Quiver Read Online Free Page B

stumbling down Oxford Street, still dressed in my pin-striped suit, heading toward his apartment.
    Humphrey would open the door without questioning my sudden arrival, take my briefcase from me, sit me down in front of the television and present me with a plate of spaghetti or paella, the only two dishes he knew how to cook. I’d sit there eating, losing myself in some disaster in Eastern Europe orgraphic car crash in Newcastle, but still acutely conscious of him moving around behind me. The very space between us was erotic. Once, after finishing my meal, I put my hand to the back of my hair and found he was pressing his erect penis into my tresses. Humphrey loved my hair; he called it the hair of Eve, loving the scent, the weight of it.
    I don’t think he thought in language at all, but in images that were juxtaposed like some mad surrealist painting. He exuded an electricity that disrupted the linear in nature: plates would crash to the ground, thunderstorms would suddenly break out when he was around.
    He would take me on the bare wooden floorboards, lifting my skirt to part my lips and pay homage to my vulva, finding every possible caress with his tongue, teeth and lips, taking me to the brink for hours before finally entering me with his blunt, hard cock. Afterward we would lie there twisted, exhausted, sated, my head against his foot, my back upside down against the corner of the room, his knee in my mouth, his cock in my elbow. When the silence became uncomfortable he would pluck out my pubic hair from between his teeth and tell me about his sexual escapades.
    Early one morning when the streets were still desolate, with only the party-goers gliding past the pimps, the homeless and the desperate, while a flock of cockatoos shrieked above like a thousand rancorous drag queens flapping their way over Kings Cross, Humphrey was stopped by a traveler when returning home from a lover. The man asked for the way to Central Station. Humphrey obliged and began to trace a map in the dust of the pavement. Suddenly he noticed the man staring strangely at his face. Humphrey, who was used to being stared at, continued on regardless. Eventually, the man excused himselfand rushed away. Humphrey, bemused, walked on and in that hazy, muddled morning state soon forgot the man’s fear.
    Back at home he started dressing and was about to leave when he checked to see if he needed to shave. Shocked, he noticed a huge smear of dried blood across his mouth and cheek. For a moment he tried to remember whether he had cut himself, until he realized that it was the menstrual blood of the woman he had just left. The man’s staring face suddenly made sense.
    I loved that story, and imagined all sorts of romantic notions of Humphrey brazenly wearing that stain as a mark of woman. The imprint of woman on a man who loved women.
    At work, in the middle of a slide show illustrating the merits of irrigation, the scent of Humphrey would miraculously drift across the room, carried along by the smell of mown grass blowing in from an open window. I would find myself faltering in front of a group of cynical wheat farmers as the lines of irrigation on the slide dissolved into the line of black hairs running up from erect cock to navel. I felt as if I was in the grip of some crazed sexual alchemist. The more I had him, the more I wanted him. My visits to his apartment became a nightly occurrence. Sometimes he would already be asleep, half-drunk, murmuring no, no, as I took him into my mouth, slowly winning him over with my tongue. At other times it would be me falling onto his disheveled bed with the red dust of the soil still in my hair. He would work over my body in the same way he drew shape out of a stone.
    My fascination with his past moved from the objective to the subjective. I could no longer listen to stories of sexual duplicity and deceit without identifying with the female victim. For the first time in my life I felt as if I understood the phrase