Becoming alive

 

She began giving her husband what he wanted, though it was taboo to her.

He was thousands of miles away in Oxford, and she in the veld, where the internet didn’t work properly. Though he was sat in his office ready for his next meeting, he felt this intense longing for his wife. There was something erotic and comforting at the same time about their familiarity and intimacy. And so he called her.

“Oh, I’ve just come out of the shower,” she said.

He wanted to say, switch Skype on, but he couldn’t. There was something of a Wonderland feel to the situation, a surreality, because they were in different time zones. And there was something erotic about making love to someone across the miles and across time zones. He thought for a moment before saying:

“I have a meeting in six minutes’ time, so I have to leave you for the moment. But this is what I want you to do. Think deeply about all the places on your body that you want me to kiss. Then use your lipstick to mark X on each and every spot that you want me to kiss.”

If she was startled by his request, she did not show it.  “And then?”

“And then show me.”

He rang off, and she began her task. She tentatively touched herself, imagining his lips instead of her own fingers. She started touching her own lips, and wondered what he tasted there that drove him wild with desire. She remembered kissing him in the torrential rain. Yes, she wanted him to kiss her there. She marked an X on her mouth.  Her fingers moved down the hollow of her throat; another X. And on and on her self-exploration went. She sometimes had to twist and contort her body to mark a particular spot out for him to kiss.

And when she finished, spent, she sat patiently and waited for his call. It came, in the form of a text instead of Skype, to her disappointment.

Show me, he said. “Take a photo.”

“No,” she replied. “Only on Skype.”

Einstein’s light experiment with the mirrors. It changed the way we looked at the world, because for the first time, we are faced with irrefutable proof that time and space are elastic. She wanted to see his eyes when he looked at her body in real-time, at just a shade under 186,000 miles per second information transformation.

A pause, and then his reply. ‘OK, just for a minute. And I can’t speak, because I am in a conference call.”

Her Skype flicked to life and she showed him.

He wrote back, his fingers burning the keypad:

And I would kiss you in all those places …. many times. Gently at first and then becoming more hungry as I move my mouth across yours and then move down your torso. I want you so much.

She knew he could not hear her  voice as he had turned off the sound function;  she took her lipstick out again as he watched her with hungry eyes. She wrote one word on her body, right across her breasts, and that one word was his name.

(from Chapter 13, Inside The Higgs)