She is barefoot but clothed, though her dress is pushed up above to the tops of her thighs, a beautiful dress. He wants to speak of how wonderfully it shimmers with its thousand shining silver beads. Against the deep blue of the fabric, they look like stars from deep inside the universe, places where no man has been. She keeps talking, just idle chatter, in soft breathy tones, lit by the low lamp on the dresser. But he’s not listening; only watching her. Just trying to find some words.
She looks at him, as he views her through the lens, and flashes him a naughty smile, “Hi, sexy.”
John fiddles with the image, adjusting various knobs and settings on his video camera, until it is perfect, and he goes to sit down beside her. He touches her, caressing her stomach, hipbone, thigh, through the thin fabric of the dress. She arches into it, washing herself in it, loving it.
He wants to tell her how these things are precious. How he will think of them forever. That’s how he came upon the idea to record the two of them, so he could preserve their image, the two of them intertwined, and watch as if he were a stranger.
“Marlena,” he says instead, “You look very beautiful tonight.”
She stops what she is doing. Stops the idle chatter he hasn’t been listening to. Stops tracing lazy eights on her thighs. For a moment John is concerned that he has spoken something offensive.
He didn’t even mean to say it aloud, not really. Marlena looks at him through eyes heavy with desire, and blushes slightly at his intense scrutiny. But she reaches up to him, a thousand points of light lit up, her eyes dark and serious on his. John is nervous; he’s never seen this look exactly. Perhaps her face just looks different with her formal make-up. Or perhaps the idea of the camera, with it’s cold inhuman eye watching her, gives her new feeling. Flashing that dead blue laser beam on everything it sees here. Analyzing. Analyzing. Finding it irrelevant.
She kisses him. Her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open, she kisses him.
They are overcome. The sensation hits like a thunderbolt. Warm and dizzying and liquefying. He tastes her, she takes a breath of him; not only lips, but skin and hair and perfume. John feels her body, too, snug and curved against his angles. Hears the slow sigh of her breath from her lungs. Pressed against him.
5.72 seconds.
Then she breaks away, and moves back a little, “Thank you,” she says.
One hand on her chest now, one on the dress, he pulls her left breast free of the garment. He leans down, bringing his mouth to the nipple.
When he sits up, the nipple is erect, glistening.
His hand is on her thigh, pushing up her skirt around her waist. Her breathing becomes audible.
She doesn’t have time to react. Marlena is flushed, sweating. Dilated pupils. She imagines she will be horrified at what she will see on tape.
She is speechless. He is smiling. Enjoying her, and her obvious pleasure. Her obvious embarrassment at his pleasure.
He can’t seem to use his tongue. It still tastes of Marlena’s tongue. John’s chest aches where her breasts were against it. His fingers feel branded where her leg was pressed.
He moves close to her and turns her into his arms, noticing how her eyes look like the morning dawn to his dark blue night. Her skin is blank and white with light. He holds her face in his hands, framing it. She looks… curious.
A strand of her hair blows into her mouth as he kisses her. It tangles against his tongue as he pushes it into her mouth. Feeling the softness of her lips on his. Feeling the warmth and wetness inside her mouth. Tasting it. She tastes like drink, and food. Something sweet.
“Mmmm,” she says.
John kisses her again, pressing lips to her lips, to her cheeks, to her closed eyes. Breath stolen from his mouth by her mouth.
“John,” she breathes.
“Marlena,” he echos.
“Now,” she says to him. Reaching out to him.
“Now?” John mocks, teasing, enjoying, sitting up and going over to her.
“Now, John. Oh God, now…”
The last word she breathes into his face as she tips her neck back to kiss him. Tongue licking the sweat and hands fondling. His back, his buttocks, his chest. Not waiting, not stopping. Beautiful.
John takes hold of her leg and feels it. Squeezes the fat and muscle and bone in her thigh. Hard. She moans and parts her legs so far he has to support her weight as he lays her down completely.
Inviting him to touch her intimately. Between her legs. Already with her hand between his.
She rests back on her arms and lets him disrobe her, laying aside that glittering dress on the bed, displaying herself without inhibition.
She’s so pink underneath. Pink because of her heritage, but also her humanity. John runs his hands across that pinkness, that softness. He doesn’t have that; he is hard and male, with scars from his past, so unlike her.
Marlena sees his fascination. His wonder at her body. She lies back to let him look. Let him search her.
Her muscles shiver where he touches her. Her skin contracts. Her eyes are dark and huge and watch him as he stroke her, face flushed with blood.
He kisses her and kisses her, trying to show her something, show her what she gave him. Show her how much he has to give back now. John is human. John is free. He is human, here is his humanity. This, Marlena, this is what you gave him. Stefano’s mercenary didn’t love.
Reaching inside her now with two fingers, held and holding all at once. Caressed by her essence. Caressed by her soft moans in breath on his shoulder.
He has to please her. Release her. Her body tense, hands biting at the sheet beneath them. Neck taut. She’s not looking at anything.
Her face flares with pleasure and she jerks upwards. Then is released, writhing helplessly in his arms. A moment of sharpness followed by a moment of softness.
Just like their lives.
“Oh yes,” she hums. “Oh yes … oh yes… oh yes… oh yes…” in time with the pumping of her orgasm. “Oh John.”
Marlena melts against him, kissing and hot. Belly quaking a little. Her naked flesh slightly sticky and musky. John slips his fingers out of her body.
She lays back on the sheets of the bed, her arms above her head with a gooey, gorgeous smile of pleasure on her face. Now, she is relaxed. Completely and utterly stress-free and relaxed. And still she yearns.
John is lying atop of her, prone and warm, his fingers linked with hers, his mouth gently kissing her nipples. She feels his hard penis, prominent against her leg, stiff and urgent in its arousal, drawing its pleasure merely from her proximity.
He draws himself up and across her, his breath warm against her neck and then in her mouth as he kisses her. She can feel his belly tense as the tip of his penis brushes against her, first over her thigh and then skimming the moist curls between her legs.
He smoothes her hips with his hands, stroking her in big, slow, supple circles. He feels her breasts, the curve of her waist, slipping his hand behind her so he can caress.
She moans, almost inaudibly, and takes a hold of his penis and strokes it firmly, slipping its knotted muscle smoothly through her palm. John chokes a little with the pleasure and allows her palm to pump against him for only another few strokes before moving it away, elsewhere. She is taking him too far.
She writhes against him, bucking her hips nineteen to the dozen, getting very flushed and dark-eyed. He nips at her neck and chin with little bites, the old compulsion to mark her as his property back with a vengeance.
It is when he dips his head and sinks his mouth over one of her nipples that she reacts, arching her bottom right off the bed and calling out for God. Her fingers flex and clench into tight little fists as the orgasm starts to build.
Grabbing hold of her ankles to move her to a better angle for himself, he spreads her legs wide and watches himself fucking her, allowing the pressure in his balls to build and burst. And he has to admit, he’s trying to give the camera a better view.
He hammers into her, yelling her name, spurting into her in long, hot torrents. Afterwards, he feels lightheaded. Only Marlena can make him come like that.
The pair of them, linked by their sexes, wet and spreading. Joined by the sweat on their bellies, by their tangled limbs and organs. The pair of them building, building, rising. Shouting out for joy and sweet release. The pair of them coming, together.
She finishes with a soft sigh, relaxing against him and kissing his face over and over with soft lips. So beautiful. Grateful. Loved.
“Thank you,” she gasps, as she begins to come down.
“Don’t mention it,” he laughs, spent and exhausted. He keeps hold of her hand. His hand is trembling.
The bedroom is filled with the sounds of panting, dying away slowly, from both John and Marlena. He smiles to himself as she lays there, in a purely juvenile moment of self-congratulation at having had sex. Good sex too, he thinks, feeling his exquisitely sensitive penis begin to lose its rigidity.
Marlena stirs slowly in the bed beside him, and then groans, as if she has just awakened with a terrible hangover. He smiles at her, and watches as she crawls into the safe cradle of his arms, her hair in slight tangles and her eyes unfocused and bleary.
“But if I find this on the internet, you’re dead,” she yawns, and he watches as she passes out into unconsciousness, just moments before him.
And still the camera, with it’s cold, unfeeling eye, watches them.
* * *
I found it by accident. I don’t even know if it’s real.
I try not to watch it. It feels wrong; I shouldn’t. Sometimes I think of destroying it, but then I find myself nearly shaking with my desire to get back to my home and…
She comes, crying out, and there are tears on her cheeks, I can see that, the resolution is that good. And then she turns her head to the side, her body twisted in the sheets. She turns, cries out “Ah,” and then what I think is a name. One syllable. I cannot decipher it, but I know what she is saying. Though I cannot see her face then too clearly, cannot read her lips, and the sound of the sheets… I do know whose name she calls.
Because I recognize them. I love them.
It might not be real; it could be someone playing a trick. And it may have been put there to trap me. Though that seems like a lot of trouble. And to be honest, unlikely. Besides, I want to think I have this little thing.
My favorite theory is that someone is spying on them. A machine body. A computer that feels about them the way I do. That it wants them and cannot have them, and contents itself with surveillance. They say it cannot achieve sentience, the computer, but I have worked with it for several years, and I am not sure. Computers can be like brains, able to get around all sorts of limitations.
It makes me feel less lonely, thinking that the computer and I are so similar, share our voyeurism, our secret, our love. Oh, I have friends. But that’s all they are. They don’t share my bed and they don’t share my secrets.
I should destroy it. But I cannot bear to do so.
He knows my name, could bring it to mind in an official context, or if there is a social occasion. She knows everyone’s name. But she never notices me. I might as well be nameless. Salem is a dangerous place for someone like me. Here, there is no real future. Just the present.
So I don’t destroy it.
I found it during a quick lunch at the Brady Pub. It was out of place, sitting there, lonely and odd and calling to me. So I took it home, and watched it and… and…
She is in their bedroom, stretching sensually on the sheets. I’ve never seen them of course, so I don’t know if this is really the way the bedroom looks. But it looks right. Elegant and warm. She’s in her bed, above the sheets, chatting to John who is out of viewing range. Marlena is wearing a stunning gown. Nothing under it; I can see her nipples. Her breasts look smaller than usual, but then that’s true of most women when they lie on their backs.
And then John enters the scene, and though I am tempted to refer to what happens next as pornography, this is somehow so much more. They are above it. He is reverent and controlling, as he worships and plays her body, in sync with his own tune. It makes me understand the scandal all those years ago; makes me understand why they couldn’t stay away.
Her lips part near the end, and I can hear her breath come in tiny gasps. She looks almost pained, with the kind of pain that hurts so good. Oh, but God she looks stunning all the same.
I wipe my mouth, it is that good. Marlena is gasping, elegantly. John pants in time with her soft cries. We all have sex, but they look so pretty. So beautiful. Not like the stuck fat pigs the rest of us must be.
As they come, they gasp and cry, and whisper things to each other. Things of comfort and love, in voices so low that it makes it impossible for me to intrude on this private moment. It almost seems wrong, but I can hardly stop now.
I love those little cries. I go warm just thinking about them.
She is the beauty of this earth as it is, chaos and disunity. Oh Marlena. She is individuality incarnate, isn’t she. Her compassion, the unfathomable expressions. The hair, style changed so often. The different perfume every day.
Oh Marlena. I am fascinated by her, by every beautiful pore and hair and vein. I pretend I am him, that those are my fingers and palms and lips, tracing the patterns and the parts of her.
And then him. Big and quiet. Irrelevance. Minutiae. His intensity is intimidating, and deceptive.
The clenching of his hands, one upon her face and the other secured upon her hip. The twitch of brow and cheek and mouth. Dark and strong. The smile, sliding up one side of his face. I imagine I am her, and that he is filling me, gloriously. It is wonderful. I feel this in them and it makes me want to hug the walls, skate myself along the ceiling, watching everything.
And then she says “Ah” and the name. The name that is not mine. “John.”
And then he says “Ah” and the name. The name that is not mine. “Marlena.”
Behind me, someone is speaking, breaking me from my reverie. “Beautiful dress, Marlena! I don’t think I’ve seen it before.”
“Why, thank you. No, it’s new.”
I turn around; John is getting her a drink and she’s wearing the dress. The dress she says she hasn’t worn before. The dress that nobody here would know. The dress that she did wear before, but in private. I feel sick.
Perhaps I am imagining things, but I can almost smell the sex of them.
I move toward the door, muttering something. Anything, to leave.
I can’t help it. It’s like I am holding them in my arms, and I feel the universe, beating in my chest. Think of every molecule of blood and water in their bodies. But I also think of every star, spread out outside this building. The same stars I see in her dress.
The big and the small.
All night I think of it and hold them, never sleeping, understanding once again the magnitude of everything and John and Marlena.
Finis
The Jarlena Journal 