Club Storyville

by Riley LaShea

  Feeling the mattress at my back, I groaned at the feel of Ariel’s weight pressing down upon me, and again in frustration when she pulled back for a moment, as if surprised by our sudden position. I was so afraid she would change her mind, realize what she was doing and decide she wouldn’t pretend for me after all. As I clutched desperately to her shoulders, though, Ariel’s head dipped and she captured my lips for the most fleeting of instances, before her lips moved to my neck, pulling gently at the flesh there until I couldn’t suppress the moan that rose up in my throat.

  Her kiss trailing downward, Ariel untied the binds that held me captive one by one, and I knew if there was any such thing as true freedom, she was the way. When she went as far as the neckline of my gown and no further, though, I knew she wasn’t going anywhere I hadn’t given her express access, and, suffering her hesitation with a deep, throbbing ache throughout my entire body, I reached between us, pushing her back just enough to pull the interfering garment over my head and toss it to the floor.

  Exposed before her, I felt such a surge of pleasure as her gaze moved over me, I didn’t even remember to feel discomfort with myself. I just felt needy, desperate for something I couldn’t name, but felt I might die if I had to do without.

  Ariel’s gaze rising to mine as her hand stroked down my skin, I felt its brush against the inside of my breast as she sought to verify the permission we both knew I had secretly given her months before. The simple touch a thousand times more powerful than it made sense for it to be, I realized nothing was going to make sense.

  As it didn’t make sense for her kiss to feel like so much more than any other kiss. Or for my mind to go blank as it did when her thumb brushed across my nipple, only for it fill with the tingly crawl of euphoria that spread up my neck and scalp when Ariel’s mouth replaced her hand and her tongue sent fiery offshoots of ecstasy in every direction.

  It was nothing like my fantasies. In fantasy, everything took time. Ariel and I spent hours touching, her fingertips moving softly over my skin, her lips brushing mine again and again, until it became inevitable for things to come to a natural conclusion.

  In reality, Ariel’s touch set me on edge from the first instant, and, as much as I wanted her to take her time, for her touch to go on forever, a part of me demanded instant gratification, a fulfillment of the need that had plagued me from the moment she showed up at Nan’s door.

  The slide of her hand across my abdomen was torturous, and my body curved toward it, desperate for her touch where it needed it most, more wanton than I ever thought I could be. And, Ariel’s hand growing heavy against my skin, it held me in place as she pulled her mouth from my flesh, which certainly wasn’t my intent.

  “Are you sure?” Her eyes rose to my face, and I squirmed beneath her, in such a state I couldn’t imagine her leaving me that way. “You can’t get this back.”

  I didn’t know why she thought I would want it, how she could tell what it was I was giving, but didn’t know she was the only person on Earth I wanted to take anything from me.

  Unable to speak, I nodded my certainty, grateful nothing more was required as I felt the soft brush of cotton between my thighs when Ariel stripped my panties from my body.

  Her hand sliding up the inside of my calf, that alone felt like too much, and my breath hitched when Ariel’s hand paused to wrap around my knee, bending it up against her body and opening me up to her in a way I was probably supposed to think shameful. If there was any shame that remained, though, from my proper Christian lady upbringing, it was superseded by a dozen feelings more pressing as Ariel’s fingers skimmed the inside of my thigh.

  Nothing I had ever wanted so much, everything in me reached for it, but, in those last centimeters, I still felt the thick taste of fear on the back of my tongue.

  “Wait,” I said, and Ariel paused instantly, her hand resting somewhere between a comforting touch and torture, and when she looked up at me, it was the first moment I felt at all embarrassed, the first instant my lack of experience felt like a burden, and I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Is it going to hurt?” I questioned, because, though I hadn’t been told to expect pain - not directly, since such information was expected not to be required until my wedding night - there had been enough allusions to the fact it was a woman’s lot to suffer in all ways that I had drawn my own terrifying conclusions.

  Despite not looking at her, I could feel Ariel’s gaze on me, and I blushed harder at the sensation.

  “No,” she shifted against me, the heat through her thin gown sweltering, and I was distracted for a moment by her fingers crawling gently along my inner thigh and the yearning for her to undress too. “It shouldn’t,” she said. “For a lot of women, it does, because they're not ready. They don't really want it. So, Elizabeth...” Ariel situated onto her elbow so the fingers of her free hand could lift my chin, making me look at her. “I need you to be sure,” she said. “I don't want to hurt you.”

  “I’m sure,” I breathed, but it was such a lackluster term for what I was feeling, it felt almost like a lie. I was on the verge of desperation for her, and no amount of pain was going to stop me from wanting everything. I just wanted to be ready, and I knew she would tell me the truth.

  Even more sure when Ariel’s touch traversed the tiny expanse that remained to touch me where I’d been taught never even to touch myself, silken ribbons of pleasure sprouted from her fingertips to wind completely around me.

  It was that, I realized, that surprised me most of all, not the lack of pain, but the abundance of pleasure. Why, I wondered, had no one taught me to expect that?

  After some time, those silk ribbons, tied by Ariel’s fingers, tried to tug me back through the door to the Big World, and, arching against her, I wished I could tell her what I wanted, that I wanted more, to feel her deeper, that I needed to know what that was like, to be fully and truly possessed by her.

  Those words were bad, though, almost worse than the acts themselves, and I couldn’t make my mouth form them to tell her how much I needed her and how I needed her.

  “Relax,” Ariel didn’t need to be told. “If you're tense, it could hurt.” Her lips opening against my neck, her tongue ran hot and wet up it, and I felt a resultant stream of perspiration run down my back. “If you want me to touch you,” she whispered against my jaw, “let me touch you.”

  It was all I wanted, everything I wanted, so I let her. Head falling to the side, I invited the next stroke of her tongue against my skin as her delicate touch carried me further and further from my mundane existence, before bringing me right back to immediacy as it moved suddenly inside of me.

  Gasping, I discovered my imagination utterly insufficient, or that one could never adequately imagine the touch of someone she desired as I desired Ariel. I could imagine the act, and had many times, fabricating a sensation I thought could be estimated, but my mind with its limitless boundaries had never come close to predicting the feel of Ariel’s touch as it invaded me in the most intimate possible way.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, but I couldn’t speak. Struggling to draw air, I was just lucky to have understood the question. “Elizabeth.” One hand stroked across my cheek as the other stilled, and it was the threat of her stopping that forced my eyes to open.

  “Yes,” I panted. “I just…” Honesty seemed the best way to make sure she didn’t stop, a blessing, since, in my incapacitated state, I had nothing else. “It just feels so good.”

  Staring down into my eyes, it took a moment for her to believe me, but, when she did, a soft smile chased the worry from Ariel’s beautiful face.

  “Good,” she said. “It's supposed to feel good.”

  As her fingers moved again, sinking deeper, I realized good was an utterly insufficient term. Ariel’s touch on my cheek moving to cradle the back of my neck, I felt completely safe in her hands, in closing my eyes, in coming apart under her touch.

  There were moments my heart beat so hard, I thought it would gallop from my chest, and moments
it slowed to barely beating, as if experiencing Ariel was my body’s sole purpose and all other functions ceased to matter.

  It was as I felt Ariel’s lips at my throat again that I felt the unremitting pull in my body, that something building inside bound to erupt, and it drew me even more to her. My arm tightening around her, locking her close, I felt her breaths on my cheek as she lifted her head, felt the brush of her hair on my neck as her fingers beckoned me into the world beyond the door. Though I had been there before on my own, in every way, nothing could prepare me for walking through it with Ariel, for the moment the world of my fantasy and the world of my reality merged in a flash of pure, radiant light that transcended both.

  As dark as I had been led to believe my desires were, my feelings for Ariel were, I found no darkness, and I felt no evil. Everything in me letting go at once, all the bad seemed to leak out, and, settling back into my body, I felt it running down my temples into my hair and opened my eyes, worried Ariel would think she had hurt me when she had done nothing but heal things in me I didn’t realize were fractured.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, her eyes searching mine, her hand moving up to rest warm and wet against my stomach.

  “I feel…” I started, but, thinking through all the descriptive words I knew, I determined them all lacking or totally incorrect. “I don’t know,” I admitted, because I had never felt anything like it before. Looking to the ceiling above, tinted brown where the darkness and yellow street lights mixed, I wondered if I would ever feel anything like it again. “Is it always like that?” I asked, goose bumps breaking out across my skin as Ariel’s small laugh hit my bare chest.

  “That’s hard to say,” she responded, reaching for the sheet and pulling it over me. “I don’t know how you feel. But it’s always different.” Watching her in the darkness, I could feel her slipping away, more mentally than physically. “We should try to get some sleep,” she said, and, dropping her head to kiss me, she bypassed my lips for my cheek, and I realized I wasn’t satisfied with her telling me when we were finished.

  My hand sliding into Ariel’s hair to keep her from getting away from me, I seized her lips, finding when it most mattered, I too could be demanding. There was a small part of me that wanted to give orders and make Ariel follow them. Another part, though, a much bigger part, just wanted to make her feel the way she’d made me feel, to steal her breath and her ability to think, to leave something behind that would live inside her forever, no matter what came to pass when the night ended and the sun came up again.

  Ariel’s tongue winding around mine, despite her declaration we should sleep, my hands found the fabric of her nightgown, easing it upward, and I tugged my lips reluctantly from hers when it stuck at her hips. Ariel’s thighs pale and strong as I cast a glare toward them, they distracted me from the task at hand, and, releasing the fabric for a moment, my hand curved around her exposed leg, delighting in the way her muscles responded to my touch.

  As demanding as I’d discovered I could be, it turned out Ariel could be equally acquiescent. As I looked up to meet her eyes and tugged more insistently at her nightgown, she rose from the mattress to pull it over her head and fell back into place beside me.

  Gaze sweeping down her body, I felt things I could never have imagined feeling just from looking at someone, and, fingers drawn to her skin, as if there was a magnetic pull between them, I felt immense satisfaction as it responded along the path of my touch, realizing there had been some truth when Ariel said she wanted me. Or at least truth that she wanted someone.

  Emboldened each time she let me touch her, her arm, her chest, her stomach, I at last dragged my fingertips down Ariel’s side, sliding my finger into the waistband of her panties and glancing up at her face as I urged them off.

  Though I could see the indecision in the instant before she chose to meet this last request, Ariel at last complied, rolling to her back to ease them over her hips and kick them toward the end of the bed.

  I had never seen a naked woman before, not in real life, and, in that moment, I was thankful. As Ariel lay back in the moonlight, I could fathom no greater introduction to a woman’s beauty, and I wanted her to stay just like that, exposed and receptive to me.

  Sliding closer as she tried to turn, my hand pressed against the center of her chest to keep her still as I molded against her side, gasping a desperate breath at the unexpected feel of our skin pressing together.

  Touching her as she had touched me, my fingers softly finding her breasts, her nipples, my mouth exploring all the places my fingers had been, I realized I had the power to make Ariel sigh, to make her moan quietly beneath her breath, to make her reach for me, which felt like the greatest power I could ever possess.

  Ariel trembled as I still trembled, she sighed when my lips pressed to her stomach, and jerked when my fingers found their way between her legs, exploring the velvet flesh there to find the spots that would make her moan and gasp.

  “May I?” It felt unnaturally polite, but also like something one should ask, and when Ariel nodded her permission, I let my touch slide inside of her, watching her hair spill against the pillow as her head fell back. It was like being wrapped in a cocoon, warm and transformative.

  By the way Ariel rocked into my touch, I was sure I was doing something right, but, her heady scent drifting up to me, I realized I wanted more. I had seen, heard, touched and inhaled every part of her, but I hadn’t tasted everything. It was my fantasy, but incomplete, and I wanted all I had ever dreamed.

  Pressing a kiss to her hip, I heard Ariel’s sharp intake of breath as I pulled my hand away, wondering if I could figure out what I was doing as I went along.

  “Elizabeth,” Ariel’s hand on my shoulder stopped me when she realized my intention, and I looked to her through eyes glassy with a primal craving that superseded fear or doubt. “You don’t have to,” she said softly.

  “I want to,” I told her, and I wondered if I would have to tell her how much, how often I had thought about it, how many times I had tasted her in my mind.

  It seemed to be Ariel’s greatest concern, what I wanted. Her fingers turning softer on my shoulder, they guided me over her, and her leg fell open to let me in. Breathing in the scent, she was like wine and citrus and nothing I had smelled before, and sticking my tongue out to taste, before fear or unwelcome voices could find their way in, I found she tasted something like wine too, tangy, and less sweet than I expected.

  Then, beneath the layers of perfectly-hemmed Sunday dresses and mild manners and carefully chosen words, most women were.

  The more I tasted Ariel, the more I wanted to taste her, and the more she gasped and whimpered above me, the more I wanted to please her.

  “You taste like Heaven.” It might have been a silly thing to say as I pulled away to catch my breath, but it was true. Smile flitting across my face as Ariel opened her eyes, I watched her lips part, her skin paler than usual without the powder and rouge she put on to cover it, more perfect than ever. “But I have no idea what I’m doing,” I admitted, and it felt so good to laugh at myself, at my floundering inexperience that wanted so much to give her pleasure, but didn’t know how.

  When Ariel laughed too, her body shaking beneath me, I was glad we could still be normal with each other, what normal had become between us, at least. Though it changed a lot, what we were doing didn’t have to change everything.

  Ariel’s hand moving to my cheek, her eyes softened on me, and I loved her so much in that moment, I was sure my heart would burst from the sheer expansiveness of what I felt.

  “You’re doing fine,” she said, and it was all the encouragement I needed to keep trying, to lower my head and revel in her taste, to flick my tongue over her soft, willing flesh.

  When I felt Ariel’s body grow tense beneath me, though, her hand grew tighter on my shoulder, her acquiescence coming to an abrupt and forceful end as she pulled me upward and I felt her lips against mine.

  Her hand guiding me, it pressed my
hand between her legs, encouraging my fingers back inside of her, and I felt strangely powerful when Ariel moaned as they entered her.

  “Like that,” Ariel pulled away on a gasp, her head falling back. “Just like that.”

  It wasn’t just like that, though. The deeper I was willing to go into her, I discovered, the more Ariel opened to me, the tighter she held me, the richer her breaths became where they poured from her lips.

  She could conduct me, and I was certainly in need of conducting, but, in the end, I was the one who got to play the notes. That’s why it was always different, I realized. It didn’t matter how proficient or deficient one was at the start, it mattered only how much two people wanted to make a piece right, how in tune they were with each other. When it came to the world’s most exquisite beauty, it was always collaboration.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Out of a night of such horrors, I never could have imagined such a happy waking, but it was the happiness that came first, before any other feelings had the chance, crashing over me in a wave of sensation and memory of the last hours before I fell asleep. As I shifted, I could feel the ache in secret places throughout my body, and it only made the sensation more acute, reminding me not every way in which I had been profoundly changed in the night was bad, and making me turn to look for Ariel with the secret hope we might continue my lessons by daylight.

  Finding the room empty, I could tell it was late by the way the sun reached in through the window, but I only stretched against the sheets, not worrying until Ariel’s absence went on and on without any sign of her imminent return.

  At last sitting up, I inspected the space, comforted by her things where she had left them, and was about to get out of the bed and go in search when the door opened and Ariel came in, fully-dressed for the day as if she'd been awake for hours.