As soon as he told her, she blinked her damp eyes and said hoarsely, “I know.”
They made love once again. They made lingering love in their bed on the second floor of the old Klamath. Sam caressed Tyler as he’d never caressed anyone in his life. He was certain of that. He kissed her as if the world centered on that kiss. He filled her with his semen until there was no semen left. He loved her so much his heart ached.
Tyler felt it. She felt every scintillating emotion. She felt. . . loved.
Banks of snow from the blizzard had been shoveled away from the railroad tracks, piled into little white hills. The air wasn’t as crisp that morning. The sun was bright in a sky the color of Sam’s eyes. Tyler looked at her man and saw tears in those eyes, which caused her throat to tighten once again. She tried her best to keep from crying.
Sam put his hands on her shoulders and blinked his tears away. She could see his bottom lip quivering as he struggled to speak. She kissed his lips. As soon as she pulled away, he said, “I love you.”
She nodded, her eyes blurred now.
“I love you so much, babe,” he said in a voice filled with emotion.
She told him she loved him too. Her throat was so tight she could barely speak.
Sam took in a deep breath and said, “I don’t know why I’m crying. I’ll be back.”
“I know.” She barely got it out.
Sam kissed her. She kissed him back like it was the last kiss of her life.
The train whistle blew again reminding them it was time. They kissed once more and Sam slowly pulled away. The train began moving. Sam stepped up on the platform and brushed his hand across the scarab pin on the lapel of his overcoat.
Tyler mouthed the words, “I love you.”
He mouthed them back.
Smiling at his love, he caught sight of the station sign over her head and repeated what he’d told her a few minutes earlier. “I still don’t understand why my name’s up there.”
Tyler wiped her tears away and said, “I love you. Oh, how I love you.”
She watched until Sam’s image blended against the train and all she could make out in the distance was the blueness of his overcoat. She continued to watch until the train was a speck on the horizon and long after it was gone.
Sam watched the Grayville station shrink behind. The frigid air washed over him, chilling him deeply, tearing against the heartache pounding in his chest. When the station and his hometown were gone over the horizon, Sam stepped back into the train. He made it just inside the door before a piercing jolt of white-hot pain jammed his chest, took away his breath, and doubled him over. Faintly, as he sank to the floor, he felt a familiar agony, a long excruciating familiar agony.
Turning slowly, Tyler looked at the station sign and said the words aloud, “Sam Hyde Station.” She had to sit for a moment, on the bench. She buried her face in her hands and let it out, let it all out.
In the living room of her small red brick home on the south side of Grayville, Tyler Sproul sat cross-legged in front of her fireplace. Wearing only a nightshirt, she had pulled the shirt down over her knees to fend off the chill in the air. Next to her left knee was a glass of white wine. In front of her were the memories of a lifetime. She opened her high school yearbook and found her own picture first, a young face that seemed a little heavy. Smiling in her graduation picture, Tyler’s hair was long and curled. She’d worn a black-and-white-striped sweater over a light blue turtleneck pullover.
She turned back the pages until she found him. There, between a boy named Hudson and a girl named Indihar was Samuel Dennis Hyde. His hair was styled in a Beatles haircut, a slight smile on his lean face. He was wearing a blue button-collar shirt. Beneath his name was listed: “Senior Most Likely to Win an Olympic Medal.” Tyler read the credits below: “State Swimming Champion 100 Meter Freestyle and 400 Meter Freestyle; District Champion in 9 events; Letters in Swimming (4 years); Key Club; Young Democrats Club.”
Thumbing through the pages she found the only other photos of Sam, both taken at swim meets. In one, he wore his two gold medals from his state championships. He had the same slight smile on his face. The other had Sam diving at the beginning of a race. He wore a striped bathing suit.
Closing the yearbook, Tyler opened a tan leather scrapbook. She moved the fingers of her left hand across the news articles as she read each again. Delicately, she turned the pages and continued reading each and every article in which Sam Hyde was mentioned in The Grayville Gazette. She read about each of his triumphs and stared at more pictures of Sam, grainy black-and-white photos yellowed with age.
She stopped and studied one particular picture. It was the only photo in which both of them appeared. In it, Sam was receiving a district champion medal. Off to his right and slightly behind was Tyler’s beaming face. She was in her cheerleader outfit, a pom-pom in her hand.
She turned the page and felt her breath slip away slowly, as it always did when she read the article: “Olympic Hopeful Drowns in Little Blue.” She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she finished the article and let out a deep sobbing sigh. She put her hand over her mouth and took in a deep breath. She fought back the tears and turned the page.
Sam’s graduation picture was used in his obituary.
She turned the page to a later article, which featured the same photograph. Beneath it was a line Tyler had underlined years ago. “Originally thought to have drowned, a medical exam revealed Mr. Hyde succumbed to a congenital heart defect.”
Tyler shut her eyes to keep in the tears. Her mind continued working, flashing memories of a funeral in the rain, of touching his coffin before it sank into the earth, of that first heart-wrenching phone call the following Christmas Eve from a voice she’d known, a voice she’d cherished. She remembered crying and not believing, then dressing up and going to the Klamath anyway. She remembered Sam’s smiling face and all the Christmases after.
She opened her eyes and turned the last page. She didn’t bother reading the last article, the one about how the train station was named for Sam Hyde. She closed the book and reached for her wine.
Her hand was shaking so she was barely able to get the glass to her lips. She couldn’t drink, and had trouble putting it down without spilling it. Closing her eyes once again, she took in another deep breath and tried to fight the sadness. But it was no use. She thought of all the lonesome nights ahead until he would call again. The tears came. She caught her breath and, for a moment, tried to think of what Sam would look like at thirty-six.
Four on the Floor
Alison Tyler
We weren’t very nice about it. That was the surprising part. I expected the cliché of scented oils and gilded candlelight and slippery limbs entwined. But how we acted afterwards was unforeseen. Alone together, reliving the night, Sam and I were truly cruel. Here I was, operating under a false impression for so many years: you see, I always thought I was a nice girl.
Others reminiscing over the experience might focus on the way Sheila’s gray-blue eyes lit up when I pressed my mouth to her freshly shaved pussy, or the look on her husband Richard’s craggy but handsome face as he started to slowly stroke his long, uncut cock. But not this girl. The best part of the evening for me was the laughter with Sam afterwards, giggling all the way home about the freaks we’d spent the evening with. The freaks we’d just fucked.
They were decades older than us, and richer by far, and they’d run a charming ad at the back of the Pink Section of the SF Chronicle. Filled with dizzy anticipation, we met for drinks, to check out the chemistry.
Sizing up potential fuck partners is a heady business. Nobody else in the trendy after-work bar knew that we were responding to a personal. Not the cute curly-haired bartender. Not the female executives lined up against the wall like pretty maids all in a row. The thought of what we were actually there for made me giddy with excitement, and desire showed rather brightly in my dark eyes.
The woman said I was pretty. Her husband agr
eed with an anxious nod. All evening long, they looked at me rather than Sam, and I knew why. Sam is tough. He has short, razor-cut hair and a gingery goatee. If you met him in a back alley, you’d offer him your wallet in a heartbeat. You’d beg him to take it, the way I beg him to take things from me every night.
The couple didn’t understand Sam. So they talked to me instead.
“So pretty,” the woman repeated. “Like Snow White.”
I grinned and drank my Cosmo, then licked my cherry-glossed lips in the sexiest manner I could manage, leaving the tip of my tongue in the corner of my mouth for a second too long. Iridescent sparkles lit up my long dark hair. Multicolored body glitter decorated my pale skin. I wore serpentine black leather pants and a white baby-T with the word SINNER screaming across the chest in deep scarlet. There was an unspoken emphasis on how young I was in comparison to the woman. She was holding firm in her mid-forties, while I was just barely getting used to being in my early twenties. Her entire attitude was both calculating and clearly at ease, obvious in the way she held court in our booth, in the way she ordered from the waiter without even looking up.
“Two Kettle-One Martinis, another Cosmo, another Pilsner.”
I was her opposite, bouncy and ready, a playful puppy tugging a leash. More than that, I was bold from how much they wanted us, and we from how much I wanted Sam. When he put one firm hand on my thigh under the table, I nearly swooned against him. We’d be ripping our clothes off each other in hours.
After drinking away the evening, we made a real date with the rich couple for the following weekend, a date at their place, where they promised to show us their sunken hot tub, wrap-around deck, and panoramic view of the city. In cultured voices, they bragged to us about the gold records from his music-producing days and her collection of antique Viennese perfume bottles accumulated with the assistance of Ebay. But though I listened politely, I didn’t care about their money or what it could buy. All I wanted was all Sam wanted, which was simple: four on the floor.
We had done the act already, nearly a year before, with a lower class duo Sam found for us on the internet. The woman was thirty-eight, the man twenty-six. They’d been together for two years and had wanted to sample another couple as a way of enhancing their already wild sex life. After dinner at a local pizzeria and two bottles of cheap red wine, Pamela and I retreated to the ladies’ room to show each other our tattoos. Hers was a dazzling fuchsia strawberry poised right below her bikini line. When she lifted her white dress. I saw that not only was she pantyless, but that she’d been very recently spanked. She blushed becomingly as I admired her glowing red cheeks, where lines from Andy’s belt still glowed in stark relief against her coppery skin.
“He gave me what-for in the parking lot,” she confessed. “Told me that he wanted me to behave during dinner.”
“What would he think of this?” I asked, stroking her still-warm ass with the open palm of my hand.
“I think he’d approve.” She grinned.
I gave her a light slap on her tender skin, and she turned around and caught me in a quick embrace, lifting my dress slowly so that she could see my own ink.
Teasingly, I turned to show her the cherries on my lower back, then pulled down my bikini to reveal the blue rose riding on my hip. She traced my designs with the tips of her fingers, and I felt as if I were falling. Her touch was so light, so gentle, and in moments we started French-kissing, right there in the women’s room at Formico’s. I could imagine what the men were doing: speaking macho to one another, sports and the recent war, while growing harder and harder as they waited for us to return to the red-and-white checked table.
Sam and I followed the duo to their Redwood City apartment and into their tiny living room, overshadowed by a huge-screen TV and a brown faux-leather sofa. Pamela had her tongue in my asshole before my navy blue sleeveless dress was all the way off, and my mouth was on Andy’s mammoth cock before he could kick off his battered black motorcycle boots.
The TV stayed on the whole time we were there. Muted, but on. We had crazy sex right on the caramel-colored shag rug in front of it, while heavy metal bands played for us in silence. It was like doing it on stage with Guns & Roses. Surreal, but not a turn-off.
I remember a lot of wetness – her mouth, his mouth, her pussy. I remember Sam leaning against the wood-paneled wall at one point in the evening and watching, just watching the three of us entwined, the TV-glow flickering over us, my slim body stretched out between our new lovers. I felt beloved as their fingers stroked me, as they took turns tasting me, splitting my legs as wide as possible and getting in between. I held my arms over my head and Sam bent down and gripped my wrists tight while Pamela licked at me like a pussycat at a saucer of milk.
Scenes flowed through the night, lubricated by our red-wine daze, and we moved easily from one position to another. Pamela bent on her knees at Sam’s feet and brought her mouth to his cock. I worked Andy, bobbing up and down, and after he came for the first time, I moved over to Pamela’s side so we could take turns drinking from Sam. I was reeling with the wonder of it. The illusion that anything was possible. Any position, any desire.
“You like that?” Andy asked when I returned to his side, pointing to Pamela as she sucked off my husband. “You like watching?”
I nodded.
“What else do you like?”
“I like that you spanked her,” I confessed in a soft voice.
“Ah,” he smiled. “So you’re a bad girl, too.”
My blush told him all he needed to know; soon I was upended over his sturdy lap, and the erotic clapping sounds of a bare-ass spanking rang through the room. Andy punished me to perfection, not letting up when I started to cry and squirm, making me earn the pleasure that flooded through me. Sam filled Pamela’s mouth while watching another man tan my hide.
Andy was a true sadist, which I could appreciate. He had a pair of shiny orange-handled pliers which he used like a magician on his girlfriend’s teacup tits. She didn’t cry or scream – she moaned. He twisted the pliers harder, and her green eyes took on a vibrant glow, as if she’d found some deep hidden secret within herself, and that secret gave her power. Andy told us how he liked to spank her with his hand or belt or paddle. Sometimes he used a wooden ruler. Sometimes he used whatever was nearby.
He told us detailed stories of how he fucked her up the ass, how he made her bend over and part her cheeks for him, holding herself open as wide as possible and begging him for it. He liked to lube her up good, and then pour a handful of K-Y into his fist and pump his cock once or twice before taking her. The size of his cock in her backdoor would often make her cry, but it was a good sort of cry, he explained. Pain and pleasure were entwined in everything they did. Andy’s stories made me more excited, and we kept up our games all night long, screwing on stage with the long-haired boys in the bands.
Sam and I had fun with that couple, and we didn’t laugh afterwards. We fucked. Not like bunnies, which are cute and soft and sweet. We fucked like us. Hard and raw and all the time. Sam’s large hand slapped down on my ass, connecting over and over as he relived the night. “You little cock slut,” he said, his voice gravelly and low. “Your mouth was all hungry for him. You couldn’t get enough.” I would be red and sore after our sessions, and I relished every mark, every pale plum-colored bruise, every memory. The night was fuel for a year’s worth of fantasies.
We got precisely what we wanted. We never saw them again. The woman called and called after our one-night stand. She emailed that she was in love with me, that she was desperate to see me. But Sam and I didn’t want love. We wanted something much less involved but much more momentarily intense: four on the floor.
With Sheila and Richard, we got a great deal more than we bargained for. A gourmet dinner – delivered by a local party service – that dragged on for hours. A tour of their two-story house and their walk-in closets. Close-up views of their his-and-hers Armanis.
These appearance-obsessed people were
the ones we were about to have sex with. I had a difficult time picturing it. Yes, she was attractive, although “cool” was a better word. Yes, I liked how distinguished he looked in his open-necked crisp white shirt and pressed khakis with the ironed crease down the center. He was so different from Sam with his faded Levis and dangling silver wallet chain. But they were trying to win us over, and somehow that made me feel hard and bristly inside.
Didn’t stop us from getting busy, though and peeling our clothes off. Richard didn’t fuck me. He sat nearby and stroked my sleek dark hair out of my eyes and said he wanted to watch. Sheila had on a black velvet catsuit, and she stripped it off in one practiced move and was naked, her platinum hair rippling over her shoulders, her body gleaming chestnut in the candlelight. She stood for a moment, holding the pose, waiting for applause or flashbulbs.
Sam took his cue from Richard, backing away, watching while Sheila courted me. Sheila had obviously done this before. She strode to my side and helped to undress me. She cooed admiringly as she undid my bra and pulled it free, as she slid my dove-gray satin panties down my thighs. Her fingers inspected me all over, as if she was checking to see that a purchase she’d made was acceptable.
She kissed wetly into the hollow of my neck and caressed my breasts with her long, delicate fingers, tweaking my rosy nipples just so to make them erect. Then she spread me out on the luxurious multi-colored living room rug and started to kiss along the basin of my belly. I had a second to wonder why it is that menages never take place in beds before I sighed and arched my back, parted my legs for her, closed my eyes. She turned her body, lowered herself on me, let me taste her.
Everything about her body felt cool, like polished foil. Her skin. Her lips. Her tangy juices when they flooded out to meet my tongue. We sixty-nined for the men, and for a moment I was won over. I was fine, alert and happy. With my mouth on the older woman’s pussy and my hands stroking her perfect silky body, I lost myself in momentary bliss. She was exotically perfumed, a scent I didn’t recognize but knew must have been imported from Europe. She even tasted expensive. But sex levels out any playing field. I might only have been able to afford CoverGirl dime-store cosmetics rather than Neiman-Marcus special blends, but I could find her swollen clit, and that’s all that mattered. I teased it out from between her perfectly shaved pussy lips. I sucked hard, and then used my tongue to trace a ring around the rosy.
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