October 28, 2009
Fiction
Spider Lines
My wife and I took our time undressing her. I’d like to tell you how strong my hands were and how the girl trembled beneath my touch. But no. My hands shook. My fingertips were cold.
I stood behind her, my face pressed against her neck — kissing her, smelling her, holding back the nibbling and the biting that soon would know no restraint. Her hair on my cheek. Her skin warm against my lips, which were cold as my fingertips.
If I were making this up, I’d say she smelled like flowers — jasmine or hyacinth or even roses. But I’m not, and she didn’t. She smelled like you or I smell on any given summer day — a hint of soap — the ghost of an early morning shower — and flesh. Flesh and sweat.
I held my breath. I was hard. Do I even need to tell you that? I was harder than I’d ever been. That’s how it seemed, anyway. I was a teenage boy with his first tattered Penthouse, a pink world of possibilities opening before him. There was ice in my veins, yes — I get cold when I’m nervous, cold and a little shaky — but no ice would reach me there. If it tried, it would become steam.
We slid her shirt down her shoulders. In a movie or in some cheap ream of stroke fiction, she’d have worn a black bra. Black lace on light brown skin. In reality, it had been simple, off-white and functional, devoid of all but the most basic ornamentation: a flower pattern on the cups, a small bow between them.
Looking down upon the swell of her breasts, I could see the dark edge of her areolas beneath the fabric of her bra. I seized a breast in each hand. At some point I must have released the breath I’d been holding.
I don’t know how you undress a lady, but here’s how it’s supposed to be done: shirt first. If there’s no bra, all bets are off. Do whatever the fuck you wanna do. But if there is, you move down to the pants.
That’s what my wife was doing, goddamn — that was the only thing keeping me from staring at the tits in my kneading hands, the fact that my wife was sliding to her knees before the girl who rented the apartment above ours, sliding to her knees and kissing Tasha’s stomach, kissing, nibbling. Her fingers unbuttoning the girl’s pants, unzipping them. Fuck.
My wife saw the spider before I did. Before the night was over, I got a very long and hard look at the thing. Memorized every line.
•
Our lives weren’t very interesting. No more interesting than yours. We worked, we came home, we watched TV, read, hung out, fucked. Went to bed, got up, and so on.
Before we met, my wife managed a bookstore in Ohio. I lived alone in Texas in a nice enough one bedroom apartment. I rarely left, which meant I didn’t have the world’s greatest social life. Which meant I didn’t have the world’s greatest sex life. I made my money designing books for independent presses and no-talents publishing their unpublishable books through vanity presses. The indie presses paid well, the self-publishers even better.
We met at a trade show in New Orleans, in the very convention center that housed a thousand desperate souls following Hurricane Katrina. It was a little creepy. You wouldn’t know — with the smell of new carpet in your nose and the sight of one hundred colorful displays filling your eyes — that folks had actually died there.
Yeah. That’s the first thing I talked about with the woman I would, a year later, marry. Death and disaster. We hit it off.
Three months later, after countless nights chatting online and on the phone (yes, there was phone sex, there were naked photos), she moved to Texas. I could carry my job in my Mac Mini, so I offered to come up there several times. No: she wanted out of Ohio as much as she wanted to be with me. Transferring to another bookstore wasn’t a problem. The company she worked for had regional offices near Dallas, and she hoped to move up to a corporate position.
Long story short, we moved in together. In many ways she was a lot like me. Which meant, among other things, that her social life hadn’t been all that great. We’d both fucked around, once or twice, but I’m talking literally once or twice.
Before, I had my hand and my computer (the song is right: the internet is for porn) and she had her erotica and her battery-operated friend, but really, you know the simple truth: there’s nothing like the touch of another. Nothing.
Living in my tiny apartment, there wasn’t much to do but fuck. We fucked and we fucked. I did everything I’d ever dreamed of doing to a woman. I spent hours with my face pressed between her legs, lapping and biting and sucking, her fists in my hair.
We each had lines. The thing about those lines, though — and you know all about this, I know you do: they’re drawn in the sand. They’re real easy to erase.
•
What happened may or may not have sprouted from the seeds planted during our sweaty bouts of phone sex.
Lauren had a way with words. One night she told me about the time she did it with a girl. She sprung it on me, just like that, describing how she sucked this girl’s nipples and fingered her and how, afterward, she’d smeared the girl’s own juices across her lips and kissed her. I almost couldn’t hear her — my heart was thundering in my ears.
The next night, she told me she’d made it up. The girl was real, a co-worker. They’d kissed once, but it had gone no further. The girl wanted to. Lauren may have, too, but she’d stayed on her side of the line.
She told me the story a few more times anyway. I enjoyed it.
•
Jump forward with me now:
We were married — had been for over three years. No phone sex. Our sex life wasn’t as wild as it had been. We talked about getting a house, having a baby.
I still did the freelance book design and typesetting thing, but I also worked for a design firm in Dallas. Lauren had her feet planted on the corporate ladder. The ceiling was low, but that was okay — we both made good money.
It was a weekend. We went to the movies on weekends. We fucked on weekends.
“Oh, man,” she said as I was pulling the car into our slot. I could tell by her voice that she was already in sex kitten mode. We wouldn’t make it to the bedroom. She’d pounce before I even had a chance to take off my shoes.
“What is it?”
She nodded toward the mailboxes, shot me a mischievous glance.
The girl who would for a time become the center of our world stood above the trash can, sorting through junk mail. She appeared to be in her early twenties, a good decade younger either of us. Light brown skin, black hair. She was looking down, so I had no way to be sure, but I knew: her eyes were as black as her lashes. High cheekbones, perfect eyebrows. Full lips. A slightly too-round nose kept her just out of perfection’s reach.
Her shirt was too baggy, her shorts too long. I wanted to see more.
Lauren looked at me, leering. “Let’s take her home and fuck her.”
Of course she was kidding. That didn’t stop my nuts from tingling.
The girl tossed the junk mail and walked away from the mailboxes. She glanced in our direction and I looked away a little too late. She went into our building.
“She’s the new girl,” Lauren said, biting her lip. Someone had just moved in upstairs.
“Ah,” I said, trying not to show how turned on I was. “So it was her stomping around at three in the morning and flushing the toilet.”
We got out of the car, went inside, and peeled away one another’s clothes within seconds of locking the door. We made it to the bed, after all. I rolled her onto her stomach. She arched her back, parted her legs. I made it last.
•
But you want to hear about the girl with the junk mail:
Lauren ran into her one day, down at the mailbox. I wondered later if Lauren had been hanging around out there, orchestrating a bumping into, ‘cause that’s just how she put it.
“Guess who I bumped into today?”
“Hm?” I was eating a slice of pizza.
“Tasha.” We never got her last name. I don’t think she got ours.
“And that would be?” Talking around a wad of cheese and mushrooms.
She pointed at the ceiling. I raised my eyebrows.
A few days later, Tasha came over for dinner. We watched a movie, talked small, talked embarrassing movie geek trivia, talked sex.
We liked her. She was sweet and friendly and had a quiet about her, a stillness, a sense of control. I was wrong about her eyes: they weren’t black. They were light brown, mahogany. They were entrancing.
So we were buddies. I was married, I loved my wife, she loved me, and neither of us had ever said anything about an open marriage. Even then, the idea was repulsive. But what I was thinking had nothing to do with an open marriage — there would be no men bedding my wife, nor would I fuck around. We, as one, would have this girl. She’d be ours.
That’s how we justified it.
Tasha would go home. We’d sit in silence for five minutes and then we’d fuck on the floor or on the couch or on the table. Afterwards, we’d wonder aloud if she’d heard us.
Two days before it happened, Lauren slid my cock from her mouth. I lay there waiting. When she did nothing, I opened my eyes. She held me, slick and shining. I could see my pulse. Her lips were wet, her eyes heavy.
“Are you thinking of her?” Her voice was toneless, without an indication of intent.
What could I say? I nodded.
“Good.” Her eyes flashed and she went back to work. I finished with my fists in her hair and she crawled up my stomach, dribbling. She pressed her lips to mine, flooding my mouth with what I’d given her.
Move that line a little further back, why don’t you?
“Good,” she said again, sliding herself onto me.
•
They went shopping. Isn’t that just the cutest fucking thing you’ve ever heard? You imagine them looking at dresses and silverware or some shit, right?
Yeah, me too. Only they went shopping at the lingerie joint in the mall. They shopped for teddies and bras together.
“Yeah?” I figured maybe she was kidding.
“Yeah.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“Hers,” she said, half smiling, giving her head an unsure shake. “Maybe it was mine.”
“Yeah?” I was usually more verbose. I was having trouble thinking straight. I could feel it coming; I knew where this was going. Not just this conversation but the whole damned thing. “You get anything nice?”
“No. We just looked.” She touched her bottom lip. “We tried on a few things.”
“Yeah?” I set down my half-eaten slice of pizza. My throat was dry. My nuts did a dance.
“Mm-hm.” She was close to getting fucked atop a tepid pizza. “I saw her tits.”
I tried to Yeah? again but only managed a croak. I knocked back my root beer — the hard beverage of choice of swingers everywhere. “Tell me everything.”
•
And here we are, at the beginning of the end.
I spent that last Friday before things went insane working late. A very important client made some very unreasonable demands. Everyone in my department stayed late and made the fucker happy. I got home tired and hungry, wanting only food and sleep.
Lauren and Tasha were on the couch together, watching TV, Lauren lying with her head on the armrest, Tasha sitting on the other end, holding Lauren’s feet. Hoo-fucking-boy.
I kissed Lauren and dropped into my chair.
“Tough day?”
“Yeah,” I said. My eyes kept drifting from the TV to Lauren’s feet, right there on Tasha’s lap. Yeah, oh yeah. Here it comes.
We pretended to watch TV for a little while, then Tasha stood up. She walked to the television, clicked it off. Lauren and I looked at one another. We were a little slack-jawed.
Tasha faced us. She licked her lips once and, in her hushed and steady voice toppled our world with six simple words:
“I need you to fuck me.”
We fucked her.
•
My wife gasped, tracing her finger around the spider tattoo located beneath Tasha’s panty line. She kissed it. Then she slid Tasha’s panties down to her feet and sighed. She sounded hungry.
Tasha kicked away her panties and sank into my chair. Except for a neat little tuft, she was smooth down there, smooth and perfect and holy fucking shit my wife’s mouth was so close, so, so close. Lauren’s lips parted, grew closer, closer still to the flower waiting to be —
Wait. Hold on. This isn’t one of those stories. The colorful metaphors, the prose as purple as the head of my cock — they’re fine someplace else, but we’re talking about the real world. There will be no flowers moistened as if with morning dew here. There will be only fuck and cock and pussy and cum.
My wife ate Tasha’s pussy. Her tongue darted up and down across the girl’s labia, her fingers spreading them, working them. She dipped low and pressed her mouth to Tasha’s asshole, working the girl’s clit with her thumb.
Tasha slid her tits from her bra and began to squeeze them, eyes closed. I dropped my pants and, spitting into my hand, began to work myself. Lauren had at least one finger in each hole, and she was grunting, gasping, her face slick against Tasha’s glistening cunt.
I stood beside the chair and seized Tasha’s hair with my spit-shined hand. She twisted toward me and took me into her mouth. A few minutes passed just like that, and then Tasha pushed me away. Her face was expressionless, but I knew what she wanted.
I fell to my knees and joined my wife, nudged her aside. We were like two dogs at the same bowl. My hands found Tasha’s tits. Lauren didn’t like her nipples pinched. Tasha did. She arched her back and pressed herself to my face. Lauren nudged in, lapping at Tasha. We kissed for awhile, sucking the girl’s moisture from each other’s lips, her hands working my cock.
Soon we were a tangle of flesh.
I was 18 again. I came three times that night.
The first time onto my fist. They rolled on our bed, gasping and grunting and spinning into a sixty-nine position. I stood at the edge of the bed and I watched them, unable to stop myself from finishing. Lauren saw what happened and they crawled over to where I stood. Tasha kissed it from my hand, from the head of my cock. Lauren kissed it from her lips.
The second time I filled Tasha’s mouth. She swallowed it, shared it with no one. She came up for a kiss. She tasted like my dick, like Lauren’s cunt, like her own. I was still hard. She slammed herself onto me. Lauren watched, working herself with both hands.
The third time was in my wife, who was bent across the bed, devouring Tasha.
We went down on that girl a lot over the coming weeks. I memorized every line on that fucking spider. I saw the damn thing when I closed my eyes to sleep, quivering and shaking as the muscles in her stomach tensed.
Take what you’ve read so far and toss in a few variations, even a few of your deepest, most shameful fantasies, and you might come close to imagining the three weeks that followed.
We stopped crossing lines. We destroyed them.
We fucked. Every night. Several times a night. And in ever imaginable way.
One weekend, Tasha went away. Where, I don’t know. Lauren and I couldn’t finish without her. I went limp in her mouth; she slapped my hand away after five minutes, irritated.
We watched the video we’d shot with Tasha and finished ourselves. We fucked up at our jobs. I ignored my freelance work, my inbox bursting with unread pleas from worried clients.
And then the cunt left us.
She said nothing. She woke up one day, left, and we never saw her again.
Lauren lost her job and started drinking. She cried when I destroyed the video. She cried even harder when she missed her period and the test came back positive. I wondered if I’d be able to look at the kid.
I dreamed of Tasha. Often. Lauren and I stopped having sex, though we continued to burn. Some time later, after things had fallen apart, I realized that during the entire affair I’d come inside my wife once. Just once.
Four months after Tasha passed through our lives like a fucking tornado, I came home from work to find Lauren lying naked on the bed. She was showing.
The spider tattoo on her stomach looked just like Tasha’s.
“I hope it’s enough,” she said, touching the tattoo.
It wasn’t.
• • •
is the pen-name of a New Orleans-based author and publisher who doesn’t want some people in his life to know that he has a dirty mind. He likes zombies and sex and Spider Man, and his real last name rhymes with Chopin.
