by Sacchi Green
In a moment, they will both turn to me, wanting to demonstrate their gratitude that I am their Daddy, that I take care of their desires, and provide for their pleasure. I will allow them to service me with their sticky fingers, their ripe mouths. I will accept the caresses of my boi, and of my girl, and I will accept the offerings of their bodies, surrendering to mine. After I’ve been pleasured, I know we will sleep, all together, Nisrine in my arms, Miki at my feet. I could get used to sharing a bed with my boi and girl.
GARGOYLE LOVERS
Sacchi Green
I’m siingin’ in the raaiin…” But that song was from the wrong Gene Kelly movie, and it wasn’t quite raining, and I was only whistling. My speaking voice gets me by, but singing blows the whole presentation.
Hal glanced down, her face stern in that exaggerated way that makes me tingle in just the right places. I shoved my hands into my pockets, skipped a step or two, and knew she felt as good as I did. Hal’s hardly the type to dance through the Paris streets like Gene Kelly, especially across square cobblestones, but there was a certain lilt to her gait.
Or maybe a swagger. “That pretty-boy waiter was all over you,” I said slyly. A gay guy making a pass always makes her day. “And giving me dirty looks every chance he got!”
“Lucky for you I’m not cruising for pretty boys, then. But don’t give me too much lip or I might change my mind.”
I couldn’t quite manage penitence, but at least I knew better than to remind her that she already had a pretty boy, for better or worse. Still, some punishment games would be a fine end to the evening. Last night we’d been too jet-lagged to take proper advantage of the Parisian atmosphere. “That maître d’ with a beak like a gargoyle was sure eyeing me, too, especially from behind.” I gave another little skip.
Hal ignored the bait. “Thought you’d had your fill of gargoyles today.” A cathedral wouldn’t have been her first choice for honeymoon sightseeing, but the mini-balcony of our rental apartment had a stupendous view of Notre-Dame de Paris. I’d oohed and ahhed about gargoyles over our croissants and café au lait, so she’d humored me and we’d taken the tour.
To tell the truth, being humored by Hal unnerved me a bit. I didn’t want being married to make a difference in our relationship. The fact that she’d shooed me out of that sex toy shop in Montmartre while she made a purchase was reassuring, but just in case, I decided I could manage some genuine penitence after all.
I hung my head and peered up at her slantwise. “I know I was a real pain. I can’t figure out what it is about gargoyles that just gets to me. They’re sort of scary, but not really, and sort of sad, and some of them are beautiful in a weird kind of way.” Just as Hal was, but I’d never say so. “I’m sorry I went on about them like that.”
“What makes you think they’re sad? Just because their butts are trapped in stone?” She was trying to suppress a grin. I felt better.
“Well, I’d sure hate that, myself!”
That got me the squeeze on my ass I’d been angling for. “I’d rather have these sweet cheeks accessible,” she said. The squeeze got harder than I’d bargained for, startling me into a grimace.
She eased off with a slow stroke between my thighs. “You should’ve seen your face just now. Could be there’s something like that going on with the gargoyles. Not rage, or fear, or pain at all—unless it’s pain so delicious it makes them howl with lust.”
I was awestruck. Hal is generally the blunt, taciturn type, but I love it when her wicked imagination bursts forth. Almost as much as I love the vulnerability that once in a while gives an extra gruffness to her voice.
She was on a roll now, face alight like a gleeful demon’s. A lovable demon. “There’s somebody hidden behind the stone, in another dimension, or time, or whatever, giving the gargoyle the fucking of its life. A reaming so fine it’s been going on for centuries.”
“Yes!” I was very nearly speechless. To lean out high above Paris, in the sun, wind and rain of eons, my face forever twisted in a paroxysm of fierce joy while Hal’s thrusts filled me eternally with surging pleasure…
A few drops of rain began to fall, but that wasn’t what made us hurry across the Pont de Saint-Louis. The great ornate iron gates at our apartment building had given me fantasies that morning of being chained, spread-eagled, against them, but now I rushed across the cobblestoned courtyard and through the carved oak door, so turned on that the four flights of stairs inside scarcely slowed me down—which might also have been because Hal’s big hand on my butt was hurrying me along.
At our apartment, though, she held me back while she opened the door. “Over-the-threshold time. It’ll be more official when we get back home, but this will have to do for now.”
So I entered the room slung over Hal’s shoulder, kicking a little for balance, until she dumped me amongst the red and gold brocade cushions on the couch. They went tumbling off as I struggled to get my pants lowered.
“Not here,” she mused. “Maybe up there?” There was a sturdy railing across the loft that held the king-sized bed.
“Out there! Please?” The balcony was really only a space where the French windows were set back into the wall about a foot, but there was an intricate iron fence along the edge, and with the windows wide open it had felt like balcony enough at breakfast time.
“Can you be quiet as a gargoyle?”
“You can gag me.”
“No. I want to see your face.” Hal pulled open the windows, grabbed the bag from the sex toy store, heaved me up, and the next minute I was kneeling on the balcony and clutching the fence.
She moved aside a couple of pots of geraniums and tested the fence for strength and anchoring. “This would take even my weight,” she muttered. In seconds she’d fastened my wrists to the railing with brand new bonds that looked uncannily like chains of heavy iron links, even though they weren’t hard as metal and had just a hint of stretch to them. “Feel enough like a gargoyle?”
“Mm-hm.” I was drifting into a space I’d never known before. Lights from the Quai D’Anjou below and the quais across the Seine were reflected on the dark river, flickering like ancient torches as the water rippled past. Even the lights of modern Paris on the far bank took on a mellow glow that could have fit into any century.
“Hold that thought.” Hal backed away into the room. I scarcely heard the rustling of the shop bag or the running of water in the bathroom. Then she was back, soundlessly, a dark looming presence that might have been made of stone.
The night air drew me into its realm. I leaned out over the railing as far as my bonds would allow, my butt raised high. Then Hal had one arm around my waist, holding me steady, while her other hand probed into my inner spaces that she knew so well. Need swelled inside me and shuddered through my body, catching in my throat as strangled, guttural groans. My face twisted with the struggle not to make too much noise, my mouth gaped open and my head flailed back and forth.
A whimper escaped when her hand withdrew, and so did a short, sharp bleat as something new replaced it; smooth, lubed, not quite familiar, not any of Hal’s gear I’d felt before. I heard her heavy breathing, felt her thrusts and lost all sense of anything beyond the moment, anything beyond our bodies. A scream started forcing its way up through my chest and throat.
Just in time, Hal snapped open the bonds on my wrists, lifted me from behind and lurched with me across the plump back of the couch. With a rhythm accelerating like a Parisienne’s motorbike she finished me off, then found her own slower, deep pace, and her own release. I could still barely breathe, but I managed to twist my neck enough to see her contorted face at that moment. Yes, magnificently beautiful in its own feral way.
In the aftermath we curled together, laughing when she showed me the new gargoyle-faced dildo slick with my juices. “Those French don’t miss a trick when it comes to tourists,” I said.
Hal grew quiet. I thought she was dozing, but after a while she cleared her throat. “Those French…” Her voice was unus
ually gruff. She tried again. “They claim to be tops in the lover department, too, I’ve heard. But I’ve got the best deal in the whole world with you. The best lover…” She stroked my still-simmering pussy. “The prettiest boy…” She touched my cheek. “The best wife… And the wildest gargoyle in all of France.”
I remembered her face just minutes ago, and knew that the last part wasn’t true. Still, the wisest response seemed to be a kiss that moved eventually from her mouth along her throat, and lower, and lower, with more daring than I’d ever risked before; eventual proof that the best lover part, at least, was absolutely certain.
HER GARDENER’S BOY
D. Orchid
I bit my lip, nodding my head to the beat of my own quick pulse as I forced myself to sit reasonably still and watch the western garden wall for signs of my usual summer visitor. The early afternoon sun warmed my skin, the smooth wooden slats of the park-like bench pressed neat dents into my rear end, and I wondered if she’d be different this time. Would she ring the bell out front instead, like a university type should? Like what my mum called a “proper lady?” Would she even come at all?
I was clean enough, I thought, had run fingers through my cropped-short hair, and left the glass door open with only the screen pulled shut, separating our garden from the house, just in case she came by way of the front door. She never had, of course, but she could and I didn’t want to miss her. It might be her first time inside the actual house since she’d come calling years ago when freedom from parental eyes was still new to us both. Looking down at me from the wall she’d scaled from outside, she’d asked, rather more confidently than I could manage, “Who are you? And what on earth are you doing to those flowers?”
Though I could never quite retrieve the thoughts I had in those early moments, somehow I let her stay and she decided to come back every summer afternoon that she could get away. I listened and I learned and I’d never worried in the interim that she might not return.
Now, however, with a year of uni in her pocket, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My thighs were tight with tension, ready to spring toward the door or just pace about the garden, siphoning off the energy that trickled out in my mindless rocking and the near-obsessive way I strained at every sound. Was that a knock? Footsteps? That brushing? What could that be?
When I finally saw tan fingers gripping the top of the wall beside tossed-up thin-strapped sandals, I knew everything I needed to let me breathe, to free my lip from the rein of my teeth and curve my mouth into a smile of relief. Her arm and leg, head and torso, came into view, hugging the wall, and the sunlight striking my face turned my shadowed doubts into harmless flecks of dust floating in the air between us. She sat up on the wall as if it were the queen’s throne itself and grinned at me like I was the whole of England.
I swore for a moment that someone had buttered my heart and put it in the oven to bake like cookies. Had it gotten this hot in the span of three blinks? Maybe it had.
When she worked her way down the inside of the wall, however, deftly avoiding anything that might snag her flowing skirt, I didn’t have to be told to rise. As she strode my way, sandals swinging in the crook of her fingers, I was already on my feet, beaming back at her like it had been more than just nine months between our last visit and now.
Even curvier and stronger of arm than I remembered, Aniah was tall and radiantly olive-toned with dark hair that still shined enough to draw my gaze when her own arresting deep-brown eyes let mine go. Her gravitational pull even had me leaning forward, like the planets in my da’s telescope. So I asked myself, for what felt like the hundredth time, why I bothered with my mum’s social experiments during the year.
Putting on nice pants, suffering a curling iron in my hair and letting a boy from across the river take me out did not a “proper girl” make me. Nor did it make me want to “soften up,” as mum suggested, entirely too regularly, as if smothering me with pink lace would snuff out the rougher bits and only leave “an eligible young miss” for her to court out to every son-of-a-friend who’d take me off her hands. The fact that I was stuck in the house even after my final exam year just made me more adamant about it all, though, not less. It was why I’d waited this afternoon, why I’d hoped and why I’d work on my knees in the dirt for this eccentric girl—woman, now—who climbed over my garden wall each summer.
Her eyes slid over my sun-battered face, my T-shirt with a fraying collar, my rolled-up-cuff overalls and my already-dirty kicks, and her smile never wavered. All she said was: “You look ready to work, boy. Am I correct?”
“Yes, miss.” I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin, ready and waiting for orders. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to be a real boy. When she was here, this was her garden and I was just her gardener’s boy.
“Well then,” Aniah said with a gorgeous smirk draped across her lips and a sparkle of fun in her eyes, “about these rose bushes…”
Her voice and the implicit arrangement she hadn’t forgotten or tossed aside sent the swirl of worry and want in my stomach surging up to smack me in the chest, my breath pressing out all at once. “Yes, miss.” I nodded, trying to remember to draw new air in and let it out again, tipping my head toward the row of pink flowering bushes near the bench. “Those there?”
“Yes.” She pursed her lips as she assessed the bushes and then me again, a curious quirk in her eyebrow that I couldn’t quite decipher. “It’s a good place to start. I want to see your work up close today.”
“Is that so?” I didn’t have a hat to tip, but I nodded again, something more like a bow, and stepped aside to allow her to walk up to the bench before I bent to retrieve the gloves and tools I’d brought out from the shed. “A trim then, miss?”
“Yes,” she said, as perfect as a painter’s model, upright and yet somehow relaxed on the bench with her head tilted to regard the bushes in question. “Make them shapely, like bowls, a bit more rounded.”
I went to them and down on my knees beside them, but found myself waiting again for some reason.
“Go ahead. I trust you.” She nudged me gently with her toes, her voice soft and encouraging in ways that made warmth swim across my shoulders, knowing her eyes were taking in the curve of my back.
I twisted around to lift my eyes to hers, unsure how to tell her I was grateful that, even after her first year really quite far away, she’d come back to…be with me this way. It didn’t quite feel like play anymore, like when we were children and youths, but I wanted it, needed it, all the same.
Her smile turned knowing, her eyes like crystalized syrup, flashing nature’s sweetness at me. “Is there a problem, boy?”
“No, miss.” I shook my head. “I’ll do it however you like. Whatever you like.” Not just these bushes, I meant, though I couldn’t explain that all out loud. This garden, or me, or the world. In that moment, I might have meant them all.
“Yes.” She nodded, a more serious and thoughtful expression on her face than I’d seen before, her voice still soft but firmer somehow, as if she’d considered this all a long time ago. “However I like and whatever I like.”
My heart skidded with her eyes on me like that and even fully clothed, I felt like my skin was bare to her eyes. The stirring summer wind wasn’t enough to cool the fire she left burning there.
“Now get to it, boy. We’ll talk later.”
Work first, I knew that, and I lowered my eyes respectfully. “Yes, miss.”
Starting my work and continuing it about the garden as directed was as thrilling as always, maybe more so, and I felt sure my pulse was going to dance its way out of my skin when she rose from her customary seat to start walking about the garden as I moved from place to place. She strolled past me here and there, her skirts brushing my clothing in ways that made me worry on occasion that they would get dirty, though I said nothing of my thoughts to her. It was her garden right then and she could do as she liked.
When she began to run her fingers through my short but layered hair whi
le I worked, however, I froze at first, unsure of myself, unsure of her. She had only ever touched me, even just playfully, when we were both ensconced on the bench, just two youths murmuring to each other about funny stories and oddball parents. Her touches were always fond, but this was… out of routine. I didn’t know what that meant.
“Boy, am I distracting you?”
I took a breath, but shook my head, resuming the work of setting a growing plant into its new home in the sparsest patch of the garden. “No, miss.”
It wasn’t just my hair, however, and as the moments went by and I moved from task to task, she touched my cloth-covered shoulders, slid fingers down my arm, brushed her thumb against my nape and even traced the curve of my ear until I shuddered and really did have trouble concentrating. It made me realize what was different about these touches. They were no less fond than they’d been in the summer before, but she touched me now as she did the real inhabitants of the garden, the lilacs and roses, the hydrangeas, the leafy ferns.
She touched me like I was a prized part of her garden and like she had every right to run her fingers over anywhere on me she found smooth or rough or just interesting. Because I was here, as true as the small trees that had been growing since our earliest days together, and because when she walked the stone paths here, she was mistress of this garden. Every inch belonged to her and that also seemed to mean every inch of me.
When she finally had me stop for the day, my heartbeat fluttered in my chest and along every expanse of skin that she had touched. Every inch under my clothes where her fingers left a trail sparked with heat. I could even feel traces of her in all the places that I’d hoped or feared she would touch, even if she never did. Standing to face her as instructed was surreal, the flush deep in my cheeks, and I couldn’t have raised my eyes to meet hers even if I’d wanted to. I wasn’t wholly embarrassed exactly, but I was something, something hot and wondrous, something I both wanted more of and wasn’t sure I could handle.