Love on the Dark Side

by Love on the Dark Side [Black Lace] (retail) (epub)

  They stopped in a flash; the hunky driver opened the door and handed Laura a picnic basket. She sprang out into the bright sunshine and skipped off across a rolling emerald-green meadow, Perkin in tow. They rushed through a forest of tall leafy trees, then burst out on to the loamy banks of a clear babbling brook. Whereupon Laura dropped the picnic basket and all further pretence and flung herself into Perkin’s arms, smooshing her mouth up against his.

  They kissed for an eternity, Perkin coiling his arms around Laura’s vibrating body and holding her tight. She felt his heat, his passion, his hard cock pressing into her stomach, and it set her on fire. They tumbled down on to the soft cool bed of grass, devouring each other’s mouth, Laura on top of the guy, all over him.

  Perkin slid his hands up under Laura’s dress and on to her bare bum cheeks. He kneaded the fleshy mounds to her delight, as she caught his tongue between her teeth and sucked on it, riffling her fingers through his hair, forever mussing up the perfect parting.

  They furiously kissed and frenched and fondled one another under the glowing sun, on the banks of the gurgling stream, until, ablaze with desire, Laura arched up over the top of Perkin. She pulled her dress over her head and tossed it away into the water, baring herself to the man. He anxiously reached up and took hold of her hanging breasts, and she tilted her head back and moaned, joyously running her hands through her raven locks.

  Perkin grasped and squeezed the soft supple flesh of Laura’s burning breasts. Then he crawled his quivering fingers up to her flowered nipples and rolled the rosy-red protuberances, sending twin streaks of lightning arcing through the girl’s chest, shimmering all through her body.

  She collapsed over the top of him, digging her fingers into the good black earth as he gripped her breasts and licked at her nipples. He twirled his tongue all around her buzzing tips, before finally taking one into the wet hot cauldron of his mouth and sucking on it. She shivered with pleasure, as he licked and sucked and bit into her achingly hard nipples, working her electrified breasts with his hands, until she just couldn’t take it any more.

  Laura scooched lower down Perkin’s body, unbuckled and unzipped his pants, then pulled them down, and his underwear. She gazed at the straining object of her desire, then looked up into his begging eyes and encircled the pulsing shaft with her fingers. He groaned and jerked. She lifted his rigid cock off his stomach and pumped it. He grunted. Then she rose up and pushed the bloated head of his prick in between her slickened pussy lips and lowered herself down, swallowing him up in her hot velvety wetness.

  He grabbed on to her shuddering breasts as she undulated her bum, impaling herself on his stake over and over again. She bounced up and down on the man’s thighs, the wet smack of their charged flesh melding with the birds twittering rhapsodies and the leaves rustling contentment at the gentle caress of the wind. The brook babbled its delight and the sun beamed down on the heaving dewy lovers, nature in perfect harmony with their erotic efforts.

  ‘God, I’m coming, Laura!’ Perkin suddenly bleated, gripping her waist and furiously thrusting his hips up in rhythm to her movements, fucking her with abandon.

  Laura dug her dirty fingernails into his chest and cried, ‘Yes, yes!’ Her body was burning out of control, her pussy gone molten.

  He groaned sweet agony, and she felt his hot seed spill into her gushing sex, the two of them bucking and shaking with a fierce fiery ecstasy that went on and …

  Her eyes shot open. He was awake.

  She heard his bed scrape against the floor above a couple more times, and then all was quiet. She closed her eyes again, and slept deeply and blissfully.

  Laura wore a red dress and pair of red high heels to work the next day, her face and body done up exactly like they’d been the night before – in dreamland. Evelyn dropped little Ezekiel’s latest crayon masterpieces all over the floor, as she and the rest of the accounting gang watched the woman in red strut down the hall and into the actuarial area.

  Perkin was standing next to his cubicle, talking to a colleague. She strolled up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder with a red-painted nail. He turned around.

  He took one look at her and took off running down the hall.

  Laura could see the fear in the guy’s eyes, all right, but she couldn’t read his wide-awake mind, which was screaming, ‘She’s out of my league. She’s a dream-girl. She’s too good for me!’

  To Stand between the Wild and the HumanTeresa Noelle Roberts

  I stood on the narrow beach and watched as the fishing boat motored away from Torishima, shrinking and finally turning into a speck on a blue-tossed horizon.

  The boat had answered my distress call, and was now ferrying Akiko, my Project Albatross partner, off to the nearest hospital, some eighteen hours away.

  Thank goodness, she’d only broken her leg when she fell. It looked like a nasty break, but it could have been far worse. She could have broken her back or neck tumbling down that steep rocky slope, or she could just as easily have fallen off one of the many sheer cliffs that protect the albatross-breeding grounds.

  I was alone on the island now, just me and most of the world’s population of short-tailed albatross.

  And I was guiltily relieved Akiko was gone.

  Akiko just wasn’t cut out for this kind of rough fieldwork. She was smart and she knew her birds. But she was a klutz, and she spent more time watching the sky than the ground under her feet. On a deserted island that features dangerous cliffs, crashing surf, slopes slick with a mix of volcanic ash and bird guano, and an actual live volcano, that’s a bad combination. Her stay on Torishima had been a series of small disasters: blundering into a lit Coleman lantern, stumbling and gashing both palms open on sharp volcanic rock, smashing one of the cameras so it looked like a hatched egg, having a few close calls with both her own climbing ropes and mine as we made the steep ascent to the nesting grounds. She was safer at Toho University with her leg in a cast, analysing data, than she was here. Pity she would miss the mating flights, but at least she wouldn’t fall off a cliff backwards in her excitement and kill herself.

  Right now, standing alone on the beach and staring at the tiny speck of the boat, I felt a bit desolate, but I suspected that I really wouldn’t miss her that much. She was a pleasant enough person but, after six weeks alone together, we’d been getting on each other’s nerves. Some of that was a problem I’d had with other Japanese acquaintances. As a third-generation Japanese–American, I was a walking mixed signal; I looked Japanese enough and spoke the language well enough that sometimes they’d be taken aback when I didn’t get a pop-culture reference or react to something in the way most Japanese people would.

  A lot of it, though, came down to differences between Akiko and me. She regarded me as borderline uncivilised, and I could see why; with two naturalist parents, I’d been going on field expeditions since I was an infant, and Torishima was more comfortable for me than Tokyo. For my part, I didn’t understand how an ornithologist could be as unconcerned as she was about global conservation issues. As long as it didn’t have a direct impact on the albatross, she saw it as someone else’s problem. I tried to walk as gently on the earth as I could. She admitted that she simply couldn’t be bothered.

  For me, the sky, the ocean and the magnificent short-tailed albatross would be better company.

  On the other hand, if Project Albatross sent out a gorgeous single man in her place …

  He’d be married. Or gay. Or, worse yet, he wouldn’t be, we’d have one night of insanely hot sex, then fight and spend the rest of our stay tiptoeing around each other.

  That didn’t keep me from having a few lovely thoughts about passionate kisses, well-muscled male bodies and hard cocks. About sex in the field of golden-yellow chrysanthemums in the centre of the island, sex under the stars on the ‘veranda’ (which had been a cannon platform in our research station’s original incarnation as a military observation post), sex while we watched the albatross in their beautiful playful courts
hip rituals.

  I swore I could feel a cock inside me, feel hands on my breasts, rolling out my nipples, elongating them, firm pressure but not painfully so …

  Being alone on the island, I told myself firmly, was getting to me already. That or it was the complete lack of nookie in my life since leaving the States. I’d told myself for over a year that it wasn’t important and, compared to my work, it wasn’t. I’d been preparing myself to work with Project Albatross since I’d heard of it back in high school and, in the big picture, the fact that finally getting the chance to do so had pretty much derailed my sex life for the time being didn’t matter all that much.

  But there were times, and this was one of them, where it became damn hard to focus on the big picture over the sheer horniness.

  I felt the sexy phantom sensations throughout the steep walk back up to the research station. I was in good shape with all the walking I’d been doing, but trembling legs, a racing pulse and a pussy that was getting wetter with each step made the climb feel more strenuous than it normally was.

  By the time I got home, the light was failing. Taking care of Akiko while waiting for the boat to arrive, I’d not got in any fieldwork, but I had notes from the day before to collate and pictures to get off the digital camera and back up. (When you’re running your computer off a generator, you back up obsessively.) Dinner to prepare, even.

  But, before I did any of that, I needed to release some of the sexual tension flooding my body. There was no way I could focus in my current state, with my nipples so hard I was nonsensically convinced they’d rip my sweater and Gore-Tex pullover and my pussy so twitchy I couldn’t think straight and so wet that, if I didn’t do something soon, it would soak through to my jeans. Given how inconvenient it was to do laundry out here, that alone was a motivation to peel out of them.

  So I did.

  Right on the veranda.

  Why not? It wasn’t like there was anyone to see me, and the view from the veranda was far more appealing than the streaky cement interior of the research station. Fog hung low over the water, but directly overhead the sky was streaked with the last of the sunset and jewelled with a rising full moon. The only sounds were the surf and the cries of birds, my beloved albatross among them. Romantic, even with no one to share it with.

  It was cool verging on chilly, but the dusk air caressed my overheated skin. I plopped down on the little table some previous insane researcher had built out of driftwood, lay back and spread my legs.

  The cool air on my crotch felt like a lover’s touch. I was that sensitive. That wet. That needy, in a way I didn’t remember feeling needy when I actually had a lover and was longing for him.

  But it was far from enough.

  I bit my lip as soon as I began circling my clit, bit back the cries that were threatening to burble out of me.

  Then I remembered that I was completely alone, and let myself whimper encouragement to myself, cries as crazy as those of the albatross. They hadn’t started mating yet, but they were getting restless and, with that, noisier.

  I pictured a man licking me. Not anyone I knew, but not the usual vague, faceless fantasy fill-in either. I pictured a vividly distinct individual: a handsome longhaired Japanese man with a narrowly triangular face, large but rather close-set almond eyes, a slender hard body I could only guess at under his elegant traditional clothes. His cock, though, I could see, or rather feel, pressing against me as he licked, nipped, took me to the edge of orgasm time and again without letting me slip over. I followed suit with the fantasy, teasing myself into a frenzy, but not letting myself come, letting my need build higher and higher.

  I imagined my lover kissing and nipping his way up my body and – in the way of fantasy – slipping his cock into me without any of that awkward fumbling that happens in real life.

  As I came, I would have sworn that I was coming around a cock, one that filled me like no other ever had – not because it was so huge, but because it was simply the perfect fit.

  When I gave a damn about my surroundings again, it was cold and the blanket of stars you see only in such an incredibly isolated place was coming out.

  And a fox was staring at me from the corner of the veranda, cheekiness incarnate in the cock of its head, in the way it held its magnificent tail.

  It looked so intent, so interested in what I’d been doing, that I jumped up and tried to cover myself as I would have done for an unexpected human guest. My quick movement startled the beast, which darted off into the darkness.

  I followed it for about two steps before I lost it in the shadows.

  And I realised I shouldn’t have seen what I’d just seen. Foxes were common in rural parts of Japan proper, but not on Torishima. According to everything I knew about the ecology of the island, I should be the only mammal on it.

  And yet I was sure I’d seen a fox.

  A fox among the world’s last breeding population of short-tailed albatross, which had never seen a mammalian predator and had no idea something might try to eat their eggs or chicks.

  I couldn’t imagine how it got here.

  Maybe it was a trick of the fading light, the shadow of a cloud or something, but, if it were here, I was going to track it down and dispose of it.

  How, I would think about later. I had no weapons. I was trained to protect wildlife, not to kill it. And I’d always been fond of foxes, with their cocky attitude and beautiful tails. But I couldn’t let one maraud through the birds of Torishima.

  I stayed up late that night, trying to devise a plan that could kill one mysterious fox and not harm any of the island’s other wildlife.

  With each minute I spent pondering the creature’s death, I felt sicker at heart. Yet I knew it would be far worse to let it roam free, assuming it was actually there and not some bizarre product of hormones and twilight. (But, I reasoned, if I’d imagined anything in the shadows at that moment, it would have been my hot fantasy man, not an animal that had no reason to be there.)

  When I finally fell asleep, I tossed and turned in uneasy dreams. A fox, broken and bleeding under my hands, turned into the gorgeous Japanese man of my fantasies, who turned huge sad eyes on me and tried to speak.

  I snapped myself from the dream several times, fearing to hear what he’d say, how he’d condemn me. The final time, though, I didn’t wake up – and I heard him apologise to me. I didn’t understand why he was apologising when I had killed him, but he didn’t have time to explain before death took him.

  Once I knew to look for signs of a fox, they were laughably easy to find. Scat that never came from a bird. Narrow pathways winding through the sparse undergrowth.

  I didn’t find broken eggs, though, or the remains of dead juveniles. My count of young albatross was the same as it had been.

  The fox might have been going after any of the smaller less threatening-looking seabirds that nested here. Must have been, in fact – it had to eat something. There were no albatross eggs or chicks yet, and the juveniles from last year’s mating must be too big to look edible. (No surprise there; the adults have a seven-foot wing span and the juveniles are still impressively large.)

  But, still, the day would come when it figured out that, for all their size and magnificence, albatross weren’t all that bright and wouldn’t know to fight off a fox until it was too late. Newly laid eggs would be extremely vulnerable.

  So, to prevent that day, I laid snares on the fox’s trails, as far from any bird-nesting sites as I could. They were makeshift, the product of dim memory of having someone show me once how hunters in earlier times would catch rabbit.

  I hoped they’d do the job.

  And I hoped they wouldn’t.

  That evening as the sun set, I gave in again to lust, dreaming of the man I’d dubbed ‘my samurai-poet’ as I made myself come and come. I’d hoped to wear myself out enough to fend off dreams of dying foxes.

  It didn’t work.

  I woke in the middle of the night in an actual cold sweat, shaking with the c
onviction of death. It wasn’t the dream that woke me, though. It was a voice on the wind, a beautiful voice begging, not for help, but for absolution.

  And, once I was awake, I still heard it.

  It compelled me out of bed, into my clothes and out into the night, flashlight in hand, looking for God only knew what.

  The rational part of me, which was by far the larger part, figured I was still dreaming.

  The part of me that had been raised on my grandmother’s Japanese folk tales (she was born in America, but she’d learnt them from her mother) thought of ghosts – the entire human population of the island, bird-hunters and their families, had been killed in a volcanic explosion in 1902. Thought of demonic oni. Thought of all sorts of hideous phantoms that should, by all logic, have kept me cowering in my futon with the covers over my head until morning dispelled them like the nightmares they were.

  Instead, I was following that voice as if it were the voice of my lover, and damned if I could make myself stop or turn back.

  I didn’t have to go far from the station to find what I was looking for. I almost tripped over it despite the flashlight.

  I trained the light down to find the fox I’d sought. It wasn’t caught in a snare, and under the flashlight’s beam I couldn’t see any signs of injury, but it was struggling to breathe.

  I crouched down next to it, careful to keep back. Despite the threat the fox represented to my birds, I pitied it, wished there was something I could do to help. But I didn’t dare. Sick or injured animals might strike out and, while rabies was rare in Japan, that wasn’t something I was willing to risk.

  And then the fox laboured, turned its head towards me … and spoke. ‘I have wronged you, beautiful lady, and my regret for this is killing me. Please accept my apologies and let me right the wrong I did you.’