Anyway: Gloria. I imagine that the older man thinks it’s going to be hell and is often agreeably surprised to find that it’s not quite, not quite, as bad as he had such excellent reasons to fear. With the youngster the very reverse is true. Gloria and I undressed like lifeguards, and without actually separating. I always forgot the full drama of the change that came over her the minute she was underway. In normal circumstances, with her embarrassment in any kind of pre-coital conversation, her unassumingly pretty face, the stiff-limbed movements: you were a plaything of her unease. Once underway, though, Gloria would have been able to detect few noteworthy points of contrast between sexual arousal and rabies.
It wasn’t that bad, as I remember, not significantly worse than usual. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes trying not to come, with a beady dread of what was going to happen when I did; a decent (i.e. perceptible) orgasm; a further two or three minutes in garrotted detumescence. Cock attains regulation minimum and is supplanted by well-manicured thumb; Gloria has another … five? orgasms; and so it ends. I roll over. My thumb looks as though it has been for a four-hour swim: grey, puffy, dappled where I’ve eaten bits of it in the past. My alarm clock claims it’s only ten fifteen. I wish I were back in Oxford.
A remarkable phenomenon, students of the human condition gather round. While thinking about this, while leafing through my notes, I have a shirty erection. I am jealous of myself. If Gloria came through the door now – I’d do it again. She is a fine-looking girl, certainly: excellent middle-weight figure, costly red hair, huge mouth, a judicious number of freckles, and, paradoxically, she does look very becoming with her clothes off. But such attractions shouldn’t becloud (let alone obliterate) an elementary correlation of pleasure and pain. Can it just be experience we’re after?
Restored by a cigarette, Gloria beguiled the following hour in an attempt to actualize my full nineteen-year-old potential. Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis: ‘Now she wheedled and tugged at my snaily genitalia, now scoured my ears with her tongue, now patrolled my ankles and shoulder-blades for uncharted erogenous zones. After our second coupling I go as far as faking a third orgasm. My gurgles of pain are taken for cries of virile delight.’ That sort of thing.
‘Wow,’ I then said. ‘That really was something. Well – have you got enough pillow there ? – night night, sleep well. Until the morning.’
Gloria looked at me oddly.
Front to the wall I feigned sleep … the odd incoherent murmur … two or three tentative snores … a certain amount of involuntary twitching. But the sheets whispered beside me. I felt a hand traverse the lower areas of my back. In seconds -radar-tracked by my whisker-sensitive pubic hairs – it was treading air above my groin. And my groin, in its youthful way, said: ‘I’m game.’
During the long pre-copulative session I glanced downwards – and what should I see but Gloria, practising the perversion known as fellatio. Unaccountably, she was doing this with great rigour and enthusiasm, circling her head so that her long plush hair skimmed and glided over my hips, thighs and stomach. Visually, it was most appealing, but all I could feel was a remote, irrelevant numbness – plus, in my legs, cramp and pins-and-needles respectively. Have I come already, perhaps ? I asked myself.
Gloria didn’t think so. She swooped up, said ‘I only do that for boys I like,’ planted a fizzy kiss in my mouth, and hoisted me on top of her.
I recall turning at one point from the section of wallpaper I was perusing to check on Gloria’s face (just for the files): and impressively atavistic it was too. Accordingly, her orgasm came with clenched teeth, bull-whip shuddering, yelps of dismay; mine came (or did it?) with back pains, bronchitic gasping, with everything all caving in. When I withdraw, it occurred to me, I shall surely get blood over Jenny’s nice room.
Gloria lay back, her race run. After a while she folded up and went to sleep. And I watched the ceiling, breathless with envy.