Teeth

She's not a prostitute, but I always feel like I'm paying for it.

"Easy on the teeth", I have to remind her but I don't know why because I haven't had an orgasm in over a year.

The nearness of fulfillment has become enough. What some have called edging, as a sexual trial, I call more than enough to go on; I know what happens after I let go. I sink, I drown.

Jeanette's husband has been dead for as long as I've been withholding my orgasm. But I keep going along with our arrangement because we never have to pretend to each other, and she never lets her sorrow in. I try not to let in mine.

Some would say, if they didn't know any better, that we didn't even have to call what she does on a Tuesday afternoon in my office on the third floor sex because I never finish, and she doesn't ask me to hold her after she does. Wouldn't that be easy.

She tells me she likes it that way, though. She says there is less of a mess afterward and truthfully I shudder to think otherwise.

"There is a screening of Jaws tonight, if you're into it...you mentioned it was your favourite movie", she says before viciously taking me in her mouth again.

On our first date Royce and I spent a summer afternoon watching Jaws. She wanted to be a screen writer. She said Jaws was written with her favourite climax.

Jeanette is looking up at me, caressing my abdomen. She holds me in her mouth sucking slowly. She takes her tongue from the base of my penis up to its head and like on a scale, carefully adjusts the force she uses to moisten the underside of my bulbous head to bring it to a balance. I watch her eye lids close over as she centres her breathing. Opening them again, she tries to smile, mouth full, and when she does I can see the layers of my foreskin, tendered and moving, over and down in-between the rounds of her teeth.

I am reminded of the climatic scene where the beast ceases the boat with protoplastic teeth and nearly rips Hooper to pieces.

We held each other throughout. I couldn't bear to look away.

"What do you think?", she says coming up for air.

Unsure how I feel about taking our relationship beyond these meetings, I feign any resignation, and sign it over with a confidently pensive head nod.

This seems to please Jeanette and she takes me in straight on, deep in her throat. I gasp, unable to hush my surprise. I wonder where she learned that.

If only our prickly manager Callighan were given a separate write up of her resume, she could put wherever she learned that under 'special skills'. That way all subsequent interviews would be conducted in an entirely different way.

I know that anything worth knowing is taught by our experiences, there is no going back on what we learn about our bodies and what they can do to others. When I look back again, meeting her eyes, I catch sight of it and immediately look away.

My first orgasm came several weeks after we watched Jaws. Royce used to steal her mother's Cosmos. She delighted in passages like 'ways to tend to your unique and beautiful womanly oasis'.

I remember welling up with excitement, swollen across her penciled in lips, as she lapped at my member. The technique she had had from those pages was to cradle my sparsely haired balls, intermittently taking sips of water to facilitate cool lubrication, and alternating faint nibbling with firm-gripped stroking. She was a growing oasis that I had entered, after-all. My boyhood was a creature given its power to wind its way through her not-quite-a-woman land, and just like her mother's book had said, to take my power back would mean she would have to use its every bit of wisdom to suck the venom out of my rattle snake. She would stop reading her mother's books when she went off the college. Where she would trade a lipgloss for A.Gibson, and a bed-game for A. Lorde.

"Jeanette please", I say which she knows means I need her to stop because I'm almost there and again I can feel a discomfort from the sharp points of her shark-like incisors. Luckily, she always gives up right when I ask her to stop. Janette is such a great listener.

I may be undeserving.

I'm up on my feet pulling up my trousers when she moves me out of her way, and eases herself into my office chair; she's nearly brooding over my forgetfulness. She prefers that I stay naked when returning the oral favour. That way we both assume the preverbal risk of being caught by a co-worker. We've never been caught, but I have had to catch myself.

On one occasion, while on my knees and kissing her inner thigh, I had moved to wipe the residual spit from my semi-hard cock, and wound up rubbing it back to its full length. That was the closest I've ever come to finishing with Jeanette.

Something about the wetness, that day, had me aching for a touch like it was the two months Royce had left me, and her activism, to go write in Amsterdam.

Jeanette unbuttons her jeans and lets them fall to the floor. She spreads her legs and I take my cue kneeling at her feet. A slit of a wet stain on her underwear holds my eye but it doesn't persist as she parts them to the side, laces a finger into her contracting vagina and then pulls it back to run her moistness through the long, and unkempt, curls of pubic auburn hair.

"No time this week, sorry hun", she laments, fully exposing her crowning bush. I meanwhile wonder if the door has been properly secured this time.

"It's fine", I say while running my fingers through it, not entirely disappointed until I feel moistness and suddenly my erection fades.

Spearing no time I enter her quickly, crooking my finger upward to overcome her tightened inner walls. She steadily undoes a button on her blouse, and circles a finger over her nipple through her bra.

This being her casual sign of depreciation, I hastily reach into her unbuckled shirt, and while fondling her supple breast ease yet another finger her now nearly flooded vaginal damn.

To this, she grabs my head firmly and tides it down in the wash of her wanting vulva. I feel her clit harden as I dizzily enclose it with my lips to hold the current of her body's pulsations. She moans and arches her back to move firmly keep my head in place. I finger her thoughtlessly: being now like an ebb and flow that curls under the sand as it glides into the shore.

The last time I was on a beach was during the trip Royce and I took to Virginia before I started working for Peak Technologies Inc. We rented out a villa on the beachfront and, when the sun was out, made love in circles. We never wasted a drop of perspiration. She talked with all the neighbours, asking them for the best restaurants and shops in a nearby town. The town we had driven through upon arriving, but that I knew we wouldn't visit for a stay. She made sangrias each morning, and never had a glass; she preferred martinis. In the mornings, I rolled cigarettes on the beach and gave them to passing strangers. In the afternoons, I would lounge about, casually reading some old newspapers I had found by the linen closet. She finished her second script that summer and one day, when Royce was out for a walk on the beach, I stole into her overnight bag, where she had hid it, and read it from cover to cover that same afternoon on our little private porch. Royce once told me that she did not fear loss, instead she was afraid of what would happen if she let it overrun her; her angst was the fear of a loss. It ran like a thick and steady stream through all of her work, and I wept uncontrollably when reaching the denouement, when her heroine miscarried in the back seat of a car. Until that day, I had very few impressions of having children of my own.

There were times during our stay when I wondered if spending too much time circling her would bring on another argument about our future. Yet, I couldn't keep away for long.

In the evenings, when I was up to it, I would take photos of her as she was preparing dinner or tending to the plants left by the previous tenants. She'd have a way of cautioning me against it, but like a guiltless fairyland nymph she could never resist striking a pose, at which I'd swell again and we'd laughingly collapse into each other.

On one of our very early nights there she asked if I would model for her instead and I let her have the camera.

Click: I had been laughing for whole two hours. Half a bottle gin gone to a lengthy debate about memory and Manfred.

Click :I was lying on my back under her; her moist up-skirt pressing down on my lips. She had the camera in hand, and would not let my tongue cramp."This is what you look like when you are pleasing me", she moaned desperately, as if in a sort of stasis that I could just barely hear with my head in her warm vice.

Click: she had been washing up in the shower, and I overheard her sing, 'quiet, don't explain. What is there to gain', She didn't know I had come in and as the oils fell lush from her freshly fucked flesh, I snapped another. It's a photo she didn't know I had taken. One I've kept for myself, but haven't looked at since our trip to Virginia three years ago.

Jeanette bucks with her hips like she's performing saddleback for a crowd of people. Like they are all watching, waiting.To show them that she knows how to move in a way so as not to fall: that she can tame herself to a beast.

"I read somewhere that certain positions can help with conception", I heard Royce say.

I've come to know what will happen next well enough. Jeanette picks herself off the chair, and turns herself over on my desk. She stretches herself out on all fours to face the wall taking up the length of it like a fleshy paper weight.

"I want it now", Jeanette commands.

There was a new, helpless, sinking or already sunk, urgency overlaid in her tone when she asked, "what time will you be home tonight?", then adding, "the doctor says we should be trying this week".

Jeanette has tied her hair in a knot so I can pull on it as I mount her. I enlarge to meet her body, forming a perfect triangle with my legs apart. She is grinning her teeth in anticipation. She has a tattoo on the side of her left buttock, a fairy, which I dig my nails into as I slide my deepest into her. I pull out again and, for reasons I dare not confront in thought, kiss the back of her neck.

"Mom, Dad...we have soon news...is four months along", they had peaked with joy.

I barrel into her and she squeals horribly well. I settle into a nice rhythm until I feel another slight contraction and slowing my pace reach around her prissy back side and roll moisture into her pink outer walls.

We had already made a room for her. "I think we should decide on less traditional gender identifiers, like pink...So what do you think of the yellow, hun? It's a neutral colour".

Jeanette cries out again, and it's tempestuous vibration makes my manhood recoil. Knowing from what an excess can do to me, this may have been the reaction she intended. For it allows her to turn over on her back, smiling as she does; her inner thighs glisten with sweat. I hold off reentry.

"Oh common, the doctor says we can still have intercourse it hasn't passed that point yet", we should have waited.

"I want to feel all of you this time, until the end. Don't hold back", Jeanette whispers in my ear, pulling me in close. I reluctantly inch myself back in, and steady my body to hover above her, gyrating without pause. "Harder", I hear her say, and then again, louder. She has hand on my hip and is forcing me deeper, while guiding my pelvis back and forth mounting to her desired roughness.

"Whats happening? Something's wrong...you're bleeding...get your coat, we're going to the hospital...now", I learned simply that the time by which something ends can also be the time that it begins, unchanged.

I feel the veins in her wrists, like rope's Hooper would have used to drag the beast back to land, hook around the back of my neck. I fall into her, and cup her buttock. I look down the long narrow pathway that is our two bodies and watch as my member enters and reenters. I look away, again but manage to maintain my pace.

I feel her grab ahold of me as if to study and mimic the slightest of my every motion. I feel her kissing at the arches of my forehead and even for a turn it soothes me.

"I'm sorry Mrs... there was nothing more we could do. I am afraid she is gone"...she...

She cries out and asks that I quicken again. I breathe into her softly before pulling her closer and copulating furiously.

Sometimes I close my eyes for a moment and it's as if nothing has really happened or changed.

The pressure mounts all around us and helplessly we claw at the hot air, jointly moving like each a part of the same unnatural beast. A thing belonging here and nowhere. A thing moved into action by a boundless force, like there is no choice outside the things we do outside this office. Like our present needs are to cling to each other, because there really is nothing else except to learn to move as quickly as we can, hoping together that we can keep away from our pasts while we fearing that we are forever hailed onward to the croon of a future which upon arriving will have already been forgotten.

I held off for as long as I could.

Royce used to say that the climax in any story, although brief, can be its most traumatic feature, like a full wound that was slow to open and will never truly heal. A moment where everything will change, even if it turns to stasis; it is never forgotten or outlived.

An orgasm, in the way I know it now, is a moment without body, without thought, without memory, yet it is not unlike Royce's steady wound. To let go means, for a moment, to move on. It would mean to forget myself, to forget her.

There was no real place to linger because I had been unable to draw lines between rising and falling.