Mieko: A Catalogue

This time, he didn't try to cover her. Instead, he lowered the bed rail, then reached to cup one of her breasts. She could smell the faint chemical floral of hand sanitizer. He took both of her breasts in his hands, palming them softly, then bent to her and began to lick and suck at one of her dark nipples. She drew her fingers down the small dome of his belly until she found the hardness pushing against the front of his scrub pants. He reached to them himself and hastily yanked at the drawstring. She pulled the front of them away and down until his cock and balls were free, and began to slowly stroke his erection. His breath came fast; he was panting at her breasts, panting and sucking.

She tried to turn herself, to get her head to the edge of the bed so she could taste his cock, get her parched lips around the bulging, spongy head, but she felt weak and it was difficult.

"Help me," she whispered.

He left off her tits to help her change her position. But instead of bringing her head to the side of the bed, he carefully, carefully rearranged her until she was crosswise, with her hips toward the edge.

"We have to be careful," he whispered.

"I'll be quiet," she said.

"No, I mean your leg."

He held her high on her thighs, just below the curve of her ass. He placed her good, left leg over his shoulder and, pulling her wounded limb to the side to spread her slightly, he moved forward until the head of his cock was touching between her legs. She reached down and guided him between the lips of her very wet cunt and told him, "Fuck me."

He pushed in slowly. She was petite, barely a hundred pounds, and tight to everyone who had ever been inside her. She began rubbing her clit quickly, already turned on to be getting what she wanted, and hoping to come at least once while still full of cock.

"Harder," she said. She knew he wouldn't last long, even going slow, and if was going to be brief, she would rather have it rough and fast. "Do it," she said through clenched teeth, rubbing herself hard. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the feeling of this stiff cock pumping in and out of her.

He managed to fuck her silently and steadily through her first orgasm as she pressed her fist to her mouth and shuddered on the hospital bed. She thought he might take that opportunity to finish, but he kept going, much to her surprise, not changing his pace. It permitted her to rub herself to a second, even more vivid orgasm—a steeper, more precarious climb, and one she feared she might not be able to achieve before he came or grew tired and had to slow or stop thrusting. Only then, panting and beginning to feel a soreness, did he finally stop. She found herself suddenly, dismally empty, at the same moment she felt the first warm stream snaking up her belly. She opened her eyes and looked down, saw him looking down at the cock in his fist; she looked at it too, watched the dimly glistening head spurting warm semen over her skin.

"You could have stayed in," she said. He didn't say anything. Silently, he cleaned her, rearranged her on her bed, fixed her gown, and left.

When he next came to her room that night, he behaved like he had prior to their encounter. He spoke to her gently, took her vitals, checked her dressings, tried to make her comfortable. He didn't seem nervous or shy. He didn't touch her in any way as he'd touched her before. When she reached out to touch him, he patiently took her hand and placed it back on her bed as he'd done earlier. She wondered if she had dreamed the whole thing. Maybe she had.

Deliveries

She loved working in her studio on the very hottest of days. Sun swinging across the southern sky flooded the space through the open, barn-style doors. She wore, every day, those same painter's bib overalls, varicolored with a thousand streaks and smudges of bright oils: smears of carmine and saffron, chartreuse and ocher.

She sweated, and paced back and forth in front of a large canvas, and squinted at it through the smoke of a cigarette clamped between her teeth. Sweat ran from under her arms and down her ribs; it trickled from her throat and down between her breasts, which hung free beneath the bib of her overalls.

She dropped her cigarette and ground it out on the concrete floor when she heard the delivery van coming down her drive. After he stopped, the driver stepped into the back of the van and rummaged around before emerging with a box of art supplies she'd ordered, and walked across the yard to her studio.

"Mieko Rossi?" he said.

She smiled and directed him toward the work bench.

He handed her the bulky little tracking tablet and stylus. She glanced up at him as she signed, caught him staring at what he could see of her bare, sweaty breasts behind the bib of her overalls. He was a head taller than her and looked, she thought, a little quaint in his uniform of brown shirt and shorts. His hair was cropped close; his face was smooth and flush from the heat and maybe, probably, something else.

Instead of handing back the tablet, she set it on the workbench and undid the button-and-loop clasps of the bib, let it fall to her waist. A box fan was droning from across the space with a loud, zurring sound. Strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail fluttered at her ears. She took one of his rough hands and placed it on her breast.

"It's so hot today," she said as he fondled her, first with one hand, then with both. She found the tab of his zipper and lowered it, reached inside and caressed him through his briefs, felt him start to thicken beneath her touch. Then she found the flap of his briefs and pulled his cock through it and out the zipper, into the warm thrumming air of the studio.

It was difficult for her to squat and even if she did, impossible for her to hold that position for very long. Instead she turned slightly sideways and bent at the waist to take him into her mouth. She formed a ring of thumb and forefinger and slid it back and forth, in concert with her lips, over the head of his cock. The driver leaned back and braced himself against the workbench with one hand, used the other to continue kneading one of her full, dangling breasts.

He was fully erect and flexing in her mouth and she enjoyed the pulsing feel. Her lips and hand glided smoothly, firmly over his glans and shaft. When his legs began trembling she hummed her approval, a murmur of permission. Her other hand was down inside the front of her coveralls, inside her underpants, fingers working at her slit. The driver thrust his hips, pushing more of his cock into her mouth; she felt it spasm violently against her tongue as he grunted, followed by a second, which this time delivered a warm, thickish gush that filled the remaining space in her mouth. He continued grunting, shooting cum. She swallowed and swallowed, but some still escaped her lips and plopped to the concrete floor between his feet.

Incubus

The experience with her night nurse over her remaining days in the hospital was eerie and erotic in a way that was wholly unexpected and so even more satisfying. As with the first night, he attended to her on his scheduled rounds, taking her vitals, checking her dressing, speaking to her in the same soft, gentle tones, rearranging her pillows and bedding to make her comfortable. She accepted his ministrations and made no advances She lay in the quiet dark once he left, sometimes drifting off, sometimes not, until shortly thereafter he slipped into her room and, with barely a word, had some sort of sex with her.

On the second night, she opened her eyes and saw him standing next to her bed, slowly stroking his erect cock that he'd already pulled out of his scrubs. She rolled onto her good side as he lowered the bed rail and then lowered the height of her bed until he could comfortably slide his cock into her mouth. Which he did, stroking in and out between her lips while she worked her fingers over her pussy. Fucking her mouth as she came once, twice, before spilling his load over her tongue and down her throat.

The third night, he fucked her like he did the very first time, holding her legs up and apart as he thrust in and out of her. As before, he took great care about her injury, but fucked her much harder, his balls vigorously slapping the cheeks of her little round ass. He came more quickly this time for some reason, emptying inside her. But after he pulled out, he went down on her, tenderly sucking her clit and licking her clean. Lick my cum-filled cunt, she thought. Lick it. She wanted to say it aloud but didn't want to violate the strange wordlessness of these encounters, the dreamy otherness of it all. She came very hard against his wet and slightly prickly face, the space between her legs a brackish swamp of seed and desire.

The fourth night, she awoke from the motion of the bed; he'd actually climbed atop her and began fucking her while she was still asleep. She pulled her hospital johnnie up past her breasts and then stretched her arms back behind her and gripped the headboard of the hospital bed. He fucked her with slow, deliberate strokes, his eyes fixed on her mostly naked body, lithe and only slightly less pale than the sheet in the room's half-light. She could only see the top of his head. He wouldn't look at her face, and she realized she was feeling relief in that, afraid of seeing his eyes just now, afraid she might catch a flash of something demonic in them, something befitting the odd nature of these carnal visitations. After he'd made her come, he pulled out and straddled her chest. She held her breasts together to surround his slick tool as he fucked them to his climax, strings and dollops of thick semen spitting from between the soft clench of her tits and decorating her chest and throat—a non-abstract expression, as it were.

On the next night in the hospital, her last, she had a different night nurse, a jolly, broad-hipped blond girl who smelled of almonds. Still, she waited in the dark, her heart pounding, thinking that yet he would still come to her, would sneak in after the blond nurse's routine visit. Since every visit had been slightly different, how would this one be? Would be fuck her ass this time? She'd never done that before but she was ready, knew that she would let him if that's how he wanted to take her.

But he didn't come. She never saw him again.

Gait Training

Dash was her physical therapist at Harborlight, the rehabilitation facility she transferred into from the hospital. He helped her build strength in her joints until the time when she could be fitted with an intermediate prosthesis, once the edema around the amputation site passed and the muscles there began to contract. When she could finally bear the artificial limb, he helped her learn how to walk with it—gait training—in a manner so her disability could not be detected by her stride.

Dash was tall and very thin. He had a runner's body, seemed to her to be all bone and sinew. He had a prominent Adam's apple. She was attracted to him but had no designs. She was just going to rehabilitate. Still, it was difficult. So much of their work together involved his hands on her, gentle but firm, insistent, manipulating, like a lover's hands, one who knows you, arranges you for the giving and taking of pleasure, pressures and prompts that won't meet resistance: the guiding touch that says sink to your knees now, spread your thighs...

She valued the touch, the physical contact. But she kept herself in check, willfully. Though, in hindsight, she couldn't remember why she did. Maybe she was concerned that sleeping with him would get in the way of things, slow her progress. She had a life she wanted to get back to, her work: especially now, now that something so significant had changed. She was someone different now, and knew she would make new and wholly different things.

She also didn't want to do anything that would contribute to his further discomfort, because it was obvious to her from the start that he was nervous around her. Only when they got to work, got involved with the exercises and therapies, did he seem more at ease.

She asked him if he was married or had a girlfriend.

"I've been seeing someone for a couple years," he said.

"It's serious," she said, then immediately regretted it, knew what it sounded like. "I mean, that's nice."

"It's steady," he smiled. "Unwavering."

"Unwavering," she said neutrally, disappointed. Disappointed because it struck her as that minimizing thing that men always did when they were around attractive women. They never told you they were madly in love with someone else.

"You were married before," she said.

"I was. Can you tell somehow, or are you just guessing?"

"Educated guess, maybe. Forty-something, seeing someone for a couple years. Probably someone with an ex as well. There's no rush for the two of you. Happy to maintain the status quo. You've both already done that sort of thing, and you're not sure what you think about a second go-round."

"Not bad," he said. "Pretty close." But his voice was flat, toneless.

"I'm tired," she said, hoping it might be interpreted as an apology, if she'd actually said something, unintentionally, that required one. She rested her forearms on the parallel bars and focused her weight there. "Can we stop now?"

"Two more times down and back," he said, all business.

"I can't not limp when I'm tired."

"That's the point," he said and, after a brief pause, took her upper arm and pulled her to a standing position.

Graphomania, continued

The glyph drawings proliferated, whole large sketchbook sheets of nearly identical shapes, drawn to full bleed. Sometimes she would arrange the filled sheets into triptychs, or a four-square pattern. But that never looked right, she didn't like that, so she began taping blank pages together to form a single large sheet. Sometimes one long row of four or five, like a scroll. Other times fixed them together more canvas-like: three-by-three, four-by-four, five-by-five. Worked a continuing pattern across the entire blank surface.

The larger works were even more compelling to her. The multiplicity of it all was strange and hypnotic, felt like a fever dream, a darkness in her blood. The large format drawings might take days, but she never tired of working on them until one was finally finished. Then she was spent, her entire body aching with fatigue. Sometimes after she would fall directly into bed, exhausted and ink-stained, too tired even to remove her leg, and sleep for hours.

After she completed several, she knew that she had to take it another step, that she had to begin working on real canvas, a much larger stage. This posed some logistical problems, but she'd figure it out.

Home, Care

She was to have a therapist work with her in her home after she left rehab. She wanted it to be Dash but he said he couldn't, he was attached to the facility. He gave her the name of a therapist he recommended highly who could come two or maybe three days a week, depending on her progress.

Her home therapist was a woman named Callie, a pale, pretty blonde, probably not as old as Dash, but close. Callie came in what she'd come to recognize as de rigueur for PTs: polo shirt and khakis and cross-trainers. She kept her blonde hair in a pony tail that hit between her shoulder blades. Her eyes were her most memorable feature, a glistening, soft blue: pale and clear and luminous as sea glass.

Callie came three days that first week, while her mother was still staying with her. She helped her with exercises and some occupational therapies. The woman was genial, patient, and—unlike Dash—seemed entirely at ease around her and her mom. After that first week, Mieko felt comfortable enough with her new circumstances that she sent her mother home to Philadelphia.

It was mid-September then—between her hospitalization and rehab, she'd missed the summer, and lamented that—but the days were still very warm, unseasonably so. She resumed her routine of drawing in the morning. The house was disconcertingly quiet. She was grateful that she had Callie's visits, at least for now. She'd spent so many weeks with people fussing around her day and night that the regained solitude almost felt like a shock to her system at some moments throughout the day. And yet, at the same time, it didn't quite feel like absolute solitude.

"I've been sleeping a lot," she told Callie. "A lot more than I ever have. On our off days I sometimes don't wake up until ten o'clock. It's a little unsettling."

"I'm not surprised by that. This change in environment is a lot more taxing. You're on your own now."

"I am and I'm not," she said.

"You mean, a boyfriend?" said Callie.

"No," she laughed a little. "I mean this thing." She reached down and pinged a fingernail against the aluminum pylon that was now one of her legs. They were sitting at her kitchen island drinking tea. There was a small, pink bakery box with a couple cranberry-orange scones that Callie'd brought from a bakery she said was her favorite, but neither woman was eating. The therapist cocked her head slightly to one side: tell me more.

"You're probably going to think I'm crazy, but I feel like a caretaker for this. Like it's my charge. Someone abandoned it here and I had no choice but to take it in, and now I'm responsible for caring for it. It can't do anything on its own. Without me it just sits there. I open my eyes in the morning and it's leaning against the chair by my bed and I imagine it feeling sad and lonely and just wishing that I would wake up already."

"You're right," said Callie. "You are crazy. Come on, eat a scone. They're feeling sad and lonely too."

Her vibrating cell phone woke her. What time was it? The morning was overcast and filled her bedroom with a gauzy, mouse-gray light. She answered.

"Hey, are you okay? Is everything okay?" The caller was Callie.

"Yeah," she said breathily, trying to clear the sleep from her voice but not succeeding. "I'm still... I overslept a little again."

"Well, that's what I figured," said Callie. "I'm just glad you're okay, I was getting a little worried."

"Why?" she said. She was confused.

"Because I've been out here ringing your doorbell for ten minutes," said Callie.

"Oh. Shit," she said.

She didn't bother with her clothes or her leg. Just used the crutches that she kept by her bed to get to the front door.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Sometimes I lose track of the days."

"It's okay. I'm just glad that's all it was." The therapist placed the leather portfolio she always carried on the entryway table. She smiled at her sleepy, disheveled client, her bed-tousled hair a tumbling black mass. The crutches scrunching the t-shirt up under her arms and exposing the lower half of her black underpants. She felt the therapist's gaze and knew it, knew it wasn't a disinterested look, and she felt a certain quickening.

"Let's get you ready for the day," said Callie.

She slipped the crutches out from beneath her arms, handed them to Callie, and sat down on the edge of her bed. The therapist propped the crutches against the wall and looked at the prosthetic limb leaning against a nightstand. Then she knelt on the floor in front of her and touched her damaged leg.

"Let me take a look at things," Callie said softly. She examined her leg around the stump, gently pressing two fingers into the skin below her knee, palpating muscles and tissue. Mieko crossed her arms and took the hem of her shirt, pulling it up and off, a jostling of breasts and hair.

The therapist looked at her, then ran her hand up past her knee and over her thigh.

"Are you okay with this?" said Callie.

She nodded. "It's been a while," she said.

Callie's body was like sculpture, firm and contoured, rippled in her torso, toned and proportioned. It could be on the cover of a women's fitness magazine, she thought. She ran her hands across the therapist's shoulders, her breasts, down over her infomercial-ideal stomach and abs. She stroked her thighs, first the hard tops and then the concavity along the inside—soft flesh over taut muscle and tendon—and up to her groin.