Unmasking Desire

The virus hangs its microbial haze over the city. This pandemic-paused world   — three-months thick and the weather reports only gloomy future forecasts. Even the moon is coughing, struggling to shine through the oppressive atmospheric pressure. Streets, scattered with tense and hushed figures with nowhere to go—before the curfew swallows us back into claustrophobic homes. Incarcerated nightly, we’re restless inmates — especially those of us in solitary confinement.

The masks still feel foreign; alienating demarcations on the face’s landscape, tracing a boundary between the known and unknown. Mouths  are rendered mysterious;  the undiscover’d country. Yet, the plane of foreheads, nose bridges and cheekbones as varied as shorelines  are accentuated territories. The eyes, especially emphasized. We’re awash in a sea of anonymous gazes.

She’s noticed the change. At first no one looked too closely at anyone, but months later now — the way men look at her — shopping in supermarkets or crossing a street. Now distance is socially mandated , lawfully monitored. The husbands are more surreptitious than the man alone. Those lonely, hungering eyes. Now proximity to strangers is a finable offence in a corona-caused oligarchy. Women have finally got their hands-off reality — no need for wishing for the power to turn men to stone. But is it a double-edged liberation?

She feels the intensity of their gaze like fingers grazing her body, lingering heat like palms, cupping over her breasts. The fear of never fucking anyone ever again  lets a new vulnerability seep into their seeing of her, a new code of need timing how long they look. Determination birthed from desperation — desperation even the masks don’t hide.

She finds herself letting them look ,  revelling in the feeling of unattainability .  Finds herself looking back. Enjoying the power of walking away — but feeling that locked-down desire rise from deep in her belly, moistening her mouth with anticipation. One day, she realizes she’s ravenous. As she walks home, the renewed charge of sensuality in her walk from their stares. She knows—

Next time, she won’t walk away alone.

Next time she’ll choose.  A man whose eyes she’s drawn to. A man who’ll hold her gaze long enough to ignite her courage  and her desire. She’ll glide her eyes over his chest , down his torso. She’ll walk to him, eyes locked ,  taking his hand, defying rules for a dangerous moment. Then she’ll turn and lead him — for of course he’ll follow — looking back just once to reassure his disbelief.

Out of the supermarket (where else can she stage this fantasy) and into mundane streets rendered unfamiliar by the heavy thread of acquiescence hung between them. Her every step, burning with the feel of his eyes upon her body .  His growing desire, matching his pace to hers.

When they’re finally inside, door shut behind them, she’ll speak her first words.

Don’t take your mask off — and don’t tell me your name.

Mouths masked. Names unasked. Tracing a boundary of safety around the delight of the danger. 

Unmasking desire.

Already her clothes are falling away. It seems she steps across a chasm she thought unbreachable, to where he waits.  Bathing in his body heat, breathing in the intoxicating scent of a stranger. He’s forgotten how to unbutton his shirt , but she helps him to remember. His hands, stroking her shoulders, pulling her closer. Hands like water, cascading down her spine, washing away the loneliness.

They’ll sink into the bed, flesh and limbs merging in a delirium of sensation ,  all the more fevered from feeling forbidden. The shock of skin-collision, heightening the senses into outbreaks of pleasure. Crying, too, for the relief of it.

She sees herself in the unfamiliar mirror of his eyes, allowing his gaze to penetrate hers. Down to the depths, where dark currents of solitude have been pooling, rising, night after night, threatening to drown her.

Eyes of a man whose name she’ll never know; whose mouth she never kissed. 

Eyes of a man she’ll never see again.

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Adrea Kore

Adrea Kore (she/her) is an Australian writer, poet and performer, focusing her lens on the feminine experience of desire and sexuality as self-discovery. A former theatre director, she’s intrigued by the theatricality inherent in sexuality. Her short stories, flash fiction and poetry have been published in Cosmopolitan UK, The Big Book of Submission: Volume 2 (Cleis Press) For the Men, Lustily Ever After, Coming Together: In Verse. Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 13. Find Adrea on Twitter: @adrea_kore.

• Unmasking Desire