Amanda’s Cotton White Panties
I remember watching Amanda’s hands and their descent beneath the sheets, and my mimicking her posture because it seemed like the polite thing to do. I remember forgetting who I was and never wondering whether her age and experience, far advanced by comparison, might be problematic, as I reached for my aching, dripping — what was this?
In the radiating image before me, which I later realized was only an extended preview for some low-budget soft-core answer to every sexless marriage in the neighborhood, the two starlets complimented one another’s bodies with silky laughter and wet hands as they rekindled a lost friendship. They floated and dove in the blue, and the first-person voice-over explained that these friends were “pretending” that they had not been in love with one another in all the time they bunked together in college, some three years prior. They fooled themselves and each other until the one who showed up to this rendezvous without so much as a towel finally gave in to her inclinations and — closeup — confidently, firmly, held her breast to the lips of her bathing partner. To my surprise, the friend smiled, returning her affectionate eye contact, and began to suck hungrily at the nipple beaded by the water and the moonlight. Hot tongues came together. I came apart.
Having never put much thought to the experience of orgasm, I was convinced this was the end. I was dying. God and his pious adherents in the sky had singled me out as their unforgivable sinner, and had opted to punish me for my perversions by way of some glorious heart attack. It wasn’t such a bad way to go, really. There was the light they tell you about, the racing thoughts, the flash of darkness, the wave of angst followed by an unexpected sense of peace. But the dampening between my legs — that was adding insult to injury. I would be found dead and suspected incontinent.
But I didn’t die. And neither did Amanda, who I now remembered was in the room. She, too, seemed short of breath, and her hands surfaced, wringing one another in search of proper circulation. Her mouth was open, slack-jawed and moistened, as I could see by the sheen of her upper lip. “That was fast,” she remarked. Her casual tone indicated to me, in all my naïveté, that she had plumbed these depths before. She changed the channel to a late-night talk show and made no more mention of the mysterious behavior in which we had just engaged.
Later, it would be shows with stories of men with women, women with strap-ons, strap-ons with vibrators, and vibrators with two ends. Amanda spent months insisting I watch with her, insisting I give her hands a rest by performing the exercise for her. Her panties were always cotton and white.
[From the Preface of Match, Cinder & Spark, Volume I: Nymphomania and the Single Girl. Preface by Lola Down.]
