It Begins With a Kiss

It begins, of course, with a kiss, with the faintest press of my lips between her eyes, and then another, just below the line of her hair. My hand splays across the small of her back, and I hold her there, hold her closer, wanting the moment to last forever. She’s intoxicating, warm and comforting, and her scent fills my lungs, her soap and shampoo, her skin and her hair, a drug wound up tight around that primitive, pleasurable part of my brain.

The scent is called Jacqueline, and I have missed it for far too long.

It’s Just the Liquor Talking

Like most American boys, I had my first taste of alcohol while I was still in high school. My dad gave me a half-glass of wine with dinner. It wasn’t particularly good (I later learned that I just don’t like his taste in wine, but I get ahead of myself), so I shrugged it off and went back to my room. I looked at my bed for a moment, fell over into it, and woke up fourteen hours later.

So… yeah. I’m pretty sensitive to alcohol. I didn’t touch it again for another three and a half years.

Again, like many American boys, I had my second drink (and the first one I actually enjoyed) with my girlfriend. Her name was Jacqueline, my tiny little half-French girl. One way or another she had a little flask of her father’s cognac, some French white wine distilled into its purest essence and aged, longer than both of us put together, until the barrels stained it dark, rich amber. We were sitting in a park when she offered it to me, in one of those shady, private clearings, sealed away from the world, just the two of us watching the light dapple against our skin and clothes, talking about nothing in particular. It was stronger than wine by a long shot, and I felt it at the first swallow, felt myself relax, felt myself go mellow, placid and vulnerable, but it felt right in a way that my father’s wine did not. It was warm and spicy, smooth and sweetly addictive, a small, refined pleasure that slipped inside before I could notice, melting down my throat and coiling its vapors up into the root of my brain, leaving fingerprints across my soul.

Something – well, it didn’t quite click; it really just slid gently and effortlessly into place…

Sometimes, When You’re Sleeping

Collaborative fiction by Jacqueline du Treilly and Adrian Mailenna

Just Like This

On this night, I'll hold you close,
Just
  Like
    This.

Kiss your cheek and breathe your scent,
Then taste the girl that Heaven sent,

Just Like This.

A Dream of Black and White

Sometimes when I’m sleeping, a girl comes to share my dreams. She’s very slender, only gently curved. Her skin is very soft, milky-white, and she offers me an indulgent little smile as she lies there, on her belly, like a pearl against the sheets.

I count her vertabrae, kissing up her spine, to her neck, along the curve of her jaw, finally to her ear. In the morning I’ll still taste her skin upon my lips. I tell her this, and it makes her laugh, makes her turn and nuzzle back at me before she settles down again, her breathing slow and deep, calm and even.

That is when I begin to write. There isn’t much form, or very much plot, only a thousand obscene fantasies, the texts of dreams that have come without her, kisses and caresses, licks and silk and collars, love and sodomy and cuffs and hard, careless fucking. They spill out, a torrent of words, just a million strokes of dark, elemental blackness against her skin.

I suppose they are good, these uncertain transcriptions, but somehow I do not feel them; in dream-logic they are not yet real, written in ink but not in flesh. Soon there is no more skin to cover, and she sits, bathed in the candlelight, to see what I have done. She reads, silently mouthing the words back to me. Her eyes glitter with approval, and the words crystalize against her skin. Made flesh now, they move with her, move over muscle and bone as she takes me into her arms, and it is there that they become complete.