Songs_of_the_Satyrs Read Online Free PDF

stroked his face—which was well into five days’ worth of beard—and kissed his salty flesh.
    “Why don’t you explore something more current?” she breathed into his ear.
     
    ***
     
    She couldn’t get a hold of Denny later that evening. He wasn’t answering his phone. She considered trying to find him, but where to look?
    She took a long shower in the common bathroom at her dorm, enjoying the spray of steaming water on her flesh. Her nipples tingled as she massaged and soaped herself, and before she realized it she was masturbating with the hand shower, shuddering and moaning. Two girls from her floor giggled as she left the stall, and she blushed, fleeing to her room.
    No sign of Denny yet. Thinking about the moss stains on his hands, she threw on some clothes and drove down to the park. He wasn’t there, but someone—certainly Denny—had been cleaning the statue.
    She’d not gotten a good look at it before, and with the filth and growth removed, she could see its bestial goatlike features and squat muscular body more clearly. Those eyes with their horizontal slits had gazed at her when they had made love that night at the party. She felt lightheaded and reached out to steady herself, her hand coming to rest on the muscular marble haunch.
    Art and history were not her subjects, but she could tell that the style of the sculpture was wrong for the period, as Denny had insisted. It was grotesquely real and primitive in its lines and detail. Denny had dug out the accumulated dirt and leaves around the base of the pedestal beneath the cloven hooves. The base was wider than she had imagined.
    She drove back up the hill, planning to go back to Denny’s room, but something made her turn off and go back another block. She passed Club Passion a second time. Neon lights and nude women in silhouette. The sign said it was amateur night with a cash prize. Ridiculous. She had never considered stripping before.
    She drove around the block three more times before parking. Up on stage she writhed and moaned: excited, horny. The crowd of men watched her with undisguised atavism. The music was throbbing, urging her on, some DJ mix of trance with a primitive flute echoing through the background.
    In the changing room, the other girls glared at her and whispered, “Bitch has done this before.”
    She won five hundred dollars and the owner offered her a gig weekend nights.
     
    ***
     
    “I’ve just been in a weird place,” she told Samantha afterward, as they drank wine in her friend’s room. “I mean it’s been a little over a week now and it’s like I can’t think about anything but sex. And Denny has turned into some kind of animal. If he’s not on me, he’s surfing the Internet for porn.”
    She didn’t mention the strip club, gyrating and bending over in front of complete strangers. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about that yet.
    “You should relax as long as you’re enjoying yourself. I can’t get attention from anything that doesn’t run on batteries right now. Sometimes couples just get like that. When my dad started dating his new girlfriend last summer they were at it constantly.”
    “Eww!”
    “You’re telling me? I caught them on the couch. Oh God, he was behind her and his big white gut was rippling around and all I could think about was video I had seen of elephant seals going at it.”
    “God, that’s gross. Thanks for that image. Really.”
    “I know,” Samantha said. “No one wants to hear about their parents having sex.”
    “Well—I don’t mean that I feel bad about it. It’s just . . . different. I almost feel weird that I don’t feel weird about it. Because it isn’t like either of us.”
    “As long as you aren’t doing anything dangerous.”
    They talked for several hours, drinking merlot and smoking a couple of joints. Samantha was taking a course on human sexuality and they went through the chapter on hypersexual behavior and laughed. She was pretty sure they didn’t