Page 31 of Josephine and Clay

Josie: And then?

The answer flashes back:

Clay: I’d taste you. All of you.

My forehead goes hot. I can see the blur of his jaw, the flex in his forearm, can almost feel the wet brush of his tongue.

That slide and hush, the inside-out sweetness of being stretched open by his mouth. The memory hits: the taste of him, the way it didn’t matter whose hands were whose, whose breath belonged to which name.

Clay pressed me into the kind of wordless oblivion I didn’t want to come back from.

I look at the phone, the shape of my own desperate face reflected in the midnight slick of the glass. I could stop, put the phone down, close my eyes and wait for the heat to drain away.

But I don’t.

Josie: You’re a liar. You never go slow.

Clay: I do. When I have to.

Clay: Don’t believe me?

Josie: Never have.

Clay: You can always ignore me.

I want to answer right away, but everything is trembling, my free hand restless against the knotted towel. I’m so wet it’s embarrassing, a secret only for myself and for him, atomized across the city, fuzzed and pixelated in a way that makes all this feel both unreal and closer.

Josie: I won’t.

Clay: Good.

Clay: Now get your hand under the towel.

I let my thumb drift, draw a line down my sternum, reeling from the thought that he can break me open just by asking. I hesitate, then type with my left:

Josie: It’s there.

Clay: Touch yourself.

I imagine him leaning against the bar, reading this with his free hand wrapped around a sweating glass, the other in his lap, palm pressed hard and cruel over the crotch of his jeans. The idea makes my mouth go dry.

But I follow orders. I push the towel aside, let it fall in a ruined heap around my hips, and listen to the silence of my room.

I touch myself very lightly, at first. It’s almost clinical, a curiosity. It isn’t until I lean back, arch into the couch, that all the hesitation sloughs off and my fingers come alive.

Clay: I wish I could hear you.

I’m not thinking about the words anymore. I’m only thinking about the way it felt last time, wrist bent and elbow locked as he opened me up so slow I thought it would kill me.

I dig in with the heel, slow circles that turn my knees to jelly.

My phone slips off my hip and hits the floor, screen up, his name still bright against the black. I wonder if he’s still there, waiting for the play by play, but my neck’s too soft to let me bend and see.

It’s just me and the water left cooling on my skin, and the animal sound of my own breathing.

If I close my eyes hard enough, I can see him. The way his hand would find the center of me without hesitation. The drag of his fingers. Unkind, then sorry, then unkind again.

The heat pools and gathers inside me, furious and greedy. I push back, arching off the couch, shoving at a ghost.