Playing Doctor (story)

Two weeks in hospital, and it wasn't until my libido started kicking in that I knew I was getting better.

My lover had been coming by every day, sometimes twice a day, and he teased me. He wore that cologne that always made me want to pin him down and nibble him all over. He wore silky boxers and shaved skin underneath them, and invited my hands to feel. He shaved his face every other day so he could tease my neck and shoulders with his scruff, making me shiver and squirm. And he teased my nipples.

My nipples always stand up and say hello when he is around, and for some reason they were terribly sensitive, so each tweak or brush of his fingers made me gasp. I begged him to leave me alone, to not get me worked up, that it was not fair to arouse me and leave me hanging, but he delighted in teasing me.

One night he did so rather mercilessly and then offered me a piece of chocolate to consummate my desires. I feel asleep with the richness on my tongue and was swept away to the land of endorphin dreams.

I awakened to the sound of the bed rail being lowered in the darkness. There was a masculine presence in the room with me, warm and gentle, and his hands slipped under the sheets, massaging my legs. The hands were tender and skilled and they worked up to my thighs, sliding the hospital gown up as his hands moved to cradle my hips. I sighed voluptuously, and felt the warmth of my center ache for fulfillment. So much teasing. So much unconsummated craving. Gently, he spread my thighs until they formed a vee, and then his hands touched me, explored me, seeking proof of my arousal. Which he soon found, oh yes, and his fingers explorered further, deeper, opening me.

I thrashed a bit in my bed, wet and aching, and begged him to cover me. I wanted to feel him on me and in me. Gently, oh so gently, he turned me on my side, and lay behind me, pressing his warmth against my back. I felt the brush of whiskers on my shoulders and moaned, and pressed my ass back into him, into the heat of his groin. I felt him pulse against me in response, and smiled with joy. His hand guided his cock between my thighs, into the slippery wetness there, and I soon felt the nudge of his head between my pussy lips, tickling my clit. We rocked gently that way for a long while, and then he drew back and pressed upwards a bit, and then he was there, yes right there, the mushroom head pressing into my opening, and slowly, ever so slowly, gaining deeper access to my secrets. I tried to rock back against him but he shushed me, and I held still as his hand moved to hold my hip. His body strained against mine, and his fingers gripped me hard as he pressed onward and inward. When he could go no farther, when he was pressed up hard against my ass, he slid his hand into the vee of my thighs, seeking my clit. when he found it, I gasped and bucked, and he again shushed me. His lips pressed to my shoulder and then his mouth opened, and he sank his teeth into me oh so gently.

Impaled like a butterfly on the pin of his cock, I held still, caught between his teeth and his hands. There was no movement but the gentle press of his fingers into my clit, and the clench of my muscles around him. No friction, no movement, he did not want to hurt me, I knew. I hung in sensuous delirium for endless moments. And then he rolled my clit between his fingers. That movement, that act of rolling my clit between his fingers, was like the flick of a thumb across a cigarette lighter. It ignited in me an orgasm both hot and gentle, one that pulsed though me and made me catch my breath. His fingers covered my mouth and I bit into them as I shook with drowsy pleasure. I heard his gasp and low moan, and he thrust hard against me, and his fingers pressed into my clit, and then he came, his cock pulsing again and again, and I drifted off to sleep, warm and loved, and sated.

In hospital

May got off to a good start. I was having a lot of fun.

Then I caught a flu bug from a colleague that hammered my immune system.

Then I got an ingrown hair. It got infected. I got some antibiotics for it.

I flew to CA to see my sister and celebrate her first round of chemo. And never made it to see her. The infection turned septic and I ended up in the hospital, 550 miles from home and 3 hours away from family. I've been here since the 16th of May. I've had two surgeries and nearly 2 weeks of IV antibiotics and they want me to do two more. I'm trying to get out on home health care and a PICC line for IV antibiotics--MR has graciously offered to take me in for the duration of the illness. This, despite the fact the needles and IVs and blood and such make him squeamish. But he's just a mile or two from the hospital, and they don't want me to go far.

Life is absurd. I laugh about it most of the time. And when the pain or the boredom gets to be too much, I look out the window at my million dollar view of San Francisco and try not to cry.

On the up side, I've got my laptop now, and limited wifi, and soon I won't have to endure any more needles in my arms. Yay!

Beaming metta in the rain

Yesterday I met up with some friends for lunch in Chinatown. We had sushi of course. They are poly, and I really like her, I did the photography for their wedding a few months ago. They've been very good to me since my sister died, and he's been concerned about my being anti-social, so Thursday, Friday and Saturday I spent some time with him. Its been good for me. After lunch we parted ways. I was pouring rain so they had their car instead of taking the Max home, and I walked toward the Chinese Garden.

I called my sister and we spoke briefly. I've been beaming a lot of metta her way, and I think I must have left it on, because when I got to the Chinese Garden, I noticed people were noticing me. I normally do a good job of being Plain Jane and avoiding notice, so I must have left my energy level turned up like a beacon in order to catch the attention of so many people. The first was a little boy. He was walking along a path and then he just stopped and stared at me. I looked back at him and smiled and still he stared, and then when I spoke to him he walked to a corner and turned it and then peeked back at me. I caught him glancing my way quite often. Shortly thereafter a man asked me a question about a penjing on display, and we got into a conversation about bamboo. Later, two women, same thing.

I had just finished my first walk around the garden and exchanged a few words with a young man wearing a back-pack when I decided to go into the tea house. It being a rainy day, the place was crowded with people, and the windows were thrown open to let in the sights, scents, and fresh air that is so keenly appreciated here in the Pacific Northwest. I went upstairs and while I waited to be seated, I noticed a woman sitting alone at a table. She was one of the three I had seen in wheelchairs at the garden yesterday, and everyone else in the room had company, so I asked her if she would mind if I shared her table. She graciously accepted my self-invitation. We talked for a bit and then my tea and lotus-seed mooncake arrived. She has cerebral palsy and has no fine motor-control, so I hand-fed her bites of the mooncake wedges. Does that sound strange? It seemed very natural at the time, but in retrospect, it is a bit odd that two strangers would sit at a table and establish enough of a rapport that one would allow the other the intimacy of feeding them. She finished her tea and left and I remained for a while, looking out the windows. Its like being in a tree-house, with The Big Pink dominating the skyline like a redwood tree.

I knew there was someone behind me and to my left and after I paid for my tea and turned, I recognized him. The college kid.

"You should have asked if you could join us," I said to him.

"I didn't want to intrude on you and your friend," he responded.

"Oh, I met her just now. I asked her if she wanted to share her table."

His expression was bemused. "Do you come here often?" he asked me.

"Yes, I am a member."

"So am I," he said, "We can have tea next time."

I smiled and nodded and walked downstairs and out into the garden again, to enjoy its beauty and try to capture it on camera. A man was doing walking meditation though the garden, chanting a mantra. I stopped to listen and then turned to smile at him and he stopped for a long moment, looking at me. I held his gaze for a bit and then continued walking the paths, camera in hand. He followed me after that through much of the garden, and I noticed that he would stop in the places I had paused to photograph or just gaze, and then he would move on. Eventually, I finished my second circumnavigation of the garden and wandered out into Chinatown.

Here are some photos. The one with the girl and the lion has an interesting story. I was looking through a window in at a porcelain dragon, when the little girl behind me leaned over the railing to look at the fish. When she did, her reflection draped itself over the lion's head. I snapped the photo and just a moment later she moved. I thought I had missed the shot, but I did not.

On my previous entry, SacredTouch made the following comment:

To be free in the present moment with someone involves bearing all possible responses and reactions, moment by moment, including silence. To be there for someone, wherever there is, especially for someone in the depths of suicidal despair, requires patience above all, as well as a willingness to speak from the heart, about your own experience, in relation to the conversation (however minimal) that arises moment by moment out of the space you make for the encounter. Beyond this, I cannot think of what else to say, except to ask: are you prepared to face the realization of total freedom from your encounter - or your encounters?

This comment and closing question stayed with me for the better part of the day. I recognized the wisdom of his words and the true depth of his question. It is profound and in many ways conceptually, never mind verbally, ungraspable. I was still wrestling with the impact of my attempts to imagine my response to such a powerful expression of freedom when my cell phone rang. It was my sister. She'd been released from the hospital, cleared medically and mentally. We discussed many things, though the main theme was a complaint about strength. She had wanted to be admitted for 72 hours of psychiatric evaluation but was told it was not necessary. She was deemed to be a strong woman who was stable and no longer a danger to herself. Her voice broke, she did not understand how other could see strength in her where she felt only emptiness, exhaustion, and a profound sense of loss.

As I listened to her, I held in my mind the image of my sister as the woman I know she is and can be again: beautiful, compelling, vital, earthy, funny, raunchy, strong and free. And when I spoke to her, I spoke spontaneously, from my heart, and I surprised both of us.

I'd like to ask you to try to distinguish between energy and strength, and between exhaustion and loss.
You feel weak because you have exhausted your strength, not weak because you have lost your strength.
A body-builder is very strong, but there comes a point when he has exhausted his strength and does not have the energy to lift that barbell one more time.
He must rest and eat so the next day he can go back to lifting heavy weights.
Take a break, give yourself time to build you energy reserves back up, and you'll find that your strength will be there, too.

Apparently it was the right thing to say.