Drenched

by Janine Ashbless

Sarah hadn’t known what to expect about anything. She had been a virgin until the day that she married.

  Technically, it had not been their wedding night, as Tom hadn’t waited for night to fall. He’d pulled over when they had driven only a half mile or so from the church and with his hands fluttering madly like sheets in a strong breeze he had lifted her white dress to her waist, leaned over the gear stick and buried his face between her legs, wetting her cunt with liberal strokes of his tongue before pushing her seat back, clambering across to lay overtop her body and piercing her through. By the time she realized what was coming he was inside her, and she felt a sharp stab that made her draw her breath, and then the wonderful sensation of being filled.

  She hadn’t wanted it to end, but it had, not even a minute after it had begun. He had suddenly collapsed on top of her and then awkwardly removed himself. His appendages were stiff, save for that part which mattered most to Sarah—his cock. Stiff as a wooden puppet, he maneuvered himself back into the driver’s seat, eased the car away from the kerb and drove them both to their new house: the red one on the hill.

  She had lifted her skirts then. She wanted to look at herself, to see if she was different, now that she was no longer a virgin. To check if the hammering of her heart and the blissful headiness that had overtaken her brain were in any way reflected in her body. Slowly she drew the white silk up over her knees and then the pale expanse of her thighs. She spread her legs apart, tangled her fingers into the fabric and tugged her wedding dress all the way up to her waist.

  She was wet, deliciously wet. Sarah could feel liquid dribbling from her pussy.

  She watched as a droplet gathered, viscous and heavy as if one of the pearl buttons from her gown had been liquefied and transported to her cunt, and then rolled down her inner thigh before she lost sight of it.

  There was no blood, and this fact excited Sarah. How such a thing were possible, she didn’t know, as she had not so much as kissed a man before Tom. And yet here it was, the physical evidence that she was impure, a whore, a slut. He had taken her on the side of the road like a common animal.

  Her mind was a maelstrom of thoughts and images, and as each flittered by she felt another stab of arousal through her middle, as though her mind was directly connected to her vagina.

  A terrible thought—no, she mustn’t—but she was a married woman now, so she rebelled against all of the things that she had learned about the way she ought to feel and behave as a single Christian woman.

  Sarah took the tip of her finger and ran it between her slit, over the milk white offering that she knew was Tom’s, the seed that he had left inside her. She brought it to her lips and sucked.

  The flavor was tangy and acidic. Not comparable to anything that she had tasted before. A little like sweet water, but thicker, and with an edge of the sea.

  She wondered if that was how holy water tasted, and blushed. What a wicked thought. Sarah giggled. A wild, ecstatic giggle, the sound of a woman who has torn away a part of herself only to find another part, so overwhelmingly different from the first that the realization made her hysterical with fear and excitement.

  But Sarah’s excitement was stronger than her fear.

  Her finger was still in her mouth.

  Tom, hearing this strange sound emitted from his new wife’s lips; part wail and part whoop, glanced over. His forearms were as stiff as lead pipes attached to the steering wheel. He had been so fixated on the mechanical act of driving the car—turn here, push down on the pedal, apply pressure to the gearstick—that he hadn’t noticed Sarah lifting her skirts.

  Now he saw her, naked from the waist down, legs spread, the geometric pattern of their mixed juices forming a map down her thighs, and her finger in her mouth.

  He snatched it away.

  “No more,” he said. “No more.”

  Sarah pulled down her skirts and pressed her knees together. She clenched her legs harder and harder as they drove, imagining that the press of her muscles pushing against each other was the pressure of Tom’s body moving inside her, but it was no use. She slumped back into the chair.

  The gravel crunched as they pulled into the driveway. A soft sound that seemed far louder than it was when measured against the dull echo of silence that had gathered like a fog in the car.

  Sarah opened the car door and pushed herself out. Tom was still fumbling with the keys. He did not pick her up and carry her over the threshold of their new home, as she had long imagined he would. He did not even hold her hand. He walked ahead of her with short, staccato steps, without looking back. She had to scurry to keep up and the sharp stones on the driveway bit into her feet. She was wearing flat silk slippers with thin soles, like ballet shoes, so that when they stood together at the ceremony everyone would see that he was taller than her, if only by an inch.

  That was the way that it should be between a man and his wife.

  “Your dress,” he murmured, when they walked inside and she ran ahead of him, gasping with delight at the airy inside of the house that he had built for them with its wide, open expanses and the light that filtered in through the large bay windows. It was almost like living outside, with a roof.

  She stopped. “My dress?”

  “At the back. It needs to be washed.” He reached forward and grasped the back of her skirt and she craned her neck around. There it was, a spot of blood, bright against the white background, the same coppery shade of red as the roof.

  His jaw tightened. “It needs to be washed,” he said again, and he pulled her across the wooden floor until they reached the bathroom.

  It was a far larger bathroom than any that Sarah had seen before. The bath was set into the floor rather than standing on top of it, and it was more like a pool that could have comfortably fit four people, even six. It was surrounded by a slatted pine floor, sanded and polished to gleaming, pale wooden perfection.

  Sarah removed her slippers before she tread on it, an act of reverence. Tom walked quickly to the brass taps and turned them. The faucet itself was set into the wall, and protruded from it, hard and round and long and phallic. Steam filled the air, as soft and hushed as an exhalation of breath.

  His face had taken on a paler than usual hue and his eyelids fluttered. His hands were tense and he flexed his fingers unconsciously as if were kneading dough. He was stripping his clothes off even as he strode back towards her and Sarah noticed that even the angles of his body had changed. His shoulders seemed more angular, the line of his limbs sharper. He cut through the air as he moved, his legs opening and closing like scissors.

  The change in him made her pause. Sarah stood stock still in the moments that it took Tom to cross the room back to her, tearing at his cufflinks with violent haste. One came off into his hand easily, the other could not escape the tight prison of his shirt’s buttonhole without a hard yank and the when the decorative jade green jewel finally came away from the silver claws that fixed it into place, it traced an arc through the growing fog of steam and landed with a clatter in the tub.

  Tom had reached her now, and he grabbed her by the laces that held the bodice of her dress tight and dragged her backwards, turned her to face the bath and pushed her forwards.

  “Get in,” he said, just as she thought he was about to push her over the porcelain lip of the tub and send her falling to her knees in the basin. His voice was rough like gravel, as deep as the plunge of a well. He had taken on the tone he used in his harsher sermons, when he was berating an unknown congregation for sins that had not yet been committed.

  The offenses that caused the darkest shadows to fall across his brow were always sexual.

  Before they married, Sarah had harbored a secret enjoyment of these talks. Watching his big hands clench and unclench, the rise and fall of his chest as his breathing became quicker, the orchestra of his arms drawing invisible crosses into the air as he spoke of the all the things she shouldn
’t do, shouldn’t think about, shouldn’t want to do. The dangers of masturbation and unnatural couplings between man and man or woman and woman, or those who favored stimulating the anus, filling the entrance that could not lead to creation.

  All the while Sarah would feel the hard wood of the pew pressing against her buttocks. She would spread her thighs a little beneath the modest barrier of her long skirt, flex her ankles, and imagine Tom forcefully dragging her behind the church wall to unceremoniously tug her skirt up and her underclothes down before pressing his cock into her asshole and fucking her hard until his hot seed flooded over the rise and fall of her buttocks.

  Sometimes, afterwards, she would go home, rush to her room and lie on her narrow, single bed with the smooth cream cover, and press her head into the pillow with her hand between her legs. She would rub herself and imagine him finding her like this and then punishing her by lifting her skirts and whipping her bare thighs.

  She liked him best when he was angry.

  They were part of a small, breakaway Christian sect, located in a tract of farmland in the rural American mid-West. Rules were strict and, among them, the notion that the practitioners should not socialize with unbelievers. So slowly, they had congregated to form a small community. Tom’s father had been the pastor of the area and, with his death, Tom had been appointed to take over. Sarah’s mother had converted when she had become pregnant with Sarah; and when her husband left her—walking out in the morning one day and never returning—she sought the church to provide her with support. Sarah had been born into it, and never known any differently.

  Had she ever toyed with the idea of running away? Of leaving the community that she had been born to? Not really.

  She hadn’t thought much about it at all, besides the fact that she often felt as though she wasn’t made for the rules she had to follow, or the rules weren’t made for her. Sarah never dared to speak of the desire that filled her, or the images that regularly populated her daydreams or kept her awake at night.

  Even stimulation as gentle as the flutter of long blades of grass caressing the soles of her feet, or the rush of a breeze against her bare arms, was enough to make Sarah slick between her thighs. Sex, and thoughts of sex, were her life blood, and the guilt that accompanied them like kerosene to a naked flame.

  The keen longing that resulted from the repression of her sexual drive only made that drive grow stronger and stronger until it was like a demon that possessed her and allowed her to think of nothing else but cock and cunt and all of the ways that she wanted Tom, who now had the body of a strong brute of a man, yet retained the baby faced features of the boy that she had grown up with.

  Her mind filled with perversions as she watched him standing atop of the church pulpit and lecturing valiantly on all the things Sarah shouldn’t do, his eyes glittering all the while like sunbeams bouncing off pools of cool clear water.

  He didn’t pay the slightest attention to Sarah, or anyone else for that matter, until she asked to be baptized.

  One of the points of theology that separated their group from many other Christian churches was the practice of adult baptism. Sarah had seen Tom perform a baptism the previous summer. She remembered the vision of him standing in the wide river that ran near the churchyard, the water lapping all the way to his chest, his white shirt soaked through and sticking to his body, revealing the faint hint of his small hard nipples. The look on his face as he had taken the younger man being baptized into his arms and dunked him under. Held him there a fraction too long for comfort, it was thought, as Timothy emerged what felt like a long while later, water streaming from his nose, heroically trying to stifle a cough.

  Tom had risen from the water and strode straight back to the white washed wooden church, ducking through the door without saying a single word to anyone. Sarah watched him as he walked. The trousers he wore for the baptism were also white, though of thicker material than his cotton shirt, so not so sheer when wet. The material clung to him, revealing the round hills of his ass, the muscled shape of his thighs. He disappeared inside and did not return for almost half an hour. Getting dry, they all supposed, and nothing was said of it although everyone thought it strange that he would leave the newly baptized Timothy to pull himself from the stream and formally greet his new congregation alone.

  When it was Sarah’s turn, she didn’t even notice the coldness of the water. Within a few steps from the bank it was as deep as her underarms. Her nipples were hard, and she knew that despite what others might think, that was not the result of the temperature. Tom’s hands were on her waist, holding her steady, but then they slipped down to each side of her hips, scooting nearer than she knew was modest to the curve of her buttocks.

  She crossed her arms over her breast and leaned back against him as he prepared to lower her into the water for what was traditionally a quick dunk. She hoped it would be longer. A hawk cut a dark line through the bright blue sky overhead and then Sarah closed her eyes, Tom tipped her back, and water flooded over her face.

  Seconds passed. Three, and then five, six, seven. She began to feel giddy. Then she felt one of his long arms reach between her legs and his hand clasp the hem of her dress and pull it upwards and as quick as a fish jumping onto a hook his fingers were inside her, pumping, once, twice, three times and the blissful shock of it nearly caused Sarah to gasp and breathe a mouthful of water into her lungs.

  Just as she thought she might pass out, he pulled her skirt down again and pushed her to the surface and he was gone, striding out of the water and towards the church, leaving her swaying on her feet in the river, alone.

  Her mother, and others in the congregation commented that it had been a beautiful thing to see. That her face when she surfaced was radiant. That she looked as though she had had a communion with God.

  He did not speak to her for weeks afterwards. Then, suddenly, out of the blue, he asked her mother for permission to court her, and after just a fortnight of chaperoned early dinners and one dance that took place with their arms outstretched, Tom proposed marriage.

  Their engagement, too, was rushed. They married within four months, just long enough for Tom to finish the house that he was building on the hill.

  That first night, just after she had tentatively stepped into the bathtub under his instruction, she thought of the baptism, and it occurred to her that Tom was aroused by water.

  The tub was so deep—much deeper than an ordinary bath—she’d had to carefully tuck her full skirt beneath her and perch on the edge and then lower herself in. He had bent down and placed one hand on the edge and jumped, so close he was nearly on top of her. His impatience was palpable, and almost anger. Though there was no malice in it, nor any real temper or frustration. No, the emotion wasn’t quite anger. It was longing. Sarah recognized that feeling as easily as she knew her own shadow, for it had followed her for as long as she could remember.

  This time, instead of pulling her into the water he put his hand on the back of her head and pushed her forward. She plunged in, face first, spluttering until he pulled her out again and let her catch her breath. Then he pushed her towards the opposite lip so that she could steady herself on the edge of the pool as he lifted her skirts up and prepared to enter her from behind. Her petticoats spread out on the surface like a parachute, and he bundled a bunch up on either side and pushed the fabric into her hands, indicating that she should keep it lifted for him.

  Although the bath was deep it had only filled enough to reach the back of her thighs when she was standing. He curved his palms through the water, creating a pair of waves that rippled across the surface and then up and over her buttocks in a wet slap. He cupped his hands and threw scoops over her back. Rivulets poured over her shoulders, following the curve of her breasts that hung in front of her as she bent over like the udders of a cow, and formed droplets on the pointed nubs of her nipples. She felt a current of air, cool after the sting of the hot wa
ter, and then the wet smack of his hand as he brought his palm down first on one ass cheek, and then the other. She hissed from the shock of it, and gripped the lip of the tub tighter to avoid losing her balance. He ran the blade of his hand between the valley of her ass, the hard points of his fingers pressing against her asshole.

  They developed a rhythm between them. As the pressure of his fingertips against her hole became more insistent, she pushed back against him, and he thrust further forward, until the push and pull of their desire was like the pulsing tide of the sea. A silent conversation of want, each of them intimating that with this new and forbidden exploration, they were fulfilling the need of the other and not their own desire. His fingers were inside her now, and as she relaxed and allowed him to enter he pushed deeper and began to thrust.

  She moaned, a sound that was something like a croak. Despite the humidity in the air, her throat felt as dusty dry as the fields around them would soon become, as dry as a sand dune in the midday sun. She licked her lips, trying to moisten them but it was no use, as if all of the moisture in her body had been drawn down to her vagina. She was seeping, sodden. Wetness dripped from the folds of her cunt into the water below her.

  Sarah steadied herself with one hand and reached the other between her legs. She grazed her clit and the unexpected touch, after so much longing, swept through her in one sharp jolt as though she had been irradiated. But it was not her clit that she was seeking. She fumbled at the air, reached the strong bulk of Tom’s thigh and traveled higher until she brushed against the softness of his balls, and then the hard pole of his cock. The effort nearly unbalanced her but she clung to the slippery edge of the tub as she wrapped her fingers around the base of his shaft and tried to angle the path of his erection towards her cunt. She wanted him inside her, but he resisted her touch, and batted her hand away. He caught her as she nearly slipped sideways and lowered her hand back onto the bath’s edge.

  His torso curved over her back and his penis jutted, a rigid point that jabbed against her leg until he stood upright again and directed it between her buttocks. Sarah raised her rump a little, using her body to nudge him lower, towards the entrance of her pussy but Tom was insistent. He dragged his cock up and down, following the same path that he had caressed with the flat of his hand earlier. When his cock head found the dip of her anus he let it rest there for a few moments and then began to gently push, to ease her open. Her hands turned white as she gripped the tub tighter in anticipation of what would come next.