Though Monique had come from Paris
with her mother when she was only five, and was half Russian, she was as
unmistakably French as the Eiffel Tower.
Maybe it was the way her mermaid's eyes tilted at the corners, or the
proud set of her head atop her ballerina's neck, or the whimsical tilt of her
luxuriant mouth. Whatever it was, I was
entranced from the moment we met.
Her tiny closet of an apartment on
the Lower East Side was a testament to her loyalty to all things French and
enough to tell me ridicule would have ended our friendship.
Her cushions were swathed in thrift-store
toile, and screens painted with scenes of Montmartre and the Seine covered the
reality of New York outside her haven.
Red wine, cheese, and bread were her preferred sustenance. She nursed pots of lavender de Provence and
fragrant thyme on the fire escape in the summer, and saw them through the
winter with the love of a mother.
Monique listened to Piaf on an old
turntable because, she explained, without the crackles and snaps of a record
album being caressed by a needle, the music was not "right". That long hot summer, making love in her
iron, curlicued bed, I began to agree with her.
****
"Ah, mon chéri, tu es tant sexy!" she purred.
I didn't understand most of what she
said in French, but it didn't matter.
Anything that came out of her mouth was titillating to me.
Piaf sang Sous le ciel de
Paris, and I reclined like an emperor while Monique devoured me.
Usually, our lovemaking was a back
and forth tussle for control. At various
times, she would give in, or I would, or we'd just melt together in a tangle of
body parts. We fucked like people with
no modesty, no shame, and no boundaries.
Sometimes it was hard and fast, over in a flash. Other times we lasted all day, occasionally
spending entire weekends naked, fucking, eating, talking, and listening to
music.
Our relationship was still new, but
I had a feeling it would always be this way.
We just seemed to fit one another in every way, both physical and
mental. I know everyone in the throes of
new love says things like that, but with us, it was true. I knew no matter what happened my life would
never be the same.
"Comme tu es joli, chéri. Voyez,
comme il dort maintenant. Est-il
fatigué, le pauvre petit? Mais
vois-tu! Il se revéille! Il lève la tête! Ah, comme il est beau, ton petit soldat. Mais non, il n'est pas petit, pas soldat, il
est tout un général, ta queue!" she said, in between licks and sucks
of my cock. Her tongue was a snake in
the Garden of Eden, tempting and seductive, winding its way down my shaft.
"What?" I said, my voice taut with sexual
tension. I closed my eyes, and still was
assaulted with daydream images of her.
She was like a drug I could not get enough of, could not stop thinking
of and wanting.
She kept me on the edge, fingers and
tongue working together. The sound was
obscene – wet slithers, sucking strokes and heavily accented English that drove
me wild.
"It was silly, mon loup," she said, her lips
forming a moue as she kissed the aubergine, mushroom-head of my cock. Her lush bottom lip shone with a gloss of my
pre-cum.
"Nothing you say is silly, minette.
Tell me." I loved that nickname – sex kitten. It fit her perfectly and made her purr every
time I said it.
She sighed softly, her head coming
to rest on my thigh, her fingers cradling my turgid prick, those cat-like green
eyes turned up to meet mine. "I was
talking about your cock. How pretty it
is. I said, look how he sleeps. I asked if he was tired, the poor little
thing. But, then he woke and lifted his
head and I said he was beautiful, your little soldier. But, he isn't little, and not merely a
soldier. No. He is a general, your cock!" She blushed as she finished, laughing softly
and kissing my balls. Tiny hairs rose to
meet her lips and my flesh quivered. I
was so close to coming that just her breath wafting over my penis was almost
enough to set me off. I had to grip the
sheets, and think of the Yankees, to keep from spurting all over her pretty
face.
Like any good general, I accepted my
minion's worship and took control. My
fingers fisted in her hair – luxurious locks of red twisted around and around
until she was poised where I wanted her, over my cock once more. I urged her mouth downward, slowly, to tease
us both. "Open wide, minette.
Make me come." My voice was gruff, commanding. I was in charge and we both knew it.
I let her hair fall to my thighs,
framing her face with its waves. She
moaned, swiveling her head and corkscrewing up and down my cock. "Faster.
Deeper," I instructed her, lifting my hips to show her the way I
wanted it, until she fell into the metronomic rhythm I imposed upon her.
"Oui, oui, mon coeur," she said when she came up for breath,
her voice husky from the ramming of my cock down her throat and her own
building desire.
She wrapped her arms around my
torso, nails scratching lightly over my belly.
I twisted and began to buck, until her mouth almost took in my entire
cock. I felt her nose buried in my
public hair and her teeth graze my fuck-lusted skin.
"Fuck!" I shouted, taking her head between my hands,
and fucking her face like a street whore's.
I was rough. So was she.
I felt her long legs spread on the bed, silken skin against mine, as she
almost crawled in place, wanting, it seemed, to crawl right inside of me.
Crazed with lust, my body bowed, I
spread my knees wide and gushed into her eager little mouth. I kept going and going, until her mouth was
full, leaking at the corners. I groaned
as she licked the droplets from her lips and smiled at me, coming up to lie
atop my body, her curves fitting me perfectly.
"Je t'adore. Je t'aime,"
she said, for the first time, her head atop my heart, which still beat
frantically even as my orgasm died.
I knew enough French to understand
that, and my battered heart sang. "I
love you too, Monique."
****
The images, smells, and memories are
still so alive in me; sometimes it's as if I could reach through the ether of
time and step back, to that walk-up flat filled with France and the only woman
I've ever loved.
I was not her first lover, but
unlike most couples giddy with new love, we didn't share our former
experiences, successes and failures. It
was as if, when our eyes met, we knew everything truly important there was to
know about each other, and the details of how we'd arrived there didn't matter.
Instead, we spent our time learning
about one another through touch, taste, scent, and sex. When my fingers slipped over the bumps of her
fragile spine and my palms filled with the ripe peach of her ass, it was as if
puzzle pieces clicked into place and I was given all the knowledge of her I
needed. Looking into her eyes, I saw
myself mirrored and was home with another for the first time. Nothing else mattered.
I'd climb her stairs, enter her
recreated Paris, and the rest of the world would fade away.
We ate dinner in bed more often than
not, and after feeding one another tidbits, licking the crumbs from our
fingers, and drinking wine offered from the cups of our mouths, she'd light her
Gauloises cigarettes and the room would fill with wisps of gossamer smoke. The dark tobacco gave off a distinctive
aroma, the scent rich and earthy. Soon I
began to associate its unique bouquet with Monique, fucking, and France.
Monique offered herself to me as the
final course of our meals. Spreading her
long, dancer's legs, she drew me down to her and into a world of sensual
pleasures. Chevalier and Piaf sang
accompaniment to the sex-symphony we created in her bed.
She had a childlike figure,
surprisingly frail in one so crackling with energy. Her skin was translucent, white. I loved to make the blush rise in her face,
and see her neck and chest pinken because of the scratch of my day's growth of
beard, and the completeness of my attention to her pleasure.
There was no part of her I did not
lick, or pinch, spank or fondle. I
inserted myself into her every orifice, and she into mine. We had a mutual need to be as close as
possible, and nothing was forbidden between us.
Slick with sweat, in the hottest
days of summer, our bodies slid together in a way that seemed almost primal,
primitive, as if in the act of fucking we became something else. Reduced to our most base natures as humans,
we elevated our individual selves to something beyond what I thought most
people would ever know. We fused.
Monique did not smoke, but liked to
hold cigarettes for me while I inhaled and blew the vapors over her body in
warm streams and billows that caressed the furrow between her thighs, making
her shiver. I learned that the nicotine
prolonged my erection somehow and the head-rush I got from the tobacco added to
my sense of drifting somewhere far away and exotically foreign.
It was seductive, the smoke. Had I known where one could indulge in opium,
lounging on plush sofas, nursing hookah pipes, I'd have saved every penny to go
there with Monique. I wanted to float
with her in a smoke-filled dream where anything was possible and nothing else
mattered. Instead, I smoked Gauloises as
we drank cheap, table wine, and was as close to heaven as I've ever come here
on earth.
Her walls were a deep crimson and she
did not like artificial lights, choosing instead to burn cheap wax candles that
only added to my sense of being somewhere much more compelling than the world I'd
known before. Smoke wafted in tendrils
of gray and white over red and toile backgrounds and the smell of burning wax
mingled with other scents – sex, cigarettes, Monique's seductive perfume.
****
Her cunt smelled of the ocean-fresh,
salty tang mingled with musky water scent.
After a day of fucking, she would smell like me. I liked her that way. It was as if I branded her, not only with the
marks I left on her pale skin, but also with my very essence.
As the summer wound to a close, life
began to press upon me, intruding into the little world we'd formed
together. A new semester of school needed
my planning, and my parents demanded a visit.
Friends whom I had not seen in months started leaving notes on my
doorstep, worried when I failed to return any of their calls and never showed
up at our regular haunts. People
summered on Long Island without me.
Lying on her floor, nose to nose, my
hands wandered over the wondrous bounty of her skin and, inside my head, an
imaginary camera recorded every detail.
There … a mole shaped like a lopsided heart. Here, the silk of her hair slipping through
my fingers. Everywhere, lovely
woman. Sexy and sure of her charms. A coquette with a mermaid's face and a siren's
allure.
"Fais-moi disparaître,"
she whispered, her mouth moving over my lips, her fingers twisting in my hair.
"What?" I asked, though I did not really care, not
then, what she said.
"Fais-moi
jouir." She tangled her fingers in mine and dragged
them down, over her belly, urging them between her legs, which she spread wide.
I understood.
I love to fuck. I love to kiss and taste my lover, but there
is something so tactile about using my fingers to pleasure her. Though my cock is sensitive, it cannot
compare to the way every nerve on the tips of my fingers feels her every furl,
her every slick petal. The moment when
she swells with want, when her body oozes its juice onto my hand is one I
cherish, knowing I am pleasuring her. I
hold her close, my mouth near enough to dip down, my teeth catching an
up-tilted nipple and biting until she writhes against me, pressing her pubis
into my flicking fingers.
My cock was so hard, leaking against
her hip, but I concentrated on her, that camera inside my head recording every
moment as if it might be the last. I
wanted to bury myself deep within her, impaling her and forcing her to stay
with me always, but I waited. It was as
if I knew these moments might need to be stretched out to last a lifetime, and
I wanted to savor each one.
"Oui! Oui! Maintenant!
Je jouis!" she cried. I'm
coming!
"Come with me, minette.
Come," I whispered into the curve of her shoulder, fingers bearing
down harder now, knowing she could take whatever I gave in these final moments
before she exploded. When I slapped her
quivering, wet pussy, she lifted from the floor and shouted, "Baise-moi!
Baise-moi!" Fuck
me! Fuck me!
I did. I fucked her, flipping her over onto her
knees and pushing her face into the floor, my pussy-wet hand on the back of her
neck. I plowed into her like a man who
has never fucked before and may never have the chance again. I left marks on her hips that day, bruises
from the force of my fingers digging into her flesh, pulling her to me and
pushing her away, only to pull her back and bury myself within her once
more. I felt like screaming. Like crying.
Like dying.
She accepted what I gave her, even
when my cock left her warm cunt and buried itself in her tight bottom.
She screamed and moaned until my
hand moved around to find her cunt again, fingers moving exactly the way I knew
she needed them to.
"Oui, oui, comme ça!"
I made the pain go away, and we came
together. After, we collapsed, entwined
upon the floor.
"I love you," I said,
smoothing tendrils of hair from her sweat-soaked temples.
The red walls of her apartment
sheltering us, satiated and exhausted, we slept as Piaf sang lullabies.
****
Now, many years later, my walls are
the same shade of red. My windows are
covered with painted screens, and I burn candles and Gauloises. Inside, I burn for what was and for what I
lost when the inevitable came, and Monique left me for her first love – Paris.
Every evening, I climb my stairs and
close the door on the rest of my world.
Late at night, I stand in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, smoking,
and spinning old, French records while I pleasure myself, needing the acrid
smoke in my lungs, and the scent of it in my nostrils to accompany my hand's
jerking of my cock.
Behind me, I see Notre Dame,
Pigalle, and the Seine cutting through charming streets. If I squint in the candlelight and
smoke-filled room, just as I come, I see her.
I can believe the painted image of Monique hanging on the wall behind
me, and reflected in the mirror, is her.
She urges me to one more orgasm and, in those moments, I find her again
in the haze. I am the young man she once
loved.
I sing along to the music,
translating as I go – give your heart and soul to me and life will always be
la vie en rose – and sometimes I cry.
First Published by Erotiqué Press in 2009 as Smoke and Mirrors
Republished by Renaissance Press in 2011 in Zander Vyne's short story collection Kinky Tales
