To repay the hospitality my kinsmen had shown since my return to Jingzhou, I invited them all to a grand dinner party in a big restaurant near the northern gate of the city wall. To follow the local custom, I provided my guests with two meals and several mah-jong tables, so they could eat and play for the whole day. Neither good at, nor interested in, hard drinks of any kind which were an integral part of any banquet in Jingzhou, I asked my younger brother to do all the “wine-talking” and act as the host in my stead. By the time everyone got ready for the evening meal, I had felt just too bored to stay, so I excused myself from the scene.
The moment I returned to my mother’s residence I began to fill up my backpack with daily necessities for a “black taxi” trip to Songzi. As we entered into the hall of Guanshenyuan, she reminded me in a whisper to act “normal” as her surrogate husband. In the elevator, she deliberately kept a distance from me, pointing her fingers up towards the ceiling, where I spotted a surveillance camera. She told me that her mother was actually in a very critical condition. Her father and brothers hadn’t told her the truth beforehand because they didn’t want her to become too worried.
“So, you got every reason to have come to Songzi alone and sooner than usual,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I told Ping the day I arrived home,” replied Hua.
After eating a simple meal at a food outlet, we could not wait to return to the hotel, where we water-massaged each other in the shower room for a while before we started making out.
“The first thing all paramours do when they meet in person is go to bed. I wonder why?” Hua reflected.
“Good food for thought!” I replied, kissing her neck and fondling her breasts alternatively. “I may come up with an explanation after I manage to get in first.”
Easier said than done. Given my age and physical condition, I had to take time to become hard instead of waiting for her to become wet. While it was more often than not difficult for my hardness to match her wetness exactly in time, the constant failures made the two of us feel distressed and even despair. In our younger days, this was a most natural thing to do, but now the whole business has become a highly skillful and luck-dependent game. The way I felt it, the process was like fishing in a deep pond. With a bait on the hook, I kept throwing my line into the heart of the pool, waiting for a fish to come along, swimming around the temptation, trying to give it a bite at a different angle with a different force until it finally swallowed the soft bait. At this moment, I would pull the line right into the depth of my heart, with as much thrill as joy and contentment. In doing so, I had to learn to enjoy every second, every rubbing or fondling movement, every playful expression of our feelings for each other. .
Fortunately, we made it around nine o’clock. I was happy that I had a punctual ejaculation, while Hua told me she had a good orgasm, something she hadn’t had for a long while.
“Part of the reason why all paramours go to bed at their earliest possible moment lies,” I said, “probably in their great psychological and physiological need to maximize their intimacy.”
Indeed, only by making love in a bed could two paramours explore their romantic relationship to the fullest extent. Every intercourse marks a most treasurable moment in their lives.
“Why’s this thing so important to lovers then?” Hua asked again, apparently becoming more curious as she enjoyed the process.
“That’s because only when people fuck each other do they become truly selfless, and totally forgetful of all the negativities of the red dust,” I said. “Unfortunately, no man could do this on a continuous basis.”
As we lay down on the bed and began to chat, we counted the days and nights when we could stay together until we had to separate again. As previously planned, I was to stay in the hotel until October 17 when her husband would leave Zhuhai and join her in Songzi to celebrate her father’s birthday like before. In the meantime, she was to stay with her parents for the three meals during the day when I would bum around, do some reading, meditating or watching TV until she joined me after suppertime. The night before Ping arrived in Songzi, she would change to a different hotel so that no one would notice the man living together with her was someone else. After her father’s anniversary, they two would go to Wuhan and spend a week close to his mother, a nasty and violent Alzheimer patient living in a nursing home. Then, he was returning to their own home in Zhuhai while she was to spend more time supposedly with her parents, but actually with me. As my trip back to Vancouver was pre-scheduled on November 12, she would travel with me as tourists before coming to see me off at Shenzhen Railway Station on that day. Considering how everything had been going exactly as planned, both of us felt delighted about our arrangements.
“So, I travelled half of the world just to sleep with you, first in Jingzhou, and now here in Songzi,” I said.
“Same here, I’ve been waiting here almost one hundred hours just for you to join me in this room.”
As we kept sharing our sensual pleasures and caressing each other, I became aroused again and had a second fleshy invasion.
“That’s a new record,” Hua said, “You did it twice within three hours, on a single night!”
“Were I younger, I’d have fucked you to my own death!”
Bio::
Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and 2149 other publications worldwide. A poetry juror for Canada's 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began to write prose in 2022, his hybrid novel DETACHING, 'silver romance' THE TUNER and short story collection FLASHBACKS availabl