He asked me in his email which I would prefer: Ought he send me a ticket to fly to Seattle or would I prefer he come to San Francisco?
I gasped when I read it and quickly wrote back, "Do you mean it?"
"Of course, I mean it, my silly, beautiful, sweet, pretty boy."
I thought for a few minutes and then wrote back, "I'd like it if you came here."
All the day of the evening he was to arrive, I was in such a state of excitement, it was difficult to get anything done, and there was so much to do. It was just at times like these when excitement and anticipation and fear that I might not make as good an impression as I wished to make that the discipline of submission he had instilled in me really came in handy.
He had suggested we go out for dinner, but I said I wanted him all to myself and I would like to prepare an intimate dinner just for two with candles and flowers and champagne on the terrace of my apartment overlooking the Bay, weather permitting, or inside if it rained, and he agreed after repeatedly saying that he did not want me to go to any trouble.
"Trouble!" I wrote back, dismissing his solicitude with a word as if it were a flounce of my braceleted wrist.
"Ok, then," he wrote, after I wrote that I would pick him up at the airport. "But I will take a taxi to your place. I said I did not want to put you to any trouble. All I want to do is pamper you. You know that."
It was not trouble, but it was a lot to do.
In the morning I went to market.
Back home, I laid a terracotta colored cloth on the marble topped wrought iron table on the terrace. (The weather was obviously blessing this first meeting in the flesh – oh, yes, in the flesh; we both knew that. The sky was clear blue and the sun bright but temperate in its luminosity.)
I set the Limoges dishes my mother had left me, her special occasion silverware, and the crystal stem glasses with the silver filigree circling their rims that she had brought back from Budapest when she had performed there. I put the champagne in the refrigerator, along with the flowers, a dozen red roses for the black vase in the bedroom, and a dozen white as a centerpiece for the table.
It was a simple menu I prepared. To open, pétoncle, baby scallops, sautéed lightly in garlic butter and lemon juice on a mixed bed of mache and arugula , garnished with cherry tomato halves, black olives, and crushed almonds. The main course consisted of a gigot of lamb, cous cous garnished with cooked prunes, and lightly steamed young spinach leaves. At the Parisian bakery I purchased a small Opera, a Black Angel they called it. I also picked up a bottle of Pommard, 1996, and a bottle of cognac.
Food preparation completed by two o'clock, it was time to turn my attention to myself. I wanted to look better than my best, to look as enticing as Jordan must have imagined me.
I was not worried about what he looked like. He had once written, "You might look better in your black bikinis, but it would not matter to you at this moment. You would desire me totally."
And I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was absolutely true.
I may sound shallow to say this, but I love my bathroom. It was one of the reasons I bought the place. Yes, I have enough money even though I am still in my twenties (enough said about my age) to buy a wonderful apartment. My mother was very generous in her will.
The bathroom: Like the traditional French bathroom it was modelled on, it was not equipped with a toilet. The toilet was in its own room at the end of a rather long corridor, in what seemed like a rather spacious closet. It was companioned by a small washbowl and a mirror.
I applied a green clay mask to my face, argile verte, and began my preparations. After ten minutes I stood beneath a thundering cascade of hot water soaping myself, surface and crevice, gently stimulating myself, but hardly going anywhere near the edge. For that I would wait for Jordan to take me there and throw me over it as he flung himself into the ether with me, and we would fly mightily down to land in a world where we had never yet gone.
Wet and lathered and softened, I shaved my entire body, chest, legs, anal crevice, under arms. And trimmed my pubes to reveal in what seemed like a shadow the delicate pattern of a fleur de lys, the hair as silky to the touch as the petals of the lily itself.
Afterwards, I soaked in a tub scented with the water of orange flowers. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply and imagined? no, felt Jordan slowly teasing my nipples.
I opened my eyes with a start realizing what danger I was in, not of falling asleep and drowning, but of coming on my own, and that was something I no longer wished to do. Perhaps it was foolish, but this restraint powerfully assured me that I no longer belonged to myself, that I had been reserved for Jordan's use.
It was nearly five-thirty when I stepped out of the bathroom. I examined myself in the long mirror inside the bedroom closet and was pleased and hopeful that Jordan would be able to find no fault.
What I would wear, my costume, was of great importance. I had existed up to now for Jordan only as a collection of words and I appeared to him clothed only in garments of words. But now...now words had to become actual things.
First, then: I got into my underwear, a skimpy, skin tight black bikini, a band of elastic and a small black V covering the parts reserved for only Jordan, front and back. How that tiny underwear emphasized the dimples of my lower back just above my muscled, high and tight round buttocks and the hollows on either side, its sloping valleys framing the deeper valley that lay hidden in its central crevice!
Over that I put on a silky pair of snug black shorts that stopped just at the top of my inner thighs and were edged with a scalloped band of lace.
The knee high black vinyl boots I had bought and never yet had found the nerve to wear except sometimes alone when I posed in front of the mirror, I had to put them on. They had just enough heel to show off my upper legs to their best advantage.
For a top, it was simple, a snug, brocaded black and silver halter with spaghetti straps that stopped just below my nipples, lightly threaded with silver rings, and left my well wrought midriff bare. I wanted Jordan to know I was both highlighting my breasts for him and keeping them, as it were, under wraps, the gift I was offering that signified my entire self.
Once again in the bathroom, over the sink, I applied black eyeliner above and below my eyes. My lips, just for a hint of vulgarity, I painted a luscious Chinese red. My hair color falls somewhere between brown and blond and I have it cut the way a beautiful girl who wants to look like a boy would have hers cut. After I combed it carefully I sprayed a fine mist over it to keep it in place but with a natural look. I hooked a small silver chain around my neck and a pinned a silver stud earring through my left earlobe.
The piece de resistance: a long silver velvet cape flung over my shoulders and tied loosely round the neck, the ties falling so as just to draw attention to the delicacy of my clavicles.
I would be lying if I said I had any doubts that Jordan would find me pleasing.
Seven o'clock arrived and so did he, and despite my serene and composed demeanor, I was as nervous as a schoolgirl and inside, as fluttery, and I also knew, as desirable.
I answered the downstairs buzzer without asking over the intercom who it was, and I waited to hear the elevator gate shut.
He did not ring the doorbell, but knocked, as if he knew the rhythm of my heartbeat.
I opened the door and when I beheld him – remember I had not even seen a picture of him, as he had not seen one of me, either, except in the words we exchanged in our emails – and my heart leaped out of my body drawn by a magnetic force in him. I had never before experienced anything like this, and I felt myself lodged in his breast. Simultaneously, I felt the same thing happening to him, and I was sure that it was his heart now that was pounding in my breast.
I don't know how long we stood there before he laughed and said, "May I come in?"
"My home is yours," I said, taking his hand – our first actual touching – and led him inside.
That moment of the two of us frozen in the doorway was not awkward. It was rather like the Russian ritual practice at parting before a journey for everyone to sit one moment in silence. Only our spontaneous engagement turned it into a ritual of beginning, a shared prayer of thanks for having reached safely home in a world so full of error and snares.
"My home is yours" was not just a polite formula.
The touch of Julian's palm around Jordan's wrist as he led him into his apartment was all that was needed to ignite what was already smoldering and they clasped each other in a fervid embrace as if devouring each other with every inch of their bodies. Their mouths found each other. They tasted each others lips and their tongues met in a fury of desire that exploded in joy that seemed never to be able to be quenched.
And then they drew back and only grasped each other with their eyes, gazing until they became sleepers inhabiting the same dream.
Jordan had caught his plane that afternoon without going home, taking a cab to the airport directly from his office and was still dressed in the suit he wore to work.
Julian freed his eyes from the power of Jordan's gaze when Jordan released him and regarded the full figure of masculinity standing there. His excitement was alloyed with an inchoate sense of fear that the power of unadulterated virility and the aura of masculine aggression must always exert over a feminine disposition like his. It was a power that could threaten or protect. Julian knew that Jordan was his hero, his protector, a man worthy of his adoration and devotion, and submission.
"I am like a lighted candle," he said "When you touch me I feel myself melting."
"You are more beautiful than I imagined," Jordan said, and Julian blushed.
"You," Julian responded, "are a god. I know it's a cliché, but in this case... And in that suit! May I pour us some champagne?"
"With pleasure," Jordan said.
Flutes in their hands after their first toast, Julian took Jordan's hand and took him through his apartment, and he was as pleased at his appreciation of it and of the rare old pieces that furnished it as he was at Jordan's appreciation of him and how he was arrayed.
They belonged to my grandmother and my mother has passed them on to me.
Last, he led Jordan out onto the terrace and in the falling light they looked across the Bay and spanned the great arcs of the bridge.
"Wow!" Is all Jordan said, wrapping an arm around Julian's shoulders and drawing him nearer. His other hand strayed across Julian's chest and stopped at a nipple which he gently teased, playing with its ring, without lifting the fabric which covered it.
"I wonder who you want to be tonight, Julian or Julia."
"I want to be who ever you want me to be, whatever you want me to be," Julian said, turning only slightly to face Jordan and gaze up at his impossible eyes.
"I will let you know after dinner," Jordan said.
After dinner, under a full moon, sipping cognac and sharing a joint, Julian said, "Take me to bed, please." The room was lit by candles and perfumed by the essence of the roses, roses of a rare variety that still, unlike most flowers now sold, suffused the room with their powerful fragrance.
Julian danced in his heart and it was translated by the way he moved in his body; swaying in front of Jordan: Julian's hands slowly made their way to the knot of Jordan's tie and slowly began undoing it.
We gazed without pause into each others eyes, ensnared, bound to each other by the invisible eyestrings that joined our gazes.
I unbuttoned his shirt and removed it. He wore nothing underneath and I bent and kissed his nipples, worshipping them as I drew life's sustenance from the energy that flowed over my tongue.
I opened his belt and knelt before him to remove his shoes and socks. I slid his trousers down and removed them. Everything done slowly, with deliberation. No need to rush. This was the beginning of forever.
I folded his trousers carefully and with his shirt and jacket hung them in my closet.
Naked he stood in front of me while I was still clothed, even to the silver cape.
I fell again to my knees and gently tongued his velvet scrotum and took each ball in my mouth and gently held it until I took his silken steel cock inside the womb of my mouth and cradled it there without yet daring to suck on it, feeling myself filled with its fullness bathing it in the amneotic fluid of my saliva.
Jordan stroked my hair and lifted me.
"Now you," he said, undoing the ties of my cape and letting it fall to the floor where it lay like a shimmering puddle.
His spidery fingers wove a web over my chest and slipping under the bottom of my top lifted it up over my head. I stretched my arms up to help and felt his palms press and circle my nipples. A great breath escaped from me as he pulled me near by my rings, and my knees began to buckle.
Jordan held me up and stripped me down until I was only wearing my bikini jock. And then he stripped me of that too and wrapped his palm around my softly swollen...clitoris.
I backed up to the bed and drew him irresistibly after me. I lay upon my back in full surrender. Jordan straddled my ankles and with hungry tongue strokes tasted my clitoris and brushed his finger through my holy valley and then touched me with his tongue. I felt myself split open. He raised my legs to his shoulders and drove slowly into me, slowly at first, going deeper, and then withdrawal, and then return, going deeper, holding me in his gaze until his sword had sheared and sheathed itself into me to the depths. He held me there as we trembled and shook in tectonic eruptions, turning each other inside out as we clawed our way through the flesh to the flaming undulation of the spirit, and then he took my mouth with a hunger no fiercer than mine for him and breathed me to the depth as I did him.
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