Three Way, page 14
“Y’all like hush puppies?” he called from the bright kitchen. It was a blaze of sunflower gold.
“Sure. I’ll eat anything.”
“Greens?”
“Anything, honestly.”
“Fried clams?”
“Sure.”
“Well if you want ’em y’all’ll have to get ’em. There’s a pail and a digger out on the porch. Go get us some, then. Know how to find ’em, right?” I nodded. “Make sure you bring ’em in some clean water. Tide’s out so it’s perfect. They’ll be frisky, though. Work fast. See if you can find some crabs, too.”
I was back in half an hour, the bucket filled. He puttered in the kitchen, pots clattering, conversing as he worked, and emerged shortly with two steaming plates, topped with sliced tomatoes, dusted with pepper and parsley.
Over lunch and for part of the afternoon, I asked the questions, got my answers, sipped on the Bud he’d pulled out of the fridge.
“Ya’ll are welcome to stay and I can drive you back in the morning or whenever y’all have to get back. Nothin’ ever happens out here, anyway. They be talking about you back at the store. That’s how dull it is in this part. I c’n hear ’em talk about how y’all got lost from the other side. Should be with the country-club folk.” He laughed. “Should keep them going for a while. Might as well give ’em something more to talk about. Besides, it looks like the day is turning rough. Check it out.” He pointed out to the darkening sea.
A squall had blown up offshore and the surf rose with the tide until water licked close to the verandah’s stilted legs.
“Shouldn’t we be getting away?”
“Nah. Seen worse ’an ’at. Not likely going to go higher than ’at, and there’s a spot down the road a ways where there’s more chance of a washout than here. Might not get past that point, anyway. Might as well stay and enjoy the show. It’s best if you get out on the porch an’ stick ya head into the wind. Always makes me feel like a sea captain. A reg’lar pirate.” His twin earrings shook.
So we stood on the porch while the waves sucked at the ground and the rain sliced and swung like a curtain parted and swaying upon itself. It turned and drove itself into us like needles. A huge explosion of lightning made me jump, crashing into him, sodden. We scurried back inside.
“Damn.” He was laughing, a big boom, boom, boom of a laugh like thunder.
“I feel like a drowned rat….”
“Y’all look like one, too, sorry to tell ya. I’ll fetch you a towel and if you like I can throw your stuff over the drying rack. I’ll getcha something dry to wear.”
He came back with a huge towel and a sweatshirt, then passed me some flannel pajama bottoms with a drawstring waist. “You can change in the bathroom or the bedroom, wherever you like.”
“Thanks.” I chose the bath, took some time drying my hair. When I came back out, I found him standing in the same place, but dressed in a floor-length plain linen caftan. Barefoot. He looked like a prince. Like Fishburne in Othello…. He was smoking a joint.
“Y’okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” I handed him my wet things. He put them on the table and turned back to me.
“You want some?”
“Sure,” I said, holding out my hand. “Sure. Love to.”
“You need more research for your article?”
“I’m always open for new information.”
“What do you need?”
“I don’t know what else to ask. So I’ll just remain open.”
Lightning blued the light in the room.
“You want an exclusive?” That funny smile I’d seen in the truck reappeared.
“Like what? I thought I already had one.” He touched his tongue to his lip, again. I passed the joint back, sputtered a little. He put it down. And he kissed me. “Oh,” said I. A peck behind the ear, a suggestion laid upon the nape of my neck, an invitation pressed to my lips, an invocation upon my tongue. We stood like that for a long time, tasting. I mouthed his neck, at this darker hollow in a dark hollow near the collar bone. In that spot the smell of salt and wind was strong. I licked it. Salty, too—sweat and sea spray.
“Shoulda jus’ given you the towel,” he said.
I stroked him through his robe, testing weight, length, breadth and started to feel giddy at the thought of slowly jerking this man off through what looked like an exotic housedress. Was that all I’d do? Maybe he would just want to be sucked. My legs wobbled. Where would this end? The kitchen table? The paneled wall of the den? Domestically in bed, missionary style?
“Leni, are you in there?” She kicked me on the shin. Charmaine was looking at me. I snapped back to the present. The Bam Boo’s purple-haired waitress hovered.
“Yeah…just thinking about what you said. You’re gonna have to take my word for it. I did. We did. He’s not entirely who you think he is. Who he says he is.”
After our lunch, Charmaine came over to my house for the first time. I showed her the pictures.
Proof. Sort of.
“Damn, I could just kill you. I’m so jealous I could spit.”
“Well, get over it—it’s not like I married the guy. He was very cool. He was fulla himself, though. A regular cock of the walk…but he was…,” I sighed, “…for two days he was the finest man I ever was with. Sometimes I get mad, thinking about it. You know, you have the fling and it gets under your skin. You want more and it’s not there.”
“Please put me out of my misery and tell me about it….”
“About what?”
“About it all… his cock. What he said… Sometimes I read his poetry and I start thinking stuff…and I want to put it there….”
“Oh girl, you have it bad,” I said. I felt that shift again, the rip in the universe. If I let something go, I might get what I craved. But should I? I wasn’t the kiss-and-tell sort. Still, this could be my ticket. She wouldn’t touch me. Fuck it.
So I told her. I told her everything. She so wanted to know. I tormented her. I told her about lifting the linen robe very slowly, until it bunched over the high curve of his ass, held there by my fist; how his cock drizzled wet across my rib cage. Her mouth fell open, her lips wet, wet, wet, too. Looking into her mouth I remembered taking him in mine, the smell of salt marsh and wet earth, the clay tang of him as his wrinkled sheath rolled back and my tongue snaked around him, his hands in my hair. This, I told her. With her next exhalation, I was back sprawled on his sofa, exulting in his tongue parting my lips, and his words, “You taste like the sea,” eddying over me as he dragged my clit between his gapped teeth and tortured it slowly with the very same clever, pink source of all that jive that had sprung from his mouth. “I’m floating on your sea….” And at this her mouth dropped open again, and in it I saw desire, and I leaned forward and put my mouth on hers, and said, “This is how it all went down….” On her, I redrew the map—rewrote the history of that travel. The key to this had been so simple, and so unfair to use.
She writhed on the couch beside me, ripe, like a mashy Mission fig—soft. I stroked the narrow silk gusset of her panties, slick already. She was unfashionably and beautifully unshorn, a dense mat of hair peeping all around, spreading to her upper thighs, up the inner cheeks of her ass, the indigo ribbon of her lips glistening then parting slightly: pink, like conch, inside, a recollection of the sea.
I whispered how, for all the gushing wet pouring out of me, he still hurt me with his thing. How it took working slowly, until he said, “Pull the skin fo’ward,” and then pushed into me in one slick motion. Farting and sucking from my stretched insides, gales of air caught and released. I bunched my fingers, two, three at a time, into her. She mewled. I pushed, felt resistance, pushed again and again until my hand was clenched around its breadth by her gaping mouth and she broke like surf on it. “Like that,” I said. “Big, just like that, Charm. I was bent over the windowsill, with my face in the glass, facing the storm, the rain pelting the window, running down the glass. He made me shoot. That never happened before. It hasn’t happened since.”
Charmaine grasped my hand, shuddered, jerked like a spastic or a Voudoun in trance, babbled in a strange tongue like that of love; then cried, hiccoughing into my chest.
Later I made her some of the coffee he’d given me; a gift in parting. One of his friends fronted him the expensive Jamaican grind. The stuff cost a fortune. I kept it, sealed in my fridge. Rationed it.
We smoked one too, and I petted her hair, twisted the ends and rewrapped the scarf around it so it stood up in spikes like dragons’ tongues. She looked like a queen. She checked my work in the mirror, and was surprised. “You did a good job.”
“I have hidden talents.” We laughed.
I haven’t seen Kayo since that time. A year. We keep missing each other. I’m always where he’s not. I don’t feel like I’m entirely done. Like the poor SOB jonesing twenty minutes after his first stem of rock, I’m not done. It keeps me on edge. Moist and restless.
I can hear her stirring upstairs. The place is already beginning to heat up. It will be a clear, calm day, perfect for summer idling. I know that part of the past is why she continues to see me, sometimes calling in the night for a fix. We keep apart unless it’s to fuck, or in this case to flee into the country. Anais and June… Much as I’d like to, I can’t call it making love. We’d have to be in love with each other. Seems we’re both in lust with him. It’s not a fair trade. We don’t talk about him, either. That would be too much an acknowledgment of this two-sided triangle. Kayo’s the lacuna, the space between, the spirit in the bed. That’s my dry, hollow place. If I shut my eyes I’ll allow her to be my diviner and I’m her channeler, her shaman. The water flows from the cracked pot, out of the space within its walls. I talk to her. I know the words. Blunt. My fist is his cock—my tongue is his too. It fills her gap. I know what it felt like. I can take her there—almost. I wish it were enough. One day I might have to deal with her finding him herself, except not by accident. She’ll go looking.
Then, I don’t know what will happen. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t told her, but in this game the end justifies the means. It’s what I dealt for.
In the meantime we revolve about each other in an uneasy orbit, listening to the loons laugh like unhinged spirits on the lake. Pretending. I make her herb tea. I must make a trip into town to get some coffee. I’m out.
Harvest Time
SASKIA WALKER
“Take me to bed,” Ash rasped against her hair, clutching at her.
“And me,” Joel growled, pressed against the other side, the three of them clinging together, breathless and panting, in the gloom of the hallway. Joolz threw back her head, laughing joyously, reveling in the sensations. They had chased each other back across the moonlit fields and tumbled into the cottage in the early hours, giddy after a night of festivities unique to Dorset villages in harvest time.
She dropped her sandals from her hand and led them to the large bedroom, peeling off her dress as she went. It was still hot, even though it was so late; it was easily one of the hottest summers she could remember.
“I’m sticky as hell; I’m going to take a shower,” she said.
Joel threw himself into a chair, ruffling his hand through his spiky black crop, eyeing her hungrily. Ash, lean and fair, with a goatee and shaggy hair, lounged on the bed, arms behind his head, watching her through narrowed eyes as she dropped the dress on the floor and then turned away into the adjacent bathroom.
Joolz smiled at her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she flicked on the shower, enjoying the anticipation that had hummed between them all evening. The three college friends had fallen into a relationship quite casually, a few weeks earlier. First Ash and Joolz had become lovers, and then one night Joel had been with them, and he’d stayed and he’d kissed her while Ash fucked her. She’d put her hand on Joel’s cock, jerking him off, and it had sent Ash wild. That night he gave her the best fuck she’d ever had, rutting at her like a wild man.
After that, the three of them hung out together even more, constantly wired for sexual suggestion. Sometimes the men took her one after the other; sometimes she liked to watch one man wanking, while the other fucked her. The two men let Joolz determine the mechanics of their relationship. That made her smile; they didn’t like that kind of responsibility, but she did, so it was a very satisfactory arrangement. Joolz enjoyed the power. She also enjoyed slowly upping the ante between them.
She soaped her breasts under the lukewarm water, smiling as she thought back to the image of the men in the pub, how lean and gorgeous they looked alongside the beefier farm workers. The two men noticed when other men looked at her, their gaze darting and suggestive. Ash seemed to take a perverse kind of enjoyment from sharing her with Joel, and it made him want her in a very forceful, physical way. Seeing Ash get territorial and act on it made Joel hot. He told them it was like watching a live sex show of his very own. And Joolz? Joolz simply enjoyed each and every experience the dynamic between them offered.
That evening, while a fiddler played in the snug, and skittles led the gambling in the main bar, they had both held her and kissed her. Amidst the celebrations of fecund mother earth, it was as natural an occurrence as the rising of the seasons. The three London socialites had found that the traditions of the countryside inspired something even more earthy and real, something entirely unashamed. They had claimed her as theirs, publicly.
Joolz flicked her hair back as she climbed out of the shower, glancing around at the old bathroom walls, remarking to herself how well the place had stood up to time. She hadn’t been back to the rambling cottage for four years, even though it remained in the family after Grandma had passed on and was always on offer for holidays. It was the place where she had spent her childhood summers and big family celebrations at Christmastime and other special times, she reflected. She’d slept with Laurence, here. He was her first lover. She glanced back at the mirror, remembering. Her dark eyes turned black, her mouth opening as thoughts spiraled in her mind. Back then she’d been eager, but jittery. Now, she looked ripe, ready. After a few moments, she lifted her kimono from the back of the bedroom door and slipped it on.
A wedge of moonlight carved into the room from the open curtains. They were both sitting on the bed, expectantly. They looked at her body through the flimsy silk kimono she had thrown on. It was sheer and clung to her damp skin. She shook her head and her long chestnut hair tumbled over her shoulders, damp from the shower.
“You look nubile, half undressed in the moonlight,” Joel said from the bed, smirking as he pulled his T-shirt over his head. Joolz smiled and wandered toward them. She crept up from the bottom of the bed to lie between them.
“That’s funny that you said that, you know,” she mused. “Because I had just remembered that I lost my virginity in this very room.”
“Mmm, Joolz. You say all the right things.” Joel rolled closer and lifted up on his elbow, moved his mouth to her earlobe and kissed it, his hand stroking over her breast.
“Really?” Ash asked, looking at her with curiosity. “Tell us about it…,” he prompted. She smiled. It turned him on, big-time, when she talked about sex. He put one hand on her thigh, gently enclosing its curve of flesh as he climbed next to her. Joel began to unbutton his jeans, kicking them off.
“I was seventeen. It was a colleague of my father’s, Laurence. I haven’t seen him in years.” Her mind drifted back and forth, riding the time between then and now. “I’d been infatuated with him for an age. He was well aware of it and he—well, he pursued me.” She gave a light laugh.
“That’s understandable,” Joel said. “The guy obviously had good taste.” He chuckled, kissing her silk-draped breast. She covered his head with her hand, stroking his hair.
“Go on,” Ash said, his eyes dark with lust and a spark of something else—envy? Joolz lifted her eyebrows at him, a teasing smile lifting the corners of her mouth.
“He had just come back from Nepal, where he had been writing a travel journal. I was swept up in the visions he described during dinner. At the end of the evening, when I left, he kissed my hand. Deliberately. It made me feel like a woman, I suppose. The second night of his visit, he retired early and when I went to bed, I found him in the corridor. He caught me in his arms and put his fingers to his lips. Then he pulled me in here.” Joolz glanced round the room. Joel was kissing her shoulder; tiny light nibbles, just anchoring her.
“He asked me questions about my sexual desires, and I told him about the strange tugging that I felt, every night, the unfulfilled lust, deep inside. He began to stroke my body, slowly taking my clothes off.”
Joel moved against her, his body responding to her comments. She felt his hard outline against her thigh. Her sex had begun to cloy with need, need inspired by real sensation, and memory.
“Then he began describing what it felt like, for him, wanting me… he told me he wanted to push his cock deep inside me. His fingers were all over my underwear, pulling it off me. I could barely breathe.” Joolz paused. Ash had risen and stripped of his shirt, baring the strong lean muscle of his chest. She linked one finger over the belt on his jeans, tugging it open. She looked up at him, provocatively as she popped open the buttons on his fly.
“He explored me thoroughly with his fingers; all I could do was let the experience eat me up—his eyes were so inquisitive on my virgin flesh. But I wanted him to look at me….” She drew his cock out, embracing it firmly as it grew harder in her hand. He groaned, his body wavering.
“I want to look at you, now,” Joel commanded, his hand roving up her thigh. Ash reached over and stopped him.
