(Foto: Romana Novak)
“You’re beautiful, so beautiful! Proportionate… and still so juicy, like an orange…” he says, his gaze following the contours of my body. He stares at me. Standing still before me. We both stay still, hovering.
How can I believe him when I don’t even believe myself, I think. Alex doesn’t believe it, the film production company doesn’t believe it, Milena, Zoya, and Zane, the artistic director don’t believe it, the actor’s guild doesn’t believe it, the awards commission doesn’t believe it, nobody believes it any longer… Shut up Mara, just accept. That should really not be that difficult, an angelic voice commands me. I don’t know where it’s coming from. But it’s there. Determined not to leave me. Accept, this is all yours, he is yours, this night is yours. And it is just this night, not yesterday, not tomorrow, just here and now! On the eve of you turning forty, you’re about to make love to a king. And a king knows what a queen needs. How to curtsy a queen. How to feed a queen.
He holds my hand and doesn’t take his eyes off me. His eyes in mine. A continuous thread. We move backwards towards the bedroom. How did he know where my bedroom was? Yes, the bedroom is no longer ours, mine and Alex’s, now it’s just mine. Free and open to strangers. And he’s a stranger. A total stranger. Rob, isn’t it? Yes, Rob. Did he have his radars switched on when he entered the flat? This man knows everything. Perhaps he’s a secret agent and was not watching me only in the square down town? Perhaps he has been scrutinizing me forever? How did he know he could walk me home, how did he know that I lived in the centre of town? My Nona would have said he has been sent by God. The one sent by God will find his own way to the door. Perhaps he isn’t even from this planet. He really must be from somewhere else.
The light from the corridor softly stokes the wide double bed. He places me on it and lies, still fully dressed, by my side. We don’t turn on the light. I lie on the dark bedcover like an odalisque, a pale, starving concubine. His still dressed body is sinking into the blackness of the bedspread. We’re bound to each other like a sea anemone and a hermit crab in symbiosis. Legs tied in a plait and if I could impress the scene into a photograph, all that would probably be visible would be a pale female body, soft and rounded, twisting, rising and sinking in the magma of a mysterious, dark and unidentifiable mass of the bed cover and the strong, fully clothed male body. He kisses me, strokes me, gently covers every last centimetre of my grateful skin. I feel my nipples are rock solid when he from time to time awards them a kiss. He brushes across them with his tongue. I am about to die. My trembling increases. It starts off in the heel with a brief contact, prickles its way in a single surge up the calves and climbs like a muscular climber up the thighs. Lactic acid bubbles and boils over inside them. In a flooded groin everything is pulsating like a crazy lighthouse in the middle of a storm. The umbellate inflorescence is flaring up. I squeeze him stronger against myself, my legs wrap around his body. They need, they demand. They cling onto his loins like an octopus onto a luscious meal. Electricity surges. Pulses pound. The metre will burst at the wall, the fuse is about to blow. I will not let him go. I catch my breath, catch his mouth, we thrust at each other, rub against each other, I can feel his strong member, swelling under the fabric, forcing its way into the open. I once more reach for his belt, towards his trouser zip, but his left hand forcefully moves it away. I don’t understand. He presses even harder against me, his hand sinking in between the cheeks of my arse, and presses, strongly, so I groan and, blazing and wild in an orgasmic wave, cry out my prolonged and raw yes.