Free The Purple Room by Mauro Casiraghi Page B

keep up, but I’m afraid I’m making
a poor showing. I’m busy giving it my all when Antonella grabs my tongue
between her teeth and starts to suck it. She sucks it into her mouth with such
force that it’s like she wants to tear it out. I try to pull it back, but I
can’t. The harder I resist, the more she sucks it back into her mouth. It
hurts, but I can’t say anything. The moan that rises from my throat sounds like
a groan of pleasure, so I surrender, imagining my tongue, with my whole brain
attached behind it, being sucked into that vortex.
    Antonella
breaks away from me with a pop .
    “Come with
me,” she murmurs.
    I follow her,
dazed by the kiss and the whisky on an empty stomach. She leads me by the hand
into her bedroom. In the dark, we move forward until we reach the bed.
    “Lie down.”
    I fall back
onto the bed. She lights a couple of candles that are sitting on a chest of
drawers. She undresses, then comes and kneels over me. I like Antonella.
Usually in these situations the autopilot takes over. There’s no need to think.
Everyone does what they should and that’s all there is to it. This time,
though, my autopilot doesn’t work. I feel guilty being here, on this bed, like
someone about to cheat on his wife. Antonella refuses to be discouraged. Her
autopilot works extremely well and is enough for both of us. She takes care of
everything. She unbuttons, undresses, strokes, kisses, licks, sucks, mounts,
gasps, accelerates, slows down, accelerates, slows down again, breaths in and
out, in and out, backs up, starts again, goes, goes, goes, gallops faster and
faster until she reaches the finish line with a wild cry of, “UAAAHHH!”
    Then she
collapses on top of me. She kisses my ear. She slips under the sheets. And goes
to sleep. I lie there, stunned, watching the light cast by the candles on the
chest of drawers, relieved that I managed to get there. That, at least, is one
thing I haven’t forgotten.

 
 
      The scratch on my hand is bleeding. I
must have scraped it against the sheets while I was sleeping. It’s a red line
running across my palm, cutting all the other lines in half: Life, Luck, Love.
    Antonella’s in
the bathroom. It was the shower running that woke me. At first I felt a little
disoriented, not sure where I was. Then I saw the denim shirt thrown over the
back of the chair and I remembered. I didn’t get an urge to run away, like I
had other times. What I’d like to do is roll over and go back to sleep, but
instead I sit up and try to fix my hair.
    Antonella
comes out of the bathroom wearing a robe. Something about her is different from
yesterday but I can’t put my finger on what.
    “Good
morning,” she says, seeing me awake. She sits on the edge of the bed, smelling
of coconuthair conditioner.
    “Did you sleep
well?”
    “Yes. What
time is it?”
    “Almost
eleven. I have a class at school in ten minutes and I’m still like this!”
    She jumps up,
takes off her bathrobe and starts fishing around in the closet.
    “What about
you?” she asks. “Don’t you have to go to the office or something?”
    “I’m on vacation.”
    “Lucky you.”
She pulls out a bra and squints at it. “I can’t see a thing. Do you mind if I
turn on the light?”
    “Open the
shutters if you want to.”
    Antonella,
naked, crosses the room. She moves around the bed on her way to the window.
Blades of sunlight filter through the shutters, capturing particles of dust and
cutting her body into slices of light and shade. It is in the instant that she
places her hands against the shutters and pushes to open them that it happens.
It’s the feeling you get when your heart misses a beat. A sudden void in the
center of my chest. I lean towards the image before me: the woman, opening the
shutters, letting the light in. I hold my breath, staring at her figure
silhouetted in the bright rectangle of the window frame. Her hair, falling
loose down her back, the outline of her shoulders, her breasts