Quiver Read Online Free Page A

every movement instinctive and sure. He wove himself around me for hours, caressing the air between us.
    Outside, dawn had turned the sky a pale gray. Humphrey, not daring to presume anything, offered to walk me home. As we all know, momentous events start in the most arbitrary way; destiny doesn’t really offer us a choice. It’s a trick God plays. In this instance it started with my bursting bladder. Hobbling along in my high heels, full of beer, I realized I’d have to stop off at Humphrey’s place.
    His flat was in an old Victorian block, bleak in red brick. I had always resisted visiting him there, feeling that the proximity might have an inevitability to it. A sexual fatality.
    The room was dark, with a few broken pieces of furniture. There was a model of a heart resting on a picture frame, one ofthose three-dimensional plastic replicas of the organ. I remember I brought it down and began to open it up. He told me it was a present from his last lover, who had fled to England a week before. He seemed to find the plastic organ an apt metaphor for their relationship. I didn’t bother probing, but now I wish that I had. In the center of the room was a beautiful wooden model of a sailing yacht. It stood about four foot in height, with miniature rigging and brass fittings bolted to the deck. It seemed to be the only cherished object in the room. Humphrey watched me as I gravitated toward it. As I bent over the polished stern I could feel him wanting me from the other side of the room. I liked that, teasing the moment out before we touched for the first time.
    He came up silently behind me. I stood pinned, feeling like a deer caught in the glare of headlights. He lifted my long hair and bit into the back of my neck. I could feel his teeth as he breathed in the smell of my hair, my body. We stood there for aeons, caught in that dangerous impasse between friendship and lust. I could feel his cock, hard in the small of my back. My head rolled against his shoulder, resting in the hollow of his neck. In the silence, I swear I heard a faint gasp, a woman’s breath caught in pleasure. Man of sighs, I thought, he is a man of sighs.
    There are two kinds of men: those who are cunt-shy and those who are not. Those who are not are the connoisseurs who know where a woman likes to be worshipped. And Humphrey was the ultimate connoisseur, a sex artist, one of those rare men who was able to focus completely when making love to a woman. He was totally intuitive about what I wanted when weaving his naked body around mine. It was as if he was able to second-guess my fantasies.
    He squatted over me, his cock moving slowly in me, between my closed legs. He threw back his head and I had the definite impression that he was in direct communion with the great god Pan. There was a complete abandonment of intellect in his lovemaking, as if he was tapping into a higher frenetic power. I was drunk with his tongue, his cock, his lips, the hair on the back of his neck, his hands and the danger of it all. What could I do? I fell heavily headfirst like all the women before me. Love is like vertigo. I know, I suffered from it—as a child I couldn’t even cross bridges. Falling in love with a friend is disastrous, it’s like stepping into a shower that you know will scald you.
    There was no way I could plead ignorance, after all I’d been warned about his previous conquests, his tendency to evaporate at the mention of commitment. And hadn’t it been me he’d confided in over all those coffees?
    We were lovers for three months. In those days I was working for the Ministry of Planning and Environment as a consultant for salinity. After days of touring around the barren districts of New South Wales, photographing the white crusty rims of saltbeds, visiting the local church halls and standing in front of suspicious beery men twenty years my senior to lecture them about the dangers of over-farming, chemical insecticides and blue algae, I’d find myself