Here in the city everyone goes around in little bubbles of their own, cell phones pressed to their ears, closer to people who are miles away than they are to the ones who crowd against them in the elevators. Talia is like that too, and though she lives not far from the center of town, she's always somewhere else: through her phone, through her music, through her big TV.
The doors of her minivan close with a cushioned thump and completely shut out the noise of the streets. The minivan has a very good stereo and quiet ventilation and tinted windows, and the ride is smooth and soft and clean, even through the worst neighborhoods. She bought this car with the money from her new job, and even though it's a family car and she's a family of one, she bought it so she can haul all the stuff she plans to buy with the money this job pays her. In this world of dwindling resources and diminished expectations, with jobs leaving the country like suds down the drain, Talia has got her nails into the rock of personal success and is holding on with selfish tenacity. She worked her ass off in school and spent enough time in a shit entry-level job for a couple years until this one came along, and now that she's got a jealous grip on what she can get, everyone else can be damned. She has no use for them.
She has a use for me though. She found my stories on a web site, and though I'm a lot older than she is, she started writing me. She liked what I wrote. She liked the fact that I'm a kind of passionate slob and that I'm a poet and can give her things in words that she can't get any other way: one of the few things she can't buy these days. We'll stand naked in the glass wall of her new high-rise condo and look out at the city beneath the full moon, and I'll spread her pussy apart and stroke her and give her poetry about why she's like the night. That's something she knows she can't get from anyone else. We can stand there with her leaning back against me, her wrists tied behind her back, my hand full of her juice, and I can tell her what it's like when the moon fucks her from behind or how it feels when the sun comes in her face, and that makes her shudder. When she orgasms she reaches back and tries to bite my naked shoulder, hating me for making her feel so much. She likes it when I tie her up too, and slowly whip her open legs and tell her poetry about what a whore she is until she throws her head back and comes, panting the way she does, the old wooden chair creaking as she pulls on the ropes in her spasms of release.
Talia and her friends put on sexuality like other people put on shoes, looking for something that fits and looks good on them and doesn't pinch too much. If there are no men around, Talia will do women, and she's done groups before too. She's offered to do a three-way with me and a girl friend of hers, a girl she'd gone to college with and now works with, but I'm not really that interested. I'm not that much of a sexual team player and I don't think this friend is into poetry and passion much, so I doubt she'd have much interest in me, but Talia thinks otherwise.
"Blaine really wants to do it," she says when I meet her for lunch the park beneath the weak spring sun. "She told me again. I talked to her this morning."
Talia's a very pretty girl, with slick, dark brown hair that is actually auburn when seen in the sun. She wears it cut to chin length straight around, showing off her lovely neck. She's got a down-turned mouth that makes her look stuck-up or privately angry, and I love it when I have her tied up and see that proud, pouty look on her face. It makes me want to hurt her, and often that's just what she wants too. She likes pain when we make love. It seems to be one of the few things in the world that can really get to her whether she wants it to or not. Most everything else she can tune out at will.
"You know what this is going to be like if we do it with Blaine?" I ask her. "It's going to be 'Blaine, why don't you lie over here, and Talia you get up on your knees over there, and I'll squeeze between you here and rub my dick on her ass, and you do this and I'll do that' and then it'll be like half-time and change sides. And two people will come and the third will be left out."
Talia's pouty little mouth doesn't change but her eyes smile.
"You're so hopeless," she says. "Most any guy would jump to have the two of us in bed together."
"Maybe I think more of you than that."
She looks at me to see if I was teasing. "Yeah, right."
I wasn't teasing. I really did care for her. It drove me crazy that she refused to see that.
"What do you get out of it anyhow?" I ask her. "You already slept with her once in college. You told me she didn't do much for you."
She stirs her yogurt around and licks the back of the plastic spoon. "Oh, I liked it all right. She's got gorgeous tits, and she's real hot when she comes. Screams and yells and everything. You'd like that. You like all that hysterical stuff."
"I like it when it comes from you." When Talia comes, she starts panting really fast in this high whimper. Her face gets red and her hands and her legs shake out of control.
I look at her. "You know what I think?" I say. "I think you just want to show me off. I'm the one thing you've got that Blaine doesn't have, and you want to rub me in her face."
"So? Is that so bad?" She squints against the weak sun as the wind blows her now-auburn hair across her forehead.
"It's a status thing, isn't it? Everything you do is a status thing."
She makes her pouty mouth. She's such a beautiful young woman that I could just crush her lower lip between my teeth. She loves me in her way, but she doesn't really know what that way was. She's just not equipped to think about things like that, things that don't quite make sense.
"You're not a status thing," she says. That was probably as close as I'd ever get.
"Do I get to tie her up? Do I get to use the whip while you go down on each other?"
She looks at me again, squinting to see if I'm serious. "I don't know. I think so. I'll have to ask her."
*****
I don't see Talia that often, maybe once a wek or every two weeks, and then it might be for a weekend or a couple of days during the week, or maybe just a night. She calls me when she needs to talk or she needs what I have to give her: words, understanding, passion, and pain. She doesn't like to go out very much because of the difference in our ages, but sometimes she does like it, exactly because of that. She'll dress herself up to look even younger than she is, with short, little-girl skirts or a tank top and jeans and she'll hang all over me in public, pretending I'm her sugar daddy. She loves to fantasize that I'm corrupting her. When we go back to her place I have to spank her and stick my fingers in her pussy and her ass and make her suck me off with the kind of brutality she loves, holding her hair and lifting my ass off the sofa to bruise her lips and make her gag with my thick cock. She likes to see the come erupt from my prick and feel it shoot against her face. She still has a splash of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose and they really show when she gets aroused, and I love to see my ejaculate dripping down her childlike face, the pulse in her throat as we come down from our orgasms and turn back into ourselves.
As we sit in the car one night I tell her that the shadows of the streetlight through the trees are writing things on her body, things she won't be able to read for years to come, and when she does read them they'll tell her about things that are already over and done with. She likes that, but she doesn't quite understand it, so I grab her hair and pull her head back against the seat and I run my lips over her exposed throat, scraping her with my teeth. As soon as I take control of her, her nipples get hard as raisins and I twist them in my fingers before I put my hand down between her legs and push a finger into her shaved pussy. Aside from her wetness and the eager stiffness of her nipples it's hard to tell whether she's excited or not, but when my finger penetrates her she squeezes her eyes shut and grunts in masochistic pleasure.
"Go ahead," she moans, "finger fuck my cunt right here in the parking lot. Make me come on your hand. God, you're so dirty!"
