My skin started to buzz. Jesus, twice in one week? That was rare. I set my beer down, carefully, against the wall. It was less likely somebody would kick it over that way.
“I gotta go,” I said.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s not—I’ve just gotta go.” I began moving through the crowd. Right now I felt buzzing, tingling, a sort of pre-painful ache in muscles and joints. Soon it would be more, but I could tell I had time to get out. A stabbing cramp hit as I reached the door and I stopped with my hand on the doorpost, bent, waiting.
“Hey, you okay?” It was the silver-bracelet guy from before. “You should have some water, sit down awhile.”
“Not drunk,” I gasped. I pushed away his solicitous hand and made it out the door. The night was cool, but I was sweating. The ache grew stronger in my feet, knees, ass, back. I ran, a strange, loping gait, aided by urgency but hindered by pain and the stretch in my bones. There was an almost-forest at the edge of campus—deep enough to hide for a while, not deep enough for much hunting, if it was a hunter coming. I could get there.
I panted as I ran, sweat dripping down my neck and my back. I could feel my skin soaking in it, letting it out and marinating itself. I peeled off my hoodie and let it fall. I reached down and pulled off my shoes; my feet were all pins and needles and wanted to be free. My vision was changing, sliding, shifting. For a moment I thought I knew a wolf-time was coming and I laughed to be so suggestible. Then my tongue went heavy in my mouth and my thoughts slanted and I bent over, close to all fours but not quite touching the ground in front. I was moving faster now, faster than I could in woman-times. I was at the trees and then the pain was blinding for a minute and then I was sleek, sleek, fast, energy straight through, shooting silver out to ground and pleasure—
Pleasure of movement, pleasure of speed, pleasure of sweat on fur, heavy pleasure, feet quick and smell all over. Nothing to worry, all moving and smelling and listening and pausing. Yes hunger mouth hunger stomach hunger pit hunger. Turning turning smelling stillness eager. Other-kill yes growl gobble spin chase. Smell of not-prey, smell, too-strong, melt vanish go. Marking, smelling, moving. Not-prey still. Smelling. Knowing.
I know. I am still. Looking. Stillness. Looking at her, in her stillness. Alive, right here, surface. Fear and pleasure. Deep. Strong. She opens her fingers, at her side. I want to smell them. Step. Step. Close now. Nose raised. Nose to fingers. Strong smell, deep smell. Sweat and the brass tang of her just-starting menses. I can see her with new sharpness. Must be coyote-time. Woman-time things bleed through in coyote-time. I keep my stillness and her eyes. Then I run.
When I came to myself again I was crouched at the far edge of the forest. I sat, exhausted, in my own sweat, feeling moss and dry leaves against my knees and thighs. I stayed there for a moment, letting my breathing come down, muscles quivering under skin. Then I remembered. Had she really been there? Had I imagined? I turned around, slowly, getting to my feet. I could barely see in the early dawn. I couldn’t smell a thing, the worst part of woman-time. Humans can’t smell for shit.
I figured my clothes were back closer to the campus, maybe shredded a bit but hopefully wearable. I started walking back, slowly, touching the trees as I passed. After a long change, a full night like that one, I was always both tired and strangely rested. The sun coming up was warm and bright. I watched it coloring in all the night grays of the almost-forest.
Back at my clothes, there she was, dozing against a tree with the remnants of my Harry Potter shirt under her arm. I tried to wear mostly clothes I didn’t care about, but sometimes I felt perverse. I watched her, the pull of her party dress over her boobs and her belly, the fabric carelessly riding up her thighs. I looked at my shirt in the crook of her elbow. She opened her eyes. We watched each other.
She held my shirt out and I took it, examining the strain, the rip caused by a claw as I worked my way free. I pulled it over my head. I started to walk away.
“Your pants are over there,” she said, pointing. I saw them and moved toward them. “Wait,” she said. “Don’t get them yet.”
I stared at her. “You’re not scared,” I accused. “You oughta be.”
“I’m scared,” she said.
“You’re into this, it turns you on.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“It’s fucking scary shit,” I said. “It’s not a game. I turn into animals, all kinds of animals; did you think I was a werewolf like that stupid girl? She’s not anything; she’s just a human being who likes being trippy and weird.”
“You were a coyote.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not always a coyote.”
“Do I look like a coyote right now?”
“No.” She smiled.
I sighed. I lowered myself to a crouch. I was tired. “I’m lots of different kinds of animals,” I said. “Some of them, I don’t even think are real. Some are definitely extinct. I don’t always know, when I change, what I am, what the English name is or the human idea about it. I can’t make it stop, usually, and I don’t decide when it happens, and there’s no rule, that I can tell, except that—it happens when I’m feeling something. Not one thing in particular, just—strong things. And not even always then. I don’t know why.” She nodded. I sucked in a breath, dug my fingernails into my palms, and said it fast. “I turned into a bear when Polly broke up with me. And I scratched her. Badly. That’s really why she transferred.”
She laughed. I blinked at her. Then I laughed. I landed full on the ground, with a bump, and laughed.
“It was bad,” I insisted when I’d stopped laughing. “I mean, yeah, she was a bitch, she really was, but I attacked her. As a bear. It’s not…”
“You didn’t kill her,” she pointed out. “I mean, you might have, but you didn’t.”
“Bully for me,” I said.
“I mean it.”
“You don’t seem scared.”
“I am,” she said. She reached and put her hand on my thigh. She crawled her fingers up and brushed them over my pubic hair, this way and that, her eyes rising to mine. “I’m scared,” she said. She cupped her fingers over my vulva, and I could feel it warm and swell beneath them. “Is this okay?” She waited a moment. “It turns me on because it’s magic and because it’s yours.”
I was quiet. I felt the throb and pulse push out from my center to her hand. She took her hand away.
“I want to fuck you,” I said, looking at the grass under my fingertips and not at her. “When I see you in class, the smart things you say, you get under the skin of things. And your hair and your feet in those high heels and the clothes you wear. The curves of your ass and your boobs and your belly. And the shape of your jaw and the strength of your back. I shouldn’t fuck anybody, this thing that I am. But I want to fuck you.”
I could hear her breathing as I spoke and then she was on me like a wild thing, leaping and pressing and tumbling me back against the floor of the almost-forest. Her hand returned to my labia and my clit, drawing me up against her like a magnet. My back arched and my hips pushed forward. She bit me and scratched me with her other hand and I giggled helplessly and then grew still.
I felt stillness, circling, and a throbbing hunger, great, fierce, in the center of my body, sucking away my breath and giving it back in bursts. The noises in my throat were strange but human, for all their ferocity. I felt her middle finger dipping and playing at the opening of my cunt, teasing the puckered edge and sending a jolt straight from there to her palm against my clit. My hips surged and bobbed like a toy boat in a rough current, and I came in sudden, pulsing jolts, and then I forced myself back, down, away.
“Take off your dress,” I said hoarsely, and she looked at me and did. Her bra was purple and satiny, and her underwear was a plain cotton bikini. She undid her bra and pulled her underwear off. I was on her breasts as soon as I could see them, raisin-dark nipple sucked hard between my lips. She made a quick, deep, grunting sound, and then a
higher, floating cry. She got back her breath. “Your period’s about to start,” I told her. “I could smell it.”
She laughed softly, breathlessly, but I saw a real stab of fear in her eyes for the first time. She didn’t hide it, just looked at me as she pressed her back against a tree trunk and parted her thighs.
“I like it deep and slow,” she said.
I circled her breasts with my mouth and her cunt with my hand, taking in the shape and the soft folds that surrounded me. Different from mine, larger, more contoured. I swept my fingers over the top of her clit, felt her shudder and pressed in harder, circling and finding the opening, slick and warm. I straddled her thigh and rubbed my own cunt against her, drawing out bursts of color under my skin, all up and down. My thoughts whirled and splintered, and I let my first two fingers slide inside her, deep and slow. Her arm came around my back and gripped me, hard. We rode each other and I pressed her, deeply, inside and out, the heel of my hand and my thumb searching out her clit. I lost my balance against her leg, dropping to the side of her. I closed my eyes then opened them again to watch her face. Her mouth was opening, wider and wider, and she was almost silent, straining against my hand. She laughed, suddenly, and then choked on the end of it, and I felt her clench and rise and come, the tension in her bursting like a bubble, opening like the new leaf on a tree, fresh, green, fiercely connected.
I pulled my fingers out of her, showed her the blood at the very tips, and then put them between my lips to suck them clean. Threatening, warning, daring, accepting—I couldn’t have said. Woman-time without words. Her eyes were locked on mine, and when I ate her blood they lit like I had touched her. She groaned and pushed me back, grabbing my ass in both her hands and squeezing, lifting my hips toward her and pressing her face into my crotch, nuzzling and licking and then rising to kiss my mouth. She lingered there, long and sweet and dizzying, and her hand slid between my legs and stroked me until I came again and again, easily, without strain, fire-bursts in a show I did not have to control.
We lay on the ground afterward, separate and quiet, our fingers touching. At last I stood up and began looking for my pants. We got dressed, still silent. She picked a few leaves out of her hair, steadied herself against a tree trunk, and looked at me again. Her eyes asked questions. I wanted to answer them. I felt a change at a distance, hovering, not yet here, something with wings.
“Will you come back with me?” I asked. “I want to show you my room.”
She took my hand and squeezed ’til I could feel the bones beneath.
“Yes,” she answered. “Yes.”
KITTY AND THE CAT
Amelia Thornton
It was near midnight when I got there, and I knew she could see me when I walked in. And by “walked in,” I mean sashayed in, hips swinging, head high, every curve perfectly contained and displayed and inviting the gaze of every person in that room. I knew she could see me, and I knew she would want it. She just didn’t know what it was yet.
Lynn had told me about her, said she’d just moved into the flat below, seemed ever so sweet and unassuming and just generally nice. I like nice girls. Especially when I can make them be so not-nice when I try. Of course it only seemed neighborly that Lynn would invite her to the party, and of course she had warned me to “be good,” but good is not something I am particularly capable of, especially when I am presented with a specimen so utterly, unquestionably adorable. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her, staring, trying hard to compose herself and continue her small talk, but not quite able to. She couldn’t help it. Girls like her never can.
Of course she would submit; there was no question about that. She would be on her knees, her tongue caressing the slick shine of my heels, her worshipful eyes looking up at me, begging me to fuck her ass and cane her thighs and do whatever I wanted with her, whatever that was. She would tell me how much she needed it, tell me she was mine, tell me her whole body and being belonged to me entirely. But that’s never the best bit. The best bit is always the part when they just don’t know they’re submissive yet, when they haven’t realized the true equality of inequality and the beautiful release of giving themselves over. This chase, this game, this revealing of what I always know and they never do, this is the part that makes the blood pump through my veins. And I intended to savor every tiny, minuscule moment of it.
Across the room, I could see Lynn scowling at me, annoyed I had ignored her primly conservative costume advice and turned up in my own creation. I just smiled good-naturedly and gave her a little wave, mentally altering her entire pirate wench outfit to be at least six inches shorter and possibly two sizes tighter. Bless her. She didn’t really think I was going to miss an opportunity like this, did she?
The sheer beauty of costume parties is that they make it utterly acceptable, if not mandatory, to dress like a complete slut, and though sluttery is usually what I pride my girls on, not myself, I felt it rude not to get in the spirit of things. After much deliberation, I had decided on Catwoman, since I already owned the outfit, and I knew it was just what I needed to make Cute Little Neighbor aware of what I intended for her. As a nod to the flimsy excuse for head-to-toe perversion my character allowed, I even had a matching black cat-eye mask, but the beauty of the outfit was in the suit. Every curve of my body was coated in a thick sheen of polished black latex, clinging to me like a second skin, each limb a smooth length of blackness; my feet were encased in tightly laced six-inch-high boots. My ivory-white breasts were crushed into an unbearable cleavage, revealed by the temptingly lowered zipper bisecting my entire torso, undone just enough to display what I wanted, but also to hint at what was beneath. She would certainly want what was beneath, I knew that much.
I was pondering how long to leave it before going to fetch her, and how forward to be when I did, when I heard a small, timid voice at my side.
“Hello.”
I turned, blinking in surprise to see her standing there already. So the prey thinks she can be the predator, hmm? Her eyes were round and expressive, a deep brown framed by long lashes, and there was a sprinkling of freckles across her rounded nose. Her neat brown bob was topped with a pair of cat ears looking suspiciously like bachelorette party accessories, and the rest of the outfit was a plain black leotard, shiny black tights and a homemade cat tail made from a wire hanger wrapped in furry fabric. Around her neck was a pastel-pink kitty collar, trimmed with diamanté, with a little metal tag in the shape of a heart. I do like an attention to detail. The paws were what got me though: safety-pinned with ribbon to each of her leotard sleeves hung two furry black mitts, stitched with pretty, pink satin paw prints, looking alluringly as if they would render the hands quite useless if put on properly. Oh, my poor, helpless, pretty little kitty…
“Hello,” I replied, half smiling in amusement at how perfectly innocent she looked like that, half at how depraved I knew she would become. “What’s your name?”
She looked a little awkward, as if taken off balance by my simplest of questions, or perhaps more by the tone of an adult talking to a small but adorable child, instead of one adult talking to another.
“Susie.”
“Well, Susie, it’s very nice to meet you. You’ve just moved in downstairs, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, a couple of weeks ago. It seems lovely here; everyone’s really friendly and everything, not like where I used to live; my neighbors were just a nightmare, and Lynn’s ever so sweet to invite me to her party, and…”
“Yes, she is,” I cut in smoothly, almost able to taste the nervousness of her babbling. “I would quite like you to go and get me a drink, Susie. Vodka and soda, with fresh lime. Half-full with ice. Will you go and do that for me?”
Her eyes widened as if she was not quite sure if I really had just interrupted her and told her what to do. Well, asked her, really. Telling would come later.
“Oh…um, of course. Certainly. I’ll be right back.”
“Good girl,” I said with a smile, watching her cheeks fl
ush as she scurried away, her little coat-hanger tail swaying from side to side. Oh, she was just too, too perfect. I had tried in the past to take the small-talk route, exchange pleasantries, discuss preferences. It usually worked out all right in the end, but it was just so terribly, tediously dull. It was much more fun to start off by knocking them sideways and see what happened, and besides, I’d never been wrong yet. I always know when a nice girl wants to be bad for me.
A few moments later, she returned, my drink in one hand and hers in the other, an expectant smile on her face.
“Thank you,” I said as I took it, making sure to look straight into her big brown eyes in a way I knew would make her squirm. She looked so beautiful like that. “I do like your costume, Susie. Did you make it yourself?”
“Yes.” She looked a little embarrassed at having made her own costume, not realizing that was the very thing that made me want her even more, that innocence that just couldn’t be bought.
“It’s very nice. Why haven’t you got your paws on though?” I inquired, knowing full well why not.
“Well, they’re just a bit tricky to do things with you see. Everyone was getting a bit fed up with me getting black fluff in the Doritos, so I just took them off!” She grinned shyly, tugging at the fuzzy paws. “They were more for effect than for wearing, really.”
“Well, a real kitten wouldn’t have the choice to take her paws off, would she?” I remarked, admiring the way this made her shift her weight from one foot to the other. “She wouldn’t be drinking from a glass, but from a little saucer on the floor, and curling up at her mistress’s feet like a good little kitty, having her ears stroked and her neck tickled. That is, if you were good. I think perhaps you should put them on, don’t you?”
Best Lesbian Erotica 2013 Page 5
