Carapace

In the dead room, tastefully done out in shades of charcoal, he comes again.  A little slower this third  time. His body goes rigid and he makes a sound like his orgasm has been wrenched from him with violence. As if I’ve shoved my hand into his gut and pulled out a kidney. Moments later, all he looks is grateful.

Long before the vital parts came out, I knew he wouldn’t be the one. Something in the eyes: a softness, a terrible tenderness that confuses pleasure for power, engulfs and swallows them, and leaves them in this state of mute obedience.

The world forces them accrete this hard shell of brazen, masculine desire, but it’s so brittle and thin.  I cup the back of a neck, press my lips to the side of a face, curl my fingers around that stiffening cock, say the magic words and the carapace disintegrates. He becomes little boy at bath-time. Malleable and grateful and compliant as a shooter with the needle in his vein, anticipating the blessed, fluid heat.

It doesn’t occur to him – to most of them – that he possesses something I need. Something that could enslave me. Something that could free me from this god-awful prison of grim control.  By the time I know who he is, it’s too late. The order of how this will go has been set. I know what he wants, and what he wants is so little.

My instincts kick in with the disappointment; it becomes automatic. Not desire or eroticism, or even sex, now; just the gestures of it, the big bag of whore’s tricks I was born with. The innate knowledge of what to say, what to show, what to do with my mouth, my hands, my cunt. The evening curdles into a chore.

I’ve never found the trick to reading them before I get to this point. Nor have I learned the knack of just leaving. I give him his little dream, his watercolour fantasy. Two orgasms more than he thought he could manage. It only takes an hour and I’m not a cruel person.  I leave him dozing on the bed, remembering when he was eighteen and could go all night.

“Did you come?” he asks, in a sleepy haze as I pull on my jacket and shoulder my handbag. They all ask that, as if that was what mattered.

I once knew a man who wanted more.