Message-ID: <13541eli$9807311318@qz.little-neck.ny.us>
X-Archived-At: <URL:http://www.qz.to/erotica/assm/Year98/13541.txt>
From: <OscarPaco@aol.com>
Subject: Exactly Nowhere, Iowa
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Path: qz!not-for-mail
Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam
Approved: <usenet-approval@qz.little-neck.ny.us>
X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded <story-admin@qz.little-neck.ny.us>
X-Story-Submission: <story-submit@qz.little-neck.ny.us>
X-Original-Message-ID: <22331eec.35c19b58@aol.com>

The Darkness in Exactly Nowhere, Iowa



I awake to pitch black.  I am lying on my back, my skin covered in a sheen of
sweat, and I almost panic from the utter darkness but remember an old trick
from childhood:  I smile and close my eyes.  

Slowly I wake and hear the sounds:  beside me they are making love again.
Counting that first time with all three of us, this makes three or four.  I
open my eyes again to pitch black.  I have never experienced such complete
darkness.  I move my hand before my face and scare myself when the fingers
touch my nose:  no vision possible inside this tent in the middle of the night
in Exactly Nowhere, Iowa.

"Are you two at it again?" I say into the darkness.

The two of them laugh and stop moving for a time, then pick up the slow and
gentle rhythm once more.  The sounds are filled with love, and they do not
bother me.  I think to go back to sleep, but the sounds won’t let me.  Their
breathing is woven, the sounds of their soft skin intertwined, the moist give
and take of their lovemaking joined with the mysteries of night.  After a few
moments and without thought, I am caressing myself, excited by their sounds,
their discoveries, their kissing.  As their breathing grows more ragged,
tripped up by the ecstatic promise of release, my own breathing shallows and
careens.  
We all seem to come together, and the image of Colin releasing inside my wife
brings unutterable joy to me.  Still lost in the darkness, I feel a tongue on
my abdomen, around my navel; then it is joined by a second tongue, and the two
of them are kissing my stomach, cleaning off their influence on me.  When the
two tongues leave my body, I feel a male shadow moving over my face.  I smell
Colin hovering over me only a moment before he leans down and kisses me full
on the lips.  The gesture is startling in its clarity, its openness and
thanks.  I kiss him back and touch my fingers to his shoulder.

           Soon, Karen etches her body into mine, Colin etches his body into
hers, and we drift off to sleep together again in the center of dark, hot Iowa
summer.


I awake next to uncomfortable heat and daylight.  It is morning, and I am
alone in the tent.  I lay on my back for awhile and pull the pieces together:
the way Karen came to me while Colin was in the bathroom at the last gas
station, the way she said, "I think I want to sleep with two men," the way she
looked at me lovingly, the way her eyes wondered if I would give her this
gift; the way she announced her desire, sitting between us in the front seat,
as we pulled into the campgrounds, the way we all grew silent for a long, long
time; the way nothing else was said about it for the rest of the night; the
way Karen made a cooing sound after the three of us had crawled into the dark
tent to sleep for the night, and the way she quietly slid off her clothes in
the sleeping bag, the way she held my hand as she kissed Colin on the lips,
the way she fell back in ecstasy as Colin and I caressed her entire body,
kissed and kissed her.  And when Karen began to move her body against us in a
pleading manner, Colin had produced a condom, tore the package off, then
delicately and boldly placed the condom over my penis and told me to make love
to my wife, which is exactly what I did, while Colin kissed and caressed her
naked body.  And after Karen and I climaxed, Karen turned to Colin’s body
warmly and within minutes they were making love beside me while I caressed
first her body then his body until the two of them orgasmed and fell back in a
sweat.  "That was incredible," is what she said.  And Colin made love to her
again before we all fell asleep.  And I had been awakened later by the sounds
of their lovemaking in the pitch black Iowa night inside the tent that felt
like the center of the universe.

We made these decisions, yes, without saying a word.  In total darkness.

I sit up in the tent and listen.  Birds.  A slight breeze.  Colin breathing
rapidly several feet away from the tent’s door.  I peak out and see Colin
sitting on the picnic table, Karen between his legs, her hair cascading over
his naked thighs, her head bobbing slowly and rhythmically over his sex.  I
fall quietly back into the tent and get dressed.  Listen again.  After Colin
lets out a brief shout, I wait a few minutes before stepping out of the tent. 

My sudden appearance startles them, their faces redden, and they avert their
eyes, making silly gestures to look busy with breakfast.  It is not necessary:
I am not jealous.  Strangely, I love Colin in a new way because Karen loves
him in a new way.  A part of his spirit exists inside of her now, and I have
to learn how to love that, how to be gentle and loving with that part of him
he would never get back, that part of himself he has offered my wife freely
and without fear.  


Two months earlier, just as we began the melodic dance of making love, Karen
broke into tears, quiet at first then violent fits of crying.  I held her body
to mine, tried to absorb whatever pain had climbed out of her body, and I
waited.  When the crying died down, I gave her a tissue.  She blew her nose,
glanced into my eyes, then started to cry again, softly.  "I’m sorry," she
said.  "I’ve fallen in love with another man."  

Without saying anything further, she told me this story with her body, with
her eyes and hands:  while I was away for the weekend, she and Colin had tried
to make love on our bed, but the guilt grew too heavy.  


The three of us drink Bloody Mary’s and scan the classifieds for an
apartment.  Colin is moving to Iowa soon.  His life in Iowa is beginning with
Karen and me, and that makes us all feel good, the way it feels good to have
somebody next to you when you are sad.  
We drive around this little city looking at buildings, soaking in this
strangely exotic place that will absorb our dear friend soon.  Finally, we
arrive at the building that Colin will live in for the next two years, and
Karen and I wait in the parking lot while Colin signs the papers and hands
over the security deposit.  Karen asks me if I’m mad at her, and I tell her
that, no, I am not mad at all, I am happy that the two of them are happy to
share.  It is an honest answer.  It depresses me, though, I have to admit.
Five years later I will rehearse this answer, and it will still be honest,
only in a slightly different and darker way; for now, it is true as truth, no
catch.  

We go to a bookstore and make a few purchases:  Rimbaud for me, Shelley for
her, and rare Brautigan for him.  We drink beers downtown and talk about
everything but sex, everything but our eventual sadness when he moves.  Once,
when Colin turns his head, I drink up his profile and swallow and understand
part of what she loves about him.  The cleft of his chin, the long sideburns,
the alabaster skin and freckles, the James Dean good looks, the seductive
rhythm of his carriage.  Her feels himself being swallowed and looks over at
me, smiles:  his eyes are open as doors.  I smile back and blush slightly,
knowing what I know but not wanting to let on that I know it.  He knows it
all.  Still, he looks away.  


We drink more beer from the cooler and sit around the campsite playing guitar
and telling stories.  Karen’s green eyes flash as she watches these two men
she loves intensely, her blonde hair glints and suffocates in the summer sun;
her lips quiver with a dangerous knowledge.  "I’m hot," she announces and
takes off her shirt.  Colin and I exchange a nervous glance and smile, drop a
beat in the song we are playing, then pick it up again and harmonize through
the chorus of a ancient spiritual we all know by heart.

 

There is nobody else in the universe besides the three of us, and we are
singing prayers and gazing through the future.


Ten years later I will ask Karen what she loved about Colin’s body, why she
craved his penis so profoundly at that campsite in Exactly Nowhere, Iowa, in
the dark so many years ago.  We are tripping through time, defying realists
the world over, jumping from one zone to another in the forever space of our
marriage.  She speaks of his wry grin, his deadly profile and his tender skin.
She tells me that his body sang to her in the middle of the night, asking for
harmony in the darkness; she tells me that her body learned a new dance inside
that canvas tent, that her body learned to harmonize with gestures.  I ask her
to tell me about his penis, and her smile broadens with the physical memory.
She narrates an epic come from an ancient grotto:  a warrior who visits the
alchemist for strength, who strips bare while the alchemist smokes every inch
of skin, even the insides, magically, then sends him on his way.  She tells me
this without saying a word, and I hear every syllable rolling off her tongue
as if it is coming exactly from an impossibly mysterious place.  Part of it
pisses me off, but I don’t say a word.  


Colin is in the next shower stall.  I listen to the water hissing over his
body.  The water hisses over my body, too.  We are neighbors, locked in time,
pressed like moist flowers in a book of poetry.  When I step into his stall,
he smiles at me and turns to greet me.   We kiss openly, he touches his tongue
inside my mouth, touches my teeth as if they are piano keys.  

I kneel in front of him and take his penis in my hand, feel it growing, feel
the blood rush of desire.  Fully extended, his cock is so sleek, so hard and
so marvelously different than my own – like the largest mystery there is.
There are no words between us.  The water hisses on our naked skin.  I take
him into my mouth, crossing that line willingly, and begin the way Karen
begins.  It feels as if a parallel universe is entering me by a secret portal,
one that isn’t on any map, and I nearly faint from the exquisite texture.  I
begin slowly.  I take his balls in my hand:  so much larger than my own.  I do
exactly what Karen does because I know how tremendous it feels, and soon his
body gives off the clear message.  In another moment or two, he comes in my
mouth:  a sensation so dramatically different than I expect, a taste so wildly
different than my own.  My head spins in an ecstatic world for a brief time,
and I swallow stars and dust and darkness, taking it all inside me, gladly.  

After I finish, I return to my stall, and we finish our showers in silence.
We dress in silence and leave the shower house in silence, walk in comfortable
silence back to the tent, enter the tent silently and find Karen lying naked
in the sprawl of sleeping backs in the middle of the tent in Exactly Nowhere,
Iowa.  


Twice now the phone rings and it is the wrong number and I answer the absurd
questions before hanging up.  We have been waiting four days for a phone call
from Iowa but continue getting the wrong number.  It has become a childish
game, something to do when it’s raining, even though it hasn’t rained for
weeks.  It’s a mild drought, the talking heads on TV keep saying, but Karen
and I know differently.  We can feel it in our blood.  

Colin writes letters to us but they never arrive.  All we do is wait.  

Karen hasn’t said a word since we returned from Iowa.  
Once I came home late at night and found Colin and Karen making love on the
sofa:  their bodies grinding into one another with abandoned zest, with verve
and purpose.  They didn’t hear me walking in, didn’t drop a beat.  The sight
of it gave me a chill, which is why I left and drove around in the country,
dazed and uncertain, but sure of one thing:  the sadness of his departure was
going to be difficult.  But that was the day before he left.

I haven’t said a word since we returned from Iowa.  My body does all of my
talking for me.  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night shouting,
covered in sweat, usually with a painful erection.  Karen hugs me and drifts
back to sleep.  It takes a lifetime for me to find sleep again once I’ve
misplaced myself again because of a nightmare.  More and more, that is the way
things go.

All we do is wait, wondering when the waiting will end.  



Colin sends us a postcard from New Orleans, but it gets lost forever in the
middle of Kentucky, taking a wrong turn somehow.



Sometimes or never – it is impossible to tell which – Karen and I get out the
photo album and flip the pages, trip through time the way we do, tell stories
and exchange a glance and gesture, twelve courteous and open years of loving
one another.  

Somewhere in the middle of that first photo album is a picture that defines a
night in Iowa.  Let me tell you about it . . . .
Colin plays an ancient spiritual, harmonizing with his guitar.  He wears a
leather jacket, a red flannel shirt, a black T-shirt.  His head is cocked
forever to the side:  profile trapped in time.  A curled lock of hair on his
forehead, that long sideburn beside that delicate ear, that strong nose etches
against the dark night of Iowa summer a lifetime ago, that cleft in his chin.
The expression of his mouth, the serious glint in his half-shielded eye, the
calm demeanor of his posture:  everything was leading to dangerous love.

When we stumble over this photo, Karen and I stop.  We gaze in complete
silence, we travel through time, and we know things that we will never regret.


The End


-- 
+----------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `--------------+
| <story-submit@qz.little-neck.ny.us> | <story-admin@qz.little-neck.ny.us> |
| Archive site +----------------------+--------------------+ Newsgroup FAQ |
<http://www.qz.to/erotica/assm/>----<http://www.qz.to/erotica/assm/faq.html>