“I ain’t going anywhere, Lover,” Clara whispered back, “especially when you’re doing what you’re doing to me right now. But what about you, Honey Bunch, who did you love at that old swimming hole where you went to ogle pussy all summer long?”
“I didn’t love anybody,” Connie reassured her as Clara’s hands caressed her breasts and worked their way lower, “and certainly not any of the men who pawed me along the way. But there was a girl once who I cared about just a little...”
“And did this ‘caring’ involve any pussy play?” Clara asked, a little jealously, finding Connie’s cunt and sliding her finger into the other girl’s very moist slit.
Connie nodded. “Yes. You wanna hear?”
“I do.”
“Okay,” Connie began, “it was at the swimming pond, right enough...”
“Why am I not surprised,” Clara said, snuggling closer.
***
“There were unspoken rules about swimming at Randsom’s Creek,” Connie began, punctuating her narrative with little kisses to Clara’s bee-stung lips. “Men never went there, ever, that was forbidden, and the coloured girls had the use of it up until the noon day bell, then the white girls had it for the rest of the afternoon. It wasn’t written down or anything, it’s just how it was and had always been, and that’s how we all managed to swim naked every day of summer. In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing a girl in a suit at that swimming hole or even anyone with a towel. We used to just take off our clothes under the trees and swim till we was tired, then sit against the crooked oaks and let the sun dry us off, laughing and talking, just generally having a good time being naked together. There’s probably girls still doing it there today.
What ended it for me, though, was the day I broke the rules. It was a Sunday morning and everyone was at church, but I’d told my Mama that I had a fever and stayed home, but it was so hot I knew I just had to get me down to the water and the cool of Randsom’s Creek. I knew it was before the twelve o’clock bell, the coloured girls’ time, but if I hurried I could go and be back before the pastor finished his sermon and the congregation spilled out into the town square, and, anyhow, all the black girls would be at church anyways, so there’d be no-one to see me at the pool.
I slipped through the back alleys and made my way down to the pond, just as the eleven o’clock sun was real high in the sky, and quickly stripped under the trees and walked naked across the long grass to the water. It was a really hot day and sun on my skin was like a lover’s caress, and I stood in the shallows for a while, just luxuriating in the feel of all that heat on my body while the cool of the water kissed my toes with its cold lips.
“You gonna burn yourself red standing there in that sun like that, White Gal,” a voice said quietly, and I whirled round, looking for who had spoken, since the pond and all the fields around it were quite deserted.
“Where are you?” I gasped, putting one arm across my tits, the other hand over my pussy and I heard her laugh.
“Down here, Girl,” she whispered, “I’m hiding my shame from the good Lord who knows that I should be safely locked away in church on the Sabbath.”
I looked round me again and then I saw her, floating low in the shallow water like a crocodile, her dark skin almost invisible under the kicked up mud and reeds.
“Jeez, you gave me a fright,” I said, still covering myself.
She laughed. “Oh, that’s our lot in life, White Missy, they teach us to be invisible from a very early age. It has its uses, though, and I’ve seen a lot of things in my time that I wasn’t never supposed to ever see. Like all that fine black fur on your little white pussy that you’re covering up so shyly now, for instance, I had me a good long look at that before I spoke, so I did.”
That annoyed me so I let my hands fall to my side defiantly, letting her see that I wasn’t afraid of her looking. “And did you enjoy having that good long look?” I said, strangely excited by her scrutiny.
She laughed. “Oh yes,” was all she said.
***
We lay together in the water for a while, not speaking, just enjoying the cool in the heat of the day. The water covered most of our modesty, but the girl’s breasts were huge and her nipples were hard and erect, as were mine, and it was if she had two glossy black olives and I had two glace cherries floating above us.
Suddenly she spoke. “Come on,” she said, “we best get out so that we can get dried and dressed before the churches come out. Not be good for us to be found here bare-assed naked and together like this.”
She looked over at me meaningfully as she said this, a look of knowing in her big brown eyes, then rose out of the water like a sprite.
She was older than me, twenty-nine or thirty, maybe, tall and statuesque, with huge low-slung breasts and perfect skin, obsidian black and gleaming in the noonday sun like polished ebony. Her hair was neatly braided in cornrows, and her body was smooth as sea-washed pebbles, except for her big pronounced pussy, which was covered in a thick lichen of close-cropped curly hair.
She reached her hand out to me and lifted me from the pond’s protective embrace, and we stood facing each other for a long moment, just drinking in the sight of each other’s naked bodies as the water dripped from us, making lazy ripples in the green surface of the pool.
“You go with a lot of boys, don’t you, Miss Connie,” she whispered, “but your heart’s not in it, is it, Girl?”
I looked at her, so proud and so naked, and didn’t reply, but my eyes were saying plenty. As was my cunt.
“But it’s nicer here, ain’t it,” she said quietly, “lying all safe and naked in the water with the other white ladies, but you can’t touch, can you? That’s the hardest thing about it, all that hunger amongst plenty. So near that you can almost touch it, but that’s the one thing you can’t ever dare to do, is it?”
I still didn’t reply but I nodded imperceptibly. Yes, that was so hard. Like it was so hard not to take her in my arms and kiss her right now.
“We’re not the same as other girls, you and me,” she said quietly, “oh sure, we play at being normal, wanting husbands and all that stuff, but it’s a lie and we know it. So we lie in this water and look at all our best friends’ naked pussies and we dream, lying in the hot sun and wishing its rays were our friends’ lips on our skin, that the breeze was their caress, and that that sun-warmed fruit we eat before dressing is the sweet juice of their cunts. Oh yes, we hunger, you and me, and we are never fulfilled...”
My lips finally moved. “Kiss me,” I whispered, twenty-one years of pent-up longing condensed into those two incendiary words.
She didn’t reply but took me in her arms, her grip muscular and demanding. I knew her, vaguely, from before, had seen her at the laundry where she worked, her strong arms in tubs of suds all day, washing away the sins and stains of her white employers.
“Kiss me,” I begged again and she laughed.
“Oh, I’m going to kiss you, alright, but don’t go thinking that I love you and that this is for ever. This is an itch we’re scratching here, me and you, don’t you ever go thinking that we can be together or that our kind can know love. That ain’t never going to come to pass for creatures like us. Never in this life or the next.”
She might have said more but I kissed her then, full on the mouth, softly but firmly, and she responded in kind, pulling me to her nakedness, sharing her heat and her passion as we lost ourselves in the embrace. Her hands were all over me, no stranger, I thought, to the touch of another woman, and I started to tentatively explore her too, running my hands down her magnificent spine and onto her fabulous ass, marvelling that God could ever have created something so beautiful.
Her breathing was ragged now, all that outward pretence of calm discarded, and she sucked and nibbled at my ear, finally gasping her desire to me.
“I have to have you n
ow, will you trust me and do what I do?” she panted, her nipples up like hard-boiled comfits, her pussy wet and fragrant and rubbing on my quivering thigh.
I nodded and she laid me down gently in the grass, swivelling round beside me so that her beautiful cunt was level with my face.
“Remember,” she whispered, “do what I do...”
***
I had never lain with another woman before, and I delighted in the taste and scent of her as I felt her lips and tongue caress my fur and then slowly enter me, every sensation magnified by the fact that I could do the same to her. She was sweet and musky, her body hair soft and springy like moss on a sun-warmed rock, and her slit was a magical cavern that opened like a hot-house flower to my touch, her big pronounced vulva the slave of my hungry tongue.
I could hear her voice above me, moaning, “fuck me, fuck me,” as we licked and sucked, her juices sweeter than corn syrup, the most delicious honey I had ever tasted. I wanted to finger-fuck her too, feel her heat around me as she came as I knew she soon would, but I held back, not wanting to spoil the magic of the moment, and suddenly she began to buck like a wild pony, her strong hands holding my head to her as I sucked hard and roughly on her big engorged clitoris, my own orgasm dwarfed by the force of hers.
***
“I never saw her again after that day,” Connie said between kisses as she held Clara close. “though I went to the laundry and asked for her.”
“Did she talk to you?” Clara asked, her breath hot and rapid.
“No,” Connie replied, her whole body rocking, her back arched up, “they said she hadn’t shown up for work the following Monday, and that she’d left town.”
“And did you look for her?”
Connie shook her head. “No,” she whispered, “but I made a vow in her honour.”
“What was that?” Clara asked, so close to cumming that she could almost touch the orgasm that hung above her like a storm cloud, ready to deluge her at any second.
“That I would find love, and that I would never kiss another person, man or woman, that I didn’t love ever again. And I never did.”
“But you’ve just kissed me,” Clara said weakly.
Connie smiled. “That’s because I love you and will never leave you,” she replied breathlessly as she was tossed up on the tsunami wave of her orgasm and thrown into the blackness of le petit mort.
“I love you too,” Clara gasped, likewise engulfed, “I love you more than life itself...”
Chapter 4
Nobody cared much when the old Mermaid Club finally closed its doors in nineteen eighty-seven, but the editor of New York Magazine sent a junior reporter out to interview the owner for a sidebar to their feature on the death of Coney Island.
The old club was a sad sight, though, when the elderly owner unlocked the big brass-fronted doors and led the young rookie inside. The bar had been closed for years after the licensing board revoked the liquor licence in the seventies, and the dance floor was scratched and dusty, its once polished parquet covered in rickety chairs in front of the patched cinema screen that dominated the tiny stage, the floor littered in old Kleenex and condom wrappers.
The young reporter looked around her with barely concealed disgust, as though wading through the sewers of human sordidness, and the old woman who was showing her round laughed softly, a frail tragic sound like the dying sigh of a broken Victorian automation.
“It’s not much now, is it, Baby Doll?” she said, as though addressing someone else now long departed, “but you should have seen it when we bought it in nineteen-forty. The old owner, Mr Tonelli, he was retiring and he sold it to my friend and me. Cause quite a stir in them days, two frails running a club...”
“And now?”
“And now it’s finally over,” the old lady sighed. “It’s only been the cinema these last ten years, anyway, and even that’s not needed now. They have their own tapes that they watch at home. Funny, ain’t it.”
The reporter shrugged and looked longingly at the shards of sunlight that streamed through a crack in the big double doors that faced the ocean.
“Nineteen thirty-one,” the old lady said quietly, “that’s the year it all began for us. You look like a good girl, Baby Face, will you do something for an old woman?”
The journalist nodded, in spite of herself.
“There’s something I want you to see here before they tear this place down,” the bent old figure said, “will you watch it right through? You promise me?”
The girl nodded again and the old woman seemed satisfied. She threw a switch on an ancient movie projector that stood on a shaky stand beside them and the old machine grumbled into life, throwing the image of two naked girls blowing bubbles onto the faded silver screen.
The reporter watched them transfixed, conscious of the sparkle of love and happiness in their bright young eyes, and turned to the owner as the little film faded to its close.
“They’re beautiful,” she whispered, “who are they?”
But she was alone in he dusty club and her only answer was the slap-slap of the finished film rotating on the take-up spool and the weary whir of the projector’s tired motor...
Beach Photographer
She walked the promenade each day in her red blazer and white flannels, oblivious to the giggles of the girls in their summer dresses who came down for the week to squawk and shriek and make big eyes at boys. Married women treated her more kindly, though, and posed with their children for her, their big maternal breasts heavy under their swimsuits as they stood ankle deep in the lazy water, their progeny gathered around them in smiling clusters.
Cindy remembered them all with affection, every laughing group, every goose pimple on every fat thigh, every grain of sand that clung to wet swimsuits on white bodies shivering in the breeze as the endless processions of donkeys trudged up and down the crowded noisy beach. It was as though her brain was a storehouse for everything her camera saw, and she would watch, smiling, as the images she already knew faded into being in her developing tray under safe red light of her darkroom.
Cindy loved being a beach photographer, loved strutting along the seafront in her blazer and creased white flannels, her prized Rolleiflex slung nonchalantly around her neck as she walked, chanting the patter they had taught her at the Snappy Snaps training course. “Photograph, Lady? Keep the memory alive on the dark winter nights? Record the kiddies growing up? Come on now, Love, only one and a tanner, hardly more than the price of an ice cream. Do it now and I’ll have it for you in the morning. Where you staying, Mrs Brown’s? Not a problem, Dear, deliver it while you’re still at breakfast. That’s lovely, stand together now, oh, now that is lovely, all together now, cheese!”
Snappy Snaps provided the film and the chemicals and photo paper and took two thirds of what she made. Each week a man from head office came down to inspect her and tally up the books, counting the negatives and the print sales and taking the money, leaving her with fresh supplies and the rent paid. She had leased a tiny flat for the season, down at the far end of the north prom where the wreckage of the old pier stood like a rotten teeth in the waves, and the landlady turned a blind eye to the smell of chemicals and the strange red light in the linen cupboard she had converted for her nightly use.
But tonight was Friday and the families had all gone in for tea, the scent of fish and chips wafting from every boarding house along the central prom. Monday it was pie and mash, Wednesday boiled ham salad, but Friday was always fish and chips with tined plums and custard to follow and a chocolate biscuit with the evening mug of tea, a special treat to end the holiday on a high note and ward off the thought of getting up next morning and catching the early train back to Manchester.
Cindy sighed and walked slowly along the deserted front. She didn’t do too much business on a Friday night on account of everyone going home on the mor
row, but she had counted the taking and things were good this week and there was enough to send off for the new lens she’d been saving up for plus half a crown to spare for her copy of Photo World from the newsagents.
Cindy loved Photo World and longed for the day when she would peel back the cover and see her name under the list of contributors, and she had printed up some of her best shots and pasted them onto the pages of old copies with her name written in neatly below; but for now all she had were the polite rejection slips from the picture editor. We thank you for sending this excellent image to Photo World but...
Once a man had contracted her to take some “private” photographs and she had assembled her lamps at his flat on the South Shore Road, snapping the voluptuous bodies of brittle girls who had come up from Liverpool, their painted nails like claws and their eyes as dead as the fish the men landed at the pier each morning before the holiday-makers came out to play. She had taken her client the prints the next morning, still damp at the edges from where she had sat up all night in the darkroom, the girls’ bodies transformed into undulating plains of light and shade, but the man had been annoyed and hadn’t paid her.
“No, no, no,” he’d said, throwing her work back down on the coffee table, “I wanted tits and arses, Lass, not all this art stuff. Lads in the forces buy these pictures to jerk off to when they’re away from home, no-one’s going to tug themselves off over these. This is a waste of my money, Lass, a waste, and now I’m going to have to pay those girls’ train fare to come up again. I knew I should have got a lad to do these...”
She had the photographs still, the negatives carefully preserved between sheets of crisp tissue paper, the prints neatly labelled in an album discretely marked “figure studies”. She also had some other images, though, pictures that she hadn’t deemed suitable at the time, where the models’ carefully shaved bodies had revealed more than they should have, where rebellious nipples had poked up or languid labia hung down.
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