'll tell her, "I know what you mean about feeling like a virgin." Then I'll wait to see how she responds. I'll wait for us to become whoever we're going to become next.
n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
 |
Joshua Furst is the author of the novel The Sabotage Cafe and a collection of stories, Short People.
|
©2007 Joshua Furst and Nerve.com
|
|
|
|
