Love Burns Bright Read online

  I taste her. I eat her. I push my face up between her legs so far that my nose is wedged against her mound, my chin wet with her juices. She smells so strong then, and I love it. I lick her delicately, using my tongue all around her pussy, pushing it inside, and then around and around her clit. She’s vocal, my Sarah, and she hums and sighs and grunts in pleasure. Sometimes she’ll hold my head, trying to direct me, but I’ve been doing this for so long that I know the moves, I know the paths that she loves the most.

  She shivers when she comes, a whole-body sort of shiver that starts at her toes, travels up along her legs, so tautly held, and into her rigid abdomen. She clenches down, as if pushing herself into the blanket, into the red earth, will make her come harder. If my fingers are inside her, I can feel her internal little tremors too, all flicker and shivery. It would be a delicate dance around my fingers, except that she’s so strong. She always comes. Once, maybe twice.

  This is a story about Sarah, and how she loves.

  Sarah likes to surprise, which is the opposite of how she likes me to love her. Sometimes she blindfolds me and leaves me lying there in the patterns of sunlight. I can barely breathe when she does that. I lie there waiting for her to touch me, wondering where it will be. Maybe she’ll kiss me again, maybe she’ll kiss my breast, or my belly, or the rise of my hipbone. Maybe she’ll just spread my thighs and plunge her tongue into my cunt. Or maybe she’ll brush me with scratchy piece of bark, or trickle hot sand onto my skin from a height, so that the grains pepper me like buckshot, before forming their own little pyramid. Sometimes an insect will run over my skin and I won’t know if it’s her. That makes her laugh in delight.

  Always, though, Sarah likes to please.

  “D’you like that?” she says, or “That feel good?” Even when she knows the answer—which is most of the time after all our time together—she still likes to ask. And she catalogs my grunts and sighs and incoherent responses and works out the answer for herself.

  Sarah likes to use her fingers more than her tongue, as then she can watch my face. She says I’m most beautiful when I come. I don’t believe her, but I like to hear her say it anyway. So most of the time, she uses her fingers—three, four, sometimes her whole hand—and she pistons and thrusts and fucks me as hard as I can take. Her fingers are nimble and flexible. She knows my insides better than I do, and she knows where to press so that I come alive under her hand. She can make me wetter than the creek in no time at all, and the wetter I get, the more she likes it.

  Afterward, when I’ve come so hard that my stomach muscles ache with the spasms, she cradles my head and strokes my hair from my face and croons to me.

  This is a story about Sarah, and me and her together.

  It’s not just about her. It’s not just me doing her, and it’s not just about me either. It’s give and take. We both know what we like, and we share that giving. We know which one of us needs it first, needs it most. And afterward, we lie together on the bright blanket with the gray-green leaves overhead. The air is hot and dry, and our skin is hot and damp. Afterward, it’s about patterns. The leaves above our heads, the movement of her breath on my skin, the ritual of our loving completed. If I close my eyes, the sun and shade are still there behind my eyelids, and Sarah is there too. She’s always there, in my head.

  We get up and take turns brushing the sand from our bodies. Then we dress, putting on shorts and T-shirts, and we roll up the blanket and put it back in the nook in the rocks for the next time. Hand in hand, we wander back to our weatherboard house at the edge of the camp that we’ve shared for the last twenty-one years. It has a verandah that looks west, toward the ocean, although the ocean is far, far away. Sarah and I sit on our big double rocker, drink a cold beer and watch the sunset. Sarah thinks of the ocean, and how she’d like to feel the salt water surround her.

  I think of Sarah, and how I’d like to feel her surround me again.

  This was a story about Sarah. Sarah and me. Together.

  WAITING FOR THE HARVEST

  Sommer Marsden

  Seriously. How long?” I hissed this right into Misty’s ear and saw her grin in the orange Halloween glow of the campfire.

  “Calm down, baby,” she said through rigid teeth. Her mouth did not move, and her words came out stilted. The grin never left her handsome face.

  “Calm down? These people think they can control the weather!” I breathed. It was one thing to come at Misty‘s acupuncturist’s invitation. It was another thing to listen to the attendees wax poetic about being weather workers.

  I was all for diversity, but the whole thing was creeping me out a bit.

  Misty leaned into me, snaking one long arm around my shoulder, and said in my ear—so my shoulders shook with a shiver and my nipples peaked under my thin pink tee—“Listen up, Meredith. We are going to sit here for a few. Then we are going to go peruse Bruce‘s organic veggies that he‘s invited everyone to take home with them. Then you are going to plead a headache, and we are going to beat feet like our asses are on fire before anyone can offer to stick needles in you to alleviate your pain. Capisce?”

  Her voice was as smoky as the cool night air, and in the fire pit a sappy knot in the wood popped with a vengeance. I turned and kissed her right on her naked lips, which always somehow tasted of strawberries. “I have never been more turned on by you,” I admitted.

  “You know it,” she said and smiled. I sat in my lawn chair watching orange bits of fire float up to the heavens until she squeezed my hand, signaling our nonchalant mosey over to the vegetable table the host had set up.

  Bruce had informed everyone of his abundant organic garden harvest upon arrival. We‘d all been invited to take baskets of veggies home with us. I couldn’t help but mentally roll my eyes when he’d said, “All of this bounty has been tended to by my own loving hands. No pesticides or chemicals or falsities of any kind.”

  But I had to admit, they were gorgeous. “Tomatoes?” Misty asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Eggplant?” Misty hefted a huge aubergine eggplant and turned it in her hands. She stroked it almost sensually, and I felt my skin prickle with arousal.

  “Yes,” I said, a small catch in my voice.

  She heard it and grinned at me. The firelight in the navy blue night made her teeth look big and white. The Cheshire Cat sprang to mind.

  We moved down the table laden with bins of fresh-picked produce. “Beets?” She picked up two round root vegetables, their leafy tops swinging like a burlesque dancer’s tassels.

  “Yep. I love beets!”

  “Parsnips?”

  “I’d rather die,” I said, my words a reminder to her of her infamous venison and parsnip stew that had found me charging from the room intent on brushing my teeth. For a year.

  Misty reached into a blue bin and pulled out a handful of carrots. The green leafy whips of their tops draped over her hand. “Carrots?”

  “Tons,” I said. Carrots were my favorites. Raw, roasted, stewed, Crock-Potted within an inch of their thin orange lives. I loved carrots. I took one from her hand and stared. “Wow.”

  “What?” Misty pressed against me, peering at the vegetable in my hand.

  “It is rather…male, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like a cock,” Misty said.

  I clapped my hands shut over the carrot and said, “Shh!”

  “Is it a secret cock?”

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “It reminds me of that cartoon you showed me that one time.”

  “The farmer’s wife fucking herself with a carrot?”

  “Yeah, that one.” I opened my hands again and stared at the bulbous, phallic carrot.

  Misty grabbed my hand and said into my ear, “Come on. Let’s take your boyfriend home and put him to good use.”

  “What? What does that mean?” I squealed, but in my belly a warm stripe of anticipation flared hot. My skin pebbled all over and my scalp tingled with excitement.

  “Come on. Stop bellya
ching.”

  Misty said a speedy good-bye. Good-bye to the Reiki masters and acupuncturists. Good-bye to the psychics, the mediums and the weather workers.

  “They know we’re lying,” I said as she hustled me to the car, the distant glow of the fire nothing more than an orange ball of intense light from this distance.

  “So they’ll strike us with lightning. It’s a risk I’ll take to fuck you,” she said and slipped into the car. I had no choice but to follow.

  “Wash this well. I’ll be right back,” Misty said. The way she said it sent a thrill up my spine. It was her no-nonsense, “you’re about to be fucked, like it or not,” voice, and after a night full of characters who leaned toward a bit of spiritual lunacy, I was ready for down-to-earth fucking.

  I scrubbed the carrot and really looked it over. Its bushy green top was slick with water, and the top was as big around as three of my fingers bunched together. As long from tip to top as my middle finger to the bottom of my palm, it really was nature’s dildo. Which made me snicker. I waved it at myself in the mirror and waggled my eyebrows. “Shall we leave the greens on, Mama?” I asked my reflection.

  “Yes, let’s,” Misty said from the doorway, and I jumped.

  “Oh, no,” I said. For ages I had vetoed the long, thin, screaming orange strap-on. And now Misty stood there wearing it.

  “Can you guess tonight’s theme?” Misty asked, pulling my arm so I stumble-stepped from our tiny one-ass bathroom.

  “Surreality?” I quipped

  “Orange. Now come on then, Farmer Meredith. Let’s get you out of these clothes so you can commune with nature.”

  I put my hand on her long, orange faux cock and said, “There’s nothing natural about that.” But my pussy went wet and soft and eager when I touched the long silicone appendage. I would never ever admit to it in a million years.

  “No, but it sure as hell will be fun.”

  Misty had braided her dark red hair into long, thick braids. They hung down the sides and made her look like a cowgirl. A cowgirl strapped and ready for action. That made me laugh again, but it was a high wild laugh that indicated nerves.

  “Oh, but…” I eyed the carrot I clutched in a death grip and the fake cock jutting from her trim pelvis, and my cheeks burned like hothouse tomatoes in the sun. I was scared.

  “Come on, city girl. Let the farmer show you how we do it in the sticks.” She rubbed her strap-on against my leg and chuckled softly. It was that sexy, self-assured chuckle that did me in.

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  Misty led me to our room and bumped me with her hips so I hit the bed with my ass first. She tugged my jeans and panties down after wrestling my boots free of my feet. Her fingers tripped each pearlescent button on my blue button-down, and she freed me of my bra. When I was naked, she took my bare foot and kissed my toes, finally kissing her way up my inner legs until I was vibrating with a fine tremor of want.

  “I’ll make it good for you, city girl,” she said, kissing the crease where my thigh met my pussy. She pressed the pads of her cool fingers just outside my nether lips and pressed, sending a pleasant pressure through my cunt. Then she speared me with her wet, hot tongue, putting me out of my anticipatory misery. “I’ll make you so wet you’ll be begging for it,” she said.

  When she sucked my clit in alternating rhythms, I believed her. “I never beg,” I said, but my voice was so watery no one—including me—believed me at all.

  “Okay,” she said, laughing softly. The vibration of her amusement skittered up my inner thigh to my belly. Misty pushed a finger into me, thrust and moved and pressed and then took it out. I gasped.

  “Hey!”

  “Shh,” she said and put her lips back to my pussy. Wet circles and patterns and flat, broad licks of her tongue, and I was dancing on my back. Then a finger and a twist and a press and all my nerve endings sang out with joy and then—she’d withdraw.

  “Oh, my god,” I said.

  “Shh.” Licking and sucking and flicking. More sucking. More fingers, and she found my G-spot and I shuddered. And then her fingers were gone.

  “Okay! Okay! Do me now! Spear me with your pickle!” I snorted, breaking the sex-soaked spell, but only for a moment.

  “It’s a carrot. Well, a pseudo carrot,” she said, but she flipped me on my belly and patted my ass. “Hands and knees, baby. Like a horse.” Then it was her turn to snort, and I heard the distinctive sound of the lube bottle.

  Her fingers pressed deep into my ass. Drenched in lube, she slid right in on a moan from me. “Nice,” Misty breathed. “You really do want my pickle.”

  “Carrot,” I reminded her in a soft voice.

  “Right. Speaking of…got yours?”

  I reached out to find our prized organic carrot and waved it so the ends rustled like pom-poms.

  “Good girl.” Then she positioned the tip of her glowing orange cock to my ass and pushed. A steady pressure that built until I was breathing out a long breath through that pinchy pain that always came, and god, she was in, and I was so full. Misty froze and reached her hand out, her voice drunk with lust now that she was in and that nub in her harness was rubbing her clit. “Give it to me.”

  I handed her the carrot, only able to focus on the intense pleasurable pressure in my ass and the fact that my clit seemed to be beating in time with my heart. “Hurry,” I said. My cunt flexed and spasmed around nothing, my nerve endings all alive at once as my body flirted with the swiftly approaching orgasm.

  “Shh,” she said, again. It seemed to be her theme word for the night.

  Misty started to move, and I forgot about people clustered around a fire, discussing controlling the elements. I forgot that I was afraid of the orange-strap on. I almost forgot she was about to fuck me with a vegetable. Until she pushed the scrubbed-clean, warm-from-the-tap-water carrot to my slippery pussy and thrust.

  And then I truly was full. So full of her cock and the lusty vegetable all I could do was hang my head and rock back against her. It wasn’t a long time coming, that first orgasm. It rocketed toward me with frightening speed as she drove into my ass, working my pussy with our freshly harvested phallus.

  “Oh, god,” I said.

  “Farmer,” she said. There was humor in her tone, but more than anything, there was arousal. Her voice was husky with it. Her warm nipples rubbed my back as she covered me, pressed to me, pressed into me. Fucked me completely.

  “Farmer,” I said, “I love your carrot.”

  I sighed. The orgasm took me under, and I pressed my forehead to the cool blue wall above our bed. Misty thrust harder into my ass, her own pleasure building, I could tell by her breath.

  “Carrots,” she said, exaggerating the S and thrusting into my spasming pussy with her root vegetable. The green top hissed and rustled under me, and I wondered, wildly, if we’d be picking greens out of our bed for weeks.

  “I’m going to come soon,” she said, rotating her hips in that way she always did when trying to ward off an orgasm that was coming too fast for her. Like she could fend it off with flicks of her trim hips.

  “Good,” I said, snorting. I meant it. I loved to hear her come. The only thing better than hearing it was seeing it. But my head was pressed to the wall, and my girlfriend was pressed to my ass.

  “No, no,” she said, stilling her body but fucking me more briskly with that randy carrot. “I know you have one more in you. I can feel it. Give. It. To. Me.”

  She moved just a bit. Just enough that I felt her fullness warring with the carrot’s fullness in my cunt, and then she bent to nip me on my side. Right above the ladder of my ribs. Her small white teeth found me, and she was moving, working her voodoo sex magic as usual.

  I came with an “Oh, Farmer!”

  And Misty started to grind into me, her hips banging, her breath rushed. She came with a long, low sigh, her fingers digging into my skin hard enough to bruise. And then she said, “Now, for that, I’d get up and till the fields any day.”

&
nbsp; “Not me,” I said, pressing my forehead to our cool sheets, waiting for my heart to calm. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be in bed waiting for the harvest.”

  SEPIA SHOWERS

  Andrea Dale

  I don’t usually bring Kathy with me when I visit my mother.

  Oh, my mother knows that Kathy’s my friend, that we share a house. But I don’t know if, when she was more lucid or now, my mother ever figured out that Kathy and I were together.

  Now, it doesn’t seem worth it to try and explain. While my mother hasn’t (yet) forgotten who I am, other people in her periphery have become more fluid. And although I’ve never exactly hidden my preferences, I don’t think my mother ever fully comprehended that I’m a lesbian.

  My father, god rest his soul, would never have understood. It became second nature to me not to spill the truth.

  “It’s time for me to go, Mom,” I say. It’s past time, really, but it’s always hard for me to leave. I know how alone she must feel, despite the staff who check in on her several times a day, make sure she takes her pills and eats balanced meals.

  It’s dementia, but a mild form. She remembers me, knows the people around her. It’s the day-to-day things she forgets. Where she put things. Whether she ate. Where my father, who died last year, has gotten to this time.

  I know it could be far worse, but it’s still hard.

  I start to rise, but she doesn’t let go of my hand. “I just wish you’d find someone, Dana,” she says. “A good man to make you happy.”

  I smile for her. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  But before I can get up, she looks over my shoulder. Her eyes widen and her free hand goes to her throat in shock. “Charlotte?” she whispers.

  I turn. “Oh, Mom, it’s just Kathy, here to pick me up. You remember Kathy, don’t you?”

  Kathy steps into the room. “Hi, Mrs. Hollander.”