Call & Response

She had that wicked look in her eyes. "What," she said, smiling, "turns you on?"

Unbidden, a photograph flickered across his mind's eye: two girls sitting on a couch, long bare legs drawn up to their chests, leaning shoulder to shoulder to tentatively kiss. He blinked. No. She put her cool fingers on his hips, under the hem of his T-shirt. "What do you think about," she said, and her thumbs hooked in his front belt loops and pulled him closer, "when you come?"

"I," he said, thinking of her sitting on the couch in her lazy-day dress, the green one that hung loosely on her, with the big wooden buttons he could idly toy with, slipping one after another from their buttonholes almost without her noticing. Thinking of the rough green fabric framing the freckles between her breasts, rising and falling with a sudden sigh. Thinking of the girl at the airport bar, wearing a midriff-baring T- shirt, her skin like some hand-rubbed wood the color of honey, lathed into the slim smooth curves of her belly and hips that shifted in the loose mouth of an otherwise impossibly tight pair of faded jeans. As she'd leaned forward, straight blond hair slithering past her face, those jeans had peeled away from those hips a little and he'd caught a glimpse of her candy- colored thong. He blinked again. "I," he said, "uh."

"What's the matter?" she said. Her thumbs still in his belt loops, she curled her fingers over his waistband, and he felt them warming against his flesh. He felt them toying with the button of his pants as if it were a part of him, an odd, distant erogenous zone. "Cat got your tongue?" They pressed and twisted and he felt the sudden release as his button slipped free. "Or," she said, grinning mischievously, wickedly, the tip of her tongue licking against her upper lip, "something else?"

He felt like one of those hapless sitcom dads who opens the hall closet door and is suddenly buried under a comical avalanche of shoeboxes, old clothing, broken sporting equipment, packing peanuts and wrapping paper. The black-and-white photo of the two women dressed in old men's suits, cool and severe, their hooded eyes lost in each other, their thickly lipsticked lips parted slightly. The simple pleasure of lying back in bed, naked, watching her undress. That strange, confusing afternoon years ago in his then-girlfriend's overheated apartment, her then-best friend lying back in his arms, kissing him extravagantly as he watched his then-girlfriend kneel between her thighs, looking up to meet his gaze as she opened her mouth. Sneaking up behind her as she did the dishes and slipping his hands beneath her dress to find nothing but skin and crisply curly hair and a surprising finger's width of slick wet heat. The liquid warmth of her mouth sliding around the head of his cock. The girl on the bus in the black tank-top, with the sharp glasses and the amazing tattoos on the backs of her hands and down her calves to the tops of her sandalled feet. The look in her eyes, here, now. "What," he said, thickly, and he swallowed, "what was the question again?" A transparent ploy, but she indulged him.

"What turns you on?" she said. Her fingers tugged at his zipper, and his distracted senses were heightened enough that he could feel the individual teeth disengaging. His fly spread open under the insistent pressure of her fingers, of his cock, swelling, stirring, inflating to fill the space she made for it. He thought about saying, "You," but didn't. That would be trite, and he felt an urge to be honest, to take this seriously. But putting into words how what she was doing conjured up the image of her lying under him, of that moment when she dissolved into inarticulate groans, shivering on the edge of coming for what seemed like forever, her face screwed up with the effort of finally--and suddenly tripping over the image of whatshername, the pop star, dressed as a slutty Catholic schoolgirl, face contorting as her hips pumped, her bare thighs flashing between the hem of her too-short kilt and the tops of her over-the-knee socks- - How embarrassing. He was left quite literally speechless, pawing through the clutter of old porn magazines, of impossible movie stars, swimsuit models, of girls glimpsed on sidewalks, of old memories and half-formed desires, trying through all the static to find--her. What he thought of, when he came.

What turned him on? All of it did. Why couldn't he just say something? She knew how flustered he was--and he knew she knew why. He remembered a time when he'd seen her this flustered, herself, when he'd caught her at the video store, surreptitiously eyeing the Japanese bishonen anime, the cartoons about beautiful young men in love with each other. How she'd grinned, embarrassed, when she discovered he'd slipped the one about the two police detectives into their stack of weekend rentals. How she'd come to him once, admitting she'd gone through his briefcase looking for stamps and found the magazine, his once-every-couple-of-months vice. How she'd asked if she could maybe, you know, since she'd never really seen one before. How he'd peeked in on her, sitting in her chair in a T-shirt and panties, her toes curling self-consciously as she flipped through the brightly colored pages. Looking at the photos of the two girls on the couch, kissing. How she'd rolled her eyes at the airport when she caught him sneaking yet another glance at the thong curling over the ski-bunny's perfectly tanned hip, an irritant, almost, that he couldn't stop trying to catch another glimpse of. She'd rolled her eyes, but she'd smiled, and that night they'd chuckled about it as she wrapped her legs around his butt and pulled him in.

He sighed.

"Well?" she said. His fly lapped open, and her fingers peeled his burgeoning cock up and out of his shorts.

"All of it," he said. "You. Everything."

She was kneeling before him. "Tell me."

And as she took him in her mouth, he did. Somehow.

----

Later, after, he stroked her flank. She nuzzled his neck. "That," she said, "was nice."

"What turns you on?" he asked.

She hiked up then on one elbow and looked at him, and reached down and found him somewhat more than soft. "Oh," she said, and she lifted her leg and straddled him, and he felt her heat against his skin. "Oh," she said. They kissed. "That's easy," she murmured, against his lips.

ENDIT