Brioche

I had a downcast Sydney Saturday afternoon a couple weeks into quarantine, strolling the length of George Street and around the harbour’s Circular Quay, with a sense, despite the glorious sun rays, that most people had died already and I was destined to live anon without an audience. 

I was just about to turn towards home when I saw an all too familiar pair of calves walking ahead of me on a purposeful expedition, no matter the empty streets. 

No one was anywhere today, least of all looking for sex. But Vincent, the most unrelentingly sexually voracious narcissist I have ever encountered, would have a gander on the pavements, like a monied 19th century Paris louche, whatever the apocalypse on the horizon.

It had been more than a decade since I said goodbye to Vincent after his last tourist visa had expired. He had sat on my desk chair taking me all in one last time, inside and out. Smoke circling. When he left up the road, I sunk down into the pillows and tried to make his smell of brioche last a few more hours. By the morning it was almost gone. Vincent was not an individual I needed to lie splayed under or over again; I only had sex with him for three weeks but have memories to last me through a three-year quarantine.

Like the time he walked us to a sex shop to pick out some toys to amuse ourselves with while the city worked. He dared me to conceal a purchase on a midday drink jaunt, where he pushed it deeper into me as I leaned over the bar checking the wine list.

Or when he texted and instructed me not to change my underwear until I saw him again five days later. 

He was the first man to pee in my mouth. It made me laugh and moan. 

He had a habit of pausing our friezes midway and sitting down for a cigarette to watch me from across the room. Such restraint could only build the most pleasing of my frustration.

I found him ludicrous but entertaining. Yet ultimately, impossible.

I first spotted Vincent at my faithful pick-up locale. It was a Tuesday night and the sticky dive bar floor was scant. He was leaning on the bar alone like a merchant ship drop-in. Pink shorts. Deep tan. An inky black octopus trailed from an armpit; a veritable pirate. And Gallic. Favorite genres of mine. And so I walked right up, our eyes fixed on each other’s.

“We must have a drink tomorrow,” he said. The confirmation of the details took about three minutes, from his plain-spoken step towards me and my lean into his nape before I turned toward the exit.

Being typically French, he was fingering me as soon as I sat down, drink in hand, the following evening. Tracing my asshole and back to the cotton string at my entry. After five minutes I resolved to improve his access with a stride to the ladies, where I removed my tampon along with my panties and hid the lingerie on a high shelf. I never returned for them.

We made our way to an old hotel favoured by horse track gamblers, where a graveyard shifter took Vincent’s credit card. Vincent cradled the tassled key – no key cards in this leisure relic – and dropped it into his top pocket with a flourish that underlined his ownership of all that was about to unfold. 

We walked slowly to our floor, pretending to get waylaid, and found ourselves on a corner terrace in the brisk midnight air. I was deep into my period but as he pushed me decisively back on top of a plastic poolside table and entered me with his tip, he was completely at ease when he saw the blood that stretched between me and him like an unctuous spiderweb. 

While I should have been safe with him (and anyone), I wanted to feel him raw inside me before I even considered foreplay’s tease. I could have stopped him just at the last second before he crossed my final border but it felt pointless to attempt since I foresaw, like a premonition, that he would peel my desires right back. 

Conscious that we may be close to a guest’s line of vision, and being a private sensualist, I broke from our tangle and led him towards our final destination.

Our door closed behind us, Vincent peeled his clothes off in one motion and stood staring at me from the foot of the bed. I crouched at the pillows. Perhaps appearing vulnerable to the 6 foot self-satisfied hunter, in fact, I was joyfully expectant of what he was preparing to do to me. 

It had been several years since I had laid myself open to a man, having danced with boys for much too long a stretch. His decisiveness and looming torso made my thighs shiver. 

I was momentously bleeding and my pallid skin gave my silent scarlet rivulets a heightened drama. We would ruin the sheets and towels but Vincent was pleased as punch. He was concerned I wouldn’t be dirty enough for him. Or so that’s what he said as he crawled up the mattress to me and traced the porcelain curve of my hips. I loved his acceptance of any variant of body fluid. 

It was a very simple act in that room that night. Him on top of me and in control. And me, dissolved in pleasure. I did not for a second lower my lips to him. There was no expectation of me to do so. Neither did it cross my mind. He was there to fuck me. And he was more than happy to do all the work and take all the time that that required.

It was not that he ever gave me an amazing orgasm. Rather that he was just so inexorable. He took charge of me. And we were never too much for each other whenever we met after that first night.

One of the last times we were together, it was at a hotel that I was to pay for on that occasion, in a boutique address in the Cross. He arrived with an angry nude drawing of me because the front desk had let him into the wrong room, where he had been waiting for me. He stretched me across the hotel room desk with experience but, as he proceeded to fill the sink with cigarette butts throughout the afternoon as he raised himself from our tangled sheets for a drink, I found him coarser each hour. But I would forgive a lot to play with him in anonymous rooms. Our last two hours he told me, without a whiff of sentimentality, that I was the most sensual person he had met.

Vincent was a darting presence. From whatever bed we found ourselves in; from this city to another side of the world; from truth, his ghosts and responsibilities. Yet I believed him in that moment. And I was pleased to hear I had shown a rampant lover my ways of lying naked with someone. In doing so, it seems I had surprised him, a man who had gorged himself sexually in myriad ways, with my disrobed knowledge and expression.

Every few years he has a tendency to send a random message from a new social media account, often a platform for the sexually flagrant or distracted. He asks if I am still there. While I am amused he finds it hard to forget me, I ignore him as a narcissist who thrives on disorder. 

I am in a calmer place in my life. My adventures with strangers, reeled from dark bar corners, are somewhat curtailed these days. I am more discerning with the energy I take in and in turn share. I am less willing to walk danger’s knife-edge.

But I am able to remember the scent of pastry skin a little wistfully from time to time, if I squint hard in my mind, and my impression on him.

Photo by CottonBros