IN THE DARK WOODS
Kristina Wright
Anthony’s wife worships at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, two blocks from my condo in the city. They drive in from the suburbs because Sacred Heart is the only Catholic church in the area that still observes Latin mass. Anthony’s wife prefers the old-fashioned church services of her childhood to the contemporary version offered in the bland suburban church near their stylish five-bedroom, three-bathroom home. Each Sunday, Anthony dutifully drives his wife and their two little girls to church and drops them off at the curb in front of that imposing stone building. Then he drives a block to the coffee shop where he will get the Sunday Times and an extrahot double latte, killing time while his family attends services (and prays for his soul, presumably).
Or, he used to. That was before me.
We met at the Colley Café one particularly chilly autumn Sunday morning. I was nursing a nasty tequila hangover and sipping a heaven-sent chai latte when he strolled in, wearing gray chinos and a black sweater, looking like the suburban dad he is. I didn’t take much notice of him as he purchased his newspaper and latte and settled into the red overstuffed chair catty-corner to mine. He was a hairy Italian guy with a well-fed belly and an expensive gold watch on his wrist to match the gold band on his ring finger: most definitely not my type.
Our eyes met over the top of his paper and he arched one thick, dark eyebrow at me as if I had said something of which he disapproved. He stared a fraction of an instant too long to be polite. My pickup radar went off as I recognized the glimmer of interest in those dark, unreadable eyes. Even though I looked like Technicolor death in my pink and red flannel pajama pants and purple Stockley Gardens Art Festival sweatshirt, my dirty blonde hair twisted in a knot on top of my head, the Italian guy thought I was hot. That spark of desire in his eyes felt like a physical touch and left me with a surprising ache between my thighs.
We started talking and discovered we had absolutely nothing in common. He is a financial advisor with a wife and two kids, a hefty mortgage and a time-share in Orlando. I’m a happily single artist who pays the bills waiting tables and teaching middle-aged women how to find their inner goddess through yoga and belly dancing. Anthony is only five years older than me, but he lives in a different world—a world of two-week vacations and mini-vans with screaming children and rigid rules of right and wrong. That first Sunday, Anthony told me he liked my laugh and my ladybug pajama pants. I liked his big, strong-looking hands and the way his dark eyes never wavered from mine when I told him I hadn’t had sex in nearly two months.
Three Sundays later we gave up on small talk and gave in to temptation. On the pretense that Anthony wanted to see some of my art, we walked the short distance from the coffee shop to my building. That familiar walk felt like the walk of shame before the deed is done. I was getting ready to take a married man to my bed and fuck him. I’m no angel—I’ve been with my share of guys who were supposedly already in a relationship, but though I had toyed with the committed and the affianced, Anthony was my first married hookup. What surprised me was not the guilt, but the lack of it. I didn’t give it a thought. The only thing I could thing about was fucking him, feeling those big hands on my body and his cock—hopefully as big as his hands—moving inside me.
I was painfully aware of Anthony behind me, staring at my ass, as we climbed the stairs to the third floor of the brownstone where I lived. I kept waiting for him to touch me—wanting him to—but it never came. My hand trembled, jangling my keys loudly, as I let us into my condo and his deep laugh at my awkwardness eased my nerves. It felt as if we were moving in slow motion as we crossed the threshold and a tingle of restless anticipation danced along my rigid spine. Then he laid his big, warm hand across the back of my neck as the door closed behind us and my sigh was almost a moan.
I led him directly to the bedroom, feeling no need to play coy at this point. We both knew why we were here—and it wasn’t so Anthony could look at my watercolors and oils. Sunlight streamed through the drafty, hundred-year-old windows, illuminating the white sheets on my rumpled, unmade bed. For a fleeting moment, my thoughts went to his dutiful wife sitting in the church a few blocks away, sunlight streaming in through stained glass windows. The sun shone on both of us that day, the virtuous woman and the whore. My twinge of guilt fled before it could take hold when Anthony gently turned me toward him. His hands were warm and steady, soothing.
He cradled my face in those large hands and placed the sweetest, most chaste kiss on my lips as we stood beside my bed. I knew this was the point of no return. He was giving me the option to walk away. I could say no. I could be virtuous, too. Instead, I whimpered one word against his soft lips. “More.”
He gave it to me. He gave it all to me that first Sunday afternoon on my unmade bed. While his wife knelt in prayer two blocks away, he knelt between my thighs, thick and rigid, his cock all I had prayed for.
When he entered me that very first time, I cried out, over and over again, “Oh, god!”
For six months, with the exceptions of Christmas and Easter, when even bad Catholics make an appearance in church, Anthony has worshipped my body every Sunday as if it is the only cathedral he will ever need to enter. When I let myself think about it, which isn’t often, I feel the sharp edge of guilt knocking against the ache of desire. I push it aside because I want him so bad he makes me ache—and because being with him has opened up something inside me, unleashing a frenzy of creativity I’ve never experienced before.
I spend the nights between our meetings painting. I don’t go out with friends anymore; I don’t want to. I want to fuck Anthony—and if I can’t satisfy that desire, I want to be alone and paint. Canvases are lined against the walls and perched on windowsills. The longer I am with him, the more…feral, for lack of a better word, my art has become. My art is darker, wilder, almost frightening. And in some of my work, I find myself painting Anthony. But not the Anthony I know, or at least not the suburban dad he appears to be. No, the creature in my paintings is the man who brings out this wildness in me in bed and in my art. The guilt of being with him never goes away completely, but it seems a small sacrifice for what Anthony gives me in return.
Anthony has no such guilt about being with me. I ask him, but the answer is always the same.
“She has her faith and I have mine,” he tells me, using his long fingers to part my plump labia. He opens me to his heavy-lidded gaze, hovering over me like a dark devil while his cock lies thick and hard against his thigh.
I moan, writhing in anticipation as I clutch the brass headboard. “What is your faith?”
“This,” he says, slowly pushing a thick finger inside of my wetness. “Desire is the closest we get to heaven in this life. Passion is sacred.”
I am intrigued even while I’m aroused. He slides a second finger in me and I nearly come off the bed. He knows how to touch me, this middle-aged, middle-class suburban husband and father. He knows what I need and he gives it to me like a gift.
“That sounds like sacrilege,” I gasp.
His laugh is fiendish as his fingers coax me into incoherence, gliding over the engorged bump of my G-spot like it was a worry stone. “I don’t believe anything is sacred,” he says. “But I believe in fucking you.”
I don’t know what I believe in, but at that moment it doesn’t seem to matter. All I know is his fingers are moving inside of me, stroking me in a way I’ve never experienced. An image of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam flits through my fevered brain—God reaching down to touch Adam, their fingers not quite touching. Anthony’s fingers inside of me are like the fingers of God, creating me from the inside out. Conjuring my soul into existence from the sheer will of his dark desire, making me in his image. And then making me come.
He slides his fingers wet with my arousal into my mouth as he pushes his cock into me, thick and ready, an instrument of my torture and ultimate release. I moan around his fingers, tasting myself, tasting what he has done to me. His heavy bod
y above me, thrusting deep inside me, no longer seems divine. He fucks me into oblivion like an incubus intent on possessing me body and soul. I wrap my legs around his broad back and give myself over to this knowing demon who makes me scream and beg.
“Fuck me,” I moan desperately into his ear. “Oh, god, fuck me hard!”
He pulls back, his expression feral. “God has nothing to do with it,” he says in a voice that is little more than a guttural rasp. Then he comes, the demon inside him appeased for now.
Later, when it is time to leave, he notices my newest painting. “I like this. It has your passion. Angel and demon, huh?”
I’m not sure what he means; my brain is fuzzy from the rush of endorphins. I look at the painting as if for the first time, seeing it through his eyes. A nude couple writhes on a forest bed of green and brown foliage while countless bloodshot eyes watch them from the gray shadows. Watch them and condemn them. The lovers are Anthony and me, though I hadn’t intended it that way. But the woman is pale and blonde like me and the man…well, he’s hardly a man at all. His body is huge, hairy, ruddy. He almost blends into the forest background. His ears sweep up into points and on top of his curly dark head are two small horns.
“Angel and demon,” I whisper as I close the door behind him. What is this demon doing to me? Do I even care?
Anthony is not the best lover I’ve ever had, but he is the most intense. I am languid and sore after he leaves me to pick up the family at Sacred Heart. I feel stoned and the world is a beautiful, hazy image through my orgasm-colored glasses. I have never felt this way with another man, have never woken the morning after sex feeling so well used that I ache. I cherish every love bite he leaves on my breasts and neck; I press obsessively at the bruises left by his big hands digging into my hips, thighs and ass, causing myself a pain that is but a fleeting memory of the pain I desire. If not for these marks, I wouldn’t believe Anthony existed outside of my paintings.
Our relationship, if you can call it that, only exists on Sunday. Our time is short—two or three hours at the most—and it never feels like enough. This is the only time he has to himself, he tells me. Work and family suck up the rest of his time. Once or twice a week he calls me, but I never answer. I wait for him to leave a message and then I listen to it, again and again, like a favorite song. He whispers dirty things in his messages, promises of how he will fuck me when we are together again, and how he will make me beg for more. I imagine him at home, the wife making dinner, the children playing in the yard and him, pacing the length of his study like a caged animal, thinking about how he will fuck me the next time. I paint with these images in my head, butting up against the images of the perverse things we have done on my white sheets.
The Sunday after Easter, my cunt is wet before I even hear him coming up the stairs. It’s been two weeks and I’m hungry for his body. My arms and neck ache from hours of painting, but even painting cannot satisfy this deep ache inside me. I need him. I’m standing in the doorway in nothing but a white T-shirt when he makes it to the landing. There are no preliminaries, no catching up on what each of us has been doing in the two weeks since we were last together. Our need for each other is too strong.
He grabs me in his arms and kisses me hard, nothing soft or gentle about him. I have the fleeting feeling I should be afraid, but I’m not. I am already high, my pulse throbbing. I melt against him, molding my body to his, as he squeezes my ass and presses his erection against me. I moan into his mouth, rubbing my bare pussy over the crotch of his pants. I don’t care if I get him wet, I want to mark him the way he marks me every time we are together.
“I’m going to fuck you so hard,” he promises as I wrap my legs around his waist.
I gasp, “Yes, please.”
He carries me like that to the bedroom and tosses me on the bed. He strips while I watch and his naked, bearlike body makes me squirm on the bed. A dense forest of black hair fans across his broad chest and tapers down his stomach, his cock jutting from a tangle of black curls. He looks more like my fantasy creatures than ever before. He looks like the demon in the woods. I moan, slipping from the bed to my knees in front of him.
Wrapping my hair around his hand, he looks into my eyes. “You look like an angel.”
I imagine myself as he sees me: pale, blonde and still wearing a white T-shirt. In contrast, his skin seems darker than it is because of all that black hair. His deep brown eyes are wild with an almost violent lust.
“You look like the devil himself,” I whisper.
He laughs harshly. “No, I’m just one of the lesser demons.”
I lick the length of his erection, from tip to root. His cock jerks against my tongue, coming alive beneath my touch. I take the head between my lips without using my hands as he guides me up and down by my hair.
I’m hot, so fucking hot, as if just being in his presence raises my body temperature several degrees. As I suck him, I strip off my T-shirt, releasing him from my mouth only long enough to slip the shirt over my head. My body is already slick with sweat, my cunt is dripping and I’m drooling around his cock. I slip him from my mouth and nestle his erection between my damp breasts. This makes him catch his breath, as if I have caught him by surprise. I look up and smile, not feeling the least bit angelic. If not for our civilized surroundings, I could almost believe we were the forest lovers from my painting.
I cup my breasts in my hands and slide up and down, letting his cock glide in the damp valley between them. He groans in appreciation, his hand tightening in my hair, pulling my head back so that my neck arches. I stare into his eyes and whimper, the hair-pulling triggering a visceral submissive response. I want to please him—I need to please him—and I squeeze my breasts around his cock and quicken my pace, anticipating his orgasm.
He jerks away from me suddenly. “What the hell?”
I look where he is holding his cock, see the streak of blood up the shaft. “Oh, god, I’m sorry,” I say, fumbling with my necklace.
He notices it then, the small silver cross on a chain around my neck.
“Where did that come from?”
I am oddly embarrassed, as if I’ve been caught looking at porn. “My mother gave it to me for Easter.”
“Damn thing is sharp,” he says gruffly, his erection flagging.
I feel bad but can’t help but giggle. “Ironic, huh?”
The lust is back in his eyes and he reaches for me. I think he’s going to rip the chain from around my neck, but he only turns it so the cross hangs down my back. Then he nestles his semi-hard cock between my breasts. Staring into my eyes, he cups my breasts and moves against me, rubbing his thumbs across my nipples. His erection returns, hot and hard as before, and I grip his thighs as he rubs against my body. He begins tugging at my nipples, and the sensation goes right to my clit. I ache for him to fuck me, but I want this, too. I love the feel of his hard cock against my damp flesh as I kneel before him.
His strokes become faster as he squeezes my tits around his shaft. He is like a wild thing, humping my chest with no thought for my pleasure. I thrill at the look in his eyes and gasp when I feel the first hot spurt splatter against the swell of my breasts. Sucking my bottom lip between my teeth, I taste the ocean, salty musk. Whether it’s my sweat or his semen, I don’t know, maybe both. The taste is intoxicating and I suck harder until I taste blood. All the while he is thrusting against me, satisfying himself.
He slumps down on the edge of the bed and his eyes have lost that dark predatory look. I remain kneeling, heat radiating through my body. There is still a hum of anticipation dancing along the surface of my damp skin. I know my pleasure is to come, and I savor that feeling like a piece of hard candy melting on the back of my tongue. I rest my head against his hairy thigh, biding my time, pressing my hips together as I begin to writhe with my own rising desire.
“Would your god approve?” He pulls me up beside him and his fingers find my swollen clit.
It is hard to think when he’s touching me like t
his. I shake my head, tendrils of hair clinging to my face. “I don’t know. I don’t care.”
In that moment, with his thumb stroking my clit and his fingers pushing inside me, opening me up, I really don’t care. I only care about this feeling—an ache like a hot stone at the core of my being—a need that only he can quench with his fingers, his mouth and his cock. In that moment, he is my dark muse and the only thing in the world I need—and I do need. He mounts me then—and that is the only word that describes the way he presses my knees back toward my shoulders and pushes his newly hard cock into me—and fucks me until I scream.
His words come back to me after he has gone. My god. He has never asked me about my religious beliefs, though I have questioned his. My god.
Would my god approve?
It’s the following Sunday morning and I sit in my bedroom, sunlight streaming in the window. I finger the cross around my neck like a touchstone, aching like an addict in need of a fix. Anthony is already twenty minutes late, and I am not sure he will come today. I look at my newest painting. It’s only half finished, but it will be an orgy of bodies on a bed of red satin. At the center of all the decadence is a satyr who looks like Anthony. I smile.
Fleetingly, I wonder if he is sitting in a pew at Sacred Heart next to his wife and children, worshipping a god he doesn’t believe in. If he never comes back, I wonder if he will think of me as I’m sure to think of him. Will he remember me as his angel or his whore? How will I remember him? A sharp pain pierces my breastbone: fear of losing what only Anthony gives me. I feel as if I’m drowning. Or dying. What will happen to me if he doesn’t come back? What will happen to my art?
I hear heavy footfalls on the stairs and my pulse accelerates. I’ll save the questions for another day because he is here, at last. Anthony.
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