by Неизвестный
“Edibles?”
“No, it’s candy.” He retrieved a Ziplock full of chocolates and placed it on the desk. They looked like the malted milk balls I used to eat as a little kid. “It’s new, it’s like a… it’s supposed to be a stimulant? But with sexual sort of… I don’t know, element?”
It was easy to tell Aaron was nervous. Everything he said was phrased as a question, his cheeks were turning pink, and he still wasn’t looking directly at me. It was… well, it was really cute, and a huge relief. “So what you’re telling me,” I teased, “Is that you are selling aphrodisiac chocolate?”
“Yes, uh—no.” He scratched his forehead before sitting properly in his chair, letting all six feet hit the ground. “I’m not selling them, not until I know what they’re like. Y’know, that they’re safe. Would you wanna… help me test them?” As soon as the question left his mouth he seemed to regret it, his entire face folding like a deck of cards. “Oh fuck that’s sounds weird, I’m sorry.”
I guess I wasn’t the only one in the room with a fear of rejection. “No, it’s fine,” I tried to reassure him.
He looked doubtful. “I’m not trying to drug and assault you or anything, that’s not—”
“Dude, relax,” I interrupted. “I’ve liked you for ages. There’s no… coercion here or anything.” He was still blushing but relaxed at my words, the smile that was my weakness returning to his face. Even so, my responsible Steph brain knew that barging headfirst into altered-state casual sex maybe wasn’t the best idea. “So are you asking me to try them with you, or…”
“No, I’ll try it,” he explained. “In case I start coughing up blood or something. I’m not asking you to be my guinea pig.”
“You are not instilling much confidence in your test subject,” I said with a smile, and he laughed.
“You’re not my test subject, you’re my supervisor,” he said. “Or the control group, or… something.”
“Is there anything we should, uh, talk about first?” I asked. This was always the awkward part about hookups, but Aaron didn’t seem like the type of guy to get shifty when discussing boundaries. “Like, do’s and don’t’s?”
His answer was refreshingly matter-of-fact. “Not really. I got tested a couple weeks ago, nothing to report.”
“Word, me too. And I’m on the pill.”
“Let’s just… keep it simple,” he decided. “Nothing intense, yeah?”
Like I was going to whip handcuffs out of my yoga pants. “Simple is good. I’ll follow your lead, since you’re the one eating it.”
Maybe it should have felt weird that I was about to experiment with recreational sex-drug usage with a guy I didn’t know beyond dormitory small talk, but that was the thing about Aaron: he put me at ease. It seemed perfectly normal for him to sit down on the side of the bed next to me, his knee nudging mine.
He fished out a chocolate and I tried not to watch as he brought it up to his mouth, but the world went into slow motion. His lips parted, a hint of pink tongue revealing itself as he tucked the candy into his mouth. Aaron chewed and sucked, the bones of his jaw visibly working, and I was pretty sure I would never need any chocolate to get going. I wanted to see him suck on my clit just like that.
His eyes fell closed and he rolled his shoulders back, first one side and then the other like a jungle cat waking up from a nap. Then he stretched out his fingers and cracked his knuckles. Finally his neck arched, eliciting a small pop.
“What does it feel like?” I asked, fascinated by the alertness sweeping over his body.
The Aaron who looked at me then was a different person. The lazy slump of his shoulders was gone, as was the blasé but good-natured smile. “Like everything just got simpler,” he said.
Gone was the hesitant speech. Gone was the avoidance of eye contact. I envied him immediately for whatever it was the chocolate was doing to him, knocking down those insecure mannerisms that kept him safe. He wasn’t finished: “I know that I want you.”
As he spoke he reached out to tuck a few wisps of hair away from my face. I could feel myself melting at that first touch; it was like a contact high. His eyes—green, I noticed now—were so focused on me I could see my own reflection in his pupils. “I know that I’ve wanted you for a long time.”
What the fuck was in this drug? It had turned the goofy but reserved boy upstairs into a confident, assertive man. I didn’t want to try the drug myself, I just wanted him to stop staring at me like that and…
“Kiss me,” I said.
He didn’t need to be told twice. There was a precious handful of seconds when we just looked at each other, fully aware of what was about to happen and how fucking incredible it would be. And then one of his hands was cupping my jaw as he pressed his mouth to mine, and my body tilted back onto the bed as he moved on top of me. It was everything all at once, his body heavy and hot, his hair soft between my fingers as I pulled off his hat, one of his knees pressing between my thighs. He tasted sweet, his tongue still coated with chocolate, and his lips were full and lush and he growled as I bit down. I couldn’t keep track of where his hands were once they started to move. He was insatiable, touching every part of my body that he could, my waist, my breast, my inner thigh as he dragged my leg up to hook around his waist. But I was insatiable too and I moaned as he rocked his hard-on against my center.
Aaron broke the kiss to ask with much less composure than before, “Is this what you want?”
A plain yes wasn’t good enough when I wanted everything. I wanted him to fuck me until the bedframe rattled. I wanted to turn over and have him take me gently from behind. I wanted him to be as sweet as he tasted right now and as rough as the drug wanted him to be. Mostly I just wanted to watch his lips move.
“I want you to kiss me everywhere,” I said. It had been true for months. I felt no fear admitting it now. Maybe his drugged confidence was rubbing off on me.
There was a glint in his eyes that said he understood but that I should be careful what I wished for. He dipped his head to tease his lips against my clavicle, more of a whisper against my skin than a kiss. I arched my back from the bed as he guided my tank top up my stomach. Instead of taking it off he let it bunch above my breasts and leaned down again to ghost his mouth against my cleavage. I watched in awe as he trailed that mouth down my chest, down my belly, stopping at the top of my yoga pants to glance up at me from under his eyelashes and catch me in the act. I had always liked to watch.
He smiled again, closer to his usual warm grin, and didn’t look away from my face as he took the elastic waistband between his teeth and dragged it down. I lifted my butt in the air a few inches so he could pull my yoga pants off (using his hands eventually, as teeth could only do so much against stretch cotton).
And then Aaron was staring up at me from between my thighs and I thought fleetingly of my iPhone in my room downstairs, what a good picture this would make. I wanted to savor the image, dip the memory in chemicals and hang it up to dry like a dripping portrait in a dark room. The elated look on his face as he guided my thighs apart. The power in how his palms pressed down to open me up. The patience in how slowly he lowered his mouth to my underwear, placing a hint of a kiss on the fabric. The contrast of it—the kindness in his face and the force of his touch—it was better than any drug.
“Have you thought about this?” he asked, rubbing his thumb over my clit through my underwear. My mouth fell open in an inelegant gasp. “Tell me.”
“Yes,” I managed. My entire body twitched and my heels dug into the mattress as he kissed my inner thigh. Then without warning he bit down in the same place and I moaned, “Ohh god yes, please.”
“Please what?” Aaron said. “Be more specific.”
I fought the urge to kick him—finding words was like putting together a puzzle with half the pieces missing. He looked up at me expectantly and then tucked my underwear to the side, continuing to tease me with gentle strokes of his thumb up my labia.
“I’ve thought
about you—about you tasting me,” I said. He followed my instructions, making sure never to look away from my face as he stroked his tongue up my wet slit. A shudder ran through me and I knew I needed more. “About you licking me hard.”
“Like this?” he asked before repeating the motion with more force, a long broad lick ending in a firm press on my clit.
I jerked so hard he had to press down on my thighs to keep me still as he did it again, and then again. “Yes, exactly—fuck exactly like that.”
The pace he set was ruthless, hard and fast to keep the pressure inside me building. I needed constant stimulation to come from oral, and teasing was great to start but could make me lose momentum. But Aaron knew what I needed, speeding up and focusing on my clit when my breathing started to stagger. “I want…” It was a struggle to phrase the “oh god oh god more please” desperation mounting in my center. “I want your hand, fuck me with—”
Aaron slid three fingers into me easily without stopping his attack on my clit. I hadn’t realized how desperately empty I’d been before, relishing his hand pumping in and out of me. He curled his fingers to find my G-spot, stroking it in time with his tongue. My eyes had closed at some point but I forced them open to watch as he stared up at my face, dying to see me fall apart, dying to see me come. Aaron was focused on me but that determination was mixed with desperation too—this was turning him on, doing this to me. Not the chocolate. I’d found one of those gems: a guy whose pleasure was tethered to my own. And he needed me to come as much as I did.
“Come for me, Steph,” he said, his mouth shining with my arousal. The sight of it combined with his words sent jagged strikes of desire through my nerves and I clenched around his hand, desperately close.
“Please, don’t stop, please,” I said, my hands gripping the sheets. He licked my clit viciously hard and I couldn’t keep watching even though I wanted to because I wasn’t in control of my body. The orgasm took over, tearing through me as Aaron fucked me with his fingers.
And then they were gone, yanked out of me so quickly I was startled back into hot awareness. Aaron kneeled between my legs to unzip his fly and shove down his pants and boxers. He didn’t even bother taking them off before bracing his weight on one hand and using the other to guide himself into my still spasming cunt. I immediately wrapped my legs around his waist to pull him as deep inside me as possible, shuddering around him. I was still lost, lost in the ether, tightening around his cock in a frantic, hardly rhythmic pulse. He groaned into my neck.
It had been a while since I’d had sex but it didn’t matter—this was different from any sex I’d had before. I ran my hands up and down his skin like I wanted to come home to every notch on his spine and muscle of his forearm. He read when to slow down in how my nails grazed down his back, knew where to kiss my neck to make me moan and wrap myself around him. Neither of us was preoccupied with how he looked or how I looked or trying to contort into a yoga poses ripped off from shitty Internet porn. This was the sort of sex we had no business having as two college-age stoners who barely knew ourselves let alone each other. Fucking Aaron was transcendent and simple.
The chocolate probably helped with that.
By the time he finished we were both sticky with sweat, our mouth smeared with chocolate and my climax and each other’s skin. His orgasm was beautiful to witness, lips shiny, eyes full of fire and relief. We collapsed in a boneless puddle. “Mozel tov,” I mumbled for a reason that escaped me. Neither of us was Jewish and I wasn’t even the high one.
He laughed into my shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. “The product seems, ah… market ready.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I scolded as I reached my arm out toward the desk, groping for the Ziploc bag. “It would be irresponsible to sell it without testing its impact on a female participant.”
The Stranger
Tamsin Flowers
The summer was long, hot and sultry, the year the stranger came to town. Too damn hot! I’d taken to spending my afternoons lying on the ottoman, sipping iced tea, a wet flannel draped across my forehead. There was nothing to do and I couldn’t even summon up the energy to go down the road to pass the time of day with Betsy. I lay in torpitude, wondering when the mercury would drop, wondering when I would pass a day without the prickle of sweat between my breasts.
And that was the summer the stranger came.
I didn’t know anything about his arrival. By the time Melba told me about him on the telephone, he’d probably been in town for a week or more. But I was never one for being first with the gossip. I didn’t care if other people knew it all before I had the slightest inkling. I was just lying on my back, counting the flies on the ceiling.
However, Melba was full of it. The stranger, a man, in her opinion, of about thirty years old, had just turned up at Bill Mason’s diner one afternoon, asking for work. Bill Mason set him to clearing tables and washing dishes, and this was how Melba had chanced upon the man. He worked one shift but he didn’t come back the next day. Melba asked Bill all about him—Melba Doone is one of those women that needs to know everything, especially those things that are none of her business—but Bill couldn’t tell her anything that was of interest.
The next sighting was, according to Melba, at McGrindle’s store. The man did a day’s work there and Patty McGrindle was full of how helpful he’d been and how polite. She seemed quite smitten by the fellow. According to Melba, she simpered.
“Why are you telling me this?” I had to say. The conversation had gone on for long enough and I wanted to refresh my tea.
“Because,” said Melba.
I knew why. Nothing ever happened in our one-horse town. The last time the telephone lines had buzzed as much had been the week Betsy’s cousin Topher had accidently set fire to Aiden Smart’s garage when he was drunk. Aiden was there and he was drunk too, so Sheriff Dawes put them in the lockup overnight. That was three, no, maybe four years ago. Melba wanted to track the stranger’s movements and find out everything she could about him, to give herself something to talk about for the rest of the year.
The next I heard about the stranger was from Betsy. She’d heard all about him from Melba, so when he came knocking on her door, asking about odd jobs and yard work, she invited him in. Betsy’s husband, Sheriff Dawes, isn’t one for yard work, so Betsy kept a list pinned to her fridge with any odd jobs for when an itinerant would come knocking. She gave the man the list. He said he could get it done in two days and they agreed a rate.
I saw Betsy a day later or so at McGrindle’s and she was excitedly recommending him to everyone in the store. Melba said he was going to fix her fence and Sherry Smart came up to us and said he’d cleared her rainwater gutters and was doing some work on the car for Aiden. They all seemed a little flustered and a little breathy, about the prospect of having the man come to their house to work.
I couldn’t have been less interested. Until the moment he knocked on my door.
“Who’s there?” I called through the screen.
“Ma’am, I’m in the neighbourhood, doing yard work, and I wondered if you had anything you needed doing.”
The stranger. I opened the screen door and stepped outside. He was standing a couple of steps down from me but he was tall. Taller than me despite my elevation. He wasn’t handsome but he had the type of face you look at and then you want to look at it some more. The face of an outdoorsman—crinkled, freckled, bee-stung lips, eyes that squint into the sun, a few days’ beard growth.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got stuff you can do. Will you chop wood?”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
“And fix a window screen?
“Not a problem, ma’am.”
“Follow me.”
I started leading him through the house to get to the back yard but he stopped in the kitchen.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but would it be alright if I stored something in your refrigerator? I don’t want it spoiling in this heat.”
“Go ahead.” I pull
ed open the refrigerator door.
He swung a small knapsack from his back and rummaged inside. He drew out a small cardboard box, plain gold, expensive looking. I stared but I couldn’t see anything written on it. As he put the carton reverentially onto an empty shelf, I wanted to ask him what was inside. But it was none of my business. His eyes rested momentarily on the jug of ice tea.
“Want some?”
“Thank you, yes.”
I poured him a glass of tea and he drank it down in one. Then I showed him outside to the yard and set him chopping and piling logs ready for the winter. I went back in and closed the door. Once I could hear the steady rhythm of chopping, I opened the refrigerator. I’m not usually a nosy woman but for some reason I really wanted to know what was inside the gold box.
I took it down from the refrigerator shelf and brought it across to the kitchen table. I sat down with the box in front of me and I stared. There was no clue on the outside as to what it contained so, after a moment’s hesitancy, I slowly raised the lid of the box. Inside, nestling on a bed of soft velvet, was a single, beautiful chocolate, the likes of which I’d never seen before. The outer shell was dark and glossy and when I breathed in I could smell cocoa and cinnamon, and other unknown spices. I wondered what flavor the filling was—a praline or a ganache or perhaps a fine liqueur.
My mouth watered, while outside the sound of chopping continued.
I put the lid back on the box and placed it carefully back on the refrigerator shelf. Chocolate seemed such a strange extravagance for a man who existed by doing yard work. Why would he be carrying such an extraordinary piece of confectionery around with him? I went to the kitchen window and looked out and he immediately glanced up at me and nodded his head. I opened the window.
“Would you like some more tea?”
“No thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I’m fine.”
And he was. Fine and strong. I stood watching him for a few minutes longer, mesmerised by the cording in his neck and the ripple of muscle across his shoulders as he swung the axe. Then, in a moment of madness, I returned to the refrigerator and pulled open the door. The gold box was still there. Of course it was. I took it out again and across to the kitchen table once more. But this time I opened it with intent.