Her eyes flutter open. “What?”
He sighs and looks smilingly ceiling-ward. “Amida Buddha, grant me the patience to –”
“Oh no you don’t,” she laughs, ending his prayer with a kiss.
When they finally come up for air, he grins at her. “Ah, there’s my impetuous darling.”
“I’m not impetuous.”
“Of course you are,” he says, kissing her knees. “And also predisposed to theatrical displays of hyperfemininity. But you’re young and Japanese, so I’ll forgive the second flaw.”
“And the first?”
He grins. “You’ll learn that in time. Want your present now?”
“Yes,” she husks, making every effort to look at him directly.
“Then spread your legs.”
He leans into her then, bunching her pleated skirt in his hands as his questing lips find the source of her secrecy. Her nether lips are held closed by a thin cotton veil and he kisses her through the white eyelets. A moment later he feels her begin to dissolve. Her legs relax on either side of him. Her hands sink into the pool of his wavy blond hair, combing it out and stroking it as he licks her. The first touch of his tongue tip feels to Hiroe as if one of the cherry petals has alighted at the base of her mons, where the bud of her womanhood would jut if it weren’t wrapped in cotton and imprisoned between the pouting lips of her sex. The next touch is a slow, broad stroke of his tongue along her dewy furrow. After two more strokes it’s unclear how much of the dew is coming from within and how much from without. But the scent of her guides him. John breathes her in, filling himself with the scent that reminds him of an ocean breeze after the rains in late summer.
A dovelike sound from above encourages John to explore further. His licks are deliberate. No matter how she rolls her hips or presses into him, he keeps his own pace, nuzzling her stiffened bud or nibbling at her sweet lips or pointing his tongue and, only when she is no longer expecting it, pushing it into her cranny.
At last, a pause. He stops to watch her. She is adrift on a cloud-sea of pleasure, with her eyes closed, swaying gently on the table. Tenderly he collects Hiroe from her uncertain perch and gathers her into his arms. It is a sweet feeling to have her there, this warm, heavy, girl-shaped bundle with her temple pressed up against his chin.
He touches her cheek and she nuzzles, catlike, against his hand. He traces the outline of her lower lip – the very fullest, pinkest part. Her mouth opens and, fluidly, his thumb slides in. At the new sensation, her eyes open as well. They follow the path of his digit as he draws it away and glosses her lips with it. So he lets her have it back, and her eyes fall closed once more.
“That’s a good girl. Suck it.”
Another small sound escapes Hiroe. Her hands tighten on his knees.
“Suck. With that pretty mouth and those cheeks all hollow. Do you have any idea how many times you’ve shown up in my dreams like this, you little carp?”
She moans for real this time, wanting nothing more than for him to slide his hands down under her skirt, under everything, to touch the very core of her and finish what he has started. All those nights she had lain in her bed, with her own hands wandering through her garden, are nothing compared to the distilled essence of desire that is coursing through her now.
And so her need expresses itself in the movements of her lips. They close upon the narrow part of his thumb and he twists, enjoying the feeling of her tongue fluttering against its very tip – a heady sensation, even without her pert bottom pressed enticingly into his groin. Still, he knows Hiroe is expecting her gift, so he lets the digit pop free and uses his hands to slide her panties down. He tucks the hem of her skirt carefully into its waistband and gazes down at her from above, at her mound and the beautiful thatch of hair that graces it. Hiroe feels open and exposed, but the rustle of the paper bag distracts her.
He takes out an ordinary sea sponge, golden and no larger than his palm.
She wants to ask, tries to, but he shakes his head no, and the movement is transmitted along his jaw and through the obsidian waterfall of her hair. Her eyes trace every movement of the sponge, from the bag, in a low arc past the table, to the floor with its tray and teacups and kettle of water, no longer steaming, only warm. The kettle is as shallow as her breathing. It has a wide opening in the top, large enough for him to dip the entire sponge inside. He soaks it and squeezes just slightly. There is no other sound in the room, in the teahouse, or perhaps in the entire world.
Water is falling in drops now, from the sponge and onto her young and sensate skin. The first two drops, fat and rapid, alight on her stomach and splatter there. He goes back and squeezes out the sponge a little more. The next few drops are slower. They fall on her belly, her mons, and then on her pink and jutting centre. She hisses at the teasing contact. She struggles to get free, beating her stockinged feet against the tatami. But his other arm is locked about her waist and there is no way to free herself without hurting him.
He waits, with the sponge in his upturned palm, until she is finished struggling. Then he turns his hand over and begins again.
The next drop falls exactly where he wants it, and so he braces his forearm against her bent knee and lets the sponge hover there as he watches the subtle interplay of gravity and tension. Hiroe is keening softly in his arms. He soothes her with murmured words. Nonetheless, each tiny impact makes her body jerk. Soon she is digging her nails into the long muscles of his thigh, and of the arm that binds her, her head rolling from side to side. He goes back for more water. Again he lets it drip against her core and again the struggle begins. But after a time, her breathing quiets down. He can feel her heart slowing and, in the tiny movements of her eyes, sense her attention wandering from the sponge between drops. The water is cool now, as it trickles along her slit to the sodden pillow beneath her. She cools as well, and her sighs are frustrated.
“What’s the matter?”
“John, I – I don’t think I can____”
“Don’t think you can what?”
“You know,” she says shyly, half-turning to press her cheek into the row of buttons on his shirt.
“You can say it.”
A sigh. “Come,” she breathes at last. “I don’t think I can come like this.”
“Well, who said you were supposed to?”
She pulls away to look at him. “But –”
“But what?” he remarks, tenderly untucking her skirt and smoothing her hair into a semblance of order. “Oh, I see. You thought that due to the elegance of the surroundings I was going to, maybe, deflower you here?”
“I –”
“Or perhaps that this was all about your pleasure? That there wasn’t something bigger wrapped up in all of this?” John regards her with a bemused expression as he squeezes out the last of the water and returns the sponge to its paper home.
“But . . . you want to.” She reaches for that forbidden part of him, and at her delicate touch he springs instantly back to full erection.
“You,” he says, pointedly removing her hand, “need to learn some patience.”
She regards him with a dark, shifting kind of expression. “All this time I’ve waited for you and you’re telling me I need to learn patience?” “All these months of teasing me, you mean.”
“Teasing you?” Her expression hardens and she chokes the words out, rising up onto her knees, small fists angled away from her body.
The instant stretches out into a moment and then into a longer time. The dim lighting along the floor etches years into her face and her frame trembles, but it is her eyes that finally enlighten. The pain in them – he’d never seen it before.
He opens his arms then. She is reluctant at first but then comes into that longed-for circle. A kiss and she trembles in every part. A hand beneath her skirt and she sighs. This time he goes directly to her slippery cleft, working her still-swollen nub with a trio of careful fingers until she gasps, until her hands tighten on his crisp, white sleeves and she coats him with her essence,
at last turning to muffle her impassioned cries against his chest.
When her eyes blink open, he has another kiss for her, soft as a cherry blossom on the sacred space between her brows.
“Hiroe,” he says at last. “I’m sorry. I promise – no more games.”
So that when her small hand closes around the hardness that still pulses at the root of him, and when that member leaps in her hand like a fish, he surrenders, at last.
Drift
Christopher Hart
It was a hot summer night and I was at a party in a large, dark garden somewhere, nowhere in particular. The hosts might have called it London, only because they didn’t know what else to call it. But it wasn’t London. The garden was too big.
It was later summer, everything sighing and dying, the most lethargic and dreamy time of year. BMWs and Jags snoozed and purred on the gravel drive round the front, and round the back, light spilled out from the open windows and across the lawn and caught our champagne glasses as we stood around in the darkness, the air filled with murmurous insect voices. I couldn’t even be bothered to drink much, and I never did like champagne. Filled you up with gas, made you feel like you were about to take off. I was very bored.
Then I saw a girl stepping out of the french windows and coming across the lawn. She was striking rather than pretty, in red heels and a figure-hugging long red dress and very white arms and shoulders and long red hair. I hate that look. And despite the loud, loud colour signals, she walked quite shyly, head down. It was obvious I had to go and talk to her.
“You don’t have a drink.”
“My boyfriend’s just getting me one,” she said, not even registering me, nodding back inside. Perfect.
She relented a little. “A cocktail of some sort, so he says.”
“Ah, so – is he a cocktail waiter by profession?”
She gave me a look and something inside me whimpered. I quite enjoyed it really. “No,” she said, very slowly. “He works in LA. Title credits.”
I was beginning to like her. “What, you mean the lettering? How to spell Nicole Kidman and things?”
She ignored that one entirely, looked away, and lit a cigarette. I was really beginning to like her. Then she looked back. “And if you dare to say I remind you of Nicole Kidman I’ll put my heel through your foot.”
“As if,” I said. “There’s nothing sexy about Nicole Kidman.” No response. “So he’s out there a lot, is he? In LA? Mixing his cocktails? Leaving you all alone?”
She looked very, very bored. I felt quite perky now. We stood a while longer in companionably mutual dislike, plus something else. Finally she muttered “fuck” and dropped her cigarette and went back inside. She came back with a glass in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other.
“No cocktail?”
“Seems he’s too busy,” she said. And then, ah! Like a little beam of light between a woman’s thighs, she looked up and smiled. Admittedly it was a smile made up about half and half of unhappiness and malevolence. But it would have to do.
There weren’t many guests left outside, and we were at the end of the garden in deep gloom, when the music changed. “When a Man Loves a Woman”, of all things. So I slipped my right arm round her waist and laid my left hand on her cool white shoulder and pulled her as close to me as I dared and we started swaying. She didn’t resist. Although the way she continued to swig from the bottle while we danced seemed to me kind of detached. I felt myself hardening already and pressed myself closer. She ignored it, continued to swig from the bottle.
Over her shoulder, the other guests all looked like they were in black. And as if they were frozen, not moving, unable to see us back here. I felt suddenly hot. Something was wrong, or very, very right. Something was out of control, anyhow. I leaned down and kissed her. She kissed me back. We were like figures in a painting coming mysteriously to life and beginning to move, while everyone else was still and silent, dressed in black. And so cold.
But her small waist was warm under my hands; hot, even. We kissed and revolved anti-clockwise and nobody saw us, noticed us. We would have been more subtle, teasing, educated in our kisses, if we had pulled back, taken breath, then kissed some more. But we couldn’t do that, couldn’t pull apart, remained caught; there was only one kiss between us and we couldn’t escape.
The first I knew of it, the pressure on the soles of my feet had gone. Like your health, it is not something you notice till it goes. There was no pressure there, just loose, bewildered blood. Her feet too were dangling free in the air, and kicked lightly against mine. We were six inches off the grass, a foot, two feet and rising. We were also drifting dangerously towards the house.
“Um . . .” she said, cautious, English. “Is this . . .?”
I was cool about it. “Gravity seems to have failed us.” I didn’t feel cool about it all. This was supposed to be a hollow seduction, nothing more. Not this, not now. Not this serious. I kissed her some more. She pulled back again.
“I think this is quite serious,” she said, looking down between our feet. We were now above the guests’ heads. No one had noticed us yet. But if one of them should just happen to glance up . . .
“They’ll see us,” she hissed. “And it’ll really freak them.”
I don’t think we cared. There didn’t seem to be much we could do except kiss again. I wrapped her in my arms and slid my hand down over her bum, the fabric of her dress cool to the touch but her flesh so warm beneath. Her eyes opened, upturned, beseeching, needy, and closed again. We both opened our eyes again when we bumped up against the side of the house. About twenty feet up. I grazed my knuckles slightly on the brickwork, and the bottle she was still holding clanked noisily.
“Jesus,” she whispered.
But it was too late for that. I pressed her against the wall and dropped my hand down between us and pinched her breast so lightly she didn’t even gasp, but her eyes flared wide. We began to slide upwards again.
The light was on in the bathroom and we were heading straight for it, like insects illuminated. I loved her face then, and my hand already loved the giving curve of her waist. We pushed off from the wall and floated past the window. Inside there was a girl on the loo and another standing nearby, gossiping. Ideally, I suppose they would have been going for it too, if this was just another erotic dream. But it wasn’t.
She managed to lodge the champagne bottle in the guttering, and then we pushed off harder, out over the lawn again, and started to pull each other’s clothes off. I had her dress rucked up around her waist and her knickers down to her knees, floating back, my face buried between her thighs, when she whispered urgently about . . .
It was true. I couldn’t just drop them, they could land on somebody’s head below. I stuffed them in my jacket pocket and she began to unbuckle my trousers. We were drifting towards a tree, a big old copper beech.
Half naked now, we slid in among the covering leaves, which rasped and tickled against our bare hot skin. In another month or two the leaves would brown and fade and crisp but now they were their rich summer copper and soft and generous as skin. We drifted in, scraping our bare limbs on the bark, past caring, wondering if those down below would see the shimmy of the branches, hear the gasps from above.
We draped our clothes over the black branches as we went past, tucked my shoes away in a cleft, but I made her keep the red heels on. Some things never change, even in zero gravity.
For a while I held us steady with my hands on a branch above, and she spread out in front of me on a wider branch and I slipped straight into her, she leaned back taut, unable to fall if she tried, I fucked her in slow steady strokes, and then I let go of the branch and she wrapped herself around me and we rose higher, up through the last thin top leaves and out into the night sky.
There was no wind, or we could feel none. We just drifted. In a hot air balloon you never feel the wind, because you travel exactly at its speed. Maybe that was us. Our discarded clothes lay on the branches below, flirtin
g with the wind, but we couldn’t feel it. We rose higher.
Instead of the wind I had her white limbs wrapping around me. The moon was a black disc with a white splinter on its back, and, above the street lights, we could now see all the stars. And looking down, we could still see the guests on the lawn, a vertical view of the tops of their heads and sometimes their feet poking out below. She whispered, “There’s my boyfriend,” but it was a hollow word now and didn’t carry.
Below us the town was laid out like an illuminated map, parks and gardens and cats under the cars. We could see it all. Though in the east already the night was fading away, and before long we’d have to come down. Brush down past the swaying branches, scramble for our cold clothes, nod our goodbyes. But not for now, not yet, not while I was still inside her and she was arched back from me and I leaned down and took each breast in my mouth in turn, not yet, trapped in a dream of flying and no desire to escape or come down at all.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3 Page 53
