fascinating rhythms

He made a kind of noise in counterpoint to his thrusting. A rhythm. Enough to distract a girl from the quiet enjoyment of the regular in and out. All evening he had been half out the door, a wild animal, barely contained. I distracted him with games as one might tempt a possum with slivers of fruit. Draughts first. He was very fond of draughts and I found, with sex as the wager, I was particularly good at the game. Still, the four walls and the relative inertia soon had him edging towards the door.
Food. All men like food, cooked expertly and quickly. I suggested an omelet. Toast soldiers. I saw him pause at the door, his leg all jiggly. Eggs. Impossible to resist the urge to throw them. Visual comedy. I was in stitches. He liked the game. He juggled three, broke two, cracked the third one into my hair. We found the shower necessary and here, finally, he removed his clothes. He didn't participate in the kissing, but he watched me kiss him, opened his lips to me and I tasted tobacco on his tongue. His finger was tapping against my shoulder. Morse code perhaps? But of course I soon recognised it as a tune. He hummed through the insistence of my mouth. Our teeth buzzed together, sympathetic vibrations. He was music in a skin bag.
It didn't surprise me when he soon bored of this simple rhythm in a major key that is the initiation of sex. He began to make the sound. The sound was air escaping from his lungs, but if you mic-ed him up he would be a snare drum.
I was in love with him by then. I had fallen in love with the sound of his voice, head curled over the body of his guitar. The kind of voice that calls to you from somewhere you could never be. The sound of my own longing harmonising with the notes on his instrument. The sounds his mouth made during sex were not the kind that had anything to do with me. The thrusting was just an easy base-line. The sounds of air escaping in staccato gasps was the real music and it was all closed-eyes and lost-to-the-world dreaming. Lying there I was as involved as a drum can be when it is played. I felt the sound and my skin became flushed and slippery with a combination of both our sweat, but when I tried to participate, he opened his eyes and stared at me without recognition. I had distracted him from the song and he would not continue until his audience was silent.
I let him sing alone. I listened. I closed my own eyes then and his music vibrated in the tender spot at the base of my neck. I reached down beside the bed and found my vibrator and his eyes remained closed as I used it. He was barely aware of it at all. I knew that he was not even aware that I had climaxed under him, around him. The pulsing of my body would have been like a whoop and a cat call from the crowd, a distraction, easily blotted from his consciousness. The song was still midflight. I relaxed back into my position in the front row and watched as song paced itself through each stanza, the last, a climax, and a coda, a little run of little thrusts to end the music. He settled into the bed beside me and I knew better than to speak to him. He watched the ceiling, twitched. He placed a hand on my thigh just once perhaps to thank me for listening. He fell asleep so suddenly that I wasn't sure if he was just pretended. I lay awake with questions, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest, another rhythm.
Later in the night he opened his eyes and asked if I had read Salinger.
I was dozing. I opened my eyes and searched for the name through the fug of sleep. Salinger.
"Catcher in the Rye."
He shook his head, looked agitated, "no, no. The Carpenter novels. Franny and Zoe, Raise High the Roofbeams."
I must have looked confused because he shook his head in frustration and turned his back to me and seemed to have fallen asleep. I couldn't stop watching him. A fragment of song fell from his lips without waking him. I was entranced. I didn't believe in love but I called it that anyway, entranced by the strangeness of his behaviour.
He got up suddenly before the sun had even thought about rising. He dressed quickly in the dark.
"You can stay."
He said nothing, left quickly, and then, moments later, returned to hover nervously in the doorway.
"Thanks," he said, "for..." and nodded to the place in the bed where his body heat still lingered, the pleasant reek of his nicotine on the sheets. "With Love and Squalour" he said and I thought perhaps it was some comment on my bed until he added, "Salinger."
I nodded. "Salinger." and, "will I see you again."
He laughed. "This is Brisbane." He said to me and left quickly.
Yes. Brisbane. I would, of course, see him again.