by Krissy Kneen
Leda felt a new closeness between them because of the secret they now shared. She ran home from school and raced to get Paul’s lead. As soon as they were safely across the busy street she would unclip him and let him run free to chase a stick till she tired of the game. Then together they would climb the secret track towards the shoreline where Paul would dart across the beach nipping at soldier crabs as they scuttled across the sand.
It was their place, secluded, a long climb from the main swimming area. From on top of the rocks, Leda could peer down at the sunbathers to the left of the cliffs, the swimmers keeping carefully between the tiny yellow flags. They seemed like toys, corralled and protected and packed up at the end of a hot day back into their boxes, kept safe till the next sweaty afternoon.
At the base of the cliff there was a stretch of water sheltered by a jagged mouth of volcanic rock. The sound of the ocean there was like the roar of a crowd at a stadium, the rough slap of the sea a recurring adulation.
She had been coming here since her twelfth birthday, when her family finally deemed her old enough to walk Paul by herself. When it was warm enough, and often when it wasn’t, she took her clothes off carefully and laid them over the sharp outcroppings of rock.
The tidal pools were deep and filled with sea life. Anemones sucking at her exploring finger, tiny multicoloured fish swimming in tight circles, marking time till the tide washed over the rock pools and released them back out into the open ocean. In one pool she had once seen an octopus. A quick caress from its suckered leg and she scrambled from the pool, cutting her feet on the sharp edges of the rock. Paul licked her feet clean then, her nurse and her constant companion, and together they lay down on the warm sand, sheltered from wild winds and the prying eyes of the rest of the world.
Love. She hugged him and there was only this single word to describe something so sweet and pure. She wrapped her arms around his neck and closed her eyes, wishing more than anything that there was some better way to describe this tide of emotion overwhelming her. She buried her head in fur and breathed in a scent that she associated with her most intimate moments, and whispered, ‘Love, Love, Love,’ in time to the rhythm of the waves.
It was a shock at first, and Leda was a little frightened. She had been bending towards the water, distracted by a tiny glow deep in the shadows at the bottom of the pool. A bug, perhaps. She had heard of deep-sea insects attracting their prey by holding aloft a light. This glow was slightly green and so far down that even with her outstretched arm submerged up to the shoulder she could not reach it. Her cheek was pressed against the surface of the water. The weight of Paul landing on her suddenly almost unbalanced her and she gripped with both hands at the rocks that edged the pool.
She knew what was happening. It was the way his fur shuddered against her naked back, his paws scrambling at her shoulders for purchase, the weight of his hips so close against hers. It made her laugh, she could hear it in the air, a nervous sound, as she was overwhelmed for a moment by the shock of two realities colliding. Paul had never before done this anywhere but in her bed. His breath in her ear was overwhelming, the little animal grunts and whines so close that they might have been in her head. The power of the thrusts edged her closer to the water and it took all of her strength to hold herself upright at all.
Leda knew what he was doing, the architecture of the thing, the way the bright red worm of his penis would be arcing out towards the cleft between her buttocks. She knew that tipping her hips a little further forward, leaning her new breasts to touch the icy surface of the water, would make the contact possible between them, and once she had pictured it she was filled with an uncontrollable desire to make it happen. It would make the love she felt for him into a solid thing, this unmediated connection, flesh to flesh. It would be a pact between them.
She wanted it because she loved him, but also to give shape to the intensity of her own desire. Her young body understood suddenly what it had been longing for, her thighs felt hot and tingly. Deep inside there was a sudden upward surge, as if she had swallowed a fish and the excitable creature was leaping up from her loins towards her breathless lungs.
Her breasts were new, the nipples softly sensitive and this motion of bowing forward dipped them into the freezing water, made them harden into two sharp little bullets aimed towards the elusive phosphorescence below. She felt the wetness pressing up against her raised bottom and tilted over just a little further. Her hair tumbled down over her face, wicking up the cold salt water. Her forehead touched the surface, her nose filled with the scent of brine.
The pain was sudden and intense and for a moment she was overwhelmed by what she had done. She knew it was her fault; she could just as easily have tipped her body backwards, shuffling away from the excited thrusts of her companion. But then he was inside her and after a moment of discomfort, the slippery friction began to feel more pleasurable than painful.
Her legs were spread at an awkward angle, she had a sudden urge to clamp them together. She shifted, shuffled her knees on the rough sand. She could barely move her legs and the weight of him drove her thighs wider with each thrust and closer to the ground. The dog moved faster, and it was over before she was ready for it. A sudden guttural growling sound, a heavy downward thrust of Paul’s hips, her pubic bone thrust forward, the exquisite contact with the warm sand and then another sharp pain before the big shepherd scrambled up and away, yelping with joy and making a mad dash from one end of the tiny beach to the other.
Leda sat up cautiously.
There was some blood. It worried her, perhaps there had been damage; perhaps there was a tear and she would bleed to death with Paul whimpering by her side on this little beach.
She took a handful of the water and spilled it on the tufts of fine hair that had recently sprouted between her legs. The water chilled her, stung sharply, but as she felt it drip over the folds of her skin a delicious warmth continued to spread out from her vagina across the inside of her thighs. The skin between her legs was swollen. She noticed a tear in the flesh, but just a surface wound; nothing that looked like internal damage. She noticed, too, a swollen nub of flesh at the top of her little slit. She poured more water onto it and the heat of her blood pushed out further into this tight thumb till the throbbing pressure inside was almost too much to bear. She touched it gently, tenderly with her ocean-chilled finger, rubbed at it, and felt a gentle wash of pleasure seep out through her body, still and thick as the moments before sleep.
Leda stretched back on the rocks and let the heat of the day spread out into her shoulders. She stroked the little nub of skin and her thighs fell languidly apart.
The dog’s rough tongue startled her out of her stupor for a moment. Paul had returned to sniff and lap at her. She remembered her cut feet, how his tongue had healed them. Now her skin was torn again; there was blood, and his tongue and the slippery pressure of his saliva were making it right again. Leda lifted her hand away to let his tongue do its work. She let the sleepiness overtake her, the sun on her naked skin, the sand and the smooth warm stones against her back. All this and everything coalescing in that one place, the swollen lips between her thighs and the rough, gentle tongue lapping there.
The abrupt spasm caused Leda to open her eyes wide in sudden understanding. The waves of pleasure began in an overwhelming crash as if a wave had taken her and tumbled her and each successive wave to follow pounded her so relentlessly that she heard a sound escape her chest, more animal than human. Paul still licked at her and if he continued to do so she would die of pleasure. She put her hands between her legs and let his tongue play on her fingers. In this position she managed to catch her breath.
She had an urge to hug Paul and to kiss his soft fur in the same way he licked her and cuddled with her every night when his final love spasms were over. She suddenly understood his enthusiastic expression of affection for her. Here in the joy after her first orgasm, Leda hauled herself up to sitting and called the dog up to her breast.
; ‘Here Paul, good boy Paul.’ She hugged his muscled shoulders, buried her face in the sweet perfume of his freshly washed fur. ‘I love you,’ she said then, breathing into the soft velvet of his neck. She kissed his ears, his jaw his forehead, ‘I love you so much, Paul.’
It is all about consent.
Leda did not remain as innocent as she was on that day at the secluded beach. She knew where babies came from now and, for a terrifying time, returned in her dreams to the childhood image of a monstrous egg growing from an overburdened plant. When she put her ear to its bulbous skin she heard a scrabbling sound, a whining, like Paul scratching and begging to be let out. The egg began to crack and she held it tight between her fingers, hoping to keep the fragile shell intact. The cracks widened. There were tiny claws, unmistakable paws catching at her fingertips.
When she woke Paul would be running from a nightmare of his own, whimpering and shuddering, his feet racing at a gallop. She would shush him and hug him and there could be nothing wrong with this kind of loving comfort.
While the nightmares lasted she was too afraid to invite the dog to mount her and in her frustration she tossed and turned at night, finding sleep impossible to achieve.
The mythology of the schoolyard plagued her, the diseases that were real or were invented, sexual practices that could only be whispered about, imagined consequences of fabled sexual crimes. Leda was overwhelmed by guilt and it might have eaten her alive if it hadn’t been for Rachel.
Rachel was not particularly pretty but she had an air about her. She had come from a public school where boys and girls mixed freely. She was so worldly, Leda was sure that if Rachel hadn’t ‘done it’ then all her friends surely had. She wandered alone through the halls with whispered insults trailing behind her. She moved through the other children’s disdain like a shark through the shallows, laughing at the worst they could throw at her. Whore and tart and slut—the words rolled off her back without stain, as if they had never been thrown at all.
Rachel fucks bulls’ cocks, they whispered at recess, quietly so that the teachers would not hear. Rachel is preggers with a half-bull half-boy baby. And Rachel laughed and laughed, and on one particular day sat down close beside Leda, as if in solidarity.
‘You can’t get pregnant to an animal. The animal sperm kills the egg. You are thinking of Greek myths, Pan, the faun, Beelzebub, a man with cloven hooves. They are just fairy stories, you know. Fascinating, but scientifically improbable. It is physically impossible for me to get pregnant to a bull and I have a feeling you would die if you even tried. Those things must weigh a ton, don’t you think?’
The girls tired of their taunting soon enough and abandoned Rachel for some other, easier target. Rachel offered Leda some of her grapes and shrugged when Leda shook her head.
‘Now Leda,’ she said, ‘Leda’s a different story. Leda mated with a swan, but the swan wasn’t really a swan, it was the god Zeus in swan form and she gave birth to two eggs, and all these important Greek dudes hatched out of them. The Greeks really knew how to roll. There’s all this other stuff about the children that I’m sure I’m supposed to know for the test and everything, but I find the actual act itself is the heart of the story. Did you know swans have a spiral penis? Like that type of pasta. All these famous artists have painted Leda having sex with the swan but no one paints in the penis, which is the most interesting aspect,’ Rachel spat out a grape seed, ‘obviously. In my painting I would show the scene just before the penetration, that spiral penis snaking out and Leda with her thighs spread open, all wet, not for Zeus, but for the idea of a swan. Can you imagine how soft all those pure white feathers would be against your skin? Swan down. Like a pillow settling against your breasts. Of course if he were a real swan he’d have you head down in a pond and you would probably be drowned. My uncle has a farm, don’t worry, I’ve seen it.’
Rachel with her uniform untucked and untidy. Rachel with her shoelaces undone and her head flung back to face the sky, her mouth wide with laughter as if to eat sunlight. Rachel banishing the night terrors, her wisdom easing Leda back into the eager embrace of Paul.
‘It’s all about consent,’ Rachel told her. ‘As long as two creatures, people, animals, whatever, as long as the sex is done with consent then you have nothing to worry about at all.’
Rachel believed that everything came down to sex. ‘We work to keep the economy going for our children. We make art to teach our children, we are alive solely for the continuation of our species. It all comes down to sex in the end. Sex is the bright, throbbing centre of humanity.’
‘But what if you are not mating for reproduction?’ Leda asked her. ‘What if you’re gay? Or masturbation or even sex with animals like Leda and the swan?’
‘We should definitely go for it. We are hardwired to enjoy sex for reproduction, aren’t we? To ensure the continuation of the species? Well, fucking for pleasure is a wonderful by-product of that.’ She thought about it for a moment. ‘Like vegemite.’
At home, after dark, Leda would nestle down on the carpet. She knew now to touch herself when Paul mounted her, because the pleasure was mostly from the pressure on her clitoris. Rachel told her about the clitoris, and she was right as usual, that tiny point of contact could elicit sensations of catastrophic proportions. With her fingers on her clitoris Leda was torrential rain, gale-force winds, a flood that might have floated an ark.
But there were other things that she did not learn from Rachel. She discovered the large knot that moved to the middle of Paul’s penis when he was finished, how the swelling there rubbed against another, more sensitive place deep inside her, and how sometimes the friction from this place could cause convulsions in her body so consuming that she lost herself entirely, only recovering when she had fallen forward onto the carpet, flipping like a fish till Paul was able to retract his swollen penis and withdraw.
She was tempted to tell Rachel about her secret life, but she was still afraid. What if breaking her silence ended everything? What if they reported her to the RSPCA and took Paul away from her? She hugged her beautiful boy tighter and whispered into the sweet spot behind his ears, ‘I will be here always. I will love you always. I will never let you go.’
When Rachel eventually found out about Leda and Paul she greeted the news with a grin, and not a shriek as Leda had feared. It was summer break and the girls had suddenly blossomed into young women, seemingly overnight. They were inseparable and studying for their final exams amid all the distractions a newly accessible metropolis had laid out to ensnare them.
It was Rachel who first suggested they get out of the city for a while. Her uncle would be abroad and his farm left to its own devices: the only person to distract them would be the hired man, Richard, who arrived every day at dawn and vanished by mid-afternoon. A welcome distraction, Rachel told her. Richard, who worked hard and mostly with his shirt off, was sun-brown and heavily muscled. Rachel groaned when she talked about him and Leda wished she could share her friend’s enthusiasm for the dream of a tight, bronzed body.
This was Leda’s first time away from home; Paul became uneasy when she dragged her suitcase out from her parents’ room, his tail held firmly between his legs. Even at night when Leda crouched down on the carpet, her rump raised high to receive him, the dog just curled up beside her and they lay like that together, Leda’s naked body wrapped around her companion’s soft back.
The farm was just as Rachel had said it would be. Acres of orchards covered over by nets, like spider webs reaching between branches to protect the succulent fruit, a cow ranging in a paddock, a skittish blue kelpie and, to Leda’s delight, a warm stable full of horses, tall Arabians used for dressage by Rachel’s cousin and little ponies that were trotted out every year for the country school fete.
Richard was, as promised, a strong and shapely specimen of the male form and the two girls lay with their text books, baking in the dappled light of the orchard, spending too much time glancing at the young man with his shirt draping out of
his back pocket as he worked on a broken fence not far away.
On their first night they raided the uncle’s bar, mixing lurid green cocktails sweetened by fresh juices from sun-warmed fruit. The girls giggled as they worked, imagining the potions they concocted would work like a love draught, the very scent of which would lure Richard from his nearby house.
‘Did you hear him call us fillies?’ Rachel laughed. ‘Do you imagine he likes us as much as the horses in the barn?’
‘You couldn’t do that with a horse.’ Leda was thinking of Paul, who was exactly the right height for her. She could kneel on all fours and it was only a matter of a quick jump before the dog settled comfortably onto and into her. The idea of a horse seemed quite impossible.
‘I think maybe you’d pull a ladder up behind it,’ Rachel suggested, measuring the height of the imaginary mare’s rump against her chest. ‘It would be pretty dangerous, but I suppose if that was your passion, you wouldn’t let the fear of falling stop you. Anyway, we’ve got ponies…so there’s that, I suppose.’
‘But isn’t that an issue of consent? Like you said?’ They were staring through the kitchen window out to the barn, where the moonlight shimmered on the roof and touched the grooves between the rough-hewn walls.
‘Let’s go out to the barn,’ Rachel said suddenly. ‘Let’s ask the horses how it is done.’
Leda felt a little wave of excitement engulf her. She held her green drink carefully between both hands but even so the glass was shaking slightly, spilling the sweet liquor over her hand. She licked it off furtively and was transported for a moment to her first time with Paul, to the rough wet tongue between her legs, and the thought of it made her stomach leap in a ripple of delight.
The scent of the barn seemed amplified in the still warmth of the night. The girls crept inside and shut the door behind them. An almost inaudible click. There was no need for secrecy and yet they felt the urge to tiptoe across the straw. The smell of the horses and the hay combined to make a heady scent that seemed to epitomise all things wild and powerful. The Arabians were taller than they had remembered: Rachel’s imaginary line across her breasts was way too low.