by Alison Tyler
Then the one man watching, the tall Spanish-looking one with green eyes, moved very close to her and pushed her against the wall of the car. The other man had moved out from behind her and now stood in front, also blocking the view and keeping her cornered. The second one lifted her slightly, wedging between her legs, and almost before she knew it, he pushed into her, kissing her at the same time to keep her quiet.
He was large and slid slowly in. Erica moaned, moving the leg nearest the window up and around his waist. Once he was in all the way, he pulled back and then rammed her, slamming her into the wall. She clung on as he fucked her, the speed of the train equaling that of his pistoning cock. Her own juices trickled down her legs, her core melting with a mix of shame and lust and pure wanton fucking. Erica churned her hips, grinding back as she came, pulling the man over the edge with her. He groaned, the first sound she’d heard from him, as he pumped the last into her.
Then he stopped for a moment and withdrew. She heard one of the others say, “Our stop,” and she realized the third would not do her, not today. But they all knew each other. It slowly dawned on her that this had been planned all along. She’d been led along, yet had she resisted?
The three men left at the next stop without looking back. Coolness whispered over her flesh for the first time in days, but somehow Erica knew that in the weeks to come the heat would build and there would be more than one way to ride the train.
CHEYENNE BLUE
ARIZONA, IRELAND, NEW ENGLAND
EVERY YEAR, SUMMER COMES to the Arizona desert, although some say it never leaves. And summer comes to Ireland, although some say it never really arrives.
Jessamy emails Dara, a woman she’s never met, although she knows her better than she knows her own sister. They met in an Internet chatroom, although both of them have forgotten which one. It’s unimportant now. What matters is their friendship, and they exchange copious emails every day. They talk about important things: how to stretch their unemployment benefits; their neighbors, their infrequent middle-aged nights out; and whether Irish boxty is more like American grits or potato pancakes.
Dara tells Jessamy about the greenness and the quaintness of Ireland, painting a picture of a tranquil, rural life; where donkeys carry the turf to white-painted cottages, a story as appealing as it is inventive. And in return, Jessamy relates tales of coyotes, saguaro cacti reaching imploring arms to brilliant skies, and the merciless Arizona sun that shrivels all to bleached bones, a tale as fascinating as it is tall.
Dara sits in her tumbledown stone cottage in County Cork, which reeks of damp, and says wistfully, wouldn’t it be a grand thing indeed if she could see the desert blooms for herself. She dreams of wide, white landscapes, and rattlesnakes in the laundry, and wakes in the morning with the smell of sage in her nostrils.
Jessamy slouches in her trailer on the edge of Tucson, wishing the landlord would repair the air-conditioning, and agrees. Dara would love the desert, and she, Jessamy, would love the curling turf and emerald wash of Ireland. She imagines a checked apron and herself carefully putting hens’ eggs into the pockets.
A plan is made. They will swap houses for the summer, meeting when their flights connect in Boston, to hand over the keys, and again on the return trip to exchange tales.
They know each other instantly. The fuzzy scanned photos didn’t do justice, of course, but they link arms like the bosom pals they are, and share a cab to the Holiday Inn. Two nights they have; two nights to see if their friendship translates into Real Life.
The friendship does more than merely translate, and on the first night one offers, the other accepts, and the air-conditioned room on the seventh floor turns into a trysting house. They explore, pressing and caressing flesh that is so familiar, yet eerily strange. Jessamy hovers, then delves between Dara’s spread thighs and bites and laps, curling female moisture onto her tongue. Dara tastes of clover honey, she thinks fancifully, and dreams of lapping the cream from the top of a pint of Guinness.
Dara fingers and fondles, pistoning assertively into golden-pink yielding flesh, and curls her fingers around to seek the pleasure points. She compares the rush of moisture to the summer monsoons, which turn the arroyos into rushing torrents. She suckles at her lover’s breast, and traces the suntan lines with her tongue. At the end of the summer she will be like this—a tawny creature, with long limbs of sun-gilded skin, and heat-streaked hair.
Jessamy compares her dark, dry hide to Dara’s softer skin, clotted cream pale. The gentle Irish summer will curl Jessamy’s hair, soften it so that it hangs in springy curls on her shoulders. The temperate climate will be kind to her body, and she thinks of lazy days in a tiny bathroom with floral curtains at the windows, stroking lotion scented like tea roses into her skin. She runs gentle hands over her lover’s flesh, feeling the slight catch as her rougher hands slide over skin as smooth as water.
Dara undulates up her lover’s body to catch her lips in a kiss as fierce as the wind that curls along the desert pavement, whipping the sand into swirling eddies that beat against exposed tender flesh. Her tongue plunges deep, stabbing like cactus spines into flinching flesh. Dara’s hands are firm, running in assertive patterns, pinching a nipple, biting on a yielding inner thigh so that the bruise blooms, cloudy, crushed-purple marks of possession.
Jessamy yields, her body melting bonelessly into the bed, soft, springy like the sodden tea-colored turf, as she raises a leg and clasps Dara so that her head is encompassed between her fleshy thighs. Dara’s mouth can now flicker with glorious friction on Jessamy’s sex, so that the orgasm builds, slowly, wetly, until it breaks in a sun-gold crimson tide, sweeping her away from the Holiday Inn.
In a fluid motion, their positions change, and Jessamy pushes and rubs with a deliberate finger frottage, exploring through folds and damp crevices. She insinuates her way so slowly, stimulating so gently that Dara is not aware of the rising climax until it seeps over her, washing from fingers to toes, swelling outward from her sex in deep, dark pulses.
Their sleep is disturbed by dreams, fractured images of waking dreams to come. Dara dreams of how the light will fall clear and sharp over the Sonoran Desert. How she will fearlessly sweep a scorpion from the kitchen bench with a swift flick of a tea towel. Jessamy falls into dreams of drowning; black tea pools of bog land, hazy in the twilight, blurred by the soft rain. Herself, sipping on a pint, playing the fiddle with men in tweed caps, her foot tapping the rhythm.
By day, the women explore Boston. Jessamy buys a porcelain coyote figurine, a bandana around its neck, head raised and howling. She will stand it on Dara’s bathroom window ledge, next to the redhaired girl in a step-dancing costume that she knows is there, and it will remind her of what she’s left. In an Irish shop, Dara buys a St. Brigid’s cross, woven not of reeds but shaped in clay. She will hang it above the doorway of Jessamy’s trailer, above the Navajo rug on the floor, and it will be a small image of home in an alien landscape.
That night, they return to the Holiday Inn and they return to each other, falling onto the bed with indecent haste, shedding clothes, baring flesh to latch on to a nipple, part pale or golden thighs and dive between. The Holiday Inn is insulated from the real world outside; the summer can’t penetrate its walls and the air-conditioning negates any trace of heat or humidity. But to Dara, the room and her lover are as exotic as the surreal cacti that she’ll see tomorrow. The sharp taste of
Jessamy’s cunt is as unusual as the nopales and scrambled eggs she’ll eat for her first Arizona breakfast. Taking the razor she uses to shave her underarms, she scrapes her lover’s pussy bare so that the folds stand out in stark relief. A paradox; bare abraded flesh outside, but inside, secret moist places, slick as summer rain.
Jessamy considers the razor but sets it aside. She tangles her fingers in Dara’s abundant thatch of turf-dark pubic hair, parting sodden curls to find the drowned, wet depths they guard. To her, this room is secret and dark, and the things they do here will be forever held close to h
er heart, as mysterious and strange as the holy shrine where she’ll light a candle tomorrow.
That night, neither of them dreams.
Every morning, Dara opens the door of Jessamy’s trailer, sketches the sign of the cross, gives a quick flicker of acknowledgment to the St. Brigid’s cross above the door, and sits down on the step with a cup of tea. She stares at the desert and shudders as a centipede runs across her foot. Then she goes into the small kitchen to cook what passes for bacon here, throwing the scraps into open bins, which will be raided by scavenging coyotes. Later, in bed, Dara will shiver under the thin sheet, as she listens to their snarls, and prays that they don’t attack her.
Jessamy shivers, stepping into the damp bathroom. Every day, the mold creeps further across the ceiling, an advancing olive bloom. She bemoans the absence of real coffee, and sits inside at the kitchen table, watching the rain stream down the small panes. Turning the heating up another notch, she contemplates a visit to the village shop, where, once again, she will not understand a word of the thick local accents.
Later, she will go to the pub and stare into a pint of Guinness, trying to convince herself she likes the taste.
Both women dream of two nights to come in New England.
SASKIA WALKER
THE THINGS THAT GO ON AT SIESTA TIME
EVERYTHING WAS QUIET. It was midafternoon, siesta time. The sun smoldered across the crystalline-blue sky over Crete, sparkling off the Aegean Sea and making every rock, wall and tile glow. Nikoleta shielded her eyes and stepped quickly over the sun-baked rocks that led up to the back of the villa. She kicked off her sandals, stepped out of her uniform and sat down, resting her back against the shady wall behind her. The heat didn’t bother Nikoleta, but the companion she was expecting was fair-skinned and needed the shade. Lydia. Lydia with the long legs and the big, baby blue eyes. Nikoleta’s mouth watered just thinking about her.
There were so many advantages to working for the big-shot English movie producer. She got paid very well indeed, more than any maid in her village—a secluded backwash on the island, far from the tourist resorts where good jobs were more plentiful. The family was only going to be in the villa for a few months of the year, but intended to pay the staff all year round. The villagers were always eager for the gossip about who came and went at the big house and—best of all— she had access to the lovely Lydia, the daughter of the house.
Lydia had turned nineteen that year. She was fair and lithe; spoilt and incredibly naive. She pouted and preened, wandering around the grounds of the villa half-undressed, exposing herself in skimpy bikinis, shorts that frayed up over the cheeks of her cute behind and halter-necked tops that revealed the outline of her pert little breasts. Every man in the village lusted after the pretty English girl and a chorus of whistles followed her whenever she rode her bicycle around the local area. Lydia clearly loved that kind of attention, but Nikoleta didn’t think the little madam was helping herself any Nikoleta was a very practical woman. She could see it made Lydia even hotter; her chaotic sexual chemistry swamped the entire household.
Nikoleta had watched as Lydia flirted outrageously with Stefanos and Alec, the groundsmen. She lay on her sun lounger by the pool rubbing lotion into her bare limbs, flicking through trashy romance novels looking for the dirty parts. She’d pause and slip her shades down to inspect the men while they fished leaves out of the pool, eyeing their sleek muscled bodies at work. Those poor men were in a constant state of arousal with that little sex bomb on hand—so near, and yet so far out of their reach. Nikoleta smiled to herself and smugly treasured the fact that she’d gotten the first taste of the lovely Lydia that sultry summer.
She had discovered quite by chance that Lydia responded to both idle caresses and outright groping. She brushed out her long blonde hair in the mornings and touched the soft skin of her neck and shoulders, stroking the flaxen strands down over her chest. Lydia gasped and whimpered, but didn’t tell the maid to stop. Nikoleta murmured compliments, purring constantly and growling at the back of her throat whenever she made eye contact. When she helped her choose what to wear from the long walk-in wardrobe stuffed with clothes, Nikoleta got even bolder. She held things up against Lydia with cheeky hands, hands that molded the material in against her breasts and over her hips, both dextrous and suggestive. Lydia’s body was programmed to respond. Riddled with frustration, she leached against the wily maid for more contact, staring at Nikoleta with wide eyes and open lips, whimpering, her breath constricted, while Nikoleta fondled her body through the skimpiest of barriers. Nikoleta knew Lydia could only hold out so long. She was a sexual time bomb that was about to blow. Nikoleta grinned; she was getting nearer her target. She kept up that intrusive routine until there was such a plea in Lydia’s eyes that it was obvious she had reached the point of desperation.
“Nikoleta...” she declared. “You are touching me like a man would!”
“Oh, but you like it, yes,” Nikoleta chuckled. Lydia’s cheeks burned but she seemed unable to deny it. Nikoleta took her chance.
“Take off your robe,” she whispered. “I am here to help you.” Lydia obeyed. When she was naked, Nikoleta dropped the dress she had held out in one hand and pushed Lydia back into the darkest recess of the wardrobe.
“You’re so hot,” she declared, squeezing Lydia’s peaked nipples.
“That feels so good,” she murmured, her body trembling with need. Nikoleta kissed her mouth to quiet the desperate moans of pleasure while she plundered Lydia’s intimate flesh with knowing fingers. She had responded like a forest fire suddenly blazing out of control; hot, wild, desperate and clambering all over Nikoleta, even more responsive and willing than Nikoleta had guessed she might be, bucking wildly and crying at the point of her climax.
High with the thrill of dominating the English girl and wet with wanting herself, Nikoleta stepped back, hoisted her skirt, squeezed her pussy lips hard, and then rubbed and flicked her clit, quickly, while Lydia stared at her lusty new lover with fascinated eyes. When she ventured to touch Nikoleta’s sex, Lydia soon found her fingers crushed and her hand completely drenched. From that point on the two young women ricocheted together in an almost constant cycle of arousal and fulfillment, each day bringing new games and pleasures. These were new games for Lydia, but she was well and truly hooked.
This was their third time meeting outside. The spot was perfect; they were outside basking in the warm breeze and yet they were so secluded. The large flat rocks bedded in against the villa wall were overhung with honeysuckle and bougainvillea, shady and intoxicating. Nikoleta brushed the falling blossoms off her shoulder and pulled off her bra, her nipples growing hard and tingling at the sight of Lydia’s lithe body hurrying over. She drew to a giddy halt, wisps of fair hair escaping from her ponytail, her aquamarine sarong wavering gently around her legs. She was breathless and flushed with arousal.
“Let me see you,” Nikoleta whispered, lifting the hem of Lydia’s sarong. She snaked one hand up around the calf of her leg, looking up at her from below. Lydia gasped and laughed, glancing over her shoulder back along the path behind her. She was still worried about discovery, but Nikoleta—being practical— reminded her it was siesta time. Besides which, Nikoleta’s dark suggestions had an almost hypnotic effect on Lydia; she had no choice but to submit. She lifted the sarong, slowly revealing the curves of her inner thighs. Nikoleta watched with blatant, hungry eyes.
She was naked beneath, wearing just the bikini top and sarong. The mound at the juncture of Lydia’s thighs was so softly rounded and firm that Nikoleta’s mouth ached to bite the flesh and stick her tongue into the dewy niche.
“You are so wet, so ready....”
Lydia nodded vigorously. “I was getting so bloody horny, waiting in my room…” She untied the bikini top. Her breasts jutted forward, nipples the color of wine against the pale marble of her skin. Nikoleta pulled her down onto the flat rock, rolling over and quickly pinning her. Lydia’s head rolled from side to side, her legs o
pening.
“Hurry, before someone sees us,” she declared, her eyes pleading with Nikoleta to be quick. Nikoleta smiled. She never rushed. The threat of being discovered would keep Lydia trembling on the point of climax, while Nikoleta gave her sweet torture with strokes of her tongue, mouth and fingers. Lydia shuddered and moaned, her lean body prone in submission.
“Everyone is asleep....” She rose up, pinning her friend down with her hands on her shoulders, and looked at her body with hungry eyes.
“For God’s sake, Nikoleta, do me...” she begged.
Chuckling, Nikoleta lowered her head to trail her tongue over the girl’s belly and lower, warm breath moving the fair hair at her groin, the tip of her wet tongue parting the intimate folds. The inflamed morsel of her clit reared up between the plump, swollen folds of skin. She sucked then tongued the sensitive nub, stroking further down each time and sticking her tongue into the tight core of Lydia’s sex. She sighed. She was in heaven there. Then a draft came up from somewhere and wafted the scent of flowers over them. Lydia’s body grew still. A shadow had fallen over them. Nikoleta lifted her head. Lydia’s expression was horror-struck as she stared over Nikoleta’s shoulders.
“Oh fuck it, I’m dead,” she uttered, eyes closing.
Nikoleta turned. Stefanos was standing behind them. His eyes were glazed, and he had a leering smile on his face. Nikoleta’s eyes dropped to his belt. His shorts were stretched tight over his crotch, a huge erection threatening to rip the fabric asunder. He’d been watching them and he’d gotten turned on. It served him right. Stefanos was a dirty spy. Why, just that morning she had spotted him watching her while she was doing her sweeping. He had stood on a box and peered over the edge of the terrace to look up at her from below. Nikoleta knew full well he was watching, but instead of shooing him off she bent over her task and hitched her skirt up around her hips, giving him a look at everything he was missing. Nikoleta never wore knickers. That was his punishment.