© Sauce*Box, Winter 1996/97.
All rights revert to author.
Silking Eve
by Pat O'Brien
A lady came to re-felt the roof of the bay window. The exhaust of the tired, blue van woke me. Then the screech and clang of rear doors drew me to watch through the open bedroom window. The bay roof was six feet straight down.
Her movement was determined, experienced and economical. Ladder, ropes, a hoisting of rolling, tar scented carpet. She was strong, stocky. Wearing a sleeveless top and cut-offs, her muscles tensing as she rolled the bitumen, wielded the cutter.
I did not think her attractive and was unsurprised at her employ. From my vantage above her I could examine her without discovery. Her hair seemed coarse, caught untidily at the nape...a wedge of sweat darkened between her shoulder blades. I caught a glimpse of dark, curling hair as she reached forward, wet arcs under her arms. Her jeans defied her and rode her buttocks, revealing a hard curve of hip, a graceful cleft and muscled cheeks.
Midday, hot and the sun glancing off the sheen of her; my idle reverie and unfocussed but intense surveillance. I did not think I moved but she stilled, a moment and then she looked up from her crouched endeavour, eased to rest on her heels; a choreography of taut, fit flesh and limb-lines. I had the impression of someone entirely unsurprised but carefully coiled.
Violet eyes.
I had always felt the colour to be not-real, the mannequin effect of special contact lenses gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Violet eyes, spaced wide over a strong, curved nose, planing cheeks and square chin. Wild, escaping, sweat-damp hair tendrilling olive skin. Eyebrows heavy, untamed, sharp horizontal exclamations slashing her wide brow. Untidy, heavy non-committal lips.
A scar. A broad, puckering river flowing harshly from where her left earlobe would be, runnelling her cheek and reaching for shadows below her chin. Now shamefully revealed in the tilt of her head. It rushed in hasty, white alarm over tanned chest and burrowed beneath her top.
A shocking, churning white torrent.
I felt surprisingly comfortable. A mutual scrutiny. Normally shy, I felt a hasty retreat would be inexcusably rude following my intimate surveillance.
"Coffee?" Seemed right.
"Washroom...beer."
Her voice was more shocking than her scar, which itself paled in the violet glow. Rounded and elegant; public school. It projected steadily, reached amicably across the space and commanded. I felt dipped in oil, a heady sense of anglicised Persia. A delight. What followed significantly more surprised me. She stood, tensed, leapt and eased fluidly through the window. My back-step was clumsy, sharp against her weaving grace. It was an entirely rational move, if invasive, on her part. An understanding of permitted entry and the nearest available entrance.
When facing the unexpected, do the obvious.
I gestured to the en-suite bathroom.
She made a mess. Filling the porcelain with brimming cold and ducking her head, cupped palmfuls of water over her face, hair, nape. It ran in chuckling rivers over her shoulders, poured on her sweat-dampened back and splashed over the floor. It escaped over the basin brim with glee, dripped the cliff of the unit and puddled. Then she raised her arm, a careless curve, dark sticky hair nestling in the lean pit, leaned and scooped.
It was a celebration. Her intense enjoyment, the slaking, oblivion, and sudden smile as she stood to face me, wet and pleased. A mingle of water and sweat.
The scar resisted her mouth on the left, anchoring it sternly while her lips arced gracefully right and up, charming her cheek. A textbook, lop-sided grin; powerfully simple. A blazing reward.
"Beer?" A demand; reminder.
Having risen to peer I wore only a crumpled T-shirt. Jeffrey Rogers, worn pale blue with washing, it sported a faded picture. `What is this thing called love?' the man queried, his eyes feasted the upturned lustrous lips of the women. `A Jeffrey Rogers T-shirt, silly' she quipped. The cloth barely covered my thigh. Under it I was naked.
I did not feel self-conscious as I drew the panties over my legs, eased them up and settled the elastic on my hips. She watched with distracted interest, no more nor less than any women would watch another, then followed me downstairs with easy tread and eager thirst.
"Eve." I was rewarded as I proffered the beer. A rich syllable.
We took the cans to the patio, sat on the ridge of warm stone and popped the tabs. A strange companionship, quietly watching the bees busying in purple blooms, the hot green lawn alive with small jumping insects. The cat pounced, an exhibition to our audience, on pretend prey.
Eve chuckled. An easy warm, small welling, hosted deep and enjoyable from some core of her. That same which allowed her to seat to my right, the scar open to my gentle examination. She seemed rooted in herself, strong and certain, a wide plain of pain behind and forgiven. Her hands were wide, curved smoothly on the cold can, lifting and pressing with sureness against parted lips, her throat a welcome for the cool brew.
We did not speak. The silence was good, natural. I shifted more, my thighs sensitive to the harsh edge of slate. The stone warmed through the thin crotch, a remote pleasure as my eye roved the erratic, sweet path of a bumblebee cleaving the shrubbery. The heat, scent and colour lulling. It was pleasant and alive. It felt good to sit on the patio with Eve who I had known but an hour and spoken a mere several words. My skin is pale, against her tan. It seemed fragile and indefinite, underlining her dark certainess.
I had never thought of myself as fragile. She seemed safe, a strong place to be. An association bridging the small space of stone and bringing the musk of her employ. It seemed I breathed her in easily.
Like sitting on the top deck of an old bus on a short trip. Feeling the vibrations please my thighs. A faint knowledge that my lips are swollen and the pleasure of slipping my tongue sympathetically along them. A teasing thought that a fellow passenger may witness my small arousal, and complicity - that same is likely as I, aware as I. It is not threatening, it ends with the bus-stop, disembarkation. Transitory and futureless, encapsulated in a tiny moment.
I felt that, when we rose, Eve and I would disembark this non-threatening arousal. A same gender recognition, no more no less. I expected her to circumvent the house, mount her ladder and finish her task. There was a vague wish to be friends, drink cold beer in the heat again. Some indeterminate time.
She crumpled her can. An exclamation marking her rising, entered through the patio doors and vanished from view. I accepted her departure with my own plan for a shower, gulped the last of my beer and entered the cool of the house.
The contrast chilled my nipples and I peeped, absently, to see them brazen under the thin cotton. Almost with irritation at their sudden invitation, I brushed the back of my hand over them, wondering idly about pleasant masturbation in the shower. An image rose in my mind.
I had drawn a .gif from a newsgroup. Many in fact; but this one remained on the disk, it was so pleasing. A blonde woman, gold filtered, in a shower. Her arms raised, breasts lifting to the spray, nippling. The lean stretch of her stomach invited the slide of her own palm. The picture was a caught moment and of course it was innocent, simply a beautiful nude, cleverly photographed with pleasing lights. My imagination supplied the catch of her slender fingers in the gold curls of her mound and slipping entry in her damp whorls and crevices.
And I am not blonde and lean-tummied.
But I looked forward to the hot spray and the feel of the undercurve of my small breast. Its little weight in my hand and the peak a hard roll between my fingers. As I mounted the stairs my anticipation increased. Vague thoughts of my sloping waist, rounding tum and the tuck of my fingers into now eager inner folds.
With my mind rolling thus it took a moment to absorb Eve. Eve, sitting on the edge of the unmade bed. Looking less certain, but strong, her hands loose on the rumpled sheets. I was almost upon her when I noticed her. A strange sense of displacement as I gazed with mild unfocus into the upturned violet eyes.
Eyes which dropped and narrowed to the confession of my breasts. My awareness was uncertain until her hands rose, palms a moist bracket on my waist, a gentle pull as her thighs parted and took mine, standing between.
Her mouth was soft through the cloth. I stood very still as she nipped gently at the prisoner-nipple. I felt slightly shocked, but mostly at the ease I leaned to her, willing my breast to feed her reckoning mouth. That shock, which suddenly complicit, felt a safe home-coming; an aware rightness. Not Eve, not woman, just people in synchrony. An identityless union. Rightness.
Her eyes were large, dilated as they rose to mine and the parenthesis of her insistent palms eased, sure in knowledge that I was willing, joined to thigh. Not leaving but bending to her. And the silk that swam as desire through me was safe, a river running through me and coursing to her mainstream.
So that when she slid her hands to part my thighs there was obedience. I mourned her leaving my breast. The damp spot she left cooled and sought warmth even as her hands rose along my inner thighs. She parted her fingers, slid them to surround my now wet cloth crotch, and pointed them to me, arrowing the tips at me. Eve entered me with two fingers of each hand, the strip of cloth ribboned, forcing along my slit. Her eyes never left mine and her scar was blatant, now a flushed, angering red. Wounding, vulnerable and irresistible to me.
Her fingers were distracting. They danced their separate lives within me. A bittersweet invasion. I centred on their insistence, felt myself swell, harden and surround. I rode them lightly, drawing time in a syrupy thread until I melded and motion became thick, my head white-noise and breath caught. Until the slumbering, soft beast rose to overcame me.
I have no doubt that I then surprised Eve. She, certain in her seduction was safely in control. Until I forced my weight to her and pushed her back on the used sheets, amongst the old sweat and crumpled pillows. She tensed a moment and then slumped as I straddled her, discarding her hands before it was too late.
My urgency rose simply. It was necessary to know where the scar hid its ending. My blood needed to know. And Eve was suddenly compliant, almost resigned, submissive under my small hands while I hastily drew her top over her willing arms, head, loosed her tangle of black hair. Hair amazing, soft coiling, spread untidily and strong with smells of sun and dust. Hair for later. Although I could not resist burying my nose and tongue in the whorls of her armpits, tasting and breathing her sweat, licking, the curls caught in my lips and on my muscling tongue.
I thought of the cat cleaning itself, its fur sticking pleasingly to the tip of its wet tongue. I cleaned Eve determinedly, pit and pit, as she lay, open and vulnerable. I nuzzled and forced her to endure my tongue taking the sweat of her in rasps and with grunts of satisfaction. I purred into her.
That was before I sought her scarring. My eyes narrowed to it, tracing; cheek neck, slashing its arc to her breast, bearing along the soft rise. It ceased before the brown-red splashing surround of her nipple. It was intense and her eyes closed softly under the scrutiny.
And I closed mine as I reached to her ear, slid my tonguetip along the squared edge, the missing lobe. I sought the red puckering, blind, edging along its uneven ridges, moling the contours until I reached smooth flesh. Then continued to hold the now-hard neighbouring bud between taut lips.
It almost sated me, this journey. I felt my blood cool. I felt wiser. It alarmed me in its perversity. I sought some information and, once found, it seemed the rest was debris, depersonalised.
Like a drunken foray. A forcing penis, spurting into some woman's void and, now empty. He launches away leaving her open, dirty and faceless; done with.
I felt ashamed.
It was only when I lifted my eyes to hers I knew just one part was answered. In Eve there was me, all the missing truths to seek and endure. She was my fears and lusts and uncertainties. The rank and sweet odours, the ghosts and history. Eve was, is - global. I had taken the obvious and traced it; found an ending. With the penetration of her arrowing fingers she had entered my life, injected some truths into my fluids.
So when I eased down her jeans and paused at the matt of her mound, curled my fingers in the amazing expanse to tease it up, and free. Entered her, in my turn, I learned about me. She surrendered her spread to my penetrating stare. Purple, pink and swollen; moist and caving before me. I dipped in her, my fingers seeking, probing drawing wet with her pomegranate juices, tasting, savouring as she sighed and moaned a backdrop.
Eve is dark. She stains the white sheets with olive skin, black spread hair but she is as lean and filtered as my gold lady in the shower, as pale as I clasped between her thighs. Her smells are richer, her labour and strength more strong and controlling. But Eve, like me, can surrender, succumb to the river running through her. Our course is mingled; a blending. No mystery but an innate knowledge.
That day she finished the bay roof.
Now it is summer. I leave my window open, taunting the thieves. The air that funnels in, with its day or night warmth, sometimes brings Eve with her fluid movement, rich with complicity; the river of silk running through her. Eve, who is free, safe - Eve with me.
* * * * *
Your critique of this work is appreciated.
Please e-mail the author.