The best gift to me is free and unfettered reign in a bookstore.
It is something that reduces me to tears, which touches me and heats me up. In and out.
Few men ever figured out that they best way to feed me was with words. Word by word, stacked into slippery paragraphs, crowded into pages flowing, one of a set…therein lies lust.
A fire starts in my brain and creeps quicksilver fast into my groin. An explosion of desire erupts from my eyes.
All it takes is for my lover to say: go; get whatever you like...
+++
It was 7th grade. A lover of girls and books (truly rare, I know) would plan to make me his pet, as he plied me with books of my choosing and slid his hand up my skirt on those early-warm spring days after school. I shook with such a fierce and unexpected desire when he bit my lips while pressing a copy The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius against my chest.
“And I thought this was beauty, until I saw you” he whispered in my ear, as his right hand caressed my ear and snaked a path to my collarbone.
In that moment he went from cute boy to worthy sex object. Such a joy it wold be to let him get to 2nd base without any hesitation.
From that onward, our affair was defined by bound pages, nastily scribbled quotations on passed notes in the halls and fervent necking in the abandoned book stacks in the back of the 3rd floor library.
Our dates would center around finding hidden spots and unlocked closets in our main public library. A huge building with wide shiny halls and hushed workers rapidly gliding on retrieval missions for ILL requests, it was the perfect place to kiss to feel, to breathe in each other.
Unwittingly, he touched my libido and set off a kink I was not aware of.
Years later, he returns from the service, handing me his hand-written journals of what he saw in hot countries with poor sanitation and even poorer governments. Some pages were smeared by his fingers, as he wrote by the light of a candle or under a blanket with a flashlight. Others have droplets of sweat staining them. A few passages, such as those that detail the plight of women in those places, are lightly speckled with tears.
Rubbing my own fingers across those places, I can almost feel his grief at the time. Times when he saw mothers wandering to find potable water for their eerily silent babies, times where women who so desperately wanted to be clean had to bathe in standing pools of water, streaked with iridescent strands of chemicals left behind for the good of the people and animals.
He told me that when he wrote, during those sad and scary times, he often thought of me.
+++
After a weekend getaway, my last stop was the chain bookseller, located in a standard upscale shopping centre, which tries to look as those the Founding Fathers broke ground on it back when our modern experiment here was born.
He was kinda pissed at me, for I was carefree, giggly and full of jokes. He was weighing if we had a future. I was already in my future, which did not include him.
Earlier over breakfast, I gently explained to him about how the present was all we had, so his desire to ruminate over what was not yet (nor would be) was…fruitless.
It set his mood, make him sour to my sweet.
But he looked me in my eyes and said I could have whatever I liked.
Which I did. Anne Rice’s 1st novel in her Christ series had just came out, so I grabbed it, Along with a copy of things I liked-Rabelais, Nin, Achebe, Erhman, Roy. He chuckled at the mix, a brief ray of sun that parted his clouds.
As we said goodbye at the airport, he shifted a bit. His demeanor softened for it is hard to say goodbye to things and people we enjoy.
I looked over my shoulder right at the last public access checkpoint and waved once more at his lean silhouette, his overpriced sumptuous leather bag slumped at his feet.
Falling into my books, I did not think of him until I got home.
But again, in the future where I lived, he was already a memory.
+++
Few men know my secret. Books can make me smile, dissolve my rage, dissipate my anger and cause me to giggle like a child with Play-Doh.
Books break me open like an egg destined for a hot skillet.
It remains something they have to discover, for if I tell them, it is met with disbelief. Often, a tinge of horror follows the initial reaction.
So, I often stand mute on how I love words above all things human.
The false civility we have created over what women inherently want and desire.
