Work Text:
"[Natalie Clifford] Barney and [Renée] Vivien were poorly matched in other ways as well. Sexually, both liked to play the role of the suitor. Barney imagined herself to be the fearless 'Amazon,' pursuing women with both persistence and wiles. Obviously, they could not both be the pursuer, neither the object of pursuit ... [without Renée] abdicating the role of the unfulfilled page/knight who is always in pursuit but who almost never attains sexual satisfaction." - Karla Jay, The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien.
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And when you were finished posing for tableaux in your costumes – Natalie, the pageboy in tight trousers; you, a little Greek shepherd in garlands and a chiton – she gathered the cloth around your hips and got to work. You had been excited for the role, eager to assume the mantle of the Hellenistic androgyne, but now the whole experience began to spoil with resentment as you wondered if she assigned you the shepherd’s part so she’d have something to hike up at the end. It wouldn’t do for a swashbuckling page to be fumbling around with her lover’s button fly, and, if her lover wouldn’t wear a skirt to rustle around under, was a tunic the next best thing?
It occurred to you that the climax of these encounters always took place before Natalie started touching you.
When you held your poses and took the opportunity to slip your gaze along the languid curves of her silhouette – that’s when you’d feel the flames begin to scorch. The pale, candid triangle of her chest where the skin emerged from her loosened collar. Her thighs in those tight trousers, nearly bulging against the fabric containing them, like sinuous, muscular snakes straining beneath the casings of their well-worn skins. The long line of her throat, an orchid’s stem. You’d picture yourself running a fingertip along that stem, lifting the petals – lush, velveteen, swollen, and dark – to your mouth, pressing your lips to each in a devoted kiss, knowing full well you could tear them with your teeth instead. Beneath your mouth, you could tear Natalie clean in two.
So it’s no wonder that when she’d touch you, she’d find you wet already – and, of course, vocalize that discovery every time, as though it were some monumental accomplishment. At this point, it wasn’t that impressive. Your body had long since dedicated itself to liquefaction in her presence. She didn’t even need to do all that much.
Sometimes, you wished quite fervently she would do less. Sometimes, you wished she would allow herself to be seduced, to be attended to, to be carried gently to the brink of annihilation.
Well, you wished it often, though admitting it even to yourself threatened to plunge you into a void of guilt, shame, and self-remonstration.
And, sure, there was the contact of her skin, warm on your breast, now dangling over top of the chiton’s neckline. You only wished that Natalie would let you touch her, too. You’d grow feverish with the possibility, implacably dangled and denied. Instead she’d swat at your hands or, more often, scrabble to pin them behind you or over your head with a huff and a smirk, as though this were a game you’d devised to nettle her, to keep her ardor smug and sharp. It wasn’t in your nature, you’d remind yourself, to bowl her over in retaliation and see how she liked being manacled. It mustn’t be.
When she’d stick her finger inside you – two, if she was feeling particularly aroused at the way you clamped around her, or pleased with her own dogged persistence in constricted terrain – you’d try to visualize the bones. You’d mentally displace them from the tepid cavern of your body and settle them where they belonged, in a cool, magnificent sepulchre, the appropriate stage for you to lavish your true devotion on Natalie’s pallid, pearlescent remains. You would make your mouth her reliquary, running your tongue flat along each beloved phalanx, anointing radius and ulna with fervent kisses, grazing your teeth against their milky surface and bearing down, filling your mouth with her ecstatic fragments, drinking deep libations of her marrow.
And that would get you going again. Either that, you’d tell yourself later, or imagining another woman altogether, and far worse to supplant your mistress with a rival than to amorously ideate on her exquisite death.
Although, never to your own end, so to speak.