Let's Swing

by Piquette Fontaine

  “Ahhh, well. Boys will be boys, now won’t they…” she commented.

  Maybe she could have, should have disciplined the boys, but they were awfully cute and working and playing together nicely. She let them carry on and on in the freest way.

  There were lessons to be learned and she would see that those lessons were learned. She watched over them carefully. It was time, she walked over to the mock kitchenette to create lunch for the kids.

  Chapter Five

  Ashlee whipped up her sweet cornbread in a mixing bowl and put it in the Dutch oven to cook for their meal. She had selected a distinctive little surprise for her sweet boys from the market. She had thoughtfully picked up some squeeze and bake peanut butter cookies to make for the boys. She had put a pot of beans on to simmer with some ham hawks early that morning so that they would be ready by noon. Beans with some sweet cornbread and a handful of ham hawks was what it was all about. She grabbed a knife to slice the aged sharp cheddar cheese. She, for one, could not pass up some sharp cheddar cheese. It paired pleasantly with the fruity savory white wine that she had brought. She chopped some vegetables to throw in the oversized pot. The boys needed their nutrients, she figured. She threw them in the pot and carried on. The boys could smell the ham haws cooking in the spicy brew and they came a running soon thereafter.

  ”Tarek and Pete…. You boys make your way over here… You boys get you something to eat. You need your protein, no doubt,” she said as she walked about.

  A smile on her face, she adored taking care of people. She placed one single nugget of cheese between her crisp white teeth. As Tarek moved in close to her, he took the bait and stole it from her wanting lips. She pressed her kind lips against his forehead.

  He loved her curvaceous body and how it shifted and swayed with the wind as it blew. She never wanted to give the impression that she was one of those ladies that was scared to eat. That wasn’t the image that she wanted to portray to anyone. She put a red checkered pattern table cloth on the picnic table, methodically putting their bibs over their strapping chests. They liked it that way. They were messy eaters and they knew it. The boys had worked so hard that they deserved a hearty meal in their bellies. The boys filled their bellies with a hale and hearty meal. But Tarek had a tummy ache and was looking rather green. So, Ann tucked him into his sleeping bag and put a drop of oil in her palm. Then she rubbed her hands together vigorously. The air filled with the smell of peppermint. It was delightful. She rubbed pure peppermint oil on his stomach to make him feel better and it did.

  Chapter Six

  Ashlee slipped her dress off and slid into the warm stream water behind Pete. Using a wash cloth she lathered with soap, she gently washed his back. His hairy arms rested on her bent knees. Pete rotated his head in circles, trying to loosen his neck up. It had been a very long week and he felt it in his shoulders. She noticed the tension and reached around to wash his chest. She stretched to get another bottle of her essential oils. This one would offer him the essential vitamins and nutrients that his growing body needed. Ann rubbed a few drops of vanilla bean extract on his gums and tongue. The smell was calming and the effect of it would be slowing him down to let him unwind. And after they towel dried off, his tired body gave out and sacked out on his sleeping bag. He lay his forehead down on his arm, feeling thoroughly satisfied by his experience, she never disappointed him.

  She said, “Little Pete, this is a story about what happens to little bad boys.

  The Story of Benny Bear. Ben was a curious bear. He leaped onto his own two feet. He was wild and untamed and often suffered defeat. Because his curious ways led him away from his mother’s side indeed.

  He chased a butterfly with a sparkle in his eye.

  As if he could fly like a bird, over the sandy beach.

  He chased that butterfly but it stayed just out of his reach.

  He bobbled and toggled his way through the woods until there was no more to see.

  There was a clearing at stake before he could fake that he knew it wasn’t meant to be.

  A bee buzzed in his ear, which led him out there.

  Where things weren’t safe for B’s.

  He swatted and swayed till the end of the day,

  Before the hive came into his reach.

  Once he was told of a sight to behold if honey were what you could see.

  He swooped and he swallowed before the old hollow, tree fell right onto his knee.

  His eyes were confused as the bees flew, out of that hive on the tree.

  He licked honey from his paw.

  He was in awe of what they created for B.

  One lick, then two before he was threw.

  Just as the bee bit his paw then two.

  The moral of the story Pete is: don’t get caught with your paw in the honey,” she grinned as she shared.

  She leaned over and propped up on her elbow. Her eyes had grown heavy. It had been a big day, to her dismay and it was time for them to sleep. She couldn’t help but to fall asleep by his side, his fetish was hers as well. His play time was hers just as it was his, very satisfying indeed.

  THE END

  Craving The Wolf

  The sun beat mercilessly down from its place in the bright blue sky as Matthew Edwards stepped out of his car. Nine am in February in Southern Texas, and still it was almost 95 degrees outside. He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked out at the rolling folds of shrubby landscape before him. A small breeze ruffled the dusty leaves, smelling of the drooping juniper trees that rose from the valley floors in the Chisos Mountains. A small path of orange sand began a few feet from where he stood, trailing away into the undergrowth. “Donkey’s Ear, 10.5 mi.,” said a weathered wooden sign. A dun-colored lizard scampered across the gravel. Matthew passed a palm over his forehead, already slick with gathering sweat. This was it: the first trail of his three-day return to nature. Freedom from his job as a real estate photographer in Dallas, a city so full of concrete it felt to Matthew like living in the bottom of an empty pool. Freedom from sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on highways that rose above the city. Freedom from the bills and Keller and all of it. It felt good to be here. Even if it was alone. Matthew opened the trunk, pulled out his dark green pack, strapped his sleeping roll and a final jug of water to its shell, and slid it onto his back. Grinning, he locked his car and stepped onto the trail with a loud whoop of joy.

  The funny thing about hiking, Matthew had found in the twenty-odd years he’d been doing trips like this, was that the first mile was absolutely exhilarating. His muscles felt alive, his lungs took in clean, fresh air, and the gleeful hollers Matthew made echoed infinitely against the vivid cliffs of the Chisos in the distance. But that was the first mile. By the third mile, panting and sweating in spite of the bandana tied around his freckled forehead, Matthew’s mind was doing what it always did when he went hiking these days. It turned to thoughts of Keller.

  Keller was why he was here alone. Keller. His high school sweetheart. They’d talked about taking a backpacking trip into Big Bend National Park for months, putting up magazine clippings on their refrigerator in the apartment they shared, emailing each other articles from NPR on the drooping juniper trees that only grew in the Chisos or the strange, wiry javelinas who roamed the desert basin at night. After they made love, Keller would lie on his chest and murmur, “One day we’re going to be fucking in the mountains,” and he would lean down and kiss the top of her perfect, blonde head. Big Bend had been their dream. And then, she’d dumped him. At first she wouldn’t say why. “I just don’t think we want the same things,” she’d wept, her arms crossed over a t-shirt she’d stolen from him in their first months of dating nine years ago. But then, eventually – inevitably – it had all come out: she’d slept with someone else. Someone from her job at the publishing house. Some sculpted suit-wearing jackass who yelled at people on an expensive phone and hated when children hugged his trousers.

  So okay, fine. Most people broke up with their high school
sweethearts eventually. It had just taken Matthew a little longer than most people. But then came the weird friendship with Keller. The constant text messaging, especially when she was drunk, or when she and the Suited Jackass were fighting. The late nights when she’d come over to his old apartment that they’d once shared, and she’d crawl into his bed with him, and she’d whisper, “I just want to be somewhere that feels like home.” The flirting that he wasn’t allowed to act on. It was all crushing him slowly: Dallas and Keller and photographing empty, soulless condos. He’d stopped going out with his friends from work. He’d stopped really leaving his apartment. Sometimes he wondered if he was going to spend the rest of his life waiting for Keller to need him on a grocery trip outing or to help her with her marital problems…

  Matthew shook his head, sweat dripping from his chin. “Focus on the trail,” he told himself. His t-shirt clung to his lanky body and he could feel blisters beginning to form on his heels. The sun, relentlessly pounding its heat onto his lean, muscled body, was now at a slight western angle, which meant it must be something like 2 in the afternoon. The path now dumped into a dry riverbed filled with white, flaking pebbles, small towers of stones constructed every few feet to lead him the right way. He strained forward, his feet sinking into the pebbles with all the combined weight he bore. “Fucking river,” he grumbled, and then almost laughed: what a perfect metaphor to describe the last two years of his life. A dry riverbed, a slog through sinking rock, and ceaseless thoughts of Keller to torture him. Perfect.

  Just as Matthew felt an ache forming in his neck, he lifted his head and saw a little patch of green. It was an oasis. He clambered up the loose shale, through the shrubs, to a dark brown cut in the rock where a little brook bubbled out of the earth. Matthew cried with relief, threw down his pack, and began sucking at the bubble, his face thrust forward into the water. It was cold and sweet, and he tossed it up and down his dirtied knees and along the back of his neck. Matthew rose to grab his plastic jug to refill it with water from the stream. Then he froze. Across the jagged cut in the earth, mere meters from where he crouched, was a gray wolf. It perched on a bone-white rock, dry branches rising behind as if forming a halo, its yellow eyes following his every move.

  “Jesus,” Matthew cursed softly.

  The wolf cocked its head. Slowly, it lifted a graceful paw to its mouth. A pink tongue emerged and lapped at its toes, the eyes still on his.

  “What are you?” Matthew said to himself, trying to remember if the park ranger had mentioned any pack of wolves that lived in the area. The only thing his shoddy, Keller-clogged memory could come up with was the Mexican gray wolf, but those were said to be extinct in this part of the world. Yet no other wolf called the Chisos Mountains home. The wolf tossed its dappled head, and Matthew suddenly knew – without fully understanding how he could possibly know – that it was a female. Her pelt, with its supple swirls of brown and black and its white freckled back, gleamed in the sun. Her tail twitched. Her ears tilted forward. Matthew got the impression that she was looking down her long, pale snout at him, as if she were waiting to be impressed. Without thinking, he passed a hand through his thick dark hair.

  The wolf stood. She flicked her tail again, and her curvaceous, slender haunches quivered. In one majestic leap, the wolf disappeared from the ledge.

  Matthew fell back on his own haunches, staring at the space where the wolf had just been. Then he grimaced. He could feel himself getting hard.

  “What the hell?” he groaned, horrified. “Come on, man, this is disgusting. Think of something else. Anything.” He tried to picture Dallas in August. He tried to picture the Cowboys losing to the Seahawks in the Superbowl last year. No matter what he did, though, he couldn’t banish the wolf’s gaze. His cock was beginning to strain against his zipper.

  “Fuck, this is a new low,” Matthew muttered. He looked around him. There was no sign of another human being for at least twenty miles. It was just him and the desert now. He unzipped his cargo shorts and freed his shaft, now almost a full erection, from his boxers. Matthew dipped his hand back in the brook and began stroking himself with the water. He gasped, and then hissed as the liquid warmed under his palm. As he always did when he was jerking off, Matthew turned to the memory of fucking Keller in her parents’ hot tub after Senior prom. He thumbed his head and thought of her blonde hair tumbling down her back into the frothy water. Her pale, flexible legs wrapped tightly around his waist, her pink, hard nipples bobbing on the surface, the swells of her pale breasts swaying below. (Matthew’s breaths grew shorter. His cock swelled with the need for release.) The soft, flaxen down of her pubic hair tickling his wrist as he thumbed the throbbing red button of her clit. Her gasps as he pounded into her, water sloshing over the edge of the hot tub, her hips bucking against him, her nails dragging against his arm, her throaty breath as she grabbed the back of his head and said against his skin, “Make me come with your big, hard dick,” (still he wasn’t coming, usually he had by now), her yellow eyes, her dappled fur, her intelligent gaze…

  With the image of the wolf fixed firmly in his mind, Matthew gave his cock three more strokes and then gasped as he spilled come onto the shrubs and the surface of the rock. Then he leaned back on his elbows, massaging his right wrist while his member began to slowly wilt. Huh. That was the first time he’d ever come to the image of an animal before. Matthew reached into the brook and splashed water on himself, trying to clean up. He wasn’t going to read too much into this. He was recovering from Keller. That was all. It was absolutely no big deal that, at the crucial moment of masturbation, what made him come was not the memory of his ex-girlfriend, but rather the vision of a wild animal.

  Animal. There. A pair of yellow eyes, watching him through the brush. Matthew blinked, and they were gone.

  At dusk, Matthew reached Donkey’s Ear, a rock formation named for its concave center that reminded someone long dead of the soft ear of a donkey. The sun was setting behind the Chisos in a swathe of hot pink and orange clouds. The mountains turned deep purple in the changing light. For a moment, everything was on fire with dying light. Matthew let it wash over his face, and then he set up the tent a ways off the trail and lit his small camping stove. Campers weren’t allowed to light fires in the desert, but all he needed was a little heat to warm up his can of black beans. He shut off the stove and leaned against his pack, spooning his dinner into his mouth while he watched a hawk circle the sky in search of pocket mice and kangaroo rats. The perfume of the drooping juniper trees drifted across the desert basin. A light breeze ruffled his hair. Before Matthew could finish his beans, he fell asleep, crumpled on the desert floor.

  The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes again was a bowl of stars and a moon that was only a few nights from being full. A shooting star fizzled out near the horizon. Dark arms of cacti lifted towards the sky. Matthew stood and stretched his cramped muscles. It had been stupid to fall asleep slumped over like that. The temperature had dropped significantly. He began to dig through his pack for a sweater when a howl stilled his hand. He stopped and looked up. Though the moon and the stars gave enough light to cast shadows, he couldn’t see any animal moving, but something cracked a stick not too far from his camp. Matthew quieted his breathing, his heart pounding in his chest. He heard the howl again. A coyote’s mating call, maybe. Or a wolf’s. Another snap. Matthew dove for his flashlight and, with shaking fingers, switched it on.

  “No,” said a hoarse voice.

  Matthew shouted. A hand came across his chest and he felt a body press against his back.

  “Please,” the voice whispered. “Put it down.”

  Matthew swallowed hard and switched the flashlight back off. He let it slip from his fingers to the dust below. The hand trailed across his collarbone, and the voice giggled in his ear.

  “Let me see you,” he said, in a voice far more confident than he was feeling at the present moment.

  There was a gust of wind on his back, and the sudden loss of heat.
He watched from the corner of his eye as, slowly and silently, a woman padded until she was in his field of vision. The moon formed a halo behind her long, black sheath of hair and fell gracefully upon her face, revealing full lips, a wide nose, and amber eyes that darted over Matthew’s dirty legs. She struck a curvaceous silhouette against the darkened desert, and it took Matthew a moment to realize she was dressed only in an oversized sweater. His sweater, as a matter of fact. He leaned forward and touched the sleeve. The woman, startled, took a step back and left a footprint in the cold blue dust. She was barefoot.

  This felt like a dream. Was he dreaming? He couldn’t tell. When he breathed, small puffs of air were sometimes visible. If he pinched his thigh with his jagged fingernails, he felt pain. Then again, the sky was blazing with starlight, and a half-naked woman had just appeared out of thin air. This couldn’t be real. Maybe he was having a desert vision, brought on by Keller-induced misery and the cold.

  “That’s my sweater,” said Matthew lamely.

  The woman seemed unconcerned with what was and wasn’t his. She shrugged, and the sweater dipped below her shoulder. Matthew trained his eyes on hers. Don’t look at her chest, you perv, he thought desperately to himself.

  “You weren’t using it,” she said.

  “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.

  The woman grinned a grin that felt feral under the teeming bowl of constellations. “I’m used to the cold by now,” she replied.

  “You live here, then,” he said.

  The woman shrugged again. “Yes,” she said. “No. This is boring.”

  Matthew laughed in spite of himself. “Who are you?” he said, tipping his head. “How did you even get out here with no pants?”