by Kerri Sharpe
You sang about wrapping me in your arms, and I hugged myself, rocking, feeling at the same time the low beat of the drum bump along like you were bumping your hips against me, felt my nipples stiffen up as though you were nuzzling into my neck. I was leant back in the chair, the afternoon sun lying on my legs, warming me slowly, and the rest of the house started falling away, obscured by the lush and seductive sound of the music.
The strangest of feelings, being fucked by a song. My breath was heaving. Between my legs my cunt was undeniably buzzing, getting the slippery way it does when I’m anticipating sex. The desire was growing in me again, all the hazy, delicious desire of that long summer unfolding from within and multiplying like a psychedelic dream of pornographic detail. I felt myself swell and fall, my limbs grow heavy, my knees weaken. That wanton, reckless girl I dimly remember as my younger self seemed to awaken. The tug of sex stirred under my clothes, and I shifted in the chair. An old touchpaper was lit, burning quickly from my pussy and rising in my chest. I was sure that somehow I had grown young and juicy again, lips redder, tits magically prouder and as full as a bowl of fruit. I rubbed my thighs together, letting the crotch of my jeans agitate my clit. For once I felt mischievous, inflamed, vivacious again.
By now my clothes were all starting to itch and all I wanted was to strip and somehow bathe in that song, be naked in the sound and let it penetrate me, soak into my skin, pour into my ears and cunt. While you played, I could hear the deep breath you took before singing a line, and I swear I could feel a cold draught of air as you did so, your inhalation brushing over the back of my neck. With one finger I traced a line from my throat to my breasts, to the outline of my jutting nipples, crying out to be tweaked.
Just the way you would twang a guitar string, I flicked at myself, coaxing little shocks of pleasure from the hard tips. I pictured you doing it, with that half-smile of yours, the lazy lopsided way of looking at me with your head tilted and a splash of black hair over your eyes. When you wrote this, I thought, you were standing, one leg half bent to hold the guitar. Your hips angled forwards, and every note would send a vibration down the neck to shudder against your cock. I wondered at the thought of that sensation, the feel of the instrument between your legs, making you a little stiff, a little horny. At the image of your cock hardening, I let my legs spread wider, like you’d gripped my ankles and tugged them gently apart.
Was this what you’d wanted? When you wrote this song, were you imagining me lying back and slipping my hands down the front of my knickers? Was that low note you sang a way of courting me, like a songbird singing his mate into a state of readiness? Maybe you knew that the ache of this song would seduce me, maybe you wrote it with your cock in your hand while you imagined fucking me across oceans. Knowing that the notes would turn me liquid, would send me, writhing, on a voyage of erotic intent.
It was working. I was working on myself. One hand crawling inexorably down my belly towards my sex, my hips bucking in time to the suggestive drumbeat, biting my own lip to give it the stimulation of pain, if not the blessing of your warm skin.
It occurred to me that all the excesses of that summer might have been prompted by your innocent-sounding voice – the undercurrents of sexual want propelling me towards those dark basement clubs, into the arms of a different man every week. All the time I’d been enthusiastically sucking and writhing in the beds of strangers, I’d had the maddening want for you, for a night in your bed with you whispering dirty words in my ear. I worked my way through all those various cocks in a search for your elusive, beautiful presence. An echo of your melody-soaked possibility.
As I thought of this I was still pawing at the front of my pants, feeling the rough scratch of hair at the V of my thighs and knowing I had to bring myself off or go crazy listening to this heart-rending music.
A three-minute song wouldn’t give me the drawn-out mindfuck I really craved and, realising I was halfway through the middle eight already, my dirty hands suddenly plunged right in, desperate to wring an orgasm out of this song, to come while you breathed a melody in my ears. It was burning heaven to feel fingers against my clit, frantic, hot as lava and as resounding as C major clanged out on a Steinway. Reviving. At the same time, I felt weirdly as though you were present, watching me, cheering me on with the rising chorus of your song. A performance as intimate and shocking as masturbating in public, and I felt my cheeks burn as though I were onstage, exposed as a slut yet unable to stop.
I rubbed that hungry pussy like I was strumming chords, loving the feel of it but still craving more. I felt the huge absence of your cock within me as I tensed my muscles. Panting, I rolled from side to side on the recliner in desperation to press myself against a firm surface, to feel friction, heat, the thud of satisfaction as the song rushed towards the climax. I knew it was foolish to think the bass beat was some priapic, rutting creature that had me impaled on its rhythm but believed it still in my delirium. Hanging on to your voice and the smooth growl of your lyrics, I spun myself tightly, thrusted upwards onto my hand and twisted, pressing, bringing at last and just in time a long, swooping rush of sweet gunfire hammering through my head and breaking open in a full-on orchestral clamour – you screamed, the last refrain, I moaned, I made a sound like I was breaking into tears as the guitars clanged, clanged, clanged. I came like a car crash, full speed and so hard I forgot to breathe for a minute, gasping, convulsing, curling over and letting the song carry me with it as it unravelled in a glorious, tangled crescendo.
And faded. I was holding tightly onto my pussy with one hand as the last chords softened and faded, a little reverb echoing sadly in the way one clings to a lover’s neck, like the tide going out.
So I was left lying there like something washed up on the beach, flushed and mildly ashamed of my stolen tryst. How would one explain something like that? I just got fucked by a guitar, by a bass and a piano. True, what sent me spinning into lustful fantasy was mostly your honeyed voice, but in a way I felt I’d just wanked with a crowd of strange men as they played their instruments. Had a sordid fling with an imagined lover. Was this a common perversion? Teenage girls screaming at The Beatles, wetting their knickers with excitement. Kissing the pin-up posters on their bedroom walls. I felt like some obscene groupie as I pulled my clothes straight and let my heart thump out the last post-orgasmic beats. I’d given in to that old lust, the voracious appetite that used to send me spinning out to find a conquest. Still there, after so long. The desire for that pageant of sex. The fast motor of my libido had suddenly been jumpstarted so hard I was shocked by my own feelings. Like a wound-up teenage nymph, not a sober adult doing her Sunday housework.
The shakiness of afternoon sex made my movements uncertain, and I staggered to my feet with the headphones still attached, like a tethered animal, disoriented, suddenly come to from a lurid daydream.
It was when I turned to switch off the stereo, which was playing a hissing wail of white noise, that I realised I’d been caught. A shadow caught my eye.
Husband, hands in pockets, leaning against the radiator. His eyes fixed on me, on my crumpled clothes and flushed face.
Awkward moments between a married couple are something to savour. When you’ve spent so long deep in each other’s lives, breathing the same air, it’s almost a gift to find yourself suddenly screaming with shame, humiliated in such a thoroughly shocking way. What did he see? Me writhing on the recliner, hands in pussy, face twisted in painful ecstasy, lips bitten. I searched wildly for an excuse, for a reason to explain why I was locked in rapturous union with the headphones, a thief caught red handed. Stealing a fuck from the distant past, committing adultery with my own memory. I was guilty as sin.
He could have left me hanging there, stewing in my own painful embarrassment while I tried to recompose myself. But it’s at times like this when I realise one of the reasons I marched up the aisle with this man. One of the reasons I hang around and play house with him. Standing there, acres of space between us on that Sunday after
noon, he gifted me with one of those beautiful lopsided smiles of his. A splash of black hair in his eyes.
He traversed that vast space like it was nothing more than walking across the room. Pulled at my dishevelled clothes and laughed at me. With his voice like chocolate, like silk in my ear, he put his mouth to my ear and sang to me. It’s always taken my breath away, how he forgives my lurid excesses with a shrug and a tease. How he can turn me on just by talking to me, but most especially by singing to me. Those Everly Brothers songs. When you sing ‘Dream’, it still turns my knees weak.
Nikki Megennis’s short stories have appeared in numerous Wicked Words collections. She is also the author of the Black Lace novel, Circus Excite.
Gettysburg Undress
Amber Leigh
‘TOMORROW WE’RE GOING to rewrite history.’
Major General George Pickett raised his glass in the air to toast the impending victory. At his side, Major General ‘Jeb’ Stuart chuckled and plucked his cigar from the edge of the card table. Under plumes of smoke that hung listlessly in the billet tent, their laughter was a cacophony of vulgar mirth.
‘What are you gentlemen plotting?’ Vivien enquired.
Their table was a skirmish of maps and half-drained whiskey bottles. A souvenir mug, depicting the battle of Railroad Cut, had been conscripted for use as Jeb’s ashtray. It overflowed with dead matches and the stubs of spent cheroots. Vivien knew the men took their re-enactments seriously – each year she encountered them at Olustee, Spotsylvania and this July pilgrimage to Gettysburg – but she couldn’t understand why they recreated the squalor from the nineteenth century in their shared billet. The stench of cigar smoke clung to each breath like a greasy stain. The perfume of sour mash whiskey reminded her of spoiled fruit. With the rumpled sheets that covered their respective cots, and the clutter of anachronistic suitcases stuffed in one corner, Vivien thought Pickett and Stuart were as untidy as the messiest frat boys she had ever encountered.
Ignoring the disarray of their quarters she pouted at them. ‘I thought one of you fine gentlemen was escorting me to the dance this evening. I saved this bodice and crinoline especially for tonight.’ To show them how special the dress was she gave a brief twirl, displaying the gathers of vermilion silk, white velvet trim and the delicate decoration of dainty blue bows. The colours glistened like kaleidoscopic waves beneath the glimmer of the tent’s lamps. The gown was cut tight to emphasise her slender waist and the bodice’s plunging neckline gave the illusion that she had a magnificent bosom. Vivien had hoped the finished effect was appropriate for the period and might help her catch the eye of a general or two at the re-enactor’s camp dance. Seeing the approving glint in George and Jeb’s smiles, Vivien realised she looked as good as she had hoped.
But she could also sense they were more preoccupied with plotting mischief rather than paying her the attention she deserved. Their apparent lack of interest was a challenge and she silently vowed to make them take notice. Throwing her shoulders back and pushing her chest out, she flicked her hair over her shoulders and graced them with her most alluring smile.
‘Come and sit with us awhile, Miss Vivien,’ George suggested. He shifted slightly on his bench and waited until Jeb had also moved so that there was a space between them. A devilish twinkle glinted in George’s eye as he patted the slender seat and Vivien allowed herself the hope that she had already sparked his arousal. ‘I’d love to impress you with an insight into my military genius,’ George confided.
His comment dashed Vivien’s hope that he might harbour an amorous interest and she turned her winsome glance in Jeb’s direction. She was dismayed to hear the second officer expand on Pickett’s claim. ‘We’re going to win the war for the Confederacy tomorrow,’ Jeb promised. ‘You’ll be overwhelmed by our audacity.’
Although they weren’t showing her the attention she wanted to enjoy, Vivien had to admit she was intrigued. Conceding she could miss the opening of the re-enactor’s camp dance, she gathered the folds of her dress and stepped daintily across the groundsheet to sit between them. ‘You’re planning to win tomorrow’s battle? I thought you were scheduled to lose.’
‘That’s what the organisers think too,’ George said ominously. ‘A lot of the spectators might be very surprised by how things turn out tomorrow.’ He chuckled and Jeb cheerfully echoed his merriment.
For all their faults in housekeeping, Vivien could see George and Jeb had made scrupulous preparations about their appearance. George had grown his facial hair so that it properly resembled Pickett’s resplendent goatee and soup-strainer moustache. He wore a double-breasted frock coat cut from pattern grey serge. The outfit was trimmed with the collar badge and cuffs of an esteemed Major General. Shiny gold buttons sat in twin rows of three against his broad chest and torso. They sparkled brightly beneath the dull glow of the tent’s lamp and Vivien was struck by the urge to touch them – tease one or two of the buttons open – and dishevel Pickett’s otherwise meticulous appearance. Blushing at the impropriety of that thought, shocked that she could so easily find herself yearning for any man in uniform, Vivien turned away.
She caught Jeb leering at her cleavage.
A knot of arousal tightened in her stomach. Her cheeks blushed with a warmth that had little to do with the balmy heat of the July night. Between her legs her cleft was suddenly moist with fetid excitement. The air in the tent thickened with expectation.
She knew George and Jeb were probably not their real names – the most ardent devotees of the re-enactments got into character early in the event and stayed that way until they were heading home in their SUVs – but Vivien couldn’t bring herself to break the magical atmosphere by asking either of them for their real identities. To discover that George was a CPA, or that Jeb sold surgical appliances, would shatter the world of illusion that had been created at the re-enactment.
Jeb, like George, had gone to excessive lengths to impersonate his hero. From the feather in his hat; through his full and flowing beard; over his frock coat; and down to his black leather boots: he looked every inch the dashing cavalryman Vivien had admired in a hundred or more history books. A sabre hung from the gold sash at his waist and his bulky yellow leather gauntlets drooped from one corner of the cluttered table.
Of the two officers, Vivien thought Jeb the more handsome and she met his gaze with an encouraging smile. If they had been alone she would have daringly toyed with the decorative tassels that adorned his sash. It would have been bold and suggestive behaviour – obscenely inappropriate for a well-mannered nineteenth-century lady – but it would have left him with no doubt about the urges that he stirred inside her.
‘I’m not pressing too close against you am I, Miss Vivien?’ Jeb asked courteously.
The bench they shared was barely big enough for two and she had been forced to squeeze between Pickett and Stuart. Thankful that her crinoline was made full by layers of petticoats and underskirts, rather than an inflexible whalebone skeleton, Vivien smoothed down the silk of her dress and shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t complain no matter how hard you wanted to press against me, Major Stuart.’
His smile shone brightly through the flaxen forest of his moustache and beard. Slipping one hand beneath the card table he touched her thigh and murmured, ‘I might have cause to remind you of that comment later on.’
The weight of his fingers against her leg inspired a sudden and glorious thrill. Vivien drew a sharp breath, not certain how to respond but sure she should say something suggestive.
George chose that moment to point at the map and ask, ‘Are you familiar with what should happen tomorrow?’
Reluctantly, Vivien passed her attention back to Pickett and frowned as she tried to remember the schedule of events for the forthcoming day. She took a deep breath to distance her thoughts from the excitement Jeb inspired and turned her mind to the more mundane matters of the following day’s itinerary. There was going to be a demonstration of nineteenth-century field surgery in Tent One, competing
against a display of period fashions in Tent Two. She had already made up her mind about which of these she would be patronising but she didn’t think George was referring to anything as commonplace as the listings for the re-enactment sideshows. ‘You’re going to lead a charge against General Henry Hunt’s forces as they defend Cemetery Hill.’
It was an effort to keep her attention away from Jeb and she was thankful his hand continued to rest on her thigh. Admittedly, it was difficult to feel his touch through all the layers of stiff cotton underclothes but the movement of his fingers was comforting and made her believe her interest in the two officers was partially reciprocated.
‘Pickett’s Charge was a decisive moment at the battle of Gettysburg,’ Vivien continued. She measured each word, scared of exposing the arousal that might rasp from the back of her throat. ‘The troops were disciplined, resplendent and fresh for the fight. But they were attacking from an inferior position. They bravely went on to suffer decimation because of Lee’s ill-conceived tactic to march through the centre of strong defensive forces. The history books repeatedly refer to Pickett’s Charge as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.’
‘You know your history,’ George said with a smile. With a burst of Southern panache that made her feel weak he said, ‘You clearly are as intelligent as you are desirable, Miss Vivien. You do Major Stuart and I a singular honour with your presence in our humble billet.’
Vivien placed a hand over her breast and coyly fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Major Pickett,’ she gasped coquettishly. ‘I do believe you’re flirting with me.’