“I want to try it.”
Quietly he nods. There are a hundred things he could say, but he holds them all back. I love him for that.
We collect light fleece jackets, but they’re not really needed because the night is mild despite the gentle breeze. From inside the kitchen it looks pitch black out there. Callum opens the door and holds out his hand for me. I grab on, holding him tight as we move outside.
In ten years, I’ve not once been outside in the dark on my own. Not to catch a bus or visit the mailbox on the street; not even to push the bins down to the end of the drive for collection. We keep the car in the garage and I access it from the side door into the house: I can drive out to places on my own, but I can’t step from the safety of the driver’s seat once I’ve parked unless there’s someone friendly there to meet me. Even that makes my pulse race and my skin crawl. Now, right now, with my hand in Callum’s firm grip, I can feel the night sniffing at me like a great black beast wondering whether to take a bite. I feel it tasting me, the flutter of the night breeze like the lap of a cool tongue on my prickling flesh.
“You okay?” he murmurs.
I nod, not answering.
“Tell me if you want to go back.”
“I will.”
It’s not so dark though, as it looked from inside. And as soon as we step away from the house and let our eyes adjust, the landscape around us starts to emerge dimly. This is late May, not a black midwinter night: even at eleven there is a faint glow in the sky, and the stars look fuzzy. The moon has risen, backlighting the clouds, and the dark cutouts of the hills and hedgerows are silhouetted against the paler backdrop of the heavens. From the corners of my eyes, I can make out more: the webbed outline of the folded clothes pole, the humps of garden shrubs, the glimmer of that kitsch concrete sundial in the middle of the lawn.
I can smell the night-flowering stocks planted under the kitchen window and I breathe the perfume gratefully, embracing it with my body. We walk across the grass, hand in hand, past the apple trees to the stile at the bottom of the garden. “Careful,” says Callum, as he helps me over.
We found the hayfield on the first day of the holiday, when we went out exploring along the network of footpaths that leads out across the fields, down into the valleys and up through the woods and the disused quarry and eventually, over two miles away, to the village. Our hired cottage here in the West Country is beautifully isolated down a sunken lane, our nearest neighbors scattered and hidden away in folds of land. During the day we can hear the occasional noise of a car passing and sometimes the lowing of cows in the hills, but we’re not overlooked by anyone and most of the countryside is a patchwork of arable land—grass on the steep slopes, maize in the valley bottoms, blue-green sweeps of growing wheat and brilliant yellow acres of oilseed rape—so it’s quiet except for the birdsong. We love it. We walked for miles, and drove out every day to visit the coast and the little towns and the blustery moors for further walking.
The first field beyond our garden fence is all grass, left tall and ungrazed, and slopes down to the hedge of tall hawthorn and oak trees at the bottom. Yellow wildflowers grow here and there among the feathery purple seed-heads of the grass. In the dark I can’t make out any colors, but I can feel the soft brush of the hip-high grasses through my thin skirt, and just make out the dark line of the path that cuts through that pale pelt. I’ve got to be careful with my footing here, not like on the mown lawn; I walk close in Callum’s footsteps.
There’s a picture of this meadow over our bed in the cottage. I recognized the shape of the clustering hills, but there the naturalism ends. The grass is painted in fiery, aching reds and purples, as if it’s burning.
That first day here, in the middle of the afternoon, Callum took me in his arms and nuzzled up against me. “I should lay you down here in the meadow,” he growled, “and have my wicked way with you. Bring you home all pink and happy and stuck with grass-seeds.”
I giggled and pressed up against him, then was impressed to find it was not entirely a joke on his part: there was a semihard erection stirring already in his jeans. The spring sunshine, I reasoned; the start of a week off together. The isolation. “I don’t think the farmer would appreciate us flattening his hay,” I pointed out, as Callum kissed my throat.
“Mmm…” He gripped my hips, pressing both thumbs just above my pubic mound, making me squirm deliciously. “You’d love it, Leah….”
I would love it, he was right. Well, part of me. I was excited by the thought of the freedom and the impropriety, but too much of me was self-conscious. “Don’t be silly,” I giggled. “We’re overlooked here.”
“What?” He nibbled at my earlobe. “There’s no one in miles!”
“There’s a bridle-path up the hill there, under the trees. We could be seen.” I pushed him away. “Save it for the bedroom, Romeo.”
Callum sighed and bumped me against his crotch. “You’re wasting a magnificent opportunity here, you know,” he said, his lower lip thrust out boyishly.
I patted his stiffy in consolation, allowing myself a greedy fondle of his ball sac. “And it’ll still be magnificent when we get back to the cottage. I promise.”
“You expect me to walk that far with this?”
“For this,” I answered, pulling his hand down to cup my sex and speaking with my lips brushing against his, “Yeah, you’ll walk that far.”
“I’d walk to the fucking moon,” he admitted.
That was in broad daylight. Now, in the dark and nearly a week later, we stand in the same field and there’s no levity, no teasing. Sweat is crawling down the small of my back and my heart is smacking like a clenched fist against my breastbone. The night circles me and I hear its eagerness in my own shallow breathing. It’s only Callum’s warm grip that’s stopping the great dark beast from sinking its teeth into me.
For ten years I’ve been scared of the night. I close the curtains at twilight. I sleep with a bulb on in the hall and the bedroom door wide open. I won’t open the front door at all after dark.
Isn’t ten years too long?
Isn’t it enough, now?
“Callum. Just stop there.”
“Okay?”
I circle round in front of him, using him like an anchor point, and reach up to touch his face. Tight, spare flesh on his bones. A soft bristly mat of hair, all silver in this moonlight. “Just stay still, will you? Don’t speak.” Then I turn away and step out into the sea of grass, and I’m no longer touching him and all I can see is the night.
Ten years ago—more now—I was walking home through the park, and it was November and it was dark. Callum didn’t like me coming back home that route, not on my own, but I wasn’t afraid in those days. Nothing bad happened in our part of town. Nothing bad happened to us. I was almost home, actually in sight of the last road I had to cross, when from under the shadow of a tree someone stepped out behind me and grabbed me. He shoved me to the ground, bouncing my face off a rock. He wrenched the bag off my shoulder and he ran.
That was all. I should be grateful, shouldn’t I, that it wasn’t worse? My cheekbone was broken and I still have the scar where the stone cut my skin, but it’s not really that noticeable. It could have been so much worse. I ought to have shrugged it off and gotten over it, I tell myself—but I didn’t. My fear of the night grew thick and wild, out of all proportion.
The terrible thing is that I heard him. I heard the scuff of his feet as he stepped out, heard the rasp of his breath at my back. And I didn’t react. I didn’t even break into a run; I couldn’t think fast enough. I just kept walking, like ignoring it would make it not happen.
For ten years I’ve hidden from the night. At first I was ashamed of my fear, but shame doesn’t make it go away and neither does stumbling helplessly onward. Now, in this field, I stand still. And I let the night catch up with me.
The silence is vast, like the gape of jaws. It makes me feel tiny. No birdsong now, not even an owl. No traffic noise out here. Only th
e soughing of the breeze in the trees and—yes, there: the faint rumble of a plane miles overhead, right at the limit of my hearing. That breeze is just cool enough to raise my nipples to hard points under my clothes. I lift my breasts, filling my chest with that air, trying to keep my breath slow and even. The night smells clean and my nipples tingle, like stars. The skin between my shoulders prickles. I can feel Callum’s gaze upon me; I know he’s right there, though I can’t see him. He’s right there at my back, like the man under the tree was, like the night is: ready to seize me.
My hands are shaking as I lift them to the zip of my fleece. My eyes are wide, searching but blind. There’s nothing to see except the dark. Hands tug, the zip gives way. I cast the fleece aside. With ungainly movements I stoop and snatch up the hem of my dress, peeling it over my head. I hear the catch of Callum’s breath and gooseflesh explodes all over my shoulders, but he says nothing. The empty air embraces my waist and my thighs like a caress. My breasts feel huge and heavy in the night’s cool hands. My nipples rasp on the lace of my bra. Two straps—a hook—that’s off, too, thrown aside. My breasts bounce free. I spread my arms wide, letting the dark lick me all over. It’s very nearly as much as I can bear.
“Callum!” My fingers curl beseechingly.
He’s there, watching out for me. He steps up behind me and I shudder as he slips his hands around me and cups my breasts. I feel my nipples, stiff with fear and chill, jutting between his splayed fingers, and I arch in his embrace, writhing with both delight and terror. His breath is hot in my ear.
“Leah. Oh, god…” The voice is hoarse, not his, not his alone—it is the night speaking through him, strained and eager. He pinches and tugs at the points of my breasts, making all their round vulnerable warmth the captive of his hard hands. I feel a sudden gush of heat in my sex, and I press my ass back into his groin, finding the abrupt jut of his arousal.
“You’re fucking beautiful, Leah,” he groans. He only swears when he’s really turned on. Reaching one hand to his groin, he scrabbles frantically at his clothes. I feel the bite of his fly buttons against my cold bottom. Then the burning slat of his cock slaps on my cheek, rubbing up against me. He growls my name again, in my ear, and fumbles at the lace of my panties. “Want you. Want to…”
Fingers tug down my last garment, exposing me. They push into the furrow of my sex, spreading, and the night rushes in to tongue the wet flesh between. My whole body is quivering. I feel the surge in his cock as he realizes just how slick and juicy I am, and the press of his flesh makes me want to open for him and enfold it in my thighs. My mouth is making little broken gasping noises, but I manage to find one whole word: “Wait!”
His grip slackens. I slide out of it, knees folding, down the length of his torso and his legs. His belt buckle scores my back. His cock tangles in my hair and butts my turned cheek, planting its own wet kiss. Then I tip forward onto hands and knees, presenting my raised ass, bowing to the earth. My upthrust cheeks must glimmer in this light. I hear him wrench off his fleece and shirt, swearing under his breath with awe and impatience. Grass folds beneath my forearms and soft seed-heads tickle my belly. The smell of crushed greenery is sharp but I can smell myself, too, the heavy aroma of my arousal. I want him to grab me quickly, before I panic. I want him to mount me from the rear as I press my scarred cheek to the earth, among the flattened stems.
Instead, he does something he has never done in the safe and cozy confines of any house, nor in all the years we’ve been together. The night must have granted him permission; he kneels and grasps my ass and pushes his face into the cleft between my cheeks, his tongue wet and squirming on my butthole. The shock makes me squeal. Hot and cold flashes erupt through my flesh, and suddenly my fear of the dark isn’t uppermost in my mind. A warm wet tide sweeps me off my feet. He lifts me so he can press lower, raking the split of my sex with his mouth, but returns to the forbidden pucker, snuffling and sucking and thrusting with pointed tongue until the clench gives way and he’s forced my surrender. There’s this sensation, one I can’t name. If it had originated in my clit I’d call it an orgasm, but it comes from my anus so I don’t know what to call it, this tumbling thrill that cascades out from the darkest part of me, turning to light as it goes so that my fingertips blaze incandescent. I cry out, muffling my face in the cool grass, and start to sob.
I’m crying his name.
I’m just crying.
Callum lays me down on my side. He knows me well enough not to be afraid of my wild noises. I feel him kneel over me, am dimly aware of him stripping his shoes and jeans off, and then he scissors in between my thighs, his beautiful big cock that I love so much nudging its head up against my pussy, demanding entrance into the warm, wet depths. I open gratefully to its thick girth.
“Shush, love,” he tells me. “It’s okay.”
We’re naked together, fucking in the grass, in the night, in the dark.
From here I can see the grass dancing above me. I can look up and see the stars outlining Callum’s head, the shimmer of the moonlight on his pale hair and glistening brow. He sinks his left thumb into my folds, rolling my clit, and with his other hand he gets a good grip on my hip. I can see the jet-black outline of an oak canopy waving in the breeze. The hiss of the wind is all around me. The night is alive with movement. It surrounds us, poised.
I can feel my body opening up to him as his cock moves inside me. But not just opening to him. Take me, I whisper silently as his thrusts spread me wide: Come into me. I want you. I need you. Fill me. Eat me. Fuck me. I need to be fucked. I need to have you inside me. I need the dark. I need the night.
The night hears me. Callum reaches out and shoves his thumb into my mouth, wetting it on my tongue. He takes this wet back down, out of my sight, up into the split of my cheeks. There’s not much room between us but he gets a hand in somehow. He circles the moist digit about my ass, probing the softened hole and then working it inside me. My body experiences again the invasion and the terror and the yielding, the burning surrender. And all the time, Callum is drumming my clit and slapping hard up between my thighs, and I feel all the fear melt into something just as merciless, just as overwhelming. His shoulders stiffen as he sinks deeper, thrusts harder, leaning into me. His face is shadowed, the moonlight not touching it: I am being fucked by a man of darkness. I can hear the rasp of his breath—but this time it is not over my shoulder; this time I am twisting to face him and clutching at his hard body with my hands, pulling him into me, and he is coming hard and fierce, with explosive gasps.
And I let the whole of the huge and terrible night—with its wind and its darkness and the sighing trees, the stars and the cold—pour itself into me and take me for its own.
There. Callum and I have begun to remake my memories. Their landscape is the same but we have painted them in a different palette: the hues of desire instead of the cold blues and blacks of fear. Maybe once is not enough, but it’s a start. As we walk hand in hand back to the cottage the night is crazy with color, and I’m smiling.
SAME AS IT EVER WAS
Cole Riley
It was one of the worst winters the city had ever endured. More than three feet of snow fell in less than a day and more was to come. Many businesses were closed, classes were canceled and all but the essential city services were on a forced holiday. It was cold as hell.
Joanne didn’t have to go to her speech therapist job at a charter school on the city’s Lower East Side because many of the streets leading to work were completely covered with snowdrifts, concealing a thick sheet of treacherous ice underneath. That was not the case with her husband, Wayne, the head of the publicity department for a large record company. His wife couldn’t understand why he didn’t call the company and say he couldn’t make it due to the nasty weather.
“I can’t do that because I’ve got to finish the paperwork on the DJ Burn publicity tour,” Wayne said, taking off his pajama top and glancing again at the alarm clock. “If I don’t go in, the work won’t get don
e, and something could go wrong when he tours in Berlin and Munich next week. Gotta go in.”
“Can’t somebody else go in for you?” she asked, trying to find another way to keep him home. “There must be somebody closer to the city that could go in. I don’t understand why every time there’s some kind of crisis, everything falls on you. They don’t pay you enough for this kind of loyalty.”
“Joanne, it must be done,” he said, going into the bathroom.
Irked by his dedication to a job that didn’t pay nearly enough for him to go in during a blizzard, Joanne walked to the bathroom doorway and stood, watching him shave. Then he would shower quickly and drive to the parking lot to make the 8:10 train to Penn Station. Why was he so eager to go to work? Maybe he couldn’t stand being with her anymore. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was his new, pretty secretary. She’d spoken to the wench on the phone and didn’t like her easy, casual manner. The woman was too friendly for her own good. How was she with him? Maybe there was something going on with the two of them.
Yes, he seemed to work a lot lately and when he got home, he was usually too tired to do anything. In so many ways, she was bored with marriage, ritual and routine.
But it wasn’t always like that. During their first year of dating, she told Wayne that she loved him as much as she could. Maybe it would deepen as time went by. In those days, she had one man after another. She built a reputation for making men suffer, but it didn’t chase him away. He only wanted her more.
Back then, she got off sexually on exhibitionism, showing her ass in public, fucking in public places, anything weird, and nothing but those kinky things made her excited about living or loving. It was possibly an emotional rebellion against her strict upbringing in a military household. It was her mission to unleash the freak in Wayne, to loosen him up. Their dates became a series of wild parties, at private spots with over-the-top carnal activities and underground sex shows.
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