You anoint the raw tips, carefully, but the stuff clusters and clings, still too thick to absorb without rubbing harder. And you sure don’t want to do that.
So you reach for the nearest book instead, hoping to distract yourself while the salve’s touch dims from its present slow burn to a mild tingle. But its spine is cracked—it opens on a bias, loosing a carefully-hidden cache of pornographic snapshots which scatter on the floor. Small, brown-tinted, like that one photo of Aunt Maris. From the same period, perhaps? No, even older.
Some have notations in Arabic, red ink on sepia. Written on the back of one, in Maris’ familiar looping script, the words: Sufiya, 1949.
You turn this particular one over, and the image revealed makes you burn even harder, nipples elongating inappropriately under their caps of medicinal cream. A spark set to your hidden bud, like a match to a short, short fuse.
So much better to show than to tell, foreign lady—a voice whispers in your head, strangely faint, strangely near, not at all strangely unfamiliar—always. Do you not think?
And easier, too.
The woman—Sufiya, one assumes—tilts herself towards the camera, spreading her bald, engorged labia wide with tattooed hands, long-nailed fingers: An upraised flesh pomegranate, flecked and packed with blurred, shiny stuff that could be juice, could be scar tissue, could be an oddly enticing mixture of both. Smiling wide, with both pairs of purple-rimmed lips. The topmost point of her deep-set navel is pierced with a small, silver ring and threaded by the fine-linked chain that circles her gorgeously lax waist, half-hidden in its soft folds. More of that wet, indefinite sheen extends down her inner thighs, so tensed and gleaming you can almost smell them.
The back of someone’s head rears towards her, seen from above. Its hair is a dark, braided, mirror-fringed mass that matches her own mane, almost exactly—as though she were offering herself to her own reflection. The nape of the neck shows through, similarly tattooed with something vaguely oval, vaguely dotted. A supernumerary eye, staring back at the camera’s own.
That blur between it and her—an exhaled plume of smoke?
The extended tip of a hungry tongue?
Who was taking these? you wonder. Maris? Then, annoyed with your own denseness: Well, who else?
You flip the photo back over again, and reach for another, free hand slipping under the closed portion of your robe. Excavating. Scooping upward, collecting lubrication, digging for the point of most resistance.
A slow, fluid, stop-motion fantasy strings itself together in front of you, images flickering through your fingers, figures snapping unexpectedly from position to position. Sufiya bending back, legs widening like a pulled wishbone, as the other person laps over her bare, split mound and up past the ring and chain, suckling at either breast, then forcing apart her lips, smearing her with her own juices from nose to chin.
Another woman? Yes, almost definitely. A long curve of spine uncoils as it spreads itself out over her, ending in a wide pair of hips, two soft and resilient cheeks, a subtle shade or two paler than Sufiya’s own—ripe and reflective, lush with internal movement.
A somber image, hammered silver, cast in some ancient, concave mirror. It dips and writhes, wraithlike, up through a series of sheer and smoky veils that peel back like petals, trailing along its flanks and sides, cradling Sufiya’s rapt body on a foamy, barely transparent wave. A tide that ebbs and flows in sudden rushes, hiding more than they reveal.
And always from the back. The face always hidden.
Sufiya is obviously moaning now, eyes rolled back, mouth squared over bluish teeth; her partner rummages through her spread stickiness with both hands, their exact location evocatively uncertain.
Obsessively, you map the various possibilities on yourself: Suck your middle finger, sliding it first past your streaming cleft and then lower still, broaching the anus’s brown flower; wedge your slickened index to its haft inside your vagina, as you use your thumb’s broad pad to flutter your clit’s hood back and forth, a makeshift tongue grinding against its moist, jeweled hardness.
Your gaze turns upward, inward—pleasure growing slow and spreading, in small, circular waves—shock and aftershock knit tremor-close, nerves alight and aimless—your desire snarled in on itself like some half-burnt summer firework, a curled, self-immolating frenzy, haloing your groin with heat.
Dropping the last photos, you find your free hand drawn inexorably back to your aching, slippery, fiery nipples—to pull them ever harder, ever longer, first the left, then the right—finally teasing a thin spurt of milk from one, with a sudden, painfully satisfactory jolt.
Uh. Oh, Jesus.
Your lids flutter. The ceiling shakes and reels.
Sweet Lord Jesus.
A sickly-sweet stink of soap rises, rushing back over your spasming body in a volcanic cloud. The discarded photos fade to white, becoming empty screens, rear-projected. Spilling a pale, unfocused light that melts their contents whole.
Sweet . . .
And a fresh load of watery blood explodes down your legs as you ride your hand to climax, soaking the chair beneath you. Your toes curling, cramping. Gasping. Breathless.
Sweet . . .
Too busy making that thin, endless, whooping shriek you faintly hear in the background to mind just how ridiculous you must look, even if there were anybody else here to see.
Or care, for that matter.
. . . sweet . . . Maris.