by Cara Bruce
Of course it had to occur to me, lost that way, that his hair would make perfect pony reins: head thrown back and back arched, rising over him and fucking his ass. For that matter, my partner Robert could fuck him while I watched.
I carefully skirt the notion of using Hair Girl’s hair like reins, because I think hair girls and boys, captive audiences as they are, should be the ones to make the first move. So I keep at bay—barely—a cascade of images that might otherwise sweep through me when she pulls my head back again by my hair.
I finally open my eyes. Oh, what a cute haircut, a sleek sweep over my eye, a completely different look than I walked in with. I’m in a rather different mood now, too. My dad, who used to be a barber, would call this “pixie-ish.” Are there still pixies? Am I one, even sometimes?
At home Robert says, “Oh, I always want to fuck you when your hair is all Breck Girl.”
The Devil Is a Squirrel
Astrid Fox
The devil’s not so bad in the sack, you know.
She’s not. Not if she tries, anyway. She can get a little lazy, what with her hot ’n’ horny reputation and all. But let’s face it, things tend to go her way: the filthiest and most satisfying curses, the most delectable transgressions, the moistest chocolate cake—and she’s got all the best songs.
I met the devil last August in a grimy, Hell’s Kitchen section of East London—my neighborhood, actually. It being London, and also being the wettest English year on record since 1776, it was raining.
I was in a bad mood last August. I had had it with polyfidelity, with monogamy, and particularly with celibacy. As a result of the disastrous consequences of the two former conditions, I had been practicing the latter for a good few years. Six years, six months, and six days, to be precise. By choice, obviously. Obviously, by choice. I had made a conscious decision to value my sexual self and change my non-sexual-self-respecting life by making different conclusions the next time around. So obviously, it was by choice.
It always is, right? Right? So stop snickering. I hadn’t been laid since February 9th, 1994. Last summer, the middle of postmillennial August should have been a swelteringly hot, steamy, sunny day, yet I was drenched in the middle of Hackney. I was miserably soaked. Miserably soaked and shag-less is a terrible condition to be in. I had gotten way past any concept of blue balls, or blue labia, many years before.
I was having a dry spell in the middle of England’s wettest spell ever. There was irony in there somewhere, but by that point I was far too bitter to care.
I was taking a shortcut home, my jacket pulled up over my head, since I had lost my umbrella on the underground on the way in to work. I was mumbling something about the cursed, bloody weather and cursed, bloody fellow pedestrians who insisted on walking where I wanted to walk and cursed, bloody cars splashing through cursed, bloody puddles; mumbling how the devil could take them all, because I’d had it. I’d absolutely had it: with life, with London, with my perpetual paucity of shags, and I’d be damned if I was going to spend yet another year with a big fat zero on the action front.
I dodged the traffic at last and cut through an alley, trying to remember, with some irritation, whether I had anything in the freezer to pop into the microwave for dinner.
And that’s when someone hissed at me from the deepest corner of the alley.
“Psst! Come in here!”
Without my umbrella, rain was dripping down my neck. The alley had the semblance of shelter, thanks to a green plastic awning overhead.
“Just a little closer.”
I could barely see. I took a moment to wipe the rain out of my eyes and began to make her out more clearly. She appeared to be unarmed. She also looked out of place in the gritty dinge of a trash-covered alley. I say “she” casually, as if the devil was any other female. Let me tell you, she wasn’t. Long, sleek dark hair. It looked liquid: like molasses, like treacle, like honey poisoned with ink. She had a knock-out body, too—even asexual little ol’ me could see that. Curve to curve to curve. Like a glam-o-rama starlet: really stacked. Said curves were swathed in what looked to be a strapless taffeta frock, circa 1959. It was blue as a prom queen’s eyes, but in this dress the dark-eyed woman put all predictable prom queens to shame. Dark hair, sinful eyes, and a to-die-for body in a killer dress. Murder by numbers. (But, see, I hadn’t clocked onto the fact that she was the devil yet, you know?)
She smiled at me.
Even then, not knowing what she was, I wanted her to have some effect on me. I wanted her to make my pussy wet and my clit hard, but she didn’t. Female impotence is a very weird thing.
“Come a little closer,” she requested.
Listen, I didn’t want to get stabbed. I stayed where I was.
“Suit yourself.” She lit a cigarette. She stared at me. “Well?”
“What do you mean, ‘well’?”
“Hey, lady, you’re the one who called me up. Now why don’t you cut the crap so we can get started?”
“Excuse me?” I was staring with horrified fascination at her as she took exactly three steps toward me. Her hips swayed provocatively. Her cleavage shifted appreciably. Just watching her made my mouth dry, the way you feel when you’re watching an especially good theatrical performance. But it didn’t make me wet. In fact, it made me annoyed, because when she sashayed up to me and stuck her tits in my face, she blew a purposeful mist of cigarette smoke straight into my eyes.
Her eyes were narrow and glittering. There was a flush to her sallow skin, as if she were particularly excited about something.
I thought about taking a step back. There was only one advantage to staying here in the alley, and that was the fact that it was shielded in part from the rain. The disadvantage, of course, was a possibly imminent mugging.
She didn’t move away. “I don’t have a lot of spare time, sister. What’s it going to be?” She pushed her breasts against my own—quite brazenly, I have to say.
I knew it was a proposition, but I hadn’t had one in so long—well, at least not one from anyone who wasn’t four sheets to the wind—that I have to tell you, I was a little shocked.
I asked myself what she saw in me: cranky-looking woman of about 40, short hair, glasses, fairly butch (but looked like I could swing for the home team, too, in a rough-and-rugged kind of way). I didn’t look straight, gay, or bi. I was a female eunuch. More than anything else, I looked grumpy, which I was.
Maybe she was drunk, after all.
“Hey!” She snapped her fingers near my ear, something that always pisses me off. “I mean it. Make your choice: chicks, dicks, combinations thereof, or the red-hot mama herself, yours truly, au naturel.”
I tried to regain some composure, and cleared my throat. “And who might ‘yours truly’ be?”
At last she took a step back, and then burst out laughing. “You’re great!” she said, not very nicely. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Thanks for the invitation, but I’m just going to make my way home, put my frozen dinner in my microwave, settle down, and….”
“Shut up, yeah? Take a look at me. Come on, take a good look.” She stood back and did a twirl before posing, rather sarcastically, with her hand on her hip.
I sighed. And then reckoned that the sooner I humored her, the sooner I’d be on my way. So I took a good look this time.
OK, to be fair, she had a hell of an aura, what with that snug dress and her dark hair tossed back as if she was Jessica-fucking-Rabbit. It was a sinister aura. In fact, you could say she glowed with malice and ill intent. If I had been the susceptible type, I might even have called it allure. Her smirk, her blood-dark nail polish, her lush wicked body—it was as if the air around her was sizzling and cackling. I thought of what she said about me “calling her up.” I thought back to my cavalier cursing at the London weather and my current nun-like state—the six years, six months, and six days since last I shagged. I wasn’t a specialist in the proper cataloging of medieval court recor
ds and witch trials for nothing. I got it.
I wasn’t particularly shocked. Just as my senses were dulled to sensual pleasure, I was also impervious to full-scale, supernatural shock. After so long without any sort of stimulation, carnal or otherwise, I was kind of floating along in a celibately grumpy haze. Nothing really got to me anymore. Not even this.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. “I’m sure you’re perfectly delightful, but historically I think there’s a downside to playing with fire, if I remember correctly. Loss of one’s eternal soul and all that?” My voice trailed off. I was staring at her cleavage, her tits being thrust up by some invisible but terribly effective support system. There was a sheen to her skin. I didn’t think it was rain, but just the faintest layer of perspiration. I wondered how hot her skin was on this cold rainy day. I watched a tiny drop of sweat trickle down between her breasts. For the first time in many years, I felt a dim jolt of desire, a little twinge between my legs.
I cleared my throat hurriedly.
“Anyway,” I continued awkwardly, “I have to get home.”
I found that I was still staring at her tits.
She moved in on me so that she was within a couple of inches, once again. Let me just say this: She was very quick to take advantage of any weakness.
“If you don’t mind my saying so,” she said in an irritatingly sultry voice, “despite the weather, you look a little dry.”
“Excuse me?”
“A little dried up. Like a prune. Am I right? OK, you’re no spinster, but let’s just say it’s fairly evident you haven’t had it for a while.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A good long while, I’d say, actually. You’re aching for it, aren’t you? I bet it feels a lot longer than six and a half years.” She abruptly changed the subject. “What’s your line of work?”
“I’m a librarian.”
“A librarian? Please. No surprises there.”
“You should talk—look at the color you’re wearing. Talk about predictable. How about a little subtlety?”
“How about a little appreciation?”
In a suddenly crude motion, she hiked up her hem and stuck her fingers between her legs. I couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, but it was such a vulgar act that a kick of desire jumpstarted in my cunt. The feeling tightened and got worse. She withdrew her left hand with an audibly slurpy sound and raised her fingers to her mouth, smelling them and then slowly licking the juices off them, like the cheapest tart in town.
Her more discreet machinations hadn’t worked, but this obscene little display had my clit buzzing as if her tongue was already working at it. It was downright embarrassing. She’d worked out exactly what would get me going, and then did it. I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be played like a fucking piano. But now I was horny. Her dark, crimson, full lips made me wonder what her pussy lips looked like; I found myself straining my neck to get a look at the shape of her ass with its plump, high cheeks. Jesus, I felt as if I was melting in her heat already. I almost didn’t care.
I closed my eyes for a second, trembling, trying to get a grip on my sanity. It was highly unlikely that I was standing in an alley being propositioned by the devil herself. Maybe lack of nooky had finally driven me round the bend. Maybe one of those cars that had been skidding around on the wet pavement had crashed into me and killed me, and now I was in—heaven? hell? who knew?! I screwed my eyes tightly shut, trying desperately to think. I’d open them, and everything would be fine. I’d open them and I’d be alone in the alley, and then I’d go back to my safe, celibate life.
“Maybe girls aren’t your thing? I’m flexible, you know.” Her voice was very low and very sultry. I snapped my eyes open.
The bitch was really fucking with my head now. It was becoming harder and harder to convince myself I was sane. Because Temptress No. 1 had disappeared and Tempter No. 2 was in fine form. I don’t fuck men all that often—well, up to six and a half years ago I didn’t fuck men all that often—but in the good old days I was always open to suggestions.
A certain type of tall, academic, smooth-faced, shy, cerebral boy could always make me go weak at the knees. One with disconcertingly sleazy eyes behind his specs that would belie his mild-mannered appearance. Eyes that made me wonder what perverse thoughts he entertained during the long hours spent studying in the university library. A few of those boys had passed through my own doors of knowledge in the past.
The young man smiling down at me in the alley had exactly that look.
He was smiling, just as she had been, but he didn’t have her smirk—his lips were curving politely; unlike her, he seemed passive, waiting for my move. He reminded me just a tad of my first boyfriend, Owen, from when I was fifteen. The biggest difference being that I had known Owen in the seventies and Tempter No. 2 was obviously from our present decade. He had long blond hair tied back in a ponytail and was wearing a scuzzy black heavy-metal T-shirt—reading “Queens of the Paleolithic” (or something like that; I don’t keep up much with modern music)—and a pair of loose blue corduroy pants. Blue was a constant theme.
He was observing me carefully, respectfully. He still reminded me of Owen, and suddenly I had a flashback—Owen and me making out until I was as wet as the weather today. My crotch soaked through my tight faded jeans, his hand tensed on a nipple beneath my halter top, his teenage hard-on thick and rock hard beneath his flaring pants, the obligatory plastic comb squeezed in tight against his young ass.
I could nearly smell Owen now, could remember the taste of his mouth and the way his kisses made my heart beat fast. The way I would stroke him until he groaned and came in my fist. The way his hand would glisten, sticky from finger-fucking me in the back seat of my parents’ car. Then how we’d kiss again, after everything sweet had happened. Everything was always easy, smooth and sexy, smooth as butter, smooth as cream, smooth as fucking itself, and we’d start all over again.
The devil’s eyes were clever and knowing. The devil was as innocent as my very first fuck. The devil knew that, deep inside my celibate, asexual skull, I could still remember things like that. I could still remember sex. And yet this devil was presenting me with an older version of Owen, maybe a university, twenty-something version, not innocent anymore but still eager, young but aware.
He’d learned a few things. There’d been a few Mrs. Robinsons around to instruct him. He was partial to older women, maybe. Maybe he even fancied grumpy old me. The devil knew damn well what he was doing. He pulled me toward him and we kissed. His tongue slid in my mouth quick and tight, tasting of cheap cigarettes and micro-brewed beer, like a college student’s tongue should taste. I clung to him. I could feel the heavy push of his cock against my abdomen. I wanted to squeeze my pussy down on him, soft, wet and hot, and just rock and rock.
No! I swung myself away from him, breathless this time. The submission wasn’t worth it: a shag for a soul. I don’t think so, buddy. No matter how cute and pretty you are, or how many times you’ll whisper Chaucer in my ear in the late mornings when you’re prone to skipping class.
“You’re a hard nut to crack,” the devil observed. This time his eyes were neither slow nor sweet. He gave me a once-over with that sleazy gaze, and I remembered all those late-twenty-something Ph.D. boys whom I observed so impassively week after week in my library.
Had I secretly wanted to fuck them all along, and just been unaware of it? Was the devil giving me the kind of man who would finger my asshole on a public bus, daring me to let on to the folks in the seats up ahead? Would he bind my wrists up and just fuck me, use me like a hole, while he selfishly pumped his cock into my soft, sticky center until he, and not I, had enough?
Would I beg him to slap me, and then watch his expression when I whimpered down on my knees? Whimpered in lust mixed with shame and a twist of pain, wondering if maybe he enjoyed the crack on my cheek a little too much?
I was doing it again. The devil was toying with me. He, she, whoever—it wasn’t going
to get me. The devil might know me inside out, but there was still free choice. My clit was as hard as Owen’s teenage cock had ever been. My cunt was wet with desire. When I closed my eyes, I saw the devil’s figure: a being with marvelous, luscious tits that were flushed with want. Fantastic tits, with stiff thick nipples of candy-red; tits that made my clit quiver just at the thought; and beneath those breasts a smooth abdomen, and beneath the abdomen a thick long cock already glittering with wetness, as if it had just been withdrawn from a sopping pussy.
The devil had it all. I had to resist.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “but no.”
The devil sounded ever so faintly amused. “There’s not a lot of options left, you know. Still, if you insist.”
Suddenly, instead of a grungy postgraduate student standing before me, there was a fluffy, bushy-tailed squirrel with bright black eyes. Its tail, I noticed, was blue. It looked like an exotic form of feather duster. Thankfully, the squirrel caused my desire to drain swiftly away. I was going to be all right.
I was going to be in control.
“I don’t know where you get your information from,” I told the small rodent, feeling pretty stupid about it, too, “but animals really aren’t my thing.”
“I know,” said the squirrel in a midrange voice—wait: said the squirrel! Now I knew things were dire—“I just wanted to illustrate an old German dialectal saying.”
“And what’s that? ‘Don’t go down trees head first’?” I asked. I was starting to feel like myself again, though lust was still resonating in little twinges throughout my body.
“ ‘The devil is a squirrel,’ yeah? That’s the saying I’m referring to. It means that odd things show up where you least expect them. I personally feel—and granted, I’m biased—that the trick is to take advantage of odd opportunities whenever you can.” The squirrel’s intonation rose on the last word, and the original dark-haired woman was standing before me, smoothing down her blue dress rather demurely.
