Red Hot Lipstick

by Jeremy Reed

  Justin offered no explanation, and Juliana put her hands to her head to prevent losing balance. Someone was playing games with her, or was it the heat? She didn't know, but she felt an overwhelming sense of sexual desire for her double. And Justin was right there at her shoulder, his breath caressing her skin.

  'But who is this?' she found herself asking, and Justin and her female counterpart both exclaimed, 'Lucinda.' There were two green lizards sunning on a crumbling wall, and one darted into cover like a forked lightning.

  Juliana watched as Lucinda slipped from her red tee-shirt, and just as she had imagined, her breasts were full like her own, and characterized by the two beauty spots she had thought individual to her. And as though compelled to follow, Juliana too took off her tee-shirt and then her skintight shorts and stood being her rival or friend in the same high-cut thong. And losing consciousness of time and place she had failed to note that Justin was filming events with a camcorder. He had spoken of doing rough preliminaries, and was busy recording the initial relations between the two women.

  It was cooler here because of the preponderance of trees, and Juliana sensed that Lucinda was going to kiss her at some stage. They looked directly into each other's eyes.

  'I used to be Justin's girlfriend,' Lucinda said. 'He brought you here to convince himself that it wasn't me who was pretending to be you. I know he met you on the beach two days ago. Only by bringing us together would he be convinced that he wasn't resuming his relationship with me. I know the whole thing sounds unreal, but I can assure you it's true. I came to Limni with him as a companion, and somehow he met you. When he came back from the beach yesterday he asked me why I had spent the afternoon on the beach when I assured him I was looking for this ruin. That's how alike we look.’

  Having said this, Lucinda came closer. Juliana felt the warmth of her double's carnation-scented breath as their mouths came together and locked in the sensuous oval of a red kiss. It was like fire flickered into that space, and all the time Juliana was saying to herself, this is the first time I've ever kissed a woman, and it has all the surprise and excitement that I imagined. She could feel a finger which she knew was Justin's tracking down the length of her spine to the crack of her bottom. And then the finger was gone, for he was clearly busy filming this passionate embrace between his ex-lover and the woman he intended to be his new lover.

  The two of them stood back, and watched butterflies flickering between the grasses, one white star folding over another ill flight. There was an absolute sense of timelessness attached to this place. It was like stepping into a dream of the past.

  'I know although you've hardly met, you feel a lot for Justin,' Lucinda said. And perhaps you'll continue the relationship I decided to leave. I left Justin because I needed space and time. He was still attracted to me, and so he discovered the closest thing to it, you. But you don't know him well enough yet to undergo the one test which I hope will convince him of our physical difference. I've assured him I will discover the hidden knowledge for him. I have a tiny red love-heart tattoo right next to the fold of my vagina. It's so distinctive to a lover that it could hardly be repeated in anyone else. If you'll let me kiss you there, I can then inform Justin that he has discovered a new girlfriend.'

  Juliana found herself complying, and Lucinda led her to a place in a grove of olive trees where contrary to her expectations, Juliana derived pleasure and excitement from the distinguishing examination. Lucinda showed considerable oral expertise, and it was only after aeons had elapsed that the two women emerged from the shade and found Justin sitting with one arm round the partly truncated statue.

  'There's no need to even ask me,' Lucinda told him, and she made a hurried departure for an evening date on the island. 'I'm free, and you two are only just beginning.'

  Juliana watched her walk away. Justin took her hand and suggested they walk back across the beach to the villa he was renting on the coast. It was cooler now. The beach was still deserted. Juliana was ready for anything. She slipped her arm round his waist, and the seagulls accompanied them, their raucous screams ringing in the empty blue air.

  Blue by You

  Sunday was the blue day in the week. To Greil it was like an unfinished poem, or a jazz riff remembered from a club somewhere in Berlin, Paris, or London; a sort of inconclusive piece that suggested endless journeys, and pastel-coloured houses facing a bridge over the black undertow of a river's current.

  But out walking that afternoon, he remembered the short-skirted librarian, her invitingly long legs terminating in black pointed ankle-boots, her hair tied in a red ribbon the colour of her lipstick, and her big black eyes sheltered behind St Laurent frames. She was the bright constellation in his memory. When he felt about to be extinguished by solitude and the vacuous anonymity of the crowds, he remembered her, as he did at night when his sexual fantasies rioted around her availability and her provocative image. He didn't as yet even know her name.

  Greil walked quickly along the harbour front. A blond girl in seam-splitting jeans engaged his eyes, and he felt the nerves in his abdomen resonate like a tuned instrument. She walked from her hips, and he watched the quiver of her bottom pronounce a vocabulary of rhythmic provocation. There were some Swedish and Japanese cargo boats berthed in the still docks, and the water was flat and opaquely green. Gulls burst across t he sky like an origami trail.

  Greil headed up a side street, and listened to his footsteps echo as though they were reverberating on a drum-skin. He intended to head towards a number of cafés in his harbour-front district where young people met on Sunday afternoons, mid by the evening spilled on to the pavement, all of them gravitating to the sexual hedonism created by loud music. Greil was hoping to start a liaison, or just pick up someone for the night and see where the encounter took him.

  He walked along in a state of high anticipation, a euphoria he always experienced at the onset of possible meetings. Suddenly a door opened and slammed, and two girls hurried down the steps and began walking down the street. Greil couldn't believe it. The girl to the left was the librarian on whom his thoughts had been trained, and she was dressed in a violet-coloured micro-mini which gave full emphasis to her legs, and the black pencil-line seams travelling the length of her sheer tights. She wore black spike heels, and her redheaded friend was moulded into the black banana-skin of lycra leggings. Greil increased his pace slightly, for the girls had set out at a fast walk, and seemed to be headed for the cafes which were his intended destination.

  The one he liked had her hair in a violet band to match her skirt. He caught hints of her perfume, and with his knowledge of the subject he recognized it as Amirage by Givenchy. He was excited by the whole engaging aura that this girl transmitted. He longed to know her name, and to explore her legs; he imagined running the tip of his tongue right up the line of each seam to the mauve bud between her thighs. It would be like travelling parallel highways to a tantalizingly approved point. He imagined she would be wearing tiny mauve panties under her skirt, and he delighted in the thought of having them bunched around one ankle while he coaxed himself into her, pulsating inch by inch.

  Greil followed the girls, not intentionally, but by way of their taking the same streets towards the precinct in which the Red Sundown and Blue Port cafés were situated. The girls occasionally reciprocated a vivacious laughter, or linked arms, and were quite unaware of Greil's pursuit at a discreet distance. He was growing acutely fond of this girl to whom he had never properly spoken, and he was inwardly jealous that she could be on the way to a rendezvous with a lover. He kept on telling himself that perhaps the two girls were going to fulfil a date, and that he would end up eating his heart out in one of the dockside bars, seeing everything through a whisky haze, and seeing nothing at all.

  There were clouds chasing across the sky: they looked like a herd of bison starting to stampede. Greil could sniff rain in the air, and that would be for later. The girls stopped off at a newsagent, and reappeared with a copy of Glamour, and both g
ood a moment looking at the shot of the French model on die cover before continuing at a staccato, heel-clicking pace towards the Red Sundown.

  Greil watched the two go inside. The one he fancied was smoothing down her skirt at the back, checking for the reassurance that she was fully covered. Greil never tired of those little gestures which defined a woman. He kept a detailed inventory of them in his mind, and the pretty librarian manifested every feminine trait that he relished. She could at this moment have no idea of the ways in which she was seducing him, or that he was imagining a minimal triangle of black silk clinging to her curved bottom. He was longing to eroticize the most sensitive centimetres of her clitoris, and to initiate her into pleasures that would have her pleading in submissive postures. In his mind she was already crawling across a piano-top, picking sugar grains off it with her tongue, and later on pecking sugar grains off his cock.

  Greil followed the girls into the cafe. The place was in semi-darkness, and the tables were lit by red lamps. Elvis Presley was singing 'Heartbreak Hotel', and the room was half full. Groups of girls sat at the table, and young men stood up at the bar or against the walls, singling out the ones who attracted their attention. The two girls took up a table near the rear, and Greil found a table conveniently near to theirs. He was all eyes as the librarian sat down, composing her long legs and crossing them in a way that guarded her secret triangle. Greil was fixated by her curvaceousness, and kept expecting that the girls had a pre-arranged date, and that two young men would arrive to interpose themselves between him and his telescopic view up the girl's skirt. The music ached in his veins; he kept on trying to catch the girl's eye, but she was absorbed in the edition of Glamour, and she and her friend had formed a microcosm from which he was excluded. He could feel the electric parameters of their closed circle; it jumped out at him like a set of nerves.

  Greil thought he was imagining things. It happened simultaneously with his catching sight of a flicker of the girl's black panties, that their eyes met. He assumed he had been caught out in his exaggeratedly close scrutiny of her legs, but the girl's smile acknowledged nothing of his clandestine voyeurism, but instead played directly into his own. It was like catching a chocolate in his mouth. The next moment the girl in the moulded lycra went off to the Ladies Room, and Greil, acting out of his normally shy character, found himself going over to the girl's table, and asking if she would mind if he joined them. Her lips seemed redly inviting. He sat with his legs parallel to hers, and couldn't help wonder what it would be like to have her legs somersaulted over her head, or up on all fours, bottom arched for his tongue to explore her in the 69 position. It would be like licking Turkish Delight.

  'I've seen you at the library,' the girl simmered. 'I'm Joanna, and my friend's called Heather.'

  'I've been admiring you for a long time,' Greil said. 'It's pure coincidence that we should both end up at the Red Sun down. I suppose you know my interests: modern fiction. Bowles, Burroughs, Genet: that sort of stuff.'

  The girl laughed. Greil could almost see the little black triangle of her panties through the fine mesh of her tights. The tension tightened in his abdomen. Their initial rapport was such that he knew he was going to succeed. He imagined het long red fingernails making tracks across his balls. And when Heather returned to the table, there was no strain to the relationship he was beginning to establish with Joanna. With his adrenalin racing, he found himself placing a tentative hand on her right knee, fingers that went unreproved, and stayed there like a cat beginning to play with a mouse.

  The cafe was starting to fill up. A young man came over and started to talk engagingly to Heather, and it was with an elated sense of relief that Greil watched the young man draw up a chair, and make her his centre of attention. It allowed him in t urn to concentrate exclusively on Joanna, and he was captivated by the red imprint of her lips on the coffee cup, and the way the lower lip formed the outline of a pinkish crescent moon. Joanna was right up close to him and was telling him a compressed biography of the important events in her past, with the manic rush of someone wanting to impart the lot in a given space of time. She was playfully flirtatious, and took out a compact and checked her lips, and then recrossed her legs, and in repositioning his hand Greil took the advantage of travelling higher up her right thigh. And suddenly, and without any warning, they kissed, their lips rotating in a hot circle before Greil advanced his tongue in a mimetic snake-dance deep into Joanna's palate. Correspondingly he ran his hands over her shoulders and down her spine, and traced out the horizontal ridge of her bra, and then the two shoulder straps, as though he was playfully undressing her. She smudged her lips into his as he began kneading her nipples with the base of his thumbs. He could tell from Joanna's sensually rhythmic response hat in private they would take things to an incandescent climax.

  'We need a little more privacy,' Joanna breathed into Greil's ear, before she injected her tongue into that helical cavity. 'My flat's quite close to here. Shall we go back there for a drink?'

  Together they walked back, and Greil moved his arm from Joanna's waist to her bottom, his hand resting on the violet fabric of her moulded skirt. He was more excited than he could ever remember having been, for he had obsessively entertained the fantasy of converting a librarian into a sex slave. For months he had imagined her climbing up high steps in a micro-skirt, while he stood below tickling her bottom with a long plumed leather, and then with her consulting a book, her glasses tilted forward on the bridge of her nose, and with her concentration absolute, he would begin the process of taking her black panties down inch by inch until they formed a dark pool at her ankles. And then detaching them from her spike heels, and with her still absorbed in a point of reference, he would climb up the steps and tie her hands. That done, he would begin licking her upwards from the backs of her feet to her pussy, leg by leg as though he was following the lines of stocking seams. He had fantasized about doing this to Joanna, and had imagined the undulating shiver of her bottom as she climbed the high steps.

  When they got back, and tumbled interlaced on to her bed, he noticed the staggered bookshelves, the room entirely insulated by the silence that books afford, and there were steps as though the components of his dream had been realized as a prop-arranged reality. He couldn't believe it, and Joanna's fingers were soon brushing the taut erection contained in his tight black jeans. Agonizingly ticklish impulses were travelling up and down his cock. And his hands were busy choreographing Joanna's body; he had her bra off and her top lifted, and his tongue moved in every variant route across her indigo nipples. He had her arch with pleasure as a foretaste of the passionate love-making to come.

  He teased off her tights, but left the rest of her clothes intact as he was determined to have her act out the fantasy which had preoccupied him for such a period of time. Joanna was only too willing to comply with his suggestions, and tied her hair severely with a red ribbon, angled her St Laurent frames on the bridge of her nose, put her spike heels back on, positioned the steps and climbed provocatively towards the top shell of her books, a collection she had been accumulating since childhood.

  Greil stepped out of his shirt and jeans, and stood at the base of the steps. He looked right up her violet micro-skirt to the gusset of her black panties. Joanna took down a book, and according to plan began reading it. Greil was throbbing with anticipation. He took two steps up the ladder and hooked his thumbs into the elastic band of Joanna's panties, and then he began manoeuvring them centimetre by centimetre over her bottom, peeling them like the skin of an exotic fruit, and running a finger down the crack of her bottom. And he maintained this slow-motion action until her panties flopped at her ankles, and then he went back up the steps and tied her wrists with the flimsy black garment. He could see that Joanna was inordinately excited, and had never experienced anything like this inventive ritual. She was rotating her bottom in a circular arc as he began running his tongue up the backs of her legs, first the right and then the left leg, before making an exploratory re
connaissance of her pussy.

  Joanna's silent gestures told Greil that she was pleading to be entered, but he delayed again and again, before finally pushing his tongue into her tight bud and hearing her voice issue a guttural commentary on his expertise. He then lifted her off the ladder, and placed her bottom up on the bed, and deliriously entered her to the hilt. He moved in and out of her with subtle and affirmative pressure, and felt her contract and release, contract and release until her orgasmic pitch reached an ecstatic shriek. Greil buried his cock in her as he came in a series of frenzied spasms.

  They lay back on the bed, and he untied her wrists. He knew they would be urgent again in a short while, but for now they lay there talking of books, of Bowles, Burroughs and Genet, and of the whole spectrum of contemporary fiction, and Joanna licked her lips and ran a scarlet fingernail over page 93 of Our Lady of the Flowers.

  Flying Kites

  Roberta sat on the bed putting a gloss to her toenails. She had painted them co-ordinating colours, a black, a gold, a red, a green, and a silver on each foot. Her tiny feet looked like two fans which would have pleased a Chinese emperor in some autumnal dynasty when the foot was seen as the symbol of sex.

  She was excited. For the past month, and throughout the blond heat of July, she had formed a liaison with a particular man, which was the more erotically charged by its remaining unsublimated. She had rented an apartment with a balcony overlooking the bushy end of the park. Each afternoon, her skin filmed with UV preparations, and sheltered by a floppy green umbrella, she sat on her terrace. She would read, listen to music and acquire a tan. As the place wasn't overlooked, she would bask topless in a string bikini bottom, or sometimes in nothing but the shiver of black chiffon panties. Roberta liked the erotic daring this challenge created, and it excited her to think that perhaps somewhere an eye was focused on her curves, an eye polishing itself on one of her splashy violet areolas.