Chapter 9
On Sunday morning, Ron told Zoe that he was going to need to spend most of the day with papers. She smiled and stretched in front of him. His eyes grew perceptibly larger as she spread her legs and said, “Are you going to want to visit me later?”
Ron cleared his throat but he couldn’t take his eyes away from in between her legs. “I assigned all these essays,” he said unconvincingly.
She laughed and snapped her legs shut so quickly that it made him blink. “Maybe I’ll spend the day at my parents’ house and go for a swim and show my face. Do you want to drive me there now?” The angular shape of her jaw had a strong curve and with the way the sunlight was dancing off of her hair he could have sworn that she was throwing off a radiation of light that came from within her.
“Do you think that maybe we should talk about living together?”
She smiled broadly and slid her arms around his neck and said, “We just did.”
He drove her home feeling very close to her and not wanting to send her off anywhere, almost as if some spell would be broken if she wasn’t in contact with him. She talked to him about her sisters and how they used to put on puppet shows for their parents on Sundays. The girls had constructed a miniature stage and Zoe painted the comedy and tragedy Greek theater masks on it. They would practice all week long. Hiedi would write the script and Barbara, the only one of the daughters named for someone on their father’s side of the family, would make clothes for the dolls that they had converted to hand puppets. Zoe would paint scenery. Her face became very dreamy when she said, “Do you think it’s possible to have a childhood that is too happy? So happy that growing up can’t help but be a letdown?”
“You’re asking the wrong guy that question,” said Ron in a voice that at that moment felt very old and far away from childhood. Except that childhood was sitting right next to him in its entire splendor. That thought made him smile.
Back at home, he unpacked his briefcase and spread the papers onto the bed. The scent of her in the sheets made him lie on his back and just close his eyes, turn his face into the bed sheets and inhale her. He felt a stirring between his legs and his eyes opened like some kind of alarm sounded in his head. He needed to work.
Coffee and papers and a red pen carried him through the next hours. He learned that they had uniform difficulty with the placement of nouns and verbs. He drew circles and wrote to each of them. By the time he was finished with a paper, there was as much red on it as there was any other color ink. When he could link a face with a paper, it made him smile. To each of them, he wrote a few sentences at the end. He told them what he thought were their best ideas and what they needed to work on to express themselves better. Lashly had very rarely paid him any compliments at all and he wasn’t going to be one of those teachers who made it an ordeal for students to read their graded work.
He was insatiable for their ideas. He almost sighed when he finished reading some of the papers. He wanted to talk to the authors right then and show them what could make their papers better. They were so vulnerable and transparent. He was almost finished with his senior essays when he read he came to Andrea’s paper.
In the second paragraph, she wrote about the power of language. She had learned the year before that poetry could inspire emotional and physical responses with the power of words. Then she wrote, “I once read a poem that said the words ‘a candle between my thighs’ and when I read it I felt jolted. Then I read it again and again and it made me want to have that feeling.” Ron read to the end of the paper and then started reading it again. He noticed that he was sweating and that he hadn’t turned on the widow fan even though it was a warm day. He got up and to his shock saw that he had an erection. He walked to the fan and switched it on. Then he lit a cigarette and read her paper again. The words “a candle between her thighs” jumped out at him again and he stared at them. She said that it came from Dylan Thomas. What was he supposed to say about this? Was he supposed to ignore it? It was the most powerful line that he’d read all day but how was he supposed to respond to a seventeen year old girl who was writing about a candle sliding between her legs? She deserved a response. That was exactly what poetry was supposed to do: stop you dead in your tracks and make you want to go back, but how was he supposed to tell her that. He was sure that he’d never heard the line before. He would have remembered it if he had. He wanted to know where it came from. Then he saw again that she said it was Dylan Thomas. What was this girl doing reading Dylan Thomas? He went to his bookshelf and looked for his complete Dylan Thomas poems. He had to admit that he hadn’t read them ardently. He loved the prose things like “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and of course “Do Not Go Gentle” but he didn’t know this piece and now he was determined to find it.
The phone rang and it was Zoe. “I want to be there with you,” she said.
“Can I come and get you?” he answered.
“Come now,” she whispered.
He left the book of poems lying on the bed but carefully packed away each of the stacks of papers. He glanced over at his clock. It was 6 o’clock. He’d been reading for more than 5 hours and he hadn’t once looked up at the time. He hadn’t straightened up the apartment. Before he left, he pulled the sheet up and tried to smooth it out and put the pillows at the head of the bead next to the rougher fabric of the sofa portion of the hide-a-bed. He left the book in the middle of the bed and was out the door.
She had run to the curb almost before the car stopped. She dove in and ran her arms over his shoulders and kissed him and straddled him so that she was between him and the steering wheel. Then she said, “I guess you can’t drive this way can you?”
She settled onto her side of the car, rolled down the window, the first rays of the sunset were bouncing on the sides of her glasses and her presence warmed him. She waved at the closing drape as he pulled away.
When they were back inside his apartment, she said, “I did something for you today. I hope that you like it.”
Ron looked at her quizzically. “What did you do?’
She pulled her shorts down and unbuttoned her top. He lay back on his bed and she tucked her hand into the waistband of her panties and slowly wriggled them down until they were just over her knees.
Ron’s eyes were drawn and then they saw the bareness, the nakedness of her pubic triangle. “I waxed myself for you.” She stood very straight until the panties gathered below her knees and then slid down to her calves. Then she stepped out of them. Ron was transfixed. He knew that his mouth was open but he didn’t care.
“I want to kiss it,” he murmured.
She crawled onto his bed and lay on her side and then her left toe raised and pointing at the ceiling, she let it slide down to the back of her right knee so that he could see her the way the flower of her opened and swelled with the feel of his gaze.
She tasted moist and fresh like a saturated breeze and he let the tip of his tongue wiggle along the slit of her sex; appreciating her with soft licks. She slid from her knees to the mattress and raised herself up for his mouth. She held herself up like a delectable morsel and quivered for him. He shifted his shoulders between her thighs, inclined his head and placed his lips on her. She tightened her cheeks and thrust up at him. He bit into her naked lips and shook his head like a warm, feral lover and she felt the waves of the first orgasm pulse through her. It caused her to buck against his hard teeth. He swallowed. He sucked and shook his head, gulping her. His lips pushed against her hips, his hard teeth squeezing her like a fruit that he wanted to split open. Then he rubbed the wet of her all over his face; he glistened with her. He pressed the chin that he hadn’t shaved since the day before against her lips, while his fingers peeled back the hood of puffed flesh that gathered in protection of the small bundle of nerves that was throbbing and pulsing and sending electric shocks like Morse code.
His sandpaper chin was pressing to her lips, his fingers were exposing a swollen clit, his tongue was lapping at it like a soft gentle whip; she exploded again. Juice was squirting out of her. She tossed her head as the erotic explosions rolled over her.
His eyes traced the tender shape of her flowered lips, blinking so that his long lashes brushed her into deeper frenzy. She locked her elbows in back of her knees and rocked for him, incoherent moans formed in her brain. She was not at all sure that they came out of her mouth that was locked wide open and gasping, head in jerking spasm that moved it from side to side. He had never seen a depilated vagina before.
Robin had been covered in a soft angel hair, a tangled swirl and she had told him it felt funny when he sucked on her and drove his curled tongue wiggling in and out of her, just as he was doing now with Zoe. She screamed with this orgasm or maybe it was a continuation of the last one that hadn’t stopped, but the urge to mount her was overwhelming.
He was so hard and he wanted to feel the silky warmth of that tight wet glove that she slid around him. He needed to feel her fingers on his ass urging him in and out. Wait! She didn’t do that, Robin did that! A voice inside of him screamed, “No!” and he sat him with a dazed expression.
She panted and tried to relax and managed to say, “I was about to pass out.”
He sank deep inside of himself, clawing and screaming against the silence like a man that had been tossed down a well, fingertips ripping against the stony sides of the chasm. He blinked up at her; had he been blind? What had he been seeing? Where had he been? Then his thoughts merged into clarity. It was Robin’s hand that slapped on his bucking ass, her small voice in his ear saying “I love you,” repeating it over and over.
He looked Zoe straight in her face and realized that what he wanted was that Robin would be this way with him. He told himself it wasn’t true. Zoe was in tune with his spirit; he loved the way that she saw him. For Robin, he had been all potential and doubt and now it was himself that he doubted.
How could he let a woman inside of him again? What was wrong with him? Look at what had happened the last time that he’d made that mistake! And then Zoe had his head in her arms and she was holding him to her breasts and he realized that he had been crying.