Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 18

Sate

Simone changed into her nightclothes, shook Marcel awake, offered him her nipple, hoping to fill him up so he didn’t wake her later. The tug of his mouth on her breast made her cunt throb, sexual hunger as sharp as hunger in the belly.

She heard a soft rap at her door, her name whispered.

“Just a moment,” she called out, rising, laying the sleeping Marcel down in his cradle.

When she saw Jacques at the open door, she thought he was going to ask her some practical question—Where are the extra pillows kept? Do you have matches?—but instead he reached out his hand and touched her face.

For six months, she had been living in a world of softness: the midwife’s hands, rubbed with lanolin; Marcel’s sweet flesh. The roughness of his hand shocked, excited her.

“I want to make love to you.”

She did not open the door wider to admit him; nor did she slam it in his face.

He said nothing more, only stared at her.

“I believe it’s usual, in this situation, to begin by paying the lady in question a compliment. To tell her that she is charming, beautiful.”

“You don’t need me to tell you that. You know it already.”

“So I am vain?”

Again that direct stare. She was so aware of the pulse of blood in her sex she thought he might be able to sense it too.

She could do this and it would sate the yearning within her. With the feeling of leaping into a cold lake, she opened the door. “Just tonight.”

“Just tonight.” He shut the door behind him, pulled off her nightgown, cupped her pubic mound in the palm of his hand, thrusting his fingers into her.

She cried out, more in shock than pleasure.

“You were wet already.”

She did not dare tell him she became aroused by nursing. He might run from her as if she were a primordial female, sucking men into her maw.

She thought that now he was going to trace his tongue along the whorls of her ear, bestow a line of kisses along the inside of her forearm, inner elbow to wrist, stroke the nape of her neck, but he did none of these things. He locked her in an embrace and their two bodies shuffled, awkward as a walrus on land, towards the bed. “Careful. My son’s cradle.” But when they tumbled onto the bed, the ropes supporting the mattress rasped against the holes they were threaded through.

“The floor,” he said.

Her breasts began to jet milk. “Oh,” she cried, clapping her hands over her nipples, trying to stop them from spouting.

He moved her hand away with his mouth, tasted her milk with the tip of his tongue, then guzzled at her breast like Marcel.

Never having before made love with anyone besides her husband, she had thought the sensations, the smells, the raw physical feeling of Luc’s flesh moving in and out of her flesh encompassed the totality of the world of passion.

Everything about Jacques was different—the shape of his cock, the way he thrust in and out of her, the smell of him, his air of slight disdain—not so much for her as for the act itself, as if a part of him were split off, looking down from high above at these two strange, wild creatures, caught up in their rutting.

After he climaxed, he did not immediately withdraw from her, as her husband had always done, instead collapsing upon her. His breath came hard and ragged in her ear. With Luc, everything had been so much more—contained. Upon ejaculating, Luc had always risen and gone to the washstand and rubbed his genitals down with a washcloth and a soap reserved for this purpose. He had instructed his innocent bride that she was to do the same, and they had each returned to the marital bed smelling of jism and sweat, tallow and coal tar. She had assumed this was a universal human ritual upon completion of coitus—as ubiquitous as cleaning oneself after defecating. Vaguely aware of the connection between disease and sex, she feared those fluids their bodies had given off might fester and putrefy as they wallowed in them. But Jacques must know, this sophisticated man, this man whose easy gaze showed he was at home in the world of sensuality, how such routines were managed.

Her body ached from the weight of him, anchoring her, and she squirmed beneath him.

He drew himself free of her, they clambered up onto the bed, he pulled her close to him, she lay with her head on his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. She and Luc had never lain like this. After Luc performed his ablutions it was her turn, and by the time she returned to the bed, he would be fast asleep, snoring softly, sex functioning not so much as a soporific but more as an anesthetic.

She drifted off to sleep, woke. Was it because Jacques, half-asleep, was caressing her, or was she the one who, half-asleep, had started to caress Jacques? They made love again, gently this time, drifted off to sleep. And then—how could it be?—the sky was growing light. Jacques gave her a kiss on the forehead, a kiss of benediction. He put on his underclothes, folded the rest of his clothing into a neat packet, set his shoes upside down on top of it, and started to tiptoe out of the room.