the apparition,
this glow of beautiful young female flesh.
Holly slipped easily into the group, folded herself into their greetings.
She leaned back on her elbows, propping herself up so she could look up at the sky.
The trees threw mottled light and shade onto the ground beside her. Light like confetti.
‘Huge party,’ someone was saying and Holly thought, ‘Fete’. In the novel by James
Salter they would call it that, a fete.
She wanted to talk about A Sport and a Pastime . She was confused by it, disoriented.
There was a rare break in the conversation and she could mention the book casually.
If only her friends did not find reading such an ugly chore, suitable only for nerds
and geeks. She could tell them about the passage where the man puts the pillow under
the girl’s naked hips, a brief moment of being still in one room when all the rest
of the book is lurching from town to town, party to party, dinner to drinks to dancing
in Parisian bars. She had felt a visceral longing to go to Paris, now, without preamble,
to run into the fete. And then this one still moment when the lover is inside her,
driven to the rim with his balls brushing against her flesh. He reached down and
traced the wet circle of her cunt with his finger and ejaculated, so suddenly that
Holly was forced to put the book down for a moment, trying to calm the suddenly frantic
beating of her own heart.
Holly had fallen asleep, her head resting on the stockinged legs of the girl on the
cover of the book. She had dreamed the position. She was in his place, her own balls
swinging gently, slapping against the young girl’s thighs. She reached down then
and felt the wet slit, not the one that her own cock was buried in, a second cunt,
thick wet lips. She traced them gently. The young girl lifted her hips and Holly
felt her own strange little penis gripped in the most delicate glove. The girl turned
her head to the side, her cheek down and pressed into the bed with each thrust of
her hips.
‘Don’t worry,’ the girl had said to her in her sweet French accent. ‘ It is impossible
to control your dreams. The forbidden ones are incandescent. They burn through resolutions
like parchment .’
The girl turned her head back into the sheet and began to grunt. Holly pushed forward,
into her, trying to stop the terrible sound, the sound of an animal, a pig perhaps.
She reached down to the second cunt and felt it wet, a perfect ring of muscle. It
came to her then, suddenly.
‘I’m in the wrong hole,’ she said, a terror pouring down over her shoulders. A trickle
of ice dripping down her spine.
‘No such thing as wrong,’ the French girl grunted. But when she turned her head it
wasn’t the French girl at all. Mandy grinned up at her. Holly tried to pull out of
the woman’s arse but her penis was held fast.
‘I’m in the wrong one,’ she said, her eyes tearing up, her hands brushing against
the great pale globes of flesh, tight as knees at her crotch. Her balls were poised,
tensed, she shouldn’t spill, not here, not in a woman’s arse, a dirty place, a place
for secret defecations. She shouldn’t ejaculate here where it was so wrong. Her head
tipped back, she felt her balls tighten, her mouth became a perfect o, she was swallowing
the universe, stars and planets, hurtling past her teeth. But then she was awake
blinking in the dark, restless on the sweat-wet sheets. Only it wasn’t dark. She
felt her flesh pulsing as if she was indeed ejaculating in time to the pulsing of
a pale blue light. Everything was illuminated by it. She lifted her cheek off the
cover of the book, felt the line of it branded on her face.
Her penis was gone. Or, more correctly, had never been there at all. She reached
down and felt her vulva twitching as if it were kissing the tips of her fingers.
When Holly held her hand up to her face, her fingers were moon-bright.
Now, outside the history building, she blinked up at Jennifer’s face, refocusing.
‘Are you