The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

FOURTH DATE, FIRST FUCK by Dion Farquhar

BACK WHEN THEY were dating, before they were sure of each other, before they’d lived together for years and done just about every kind of fucking – positions, places, toys – and before they’d worried about money together, before they’d fought about who-should-have-done-what in the division-of-labor, back in their prehistory, there had been a first time.

Lying in bed alone and half awake, hand cupping her cunt, she enjoyed an orderly remembering of the extraordinary week that just ended. She was in love – again. Resilience has been her forte, and this time, like every other, she hoped she’d gotten it right and chosen a grown-up who could be a full-time partner and not just a weekend lover.

Things so often go slower these days, she thought, given AIDS and the age, not to mention their age. With an inadvertent smile, she tried to account for their not jumping into bed on the first or even the second date. Sex on the fourth date was something of a rarity in her experience as opposed to the more common variety – the slam-you-up-against-the-wall, I-could-fuck-you-right-here first date kind. With Josh, it was four dates before they got to bed. A week later, now that she was spending every night with him, it seemed both fast and slow. But what mattered, was that they got there at their own pace, and that was so right, she thought, feeling a ripple of desire course through her stomach.

Although an astute observer would have pointed to the awkwardness of their leave-takings, to the close timing of their dates, to their eagerness to be together and laugh and talk until workers shooed them out of closing cafés, and other indicators of mutual desire, she had only known for sure that he was interested in sex with her because of where he sat on his couch. The body always gives it away. On their third date, the first time she had been in his house, they had sat at opposite ends of his couch. They’d had a great time, and laughed and talked until she said, sensing sex was too much to take on that night, “Well, it’s getting late, I’d better get home.”

But on the fourth date, they’d watched a video of the incredibly sexy Carlos Saura film Carmen. During the awkward transition from the video to who-knew-what’s-next, she reached over to the coffee table for the half-smoked joint and relit it. When he returned to the couch after refilling their seltzers, she noticed he was sitting much closer to her this time, only inches away from her corner perch. Unable to stop herself from smiling at him, she held out the joint to him, and her reached for it, his fingers grazing hers, returning her smile. This was fun, she thought. He inhaled deeply, and they looked at each other, smiles breaking out across their faces.

Feeling more relaxed by the minute, she took her shoes off and swung a cushion around for her back so she could sit perpendicular towards him. “That was quite a movie,” she said, smiling. “Yah, it’s pretty intense,” he replied. They smiled at each other, allowing themselves to show their delight in each other’s company and savor their effervescing desire.

Although quite relaxed from a combination of the grass and the late hour, her head was racing. This was powerful stuff. As she shifted her position on the couch slightly, she realized that she was wet, a little surprised at the effect that the film and their unacknowledged desire for each other was having on her. Her body ahead of her, telling her she wanted him, even though the movie was just plain hot. This was more than mood. Regarding him, she remembered what good sex was like. Not having had any in months since her breakup with a French Department – Romance Studies they called it at his university – Don Juan who needed his space when he wasn’t telling her he’d never been more up for it.

But here she was – falling-in-love-again – in California, a continent and three time zones away from home, on this new man’s couch, turned on and happy.

She knew what she liked – both for herself and in her men. Hungry, sensitive, passionate. And she knew what she wanted. A man who wanted sex and intensity to go on. Not just the weekend/party model. She wanted a man who, like her, refused to trade off the domestic for passion. A future, a history. Now on their fourth date (ancient history, for Christ’s sake), she sat on the same side of his couch but perpendicular to him as he sat in the middle, only inches away from her. But this time, she noted, he sat closer to her, in roughly the middle of the couch. This feels completely different, she thought. Better. In every way. Emboldened, she ventured to tuck her toes under the side of his butt. She watched his face register the contact. Instantly, with no hesitation, he gently reached one hand over to touch and then caress and squeeze her feet. She acknowledged his gesture by wriggling her toes, as she snuggled closer and less tentatively. His hand felt so good rubbing her feet. They were saying hello.

One thing led to another. Her eyes closed as she pressed against him, feeling how good their fit was. This is great, she thought. I can’t believe it. What a good kisser he is, she mused, as they moved from the discrete footrub to kissing and rolling around the couch. Mouths and tongues eager for each other. A lot of kissing, touching, hugging. “Do you think we might be more comfortable on a bed?” she ventured after a while, feeling the limits of the couch’s design. “Absolutely,” he said, “let’s go.” Another awkward move, and then the digression of the bathroom stop, each waiting for the other on the bed, still dressed and not knowing what to do, how to wait. “Would a candle be good?” he asked her, standing in the bedroom doorway, an erection visible through his jeans. “Yah, very,” she heard herself say, liking his attention to detail. This man had a life, a place, even a kitchen with food in it. While she was thinking about the ways in which Josh’s attention to detail and self-sufficiency augured well, he came back in carrying a round blue candle on a plate. She watched him place it on the dresser across the room from the bed and light it. They both “ahhed” at the light it cast.

Then he joined her on the bed. They reached out to hold each other and reestablish their very recently found pleasure in their bodies together. They lay together, alternately hugging and kissing and watching the candle flicker, enjoying looking at each other in the candlelight. Although they would go on to fuck in every gradation of light and in no light, the light of one or two candles always remained one of their preferences, one associated with particularly luscious sex.

“You feel so good,” she told him, backing away just enough to see his face. His eyes opened to meet hers and he looked at her with so much love and desire she thought she’d melt. “You feel so good,” Josh told her. Thank you, Ilene, she thought, of their mutual friend who introduced them. A sentiment they would echo often over the next several years. Though neither knew it then. This was only their fourth date.

They began to hug and kiss and wrap themselves around each other again, only briefly derailed by the move to the bedroom. Then came the undressing. She wanted to feel him skin to skin, but her desire mixed with hesitation – evoking feelings of need and loss and mistrust. Noticing her deep inhalation that was almost a sigh, she had a stoned flash of literally taking a plunge, into his arms. First-time sex is like walking off a cliff, she thought. What was she waiting for? she thought, as she felt their tongues probing each other’s mouths, relaxing into his body and into the feeling that their pressed-together groins generated. A source of heat and desire. First times are good to get over, she thought, as they pulled each other’s tee shirts off. She liked what came after first times even better.

Their chests together made her dizzy with desire. She loved the feel of his chest and its hair and texture, especially the way it made her breasts feel. He moaned as she rubbed her breasts over his chest. “Oh, I love your beautiful breasts,” he whispered, reaching up to take them in his hands, gently rubbing them in circles. They eventually moved on to unzipping each other’s resistant jeans and coaxing them off hips and legs.

At last, they snuggled under the covers and luxuriated in the feel of flesh upon flesh, the contrast of hairy and hairless legs, and hard cocks and wet spots moving around each other. Smooth against rough. Hipbones and smells of sex. They took turns running a leg up and down the other’s leg and butt. Rolling over and sliding along each other’s body, exploring all that heat and cool, breasts and penis and cunt. Ear and breast sucking, nibbling, biting. Fingers inside her, around her. Sighs of “umm” into the night. Fingers inside him. Far inside. His writhing with pleasure. Moaning. And breaks for more seltzer refills to combat drymouth. They finally brought the two-liter bottle in from the kitchen.

At one point during their kissing and sucking and touching, she heard herself say, in a low voice, “I want to fuck you soon.” “How about right now?” he replied, reaching down by the bed to get a condom. He extracted it from its package and began to put it on his erect cock. She leaned toward him and put her hand over his half-condomed cock to help him roll it on. Her hands stroking his sides. “Oh, God,” he said, as she ran her hand over his cock. She climbed up on him, and slowly, very slowly lowered her cunt over his cock. She reached down and with her hand, she guided him in. First the tip, then a little further, then taking the entire long shaft inside her, she pressed her weight down over him. What a nice big hard cock, she thought. Not too big, but substantial, and just right. She couldn’t believe how good he felt inside her.

She watched his head burrow back into the pillow, moaning with pleasure, at the same time that his hands gripped her hips, moving her slightly back and forth over him. After a while, she leaned down over him until her breasts touched and then pressed into his chest. He pulled her head over his and their tongues sought each other out, in and out and around their mouths. Their fucking went on until she couldn’t tell whose cock and whose cunt was whose. At the same time, he seemed to grow even larger inside of her, or she grew tighter around him. The result was an intensification of feeling right there in that indistinguishable cunt-cock place. Oh God, she thought, this guy can fuck. This is wonderful. Their thrusts intensified and eventually he came in a paroxysm of feeling that echoed throughout her body with an intensity that both satisfied and stimulated her.

Good fucking. Hours of it. Urgent. Him above, across, around, her. A prepositional orgy.

She awoke with a start, unsure of where she was, what day it was, gripped with the fear that she’d missed an important appointment. As she fought to remember where she was, she surveyed the large pastel bedroom pooled around her double bed adrift on a buttery plush carpet. The peach and pumpkin and beige duvets were not hers. Immediately, she remembered that she was subletting a house near the university that hosted her summer program. From a faculty member in Modern Languages. The linen closet had post-urns labelling the sheets “double”, “queen”. The holes in window screens are patched with small rectangles of mesh. Must be a German teacher, she thought, the house is too neat and clean for a French or Italian professor. They all had two-car garages, that in reality were one-car garages because of all the stuff people store in them. If you want to get two cars in, you have to get a three-car garage. She, a earless Manhattanite, pondered the diversity of national custom and life style. California was fieldwork in anthropology for her.

Every summer, lucky grant recipients scattered from their homes, fanning out across the country to major research institutions hosting seminars and institutes on a variety of scholarly topics. A kind of Fresh Air Fund for junior faculty, the hordes of unsung and underpublished wannabees, she thought, distancing herself from her fellow participants. A jobless part-timer, she thought, but at least I’m not stuck in Oklahoma or Tennessee. She laughed, as she padded across the carpet lining the floor from her bedroom in the summer rental all the way to the kitchen, at such behavior patterns in adult humans. Twenty-five competitively chosen participants (they’d had to write pages justifying their interest and experience in the topic at hand, fill out forms, garner letters of recommendation, enough to derange even a well-ordered life) had left their homes and loved ones, if they had any, and converged on this California university resort town for two months of lectures and comraderie.

When she wasn’t with her lover, during the first two weeks of the seminar, she ate dinner, a sacred social ritual in her home city, with strangers, she thought, as she put water up to boil on the glacially slow surface of the electric range in the rented house. Her new manicured suburban neighbourhood, nestled at the foot of the university hills, was plunked down in what had been two decades ago cattle grazing fields and bulb farms. The university, looking more like a state park, was donated by a logging company. Good move. Each term, more years of forest growth was consumed by the book orders of ambitious professors than the havoc the multis could wreck in a decade.

After graduate school was military training. Each recruit stuck in his own isolated warren, alone with a series of confrontations of programmed obstacles, monsters, masters, hazards he must confront and survive. Only the all-seeing administration knows/sees the behavior of each recruit from its privileged altitude. By the time the recruit has survived his trials, he believes that he merits the condescending praise dished out by his superiors. He learns to copy the masters until one day, he finds not only that he can do it, but that mastery was a bit pumped up and overinvested to begin with.

The town had beach, seals, sunlight, redwoods, cliffs, sand, and surfers, but no city. No graffiti, no garbage, no crowds. Social homogeneity instead of diversity of people. Nature in the country. Culture in the city. Here the house and its boundaries and connections to the outside were manipulable, relational categories. The two pages of instructions on “Lawn and Garden” included reference to “blue hibiscus”, “camellias”, Japanese maple, bougainvillea, rhododendrons, large fuchsia. When she sat out in the back yard, the scent of the lemon tree ever present, the sound of printers sputtered like chain saws.

After the third day of the seminar, she knew there was no one there to fuck. Twenty men out of twenty-five people, and only one interested her. But he had a live-in girlfriend in tow, so she called her girlfriend in San Francisco, who wanted to introduce her to a man. “Tell me again about your friend, the man you want me to meet,” she said, “there’s no one here.” “He’s single, heterosexual, and interested in a lot of the same things you are, the same age, divorced,” her friend said. “What’s his phone number?” She called, they made a date, and here she was, a week and a half later.

Twenty-four hours after they’d gotten almost to sleep, she slept alone the next night. Now fully awake the next morning, she let the recent time with Josh flood her memory as she poured herself a cup of tea, watching the steam rise as she stirred her tea with a spoon. What she had particularly loved about sex with Josh was that it wasn’t over when he had come. No more than, many times later, it was over when she had come first. After a pause, they always started in again until each had come enough. Although she didn’t know it yet, one of the things that made their sex so good was that it gave him as much pleasure to make her come as it gave her to make him come. She looked beyond the patio doors to the flowering trees in the backyard, enjoying her recollection of that first night, a little more than a day ago.

His hand lightly tracing circles over her cunt brought her back. They lay together enjoying the feeling of having fucked their hearts out. She felt the cool of the wet spot on the sheets made by the mix of their fluids, and shifted her body a fraction to a drier spot. He moved with her, never breaking their contact. “You have to show me what you like,” he said, running a finger gently over her cunt lips, then veering toward her clit. She shuddered with pleasure, sensing the arch of her neck thrown back, the muscles of his hips and thighs. Lying there having her clit stroked and rubbed evoked a flood of images. Multiple screens flashed images of femmes fatales, discus throwers poised and bent to throw. She became a high-heeled, bejeweled, slinky-dressed femme, and he a tango-leading, tall and black-booted stud.

He moved his leg over hers, feeling her tense against him. “There, like that,” she managed. He touched her lightly at first, in teasing motions, making her move toward him, show him with the motion of her pelvis toward or away from his hand exactly what she wanted. “Harder,” she said, and he continued, rhythmically and more firmly. She moved under his touch onto plateaus of more and more pure pleasure until she couldn’t bear it any more, coming with an arch of her back and a moan that surprised her. “Oh, my God,” she said, pressing herself onto his hand, still coming. “Oh, baby, come,” he said, smiling over at her as she opened her eyes. “Oh, God, that was wonderful,” she said, kissing him on the lips. “Next time, I’ll bring my vibrator,” she said. “Fine, I’d like to meet it,” he said.

They lay together, quietly, kissing lightly, his hand cupping her cunt. What a beginning, she thought. I like him. Josh spooned her with his body, “Good night, baby,” he said. “Good night, love.” Unbeknownst to them, this was only the beginning.