by Zoey Parker
“I understand.”
He nodded, satisfied for the moment. I saw him leaning forward inch by inch. His mouth drew closer to mine until his breath was hot on my face and his smell filled my nostrils, rich and deep, drowning out the leafy scent of the wildlife around us. I was sure he was going to kiss me. I wanted him to do it, like it would seal in everything he’d just said and make it real, make it realer than real.
But the membrane was still there. I could feel it and I knew he could, too. We weren’t quite there yet. A little bit was left to go before we could fully trust each other.
He looked into my eyes, then drew back again. “Look down there,” he said softly. “Jay and I used to do this thing every now and then. We’d pretend that if you looked closely enough at the surface of the pond, you could see the future, your future, playing out like a movie on the water.”
I followed his pointing finger. The pool’s surface rippled slightly from the force of the waterfall puncturing it from above, but it was still enough at the edges that I could start to see a reflection swimming into place as I squinted. I leaned over. There, I could see myself, almost, the blurriest outline of my head and shoulders peering down from where we were sitting a few yards above.
“You have to really look,” he said solemnly, “but I swear, sometimes you can really see stuff.”
I leaned forward an inch more, staring intensely at the surface. I came a little more into focus the harder I looked. But then the wind picked up a spray of water from the waterfall and sent it a little bit farther beyond its normal path, scattering across my reflection and ruining it.
“I don’t know,” I said, staring to straighten up, “I don’t think I can—”
I saw only a flash of Ben’s wild grin before he scooped one hand under my legs and another under the small of my back and tossed me high into the air over the pond.
I screamed as I flailed helplessly all the way up to the apex of my flight path. I heard Ben’s booming laughter, then I started to descend. The way down was quick. I had only a tiny chance to swallow a huge breath and squeeze my nose shut to keep out the water before I plunged below the surface.
It was frigid. I was chilled to the core immediately. I sank like a rock, spearing a yard or two down. The pool was deeper than I would have expected. I bumped gently into the rocky bottom before finding my feet and turning my gaze upwards. The light sparkling through the surface of the water was beautiful. It looked like it was dancing for me.
But my lungs were starting to burn. I hadn’t gotten enough air to stay down here very long. Driving my heels hard into the bottom, I arrowed back up to the surface.
The sound of the forest seemed loud after the silence underwater. I treaded in place as I took a big inhale, then squealed, “You asshole! I can’t believe just did that!”
Ben was standing above bent over with his hands on his knees as he laughed harder than I’d ever seen him laugh before. There were legitimately tears running down his cheeks and mingling with his beard. As stunned and angry as I was, I couldn’t help but love the sound of it. It was the most purely joyful thing I’d ever heard from him, far lighter and happier than I knew he was capable of. In spite of myself, I smiled.
He tried to choke out words between bouts of chuckling, but he could hardly manage it. “You thought…the future! In the water! Haha…” He descended again into another laughing fit, falling back onto the stone as he wiped the tears away from his face.
“You better get your ass down in here with me,” I warned, “or else bad, bad things are going to happen to you.”
He composed himself and hunched down to look at me. His eyes were twinkling. “No chance,” he said. “I’m not the clown who tried to see the future in a pond.”
I scowled and turned to swim to the edge so I could climb out and start to dry myself off. I was shivering already. The skin on my arms and legs was riddled with goosebumps. I took two strokes, teeth chattering, before I heard the scuffle of boots on rock and then a wild, banshee wail.
I flipped onto my back to see Ben, knees tucked into his chest, leap into the air over the water, mouth open wide in a happy, wordless holler.
I yelped and kicked away hard as he smashed into the surface. A giant plume of water sucked in and shot straight up where he’d landed. Massive waves roiled outwards from the epicenter of his cannonball, swamping me in their path. I bobbed up and down in the current as it started to settle down, watching and wondering where Ben was. I was starting to get a little bit worried. Had he hit his head on the bottom? Did he get his foot trapped below a rock? Finally he emerged, sticking his head above the water before shaking it like a wet dog. His grin was lopsided, goofy, and unbelievably contagious. I felt myself smiling without even trying to.
He took two broad strokes to knife across the water and bump softly into me. He encircled me in his arms. Then his chest was against mine and his mouth was against mine and the last barrier fell away from between us as his tongue swept across my lips before diving in. His kiss was hot, warm, and as wide open as it could have been. It was like he wanted to taste every ounce of me. I wanted the same from him. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and kissed back, hard and fiery.
We were bouncing up and down, wrapped tightly around each other, as the pool gradually recovered its stillness. His breath and mine mingled in each other’s mouths. Ben leaned forward slightly and kicked, propelling us towards the edge of the pond. I felt the soft, grassy bank bump up against my back. He found his feet and stood, scooping me up with him in an effortless motion before laying me right back down just above where the water lapped onto the shore. He never stopped kissing me.
His body was wide and smooth, all wet, shiny muscle. I peeled his shirt up, breaking our kiss only for as long as it took to get the thing over his head and off of him. It made a sucking noise as I tossed it aside, like it didn’t want to give him up. That was too bad for it, because he was all mine. All of him was mine—his arms, his chest, his soft, brushing lips. The wet curls on his head were mine, and the growing stiffness between his legs would be mine just as soon as I could fight with his jeans to claim it for myself, too, or rather, to let myself be claimed by him.
He kissed me like he wanted the world to know I was his, and I was glad to let him. I wanted to be his, to be Ben’s. His hand found the bottom edge of my shirt and tried to tug it upwards, but the way I was laying prevented him from pulling it off. I started to lean upwards to let him work it off of me, but he pulled back, frowned, and with two hands tore it clean down the middle.
“You ripped my shirt!” I gasped in surprise, pretending to be angry.
He gave me that cocky smile, the one I couldn’t resist. “Cost of doing business, babe.” Then he descended back onto me, biting and sucking at my lips. I moaned, unable to keep all the tension inside of me.
He pawed at my breasts, bare since I had decided against wearing a bra that morning, and slid down me to take each nipple into his mouth one at a time. His teeth raked tenderly over the sensitive flesh as he suckled at me. After the freezing cold water, his hot mouth was heavenly against my skin. While he nipped at me, his other hand moved down to my jeans.
He didn’t hesitate to slip his hands down further to cup my mound. The merest touch was already almost too much to handle. It had been such a long waiting game, so many days of my body crying out for Ben while my brain steadfastly refused. Now, though, I had his hands and his mouth and his everything, all to myself in this hidden oasis in the desert.
He let my breasts fall from his mouth and sat back on his heels so he could rip my jeans off. I raised my legs to help him and he pulled them away in one clean swoop, throwing them over his shoulder next to where I’d cast aside his shirt. He didn’t wait long to bring his mouth down to the crease in my hip, biting hard enough to leave a mark before gliding across my waist to the other side.
He let the tip of his tongue sneak out and trace intricate patterns along the edge of my panties, teasing me with
his flickering touch. I wove my fingers in his hair and held on tightly as he worked closer and closer to my hot slit. Every cell in my body wanted him to touch me. He hadn’t even taken off my underwear and I was already shivering close to the brink of coming.
He slowed down suddenly. The frenetic tempo of his clawing, biting, sucking force calmed to a crawl. Now, his fingers were delicate instead of probing as he hooked them around either side of my panties and drew them carefully down my legs and off of me.
He rocked back onto his heels once more and took his hands away as he gazed at me. Old Carmen would have thought this was insane. I was lying naked on a riverbank in the middle of nowhere while a grizzled, tattooed biker looked me up and down like he wanted to devour me whole. Old Carmen would have said something embarrassing about having to go before sprinting to the nearest police station, or panicked and made an excuse before scampering away.
But I wasn’t the girl I used to be. I wasn’t going to run. I didn’t want to. This was the only place I wanted to be: right here, with Ben, knowing I was every bit as safe and free as he told me I was. Knowing I could run if I wanted to, but that I’d rather wait in wild anticipation for his tongue to lick me upwards and upwards until I burst and moaned his name.
“Do you want me?” I whispered.
His eyes shifted from my body to my face. “Like a dying man wants a second chance.”
He kept his gaze locked on mine as he unfolded forward. His mouth found my pussy and the first broad, slow lick of his tongue over my swollen lips was pure ecstasy. The second was magic. The third broke me.
It poured out through my throat, becoming Ben’s name as I moaned it into the treetops for the birds to hear or whoever else wanted to know the identity of the man who was doing this to me.
He switched from the long, wide passes of his tongue to darting circles that flicked around my clit at the same time he reached up a finger and slid it teasingly into me. I was so tight—it had been so long—that I had to bite my lip at first to stop from whimpering. But I quickly warmed to his touch as he twisted it easily at my entrance. I grew wetter and wetter as he licked around my clit and pushed his finger a tiny bit farther every few seconds. Soon, he was far in me, and he turned his finger around to stroke at my g-spot. As he did, he sucked my clit between his lips and rolled around it with his tongue, adding pressure and moisture to the motion with each passing rotation.
I gripped his head tightly as he sped up, fingering and eating me out with increasing intensity. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I had to wrench them closed and focus on the burgeoning pressure beneath his touch. He knew exactly what he was doing as he brought me right up to my second climax and shoved me out into it. I fell, tumbling head over heels into the sensation breaking out over my body like lancing electricity.
He didn’t wait for me to settle back down either. Instead, he pushed his own jeans down his hips and took out his manhood. It hung heavy in front of him, but as he lined himself up with my entrance, it grew stiffer and stiffer, until his cock was rubbing back and forth on my clit. The friction was mind-numbing.
I felt exactly how I’d felt the first night we spent together—hollow, empty, needy. The answer to all of it was pushing between my lips, waiting for me to say yes before it could fill me. Before he could.
I forced my eyes open as the orgasm Ben had given me continued to flare like fireworks up and down my body. My lower lip was scraped raw from biting it so hard. It was all I could do to nod desperately as he raised his eyebrows at me in search of a sign to keep going.
“I want you, Ben,” I whimpered.
He responded by pushing all the way into me. I gasped. It was even fuller than I remembered, thicker and harder. He went slowly, but I still had to dig my nails into the turf on either side and clench my knees hard around Ben’s waist. When he had driven deep and our hips were almost touching, he bent over and smashed his mouth against mine.
I pulled his head close and hung on for dear life as he began to pump slowly in and out of me. Each stroke took minutes, hours, centuries, but it was pleasure all the way up and all the way down. When he was buried fully, I moaned, and when he was almost gone, I moaned. My arms were getting sore from holding onto him so tightly, but it was the only way I could ride out the waves of sensation rippling outward from where he was piercing me.
He broke off the kiss, but he didn’t go far. He kept his forehead pressed against mine and his eyes boring into me as he began to increase the speed of our rocking. Faster and faster we went, building and building, getting higher together, until sweat slicked both of our brows even though the air around us was damp and cool. It didn’t matter—there was fire just below our skin.
“Ben…” I cried.
“Carmen,” he responded. His face was screwed tight in concentration as he slaved to keep himself from going over the edge.
But I wanted him to. I wanted to feel him explode inside me and I wanted to see how his face looked when he came while we held each other. “Come for me,” I begged. “Please.”
His hips slammed against mine like a hammer descending over and over again. His cock was stiff and strong, and finally, he was there. One more stroke and I felt him unleash. Deep in my pussy, he erupted, filling me. I held him tightly until his motion slowed and eventually stopped.
Ben’s eyes were closed as he regained his breath. When it had normalized, he opened them again and looked at me. “The future,” he said, chuckling. “Who falls for something like that?” He grinned.
I nipped at his ear. “You’re an asshole,” I whispered jokingly.
Those eyes glistened with more emotion than I knew how to understand. “Yours, though.”
The most beautiful words I’d ever heard.
# # #
We lay on the bank for a while until the water had dried from our bodies. Then, reluctantly, I let Ben help me wriggle back into my wet jeans. I picked up the ragged remains of my shirt and examined it.
“Thanks a lot,” I said sarcastically.
“Hey, that’s a very fashion-forward look,” he shot back.
I glared at him. “Yeah, because you know so much about fashion.”
“I was voted most fashionable in high school, thank you very much.”
“No way.”
“Okay, so I wasn’t. But I could’ve been.”
“Did you even go to high school?”
“No, but you’re missing the point.” I smacked him on the shoulder and he laughed. “Here,” he said, “take mine.” I eyed the shirt suspiciously, but I decided it would be better than nothing. I pulled it over my head. It wouldn’t be so bad to follow Ben and stare at his back muscles.
Once we were dressed, we headed out of the enclave. The boulder was easier to climb going in the other direction, though Ben still kept a close eye on me as I swung over and dropped down. The bike was still waiting where we’d left it. The sun had dipped below the horizon and the last of its rays were close behind. It would be dark soon. The warmth of the day had started to disappear, as well.
Ben was checking something on the bike when I heard footsteps approaching from around the bend. A few moments later, two people emerged, a man and a woman. They were both wearing big camping backpacks and chatting freely. My jaw dropped when I realized who it was.
Dan stopped a few yards away from me. His eyes went round. He looked back and forth between Ben and me, trying to figure out just what in the hell I was doing in the middle of this huge state park wearing a man’s t-shirt while accompanied by a shirtless, tattooed biker.
“Uh, um, Carmen, good to…see you again,” he stuttered eventually.
“Hi, Dan,” I said.
“Whatcha, um, whatcha been up to?” he asked, shifting around on his feet like he couldn’t decide what to do with himself. I could tell he was baffled. I couldn’t blame him. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t exactly have expected this to be our second encounter either. I didn’t really know how to go about explaining the situation.
>
“Just, you know, exploring, I guess you could say.” I was blushing a little bit, but Dan was the color of a stop sign. Next to him, his companion was doing the same thing he was, glancing back and forth to try to make sense of this bizarre twosome, though she was doing a better job at not gawking like a fool. “You?”
“There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight, so we’re, um, going camping. Oh, shit,” he said, smacking the heel of his hand into his forehead, “I’m sorry. This is Cassie. Cassie, this is Carmen.”
The girl was cute and seemed friendly. She stuck out a hand and smiled as we shook. “Nice to meet you, Carmen,” she said brightly.
“You, too, Cassie.” I felt Ben walk over behind me. “This is Ben,” I said. “Ben, meet Dan and Cassie.”
Ben and Dan clasped hands firmly, nodding to each other in that overly stoic, masculine way that men always seemed to love doing. Underneath, though, I could tell Dan was downright terrified of Ben. I couldn’t blame him for that either. Ben didn’t exactly come off as the friendliest of guys on first impression.
