The Transmigration of Bodies Read Online Free

to stop moving his fingers for the duration of that exchange and by the end Three Times Blonde had stopped worrying about names and he let his tongue revel the way a tongue can only revel when nobody’s asking it for words. As soon as he sensed he didn’t need further permission he pulled off her panties and got naked and pulled her to him by the hips but then she said Where’s the condom?
    Motherfuck the condom. He’d asked himself the same thing and had answered himself Don’t fuckin worry about it right now.
    He put his pants back on, said Don’t move.
    He stepped into the hall barefoot. The anemic student was nowhere to be seen.
    He ran into his apartment reciting the prayer of the overheated horndog:
Oh please, oh please, oh please
    May he, the drunken me
    May he, the dumbfuck me
    May he, the me who never ever ever knows where shit is
    May he have saved one
    Just one
    Lubricated or corrugated
    Colored or flavored
    Magnum or tight-fit
    Oh please
    Holy Saint of horndogs
    Grant me just one condom
    But he knew there were none. He’d used that prayer the last time, months ago, and managed to unearth one under the bed, gleaming and glorious as a national hero. The very last one. This was not a time for heroes or miracles. Fear was what had granted him these hours of intimacy but now it was showing its virulent side. Go on, off to the shop, ladykiller.
    Across the street was an old-school pharmacy run by little old men who still wrapped condoms and sanitary napkins in brown paper so the customer need not feel self-conscious on the way out, but in the mental photo he’d taken that morning the metal awning was down. He triangulated the hood in his head, locating shops and less-far pharmacies and said to himself, Be right back, no big deal. He walked out of his place and before walking back into Three Times Blonde’s saw the anemic student at the end of the hall, staring at him, fiery-eyed, glassy, on his way out the door.
    Three Times Blonde was still splayed across the love seat, transfixed by the shadows cast by the candle. He told her what he’d told himself:
    Be right back, there’s a pharmacy close by.
    She sat straight up on the couch.
    No no no, how could you leave with that thing out there, it’s not like we’re that desperate.
    Evidently she knew nothing about him. In other circumstances he wouldn’t have listened, but the current circumstance, the one that concerned him, wasn’t the epidemic so much as Three Times Blonde herself, naked before him, adamant, insisting Come. That was all. No pharmacies and no condoms. Locked up with a woman who was calling him.
    Like a wrestler, he said to himself, I surrender. He approached and attacked her tongue as he once more undressed and then she said We can’t get comfy out here and led him into the bedroom where at first she just let him adore her unwrapped three-times-very-taut skin and run his lips across it and his fingers inside it, but then she put her mouth to his cock, no talk; they rolled around clutching bony and fleshy backs, round and skinny buttocks, until there in the center of it all he felt her so wet and so ready and so present that he just slid inside. It was worth it, no matter the price, just to feel her drawing his cock in from the deepest part of her body, even if only for an instant. He did it fast but in that time a million epidemics came and went, through a million deserted cities in which the only sounds were deep sighs, and then she, once more, looked at him like he’d done something unforgiveable, a thing that for one very long minute he did not want to end: she trapped him with the lips of her sex, with her legs, with her fingernails, and then said, in a steady but almost inaudible voice, Off.
    He pulled out and slumped beside her. He thought she’d kick him out and told himself the same thing he’d told himself so many times in so many situations: All good things are but a part of something terrible. But instead of shouting at him she