After a first kiss there are normally two things you can do. Either extricate your mouth, grin with it, and say something (necessarily) cinematic; or move on to the neck, throat and ears. My posture suggested the first, since I couldn’t get at the rest of her face without falling backwards on to the floor or collapsing wheezily on top of her. But I preferred the second method, having, indeed, never tried the other. The kiss had been underway for better than thirty seconds now. I made it more positive, introducing tongue a quarter of an inch. Rachel’s mouth widened the same distance. Right.
Great strength was called for to lower my body down to just above hers, so that I could bring in the support of my right elbow (crooked for this purpose) to take the pressure off my left arm. In one movement I shifted my nine stone on to said elbow, slid my legs over Rachel’s to the other side of the bed thereby settling in beside her, withdrew my mouth, and lay my head on her chest.
I listened to the fizz of cashmere and the crumpling of (more or less) empty brassiere. My knees came up to rest against Rachel’s, keeping a good six inches between her skirt and my groin. I lay there still.
As hoped, Rachel’s left hand came up and stroked my hair. Smirking at the wallpaper, I stayed in position for a quarter of a minute and laid an arm across her waist. Then I looked meekly up at her. She was gazing at the ceiling, deep in some maternal fantasy perhaps ? I doubted it.
Tactically, this was less than ideal. Too wistful, and this gives time for regret. I brought my face to within an inch of hers, having crunched my back teeth together. I kissed her again, far more emphatically this time, paying special attention to the corners of her mouth and to the points at which her teeth and gums met – both very sensitive areas. Meanwhile, I ‘did’ her left ear with the index finger of my right hand. If ‘done’ skilfully this can cause the subject to become ga-ga with arousal. The thing is hardly to touch the ear, to touch it as lightly as possible consistent with touching it at all. The nearer you get to not touching it the better. (I knew because I had had it ‘done’ to me, in the St Giles bus shelter, by a wonderful waitress. I had almost fainted, but I was seventeen then.)
Rachel responded tolerably well. Her tongue, as yet, was held in abeyance. However, she was jostling her lips a fair amount and made some of the right noises. When I pressed a corduroy kneecap against the point where hers met, though, her legs could not be said to have leapt apart. Nor, to be honest, did she have so much as one finger up my bum.
Just as well.
With my left hand I was making swirling motions on Rachel’s stomach, outside her jersey, not touching her breasts but coming mischievously near them sometimes. Thus I maintained a tripartite sexual application in contrapuntal patterns. This sort of thing: insert tongue, remove finger from ear; withdraw tongue, stroke neck, trail pinkie of left hand along narrow gash between her jersey and skirt (tastefully avoiding navel); kiss and semi-lick throat and neck, ‘do’ ear, and place hand unemphatically on knee; stop ‘doing’ ear and stroke hairline, bring mouth towards hers and hand up her leg at similar speeds; with mouth almost there, hold her gaze for long second while hand takes off at aeroplane trajectory from the runway of her thigh and lands … on her stomach again just as mouths meet. That sort of thing.
While doing this I thought how lucky I was to be out of action. In Dr Thorpe’s queer words: ‘Don’t go sticking it up any pretty ladies for a bit, now will you? Come back next Monday, all right? and we’ll take another peep at it.’ Lucky because there was no chance of me getting ‘worked up’, of getting carried away, I believed was the phrase ? ? ? There was no danger of me thinking about anyone’s pleasure but Rachel’s. I made polite groans, naturally, but with the professional sincerity of the wine-taster as opposed to the candid slavering of the alcoholic.