Second Best Fantasy by Angela Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

gently and said,
    “God, I love talking with you. I am trying to teach you a valuable lesson.”
    When we became student and teacher must have happened while I was daydreaming because I failed to notice the transition.
    “Let’s walk down on the beach first.” Following behind her in a daze, I knew that, even if I had no desire for her at all, I was going to make love to her under the boardwalk because she wanted me to. Maybe she was a witch. I’d been under the sexual control of a woman before, but this was somehow more ethereal, more Zen-like. She wanted to teach me something and I was willing to be taught, whether she was an angel of heaven or hell made no difference.
    We stopped at a Tiki bar on the pier and got two Budweisers in plastic cups; the staple cocktail of the Jersey shoreline. Walking down the wooden ramp to the sand, I noticed from the moment we emerged from the parking lot, she hadn’t touched me at all, not even so much as a brush of her hand against mine when she went to grab her cup from the counter.
    My blood still boiled in my loins from the sheer sensation of denim against my bare clit. (I wasn’t one for undergarments.) Without any effort at all, she forced me to want her more with each second that passed, it was unnerving but riveting.
    “What did you learn from Blake?” she asked, patting a patch of beach beside her under the pylons of the pier. I took an enormous swallow of beer and tried to separate my intellectualism from my sexuality. Then, like an epiphany, the realization hit me that I should not be separating the two at all.
    “I learned the absurdity of socialization. As humans, we are living proof of all of life’s contradictions and, also as humans, it is our job to resolve them.”
    “Correct,” she announced as she changed her position so we were facing each other, her legs bent over my own. The rush 36
     
    came back again at the feel of her skin against mine, even clothed as we were.
    “So, if you realize the absurdity of socialization, why, then, would you think it was wrong to make love in a car in a parking lot?”
    She dipped a finger into my beer and then ran it over my lips.
    “I didn’t say I thought it was wrong. I guess I don’t really know what I was thinking. I want to make the next couple of days last as long as possible.”
    “Yes,” she said as she pulled off her shirt. “But in the greater realm of things, what if the next few days were all we had, all any of us have? Then you would wish you had done more.”
    I reached out to touch her breasts but kept speaking. “It is the desire to have more time that makes us have so little.” I gently brushed the hair back from her face and exposed a singular tear running down the side of her cheek.
    She kissed my open palm and continued, “Do you believe as Blake did that we are all fundamentally evil?”
    I unbuttoned my shirt down to my navel. “Yes,” I said,
    “because according to Blake evil and desire are one and the same, which also means evil is inherently a myth.”
    I felt as if I were in a dreamlike state, never before had I experienced the culmination of philosophy and sexual anticipation, it was exhilarating but somehow deeply tragic, and I felt my own tears well up in spite of my breathless heat. When I went to wipe them away, Janine held my hands to her chest and kissed me with desperation.
    She whispered in my ear, “There should be no shame in the face of desire. Do you remember why religion and life are in such contradiction to each other?”
    “Yes,” I breathed softly. She pushed me back onto the sand, straddled me, and unzipped my jeans.
    “Tell me.”
    This was the most mind-blowing foreplay I had ever experienced, I lack the words to express it. Suddenly, though, clear thinking arose to my lips without effort and I paraphrased Blake to the best of my ability as she lightly stroked me, still constricted by denim.
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    “All religious codes are based on the idea that the mind