Phoenix Rising

by Anais Ninja

  “Daddy?” I whispered. Even stranger. In some of my dreams I wasn’t able to speak, unable to scream if I had to.

  “Shhhh...,” he said. “It’s just a dream.”

  “It’s not a dream,” I said. “My dreams are weirder than this.”

  “Shhhh...,” he repeated. “Go to sleep.” I was groggy, and I started to close my eyes, but I heard him gasp and hold something white over the tip of his penis. He wiped himself off with it and dropped it on the floor before leaving. I wanted to get up, to see what that white object was, but I was too tired. I closed my eyes and the dream faded into nothingness.

  * * *

  Chapter Two - I Touch Myself

  “Anne,” Mia whispered, gently stroking my cheek. “Wake up, Annie.”

  “Wha? Where am...?” I bolted upright on the cot. It took me a moment to remember where I was. “Oh...”

  “Come to the kitchen,” she said. “I’ve got coffee on.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Mia smiled and left the room. I pulled the sheet aside. My chemise wasn’t bunched up, like in my dream. Dana’s bed was empty, and the digital clock on her night table read “9:32”. She must be in school by now. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slipped into my kimono, getting out of bed and stretching. I was heading towards the door when I noticed something on the floor, something white, something I’d seen in my dreams. I knelt down and picked it up, realizing that it was a pair of Dana’s panties, white cotton with a cartoon character on the front.

  There was something stiff on the back, as if something had dried on the fabric. I fingered the stain; it wasn’t totally dry, and I held the damp part to my nose, taking a tentative sniff. It smelled a bit like pollen, with a slight note of ammonia. I knew that scent well, intimately.

  Dana’s panties had dried semen on them.

  I dropped the panties on the floor and headed to the kitchen, wondering if my dream had really been a dream. Unlike most of my dreams, this one remained with me instead of unraveling like an old sweater. Still, it had that unreal quality and, despite the semen stain on Dana’s panties, I wanted to believe it was a dream. I tried to put it all in the back of my mind as I got dressed in jeans and a sweater and headed to the kitchen.

  Mia made delicious coffee, with heavy cream, sweetened with raw sugar. I poured myself a second cup as she served me pancakes with syrup. As I watched her move about the kitchen, I started to notice something about her, a sensuality, a fluidity in her movements as she reached into cabinets for clean plates and placed dirty breakfast dishes in the sink.

  “Were you a dancer?” I asked her.

  “Gymnast,” she replied. “I transferred to Arizona State to train under Komarov.”

  “The Olympic coach?”

  “Yes. It was right after he defected,” she said. I remembered hearing about him on the news, his daring leap from an Aeroflot jet as it taxied towards the runway after the closing ceremonies in Montreal, six years earlier.

  “Let me do that for you,” I said, watching Mia start to wash the breakfast dishes.

  “No, you’re our guest here, Annie,” she said.

  “Please. Let me,” I said. “You shouldn’t be on your feet so much.”

  “Well...,” she said, hesitating before she stepped away from the sink. “Thanks. Just rinse the plates and put them in the dishwasher.” Mia sat down at the kitchen table and sipped her decaf while we made small talk. I finished the dishes and started scrubbing the pan she’d used to make breakfast.

  “Is there anything else I can do?” I asked her. “Laundry? Make the beds?”

  “You shouldn’t...,” she said, standing up to put her coffee cup in the dishwasher.

  “I want to,” I said. “Please.” Mia stood close to me, looking as if she was about to kiss me, her big brown eyes gleaming. I would have gladly let her press those full red lips against mine.

  “Very well,” she said. “Help me with the beds, okay?”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  We started in Dana’s room, stripping her sheets and putting fresh linen on her bed. I scooped up the semen-stained panties from the floor before Mia had a chance to see them. Then we did David’s bed before moving on to the master bedroom. I hadn’t seen it before; the bed was huge, with a lacquered wooden headboard that held some books and an alarm clock. The titles were all self-improvement and sales technique manuals, my father’s I supposed.

  There were more of these books in his den. I folded the blanket that Mia had left out for him the night before. On his desk was a personal computer, one of the first that IBM had started making the year before, with a small monochrome monitor atop a big beige metal case. I sat down on the big leather swivel chair behind his desk, imagining myself as a businesswoman, someone important, someone who wielded power, controlled vast sums.

  I laughed to myself as I stood up from the leather seat. I’d seen so many businesswomen in Boston, walking around in their skirt suits, running shoes on their feet, carrying their heels in a tote bag. Cami and I made fun of them sometimes, while we stood on the streets of the South End. Delia called them “yuppies”, and growled about how they were taking over the neighborhood, driving the cost of rent upwards.

  Mia showed me where to put the laundry, inside a hamper in the laundry room by the kitchen. The housekeeper would be by later to do the wash, so I didn’t have to load the laundry into the washer. Then she excused herself and went into her office, which had once been a spare bedroom. She did translation work on a part-time basis. Her major in college was Russian literature, but she was fluent in Spanish and French as well. I asked Mia if I could use a phone to call Helen back in Boston, to let her know how I was doing. Mia said that I was welcome to use the phone in Frank’s den. I heard the clattering of her electric typewriter down the hall as I walked into the den and shut the door.

  Helen was happy to hear from me, though it had been only a day since she and Bradley saw me off at the airport. I told her about Frank’s drinking, how cute the kids were, how Mia seemed to glow from her pregnancy. When I told Helen what Mia had said, how my father wanted me to live with them, there was a momentary silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Annie, you know that we love you, and that our home is your home,” Helen said. “But if you do decide to move out there, remember that we’ll support your decision fully. Whatever you decide, you’ll always have our love.”

  “Helen...,” I said, feeling my eyes fill with tears. “Thank you. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Annie,” she said, her voice starting to crack. “Now go, enjoy the weather. It’s freezing up here.”

  I let her go and sat behind my father’s desk. No business fantasies this time, just a decision, the hardest decision I ever had to make. I felt the need to write, to make a list of pros and cons. In the end, I knew that my heart would decide, but I wanted to get my thoughts out on paper. There was a coffee mug filled with pens and pencils on my father’s desk, but I needed some paper. I searched through his desk for something to write on.

  In the bottom drawer was a crumpled pair of panties, a familiar looking pair, pink cotton trimmed with picot lace. I picked them up, feeling the same stiff, dried stains that I’d felt on Dana’s undies. These were my panties, though, a pair that matched one of the soft cup bras I’d bought at Jordan Marsh a year before. My father must have taken them from Dana’s room the night before and jerked off in them.

  Beneath where I’d found my panties were some magazines, a couple of copies of “Hustler”, both covers featuring young women with their hair up in pigtails, plaid skirts hiked to show a flash of white cotton. Beneath these were more magazines, smaller ones, some of them in German. A few of these purported to be guides to European nudist colonies, showing families together on the beach, by a pool, playing volleyball, having a picnic. There was no sex, no lascivious poses, just naked men, women, and children, some as young as three or four. These could have just as easily been snapshots
from a family photo album, except no one had any clothes on, save for sandals or flip-flops.

  Further down in the pile, however, I found more little magazines, some in English, some in German, some in what might have been Danish, with names like “Kinderfich” and “Lolita Sex”. I thumbed through them, seeing pictures of girls younger than me undressing, posing, even having sex with other kids or older men and women.

  I felt a chill run down my spine as I remembered how I had posed for Cecil, the guy I called “The Photographer”. I’d started out just modeling clothes for him, maybe showing a little leg or my panties, but it had gradually progressed from there, ending up with the porn video he’d shot of me having sex with those two boys from that punk rock band. He got busted before he had a chance to finish editing the movie, but I’d always wondered what he did with the photographs he had shot. I didn’t think he sold them to a magazine, but at that time I didn’t know that magazines like these existed.

  I pulled them from my father’s desk, looking through all of them, page by page, wondering if I’d see myself, laying on Cecil’s white scrim, my panties down around my thighs, a vibrator stuffed into my shaved cunny. It took over an hour, and I didn’t see any of his photos, but what I did see left me both horrified and aroused. The magazines were older, anyway, and the copyright notices inside the cover dated them from the Seventies. I heard the door to Mia’s office open and I stuffed them back in the drawer, hurriedly closing it as she knocked on the door of the den and asked if I wanted some lunch.

  I followed her to the kitchen and helped her make some sandwiches, which we took out to the patio. There were some men on the long green fairway, riding in a white golf cart with bags in the back, heading towards the manicured green. While we ate, I watched them get out and pick clubs from their bags, hitting little white balls into a cup.

  “Have you ever played golf, Anne?” Mia asked.

  “No, never,” I said.

  “How about tennis? There’s some nice clay courts here,” she said.

  “Never did that, either.”

  “Would you like to try?”

  “Sure,” I said. My restlessness was back, a nervous energy that had built up while I’d been thumbing through those magazines, wondering if I’d see my own face staring back at me.

  We finished lunch and I helped Mia with the dishes. Then she took me to her bedroom and picked out her tennis clothes from the closet, a short pleated white skirt and a sleeveless white knit sweater. We were just about the same size, at least before she got pregnant, so the skirt and sweater fit pretty well. I was about to lace up my sneakers again when Mia stopped me, pulling something from her dresser.

  “You should wear these,” she said, “so no one will see your panties.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Panties,” she replied. “Tennis panties.” She held them out so I could step into them, and she pulled them up my legs, her hands lingering just a little too long on my bottom. I lifted the skirt and looked in the mirror; the tennis panties were covered with rows of ruffles, like the ones that Mr. O’Hare had bought for me to wear with that awful communion dress. I shuddered at the memory of him forcing his fat cock into my cleft, and wondered if I could just wear the bottoms from my bikini swim suit instead, but Mia seemed to like how they looked on me.

  “You look so pretty, Anne,” she said, her hand resting on the small of my back. “Come, let’s see if there’s a court available.”

  She rummaged through a hall closet for her tennis racket, called the dog and snapped a leash on his collar, and we walked a few blocks down to the clubhouse, stopping every twenty feet so Schultzie could sniff or piss on just about every fence post or street sign. There were only two people on the court, a young man in white shorts and a pale blue shirt, and an older woman with bronzed skin, her graying hair tied back into a ponytail. They were hitting a bright chartreuse ball back and forth, while he shouted out tips in a French-accented voice. Mia and I watched them for a while, until the man caught the ball in his hand and approached the net to talk to the woman. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but something made her laugh and kiss him on the cheek. She squeezed his hand and walked off the court, slipping a vinyl bag over her racket and heading towards a soda machine.

  “Jean-Paul! Jean-Paul!” Mia called out. The man waved and walked over, kissing Mia on the cheek. They started conversing in French, which I couldn’t understand. I picked up one of the balls that was scattered around the court and started bouncing it.

  “Anne? This is Jean-Paul,” Mia said, introducing me. He held out his hand and I shook it, getting an extra squeeze from him in return.

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  “Jean-Paul has time to give you a lesson,” Mia said. “Would you like that?”

  “Yes, please,” I said. Jean-Paul winked at me and said something else to Mia, making her laugh. He was really cute, mid- to late-twenties, not very tall but in wonderful shape, his skin tanned from the Arizona sun, his unruly black hair held back from his face with a white terrycloth headband.

  “Excellent,” he said. “We start with the basics.”

  “Have fun, Annie,” Mia said, squeezing my arm. “I’m going back to the house to finish work and wait for the kids to come home from school.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  I didn’t think I’d be playing tennis like a pro after an hour of lessons, but I must have been doing pretty well for a beginner. Jean- Paul showed me how to grip the racket, forehand and backhand, standing behind me and guiding my arm through an arc. It took me a while to get the hang of serving the ball, and I hit the net more times than I cleared it, but that just gave him a chance to stand behind me again and correct my form. That was the best part, so far as I was concerned. I didn’t care if I learned how to play or not; just feeling his hands on me was enough. By the end of our hour together, we were volleying the ball back and forth while he shouted “Bon! Bon!” or “That’s right! Follow through! Yes!”.

  Jean-Paul bought me a soda afterwards, and we chatted for a while as we cooled down on a long wooden bench. There was a bead of sweat dripping down from his temple, and it was all I could do to keep from leaning over and licking it from his skin.

  “You come back next week, no?” he said. “Another lesson?”

  “I’d love that,” I said. Jean-Paul gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and squeezed my hand, heading into the clubhouse to shower. I felt compelled to follow him, to lather his tanned skin and rinse it off with my tongue. I could feel myself blushing as I walked off the court, back to the house.

  “How did it go?” Mia asked as she stood at the kitchen counter, chopping scallions for dinner.

  “It was fun,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “I’m happy you liked it,” she said. “He’s a cute one, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he really is,” I replied. “He wants to give me another lesson next week. Is that okay?” I knew that these lessons weren’t exactly free.

  “Of course, Anne. You’re here to enjoy yourself.”

  “Thank you,” I said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. It was her turn to blush now.

  Mia graciously refused any of my offers to help her with dinner, insisting that I relax before our meal. I thanked her and headed to Dana’s room to take a shower and change out of the tennis outfit she’d lent me. As I walked down the hallway I could hear the kids bounding through the front door, excited that it was Friday, the start of their weekend. As I stood in the bathroom and took off the tennis clothes, I could hear David and Dana, in their rooms adjoining the shared bathroom, dropping book bags on the floor, drawers opening and closing as they changed out of their school clothes.

  I stepped into the shower and started lathering myself. It hadn’t been too hot during the lesson, but I’d worked up a sweat anyway. As I soaped up my breasts, I thought about the handsome tennis pro, how I wished that it was his hands on my skin instead of my own. I reached for the shower h
ead, pulling it from its bracket, and adjusted the dial to one of the massage settings, spraying the pulsing jets of water over my nipples first, and then working lower, down to my cleft, making the soap suds pool around my feet.

  I closed my eyes and imagined Jean-Paul naked, dressed only in sneakers as he served the ball over the net, his cock dangling from between his legs as he followed through on his stroke. I imagined myself naked, too, my small breasts jiggling as I returned his serve, watching his muscular legs tense as he chased the ball and whacked it with a backhand stroke. I moved my hands from my nipples down to my sex, spreading my labia and directing the powerful flow of water over my swollen clit.

  My legs felt weak as I began to come, and I leaned against the tile wall of the shower, running the water back and forth over my cunny, imagining that it was Jean-Paul’s tongue. I pictured myself lying on one of the courtside benches while he licked my sex, circling my button with his tongue before lashing it directly. That was all I needed, and my legs gave out as I came, shuddering on the floor of the bathtub as I squealed with pleasure.

  Suddenly I heard one of the doors slide open. I froze, the shower massage still pulsing against my pussy. A hand pulled the curtain aside: it was David, his eyes wide as he looked me up and down. I aimed the shower head at him, soaking his face and most of his shirt.

  “Sorry!,” he cried out, letting go of the shower curtain and jumping back.

  “Fuck off!” I shouted, feeling my face turn red.

  “I...I heard a scream,” he stammered. “I thought you fell or something.”

  “Get out,” I said, picking myself up from the floor of the tub. David left quickly, sliding the door closed behind him. I grabbed a towel and dried myself off, wrapping it around me. I was about to return to Dana’s room, to get dressed, when I began to regret yelling at David. He must have heard me cry out when I came and, thinking that I might have slipped in the shower, came in to see if I was okay. Instead of opening the door to Dana’s bedroom, I slid open the opposite door, the one that led to Davy’s room.