The Pisces
Page 33

 Melissa Broder

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“No, that’s just me,” I said.
“Lucy! I’m serious. Loss of appetite?”
“Definitely not.”
“Weight loss?”
“No, it’s just been the peeing. That’s it. Which I think is directly related to the insulin.”
“How long has this been going on? Why didn’t you tell me that something was wrong right away?”
“Only a few days. And I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Lucy, he is my child! You have to tell me when anything like this happens. Are you able to give him the care he needs? What did the vet say specifically? Should I come home?”
“No, no, don’t come home. The vet said he is going to be totally okay as long as we adjust this insulin to the new amount. I can do that. It’s easy.”
“I still think he looks depressed,” she said.
“I’ll take him to group.”
The vet hadn’t exactly said it would all be fine, but she didn’t seem particularly concerned either. I felt strangely jealous that Annika would come home to see the dog. After my mother died, I longed for my sister to take some time off from college to be with me. I verbalized this one time, a few days after the funeral, that maybe she might delay her return to school. She was sitting on my bed behind me, playing with my hair, which was something my mother used to do every night before I went to sleep. It was very quiet; the only sound I could hear was the gentle brush of her fingers against my scalp.
“Please stay with me,” I said. “I need you.”
But she told me she had exams, and while she wanted to stay with me, she had to go back or she wouldn’t complete the semester. I felt totally rejected, but I did not judge her. I looked up to her, and my world had already been so destroyed by the death of my mother that I couldn’t afford to be angry with her. But it hurt, nonetheless. So instead I judged myself. I made myself wrong for needing someone, for revealing that need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting. I would not put them out there like that again. I didn’t even want to have to feel them myself.
Well, now I was feeling again and I did not want Annika coming home. If she returned there was no way I could just wander out to the ocean alone at night. I guess I could still go to the rocks and not tell her where I was going—I could lie and say I was going across town or to a café to see some acoustic guitar bullshit. But if she saw me out the window, what would I say I was doing? She would start asking questions.
Also, I had a new fantasy. I wanted to ask Theo if he would maybe come with me to the house and stay for a night. I didn’t know how I would get him there. Certainly he couldn’t drag himself across the beach. I doubted he would want me to carry him. But maybe I could get one of those little sand-wagon things, or a bicycle with a wagon on the back.
I had already planned this visit, fully, in my head. I wanted to have sex with him on a bed. I didn’t even care if he slept over or not. I just wanted a place to be with him where we could relax that wasn’t freezing and where we weren’t looking around for people to catch us. The way I felt when we kissed or when he went down on me—I wanted to create that feeling and live in that for as long as I could. I wanted to build a tent of it in the warmth of my sister’s house: a container where I could bottle the feeling, like a little ship, and hold the glow.
Here was a bit of magic that could happen in my life. After all the nothingness, maybe this fantasy was worth living for. I suppose that whenever you’re addicted to something, this is what they mean when they say you forget about the consequences and don’t care about the other side. All I cared about was my plan.
33.
Theo was waiting by the rocks, hanging on to the side of them. I ran across the beach and climbed up, feeling like Catherine running to Heathcliff across the moors, in my long skirt. I imagined that I looked like a child. I knew that I wasn’t, but I felt time to be slowing as I ran—or at least, I wasn’t getting any older anymore. I was alive and that was it.
“Hi,” I said, and crouched down to kiss him.
“I’m coming up,” he said, and twisted himself up onto the rock. For a second I was shocked to see his black tail, the sash still around his pelvis. He kissed me hard and laid me down onto the rock. Then he pulled himself on top of me and I could feel his cock, my skirt and his sash between us. It was all so natural. My legs spread and his pelvis and tail were between them, just where his legs would be if he were a regular man.
As we kissed I imagined eating his tail with garlic butter. I wanted to suck his cock and also to see it. I rolled us over and sat up on top of him, kissing my way down his torso, my skirt fanned out around both of us, covered in ocean water and seaweed and black slime from his tail. I felt like an octopus or an anemone. I sucked on his neck, his nipples, the insides of his arms. I licked his meaty rib cage, kissed my way down his belly, sucked on his belly button.
My head hovered over his sash. I teased him, kissing the outside of it, licking it. Like a salt lick, the sash had accreted so much salt. I wondered how many sashes he had, if he ever changed them.
I unfastened the knot on the side. His cock rested on a nest of beautiful dark pubic hair. He wasn’t totally hard anymore. I felt self-conscious and wondered if I had turned him off somehow. But he had an ample, beautiful cock, uncircumcised, white and pink, with two round pink balls.
I kissed his cock, rubbed it against my face and cheek, so soft. I looked up and he was smiling at me. I began to lick it, to make out with it. My mouth was very dry from the salt and I felt like I had a fur tongue. I put his whole cock in my mouth and aimed it toward the back of my throat, gagging, making some more saliva. He moaned and softly tousled my hair with his hands. He got a little firmer but not totally hard yet and so I had to hold it in my fist. I sucked and jerked gently, but he would not get fully hard. I began to lick his balls. I put them in my mouth. My chin rested on the place where his tail met his skin. The scales were slimy and hard at the same time. But his balls were delicious, like raw oysters.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
He reached down and began to jerk himself as I licked his balls.
“Don’t stop licking,” he said. “Don’t stop.”
It wasn’t the romantic jerking I would have liked to have seen, his beautiful body in a slow search of pleasure. This was the second time in one summer that a boy jerking off wasn’t what I would have wanted it to be. He was more frantic and urgent, like he was trying to get it done, like he wanted to prove to me that he could get it up and stay up. Maybe he just needed a lot of friction in order to feel pleasure. I wondered if his cock being exposed to saltwater had made it numb. Maybe this was just how men jerked themselves when no one was watching. Maybe he was comfortable around me.
“It feels so good,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I feel you so much. I’m going to, oh my God—”
My pussy surged. I took my mouth off his balls and put it on the head of his cock, grabbing his balls with my hand and rubbing them in a circle. They were tight. His come in my mouth didn’t taste bitter, like some men, but it wasn’t exactly sweet either. It was a feminine taste. It tasted like the smell of his tail, oceanic, a little fishy. I felt as though I had eaten his pussy, that I was yang or yin, or whichever the male was, and he was female for a moment.