by Jade White
Rodney bent lower and took his penis in his own hand. With the other he pulled aside the fabric of her blue panties. Her vulva was wide and gleaming with pre-cum, and he nudged the head of his sex against the pink folds of her vagina.
It was enough to bring Kristen temporarily out of her reverie. Her eyes went wide, and she grunted, stifling her breath as he plied apart the fleshy folds. When he touched the entrance of her vagina she stiffened again, as if in pain, but her mouth was open in a silent plea for him to enter her. With little effort he nudged again, and saw the head of his penis disappear into her.
“Oh, fuck!” she said, tightening her hands on the couch.
He moved deeper, growing harder and thicker as he entered, and let out a sigh of his own as he tried to keep from coming immediately. The muscles of her vagina tightened and untightened against her will as she tried to loosen them enough for him to enter her all the way.
When he did, she merely hummed and tilted her head back. Her black hair cascaded down the pillows behind her, and he leaned down and kissed her neck again, moving slowly at first, his buttocks flexing as he pushed in and out. Kristen groaned, an almost childish sound escaping her lips, as she wrapped her arms around his back and lifted her legs up higher, allowing him better access.
The soft wet sounds of their sexes mingling and crushing became a symphony, accompanied only by the rapacious shudders or moans of desire that emanated from both. Sweat speckled Kristen’s forehead as he began to fuck her harder, and she wrapped both legs around him. She felt ready to explode, and her nails cut into his back.
“Unnng, fuck, fuck,” she wailed.
“Don’t come yet,” he said, plunging into her again and again.
His hand came up and rubbed her breast, and she felt like every nerve of her body was coming undone, being given its own attention. It was almost unbearable, and she wondered if she would not lose consciousness. She held on for dear life as Rodney continued to penetrate her, and only dared to look down between both of their chests once. Her black pubic hair was moist and lathered with white foam, and she fought the urge to come when she saw his giant member moving like a piston, pulling itself in and out of her small vagina.
“I can’t.. oh fuck, I’m-I’m coming, Rodney!” she bellowed at last.
Her vagina tightened around his penis and she clung to him like a chimpanzee. Her pelvis butted against him, forcing his penis even further up into her. At the same time Rodney’s orgasm hit like a white flash of lightning inside her. It felt as if a sun had been born inside her and she let out a scream which was half pleasure and half pain as the searing liquid splashed against her insides, filling her, squirting out between her vagina and his penis which was still rigid inside her.
Rodney held her as the seizures overtook her and she sobbed, feeling the muscles in her legs shudder and cramp with the force of her climax. She was still sobbing almost a minute later when the orgasm had exhausted itself and only the occasional flicker of her abdomen remained. Tenderly, he leaned over on his side so he was facing her. His penis, half-flaccid, slipped out of her and she reached down and held a splayed hand over her vulva.
The small tuft of her pubic mound was slicked back, and she felt the hot pressure of her own passion subsiding. Both of them were damp with sweat and lovemaking, and her inner thighs were sticky with his semen, which had coated everything. She rubbed herself, pressing a finger deep inside, and felt another small stream of his seed leak out from between the folds of her inflamed labia.
Rodney touched her cheek and brushed a lock of black damp hair out of her eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“You ask that a lot, don’t you?” she said, pulling her fingers out of her and drawing a wet line like a snail’s path up her abdomen and between her breasts. “I… I’ve never had… sex like that. I’ve never come… so hard.”
“Me neither,” he admitted.
“I can still feel you… unhh… inside me,” Kristen breathed, panting.
Rodney smiled and pulled her closer, and she wrapped a white leg over top of him, settling her waist against his. She had never imagined what it would be like, to make love with the intention of getting pregnant. All of her former lovers had never reached the same level of intimacy, but this, this was different. Absently, she pulled the panties the rest of the way down and over her ankles, and let them fall with a wet slap on the wooden floor.
“Hold me,” she whispered softly, her round ass jutting against him as she turned so that they were spooning each other. Rodney quietly laid a hand over her waist, and she guided it over her navel with her own hand. Almost on cue, the candle he had lit on the far fireplace dwindled, and she let herself close her eyes.
For the moment, she didn’t let herself worry about anything. It was enough simply to exist, here and now, in his arms. She would have to take tests of course, but she had a feeling – something she couldn’t explain, except as a sort of extra-sensory perception – that somehow a new life had begun tonight. Her own hand touched the space between her navel and pubis, and she smiled.
A new life, she thought bravely.
Something she had desired for so long had finally come true.
CHAPTER FOUR
“It says I have to wait five minutes,” Kristen said, emerging from the washroom, and held the small little blue stick in her left hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger.
Gloria was seated at the kitchen table, and had an eager look on her face. Kristen was surprised at how easily her friend had adapted to Nelson – she now had a circle of her own friends, attended the daily markets, and had even started to sport the colorful hand-made DIY clothes that seemed common to the small hippie town. She’d even found a temporary job as a cashier at one of the local alternative bookstores. Very different from the straight laced style-connoisseur from Seattle, Kristen observed. While the changes in Gloria were self-evident, she wondered if she herself had undergone some sort of change since coming here.
“Five minutes!? What are they trying to do, give us hysterics? I swear, if I were smarter, I would invent a pregnancy test that was immediate. I mean how difficult can it be?”
“Four minutes,” Kristen said, setting the test on the table. She crossed her arms and began to pace.
“Stop doing that. You’ll wear a hole in the floor if you’re not careful. Here, sit down, I’ll make you some tea instead. Mint, okay? I’ll make it strong,” Gloria offered, standing up and going to boil some water. That was another change, she seemed obsessed with tea these days, but Kristen could hardly argue. Every time she came home from work, there was always a hot beverage waiting for her.
“I can’t help it. I mean, I’m almost positive, but… but what if it didn’t work?”
“I’m just glad you two finally got down to business,” Gloria muttered, “took you long enough. If it was me, I’d have laid and made that handsome little paramedic on day one.”
“You’d lay just about anything,” Kristen said, and tapped her fingers on the table.
Rodney’s story about his sister, and about how even Shifter’s could suffer from infertility, had haunted her since he’d told her. And in a way, her own hypochondriac tendencies had caused her to wonder if she didn’t suffer from a similar affliction.
“Knock it off, girl!” Gloria said, but without any sting. Kristen stopped tapping. “Three minutes now… pick up that newspaper. Read to me. That’ll keep us occupied for the next couple of minutes, and keep me from strangling you.”
Kristen stuck out her tongue, but obliged by reaching for the newspaper. “Fine. Uh, lets see. Ah, great, perfect headline, Gloria. More Dead Animals Found On North Shore,” she read. “Geez, looks like a mess. I think Dave wrote this. Ugh.”
Gloria set a cup of hot tea down beside her friend. “You know, I was talking about that with some of my friends at work. They say this has happened before, you know, a rash of animal killings. They say all the animals are just simply killed, not even eaten, like whatever’
s doing it just does it for the pleasure.”
“Rodney mentioned something about this the first day… he said the cops wanted him to check it out. I never asked him about it though…”
“Thing is,” Gloria made a humph sound as she sat down and slurped at her own tea, “ow, hot, geezus. Erm. Anyway, thing is, they’re not sure what’s doing it. The wounds look like a bear or something, but it’s not consistent. If they had to guess, they’d say cougar. But the wounds, at least that’s what Alicia says, she remembers the last time this happened, oh fifteen years ago or so… what was I saying? Oh yeah, the wounds are too big to be a cougar.”
It was all too much, and not really engaging her attention. Kristen was still focused on the small blue stick at the far end of the table. “Done, done… we’re up, right? Ugh, tell me what it says.”
She lowered her head into her hands, too afraid to look up. Gloria waddled to the far end of the table and picked it up. Her face was a completely stoic expression. Kristen made a mental note never to play poker with her.
“Well? Well!?”
“Thing is,” Gloria said, her intonation lowering, and her eyes became downcast as she pursed her lips, “I’ve always wanted to be an aunt!”
The news was like a hammer. It struck Kristen right between the eyes, and she felt the reverberation of it signal all the way down her spine to her heart, where it suddenly resonated. Her limbs felt like jelly, and for several moments she couldn’t even move. It wasn’t until Gloria tugged on her shirt and lifted her off the chair that the reality of it hit home.
“I’m… I’m pregnant?”
“Read it and weep!” Gloria said with an excited flair, shoving the pregnancy test in Kristen’s face. It was positive. “I mean, don’t weep, unless you want to, but… you’re pregnant, hey!”
Gloria jumped up and down, gripping both of Kristen’s wrists, and laughed uproariously. Kristen smiled, and it took over her face, inhabiting every muscle. She began to jump up and down with Gloria, and suddenly her eyes felt wet and she couldn’t stop crying. It started out innocently, and in seconds she was sobbing again through her smile.
She reached out and wrapped her arms around Gloria’s neck and held her friend tightly. “I can’t believe it… I can’t….”
“Believe it, beautiful,” Gloria said.
“I-I have to go tell Rodney!” she said, almost sprinting for the door, but somehow Gloria was faster and skidded on the tiles to block her. “Hey, what… what are you doing? Gloria, it worked… I’m going to have a child.”
“Yes,” Gloria said, but all the joy had suddenly evaporated from her frowning face, “but just hold on a second. I’ve been avoiding bringing this up, because… well, quite frankly, you looked happy and who am I to question that or get in the way of it? I don’t have that right… but I need to ask, Kristen.”
“Ask what? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You said it yourself when we first got here. That you wanted to take it slow, which I admit was a good thing. But… but what do you intend to do, now that you are pregnant?”
The question opened up a vacuum for her, and Kristen swallowed and sat back down at the table. The tea was still hot, and she pored over it as she circulated the cup in her hands. What had she planned to do, once she got pregnant? Go back to the Enclave? That was the obvious choice even though it had become a sort of unspoken fact she had taken for granted. But what about Rodney?
Gloria seemed to anticipate the flux of questions unleashed in her mind, and breathed out slowly through her nose. “So you haven’t really thought that far ahead, have you?”
I never do, Kristen though shamefully again, I’m always reckless like this. “I… I don’t know, Gloria. I mean, I guess, I always suspected that… that we would return, y’know?”
“Is that what you want to do, now?” she asked, and when Kristen couldn’t answer, she asked a different question. “Listen, honey, you know me. I’ll follow you anywhere. I’m your sister, in all but blood. Don’t worry about me when making this decision but you obviously have to ask yourself: what is Rodney to you, now? I warned you about getting too close…”
“You wanted this to be an actual business transaction,” Kristen said accusingly.
Gloria gave her a smile that could well have been the sort of expression a knowing parent gives to a petulant child, and it hurt Kristen even more deeply. “No, sweetie. I wanted what was best for you, to make sure you didn’t get hurt. All I’m here to do is offer my advice, to point out the consequences, the possibilities. You’re the one that has to make the choices,” she said resolutely, “and live with them. I knew that if you got too close to Rodney, if this became too, geez, I can’t believe I’m saying this… if this became too human, it would be difficult.
“When emotions get involved, especially where children are concerned, it complicates things. I’ve seen the way you act around Rodney, the way you talk about him, the way you daydream when you think I’m not watching. I’m not here to dictate how you actually feel about him, but the question remains. How do you feel about him?”
“I’m afraid to answer that,” Kristen said, and sipped at the tea. It was almost lukewarm now. Outside, the leaves had reached their full pinnacle of color, and some were beginning to droop and litter the roadsides in yellow piles. “I care about him. I do. And I know whatever decision I make, he’ll be okay with it… but that’s not the point anymore.”
“What is the point?” Gloria asked pointedly.
“I thought this was all about me. I was prepared for this to be all about me. But it isn’t anymore. As much as I wish I could just reproduce asexually, it doesn’t work that way. This baby, it’s part of Rodney as well. I don’t feel I have the right to take it away from him.”
“That doesn’t answer how you feel about him,” Gloria said, “but, we’ll leave that for the moment. The next question is: do you think he even wants to be a part of the child’s life?”
Kristen stood up and took her jacket off the rack. Without a word she zipped it up and tied her shoes, and this time Gloria didn’t stand in her way. At the door she finally turned, maybe it was the effect of realizing she was pregnant, maybe it was a lot of things, but suddenly she felt a clarity wind its way through her. It wasn’t confidence – she didn’t think she’d ever be able to use that adjective to describe herself. But it was as if certain parts of her life had fallen into place, some proverbial existential Tetris game, and the last piece had somehow come into focus, and fit perfectly where it should.
“Only one way to find out,” she gave a brusque nod, and closed the door behind her.
As she walked down the steep roads toward main street and toward the first café where they’d met, she sent a quick message to Rodney on her cellphone and slipped it back into her pocket. She breathed in the deep scent of the maples. The slow revolving of the seasons seemed to echo the movement of her life, an inexorable cycle. In life you can make choices, she thought, but there are other things, other events, other forces, that you have no control over… all you can do is hold on.
It occurred to her that this way of thinking, a sort of laidback acceptance of things beyond her scope, was in fact something that had changed in her since moving to Nelson. People here had a slower pace of life, and didn’t get caught up on the small hitches that confronted them. It seemed like a more libertarian way of living, less stressful – even her job at the local newspaper was degrees less strenuous, and there was plenty of room for her to exercise her own creative processes. A good place for a child to grow up, she thought against her will, and lambasted herself for thinking it at all. What about the Enclave? Was she willing to give up the only home she had ever known, in order to stay here?
“I’ll take two mochas, Jen, thanks,” she said to the barista behind the coffee bar.
“Coming right up, K,” the dread-locked woman replied, “my, you look radiant today! Normally, at this time of year, right in between summer and skiing season, folk
s are grumpy. What's got you in such a great mood?”
“I really can’t say,” Kristen lied. I only just found out I’m pregnant, is it that obvious to others?
“Well, as a thank you for bringing a smile in here, I’ll give you second mocha free. Not a lot of business this morning anyway, so the boss isn’t around. Just keep it between us.”
The café, Oso Negro, was a charming little artistic residence. Local artists had their paintings on the wall, and there was even a small garden behind the shop with herbs and local flowers. Most of them had died and withered by now, but it was still a safe little enclosure of nature that she enjoyed, despite the growing cold. She zipped up the collar on her jacket tighter, and the flection of the burgundy leather squealed.
“That for me?”
She turned and saw Rodney. “How do you that?”
He took a seat beside her on the cold stone bench and breathed into his hands. “Sneak up on you? It’s pretty easy… I’m a Tiger.”
“So am I,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, but I’ve had more practice,” he winked. “What’s the big news, I came as soon as I saw your text. Just got off shift, so I’m totally free this time – no interruptions.” He held up his pager as evidence and flipped off the switch.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were on a call…” she started, “nothing too serious?”
He squirmed uncomfortably. “Just more…” he stopped, “no, no nothing. It’s fine. I’m glad for the distraction actually, heh. So what is it? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost or something?”
Maybe I really am that easy to read, she sighed, and brought both hands up to her face to massage the tension out of them. She felt Rodney’s hands slip out and touch her shoulder, and took in a deep breath.
“I’m pregnant,” she said at last. She had hoped that getting it off her chest would somehow alleviate the uncertainty she felt, but it only served to increase her tenuous grip on her emotions. Rodney did his best to hide his own. His face went through a transition of different expressions, and she could barely keep up with them. Joy? Anger? Sadness? It was impossible to tell. “Please say something,” she said after he had failed to speak up.
