Free Affection by Krissy Kneen Page B

a father and a brother and my family would not let me stay in a house where there would be men. Strange men that could not be trusted. But she was welcome to visit, to sleep over. She brought some videotapes and we dragged a mattress into the lounge room and shuffled across to let the dogs curl around our feet. She had taped Video Hits off the television and I watched and listened. At first I didn’t like the music, which was poppy and jangly and brash, but when Emily sang along, the songs gained a kind of exuberant energy. We pressed rewind and I learned how to sing the choruses and we stood up on the mattress and danced and she held my hand.
    We lounged back against the pillows and I whispered about my longing for John the clarinet player, but with her beside me the longing seemed less directional, more general. She commiserated with me. She touched my hand and I relaxed into the joy of this new kind of sharing.
    She slipped another video into the player; a musical. I had my own musicals to watch, I liked Singing in the Rain , but I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes more. I sometimes practiced being Marilyn in front of the mirror, holding her pose, enjoying the generous curves of my body in the way Marilyn might have done, posing, moving, leaning, blowing myself a kiss.
    Emily’s musical was The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It took Marilyn’s primping and preening and amplified it. I watched under the covers in the dark and there was the heat of Emily’s body so close
to mine and sometimes she reached out to me and held me by the shoulders and mouthed the words of a song, a love song, a sex song, and it was all I could do not to touch her in return.
    At some point she stopped the tape and made me stand and taught me the dance steps to a particular song and it was all about hips and tits and a slow pelvic grinding. Perhaps I didn’t care about the clarinet boy. Perhaps I didn’t need to suffer from an unrequited longing.
    When the film was over, she slipped in her Video Hits tape and turned the volume down so the pop songs became lullabies. We lay side by side and she edged closer to me.
    â€œIf I were gay I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. I would be out and proud.”
    â€œYes,” I told her. “If I liked women I would kiss them in public.”
    â€œHold hands at school.”
    â€œI’d tell my family without any angst.”
    â€œMaybe I wouldn’t tell my brother,” she said, “but I’d go live with the girl I loved. And I’d have a wedding. I’d have a Rocky Horror wedding and everyone would wear fishnet stockings.”
    We laughed and we settled more comfortably onto the mattress and I heard her breathing soften into tiredness, and I forced my breath to keep pace with hers. Her hand was between our bodies and I could feel the heat of her fingers almost touching my thigh. I shifted my leg slightly and there was the brush of her fingertips. I imagined that she must be awake, too. I could feel the thud of my heart and the
thunder of it should be rocking the mattress. It was certainly shaking my body. My leg would be trembling to the rhythm of it. She would feel it through the tip of her fingers. I reached out the palm of my hand till I could feel the heat off her chest, not close enough to touch her, but close enough to hold her body heat. I clamped my thighs together as my stomach succumbed to that wonderful weightless surge that I associate with desire.
    It took most of the night for me to move my finger in slow increments toward her pajama top, and when it was within reach, I touched it. Not hard enough to feel the body beneath, but I could feel the fabric, and the sensation energized me. I was high with it, wakeful. I opened my eyes occasionally, imagining that sooner or later I would find that her eyes were open, too. I played out the scene, a sustained stare, a leaning into each other, a kiss. A fumbling under each other’s pajama tops.
    â€œIf