Nothing new had been added except…
Except something she had said in the middle of the night after that time that had been unmistakably the most complete one for her, not any kind of thrashing wildness, or spasmodic yelping, but just very lasting and very strong, fading very slowly for her, slowly and gently. It was one of those fragmented drowsy conversations as we lay in a night tangle of contentment, sheet and blanket shoved down to the foot of the bed, the flesh drying and cooling after the moist of effort. Her deep and slowing breath was humid against the base of my throat. Round knee against my belly, her slow, affectionate fingertips tracing over and over the line of my jaw from earlobe to chin. In down-glance I could see, against the light that lay in a crisp diagonal line across the foot of the bed, a round height of her hip, semiluminous, and a steep descent to the waist where rested, in dark contrast, my large hand with fingers splayed.
“Mmmmm,” she said, “so now I know.”
“Search for guilt?”
“Too soon for that, darling. Feel too delicious for that. Later maybe. But… damn it all anyway.”
“Problem?”
“I don’t know. Girl finds she can get turned way, way on, big as can be, with a nice guy that comes along. So she’s kind of a lousy person.”
“Glandular type, eh?”
“A lousy nympho, maybe.”
“Then, I’d have to be number eight hundred and fifty-six or something.”
She lay in thought for a moment and then giggled. “Counting Rick, you got one figure right. The six. The other four, I was married to one and engaged to two and head over heels with the other. Compared to some of the R.N.’s I work with and was in training with, I’m practically a nun. But my old grandma would fault dead away.”
“Nymphs are concerned only with self, honey. They lose track of who the guy is. Don’t know or care. A robot would suit them fine.”
“I knew you were you, all along. Even more so when it got to the best part. What does that make me?”
“Serendipitous.”
“Is that dirty?”
“No. That’s a clean.”
She stretched, yawned, shifted closer. “I keep wanting to say I love you, darling. That’s for my conscience, I guess. Anyway, I like the hell out of you.”
“Same here. It’s the afterglow that proves it worked right.”
She pushed herself up and knee-walked down and sorted out sheet and blanket and pulled them up over us, straightening and tucking and neatening, and then curled again, shivering once, fists and forehead against my chest, knees in my belly, her cheek resting on my underarm, with my other arm around her, palm against her back, fingertips wedged under the relaxed weight of her rib cage against the undersheet.
I moved back and forth across the edge of sleep, thinking of that afterglow, trying to explain it to myself. With the mink, the musk ox, the chimpanzee, and the human, the proper friction at the proper places if continued for x minutes will cause the nerve ends to trigger the small glandular-muscular explosive mechanics of climax. And afterward there is no more urge to caress the causative flesh than there would be to stroke the shaker that contained the pepper that caused a satisfying series of sneezes.
So in the sensual-sexual-emotional areas each man and each woman has, maybe, a series of little flaws and foibles, hang-ups, neural and emotional memory pattern and superstition, and if there is no fit between their complex subjective patterns, then the only product you can expect is the little frictional explosion, but when there is that mysterious fit, then maybe there are bigger and better explosions down in the ancient black meat of the bidden brain, down in the membraned secret rooms of the heart, so that what happens within the rocking clamp of the loins at that same time is only a grace note, and then it is the afterglow of affection and contentment that celebrates the far more significant climax in brain and heart.
Her voice came from far off with an echo chamber quality, pulling me back across the edge of sleep. “… like they say female moths give off some kind of mating signal. Gees, I don’t bat my eyes and wiggle my behind and moisten my lips. But the bed patients make grabs at me. And the deliveryman from the dry cleaner. And Mr. Tom Pike, last spring.”