Fragile Animals, page 20
The eating of my mouth finally turns to kissing as he pushes me against the dresser. His lips are cracked and dry. His uncapped aftershave bottle smells like poison in the air. My tongue is vibrating. My bones. My pelvis. His mouth is foul like I hoped it would be. The tang of pennies mingling with bitter fruit and something so sour and personal it makes my whole body turn on. Now I eat. I lick at his sourness the way dogs lick rocks on the beach – searching for minerals, craving the salt.
He takes my lip between his teeth. The lip is where the skin is thinnest, where the blood is closest to the air. I paw at his belt buckles. He picks me up and takes me to the bed, wrapping my legs around his waist. The monster lays me down and kisses my eyeballs.
Has anyone ever kissed my eyeballs before? Yes – but still it is a surprising thing. He is so careful as he presses his mouth against each eyelid, as if they were closed flower buds. The petals bloom just to watch him. He kisses my tear duct corners. Waves of affection rise up in me threatening my total destruction. I grip his cock over his jeans and bury my face in Emilia. Beneath the coarse denim, his body feels hard and factual.
I take a deep heaving breath, as I always do when I get this close, trying to categorise my sense of experiencing this man. It is everything I have noticed about him in our week together, but more. A feral doggish heat that of course has led me here. How could I not have known that this position was inevitable? The man hung me over a lake.
Moses turns me over so that his back is on the bed, my frame strung up atop his body. My legs spread over his heat. How many other women have been strung up here? The question does not deter me. From the stories he has told me I feel like I know them. With my thighs bound tight around him I feel as though I am wearing their clothes.
Where is Miss Fraser? It’s late – is she asleep? Is she having strange dreams? Can she sense what is about to happen to me? The building I am about to jump from, full of desire for annihilation? Does someone know? The birds outside in bare trees? The ocean that is almost all I can hear? Is there a witness? Does He care?
I am thrown to the side and stripped naked. He yanks the clothes off me harshly, as if in punishment, and I love it. I do not immediately strip him, have always taken pleasure in the rush of imbalance. One body guarded, the other bare and vulnerable. Instead, I stand on the mattress while Moses stands on the floor, presenting my body to him with an honesty I am not usually capable of. Look, my sticky out belly button. Look, my brittle pubic hair. Look, the scars I carved myself, the bloom of bruises spread on the top of my thigh. This is where I thump myself in the bathroom, daily. I use the sharp point of my knuckles.
I lean on him from a height. I have always liked the feel of a man’s clothes against my bare skin. As if I have been kidnapped. I press my breasts against his chest and his body tenses. He pulls my hips in tight and together we stiffen. Then he shoves me away.
‘Get on your knees,’ Moses says.
‘You want to waste time?’ I ask, kneeling.
‘I have as much time as I want.’
Moses stares. The black in his eyes is so large now I could fall into it. He takes his clothes off and stands back to let me look. His body strikes conversation with mine.
Look, I am pubic too. Look, my nipples are small and almost silver, like the button poppers on your coat. Look, I thrive on everything on which you merely survive. I run on refined oil. My digestive system is finely tuned and sacrilegious. I keep it in this nice case.
Then there is his cock.
It takes me a moment to reach it, to allow my eyes to do its bidding, acknowledge this intrinsic and peculiar thing – but I can’t because in an instant, it’s down my throat. My lips part like the split peel of a banana. He’s big, but not huge, doesn’t crack the corners of my mouth. That’s fine because I’ve always been more interested in hardness. Always been afraid when set against a big and ugly dick. This one rides down my oesophagus so smoothly. As if it has been moving its whole indeterminably long life just to find itself gyrating there. Rubbing the bacteria from my tonsils. This dick has scent and flavour. It smells richly of his scrotum. It tastes like stagnant seawater.
I groan and he grunts. I pretend my tongue is tying a cherry stem and Moses wheezes, the sound small and plain in its lust. I suck passionately and carefully, alternating between fast choking gags then oh so slow. He stiffens in my mouth, cum-hard, and yanks his cock out of my mouth. I take my chance to gape and see it’s curved proud and toned lightly lavender. Prettier and uglier than every other part of him.
We kiss again and I like that he’s kissing his own dick spit. My eyes close for the chaff of his skin… the bone of his chest upon mine. His hands roam my body, and his nose follows. He is sniffing me out, uncovering me like a good dog should.
‘What do I smell like?’ I ask.
His head ducks below my armpit, nose in my dark bush of hair. ‘Guilty slut.’
Moses lays me down on the bed and fills me with fingers. But his skin feels cold, so cold. I shiver around him. I imagine the clicking of joints and muscle. The intricacy. I imagine him in latex gloves, taking me apart. A low animal cry leaves my body. Predator meeting prey.
I force his hand out and pull his cock into me. I’ve heard some women don’t come from penetration, but I have an insatiable urge to be filled. I want the wholeness of someone inside me. This doesn’t make me any better than other women and it doesn’t make me worse. From below, I fuck him harshly, but he has weight and age and control. His hand grabs my bruised thigh, his fingers pressing deep into the moulding wound. I buzz and cry out.
Do animals go to heaven? Wouldn’t they make it so overcrowded, in their packs and swarms and flocks? And what about the birds and the fish? Do they get nothing? Nothing? So lucky and they don’t know. An existence that does not hinge on judgement. Decisions that are not steeped in the damp of God’s sweaty palm. I lie braying for Moses. If I treat myself like an animal, maybe I won’t go to hell either.
He’s impatient. He pulls himself out. A hollow is left inside me, still stinging from his mass.
I stand and leave the room, crossing the empty hallway naked. Miss Fraser’s door is closed, the crack around the sides unlit. From my bed, I grab an abandoned hair tie and bring it quickly back to him. I swoop my knotted hair up atop my head, careful to take up all the stray wisps. He rubs himself as he watches. Asides from two long tendrils framing my face, dark and lank due to my infrequent washing, I leave only wide-eyed skin. Days of talk and talk and talk and all for this image. He takes the mirror down from the dresser and sets it by the side of the bed so I can see my mutant body and what is about to happen to it.
We catch eyes in this reflection. His dark black pupils now hold a reprising glint. He’s got a question. Please don’t ask it.
‘Noelle, do you want this?’
It dulls the violence of my fantasy, but I nod, quickly, minutely. Yes, I want this. I ask for this. I believed what you said.
His angular cock strains forward. Now I can see it as part of him, in full context with his fingers and his eyes. If there is any blood in Moses’ body then it is in his cock. His fascinating cock. Suddenly, I’m desperate to know if he bleeds. I’m desperate to be the one to make him do it. I’m thinking of lunging when he yanks me into position by a fistful of my hair. Neck exposed. Mouth gaping.
The vampire finally bites me.
For a moment I am underwhelmed but his teeth plunge beyond the first veil of my skin and the pain and shock is so immense that I am evicted from my body. Instead, I float over Noelle as she goes limp in his arms like an abandoned insect skin.
Red Inside Myself
Noelle.
There she is. That’s her. Her eyes closed as if in prayer. Her lips moving wordlessly. Spirit deep within the folds of her swollen insides. Yet she is more tangible now than she has ever been. She floats not just above his hands but in them. A weight as practical as gravity. All the small hairs on her body reach outward. With him at her neck, her bruised thigh looks like a distant cabbage patch. Her disastrous life like a simple human mundanity.
And he? Who is he? What is his name? This leatherfaced man/beast/demon. This evolved leech. Drinking up everything that was put there by her maker. He looks so grateful to be taking from her. He would have gone hungry without her (That’s right, isn’t it? That’s how that works) – and though his mouth is firm, his hands are gentle. He holds her like an injured bird in a sleeve. She quivers. A drip of her runs down his chin.
That drip is not foul as she expected. It is not clotted and black like her infrequent menstruations. That drip is her brilliant red.
He drinks and drinks and drinks, fingers growing tenser, cock growing harder. It is her blood that makes him stand so erect. His cock now berry-purple, violently curved and with a dark head. His cock designed to be buried like a flagpole and pushing through the lips of her cunt. He is inside of her in two ways but she can no longer feel his teeth. As he takes more and more, Noelle sinks further away from the world.
And far away from the world, she cums. One large and brutal explosion, rattling through her bones, around his body, in his mouth. It is humiliating for her and for this reason it is perfect.
God watches.
Imagine not caring.
Oranges Are The Only Fruit
Okay.
Right.
The moment Noelle knew for certain God truly despised her arrived six years AD when she was standing in the shower. Their flat in Leith didn’t have a bath and what it did have was little more than a tiled chimney. A closet inside of a closet. It was even smaller then thanks to the presence of Lomie, naked and soapy. They were washing, eating oranges, spitting the slippery pips onto the streams of each other’s bodies. Noelle was staring into Lomie’s twinkling eyes and pretending she didn’t believe in the afterlife.
Lomie was (and remains to be) a cleaner. She started at the hotel about a year ago and Noelle was put in charge of her training. She was in her early twenties, same as Noelle, but with a plain deceptive face that could make her seem much older or much younger depending on her mood. She didn’t wear any makeup and her eyelashes were the same mousy brown as her short hair. The main landmarks of her face were made up of pearly scars curled around lips and eyebrows, remnants of a pierced adolescence. Noelle, like a magpie, was inclined to notice shine.
Lomie was not keen the way new starts could be. Never nervous, never eager to please. She didn’t ask Noelle anything about herself or any of the usual newbie questions. She didn’t nod like a bobble-head as Noelle explained the inner workings of the hotel’s ancient vacuum cleaner. She didn’t look much bored either. Just listened and then got to work. Noelle waited for Lomie to speak and in turn did not speak either. In this way, silence became their first impression. Not cold silence though. Not silence like hard fingers in your ribs. Instead, a dusty, disinfected silence. A functional silence. Of two bodies in a room, working, and not doing anything else.
Lomie became Noelle’s favourite person to work with. She came to crave their shifts. They paid the same amount of attention to their job, worked with equal exertion when making beds or removing limescale. Cleaning a room with Lomie, Noelle discovered within herself an intense, almost metronomic kind of focus. She felt like Antje seemed to when she was cutting the grass with her tiny scissors – that is, totally immersed. She became aware of the tones of the colourless hotel furniture. Saw that beneath years of apathetic use were little purple threads, glimmering like worms.
Lomie’s favourite jobs: hoovering dark corners, putting a finger inside a dusting cloth then rubbing it around the inside of a lampshade, thumbing smooth the creases on the bedsheets with an expression of stern and practical tenderness.
Lomie didn’t skirt around the shitty jobs either. She didn’t ask to do them, but she also didn’t wait awkwardly to see if Noelle would do them. Instead, into the silence, Lomie would bark, in a curt tone, what needed to be done, describe briefly how repulsive it was. Sometimes the only words that would pass between them for an entire shift were the details of a stain.
‘Cum, blood or other?’
Maybe this is why Noelle felt so compelled to try again at her first impression. To form a more particular one, this time out of words. If not for the purpose of making a friend, then at least to temper the intimacy that was beginning to dwell in their silence. For what is silence but acceptance? Noelle thought she would try hello. Or else something drier – like ‘hi’.
The moment presented itself in room 307, where Noelle found Lomie perched on the bed, something pink and fluffy in hand. It was the diary of the teenage girl staying there. Beside her, placed atop fresh, clean towels, was a padlock and a tiny, plastic key.
When Noelle came in, Lomie looked up at her and stared. Not guilty but not comfortable either. The muscles in Lomie’s fingers twitched in the fur of the cover, as if she might hurl the book at her.
Noelle spoke without thinking. ‘It’s fucking boring, isn’t it?’
Lomie stared expressionless for ten long seconds in which time Noelle developed a hard knot in her throat. Did Lomie look a little like Antje? No, Antje’s nose was a proud and sprawling garlic bulb while Lomie’s was a cute little button mushroom, like a cartoon character come to life. Why was she thinking about Antje right now? Remarkably, her mouth kept talking.
‘She just goes on about Fringe shows for eleven pages. And she never fights with her family. Not even her mum. She thinks they’re great! I couldn’t bear it.’
Noelle waited for Lomie to say something. Please, dear God, anything. Finally her eyes moved and she said, slyly, ‘The entry today is about three courses of lunch.’
Noelle laughed too hard. Lomie stood and turned to swipe the imprints of her thighs away from the bed. As the diary was returned to its original place inside a polka-dot backpack, Noelle had a second to think. She saw two options and despite all odds, picked the terrifying one.
‘If you want to read something interesting, come look at this,’ she said, then walked out of the room without glancing back. It was a gamble, but somehow, Noelle knew Lomie would follow. She wasn’t the only cat curiosity killed: once, midway through a Tuesday late shift, Noelle had heard a strange splashing and clacking coming from the bathroom. She’d peered around the doorway only to find Lomie on her knees with a sponge and soap bucket, her hands shaking so badly they slopped water over the sides. Noelle watched her pull them from the bucket, yellow-gloved and violently trembling. Staring hard at her palms, Lomie forcibly stilled them.
Noelle thought there was something in that.
They rolled the supply cart inside the maintenance cupboard and Noelle led Lomie to another room, two floors above their designated hall. Room 513 belonged to a middle-aged, pencil-skirted banker who wore cherry red lipstick everyday without fail. She was memorable because the laundry staff were always bitching about her stained sheets. Noelle had found her diary stripping the bed one evening. It was under the woman’s pillow. Anyone, she thought, who leaves their diary sitting under their pillow desperately wants it to be read.
They sat down and Noelle fished the diary from beneath the cherry-scarred pillow. Knowing exactly what she was after, she flicked past the pages about work and marriage with a card-shuffler’s dexterity before she handed Lomie the diary. The entry described the moonlit night in which Red Lipstick Banker had seduced the hotel’s decrepit maintenance guy, who the staff had dubbed Gorgeous George. Gorgeous George was short and bald, had a cranky voice and, as final punishment, an almost vertical hunch. Every thrust, throw and huff of their sordid affair had been detailed in throat-rolling detail.
‘Oh my god,’ Lomie murmured, a fist to her mouth.
‘I know,’ Noelle said.
Lomie looked up and grinned. ‘Gorgeous George. You stud. You hero.’
As Lomie continued to read, Noelle reminded herself to breathe slowly. For some reason, pretty women had always made her nervous and Lomie was beautiful in an underhanded way. Her eyes were this milky tea brown with flecks of pale green toward the pupil. Her eyelids hung low, giving Lomie this sleepy look, this bitch look, this calm look. Noelle’s nerves primed like a mouse trap to flinch. Do not get too attached. Lomie took out her phone and photographed the diary. Noelle raised her eyebrows, but Lomie just shrugged again. ‘I’m sick.’
‘Do you have a nickname?’ Noelle asked.
Lomie shook her head, moved up so they could both sit on the bed. ‘It’s just Paloma. My mum was always specific about me not shortening it. So, I never got any nicknames. It means dove.’
‘Is your mum religious?’
‘No. She just likes birds. What does Noelle mean?’
‘Born on Christmas.’
‘Were you?’
‘No. Guy Fawkes night actually. But they didn’t want to call me Guy.’ Noelle paused. ‘My dad calls me Noly.’
‘That’s cute. Noly. Like the kids show.’
She meant Noddy. Noelle smiled.
‘You can call me Lomie then. Maybe it’ll catch on.’
Noelle had never met anyone who had nicknamed themselves. She adored and was paralysed by the defiance.
‘I like your origami towels,’ Noelle said, tripping into honesty. ‘The swans. They’re so cool.’
Lomie smiled. ‘The way you man a vacuum helps restore my faith in this world.’
This is the way they began.
From here they compacted, lacing themselves together over the next month of shifts, never addressing the fact they were doing so. Lomie showed Noelle room 409, where a man had been taking apart a bread maker, Noelle showed Lomie room 111 where this couple were hoarding two suitcases worth of tiny hotel toiletries, stolen from hotels across the world. Between them they knew every nook, hole and filthy crevice of the hotel. Noelle thought she was quick, but Lomie’s eyes were sharper. Noelle sometimes came up cold with a creepy feeling as she cleaned and would find Lomie standing there watching her. It was a sensation she had never been on the receiving end of in her life.
