Reasons To Be Beautiful (2) I was drunk enough to know exactly what I was doing. I ran out into her yard and stood with my arms open wide, embracing the secret lover she had painted for me. I heard her hiss of breath halfway out into the yard. It sounded like Bean, sharp and feral. It was summer; my t-shirt was soaked, my hair plastered back from my uplifted face. I knew when she joined me; her body burned with a heat I could feel several feet away. I looked over my shoulder at her. The rain may have been my secret lover, but she was like a part of it...the flame of her hair rolled back from her forehead and into the black of her tank top like lava from an erupting volcano flowing into the sea. A child of storm, fire and water. If hot geysers of steam had hissed up off of her, I wouldn't have been surprised. She looked at me and smiled, a fiercely joyful baring of teeth. When she held out her hand for me again, I took it, laughing, and let her lead me back into the house. I felt giddy, high but not clumsy. I didn't want to lose that so I dropped to my knees and took a long swallow from the bottle. The rim was still salty and the lime I bit into was tart and bitter. I did not question her when she dropped to her knees beside me, not even when I saw the look on her face. She dipped her head for a drink. Her lips closed around my nipple, through my shirt, and she began to suck out every drop of moisture in long, hard pulls of her lips and tongue. I gasped, arched into her, dug my fingers into her hair and pulled her closer. When her teeth scraped over it, I cried out. When she began to worry at the nipple with her teeth between sucking, I would have done anything to make her not stop. My heart was slamming like a racquetball against the wall of my ribs and if she had been more gentle in her caresses, they would have been drowned out by it's pounding. Her tongue was smaller and more agile than Richards. It was a ridiculous thought, but when she kissed me, it was the first thing to come to mind. Her mouth was sharp with the taste of limes also—a lime flavored lip-lock—they were better than lemons. Lemons could be compromised into lemonade. Limes were prickly and unyielding...like old men and dogs. I kissed her back and admitted right there that I had been thinking about it for a long time now. Our attempts to undress each other were as hurried and uncoordinated as horny teenagers in a Buick at prom. I think. I had not lost my virginity at prom; I had lost it to Bill, my first college boy romance, after seeing Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom at the Cineplex. In a way, I suppose this was losing my virginity too. For a moment I was alarmed by the thought that I had forgotten condoms. Then I looked at her, full lips parted in a heavy, rhythmic breathing pattern, hazel eyes dark with arousal, and I felt her pressed against me, all firm muscle and hard curves and soft breasts and skin, tiny and as piano-wire tense and wiry as a cat. Her ceiling was speckled with a horrible acoustic that looked like cottage cheese spread over it in liberal clumps and her mouth drew at my neck with vamperic intensity. I knew I'd have a hickey; I hadn't had a hickey in eight years. I wondered where my brain had gotten off too, because surely sex on the floor after too much tequila with a woman who lived next door while Richard and his buddies were on their fishing trip and Cruz stayed the night at his cousin Rob's house was a bad idea. It had to rank right up there in the top three things I shouldn't do...right after mainlining heroin. The thing was, her skin was burning into mine like a small portable furnace and her mouth was hot and wet, leaving cool snail trails down my skin and sharp, pleasurable pains where she nipped at me, and her hands skimmed over me with the dexterity and smoothly coordinated movements she afforded her paint brushes and canvasses and I wondered if this could be another painting: her and I, sticky with tequila and lust, on the floor, making alternative romance novel love. Her mouth was on my side, sucking on the place my waist curved into hip, then over, in humid, open-mouthed kisses. I shook like cafeteria jell-o squares when she tongued my navel, wondered what I was supposed to do. I knew where she was going...but did I simply open my legs? Was there some sort of protocol for this sort of thing? Richard and I had long since moved past oral sex, him sixteen years ago, me after Cruz turned seven and I became a MOM. Moms don't suck cock. I tried not to jerk when she speared her tongue inside me. I bit off a groan when she rubbed her tongue up and over me and back down, scrubbing it over my entrance. She gripped my hips in her hands and tugged on me...hard. So I gave into her and let myself be the woman in her picture. I moaned when she sucked on me and cried out her name when she stuffed her fingers up inside me like I was a Thanksgiving turkey. I couldn't focus very well on what she was doing. I kept expecting Richard's well-rehearsed movements and it felt like being thrown suddenly onstage with an actor who likes improvisation; my body kept missing its cues. I didn't care. When I did come, it was in volcanic proportions that had me shaking and shuddering like an epileptic in a seizure. I felt clumsy when I tried to touch her back. Her body felt odd under my fingers. I had almost forgotten that sometimes you touch people when you make love, you do not merely lay on your back like a beached whale, too crushed by sudden gravity to do more than flop sporadically and thrash your tail in hope when the waves break against your side. My fingers floundered over her body in a drunken weave that suggested not driving tonight would be a good idea. The allure of her body's roads and paths beckoned me on anyway. Her bones were sharp under my fingers, the meat of her firm but not covering them quite enough. Nothing about her was thick enough to be a man. Her breasts were soft, and her nipples were not the useless kernels of a man. She demanded more of me with the tenses lines of her body and when I put my fingers inside her she was bubbling hot, clamping around them like a swallowing throat. Her skin tasted like the sea and between her legs was a taste like oysters or blood, thick and salty and slick. I fit inside her and on top of her and beside her and I couldn't breathe and I didn't think. She cried out sharply, the arch of her body when she came like the sweeping lines of a swan. And I loved her. Give me a reason to be beautiful So sick in body so sick in soul I'll give you my body, just sell me your soul And everything I am will be bought and sold And everything I am will turn hard and cold I sat in the perfect silence of her living room, and she painted me again. We made love between applications of paint. She smeared tribal markings in crimson on my stomach and blue on my back. I traced the snake eating its tail around her bicep. "Oroborous," she told me, "The wheel of time. Eternity." The circuit our mouths formed when fused together felt a lot like that. Every afternoon she drew the blanket over her painting and that was the signal for me to traverse the landscape of her backyard over into the winter brown prairie territories of my own. Richard still disappeared into the black hole of ESPN and NASCAR, and Cruz still obsessed over rice and how high he could spike his weirdly cut, blond tipped hair. I could barely see them anymore; they slipped in and out of my reality like errant Star Trek characters. One night Richard found a Playboy instead of math homework in Cruz's backpack. He showed it to me and all I could think was that the plastically arranged woman had nice breasts. I had the oddest secret thrill. I liked breasts and we decided to ground Cruz. One night Richard began to touch me. I rolled over and got a headache. I did not have a headache the next day when I crossed the boundary of the fence-line and we went rollerblading, nor did I have one when she threw me onto her mattress and showed me her more than passable Hoover impression. One day she did not draw a blanket over the painting, but motioned me to her side in front of the easel. I looked at myself in the mirror of her canvass. I was in the sun and smiling and beautiful, and maybe my hair was a little too dark. I kissed her and smiled like the painting; she looked at me with the funny, hungry look that never seemed to go away. She fucked me hard and fast in the late afternoon, even though Richard would be home soon. I had to walk home sore, with sticky thighs, and I didn't care. I thought about the picture and made cooked carrots for dinner, instead of peas or corn. My sweater showed cleavage and I walked into the nowhere of the living room with a sway in my hips that had been missing every since I became a wife and didn't need to be alluring anymore. Richard looked at me and smiled; I smiled back, as empty-hollow sweet as a chocolate Easter bunny. We rolled our eyes together at the thumping base and posturing male singing voices coming out of the boombox in Cruz's bedroom. "You think he'll ever grow out of it?" Richard asked with a resigned amusement. I shrugged. "You never see adults listening to that crap...but then, I thought he'd be over the rice by now." Richard laughed, one of his real ones. For a moment I remembered why I'd married him. Then a roar from the crowd bunched into the box of ESPN sucked him back into the black hole of the television, leaving a lump of man-flesh sitting in my good recliner from LaZBoy. I went over early the next morning, right after Richard left for work, leaving a pile of laundry on the floor of the bathroom like a range of small mountains, peaking in smelly gym sock summits. She was still in the shower, but the front door was open. I explored the bookcase in the corner, listening to the shower running...white noise. She read a lot. She had one photo album. I touched it and thought about pictures of butt-naked redheaded toddlers and first Christmases. I pulled it down and opened it. There she was, tiny and wrinkled and sucking on her fist, probably hours after being born. There she was again, dressed in frilly lace, taking first tentative steps alongside a couch, chubby fingers clutching the edge of the cushion in a death grip. She smiled from another picture, tongue poking out of the space left by the defection of her two front teeth. She stood in a frothy blue prom dress sporting a corsage the size of your average table centerpiece, on the arm of her pimple-faced date. She stood next to me under a tree, laughing and flushed with new love. I was younger and had darker hair; we had never taken a picture together. A block of ice took up residence in the Igloo cooler of my stomach. Hey baby, take it all the way down Hey baby, taste me anyway You were born We'll never know... And fading like a rose She didn't bother to deny it. I looked just like her ex-lover. Her lover had died in a car accident exactly nine months ago. She kissed me and I tasted the ashes of ghosts on her tongue. She fucked me hard and fast, the way she did it when I now realized she didn't want to see me. I lay on top of her and touched her back, her skin cold against me. She was still sticky and hot inside, like an apple turnover straight from the oven. Wet red hair and turbulent green eyes and an elfish mouth open on gasps that had nothing to do with me. I wanted to open her up and get inside her, drown myself in the sharp jagged reef of her skeleton and sink into the heat of her blood and the pulse of her organs and have her feel me inside her the way she had felt this other woman. I wondered if those kinds of thoughts were what got serial killers started. I wondered why I still loved her. One night I made white rice and peas drowning in their buttery-yellow soup and I still didn't feel normal. Love hates you I live my life in ruins for you And for all your secrets kept I squashed the blossom and the blossom is dead Her need tasted like a too-dry gin in my mouth—floral and complex—sucking up all my moisture and breath. The mindless roar of a football game blasted from the living room; I should not be doing this. I didn't listen to me, instead allowed her to thrust her tongue into my mouth, opening for her because that's what I always did, and because it seemed only fair. I knew what day it was, she had told me. Her eyes were clamped shut, but I could see the microwave clock over her shoulder. 6:45 pm, October 18th. A year ago her lover had been ripped to shreds by a savagely jagged windshield and crushed by several tons of merciless steel. The truck driver had tried to pull her out to give her CPR; she didn't look like she was breathing after the battering ram of his 18wheeler. He hadn't meant to tear her throat open on the spiked glass of the windshield. Hadn't realized that one piece was sticking up like that. Her kiss was acidic. It burned, eating away at me. I took her eggshell skull in my hands and kissed her back, just as fiercely. I wondered if I were to crush it in my palms like a walnut, would I be able to pull out the meat of another woman's memory? I wondered why I still loved her and when love had become as sharp and slicing as a razor blade. I thought about cookies, and when I had lost my white chocolate and macadamia nut twist. I no longer believed in love as soft and delicate as a rose blossom. I no longer believed in romance novels, the Lady Gwendolyn St. Eire, or her pirate. St. Eire had been raped and her pirate probably had a small dick. And they say in the end You'll get bitter just like them And they steal your heart away When the fire goes out you better Learn to fake It's better to rise than fade away... Love was something that eventually was bleached away, any colors it left behind ugly and leached of life. The kind of love that did not go away was the kind that fucked you on a bed of broken glass, digging into your skin, a buckshot spray of punctures and slashes. One day she began painting me again. We made love between applications of paint. I wondered if I had remembered to put the towels in the dryer before I came over. I thought about fixing steaks in Martha Stewart's new marinade when I went home. One day she showed me the painting. I was wrapped in the boughs of a fairy's fern, smiling in the cool of a forest glade. My hair was still too dark. I smiled like the picture and kissed her back. She made love to me, soft and slow, like maybe she didn't mind seeing me that day. I wondered when her magic had turned into the sort of purified pain one sees on Christ's face in crucifixion depictions; A flame haired Jesus writhing in redemptive agony under my mouth. One day I didn't cross the tundra of my backyard into her fairy backdrop...one day I didn't go back. Hey you were right Named a star for your eyes Did you freeze did you weep Turn to gold, baby sleep One night Richard smelled like his secretaries perfume. One night Cruz smelled like pot. I made chicken and rice and peas and still did not feel normal. Hey honey mine I was there all the time And I weep at your feet And it rains and rains One day she brought me a painting. I was wrapped in a cloak of night, studded with stars. My hair was the right color. I loved her. I didn't believe her. I sent her home.
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Copyright © 2006 Reed Alexander |