Read Online Full Frontal Fiction by Jack Murnighan - Free Book Online

band of cloth between the lace cups of her bra, undoes the little hook that holds them together. “How about now?” she asks.
    â€œMaybe.” I stare for a while trying to make the connection between all the pictures I’ve seen and these real things, Violet’s breasts. They are instantly familiar yet completely new too, and I feel as if I’ve been waiting for them a long, long time. I lean forward to touch a nipple with my lips. I can feel her hands in my hair. Her body sways and my mouth fills. My father is flying, eating packet after packet of peanuts, the tote bag sandwiched between his legs. He looks out the window and sees clouds reflecting pink and gold. He tells the woman next to him that he is a salesman, a sex therapist, a professional wrestler. The world is huge and anyone can get lost; it’s hard to fasten on.
    â€œOh,” says Violet, a sound of surprise. I take my mouth from her breast; the nipple glistens with saliva. I follow the space between her breasts to the top of her stomach, kissing, kissing to the rivulet of hairs down toward her belly button, the waist of her jeans. “Hey, that tickles.” She squirms free, gets up from the couch, stands over me, her hair in her eyes. I reach for the button of her pants, unzip her zipper, start pulling them down. Her body sways with my tugging. She watches with a distanced curiosity as her pants clear her hips, her thighs, bunch at her ankles. She is not wearing any underwear. “I’ll fall,” she says.
    â€œI’ll catch you.”
    I am down on my knees now, my hands on her hips, steadying her. I am face-to-face with the architecture of her pelvis, the tuft of hair that I have dreamt of and wondered about. Of course, of course, I tell myself, this is how it would have to be, this is how women are made. I look up at her face and see that her eyes are squeezed shut, as if it’s the scary part of a movie. I kiss the sharp edge of her hipbone, the shallow plane of her pelvis, the shaggy patch of hair. I follow the curve downward between her legs.
    â€œNo, don’t,” she says. “I’m serious, I’ll fall. Oh.”
    The smell is rich and shocking, like the breath of a cave. I feel her sway over me like tall grass, her warm thighs pressed to my ears.
    Once abandoned, you will always be a thrown-away thing. You will never be able to possess or hold, will never understand the rituals by which people bind themselves to others. Everything is as fluid as air or water; names are to be changed, money to be hidden. Doors give you an irresistible urge to leave, just for the feeling of leaving. And you watch for this same urge in others: the thinking ahead, the absent laugh, the counting of money. You know people have thoughts they don’t tell.
    She sits down on the edge of the couch, a sticky look on her face as if she’s just woken up from a long sleep. She lifts her feet and I remove the bunched up pants from her ankles. “Your turn,” she says. “Stand.” I stand up and she unzips my zipper, begins to peel both pants and underwear down my legs. I am careful to pry off my shoes as she works, to step out of the pants when they reach my ankles—I am suddenly worried about looking ridiculous. But there is no helping it: I glance down at my sickly white legs, how they end in brown socks. It’s hard to imagine that they’re really mine, these limbs, that I stand on them. Is this getting laid, this nakedness? It’s like losing your body.
    She holds me at the back of my thighs, then takes my penis in her mouth, so quickly that I’m barely aware of it happening. It’s not the sensation I expected, not explosive but gentle, like the pull of the water at the beach when it tugs the sand from between your toes. You want to follow, and you want to stay. “Not too much,” I hear myself mumble. “I want to take off my socks.”
    â€œLeave them on,”