"Almost" Part 22: Book 2, Part 12

Tom Wakes Up With Jacqueline

Tom stared at Jacqueline as she slept.

I have always been a blubberer, he thought. So, why on earth am I not crying now?

The answer was not long in coming.

Because you have been weak, Tommy…

He nodded slowly. He could barely see her face in the dim, pre-dawn light. Her dark hair was a perfect black; her cheek a faint haze of gray. He wondered just what she was dreaming about. She could be flying in her mind, but is still to me…

A violent wave of sexual desire rocked his body. Tom remembered every detail of the night before. A great mystery had been solved for him.

For as long as he could remember, he had wondered about the moment of Sexual Will. The women he had bedded in university had all been conquests of one kind or another. They had been blinded by his athletic prowess or good looks. They had felt honoured to be going out with him. But still, at the end of every evening, he had felt the moment of Sexual Will, where he had made the decisive move which would result in either acceptance or rejection. Most times, it was acceptance. Nonetheless, it was still a frightening moment, when he let his fingertips tickle a woman’s ear in a motion-picture house, or let his lips rest on the little depression between one of her knuckles.

None of that had happened with Jacqueline.

Tom had missed the company of women. He had been so damn polarized in his youth, between Catherine and his mother (and it did not escape his attention that he generally thought of them in that sequence: ‘Catherine and his mother’) – that he either bedded pretty women, or was fast friends with plain ones. The concept of ‘sexy female friend’ was rather beyond him.

Tom’s womanizing – which had been fairly extensive, but not compulsive – had left him sated but unsatisfied. To his great discredit, he had been rather blasé about it at times. “One enjoys a great meal,” he said, once to Hart. “One does not marry the chef.” (This had been rather cruel to Hart, who had no idea, so to speak, how to even get to the restaurant district.) He felt physical excitement, the thrill of the explorer trekking across new flesh, and truly enjoyed displaying his sexual prowess. He loved the little sighs and coos of surprise he was able to wring from a woman. He loved undermining their prudery with unprecedented licking and unknown angles. In bed, as in life, Tom was a sportsman to the hilt.

But last night had been something quite different. The moment of Sexual Will had, he realized in hindsight, actually been Jacqueline’s. She had put her hand on his forearm twice, and had consciously applauded his return of her caress.

He had wanted to kiss her all at once, to forestall something, if felt. But he had sensed that whatever his rush of desire wanted to forestall was a good thing, which should be experienced. So he continued to talk and listen to her, and something began to mount in his chest. Some sort of wonderful floating spiritual thing which was utterly beyond the flesh. Not alien to it – just beyond it. The body is the pedestal whose base goes to the center of the world. Love is the statue which reaches beyond the sky…