CW: this piece has some very mild elements of consensual power exchange, and a tiny moment of involuntary pigplay. It's very tame, but worth noting.
I wouldn’t say I am a dialectician, per se. Yes, I had to read him (what grad student doesn’t, I feel like?), but I find Hegel tiresome and a bit of a bore, honestly. But, if I am honest, I do love a tension. Intellectually, there are few things as stimulating as watching two good ideas intermingle with one another and the related thinker or thinkers try to resolve their seeming incompatibility. In physics, it’s the search for a grand unified theory - the very big and the very small don’t make sense together, and so we invent ever-more complicated forms of mathematics to try to fit two very real parts of our world into a single conceptual unity. The fact that we don’t have one still, even after all of this time, is instructive of the difficulty of synthesizing two almost irresolvable facts of the world.
I know this makes me the biggest dork in the world, but honestly, all of this stuff also kind of makes me horny sometimes, too.
As someone prone to intellectualization of… well, everything, that’s maybe not terribly surprising. But I admit that I surprise myself sometimes with what draws me in. Tension, and by extension, contrast, are just so deliciously ripe for eroticisation. There are the basic modes of this in storytelling: enemies to lovers, country mouse and city mouse, and so on. But I like to think a little deeper. There’s physicality: Abbott and Costello, but make it horny. There’s personality: stiff and sensuous. There’s even ideology: conservative and radical. I could go on and on, but each of these interactions, and so many more, always have this way of revving my engine when I least expect it.
And I really thought I was alone in this, until I met her.
I don’t know why my brain is so cinematic, but in my head, the story starts with a narrow-lens shot of the bottom of the door the day she opened it. Two black bars tightly frame the sun-dappled tiles of my bookstore, as the bell above the door as it ‘tinged’ and her size nine and a half’s shuffled confidently underneath her into the room.
I think I was marking inventory in the front or something, probably staring off into space, when I heard the bell ring and for some reason kept my eyes on the ground before looking up.
I still can’t tell you exactly why it was her feet I noticed first and stayed fixated on, but it was.
It’s hard to know where to start other than a general comment that they were (and are) beautiful. She must have just come from a pedicure because each individual toe looked like it had been recently pampered. Daring red polish adorned each nail perfectly and framed, like a beautiful smile, the delicate, ivory slope of the front of her foot. This led up toward ankles that had clear articulations of musculature and bone but were blanketed in a beautiful softness that accentuated their perfection.
I become an unreliable narrator in my own head at this point. I know I saw her feet first, but the rest of her was so gorgeous that it’s hard to point to what part of her held the smoking gun of my attraction.
The only thing unremarkable about her height, which was middling, but this was immaterial to the otherwise entrancing beauty that oozed out of every molecule of her being.
Maybe the most obvious thing about her, if you weren’t already enraptured by her feet, was her hair. She had the most luscious, thick nappy curls of ochre hair I had ever seen. They twisted and wound individually, but acted as a coherent mass and bloomed outward from her head asymmetrically, her left side forming a wide pompadour that only added to her gravitas. Her chin-length locks were the perfect frame to the light hazel tones of her face, overlaid with a galaxy of vibrant freckles all orbiting around her vivid green eyes.
Unable to control myself as this goddess stepped further into the store, each footfall perceptibly activating the individual threads of her abductors and flexors and plantars, I looked further down to see her galactic spread of freckles extended down her elegant neck to a broad shelf of breast flesh that was happily on display.
I know I have lost all objectivity in my description at this point, but I cannot stress how accurate I am when I say her breasts were perfect, truly perfect. Each mound rounded out from her chest with a calculated voluptuousness that seemed to test the limits of human anatomy in how they balanced pertness with fullness. They were substantial, the size of a decent cantaloupe, and, acting in perfect harmony with those equally beautiful feet, jiggled playfully with each step toward the counter. As if their perfection wasn’t cruel enough, she’d opted for a white see-through chiffon blouse with short sleeves and only a simple cotton tank underneath. It provided the thinnest possible semblance of modesty while alerting any viewer to the raw sex that lay a few millimeters beneath.
She was fiddling with something in her purse at that point I think, so, her bare arms brushed against her bust several times. The same cosmic freckles spiraled out across her arms, each plush and perfectly comfortable out in the open, breathtaking when mashed against the gooiness of her breasts.
Beneath the most obviously attractive parts of her to most, were where I thought – before I saw her feet - I would have most been drawn: her belly. Just like the rest of her, it was perfect. There was an obvious softness to it, a creaminess that dripped with sex, but it still had heft, too, and rounded outward in a bottom-heavy oval shape. It was the kind of belly that even a normie would take a second look at; the raw, sensuous fertility it represented stirred a primal desire, envy, or both, in almost anyone. The way it jiggled ever so slightly if she moved too quickly almost made me fall over as soon as I saw it.
In the way that some women are miraculously blessed, her belly did not take away from her pronounced hourglass shape; it simply accentuated it. Its bulging forward was a rousing three-dimensional addition to the rounded, meaty hips that curved out perfectly from the sinch of her waist at an angle that ranged on jagged. Poured into a pair of Daisy Dukes, the fat of her thighs squeezed right out of the hem, red marks occasionally visible from where the ill-fitting clothes tried to hold back a body that was not built to be contained.
I’m also not a physicist, but I do know that old Albert Einstein quote about “sitting with a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute,” but when you sit on a hot stove, it “feels like an hour.” I can attest that, at that moment, and pretty much any moment when I was with her thereafter, was proof-positive of that assertion. Cinematic mind ablaze, I’m sure I gaped the entire ten seconds it took her to walk up to the counter. It was only a playful “Hi?” that clicked me out of my relativistic thinking.
“Uh, hi.” I smiled, trying my hardest to recover from my brief foray into general relativity.
“How can I help you?”
I realized at that moment I hadn’t had a chance to see her smile, and that was probably for the best, I am not sure I would have survived the initial blast of its shine. I know, I know, I sound so overwrought. But you have to understand, I was a nerdy baby queer working in a cooperative bookstore, it was rare that I got as close to beauty as this. Most of my customers were beloved but utterly crusty Marxist academics who were perfectly happy to somehow leer and dismiss me all at once. That a creature this beautiful could wander into such a place was simply unthinkable.
Shit, I thought, I had missed what she was saying again.
“...anyway, the class isn’t that exciting, but it did really turn me onto Chakrabarty’s work.”
Doing my absolute damndest to recover from my repeated beauty-induced-confusions, I desperately forged ahead.
“I’m so sorry, I slept terribly last night and I’m a little spacey - which of his works was it you were looking for again?”
She smiled somehow even more kindly now.
“Oh, no problem. I’m normally a total night owl, so, I know what it’s like to be a zombie the next day.”
Amidst those magnificent breasts, she briefly fiddled with a small gold necklace that had what looked like stylized Arabic text on it.
“I wondered if you had his Habitations of Modernity… I can’t fully remember the subtitle but it had something about subaltern studies. It came out sometime around two thousand I think.”
By necessity I was fully disassociating; that someone this beautiful wanted to get into something as crunchy as my regular clients would have fully shut me down in a paralysis of attraction-overload, so, I simply became a robot and acted as if she was one of my beloved disaffected, entitled old Marxists.
“Oh, okay, yeah.”
Really smooth.
I stared down at my computer and wasn’t sure how long I had been staring at the keys and hadn’t typed anything.
I pushed enter for good measure, and then, key by key, I started the mechanical process of searching for my presumptive customer’s need.
“Okay, I don’t see it in our catalogue, but let’s just go check the shelves to make sure.”
I walked over to the history section with stiff joints and a thousand-yard stare. There’s no straight line you can draw between education and intelligence – I knew plenty of people who had PhD’s whose only defining intellectual attribute was masochism – but as I neared the end of my master’s and having engaged with a meaningful chunk of Williams’ lefty academics, I could usually smell out someone who was interested in something for its own sake, versus someone going through the motions. This woman, inexplicably for her attractiveness, seemed to be in the former category.
Suddenly I heard the mistakable dull ‘thwump’ of one book, and then several more, hitting the ground.
I turned around to see my charge red-faced, preparing to bend over and pick up books I realized her wide hips had partially knocked. I was prone to leaving a precarious stack when I didn’t have time to reshelve, but this was an as-of-yet unique experience for one of my clients to be hippy enough to knock it over.
I was trying to guffaw at her to ease the embarrassment and dissuade her from picking them up, but she was too quick and bent over completely to grab them. I caught my first view of her back and, I swear to you, almost fainted right then and there. Her shirt was pulled taught across her entire back and I could see the small sweat marks across where her belt met her blouse; she’d either been sitting somewhere hot or wearing a backpack. More importantly, however, I could see the full, generous shelf of her ass sticking out behind her.
I squeezed the side of the bookcase and tried to find my voice.
“Please, please, it’s okay. You can just leave them on the side.”
I tried another awkward laugh but it came out as more of a squeak.
She pulled herself back up with a less-than-ladylike grunt and I could see her face was blotchy and red from the exertion. She flipped her hair backward and, through a strained breath, tried to regain her cool with a dazzling smile that, in an instant, practically wiped my memory.
Trying to move quickly past the moment, I turned around and led her through the shelves further, still able to hear her laboured breathing behind me.
Once we got to history, my professional expertise in “old shit mostly old people wanted” kicked in and I was able to quickly locate Chakrabarty. Two of his newer works, Provincializing Europe and The Climate of History, but not what she was looking for. A sad robot, I looked up at her with apologetic eyes.
“I’m really sorry, but it looks like we don’t have it right now. I can definitely order it, though.”
Blessedly, she smiled warmly and said it was not a problem.
“Yes, that’d be great.”
I smiled weakly back at her, whatever remained of my intelligence slowly dripping out of my ears as I looked at this woman, entirely under the sway of her radiating beauty.
“Okay, let’s get you all set up then.”
Every muscle in my body tensed as I prepared to head back to the front counter until I realized that I was hemmed in by my customer in the cul-de-sac that was the history section.
It took a joyous few seconds, during which I was able to simply leisurely stare at her. I noticed that her freckles had a radiative pattern, bunched together most intensively at the bridge of her nose, and then exploding outward. Her green eyes felt somewhat guarded, I realized – their intensity was so immediate, she almost seemed careful to make eye contact too vividly, lest she drive someone to distraction. Whoops.
The slight twitch of my feet must have broken her concentration, too, and she realized she was in the way.
“Oh, hah, so silly. I guess I need to move, huh?”
I nodded weakly.
She began the process of turning around in the tight contours of our overloaded aisles. As I watched her execute a human K-turn, I was almost disappointed that she didn’t have her own backup sound.
With abject, unmitigated arousal, I dumbly heard beep, beep, beep in my head as my eyes burned into that beautiful, meaty ass.
It was even more arresting when she walked. Each of her globular buttcheeks had such fantastic heft to it that her glutes would jerk up a juicy chunk of ass-flesh to the small of her back, spectacularly compressing the waist of her jeans into her blouse into a tangle of fat and sweat-soaked fabric.
I had to wipe the drool from the corner of my mouth as we broke free of the narrow aisle and back into the centre of the store. My entire body seethed with desire at this point, a thin layer of sweat radiating out from between my legs. I tried to veer into intellectual pursuits to keep things PG and focus on the task at hand.
I walked up to the computer and immediately put my head down, completely ignoring any visual contact with her while I tried to perform the barest minimum of customer service.
“Okaaaaaay, it looks like I can get this in by the end of the month. Is that going to be too late?”
Unable to make eye contact and only take in auditory stimuli from her, it was now I noticed how melodic and resonant her voice was. Those breasts must have hidden a decent set of lungs and she spoke with enough variation in timbre that I had to focus in to enjoy the subtle and entertaining move between each phoneme.
“No, no, that should be fine. The class is almost done but I want this as a reference for my thesis.”
I kept typing, secretly pulling up our inventory and doing a rapid-fire series of queries, enters, and exists just to prolong the interaction.
“Oh yeah? What are you writing your thesis on?”
I was officially stalling now, the order prepared in another window but hidden from view until I knew I absolutely had to let the interaction close.
The huskiness of her laugh surprised me. It was deep and resonant, from the bottom of her belly, not just the throat. Listening to it was like diving head-first into a vat of honey in the slow way that it enveloped you totally.
“That’s a great question. I’m not sure yet.”
She laughed more and I dove deeper into the honey.
“Technically I’m in history of art, but I consider myself more a social philosopher.”
I smiled dumbly, already impressed and entranced. The silence proved enough of an invitation that she continued:
“Basically, I’m interested in geographies of desire and pleasure. I want to understand the processes through which desire and pleasure is created in particular spaces and contexts, and transmuted, overlaid, enforced, or enticed onto others, and how that transmutation may alter the experience or levels of pleasure. Chakrabarty, for example, has some really interesting things to say about how that works in economic terms, but I think haven’t worked hard enough to understand how that works in biopolitical and embodied terms.”
She caught herself at this point, the deluge of academic excitement having been released somewhat.
“At the end of the day, I have this dream we figure out how to be desirous and pleasureful without ruining everything – sort of like, how could we build a new kind of hedonism?”
She smiled somewhat sheepishly now,
“Basically, I like having fun too much and I decided I needed a master’s degree in it.”
The muscles in my neck tensed and, as an out-of-body experience, I felt my head tilt up to look at her again. Of all of the responses I could have had to her virtuosic display of academic curiosity, all I could muster was:
“Oh, you’re a graduate student?”
She laughed again.
“Yeah. A bit easy to narrow that down, huh?”
Williams only had two graduate programs: one in the History of Art and one from the Centre for Development Economics. In some strange, entirely siloed way, we were on the same level. My body rankled with excitement at this news.
I put aside the charade of getting her order ready and allowed myself to be pulled back into those hypnotic green eyes.
“I guess so,” I said, dumbly, but then quickly tried to compose myself:
“I’m actually in policy economics.”
I think I squinted at the light when that radiant smile shone again.
“No way! Wow. What are there, like a hundred masters students here at a time?”
I blanched.
“No, I actually heard it’s about fifty.”
She tilted her head back for a boisterous laugh and I got a look at the aqualinity of her neck. A few lonely freckle stars peaked out here and there and added a little spark of interest from the otherwise long, slope between the tiniest bit of her clavicle that was still visible just above her quivering breasts.
First, she peppered me with questions about my own work – basically poking and proding at leftover questions from Ostrom – and rather quickly the mutual academic respect and curiosity began to flow evenly between us. We exchanged the usual back and forth of information of academic fellow travelers: what brought us to the school, which buildings did we spend most of our time in, and where on campus did we like to eat the most. I raced past any questions about eating, lest I lose my cool.
The conversation went on for several minutes and with every syllable, I was falling more and more madly in love with this woman. I never wanted this exchange to end, until she said:
“Well, we should hang out sometime. I feel like I’m either only ever talking to snot-nosed undergrads or yelling at everyone in my faculty.”
I stifled a chortle.
“Yeah, that would be fun. You’re doing really cool work; I really enjoyed hearing about it.”
She gave me a wicked look now.
“I got that sense when it took you ten minutes to start to order my book, but never asked me for my name or credit card.”
Instantly my entire face was red. I felt blackness curl up my spine, spilled over each shoulder, and slide down my throat like I was Eddie Brock. When I went to speak again, I was surprised black bile didn’t spew out and coat her head to toe.
“...I’m, uh, sorry about that. I got, uh, distracted.”
Whether she did it on purpose or not, I’ll never know, but adding insult to injury, she shifted those beautiful feet of hers and the full weight of her bust jiggled at me mockingly.
I thank whatever gods or demons that watch over me took pity at that moment and that I could see she was still smiling when I raised my head from its initial wince.
“It’s okay. Usually, someone staring at my rack is not also talking to me about Chakrabarty and geographies of desire.”
My shame was muted somewhat and so I started to actually pull up our ordering software. Two clicks. It made the whole charade earlier a little cringe, but I tried to be gentle with myself – I think the radiative power of her sensuality gave me a hall pass on basic human functioning.
Without acknowledging my act of lechery any further, I got to work and had her book order ready within moments.
“Okay, I just need your name and number.”
Her wicked grin returned, this time with an arched eyebrow, as she folded her arms over her immense bosom, tit flesh rising like the tide to entirely swallow her clavicle and make it halfway to her chin.
“For the book, right?”
I looked her dead in the eye, and I am quite sure my soul left my body at that moment because I said:
“No, I just need your email for that.”
—-
Nawra. Her name was Nawra. Her parents were Howard alum, and got really into ‘back to Africa’ in their late twenties, she said. A brief foray into Islam after that that while it never quite stuck, left her and her sisters with a series of Arabic names. For an already racially ambiguous person it only added to her mystique.
Despite my utter failure to show even a semblance of personality, Nawra said I should text her and we’d find time to hang out.
The first one turned out to be about a week later. She’d just finished a particularly intense tutorial and I got a message as I was closing up the bookshop that I should meet her at the Water Street Grill. It was a new-ish spot locally that claimed to be ‘the best tavern in the Berkshires.’ It was a meaningless claim, but it didn’t stop endless slews of parents from swarming it during the holidays. Mid-week, though, it was just a little too pricey for most undergrads, so, we were able to enjoy the exterior patio without having to fight someone.
It was the perfect spot on an early-autumn night: the stars were just starting to come out early enough to enjoy them, but without any semblance of cold yet.
I arrived to see her already there, a partially finished Miller Lite in hand and her nose deep in the menu. Her hazel hair was floating lightly in the wind, each wispy curl occasionally flitting about lightly and tickling her forehead.
“Hey,” I said when my lurking near the table still wasn’t enough to pull her out of her intense studying.
She looked up with a start:
“Oh, Jesus, sorry. I was in my own world.”
She got up from the table and, one leg still tucked partially under the picnic table, motioned for me to hug her.
Dumbstruck, I shuffled over and, before I could fully close the gap, I was quickly enveloped in a squishy hug. She was bundled up slightly more tonight, given that we were outside, but as the heavenly embrace was released, I could see that her dark green wool button-up was only joined underneath by a very low-cut white bando that still showed off the top of her breasts in all their glory.
I smiled at her and went to the other side of the table, surreptitiously stealing a glance at her feet when I tucked my bag under the bench.
Whereas when I had first met her, Nawra’s feet were perfect. Not only were they perfect in the metaphysical sense that I have forever viewed them through, but also physically: she’d had them pedicured that day I learned and they were clean and beautiful as the day she was born.
Though they remained the Platonic ideal of feet in terms of their fundamental form, they looked quite different now.
She was wearing Birkenstocks, and the nail polish was gone. I could make out a thick layer of blackness and dirt on the underside of each toe. There were scrapes and more dirt on the top of each perfect appendage. I could even dimly make out that she, and presumably they, smelled slightly of sweat. I was heartbroken; who had done this to her? What had happened?
I turned my head back to the table to see her downing her first Miller and waving over to the waiter.
He showed up, an undergrad unlucky enough to have been born without a trust fund, and asked us what we wanted.
“Yeah, I’ll have another Miller –” she said, turning to me “ – and did you know what you want?”
I hadn’t even had a chance to look at the menu, but wanting to match her mood, I ordered the same.
I thought she was just ordering drinks, but then she suddenly kept talking again.
“Okay, great. We’ll also have an order of the nachos and one of the potato skins to start, please.”
To start? I tried not to look slackjawed at her.
The conversation, led largely by her, picked up right away. She was a determined conversationalist. Quick to share and lead when presented with someone as reserved as me, but curious enough that, anytime I showed interest in a topic, she’d pounce and start to tease out my own ideas and interests like I was the most interesting person she’d met all day.
We fit in all of the usual first-date coverage. She was close with her parents but knew she needed a few years away from them if she was really going to become close with them. I was a disaffected Midwest kid who, while coddled and loved, found it awkward to go home most of the time. She was a former visual arts student who’d gotten tired of the endless, pompous claims of originality, and decided she wanted to spend her time on figuring what could be genuinely novel, and then do that. I felt vastly less interesting, but when I told her about my research on three-day workweeks, she gasped and called us fellow travelers.
“What else is the search for the end of work but a way to make space for more pleasure?”
It might have been an elegant line delivered by someone else, but with a nacho half hanging out of her mouth as she said it, and a third beer in her other hand, it felt positively lurid.
Nawra ate like she talked, passionately. She wasn’t a pig, though her table manners may have been on the lighter side; she was expressive and emphatic. She was a self-described gourmand. She loved good food, good wine, and good conversation. She wasn’t a snob, which I found miraculous. Everyone I knew who loved food was generally fairly snooty about it, especially when they tried to make it about ‘health.’ Nawra was deeply democratic about her culinary tastes – as she was about most things. She ate what she liked, and what she liked had few qualifiers. I was never sure if it had any if I am honest, but I took her at her word.
By my third beer (and her fourth), I was much chattier now. I was telling her the original story of John Maynard Keynes's prediction of the fifteen-hour workweek in his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”
“...it’s crazy to think about, right? Nineteen thirty. The depth of the Great Depression.”
I held out my hands theatrically as if stage managing my world-history play.
“The Weimar Republic, up until that last year, slowly making its way towards a fledgling democracy, suddenly under the spectre of Nazism. In the US, the Empire State Building was a year away from being finished and people had already seen stockbrokers jumping from their windows after the crash of twenty-nine.”
She snort-laughed when I mimed a little finger-man jumping off the table.
“And this sunnofabitch writes this big, fancy essay saying not only where we going to make it through the Great Depression, but ‘our destination of economic bliss’ was just around the corner - the fifteen-hour workweek! It was laughable. Some said it was offensive.”
I paused, looking wistfully at her as she inhaled the last of what I realized were my French fries unrepentantly.
“And if you ask me, if we had done things differently, he wouldn’t ever have been wrong.”
Still chewing, she clapped her hands together with a goofy smile, a single cheek chipmunked out with the remainder of her meal.
“You know you’re really hot when you get philosophical?”
All my bombast vanished in an instant and I shrunk back down to the quarter of my burger that remained.
“Thank you,” I said, my head slowly making its way all the into my chest cavity.
“You’re so coy, you know that? I think this whole sensitive shy-kid thing is an act.”
Panic washed over my whole body as I stared at her, trying and failing to protest quickly enough.
She just laughed at me, her head thrown back in one of those full, belly laughs.
It was at this point I noticed just how taught and stretched her belly looked. The wide-buckled belt she was wearing to hold up her beautifully molded black jeans looked deeply uncomfortable. As she let loose a final deep, resonant note of laughter, her back shifted just enough to pull her belly upwards from her belt buckle and expose the angry red marks that it had left in digging into the hearty bulge of flesh that was eagerly working its way over the edge of her pants. I sweat a little bit.
“I’m joking, I’m joking. You just have an understated passion about you. It’s fun to see.”
Unable to dodge this compliment, I blushed deeply.
“Okay, keep telling me about this ‘economic bliss’” – she stressed, with cheeky air quotes – “that this Mr Keynes thought was headed our way.”
My blush only intensified as she goaded me on to continue.
“Well basically, he saw the productivity gains driven by technology increasing in speed during his time, and he thought that this would mean that we’d have a more and more efficient economy that simply didn’t need as many people-hours to generate the wealth everyone deserved.”
She had finished my fries now and had propped her bust on the table with her forearms squeezing her boobs together and cradling her chin which allowed her to stare at me intensively.
“I think sort of like your work, he said this ever-increasing economic efficiency now meant that everyone in society, not just the rich, could enjoy leisure time, which he felt was time for us to do whatever fulfilled us, and not just to be ‘idle.’”
At this, her eyes lit up and where such a large meal might have tiled anyone else into sleepiness, she jumped immediately in to carry the thought further.
“I’ve spent a long time studying the relationship between leisure, play, pleasure, and desire, and no one has ever brought in an economist before. I fucking love this. I wish he had a spatial angle to that…. But I’ll allow it.”
She smiled and leaned further in, conspiratorily edging her breasts forward, bare skin now almost touching the table the hem of her shirt had been pulled back so far.
“Can you actually imagine a world with a fifteen-hour workweek, though? Fuck that Tim Ferris bullshit, Keynes sounds like the real deal. Leisure, or ‘the care of the self,’ as Foucault called it, is an intrinsic social good – he said it was actually part of how we manifested and maintained social and personal freedom.”
Whatever pretensions I had at oratory and selling a story like this, when Nawra got going, it was incredible to behold. She gesticulated freely, unintentionally coquettish swings of flesh following behind her ideas as fast as they could, and there was a musical quality to her voice the more she got excited. Somehow her sensuousness never read as slutty or overdone, instead, it always conveyed a perfect mixing of form and substance.
“There’s this beautiful coming together of the time to undertake leisure – which in its Latin root is literally about a license, permission, to do the things that one needs – and desire, which I think of as the internal capacity to know what you need in relation to the external world. Having the capacity to know your own needs and wants, and the time and permission to fulfill those wants and needs, leads to pleasure, which is the feeling of fulfillment from having met those wants and needs.”
She now staring into my eyes so intensely now, that I felt as if caught in a prism, my entire essence captured and refracted through her eyes, solely for her consumption. Given how she’d consumed everything in front of her, more than a small flutter of nervousness shivered its way down my spine in the uncertainty of if, and how, she might want to consume me.
“I think it’s important to say, though,” she continued, still staring me down directly, “that there has to be a flip side to this. Absolute hedonism, that is, the complete fulfillment of all of our needs and wants at any given time, is corrupting. It grates against the human need for challenge and striving.”
Her eyes narrowed a little further, her smile strikingly predatory.
“Which is why, as they say, the chase is part of the fun.”
I gulped.
“Successful pleasure requires an ongoing lack - some kind of absence to justify continued striving both mechanically, like working, and sensuously…. like how I’m flirting with you right now and can’t seem to quite break through to you that I think you’re really fucking hot.”
I silently stammered, open-mouthed and adrift. She could have grilled me with a thousand questions, argued her points further, dressed me down academically, and I think I might have been able to hold my own, but the combination of her intellect and the overwhelming, raw desire she radiated, blanketed me immovably. I was a deer-in-the-headlights-hopelessly-devoted-to-her little shell of a human capable of only the most basic mechanical acts of bodily function.
“Do you find me attractive?”
Now she was just turning the screws. She knew I had no way to actively participate in this unfair haranguing, but I tried my best.
I nodded, slowly at first, eyes downcast, and then upward to her more rapidly.
“...yes.”
A little more courage.
“Yeah, like a lot.”
A little more.
“Ever since I first saw you…”
Deep swallow.
“...I haven’t been able to take my eyes off of you. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
As her predatory smile drew up into its culmination and became luminous, I heard the crescendo of Rhapsody in Blue and I made a variation of Nick Carroway’s description of Jay Gatsby in my head:
She had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.
The only addendum I would bring to it, is that the smile also looked like it wanted to fuck my brains out until I forgot my own name and lay drooling on her bedspread. Equally if not more importantly, it also suggested she believed I was up to the task - even when I myself was not sure that I was.
It was at that moment of paralyzed lust that I felt a sudden brush against the bottom of my ankle. My willowy six-foot-one frame meant most of my pants generally rested above the ankle, meaning that there was always a little exposed shin shown to the world. Nawra seemed to like that, as I could feel the crinkled flesh of her arches wrap around the front of my leg, while I could feel the thinnest edge of the tendons at the top of her foot brush against the back of my Achilles.
It was light at first, but when my startled eyes connected with hers, the pressure tightened and I felt the compression on my leg grow tighter. The bottom of her foot was hot and the longer it stayed in contact with my skin, the more I felt her sweat coat my own skin, the sensory mix of her heat, the dampness, and the cool fall air sending my nervous system into fight-or-flight. This woman was going to give me a heart attack and we hadn’t even kissed.
Nawra tightened those beautiful, dirty, sensuous, drive-me-fucking-crazy-and-I-can’t-explain-why feet around the minuscule muscles of my calves and pulled my leg closer to hers. Suddenly I was realizing just how small the table was, as she was able to pull not just my shin, but soon my entire leg toward her until I was fully wrapped between her plush thighs.
She began to shift her hips side to side, twisting and smooshing the corupulence of her legs against the sinuousness of mine. I could almost feel the texture of the cellulite on her legs. This movement caused the bottoms of her breasts to graze the bottom of the table, and, attention split kaleidoscopically, I momentarily saw a few stray crumbs ground under them. I gulped again.
“You think I’m hot, huh?”
Hypnotized and slack-jawed, I nodded.
“Even though I’m a little chubby?”
She pouted now, pulling her head in and emphasizing her more cherubic features and double chin. It softened her look only slightly, as any cutesy facial gestures were always in contrast to a body practically built for Pornhub.
“You really are the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.”
I swore I saw fangs when she smiled now.
Breaking eye contact for a moment, she pulled the nacho tray over towards her, and, in one simple motion, swept her hand and part of her forearm across the graveyard of cheese, beans, vegetables, and chip crumbs. With a flourish, she twisted her hand upwards and clapped it against her mouth. A few small crumbs fell out from the sides, but otherwise, everything went into her waiting maw - the grease ring around her mouth and the detritus on her breasts were the only visual cue of what she’d just done.
Not quite done chewing, she continued:
“Good. I love food. I love eating. And I love being fat. I got the sense you were into that, but it’s always good to check.”
I think at this point I had probably started to drool, I had lost all bodily control and was completely within Nawra’s power - hers to command.
She broke her concentration again and raised her hand to call over our server. Clearly uncomfortable with our sexual tension, he walked up hurriedly and Nawra pounced.
“Hey, yeah, we’ll get the family dessert brownie, please.”
A family dessert? Were we going to share this?
Clearly also confused, but eager to make his escape, our waiter offered a half-hearted smile and walked away with only a nod.
She turned her full attention back to me and I was once again entranced.
“Have you ever heard of a book called The Erotic Mind, by Jack Morin?”
Waiting for my answer, she began licking each finger, one by one, her full, pouty lips puckering suggestively as she playfully made smacking sounds upon completing each digit.
“Uh, no. What’s it about?”
“In general, it’s an exploration of what ‘the erotic’” – she said, using emphatic scare quotes with her greasy fingers – “is, and how people can get better access to it.”
Unsure of where this was going, I stayed quiet and watched the door to the kitchen in my peripheral vision like a hawk.
“The most important thing that Morin says, though, going back to my comment about absence and pleasure, is that he believes, and I agree, that erotic pleasure can more or less be written out as an equation.”
I felt like I’d fallen into some kinky version of Reading Rainbow, or Sesame Street as she raised up her hands to mime out the equation.
“Attraction,” she said while hefting one breast and weighing it appreciatively with the kind of adoration most people reserved for their children.
“Plus an obstacle or obstacles–”
Now she smooshed her oozing flesh towards her, turning to the side somewhat, as if pulling away her overflowing bounty from an eager suitor, only to then whip her face back at me dramatically, eyes narrowed and searing through my clothes.
“Equals attraction.”
I tilted my head and smiled, somewhat bemused.
“So, you think pleasure is fundamentally dialectical?”
Now her eyes really lit up.
“I knew you were smart.”
An aberrant “ahem” let us know that our dessert had finally arrived and the waiter unceremoniously slide it between us, not even bothering to clear the carnage of Nawra’s earlier work, and walked away without saying a word. I was glad that the patio was empty, besides us - while we weren’t exactly sticking tongues down each other’s throats, the sexual tension radiating out from us was overwhelming.
Before she spoke again, she took up one of the two forks (honestly, I was surprised he’d even bothered, I think we both knew what was about to happen) and began her work. Already
“I do think it is dialectical, a never-ending push and pull between desire and permission, given or denied. But here’s where I am stuck: if we take Foucault at his word and understand self-care and pleasure as part of emancipatory politics, how do we consistently pursue pleasure and overcome these obstacles to achieve release, without that becoming rote and, ultimately, less pleasurable.”
Miraculously, Nawra juggled the Socratic unfolding of her philosophical inquiry while also darting strategically into the brownie with her fork, sinfully deep moans of pleasure interrupting each sentence.
I tried to participate more actively, even as my heart pounded like a jackhammer and more and more sweat trickled down my leg, caught in the furious warmth of Nawra’s thighs.
“It’s a question of equilibrium and teleology, right?”
As I finished the sentence, the pull of Nawra’s legs stretched my hip flexor more and more as I felt my knee and upper shin make contact with her cunt’s furnace-like heat.
“Say more. You’re sexy when you’re agreeing with me,” she said, winking and taking an unreasonably large fork full of brownie while she watched me.
“Well, I guess what I hear in that is a problem around the whole concept of equilibrium. If you could somehow calibrate your life so that you could reliably overcome challenges to people or things you were attracted to, would that become boring at some point? Like a video game that gets too predictable, even though, theoretically, you’re being challenged.”
Now I felt like I was really on a roll, the pain of my raging horniness helping me dig into the pits of my brain for an answer to her prompt, hoping to impress her and take this to the next level.
“But I feel like that’s not the only problem you raise here.”
Nawra cocked an eyebrow now, her fork still making steady trips back and forth to the plate while she looked at me. She ate like a conveyor belt, her mind set on the task with deadly focus.
“Well, in economics, we could call this a kind of Jevon’s paradox - have you heard of it before?”
Nawra had now finished about half of the family-sized brownie and I had yet to take a single bite. Chocolate now starting to smear on her upper lip, she licked suggestively and shook her head no.
“Basically, around the time the steam engine in the UK was really getting big, this economist, Jevons, noticed that the more efficient steam engines got, the more coal got used. Because the machines got more efficient and cheaper, though, people used them more and used more of them. And we now look at this as a general problem of any kind of efficiency - anytime we get better at something, we generally want more of it. It’s an unsolved paradox to this day in environmental economics.”
She was still shoveling in the now-dwindling chocolate into her mouth like a 19th Century train engineer brought coal to the train engine, but I could see small droplets of sweat forming on her forehead and despite the continuing pace, the bites did appear to be getting a little smaller each time. Choo-choo.
“I think there’s a similar kind of problem here and, like Jevon’s paradox, the ultimate question is whether or not there’s a teleology here or an irresolvable, dynamic tension.”
“A teleology?”
Her eyes were drooping slightly now, the alcohol and food finally starting to slow her down as the buzz of pleasure washed across all of her nerves, blanketing that vivid brain of hers in a fog of delight.
“Yeah, if there’s an ultimate end-point to these questions of efficiency or pleasure. Can it be solved through perfecting some kind of method where the equilibrium of challenge and pleasure is perfectly calibrated to always be enjoyable, or is the irresolvability of the whole problem a source of pleasure in and of itself?”
Only a few bites left on the plate now, but Nawra’s hands were limp at her sides, a wild look of pleasure and defeat plastered across her face.
“Put another way, is there joy not only in the immediate overcoming of obstacles but also at the meta-level: the chase of chase itself?”
And then, like that moment in the bookstore when I asked for her number, I was overcome by a momentary surge of boldness.
I picked up the fork that she’d left on the plate and, mad as a hatter, scooped a heaping bite onto it. My hands were shockingly steady as I looked at the cake, and over at my bloated date, chocolate now smeared all around her face and a mild expression of fear coming over her, intermixed with the tiniest glimmer of excitement.
I reached my sinewy arms across the table and brought the heaping bite to her mouth.
She hesitated for a moment, and then her teeth darted out and she chomped down on the piece. Crumbs fell messily from the sides of her mouth as she closed her eyes, breathlessly chewing as quickly as she could so that she could force herself to swallow.
There were only a few mid-sized chunks left on the plate. I scooped another forkful and brought it right to the edge of her lips while she was still chewing. The dullness in her eyes evaporated and I could see the predator alive again; eager to fulfill this challenge.
“I don’t know how to resolve your problem right here, but I can tell you this, Nawra: I want you to finish this brownie, and then I want to fuck you.”
I was never an experienced person with power exchange. And Nawra was a supremely dominant personality, but at that moment, I felt called to a position of authority. However subtly, she’d given me the reins, and I intended to take them up.
The next few bites happened wordlessly, the machinic motions of her jaw slowly breaking down the very last of the heavy, thick brownie batter. She was focused and, from what I could tell by the sweat on her brow and the occasional fluttering of her eyes, on the razor’s edge between pleasure and pain.
When the last bite came, Nawra was a transformed woman. What had been the immaculate vision who had walked into my store a few short days ago, was now a heaving, bloated mess – her breasts bulged ostentatiously over the edge of her bando and she had now opened her entire flannel button up and I could see the angry red marks on the upper edges of her belly. Why she hadn’t undone her jeans was a mystery to me.
But despite her utter state of disarray, she still had my leg in a lock, some other-worldly strength coursing through her body even as she sat at the threshold between gluttony and ruin.
Her lips were already hanging half-open as I brought the fork up to her. She was breathing heavily, each heave bringing down her bando more and more scandalously close to her aureola. She closed her eyes, accepted the fork’s entrance into her mouth, and closed down slowly. There was no coquettishness now. Only deliberate mastication.
One, two, three, four, five, and six times she chewed. I watched her swallow and could visibly see the lump traveling down her throat to what had to be the very top of her esophageal entrance. I could not imagine that there was a single iota of space left in her stomach.
As she waited for the bite to settle, her entire posture changed, pain spreading across her face, but also small twitches and flutters across her body. I looked at her, poise drained and utterly agog as she tilted her head back and let out a barely perceptible moan.
She was clearly in some kind of transcendental meditation, her head bobbing slightly, her eyes closed, and her hands gently cradling her stomach.
After a few moments of quiet, she opened her eyes slowly and looked at me. Even through the sweat and general heat that her face exuded, I could tell she was blushing a little.
“We need to get out of here.”
—-
Leaving the restaurant was a slow, laborious affair, including an incredibly awkward encounter with our waiter again as we settled up. In the back of the Uber, I was careful not to jostle Nawra, or even touch her at all, lest her monumental feast find its way back up somehow. She simply continued her meditation on gluttony and sat there unspeaking, breathing heavily. The driver duitifully kept her eyes on the road, Nawra’s heaving tits and full, sagging belly, basically fully exposed, having undone her pants and kept her flannel open once we got into the car.
Wordlessly, she ordered us both out of the car once we got to her place. It was an utterly adorable second-story red brick walk-up on Spring Street, just above the new board game cafe.
The stairs were excruciating for Nawra, but I found myself in the enviable position of having to guide her up, my hands gently sinking into her backfat and occasionally grazing her plush ass as she struggled up the steps one by one.
When we got upstairs, Nawra’s inner world came into radical focus for me.
The entirety of the charming turn-of-the-century brick interior felt like a monument to pleasure. Her walls were covered in a mosaic of vibrant, and often erotic, art. There were pencil drawings of women with their legs splayed, their full, hairy bushes happily smiling outwards. There were mixed media pieces with a bricolage of pasted magazine scraps, entries from cookbooks, fashion catalog size charts, and so much more. I couldn’t tell what might have been her own work, but the curation, alongside the setting, oozed her tastes. It was all very temple-like, almost sacred.
She walked into her room, ignoring me, and closed the door. Unsure of what to do, I walked around and took stock of her bookshelves. That old saying of not fucking someone unless they read was gratifyingly, indeed perhaps gratuitously, fulfilled here. Amidst the gallery walls of colour and food and naked bodies of every size, were interspersed heavy, overflowing bookshelves. She had to have at least ten in her living room alone, each more overstuffed than the next. Novels, journals, magazines, and textbooks, she had a complete cornucopia of knowledge right at her fingertips.
I was thumbing through a well-worn copy of Justine when I heard her door open again.
I turned and felt the power I had inhabited so completely earlier fade in an instant.
She walked into the room, her rotund belly, still red and angry looking from her binge, entering first and jiggling with each measured step. She’d cleaned up her face and maybe applied a little more makeup. Her freckles once again burned intensively on her face and her eyes zeroed in on me.
I had no idea if she’d been wearing it the entire time, but with both careful and sensuous steps, she sashayed over to me clad in nothing but a strapless bra and low-slung panties and garters that made room for her gigantic belly and still had enough give to wrap the top strap of a garter around its outermost edge.
Nearly paralyzed with desire, I tried to be adventurous:
“That’s quite a costume change.”
She only smiled and kept on her slow advance.
“You were really helpful at the restaurant. I hadn’t played with those ideas in that kind of way before.”
Buoyed by the compliment, I relaxed a little.
“I was glad to help. Dialectics isn’t my specialty, but it felt like the right thread to pull on.”
Her smile deepened.
“Yes, that was helpful, but I was also thinking about your… let’s call it your sense of praxis.”
She licked her lips in erotic punctuation.
Suddenly realizing what she meant, it was my turn to blush.
“I, uh, I hope that was okay.”
Nawra was now standing right next to me, her belly radiating heat that I could feel even though she wasn’t touching me.
“It was more than okay, sweetie.”
Her left hand reached up onto my shoulder, her other folding underneath her belly and caressing it gently. Even with her height being rather diminutive to my own, the full heft of her sexual dominance left her towering overtop of me.
She kept closing the distance between us until her full, churning belly brushed up against my shirt, and then kept pressing inwards until I could really feel each shudder and gurgle of her poor, overworked organs against my own. It was strikingly active - a range of sounds and sensations constantly working their way out - but it didn’t seem to deter the other hunger that seemed more than likely to devour me any moment.
“Why don’t you put that book down? Sade’s rather filthy, anyway, don’t you think?”
My entire body ached with desire and yet holding onto this silly book also felt like my last anchor to the real world: I was off to Wonderland, for good or for ill, the second I put it down.
Gently, she moved her hand from her belly and took hold of the tome from my hands. She looked at it for a moment, and then unceremoniously dropped it to the floor with a thud that made me shiver involuntarily.
I realized that she’d put some light music on in her bedroom, and the gentle, almost mournful sounds of brass petered into the room from the distance. As I took notice of the music, she moved her hands around me and tried to to clasp one another around my narrow back; though with how round her belly was a this point, even squished comfortably against me, she wasn’t able to get as far as she might have wanted to. She ran her fingers lightly over my shoulders and lower back and danced with me on the spot for a few moments, each caress of her fingers and brush of her body against mine further devolving me into horny mush.
“I have to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like you.”
I looked down at her, surprised by this island of plainness in a sea of sensuality.
“Most people don’t want to wax theory with me, and never with such… embodiment, as you brought to the table.”
I couldn’t help a blushing smile.
“Nawra… I don’t think I need to tell you that you’re one of a kind. The second you walked into my store, I was completely under your spell.”
I surprised myself with how evenly it came out. A simple admission, with no artifice or uncertainty.
“Good. It took a long time to cast it, you know?”
She smiled in a way that never gave me full confidence whether or not she was joking
Her hands began to work my body and direct it to her needs. First, my button-up came off, our skin now freely pressing against one another and pinpricks of pleasure ebbing and flowing across my entire body. Next, she began to push me down to the floor, my knees settling on her soft, plushy carpet.
From this angle, it was impossible not to see that Nawra was a goddess. Those spectacularly full breasts loomed over the edges of her miraculously engineered bra. Each had enough heft that they sat heavily on her rounded stomach, but were also still so spherical that they maintained a distinctive presence, never fully getting lost in her other folds or rolls.
Her waist was harder to make out, from the position of practically staring into her belly button, but with the holy trinity of her breasts and belly ahead of me, I had more than enough to worship.
“You know, I get a lot of looks with this body. People love to turn and take a second peak - to see my ass or look at my tits. But what I like about you, what’s unique and beautiful about you, is that you take all of me in.”
She began to heft her belly, which whined a little in complaint.
“You like this,” she said, tracing from her pubic mound all the way up her belly to the edge of her breasts while she spoke.
“And I think you also like these - which, I have to be honest, is pretty hot.”
She laughed impishly and rubbed her foot against my bent-over chest.
Without thinking, I reached out and kissed the top of it, holding her heel in my palms like a precious vessel. I continued to reverently touch her lower body and she simply continued speaking.
“People don’t understand that I’m not just a gourmand who loves good food and to drink. I’m not just some slutty party girl who gets carried away, even if I do… have my moments.”
I was now licking the top of her foot. Whatever quick cleaning job she’d done, she’d miraculously found time to lotion up, too, and the smoothness of her skin and botanical smells pleasantly washed around me as I began to work my way up her juicy leg.
“I think you understand what I do: that beauty has to have contrast.”
As I worked my way up her shin, I moved her beautiful foot to my shoulder, my bony breadth the perfect hold for her, and giving me unrestricted access to her inner thighs. And oh… how I loved them. They had to be alchemical creations - they were perfectly balanced in their softness and smoothness, but still had the underlying musculature that was suggestive of physical prowess, too. She didn’t have much cellulite, but the occasional crop-up was an oasis that I quickly drank from.
“I’ve always been attractive, but the fatter I get, the more interesting the juxtaposition of my body becomes. Each time I go up a size, someone has to question again if I’m actually attractive, or if I just have big enough tits or a rounded-enough ass. It breaks their understanding of their own sexuality. I transform their conceptions of what it means to be beautiful.”
Something about this almost megalomaniacal talk revved my engine like nothing before. No longer content to kiss, I began to paw at that spectacular ass with one hand while the other began to grab handfuls of the still-loose fat hanging from the sides of her belly and her hips.
“And when I eat and I grow and I make a glutton of myself, I transform that even further. I fucking love watching someone try to look away as I stuff myself, or split a pair of pants. The raw sensuality of it just… it shuts them down. They don’t know what to do with it.”
Then I felt a hand on my head, titling me
“But not you. You understand.”
I kissed her pubic mount more reverently than I had ever prayed in my life.
“I understand. I believe you. I… I want to help you, on this whole project you’ve begun.”
I kept kissing her sex, the warmth and moisture merging with the nervous sweat on my forehead.
“Yes, I know, baby. Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance.”
I pawed at her ass more aggressively, pulling her body towards mine so that my head could lift up her belly and give me full access to her vulva. It shouldn’t have surprised me, even though it still did, but she tasted… sweet. It was like her body had been genetically predisposed towards pleasure on the molecular level.
I began to explore the out edges of her womanhood slowly at first. Her mound was perfectly round, sloping hill, with only the thinnest layer of hair, safely enveloped by her belly most of the time, but now exposed and acting as the perfect ramp, guiding me ever more deeply into her. Her lips were already engorged, throbbing back at me with each kiss I placed on them.
I started slowly at first, trying to make this new acquaintance, but Nawra’s hands pushed with ever-increasing force at the back of my head, guiding me deeper and deeper inwards.
My kisses became more and more intense, my entire face burrowing ever further inwards, and my tongue exploring anywhere it could find. I could feel the full weight of her belly resting on my head; my neck began to ache as its full weight, freed from Nawra’s own control, rested fully atop me. I pawed at her ass and thighs for several moments, and then reached to the edges of her belly and pulled forward and down, trying to pull in ever more of her towards me.
As my motions became more and more erratic and forceful, I felt her muscles begin to contract around my head. My tongue was rebuffed by her walls, but I felt her well-manicured nails dig into the back of my head with increasingly painful force and continue to push me. Feeling light-headed from the heat and increasing pressure, I gave one last, desperate thrust, and then began to feel the heavenly cascade of muscles and breath and spirit that signals la petit mort.
Nawra grabbed my head for stability, ripping me out of my prior task unceremoniously as the full, heavy weight of her body connected with mine. I had to adjust everything suddenly to ensure that I could catch her, our hands quickly entwining so I could guide her unsteady descent to the floor. She came down to her knees with little grace and lolled her head forward into my shoulder. Her entire body seemed to pool, the combined cascade of rolls and folds and flesh losing any semblance of solidity. She’d pushed every one of her senses to the absolute limit.
I braced her head and slowly brought her down to the curls of her white shag carpet. She continued to breathe heavily and rested her head for at least a minute, allowing me time to sidle up behind her and gingerly massage her belly with one hand while I stroked the back of her neck with the other.
“You, uh, really know how to make a lady feel special, you know that?”
I let out a mirthful chuckle.
“I aim to please”
She returned my chuckle with an unladylike snort at the end.
Without thinking, I blurted out, half-laughing: “Is someone a little piggy?”
The moment the words left my mouth my entire body tightened. We’d talked about the joyous embrace of her body and how I wanted to worship it, but we’d never even glanced at questions of humiliation. I began to spiral immediately, my thoughts trapped in recriminations and feeling like I was now at risk of losing this one-of-a-kind person after a stupid mistake.
She didn’t respond immediately, but after a breath, I heard something I never, ever expected.
Nawra was oinking, only just audibly, but ever so slightly, she was oinking.
I went to speak but I found myself so perplexed I couldn’t make sense of the words. She clearly sensed my confusion and jumped in, her voice suggestive and dominant as ever:
“Only for the right people.”
I grabbed her belly a little tighter, desperate to hold on to this goddess who had, at least at this moment, quite literally fallen into my lap.
“Play your cards right, my friend, and I must just let you do that again sometime.”
I kissed the back of her neck again.
“Does that mean I get a second date?”
“Oh, sweetheart, the night is young. Go to the fridge. There’s an already-opened bottle of Pinot Gris in there. Grab that and the dish of chocolate strawberries, too. I think we might need that later.”
I could only float, half-alive to her kitchen, looking back at the bloated beauty as she repositioned herself on the couch, her lingerie slightly askew but still resplendent. As I watched her adjust herself a little further, I could see her beautiful, delicate feet hoisted up on the throw pillows, arranged there in a perfect and appropriate simulacrum of jewelry in a museum.
I went kitchen and brought back our wares. She smiled and motioned for me to come to her.
The next morning I woke up exhausted and a little disoriented. My head was aching after the beers at the restaurant, the half of the bottle of Pinot Gris, the two cognacs, and that final, dastardly Nikka that I had consumed that evening at Nawra’s behest. The image of her swirled around pleasantly in the foggy incoherence of my barely-awake mind. I could still smell her, and as as my memory tried to integrate my other sensory impressions of her – remembering the smoothness of her skin, and the pressure of her body on top of mine – my body began to register its current location and the slippery expanse of Nawra’s silk sheets came more clearly into mental focus.
As I stretched a little, reaching outward to hopefully sneak another cheeky squeeze of my lover, I felt around in vain. While happily piled under a mountain of blankets, I was, in fact, alone.
The absence of my lover was significant enough to clear most of the fog from my mind, and, anxious to see her again, I slowly slunk out of the bed, put on my underwear, and made my way out of her room tentatively.
As the door to her living room creaked open, I saw her right away, posed in a tight runner’s lunge on her yoga mat. She was dressed in yoga garb that clung to every fold, crease, curve, and bulge her body had to offer. With a thin sheen of sweat covering her body, her curls safely sinched up on top of her head, this sensuous athleticism was yet another dimension of her physical presence I took in with wonder.
While her gaze stayed firmly fixed on the wall, she called out to me as the door opened fully.
“Ah, you’re up!”
I gave a part-grumble-yawn-affirmative-grunt.
“You’re cute when you sleep, you know that?”
I only blushed in response.
She transitioned from the lunge into a plank that she held for a moment, and then seamlessly into a downward dog - I could hear the shift of fabric from different body parts rubbing against one another intermingled with her smooth and steady breath.
“Are you hungry at all?”
The prospect of another meal with her made the back of my neck tingle and blood come to the surface of my skin.
“Yeah, I think I’ll need something soon.”
“Nothing crazy, mind you. I still need a little time to work off last night.”
She walk-crawled her way to a standing position, bowed her hands and head together, and broke her connection to the mat. Toweling herself off, she walked over to me, breasts heaving in the confines of a sports bra that, while looking a little worn on its own, had reached its zenith of achievement in having the honour to hoist her phenomenal rack.
Closing the gap, just as she had last night, she came over, kissed me on the cheek, and then sashayed her way to the kitchen.
This version of Nawra felt different yet again - she was all there, still. The sensuousness, the force of her personality, but there was an ineffable “different-ness” that projected outwards as I watched her head into the kitchen and start to throw fruit into a blender and crack eggs into the pan.
I didn’t think my face projected anything, but she seemed to sense my confusion as I walked after her into the kitchen.
“What? Were you thinking we’d go at a stupendous stuffing all over again, a big English-style breakfast overflowing the sides of the table, and you’d watch me push myself to the edge of oblivion after a Soddom and Gomorah-level of debauchery last night?”
Dumbstruck, I didn’t say anything. The thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but as she said it, my entire body lit up in a mixture of anxiety and arousal.
Ever a step ahead of me, she winked and smiled mirthfully.
“Patience, my dear. Contrasts, remember?”
My stomach growled hungrily in response.