Black Lace Quickies 3 Page 8

  He was bare-chested on the bed before she had even crossed the threshold, hands behind his head, a knowing smile on his lips. She stopped, looked at his hairless chest, at his flat brown stomach with its encroaching mesh of curls the colour of burned sugar. Lowering herself on to the bed, she placed her hand on his belly and brought her face down to him, inhaling the mint and tea-tree aromas of his deodorant. He encircled her upper arm with his hand, quite tightly, and pulled her up towards him, his lips seeking hers.

  ‘I’m still hungry,’ he said when she finally pulled her head away.

  ‘Tris,’ she began. Already she hated the whiney tone in her voice.

  ‘Oh, Christ, Tam.’ His chest rose and fell heavily. ‘Not a-bloody-gain.’

  ‘I’m just not sure –’

  ‘Not sure I’m ready.’ His voice rose a few octaves in imitation of hers.

  ‘Tris, please. Just –’

  He sat up, threw his shoulders back and looked at her with those baby-blue eyes of his, a look that said, ‘They all want me, I could have any girl I want, and you dare to refuse me. Who the hell do you think you are?’

  ‘OK,’ she conceded, tearing her gaze away from his, bending forward to undo her shoes.

  At once he was upon her, dragging her back on to the bed by her shoulders, then rolling her over and pushing her skirt up over her thighs. All the while his mouth was on hers, his tongue probing her. She struggled to breathe, felt suffocated. She felt his hands tugging at her knickers, felt the give of the elastic over her buttocks as they were yanked down. Then he sat up, and she watched appalled as he slipped his tracksuit bottoms down over his hips, revealing a flawless cock that looked polished as a pebble, scrubbed and pink as a mollusc emerged from its shell. A clean velvety cock that demanded to be held and to be worshipped. He was holding it in his hand, as if proffering it to her. She took it gently in her fist and watched as its little gummy eye wept a clear tear for her. She leant forwards, hesitantly, and flicked it away with her tongue. It tasted salty and warm, like jellied sea water. Tristan’s lips pulled back from his teeth and a hiss of satisfaction escaped between them. His face was darkening. She watched, amazed by the simple power she was wielding over him, as the tip of his cock pulsed and reddened. He was trying to thrust against her grip, to roll his foreskin back under her fingers, but she wasn’t moving against his motion.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  She dipped her hand beneath his balls and ran a fingernail along along the seam of his sac. He trembled, threatening to fall against her. Another tear of pre-come dripped across her wrist. She opened her mouth and placed the throbbing bulb of his cock beneath her lips, without touching him. She breathed hot air over him, allowed her saliva to drizzle his head. He sounded as if he might start crying. But something felt wrong.

  She released him and he fell back, his eyes open and shocked. ‘What?’ he managed.

  She couldn’t put it into words. But it was something to do with the way that it was suddenly more about the actual act than any intimacy between them. She felt that she could have been anyone and he would have been happy. He didn’t pay her any heed, not like the gardener. She was invisible to Tristan; she was something hot and wet to deposit in when he wanted to. Well, not while she was in control of things.

  She moved back over the bed, away from him, pulling her skirt down. ‘I can’t, Tris.’

  He stared at her, then before she could say a word packed himself away, hastily, leaving his shirt untucked, and pulled on his tracksuit top. ‘I’ve fucking had it with you, you frigid cow,’ he shouted on his way out of the room.

  She lay on the bed and listened to doors slamming as he made his way through the house and back out on to the street. Then she undressed fully, retrieved a pot of yogurt from the fridge and went to run a bath.

  As the sweet scent of geranium oil permeated the air, she looked at herself in the mirror. Like Tristan, she had a kind of physical perfection that aroused lust in many, envy in some, not least Jane and Julie. Not that she cared about that. Who wanted to hang out with bitches like that anyway? She was glad to be rid of them. But something was bothering her and, as she looked at her long lean limbs and symmetrical curves, she realised what it was: no matter what everybody else said about him, not matter how much even her own mother wantonly lusted after him, she just couldn’t find Tristan sexy. Did that mean there was something wrong with her?

  For months now, ever since they started seeing each other, he’d been coming around after working out at the gym, rubbing her breasts, putting his hands further and further up her skirt. It didn’t matter how often she’d protested, or what form that protest took – I’m only seventeen; I’ve got my period; my housemates are going to be home any minute – he was determined to get her between the sheets. She’d thought it was fear; now she realised his basic lack of respect for her – his reducing of her to a pair of tits and a tight pussy – revolted her.

  Or was it sex itself that revolted her? Still looking at herself in the full-length mirror, she sank to the tiled floor. She pulled her long auburn hair back with one hand and studied her face. Perhaps she was just one of those non-physical people you heard about sometimes. People who just don’t have any interest in sex, who can go a whole lifetime without. She opened her legs and stared between them in the mirror. Her lips, surrounded by downy fronds of copper-coloured hair, gaped a little, allowing her to see into the nest of pinks and reds. It was darker than she had imagined, meatier, more swollen. She thought of butcher’s shop windows, of slabs of steak, but the image didn’t disturb her. She licked her fingers and brought them to her pussy. She’d never even masturbated before. Did that mean she was asexual? Did all the other first-year girls wank?

  She glanced down again. She was wet. She moved her fingers and began to explore her folds and creases, the delicate petals of herself. She closed her eyes. This was good. This was better than good. She reached for the towel beside her, slid it beneath her and lay back, spilling the yogurt as she did so. Fuck it, she thought. To her left she could hear water coursing from the taps and wondered vaguely if she should get up and turn them off before the bath overflowed, but before she could decide a jag of pleasure ripped through her loins. It was as if she’d touched some button. That must be my clit, then, she thought. She gasped, laughed, swore. Her free hand lashed out and smeared the slick of yogurt. She brought it back to its twin and slathered the cool, creamy stuff all over her hot pussy. Her fingers squelched and sucked inside her as she delved for a rare sensation that stayed tantalisingly out of reach. Everything she was seemed focused now on the hole at her core. She didn’t recognise the creature in the mirror, hair plastered to her forehead, hands jammed between her legs, her breasts quivering as she hit a rhythm that she knew would bring her the climax she desired. Stars danced inside her.

  ‘Tamara, are you in?’ she heard from the hallway, and she stifled a moan of frustration, jumped up and climbed into the bath, submerging herself completely.

  * * *

  She rose in the dark, dressed in silence and left the house. She hadn’t worked out how she was going to get there, but when she saw Dave’s bike leaning against the fence she figured he wouldn’t notice if it went missing for an hour or two.

  She rode through the streets, through the orange pools of light cast by the streetlamps, looking up at the dark windows she passed, wondering what people were dreaming of behind their closed curtains, or what they were doing to each other across the beds, up against the walls, on the stairs … She travelled slowly; she wasn’t in a hurry. She’d dressed in her hockey shorts – they were to hand – and the night air was icy on her bare legs. She felt more alive than ever before.

  The gate was locked, as she had known it would be, but the wall was easy to scale for someone as athletic as her. She paused as she hit the ground, looked around her at the strangeness of the deserted park laid out beneath the moon. It could just have been that she was spaced out from not sleeping and from the shock of th
e glacial air in her lungs as she pedalled, but she didn’t think so. To see this public space, usually so full of activity – not just hockey players, but dog-walkers, joggers, gangs of schoolboys sneaking a cigarette in the lunch break, little old men napping on benches – devoid of all life and movement was bizarre. It was like entering an alien territory where none of the familiar rules applied.

  She followed the main path towards the house, then continued to the right when it forked. The shed lay a few steps away, side on to the house and the door to the changing room. She hesitated. Part of her wanted to go into the changing room, to inhale its rich, earthy odours of sweat and mud and rot, of old forgotten things. But she was pretty sure that would be locked too. The shed, on the other hand, she could see from where she stood that the door to that was ajar, and that a faint light emanated from within. She stepped up and grasped the handle, her breath caught in her throat.

  He was working by the light of a storm lamp, a cigarette crumbling to ash in an ashtray beside him. He was rapt in his work, easing his sturdy fingers down into the soil and moving them carefully until he had loosened the root system and could pull the seedling out. Beside him on the wooden workbench were a row of larger pots to hold the burgeoning plants.

  He hadn’t heard her pull the door open, and she was able to watch him a while. She could see his face clearly now, side on at least, and the first thought that came to her was that he was hairy, very hairy. He didn’t have a beard, but his stubble was advanced, his eyebrows thick and unruly, and she could even make out a few hairs sprouting along the line of his cheekbone. His hair, now that it wasn’t hidden by a hood, appeared bushy and tangled, with sprinklings of grey. His eyes were small, intent, inspecting every plant as he transferred it over to its new home. He seemed to stroke them as he did so, give them an encouraging or reassuring little rub with his fingertips.

  She looked him up and down, noted that he was shorter than she had realised, probably a little shorter than herself, with a slight paunch. His clothes, corduroy trousers and a brown jumper, were worn and ill-fitting. But it was his hands to which her eyes kept returning, those weathered extremities with their mud-encrusted nails, their surfaces lined as road maps. It was as if dirt had worked its way into every pore and crevice, year on year, until it had become a part of his very being. Those hands, she thought, were this man’s life. His contact with the universe. She imagined them on her, rough and greedy, leaving grubby fingerprints on her clean innocent breasts.

  He had stopped now, and stood expressionless, looking down at his workbench. He seemed lost in a reverie, and suddenly she felt like an intruder. She had no right to be watching him like this. At least when he watched her, both parties knew about it, and all the other players too. This was something else.

  She walked away, out past the house and the door to the changing room towards the pitch. She didn’t know what time it was, but thought that the sky seemed a little paler now than when she had arrived. She hadn’t got far when she heard a noise behind her, and when she looked over her shoulder she saw that the shed door was closed. So he had been aware of her, she thought, and now he was shutting her out. That was fair enough. She had been spying on him and he’d been too polite or too shy to tell her to go away. He was obviously a loner, wasn’t good at dealing with things like that. But she’d overstepped the boundaries.

  Then she heard the footsteps behind her on the path and she realised she was wrong. She tried not to change her rhythm lest it scare him off, keeping to a leisurely pace as she veered off through the trees and on to the hockey field. Despite the chill of the night, her blood pulsed warmly inside her, fizzed in her ears in the silence. She was having trouble not turning around.

  What was he expecting of her, she wondered. She had a dread feeling that she would make the wrong move and lose him, kill the moment. She strode up towards the goal, the goal that only yesterday she had been defending as the man looked on. All that seemed like light years away. When she had still been Tristan’s girl. The body that Tristan wanted to fuck. Another notch on his bedpost.

  She thought again of Tristan’s dick, his smooth pale dick like a swatch of silk in her hand. The way he’d presented himself to her. He thought he was sex on a stick, that guy. He didn’t know the meaning of the word.

  She shrugged off her coat and scarf, began to unbutton her shirt and then grew impatient and pulled it up over her head, tossing it to the ground beside her. Before she could tell herself otherwise, she had turned to face the man. He was only steps behind her now, his face contorted with longing. Full on, she could see now that he wasn’t old enough to be her father, but must have had a good fifteen years on her. She held out her hand. He looked at it, and she could almost hear his brain ticking over.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t tell. It’ll be our little secret.’

  He scrunched his face up, as if weighing up her words, deciding whether he could trust her. ‘Not here,’ he whispered finally, glancing up at the moon, as if it were some all-seeing eye.

  ‘Then where?’

  He pointed back in the direction of his shed.

  ‘No.’ She stepped forwards and encircled his wrist with her hand, pulling him over towards a mass of bushes. Her coat and shirt remained on the grass behind her.

  He took off his donkey jacket as they reached the flower bed and made to throw it down on the earth, but she pushed his hand away.

  ‘No,’ she said again, still more forcefully. And then she slipped off her remaining clothes and shoes and laid herself down.

  He stood looking over her. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘Absolutely. Now just fucking get on with it, will you, I’m freezing my tits off.’

  He snorted, repressing a laugh. ‘Bossy little madam, aren’t you?’

  She smiled. ‘Just take your clothes off. Or do I have to do it for you?’ At this she sat up and lunged for him, pulling him back down on to her by his tired brown sweater and then pulling it up over his head. Beneath it was an equally worn navy T-shirt that she tore off him too. In the halfdark she could see the fur of his chest, of his shoulders. She pressed her hands against it, the fuzz of it. It felt comforting. There was a ripe smell about him: sweat and onions and nicotine and lust, and that comforted her too. There was something so irrepressibly male about it.

  She lay back, spread her legs. ‘Lick me,’ she commanded.

  He smiled, as if he still couldn’t quite believe his luck, and then brought his face down to her. She arched her back as she felt his tongue jab inside her, once, twice, and then plunge right into her and stay there, exploring the walls of her. The melting feeling returned.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ she murmured. ‘Just don’t fucking stop.’

  He came up for air, and she saw the lower half of his face glistening. Straining upwards, she licked his chin and around his mouth, her tongue rasping against his beard growth, tasting her own slightly sour juices on his skin. Then she lowered herself to the ground again, and pulled his head back down. This time his tongue flicked at the nub of her clitoris, and she felt herself jerk like a puppet, at the mercy of new forces. It was uncomfortable, almost unbearable, and yet she didn’t want it to end. Her hands opened and closed like avid claws, convulsively, tearing up the soil beneath her. Her legs spasmed peculiarly, almost comically. A couple of times she came close to pushing him away from her but realised she couldn’t. She was on the verge of tears, even while she was shouting out with joy.

  ‘I want you inside me,’ she said, not knowing where she found it in herself to order this grown man about. He raised his head, smiled down at her, then pulled her legs wide apart and placed his clenched fist up against her pussy.

  ‘Relax,’ he whispered.

  She smiled. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘Perfectly relaxed.’

  He unfurled his hand, pushed three fingers inside her and waited, watching her face. She had half-closed her eyes now, and her head was pushed back, chin jutting up, in a swoon. ‘M
ore,’ she whispered. ‘Go further. Harder.’

  Soon his entire hand was inside her, and he stopped again, reading her face for a signal. She looked up at him, remembering the care with which he handled his plants, the way he caressed their leaves with his fingertips, urging them to trust him. She trusted him. She nodded.

  He began to rock his hand gently inside her, moving slightly from one side and then to the other. She was still now, palms pressed down against the soil, breath stopped. And then a flood tide opened within her, and the contractions started, and for a time she lost all contact with the earth beneath her.

  When she woke up he was gone, but he’d draped his coat over her, and her own. It was still only half-light, and sounds from the road were scant, so she guessed she’d only been asleep a matter of minutes, perhaps an hour at the most.

  She sat up, pulled away the covering and looked at her bare legs, at her lips still glistening in the dawn, at the smearing of blood on her thighs, mingling with the crust of mud. She lay back, just for a moment, and felt the dewy soil against her skin.

  ‘You dirty, dirty girl,’ she said and laughed.

  She stood up and got dressed. When she passed the shed, the door was closed and the storm lamp was out. She folded his jacket and placed it on the ground outside, wondering whether he would be back to watch her the following week. Then she remembered the hockey season was over.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she shouted as she made for the gate, not waiting for a reply.

  Candy Wong’s short stories have appeared in numerous Wicked Words collections. She also writes as Carrie Williams and her first novel, The Blue Guide, was published by Black Lace in August 2007.

  Cooking Lessons Teresa Noelle Roberts

  I STUDIED THE ingredients that Zak had assembled on the counter. Tomatoes in a bowl, already peeled and chopped. Peanuts. Two kinds of chillies, one in a can, the other soaking in water. Allspice berries. Small, hard reddish seeds labelled ANNATTO BERRIES. Cloves. Cinnamon sticks. Olive oil flavoured with garlic.