He was making shakshuka and Otis Redding was playing. Outside it was raining theatrically, performatively, un-Londonly in defiant refusal of the city’s politesse. Its grammar of mannerly evisceration and well-behaved alienation, intelligible to those raised to guarantee its proliferation, nebulously comprehensible to the rest. Only insofar as its sting is felt first through its delivery and second, through the assured sense that something is happening that implicates but refuses to reveal itself.
He was, of course, ‘raised for it’, in it, but spent his life and work thinking about, obsessing over, resisting with ‘the rest’ in all their incarnations with a tenacity matched only by a parallel fixation on whether or how he should be doing this or indeed, fixating. His elastic mind dwelled momentarily on the metaphorical symmetry of precipitation before berating himself for the adolescent earnestness. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered to himself, ‘any moment now you’ll whip out an acoustic guitar and start playing Time of your Life.’
She arrived late, loud, and wet. As was her wont. She was on the border of the rest, with vulgar edges and a directness that made British people awkward, but was raised for something else, somewhere else to proliferate other things that were egregious in less genteel ways. Her hair stuck to her face, clothes drenched and cold, knickers saturated from fantasising about his cock on the bus. The warmth of that wetness starkly contrasting the iciness of the rest of it. ‘I’m so fucking happy to see you,’ she said kissing him voraciously.
He poured her a gin with a wedge of lime. She had a sip and thought briefly about Botanics. The shakshouka simmered, tomatoes sensuously red, vibrant, redolent with sex. Everything was sex with him. His being, his brain, his heart, his cock made her feel perpetually on the verge of coming.
He fucked her feministly. He was bold and assertive and powerful. He took her fully. And yet, the power was always underpinned by an erotic politics of equity. Every time they fucked she had to ask him to stop the second his perfect cock slid into her tight pussy. She needed a moment to breathe, to encounter the delicious impossible task of stopping herself from coming instantly, of resisting dissolution into the full-body orgasms he artfully elicited in her so she could fuck him slowly until they came together.
She almost always failed and came within seconds. It was euphoric full body, full mind, deep pussy pleasure she had never in her life experienced despite having fucked her way through much of her life, and – with no small amount of smugness – having prided herself on her capacity to select majestic lovers and to come ebulliently.
And almost every time, even when she thought she had reached the pinnacle of pleasure, his orgasm, with the concomitant pulsating of his huge cock, with the shift in his body from melted softness into hers to a stiffness of anticipation, with his vocal cries of, ‘oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Jesus, I’m coming so hard, Jesus, fuck, yes,’ unearthed a second wave of intense eros in her that almost always led to her coming again. This time with him, moaning loudly, her pussy clamping involuntarily around his cock, breathing deeply but sometimes unable to breathe and on the verge of passing out from the intensity of it all.
Sharing with him a predilection for poetics, she sometimes thought of it as an auto-asphyxiative pleasure; with prefix play on auto for automatic rather than self.
With a wooden spoon, he gently fashioned four craters in the shakshouka into which he began to decant four endearing little eggs. He only fucked up one of them, its yolk bleeding into the red of the rest.