Ron thought.
“Slow down,” he gasped.
She licked the nerve as he’d taught her—the nerve Max teased to drive him berserk—and resumed squeezing his shaft, pressing the glans with her lips.
“Now!” he cried, releasing his own breasts, heavy as water balloons, and raising his right arm in salute.
Palming his testicles, she plunged down on the shaft, back up, down and back, until his semen massed for eruption. The ends of the hair she shampooed twice daily felt like feathers swishing across the tops of his thighs.
“Oh Jesus Christ and Paul Apostle, suck, don’t stop, suck, suck, oh Judas Christ, oh.” The wrinkles in his neck were soaked. “Uhhhhhhhh.”
He arched his back, vising her head as the vasectomized liquid spurted toward her throat. When she strained to free her head, he relaxed his grip. She rolled over, grabbed the cup, spat into it, and clapped it on the table.
“I’m good?” she asked, chest heaving, voice throaty, turning her face toward him. The capillaries in her cheeks flamed. She pulled an edge of the towel around to wipe his forehead and neck.
“Oh yeah.” He began to wheeze. His right hand squeezed his testicles.
“Do me now.”
“Gimme a breather, Lile.”
“You big shit.” She reached for a pillow and plopped it against the headboard. She stroked her clitoris—longer than most (but be glad, a gynecologist had told her before marriage; she’d thought it deformed)—and stared at the catapult slinging an F-18 from the end of the carrier’s deck. Between her other thumb and forefinger she rolled her nipple. Her chest stilled.
“Lie back,” Ron growled, scooting off the bed to his knees.
She settled herself on the American flag’s cotton nubs, legs dangling off either side of him. “Play with my tits,” she murmured.
“I need balance to do this right. You play with ‘em.” Pushing his palms against the sheet and tucking his thumbs under her shoulder blades, he lowered his face to her gray nest of hair and found her clitoris. He drew his tongue’s tip back and forth along the organ, so much longer than Max’s; fussed with it like a cat, nipping, flicking; felt her hand slip under his forehead to join him.
“Good-O. Don’t stop, Ronnie, please?”
He had trouble keeping his tongue connected because she had started revolving her pelvis. The ligature on the underside of his tongue smarted as if nicked with scissors.
“I’ve got to use my finger, babe.” He rested his cheekbone on her thigh, gazing at his silver wedding band and its bits of turquoise.
“Come back, I’m almost there. Please, Ronnie?”
A few more swipes with his middle finger and he returned to licking and flicking the clit slick with fluid until the gaps between her moans shortened, as they had before Jonathan’s birth. Her pelvis began to thrash. He bore down with his tongue until she screamed.
As awed now as he had been at their son’s birth, he watched her fling her head. How was he going to dump Max? Christ Amighty, listen to those screams, look at Prince stretch. We’ll start over, Lila, I swear it. Max can never have an orgasm anyhoo.
He bent to lick perspiration from the navel of this wife of thirty-eight years, massaging her nest with his palm until she quieted, her jaw hanging.
“Thank you, honeybunch, oh Lord.”
“Lile, babe?” He pushed his testicles against his penis, wincing at how his heart galloped as he stood. “Let’s do doggy.”
“Your doctor didn’t say only one spurt a night till you lose weight?” She rested a moment. “Another fib? You do it twice with that whore? And I put up with it.” Her voice dropped to a murmur.
“There’s no Max Morgan and me that way, Lile. I told you! I learned my lesson after Cowtown. Yes, the sawbones said one orgasm. But tonight I thought, Lila and I deserve more. Okay, we shouldn’t.”
“Right. Though I don’t believe anything you say anymore. Good trophy wife.” Leaning on her elbow, she swung her legs up and, knees squashing her breasts, rolled off the towel toward the headboard. “Come on up here.”
His own breasts and belly jiggling, he climbed onto the mattress and lay on his back parallel to the stripes now warm and damp with lovemaking.
From the Fox newscaster she turned to face Ron on her knees, straight-arming the mattress with her fists on either side of his shoulders. Saliva wet her teeth and gold fillings—she’d cracked two molars after Jonathan’s death at Fort Ord.
“Rise up, Lile, you’re hurtin’ me.”
“Too bad. You ready?”
“I guess.”
Raising her buttocks, she hunched forward, shaking the mattress with her knees and fists. He looked up into her matted vaginal nest, inhaling its salt, clenching his eyes like a boy expecting a slap, stiffening his shoulders.
“Piss on you, Ronald Kirkpatrick. Piss on that fat. Piss on treating me like shit. And piss on you for making me leave our beautiful Fort Worth home.”
“That was your idea.” Flinching as her hot urine splashed his face and chest, he pressed his lips together—that smell, more than sulphurous. He was trying to suck air through his nose when she cried out:
“Ronnie, green, it’s green!” At that moment came a loud crrraaaak and a rumble like thunder at the rear of their house, below the upstairs sliding door. It was followed by what sounded like crockery hurled against the back wall that faced the downstairs deck.
“What was that? What’s that smell? Get off me!” He wrenched his head to spit onto the towel.
“Something’s wrong!”
“Who’s throwin’ things down there?”
“How should I know? Don’t you care I hurt?”
“Where?”
“My snatch—call nine-one-one.”
At last the crashing outside ended. Wet as a walrus, he heaved himself off the bed as she folded into a V. Green mottled the towel’s white stripes and the sheet; the red seemed blistered black.
“Oh, Lord,” she moaned, hugging her knees and rocking. “Something terrible is happening and worse downstairs and you stand there with your mouth open, squeezing your balls. The Lord’s punishing us, Ronnie. We’re crap and you’re crappier than anybody. Do something.”
Wheezing, he hurried into the bathroom, lifting his feet over the raised tiles into the shower end of the tub. He turned the faucet on cold, grabbed a washcloth, and, shivering, slapped the cloth to his chest, legs, and arms.
He dried off and wrapped the towel around him, then reached into the closet to pull his robe and blue Home Loan Champ cap from their hooks.
He was heading for the phone on her desk when he twisted to face her in the dimness. Across the TV screen, Super Hornets banked in unison, emitting white contrails. The soapstone waterfall gurgled, the four squat candles flickered in their hammered-silver bowls.
“Asparagus, Lile. We had asparagus for dinner. Take a laugh break.”
He flipped the switch to light the stairs and lumbered down.
ACTIVIST
PULLING HIS RED KNIT CAP OVER HIS EARS, MANNY KNELT in the mid-March chill beside the left rear tire of Ron’s new white 2003 Escalade. He winced as the gravel bit his skin. Lying in bed waiting, he’d heard Ron and Lila drive in; the tire’s wall was still warm. As the light behind the glass blocks in their upstairs bathroom dimmed, a gibbous moon lit the American-flag decal darkening the rear window of the gleaming sixteen-footer.