Free Fresh Girls & Other Stories by Evelyn Lau Page B

first blanket around in the air, attempting to peek under the mattress. When his hand grabs my bare thigh he chuckles and does a little caper of triumph before quickly joining me under the covers.
    “Ah, you are a sneaky one, aren’t you? Thought you fooled me, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,” I say humbly, “I am very sneaky.”
    “Hmm? What’s that again?”
    “It was very sneaky of me to hide like that.”
    The old man has had enough of the preliminaries, enough foreplay. He pulls me to him by the scruff of my neck and I wrap my arms around his freckled, slightly oily back. He smells of the type of cologne worn by young, muscular men with sculpted hair and faces in magazine ads. Again he shoves his tongue into my mouth; it seems to have doubled in length and thickness since we met at the door. He works it vigorously around my gums for a while. I stroke his grainy back and think of biting his tongue off at the roots. I think of spitting it back into his surprised face, where it will wriggle and twitch before flopping like a small dead trout onto the pillow, oozing blood.
    “You do like to kiss and hug, don’t you?”
    “I like to kiss and hug
you,”
I say, pulling back from the tongue that is still disappointingly attached to the blurry old face beside me in bed.
    “Cuddles,” he says. “You are, aren’t you? You’re Cuddles,” and swiftly he pulls me against him and inserts a cunning leg between my legs. I stifle a small scream as the edge of the metal clasp of his watch accidentally scrapes a few inches of skin off my back, and then another scream as he changes position and in doing so takes another skin sample off my upper arm. Then comes a series of karate jabs, his bony elbows, knees, and shins collidingwith soft parts of my body as he tussles with me on the bed, clambering around me and then on top, forgetting to use the mattress instead of my body as a support for his weight.
    “Honey,” he is saying. “Honey? Please? Please please please please please? Honey? Honey? Can I go in?”
    Most of the time he cannot “go in,” although he tries. The trying is worse than the “going in.” He takes his limpish penis, which I have yet to look at close up, preferring to close my eyes right about now, and attempts to squish, squeeze, prod, bend and otherwise abuse it into place between my thighs. It contorts unhappily, but after a few minutes of what must be agony decides to give up the struggle and go relatively stiff, long enough for it to be inserted, whereupon it instantly falls asleep again. We do not always manage to reach this stage of hasty insertion, but I am always glad when we do because otherwise the fumblings go on for much longer. Once the penis has “gone in” and collapsed, it refuses to be handled again and the evening is over, except for one or two more searing tongue-searches of my tonsils and another soul-crushing hug.
    Tonight he enters, goes predictably limp, withdraws wormishly. In the weeks that we have known each other, he has not yet been able to come, although this is evidently what we are striving for. We are making progress;during the first week he had not been able to coax any life whatsoever into his reluctant member.
    “Thank you, honey,” he breathes into my neck. “Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    He takes my chin in his hand and turns my face towards his, moving his arm underneath me. I lose another strip of skin to his watch.
    “Thank you,” he says meaningfully.
    “You’re welcome,” I repeat, extracting my chin and other body parts and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. I want to hold my head in my hands. I want to run my hands over my body to make an inventory of tonight’s damages. What I want to do to the old man, I haven’t figured out yet, although the image of the severed tongue flipping about gives me a moment of satisfaction.
    “Oh, just you wait,” he says from the bed as I cross the room with my clothes in my arms, heading for the