Little Birds Read Online Free PDF

orgasm and needing him only to touch her with the tip of his penis. Then she learned to tease him, too, to leave him when he was about to come. She would pretend to fall asleep. And he would lie there, tortured by the desire to be touched again, afraid to awaken her. He would edge close to her, place his penis against her ass, trying to move against it, to come just by touching her, but he couldn't, and then she would awaken and begin touching him and sucking him again. They did it so often that it became a torture. Her face was swollen from the kissing, and she had marks of his teeth on her body, and yet they could not touch each other in the street, even while walking, without jumping again with desire.
    They decided to get married. Robert wrote to Edna.
    On the day of the wedding, Edna came to Paris. Why? It was as if she wanted to see everything with her own eyes, to suffer the very last drop of bitterness. In a few days she had become an old woman. A month before she was glowing, enchanting, her voice like a song, like an aureole around her, her walk light, her smile inundating one. And now she wore a mask. Over this mask she had spread powder. There was no glow of life under it. Her hair was lifeless. The glaze in her eyes was like that of a dying person.
    Dorothy was faint when she saw her. She cried out to her. Edna did not answer. She merely stared.
    The wedding was ghostly. Donald burst in in the middle of it and behaved like a madman, threatening Dorothy for deceiving him, threatening to commit suicide. When it was over, Dorothy fainted. Edna stood there carrying flowers, a figure of death.
    Robert and Dorothy left on a trip. They wanted to revisit the places they had traveled through a few weeks before, recapture the same pleasure. But when Robert tried to take Dorothy he found that she could not respond. Her body had undergone a change. The life had ebbed from it. He thought, It is the strain, the strain of having seen Edna, of the wedding, the scene made by Donald. So he was tender. He waited. Dorothy wept during the night. The next night it was the same. And the next. Robert tried caressing her, but her body did not vibrate under his fingers. Even her mouth did not answer his mouth. It was as though she had died. After a while she concealed it from him. She pretended to feel enjoyment. But when Robert was not looking at her, she looked exactly like Edna on the day of the wedding.
    She kept her secret. Robert was deceived, until one day when they took a room in a rather cheap hotel, because the best ones were filled. The walls were thin, the doors did not close well. They got into bed. As soon as they put out the light they heard the springs of the bed in the next room squeaking rhythmically, two heavy bodies pounding into each other. Then the woman began to moan. Dorothy sat up in bed and sobbed for all that was lost.
    Obscurely she felt what had happened to be a punishment. She knew it was related to her taking Robert from Edna. She thought she could recapture at least the physical response with other men, and perhaps free herself and return to Robert. When they went back to New York she sought adventures. In her head she was always hearing the moans and cries of the couple in the hotel room. She would not rest until she had felt this again. Edna could not cheat her of this, could not kill the life in her. It was too great a punishment for something that was not altogether her fault.
    She tried to meet Donald again. But Donald had changed. He had hardened, crystallized. Once an emotional, impulsive young man, he had become completely objective, mature, searching for his pleasure.
    "Of course," he said to Dorothy, "you know who is responsible for this. I would not have minded at all if you had discovered you didn't love me, left me, gone to Robert. I
knew you were attracted to him, I didn't know how deeply. But I couldn't forgive your keeping us both at the same time, in Paris. I must have taken you often a few