What was good sex? Well, good sex had nothing to do with expertise, how many French tricks one knew (how convincingly you munched on each other’s stools, etc.). No: if there was affection and enthusiasm, that was enough.
With a heart-beat like a drum-roll I led Rachel down the stairs, past the bathroom, to the bedroom.
It smelled to me of every sock I had taken off, all the ear-wax I had pasted under its furniture, each bogey I had swiped across its walls, and the bouquets of cheap talc puffed into the air to disguise these. A Low-legacy, perhaps. Or my own stressed senses.
Rachel generously took off her coat while I subdued the lighting by means of a cotton scarf over the desk-lamp. We sat on the floor next to the fire and sipped the wine I had brought down. The pink glow flattered us. It made Rachel look extra Oriental, softening her features, ironing out the nose, giving her eyes a distant luminousness – you wouldn’t call it a twinkle exactly. In strong contrast, my face became even more angular and shadowy, more hollow and … sinister, my jaw-line more haunting somehow, my mouth – if anything -still more sensual. Let’s get it over with, I thought.
‘Charles,’ said Rachel, ‘when I talked about DeForest on the bus, I hope you didn’t think I was being callous. I’m really very fond of him. I wasn’t just poking fun. It’s just that —’
‘Ridicule is the only exorcist there is,’ I said in a hypnotic voice, ‘and laughter the only true deliverance. Don’t trick yourself into guilt. – Let’s get undressed.’
Balls-aching drivel, unquestionably – and poor tactics, too. One of the troubles with being over-articulate, with having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions, is that every turn in the conversation, every switch of posture, opens up an estate of verbal avenues with a myriad side-turnings and cul-de-sacs – and there are no signposts but your own sincerity and good taste, and I’ve never had much of either. All I know is that I can go down any one of them and be welcomed as a returning lord.
Here I had gone and played the sage Frenchie, the crack-barrel artiste de la chambre; so ‘let’s get undressed’ had seemed obvious, indeed unavoidable. I had pledged myself to stranded, lean nudity. People really ought to stick together at such a time.
Keeping my body well out of the way, I looked on as Rachel methodically revealed hers. She tugged the elasticized bust of the smock over her head, lowered her tights with an electric crackle, bent and turned to unclip her bra. I was still concealed behind the chair when Rachel went over to the bed, pantied, and slipped between the sheets. Leave them on, for Christ’s sake; I needed all the vulgar stimulants I could get. For my knob was knee-high to a grasshopper, the size of a toothpick, as I skipped across the room and fell to a crouch by the side of the bed.
Only her little brown head was visible. I kissed that for a while, knowing from a variety of sources that this will do more for you than any occult caress. The result was satisfactory. My hands, however, were still behaving like prototype hands, marketed before certain snags had been dealt with. So when I introduced one beneath the blankets, I gave it time to warm and settle before sending it down her stomach. Panties ? Panties. I threw back the top sheet, my head a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scrib-blings.
Foreplay included ear-jobs, bronchitic sweet-nuthins, armpit-play (surprisingly good value in this respect), and a high-jinks of arse and thigh work. The big moment came for Rachel when Charles, the runaway robot, sat up, leaned forward, placed a hand flat on either hip-bone, and literally peeled off her panties. As soon as she began to show vulnerable self-consciousness (symptomized as usual by raising right knee) I considerately turned my gaze on her face and bunged my fist in the triangle described by thighs and panty-band. Over her knees my reach ran out. Then, in a very superior move, I got hold of an ankle and pulled it towards me, doubling up the legs. In one movement the panties draped her toes. I swung them into the middle of the room.