Paul grabbed my wrists and pulled me up off the sofa. The gesture felt like a threat, a promise, and a crude way of grabbing my full attention. The room spun as my breasts were pulled against his chest, a field of animal fur thinly covered by an old T-shirt carrying a faded, unreadable political message. I inhaled the warm spice of his armpits.

"I was giving you your space," he explained huskily. His words smelled faintly of smoked salmon, and I was reminded of my own taste, fed back to me on his lips and tongue. "I was respecting your connection to your moon energy. I know about these things." I was tempted to tell him that everything he had ever been told about women was perfectly true. It would have been the opening lie in another relationship that would eventually starve to death, deprived of truth.

"My coven would approve," I told him, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice and ignore the hunger in my cunt. "I'm only telling you how I feel." I felt alone, as usual. The verbal slaps for my heresy rose up in my mind: BLOODY BITCH, TRAITOR, FOOL. This last would surely be the opinion of the priestess who had advised me of my spiritual obligation to withdraw from carnal things for a precious few days every month. At the time, I hadn't doubted her.

I had only one defense. "I feel what I feel, man," I sighed in his troubled face. "I'm more sensitive at this time, and I want everything more: food, water, sex, sleep, warmth when I'm cold. You drive me crazy when you won't touch me."

What I wanted wasn't unthinkable. Paul and I had both done the responsible thing by getting ourselves tested for STDs soon after we had spent our first latex-wrapped night together. I knew that neither of us was likely to pass a killer virus to the other.

But fear of the Other is beyond reason. I knew what he had been told about women like me, in my state of messy openness: unclean. Dirty for being a shiksa, a godless gentile, and even dirtier for being in that female state that no one of his parents' generation ever talked about openly, even though they all knew that women needed cleansing afterward. Or their men needed protection.

"The devil's gateway" is what pussy was called in the Catholic tradition of my ancestors, and how much more hellish the witch-finders must have found it when it gushed red, the devil's color. That never stopped them from searching it out.

"Are you sure you're not disgusted?" I demanded, trying to push him away. He held me tighter. "You couldn't stand it, could you?" His classic features suddenly looked hard, stony.

In answer, he kissed me with a soft but persistent pressure, sliding his hot tongue into my mouth. His heat and his taste made my legs weak, and I felt like moving my hips. His arms were tight around me, and I needed their strength.

When I least expected it, Paul picked me up and bounced me onto the sofa. He began unbuttoning my blouse, revealing my naked breasts. My large pinkish-brown nipples were already hard.

He looked almost like a teenage boy who has been dared to do something reckless, and who would rather die than chicken out. "So," he demanded comically, "you'll starve to death if you don't get it now?" I could hear my clit answering "yes." My swollen labia felt like the gateway to the heavy, sensitive land of my hungry guts. I wanted to be fed through every opening.

He wouldn't feed me until I gave him an answer. "I want you," I murmured to the hard outline in his pants. It jumped.

He pulled my skirt and panties down my legs as I raised my ass to make it easier. I lay naked on the clean and civilized upholstery, about to leave my mark on it. "Will you bring me a paper towel?" I asked him politely.

"No," he grinned like a wolf. "We can clean up later."

Carefully, I reached between my spread legs to find the brimming plastic container and pull it out of me. Exposed to daylight, my cup of ruby wine drooled onto the sofa and the carpet as I stretched out an arm to place this grail, like a centerpiece, on the coffee table. A shaft of late-day sunlight from between the curtains completed the effect.

Posing like the actor he is, Paul reached down for the communion cup. Fondling and raising it at the same time, he studied the shreds of tissue in the dark liquid before calmly sinking a long tongue into it. For a moment, I couldn't breathe.

I felt his tongue sliding into my wet heat as it slid around the plastic rim of the cup, tasting my essential fluid. He savored each tongueful as though trying to guess the vintage. He accepted the taste of salt and iron as though he had been nourished by my body all his life. I suddenly understood that like me, this man had been afraid to show his wild face to a lover he didn't want to lose.

"Taste it fresh," I invited him, moving my hips. My womb was cramping, and the contractions sent echoes into my lower mouth; I could almost hear it speak. I wanted a full meal after the lean years of giving up emotional calories for the sake of one orthodoxy or another.

Somehow his tongue seemed to fill me, as slippery and flexible as a curious eel. Two demanding fingers followed, searching for all the itchy places that longed to be scratched. His fingers tickled and teased and asked questions that needed answers. I stroked his hair, fighting off the urge to react too hard and too fast.

When he backed away, he was licking a mixture of fluids off his mouth. He shed his clothes like a man about to plunge heroically into raging water to find lost treasure. His impatient cock sprang into view as though searching for fresh air. My eyes met his before he lowered himself onto me with the practical grace of an explorer.

He entered me all the way with one thrust, deep into a welcoming coral reef. "All the way" was what we, both girls and boys, called this when I was in high school, and the phrase suggested travel, mystery, danger and discovery all at once. All the way to heaven or to hell. All the way home.

He fucked me to a compelling beat that was clearly determined by some force beyond his consciousness, or mine. Equally mindless or mind-free, I squeezed and rocked and thrust in the vain hope of making it last, and last, and last.

Paul did, however, have a plan: he was not going to come alone. Stroking my unbearably squeamish clit, he let me know that he wanted a reaction now, soon, and would not give up until he got it. Holding my two ass-cheeks in both hands, he shot his own fluid into me, against my womb. Gasping like a drowning swimmer, I went over the rapids.

He sighed, lying peacefully on me as though I were Mother Earth. I stroked his back, loving its warm smoothness. When he muttered something into my neck, I couldn't hear the words and didn't think their exact meaning was important.

Rising up, he let me see that his cock had sprung back to life. It was streaked with watery-red slime as though it had penetrated a ripe watermelon. He grasped it affectionately and looked at me. "I need your mouth, baby," he told me. He seemed to believe I had already consented by not refusing.

But what the hell, I thought, fair is fair. I accepted the smooth, bursting head into my mouth, flicking it gently with my tongue like a baby kitten learning to wash itself. Taking in more of him, I tasted our minerals, our metals, our acids and bases, all mixed into a sexual soup.

I sucked and nibbled, not just to please him but because I wanted to be filled wherever I was open. A few well-placed strokes of my tongue had him groaning and gasping. A few more made him thrust so hard that I had to move quickly to avoid gagging. In a second, a fountain was gushing over my tongue, sliding toward my throat. I swallowed, noting the distinct flavor of his seed. By such things could I know him.

Casually, as if by afterthought, he slid two fingers into my wettest, most open mouth. Inch by inch, he traced the folds inside me until he found a ticklish spot on the upper wall, just above the entrance to my womb. I jumped as though an unexpected finger had been pushed up my ass. Grinning, he used his other hand to act out my unspoken thought, exploring my tighter hole with his index finger.

Being frigged in stereo, in two places at once, felt overwhelming, and his wrist pressed maddeningly against my clit as his fingers danced on the ceiling of my wet cave. The orgasm that began gathering strength was like a tidal wave that seemed likely to wash out all my self-control and common sense forever more. My cautious mind said no, but all my nerve endings screamed YES. I convulsed in spasm after spasm, greedily clutching pleasure as though it would never come my way again.

As we sank back, sinking into our separate selves, I felt a cooling and staining pool spreading beneath me. The thought of permanent bloodstains on Paul's sofa both tickled and disgusted me: they would be permanent proof of my sluttiness, meaning bad housekeeping as well as reckless lust. Rust-brown stains would also prove my existence, like the most basic of graffiti: COLLEEN WAS HERE. My name means young woman in the abstract, like the Greek word Kore, the Maiden. I will always be Colleen, but my maidenhood disappeared long ago.

I realized that I could no more guess the future of this relationship than I could guess Paul's whole past history. Would I leave a permanent stain on his life (his heart) or be erased within a year? I decided that I could control the outcome by moving first.

I must have moved. "Colleen," he breathed into my nearest ear, "you don't have to clean it up yet. I want you again." My own smell wafted to my nose, and it was as rich as the scent of a compost heap, containing lobster shells and rusty nails, after a rain. Periodically, not often, an incredible man wants me like this. And by ignoring advice given for the good of my body and my soul, I got what I wanted. I felt as if I had fallen into heaven, and it felt like bloody time.

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Copyright 1999 by Jean Roberta. Not to be reproduced without the author's permission.