The Shaft Read Free Page A

was jolted through a pleasantly fuzzy, half-asleep orgasm.
        Now his index finger was inserted and he kept the beat with his thumb, feeling her contractions bam bam bam , the familiar fluttering in the ring of vaginal muscle. He saw her fingers grip the sheets and tighten, then relax as the afterburn warmed her extremities. Fingers, toes, forehead hot now, body demanding breath. When she rolled over, cocking one leg, she was so wet that Jonathan's fingers barely recorded the friction of her rotating pussy.
        His erection was excruciating by now.
        He guided her ass slightly higher. She was in focus enough to help him. Only just. She arched her back.
        'I don't know why I love it so much this way,' she had told him so long ago. Before they had moved in together, back when it was imperative for them to hump their brains out every single night, no gaps. Every time she mentioned this, and she mentioned it almost every time, her admission was seasoned with her characteristic guilt. 'I don't know why I like it; I just… I jussst…' She usually dissolved into sibilance, far beyond words.
        Amanda loved being entered from behind - her spine arched, face hugging the mattress, hands hanging on, her splendid rump pointed perkily up at her lover. She could never articulate why she favored this position over all contenders. It was a thing of sensation, not logic. Or her mind just refused to analyze it. Sometimes it was possible for Jonathan to nail down isolated details: The comfortably possessive grip of his hands on her hipbones; the optimum penetration; the freer rhythm that came from bearing straight into her instead of heavily atop her. But mostly, Amanda treated this as an exceedingly guilty pleasure. Maybe Mommy had warned her this was something nice girls did not do. Or worse, maybe Amanda had told herself this.
        Jonathan could never fathom who Amanda thought she was apologizing to. She had discovered a position that made her senselessly happy. Thousands had not.
        He remembered sliding into her, feeding those first few inches with no thrust at all, and the last thing he had anticipated was her voice. Amanda's voice, in the dimness, resolving to wakeful clarity to tell him no .
        Amanda enjoyed waking up in a state of sexual high-burn. He was not taking advantage of her sleeping vulnerability; no way. No fucking way. If she even thought that, she would have stopped the sequence much earlier. She had pounced and taken Jonathan by sleepy surprise just as many times. More. Predawn was one of their mutually approved favorite times for lovemaking. It offered a nice buffer of sleep, a couple of hours to either side, followed by the deeper slumber of the satiated.
         'No.'
        Lately their bedwork had become sporadic, by rote, sometimes almost a matter of resigned duty. An exterior reflection of internal problems that Jonathan had hoped would never find their way into the kingsized that he and Amanda had agreed to share for two straight, monogamous years.
        He was, he saw, a fool.
        Here he sat, northbound on a Greyhound redeye in the middle of the night, with a truly Olympian hard-on straining against the button fly of his 501s… with dead batteries. He was thankful for the dark, which obviated public embarrassment. He was not thankful for the night, because it made him think endlessly of the last time he had slept with Amanda… and not made love.
        It had happened the night Jonathan had hoped to jump their lives back on track.
        That night, it had not been a Dinner from Hell . That was what he had come to call the stiff social intercourse they shared on their nights out - a mostly spidess meal punctuated by migraine-inducing silences and overpolite nonconversation. No. That night, things had gone swimmingly. No arguments, almost no snapping. Amanda had even laughed out loud once or twice, and it hurt him to think that he might be