All the Rage Read Online Free Page A

let me be – These are wonderful – I rounded the end of the aisle with her in tow and announcing – They really are – as she reached for a favoured item, being factual, not salacious – Things have moved on – and she offers me what things have moved on to from among the gathered ranks of more and less sci-fi imitation penises.
    It didn’t look –
thank you
– very much like a penis at all. Mandy had judged me –
thanks
– over to my left were obsessively anatomical offerings –
thanks
– Mandy had judged I would favour something impressionistic. Vague. Elegant lines. Inhuman.
    I had the air, then, of someone who might wish to redesign their partner.
    Thank you.
    To love and despise simultaneously – Mandy assumed I was capable of that.
    Thanks.
    Clever Mandy.
    Thank you
– trying to –
really, thanks
– get rid of her with gratitude and taking the package – mainly a clear plastic bubble for ease of inspection –
thanks now, yes
– and my aim was to shift off to the back of the place, ditch the thing and leave.
    Actually, not-so-clever Mandy.
    I don’t love and despise. That wouldn’t be clear in my face, not to someone who knew me, because it isn’t factual.
    Mandy is a bad judge of character.
    I love and resent.
    Everyone does that, it’s impossible to avoid. The real experience of love is of having unreasonably lost all shelter. There are wonderful additional elements in love apart from that, factors and truths which demand more than affection, which require worship of sorts, but there is, there really is, that initial loss. Sudden. And you cling to whoever is with you for sheer safety, beyond anything else. You cling to whoever has robbed you and they cling back because they are equally naked – you have stripped them to their blood. They are your responsibility, frail and skinless. It can’t be helped.
    I hurried from Mandy.
    I rushed to the extent that I could rush without suggesting unseemly desire to acquire some further contraption with which to astonish my privacy.
    The far wall of the shop offered objects that weren’t coat hooks, that wouldn’t enable arthritic hands to open tricky jars, that couldn’t be used for games of hoopla, even though they were unwieldy, even though they were unlikely, even though the human pelvis could never accommodate them as an internal feature and they were therefore unfit for their stated purpose.
    All these wild attempts at satisfaction, these declarations of absurd need.
    Chocolate-flavoured condoms. They had chocolate-flavoured condoms.
    You like penises, you like chocolate, why not both?
    There were many
whys
for
not both
. For many reasons, my opinion was in favour of
not both
.
    If I like penises, might I not be assumed to hope the flavour of a penis will be penis, which is to say not too much of a flavour, ideally just this subtle, unflavoured pleasantness and that isn’t a problem, how could that be a problem? I don’t feel my experience of oral sex is intended to be primarily culinary.
    Unless is it? Have I got this wrong? Is it not about love, about knowing and being known? Is it – I can get confused – perfectly reasonable in that, or any other, context to insist, to appear to insist, to act in such a way that I’d be insisting
your penis is inadequate and ought at least to taste of chocolate to compensate, so here you go and roll on one of these?
    Am I being over-sensitive? Am I mistaken in thinking that when I touch the man I love, no matter where I touch the man I love, in no matter what way I touch the man I love, then the point is that I’m touching him and it’s love and the whole of him is him and I am happy with the whole of him and my aim is to produce an increase of happiness in both parties and where he is tender I will be tender because that would be only right and the best and finest thing and sweet to my soul and