The Convulsion Factory Read Free Page B

windows. Everything malingered beneath a stubborn dusting of industrial fallout, and the last of the year’s greenery twined dead and brown around sagging wrought iron fences. Privacy would be valued here, and respected.
    Adam played the proper host, skimming through his apartment and around corners as quickly as if he were on a basketball court. He mixed fine drinks, served hors d’ouevres that hadn’t come from a deli. He showed her his books, including the freshly reinstated Justine . He let her notice for herself his collection of fetish videos, and be the one to suggest slipping a disc into the player. There was a lot in the way of nipple clamps and whimpering, later the obligatory golden shower, and they were really just marking time here, weren’t they? She might’ve yawned once. Adam shut it off before the end.
    “It’s been awhile since I’ve watched this,” he said. “Been awhile since it even did anything for me.”
    “So why sit through this much if it’s that passé to you now?”
    He shrugged easily. “Humoring you?”
    “Oh, that’s a laugh,” she said, and she was Elle again, had become Elle without one bit of effort. Adam recognized this. Like knows like, and from here it was a very short trip to the bedroom.
    Unclothed, his body was a peculiar marvel. Incomplete, but hard and sculpted, like a magnificent Greek statue that vandals had smashed in two. His genitals seemed all the more for it, large and immodest. His lower trunk flexed with new rhythms she’d never felt without the normal counterbalance of legs. As he meshed with her, braced upon two powerful arms, she could run her hands along the tapering curve of his back, cup the clenching muscles of his ass. Could run her hands farther down and cup the smooth rounded stumps where his legs just ended . She couldn’t think of him as an amputee. It felt as if Adam were complete, whole, and his hips met some other plane, where his legs existed in another dimension.
    For hours they rolled, locking themselves into twisted new arrangements. Positions once denied her because of one set of legs or the other getting in the way were now accessible. And Adam was tireless, his commitment to ecstasy for a long time bordering on possession, then tipping far beyond. He had a whole body’s worth of passion compressed into half the mass. Each time he came it was with a straining convulsion of ardor, racked with groans and shudders that might’ve been endearing were they not so intensely animal. For any less experienced a woman, Elle decided, his plunge into the heart of his own pleasure would’ve been frightening.
    But for herself? It was maddening, feeling for the first time ever that she had been left behind, that there was no way she could draw more from the most ravaging of fucks than her partner. He had eclipsed her, and if at the bookstore he’d nearly prompted in her a flush of embarrassment, he had now done the unthinkable: He had inspired envy.
    I want whatever it is you have inside , she thought, and lay as stunned as if a new galaxy had opened before her. Lay with him in the sweat-soaked afterglow, her cunt lips puffy and throbbing. It lasted long moments, even as Adam stirred, even as he traced a hand along her face.
    Even as he said, “If you stay with me, you … you may not be seeing me this whole for much longer,” and she found it a peculiar thing to say. But consider her life.
    It certainly was no stranger than hearing someone confess his love.

    *

    Their relationship grew from that night, a happy co-existence of need and availability, willingness and daring. She didn’t know how long it would last, but this was the way things were done on their level. Emotions and attachment rarely figured in. It was more the delight of connecting with someone who didn’t judge, who understood that not everyone craved a permanent partner at his or her side through life. Who trusted the physical body’s immediacy more than a bamboozled heart.
    It