Loading...I was about to be naked when I met Adri for the first time. I’d agreed to pose for a life-drawing class she led in the little studio behind a rare print shop in Washington DC. She hadn’t hired me, the owner of the shop had.
I undressed behind a curtain, redundant, really considering that I would be spending the next two hours on display for a room full of strangers, but I felt more dignified unhooking my bra and stuffing my underwear into my handbag in private.
Out I walked in the sort of one-size-fits-all kimono you might wear at the hairdresser’s. The belt wrapped around my waist four times.
“You’re a bit of a change,” Adri said as she took the robe from my shoulders and arranged me on a chair. Her head gestured towards some charcoal sketches pinned to the walls. A thin older man with hollows where his muscles once were and an ample woman with thighs that filled the page had been the subjects of lessons one and two.
When we were in college together I hadn’t really known Adri though, I had certainly known about her. She was a lightening rod for nasty gossip, largely because, I know now, she has never shown any remorse when her relationships ended or overlapped.
Adri had stayed in DC after graduation because she was having and affair with a professor I would gladly have gone to bed given the chance. Her wonderfully convoluted mix of vanity and personal morality demanded that she not even hint to him that she might be willing until after he’d handed in her final grade. Adri’s natural recklessness gives some people the impression that she’s less intelligent than she is. She has all of the confidence of money and beauty but still likes some reassurance about smart.
“Easy, but never sleazy,” she told me.
Adri is easy; easy to get along with, easy to laugh and talk to. The way she moves, dresses, even the little pencil sketches she is constantly drawing are all effortless.
The seven students in the drawing class were affluent looking older woman and one salt and pepper haired man. Then there was Adri, long and angular with milk colored skin and butter colored hair. She said to speak up if I got too cold so she could turn the air conditioning down. She must have noticed that my nipples were as hard as dried peas.
Throughout the class we smiled at each other. This continued when we went for drinks afterwards and Adri told me about the house in the mountains she’d inherited from her Great Aunt. “I can’t have it until August. My parents are clearing out everything valuable and taking it back to New York or Southampton. The roof needs fixing and I have to have a shower put in, but it’s my favorite place. You’ll come when it’s finished?”
It took me weeks to realize we were flirting. I had never been attracted to a woman before.
Now, it was late summer, early morning. Manhattan was empty and smelled of bread and steam. Adri said she’d meet me outside my Aunt’s building on Sunday, eight-ish and asked me to pick up some coffee for the drive upstate. I had two weeks to kill between the end of the lease on my apartment in Washington and leaving for grad school in London. I’d dodged a dull spell at home in Connecticut. We’d already had the family farewell dinner and my parents were now busy settling my twin younger sisters into their respective universities.
Adri was late but not as late as I expected her to be. She bounced out of the car, wet hair swinging, and the swirling hot air from a man hole blowing the skirt of her sundress up to her waist. She grabbed the coffee and took a long sip not bothering to worry if it was too hot. She’s not cautious, Adri, not ever. By nine we were out of the city zipping up the Hudson Valley weaving and passing the few cars on the road with us.
Every time Adri drew her elbow back to shift gears the strap of her dress slid off her shoulder exposing her right breast.
The drive from Manhattan to the house should have taken two hours. I thought we’d make it in half that, if we lived, but when we pulled off the interstate Adri’s driving calmed down. We stopped for groceries. Before we got out of the car Adri put her hand on my leg and pushed the hem of my skirt up to expose my thigh. She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite decipher and said that she was glad that I was there.
Adri had spent the end of summer is this house for most of her life; packed off to her Great Aunt when her parents thought a dose mountain air would compensate for months of beachy decadence. The house was on land that had belonged to her family since New York was New Amsterdam. Adri has an old Dutch last name usually associated with libraries and museum wings. The house has a Dutch name too, the maiden name of the wife of the man who built it in the 1860’s to save his family from the foul air of Manhattan summers; Naaktgeboren. The name means born naked. True enough.
We stopped for gas, then at a hardware store and a pharmacy all for things we didn’t need. I had the impression that Adri was announcing her arrival.
I’d never been in this part of New York State before. Some of the towns we passed through seemed a little down at the heels. The mountains were certainly beautiful if not as impressive as Vermont’s. There were the ghosts of hotels built when the railway first came a hundred years ago. Successful immigrants; mostly Germans, and a host of Eastern Europeans both Jewish and Christian, had constructed their own private worlds of foreign languages and food. It was a kitschy recreation of Bavaria and the Carpathian Mountains and the Vienna Woods; castles, chalets, onion domes. It looked like some weird life-sized model train set.
Many of the hotels had closed but a few hung on catering to the new flood of new immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Finally, Adri turned left into a dirt driveway with a chain across it. She unlocked the pad-lock and we drove strait up into the woods. At first there was no indication that there was a house there at all. Then, when the sun shone down through an opening in the trees, there was a second chain, a second lock and her magical little house appeared on the flat of the hill looking out over the valley. The house was as unlikely as anything we had passed that day. It was two floors high with four fluted columns holding up a pediment; a Greek temple in the woods.
Adri jumped out of the car and bent into a yoga stretch, hands down, her hard peach of an ass uncovered and high in the air, her heels flat on the ground. Adri is very flexible. She ran to unlock the front door pushed me inside and kissed me deeply.
I was sent off to have a look around while she unpacked the car. The house was grand but worn. Four rooms upstairs, four rooms downstairs opening off of two wide hallways. On the ground floor the hall floor boards showed the trace of having once been painted to look like a checkerboard of black and white marble. Adri’s drawings were everywhere, mostly prettily framed nudes hung to camouflage the un-faded patches of wallpaper.
The first room upstairs had been turned into an enormous bathroom probably in the thirties from the look of the tiles. The huge tub projected into the room like big white sarcophagus. To the right here was a glass shower enclosure. When Adri had said she was having a shower installed, I didn’t expect one big enough to wash the starting line-up of a basketball team all at once.
Only one of the three bedrooms looked lived in at all. Against the far wall there were rows and rows of books covered in those wrappers local businesses hand out at the start of the school year. Why? I wondered, as Adri had never been to a school that would have asked to have books handed in at the end of the year.
Adri appeared with two vodka tonics in a jelly jars.
“At least my parents left the beds.” She handed me the drink and walked over to the bookcase.
“You know, for years my Aunt thought I was being diligent about my summer reading for school.”
She pulled out a few at random and tossed them on the bed. Lace by Shirley Conran, Fanny Hill and something called and something about the adventures of a stewardess with lurid illustrations.
Over many summers, Adri had accumulated an erotic library that ranged from dirty Latin poetry to pulp novels about nymphomaniac nurses. I loved that she had Madame Bovary tucked up against Emmanuelle as if they were old school friends. Her collection was hidden in plain sight, wrapped up to look like school books. She pulled out another book, paying more attention this, and took it with her when she headed downstairs.
“Let’s go for a walk after lunch. You take this room, best bed in the house, I’ll be in the kitchen,” Adri said.
I changed into shorts and a tank top and went downstairs. Adri was in cut off shorts and a tiny tee shirt with the bear from the fabric softener ad on the front. She stood at the sink washing strawberries. We ate on the sunny terrace behind the house tossing strawberry hulls into the woods to draw the deer in later.
After lunch she opened the book she’d brought down and read;
“Fucking in groups is harder than you think, you have to confront your own homosexuality.”
“It’s from Fear of Flying,” she told me and we had a good laugh about all of the anguish poor Isadora goes through for some pretty disappointing sex.
“Let’s walk,” Adri said “there is a secret spot to swim in the woods.”
She packed a bag with wine, a blanket, and her sketch book. We set off onto a track through the woods you would never have recognized as a path unless you had walked all your life. Down and down until I heard the sound of water. Adri kicked off her shoes, spread out the blanket and peeled off her clothes.
I’d seen Adri naked before but never like this. She stood on a little ridge that obscured the view of the river behind us. Waxed bare, with the sun on her, she looked like a nymph in a Renaissance painting.
“I’m swimming,” she said.
Adri didn’t bother to ask me to follow her. She knew I would. As I waded in, I giggled at feeling so naughty. I even worried we’d be caught by some hikers. Adri floated on her back, utterly unconcerned, her nipples erect from the slight chill of the river. I felt more covered standing on a smooth rock with water up to my chin.
Adri somersaulted backwards and popped out of the water in front of me. She took my shoulders. It was inevitable; she kissed with the motion of the river pushing her body into mine. She kissed my neck, my bare breasts. She slid one hand between my legs and left it there as I caught my breath.
“You okay?” she asked.
I could only nod.
“Moving water, no mosquitoes,” she laughed and pushed my legs apart with her knee.
Our breasts crushed together as she pulled me closer. She took my hand from her shoulder and pulled it down her body passing it over a breast and along the curve of her hip. She slipped my hand between her legs and gently pushed my fingers inside of her.
The muscles of Adri’s cunt contracted over my fingers squeezing hard. Once she found a comfortable rhythm took her own opposite hand and found her way inside of me She was hooked so deeply inside that my feet left the bottom of the riverbed for a moment.
I concentrated to keep my balance because I couldn’t bear the thought separating from her embrace. We stayed there, patiently shifting and rolling against each other to lift a breast to mouth and waiting for each shudder. We challenged each other to come again and again until not even the heat of our bodies could compensate for the coldness of the river.
We lay on the blanket so happy to look at each other that we didn’t want to dress. We drank wine from the bottle until I fell asleep and Adri pulled out her sketch book to draw me.
I awoke because I heard voices and splashing; foreign voices in a language I didn’t recognize.
“Maybe this place is not as secret as I let you think,” Adri said and showed me a rough sketch of what she could see from her vantage point, peering over the ridge, belly down on the blanket.
She had drawn three men, naked, well proportioned sitting on the opposite bank in a patch of sun. I raised my head to see them now splashing about in the river.
“Think the cold made them shrink a little?” Adri stood up.
One man turned, then the other two all laughing, but nervously. Now, back lit by the sun, gleaming, golden, and naked she was even more ethereal than she had been earlier in the afternoon. And down she went into the river, but not before she warned me,
“don’t dive, it’s not deep enough.”
I watched her swim over to the nearest of our stunned new companions. She stopped in front of him and in the same deliberate way she had first touched me, her hand disappeared under the water. With acrobatic grace she wrapped her legs around his waist and pushed her breasts towards his mouth. I ached for her.
Whatever modesty I ever had dissolved in that moment and I somehow made my way into the river. I swam for Adri but the tallest of the three was coming in my direction. He grabbed me, but gently, from behind around the breasts and with one hand opening the lips of my cunt pulled me against a very solid errection.
Adri now was motioning to the last of the threesome to join her. He nervously, moved behind her, cupping a breast in each hand, trying to be as close to Adri as her could without touching his friend.
Something I didn’t understand was whispered into my neck. I realized, with a mix of fear and ecstasy that I had a total stranger sliding his cock into me Cold water came into me with him. One hand massaged my clit and with the other, held my head so I could not look away from Adri and his friends.
Adri shrieked when she came. She made a big splash falling back into the water and performed her backwards somersault move again. Then she swam in a circle before she took her other partner by the hand and walked out of the water onto the opposite bank. She knelt in front of him and took his cock into her mouth. With one hand she caressed his balls, with the other she traced little circles alternating between his chest, and his thigh
Adri worked diligently, cooing and moaning all the while. She swallowed him, and then pulled back sucking just the tip before swallowing again. Each her mouth moved down his friend’s cock, the man behind me pushed deeper sometimes pitching me so far forwards that my face submerged.
Adri fell back onto the grass laughing and smoothing the cum over her skin like sunscreen. When my own shaking and the throbbing inside me had lasted so long that he sensed I couldn’t go on, my partner encircled my waist with his hands, fingers almost touching.
His last hard strokes made the water splash into my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I felt like he had filled me with hot milk. I wondered if he could fell his heat through in his hands on my stomach.
Adri got up and waded back into the river to the arms of her first lover. She kissed him, and then blew a kiss to her exhausted lover on the river bank.
My partner had turned me to face him and said something, again, in a language I didn’t understand, but it seemed to be fairly complimentary. I looked at him for the first time really; dark hair, light eyes, good looking with strong arms that I had only so far felt but not seen. He put his fingers to my lips and I sucked them into my mouth.
Adri was swimming on her back, her long arms reaching over her head and ripples fluttering above her toes. When she reached us pulled my partner close against her body and kissed him hard. Then she took my arm and said,
“shall we go home?”
My insides where still contracting violently. I thought that I might be too light headed to move, but I knew now I’d follow Adri anywhere. We swam away and disappeared behind our little hidden verge on the higher river bank.
It was twilight. We put on our shoes. We didn’t dress for the secluded walk back to the house, though I had draped the blanket around me. I felt more free than I’d ever felt in my life but I didn’t have the words to express myself yet.
The only thing Adri said was,
“remember, you have another two weeks of this.”
When we reached the house, there were deer eating strawberry hulls at the edge of the woods.