Emily by E. Doyle-Gillespie Anatomy

I laid on Don's futon, one knee propped up, one hand touching the floor, and stared at the ceiling. He'd said "a minute or two" for a shower after we were done and asked if I didn't want to join him. I whispered "No thanks," and kissed him lightly. He probably went off to the porcelain room thinking that it was because I wanted to just laze around in the smell of our sex for a while.

I heard him piss and flush.

The truth of the matter is, I just don't like seeing him nude. It's the look of his body. He's bony and sickly like a caricature of an intellectual. Pale. Weak. And that ragged beard make sit all the worse. No artistry. No lines. No curves. No scars. He couldn't have looked any other way.

When we were like that ... in bed I mean ... I would look down and see the top of his greasy head while he sucked my breasts or went down on me. Between cover and tossing positions, I'd catch sight of his side, a thigh, sometimes his nothing chest, but I was spared seeing all of him at once.

It was dead functioning with Don. He would have a need, a lot like Alex would, and he'd come to see me to do something about it. Actually, I was the one who usually wound up walking those few blocks through our artsy little section of town to his apartment. I didn't mind, really. I didn't care. That's why he liked me. Usable. As far as I could tell, he thought of all women this way, but I was the only one that he knew who would yawn and act out his little shit.

He came back from the bathroom dripping.

"It's all yours if you want it," he said. Nothing covered him but water and the redness that his powerful shower head left on his skin. As he began to dry himself, I watched the shaking of his wrinkled little penis. Now I also wanted to wash. Without a word, I rose up off of the futon and padded nude to the bathroom.

Don's eyes covered my body until I shut the door behind me.

"You want to go for coffee or something?" he called eagerly to me through the door. I turned on the shower.

I was already stepping under that powerful spray. I shut my eyes as the water lashed my face. Screwdrivers, Alex, and Thelonius Monk

Climbing the stairs to Beth's is just flight after flight, up, up, up until you can feel the heat rising in your back and face. As usual, I began the ascent, but halfway there I ended up dragging the scarf, army jacket and heavy wool sweater that I'd worn.

Sweat ran down my sides.

Beth's door was ajar and the noises of the salon dribbled out into the hall - little scattered snatches of here-and-there dialogues, rhythmic palaver, clinking glasses and a constant thread of jazz.

Like always, I checked myself.

Maybe I thought someone had hung an "I've Just Sex With Don" sign around my neck. Wouldn't that have been great? I'm always wearing the same thing when I show up at Beth's - worn-out, black, pull-over sweater, tattered jeans and my boots. A reading calls for that sort of ratty beatnik look, I suppose.

There were the usual with a smattering of unfamiliarity. On the floor. On a sofa. Legs folded in a corner. Talking to each other with big gestures and knotted brows. I scanned the room and slipped between their words.

"Excuse me."

The glasses and bottle at the bar reminded me of how dry I was. Alcohol never really quenches my thirst, but it's always the first thing I go for when I need a drink, and places like Beth's always make me need a drink. Always. I always drink.

Beth sat the orange juice and vodka decanters close to the front of the bar - obviously in honor of my scheduled appearance - and a black, plastic ash tray was right on-hand, as well.

I was sloppily preparing my drink when a palm slid up my back and tugged at my ear. I'm not quite sure if the discomfort I felt at seeing him showed.

"Hi, Alex," I said. "You want anything?" I gestured at the bar. He just stood there, half-smiling. As usual, he played his role scherzando - hands in pockets, shoulders slumped. Without the type of awkward bob that Don has, Alex leaned forward and kissed me. It was small and quick, our lips slightly parted from a few weeks before when I'd taken him back to my basement apartment. We'd run into each other at The Top of the World Cafe' and ended up buying drinks for each other and talking for hours. That was the first time he ever told me about his exgirlfrend realizing she was a lesbian and leaving him for an English professor. He tried to hide the bitter part of him. Smirking. Laughing. It was just some big joke.

I wasn't sure if I took him home because I saw something human or because I didn't.

At Beth's he was in much better spirits, but I could still see what was in him. Hell, it was always there just not always in the driver's seat. He told me that he and Nina were chatting in the kitchen and asked me to join them.

"Sure, in a minute," I said.

I watched him walk away.

It's creepy. Alex goes into my underwear drawer and finds the handcuff as if he knows where I keep them. "Lay back," he tells me. "Close your eyes and relax." I do. I try. My muscles experience that rushing of anticipation and fear that I get.

The steel of the cuffs clanks and chatters as he paces up to the bed and lays them, for a moment, on the night table.

I lick my lips.

Gently, his hands encircle my wrists. I grow moist with his touch and he guides my arms up over my head.

I begin to open an eye and he reprimands me.

"I said to keep them shut."

I obey.

Now the clank clanking of law enforcement steel resumes as he picks up my restraints and runs the chain behind the bed post.

A sharp snapping, and the steel delicately bites at my flesh.

Now I wish I had gotten those padded ones that are made for kinky sex instead of the regular police issue.

I bet that he's looking at me now ... enjoying the sight of me bound like this.

The rushing in my muscles heightens, tingles. My heart forces itself up into my throat.

He looks at me, I know, because of his breathing - shallow heavy breathing with his lips shut. A chained woman is his artwork. He puts his heart and soul into women like me.

I feel his lips brush my belly and the muscles move on their own.

Alcohol smell...

Delicate lips, reminding me of a woman's kiss, gliding slowly down to my core ... my body twitches and rocks every time he applies pressure ... tiny electric shocks ... God!

When he finally reaches my crotch I spread my legs with a smooth motion ... and there is a glimpse of his face. "Emily, I told you not to look!"

Again, the odor of that bar. There is a shuddering in me.

I shut my eyes tightly, but he is already in motion, moving to the head of the bed and undoing his tie. I toy with protesting for a second, but soon his makeshift blindfold is binding my already shut eyes.

He returns to me.

"You have a beautiful cunt," he tells me ... a firm kiss on my labia that translates as a moan. This feeds him and he continues. He traces just over my lips with his tongue. Then, ever so slightly ... slowly ... he slips his thumbs into me.

The rushing and energy in my muscles are quickening, carried along by the warm ripples coming from my cunt ... ripples ... ripples flowing as his tongue finds my clitoris and begins to rhythmically toy with it. Electric sparks climb with tiny steel claws up my back and I arch, gasp, bite my lip.

He love my moaning.

My hands strain against the chain to instinctively claw at the sheets and clutch his hair. Chains...

He receives another trophy as I surrender an "Oh my God!"

The smell of liquor fills my head. Celia and Me

Beth snuck up behind me and slid an arm around my waist. A quick squeeze and she was in front of me.

"Hey kiddo, glad you made it. Did you see Celia? She's reading poems tonight, I think."

All of that hit me at once. This was going to be a much heavier evening than I'd expected.

"Celia's here," she repeated. I must have looked dazed.

"Yeah, I heard you."

"I know that the two of you aren't exactly close anymore..." She paused with a tight-lipped little grimace of a smile. "But she's still pretty down about her dad's passing. Maybe you could talk..."

That woke me the fuck up. I did a double take, searched my head and felt naked.

"Celia's father died?" It looked as if Beth was embarrassed for me, and I was embarrassed for that.

"When? Did I know?"

"Three weeks ago, Emily. Remember?"

Her tone was an irritating, condescending thing that only emphasized my nakedness.

"God, Beth, I feel so shitty. I'll ... I'll talk to her, okay? Really ..." And I was gone. Sometimes I just run away. I'll admit it. Sometimes it's best to just just get out. If I was going to talk to Celia at all that night, I was going to have to regroup and fix my head.

Had I known about her father? Had I even seen her once since that night at Christie's Half-Moon Cafe' when I told her that I couldn't go on? Cold seat was beginning now.

On the way to the kitchen I saw her. Celia was sitting in a director's chair that was part of a chatting semi-circle. All women of course. I hovered by the kitchen door for a moment so that I could hear the low, warm, throaty British tones coming from her side of the conversation. That was hard. Celia's voice had always beautiful to me and hearing it then made something drop inside. I wanted to hear my name. All of a sudden I caught myself really wanting to hear her say "Em ..."

I took a drink and pushed my way through the kitchen door.

A black guy I didn't know exited past me, and I was left standing in the doorway, slightly off-kilter, looking at Alex and Nina.

He turned to her and said "See? I told you your buddy was here." Habits

Nina switched the cigarette in her lips for the rim of a martini glass and raised her eyebrows in greeting.

I'm still reeling and groggy from climax as Nina rolls on to one side and takes my right nipple into her mouth. I stroke her short, jet black hair and moan with soreness and pleasure.

We've been making love for 3,000 hours in her studio and it seems like the more exhausted I get, the more ideas she gets.

She tells me what to do.

Roll over.

Now on your back.

Open your mouth.

One finger, okay, now two.

You have to ask first.

She kisses me and a finger sides up my ass.

Our wine glasses lay beside us on the bed, and every vibration that runs through the mattress makes them clink and ring. I imagine them as a pile of shattered crystal , Nina laughing as she tried to roll me into them.

She gets up from the bed abruptly and walks to her dresser. Beautiful. Beautiful body. Female body I love to watch. Lightly - muscled. Paper white. Nina. Touching, toying Nina.

A drawer is opened and I'm expecting her cock or a toy or something. Instead, she produces a little glass vile.

"Are you going to share this time?" I ask. Now I am leaning back on my elbows and watching her through the tangled, matted hair that's hanging over my eyes. She smiles over her shoulder.

"You're going to be my mirror," she tells me. She whisks her fingers through the trim Euromodel hair cut and smiles all of the way back to the bed.

Again, I close my eyes and lay back as her palm traces up my leg, over my bare crotch to my belly. She keeps caressing my breasts, sides, stomach, thighs as her other hand taps out a line on my pubes. A strange numbness in the freshly-shaven flesh....

Nina motioned for me to come and joined them.

"It's been a while."

We kissed. Like Alex, she pursed her cherry pout and captured my lower lip.

She was wearing all black again. Black ankle-high pseudo boots. Black tights. Sheer black turtleneck blouse. Every time I saw her, I imaged a wardrobe of identical Ninja outfits.

There was a time before that night when the three of us were alone. He compared Nina to me, saying I was more "womanly" with my larger, rounder breasts and wider hips. He squeezed my thigh and said "muscular" and "peasant stock". He liked it and more than Nina's slim exercised look.

"Artificial. Like she wants to be androgynous or something."

In my mind's eye I still saw the teenage layers of blubber that encircled me for years, and could barely feel the hours of weights and running that trimmed my blobby body down to the sturdy, muscular fullness that he loved. I was still big, full.

"Much more feminine. Buxom. Kind of Earth Mothery."

In Beth's kitchen he was the same, scalding our thighs with his bloodshot gaze. A drowsy impish schoolboy smile bubbled up form his booze. I could feel him beginning to tighten his clamps on my nipples and wrap me in leather.

"So tell me, Emily," So damned drunken smug. "Who's being sketched now?"

I pictured my pads and pencils scattered in front of the sofa at home, blank and unchallenged.

"Nothing lately. Nobody. With work ... and I'm taking a class and everything ... I just haven't been too creative." The hollow quaking in my stomach continued on about Celia.

"I've still got the one you did of Rebecca during the summer. Remember? The one where she's just in her undershirt, eating grapes."

"Yeah, I remember that one. I sketched her in July, I think."

Nina moved close to my ear. "You seem out of sorts, Em."

It felt strange saying this in front of them. Nina and Alex were the last people to whom I wanted to give a grand tour. But I said "What about Celia's father?"

"He died."

I swear, they almost said it in unison.

"I mean, what ... I mean ..."

"The old faggot drank himself to death." Nina came in on the tail end of Alex's sentence like clock work. "You knew that her father was an alcoholic, right?"

"Well, no..."

"We don't know for sure, but it seems to be the case. Worse of it is, he didn't leave anything worth a shit to his bouncing baby girl. Oh, sounds like we're getting started."

Nina cued me into the hushed tones in the other room. Voices were lowering and chairs were shifting as my little crowd fell all over itself at Beth's request. Precious Vessel

beth ... she always spells it with a small "b" ... would guide the salons like her own little chess match. Exlovers would read after each, or she would set up the room to draw attention to one person or another. There were times when the tension that she created was actually exciting, but that night I was swimming in too much to pay attention. Beth introduced the first reader, a woman poet ... something about stormy seas and lighthouses ... and then came a writer and his fucked-up, desert mescaline trip. Celia was nursing her book of poems all the while.

I let myself drift off.

I taste myself on Celia's fingers. Her thumb, and her index, and the rough palm of her hand are damp with me and I kiss her there as we sway to her old Van Morrison tape. We are in her narrow room full of books and scented candles and she is wearing a man's white t-shirt.

Celia has rhythm, and she lips along with the Irishman as I kiss her ridges and lines.

"I only got this tape for 'Moondance', but .... mmmmmm .... I love this song. Stoned me...."

I don't speak.

"Don't you love this song, Emily?"

I don't speak. I don't open my eyes. Maybe I moan an "Uh huh", but I don't speak. My nipples are hard and the muscles in my legs are trembling like the adrenaline moments before high school swim meets . I am wet and still bare the signature of the slow fingering she gave me just a minute before - rumpled summer skirt , and full, trickling lips. Wet, swollen cunt.

Her Moondance begins. Her hands leave my mouth ... little traces of moist cunt and lip down my neck ... and find their way to my breasts. She caresses me through floral cotton.

"Marvelous night...."

Celia's hips are full , wide and round. They stretch the denim of her jeans, making them look almost painted on. I hold them, squeeze them, reach around and cup her ass the way she loves. She closes her eyes, draws her wide, red mouth up into a smile and tilts her head back. As her swaying grows deeper and her crotch comes to press against mine, my mouth finds her neck.

When I looked around again, Celia was letting her little poetry book catch the tear that had brimmed over in her left eye. Was the last poem that moving? Who had just read anyway? Clumsily, Celia got up, moved from her flock on the floor, and took the position that was reserved for each reader in beth's old wooden chair. It made her head so much higher than all of the listeners.

"Precious Vessel," she began. I closed my eyes and listened to line of Celia's father, old man intellectual, dead, and cremated, his ashes stuffed into an opaque glass urn. A bottle. Celia's voice was warm and full and deep as she paced slowly through her poem.

Her mother, the old society woman who could never make eye contact with me, moved through the poem, showing the urn to friends like an urn is an urn is an urn and Celia can only think "handling my father". I heard her mouth form the words.

I began to well up now. Not just Celia's sadness was doing this to me. It was the urn. It was the image I got of the ashes in the bottle - Celia's father in his dust to dust in the mother's hands, passed to her sister so that she could see the beautiful, beautiful black glass. It was the image of the urn passed to her uncle who drags a gnarled finger down the neck of the bottle and nods approvingly.

I thought to myself, almost aloud, "What kind of people are these?"

Again, I was filling up. The sick feeling was blossoming in the pit of my stomach and I was sure everyone in the room was staring at me. I was naked again.

There were Celia's memories of chess and Whitman and sweet-smelling, wet fireplace wood for Celia while they passed the bottle from hand to hand. They say that it is a beautiful thing.

Broken body burned and bottled like only an old man's ashes.

Again, I was naked and crying in a roomful of strangers.

Before the meeting reached its last reader I had to go. Gathering up my clothes and books, I picked my way over and around people to get out into the hallway. A window or a skylight must have been open somewhere, because cold night air was pouring down the corridor, chilling my tears and sweat. I shivered. It's time to leave, I thought. I have to go.

A car's horn echoed out in the street and I turned my head. Motion. I felt someone near and looked to see Celia's face. Her eyes weren't as moist as mine, but she also showed her pain. We just stared and each other for what seemed like the longest time.

"You all right?" she finally asked. I sort of smiled and began to shoulder my satchel of books.

"Fine," I answered. "Your poem ... you just always ... I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."

I think she said something, maybe even reached for me as I turned and headed back down the stairwell. There was another gust of cold air. I shivered as I made my descent to the street.