Her grandparents’ house and garden were in Idaho: at this time of year the garden would be cut back and mulched, maybe even buried under a drift of snow. Katherine loves living in California because even in February the garden blooms with life. The roses are finally gone but the pink ladies, tulips, and irises are starting; in the corner calla lilies burst whitely out of a clutch of huge green leaves. When she picks them she always includes one of those big leaves in the vase; otherwise the sculptural, curved callas almost don’t look like flowers.
Passing the window of the room in which Mike works, she glimpses him, so riveted to the screen that he doesn’t see her. Must be on a roll, she thinks, but then she sees that he is moving in a way that she wouldn’t expect to see from a man writing code. Though his body is partly obscured behind the desk and monitor, it almost looks as if he is masturbating.
Katherine noiselessly lets herself into the house and heaps her shopping bags onto the kitchen work island. She lays the store-bought roses carefully on top, drops her purse and briefcase beside them, slips off her shoes. She makes it to the door of Mike’s office without being heard.
He’s on a roll, all right: onscreen Katherine sees not lines of code but a tiny movie looping repeatedly, a naked man in a blindfold lying on his back, a woman in a shiny black catsuit—it looks like it’s made of rubber—crouching over him. The suit encases her body completely, except for her crotch, which is naked, shaved bare, and she engulfs the man’s hard, upstanding cock over and over with the shockingly exposed pussy—at least, Katherine finds it shocking, but not in a bad way, more like a shock to the system, cold water in the face, waking her up to feelings she barely remembers.
Clearly, Mike has not forgotten anything. His hand pumps his cock rhythmically, eyes riveted on the miniature tableau as the catsuited woman thrusts down and down and down. He times his hand strokes to the woman’s down thrusts, just as Katherine herself times her late-night strokes to Mike’s slow and even breaths.
If you asked her why she isn’t upset, discovering him like this, she might tell you it’s like her own late-night forays, only so much hotter: she’s never seen Mike jack off in the daylight; she hasn’t seen his cock this hard in years; she’s erotically attuned to his deep breaths from all those nights lying next to him, vibrator or no vibrator; she’s fascinated by the tiny couple on the screen, smaller than Barbie and Ken; and the fact that Mike finds them so compelling makes her pussy wet. That her pussy is wet in the middle of the afternoon is such a welcome surprise that all she can do for a minute is touch herself through her fine cotton stockings, the black fabric clinging to her almost as tightly as the tiny woman’s shiny catsuit. Katherine’s mind spins, looking for a way to incorporate this unexpected scene into her surprise Valentine’s Day celebration. Silently she begins to unbutton her gray rayon suit.
Mike’s erotic reverie has advanced him so close to orgasm that when he feels a hand stroke his thigh and replace his own hand on his cock, it could easily be a part of the virtual connection he’s having with the woman onscreen. For a second he doesn’t even look to see who is holding him. Then he recognizes Katherine’s hand, a touch he knows almost as well as his own, and sure enough, when he glances away from the screen, she is crouched beside him. She wears nothing but her black bra, which snugly cups her breasts, and her black tights.
Smoothly she stands up, pulling him by the cock, and pushes the office chair across the room. “Lie down, Michael,” she whispers. “So you can see the screen.”
The rug, fuzzy against the back of his neck, gives him just enough cushion. When Katherine stands over him the screen is obscured, but that doesn’t matter because she is taking the crotch of her tights in both hands and sharply ripping, tearing a hole like the one in the woman’s catsuit. Katherine’s pussy is pink, swelling, her arousal beginning to form visible moisture like dew on the callas’ broad leaves. Mike strokes her thighs, reaching for her.
Katherine crouches down over him, and as her pussy makes contact with his rigid cock the woman onscreen is visible again. Katherine’s tight wet pussy sucks at him. He’s aware of the rug under his back, Katherine’s weight poised just above his pelvis, her thigh muscles pumping as she matches the catsuit woman’s thrusts, again, again, again. Mike’s hands rove her body as he climbs again toward the climax she had interrupted. Her hands rest on his chest for balance, for contact with him, and he feels their pressure through his nipples. On the screen, the blindfolded man is completely under the catsuited woman’s control.
Mike thrusts up into Katherine, his eyes wide, flashing from her to the screen, from her to the screen. He slips one hand through her brown hair, pulling the clip that holds it back in its demure professional style. The thick silky hair falls through his fingers, into her face, curtaining eyes that are getting wilder and wilder. Her breasts fill his hands; he squeezes, remembering their ripeness. Now their pelvises grind together, his cock thrusts up into her as deeply as it will go, both of them climb toward climax: maybe not together, but close. She has slipped to her knees, straddling him, her weight on him now, and he lifts her like she’s riding a bucking pony when he thrusts into her. Onscreen the catsuit lady and her blinkered paramour have not changed; their fuck can never escalate. But Mike and Katherine are leaving them behind.
Almost. Without warning Katherine moves her hands. She puts them over his eyes, a moist, fleshly blindfold.
“Fuck me, Mike!” she hisses. “Hard!”
If you asked him now, Mike would groan that he has missed her, missed this, before bucking involuntarily into a come that she has taken from him, imperious and powerful in her ripped tights, that he could not hold back from her, that she demanded.
He has barely stopped shaking when she slides up his body, threads from the torn stockings tickling his nose, her hot, swollen pussy at the tip of his tongue: the catsuit woman demanding service, Katherine demanding pleasure, letting him drink from her. He laps like a cat until she yelps, convulses against his tongue, collapses on him. For a few seconds he rests under her body like it’s a tent and he’s a kid hiding from everything.
They walk into the kitchen naked and steamed from a long shower. It still isn’t quite five—on an ordinary day she wouldn’t even be home from work yet.
She’d intended to make him dinner, but he insists on helping like he usually does, and begins rinsing the prawns while she runs water into a crystal vase, slices an inch off the stems of the roses, arranges them. They’re red for Valentine’s Day; the store hadn’t even bothered to order any other color.
“Put a little sugar in there,” says Mike. “They’re wilting.”
By the time the filets are on the grill the roses are perking up.
“Look,” Katherine says. “You were right about the sugar. Hey, what’s that beneath the vase?”
He opens the card, reads the message, kisses her, and sets the blurry heart up against the vase. After dinner they put on jackets and take their wineglasses out to the garden.
GREEK FEVER
Anne Tourney
THERE WEREN’T MANY MEN IN MY BIBLE BELT town who practiced Greek love. One of the few was my father, Simon. Another was Gabriel, who was posing as our live-in handyman. My father believed that Gabriel, with his charmed hands and cock, could fix anything from a sinking roof to a rusted libido. I didn’t believe anything about Gabriel except for one promise he made to me. And that was only because I had wrestled my lust into something resembling faith.
Simon and I both had Greek fever that summer. We staggered around with Greece on the brain, the light of Athens burning our bodies from inside. But while Simon retreated into his fever like a trance, I was planning to act on my affliction.
My father didn’t know that I was going to Greece with his lover.
Gabriel told me what to pack: only enough clothes for sunbathing, drinking, and fucking. We could have done all those things in Oklahoma, but in Greece, Gabriel said, you could turn a life of lazy horniness into a personal philoso
phy. In the town of Pawsupsnatch (pop. 3,007) that kind of slutty behavior was just another reason for people to gossip about you.
The gossip would have turned into mass hysteria if the citizens of Pawsupsnatch had known what went on in our house. On my days off, Gabriel fucked me. Nights, he made love with my father. In the darkness, soft groans would drift from Simon’s locked bedroom. During the day Gabriel and I would tear the house apart as we banged our way from room to room, knocking over furniture and denting the walls. Terrified of the Baptists who ran our local drugstore, I made secret trips to Tulsa to buy condoms by the trunkload. Considering Simon’s social status as a widowed high school teacher, I assumed he was doing some smuggling himself. After twelve years of exile, the specter of sex had swooped back into our home, and that specter was pissed off and ravenous.
“It’s your turn, Aggie,” Gabriel would murmur, starting things off with moth-wing kisses on the nape of my neck. His lips would buzz my ears while his arms roped my waist from behind. I’d burrow back into the muscular cradle of his torso until I felt his cock rise against my asscheeks. I started wearing short, flimsy skirts so that he could get to my pussy with his fingers, cock, or tongue whenever the urge seized us. Betraying my father felt like stepping barefoot on a rusty tin can—agonizing and thrilling and toxic—but I couldn’t help myself. When I came with Gabriel, mighty spasms cored my body, leaving me raving and senseless. I didn’t have orgasms; I had seizures.
“I could fall in love with you in Greece,” Gabriel once told me. Now that summer’s long gone, I know he must have told my father the same thing.
At first I couldn’t stand to hear Gabriel and Simon making love. My father’s celibacy was a given, part of the deal we made when I put my life in deep freeze so that I could look after him and his feeble heart. I knew he fell in love now and then, and that since my mother died he’d given up the struggle to love women. I must have known that his abstract love for men could translate into sex. I just never thought it would happen in my mother’s bed.
My mother and father had always been discreet in their passion. As a child I never wondered how they made love, but whether they “did it” at all. At the age of twenty-eight, I wasn’t prepared for this variation on the primal scene: my father having sex—intense, audible sex—with another man. My mind reeled. I wrote down a list of words to describe what two naked men might get up to, then I repeated those words until they lost their mystery. Fellatio, sodomy, cornhol-ing, cocksucking. The throaty male voices taunted me, their moans melting and swirling like butter and bittersweet chocolate. Rituals went on behind that door that I couldn’t visualize. Did they kiss with open lips and tongues? Did they rub their erections together, like two scouts trying to start a fire with a pair of sticks? Did they suck each other’s cock with juicy abandon as they lay coiled in bed, each lover’s heart thumping against the other’s belly? Did they mount each other, penetrate and thrust?
From the shouts and pleas that rang through the house at night, I imagined they did all that and then some.
After Gabriel had been with us for a week, my fascination took on a harder edge. In my sexual starvation, I hallucinated that Gabriel was moving on top of me, and that the moans echoing through the walls came from my own lips, not my father’s. My body ignored all taboos and began responding to the urgent sounds. My fingers stabbed my cunt in time to the squeaking bedsprings. I imagined Gabriel’s mouth on my pussy, my mouth on his prick, our hands roving over each other’s sweat-slick skin. In the daylight, I was mortified by the idea of being aroused by my father’s lovemaking. But as I witnessed Simon’s growing joy, I realized that the man sharing a bed with Gabriel was no longer just my father. With Gabriel, Simon was transformed into the man he was meant to be.
That’s when I let myself start wanting Gabriel. I not only wanted him, I deserved him.
He came to us in June. Tornado weather—the sky was swollen with its own miserable promise. The air in the house felt as dead as dough that won’t rise. Simon and I were reading on the front porch.
As soon as Gabriel stopped his battered Dodge and stepped out, my father and I were lost. We gaped as he strolled around the car, his hips rolling in frayed blue jeans. The tips of his savannah-blond hair were painted with sweat. His white cotton T-shirt sucked lovingly at his damp chest. A halo of black gnats circled his face and throat. Suddenly I wanted more than anything to be one of those miniscule insects, sipping at that man’s juice, stinging, biting, living a flash of a life in the warmth of his body.
“Morning,” he said. “Need any odd jobs done around here?” His voice was like his looks: bronzed, sun-creased, lubed with honey. In the bilious daylight his eyes were snake green.
Odd jobs? In a household consisting of a lonely, horny librarian; her lonelier, hornier father; and about three thousand books (half of them written in dead languages), I’d say there were a few odd jobs to be done. Yes, sir.
My father rose and walked down the front steps. Gabriel extended his hand (God, to think where that hand would end up that summer), and my father clutched it for what seemed like forever.
“I think we could find you some work,” Simon said.
Gabriel stayed for lunch. I prepared the food while my father and Gabriel got to know each other. As I carried the plates to the table, my father announced, “Gabriel just got back from Athens. Agatha, he lived there for a year. He speaks a bit of the language.”
Around here, that just about made him Plato reincarnate.
Simon’s face was a searchlight, casting its beam back and forth between me and Gabriel, but resting mostly on Gabriel. Barring death or disaster, there was no way this stranger was going to leave our house.
And he didn’t. The first night, Gabriel made a nest for himself on our sofa. Early the next morning, while he was taking a shower, I went through his belongings. I found a few dirty socks and T-shirts and a wallet with nothing but seven dollars inside: no credit cards, no driver’s license. I held a shirt up to my nose and inhaled his smell, as dizzying as a stag’s musk.
The water stopped running. I flung Gabriel’s things back into a heap. I thought he would appear any second, padding barefoot into the living room. His brown body would be sparkling with moisture, his hair slicked back, water clinging to his nipples and welling out of his navel and trickling down through the dark-gold tendrils that fanned his pubis.
From upstairs I heard voices: masculine, companionable, an intimate rumbling.
Love banter.
I buried my hand in the heap of quilts and felt no trace of warmth. Gabriel hadn’t slept on this sofa; he’d slept in my father’s bed. While I was trying to find out whether Gabriel was a traveling axe murderer, he and Simon had been showering together.
Over the nights that followed, as I lay in my bed listening to the ongoing seduction of my father, I developed a theory about Gabriel. I decided that Gabriel wasn’t a man or a god, but a spirit who goes back and forth between the worlds, like the daimon of Greek myth. This spirit came over from Athens in some tourist’s shopping bag, landed in the Bible Belt, and answered the cry for love that came from Simon and me. I never thought to analyze Gabriel’s sexual preferences: whether he was gay, straight, or some hybrid of the two. From the first time I saw him, I knew that Gabriel could take on any shape you wanted.
Since my mother’s death Simon had fallen in love a few times, but until Gabriel, his loves were always wildly suppressed and embarrassing, like the crumb that gets stuck in your throat in a fancy restaurant. Simon had a disturbing tendency to fall for his students. He taught history and driver’s ed at the high school, but long ago he had earned a Ph.D. in classics, and he missed Ancient Greek with a pain that showed in his eyes. Every so often a male student would sidle up to him and confess that he wanted to read Sappho or Plato or Aristophanes in the original. Boom—Simon would be gone. He couldn’t help it; Greek was the language he loved with.
This whole affair would have been easier if Gabriel had been one of m
y father’s pupils, and my father had suffered with love for years, waiting for an illicit yearning to ripen into a legitimate romance when Gabriel came of age.
Nothing in our lives was ever that easy.
The first words Gabriel said to me outside of Simon’s earshot were “I love girls your age.” The way he let the word love shimmy down his tongue, it sounded more like he wanted to say crave.
It was late at night. Somehow, under the dense shelf of heat that had been building up all day, Simon had managed to fall asleep. Gabriel and I sat outside at the picnic table.
“How old do you think I am?”
“Stand up.”
I stood.
Though I couldn’t see Gabriel’s eyes, I could feel him looking me up and down. My nipples stuck straight out and begged his eyes to linger.
“Eighteen?”
“I’m older than I look,” I warned.
I wasn’t about to admit that I was twenty-eight. My personal fashion profile hadn’t changed much since I was sixteen, the year my mother died.
“Take off that top, and I could make a better guess.”
I could sense Gabriel grinning in the darkness. He wasn’t wearing a shirt himself. All day he’d worn nothing but a pair of cutoffs, so short that I could practically hear his balls chafing against the ragged hems. Spit crackled in my parched mouth.
“I’ll take off my top if you answer a question,” I said.
“What kind of question?”
“Does it matter?”
“Sure. If it’s about the past, I won’t answer it. And if it’s about the future, I can’t.”
“Do you love Simon?”
Gabriel didn’t answer. I longed to sit down again, to get back to the promising buzz that had risen between us. But I had to keep standing there, like a prosecutor waiting for testimony.
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