The Mouth
(Teach Me Tonight - Book 1)
by
Rebecca Milton
***
Copyright 2015 - All rights reserved.
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The Mouth
No matter when she encountered you, she spoke as if you had been engaged in conversation with her for several hours and you were now at the mid-point of said conversation with much left to be spoken of on the downward slope. She made you feel as if there was a test to be taken looming in the very near future, and that you’d slept through ninety percent of the note sessions.
She took you completely off your guard and never had the courtesy to set you right again before she dashed off, bits of conversation hanging in front of you like a curtain. She flustered, flummoxed and completely captivated you like no other woman on the planet. However, she did tip you on your side like a shaker of salt and left you to pour your contents all over the table. The passionate presence of her being left one completely, thoroughly off guard. I had tried, at one point, to explain this to her.
“You take me completely off my guard, do you know this?” I had asked her. She stopped short, in mid-sentence, and her eyes misted over quite quickly. Her features dipped slightly giving her a very peculiar look, like a child who has tried her best to be good only to find that she has not been good enough.
“Why ever would you want to have a guard up with me?” she asked. This, of course, took me off my guard and having no reasonable answer beyond “Um...” She gave a slight snort, supporting a voiced humph, and walked away. Her head cocked to the left, trying with all her might to figure the situation out. She left me, as usual, tumbling over myself and wishing to be somehow set right again.
I had known Molly, or rather, I had been aware of her – for as yet I wasn’t sure it was possible to know someone who was the textbook definition of perpetual motion – for roughly eight months. She had come to us at the University, preceded by glittering gold recommendations from colleagues and professors, seeking a teaching position and a place to finish her doctoral work. Howard Barnes had called me into his office and shown me her resume and the stack of letters he had received.
“Well?” Howard asked. One word, and that’s usually all you could get from him. Quite remarkable when you consider that he is the Chair of the Language and Writing departments.
“It’s very impressive,” I told him, being completely honest. I had known some of the professors that had written letters in her cause. All of them quite bright and very stingy with a compliment. So, unless she was fabricating every word, she was truly some sort of heaven-sent genius.
“Yes,” said Howard. Two words, a banner day and one that marked the entry of Molly Gales into our lives.
***
I first met Molly the day I stepped into my office and found her books, coat, handbag and various papers splayed across the floor, and her own person perched on the edge of my couch drinking a cup of tea. She was reading from some unusually thick tome, and when I stepped in she looked up with the air of someone who had been interrupted just as they were about to discover the cure for cancer. I later learned that she always looked that way, an outcome of her mind being in a constant state of somewhere else. A mind that was at first maddening but, as time rolled me in her wake, I found quite stunning and, well, rather sexy.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“No, and perhaps I should be the one asking you that question.”
“And why is that?” she demanded.
“Because, you’re in my office,” I told her. With that, she gave a quick look about and discovered that she was, indeed, in my office.
“Oh my,” she said. Not with embarrassment but, with the underlying feeling of being put out. Inconvenienced. Now that she had moved in, she would have to move out.
“So,” I said, “can I help you?”
“No,” she said and without even giving me a second glance she began to gather her things and prepare to depart. “I’m Molly Gales, Criticism and Analysis. Sorry, I dropped in the wrong office. My mistake. Out of here in a flash.”
“Oh, well, I’m...” but, before I could finish the sentence she was true to her word and gone in a flash. Leaving me... off kilter.
Later, that day, I was sitting in the cafeteria, having my sandwich, when Molly plopped down in a chair opposite mine and indoctrinated me into her unique way of being.
“Simple mistake, when you think about it. I was so caught up in this bit I remembered reading in Bloom’s book, and I had to find it right then and there… Well, you know how that is. So, I missed my office by one door, plunked down in yours and started reading—”
She rambled on, all the while her hands pulling items – spoon, napkin, cellophane wrapped sandwich, small container of yogurt – from a brown crumpled bag.
She continued talking, never once looking at me while she rolled up the bag and stuffed it into her handbag. She ripped the top off the yogurt and plunked in the spoon, unsheathed the sandwich and opened the book she had been reading when I first met her. Her movement never ceased. Fingers gliding over pages plucking out pertinent sentences. Mouth alternately masticating and regurgitating choice bits of literary wisdom and food particles.
After about twenty minutes of this incredible show, she cleared away her material with thaumaturgic efficiency and with the words, must teach a class, dropping over her shoulder, she vanished. It was only then I realized that my tomato and cheese sandwich had been frozen in time halfway between the table and my mouth for the entire length of her visit. It was as if she moved with such commotion that all time outside of her sphere had stopped to give her as much of it as possible.
Only then, after she was gone, did I say, “Good afternoon, Ms. Gales.”
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Subsequent meets stayed much within the same framework.
***
One evening, I was having a pint in my favorite pub, scribbling notes about my next book when she, as usual, appeared unannounced at the other side of my table.
“And your last book was so remarkable, so witty and so special, I wondered to myself how will he ever top that? But of course, I’ve felt that way about all of your books so I am sure you’ll be just fine. Can I bum a cigarette?”
She once again laid me under a tsunami of verbiage and movement. Before I could tell her I didn’t smoke, she continued on. “Never mind. I really should quit, actually I only smoke when I drink, and I shouldn’t drink because it makes me smoke and—” Her head turning, her arm up, waving for the waitress, the other hand bringing the last of her pint to her mouth, tipping it back as it vanished.
I had not noticed this before. But how could I have? This moment, this breath in time was the first instance of stillness that I could recall with her. In that pause, that physical parenthetical, I noticed that she had the roundest, most fascinating lips I had ever seen. Full and soft with a redness that was not cosmetically enhanced. I found my eyes locked on that mouth, those lips, as the last golden stream of ale passed by them. Then her tongue, equally entrancing, slipped out from behind the barricade of teeth and ran a quick course over them, mopping up any remains of the liquid. Leaving behind a moist glisten that made me forget... Well, everything else.
Even when she returned to normal motion, mouth pouring forth word waves, hands moving in arcs and slashes, I couldn’t shake the image of that mouth. To me, the mouth had always been a utilitarian orifice, used for the expulsion of words and debris and the ingestion of food and liquid. I had, of course, in my time, used my mouth for kissing but, her mouth seemed mystical. The idea of kissing her mouth filled me with warm desire and sudden fear, all at once.
Would I actually be able to survive such a kiss? And, the better question still, would she ever consider kissing one such as me? Eventually, she was up and off, dropping the words, good luck with the book on the table in front of me as she was absorbed into the crowd and gone. Once again, time had stopped. My hand with pen was frozen, hovering over the blank page, a half-thought waiting for its end. Seeking its completion like the mythical hermaphrodite cleaved in twain by a jealous, all-powerful Zeus.
When my pen dropped to the page, and my hand moved, the ink beneath it left the words, that mouth scratched horizontally across the page.
“That mouth,” I muttered to no one at all. Thankfully.
***
Two more such whirlwind encounters occurred, one in the market as I was buying daily necessities, and one in front of my office door as I was heading off to teach my freshman composition class. Both encounters were the usual flurry of words and appendages and thoughts in streams. But on both occasions I found myself straining to look, once again, at her mouth. A difficult task because I had noticed that she never really looked me in the face and often kept her head down and at a slight angle.
After each of these quick meetings, I found myself thinking, for several hours after, about her mouth. Particularly, her lips. Wondering how it would feel if I could touch them with my fingertips, with my lips, graze them with my tongue. I began to think about my tongue licking the last bits of ale off those lips or perhaps drops of tea or honey.
This is becoming a bit of an obsession, I thought to myself and that thought took me off my guard.
***
A third meet left me even more turned about than usual. I had discovered Molly among the stacks in the school library. She was moving among the shelves, running her index finger along the spines of books. I was two aisles over and heard the soft scraping and, what turned out to be, her humming. I walked down the row to investigate, and I saw her, moving along, finger on spines, nose in a book, humming some tuneless drone. She was simply reading and walking back and forth in the row of books.
I watched her for quite some time. Her slow walk, her obvious enthrallment with what she was reading. She was just there. Just being. It was so simple, and she was so striking, that I let drop the book I was holding. It plopped to the ground, muffled by the carpet but still making enough sound to disrupt her motion. She didn’t jump or startle. She didn’t gasp or shriek. She simply stopped, looked up and then looked over her shoulder at me. She was in complete control. She smiled and turned fully toward me.
I felt an idiot’s smile slip across my face, like some half-wit farm boy who’d been caught watching the livestock copulate while holding his penis in his hand. Her normal jangling motion had been tabled for a more controlled library demeanor. She walked toward me. Her head still slightly down, slightly cocked at an angle.
“Are you spying on me, sir?” she asked, in a mock scolding tone.
“I... I... No,” I said, stuttering and pointing back towards the way I had come. “I was... I heard... I wasn’t spying at all.” She had me flustered and jumbled again. This time, she seemed to sense it, see it, and it pleased her. She looked up slightly from her usual tilt and smiled at me.
“I’m only teasing,” she said and placed the tips of her fingers lightly against my chest. A brief moment and then, they slipped away. They left a feeling of warmth on me as if I could feel her heat right through my sweater. I nodded and laughed, trying to cover my silliness. She kept her look on me. I bent to pick up the book I dropped and as I was coming up, she stepped a little closer to me. When I had risen to full height, she was standing quite close to me.
“I really like this,” she said, almost whispering the words.
“You... You do?”
“Yes, it’s one of your best. I often pull it down and read a few pages when I should be working on my own things.” She held the up the book, showing me the cover. The Swallow’s Path, my third book, and she was reading it. “For about the four-hundredth time,” she told me. The odd semi-stillness troubled me. She was still moving her hands, still gesturing, but the energy was more controlled.
She fit in nicely with the thick silence and the pomp of the library, and I was about to thank her for reading my book, engage her in a discussion of its themes when she exploded into her usual self and flew back up the row to replace the book on the shelf. She then gathered her bags and brushed by me, wafting the words off to teach a class toward me and disappearing down the stairs. Leaving me, as usual, stunned, flustered and this time, a bit more wanting than usual.
***
It was a week later, at a faculty gathering. One of those mid-semester how’s it going for you, let’s get drunk and try to forget that we hate our lives affairs. Molly again materialized, this time at the opposite side of my whiskey glass. She appeared with her usual aplomb. Words were flowing but, she was gesticulating in a little more subdued manner this time. Much like she had done in the library. I took that as either an effect of too much alcohol or perhaps she was trying to keep her physical being on par with her rather elegant evening wear.
Another discovery about dear Molly: She had a body. I mean, of course, she did. As a human being, she certainly had the requisite arms, legs, head, and neck, but Molly Gales had a body. A very fine, wonderfully curved body. Her choice of attire that night was a simple black dress. One piece, tight about her neck and fitting her form with a snug acceptance of all her feminine assets. The graceful slope of her neck into plump, buoyant breasts, down her taught tummy and stopping just above her knees, showing off smooth, well-toned legs. The front of the dress was solid, no cuts or patterns, just one long, black liquid staircase pulling the viewer endlessly from top to bottom.
I was trying my best to not visually devour her and instead concentrate on what she was saying. But when I looked at her face, for the first time given directly to me with only a modicum of movement, I noticed that she had outlined and painted her lips. Not garish as some women do with a thick coating like house paint, but much more subtle. Still, quite enough to enhance their fullness, accentuate their r
oundness and make my knees wither, and my mouth want to scream out for a sample of their wonder.
All of this—her body, her dress, her lips and a delightful scent drifting from her, rising gently above cigar smoke, old sport coats and pretension—combined to again, take me off my guard. I found myself wanting to connect with her in some deeper way. I needed her to know that I had more than noticed her, more than heard her, and that I was on the precipice of desiring her and that is when I made the verbal bungle of, “You take me completely off my guard. Do you know this?”
After her pained reaction, her turn for departure, I noticed that the back of her dress was open and low-cut giving an uninterrupted view of her back. The view began at the top of the neck, over shoulder blades and stopping just at the top of that delightful spot on a woman, the small of her back. It was a peerless back. Another surprise provided by Molly Gales and, once again, I was free-falling and tumbling all over myself.
For the rest of the evening, I paid witness to her energy from a distance, not daring to try to explain myself for fear of doing even more damage. I rationalized that, later in the week, I would tell her I had had a bit too much to drink and wasn’t thinking all that clearly when I had made that remark. This assuaged my grief somewhat, and I was contented to be a voyeur for the rest of the night. I found myself watching her move around the room. Watching her legs, her silky, slender arms, her beautiful back.
Often times I had to be pulled back into conversations with colleagues that I had checked out of due to giving my full attention to Molly, captivated by her as she bent over to retrieve a dropped napkin or deposit a kiss on the cheek an elder colleague who was camped out in an overstuffed chair. I found that most of my conversation that night consisted of me saying, “Beg pardon, what were you saying?” after Molly had moved out of my sight line. I made considerable effort to keep her in my sight lines as long and often as possible. She held me captive just being herself.