Decadence Read Online Free PDF Page A

mile?
Fuck
.”
    â€œIt’s raining, it’s cold, your clothes have weight, and the wind slows you down.”
    â€œSix minutes and
one fucking second
. Might as well be a seven-minute mile.”
    â€œYou’ll break six.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œWhen Kobe learns that basketball is a team sport, you’ll break six minutes.”
    I cursed him. He laughed. He was a Hawks fan, a Miami Heat fan, despised all things Lakers. I was a blue state girl and he was a red state man. Chest rising and falling, sweat raining, I ached and it was a good pain. The anxiety from being in need of pleasure, for now, had been diminished. A harder rain had returned by the time I cooled down.
    He said, “You’ve dropped a few more pounds.”
    â€œHave I?”
    â€œYour raw foods and juicing diet is really working.”
    â€œI just have to make sure that I’m getting enough protein.”
    For a few moments I stood with my face to the sky, mouth open, allowing heaven’s cool orgasm to fall on my tongue. The winter rain here made me miss the summer and warm showers of Trinidad.
    Bret watched me. When I realized he was staring, watching me with my mouth wide, swallowing, he moved his eyes to his sports watch.
    He said, “I have to get back home.”
    â€œNo time to eat or grab a spot of tea at J. Christopher?”
    â€œNext time.”
    â€œMy treat. Want to thank you for getting my hair wet.”
    â€œWould love to, but today isn’t good for me.”
    â€œWhoever she is, she must have you on lockdown.”
    Bret waved good-bye and jogged to his car. His engine started, rumbled like the muscle car it was, and right away I heard Eric Church singing “Springsteen.” I was learning about country artists. Windshield wipers came to life. Headlights woke up. Bret tooted his horn. For a moment there was a gaze in his eyes, a memory, an acknowledgment. Then he was gone, flying down Atlanta Road, turning right and blending with traffic heading toward the East-West Connector.
    No one would ever think that we’d had a shared sexual encounter. To country music. Now country music was a soundtrack to memory. Country music told stories about first loves, about memoirs, about the feeling about the past and loves you’d never have again. It might have a twang, or be religious, might have a redneck feel, even might have a Confederate flag, but it was intelligent, it was passionate, it was music you could play in front of your friends, family, and children. And when he hung out at places that played country, there might be a fight from time to time, but nobody was shot, no police were called because they fought man-to-man and the loser acknowledged his loss and went on his way, sometimes even buying the man who whupped his ass a tall one before he left the bar. That was how Bret felt about it.
    I respected and admired that. Hip-hop only had fuck songs and R & B barely had a pulse. Maybe it was hard to be romantic in a culture that didn’t portray itself as romantic, not in more than three decades.
    The former solider named Bret had pleased me. He was meek but his sex was remarkable. My inner thighs, my neck, he had done things to make me unleash the beast.
    When intromission had changed to intermission and his lingam had turned flaccid and I was ready to raise my right hand in a fist so I could scream and declare myself winner of that never-ending session of lovemaking, he had taken two washcloths and cut four-inch slits in their centers. While I lay on the bed naked, in rapture, simmering, barely alive, barely awake, shifting and wondering what he was doing, he filled a bowl with hot water. He let the towels soak. He kissed me awhile, touched my face, then had me recline, put me on my back with my knees bent, legs open. He wrung out one of the steaming washcloths. Bret looked at it, turned it until the cut was vertical, like the slit of a yoni. He put the washcloth on me,