Beginnings by Natasha Walker Page B

had been thinking of her skin and of her head rubbing up against his cock. He had gone to the bathroom twice to pull off before his mother had come home. He couldn’tshake the hard-on. Every thought he had strengthened its resolve to stay about. He couldn’t hang around his mother. He put on a longer t-shirt and when he heard her come home he tucked his erection under the elastic of his boxers and tried to think of anything but Emma. His mum didn’t notice and he was safe, but the hard-on remained and his balls still ached.
    He wasn’t thinking very sensibly. His mother asked him if he was worried about anything. He managed another lie and went off to watch TV. On the way he stopped at the bathroom, went in and locked the door. He undid his jeans. He touched the shaft and it jumped. He was staring at himself in the mirror. He knew that two or three strokes would do it. He looked at himself, eyeball to eyeball.
    ‘Do it!’ he said. He stroked it once and the pleasure was intense. He felt the orgasm begin. He stopped. He looked at his thick cock, which was longer and harder than it had been before. It throbbed. His was a hard, sensitive cock, bursting to blow. He stroked it again and his left knee wobbled, the orgasm rushed in and then just as quickly receded as he let go.
    The pleasure was painful. He moaned and thenbuckled himself up and left the bathroom for the safety of the backroom where he turned on the TV. Every once in a while he slyly rubbed his cock through the thin cotton of his jeans pocket.
    Saying that he could ‘hold on’ was one thing. Lying in bed for a few hours drifting in and out of erotic dreams, lying awake with erotic thoughts, well, this was something else altogether. Not reaching climax was his point of honour. But it was sending his mind into curious patterns of thought.
    He mused over the changes taking place in him without being critical, which is to say that the thoughts came and went without mental comment. He knew that he felt virile and manly, he knew that he could charge ahead in battle, he knew that he had a beautiful woman waiting for him, he knew the situation was implausible but he also knew he was capable of taking what she offered.
    He lay there thinking and feeling all these thoughts and never thinking one of them without another crashing into it, so that not one sensation, not one thought was highlighted or isolated, all were merged and knotted. Power was the overall effect. He felt, but did not express, this power.

    Emma was awake. David had come home in a rotten mood. They had talked for a whole ten minutes in the two hours that he was home before he took himself off to bed. He apologised to her as he went. He said he was being unfair to her but he couldn’t shake the mood so it was better to go to sleep and try again tomorrow.
    Emma was not an unreasonable person, she knew that sometimes the world was too big, too cruel and too hard, but she also knew that she wasn’t all those things to her husband. David could have talked to her. She had tried to draw him out. She had tried to get the lid off his bottled feelings, to at least discover the cause of his mood. But he had shaken off these efforts. He put the TV between Emma and himself. And then he went alone to bed.
    Only once David was gone did Emma regret phoning Jason. She found the regret disquieting. She began to wonder whether she had in fact been the cause of her husband’s mood. She had been so preoccupied with Jason.
    Emma switched off the TV. The room fell silent. She dragged herself from the couch and walked into the kitchen where she found that David had taken the trouble to stack the dishwasher and wipethe benches before he went off to bed. When he had announced that he was going to bed Emma had said ‘Goodnight’ without looking away from the TV and without searching for a kiss. She, too, was fed up by this stage. A sulky husband is no fun whatsoever.
    He had gone and she had continued to watch a depressing