Under her rocking movement and warmth and sweet spicy scent, his body responded and he tried to lift her up but her thighs were iron-clad, holding him down. Her hand closed against his crotch and squeezed. Her hand was cool, her grip exquisite. Her breath childlike, scented with milk.
He raised his hands to touch her neck and breasts and hips, but his fingers kept slipping through her hair. She was all hair and gossamer cloth, a shifting wisp he could not grasp.
She leaned back and maneuvered him inside. He sighed in surprise at how she was wet but somehow cool, even down there. She warmed with him inside and fell heavily back down upon him as her hips pushed forward and back, rolling, the fullness of her bush - different, thicker than he remembered - scraping his waist and the tops of his thighs. The physical sensation brought him another level closer to consciousness and she fucked him this way for a minute longer. The whole experience was a reminder of some recurring dream he had come to expect but never taken this far.
But thinking it was a dream always killed the dream and so he tried to deny himself further awareness.
She rode him, bringing him closer in a hurry and then paused, adjusted herself on top of him, grunting in anger and all at once he was awake, at home, in his marital bed. Fear like electrified water shot through his legs and snapped his back straight, but her hands pinned his arms to his sides and her full breasts pressed against his chest. The fear amplified the sensations - good and bad - tenfold.
He tried to see her face but her head was down, monitoring the point where they met, a triangle of black that opened and closed with a wet slapping sound he found erotic and disgusting. She gained substance before his eyes. Her dark form shifted from the ethereal to the clumsy and mechanical, driven by something other than love or even lust.
He struggled beneath her. She yanked his wrists up and planted his palms against her breasts, which were heavy and sheathed in white lace. They were fuller than he remembered, and her entire front was wet, hot with her sweat. He thought her injured; he thought of accidents and blood.
She moaned, winding him tighter. His mind bounced between fear and escape for another thirty seconds while inside her the muscles contracted and pulled. Her walls closed in. To this tension she added a rocking movement, forward and back, repeating the dual motion until he lost control. The sensation conjured a rope with twelve knots at six-inch intervals pulling out of him from his legs and spine through his cock, each knot detonating white flashes of blinding pleasure in his reptilian brain. Only when she was climbing away from him like a spider in the dark did he hear himself screaming.
She scurried out the door with one last fretful moan and her feet padded staccato-like down the hall.
Footsteps. This time he heard her footsteps.
Or thought he did.
Conrad sprang forward and heard his lower lumbar pop in at least three places. He tried to stand and was greeted by pins and needles from the waist down. He fell back into bed, his penis still lost in its own delirious spasm. Muscles shot, cold and shivering wet with her residue, he felt like a freshly shucked oyster, soon to be eaten.
'Why are you doing this to me?' he shouted, trying to laugh after.
No one answered. He sat on the bed listening, turning it over in his head, until he had nearly convinced himself it was another bad dream or a hallucination.
In the morning he thought of Nadia. Nadia had been here before. She even said she did not remember being here the day he bumped into her while Roddy was downstairs having a smoke. But she was just a kid. Would she really come to him in the middle of the night? Not likely.
The only other possibility - that it had been Jo, that she was watching him, toying with him - was so ridiculous that he convinced himself all over again it was a dream. He was lonely, sex-deprived. He had been through a bad couple of months. He might be having a nervous breakdown. It wasn't real. It was only a--
It was like before. When he had woken up on the floor of the bathroom. The skin of his penis was chaffed, stinging and sore in the right places. What did that leave? A nocturnal emission? Fucking the pillows?
Probably. Yes, definitely.
But when he lifted the plastic cup of warmed-over tea from the nightstand to his nose, he could smell her. He remembered feeling the warm blood on her breasts. Then he saw the evidence. Not blood. In the morning light his fingers were chalky, dry, crackly white. He put two in his mouth without thinking and the texture was brittle, sweet. You don't remember, but you know.
A mother's milk.
24
'So what've you been up to?' he said, filling his coffee cup from the Bunn machine in the Grums' kitchen. The coffee was thick, as if it had been sitting all morning, the way he liked it. Nadia was sitting on one of the stools at the kitchen island, flipping through the paper, sipping from a Winnie-the-Pooh mug and pretending he wasn't there. 'You feeling all right? Nadia?'
'Sleeping a lot. I feel like shit.'
Her flannel shirt and shorts clung to her plump curves and he searched her body for something that would affirm his suspicions - a scar, a line, the coarser hairs at the tops of her thighs - something to jar his foggy memory of the flesh he had cupped and caressed some thirty-six hours before.
'Everything okay with the baby? Did you call your doctor?'
She winced but did not look up from her paper. 'I can handle it.'
'Your parents would want me to ask. When are they due back, anyway?'
'Four or five days.'
'I'm behind on my chores.'
'I got the mail,' Nadia said, the sarcasm blatant. She slipped off her stool and went around the corner to the living room.
Conrad sipped his coffee. This didn't fit. She was not acting in any way clever or seductive. If she was playing games and sneaking into his house at night, she was one messed up girl. He went into the living room. Nadia was tucked under an orange Ralph Lauren blanket. He could see the little man on the horse near her feet. She unpaused the DVR.
'What's on?'
'March of the Penguins.'
He looked at the TV. Hundreds of the fat little birds were huddled together while the frozen wind whipped around them. Close-ups of the birds squatting on their eggs on the ice. It looked impossible.
He said, 'If I was a penguin I would leave. Go to Mexico.'
'Don't be an ass. This is amazing.'
'What part is amazing?'
'All of it.'
He watched their fat bodies hunker down, a community under the dark wind. They appeared miserable.
'What part do you like best?' he said.
'They share responsibility. They take turns until the baby is hatched.'
'Is that the one--'
'Shut up.'
He shut up and watched the penguins tough it out. Morgan Freeman explained how, when the mothers are away getting more food, the fathers take over and sit on the eggs. The fathers did their best, but sometimes they fucked up and the eggs rolled away and died. The mothers returned with food to feed the fathers, and they traded places. Sometimes, when one of the mothers returns and finds out her egg has died, she tries to steal another mother's egg. But the community won't let her. She is grief-stricken, inconsolable and ostracized.
'That's so sad,' Nadia said, sniffing.
He watched the broken egg on the ice, the little dead bird inside. 'What happens when the mother goes away and doesn't come back? What does the father do with the egg then? Find another mother, or just take care of it on his own?'
'I don't know,' she said, looking up at him with glassy eyes. 'What happens?'
He was still formulating his answer when the phone rang. She looked away, wiping her eyes. After three rings he said, 'What if it's Mom and Dad?'