Learner Driver and Other Stories

by Leigh Clark

  Title Page

  LEARNER DRIVER

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Four Sexy Short Stories

  By

  Leigh Clark

  Publisher Information

  Learner Driver And Other Stories

  published in 2012 by Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

  Copyright © Leigh Clark 2012

  The right of Leigh Clark to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Learner Driver

  My boyfriend Kevin dumped me two weeks before my driving test. Bad enough, but then I couldn’t use his car to take the test in. Dad knew somebody with the same make of car, and asked him if I could borrow it for the test. So this friend of Dad’s dropped it off at their house and I took my test, passed, and drove back to Mom and Dad’s, all shaky and chuffed to bits. Should have been the end of it. Really should have been the end of it. Thing is, Mom and Dad had gone out shopping, leaving this note saying ‘Please hang on till Jeff gets there, so you can give his keys back.’ It was Jeff’s car I’d borrowed. So when he turned up, rang the doorbell, I was expecting some old geezer in a cardigan. I opened the door and he was like Steve McQueen. And he knew it, did that whole look up and down thing with a half smile, like he understood what I was thinking. I said something half-witted and dropped the bloody keys on the mat.

  I bent to grab them and as I straightened up he put his hand out, like he was going to steady me, and put it straight on my left breast! Which was the moment for him to apologise – but he just grinned at me. And half of me was thinking ‘there’s no way you’re as old as my dad,’ and the other half thought ‘this would burn Kevin to a crisp, if he knew’ and the next thing was, I had my hands on his waistband (no elasticated jeans, thank God) and he was shoving me back down the hall until I hit the stairs. So I kissed him and he tasted really nice, and that was it, I never stood a chance once he’d got his thigh between my legs and I was snogging and wriggling around on him like a pole dancer. I didn’t even notice when he slipped his hands round my back and undid my bra. I suppose an older man has a lot more experience, smoother action, that kind of thing. But once he’d lowered his head to my nipples and was tonguing away I realised that this was going to have to go all the way, so I pushed him away a bit and just laid myself down on the hall carpet, hitching up my best skirt which I’d worn to impress the examiner and he went down on me like he was famished, really going for it. And with the adrenaline of passing the test and the fear of Mom and Dad turning up any second, I came like an express, I really did.

  And I thought that was going to be the end of it, but I sat up and he was still grinning and I was blushing like a red light, so I reached forward and put my hand in his hair, which did have quite a lot of grey in it, I noticed, and pulled him down on top of me. When he slid inside me I sort of came round and thought ‘I’m screwing my dad’s mate in my parents’ hall at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning’ and so it wasn’t the most exciting sex in the world, to be honest, not right then, anyway.

  The thing is, he came and we straightened ourselves up and that was it. By the time Mom and Dad got back, I was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea. Ever since though, I’ve been thinking about what we did, every time I pass some bloke with fair greying hair, I feel myself getting hot, and I never go round to Mom and Dad’s until I’m absolutely sure there’s no chance of bumping into Jeff because I don’t trust myself around him, I really don’t.

  Honeymoon Island

  Do you know what they call our island? Honeymoon Island, that’s its new name—it’s what they call a marketing angle. I can understand why—there’s nothing more beautiful than the place I call home, nowhere more suited to making love either, but it’s dangerous too.

  And I know what they say about me too— Marania, the bride of the Island, as if it’s a big joke. Of course I’m a tribal chief now, and the first woman every to hold that title, and I’ve never been married, and above all, I look like the archetypal Honeymoon Islander, so it’s a joke that makes some sense, but the truth is much stranger.

  Start with the looks—mine I mean, I’m tall and broad, skin the colour of a coconut husk, long curling black hair—you think I look just right for an Islander? But the place has been a ‘honeymoon’ island for centuries. The Chinese came here to trade and left behind babies, the neighbouring tribes came to barter for brides and once white people turned up in their big wooden ships, any Islander was as likely to have red hair and epithetic eye-folds or blue eyes and golden skin as they were to look like me.

  Then the missionary societies got to hear about us, and for a long time the honeymoon was over. Oh yes—we Islanders had to pay for all the sins of our ancestors. They made us wear clothes, sing hymns, get married before enjoying the natural pleasures of each others bodies—they made us suffer.

  There was one thing the missionaries had a blind spot about though. They were so focused on barstardy and fornication that they missed one major part of Honeymoon Islands native culture, and that’s where my story really begins. You see, young men and young women live separately here. Between leaving home and settling down to raise a family, they move into the Youths’ House or the Maidens’ House—long huts where each sex learns the skills necessary to survive. Boys fish and hunt, girls cook and harvest fruits and nuts. Boys tan leather, girls weave cloth. Boys learn to swim and dive in salty mother ocean and girls do the same at the freshwater falls in the interior of the Island. Each sex is supervised and trained by elderly and bad-tempered guardians of their own gender, to encourage them to learn their lessons well so that they never end up alone and forced to work as a teacher.

  And that brings me to Lehera. She and I moved to the Maidens’ House on the same day. Her family were from the other side of the Island so I’d never met her before and when she walked into the clearing around the hut with her small bundle of clothing and tools, I looked at her and knew I’d found the love of my life.

  She was fair enough in skin tone to be white, but her eyes and hair were as black as mine although her hair fell as straight as the waterfall to her waist. She had dressed as the missionaries insisted, in a shapeless cotton smock, but she’d run all the way to the House and sweat made the fabric grip her like a lover’s fingers, outlining her small wide-spaced breasts and rounded navel.

  I loved her. At first I only loved her with my spirit, working alongside her to cook and clean and grow vegetables in narrow fields that were all Honeymoon Island’s steep volcanic form allowed. And perhaps that was all I would ever have done, if the island hadn’t forced us into each other’s arms. Lehera went everywhere at full speed, as if life was trying to escape her. She was as wild as a tropical bird and as tempestuous as a summer storm and only I could calm her when her spirit was unruly.

  One day Lehera and I were walking a narrow path one day, high in the hills, to collect vanilla pods from the vines there. We sold them in the market to buy fish for dinner—once our currency had been shells, but the missionaries had made us use coins and notes, as if they were more godly.

&
nbsp; Lehera slipped and cut her foot on a rock. It was a deep, jagged wound and her pale face became paler with shock until she looked like the ghosts some of the missionaries talked about. Honeymoon Islanders didn’t believe in ghosts. When you died, you went back to being part of the place you died in.

  I half-carried her to a stream near the path and set her on the bank while I looked at her injury. It was too close to nightfall for her to hobble back down to the Maidens’ House, even if I could support her weight and guide her in the dark.

  “Put your foot in the water, Lehera,” I said. “It will stop the pain and wash it clean.”

  She nodded and only bit her lip when the cold water stung her bleeding flesh. She was brave. I left her sitting there while I searched the area in the last of the light for food . When I returned she was lying down and I could see the foot was still bleeding, so I lifted it from the water and dried it with my smock before binding it with strips torn from its hem. I laid my wet and ragged dress on a tree branch to dry. We ate mountain apples and coconut and I watched carefully to be sure she was getting strength from the food. By the time we finished it was dark and so I sat close, with my arm round her, knowing that our teachers would not be foolish enough to search for us at night. She put her arm around me, then her other arm. I felt her fingers, soft and warm, joined around my waist. Then one had slipped free to play with the hair that fell in curls to my hips. In return, I stroked her hair, then somehow found I was caressing her back, her arm and my other hand was on her thigh, like the shadow of night on the moonlight of her skin. And then she kissed me.

  Girls in the Maidens’ House practiced kissing. It was part of our training, like learning the dances to entice a man or the cooking skills to keep him happy, it was part of our life there, but this kiss was different. It came to me, in the few moments after her lips touched mine, that this kiss was not practice. It was the kiss we had been told to offer to a lover—questioning, without reservation, expressing desire.

  Her tongue explored the cushion of my lower lip and I remembered that I was naked. It was as though she read my thoughts—her hands moved to my breasts and began to stroke their undercurves as though calming a nervous animal. I sighed, my breath entering her mouth, and her tongue darted forward.

  Then, for a while, I lost my mind. I lifted her and moved her to a bed of moss and knelt over her, looking at her pale body drinking the moonlight. I ran my hands over her breasts and belly, feeling the heat in her skin and the way her back arched to keep contact with my fingers. I stroked her thighs, listening to her broken breathing as she said my name over and over and over again, like a prayer. And when I slid my finger into her, impaling her like a fish on a hook, it was as if I was pleasuring my own body. It seemed I had come to know her so well that I understood exactly where to press—above her pubic bone to force the soft flesh down onto my searching fingers, where to tease—my free hand grazing its nails over her thighs so that she opened them, out, out, out, like a night-blooming flower, and where to put my mouth—lowering my lips gently to the tiny coral-coloured jewel that stood proud in the moonlight, lapping it with long strokes until Lehera sobbed with happiness and tangled her hands in my hair, pulling me down onto her.

  I held her afterwards, wondering how we could go back to what we had been before, but even as I wrapped my arms around her, she began to move against me, sliding her thigh between my legs, pinching and rolling my nipples in her hands as though I was a field to be ploughed and harvested simultaneously. She knew my body as I knew hers, with the instinctive wisdom of love, and she gave me back the pleasure I’d given to her.

  We were happy, for a while. The next morning we went back to the Maidens’ House and nothing was said about our adventure, but our teachers watched us closely and when the time came for us to prove we could survive on what we had learned, Lehera and I were assigned to a high mountain slope to live for three months, harvesting breadfruit. The missionaries didn’t like us being sent out on these tests with had the uncomfortable undertone, to them, of initiation rites, but our teachers made a point of telling us to read our bibles regularly and so there was nothing the missionaries could complain about.

  Lehera and I did not read our bibles. Nobody troubled us. Our remote plantation was too remote to travel to easily and so we spent our days climbing trees to collect the fruit and our nights learning how to love each other in all the ways possible between women. Near our hut was a waterfall—not like the tall curtain falls we’d played in during our time at the Maidens’ House, just a stream spurting out of a rock face—but the pool it plunged into was as cold and dark as a well and no matter how much we tried, we could never plumb it, always being forced to come up for air before we’d descended to its full depth.

  We took to visiting the pool at night, when I would straddle Lehera’s body and watch her rise to the ecstasy my fingers could give her like a fish rising to the bait. One night I said, “You look like the Moon Goddess, fallen from the sky,” and she leaned over the black pool and looked at her lovely face in the water.

  “Then, as the Moon Goddess, I command you to kiss me, Marania,” she said.

  I did as she said, but a cold chill ran down my back—the missionaries would have said my words were blasphemous and our own people would say Lehera’s would make an enemy of the moon.

  I knew how many days we had been given, so I was expecting the summons back to our respective villages. I had even worked out a way for us to see each other—I would train with a woman in my village who looked after the sick, and Lehera could learn to make medicines from the herbs around her home from another woman who was renowned for her healing skills. That way I could travel to collect the herbal treatments every few weeks and we could at least have one night together. I refused to think about what would happen when a man wanted to marry one or the other of us. As far as I could tell Lehera didn’t think about any of this at all.

  But I had reckoned without her wildness. When she saw the old messenger, far in the distance, toiling up the mountain to take us home, she ran to the hut and grabbed a blanket.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “To the pool. We can have one more night alone…”

  She was right. The route to the pool wasn’t easy to find and the sun was already setting. The traveller would assume we were out finishing our harvest and would make herself comfortable in our hut while we could have a last few hours alone. I picked up the garland of Tahitian gardenia I’d been making as a farewell present for my love, and we ran together, giggling, hand in hand, to the pool.

  The waterfall jetted rose water, then blood, as the setting sun coloured it, and finally the deepest blue, before vanishing from sight in the night. Lehera and I watched it and then turned to each other like cannibals, tearing and biting each other, as if we could consume love like a feast.

  The moon came up slowly, almost reluctantly, I thought and we lay on our backs, exhausted for a while, fingers still entwined, to watch her progress across the sky. Then we loved each other again—I bent my head between Lehera’s thighs and, for the first time, instead of shouting and moaning her pleasure to the night sky, she laid her forearm across her mouth to muffle her pleasure, for fear of the sound carrying to the one who waited to take us back.

  I thought, bitterly, that this was how it would be from now on—furtiveness and silence, hiding away and denying the truth of our love—and even so, I thought that better than a life apart. But I had reckoned without Lehera’s wild nature.

  I lay down and pulled her head onto my breast, running my fingers through her hair as we waited for our breathing to slow so that we could make it race with joy again. At some point I fell asleep …

  When I woke the day-birds were just beginning to sing. The garland I had made for Lehera to take home was on the surface of the pool, ripples still spreading out from it as though it had just landed the
re. Lehera was not in sight.

  For only a few seconds I looked around, expecting her to appear from the forest. Then I knew. I screamed loudly enough to wake the island, and dived.

  Each time I surfaced I screamed again, until the messenger appeared at the pool’s edge. She dived as I rested and for a few minutes, although it seemed like hours, we took it in turns to seek out the black depths in which Lehera might still be alive. Too soon, she shook her head. I ignored her and carried on diving until she dragged me from the water. I was too weak and cold to stop her. I watched as she lit a great smoking fire to alert the Islanders and as soon as I was warm and my limbs stopped cramping, I began to dive again, this time to bring my beloved’s body back into the light.

  We never found her. Despite the best divers, male and female, trying their utmost, nobody could reach the floor of that deep pool. I heard people saying she would float up, when nature was sick of her, but she never did.

  I can see by your faces that this isn’t the story you were hoping for when you came to the Island, all you honeymoon couples. Do you think I’m putting a curse on you? Many people thought Lehera had cursed the God of water with her death, and I knew myself that she’d defied the missionaries’ God and our own moon Goddess, but I told nobody of it.

  They took me home, and no man would have me, for fear I was unlucky. They tore apart the hut we’d shared and cut down the breadfruit trees and burnt it all, to appease any spirit that might be lurking, and I was forbidden to leave my village.

  After a few years people forgot the details of Lehera’s suicide, and I was able to move around the island freely enough, although I never got near the highland pool that held her bones prisoner. An old man lived in a new hut near our former home, and spent all his days keeping any trouble-loving islander from visiting the pool for fear Lehera’s spirit might drag him or her down into the black waters.