("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._ `6_ 6 ) `-. ( ).`-.__.`) (_Y_.)' ._ ) `._ `. ``-..-' _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' ,' (((' (((-((('' (((( K R I S T E N' S C O L L E C T I O N _________________________________________ WARNING! This text file contains sexually explicit material. If you do not wish to read this type of literature, or you are under age, PLEASE DELETE THIS FILE NOW!!!! _________________________________________ Scroll down to view text Archive name: unspeakable.txt (M+/F, caution) Aythors name: Siskur (siskur@aol.com) Story title : Unspeakable Love ------------------------------------------------------ -= This work is copyrighted to the author © 1997. =- Please do not remove the author information or make any changes to this story. You may post freely to non- commercial "free" sites, or in the "free" area of commercial sites. Thank you for your consideration. ------------------------------------------------------ Unspeakable Love (caution) By Siskur (siskur@aol.com) "I once slept with thirteen guys in a four hour period." Bea shrugged a little while she spoke, and didn't look up from her pasta. I stared at her until I realized I was staring, then I glanced at the people behind us to make sure they hadn't overheard. I fumbled with something, the crushed red pepper or the straw in my Dr. Pepper. "That..." I started to talk, but a cough aborted the sentence. "That's pretty...I mean, that sounds like an exhausting evening." "Morning. I was cutting school." "You did that in high school? You were a pretty wild kid, huh?" She looked up at me, her iridescent blue eye shadow gleaming. "Benny, that was last semester. Roman history? The day I told you I'd meet you for coffee after class, but never showed up?" When she said that I felt like my skeleton suddenly turned to dust, my unsupported guts flopping to the floor; or like I'd been blindly strolling, then suddenly slipped off the edge of a dark pit. I was so stunned I couldn't even fidget intelligently. I sat there motionless, dumb-founded, gazing at the deeply-carved wooden table, the wild jumble of initials, cusses, pledges of love-all those generations of unrelated graffiti seemed to express my fractured emotional state well. I wanted to look at her, but I felt like I'd start crying out in jealous rage if I saw her face at that moment. So we were silent. Pinball machines, pool balls, other patrons, including a group from a fraternity at the back of the room-was it them? were they the thirteen? -- took the place of speech for about two minutes. "I haven't done it since, though." She was chewing pasta again, and I finally looked up at her. Our eye contact felt cold, awkward. The thought flashed into my mind that I must look like a helpless, pleading puppy to her. She swallowed, then her eyes shifted like they were beads on an abacus. "Not with thirteen, anyway." * * * "What's the big deal?" My friend Tanya tried to console me later that evening. "I mean, is she pregnant?" "I don't think so." "Well, then, there's no harm." "Well, that's not exactly true," I said. "I mean, the problem is, we'd already started dating. We had a date that morning, in fact. While I waited for her at the cafe, she was in bed with a dozen guys. Or, who knows, maybe in a dozen different beds spaced not too far apart." "Had she promised not to see anyone else yet?" "Tanya, thirteen fucking guys." "Had she promised not to see anyone else?" "No, damn it, but that's not really the point." "You're puritanical! That's so...oh, wait: I get it: You're... yes, yes. It's The Male Fear. Look, Benny..." Tanya squared to face me on the couch, and put her palms on my shoulders. She was close: her nose almost brushed my chin. "One of those guys-at least one-had a penis that was gigantic compared to yours." * * * "Jesus." "Uh huh." "Thirteen? In how long?" "Four hours." "God almighty." My friend Pete looked up toward the sky, incredulous, and laughed. "So you can see why I'm, I don't know, uneasy about dating her now." "Well..." His eyebrows were embedded arches in his forehead, almost merging into his scalp. He seemed truly amazed. A couple of female students walked toward us, and he stopped talking until they were past. "Yeah, talk about sexual gymnastics. I can sympathize; you really gotta wonder what motivates stuff like that." "She's got a different issue for each one of those guys, I bet. I mean, women who allow themselves to be used like that have real psychological problems, right?" "I don't know for sure. In all fairness I'd have to talk to her before I made a judgment like." He turned to me intently. "So can I get her number?" * * * "What do you think, Bliss?" The orange tabby purred on my lap, tranquilized by the afternoon sunlight. "Do you think she was lying? I mean, maybe she said that to test me. If I could overlook something like that and still want to see her, still be emotionally open to her, then, you know, my feelings for her must be pretty genuine. Does that make sense?" My housemate's cat wanted to sleep on the theory. I wanted to act on it. Aspen College only had about four thousand students, and if Bea was telling the truth, her past partners constituted a substantial percentage of them. I figured it should be pretty easy to find someone to corroborate her story, if it was true. Deep, reddish light drained out of the sun into my bedroom like blood from a deep wound, staining everything red, making Bliss's marmalade colored coat seem to swirl. I visualized Bea's apartment, and recalled numerous bits of evidence that suggested an extremely active social life: the cast she had kept from when she broke her leg skiing, which, I had noticed, had "get well" wishes written all over it-not a millimeter of it seemed to be free of handwriting; the enormous phone list on her refrigerator, which seemed to consist of about eight pages of single-spaced type; the desk in her small room, which had dozens of snapshots on display, either in little L-shaped plastic frames or pinned to the surrounding walls. I remember pointing at one guy, whose shot seemed prominently displayed; he was posed in bathing trunks, his stomach muscles distinct and lumpy, as if a family of pigmy gophers was burrowing under his skin. "Who's that?" I asked. "That's my brother." The guy in the photograph had very light blond hair, brown eyes. Bea was a brunette, and her blue eyes merged into ice. I gestured to another photograph, a badly focused shot of a red-haired guy sleeping with her heart-shaped velvet pillow under his head. "Who's that?" "Oh, that's...my other brother." * * * I ran into a guy who was in Roman history with me and Bea, and who I had seen speaking with her a few times before class. He was sitting alone at a table next to the cream and sugar stand. "Hey," I said, tearing a couple of sweeteners over my coffee. He looked up at me without recognition. "What's up." "You seen Bea?" He thought for a minute, then said, "No." I feigned a look of concentration. "You look familiar. Didn't I meet you with her at a party?" He shook his head slowly. "You sure? You know her, don't you?" He laughed, then said, "Well, kind of." "Right, I guess you could say, who doesn't know her." "The better question is, does anyone?" "Are you serious? Do you know how many guys she, uh, to use a euphemism, 'dates'?" He reached for his coffee. "Yeah, I know. I was at one of her carnal-census things. I remember you now; you just look different with your clothes on." I grinned a little, nodded. I had certainly never joined one of her love-feasts, but he was tired of not knowing who I was, so he assigned an identity to me: I had become one of those naked strangers to him. "But just because we were in the same room naked doesn't mean we know anything about each other. And just 'cause we both had turns on the girl doesn't mean we know anything about her. She's into all the sociological aspects of group-love; all those survey forms we had to fill out and all that? The screening process? The ironic thing is, maybe she gets to know us really well-I can't say-but none of us get to know her really well." "Is that why she does it, do you think? She wants physical intimacy but without the dangers of other people knowing her too well?" "Man, look," he tilted his head back, gulping the rest of his coffee, "I'm not into the psycho-babble angle. To tell you the truth, I just wanted to get laid. It'd been, like, eight months. I wanted to be wrapped in pussy, I wanted my rest my head on tits. Maybe you should just interview her." He rose. "I've tried," I lied to him, "but she said she doesn't want to violate the integrity of her research by discussing it before the results are thoroughly assessed." "See, I think that's weird. For me the results were simple: I blew my load. But you know what? I don't think it was worth it. I think I really degraded myself. Imagine if she had a conscience she could honestly reflect on her- self with? Can you imagine how she'd feel? It's not healthy behavior; it's fueled by neuroses, and acting them out just grinds them in deeper. Group sex is a sick thing. I admit I was just desperate. I wish I hadn't been." He began walking away. I stepped over to take his table, and noticed what appeared to be a fashion magazine under the table. "Hey," I called after him, grasping the magazine from the ground. "Did you leave this behind?" "Oh," he stepped forward quickly, "Thanks, man," and snatched it away from me. In the fractional second that the magazine passed from my hands to his, the image on the cover burned itself into my mind at multiple levels: it was only after I sat down, opened a book, and held my mug to my lips that my brain sorted it out. The magazines name was written in dark Gothic print, La Mort Elegante, and it showed an attractively made-up woman, extremely pale and lean, lying in a lacy sheer slip on a bare surface. Despite the girl's alluring self- presentation, there was something dissonant about the image, some sort of tension. Not only were her eyes closed, the girl's body seemed extremely stiff; her limbs seemed heavily planted on the plain surface under her. Then it hit me: She was lying on a mortician's table. She was a corpse. It was a necrophiliac porn magazine. * * * I realized I was avoiding talking to Bea about her extreme sexual gregariousness. "Yeah," Tanya said, "You're afraid that she'll ask you to join her with other guys. Then you might find out that they're sexually better than you. You're afraid that when it comes right down to it you're sexually third-rate." I said, a little annoyed by my friend's taunts, "No, I'm just trying to digest it. I'm not sure if I can date her if she has these behaviors." "Look, Benny, I'll let you in on a little secret. Women are not naturally monogamous. That's because individual men are never, ever sexually adequate. Women's sexual needs are enormous; insatiable by single men. That's why women are often so reluctant to know their own sexuality, why they're often sexually repressive; they don't want to realize that whatever monogamous relationship they're in, it'll never fulfill their libido. In fact, they'll never satisfy their sexual drive unless they rebel against our society's basic rule that monogamy is good, polygamy bad. That takes a lot of strength and courage. All females are, at their basic nature, like queen ants. And our hearts are big enough to love many, many males. But you men are puny, limited. It's sad, it really is. The dictate of nature is totally un- egalitarian; men are inadequate and replaceable. No wonder they're so stupidly aggressive; they have to compensate for their sexual nothingness." "Come on. Sexual nothingness? That's absurd." Tanya chain-lit another cigarette, smoke enshrouding her face as she puffed. "Nope. I'm serious. Men have a completely different attitude about sex than women. For women sex is largely about pleasure, but also it's about giving life. Women are able to give life. This threatens men, since they know that the life the women create, the child, will replace them in the woman's heart. Men want to dissociate the life-impulse from sex because that deprives women of their power. That's why all men-I know you're going to have problems with this, but try to keep an open mind-all men are, at their core, necrophiliacs. What they really want is a woman who is dead." I couldn't believe what she was saying. "Necrophiliacs?" "When men dominate women, cut off their freedom, stifle them emotionally, imprison them in housewife roles-it's all sym- bolic killing. Men want dead women; since they have to provide for women, since they're natural hunters, they're comfortable with death. Being alive for a woman has a whole different edge than being alive for a man: for women life is eternal, because they create it. For men, it's a threat, something they oppose as hunters, but can never master. Women are about giving life. Men are about destroying it. Women are life. Men are death." * * * The guy at the coffee shop, the guy with the necrophilia magazine, had mentioned that Bea seemed to approach her orgy as a sociological experiment. He had mentioned a survey, forms she had him fill out. I decided that on our next date I'd broach the subject to Bea with reference to all that, as if I was curious about what she learned from the experience in terms of sociology, or whatever field she considered her group sex to be in. We went to a show at the Galley, our local rock club. The crowd was dense and energetic, boisterous and dressed up like erotic banners. The tortured feedback of the band and the intoxicated, garbled cheers of the crowd limited our com- munication to exclaiming things into each other's ears. "Want a drink?" "What?" "A drink?" "Yeah!" When I returned from getting her a third drink, she had abandoned our table. I scanned the crowd in front of the stage-on their feet, but too packed together to really dance normally-and since she was shorter than most of the other patrons it took a moment to find her. When I saw her, I had to combat an urge to leave immediately. As I downed my drink, and then hers, I watched her frolicking lasciviously among a crowd of strangers: rubbing against bodies at random with her shoulders as well as her large, braless breasts; allowing her arms to brush people at every angle, not turning to glare at strangers who thrust against her from behind, but instead leaning back into their motion. A muscular guy with a crew cut and a tank top stepped over to me. "Are you okay?" I guess I must have appeared pale and intensely uncomfortable. Maybe even nauseous. "Fine," I shouted back, not making eye contact with him. He paused, then smiled and held out his hand. "I'm Gary." I stared at him for a second, then returned my focus to Bea's lewd antics. A couple of times I lost sight of her in the tide of bodies, but in general she seemed most drawn to the hardcore punk-rockers who were doing a mild slam-dance in the center of the throng. After a while she appeared at my side with a very broad smile: lipstick smeared, hair disheveled, the two top buttons of her shirt missing. "Hi!" She called out, now quite hoarse. "I'm going to go," I said. She hesitated. I didn't know if I'd spoken loud enough for her to hear me, but then she grabbed my hand and started heading toward the exit. "You were awfully friendly with about thirty of those people." I spoke bitterly, after repressing my jealous fuming for the first two minutes of the walk home. She looked at me with an appalled expression then stopped walking. I continued for about four paces, then sighed, threw up my arms, and turned back to her. "Are you accusing me of something, Benny?" "Accusing you. Okay, no. I'm just saying that I don't like your behavior. I object to it very strongly." "I don't believe this." It sounded like it, too; she sounded genuinely surprised and dismayed. "Look," I lowered my voice a little, embarrassed to be arguing with a lover out in public. "I just want to know: was that, all that stuff you did back there, was that somehow...acceptable in your mind?" Not to answer my question but to express some blend of pity and disappointment, she shook her head, sadly, and folded her arms. "You know, you sound like a cross between Ann Landers and a central American dictator. Benny, I have no problem sharing my love with multiple life forms. My heart is not limited by numbers." "What do you mean, 'life forms'?" As if giving up on the conversation, quite possibly giving up on me, she began walking. I followed. "All life is one. Living organisms are physically distinct, but spiritually identical. Part of exactly the same force that orders the universe." "I don't know what the hell you're getting at." "I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea of sharing my affection with non-humans." "Oh, my god." "You know, you could at least try to broaden your horizons a little. Anthropocentrism has had a profoundly destructive impact on our planet." "So...when you say you like the idea of sharing your love with other species, what do you actually mean?" "Well, for example, I'm planning on driving to the plains of northern Wyoming this summer and dating a herd of antelope." She studied my face for a moment. "Oh, come on. You're threatened by that, too?" * * * As usual, Tanya seemed to have no trouble grasping this. "She's experimenting; learning how the love-stereotypes in our society don't do justice to the complexity of her inner experience. That's amazingly wonderful, isn't it? The willingness to learn the truth about oneself, to learn what our economically driven society finds inconvenient and so struggles to conceal and repress? Benny, you could do it, too. It'd make you a more evolved person. Why don't you get in touch with your innate male love of dead things? Why don't you go to a morgue, or-" "Oh, for chrissake," I cut her off angrily, and turned toward the door. "That's fucking insane, Tanya." She paused, then said with utmost compassion, "Benny, please. You shouldn't be threatened by the idea of knowing yourself more deeply. Whoever you are-whatever your nature is-it's all good." * * * Martha Beaulieu's was no ordinary tombstone. It was elegant, and really distinguished itself from the others. It was six inches thick-good, solid granite-and stood just about to the level of my waist. The stone was rose-colored, perfectly smooth and polished. The face of the tombstone was decorated around the edges with floral curves and splashes of extra- ordinary detail and artistry. Most of the other tombstones had lettering that was so ornate that it required scrutiny to read it, but hers was simple, so precise it almost seemed to speak to me. I was really dazzled by her-well, by it-and as I kneeled close to the stone to read the epitaph, it was as if I could feel a gentle presence in the ground beneath me. Disappointingly, her epitaph was in French, which I couldn't read. I gazed at it for a while anyway, absorbing the beauty of the headstone, the absolute quietude of the cemetery. Wind swept autumn leaves past me. The air was clean, richly scented. I put my palms on the cool grass around my knees, then lay on my back. To tell you the truth, I felt more comfortable there than I did in most groups of people. The stillness captivated me, and the sight of all the tombstones seemed oddly magical: even rows of marble slabs extending out in every direction, each with its own unique character, each cushioning the eye with a compact shadow. I thought of each one as a doorway to another place, somewhere peaceful, warmly tranquil. I'm lying in a cemetery, I thought to myself. I closed my eyes and felt the surroundings flow into me. This is wonderful; I'm lying in a cemetery. I touched my chest with my fingertips, felt my heart beat. Somehow the fact that I was alive there was thrilling; it was as if in the midst of all these symbols of death, my own living energy seemed augmented. And I adored it. Soon my caressing fingers moved down, and tilting my head back, gazing at Martha's tombstone above me, I unzipped my pants. My penis was already erect, and I held its warmth gratefully. After I ejaculated, I lay on my side with a blade of grass in my teeth. My feeling of intimacy with myself was profound, yet I did not feel at all alone; I was sharing an experience with the mysteries that lay inhumed all around me. Society's fear of death is all misplaced, I thought to myself. Love is just as much a reality in death as it is in life. And with the experience of those days, I finally began learning about love. The End http://members.aol.com/Siskur/rhet.htm * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * It's okay to READ stories about unprotected sex with others outside a monogamous relationship. But it isn't okay to HAVE unprotected sex with people other than a trusted partner. You only have one body per lifetime, so take good care of it! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Kristen's collection - Directory 11