Torn
by William S. Dean © 2007

Wilmer was torn.

He loved him some good puss—and if the pussy he gravitated toward ended up beating his heart to death, splintering his soul, sucking the sanity out of his mind?

It wasn't his fault.

But the price tags kept gnawing him slowly like trained rats in a dungeon.

A glance at the cheap plastic traveler's clock told him he'd been staring at the patch of window light for half an hour. It was the blinds that did it.

Slanted shafts of shadow, like prison bars. He knew those shadows like ten months of friendship. Like ten long damp months of stoic enemies watching his every twelve by twelve move. From the metal bunk to the cell door, from the cell door to the wall, from one wall to another. Wilmer knew what a cage felt like to a trapped beast and why—so seemingly serene—an animal might sit motionless and watch the light and shadow. And wait.

It was deep thought, more like a dream. Through a morass of self, Wilmer dissected and probed for each sensory input that coursed between his flesh and hers. It should be more foggy, he reasoned. Empty hours, weeks, months separated what had been. Yet, as he sat on the lumpy edge of a well-used bed, he could taste the sweet liquid that coated the swollen pinkness of her cunt. It should taste more bitter now. It should make his tongue recoil, not urge it into a ballet of licks, a pirouette over her clit, a long, sweeping airy glide over the arch of glistening skin. The present, the recent past should distort—at least monstrify—the low groan from her mouth as it replayed again in his mind. Her taste should be poison, was poison. And still, he hungered for the Judas kiss of her soft lips upon his cock head, her thighs squeezing together as she climaxed. Was starved for the satisfaction of her which madness of desire built within him.

The bold murder she had committed was of him. He nodded at the thought with a chuckle. It was all rush from beginning to his arrest. And what a fool he had been, a perfecting one. Oh, crime was never unknown to him, he admitted. Everyone has stolen a little something, sometime. It was the thrill of the getaway that made the blood rush through the body and brain.

The intense excitement of forging beyond the tepid taboo of righteousness and order. A tiny inconspicuous theft here, a bit of rule breaking there, the con jobs of a child, the lies and protestations of innocence afterward.

To whom was any of that a stranger? The hypocrites only lied with less sincerity, more oiliness.

She spread her lie—the huge one—that love was all they could need.

But man and woman have never been merely Adam and Eve, living in idyllic pretense. Wilmer sensed it was amusing and chuckled again. The need for each other was a charming gloss, covering the baser ones: food, shelter, protection, luxury. Good times. And if she could whore herself for the occasional payment of rent, the odd flirtation of scandal with a rented motel room in another city? What else could he do but steal. For her. For them. What else?

She had a girlish coldness, harboring all her passion for the acts themselves. Fucking, sucking his cock, getting her cunt eaten until she came so hard, sometimes—once at least, or twice—flooding out the stickiness when he ravaged her G-spot. In the bedroom, perched on a child's wooden stool; in the public Jacuzzi; on a rotting mattress in a friend's outback shed with the sunlight spilling between the cracks in the slats...they fucked out in the world, raw, careless. Beautiful. And fulfilling.

Wilmer realized he could condense every hour spent with her into a micro-second flash that sped like electric current through him. With a start, he looked down at his clenched hands, fingernails digging into palms, cutting in, making him bleed. Wilmer was torn.

Ten months away from her and he could not get cold. His stillness frightened him. It was the immobile pause before a sniper fires on target.

The quiet monotonous statue-like pose just before the suicide slices down through his wrists. Which was Wilmer? Suicide or killer? Avenger or helpless victim? Wilmer decided it didn't matter. Would only matter when he saw her again. Even if it was death.

Insanity provokes bizarre images in the mind. A unicorn pranced, an indecipherable scroll of her "Dear John" letter wrapped around its horn.

Dear Wilmer. Blah and blah. "Try to understand..." "...life to live."

All the etceteras of poorly written love tales, echoed out in her handwriting. Delivered to prison, read by censors, stamped, initialed, orderly as a certificate. Thus and so. Now you may cremate the earthly remains of...

But Wilmer—even in the stagnant, sweat-stenched, violent, chaos of prison—was immortal. The first weeks he had thrown all pride down the seatless shitter in the cell's corner. Cock in hand, he lay, bathed in fantasy and memory. Being with her, yet racked with the vacant place beside himself, he jerked off, painfully. Then came a month or more of wretched disgust at his own genitals, at his sappy heart, at his trenchant memory. At last, it was all replaced with that brutish, brooding animal stillness. Staring for hours at the dim patch of light through a barred window. And now. Now, the animal was freed.

When a woman has written her farewell and goodbye, she may not yet be convinced all is done. History, life, itself, is filled with episodes of love regained after such goodbyes. Hope is a madness, too. It can rage like impossible wrath. Tear apart the flimsy constructs of distance, shatter down the fortresses of rejection. Wilmer coached himself with such ideas and stood in the small hotel room, walked across the tattered, stained carpet, opened the door to sunlight and stepped out. Toward her.

He was blind on the way. Nothing registered. Not traffic lights, not miles of homes. He felt he was running fast, unseeing. And yet. Every place he passed at which they had fucked leaped on his shoulders. He was a human snowball, gathering a weight of mnemonic torments, each bowing him deeper until when he stood at her doorway, he was hunched as if carrying his own avalanche-debris of emotional roiling.

Her eyes didn't widen in recognition. She didn't smile. Didn't frown.

Didn't slam the door in his face. She opened her lips slightly. Breathed out. Inhaled.

"I was so torn," she said.

Wilmer became The Wicked Witch. A Kansas farmhouse crushed him to the ground. A bucket of water splashed and he melted as he watched himself.

She was torn? He wanted his face to become ugly, to curse her with eternal pain. He also wanted to embrace her, fall to his knees and worship the goddess of his destruction. He wanted to fuck her.

Instead, clumsy, awkward as a suddenly animated stick, he stumbled over the threshold, felt her close the door behind him. Her fingertips touched his face, down to the bone.

"Baby," she whispered.

"Become one," he whispered back.

Her lips brushed over his. Hers felt soft, yielding, new. His were pulpy, scabrous, wounded, bloodless. Their lips opened over each other and she breathed into his throat. Without more words, her hand slid down his chest, groped at his steady hardness, fisted around his cock.

"Mmmm," she said into his ear. "Is this for me?"

It was the old craziness on him again. She unzipped his jeans, gently pulled his shaft out, went down on her knees, and rolled her wet lips on him.

Wilmer thought he would pass out. Out of his body. Out of this world. Out of consciousness of himself.

A quirk in the mind zipped past. "The mantis eats her mate," he remembered reading once. Her teeth nipped gently on the head of his cock and raked along the shaft as she swallowed him in. She sucked greedily, slid back up along him, dragging her tongue, popped the head out from between her lips with a loud smack.

"I need this inside me," she said, looking up at him. She took off her glasses and lofted them away. "Now. It's been so long."

"It should..." Wilmer thought briefly, "It should be the hiss of a cobra I'm hearing." Like in the old days, they tumbled to the floor in kisses and fumbles. He licked down the pale expanse of her neck, trailed his lips over her shoulder—pulling her blouse off—and down to the ecstasy of tasting her skin, her breast, cupping her rigid nipple between his lips, sucking.

Her own hands were busy at her jeans, unfastening, unzipping, stripping them down. One ankle still coiled in the tangle of denim, she curled the other leg behind his hips. He sank into her. She winced at first, then—growing wetter—took him deeply.

"Oh, shit!" she sighed, cheek against his face. "Move me."

It was her magic words. Wilmer never had been sure what she'd meant by them, but it was her code. "Fuck me hard, plunge into and take my heart, sweep up my soul to somewhere else, fuck me harder, make me come." He supposed it meant all of this and more. It was what he was meant to think she meant. Maybe, it was just a gibberish phrase, but what did it matter?

Ten months away from her. Ten months of longing, wanting, needing those kisses, touches, needing to be inside her, like this. It washed over him in moments. What did anything matter to Wilmer now? She flipped over and straddled him, riding his cock as if she wanted to use it all up. Hips rocking wildly, cunt grinding over the scratchy hair of his balls, rising up and shoving herself down with a twisting of hips, breasts swaying, taunting, as his hands reached up to cup and squeeze them.

She cried out sharply and kept riding, cried out again, once more, then sank down along his body. Wilmer felt her lips pecking over his face. She licked the tip of his nose.

"So good," she murmured. "I wanted you to come back. I knew you would."

Wilmer smiled up at her. "I love..."

She put her hand over his mouth and shook her head. She looked away, toward the door. "He'll be back soon."

Wilmer's eyes unfocused. Hot warm tears glazed the corners of his eyelids.

"But it's so good," she said, nuzzling his cheek, licking at the wet salty droplets.

Wilmer tried to speak. Words were disjoined. "Prison." "Stole for you."

"Ruined." "...my life."

"I know."

"What?"

"You better go now, baby." She leaned back slightly, looked into his eyes, brushed her lips over his.

He rushed away like a man running backwards, seeing the goal recede into that point where infinity becomes a speck, untouchable, unreached.

Later, he sat on the edge of the bed, in the dingy motel room, watching the shadows and light from the window and—at last—remembering that he hadn't even come inside her. Wilmer laughed a long, hurting time. A lifetime, in fact.

_______
© 2007 William S. Dean. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.

Bio: Who is William S. Dean? Read his bio on the Erotica Readers & Writers Association website.

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