Her bedroom was at the end of the hall. It was spartan: a bed, a desk, a couple of prints on the walls, chintz curtains dancing in the soft breath of the window air-conditioning unit, turned down to low. Her knees started to give way again and I caught her again. It was a weird kind of swing-dancing. There were even Arthur Murray footprints on the floor. Poundcake. I kissed her and her lips fastened on mine, dry and frantic.
I pushed her away gently and braced her back against the closet door. She looked at me solemnly, her hair in her eyes. I brushed it away, then — very gently — began to lick her dry lips with the tip of my tongue. I did it slowly, being sure to get the corners.
“Better?” I asked.
She answered not with her voice but with her own tongue. Without pressing my body against hers, I began to very slowly run my hand up and down the long length of her, from where I could feel the rapid beat of her pulse on both sides of her throat, to her chest, her breasts, her stomach, the flat tilted plane of her pubic bone, around to one buttock, then down to her thigh. She was wearing jeans. The fabric whispered under my palm. She leaned back and her head bonked on the door.
“Ouch!” I said. “Are you all right?”
She closed her eyes. “I’m fine. Don’t stop. Kiss me some more.” Then she shook her head. “No, don’t kiss me. Do my lips again. Lick me. I like that.”
I did. She sighed and slipped her fingers under my belt at the small of my back. Then around to the front, where the buckle was.
I wanted to go fast, every part of me was yelling for speed, telling me to plunge deep, wanting that perfect
“Sadie? All right?”
“Ohmygodyes,” she said, and I laughed. She opened her eyes and looked up at me with curiosity and hopefulness. “Is it over, or is there more?”
“A little more,” I said. “I don’t know how much. I haven’t been with a woman in a long time.”
It turned out there was quite a bit more. Only a few minutes in real time, but sometimes time is different — as no one knew better than I. At the end she began to gasp. “Oh dear, oh my dear, oh my dear dear God, oh
It was the sound of greedy discovery in her voice that put me over the edge, so it wasn’t quite simultaneous, but a few seconds later she lifted her head and buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. A small fisted hand beat on my shoulder blade once, twice… then opened like a flower and lay still. She dropped back onto the pillows. She was staring at me with a stunned, wide-eyed expression that was a little scary.
“I came,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“My mother told me it didn’t happen for women, only for men. She said orgasms for women were a myth.” She laughed shakily. “Oh my God, what she was missing.”
She got up on one elbow, then took one of my hands and put it on her breast. Beneath it, her heart was pounding and pounding. “Tell me, Mr. Amberson — how soon before we can do it again?”
As the reddening sun sank into the everlasting gas-and oil-smog to the west, Sadie and I sat in her tiny backyard under a nice old pecan tree, eating chicken salad sandwiches and drinking iced tea. No poundcake, of course. The poundcake was a total loss.
“Is it bad for you, having to wear those… you know, those drugstore things?”
“It’s fine,” I said. It really wasn’t, and never had been. There would be improvements in a great many American products between 1961 and 2011, but take it from Jake, rubbers stay pretty much the same. They may have fancier names and even a taste-component (for those with peculiar tastes), but they remain essentially a girdle you snap on over your dick.
“I used to have a diaphragm,” she said. There was no picnic table, so she had spread a blanket on the grass. Now she picked up a Tupperware container with the remains of a cucumber-and-onion salad inside it and began snapping the lid open and closed, a form of fidgeting some people would have considered Freudian. Including me.
“My mother gave it to me a week before Johnny and I were married. She even told me how to put it in, although she couldn’t look me in the eye, and if you’d flicked a drop of water on one of her cheeks, I’m sure it would’ve sizzled. ‘Don’t start a baby for the first eighteen months,’ she said. ‘Two years, if you can make him wait. That way you can live on his salary and save yours.’”
“Not the world’s worst advice.” I was being cautious. We were in a minefield. She knew it as well as I did.
