Author: Miriam Heddy
Author's website: http://fangirlz.net/miriam.heddy/
Author's email: miriam.heddy@verizon.net
Disclaimer: No profit but pleasure.
Notes: Thanks to anne for the beta. Thanks to CKR for the body.
Articulation
by Miriam HeddyHis body curls around me, bent at the waist, each rib a faint striation against taut skin that looks oddly sallow in the lamp light. My skin, though pale, flushes easily, and tans easily as well. Even so, I too look waxen against Ray's black sheets. I am reminded again of how much I dislike them--they are garish and the feel of the fabric against my skin is quite unpleasant. They are, I think, the sexual equivalent of Holstein-patterned tableware.
I always feel as if I am about to slide off the bed with these beneath me, but Ray would just say, and has said, "So don't move." He finds satin sheets "extremely hot," as he put it, and I think he secretly enjoys the possibility that one day I will fall off the bed, in flagrante delicto. Ray has the conventional American male's sense of humor and the erotic (with the two areas often overlapping--usually at my expense). I suppose I ask for this in some way by being too... well, excessive in some way or other that I'm sure Ray himself could point to, were I stupid enough to ask.
I don't ask. We must all make sacrifices in pursuit of pleasure.
Ray prefers to do this in darkness, with the lights off and the shades drawn. I pointed out, once, that he might have bought plain white sheets if we were never going to see them. But he just grinned and patted the bed, urging me to lie down as he reached for the bedside lamp. Modesty on his part that I don't share.
Nightly rituals like this are reassuring. He turns off the bedside lamp and I turn it back on. He finds that ironic, given my penchant for dressing in closets. But we are all different when the bedroom door is closed.
And I have a preference... well, I suppose a need, really. To watch.
Like this, I can compare us easily. Ray and Benton. Two men, two male bodies of approximately the same age and height, similar enough in frame and feature to suggest symmetry, but dissimilar enough in breadth and detail to justify sustained scrutiny.
A mouth, wet and finely drawn. An elegant, bent wrist, marked by a silver bracelet. An erection, gripped in one sure hand. If I look closely, I can still see the callused outline where a wedding band once bound his slender finger.
He lets me watch, and perhaps even encourages it: my passivity... he finds that "hot," too. At first, I worried that eventually, after the newness of us together tarnished, he would find it--me--less satisfying. But we seem well-matched, here. In bed.
His head dips down, so that I can only see the back of his neck, the bare, vulnerable nape where the dyed blond of his hair grows out in bicolored tufts.
He once asked me if I found him attractive. At times, at the station house, I have had to resist the impulse to ask Francesca or Elaine or any of the women I know if Ray is, indeed, attractive. To me, he is, of course. But as Ray reminded me long ago, I can only offer a man's opinion, and mine is so far from objective as to prove useless in this case.
An irrelevant question, I know. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But I have heard that cliche often enough to mistrust it. My own appearance seems to uniformly please--
Or perhaps it is the uniform. In any case, surely there is an element of quantifiable fact about beauty--some constant against which it might be measured. Symmetry, perhaps, or balance of color or line.
My own tastes run to the sharp edges of scapula--the tight pull of skin over shoulder blades and his hipbones that jut out from narrow hips.
The line of his back in a near-perfect arch, like an angry stray cat, each vertebrae well-articulated, a bridge that draws my eye across and down to his truncated tailbone, his spare, well-muscled buttocks. And downward, still.
My eyes touch him, following the sweeping line of his long legs, tucked under him, blond hair against fair skin, and the bony protuberance of his knees pressed against my thighs.
He keeps his eyes nearly closed, smoothing out the fine lines there that betray his age. His lashes are long enough to cast shadows on his cheeks. And a small smile appears and disappears as I watch him.
I wonder what he thinks as he hovers there, poised above my pelvis, his breath fanning almost painfully against my skin for just long enough to suggest that I might wait forever for his touch--his mouth.
At times, I am moved to say "Please." And then he does smile.
But not tonight.
Tonight, I close my eyes well before forever comes, hardly noticing the click of the light switch, the sudden velvet darkness, or the awkward, frantic slide of my hips against the damnable black satin sheets.
Fin.