Radical Encounters Page 4

  “God yes,” Lucy gasped, tugging at Carly’s jeans. “I’ve wanted to taste you all night long.”

  Carly twisted her fingers in Lucy’s hair. “Come on up here and taste some of this first.”

  Lucy climbed up Carly’s body and attacked her mouth. I considered trying to sneak out while they were groping each other, but I was afraid they would see me and I was embarrassed to admit I’d been watching this long. I was even more humiliated that I couldn’t look away. I knew what Lucy was tasting as she plunged her tongue into Carly’s mouth, how good Carly’s body felt moving beneath her. I imagined the heat and the small sounds Carly made in her throat and I couldn’t stop staring, desperate for some glimpse of her face, terrified I would see her look at Lucy the way she’d looked at me once. With such stark honesty I’d wanted to weep.

  “I can’t wait,” Lucy groaned, pushing away and grabbing Carly’s legs. She twisted them until Carly was lying half on top of the pile of coats with her legs dangling over the side of the bed, and then she knelt, forcing Carly’s legs apart.

  When Lucy buried her face between Carly’s thighs, Carly pushed herself up on her elbows and looked down in the moonlight, watching Lucy make her come. I hid in the shadows and saw Carly shiver with each small movement of Lucy’s head. I clenched my hands, my body rigid, listening to Carly’s sobbing breaths, her broken moans of pleasure, knowing from the sounds that she would come soon. She struggled on the edge for long minutes, her chest heaving, her legs trembling.

  “Oh, I can’t get there,” Carly groaned, “and I need to so bad.”

  I’ll never know why I slid into a sliver of silver light, but she stared across the chasm into my face, her mouth opening wide in a silent scream of pleasure as her back arched and she came instantly. I slipped out of the room, her cries following me into the night. That night and every night thereafter.

  “I was in the bathroom,” I confessed.

  “You were really there?” Carly whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “I always thought I’d imagined it. Seeing you. You never said.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “I thought you might be mad.”

  “How could I be mad when you made me come?”

  “I wish,” I whispered.

  “You wish what?” she said, sounding confused.

  There was still time for me to laugh it off. There had always been time enough for that.

  “I wanted to be the one making you come.” I took a deep breath. “In fact, it’s one of my favorite fantasies when I want to get off.”

  “You think about me when you make yourself come?”

  “Sometimes, yeah. A lot of times, actually.”

  Carly laughed, a lazy throaty chuckle. “Wanna tell me what you think about when you’re rubbing your clit? Is that how you do it? You rub it until you get all wet and it gets stiff and you come?”

  “Mostly.” I was already wet and stiff, and hearing her talk about it made it impossible for me to think of anything else. I slid my hand into my sweatpants and touched the top of my clit with one finger. A jolt of pleasure shot down my legs, and I started a little tiny circular motion, just enough to keep the feeling going.

  “I like a vibrator myself,” Carly said. “Do you ever use one?”

  I flashed on an image of her lying on her bed, her legs spread wide, her head tilted back, making herself come on the vibrator. I rubbed my clit a little harder. “Not too often. It makes me come too fast.”

  I heard a thunk. “What was that?”

  “I’m getting out the vibrator I keep in the end table,” Carly said. “Sometimes when I’m reading and I get turned on, I need a quickie.”

  I groaned and switched to squeezing my clit.

  “So tell me what you think about me when you’re coming.”

  “When I first start getting my clit hard,” I said, “I think about you naked and about us kissing. I think about the way your tongue fills my mouth and me sucking on it.” I pushed a finger lower and stroked between my lips and over the underside of my clit. It ached in that need-to-come way. “While we’re kissing, I’m playing with your nipples.”

  “I love when you pull on them,” Carly whispered, her words slow and careful, as if she was concentrating very hard.

  “Are you teasing your clit with the vibrator?”

  “Uh-huh. Just for a second…every now and then.”

  I leaned my head back and masturbated my clit faster. The pressure was building in my pelvis, but I was good at holding off. I could push myself to the edge over and over, backing off each time until my whole body twitched and I’d come no matter how hard I tried to stop. “Don’t come until I get to the part where I’m licking you.”

  “I’ll wait,” Carly gasped. “Tell me what you’re doing to me.”

  “I’m playing with your clit until it’s as hard as it can get—”

  “You make me have to come so bad…” she whispered.

  “I pull your legs over the side of the bed and kneel on the floor between them.” I hooked my thumb over the top of my clit and held it with two fingers underneath, starting to jerk it slowly. “And then I swirl the tip of my tongue around the end of your clit.”

  Carly whimpered and I knew she had the vibrator right on her clit.

  “You sit up to watch me make you come, and I push my tongue lower where you’re sweet and hot. I want to stay there, inside you, but you can’t wait.”

  “Oh, soon.”

  “You rub against my face and tell me to lick…” My clit started buzzing and I knew I only had a few more seconds. “I usually come as soon as you tell me to lick…oh, fuck Carly…I—”

  “Lick me…lick me hard …lick me so I come in your mouth.”

  I held my breath and stopped moving, every fiber focused on Carly. I saw her eyes, wide and stunned with pleasure, felt her body shudder, heard her voice catch on a cry of pleasure, and another, and then another. I forgot to breathe for so long, spots of light danced behind my eyelids, but still I waited. Waited for one more thing.

  Carly laughed. “Oh my God, that was incredible.”

  “Yes,” I whispered, caressing my clit until my hips rose and I flooded my hand with come, “it was.”

  “So,” Carly said teasingly. “Was that better than the fantasy?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, stretching my cramped legs. I toyed with my clit, keeping it hard, and wondered if I could get off again so soon.

  “You’re not the only one who’s had that fantasy, you know.”

  “Really?” I sat up and forgot about wanting to come again. She had that serious note in her voice and I needed to pay attention.

  “Really. In fact, there’s a whole other part to it we didn’t get to yet. The part about what I do to you.”

  I waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t, I realized it was finally time for me to go first. “Maybe I should come over and you can tell me all about it.”

  “Maybe you should come over and I’ll show you.”

  I grinned. “What about my deadline?”

  “Vanessa will cut you some slack. You can write about all of this first thing in the morning.”

  “Yeah, but it’s supposed to be a fantasy, not real life.”

  “So? Who’s to know?”

  “Carly’s so right,” I thought as I pulled on my jeans, “who’s to know?”

  Lonely Town

  There’s nothing quite so lonely as a Saturday night in a strange town on the far side of midnight. In the last twenty-four hours, I’d crossed more than just time zones and thousands of miles—I’d shed one reality for another, let my ordinary life slip away like an unneeded cloak until I arrived halfway around the world a different person. No one knew me other than as the persona I allowed them to see. No one met me at the airport, because I wasn’t scheduled to appear until the next morning. Until then, I was only a name on a program and a face on a flyer.

  Too tired to sleep and too restless to read, I decided to go for a walk,
ignoring the concerned expression on the night clerk’s face as I crossed the lobby and stepped out into the dark. As was true in so many cities in the middle of the night, traffic was sparse and pedestrians rare. Nevertheless, the sidewalks were well lit by a combination of street lamps, neon reflections from store signs, and a surprisingly bright gibbous moon.

  I walked in the direction that the cars were headed, the steady thud of my booted feet on the empty pavement a welcome accompaniment, like the beating of another heart in a darkened room. As soon as I turned the corner, I saw the bold, black letters of the stark white marquee a block away. Grand Hotel. Why not? What better way to spend the last hours of anonymity than with the woman who was famous for her secretiveness and seclusion. As I approached the theater, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see a woman crossing the street at an angle, her path on an intercept with mine. With the lights behind her and her body shrouded in a long military-style coat that came to just below her knees, I could see little of her face and nothing of her body. I knew without doubt, however, that it was a woman by the singularly fluid grace of her movements. She drew near with a purposeful stride as if she were late to meet me and eager to catch up. I slowed to wait, as if our rendezvous were prearranged.

  “Are you going to the theater?”

  Her voice was husky, with a lilting accent that tinged her English with a hint of Scandinavia. Closer now, I could see that she was indeed blond, her eyes blue or green, too muted in the half-light for me to be certain. Her coat billowed with each step, exposing long legs in pale denim and a shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal that she wore nothing under it.

  “Yes. Do you think it’s too late?”

  “No,” she replied, extending her hand. “I think we’re just in time.”

  I took her hand as if I had a hundred times before.

  Her fingers were long, slender, and cool. Her palm was soft, but with a faint ridge at the base of each finger suggesting that she worked with her hands. I stole another glance at her face, thinking that with her arched cheekbones and full jaw she might have been a model. But there was nothing studied or posed about her. She was at ease in her body in a way that those who made their living with theirs were not.

  “Have you seen it before?” I asked.

  Her full mouth curved into a secret smile. “Many times.”

  She moved even closer as we walked until her shoulder and thigh touched mine, the way a lover’s would, with familiarity and possession. I struggled not to close my fingers tightly around hers as a surge of desire caught me unawares and made me stumble.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Perfect,” I replied, only then realizing that it was true. At the first touch of her hand, I’d forgotten the disquieting sensation of being halfway around the world and a stranger to everyone, even myself. The parts of myself I’d left behind slowly reappeared, sliding into the empty places effortlessly until I remembered who I was and why I had come.

  “Two, please,” she announced as she passed several oddly colored notes through the semicircular hole in the Plexiglas to the bored-looking young man in the booth.

  “Oh no,” I protested, belatedly realizing that we had reached the theater while I had been lost somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow. “You must let me pay.”

  She laughed softly. “It is, as you would say, my treat.”

  I blushed furiously, not at all certain that she meant it the way I took it, but her words brought another flood of arousal from my depths. She cocked an eyebrow at me, then swept her fingers lightly over my cheek and down my neck until her hand cupped my throat. She leaned close, there in the bright lights of the ticket booth, and skimmed her mouth over mine. “We should go in.”

  “Yes,” I breathed, wanting nothing more than more of her mouth.

  The lights went down just as we stepped into the theater, and she guided me through the blackness into the back row, to the far corner seats. There was no one in front of us or to the side. In fact, the other figures in the room were merely faint reminders that we were not alone. Distant images of Garbo and Barrymore flickered on the screen, their words a faint hum beneath the roaring in my ears.

  Her coat fanned out behind her as she shrugged it from her shoulders, and when she extended her arm along the seat behind my back, the tips of her fingers grazed my shoulder. Each fleshy circle was a burning coal that penetrated the cotton to my skin. I leaned against her, and when my breast pressed to her side, my nipple tightened into a pebble of tingling nerves. She curled her arm and drew me closer, shifting to put her mouth against my ear.

  “No one can see.”

  It wasn’t true, but the illusion of invisibility beneath the otherworldly light in the cavernous space was enough. I tugged the shirt from her jeans and rested my hand on her belly. Her stomach tensed as I slowly rubbed my palm over the soft skin, pressing harder as the moments passed, my eyes on the screen but every sense tuned to her. The muscles beneath my fingers quivered and grew rigid, and with a faint moan, she shifted in her seat and spread her legs wide, her knee brushing mine. I knew she would be naked under the denim. The fingers that curved around my upper arm trembled. I could stop, but what would be the point? From the instant she’d taken my hand and I’d let her, our destination had been clear.

  It was my turn to skim my lips over her ear, my breath a teasing kiss. “Are you hard already? Can you feel the seam brush against your clit, just like my lips caressing the tip?”

  “Yes.” Urgent and low.

  My hand moved up, pushing fabric aside to cup her breast, grasping a nipple—already standing up, hard and sensitive, waiting. I squeezed gently. Once more. And again, harder, twisting a little until her body stiffened and another soft gasp escaped her. Her hips lifted, her heart skittering beneath my palm. I lowered my mouth to the other breast, biting through the soft cotton to tug on tender flesh. The gasp became a moan—hers or mine, I wasn’t certain. My clit jerked insistently, keeping time with her racing pulse, and I finally dropped my free hand to my crotch and rubbed the stiff prominence through my pants.

  “Open your jeans,” I murmured against her neck as I drew my tongue along the curve of that beautiful jaw. Her breath, shallow and fast, drowned out the sound of Crawford’s haughty inflections. I glanced down, saw her rip at the button and zipper, and squeezed the fabric between my thighs hard around my own aching need. My clit twitched, my vision blurred, and I had to ease off or come. I tortured her nipple a little more with my teeth to take my mind off the pressure in my clit.

  Her eyes, suddenly bright and clear in the murky light, held mine.

  “Please.”

  I stopped touching myself and pushed my fingers down the front of her pants as she rocked her hips, urging my fingers to find her. God, I wanted to take her fast—to make her come on my fingers, in my hand. I rested my fingertips just above the base of her clitoris, pressing down ever more firmly while circling up and down the stiff length, making it throb as the blood built inside. I knew how it felt, how it hurt in a way that could only be pleasure. Then, one hand stroking through that liquid heat below, I grasped her neck with my free hand and turned her face to mine. I worked my tongue into her mouth, the way I wanted to be working inside her. Turning in the seat, I threw one leg over hers. Clit pounding as I rode her leg, I sucked on her tongue the way I wanted her sucking on me. She bucked on my hand and moaned into my mouth and I forgot why I was waiting. Her need and mine conspired to undo me, and I surrendered willingly.

  I pushed my hand deeper into her pants, my wrist tenting the denim until the zipper bit into my skin. Unmindful of the pain, I slid my fingers into her and angled my arm to get higher, crushing her clit, wet and hard, into my palm. Half lying on her now, my tongue in her mouth, my fingers buried inside, I took her hard and fast, beating her clit with the heel of my hand on each thrust. She pulled away from the kiss and closed her teeth on my neck when she started to come, muffling her cries with my flesh. She cla
mped down around my fingers as her hips jerked up, her rigid body barely touching the seat, and I felt a breathless, heart-stopping wonder as she came. I was ready to come, needed desperately to come, but in that moment, the only thing that I knew was her pleasure. Only when she slumped back into the seat with a last, long moan did the fury of my desire overtake me. I closed my hand around her still-pulsing sex and lowered my forehead to her chest. Dimly I was aware of her holding me as I shuddered and thrust against her tensed thigh. I choked on my own sobs of pleasure as a dam burst inside me and every barrier dissolved. I came in the arms of a stranger who knew me more intimately in that moment than anyone else in my life.

  We dozed through the rest of the movie. I blamed my torpor on jet lag, but the truth was that I liked the way she held me. When the credits rolled, we straightened our clothing and left before the others. The streets were completely empty, and we walked in silence the few short blocks to my hotel. In the darkness beneath the awning, she leaned down and kissed me, the same knowing brush of lips with which she had first greeted me.

  “Good night,” she said softly.

  I watched her walk away until the billowing edges of her coat became only the shifting shadows of the night. Then I turned and walked inside. It was not the Grand Hotel, and no grand passion awaited me here. But when I finally laid my head upon the crisp, white pillowcase, I felt her body next to mine and her breath against my cheek. I closed my eyes, knowing I would not sleep alone.

  Zocalo Dare

  Traipsing through a crowd of people on a hot Sunday afternoon is not my idea of a good time. I shouldn’t have worn the heels. Or the leather skirt. Even the white bikini-style halter top that tied with a single strap behind my neck wasn’t a good choice. The only thing that saved the outfit was the fact that while I was getting a sunburn, it was making my girlfriend hot. And jealous. She wouldn’t admit to that, of course. But the minute we skirted around the barriers on Pine Street that the cops had set up to block the street to traffic so the vendors could set up their tents, she grabbed my hand. Being that she’s not one for public displays of affection, I was kind of surprised. Then, as we dove into the throngs of gays and dykes and inched our way from booth to booth, occasionally stopping to peruse the merchandise or fill out raffle tickets for a free weekend at a bed-and-breakfast in Rehoboth, she draped an arm around my shoulder. I gave her a curious look. “What gives?”