Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum
Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum
We are lying on a futon that we have dragged out of the rec room and placed on the hardwood floor in front of the woodstove. The door to the woodstove is open-it is a massive piece of black iron, and in my life prior to the one that now includes the man I'm with, my ex-husband used to say both in terms of complaint and compliment that the heat it produced was too much stove for the tiny two-bedroom ancient saltbox we lived in. The house, built in 1810, didn't have a particularly efficient furnace, so most days, we had stoked the stove with some of the five cords of wood we bought every summer-wood that was dumped in the driveway and then required an entire day devoted to stacking it carefully under the cover of the rickety shed adjacent to the house, and we would open the bedroom doors and allow the woodstove to heat us in the ways that the original tenants had used the long-since bricked-over fireplace.
My lover and I are lying on the futon, watching the mixture of hardwoods-oak, birch, sycamore, but mostly maple-burn red hot. The temperature gauge on the stove pipe is near 400 degrees, and I get up every now and then to check and make sure it's not going much above that. I don't feel a need to poke at the fire, rearrange the wood. I'm not terribly interested in efficiency. I simply want heat, light, and to not allow the fire to become so hot that I risk starting a fire somewhere in the pipe or chimney.
Besides, for a few moments at least, my lover and I are sleepy and sated. We have been making love for hours-the cd we are listening to has been on repeat through several playthroughs, and I laugh as I acknowledge that there are many ways that a 38-year old woman an da 24-year old man are compatible. Indefagitability is by far the most pleasurable.
Even now, as we are resting, we are not motionless. I am lying on my stomach, and he is lying on his side next to me. He is propped up on one elbow, and with his free hand, he is plucking out the bass line to the song along my vertebrae. Each note, up and down my spine-his instrument. My pleasure.
Dum dee dum dee dum
I'm so tired, tired
Of this bow and arrow
Going to give my heart away
Leave it to the other girls to play
The music is from a mix cd. I had been married for 12 years, and the courting ritual signified by the mix tape was one that had passed me by in my 20's. When my lover said, shortly after we met, that he wanted to put together a mixture of songs for me, I had been pleased-bemused, I think would be the more accurate word.
When the cd arrived, however, and I played it, a frisson of electrical current had passed through me. The songs did not all come out and say directly, "I want to fuck you," but the rhythms within them, some fast and hard, some langorous and soft, all bespoke desire. Each song set up a throb, a hum in my groin. I knew that this was music, well over an hour's soundtrack, to make love by.
I had played the cd repeatedly in anticipation of his arrival. He was in the city, working at a new job, and I was picking him up from the bus terminal Friday night. I was so anxious to see him that I told him I would save him the last hour of the trip by driving down in my car to the penultimate bus terminal, 50 miles away. He could debark the bus there, and we would have an extra hour together, even if it was in the car.
It's a wonder we didn't crash. Almost immediately, he had sought my flesh as I drove, his hand on my thigh, his fingers brushing my belly, stroking just under the waistband of my jeans. I forced myself to keep my eyes on the road, my hands on the steering wheel as I responded to his ministrations. A couple of times, I tried to close my eyes in pleasure, only to snap them back open in realization that I couldn't drive blind.
I pulled the car off at the next exit; the tiny town comprised a couple of gas stations, a school, a fast food restaurant, and a church with a huge, empty parking lot. You could tell it was a church: there wasn't a steeple-the building had a brick warehouse feeling to it-but in large red neon letters was the proclamation: JESUS SAVES.
I parked the car in the darkest part of the parking lot, put the car in neutral, and yanked up the emergency brake. I climbed over into his seat, and when both of us had pushed denim and underwear out of the way, I straddled him, my palms pushing against the roof of the car for leverage. As I came, JESUS SAVES glowed against the screen of my tightly closed eyelids.
Give me a reason to be
A woman
I just want to be a woman
My back is supple and strong. With it, I have borne the weight of my recent divorce. I have watched my lover pluck at the string of his bass when he plays, his eyes closed, finding the notes. Now, as his fingers work their way down my spine to that hollow spot where the curve of my fleshy ass rises, well now I know I won't be able to watch him practice without growing wet in response.
The languid pulling at the ridges of my flesh belies his concentration. We have talked, he and I, about how he has learned to take his time, to not rush toward his own climax, but to feel his lover's body tighten and contract and loosen beneath the touch of his fingers and his tongue.
As for me, well, somewhere in my marriage, I had lost that flinty spark that had characterized my sexual persona as a younger woman. It was not my ex-husband's fault. I had buried virtually every part of myself during my wedded years-my creativity, my sensuality, even my body-after eleven years of marriage, I weighed 60 pounds more than I had on my wedding day. In that last year, I had lost weight, recovered from an opiate addiction, and had begun to write again. And, in doing all of those things, I had intuited that a full uncovering of self would not take place until I was no longer married.
And so, here I was, slick with various bodily fluids, utterly blissed out, and being played.
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