Resistance

Words on the page are resisting my advances. I only want to look at her, describe her. Let me do it here, while you are watching. Perhaps that will make it easier.

She raises herself up in front of the mirror. The pillows are arranged as Salter has described, a mountain of them piled one on top of the other, white, unblemished. Perhaps the oils from her skin will ruin them when she settles her stomach on top of the unseemly pile. They smell of her cheek already. They smell of her hair, the faint sweetness of shampoo, the mushroomy smell of sleep. In this position she can see the globes of her rump, fruit, perfectly pale and round. The surface of the skin is unbroken, but when she parts her legs a little there is a little glimpse of the core. One cunt of course, not two. Her dreams are still with her, making her lift her arse a little, pull the thighs a little wider apart. There is hair there, dark curls of it and in the little thicket a fissure, the comparative size and shape of a peach pit. It almost looks edible. She strains her neck to look. Her head is pointing downward, the blood rushing to her eyes making her a bit dizzy. She reaches back to touch it, this seed, this core and finds of course that it is nothing but an illusion. Not a seed at all, but the space where a seed might go, an almond of space, warm, but not yet damp.

She traces the lips, full circle. If she were a man she would be able to step up to the foot of the bed and press her cock against it. She would need to aim it with her hands, but surely it would just slip in as cocks do in Anais Nin, and yes, eventually, after great descriptions of a train journey, a country stroll, a party, as Salter's cock slips in or, perhaps the cock of the narrater's friend. Now there is some life. Now a little glisten. She dips her finger into the almond hole and finds the moisture, draws the circle around the lips, painting them with it as one might paint gloss on a mouth. Above the lips is the cleft, and in this cleft - she glances at the locked door - another seed, a tiny seed like the embryo of an apple, something so small and yet a repetition of that larger space. A little tight shut hole. She touches this too with her finger. Still damp. She bounces it against the tightest resistance.

Holly rolls off the mountain of pillow and watches the shy curl of her body, the breasts protected by the prick of elbows, no nipples visible for the greedy gaze of the mirror. The girls of the Delta of Venus would touch themselves. They would rub their fingers against their flesh. Heat spreads like a fire. Resolutions burn like cloth.

Not yet. She will not touch. Not yet, at least. She presses her fist against her heart and feels that it is quickly beating.

Downstairs the sound of a door. The sound of voices. Her parents home at last. She pulls the sheet up over her flesh and a mummy fresh from a sarcophagus stares back at her in the mirror with large, startled eyes.