remembering

I remember him eating pizza. The problem was the swallowing of it. By this time his muscles were not working in any kind of automatic way. He chewed, deliberately, but when it came to swallowing, the whole thing became a nightmare of muscles working against breath, breath working against saliva, Coordinating the march of food from lips to throat to stomach seemed to overwhelm him. He choked, coughed, the sound of vomiting but without vomit. Just chunks of pizza spilled in his lap and the look on his face, the shame, the sense of loss.

He apologised and I told him it was unnecessary. I looked at his lips all smeared with red sauce, those fat sensual lips that had been the first to touch my cunt. The twist of a tongue and what it felt to have that tongue inside me. He was the first and the last lover who actually enjoyed lapping at my clitoris. I wasn't to know this at the time. I thought that all men after him would go down joyfully without all the cajoling that one has to do. Now, here in the last years of his life, his chest heaves, his lips twitch.

'I am sorry' he says and he is almost crying. He is ashamed for me to see him because he still wants me to think of him there between my spread thighs. I am not embarrassed to see him like this because I have long since stopped thinking of him in this way. His eyes are welling with tears and for a moment I do remember. He was the first lover who liked giving head. I was not to know he would be the last.

Five years later he would be dead.