“You’re not a vampire, are you?” I felt stupid the minute I said it.
Her soft chuckle went straight to my cock. “I’d be a terrible vampire, Mr. Danson. I’m a vegetarian.” She ran a hand over my damp brow and pushed my hair back. “I’m certain you’re not a vampire, slaving away in the hot sun.” She handed me a glass of weak lemonade and I drank it back in thirsty gulps.
“I’m fascinated by your strange statuary.” I handed her back the glass. “If you’re not a vampire, perhaps you’re Medusa then.”
For a brief second her hand froze over the glass, then she offered a tick of a smile. “They are my work, yes, from a very dark period in my life as you’ve no doubt figured out.”
I released my breath slowly as she handed me another lemonade. “Then you’re a sculptor?”
“Not any more, not with these eyes.” In the silence of the room I could almost hear her pulse accentuating each word.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You see how disturbing my efforts are. It’s a relief really, not to create such horrors, and yet…” She laid a hand against the swell of her breasts, and now that my eyes were adjusted to the gloom, I could see the shape of her, not disguised by the thin dress. The crown of large nipples, the crinkle of tight areolae made my cock jerk against my fly.
“I should get back.” I breathed.
“Sit down Mr. Danson. Take a break. Your work’s not easy.” She moved closer to me and rested a cool hand on my arm. My skin practically leaped at her touch, my nipples tightened to aching points at the feel of her breath against my neck. For a second I thought I’d come in my pants again, so intense was the feel of her flesh against mine. Oblivious to my distress, she guided me to sit at the kitchen table then sat down next to me, leaning close as though she would whisper in my ear. She seemed unaware of the way her top sagged giving me a view that as much as I’d have liked, I felt compelled not to take.
“Tell me, Mr. Danson,” she half whispered, “what exactly do you know about Medusa?”
“I know she was once beautiful, that Athena turned her into a monster because she caught Poseidon raping her in her temple. And after that anyone who looked into her eyes was turned instantly to stone.”
There was a slight lifting of the corners of her mouth, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a smile. “Don’t you think it rather strange that the goddess of wisdom would curse a young girl for being raped?”
Before I could speak, she leaned even closer and curled her fingers around mine. “Don’t you think perhaps it more likely that the goddess, in her compassion, offered the poor girl a way to avenge herself, a way to ensure no one would ever violate her again?”
“It’s just a myth,” I said, my throat strangely dry in spite of the lemonade.
She offered me a smile that was genuine this time and sat back in her chair. “Of course it is. Besides, what a terrible gift to offer a young girl whose anger and hurt and fear must have known no bounds, and who would have had little worldly wisdom and life experience to help her cope.” Without warning, she leaned close, so close that I almost thought she would kiss me. Her hand slipped off the table, and for the briefest moment brushed my lap. “I’m not sure even the goddess of wisdom could have calculated the destruction wrought by one angry, wounded girl seeking vengeance on all men in lieu of the god she was helpless against.”
The chair screeched on the tiled floor as I shoved back away from the table. “Thanks for the lemonade,” I croaked. “I’ll get back to it now.”
I practically ran back to the cover of the topiary, nearly falling over a stone poodle in my flight. Behind an unruly hawthorn hedge, where I was sure I couldn’t be seen from the house, I barely got my fly open before I unloaded. I’ve always had a strong libido, and I do my share of wanking, but I’m always in control, and I come when I choose. I felt like a teenager in the grip of a wet dream. This place, that woman. My god, I wanted her. As disturbing as I found her, I wanted her.
The next day I felt hungover and achy after a night of more dreams. The sky was heavy with clouds and the air was gravy-thick. There were more statues, lots more statues. Some were shoved together like chess pieces pushed off the side of the board. Some were tumbled and stacked against each other in careless disregard for erections and bare cunts. The whole thing sickened me even as it aroused me, which sickened me even more. I was so caught up in the train-wreck of it all that I hardly noticed the rain. It poured in torrents as I jerked and fought mechanically with a hefty vine entangling a tumble of statues.
A strangled cry broke my trance. I turned to find Magda Gardener, still hidden behind her mirrored glasses, wet dress clinging to her breasts and belly, hair dancing around her face in the wind like a wild thing. “This is not what I wanted, never what I wanted!” Her voice rose to a wail. Lightning split the sky with the reek of ozone. Magda pulled me back just as a large chunk of topiary exploded and burst into flame where I’d been standing. A branch flew through the air and struck her on the cheek sending her glasses flying into the hedge before I could shield her with my body. Embers showered us in a hot pelting of sparks that smoked and hissed in the heavy rain. We ran for the house, forcing our way through the driving storm.
Inside, she buried her face against my chest and sobbed. “I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it anymore. So many memories, such awful feelings. I never should have involved you in this. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Shh. It’s all right now.” I kissed the wound on her cheek and tasted blood, warm and strangely soothing against my tongue. Heat snaked down my throat and spread in my chest warming places I didn’t know were cold.
“It’ll be all right now. Whatever it is it’s the past.” I stroked her wild hair.
When I brushed her still-closed eyelids with my fingertips, she flinched. But she kept her eyes tightly shut.
Then her lips sought mine. Her kiss was ravenous, like there could never be enough to satisfy her. “I want you, Paul Danson,” she breathed into my mouth between sobs and tongue kisses. “I need you to make love to me. Please.”
With the storm adding to the gloom, I could barely make out shadows and shapes. But her pale beauty shone like light. I lifted her onto the kitchen table, surprised at how slight she was. I worried the wet dress up over her head. She was naked beneath. A soft rise of goose bumps moved over her chilled flesh just beneath the skim of my hands. I took her breasts like an adolescent who’d never touched a woman before and yet she happily sighed my name. “Paul, oh Paul.” She guided my hand between her legs into her soft moist folds. “Make love to me, Paul. Make me come. Help me forget, just for a little while.”
I lifted her legs onto my shoulders, for the first time noticing that her feet were bare and soaked and the bottoms cut and bleeding, but she was already pulling my face to her pussy spread plump and heavy before me. I buried my face in her, and she made little kitten sounds, grasping at my hair with slender fingers. She tasted like the beginning of everything, dark and primordial, and I ate like she existed only to feed me, inhaling great gulps of her until my head buzzed from her heady feral scent all over me.
“I want you inside me,” she gasped.
Breathing like the storm had migrated into my chest, I eased into her, carefully, gently. Suddenly, she seemed so fragile I feared I’d break her. She was tight, tighter than any woman I’d ever been with, whimpering and sucking little gulps of air at my thick invasion. When I was in she released a long slow sigh, grabbed the edge of the table for leverage and humped up to meet me, legs wrapped tightly around my waist. She rode me in serpentine undulations, with a relentless grip, a grip that took all my will power not to succumb to, not to empty myself into her grasp.
With each thrust visions of the statues in the garden pushed and shoved at my consciousness until the weight in my balls was balanced by a heavy knot of horror in the pit of my stomach.
“I’ve wanted you from the beginning,” she whispered. “I’ve dreamed about you all my life, Paul. I pleasure myse
lf thinking of you.”
I cupped the swell of her breasts and kneaded and stroked. “Will I end up like them?” I felt like my balls were heavier than all the stone statues in Magda’s garden.
Her eyelids fluttered, her breath bunched in her chest. “Why would you think that?”
“I want to be with you,” I breathed. “If that’s the cost, then I’ll pay.” It surprised me to realise I meant it.
She let go of the table and pulled her body upright against mine so tight that with each thrust our bodies battled each other for space to breathe. “You can’t be with me if you’re like them. And you’re not like them, darling. You could never be like them.” She wrapped herself around me and clamped down until I cried out in something not far from pain, then she spoke against my ear. “I don’t want you like them. I want you warm and sweaty and full, so full just for me.” One more squeeze from her gripping hole and I came. Sweet blessed relief, I came. The knot in my stomach dissipated and I emptied myself into her. She trembled and quaked like the willows outside in the storm. “Oh yes, dear goddess, yes,” she spoke between shudders. “This is what I want. This is what I’ve always wanted.”
And I swear, in spite of everything I’d seen, everything I’d experienced, in that moment I felt bliss.
When I arrived the next day the garden gate was padlocked shut. A man in a black suit waited for me. “Mr. Danson?”
Before I could answer, he handed me a thick envelope. “Your services here are no longer required. Remuneration has been deposited in your account for the whole project, since the breach of contract was not yours. Any tools or equipment left on the site will be returned to you as soon as possible.”
“This is Magda Gardener’s place,” I said. “I want to speak to her.”
The man shook his head. “This is not Magda Gardener’s place, Mr. Danson. She’s only allowed to use it, and this time she’s overstepped her bounds.”
I was desperate to find Magda, but I didn’t know where to look. I talked to a paralegal at the firm which looked after the estate. For some reason the woman took pity on me. The property was held in perpetuity by some trust in Greece. It had been for as long as the firm had existed. Before that, she couldn’t say. She could tell me no more.
There were no other leads. Magda was gone, and I had nowhere to look. Over time, the more disturbing dreams dissipated, and I was left with only one. In it Madga wandered her garden, talking to her statues, calling them by name. When she saw me, she pulled me down on the grass. We made love with wild abandon while all the statues looked on. But Magda kept her eyes closed. “Theirs is not your fate,” she kept telling me. I always woke feeling better afterward.
Eventually the house was torn down and the property sold. I don’t know what happened to the statues.
I was just beginning to feel myself again when the package arrived. It was larger than a case of wine and heavier. There was no return address. Inside was a bust carved in stone. The face made my heart stop, then clench, then beat faster. My cock tightened and my stomach knotted cold and low. The bust was Magda as she’d been in the storm, wild hair flying around her face, full lips parted, but this time her eyes were wide open, and the expression on her face was the same as that of the statues in her garden, terror and longing, lust and fear flowing endlessly into each other. Around her neck, like a silk scarf, was a single slender serpent, so detailed that the scales seemed to undulate in the midday light. It encircled her slender throat and paused, mouth open, tongue flicking at her ear lobe, frozen there for eternity, as though it were just about to impart a secret.
Topiary
By K D Grace
“Isn’t it time yet? Surely it must be.”
Aden ignores me, lost in concentration, delicately clip-clipping the unruly new growth from a perfectly spiralling boxwood.
I can always find him beyond the hedged labyrinth surrounded by fantastical shapes and patterns all sculpted in evergreen, each time a new shrub, each time a new shape. Aden is an artist when it comes to shrubs. He hired me to do the kitchen garden. I grow vegetables. I don’t understand his fascination. But there’s no denying Aden is the Topiary King.
“Surely it must be time.” I squirm on the stone bench, feeling the discomfort of my condition.
“These things can’t be rushed, Bess. All gardeners know that.” He’s working gloveless, like always. He says he needs to feel what he does. No one would ever believe what delicate work he can do with hands so hard. With his thumb and first two fingers he patiently teases and coaxes out the tiniest of wayward shoots until the hard swell of a budding leaf close to the top of the spiralling shrub is visible, something no one else would have noticed.
As I watch him, I bear down against the cool stone of the bench and shift from buttock to buttock. The nip of the secateurs is crisp, precise and I catch my breath with a little moan. “At least check. Please.”
His shoulders rise and fall in a sigh of resignation. His gaze stills on the shrub, checking for other unruly bits to be tamed. Carefully, he lies down the secateurs and slowly, still studying his efforts, moves toward me.
I brace against the bench and shift my weight backward, ready for him.
“Timing is everything,” he lectures. “There has to be enough growth to do what I envision, and what I envision must be there already waiting to be exposed.”
I lean back a little, feeling the clench and the flutter in my pussy that comes from knowing it’s almost time. I can barely stand another second of the heaviness, the chaos. I long for order, his order, which he never gives until conditions are just right. Please, dear God let conditions be just right. My impatience feels heavy and swollen like the buds Aden examines and caresses and nips.
“Open up.”
I do as I’m told. He kneels in front of me and pushes chlorophyll-stained fingers under my skirt. He’s hard. He’s always hard when he shapes the shrubs. The first time he fucked me, he’d been shaping the same spiralling boxwood. He burst into the kitchen garden while I was bent over weeding the young carrots. It was all over in a few minutes, me gasping my orgasm with my shorts around my ankles, and him hammering into me, coming in hard shudders. Now, most of the time he lingers, like he does with his shrubs. The memory makes me clench and rock against the bench.
I feel heat rising off him. I smell his sweat all piquant and woodsy. I’m so tight and tetchy that even the first graze of his fingertips against my muff makes me gasp and wriggle.
I never had a muff — at least not a real one — until I met Aden. I was smooth and naked. I wore bikinis and thongs. But Aden doesn’t like bare ground where something should be growing.
In the beginning it itched. Every night Aden tended me with soothing lotions and oils while he admired my new growth, tiny and prickly like young grass. He promised me it would be worth the wait. With time the new growth thickened and grew soft and escaped the edges of my panties like it was always migrating toward his touch. The more it grew, the more his hand was there to caress, to examine. Then I stopped trying to contain it. I stopped wearing panties and let Aden’s garden grow unhindered. All that soft springy growth was new to me. I could barely keep my hands from straying under my skirt for a stroke. I never missed a chance to admire its rude, rambunctious fullness when I was naked, or when I was in the bathroom. My muff exerted more control over us than I would have ever imagined. One of us was always touching it or talking about it or thinking about it. That led to sex. Lots of sex.
And when we fucked, my god, there was rough, uneven texture that hadn’t been there before. It was a primordial act when he fucked me in the topiary. It was fur against fur, catching and holding the animal scent of us, humping and growling and spreading our smell on the grass like the rest of the wildlife.
He shivers his fingers up through my lush growth and sucks his bottom lip in concentration. I practically catapult off the seat as his thumb rakes my clit. “Maybe,” he says, shoving in closer until I can feel his breath against my inner
thigh. “Could be.”
“Please.” I squirm against his open palm. “I can’t wait much longer.”
He shoves at my skirt with an impatient hand, raking and caressing, pushing my legs apart, examining. His nose is scant millimetres away. I know he smells the heat of my pussy. He’s close enough to taste me. It takes all of my self control not to thrust myself full-on at his face.
The frown of concentration hardens to satisfied resolve, and he drops a breathy kiss against my mound. “Wait here, darling. I’ll be right back, and don’t touch.” He slaps my hand away.
It feels like he’s gone for ages. I grind my bottom against the stone and imagine penis and pussy shapes in the shrubs of Aden’s topiary. When he returns, I practically sob with relief.
“Take off your clothes. All of them.” His voice is firm, certain, like he knows exactly what he’s about, like he has a plan. He watches as I strip off t-shirt, bra, skirt. My skin goes all goose fleshed with the warm breeze making my body hair stand at attention, making my muff feel bigger than the spiralling boxwood Aden has been tending.
But he doesn’t notice the goose flesh. He doesn’t notice the lead weight of my nipples, or my kittenish whimpers. He sees only my verdant dark patch, the patch that now pillows his weight every night when he mounts me, the patch that always makes him hard.
He orders me to straddle the bench and scoot down until I’m sitting at the end, legs splayed wide apart. Then when he’s satisfied that I’m right where he wants me, he kneels in front of me and opens a leather case, which contains a comb and several small pairs of scissors. “They’re newly sharpened,” he says. “I knew you were close. I didn’t want to be caught unprepared.”
I thrust my hips forward. Everything between my thighs feels expanded and puffy.
At first Aden simply strokes my heavy curls, his face in deep concentration. His creative juices, like my own, are flowing. I begin to thrust lightly against his stroking, impatient for him to get on with it. But he won’t be rushed. A stroke with the comb here, a shove of my leg there, a shivering with his fingers as he plumps and fluffs. “Yes, I see it now,” he breathes. “I know exactly how it’s supposed to be.”
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