by Alison Tyler
Next time I was within earshot while she was on the phone, she was speaking in Norwegian—but doing a dance I nonetheless recognized, which could be summarized as follows: I really ought to get going now…but I don’t want to be abrupt…and I’d honestly rather keep chatting with you than return to whatever’s on my desk…so I’ll sort of circle around signing off, while letting this friendly conversation extend itself. This subtext was conveyed to me through rhythm and tone of voice only, as Vibeke wound down—yet didn’t—her call with a buddy or sibling or European art-world comrade.
Finally, after saying one last thing in her native tongue, she added, “Because it is Friday,” in her contraction-light English—following that word Friday with a brief, happy laugh that sounded to me like white wine and weekend sex, before saying “Okay, bye,” and hanging up.
Though there were actually other people in the vicinity—I’d arrived closer to five-thirty that day—I doubted anyone would have registered what had transpired. So in the weeks to come, I would view my textured memory of Vibeke’s Friday laugh as a kind of private treasure in my personal museum.
We were alone as usual, however, on the day she nearly knocked me over—literally, physically almost bowled me over. I had a habit of cornering too tightly and too quickly from room to room, while Vibeke’s museum had a thermostat whose adjustment required ducking out of sight around one of the aforementioned corners. With the adjustment made, the curator sprang efficiently into the doorway, just as the patron sailed blithely into her path. Unlike in the classic “meet cute” collision, Vibeke and I (a) had already met, and (b) were both conscientiously looking where we were going. It was simply that we were going there too fast. And as we headed toward this unplanned bodily intimacy we were in fact looking, with helpless surprise, right at each other’s faces—which felt intimate in itself, in the instant I had to process it.
My reflex was to stick my hands up and block her from slamming into me. With Vibeke standing a couple of inches taller, this had the unintentional effect of sending my palms straight for her breasts, which luxuriated within her neckline as if lounging in a hammock. But Vibeke’s reflexes were as sharp as my own, and her hands braced my elbows in time to keep that particular contact from being made. Her gaze met mine with concern—it had frightened her to think she’d nearly run me down—and her solicitousness felt like worry, not for a stranger, but for a friend. I was, her eyes told me, a familiar presence in her realm, perhaps even a presence she valued.
I smiled. Her eyes relaxed and then drifted down to the small gap between her chest and my fingers, where the action had frozen. She released my elbows, looked at my face again, and laughed. The tension dissipated in a grab bag of “sorrys,” relieved giggles and “are you okays?”. I had an erection.
“I am very careful of my paintings,” she quipped, “but I should be more careful toward my visitors.”
“My” visitors. At last, she had claimed me.
The incident also offered us the seed of that precious commodity, the in-joke. An in-joke that, if nurtured properly, could ripen into that even more precious commodity, the running joke—a ritual that would grant the laughter Vibeke and I conjointly enjoyed a unique, relationship-specific flavor.
And so, on my next visit, I said, “Be sure to ring a warning bell before you adjust the thermostat, now.” And a week after that, when I’d been away for a few days on business, she acknowledged my return with, “Welcome back, Mr. Thermostat.” I relished the mutational whimsy whereby I had become the thermostat…and yet, I noted, there was sense in the nonsense—because Vibeke did indeed dial my temperature upward.
One day, by the mere good fortune of reversing my normal route through the galleries, I had the privilege of watching her hang a painting. She straightened the new acquisition, then stepped back and sighed, evidently moved anew by its beauty, her professional crispness melting as the miniature emotional orgasm of art appreciation overcame her for an instant.
I wondered if it had made her panties wet; then I wondered what kind of panties we were talking about, above the char-coal-pencil stockings that shaded up into the vanishing point beneath her ass-aware black skirt.
She caught me looking at her while she looked at the canvas. “Such a perfect little seascape,” she commented, graciously indicating I was welcome to share this moment.
“Yes,” I agreed heartily. “You know, I’m a software developer these days…but I actually did a master’s in art, and my thesis touched on these sorts of Italian Riviera scenes.”
“Oh, that is terrific. Perhaps you would like to do a presentation sometime? Here, under my auspices?”
Needless to say, under her auspices was precisely where I wanted to do a presentation.
And what lovely auspices she had. I was certain of this, though the skirt showed me only the general outlines, and left it to my mind to envision the detailed contours. This, naturally, was an assignment my mind was quite content to tackle, again and again: depicting Vibeke’s auspices, and what it would be like to frolic under them.
“You should email me if you would like to schedule your talk,” she continued. Then she laughed. “In the afternoon, please. I am always greeted by great sheaves of European email when I arrive in the morning.” Apparently, to this expert in objects of two dimensions that miraculously evoke three, even electronic communications had a palpability, and I adored that. Meanwhile, I swallowed an internal “ooh la la” at the absurdly titillating overtones I invested in the words “European email.”
“I suppose that’s the disadvantage of being on the sleepy side of the Atlantic,” I said. She chuckled liberally at my turn of phrase. The laughter breathed out of her mouth like courtesy overwhelmed with delight.
“You come here every day,” she said. It was not expressed as a challenge or a puzzle; it was simply an observation.
“I try to.” I explained about the five-thirty quitting time and the six-twenty train.
“Before today, I did not know you were a scholar of art. But of course I knew you were a lover of art. After all, one does not come to the galleries for sweets or for kisses.”
Though the clipboard in her hands suggested she was in midtask, she made no move toward resuming whatever task it was. She lingered there with me in her southern gallery, her lips holding the pose that the unexpected word kisses had left them with.
I stared at her as I heard my voice tremble out. “Where, then, does one go for…the kisses?”
Vibeke blinked, smiling more warmly now. “Even in a museum, there is the office. Yes?”
Yes. What better place to flourish under Vibeke’s auspices than in Vibeke’s office?
As she ushered me in, her right nipple making deals with my left shoulder blade, I observed that her sanctum included a couch, out of sight from the foyer. The room smelled like hot chocolate.
She closed the door and turned me toward her, with firm slender fingers on my shoulders. The promised kisses came down from her lips to mine, and I thought how wonderful it was that she stood taller.
I placed my hands on her bottom and pulled her in closer.
My squeezes found response, not only in her body but in her conversation. She had a way with a rhetorical question, I learned: “It could be said that the bottom, in a sense, is everything, could it not?”
I squeezed hers harder. “And yet you display none of them in your museum,” I whispered playfully.
“So true. But I will display this one, for you. Then you, I suspect, will reciprocate. I think it will suffice?”
In a moment she was posed before the sofa with her back turned. She unzipped her skirt, and I saw black bikini panties zoom down with the outer garment, an underwear passenger on an express elevator.
Her ass, now bared, exceeded my high expectations. Rounder, nobler, and unimaginably harmonious with her hips, Vibeke’s bottom seemed at once classically callipygian and utterly distinctive: no buttock globes, I was sure, had curved along exactly those trajectori
es, ever before. No specialist, whether art historian or calculus professor, could possibly demonstrate otherwise.
Yes, to use her idiom, it “sufficed,” all right. Sufficed to suffuse me with—well, I’ll call it happiness. I more or less threw myself at her feet, clasping her calves, kissing the indentations behind her knees, and gazing up at the landscape of her derriere. How could something so precise in form be sculpted from such softness? I freed my cock from my trousers.
I studied Vibeke’s ass even more closely. Symmetry being overrated, she sported a singularly fetching dimple along the southern border of her left buttock. If you can imagine Vibeke’s bottom as a smoothed out—very smoothed out—and idealized—very idealized—map of Ohio, the dimple would be in the neighborhood of Cincinnati.
Still on my knees, I straightened my torso so I could reach and lick the undersides of her cheeks. Her pussy was fragrant—beautifully fragrant in my face now, as she parted her thighs and asserted the jut of her derriere, pressing its convexity against my mouth.
As Vibeke responded to the buttock love, I couldn’t tell if her repeated staccato syllable was an English “yeah” or a Norwegian “ja.” Either one worked for me. But when I stood up and began to explore her slippery cunt entrance with my finger, she shifted to a soft, pan-linguistic cooing. Her thighs shifted, too, as she centered her nerves around the nucleus of sensation we were crafting for her.
I moved my right hand toward her clit while I fucked her with my left. But Vibeke grabbed my fingers and guided them back to her right cheek, using my digits to grope her own bottom flesh. Then she licked her finger and proceeded to take care of her clitty, while I tickled her cunt and fondled and slapped her behind. We wallowed in the bliss of this steady state for as long as she could stand the pleasure…and then Vibeke clenched, squealed, came, stammered, squirted and shrieked.
She clutched my angled cock while soliciting my feelings about the next installment. “May I enjoy your ass before we fuck? I mean, you will wait for the shagging while I pleasure your buns?”
I nodded, and she fished her panties out of her skirt and handed them over. “Here, you wrap your dick in these while I touch you. The silk for your cock, and the leather for your thighs.” She directed me onto the leather couch.
I’d never before had my buttocks celebrated. But there I was, facedown with my cock besilked and my trousers and shorts furled halfway down my legs, and Vibeke—sweet, warm, bare-bottomed Vibeke—seated on my upper thighs and massaging my ass with a passion.
I’d long been conscious of—or shall we say obsessed by—the bottom as a highly erogenous zone for many women, a theme that Vibeke had so pleasingly illustrated. But damned if I’d ever realized how erogenously sensitive my ass was. The sustained attention of a woman’s hands over my buns—all over them—was exquisite. At least it was exquisite here, in the context of Vibeke’s obvious enthusiasm for the spare, firm terrain of my butt. With every pinch, pat and caress, my ultra-aroused cock twitched into the cool silk on the leather cushion, and my thigh muscles answered the curator’s fervor by tensing libidinously against the roundnesses of her own glorious derriere.
Soon I became aware that my ass was now getting a one-handed massage—and that Vibeke was ja- or yeah-ing her way to another orgasm, her fingers playing her clit and pussy so energetically that the hairs on my ass could sense the motion. I held back from coming, but, oh my, Vibeke did not; I felt her whole body shaking atop me. Afterward, she kissed a dozen places on my buttcheeks—feverishly, lovingly. I’d never known anything like it.
She grinned with satisfaction when she rolled me over, and licked her lips at my readiness. She eased herself onto me with a slow grace, and I articulated my ecstasy in a raw, lustful sob.
Then she went wild: bouncing on my shaft, nudging her mound against me on the downstrokes, working me thoroughly and vigorously…ravening on me without inhibition, and with a clear intention of making me spurt quickly and uncontrollably—which I did. She frigged herself on me as I lost myself in the release, and through my orgasmic haze I watched her eyes climax.
Vibeke said she’d use her en suite bathroom to clean up, while I stumbled out to the public men’s room. Yet when I returned, I found her seated on the office floor—her back against the couch, her knees spread wide, her long fingers in her juicy hole. She looked up when she saw me, and I fumbled for speech.
“Oh. Didn’t you—did I—should we—?”
“No, it is all good,” she affirmed. “I always take an extra one afterward.” She blushed. “A private one.”
I nodded my blessing—not that she required it. And with landscapes and still lifes at my back, I blew an au revoir kiss to the only woman in the world.
“Yes, I will see you here tomorrow, Mr. Thermostat,” said Vibeke. Her fingers waved at me from between her open thighs.
ICE-CREAM BOY AND SPRINKLE GIRL
Kathryn O’Halloran
Every night at this time I hear the music, at first barely audible over the noise of the cicadas, then growing louder and louder until it stops just outside my house. Calling me to it. Weakening my resolve.
He stops here every night, even though it is the last house on the street. After this, it’s only parkland and nothing, the very edge of the city. He stops, even though there are no children on this street and the only potential customer is me. He sits there, playing his music, trying to lure me out.
The first few times I was easily tempted. I didn’t know then. But he’d look down on me, his floppy fringe falling in his face, and ask me what flavor I wanted. I’d look up at him in his tight T-shirt, and I’d think You, you are the flavor I want.
He is Asian. I think Korean. His face is slightly feminine but his body taut and strong. Not hard in the way that most white boys I’ve dated are hard but sleek and slim despite the muscles. He wears a smudge of eyeliner and his long hair tied back in a ponytail, and he has the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen. He looks like a prince. An Asian prince.
I wonder if this is a vacation job for him while he studies literature or music or something faintly exotic. Maybe he’s a hipster, driving an ice-cream van in a totally ironic way. Or it’s his parents’ ice-cream van and he’s forced to help out over the summer. I think about him a lot.
I think about how those arms would feel if I ran my fingers along them. I think about the softness of his shiny hair. I think mostly about his bottom lip, so lush and full of possibilities. I wonder what he looks like from the waist down because I never get to see that part of him.
But, in reality, I do nothing. I take my ice cream and pay him in coins and run back inside like a scared little wimp cursing myself for not making a move. Until I stop going out altogether rather than deal with my failure. I sit inside typing fantasies about him while he idles outside. My fingers hit the keys but my mind goes other places until he gives up and drives away. Then I delete everything I’ve written because it makes no sense.
The fading sound of his tinny music taunts me as he leaves.
But not tonight. It’s the end of summer and soon he won’t come to my street. Already the days have reached that peak of heat where they feel like they are going to burst open.
Even though I’ve just showered, I’m already sweaty again. Summer is like that around here. The humidity so thick you feel like you can drink it in. I’ve dressed for the occasion in a singlet top that is so very low cut. When I stand at the window of his van, he’ll have no choice but to look down into my cleavage and then, I imagine, it will all go smoothly from there.
I wait for him to come closer, the music calling me through the night and the cicadas going crazy. Some cars and the distant notes of a television. And him.
At last, I hear the van stop. I wait, just in case tonight, for once, someone else decides to come out, but I am impatient too. I don’t want him to drive off before I work up the courage to go out. I watch from behind the curtains until I can’t stand it any longer.
When I open the front door,
I hesitate for a second, but the mosquitoes swarm fiercely around the front light ready to attack. A breeze stirs up scents of jasmine and magnolia and honeysuckle. The sky glows purple and red. And in front of me I see the bluish light from the van.
I watch him as I cross the lawn, framed in the window of the van. He’s in the shadows so I can’t see the expression on his face. Has he been waiting for me to come out? Is that why he drives down here every night?
Around him, painted peaks of soft serve rise up from the candy pink, looking vaguely dirty as though some kind of sexual connotations could be applied to them. I’m not sure what. Even if you put air quotes around “soft serve” and add a cheeky wink, it’s not going to get anyone hot.
He has changed his hair. It’s slightly shorter and a lighter color. It bounces in waves around his face. I wonder if he’s had a perm. He’s also wearing more eyeliner than usual. These are things I have been raised to believe are effeminate and unappealing in a man. I look at him and they are as appealing as all fuck.
At the side of the window, the menu lists an array of ice-cream options. I pretend I am deciding even though I always have the same thing. I adjust the elastic in my hair, screwing up my face with indecision. What does my choice say about me? Boring? Childish? Dumb?
I ask for a standard vanilla cone.
“Sprinkles?” he asks.
I pause. Do I? I want sprinkles. I want sprinkles of his man-love. I want sprinkles of his hands all over me. I want sprinkles of… I nod my head.
He hands me the ice cream and I wrap my lips around the soft-top curl. I scoop it and flatten the top then twirl my tongue along the sculpted curves. I flick the rainbow-colored sprinkles off and look up at him through my lashes, hoping he is enthralled, then slowly work my tongue from the bottom of the soft-serve mountain to the very top in one smooth movement.
“You have sprinkles on your nose,” he says.
And my dreams dissolve. I realize I can never be a temptress. I’m no vixen, no femme fatale. I’m a woman with sprinkles on my nose.