by D. L. King
We played the richest school in our league two weeks after Bridget’s birthday, a college whose alumni endowments paid for a gorgeous stadium and separate athletic center with locker rooms straight out of a five-star resort. Coach snorted; “Don’t be intimidated by this shit. Nice towels in the locker room don’t make you tougher on the field.”
The opening whistle released the butterflies in my stomach, the roaring of lions in my head. But that night on the field we didn’t play like lions, we played like tense women powered by anxiety instead of confidence. Bridget started strong but lost her mojo when they guarded Hanna effectively enough to block her from the game. If they had scored first it would have killed our morale, but we held them at bay, blocking their passes, kicking past their strategies, not anticipating their plays but countering them with desperate aggression.
Our forward Cady slid through a sudden opening and drove past their goalie, followed by screams of joy from the small cadre of students who’d come up on the bus. We mostly stayed silent, because we knew we were off our game. They came back down the field with renewed determination and it wasn’t regionals I was thinking of but impressing Shea when I surged toward their forward. She looked surprised and angry to see me counter her so quickly; I tried to stop her from turning the ball and that was my last perception before the blue blur of her uniform and the sharp pain of a foot in my ribs.
I staggered and bent over. The ref’s whistle cut through a hushed night. Bridget ran over to me as the arguments started about it being a yellow card. I held up a hand to show I was okay but it hurt to breathe.
“Just take a few.” Shea was suddenly there, her arm around my back. “It’s okay. We’ll fucking kill them.”
It was that quandary every athlete faces; shake it off like a pro and possibly compromise the team by playing at half-mast, or leave the field. Coach took me out, making the decision for me. The rest of the game was a bloodbath. Watching from the bench, I saw my team as the athletes they were, driving with aggressive dexterity, forcing the victory. We scored again, then a third time. Shutting out the rich school: it was a triumph.
But inside the fancy spa locker rooms, I went into one of the tiled showers and struggled not to cry. I felt shaky, not with that gratified postgame flush of triumph but a sense of letting everyone down.
Around me cascaded the pounding water of twenty other showers. My slippery shampoo bottle ejected out of my hand and outside the plastic curtain. I reached out for it and met eyes with Shea, wrapped in a white towel. Every shower stall curtain was pulled shut, the roar of water deafening.
She got into my stall and dropped her towel. The shower plastered her hair around her ears. We were naked together and the heat of her skin was palpable just inches from mine.
Her hands spanned my torso. “How bad is it?”
Her mouth was close to my ear, to talk over the water or to keep the rest of the team from hearing us, I didn’t know.
“Bruised ribs. Nothing broken.”
“Gonna have to get that bitch.” She pushed me back against the tiles and kissed my mouth. It was the pinnacle of so many locker room dreams, Shea’s weight on me, warm and slippery, overpowering me in all her butch, mysterious glory. We were kissing avidly, her fingers oddly gentle on my nipples, taking her time before her hand slid between my legs. Was she being gentle because I was injured or was she always this sensual and considerate? I didn’t know.
“Don’t stop kissing me when you come,” she said. “I want to feel it in your mouth.”
Feel what in my mouth? But I did; I felt it all, her fingers moving in my cunt and my ass, her wet nipples against mine, her tongue in my mouth, and a molten supernova rising up through my body. She took my ass in her hands and pulled me against her, rubbing her pussy against mine until I couldn’t tell whose clit was whose, our skin fused and locked together in a rhythmic movement of wet friction. Shea fucking me into a searing, helpless animal cry that I muffled by sinking my teeth into her wet shoulder.
She took my hair in her fist and pulled back my head to kiss me again. Her fingers pushed inside me and worked me inside and out, filling me and teasing my clit until I moaned into her mouth, as anguished as I was excited by the unbearable need screaming in my blood. We slid down onto the tiles and she opened my legs wide, fucking my ass and pussy until a warm flood of bliss exploded inside me, spreading out in waves that resonated in my nipples, my stomach, my mouth.
She pulled back and laughed softly. “One day you can return the favor.” She bit my lower lip hard, laughed again and wrapped her towel around her, exiting through the curtain.
The bus ride home was a festival of victorious whoops and replays, Cady passing around her vegan oatmeal cookies. Shea and I stayed solitary in the dark in separate seats with our headphones on, watching the highway pass.
All too soon I awoke to frost in spiderweb patterns on the windowpane: the harbinger of the end of soccer season. Tonight was the tournament where we would play Lana’s school.
And all too soon was what everyone would say later about that tournament. There just hadn’t been enough time to show what we could do that season, not before the whistle blew and we launched into passing, kicking, grunting aggression, the lights blazing in our eyes and the screams from the crowd in our ears as we slipped past our enemies, intent on scoring. But one girl on the field was more intent than any of us, intent on vengeance, which is how Lana got the ball and took it down the field into what should have been a badly miscalculated gamble against Shea, the best goalie in the league. A gamble that turned into a kick, mistimed or perfectly timed, that landed with a foot in Shea’s knee and a ball in our goal. And my magnificent butch goalie on the ground, cradling her leg with a tortured face that told everyone our season was over.
Home for winter break, I drove up to my high school a few days after Christmas and walked around my old soccer field where I had experienced the thrill of heading to state two years in a row. My best high school memories had happened here: playing next to high green cornfields on the glaring hot days of August, then the cooler days of fall when we practiced under gray Midwestern skies while students put together homecoming floats in the adjacent parking lot. But today a snowstorm had buried the lacrosse, soccer and football fields in a blanket of white and only a harsh wind was howling where I had once played to cheers of adulation.
My phone buzzed: Bridget. Are you back yet? We’re all going to the bar tonight.
I drove back to school after dinner and was at the main off-campus bar by ten. Bridget, Hanna and a few of the others were in a booth in the back, the amber light turning their faces warm and soft. Hanna slid over and I sat down, my stomach jolting as I took in Shea across from me.
She permitted herself a small rare smile as Bridget poured me a beer. It was an off-season night for sure, several pitchers of beer on the table as everyone analyzed the College Cup game: who had stumbled, who had gotten lucky, who gave up a goal that should have been stopped. I tried to ignore Shea’s leg against mine under the table. I couldn’t tell if it was the shattered knee she’d had surgery on.
“At least you’ve got next year,” Bridget said to me, a little enviously.
“A year without Shea,” I said. Her hazel eyes met mine.
They assured me that there was already a great new goalie transferring in, that our chances were good next season. But that was a lie and everyone knew it. Everyone in the booth had spent probably the last ten years of her life dreaming of official soccer glory, championships, a shot at the women’s Olympics or national team, girlhood dreams fed by coaches and sideline screams. And now we were in our twenties and turning into women who knew those dreams were done.
“Speaking of,” Shea said, awkwardly getting out of the booth. “I gotta head home before the beer hits my leg.”
Cady gasped. “Are you drinking on painkillers?”
Shea scoffed; no painkillers for her, she let us know, she could stoically suffer through any pain. But then she lim
ped forward— pointedly, it seemed to me—and I finished my beer and stood up.
“I should get going too. I can help you if you need it.”
It took a few minutes to make it out of the bar, three girls stopping Shea to coo over her knee and tell her what a hero she was, and then the bouncer stopping us to tell Shea that she was one fuck of an athlete and he’d admire her forever. College athletics: a time warp but a powerful one. Walking up the sidewalk, the snow shoveled into banks on either side, I could see that Shea’s life after college was going to be much more of an adjustment than mine would be. Maybe that was why she said, “Let’s walk up to the field.”
She pulled me to her with one arm and leaned on me as we walked onto campus, past the brick dorms now darkened and quiet over winter break, and toward the soccer field. Snowflakes began to spiral down. I helped her onto the bleachers and we faced what should have been the ghosts of our team just two months ago. But the field was an alien landscape, devoid of sweat, glory, war or victory.
The snow looked lavender in the moonlight.
“It could have been different,” Shea said. “But I don’t know how much it matters.”
She kissed me with sudden aggression, the strong warmth of her tongue contrasting with her cold fingers sliding under my sweater. I went still, a drumming in my heart spreading the visceral knowledge through my blood that she owned me at this moment. She stripped me down, pulling off my jacket and sweater and taking down my jeans. Then she pushed me back and regarded me in my underwear with a predatory smile.
My black lace bra was wet with snow, my nipples hard and pushing against the cups. She hooked a finger under the front band and yanked it up, catching my tits in her hands.
“Pull your underwear down and show me your pussy. Sit down on your jacket and open your legs for me.”
I obeyed, shivering, mostly naked now in the winter night. She loomed over me with an impassive face, snowflakes catching on her hard cheekbones. The January breezes made me feel acutely how wet and swollen my pussy was.
She slowly rubbed my clit. Waves of heat swept down my skin. “Play with your tits,” she ordered. “Give me a show while I fuck you.”
I pushed them together and pulled on my nipples, making them stiffer and pinker. She didn’t take her eyes off me, sliding one finger inside me, just an inch, and circling until I wiggled impatiently beneath her.
She laughed. “You little slut… But okay, I’ll be nice.”
She fell back on the bleachers, pulling me onto her until she was sucking the tips of my breasts. I sighed with relief and plea sure, the snowflakes falling gently on my back making her that much warmer and more solid beneath me. She muttered something like, “All you girls just want to get fucked and come…” and then roughly yanked me upward again until I was sitting on her face, her mouth like a hot snake moving under my cunt.
I was shivering hard with heat and excitement and snow, my body almost steaming in the night. Between my thighs, Shea looked unrecognizable from who she was on the field, her eyes half-open and glazed with bliss. Her short nails dug into my thighs but I turned around, reversing so I could run my hands over her thick muscled body.
This was what I wanted. I lifted her shirt and liberated her small tits, almost flat against her chest. I touched her nipples and continued down inside her jeans, feeling first the brown triangle of hair I’d seen in the shower and then her silky wetness, wetter than I’d have imagined stoic, brooding Shea would get. I half-forgot her tongue on my clit as I pushed her jeans down and buried my face in her cunt, the rich smell and taste of her, sweeter also than I would have guessed.
My tongue swam over her and her body jolted. When I sucked her pussy lips into my mouth she stopped attending to me entirely, rigid as I licked her and slid my fingers inside her. Her cunt walls quivered around my hand, so drenched it was all I could do not to pull out my fingers and lick them immediately, but I fucked her instead, slowly at first, feeling every inch of her. She moaned into my pussy, a noise of impatience and yearning, so I began fucking her properly, rubbing and twisting my fingers inside her.
She was shaking and kneading my thighs like a cat. It passed through my mind that Shea didn’t let many people fuck her, that I was a rare visitor to her temple of vulnerability. And what a privilege it was to see my beautiful butch goalie melting and crying under my administrations, and then feel the storm in her body as her hips lifted and slammed down on the bleachers, wave after wave tightening around my fingers.
I was naked and wet in the falling snow on a January night. It hit me like a surprise, as if a spell had been broken. But Shea resurrected the spell with a grunt and brief push, attacking me from behind. She fingered me until I screamed, not caring if campus security came running to find two soccer players fucking each other on the bleachers in a blizzard, one naked and hoarse and freezing and burning in alternate waves by the second, my body on fire as if it had been waiting for Shea forever. The curious sensations of being incomplete and prolonged right on the edge, of needing to come for her, was like a raging thirst inside me, and then it broke and I was coming and crying as something like a glorious worship spilled out of my cunt.
My clothes were wet. I was a disaster. So was she. The security lights of campus blurred in my snowflake-clumped lashes as we got dressed and went to the warm showers of the athletic center.
“Maybe it had to be like this,” Shea said, stretching under the water. She could have been talking about Lana, about us losing our season, about me losing her in an hour or a month. Maybe it was what she had to believe. I shut off my shower and dressed, drying my hair, and when I was done, she was waiting to walk me home.
TAMING MAY
Megan McFerren
May enters, clad in sun. Garlands of light drape and fall from her skin, left strewn in gold across the plush rug. Gossamer curtains curl and fan on the breeze through arched picture windows, and carry in the scent of lilacs hanging heavy from the walls outside. It renders the room luminous in a way May’s never noticed before, soaking into the dense wood of the dining table, seeking into the secret spaces of the elaborate cornice molding encircling the room.
“Come.”
Hannah’s voice strips May to attention and centers her to the caress of woven scarlet carpet underfoot. The tea service blinks blindingly when she passes through swathes of sun, the silver tray heavy and cold against her hands. She does not yet look to the woman waiting poised at the head of the table, and instead demurs her gaze to the steaming pot and porcelain cups, the arrangement of biscuits circled around an ivory dish.
When she stops beside her, May’s eyes rest upon the masculine riding boots that wrap leather warmth up Hannah’s calves. Skintight cream breeches above, the long cascade of a velvet tailcoat—May wonders where she found it all, and her mouth tightens into a frown a moment too late for her to stop it.
“Speak.”
May swallows down her displeasure, and resisting the trembling in her arms, extends the tea service a little farther.
“Your tea, madam.”
“Not about the tea, darling girl,” Hannah purrs. “Set it down.”
The tray clicks to rest on the sprawling table, as empty now as the rest of the house with the usual family and attendants enjoying an afternoon picnic far out on the grounds. May withdraws her hands and presses them to her bare thighs, motionless but for a practiced patience in her breath. She makes a small sound when a thin stripe of black crosses the corner of her vision, and restrains the next noise as a fold of leather touches cold beneath her chin.
“Look at me.” Hannah raises the crop, lifting May’s face to meet her own. In an instant, May drinks her in, the flaxen hair knotted elegantly at the back of her neck, the high collar pressed stiff against her strong jaw. Her eyes are an endless darkness, glimmering with light, and to look into them is to seek the bottom of a well. “What have I done to earn such displeasure?”
“There was no displeasure, madam.”
Ha
nnah tips her chin aside, and her pink peony smile unfurls into bloom.
“No?”
“No, madam.”
“You’re lying,” Hannah says. May’s chest tightens, and even without the spill of sun across her freckles, her cheeks warm. “Twice, now, I’ve asked you to tell me. Twice now you’ve argued. I would not suggest pursuing it thrice.”
May’s breath leaves her all at once, and she curls her hands together at the small of her back. “I was surprised to see you dressed for riding,” she manages.
“You frowned, darling, did you think I’d miss it?” A threat ripples like a shadow beneath Hannah’s words.
“I was dismayed to see you dressed for riding,” May corrects, embarrassed. Her fingers tighten against each other to fight back the urge to close her eyes. “It struck me as out of place to take tea in that way.”
When Hannah laughs, pitching her head back in delight, it cracks sharp through the silence so carefully preserved.
“As if it were the only thing that will strike you,” she grins. She lets the promise hold, pressing broad white teeth to her bottom lip, and then smooths her expression. The riding crop, unyielding, pushes May’s chin higher. “What charming hypocrisy, to judge my garments when you yourself have none. And during tea, no less,” Hannah chides.
She lets the whip drift downward, tracing the curve of May’s throat. Despite the summer heat, the stroke of oiled leather between her breasts shivers her, hardening her nipples and tightening between her legs. Were she permitted to move, May would close her thighs firmly and squeeze. Were she permitted to move, May would spread her belly over Hannah’s knees and grasp the legs of her chair. She would beg, to have now what she knows in a flutter of anticipation is coming.
