Hungry for It

by Fiona Zedde

  “Oh god,” she whispered. “That’s good. That’s so good.”

  The orgasm tore through her in a low scream. She covered Claudia’s mouth with hers, swallowing the noise, absorbing the tremors into her own skin. Rémi caught her as she sagged on the bench, body shuddering in her cum.

  “The bed,” Claudia said breathlessly. “I want to feel you properly.”

  “I need to get my . . . equipment.” That’s what Rémi wanted to say earlier, but the thought of her strap had flown out of her head.

  They stumbled back, fell onto the mattress in a tight tangle of limbs and clinging mouths.

  “We don’t need it.” Claudia shoved Rémi’s pants and underwear down. “I want you to taste me.” She pecked at Rémi’s mouth, nibbled down her throat. “Fuck me with your tongue, not that fake penis you think I need. I only need you tonight, baby. You.”

  But Rémi was too slow and Claudia pressed her back in the sheets instead, shimmying quickly down to nuzzle between her thighs. At her first lick Rémi nearly jerked off the bed. Her fingers dug into the sheets.

  “I’ve tasted myself before and this is similar.” Claudia licked her again. “But not the same.” The image of Claudia tasting herself, fucking her own pussy with her fingers then licking them off one by one, exploded before Rémi’s eyes. A firestorm flashed through her, consuming her from clit to crown. Her toes clenched and water leaked from her eyes. Claudia’s name tumbled up in her throat and she shut her teeth against it. This wasn’t her house. Shit. This wasn’t her house. Shudders wracked through her body as the sweet heat of orgasm diffused inside her before slowly, slowly dissipating.

  Low on the bed, Claudia laughed. “And I’m not even done yet.”

  Claudia kept her mouth and fingers on Rémi’s pussy all night. It was as if once she got a taste of the juice between Rémi’s legs, she couldn’t stop drinking it. One orgasm after another tore through Rémi until she didn’t know where one ended and the other began. An amateur but enthusiastic tongue swirled between her pussy lips, around her thick and throbbing clit, deep into her cunt again and again. Tears streamed down Rémi’s face.

  Her hands tightened in Claudia’s hair. “Stop.”

  Fingers slid effortless inside Rémi, curling, calling sensation to the surface of her skin. Air wheezed in and out of her dry mouth. Sweat dripped down her face, her neck, over her breasts. “Don’t stop.”

  The leisurely fuck gained momentum until the fingers became like a jackhammer inside her, hitting her sweet spot once, twice, and again. Again. The world exploded behind her tightly closed eyelids. Rémi was helpless to the scream that tore itself of her parched throat.

  “Stop! Please. I’m finished. Not anymore.”

  And surprisingly, Claudia relented this time. Rémi was vaguely aware of her lover kissing up her body and collapsing against her sweat-soaked belly. Her pussy-spiced breath tickled Rémi’s mouth as she breathed softly, said nothing, just lay her head in the curve of Rémi’s throat. Their hearts knocked gently together through skin and sweat. Rémi blinked up at the ceiling, feeling eyelashes flutter, skin tingle, breathing begin to slow. Everything was sensation with no thoughts to cloud them. Just the feel of Claudia’s skin against her own and the air moving cleanly in her lungs. The window, still flung open, let in a cooling night breeze and the smell of roses. Beyond, the sky was a canopy of winking stars.

  Rémi slid her fingers through the damp hairs at the back of Claudia’s neck. “Thank you.”

  Chapter 30

  The clouds had burned away with the early morning hours, and the sun now lay, warm and golden, on the rolling grass surrounding the house and the rocks leading down to the water. Cool air pressed intimately against Rémi’s face and bare arms. Without the distraction of Claudia, she realized that her hiding place was not much of one. Although out of sight from the house and past the untamed high grass, the widely spaced twin maple trees with the hammock swinging between them could have been any other backyard sanctuary. Across the mile or so of water and past the few white-sailed boats bobbing in the bay, there lay other houses. Other backyards. Anyone could see her swaying in her solitary hammock if they just raised their eyes.

  When she was a teenager, the grasses had seemed higher and this place much more isolated. But Rémi saw evidence that others had found her hiding place. The patch of grass worn down to almost nothing near the hammock. A forgotten wooden picnic basket tattooed from rain and sun. Someone’s blue hair ribbon.

  Rémi raked her hair back from her eyes and felt the dark strands flutter around her face in the wind. Everything changes, she thought, sighing. For better or worse.

  “I thought I would find you out here.”

  She half turned in surprise at her mother’s distant shout from high up on the hill. This place really was no secret. Rémi leaned back against one of the maples and waited for Kelia to reach her. With her hands in the pockets of her jeans, Kelia walked toward Rémi, eyes nearly hidden by the gray-streaked locks whipped across her face. Her pink blouse flattened against her rounded stomach in the wind.

  As her mother waded through the tall grass toward Rémi, a memory surfaced. She blinked against the glare of it, caught unaware.

  The smells in their small dining room were wrong. Rémi paused in the doorway and watched her mother ladle soup into three small bowls then take the cover from a platter sitting in the middle of the dining table. Without seeing the food, she knew what it was. Leek and potato soup and coq au vin. Her father’s favorite foods. She sat down at the dining table, hands folded stiffly in her lap.

  “Is Papa coming to visit?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Kelia Walker-Bouchard, permed hair scraped back in a messy ponytail and her pretty face wearing a smile for the first time in weeks, sat at the small dining table she often shared mournfully with her two daughters and looked up at Rémi who, at fourteen, was already tall for her age. “We’re going home.”

  “I am home.”

  “My face is clean, Mama!” Yvette burst into the kitchen with a smile, showing off her newest missing tooth. Her long plaits flapped around her head as she rushed up to her mother. “Look!”

  Kelia reached out for Yvette. “Much better, baby. I don’t know how on earth you find the only mud hole to fall into in this entire godforsaken city.”

  She brushed the back of her hand over Yvette’s cheek as the five-year-old slid into the chair next to hers. Rémi was still standing. The smile slipped off Kelia’s face.

  “You knew this was temporary while your father and I worked things out.”

  “No. You knew this was temporary. I’m in school.” The last word rose and fell with dejection and disbelief. A whine that refused to be suppressed.

  “I’m going to school next year,” Yvette said, swirling tendrils of linguine around her plastic orange fork. It was her favorite too.

  Kelia absently stroked one of Yvette’s braids. The child sucked the pasta into her mouth and smacked her lips. “Baby, you can just transfer. Kids do it all the time.”

  “Why did you bring us all the way to Florida and put me in school if you knew we were going back to him?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Yes, you did!” Rémi pounded her fist on the table. Winced at the pain that vibrated up her arm. “I don’t want to go back there. He makes you cry. He wants me to be something else.” She backed away from the table and the food. “I’m not going.”

  “Your father is different now. He won’t ask you to do anything that you don’t want to. All he wants is for you to be normal. That’s all. He wants us to be a normal family again. What’s wrong with that?”

  Rémi stared at her mother. When they ran away from Auguste Bouchard over a year ago, Kelia had sworn they would never go back. Crying and nearly weak with fatigue, she had woken the two girls from their beds one cold night in November and drove through the night and most of the day until they reached the winter warmth of North Miami Beach and the safety of Aunt
Jackie’s house. And now she wanted to take them back to Maine to squirm underneath Auguste Bouchard’s iron fist.

  “It’s not fair!” Rémi pushed her chair back from the table and it scraped across the linoleum like a scream. “You promised he wouldn’t do that to us again. To me.”

  “Rémi, baby . . .”

  “No. You have to fix this.” Rémi turned, face crumbling with tears, and walked stiffly from the room.

  In that moment of betrayal, Rémi’s love for Kelia began to dissipate.

  She swallowed past her dry throat, willed away the fresh pain raked up by her memories.

  “Is anything wrong?” she asked when Kelia drew close.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Must something be wrong for me to want to talk with my daughter?”

  With this one, yes. The words hovered at the back of Rémi’s tongue, but she didn’t say them. “What’s on your mind, Mama?”

  “You.”

  Kelia sat with her back pressed against the neighboring tree, looking suddenly like she needed to be off her feet. She looked tired.

  “That’s a change.”

  “Don’t be mean, Rémi. I don’t deserve that.”

  “People don’t always get what they deserve.” She toyed with the grass between her boots, not looking at the face opposite hers.

  “That’s true. I don’t think I deserve to have my children taken away from me.” She looked up at Rémi. “And I didn’t think you deserved what happened to you fourteen years ago.”

  Rémi couldn’t hide her surprise at her mother’s admission.

  “Yvette won’t talk to me.” Kelia shook her head. “I had hoped with your father passing on that things would be good between us again. But if anything, they’re worse. When I was her age I never thought I’d be a mother, much less one my daughters have nothing but contempt for.”

  “I don’t feel contempt for you. Resentful. Sad. Furious. But not contemptuous. At my most self-pitying, I feel like my entire childhood was lost because you chose Papa over me.” Rémi split a blade of grass between her fingers then frowned at the green stain left under her nail. “You left me in Miami with money.” She spat the last word at her mother. “Aunt Jackie barely knew what to do with me when she stopped by once a month. I wanted my mother. I wanted someone who had the room in her heart to love me and her lover. But that wasn’t you.”

  The words that she’d always wanted to say tumbled out of her mouth coldly, in concise syllables that held nothing of the pain she felt when Kelia left her in Miami to go back to a man who ruthlessly controlled her and her children. A man who physically abused his gay daughter just because he didn’t see Rémi as his child anymore.

  “Baby . . .” Kelia moved closer and reached out to touch Rémi’s face. But she flinched back.

  “Like I said, it’s okay. I’m learning to live with your decision.”

  “Is that why you’re involved with Claudia?”

  Rémi looked at her sharply. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Are you looking for a mother in her? Is that why she’s allowed herself to become involved with you? She seems like such a kind woman, I can’t imagine her saying no to you, especially knowing how you grew up. Without a mother.”

  Rémi felt the muscle in her jaw twitch. She counted silently past ten, then fifteen, before she spoke. “I’m not fucking Claudia as a way to fuck you. I’d like to think that I’m better than that.”

  Kelia’s gaze jerked away from her face. “I’m not talking about . . . fucking me, I’m talking about—”

  “I know what you’re talking about. You’re wrong on both counts. I’ve wanted her for years. Even before I knew she was somebody’s mother. And before I accepted that you and Yvette were actually going to stay with Auguste.”

  “I’m not trying to excuse myself. By now, I realize that leaving you alone wasn’t the best move I could have made.” As Kelia turned from her contemplation of the bay, the wind flung her hair back into her eyes. With a thin hand, she impatiently scraped it back from her face. “Things were so different for me then. I knew that you would survive. The money was to help you through that survival. Living alone in Miami was better for you than living in this house with your father. He wasn’t always a good person.”

  Rémi blinked at the last bit of understatement. She had the scar on her shoulder, a kiss from the business side of a blade, to prove that he wasn’t the kind of man she would have picked to call Papa. Rémi didn’t even remember what she had done wrong, only that she felt the first slap with the flat side of the knife before she knew that he was even standing there. Then she must have flinched and turned because the second blow brought more pain. And blood. Kelia stitched her up, and it was not long after that the two of them ran away with Yvette from Boothbay Harbor and Auguste Bouchard’s petty cruelties.

  “You’re right,” Rémi said. “He wasn’t always a good person. But I thought you were.”

  Kelia flung out her hands as if to grab Rémi’s arms. But she didn’t. “I wish I could make you understand.”

  “Try then. Try to make me understand what all this is about. Because right now I’m still in the dark about what happened. I’m still pissed, and for some reason, you seem to think that I have no right to be.”

  “It’s not that I don’t think you have no right to be angry at me, Rémi. I just—” Kelia sighed. “Your father and I didn’t have the healthiest relationship.”

  Rémi stared at her, waiting for something else besides what she already knew.

  “We loved each other, I think sometimes too much. Looking at it from a distance now, we might have been obsessed with each other.” Her eyes skittered to Rémi, then away. “I couldn’t get enough of him. Even when I was angry at him, even when he had done the most awful and insane things, I wanted him. Badly. I know that’s no excuse for my behavior, but I needed to give you that explanation.”

  Looking back, Rémi could now see the signs of her mother’s unhealthy connection to Auguste. She’d felt the tug of that devil a few times, too. The one that forced her to ignore everything but the person under her hands and mouth. Nothing else mattered. Not sanity. Not friendship. But . . .

  “If I hadn’t come to Maine, would you have reached out to me in Miami to give that explanation?”

  Rémi searched for the truth in her mother’s face. Or whatever it was that she could decipher.

  “I don’t know,” Kelia said very softly. “Your father’s been dead for almost two years now. Sometimes the way he and I treated each other embarrassed me. It’s hard acknowledging these things I let him do to me. Never mind confessing them to my child.”

  Rémi nodded, swallowing past the rock in her throat. Kelia carefully avoided any details of what she and Auguste had been to each other. But Rémi had both an imagination and a past to refer to.

  “You have to forgive me sometime, Rémi Mathilde,” Kelia murmured, forehead wrinkling as she squinted against the sun’s glare. Her hair fluttered around her face in the breeze. “Can you start now?”

  Chapter 31

  “Idon’t think I can duplicate what you did to me that night of our first date, but I’ll at least try to relax you.” Claudia took Rémi’s feet in her hands.

  Rémi sighed and leaned back into the sofa. The other woman reclined at the other end, thighs fanned open to cradle Rémi’s feet. “I’m already relaxed, actually. Mama and I had a talk today. It was better than the last one.”

  “That’s good. I was worried that we’d have to run back to Miami and cross this trip off as a failure.”

  “Never that.” Rémi shook her head. “Mama and I are on the way toward some kind of truce. As for Yvette, she needs a home. She needs her family. I don’t want her to reject Mama and everything she’s known here just because of me.”

  “I don’t think she will. Because of you, she started to question what her parents have done. Their actions sparked her questions. Don’t add this tension between Yvette and Kelia to the list of things that you’re
shouldering blame for.”

  “Hmm.” She sighed into Claudia’s amateur but effective touch. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe nothing.”

  Claudia’s fingers slid between Rémi’s toes, gently stroking the light webbing between them, and she shuddered.

  Her lover smiled. “You like that?”

  “What a question.” The shudder traveled up through her feet into her thighs. Rémi’s head fell back. “You’re getting very good at this.”

  “Like I said, relaxation is my goal. For now.” The smile Claudia gave was decidedly naughty.

  She pressed Rémi’s heels even more deeply between her thighs, leaning into the massage until the toes pressed into her breasts, creating subtle cleavage in her pale green blouse. Unable to help herself, Rémi skimmed her toe across Claudia’s nipple, sighing at its delicate feel.

  “Right.” Rémi licked her lips. Pursed them. Then decided to let it go. They were in her mother’s sitting room after all. “I’ll need more of this pampering when I get back to town and have to deal with Anderson and his shit again.”

  “I thought all that was finished?”

  “No. He wants something. Even though my cousin told me that it’s not personal, I feel like it is. It doesn’t make sense for him to come after me this hard when all he wants is the club.”

  Claudia winced. “I hope you’ll be able to resolve this thing without any more violence. The last thing I want is for that man to hurt you, or for you to hurt him and end up in jail for it. You don’t need to get into some sort of primitive battle with him. There are other ways to take care of men like Matthias Anderson.”

  “Matthias Anderson?” Rémi’s mother stood at the entrance to the den. In a cream dress belted at the waist and her hair swept up and pinned to her head, she seemed more at ease than the day before. “How do you know him?” A frown wrinkled her brow.