Read Online Nine & a Half Weeks by Elizabeth McNeill - Free Book Online

elbows on his knees, shoulders hunched forward, his hands around mine. I sit stiffly, erect, my eyes on my arms stretched woodenly toward him. 1 am overcome by that mixture of contradictory feelings I should long be used to, since one variation or another has assaulted me almost daily since we’ve known each other. I am deeply embarrassed, 1 am flushed, 1 am shaking—and I am exhilarated, drunk before my wine arrives, ablaze with mindless gusto.
    The waiter has no reaction at all, at least to judge from his expression when he brings our drinks and when I can finally bring myself to look up at him. “It’s all inside you, you know,” says the man sitting across from me, in the same suit that I’m wearing. “Nobody else ever cares. But it does make it a lot of fun for me that you do.” We move on to a dining room then, where he holds my hand between courses. I have difficulty chewing, even more so swallowing; 1 drink close to twice the amount of wine I’m used to. He has another drink at the bar, his hand loosely on my thigh.
    Upstairs in the room he propels me toward the mirror. His arm around my shoulder, we look at our reflection: two men, one tall and clean-shaven, the shorter one sandy-bearded; dark suits, a pink shirt and a pale blue one. “Take your belt off,” he says, in a low voice, and I do, unable to take my eyes from his in the mirror. Not knowing what to do next, I coil it into the tight serpent it had been in its box. He takes it from me, says “Get on the bed,” and, “No, hands and knees.” He reaches from behind me to open my trousers, then says, “Pull your pants down over your ass.” Something gives way in me and my elbows can’t hold my weight. On my knees, my head on my arms, sounds from my throat that I can’t interpret: neither fear nor longing but the inability to distinguish between the two, adding up to… He beats me, a pillow over my head to muffle my cries, then takes me as he would a man. I cry out louder than before, my eyes wide open to the dark of the pillow covering my face. Deep inside me his pounding stops abruptly. He forces me down flat, his right hand under me and between my legs. Lying on top of me, stretched full length, he lifts the pillow, listens to my sobs subside. When I realize that we are breathing in unison, calmed, his fingers begin their infinitesimal move. Soon 1 am breathing rapidly again. He pushes the pillow back over my face when I come and soon he comes, too. He puts wadded Kleenex off the bedside table between my buttocks. It is soaked with semen and tinged pink when he removes it, later on. Curled against me, he murmurs, “So tight and hot, you can’t imagine….”
    SOMETIMES I WONDERED abstractly how it was possible that pain could be this exciting. Once during that time I stubbed my toe, in sandals, on my bottom desk drawer. I swore, hopped up and down, hobbled down the corridor to a co-worker’s office to get sympathy from him, and couldn’t concentrate on work for the next fifteen minutes because the slight but incessant throbbing distracted and annoyed me. But when he was the one inflicting pain, the difference between pain and pleasure became obscured in a way that turned them into two sides of a single coin: sensations different in quality but equal in result, equally intense, one stimulus as powerfully able as the next to arouse me. Since pain always came as a prelude and only then—sometimes hours earlier but always eventually leading to orgasm—it became as longed for, as sensuous, as integral to lovemaking as having my breasts caressed.
    THERE IS A pounding at the front door. It’s 6:30 P.M. and I’ve only just let myself in a few minutes earlier. When I peer past the chain lock, there he is: rolling his eyes, a bag of groceries in the crook of his right arm, the handle of his briefcase between thumb and index finger, the remaining fingers of his left hand curled around the top of a bag festooned with the Bendel’s logo; the Post,