‘Hadn’t I better put the thing on now?’
Penex Ultralite come in dull pink flip-top packets of three. On the bed with my back facing Rachel, who stroked it for something to do, I removed a sheath and peered at it: a florin-sized ring of elastic that gathered into an obscene bobble. I undid the elastic with twitchy fingers.
‘Won’t be a sec.’
But you seemed to need a minimum of three hands to get it on: two to hold it open and one to splint your rig. After thirty seconds my cock was a baby’s pinkie and I was trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.
‘Christ how do you get these things on.’ I held it up accusingly. ‘Just how, just how are you supposed to get these things on.’
Rachel took a look. ‘Oh, baby,’ she said. ‘You don’t undo it first.’
So it was more necking, strange and perfunctory necking, and more body patrol.
This time, under Rachel’s supervision, I held the nozzle daintily between finger and thumb and pulled the greased wafer down with my other hand.
‘Oh, I see,’ I said.
After all that sweat and goonery, was there any point in trying to find the blighted hair of passion, a whisper of real desire, submerged in that tub of clotted vaginal fluid ?
Supported on elbows, I hoisted myself above her and brought a knobbled knee up between hers, through the thighs. Glancing downwards, my rig, in its pink muff, looked unnatural, absurd, like an overdressed Scottie dog. I watched with approval, though, as the knee bore downwards. Then I got to work on ears, neck and throat, and paid elaborate lip-service to her breasts, on the assumption that they were to be found in the immediate vicinity of her hazel-nut nipples.
‘Yes,’ said Rachel.
Oh, hi. You still here?
Of course. They have breasts, too. Quite slipped my mind. What have I been missing ? I bite a nipple experimentally; she wags her head. I brush the other one with my cheek; she grinds her crotch into my knee. I suck on it with stiff lips; her hands grasp my head.
A definite rhythm was now created in her. Time to consolidate it. My hands taking over from my lips, my lips taking over from my knee, I have swooped downwards. It was too dark there (thank God) for me to be able to see what was right in front of my nose, just some kind of glistening pouch, redolent of oysters. A sniper, through those hairy sights, I watched Rachel’s jaw tense.
Finally, once her movements had begun to syncopate and turn in on themselves to produce new and altogether different rhythms, and once the secret shudders that have no rhythm started to superimpose themselves on the regular back-and-forth, side-to-side swing of her body … then, I wiped my mouth on the napkin of her thighs, and surged upwards, cleverly hooking my elbows round the backs of her knees to bring them along too. My left hand, from underneath, aimed the uncooked sausage on the relevant opening. Rachel’s head thrown back ? Check. Eyes tight, rictus smile ? Check. And, as I entered, she kissed me, no inhibitions, movingly and democratically partook of her own sour gelatine.
At that point – I swear – I honestly did try to get lost in her responses, to engage her motions, to crawl under the blanket of deliberateness between our bodies. No good. It’s far, far too sexy. Real sexual abandonment, for the male, equals orgasm, and therefore he is never allowed to feel it except at the end. It exists, for him, only in indolence or in rape. (If this is so, then, surely, I’m in the clear.)
Seconds away, fusing every nerve in my body, I lurched backwards out of her. Rachel subsided, shaking. Eyes wetted by pain and shock, I placed my head on her breasts. For ninety seconds man and sphincter muscle were locked in combat. I won.
Here we go. An old-school repertoire of minimally sexy positions. Examples: I slung her legs over my shoulders; knelt, bending her almost triple; lay straight as an ironing-board; turned her round, did it from behind, did it from the side; I brought my right leg up, kept my left leg straight – I did the hokey-pokey, in fact. But, again, it is change of position that is sexy, not the position itself, and God forbid that I should feel sexy.