Turn 19 of 23
Touch herself again and let the pleasure carry her under
Her right hand is somewhere on her belly — she loses track of which hand is where now, the way she loses track of which container she's eating from, which cigarette is lit, which breath is going in and which is coming out. But her left hand knows where to go. It slides down the warm, slick slope of her gut, past the fold where the cigarette butts collect, past the damp crease where her thigh meets the cascade of her belly, and finds the wet, swollen warmth between her legs. She doesn't decide to touch herself. Her fingers simply arrive there, the way they arrive at the food, the way her lungs arrive at the smoke — because the body wants what it wants and she is no longer the one deciding.
The first touch sends a shudder through her that's visible — her belly ripples, the containers on the floor rattle, a fart rolls out of her long and low and wet. She doesn't pause. Her fingers are thick and clumsy and slick with grease from the food and she doesn't care — she presses and circles and the pleasure builds in slow, warm waves that match the rhythm of her breathing, match the rhythm of the wish humming in her bones, match the rhythm of her body expanding outward in every direction. The cigarette in her other hand burns unattended. Smoke curls toward the yellow ceiling. Her mouth falls open and a belch rises out of her and dissolves into a low, groaning exhale.
The pleasure doesn't spike. It doesn't need to. It builds the way her body builds — slow, vast, inevitable, a tide coming in across a shore so wide you can't see the edges. Her fingers move and her hips shift in tiny, unconscious motions and the couch groans beneath her and her belly gurgles and gas escapes from both ends of her in a synchronized chorus that fills the apartment with the sound of her body existing. The wine bottle is somewhere against her thigh, warm and empty. An edible is dissolving on her tongue, tasteless beneath the flavor of smoke and wine and the salt of her own skin. Everything is warm. Everything is wet. Everything is happening at once and nothing is happening on purpose.
She comes with a sound that isn't a moan or a cry — it's a release, a deep, tectonic exhale that starts in her belly and moves through her chest and out of her throat and carries with it a belch and a fart and a long stream of smoke and something that might be her name or might be nothing at all. Her body shakes — not violently, but the way a landscape shakes when something enormous settles into it, a slow, deep adjustment of mass and weight. The containers on the floor shift. The coffee table moves another inch. Her fingers slow and press and the aftershocks roll through her in diminishing waves, each one accompanied by a small, wet fart, and she lies in the warm, soaking aftermath and feels her body dissolving into the haze.
The pleasure doesn't leave. It sinks. It moves from the surface — the skin, the nerve endings, the place where her fingers still rest — down into the deep structure of her, into the layers of fat and flesh and bone that the wish has been building for over a decade. It becomes indistinguishable from the warmth. Indistinguishable from the fullness. Indistinguishable from the slow, steady expansion that presses her outward against the walls of the room that has become the inside of her body. She closes her eyes. The cigarette burns. The food waits. The wish works. And Lena sinks into the warmth like a stone sinking into a sea that has no bottom, and the sea closes over her, and it is warm, and it is home, and it does not stop.