His fingers work their way down the seam of my pants, and then, as I hoped he would, they find the hole. It’s only a small one, an inch or so of torn seam but it’s right over my cunt. My hands tighten on the pole and my breathing is shallow. Buttercup trembles beneath my feet, Bob is humming to himself over the radio, the Rockies are huge and purple and solid in my vision, and my cunt is fiery with need.
Leon slips two fingers into the hole. They brush lightly over my panties and I shudder. Then they scissor and the old thread gives way a little more. Three fingers. And now they brush rhythmically over the gusset. He must realize how wet I am. I grip the pole tightly with both hands and concentrate on his fingers, moving to and fro with deliberate intent.
“Heading back,” says Bob over the radio, and there’s a dip of Buttercup’s wings as he prepares to turn.
Leon’s hand twitches; I can sense his withdrawal. He’s behind me, slightly stooped to work his fingers over my cunt. But he’s also got his harness on and there’s no danger. So I close my legs, trapping his hand. My inner thighs are tight and muscled from the wing walking, and he can’t get away. He tries again, a tug, but his hand is trapped there as Buttercup banks around and heads back to the airfield.
Bob is still humming a Sousa march, and the sun is now hot on my face. Now that we’ve straightened out again, there’s not long until we’ll be on the ground. So I relax my thighs, free his hand, and Leon wiggles his fingers in appreciation. And then he starts to stroke in earnest, getting beneath my panties to caress my lips, and circle my clit with an urgent fingertip.
I’m not sure if the ground is rushing up to meet me because Buttercup is coming in to land or if it’s just the thrill and the buildup. But there’s a tightness in my chest with the beauty and the glory of it all, and a trembling beneath my feet as Bob throttles back Buttercup’s engine. And Leon’s fingers are as fiery as the sun that burns my face and my world is tilting, the sky is falling or the ground is rising, and as Buttercup floats down out of the wide white sky, I come, screaming my joy into the wind.
Not a second too soon. Buttercup bumps down on the grass and we’re racing along, and Leon whips his hand away – I see his fingers shining with my juices – and we both grip the support tightly, totally unprepared for the landing.
Bob brakes and Buttercup meanders into her turn and taxis back to the hangar. I breathe slowly and deliberately, letting the world straighten itself again. I look over at Leon – my new partner – and smile, and he grins back with all the joy of flight in his eyes. The sun is golden on my face and Buttercup is steady beneath my feet. And here I am, on the wing, there with those that I love the most.
The Dead End Job
Laurence Klavan
They were supposed to be doing something at work, and they were. She was doing something, anyway, talking to him while sitting beside him on super-structured swivel chairs imported at great expense from Finland (or some foreign place) in her office, which had been presented to Isabel as an incentive to take the job – she wouldn’t be working in a cubicle, in other words – and which had actually become a boon for them, since it was small enough for them to be close together – “conferring on data” – without arousing suspicions when she did this, when she told him stories about herself to excite him and he touched himself through his jeans or – if he was feeling bold enough – unbuckled and unzipped his pants and touched himself directly.
They had started doing it a few weeks ago during lunch hour when the rest of the office emptied out. She had learned that Martin didn’t eat lunch, hardly ate at all, unlike herself, who felt even at twenty-three that she ate too much, even though others thought she was being silly, others found her attractive, Martin did, at any rate, though it took him forever to say so and, come to think of it, maybe he never actually had: he had just moved toward Isabel like an object on a ship’s table sliding amidst a storm at sea. Maybe his not eating enough explained more than his – not entirely unappealing – ultra-slimness, it had caused his – how should she say it? – lack of strength in a certain area, something she had discovered during their first date, if you could even call it a date; it had been more, again, a kind of gravitational drift in each other’s direction after hours. Though now that she thought of it – as he came forcefully, hearing the most erotic part of her monologue breathed into his ear – he was only weak sexually in certain ways and not in others; in fact, he was incredibly avid when he heard her tales; she might even have called him potent, if potency didn’t imply an interaction with another person, though maybe it only meant having the potential of powerfully reproducing, which Martin obviously had, even though he was currently wasting his precious (or was it inexhaustible?) reproductive material in the front flap of his underwear.
They had started doing it at work because they had been so fucking bored. Not that Isabel had expected to be thrilled, exactly collecting data in a company that made security systems – let her get this straight – so that “passive requestors” could strengthen the “trust realms” between “insecure” computers, so that web browsers could better “make requests” of – oh, the whole thing had been so lame to begin with, and so would anybody working in it; but, well, she had needed a job and the industrial park was in driving distance from her apartment (the first she’d ever had, gotten right after graduating college, where she had studied art history, as useless a major as she had been warned it would be), and this was sold to her, too, as another incentive, the short commute, though now in fact she would have preferred a longer ride in the morning, since pressing her foot to the pedal and turning the radio knob were more actions than she performed at work, more of a physical and mental workout, and she was only half-kidding.
Martin had not been her first office mate: Rita had been there to begin with, a nondescript woman of fifty who, to Isabel’s amazement, had already worked there for ten years, and who had a heart attack and took early retirement two days after Isabel arrived (Isabel was not the reason, she had been solemnly reassured by her boss, Owen, as if she ever would have imagined that she was; though, in fact, the reassurance actually made her consider it for a second), and Martin arrived soon after, at about half Rita’s salary, Isabel assumed.
He was, she immediately noticed, her own age, dark-haired and not unhandsome, though so slight as to seem positively fragile. Isabel had never fantasized sexually about being physically bigger than a man, but in truth she wasn’t the most experienced in this area, having gone through college just racking up short relationships with an aspiring and seemingly pot-addicted musician, mostly because they lived on the same hall, and an acting student who had said he was bi-sexual but whom she soon learned was homosexual, or at least would be – he confessed while leaving her for a male stage manager – after his experience with her. Their affair, too, had come about through inertia – they had been at the same cast party and left at the same time, and this, it turned out, was the most they would ever have in common.
Martin and she had quickly formed a tighter bond, one based on incredulity at the fact of their daily tasks, disbelief that they were meant to merely man computers, waiting for data, feeling as suffocated as those at battle stations in wartime submarines but nowhere near as necessary (Martin had said this; he’d been a history major). The two were nearly stunned by the idea of doing this all day, unnerved enough that they couldn’t even laugh about it, until, one night on the way home, after they’d each had two beers apiece at a nearby bar, they couldn’t stop laughing.
Even here, the torpor of the job had taken its toll, sapped their spirits; they hadn’t actively chosen the bar: Martin had just caravanned behind her car until Isabel shrugged, put on her turn signal, and he had followed. In the same sleepwalking way, they had gone to her place afterwards, since he still lived with roommates, one of whom slept out in the open, on the living room couch.
They had watched an animated movie for awhile, one that both had seen several times without even liking. Then, neither being the aggr
essor, they simply moved closer on the couch like commuters making room for others on a crowded subway car, freeze-framed the film, and got close enough to touch.
Martin’s hands had skittered over her like bats, and she had darted her tongue into his mouth, as if trying to reach something under a couch where it had not been vacuumed for years. While each had made the least amount of effort possible, both became aroused – it had been ages for Isabel, after all, and she heard Martin moan in what sounded like agreement when she rubbed his half-erection, her wrist pressed somewhat painfully against the clump of keys in the right front pocket beside it.
Yet by the time she’d returned hopefully from the bathroom – carrying a condom, which she’d taken discreetly from a bowl of free ones in a progressive bookstore downtown – wearing only her panties but still holding against her the T-shirt she’d taken off, self-conscious as ever about her size, she found that Martin was already pulling back on the pants he’d partially yanked down and was reaching again for the remote.
He gave no explanation (later, she understood he’d been too embarrassed or at least too unhappy with himself to speak) and at the moment she blamed herself and then him and then herself again, and sat there feeling strange, still gripping the unwrapped condom with her right hand and the T-shirt with her left, as he began the movie again from the place where they’d stopped it.
While they watched – or while he did, and she stared into a middle distance, wondering if she was blushing (it seemed like it) and, if so, whether if it was from anger or embarrassment or both – without a word or muting the movie, Martin turned and began touching her again, fingering her through the side of her underwear and occasionally moving her T-shirt away to inexpertly but intently suck her nipple. He did it, she thought later, out of guilt and obligation or as a kind of good form and fair play (he was a WASP, after all, he had said so over drinks, though he had gone to school on a scholarship) or from an excitement that (and here she began to feel compassion for him and not contempt) he was unable to fully feel but only witness and acknowledge, the way one smells food that one doesn’t actually crave but understands others eating. Whyever he was doing it, he made Isabel come, a bit more intensely than she usually made herself in the evenings, her experience diminished somewhat by the accompanying sound of a song sung by cartoon flounders in the movie, along with which she suspected Martin was quietly humming, though it might have been more of the agreeing-with moaning he had done before.
Afterward, he pulled away, leaving her to readjust her underwear and fully pull on her shirt. The fact that he had even done it, after being impotent (because he lacked strong enough blood circulation or didn’t desire her in that way or didn’t eat enough – he had only nibbled at the nachos in the bar, while she ate almost all of them – or was, well, ill) somewhat endeared him to her, and she placed an elbow upon his shoulder, as if they were players on a high school soccer team or something, as they watched to the end the movie they still thought mediocre.
As the credits rolled – and Martin finally pressed the mute – Isabel thought she should say something to comfort him, in case he felt at fault.
“I bet you’ve had more exciting evenings,” she said, to take the rap, though she knew – or at least suspected – she was unworthy of such punishment, a tiny residual doubt notwithstanding.
“Oh, hey,” Martin said, after a long and tortured pause, direct expression clearly – along with other kinds of human interactions – an ongoing and excruciating trial for him, “it’s you who had to … I mean, I hadn’t been …” and that was the best he could do to grab back the ball of blame.
Then there was an even longer pause before, not able to look at her, he asked, “When was the first time you – you did it?” Isabel was surprised, even taken aback, by his inquiry. For a second, she didn’t answer and so he took her silence as a rebuke and, “Sorry,” he said, “maybe I shouldn’t have …”
But that he had had the energy to ask her anything, had taken an initiative that wasn’t to make up for a failing (as when he’d touched her) or express a negative emotion (as, at work, when he had once “mistakenly” deleted incoming data) so impressed her that she felt obligated to reply, if only to encourage him to continue.
“It was, well, in high school,” she said, “at a boy I knew’s house.”
Slowly, he asked her another question about the encounter (which had been with Bailey Glynn, arts editor of the high school lit mag, the Long Island Epiphany), and then another, and each time she answered, because, as she did so, she sensed a commitment from and curiosity in him that she had never seen and did not want to quash, uncomfortable as she was revealing details which up till now had been known only to Bailey and herself.
“He undid my bra, and then we thought we heard his parents pull into the driveway, but it wasn’t the case, and, strangely, that seemed to make him harder, and—”
“What did you do then?”
She told him about her first fumbling yet erotic experience with fellatio, distancing herself from the event by pretending to describe a movie she had seen and, accordingly, embellishing it here and there, which both allowed her less unease and increased his avidity, the almost entranced quality of his arousal (his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open) which grew more and more marked as she kept talking.
“And were you excited?”
“So excited.”
As she reached the peak of her story, Martin began to undo his pants with great haste, as if he simply could not wait a moment longer. She was surprised by the strength and size of his erection now, as if he were another person, had a whole other body, when she talked to him like this. Before he could touch his penis, she did, and before she could touch it more than once, he came, so loudly and powerfully that he sounded as if he was in pain and had to place a hand on her arm to steady himself, as if he was afraid of what was happening, though this only made her excited and not concerned for him.
Afterward, Martin looked down and saw that his semen had shot the entire length of his bare leg and on to her couch, some of it even hitting the TV remote inches away. He said nothing, just rose to pull one, two, then three tissues from a nearby box and start to fastidiously clean up. Before he had finished, Isabel had tugged his hand toward her, pried the tissues loose from it, and placed it between her legs: he pushed three fingers inside her, and she held his hand there and came again, this time much more deeply and electrically than she had before, than she ever had, she later admitted only to herself.
Each briefly looked in the other’s eyes, aware that both were alive in ways that were unknown to other people in the office, and that neither would have known if neither had exposed – sacrificed – something (he pride, she privacy); that both had done things that night and been rewarded, in other words, the opposite of how they spent their time at work. Then they looked away, each secretly knowing what would happen next.
Isabel and Martin didn’t discuss or arrange it: speaking to each other was not their strong suit (especially not his). Yet the next day, after staring immobile at information on a screen before pressing a button to distribute it, when no one was passing their door, she quietly asked him what else he wanted to know about her, and he answered her question with another question – “What was the next time you, etc.” – and she answered his question with an actual answer, and that made him ask another question, with an urgency he showed about nothing else (had maybe never shown about anything else), and she answered again, his excitement exciting her (her power to excite him exciting her), until he – “nonchalantly” – placed the base of his palm quickly against the large lump that had grown below his belt, and she naughtily brushed it once or twice with her elbow, and ended the exchange, Martin gasping and seeming almost lifted up in the air by the wild rush it afforded him. Then Isabel excused herself and went into the ladies’ room where she locked herself in a stall and made herself come, too, which happened almost instantly and left her so sweaty and aromatic that she realized h
er “natural” deodorant didn’t work and probably never had, she just never had known, for she had never tested it with enough effort.
As weeks went on, they got the routine down to a science, knew when to stop if they heard sounds in the hall, when to swivel away from each other, when to start up again. One day, Martin stayed out sick with a cold and called her from home. This was physically easier for her – Isabel only had to eyeball the hall and not physically disengage from him if the coast wasn’t clear – yet it took some getting used to, it being more impersonal.
“What did he say about your tits?” he asked, after she had quietly described an event.
“That he liked them.”
“That’s all?”
“That they were big. That I had nice ones.”
“Then what did he do?”
“He kissed around, then licked around, then bit around my nipples. He wouldn’t suck them. He was tormenting me.”
“Did your nipples get hard?”
“So hard.”
“What did you do?”
“I begged him to suck them. And he said I’d have to wait.”
“Were you wet?”
“So wet.”
“What happened then?”
“He made me promise that I would swallow his come if he sucked my nipples.”
“And what did you do?”
“I promised that I would.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. Later.”
“I really want to hear about that.”
There was a brief pause on the other end of the line, as she heard only Martin’s slow, slightly cold-congested breathing. Then, “I’ll call you back,” he said and hung up.
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