Fur

by Vanessa de Sade

  But Elvira was wired for her speech and paced the room full of pent-up adrenaline, pausing only to stand in front of the big full-length mirror on the wardrobe door and inspect her reflection. She was tall for a woman, maybe as much as six feet, and skinny as a reed, her shock of thick chestnut hair razor-cut into a neat wedge, her face watchful and feline. Nicola had worked out from the photographs on fan sites that her idol was thirty-nine, a full decade older than herself, but standing there in just the tiny studded thong, her skin flawless and blue-white like fresh in-the-pail milk, it was hard to imagine that she was a day over the twenty-one years of most of her heroines.

  “Where did you buy your costume?” she asked now, looking at Nicola in a way that made her blush again. “It’s very good.”

  “Buy? Oh no, you see, sewing, well, it’s my thing,” Nicola babbled. “I made this all by myself...” I made this all by myself? Bloody hell, I might as well say I got a bloody Blue Peter badge! What the hell is the matter with you, Nicola? Get a hold of yourself!

  “Gosh, aren’t you clever,” Elvira teased. “And you’ve made a top that holds your boobs up too. And they’re so much bigger that mine...”

  ‘Is she flirting with me?’ Nicola wondered, aghast, remembering that particularly graphic scene in book one where the Witch hides out in the forest home of a lonely widow and creeps into her bed in the dead of the moonlight night...

  “I’m serious,” Elvira was saying. “How does it work? You must be, what, a forty-two double dee? And yet you’re firm as a rock while my little things are jiggling about like jellies and popping out at any excuse. What’s your secret, champ?”

  Nicola blushed yet again. This was really getting tedious. But she could never have predicted, even in her wildest dreams - and, these days, her dreams were pretty wild - that she’d be standing in a motel room, half naked, with the woman she idolised, and talking about tits, of all things.

  “It’s boned on the inside. I cannibalised an old Playtex corselette I found in a thrift store and built it into the leather of the top, it’s all elastic and rubber webbing under there. Not very comfortable, either. But, here, I’ve fixed your top for you, it’ll stay where it is for tonight...”

  But Elvira waved the proffered item away and looked intently at Nicola. “Show me,” whispered, and, still blushing like a school girl, Nicola obliged and bared her sizable breasts. She was a short plump woman with heavy hips and a pleasingly curved belly, green eyes like Iona pearls and a wicked smile that could melt hearts at thirty paces.

  “That is ingenious,” Elvira muttered with a low whistle, fingering the bra but her feline blue eyes never quite leaving Nicola’s heaving breasts. “Will you make me one of these? I do these blasted Halloween dinners every year, and I’m sure I’m going pop a boob out right in the middle of the melon starter some night.”

  Nicola nodded, aware that her own cherry-black nipples were erect and sticking out like liquorice stalks, and that Elvira was eyeing them hungrily.

  “Do you know why all my books are all out of print?” she suddenly asked, and Nicola shook her head.

  “I was originally published by a woman’s press. A lesbian press to be precise. But then they got bought up by a corporate outfit who wanted me to change all the stories so that the Witch only ever fucked men. When I refused, they pulped the remaining stock of every volume of the saga and sentenced me to fifteen years of obscurity.”

  “But you’re not obscure, you have a huge following...” Nicola interrupted.

  “Yes, of women who like to fuck other women. Women like you.”

  “I don’t fuck other women...”

  “No, but you want to, don’t you? It’s what you dream about.”

  And, still bright scarlet, Nicola hung her head in shame but nodded, yes, oh yes, ever since that night I showered with Pearl I dream about it every hour, every day, and wake up drenched in sweat and frustrated every morning, desperate to meet a woman like the women in your books. Strong. Talented. Intelligent. Sexy...

  Elvira cleared her throat theatrically. “This is the part where you kiss me,” she prompted.

  ***

  The pants on Nicola’s costume had been constructed from the same rubber webbing as her bra, and involved a series of cleverly concealed hooks and eyes to unfasten, but Elvira’s were held up with common or garden knicker elastic and slid down smoothly like a bride’s garter to reveal her pouting cunt, waxed clean of all her fur and defiant in all its naked glory.

  “Bold, I like that,” she breathed as she took Nicola into her arms and peppered her neck with little kisses. “Women are just too tit-centric, I find. I like a girl who has the chutzpah to go straight for the pussy...”

  “Sorry, I had to have you naked,” Nicola gasped by way of explanation, still blushing though her hands were everywhere. “In all my dreams I can’t kiss you until we’re both completely nude...”

  “Then we’d better get these panties off you right away,” Elvira laughed, sliding her hands under the tightly elasticated leather and exploring the contours of Nicola’s vast white bum. “Here, unfasten them for me so I can strip you!”

  “There, they unhook at the side.”

  “What? Like this? Oh, yes, that’s clever, there they go. Step out of them so you don’t trip when you’re rubbing yourself against me. Oh, you feel so good, and your bush is so soft. Not all tough and wiry like mine when I let it grow in...”

  “I’d go down on you no matter how wiry your fur was...”

  “Is that what you do in your dream? Kiss my cunt?”

  “No. I mean, yes, but not yet!”

  “What then?”

  “This...” Nicola whispered as they melted together, their lips finding each other’s in that heart-stopping first kiss as if they had been lovers for years and knew every inch of each other’s bodies intimately.

  “Oh god, I’m so wet I think I’m going to come on the spot,” Elvira finally moaned, pushing Nicola’s hand onto her pussy and squeezing it there. “And I hate to be unromantic but I’m supposed to be addressing about a hundred of my most loyal fans about now, so will you please do me the honour of eating me out very soon?”

  “Do me first, just with your fingers, while we kiss. Pull my furry pink oyster wide open and rub my clit hard, oh so hard, that’s right, now kiss me and tell me how much you want me!”

  “Oh, I want you so badly,” Elvira groaned as she felt Nicola start to come and she pushed her fingers deep inside her lover’s pulsating cunt to share every throbbing contraction of her deep and seismic orgasm.

  “Fuck, I’m such a slave to my big flat clit,” Nicola sighed as she held Elvira tightly and bit into the soft white flesh of her neck.

  “Me too,” the older woman gasped, rubbing herself frantically against Nicola’s thigh like a randy dog. “So please do me now, I’m already late!”

  But Nicola shook her head and pulled back. “I’ve dreamt about making love with you for months and I’m not going to rush it,” she said, suddenly in control and kissing Elvira on the tip of her nose. “So go and host your dinner and then hurry back and I’ll let you do whatever you want to me and go down on you all the night long until you physically just can’t come any more.”

  “But don’t you want to be there? You’ve paid a fortune for a ticket to the Halloween ceremonial dinner?” Elvira asked, already aroused beyond belief at the prospect of the night of loving that lay ahead. “Don’t you want to come and hear all my boring stories about the She-Witches of Devil’s Wood?”

  But Nicola shook her head as she lay back, voluptuously naked, amidst the soft pillows of the big hotel bed. “No,” she whispered with a slow smile. “I have an appointment with the Witch Queen right here, and the sooner she gets here the sooner I’m going to fuck her brains out...”

  “Well, I have done these dinners every year, and I know the format,” Elvira grinned as she hastily pulled her costume back on. “So I guess it wouldn’t hurt if I skipped dessert...”

&nbs
p; The Firefly’s Tears

  His grandmother’s house was a ramshackle affair on the edge of some scrubby woodland, a bad divorce settlement, her friends said, though it seemed to suit her just fine. And Peters, as a boy, had spent two idyllic firefly summers there, at an age where there was still room for magic in his busy life and wolves lurked behind every tree and the foetid pond was an elfin lake stretching out to infinity.

  Gran didn’t have a TV and barely even had electricity, reliant as she was on the fiercely panting petrol generator at the back of the little asbestos frame house, and they spent their days gathering pinecones and brightly coloured feathers, while the evening gloamings were occupied with paint boxes and making scrapbooks before bed, with the blue hiss of the calor gas stove as it warmed the milk for his hot chocolate somehow magical in itself.

  And he loved the woodland with all its butterflies and iridescent birds, azure blue tits and acid green finches, more vivid than any of the tropical specimens shown in his dog-eared Observer’s Guide; the fat caterpillars that munched Gran’s gooseberry leaves until they looked like intricate panels of Nottingham lace; and the scampering mice who scurried beneath the bramble thickets with their beady black eyes so full of alarm whenever he strode past, giant of the woodlands, feared by all.

  But most of all he loved the fireflies - fairies, Gran called them - their shimmering halos of light like glittering gems against the pumpernickel skies of early evening, when the whole forest looked like that old animated lamp in the untidy lounge with its big stuffed armchairs and sagging bookshelves groaning under the weight of art books and bound volumes of Punch. Were you a very famous painter before you married Granddad? he asked her one evening as they sat together eating thick wedges of toast spread with her own wild raspberry conserve, the sky turning from red to purple and the air thick with bobbing dots of fire like Chinese lanterns in a Walt Disney film.

  No, Gran smiled, tousling his hair like she was the Mom in Lassie or something. But I was happy enough painting pretty girls for lipstick adverts before your grandfather decided that he needed to come and rescue me. And, it seemed even to his eight-year-old self, that there was a great deal of melancholy and perhaps even a hint of bitterness in her normally placid tone.

  She still painted frantically, of course, usually at night after he went to bed, the sound of her brushes busily tinkling in the water jar and the whirr of her pencil sharpener comforting to fall asleep by, though her paintings were considered “too dark” by the lady in the poodle suit from the London office who came to visit now and then. Lighter, Amelia, lighter, the woman would say, ignoring him in the doorway with his prized jar of minnows in his hand. These are fairy stories we’re illustrating, we’re not trying to scare the kiddies half to death...

  And he’d crept in and looked after she’d gone, though he wasn’t really allowed in her studio, seen the sketchbook after sketchbook of tiny distressed girls in dark forests with amber animal eyes watching from under twisting thorns, and, yes, they made him feel sad but he wasn’t scared. It was just their wood - dark, mysterious, exciting. He thought the London lady was a bit silly and told his Gran so.

  And, that would really have been that, right here, no more story to tell, if Gran hadn’t decided that she needed to start work early that self-same Thursday night and went to her studio right after supper, supposing him to be occupied with the colouring book and crayons that she had bought him in the village that day. But it had been a balmy summer evening and the air was shimmering with the lights of fireflies, and he’d suddenly had the idea of catching one and keeping it in a jar in his room beside his fish, so that it would be like a little magic nightlight to keep him safe throughout the dark hours when the old house creaked like burglar’s footsteps and the trees outside rapped teasingly at his window pane in the playful midnight breeze.

  And he’d leaped frenziedly in the still air like a moon-intoxicated hare, fixed in his determination to entrap one of the flying fairy shapes for himself, the night sky an iridescent indigo swirl as he leaped this way and that, swiping at the ephemeral dots of light to no avail until - suddenly - the chunky green glass of his jam jar netted a slippery airborne silverfish and he slammed the lid on tightly, carrying his prize quickly off to his room as he heard Gran’s voice telling him that it was time for bed.

  And, as he lay there in the dark, heart thudding with a not-previously-experienced excitement that seemed to come from his groin and throb right through his entire body, he could see her like a luminous minnow in the little glass world he had imprisoned her in, a tiny glowing naked girl who bobbed this way and then that within the green-glass globe, hurling herself against the smooth walls of her prison as her tiny voice, sweeter than birdsong - but twice as sad - begged him for her freedom.

  And she was still there when he woke the next morning, convinced that it had all been a dream, but she had already lost her sparkle and sat slumped at the bottom of the jar like a rain-soaked butterfly, quietly crying big salt tears, and he hastily punched air holes in the lid and picked some berries for her to eat, guiltily checking that she was secure before he climbed into Gran’s old Austin and they drove off for their monthly visit to town and lunch in the faded Co-operative tea room.

  Cat got your tongue? You’ve hardly said a word all day, Gran asked on the drive back when the darkling trees were whispering about him and all the woodland foxes following in the car’s wake, ready to point him out to their young as The Boy Who Stole The Fairy, and he was fully resolved to dash straight into his room and let her go free as soon as they got home. But, when he threw open his bedroom door and reached for the jar, he found that the fairy’s bitter tears had already filled the stubby bottle and drowned her, and she floated in the translucent brine like a cold dead fish, her pearlescent skin turned grey and her fire completely doused in the watery prison he had built for her in the dark and secret catacombs of his own magic kingdom.

  So he went home early that summer, too ashamed to tell Gran what he had done and stealthily burying the tiny body in the rose bed that night, hoping that those blood-red thorny blooms would guard her spirit and keep her safe, and he had never come back to that little house in the woods again before today, two divorces behind him and his sleek blue Jaguar incongruous beside the rusted hulk of Gran’s old car, long since abandoned when the arthritis had seized her gentle hands and slowly imprisoned her in her isolated asbestos cottage like some aged Sleeping Beauty fenced in by the jagged thorns of her own traitorous limbs.

  He’d made sure that she had been provided for, of course, and, hell, he’d even offered to buy her a new house, but she had said that she was happy where she was, and they’d told him today that she’d left everything she owned to him, though he doubted that the dilapidated cottage would be worth anything and would probably have to be demolished. And, wasn’t it funny how small it all seemed now that he was large, the forest scrappy and without form, the lake nothing more than a muddy puddle that even the frogs had forsaken.

  You must be Amelia’s grandson, the voice said as he stood looking out over the somehow desolate landscape that Gran had so loved. A voice sweeter than birdsong and with an ethereal quality that made him think of holidays in the Aegean and flying Icarus-like into a Grecian blue sky. And he turned and saw her emerging form the rose-tree bed, her golden hair like a flame against the setting sun, her long white limbs like some forest faun, and he was lost. And only the day before the hard-nosed Peters that his colleagues knew would have scoffed and told you that there was no such thing as love at first sight and yet he knew, even then, that he was smitten and would not - could not - rest until he had made her his own. Though she resisted his advances valiantly and made him court her like an old fashioned Troubadour for more than a year before she finally surrendered and took him to her bed, making love amongst the myriads of scattered rose petals which seemed to have come out of nowhere. Reluctantly agreeing to an early wedding and honeymoon in Goa as she lay naked in his arms, her alabaster skin gl
eaming like incandescent wax in the moonlight, listening to his happy heart pounding safely beneath the metallic ribcage of his chest.

  And he knew who she was and should have read in her eyes that there was to be no absolution for him, though he whisked her quickly away across the sea; but yet, when he walked into their hotel room to the sound of the balmy Indian Ocean caressing the golden sands outside and found the note on old sketchbook paper and the dried rose petals that fell so softly from the envelope, he sat down on the floor and wept. Wept an ocean of salt tears for a lost youth and that drowned light that he had twice so cruelly tried to capture.

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