JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 49

49. THE BED

This time she led him through to the bedroom immediately and kissed him. He struggled with his belt and his trousers. When she was naked – before he was – she threw back the covers. Her sheets were orange and soft, with a velvety touch. Her body glowed orange in the candlelight. He was on his knees, looking down at her. This was the first time he had ever seen her naked, lying down, looking up at him, a precious gift from God – the crown of His Old Age Creationist endeavors.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he said, and he wanted to say “I love you,” but it would’ve been totally premature, he decided, even though he felt it strongly at that moment, staring down at her naked form, which looked like a picture out of some banned men’s magazine that one could find overseas but not in America.

Her body had the roundness of maturity about it, but without the sagginess. He knew that sagginess and found it quite sexy, but Eve had something else, more of a lithe perfection, to her body. Together with her face, and in the flicker of the candlelight, she was brilliantly beautiful. An angel. There was something eerily un-physical about her, an aesthetic quality not of this world: she had fallen straight from the hand of God, fresh from His imagination, an angel sent to earth to make one of His children fall in love again -- to make his feelings rise from the ashes of those twin towers and flood his frame with a healing conviction.

“Dear God,” she said, “forgive us for what we are about to do. We know we are indeed committing this act outside the bond of matrimony, but it is not for our pleasure, is it? It’s only to see if we are compatible enough to get married. Forgive us this sin. We promise to mortify ourselves afterwards. Amen.”

“Amen,” said Adam. He smiled; she had cut the prayer much shorter this time. He felt the flood break from inside his chest through his throat into his face. He wondered if he was going to cry. Tears of being overwhelmed. Tears of happiness. He bent down between Eve’s legs to hide his face.

FELLATIO AND CUNNILINGUS PUT THE DEVIL’S TONGUE IN YOUR MOUTH.

She had broken the rule with him, so he assumed he could break the rule with her. In fact, he felt honor-bound to do so, as an equal exchange. He dipped his tongue and let the taste register. Then he rolled his tongue over her pubic hair, making her as wet outside as her smell indicated the inside. His mouth overfilled itself with saliva – Pavlov’s dog – and he dribbled it onto her. The hair was soft and matted together. He stuck his nose inside her vagina. He heard her moan. Her fingers rested on the back of his head, fluttering about like birds making a nest. He followed his nose with his tongue, and licked around her lips, using his tongue like a flat shovel in broad strokes. Then he made a sharp tip and searched for the little bud under the top folds. He found it and stopped, then darted at it, as if to make sure it was there. He made a dart at the stem, then to the left, then to the right. He flicked at its length, again and again, and then took the whole tender button –- Gertrude Stein’s words – into his tongue, and squeezed it. Then he began to lick, very softly, very slowly, and increased the pressure slightly, measuring the degrees by the quality of her moans. He went on and on and on. He waited for a sharper drawing of breath, but it never came. He kept on licking, steadily, his tongue doing repetitions as though it were working out at the gym, till the root of his tongue ached. She kept on moaning, but the moaning never quickened, never caught in her throat with stepped-up agony. There was no outcry, no sudden loudness, no sharp intake of breath. Just the soft moaning. Pleasure without intensity. He began to lick slower and softer, until he withdrew.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

She burst into tears.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I can’t come,” she said, and cried harder.

“Don’t cry,” he said.

Her pleasure, which had been deep, wide and vast – as well as Non-Sanctioned -- had loosened her tear ducts instead of an orgasm.

“I have never come with a man,” she wept. “Never. I’ve never told anyone. Why am I telling you? You tricked me into telling you. I’ve never told anybody.”

Her eyes were big and scared.

He smiled. “I’m sure we can do something about this.”

“I’ll never come. I’ll never feel strong and independent if I can’t have my own orgasms with a man -- if all I do is just lie down and submit under a man like all meek female Beloveds who don’t aspire to anything more than being child-bearing breeders.”

“Now that I know this, I won’t stop next time. I’ll keep on doing it till doomsday if necessary or till you come.” He smiled again. “Whichever comes first.” He had never encountered a female like Eve before. She was different: she felt bad because she didn’t experience pleasure, not bad because she did. Guilt didn’t enter into her desire for pleasure like it did with Martha and all the others. Strange: it deprived him of the pleasure he got from inducing guilt into his female partners. He had never realized how big a kick he got out of it before: how smug and rather lordly and sadistic he felt as he watched a guilt-ridden female squirm. Now he felt empty and deprived. Why would he want to sleep with a female who didn’t give him that pleasure, that angst about liking sex? It was how he measured his success – the guiltier his partner, the greater his sexual achievement. Eve reminded him a little of a pre-Reformation female, like his wife Sarah. Eve said she wanted to feel “strong and independent.” What exactly did she mean by that? On top of his emptiness, he also felt a new excitement, dealing with somebody he couldn’t figure out easily. Now she looked very confused and upset.

“I’ll never come.”

“Oh yes, you will,” he said. Maybe when he got her to enjoy sex fully with him, she’d become like the others: guilty.

Eve couldn’t get over what she thought of as Adam’s unnatural confidence. “You don’t understand,” she objected. “I’m thirty-five, I’m not married, I don’t have a child, and I’ll never get on in my career if I don’t come.”

“Excuse me for essaying some ignorance here, but I don’t quite see the connection,” he said.

“I can’t marry a man if I can’t have an orgasm, because if I can’t have an orgasm, I’ll never feel independent, and if can’t feel independent, I don’t want to marry a man, and if I’m not married, the Men of the Gospel will never accept me into a higher tier. I’ll stay at my low level for the rest of my life, won’t I?”

“You’re ambitious,” he said. He had never heard anything like this from a female before. He did not quite know how to deal with the emotional challenge of it, let alone the intellectual challenge. Was he falling in love?

“Indeed, I am, but my sexual lack stands in the way of my focus.”

“Well, we’ll just have to help you over it.”

“It’ll never happen.”

“Don’t fret, you came to the right guy,” he said, with the same air of confidence. “I’m a musician, you know. At the end of the day I’m intuitive about these things.”

“How is a musician intuitive regarding sex?”

“You’ll see.”

His confidence irritated her. He was not taking her condition seriously, being so sure of himself. He was being himself, instead of appreciating what she suffered. She decided not to tell him that she was a musician herself, who sang at the Disciples Club every week. She didn’t want him to think they had all that much in common.

“How can you know this, that you can help me?” she asked.

“The point being simply this,” he said. “I won’t give up.” He wanted to say, “Because I love you,” but didn’t.