Page 57 of The Circle

As the uncommon sensations wash through me, my two most constant companions reach me and Christine removes my cock from my own hand and places it instead in her mouth. I tense and shiver as the chunk, chunk, chunk of the train’s wheels barrels us along the tracks and through the secret privacy of the tunnel.

Danny slamming into her from behind forces her harder and harder forward until I am fully engulfed by her mouth and throat. The yearning, gurgling sounds she makes have forced me into something beyond a frenzy. An almost tantric state of euphoria the likes of which I have never known.

“Are you going to come?” I ask Danny, in an almost pleading way.

“Are you?” he says back, teeth gritted, challenging me.

And the answer is… yes. I can hold myself inside no longer. So I no longer try.

The hot stickiness pours free from me into Christine’s mouth and, as if in rehearsed coordination, Danny lets himself loose into Christine at the exact same time, causing her to pull back from me, swallow down my passionate expulsion, and scream…

Just as the train’s whistle blares, piercing the tunnel with its own screaming cry.

“Where are you going?” Christine asks, just emerging from the loo, hair still wet from her shower, wrapped in a fluffy, white robe with “OE” embroidered upon it.

“To find something to eat. Fokken famished,” I tell her, my hand on the doorknob. Not entirely a lie. I am feeling a bit peckish.

“How long until we get there?” Danny asks from the bed, splayed out on his back, still naked, lying across the cotton and gold-flecked duvet like a conquering emperor.

I look at my watch. “About fourteen hours. Try to get some sleep.”

Christine steps to me just as I’m turning the handle. “You’ll be back, right? You’re sleeping here?”

It’s not exactly accurate to say she sounds ‘worried,’ but there’s something. Some kind of need for reassurance there. At the moment we all seem to be stripped down to our most basic essences. The essential components of us. Whatever façades or armors with which we normally adorn ourselves tossed aside.

I know why. It’s because we’re close to the end. What that means precisely, I’m not sure, but I can feel that we are so close to reaching the conclusion of a long, arduous journey. One might be inclined to think of that journey as having begun when Christine tumbled from that roof, but it began long before that.

One might be further inclined to believe that it began when Danny left and Christine and I were alone and I abandoned her as I did after we lost our child. But it began long before that as well.

Even before we met, our journey was in motion. The kind of connection we share cannot be quantified by time as we understand it in the three-dimensional universe in which we apparently live. It is something ancient, passed down, inherited.

I am reminded of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, the Zulu oke and the yarpie woman who defied all the odds and the laws of the time and braved everything to make sure they were together.

“Of course I will,” I tell her as I stroke her cheek, pull on the handle, and step into the hallway.