Like slivers of spring onions hissing in a pan of Spanish olive oil in a Chelsea flat at 2 a.m., the police still mopping up the murder down on the street below.
Like saltwater taffy and ozone when the thunder rolled in over the roller coaster in Santa Cruz long ago when I thought it was cool to carry a switchblade, and I drove a Dodge Charger with baby shoes hanging from the mirror, the same baby blue as another girl’s eyes, that I’d bought with money working in the lettuce fields where no one spoke English.
Like summer. The kind you never really have, but only dream about, and later, pretend that you remember – that you can hold on to.
And then it occurs to me – having often wanted to own just such a ladder, and a huge climbing matrix of books – and always having dreamed of such a vantage point – that the trick to these kinds of ladders is that they can be readjusted. From the ground, even with someone up on the highest rung, the wheels allow it to be readjusted, to be ratcheted down a shelf – which strangely has the effect of making things more precarious for the person on the ladder, not less. With the center of gravity neatly engineered to be in my control, you are suddenly out of balance – lower to the ground, but still too far to safely reach. You have to lean more into the cage of the ladder, clinging to it to maintain balance. What a good joke, you think.
But it isn’t a joke. You’re stuck, like someone in a hammock strung too high. You would have to not only jump, but to roll first – and if you did, the ladder would give way from the shelf and so would collapse. It takes but a moment for you to fully appreciate the physics involved. You can only come down the ladder if I let you. Until then, you are there, balanced, needing both your hands to retain equilibrium.
I, on the other hand, unlike the minotaur man (who retains his vividness in your mind … with his fearsome appendage and awful mask) am now free to do whatever I like. If I make use of the stool down the aisle of books, which has been made available to those who want to browse the lower shelves, I’m exactly the right height to do many things. If I stand on it and poke my head through the square of neatly dowelled wood to the front, I can lift your skirt and gaze without concern at your femaleness. I can breathe over your vulva. I can tongue your thighs. I can bury my face in your pussy and smear myself into it like devouring a ripe, slit-open mango. There’s nothing you can do. You can’t loose a hand to guide me, stop me, or stroke yourself – or you’ll tumble to the floor.
If I want to suck your clit like a single pea from a freshly snapped pod, I can. If I want to duck behind the ladder, part your cheeks and lick your asshole, I can do that too. You’ve really gotten yourself into a bit of a muddle. And you laugh at that at first … and sigh … because of course, why would you want to fall to the floor when such things are happening?
But here’s the thing. When you really are trapped between the ceiling and the floor … when you no longer have any control or power over what happens … when your clit can be mercilessly teased, your butthole not only rimmed but greedily sucked … you begin to find the edges in yourself. Once, twice … again … and again … you come right up to the brink of climax. The nastiness … the frankness … the sheer reality of what’s happening begins to drive you into another state. All your mechanisms for showing or hiding your reactions are gone. It’s undeniable when you’re about to come … and the frustration is scentable when the stimulation stops. A deep mouthful of haunch … a pulling back of your lips with lips. The fire of it moves from your cunt – and suddenly you want to shout the word “Cunt!” at the top of your voice in the silent, civilized world of the library – up into your belly and then your breasts – your nipples so hard now they feel soft and precious – like raindrops …
Which makes you think of the hint of rain in the picture in the book that is still so close you can smell its old pages. And the long forgotten rain outside – which world? You can see the girl naked on the floor with her ass offered, the monster in his prison head, the exaggerated penis jutting forward. You think you are ready for the beast creature now. To not simply be entered, but to be split apart … exploded and remade. You want more than anything to be fucked. To be fucked asunder.
But you are not ready yet. It takes more time still. More rain outside, in the world beyond the ladder and the library. You must be taken again and again to the precipice … until you are annoyed, angry. Until your body starts to cramp on the rungs. Until you are ready to jump, so that you can fondle and even mash yourself, and find relief.
You find yourself becoming vicious. The teasing is more than you can take. You are becoming the words the woman on the bed in the picture was about to say. You must have a fucking orgasm now … the way sometimes you have to piss and shit – to eat. You cannot last another minute. You hate me. You want my mouth, you want my cock. You want to be safe on the floor. You want to cry. You want the minotaur man to pound you open and put you back together.
And then you hear a sound you’ve never heard before.
In the stately silence of the library basement, with only the vague hum of the electrical infrastructure behind the walls, and the muffled sky sluicing down outside, you hear the soft steady wet of your own desire falling like secret, intimate rain, striking the floor. You have never been so soaked and open … or suspended from a height great enough to hear that private precipitation.
That sound frees you. To beg. Not just plead. Not just moaning in play. But to really beg – to be fucked. The way someone in serious pain begs for morphine. A total loss and surrender of all dignity and shame.
Only when I hear that telltale timbre in the voice, do I lower the ladder. Lift you off. Plant you on all fours and lift up your sopping skirt.
Then, with your ass arched up, which in your mind is just like the beautiful younger woman in the picture book, I do fuck you. I slice you like a fig. I smash myself into you, balls slapping up under you, your asshole still glistening from my saliva. In a dead quiet aisle of dusty forgotten books I fuck you like a man released from a cage.
It’s wet and messy – squishy and loud. I slap your ass. I crush the meat of it in my hands as I pull you into me, pushing more of myself deeper, so that you get the whole man and not only the cock, fucking you until the monster in us both is pooled and fluorescent on the floor … whole rows of books toppled and gaping open for the first time in years, as if in sympathy and release, gobs and jets of me, splashes and flecks of you on the tired linoleum – wrinkling a little, it seems, like hard dead earth after a sudden heavy rain.
And fallen on the floor in the mingledness of us … is the very book we were looking for, a ladder and a lifetime before.
We found it.
Park Larks
C. Margery Kempe
“I can’t believe you’ve never been to the secret garden!” Alice said, hands on her hips to show her disapproval of his ignorance. Charley shrugged vaguely, but she wasn’t about to let him get away with it. “You were born in London, Charley.”
“I have hay fever,” he whined, hoping she would change the subject soon. His thoughts were on getting her back to his flat for a little adventuring before the night was much older. Drink up, he silently wished. “I don’t play weekend rugger, but I’ve walked through the park a million times. It’s just the shortest distance to Camden Town. I’m always sneezing by the time I get to the zoo, though.”
“It’s supposed to be nice tomorrow. We’re going to go,” Alice said decisively, pointing an accusing finger at him. “You’re going to like it. I’ll make sure of it.”
Charley grinned. There was no use arguing with Alice when she made her mind up. It was one of the things he found most appealing about her. She threw herself into any activity with a verve and vivacity that he found bracing, so unlike his own torpor.
The next afternoon they met for lunch. Alice informed him right away that she had taken the afternoon off, and while Charley was reluctant to do the same, he had a feeling she would not let him commit to any less. He had come to enjoy the way s
he wrapped him around her finger. He also enjoyed the sight of her in that thin green shift dress, its light fabric barely concealing her flesh. The green seemed to be important for her scheme, but he was more interested in the clear lack of a brassiere. His hands itched to caress her breasts, where her tiny nipples already taunted him.
“All right, to the park,” she ordered him as they stepped out from Baker Street station hand in hand. Crossing into the green they saw the usual gaggle of lunchtime idlers and omnipresent tourists feeding the coots and swans with bread, candy bars and popcorn. They turned to the right and headed for the rose garden where a profusion of blooms greeted their eyes and ears with a barrage of sensory delights. Most of the blooms were barely more than buds, but the scent was pervasive. Of course, Charley felt a sneeze coming on almost immediately.
Alice, however, walked determinedly through the fragrant bushes without looking to the left or the right. Crossing the inner circle, Charley was surprised to see a gateway he had never once noticed and the long tunnel of a passageway he had never walked down. At the curved end, they stepped out into what looked like a private garden.
“It used to be part of that house,” Alice explained, pointing to the rather surprising little manor that lay at the end of a long expanse of green stretching from the little circle into which they had first emerged. “They fell on hard times and had to sell it off. Now it’s public, although not everyone seems to know about it.” The calla lilies were in bloom and waved in the hot breeze. Spring was rapidly giving way to summer and the lazy buzz of bees filled the air. It seemed an ideal setting to promote indolence.
There were people here and there, sprawled on the grass or stalking among the flowers. Alice took his hand and led him away from the house back through the circle and toward another little nook. Here there were some benches, a sort of sculpture and lots of bigger bushes. They headed for the bench in the middle. A bloke who looked like some kind of banker was reading a Financial Times on the left bench and a pair of elderly ladies were on the other.
“This is the place,” Alice said with finality.
“For what?” Charley asked.
Alice smiled that dirty girl grin he knew so well. Oh my, he thought.
“But there are people here,” Charley said as Alice’s hand caressed his thigh.
She giggled. “Yes, of course, but they’ll get embarrassed and go away if we start some earnest canoodling.”
Charley frowned, hoping she knew he was feeling highly dubious about this adventure. “What if they’re tourists? Tourists won’t be embarrassed by public displays of affection. Especially Spanish tourists,” he added, although he wasn’t quite sure what prompted him to say that. A buried memory?
“Tourists don’t come back here. They’re over in the rose gardens. Kiss me.” She reached up and pulled on his shoulders until he wrapped his arms around her neck and met her lips in a kiss that quickly went from a mere meeting to opening wide, thrusting his tongue between her teeth, fucking her mouth the way she loved. Alice sucked his tongue, which persuaded his knob to rise to the occasion, too, tightening the front of his trousers. Oh Christ, Charley thought, are we really going to do this? He couldn’t tell if he was more frightened or aroused.
Charley heard the man at the next bench refold his paper with a good bit of rattling, as if to remind them of his presence. He was cheerfully ignored. Charley pulled Alice over so she was straddling his lap while they continued the dance of their tongues and his fingers began making circles up and down her back, reminding him that she was wearing no brassiere beneath her light summer shift.
Off to the side, there came more paper rattling. Charley glanced over to see the man with his face buried deep in the folds of his Times as if he could make them go away by wishing. It only made Charley think of how he’d like to be burying his face between Alice’s legs for a feast of his own. His erection lay solid beneath Alice’s hot pressure as she leaned in as close as possible to him. It was hard to remember ever being quite this excited before.
He stole a glance to his left and found that the elderly ladies had already departed, doubtless wagging their heads at the shocking brazenness of the youth of today. Or maybe, Charley thought as Alice rubbed her hardened nipples against his chest, maybe the two old women were grinning, remembering their own fearless adventures from youth. Perhaps they came here to reminisce, he considered, maybe in another time they too had come here with lovers, far from the prying eyes of parents and elders. Like a clicking kinetoscope, images of fumbling lovers shedding period costumes filled his imagination and Charley raised his hands and buried them in Alice’s hair, aching to bury himself inside her, in that warm wet cunt that always welcomed him, clutching hungrily at his thickness.
Alice broke the kiss long enough to look over her shoulder toward their neighbour on the benches. The man continued to stare into the depths of his paper, stubborn to the last. Alice shifted around so that she was sitting across Charley’s lap, her back to the reader, her arse planted between his thighs. She moved Charley’s hand around to cup her small breast and moaned aloud, leaning back into his other arm. Charley let his eyes dart toward the man on the bench who seemed rigidly still, as if anger had frozen him like a statue. Charley leaned in to bite Alice’s neck, his thumb flipping across her popped nipple and she moaned happily again, squirming in his lap with tantalizing nearness, her heat adding to his own. His cock seemed to swell even further.
It was too much for the man. With a sudden explosion of noise, he wadded up the newspaper, stuffed it in his carrier bag and muttered under his breath as he strode off with a stomping step that was wasted on the soft ground.
They were alone.
“Quick now,” Alice said huskily, her eyes bright with desire. She hopped off his lap and led him by the hand into the tangle of plants behind the bench. It wasn’t much cover, Charley thought, suddenly worried. There was another building visible through the bower. Would someone see them?
But Alice was already reaching under her dress to slip off her knickers, tossing them into her bag without another thought and standing legs apart, looking at him with a wicked grin. Charley felt a whimper rise to his throat, but reached down to unzip his trousers. He couldn’t quite resist looking over his shoulder, but they were alone so far.
“Lie down,” Alice told him. Charley opened his mouth to complain, but closed it again. Alice would come first, as usual. But she would come again. Charley grinned and lay down, slipping his trousers down around his knees as he did so. His prick sprang up eagerly, ready for action. Alice smiled. “Now that’s the way to do it.”
She stepped over him and lowered herself with agonizing slowness, reaching down to guide his cock inside her. Alice paused, swirling around the tip in leisurely circles until he wanted to scream, when all at once she slid the rest of the way down and he groaned happily to feel himself squeeze tightly inside her – that hot, slick, welcoming, warm home.
Charley reached up to fondle her tits, groping through her thin dress as Alice bit her lip in concentration, lifting herself up before sinking back down with a sigh. Charley had forgotten about his fears, about the openness of this place, the tickle of the grass against his bum and the sneeze that threatened to build in his nasal passages. All his attention fixed on Alice’s slow rise and fall, and the way his prick wanted to explode inside her warm walls.
Out of the corner of his eye, Charley suddenly saw a young girl, maybe fifteen, who had come up the path and then frozen when she saw them. To his surprise, she did not turn and flee, but tried to hide herself behind one of the larger bushes, crouching behind it to conceal herself as she peeked through the branches. While he had felt himself wilt a tad when he spotted her, the girl’s veiled view gave him a sudden surge of power. He let his hands slip to Alice’s hips, guiding her movements to a slightly faster pace as he sensed their breaths hastening in union.
Alice reached up to caress her breasts, head thrown back, mouth open. “Charley, I think I’m com
ing, oh yes, I’m coming! Faster now, harder! Come on, Charley!” Her movements became manic, grinding into his pelvis as he sought to match her rhythm, but she was crying aloud, her cunt spasming wildly around his cock as she came, still holding her tits tightly.
Charley couldn’t bear it any more and swiftly rolled over on top of the very surprised Alice, who laughed out loud. Breathing raggedly, Charley practically growled as he thrust her legs up over his shoulders and buried himself inside her as deeply as he could. Alice’s eyes rolled up as she moaned happily in time with his thrusts. Charley thought his too-white bum must look a sight to that teen’s eyes but he no longer cared, instead panting as his balls slapped against Alice audibly and finally, after what seemed like forever, he could feel himself coming – it seemed to be rising up from his toes – shooting inside Alice’s quivering quim and feeling like roaring aloud to the whole of the city to trumpet the wonderful sensation of it all.
He plastered Alice’s face with kisses after releasing her legs. She reached for her bag and fished out a handful of tissues, intent on cleaning them up for a hasty exit. Alice rubbed her crotch with pleasurable vigour and stroked his semi-hard cock with the bedraggled tissues. Charley grinned ruefully. He could be ready to go in another few minutes, he thought with surprise.
But they would do well to skedaddle, Charley admitted, clambering to his feet and pulling his pants up. The teen voyeur had departed as far as he could tell. No one yet had come to replace her.
“Let’s go to the toilets in the rose garden,” Alice said, taking his hand as they ran laughing back down the corridor. The people they passed must have thought they were drunk or mad, although they doubtless left a whiff of sex in their wake.
As he washed his hands in the gents, Charley couldn’t keep himself from grinning. He had seen the raised eyebrow the American had given him after glancing at his grass-stained knees while they stood at the urinals. Rather than embarrassed, Charley felt quite good. In fact, he was hard again just thinking about it. At least he was until he started sneezing. No doubt his hay fever was going to linger, but it was worth it.
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