by Unknown
* * *
I am standing at the edge of the dance floor in a club too hip to have a name, hating everything that brought me here, including Maria, and Brit, and long-legged Cassidy in her crop-top and jeans that show off her ass. I’m not a club person, but I let them lure me here, and abandon me, and I cross and recross my arms over my chest, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes while I nurse my gin and tonic.
I do not wear dresses. This is not who I am, nor who I have wanted to be, once I grew out of that spell-bound adoration of my mother. I am wearing black jeans, black button-down shirt, and a vest of charcoal with the slightest sheen. My thick-soled boots make me a whole inch taller and I stand a full head over most of the women in the club, dark hair spiked and eyes hooded. I bit my nails all day in anticipation. That anticipation was both correct and incorrect, and I’ve started muttering my friends’ names under my breath, devising ever more creative methods of torturing each of them for dragging me here.
It’s one of those situations where people are more well-meaning than polite, or even thoughtful, and I am a pushover. I’m not a club person, and my friends find this to be some kind of deficit in my personality, something to be corrected, to be modified—this notion that if I just loosened up and had some fun, maybe I’d become more sociable, more outgoing, maybe even get laid.
I drain my drink and look over the heads of the dancers out on the floor before dropping my gaze down to the crowds. It’s not a lesbian club, but the floor seems to be filled exclusively by women, and, out of idle curiosity, I do a scan of the surrounding faces, picking out, as far as I can tell, three men.
“Looking for someone?”
My gaze snaps down like a rubber band and comes to light on the speaker: a full head shorter than I am, wearing something I’d never venture to even try on: a short, black dress, tight like a coat of paint applied to her skin. I’m surprised at her appearance, both in presence and the sheer look of her, like a coiled snake at my feet. My heart is suddenly in my throat.
“Not really,” I manage, over the booming noise of the bass that shakes the surface under my feet, and my blood with it. I reach up, almost without conscious thought, to touch my hair, to find out if it’s blowing in this artificial movement, too.
“You here alone?” Despite the overwhelming sound of the place, and the close quarters beside us, I can feel her shift, lean against the railing next to me; her arm is warm, even through my shirt, and I feel the hairs on my arm and along the back of my neck rise.
“I came with friends,” I say, and, after a beat, confess, “They’ve ditched me already.”
She clucks her tongue. “Not very good friends.” She nudges me with her shoulder, the bend hitting me in the bicep.
“They think I’m more interesting than I am,” I say, shrugging, feeling the fabric of my shirt brush her shoulder. I am miserable at flirting, going deer-in-the-headlight the instant an attractive woman strikes up a conversation; this might be why my friends think I need to be fixed. For the first time in a long time, I wonder if they might be right.
“You look plenty interesting to me,” she persists, and I glance down at her again, at her slightly pursed mouth.
“How can you tell?” I find myself asking, arching an eyebrow in terrified bemusement.
Her expression goes smug, and it’s her turn to look over the floor, as the song shifts from one without words to another, similar but different.
“Just can,” she responds, but her voice is almost lost in the sound of the music. I breathe in, waiting for her to move away.
“Come on,” she says then, seizing my elbow. My crossed arms slide apart. I wasn’t expecting her to grab me, and I’m helpless. In an instant, she has me by my free hand, the other clutching the empty cup like a life preserver.
“What?” I ask, but she’s already leading me out onto the dance floor. My blood thunders in my ears, louder than the bass.
“I don’t know if it’s obvious,” I manage, leaning in. I have to get my mouth close to her ear to be heard, and I can smell her shampoo—something tropical, with notes of coconut, making me dizzy. “But I can’t dance.”
Her hands go to my shoulders, reaching up so that her breasts look at risk of popping out of the top of her dress. My blood pulses even harder, painful at my wrists and groin.
“Just move,” she commands, and I drop my cup, fingers pulsing like a palsy, so I can rest my hands on her hips, curved out at almost an impossible degree from her waist.
“See? You’re a natural,” she purrs, pushing closer.
“That’s all it takes?” I ask, rocking from foot to foot stiffly, trying to follow the music, the way her body swings, the communal movement of everyone around us.
“That, and the desire for it.” She pushes her fingers up to wrap around my neck so we’re pressed together.
“Desire for what?” I have a Master’s in mathematical theory, and I sound like a dullard.
“Me,” she says, simply, mouth curled in a smile that says she knows very well how this works.
My knees quake for an instant, and I have an impulse to pinch myself. She’s far from my type, but exactly it, too: too much of everything, past perfect into something other, something created out of fiction.
“So I’ll magically be able to dance?” I ask, snorting softly through my nose.
“You tell me,” she says, and I swallow, the sensation almost painful, fingers rippling against her dress.
She moves like a snake, like the sound the bass makes, like the beats of a drum. I follow as best I can, and she’s right: the more I want her, the better I seem to do. I stop rocking from foot to foot like a sixth grade boy at his first dance, and when her hands slide from my neck to my shoulders, down to the slope of my breasts, I raise my eyebrows.
“Is the reverse true?” I ask, licking my upper lip where sweat has managed to bead. “The more you want me…?”
She laughs and traces one of the buttons of my shirt with the edge of her thumb. “You tell me,” she says, again, tugging at the same spot to pull me closer, pull me down, so she can press her mouth to mine.
She’s salty and sweet, rum and mango and lipstick, and, mind of their own, my hands go to cup her ass, the sheer briefness of her dress making my fingertips brush against her bare thighs. I’ve never been shy, but this is something on a level I’m not quite used to, as though I’ve already had ten drinks and am bolder than I knew I could be.
Our mouths break apart, and she gasps a little, clutching at me in a way that proves I’m not the only one feeling intoxicated.
“Take me home.” Her eyes shine in the flashing lights. “Right now.”
The boldness stays adhered to my tongue. “What’s the magic word?”
Her grip tightens on my shirt, goes a little painful, the pulling fabric under my arms biting at the soft flesh there.
“Now,” she breathes out.
We weave through the club like a single unit, my hands on her waist and her arm extended behind her so that her fingers stay hooked in my vest. The night air outside is as warm and heavy as the club. She turns to me abruptly, and we crash together, stumbling into the building next door at the mouth of a putrid alley. The glare of car headlights reflects off windows and the rough texture of the brick.
I jerk her skirt upward, enough to find the expanse of her ass, rounded and smooth, pebbling delightfully under my touch. She moans against my mouth, working her fingers between the buttons of my shirt in pursuit of skin.
One button pops off, and then another. I pull back just enough to look down at her, her hair caught in the mortar, spread wild behind her head, her eyes hooded and mouth open, red and slick like the surface of an apple.
“What’s the magic word again?” It’s almost like I’m speaking with someone else’s voice, through someone else’s mouth, and I feel a smug sort of burn low in my stomach at her visible reaction: her shoulders sag, her back arches, and her bottom lip pooches out with a quiver.
“Pl
ease?” Her voice is higher out here, her eyes gone wide and dark and wanting. I smile and kiss her again, taking my hands from her ass to help her unbutton my shirt so that she doesn’t further destroy it.
She makes a disappointed noise when her fingers find more fabric—the smooth cotton of my undershirt—and I shake my head with a tut of my tongue against teeth. My fingers go back under the hem of her dress and find the thin line of her panties, following the band to the front where it just barely covers her cunt, warm and wet even through the fabric. I cup my hand there. For all my awkwardness, I know this treasure hunt, and perhaps she’s surprised, her head grinding back against the brick with another sudden whine, her hips jumping forward at my touch.
“What’s the magic word again?” I ask, not stirring in my handle there, even as I can feel her leaking out against my finger nearest her slit. I have no idea where this sudden authoritative tone is coming from, but I like the sound of it, the feel of it, the way it courses through my body like a wave.
She wiggles, arches again, fingers grappling at the front of my shirt, just over my breasts. Her fingers brush my aching nipples, but I flatten my hand on her pussy again, pressing the heel over her clit.
“What is it?” I insist, and though I don’t know if I would be able to pull away should she refuse to plead, I want to think I’m capable, that I could turn and walk away with a swagger, shirt hanging open to the waist.
“P-please,” she lets out. It’s clear that she simply wasn’t able to say it, and that pleases me, perhaps, more than it should.
From that angle, I can slip my finger around the lace edge of her panties and sink it inside her. She’s soaked. Her cunt clinches my finger instantly, and she moans out loud, the sound ricocheting off the brick walls around us. Someone could pass us, I know this, and the real danger is being caught by the cops that patrol this area of town, but I’m drunk on the power that I suddenly have, and the way this girl feels under me, pushing against me eagerly, in a way that is surprising and familiar at once.
My thumb hits her clit just under the wet panel of her panties and she groans again, turning her head to the side to grind her chin and cheek against her shoulder in a desperate motion to maintain some kind of control. Her lower half, though, has no such compunctions, and she’s rocking her pelvis back and forth to fuck my hand back. Her pussy is so wet, juices drip down over my wrists.
She digs her own hand into her hair, and I push my free one up over her taut stomach to a quivering breast. It’s an easy motion to tug the dress down, exposing one dark nipple for my fingers to pluck and twist. She only barely manages to shove her hand against her mouth against her cry, but it’s sharp, and needy, and I feel my own clit throb in response, blood burning in my veins.
She comes with a hard grunt—a scream against her palm—and bucks against my hand. My fingers are soaked, thumb pressed hard to her clit, and I keep my fingers inside her to feel her pulse around me, rhythmic, like dancing.
I catch her at the small of her back when she goes boneless, eyes rolling back in her head. My body shields her from anyone who might happen by the opening of the alley, and my mouth veers close to her ear once again.
“So, you tell me,” I say, sliding my fingers from her pussy, lifting them, dripping, to her mouth. Her tongue snakes forth to taste herself there, a giggle, rough and low, making her body shudder lightly.
“Yeah,” she says, opening her eyes a crack, a smile playing on her lips. “You can dance.”
The Dress
Vanessa de Sade
I tell myself that I only keep the dress because I want to pass it on to my own daughter, although I know this is a lie. I am forty-nine years old and have a husband who has not attempted to navigate the path to my bed in well over a decade. I will never have a daughter.
And so the dress moulders in my attic amongst the fragments of my broken dreams, pristine, like Snow White in her glass coffin, its corsage of organza roses now as fragile as butterfly wings between the gossamer sheets of tissue paper that preserve the last lingering scents of my Cassandra.
Ah, Cassandra. Twenty years my senior, she ran a little dress maker’s shop in the old quarter of town, a modest single-fronted unit in a mellow red sandstone terrace, now long since bulldozed to make way for some neon-streaked shopping mall. But ever since I had been a little girl I had pressed my nose against her window and dreamt about the delights within, promising myself that, when the time came, Cassandra would be the one to make my wedding dress and that I would walk down the aisle in yards and yards of sparkling white tulle and looking like a fairy princess.
However, things being what they were, impatience got the better of me, and, after university and slaving for four years behind the counter of a sweaty local pizza restaurant, not to mention fending off the equally sweaty advances of my boss, I had saved enough to commission Cassandra to make the dress for my graduation ball. The contents of my denuded post office book clutched in my hand, I opened the door and walked determinedly into her winter white Snow Queen’s kingdom.
Outside, a chill wind was blowing and the rustling trees were tinged with their first scarlet blush, but, leading me past her alabaster mannequins and towering bolts of frosty-white fabrics, Cassandra took me into the warmth of the secret room behind the public façade of her icy realm. Here, the walls were papered in an intimate chrome yellow paper with a leafy Morris design, and a fire burned in the tiny grate, filling the room with the autumnal scents of wood smoke and pine resin, while rich Aubusson rugs draped the old walnut floorboards like a caress.
Cassandra smiled at me and sat me in a saggy arts and crafts chair, its soft cushions cradling my body in a tender lover’s embrace, and I flicked through pattern books while she sat on the floor, curled on the faded old rug like a tabby cat purring at my feet. She was a short, blonde woman, buxom and curvy, like an old fifties pin-up girl spilling out of her low-cut black dress, her huge breasts rising and falling with her breathing, her deep, deep cleavage an ivory chasm that I wanted to tumble into headfirst.
Finally, I found a pattern that I loved and she led me to a corner of the room where an old screen decorated with picture-postcards of Gaiety Girls stood waiting.
“Come along then, my duck,” she laughed, sliding her tape measure from where it had nestled around her neck like a whip. “Just strip off for me and we’ll get your measurements down in a jiff.”
“Strip off?” I stammered, and she smiled.
“Just to your underwear, my goose, I don’t need you starkers or anything,” she laughed, stroking my hair. “Now get along with you and hop behind the screen for me so we can get started.”
Scarlet, I turned my back to her and quickly pulled my sweater up over my head, ashamed of my old white bra, then let my jeans fall to the floor, standing there in just those old blue and white floral panties that didn’t quite contain my creamy white buttocks.
“There, that wasn’t so terrible now, was it, duck?” Cassandra’s voice whispered in my ear like a kiss, as she ran her warm hands over my hips and snaked the worn fabric of her tape measure around me, binding me to her. “Let’s just turn you around and we’ll get your sizes down. Oh, nice bust, duck, what’s that, a forty-two? Oh my goodness me, no, a forty-four! Same as me. What cup, dear? Double-dee?”
I blushed crimson again as she caressed my breasts with her tape’s loving touch, my nipples pricked up like hard-paste dolly mixtures under my bra, but, somehow, I managed to nod agreement.
“Thought so,” she said, scribbling hieroglyphics onto her little pad. “Same as mine. Now, let’s get your waist, oh, very nice and nippy like a waspie, and the hips and inseam. My, aren’t you a perfect hour glass, duck.”
Her soft hands were running up my inner thighs by now, the measuring tape like a meandering silk ribbon as it snaked between my legs and stroked my pussy in passing, making me shiver with delight and go goose-pimply all over. Though I was dying of embarrassment, convinced that my bush was protruding from the crotch
of my knickers, at the same time I was more aroused than I had ever been in my entire life, and I knew that, as soon as I got home, I would rush to my room to masturbate while the scents of Cassandra’s kingdom were still clinging to my tingling skin.
* * *
The night of our dance finally rolled around, the leaves falling from the calendar in my dorm room like the ocherous foliage on the October trees outside, marking the incipient end of the first chapter of my adult life, and I walked the couple of streets to Cassandra’s store to collect my gown and have her dress me.
“Well, well, belle of the ball then, duck,” Cassandra clucked as I disrobed in front of her, emboldened enough now not to have to cower behind the faded decoupage of the scanty screen. “Here, step carefully into the skirt while I do up the bodice.”
I could hear the rustle of petticoats, the whispers of stiff tulle and crinkled lace, as she slid the waistband up over my hips and pulled the top to below my arms, cupping my breasts as she did so.
“Nice?” she asked, her voice like gravel and honey in my ear, her musky scent an infusion of perfume and nicotine, heady and potent.
“Gorgeous,” I replied, letting out a long breath as Cassandra’s chubby hands massaged my tits into the dress’s whale-boned front.
“All right, now let me just fasten you up and… Oh!”
Her hands had suddenly stopped their butterfly caress of my bosom and I could sense her forehead crinkling into a frown.
“What on earth?” She muttered vexedly. “No, that can’t be so, I checked and double checked those measurements…”
“What is it?” I asked, anxiously, suddenly aware of the old clock on the mantelpiece sighing the quarter hour with a soft melodic chime.
