The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook by Paul Pipkin Read Free Book Online

of her before I could come and looked up at me, eyes wet and lips parted in an expression of absolute surrender. In
     that moment, I knew I could do anything whatsoever to her. She looped her bound wrists around my neck and sought my mouth,
     lifting her hips for me to enter her vaginally.
    Her demeanor neutralized any residual performance anxiety, and I discovered with delight that another labial ring, located
     farther down, performed for me the same function as the clit ring did for her. The contractions of her vaginal muscles gently
     nursed me toward climax. She kept her eyes open, their pale green fire burning into my soul as her slow undulations became
     unendurable. When she brought me off, she stretched all her muscles and came again with a long luxuriant moan.
    Directly she was drifting off, oblivious to the tickle and stickiness of the fluids we had generated. The sequence of choice
     left me more bemused at her apparent indifference to hygiene, but it was not something I was going to struggle with. As I
     pulled her on top of me, so that she might go to sleep without the burden of my weight on her, something happened that went
     beyond sex. Some more etheric fluid filled my heart.
    Holding her, just holding her was like… like coming home after a long trip. Yes, like coming home is all I can call it. I
     don’t mean that she was like my wife, or JJ, or others I’ve been with. The piercing and her other exotica, her morphing personas,
     all made her far different. But the greatest difference was the quiet conviction: Yes, this is what I’m used to. This is familiar,
     and safe, and… home.

II
    Circumstance
    W RAPPED IN J USTINE’S ARMS AND LEGS, MY thoughts
did
finally drift back to JJ, nonetheless. Unworthy as it might be seen, I’m afraid that it was rather along the lines of gloating
     at her probable disbelief, could she but have seen me then! I’m talking serious disbelief here, hard-core denial. JJ’s truths,
     her sense of reality, seemed to reside in whatever notions were most comfortable and convenient for the parochial minds of
     the moment. Truthfully, she had turned out to be not so different from the way I’d previously remembered her—from the portentous
     year of 1963, that single long storm of synchronicity, in personal lives as much as world affairs.
    In our later era, I first became uneasy when dragged to view a popular film that left the screen awash with passivity. My
     perception was that the male lead wussied out after claiming cosmic certainty that comes only once. What was supposed to be
     attractive about failure to embrace his lover’s confession of compliance?
    Not me, surely, but my JJ was careful to make no such confession. It became obvious that she would not leave her husband.
     Her basic conservatism reasserted itself, her discomfort with stirring things up, a pastime in which I take positive delight.
    To my credit, I refrained from making the acquaintance of more bartenders over these issues. For the first time in my life,
     I caved and sought counseling. Those of us, and this is not at all gender-specific, who spend our lives pretending to be tough
     guys may ultimately determine that we have maintained our image at a terrible price.
    The counselor, a Pakistani Sufi woman skilled in regression techniques, taught me much about the frailties of memory. Unexpectedly,
     I discovered a dark arc into which I could never see to resolve its contents. I’d not denied the reality of repression for
     other people, but finding its trail within myself was disconcerting.
    In deep hypnosis, I discovered how I’d “consolidated” some temporal facts. If asked before how many times, as a teen, I’d
     run over to JJ’s house on foot, I’d have answered maybe a dozen. Standing on her lawn in the hypnotic re-creation of the breakup,
     her dropping her chin when I tried to kiss her, I realized that I had been there scores of times not including all the lonely
     “drive-bys” of