by Violet Blue
“This is the most fun I’ve had in a long time, Chloe,” he said to me on my third threat to overflow.
“Me too,” I purred, “but if you think this is fun…”
“We’ll be landing soon. I have a connecting flight to Miami I’m supposed to catch in twenty minutes.”
“I’m expected at a conference table in an hour.”
The plane bucked as it met with the ground.
“You could call out sick,” he said with a raised eyebrow.
“And you could catch another flight. What’s in Miami anyway?”
“A three o’clock interview for a real job in civil engineering.”
“Go figure.”
“I wish I could have you, even for a few minutes,” he whispered directly in my ear.
“A few minutes wouldn’t do us justice, we both know that.”
There was a long pause while I weighed my options and he seemed to be doing the same. As the plane came to a halt and the FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS signs went dark, both of us picked up our cell phones.
The hotel next to the airport would do just fine, since close was the only credential that interested us. We strode through the sliding glass doors with our carry-ons, looking like the quintessential odd couple—grit and grace. I’d feigned a stomach virus and Russell rescheduled for the following afternoon. The next twenty-four hours we would be off the grid, working on our impulses and nothing else.
With condoms purchased at the lobby convenience shop in hand, he’d hardly swiped the key card before I blurted, “Can you believe we’re doing this?”
“Not really.”
In the room, with the noonday sun breaking past the tacky green drapes, neither of us knew what to do first, to taste first. He reached for the buttons on my blouse, rubbing the highest one between his thumb and his finger. I started with the buttons at the bottom and met him halfway. His mouth lingered over my moistened lips, his tongue calling for a playmate with teasing licks. One hand released my blouse and it fell from my shoulders to the floor. The other cupped the back of my head as he worked his tongue into a frenzy. I tore at his T-shirt, dying to feel his skin against mine in the cool recycled air.
Russell broke free from my lips to rid himself of his clothes, shedding his shirt and hastily peeling his fitted jeans from his lean thighs. His cock sprung forward, looking as delicious as I had imagined and I wanted nothing more but to suck the hell out of it. With bunched denim still constraining his calves, I took him to the back of my throat causing him to waver off balance. He curled his fingers into my hair and tangled them among my straightened tresses tightly enough to make me gasp. I filled my mouth with him, bumping my tonsils with his cock and tasting his precome every time. I didn’t know his last name, but I thought it should be Stover, for how sweet he tasted.
“Damn, that feels good.”
Just because I was a little out of practice was no reason to start slacking. In that polyester-laden hotel room, I was on vacation from the life that awaited me in my briefcase. My hair a toussled mess around a greedy mouth, Russell seemed to like my wild alter ego, growling his appreciation. I liked the way he was looking at me.
“So good, Chloe.”
He pulled my head forward with each stroke, and I was beginning to ache beyond patience for a fucking of another kind. My wandering fingers didn’t go unnoticed.
“You want some of this, don’t you?”
I answered by retreating to the bed, fussing with the zipper on my skirt.
“No, leave it on,” he grinned, as he stepped out of his shoes and pants. “Come over here, to the chair.”
Topless, I met him at the plush armchair by the window. He parted the drapes, revealing the bustling street below full of midday travelers mostly in business attire. As he rushed my skirt up over my ass and pulled the soaking strip of black lace askew, I climbed onto the seat cushion, holding steady to the chair back. I don’t think I’ve been as pleased by anything in a long time.
It wasn’t the way he grabbed my hips or how easily he slipped inside, though both sensations made me coo like a baby. I’d spotted a woman in basic gray wool trousers and a black overcoat, toting her laptop and quick stepping it to the terminal with her nose in her BlackBerry. The glee of being here instead of there turned my coos into howls of triumph. Russell rode my screams to their highest pitch, making me grip the worn velvet cushion with white knuckles and then claw at the drapes as he pressed me harder, encouraging me against the cool glass with my breasts on full display for anyone who chanced a glance at our second-story window.
Standing now in the seat with me in relentless pursuit, he grabbed one of my thighs and leveraged it high against his upward thrusts, nudging at my orgasm with his deep strokes. I called his name out, because truly it was the only thing I could think of in the delirium of my sensory overload. Nothing else mattered, no reports, no meetings—just the tingles of delight that beautiful man without a last name was gunning into my cunt. Sounds of my satisfaction dropped off my lips in short bursting sighs until he bottomed out inside me.
“Can I call you?”
I sauntered over to him nude, with his scent awash on me, and tucked my card into his front pocket. “I hope you do.”
He clutched my wrist and brought my fingers to his mouth for one last taste of our sex. “On the house, of course.”
I laughed, rolling my eyes with playful exaggeration, “That’s generous of you, Russell.”
He stood in the doorway, hesitating.
“You’re going to miss your flight,” I uttered with regret for the words.
He tapped on the doorframe a few times and inhaled deeply in a knowing sigh.
Rising on tiptoe, I stretched to reach his lips and he met them with sweet intensity, dizzying me again, instantly.
“Good-bye, Chloe.”
“’Bye, Russell.”
As I closed the door behind him, my phone vibrated on the night table across the room.
“Oh yes, I feel much better now… Four o’clock meeting? I’ll be there.”
AIR CONDITIONING. COLOR TV. LIVE MERMAIDS.
Anna Meadows
He first saw her through the glass, turning in the water so her hair whipped behind her. She’d grown it out. It billowed and rippled to her waist. It must have taken her an hour a night to comb it. She never used to let it grow past her shoulders, or the Santa Anas would tangle it so bad she couldn’t even get it into two braids. He’d never told her how much he liked it that way, all wild and weedy from crawling through the grass to catch ladybugs or spinning on the tire swing. He’d watched her from the tree house then, her hair fanning out like black sea oats.
He knew the shape of her body, not so different from the summer they graduated high school. She had that same softness in her thighs—he could see that even through the mermaid tail, covered in sequins the color of a peacock. But if he didn’t know her by her body, he would have known her by how her hair spread out in the water, the same way it did in the pond back home, like she was falling.
“House beer’s half off,” the bartender said. “Looks like you need it.”
Daniel ordered one but didn’t drink it. He was still watching her.
He’d been on his way home to visit family for the holiday weekend when he saw the sign on the side of the highway. MERMAID MOTEL. HOME OF DIVE IN THE DESERT. AIR-CONDITIONING. COLOR TV. LIVE MERMAIDS. He turned off and got a room—he was tired enough that if he stopped, it’d have to be for the night—because the last two words on the sign made him think of Lila, turning underwater in the pond.
“One day I’m gonna be a mermaid,” she’d said every time she came up for air. She always had on a one-piece, because her mother never let her wear anything else. “Only putas wear those two-pieces,” Mrs. Ramirez would call out the window as they got on their bikes. It just made Daniel want Lila more, thinking of her belly staying pale as her shoulders browned. Her costume at Dive in the Desert may have been her first two-piece, a bra so heavy with te
al rhinestones it flattened her breasts, and a mermaid tail with a fin so big that carrying it around must’ve tired her out by the end of her shift.
Dive in the Desert was the bar in the downstairs of the Mermaid Motel, fifty-nine dollars a night, and that was in the high season. The filled seats in the bar usually numbered more than twice the daily check-ins at the Mermaid. The bar was on the trucking highway, the Ocean Floor Onion Rings were supposed to be the best in the state, and when a mermaid came out, the house beer was half off. The owner once had big plans, a nightly show with a half-dozen mermaids all flicking their tails at the long-haul truckers. But after he got the kitchen up to code, he only had enough money left for a secondhand aquarium, just big enough for one mermaid, two if one of them was Lila. She was so short that she fit in the tank with one of the other girls. That was why the owner had hired her, even though she had little boobs and her hair hadn’t quite been long enough at the time.
“It’ll grow,” Lila had said, standing in his office in her jean shorts and a ten-year-old T-shirt from the Grand Canyon. “My hair, I mean.”
Lila was still learning, but now she knew how to flip in the tank, twisting her hips like the older mermaids taught her. “It makes all the little jewels get the light,” Yolanda had said. Lila was usually with one of them—she was good at getting out of the way, even with that big tail—but today she was on her own. The other mermaids had family to see for the holiday weekend, and while most places got booked up, nobody was making the drive to the middle of the Mojave to check in to the Mermaid Motel. Even the long-haul truckers went home if they could get the time off. The bar would be almost empty if it weren’t for families making pit stops on road trips to somewhere else. The bar was getting more orders for grilled cheese sandwiches than gin and tonics. The little girls came up to the tank and pointed, and the boys tapped on the glass like Lila was a fish. She waved as she swam past, blowing a kiss with a string of little air bubbles.
Through the glass, she saw a man standing by himself at the other side of the bar, as far as he could get from the tank and still watch her. He had hair the color of the masa de harina Lila and her mother used to mix with water to make corn tortillas. He was about the right age, twenty-five or so, same as her, but she knew it wasn’t Daniel. She’d thought she’d seen him at least ten times since she started at Dive in the Desert. Every time a young-looking guy with hair the color of sand-soil showed up in jeans, she’d see the blur of him through the water and the glass, and she’d think it was him. But every time she surfaced enough to peek over the edge of the tank, she was wrong. By now she’d given up looking and didn’t come up until she needed the air so much her lungs grew tight in her rib cage.
The ketchup-and-french-fry crowd thinned out. Her shift ended. She rinsed off at the showerhead behind the bar, shielded by stacks of old crates. She left the costume on to rinse it out, the fin folded under her feet. Her eyes stung with the salt, and the turquoise sky blurred into the terra-cotta of the desert.
She shut off the water. Her vision was still a little fuzzy, but not enough that she didn’t notice the man standing just on the other side of the crates. She startled. It wasn’t the first time a drunk man had tried to watch one of the mermaids rinse the smell of the tank out of her hair, but they were usually looking for Sarah Jane, with that hair so blonde it looked white in the light of the tank, or Yolanda, with her breasts that spilled into her sequined bra like batter into a muffin tin.
Lila held her hands over her costume top. “Get out of here.”
“All right,” the man said. “But I’m waiting you out. I’ll be in the lobby.”
She recognized the voice, a little lower than she remembered, but with the same slow, even rhythm.
She rubbed her eyes to get the last of the salt out. “Daniel?”
The shape of him came into focus, a Polaroid developing. He had his hands in the pockets of his jeans, like always. Without pockets, he never knew what to do with them.
She laughed, and he slipped in between the stacks of crates and put his arms around her, like he would with a friend he hadn’t seen in a while. But it didn’t feel right. He and Lila had never been that way.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Just stopped for the night,” he said.
“Nobody stops here unless they get a flat or an overheated radiator.”
She smelled like rock salt and desert and sky, a scent that was waiting on her skin when they were growing up, but now was as strong as open lilies.
She held her hand to the front of his shirt, damp now, and sticking to him. “I’m getting you wet,” she said, and laughed again.
“I don’t care.” He held her again, but this time her mouth ended up on the patch of his shirt just over his collarbone. Her wet fingers pulled down the collar of his shirt, and she put her lips to the base of his neck.
She took in the scent of him. He still smelled like wet grass, like he slept in it every night. She stood on her toes to move her lips up his neck, the balls of her feet gripping the ground through the fabric of her tail. She tasted the light dusting of salt that perspiration had left on his skin. His hands gripped her waist, and he stopped holding her like a sister or an old friend.
He picked her up like she was something strange and pretty he’d found on a beach hundreds of miles from the desert. She put her arms around him, feeling the warmth of his back through his shirt, and kissed the rest of the salt off his neck. Her tail dripped on the asphalt and then the dry dirt parking lot. When the sun hit those tacky little rhinestones, they shimmered on her body like malachite. The men getting some air outside the bar were too drunk to notice, the women at the motel check-in desk too bored. A girl on the way to the car with her family pointed and said she saw the mermaid, but her mother didn’t look, and said no, the mermaids were inside in the water where they could breathe.
The door to Daniel’s room fell shut behind them, and he laid her down on the bed. Her hair and her tail soaked the sheets, and the whole room smelled like salt water. He helped her wriggle out of her tail and freed her breasts from her costume top. She’d wanted to be a mermaid worse than anything else since she was five years old, but right now shedding the weight of all those sequins made her feel like he’d woken her body up from a spell made of blue light and a shimmer of green. Like having his hands on her damp skin had turned her naked and human so she could part her legs.
She pulled his jeans down only as far as she needed to, and she slid under him. He hesitated, sure she couldn’t mean for him to do that. He’d brought her back to his room to see her and touch her, to check her face and body against his memory and make sure he had it all right. But she put her hand on his back to tell him that, yes, this was what she wanted.
The soft ache of opening for him had the feel and color of something she wanted to taste, so much so that she almost made him pull out of her so she could put her mouth around his erection. She didn’t. Instead she dug her heels into his lower back. He was gentle and slow, like she always guessed he would be. She loved that about him, like she loved how his hands were always in his pockets and how his hair was always just long enough to get in his eyes. But it made her so impatient she wrapped her legs around him tighter, lifting her butt and the small of her back up off the bed and closer to him so he was all the way inside her before he meant to be.
He caught a gasp in the back of his throat. She kissed him, and he eased her lips apart with his tongue. He was still inside her, but they laughed softly, just breathing, no real sound, because it was the first time they’d kissed since he’d shown up. It was the only part of it all that they’d done before, and they both wondered how they could’ve gotten so far without their lips touching.
She tightened around him, and they couldn’t laugh anymore. The muscles inside her tensed and released, a rhythm she couldn’t help, and he couldn’t help finishing. His hand was already between her legs by the time he did. He traced his fingers around the little slick-we
t pearl that made her thighs tremble the more he touched it. He couldn’t remember when he started thinking of it that way, as her pearl. It was years before he ever touched it, years after the first time she said she wanted to be a mermaid, maybe sometime the summer after high school when she lived in that black one-piece. It had been strapless, her mother’s one concession about swimsuits, so he’d been able to watch Lila’s shoulders darken over those months.
Lila curled onto her side, pleasure blooming between her legs. At first she tried not to scream, then she remembered that nobody was out at the Mermaid Motel on a holiday weekend. The rooms on either side of Daniel’s were probably empty. She let herself, and she could feel the shiver that her cry sent through him.
He held her as her breathing evened. She wondered if she should say thank you when a man made her feel like that, the same as if he held a door open or remembered what kind of chiles she liked.
Daniel kissed her back and caught the faint scent of the water in the tank. “Salt,” he said. “Not chlorine?”
“Salt’s cheaper,” she said.
The hum of the air conditioner mixed with the sound of the ice machine turning over. It was a little like the buzz of the generator boxes and telephone lines in the neighborhood where they’d grown up.
“How’d you find me?” she asked.
“You were always saying you wanted to be a mermaid,” he said. “How come you didn’t tell me where you were going? One day I called and your mom just said you’d moved out.”
The ice machine died down, but the air conditioner still called up the memory of lawn sprinklers. They’d talked about going to a hotel together, one day when they were older, but they’d meant one in the city, one nice enough that they didn’t put VACANCY and PAY-PER-VIEW on their signs. But lying with him like this was putting Lila a little more on the side of cheap places with neon sides and bars next door.