What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

They stood this way for what seemed a long time. Then Jackie moved, going to the back of the store, and then he heard Charlie Rouse playing “When Sunny Gets Blue.” He stood listening, his eyes felt swollen from desire, from recognition, and from a joy. That hoarse muted horn held her as he wanted to hold her. And she stood still, watching him in that smoky, curious way. He wanted to reach out and kiss her throat. He wanted to drop to his knees and kiss her thighs, but he didn’t want to move. He wanted to stay right there in “When Sunny Gets Blue” with her. He wanted all five minutes and forty-eight seconds of it, like this, with both of them in the full and absolute meaning of things between them.

In the silence after, Jackie slowly brushed a hair from his neck, looked into his eyes as if still trying to find something conclusive there, and said languidly into his ear, “Fuck me, then.”

He inhaled her skin, held her in all the shocked passion collected in him. He laughed, chuckled in the well of her throat, kissed the smooth cool surface of her neck.

They were in Reiner’s bed, but he didn’t think of it as Reiner’s bed until after. He only thought of how they were one muscle made out of the same material, how he wanted to be inside her, how he was finally seeing her naked body, its dark brownness, its pitched sinews, its toned angles, how he felt weak and limber at the same time. He thought only of how he pushed and pushed and held her, how her legs framed him, how she bit him on his breast and his shoulder, how her arms were liquid, how she stroked his ass, how she smelled, and how she mounted him, that same cool look behind her half-closed lids; how they turned and turned, never exhausting that rhythm, the wetness between them. How she told him, “Give me your sweet cock. Fuck me.” How he said to her, “Here it is, here it is, take it, fuck me, fuck me.” How slippery he felt and close to crying when she said, “Don’t cry now, eat me, come on, eat me.” How he put his mouth on her, how she held his head, kneaded his shoulders to make his tongue obey her rhythm, and then pulled him up again, guiding his cock into her. How he wanted to come, but he wanted her to come. “I want you to come, I want you to come, I want you …” pressing her, balancing his cock in her, waiting for her. How he felt her muscles contract, her thighs shiver, a long breath in her cresting, how he wanted to scream for the thickness in his cock, how it burst when she put her hands on his ass and pulled him even closer. Then he wept, feeling so come apart. Then he kissed every part of her glistening body. She, still heaving for breath, grabbed him tightly.

He heard her breathing become steady, felt her arms loosen. He kissed the path between her breasts. She held his head, then let him go, rolling out of the bed and finding her clothing. “Come back,” Oku said softly. Jackie shook herself into her dress, then stooped beside him to run her hand along his back. “We can always fuck, Oku. Fucking’s easy.” He grabbed her, rolling her onto the bed again, lifting her dress. He put his cock inside her again. She was impassive. “Not with me,” he said, and held her face, kissing her lips. Jackie climbed off of him. He let her go. That’s when he became aware that he was in Reiner’s bed. He didn’t care; he would do anything for her. Even lie in Reiner’s spunk. Now Reiner would have to lie in his. He dressed, went to the front to meet a coolly restored Jackie smoking a cigarette.

“So what does it mean?” he asked.

“That we fucked.”

“Okay. If that’s …”

“And it was good.”

“Yeah.” He tasted her in his mouth, he smelled her on his face and hands. He reached for her, taking the cigarette away and burying his mouth in hers.

“It is what it is,” she said, pulling her mouth away, putting her lips in the cavity of his neck near his ear.

Oku felt charged and useless at the same time. Sure, he wanted Jackie this way. What he had dreamed of since Harbord Collegiate had happened. He was so high, so electric, his legs were trembling. But what was she saying?

“So that’s all you want from me?” He sounded threatening, as if he had found some leverage with her for the first time. As if he had become irresistible. But beneath that feeling he knew lay all his uncertainty. She was like a thing he did not want to drop and break.

“No, it’s what I want … all I have to give.”

That hesitation between “want” and “have” crippled him and gave him hope. He read ambiguity in it a hundred ways, but qualified by “all,” he realized, that hesitation meant nothing. She was just finding a softer way of letting him know where he stood. All these calculations flew through his head. He looked for any weakness in what she said or in her tone and decided that if he hadn’t found it, he would pursue it anyway until he did. He’d followed Jackie a long time, and he’d never been this far. So he would take whatever she gave him, whatever she had, and he would find the rest after.

He put his hand in his pocket, found the car keys, realized that he was still holding her burning cigarette with the other, and put it out in the ashtray. “And what … what will make you give me more?”

“More?” The sexual innuendo thick on her tongue at first, then becoming serious, she said, “Hmm, I don’t know.”

“Okay,” he said and headed for the door.

Jackie moved ahead of him to