After Cassandra and I had been together for six weeks, I had reason to think that things might cool off a little between us. After all, we couldnât possibly keep up the pace we had set during the first month of our relationship. It just wasnât humanly possible to sustain that level of sexual activity for any length of time. Thatâs what I thought, anyway. Cassandra had other ideas.
She kept things interesting, Iâll give her that. Her creativity was boundless. She always insisted on sitting in the very back of the theater when we went out to the movies, so we could go down on each other. (This meant that neither of us saw the whole movie, and afterwards we would have to fill each other in on the parts weâd missed.) She also liked to pull stunts like straddling my lap when I was driving (thank God for cruise control) and would occasionally say charming things like âIâve always wanted to get fucked in the ass in a really cheap motel room.â
We averaged twice a day. Thatâs an average, and thatâs not even factoring in all the odd blowjobs and extended bouts of aimless foreplay. If I ever was unable to rise to the occasion, Cassandra knew some very interesting tricks involving strings of beads and unorthodox manipulations of my prostate gland. I was very often sore.
Iâm not bragging, and Iâm not complaining. It was, for the most part, a wonderful time in my life. Even when we werenât in bed, Cassandra was great to be with. She was funny and intelligent; kind and generous. She had a really sunny, energetic personality. We almost never quarreled. I loved her very much. But then, there were also times that she scared me.
Again, this was primarily sexual. It wasnât the frequency or the variety; it was the intensity which finally began to frighten me. Thatâs the word. Intense. A few times while we were making love, Cassandra would begin to sob. Not just tears, but actual soul-wrenching weeping. Of course, my natural inclination on these occasions was to stop, to hold her and try to comfort her. But that only made her angry. She would grab me roughly and insist that I keep fucking her, even through her tears.
That only happened a few times. More frequently, I noticed that she would sometimes close her eyes and just âgo away.â Her body was still there, writhing against mine with a brutal ferocity, but Cassandra was light years away. She didnât seem to hear anything I would say to her in this state, but she did sometimes talk. In a low, moaning whisper that was nothing like her normal voice, speaking the names of people I did not know.
Still, even with all that, I felt like the luckiest boy in the world. I was in love with an amazing girl who seemed to be crazy about me. The fact that she was a slightly spooky nymphomaniac, I tried to tell myself, was just the icing on the cake.
But there was the matter of the âcraziest thing.â I enjoyed hearing stories of Cassandraâs sexual past, which was as wild as it was varied. Once I asked her what the craziest thing she had ever done was. She had said that she wasnât ready to talk about that yet, but then proceeded to tell me about the âsecond craziest thing,â an exquisite lesbian encounter with a girl from her old school. (See âCassandra and Carolyn,â also posted here, for that story.) That had kept me satisfied for a while, but thoughts of something even crazier than that made me wild with curiosity. I would ask her about it, even make guesses, but she would just say that she wasnât ready yet. The subject seemed to trouble her, so I didnât press too hard.
We were camping the night she finally told me. It was a hot, muggy Illinois summer night. We had started making love in the tent, but it had been so hot that we had to pull the sleeping bag outside and spread it on the ground. She was on top of me (her favorite position) and I was looking up at her, reflecting on how eerily beautiful she looked, bathed in the pale blue glow of the full moon. Then I noticed she was crying. She was doing it silently, but her whole body was shaking with the force of it.
âAre you all right?â I asked.
âShut the fuck up,â she snarled. Then she leaned forward and clamped her hand roughly over my mouth. Cassandra grinded into me, as if she wanted to drive me into the ground. Her vagina had become uncomfortably tight; my penis was locked inside her in a vice grip. She thrusted cruelly, like she wanted to fuck me in half. It felt like rape. I tried to make some sound of protest, or roll out from under her, but she had me pinned down good. I came quickly, in self-defense. It was all I could do.
Now, thatâs another thing. Cassandra despised condoms. She said that if she wanted to fuck a piece of rubber, sheâd just get herself a dildo. But she also claimed that birth control pills âmessed her up,â and refused to take any other kind of precautions. So we used a dangerous combination of the withdrawal and rhythm methods of contraception. I didnât quite trust Cassandraâs indications of when it was OK to come inside her, so I usually pulled out. She didnât mind finishing me off with her incredibly skillful mouth. (In fact, the almost cannibalistic relish with which she consumed my semen was another borderline disturbing thing about our sex life.) But there were times, like this one, when accidents did happen. It worried me, especially since Cassandra had such an indifferent attitude about the danger of pregnancy. âThat wouldnât be so bad,â she would say.
Now she pulled me out of her and quickly moved up to straddle my face, her knees painfully pinning my arms down and her sex-slimy vagina pressed over my mouth and nose.
âSuck it,â she commanded in that voice that wasnât her own. âSuck my cunt.â
My own come dripped into my open mouth as she squeezed it out of her. For some reason, it really turned her on to feed it back to me. Usually I didnât mind, sometimes I even kind of liked it, but this time I was already a little freaked, and the fact that I couldnât breathe didnât help. In the state she was in, I was afraid that she might forget that she was shutting off all my breathing passages and I would be smothered to death by her sopping pussy. (Which would be an interesting way to go, I must admit.)
I panicked, pushing her aside as I rolled out from under her. Her balance was precarious, and she fell over onto the ground. I wiped my dripping chin and Cassandra looked up at me with trembling fear and rage. It was like she didnât even recognize me. She screamed, an awful piercing scream, and then scrambled away into the tent and zipped up the flap.
I didnât know what to do. Here I was, naked in the woods in the middle of the night. All my clothes were in the tent, where Cassandra was crying in great jagged sobs. I didnât know if she wanted me to go in after her, so I just sat down miserably on the sleeping bag and tried to ignore the mosquitos.
Sometime later, it might have been as long as half an hour, Cassandra unzipped the flap.
âCome in here,â she said. Her voice sounded normal again, but very sad.
I crawled into the tent beside her, and held her close.
âIâm sorry,â she said. âI donât know whatâs wrong with me. Sometimes I think Iâm going crazy.â
âNo,â I said. I had no words to comfort her, so I just held her and said âShhh,â as she cried for a while.
âIâm ready to tell you,â she said eventually.
âTell me what?â
âAbout the craziest thing Iâve ever done,â she said. âSexually. The craziest sexual thing Iâve ever done.â
I said nothing. I felt strangely apprehensive, though, like maybe I didnât want to hear this after all.
âI would have told you before, but I was afraid youâd hate me,â Cassandra said. âItâs pretty bad.â
âNothing could make me hate you.â
âThatâs sweet of you to say, but . . .â Despite the heat, Cassandra shivered in my arms. âItâs so bad it almost makes me hate myself. Itâs like, sometimes I almost convince myself that it didnât really happen, that it was a dream or something, and I have to remind myself that it was really real.â
Her stalling was making the suspense worse. I wished she would just say it, get it over with, and then she did.
âI fucked my brother,â Cassandra said.
There was an awful, leaden silence for an eternal minute. Those four words hung heavily in the humid air.
âChristian?â she said after a while, I suppose to verify that I was still there.
âYeah,â I said.