One Night Only

by Violet Blue

  Her heart caught in her throat. Somewhere far away a droplet of nectar fell, making an illusory ripple in an artificial pond. She could feel it.

  The corridor ended in relative darkness, making a sharp left-hand turn. She heard the next piece before she saw it: soft wet sounds. An alcove was filled with flickering golden light to evoke the flame of candles, illuminating a mattress on the floor with punched-up pillows and rumpled white sheets.

  Kissing. She was listening to slow, intensely intimate kissing. Beside her, David shivered and she moved closer, until their hips touched. It was wrong, what her senses were sharing with her. A couple was making out on that bed, she was sure of it; their invisibility was the illusion, not the lush sounds of lips meeting and parting.

  Julie didn’t at first realize that her chin was being lifted, that she was tilting her head, that she was sighing into David’s breath. She wasn’t aware of the moment his lips touched hers, only that the kiss was perfectly right. Now the sound fit. That little sigh of his—or was it hers? Mouthing at his lower lip. The sultry sounds of lips meeting, exploring, parting only to meet again.

  Thinking back later, she would be fairly sure that she was the one to cross the velvet rope, to pull him down on top of her on the mussed sheets, locking him against her with a leg hooked around the back of his thigh.

  But only fairly sure.

  The mattress was Jell-O-soft and thin, like a day-old marshmallow left out in the heat. It had looked fluffy, but it shrank instantly to the floor under the slightest pressure. Julie didn’t care, and neither did David. Without a thought to the other patrons, he soon had her shirt unbuttoned down to her waist, and pushed it off her shoulders. He stroked her back while his lips found hers again. They kissed, kissed some more, kissed to match the sounds in the soundtrack, kissed to defy them, but always their mouths touched, teased, claimed.

  She thought nothing of the ticklish slide of her bra strap down her arm, nothing of the patrons wandering by with their tired expressions, glancing in at their flickering, mattress-clad world for a moment, getting bored and moving on. This wasn’t for them. It was for her.

  David’s hands were spidery and nimble, perfect hands. They squeezed her breasts, weighing them in his palms, closing his fingers. At her encouragement, he pressed almost tightly enough to bruise. She moaned softly, a sound that caught the attention of a few of the browsers. She almost stopped, but he leaned in and caught her ear with his teeth. “Don’t worry about them. It’s only us,” he murmured against her skin. He bit down, and she shuddered. Yes. She could ignore them. For him, for this chance with him, she could do that. For that warm rush of sensation and breath, the weight of him against her, she would have done anything he asked.

  She snuck all his mismatched layers out of his waistband, finally finding warm chest to slide her hands against. The kissing sound resumed and they met it hotly, tongues playing and teasing. Her hips shifted from side to side in anticipation of having something between her thighs to ride, and she hurried his damned layers up past his chest. He stopped her, looked pointedly at her clothing—at the bra dangling off her shoulders, dark purple seeming black in the flickering gold of fake candlelight. The meaningful gaze moved downward, toward her waist. If his clothes come off, mine come off? Okay. Small price to pay.

  She nodded her assent and reached for his gathered hems again. He sat up, and in true guy fashion, he grabbed the back collar and pulled the shirts over the top of his head as one. Even thinner without the insulating layers, he was almost delicate. Lovely, Julie thought. And hopefully delicious. She rose and leaned forward to find out.

  His nipple was pert and hard, not one of those male nipples that hides down flat. As her tongue grazed and circled it, his hands tightened at her back and a gasp escaped his throat. Oh, good. I like men who like this, she thought, and surrendered her full attention to the little nub. Now the kissing noises had their match again—her lips surrounding his nipple, pulling at it, pressing in and suckling at it with teasing swirls of her tongue. Oh, it was good. Judging by the arch of his back and the squirm of his hips, he seemed to deeply appreciate the noisy kisses. She trailed a hand down his writhing side and over the front of his hip, finding the object of her search in the opened fly of his jeans: Hard and smooth, with a wetness of its own. Wet like the kisses she was planting on his nipples. Wet as if she’d already glided messy kisses down his cock.

  Julie shuddered again, the curl of her hand tightening around his length. His fingers touched up under her chin, lifting her eyes. His were almost colorless in the uneven light, amused but also full of hunger. She shifted her hips. Her panties, soaked, clung to her.

  “It’s about desire,” one patron said to another, a rare and unexpected voice in English behind her. “See how they’re touching each other and disheveled, but not completely undressed? See how they’re looking at each other, over those sounds? It’s like we’re hearing them think about their desire.”

  David grinned at Julie, and she grinned back. Still holding her chin, he leaned in to claim her lips in another dizzying kiss, matching the heated kisses filtering through the speakers. When her bra came off, Julie made sure to crumple it into an artful ball with her blouse. The air was cool on her nipples, and she felt her lower abdomen tighten. But a moment later his bare chest was against hers, warming her. The English tourists were still watching from the safety of the velvet ropes, accepting her anonymous encounter—her wanton, spontaneous, crazy display of random lust—because they believed it to be scripted for their entertainment.

  David’s fingers tightened on her chin. “Not for them,” he breathed at her lips between hard, humid kisses. “For us.”

  Julie nodded shallowly. Her hand had stilled on him, and now she stirred it into motion again, fishing his cock fully out of his jeans and stroking his slickness along his shaft. He groaned into her mouth, surged in her fist. He was a little thicker than she was used to, she thought, and perhaps a little longer. She blazed with the need to know how he would feel inside her.

  He slid a hand up under her skirt and into her tights, faltering with a sharp intake of breath when he reached her slippery labia. The feel of his bare fingers sent a hard tingle through her core. If he’d had any doubt as to the extent of her arousal, he didn’t any more. “Smooth,” he told her lips between kisses. One finger squirmed its way to the snugness of her entrance.

  “Soaked,” she answered. The single word came out more apologetically than she’d meant it to.

  “I like soaked,” he murmured, shifting his wrist to spear his fingers in deeply and prove his point. They spread her, curving perfectly to the shape of her body, but didn’t fill her quite full enough. She rocked on his hand. “Mmm. And needy. I like needy, too.”

  She was sure she was blushing, but she didn’t care. She rode his fingers, pushing them harder against all the right places inside her. Then they were gone, and wet fingers were tugging down her tights. She leaned back on the thin mattress and lifted her rear. Her skirt pooled around her waist, obscuring her sex from the patrons but not from him. He waited, tights around her ankles, while she kicked off her boots, then pulled the ribbed cotton off her feet with her thick walking socks still attached to them. There was a moment of shyness, of feeling exposed and aware of the gathering crowd, and then he was crawling back up her body with his jeans around his thighs, the wet sounds of kissing still charging the air around her, and she forgot about everything else.

  Strong fingers spread her legs, glided lightly up her slippery labia, and parted them. Then his lips were around her clit, suckling to give new depth to the intimate sounds that surrounded them. Deep, intense, just the way he’d kissed her mouth, surrounding her folds with warmth and delving between them to drink in more of her nectar.

  Her climax took her by surprise, but it didn’t surprise him. He held her thighs, pinned down and open, caressing her sensitive places with the flat of his tongue long after her tremors would have otherwise ceased. Only when she reach
ed down to his hair did he rise, crawling up her body and settling the smooth heat of his penis against her drenched skin. His hips rolled once, rubbing him through her wetness, and she was rewarded with another of his perfect, hungry moans. His kisses tasted sweet and forbidden, wetting her lips with her own arousal.

  She pressed herself to the firmness of his shaft, grinding her hips to push her clit against his pelvic bone. He took her chin again, forcing her gaze to his in the flickering light. “Yes?” he asked. His cock pulsed against her entrance, poised and waiting.

  Disjointed words flooded through her mind. On the pill was too long for her lips to be away from his. Tested. Clean. Consenting . All true, but only fragments of what she wanted to convey. She shifted her hips, and he moaned again. She could feel his arms trembling with the effort of holding his body above hers. She could hear the murmurs of the onlookers under the wet sounds, so like the ones his mouth had made on her cunt. And then, on their own, her lips formed the word that meant all of those yeses and also Now.

  “Please.”

  He drove into her without a moment’s pause, filling her with all the fullness and length she’d hoped for. She arched up against him, legs rising, feet hooking on the backs of his thighs and finding denim there. She squeezed his cock inside her, and a strangled groan accompanied his next thrust. His lips crushed down onto hers and he fucked her with a steady pace—firm and measured, accompanied by the low claps of bodies joining and the slick, lewd liquid noise that was evidence of her overflowing desire.

  “Sarah…” he gasped at her lips.

  It took her a moment—a quick moment, measured in three thrusts—to remember.

  “Yes.” Breathy and low, her answer was encouragement as much as confirmation.

  “Sarah, I’m close.”

  The words were low, like a growl, and they sent a thrill through her. She tightened her thighs around his, digging her heels in, and felt her sex constrict around his cock. One pulse, then another, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. It welled up in her, each pulse rippling outward like the droplets in the pond, filling her with sensation until she couldn’t help but brim over.

  He buried a strangled cry in the curve of her neck, clutching her tightly to him and pounding her into the thin mattress. Her arms around him, she leaned up and trailed kisses along his bare shoulder, matching the sounds of insatiable passion that still surrounded them. He groaned, filling her with molten heat just when she thought she would burst, pulling her over the edge with him.

  He relaxed on her gradually. They rode out the climax with slow, dreamy shifts of their hips. Afterward, when the last of his deep pulses had triggered the last of hers, he grazed her jaw with his teeth. He seemed in no hurry to move, and that was good. Julie’s body was all tingle and no substance, finally rid of the pressure that had been building in her all day. She didn’t think she could have gotten up if she had to. Even if the artist and the museum staff were to suddenly arrive with the police, she thought, she would only be able to move far enough to invite them to join in.

  “It’s about afterglow,” one patron was telling another. Her accent, Scottish and gentle, floated lyrically above the quieter murmurs. “See how they’re laying there entwined, with the glow of a fireplace, and the clothes and bedding scattered around them, and the sound of slow, aftermath kissing.”

  “You don’t know that,” Julie heard another woman answer her. “It’s art. It’s what we make of it.”

  David heard them, too. His arms tightened around her in a warm squeeze, and he winked one pale blue eye at her.

  It was indeed.

  LET SLEEPING DOGS COME

  Chrissie Bentley

  What’s the most common lie that a guy tells his girlfriend?” Sharon’s eyes were glittering with delight.

  Mary shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “‘I promise I won’t come in your mouth.’ And what’s the most common lie a girl tells him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “‘Good.’”

  Mary smiled briefly and then frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “Oh. come on. ‘I won’t come in your mouth’—‘Good.’ The two biggest lies.”

  I sank down in my seat. Someone once told Sharon she was South Philly’s answer to the singer Amy Winehouse, and I’m not sure that they meant it nicely. It’s the accent, I think, an unholy cross between fingernails on a chalkboard, and a fax machine that smokes too much. But I love her to bits, and I love to see her in full flight as well. She’s hours of fun, she laughs like a gurgling drain, and if you don’t understand her sense of humor, she might as well be speaking Swahili. Which, judging from the look on Mary’s face, is what she’s doing right now.

  “Okay, let me spell it out for you.” Slowly, patiently, and a lot more facetiously than could ever have been necessary, Sharon explained her not-so-funny joke, then turned to me in triumph. “Chrissie gets it, don’t you Chrissie?”

  I nodded.

  “Every time,” Sharon concluded, then threw her head back in a violent laugh.

  Mary looked at me curiously. “Really? And you like it?”

  I paused. “What was that line from Sex and the City? ‘Well, it’s not a trip to Baskin-Robbins, but….’”

  “I had a guy who worked at Baskin-Robbins once. He was hot.” Sharon hooted again at her (admittedly labored) oxymoron, but Mary at last was on solid ground. “And I had a pizza delivery guy, only he arrived too quickly. I mean ‘came.’ He came too quickly.” I laughed and was about to add my own pun to the party when a shadow fell across us. “And if you ladies have finished with your undoubtedly scintillating conversation, the seminar is about to resume.”

  We gathered our purses, rose and followed Mr. Albertson out of the cafeteria. Great—the three of us had tugged so many corporate strings in order to wrangle our places at the book fair…the biggest in the country, held midsummer in New York…and our boss caught us laughing on the very first day. Good job he didn’t see Sharon last night.

  She had, from what she told us this morning, made quite the night of it. The book fair’s not just for publishers, after all. There are authors here as well, and some of them…well, like the guy from Baskin-Robbins, they’re hot. Or at least famous. So, when Sharon walked into the hotel bar, and spotted—oh, I’d better not say his name; suffice to say that he’s exotic, balding and recently separated—she just had to leaf through his pages. And they both told each other lies. Apparently.

  Me, I went to bed with a good book, and I expected to be doing the same thing tonight. Star-fucking’s fine when you’re in your early twenties, but it loses its luster after a while, especially when (as is so often the case) the star turns out to be a dick. A dick with a dick, granted. But a dick all the same.

  We made our way into the auditorium and found our seats. The guest speaker—yes, it was Sharon’s friend from last night, as her pointy elbows kept excitedly reminding me—was already at the podium, but while he registered our late arrival, he gave no sign of recognizing its loudest component. I wondered whether he might even be regretting having succumbed to her admittedly buxom charms. Sharon might be a dynamite editor, but she’s scarcely the smoothest dildo in the drawer. In fact, she can be rather prickly.

  I fixed my eyes on the speaker, doing my best to ignore Sharon’s whispers and giggles, and when the guy seated in front of me turned around to try and stare her into silence, I offered him my sweetest sympathetic smile. Quite frankly, I don’t think it’s possible to shut Sharon up…even with her mouth full, she’s probably drumming out Morse code with her fingernails. I’d hate to be within earshot when she orgasms.

  Damn, but this guy was boring. I swore if he namedropped one more of his bloody awful books—“and as I wrote in blah blah blah…”—I couldn’t help myself. “Please tell me,” I hissed to Sharon, “that he wasn’t this dull last night?”

  She snorted. “Well, he is a bit full of himself,” she half whispered. “Even fuller than I was, in fact
.” Again her laughter drowned out the speaker, and again the guy in front of us turned with an irritated look on his face. “Must be his agent,” Sharon hissed, just loud enough for the man to hear. “Nobody else could care that much. Fucking old windbag.”

  I felt myself redden, out of sympathy as much as shock, watched as the man turned away from us, and I fought to straighten my face. The worst thing was, he was rather cute…the guy in front us, that is, not the author, who was now droning on about some existentialist dilemma that he dramatically resolved on page 474 of blah blah blah blah….

  “You can wake up now, he’s finished.” I opened my eyes. Oh, my god, Mr. Albertson…no: it was the agent. Beside me, I could hear Sharon chattering away to whomever would listen, poor Mary probably, while around us, the rest of the audience was leaving.

  I thought of trying to bluff my way out, but I knew it wouldn’t work. “Did I miss much?”

  “No. Nothing at all.” He cast a nervous glance at Sharon and looked relieved when he realized she was oblivious to his presence. “I was wondering…it’s my first time alone in New York. Would you be free for dinner this evening?”

  “I’m not a writer, you know.” After all, why else would a literary agent be asking me out?

  “And I’m not his representative,” he said pointedly, with another glance at Sharon. He fished around in his jacket pocket and pulled out a card. “Robin Mitchell—publisher.” “Hey, you do…” I rattled off half a dozen book titles, a series that I’d been collecting for a few years, on the history of American pinup art.

  He nodded. “And you are?”

  I gave him my card. “Senior editor, eh? See, we have something in common already. I’ll meet you in your hotel lobby at seven, yes?”