41
Cinnamon’s kiss was a spiritual thing. It was like the sudden and unexpected appeasement between the east and west. A barrier fell away, forgiveness flooded my heart, and somewhere I was granted redemption for all my transgressions.
“I need this,” she whispered. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
She pressed her breasts against me, positioning me so that I was leaning back on the arm of the sofa. Then she grabbed my ankles and pulled hard so that, with my help, she got me flat on my back.
She lifted the white T-shirt to straddle me. When she did so I caught a glimpse of her protruding pubic hair. I felt like a child seeing something that had been kept from him for what seemed like an eternity.
“Wh-what do you need?” I said, embarrassed by my stutter.
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She moved down to my shins and reached up to catch the waist of my pants. With a quick tug she had both my pants and boxers down to my knees. Then she came up again.
Just before settling back down she said, “I need your warmth.”
The feel of her hot sex sitting down on mine gave the hiss of her words a deeper meaning.
“Pull up your shirt,” she said.
She began rocking gently back and forth and to the sides, doing things with my erection, which lay flat against my belly, that I would never have thought of on my own. I watched closely, looking for passion. But she was in control. The feeling was inside and she was keeping it there. She laid her hands upon my chest. I could see a finger against my erect nipple but I couldn’t feel it.
“Was he your lover?” I asked. It was the last thing on my mind.
“Axel?”
“Sure.”
“Sure,” she repeated.
“What were you guys doing?”
“You mean how did we do it?”
“No. Those bonds. That letter.”
“He loved me,” she said. “He wanted to help me cross over from where everybody else was.”
I understood every word, every inflection. She moved side to side and I felt her excitement down between my thighs even if it didn’t show on her face.
“You love him?”
“If I tell you about him will you tell me something?”
I nodded and gulped.
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
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“Do you love him?” I asked even though there was another question in my mind.
“It’s more than that,” she whispered with a sneer and an evil twist of her hips. “He reached out and saved my life. He took me in his house and then left me there with all those treasures. He introduced me to friends and family and never walked into a room where I couldn’t go with him. And he never gave me a dime I didn’t work for and he did what I told him to do.”
The idea of a man obeying this woman brought a sound from my chest that I’d not heard before, not even from some infant that was all feelings and desire.
“He let me help him,” she said. “He recognized that I was smart and educated and that I could understand him better than all those old white men and women that made him ashamed.”
“Were you helping him with those bonds?” I asked, again a question I didn’t care to ask.
“That was him. That was his devil.”
She lifted off of me and cold concern rose in my face. She smiled and came back down.
“My turn,” she said with a swivel.
“What?”
“What’s making you so sad?” she asked.
In a flood of words I told her about Feather and about Bonnie, who was saving her while in the arms of an African prince in the Alps. It sounded like a bad movie but the words kept coming. It was almost as if I couldn’t inhale before finishing the tale.
Her fingernail got caught on my nipple. A shock made me jump and press hard against her sex.
“Oh!” she said and then snagged the nipple again.
She’d found another way to pleasure us both. My breath was coming harder.
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In between her rocking and snagging she said, “All men feel that women do them wrong. They feel like that all the time. But that’s just silly. Here you got a woman givin’ up everything to save your little girl and all you can think about is a passing fancy or even maybe another lover. What do you think they’re doin’
right now?”
I reached out and pinched one of her nipples and then the other.
She liked that but only showed it by inhaling deeply.
And to show me that it wasn’t too overwhelming she began to speak again.
“It’s like when Axel’s older cousin Nina got jealous of me bein’
in his bed. She loved him in another way; like Bonnie loves you.
You shouldn’t be jealous of her. You should be happy that she can give your little girl life.”
Those were the words I had wanted to hear, needed to hear for days. I opened my mouth but she spoke first.
“No,” she said, pinching my nipples hard and then pounding down, her sex against mine. “No. No more. Come to me.”
I came all at once, before I was ready. She smiled but didn’t slow the hammerlike rhythm against my erection. It hurt but I didn’t throw her off or complain. And after a few seconds I had another orgasm. I guess that’s what it was. It happened somewhere inside my body. All of a sudden there was a dam I didn’t know about and it broke open and everyone in its path was drowned.
w h e n i a w o k e ,
the woman who might have been a murderer was lying along my side with her head nestled against my shoulder. I knew almost nothing about Philomena Cargill and yet she had touched me in a place I couldn’t even have imagined 2 7 3
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on my own. Was she like this for all men? A fertility goddess come from Africa somewhere to bedevil mortal men with something they could never know without her? Her hand was on my limp sex. But as soon as I saw it I began to get hard again.
“We should get cleaned up,” she said, awakening to my arousal.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
There was a jury-rigged shower nozzle attached to the wall above the small bathtub in the restroom. We washed each other.
Physically I was as excited as I had been on the couch but my mind was free.
“Where does Axel’s cousin live?” I asked.
“Down in L.A. somewhere.” In her mind she was still in Berkeley.
“And is she related to the family business somehow?”
“Nina’s father was the man who started the company. He’s Tourneau, Rega Tourneau.”
“Was he part of the company before the war?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Is he still alive?”
She began to lather my pubic hair, working deftly around the erection. “He’s very old. Ninety I think. Nobody in the family likes him.”
After the shower I was still straining with excitement. Cinnamon stood in front of me, smiling, and asked, “Are you going to leave now?”
I wanted to leave because I knew somehow that I’d lose something of my soul if I let her make love to me again.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
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42
Ididn’t leave Philomena’s until early the next morning. It had been a long time since I’d spent a night like that. Georgette was wonderful and passionate but Cinnamon Cargill was the spice of sex with no impediments of love at all. Where Georgette kissed me and told me that she wanted to take me home forever, Cinnamon just sneered and used sex like a surgeon’s knife. She never said one nice or kind thing, though physically she loved me like I was her only man.
When she’d leave the room to go to the toilet she seemed surprised, and not necessarily happy, to see me when she returned.
She told me all about old Rega Tourneau. He was the family patriarch, born in the last century. He had married Axel’s father’s aunt and so there was some family connection there — though not by blood.
“The old man had a sour temperament,” Philomena said.