Loading...“Really, Sidonie,” I said. “I didn’t come to New Orleans just so I could help you keep your kinfolk in order!”
My friend from college days grinned at me, lifting a rake through her big chestnut hair. Gavin, her husband, sat on the bed patiently channel-surfing while she finished getting gussied up for their evening out on the town. She was dressed in a red satin shirt, black leather pants and Doc Martens, and Gavin was equally street- and party-ready, although far less dramatic, in chinos and a polo shirt.
He was an inch shorter than his wife but built like a tank. They both looked a little too sexy and dangerous to be a respectable couple with grown kids, which in fact they were.
I was wearing a pair of flowing harem pants and a snug-fitting top with a low, draped cowl neck. A well-designed bra pushed my breasts up to a flattering level, but now I wondered why I’d bothered. I’d assumed that we’d be spending the evening together, and now she had sprung this on me.
“It’s not like I was asking you to baby-sit small children, Esmé. It’s just I promised Drew’s mom that I would spend some time with him and sort make sure he was OK while we were in town. I told Lisa that rock musicians could look after themselves, but you know how mothers are.”
“Yeah.” I did that.
“And I can’t be in two places at once, now can I?”
“No, I don’t suppose you can,” I said.
“Hey, it won’t be so bad,” Sidonie said. “For all I know, we may decide to make it an early night. I swear, the parades in New Orleans are getting to be so damned big and unwieldy, they just aren’t fun anymore. I worry more about getting trampled or caught up in a fight or getting arrested than I enjoy watching the parades. And as for catching anything, forget it! When I fight, I prefer to take on one opponent at a time, and for something important—not some piece of plastic that cost a fraction of a penny to make!”
Sidonie slicked a layer of dark pink lip gloss onto her mouth, strapped on her purse, and she and Gavin left the room. I left with them, and we went down into the lobby of our hotel and out onto Rampart St.
Sidonie handed me a piece of folded paper. “That’s the name of the club where he’s playing at, and how to get to it and all. When his set’s over, get him to back you up at the parade, or bring him back here. We’ll probably be back by then, and then we can figure out what to do next.” I looked at the brochure. The place wasn’t too far away. “Thanks much, Es! We’ll see you in a few hours.”
I had the same opinion of Mardi Gras parades as Sidonie. I felt they had gotten too big and dangerous, and preferred the funky charm of the small town celebrations. We had gone to the Spanish Town parade in Baton Rouge and I had laughed myself helpless. We might not even have gone down to N’Awlins except that Sidonie had promised this kinswoman of hers that she would do so, on account of her wandering musician son, whose band presently had a gig in the Crescent City.
The pounding rhythms of a southern rock band hit me like a wall of sound as soon as I got to the door of the place. I was a little surprised; considering that I’d heard so much jazz and blues and Zydeco since I’d arrived in Louisiana, but then I remembered that the club Drew was playing at was a southern rock type place. It occurred to me that Sidonie had forgotten to give me either Drew’s last name or even a description of him. However, I had been to gatherings of her family and knew more or less what to look for.
I managed to find a table not too far away from the stage and sat down to check out the band. The most likely suspect appeared to be a broad-shouldered, dark-haired, twentysomething kid playing electric bass. His looks followed the format I’d observed in about three-quarters of the people I’d seen in the last reunion of Sidonie’s family that I’d been to—thick black hair, important-looking eyebrows, and killer smiles. He had the first two attributes, but since he was playing something grandiose and turgid and dramatic, I did not expect him to smile.
I ordered a beer and ascertained from the waiter who brought it to me that yes, the bass player was Drew and therefore the guy I was looking for. I nursed it very slowly, ignoring attempts by various men sitting at the bar to send me fresh drinks, and when the band was on a break, I gave the waiter a note to pass to the young man. He opened it briefly, looked at me, gave me a neutral look, and made his way over to my table and sat down.
“Drew, I presume?” I said. I extended a hand, and he gave me a good handshake. His hand was warm, firm, and calloused. “I’m Esmé Trent. Your…ah, cousin Sidonie sent me to look for you.”
“Hey, so she’s in town? That’s nice. You a friend of hers?”
“Since college,” I said, suddenly wishing I had lied. Now he knew exactly how to classify me—someone as old as his cousin Sidonie was, assuming that he had that info, and therefore as a person of barely human status. Now that I was close to him, I thought he was even more attractive. His hair was as thick as a seal’s pelt, short and free of sticky stuff; and his arching dark eyebrows described a sudden angle over the outer third of his eyes, which were a pleasing shape and a warm, light shade of brown,. His nose was a tad too long for technical beauty, but that was as well; beauty is a liability in a profession where they don’t respect you unless you look like Tom Petty. There was something Italianate about his mouth, he had a small dimple in his chin, and his ears were close-set and at certain angles, looked pointed, like a faun’s.
“Um, Ms. Trent, are you all right?” His voice was baritone, with a warm, dark quality. It sounded older than I thought he was.
“Yeah. I was just trying to…place you. Sidonie sent me haring up here with virtually no info about you, expected me to just pick you out of the bunch on the basis of family resemblance, I guess. So, are you one of the Wanzacks or from some other branch?”
“Half,” he said, and then he smiled. He had a great smile. “My name is Scarpetti, Ma’am. Let me think…my great-grandpa, Victor, was Sidonie’s father’s uncle, which makes me—mm—” His eyebrows knit as he thought it over—”her second cousin. I think.”
“I’ll take your word,” I said. “And don’t call me ma’am.”
Before Drew’s break was over, we established that I would meet him after the band was through playing. Then he went back to the stage, and the band started playing again. I continued to sip my beer and look around at the band and the other patrons of the club. Most often, though, my eyes kept coming back to Drew. At one point, the lead guitarist said something to him that nobody could hear, but he did. His face got the same kind of everything-suspended look I had sometimes seen in Sidonie, and one of her kids, and then this thing happened to it when he laughed, some felicitous arrangement of lines and dimples that threw me into confusion. The house lights gleamed on his teeth. I looked down into the golden pool of beer in the bottom of my mug, and then back up at Drew. Come on, laugh again, I thought. I surreptitiously tugged my blouse down so that I had a little more tit showing.
At the end of the band’s performance, I waited for him and the band to take down all their equipment, disconnect the cables from the amplifiers and coil them up, and put their instruments back in their cases. I had wondered if he was going to have to carry a case through the streets of the Quarter, but he had that covered; since he was coming back the next evening, he could keep his equipment at the club. We went out. After the close, smoky air indoors, the damp, funky air from the city seemed as cold and fresh as if it had come from the mountains. Over on Canal Street, we heard a distant roar and made our way to it.
“Jesus!” said Drew. After an hour taking in the Bacchus Parade, we were scraped up and bruised; I had a gash on my ankle from when someone had stomped on it. We had had beer splashed on us. We had been scratched with fingernails. I had one lousy short string of beads and a cup I’d probably leave behind in the hotel to show for the pushing and shoving I’d done. Drew had nothing; a boy with an old-fashioned upbringing, he had spent too much time trying to protect me to collect anything himself. However, it was the sight of a man up on a balcony, sprawled on a chair and luxuriously writhing under the oral ministrations of another man right in front of God and everybody that led him to call it quits for the night.
“Like the old song said, ‘That ain’t no way to have fun, son.’ That’s a little too rich for my blood,” he said.
It seemed to me that it was an excellent way to have fun; if he objected to the gender of the people having it that could not be helped. Some of Drew and Sidonie’s family had the reputation of being kind of wild, but evidently their wildness did not seem to go in that direction.
The first thing he did upon arriving at my room was to disappear into the bathroom to pee, and while he was doing that, I called the desk to see if Sidonie and Gavin had checked in—I knew they weren’t in their room—and I called Room Service to order up a bottle of champagne. I thought Drew might prefer beer, but I did not, and I was buying.
My room was a bed-sitting room; my friends didn’t care what was in a hotel room as long as it had a bed and bath, but I liked my comforts. The sitting area boasted a little padded brocade French provincial settee that probably purported to be a loveseat, but was limited to the love that could be made on it. Nevertheless, it put us closer together than we would be on the average sofa. That was all right; after a glass or two of champagne, we seemed like old friends. We talked about our impressions of New Orleans, other places we’d traveled, and his family. Among other things, Drew volunteered the information that he had been christened Andrea, and the first thing he had done upon reaching his eighteenth birthday was to go down to the courthouse and get it changed to Andrew, which was how he’d been signing all his documents since first grade anyway.
“I mean, girls are called Andrea,” he said. “Where’d she get that?”
“Andrea del Sarto, maybe,” I said.
“Whatever,” Drew said, that all-purpose retort that made people my age want to dope-slap those who uttered it. Scratch art history as a topic of discussion, I thought.
The phone rang. It was Sidonie, calling from some very noisy, steel-girt location, on her cell phone. She kept cutting in and out. I could barely understand her.
“at—O—ien—ine,” was what I heard. I extrapolated that perhaps she and Gavin might be at Pat O’Brien’s in a long line. I thought she was nuts if she was. “—ew?”
“Yeah, he’s here,” I said. “You want to talk to him?”
“No, that’s OK,” she said, understandably for once. I couldn’t catch what she said next. Just more crackles and vowels.
“You’re breaking up, Sid,” I said.
I got more unintelligible crackles. “—orning,” she said, and then I heard an empty rush of air, and then a dial tone.
“Well?” said Drew.
“I think they’re going to be out the rest of the night,” I said.
“Oh, shit, I guess I’d better get going, then. I’ve got a ways to go before I get to the place we’re staying at. I’m gonna have to get on the bus.” He looked a little flushed and glittery-eyed from the champagne, and it occurred to me that whatever Sidonie had said about rock musicians being able to take care of themselves, I didn’t like the idea of this delectable-looking young man making his way alone and slightly drink-taken through the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras night. I didn’t think that either his mother or Sidonie would call it looking after him if I let him.
“Um, Drew, you don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’m sure Sidonie wouldn’t mind if you stopped here.”
“Yeah? And I’d sleep where?”
“The room does have two beds in it. You could sleep in one of them,” I pointed out to him. “…Or not,” I suddenly added, looking at him with a slow smile.
He had started to get up, but when I had spoken, he settled back down.
“Mrs. Trent,” he said, squinting at me slightly, “Are you hitting on me?”
“You were calling me Esmé earlier,” I said. “And I’m not hitting on you, yet. If I were, I’d be pointing out to you that you could do a hell of a lot worse.” I began to count the reasons: “Disease-free, non-fertile, I’m right here and think you are hot, I won’t brag to my friends, and I won’t tie you down. At the same time, I will respect you in the morning.”
“Wow!” he said. “Those are reasons to consider, all right. It’s just that you’re—I’ve never been with—I mean, you did say you’d gone to school with Cousin Sidonie, right? And she’s—”
I slid a little closer to him on the loveseat. “Would you shoot down Bonnie Raitt, if she were here hitting on you?”
I envisioned synapses flashing like pinball lights in his young brain as he worked on the question. Finally he shrugged.
“Bonnie Raitt,” I said, “is exactly two years older than me. I rest my case.” And I slid closer yet, close enough to be within reach of his arm if he chose to take it off the back of the settee. I could smell his sweat and cologne and the stale smoke-and booze club fug coming from his skin and clothing. I laid closed lips on his mouth, off-center, and then, with the utmost gentleness, caught his tender lower lip between my teeth.
He took his arm off the back of the loveseat and put it around me; he opened his mouth on mine and slid a warm, champagne-flavored tongue between my lips. With a little groan, I pulled it into my mouth and sucked on it until he backed it out only to slide it in again. Our tongues slipped and danced against each other like aquatic beasts in courtship. With only that contact, I was gone already; conscious only of my supersensitive skin and avid mouth and pussy that felt as puffed and glazed as a Krispy Kreme donut. We kissed for a while longer, licking and nibbling at each other’s mouths. He got one hand in my shirt and played with my nipples, and I did the same thing to him. I opened my eyes and tried to look into his, but that was no good; I had given up three years ago on getting printed material far enough away to read and started wearing bifocal contacts, and he was a lot closer than that. He opened his eyes and tried to look back; we found ourselves both getting cross-eyed, and laughed.
“What happens next?” he said. I sat up and looked at him. He was wearing a shirt in a pattern that accentuated the width of his shoulders and upper torso, and a pair of those stupid trousers young guys are currently wearing, baggy to the point of falling off and pockets everywhere. They concealed a hard-on no better than the tight bellbottoms guys wore when I was about his age, and he was making a nice teepee in them. He believed in being direct. He took my hand and laid it right on the tent-pole. It felt like a piece of steel bar, but it was warm. I refrained from giving him Mae West’s line about the gun. Or John Lennon’s, for that matter.
“This I gotta see,” I said. I found the buckle of the woven belt that kept his trousers from going south, and tugged at it.
“I hope I’m not gonna be the only one naked around here,” he said.
“No! Of course not.” I hit the dimmer switch on the lights. I had always looked young for my age, but I knew what my limitations were. I had taken care of my body and was pretty fit, nevertheless, in my own house, I had taken to employing such ruses as candlelight and pink bulbs.
In a few seconds I was down to French-cut panties and bra, and he was down to far less. I realized that I must have been wondering what he looked like naked from the first time I laid eyes on him. He was gorgeous, with a wedge-shaped body, muscular arms and legs, skin marble-like where the sun had not hit it. He had less hair than I had expected on one with his Mediterranean coloring, just little rosettes under his arms, and a sleek scatter of it on his chest, tufting around his darling little pointy nipples. Fur zipper on his belly. Thick dark hair half-concealing his package like the husk of some exotic fruit.
If you think I’m going to say that he had a twelve-inch dick or anything like that, you’re wrong. For one thing, I had never seen one, haven’t seen one, and don’t believe they exist; and if they do exist, they are of no more use than a volleyball serve that goes slamming against the opposite wall of the court and leaves your team with a side out. It was rosy, beautifully lathed and sturdy, smooth, and I knew that underneath its satiny covering, it would feel as hard as a rock. I had forgotten about how incredible it seemed that anything could be that hard and still be flesh. I had a sudden hankering to taste it.
I slid down onto the floor between his parted legs and looked up at him. I ran my hands over the delicious planes and angles of his body as if it were a piece of sculpture I had just acquired. He was slightly flushed, trembling a little; I could not tell if he were enjoying my touch or enduring it.
“That, um, sight we saw on the balcony earlier this evening,” I said, lifting Drew’s cock from where it lay twitching impatiently on his belly, “what about it specifically grossed you out?”
“A man doing it to him. God, Esmé! We never had anything like that go on in our family.”
He wasn’t 100% right, but enough right that you couldn’t blame him for his assumption. It wasn’t my place to tell him that the reason Sidonie had gone off with Gavin tonight and left me to honor the obligations of family was that one of the people they were possibly going to meet was Jeremy Gable, a guy both of them had known since they were kids; Gavin and Jeremy had been in the Army together. They’d had a brief thing in ‘Nam—one of those wartime things that shouldn’t happen but they do. It was long over, but while Sidonie trusted Gavin, she didn’t trust Jeremy any further than she could spit a rat.
“But it wasn’t the act itself?”
He looked down at me with an asymmetrical smile. “No. Sure wasn’t.”
I licked the crystalline tear from its single eye and used the broad smooth head to spread it all over my lips like gloss; then I began spiraling my tongue all around the beveled edge, drawing his cock a little bit more in my mouth with every turn. I sucked the head into my mouth and licked at the flat place below the slit.
Drew nudged up further into my mouth. His voice deepened into a velvety growl. “Mrs. T, are you going to suck my dick already or not?”
I had the nails of my other hand pressing infinitesimally into his scrotum, and the head of his cock resting on my tongue. I grinned ferally around it. “Call me Mrs. again and I’ll bite you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and wound his fingers in my hair. Enough with show and subtlety; it was time to get into some serious stroking. I worked on him and he met me; we came to something between me doing all the work and him fucking me in the mouth, at first anyway. Over all the suckings and slurpings, I could hear his little gasps and murmurs and groans, as he shifted and surged into my mouth and beneath my hands. And then, as his pleasure began to run him, the words he used to feed into it: Mm yes that’s good suck it harder go a little deeper further down on it oh I love it when you grab it with your throat like that do it again do it some more oh yeah like that just like that don’t stop
–and then I couldn’t stop because he couldn’t stop; he was helplessly thrusting up into my mouth, and I was caught inexorably between his strong hands wrapped in my hair and his pistoning cock—
“Oh, yeah, honey, that’s good, oh take it, take all of it, just keep doing that, I’m about to—oh I can’t help it, I’m—aah! Yes!”
With one final thrust he was over the top, his body pronated in ecstasy, his pungent life fluid fountaining into my mouth. I gulped it down as best I could. Spicy, wiry hair tickled my nose with no way for me to scratch. I could hear and feel the fast, heavy thudding of his heart, his accelerated, jagged breathing.
Still panting, he relaxed his hands and let me up. His cock slid out of my mouth, glazed and somewhat deflated. I sat up and used a finger to dab excess cum out of the corners of my mouth and blinked my eyes. Drew lay sprawled on the settee with his head resting on the back. His eyes were closed and he looked completely blissed out. Then he opened his eyes and sat up, reaching for and handing me the remains of my glass of champagne.
“Thanks,” I said, drinking it down. When I had drained the glass he poured me another and filled another glass for himself.
“That felt great,” he said. “That was primo!” He gave me his dazzling smile again, and I felt absurdly pleased with myself. I figured that in his line of work, blowjobs were an expected and commonplace reward, like the bouquets of red roses that conductors and soloists in the more staid musical genres received after the concert, and I was glad if he thought I’d done him good.
By unspoken agreement we moved to the nearest bed, taking the champagne with us, but not bothering about the heaps of clothing we’d left around the settee. We lay cuddled together. Drew ran his hands through my hair and kissed me from time to time. He got his hand partially stuck under the underwire of my bra, and said, “C’mon, get this off,” and when I reached back and unsnapped it, he gathered up my breasts and tongue-flicked and suckled my nipples until I was panting and whimpering and moving all over the bed. I treated him the same way. His dark-rose nipples were as hard as little erasers, and when I flashed my tongue over them it made him shiver and gasp. He pressed me down on the bed and started kissing a trail from my breasts down my belly, stripping my panties off and pulling my thighs apart with his hard, warm, hands.
“Mm, you smell hot,” he said, sniffing appreciatively. He grabbed one of the pillows off the head of the bed and stuffed it under my ass. He lowered his mouth to my upraised cunt and gave it a long, complicated kiss. His tongue strummed my clit and figure-eighted in my wet furrow. I shifted and nudged it against him as if it were my mouth kissing him back. My center tautened and clenched, and clenched, and I let out a gusting shout and told him don’t quit yet, and he didn’t. Just as if he had ignited a string of firecrackers, I went off three more times in rapid succession, something which had not happened to me in many years. We continued our interesting kiss, his mouth against the one between my legs, until I was shuddering and incoherent. He raised his head and looked at me, dazed, his mouth glazed with my juices.
I could hardly talk, except to say, “I want you to fuck me now.”
He got up and leaned over me so he could kiss me. I licked my juice off his mouth. He sat back and put the tip of his cock to my slit. “Damn,” he said. “And I thought it was going to be a boring evening.” I gazed at him, breathing hard. I squirmed closer to him, trying to get closer, get impaled. “Talk to me. Tell me just what you want me to do to you.”
“You want me to talk dirty to you?” I said.
“Yes. Yes, I do.” He smiled.
“Put it in me,” I said.
“Put what?”
“Your cock. Stick it all the way up my cunt. Please. Now.” He did. I felt it slide against the sweet spot inside me when he did. He settled completely inside me, all the way up to the root. He leaned over me, looking down into my face.
“What happens next?”
“You fuck me. Move inside of me.”
“You got it,” he said. He drew back and shoved it into me, hard. I gripped his arms. He had me spread out in a slightly uncomfortable position, but it let me feel that contact with my sweet spot and watch him as he moved, see his face as he gave himself over to the sensations he was feeling. At some point, he tensed and shivered inside me and I thought he had come, but he carried on; he must have pushed himself to the very edge, felt that edge and pulled back. He kept up that almost unendurable slide and scrape against my spot, and I knew I had to have it again. His pace had picked up; I figured he was going to really do it this time.
“Damn that feels good, Drew! Keep ramming that beautiful fuckstick up my pussy. Oh, that’s lovely. Mm. Yeah. Put your thumb on my clit, I want it now oh, yeah, stroke it stroke it stroke it—”
I broke around his cock like a wave, as the bifold roar of sensation took me from the inside and the outside simultaneously. This was where I always needed action and force, just brutal ball-slapping cock slamming into me and making my climax roll on the way a wave that crosses another wave extends your ride. I wrapped my legs around him and thrust against him. I wrung his cock with my cunt muscles. “Ah, God, Drew, fuck me, fuck it good! Now! Do it now! Move, honey! Fuck me till I fucking split! Unh! Right! There! Now!” And he did it now, gasping, groaning, his beautiful mouth drawing open in a rictus of ecstasy.
We fell in a sweaty, exhausted heap. I could feel waning flutters as Drew finished inside me. The roar of our hearts quieted to something we could hear over.
“You—talked me—right into it,” he said. He was collapsed on top of me. He still had not got his breath back. “Wow! What a ride! That was something. I don’t know what I expected, but—man, have you ever got a tight grip!”
I gave him a heartfelt Kegel. His eyes widened. “I work out,” I said.
In a little while we ended up in the shower. We’d both had to go to the bathroom, and taking a shower seemed to be a logical next step. I loved an après-sex shower with a man; the way the water made the combined smells of our sex juices revivify before washing them down the drain, the way when you kissed the water that got into your mouth tasted sweet next to your saliva, the slipperiness of soap and the squeak of clean skin (unless you were showering in Baton Rouge, and then you never felt rinsed off)—the potential for further mischief you could get into…
When you contemplate mischief with someone, especially when you’ve only recently met them, it’s as well to make sure that his idea of mischief is compatible with yours.
We were doing a half-assed job of washing each other off. He was washing my back, and had progressed to my backside. He massaged it with a soapy hand.
“You sure have a muscular butt, Esmé,” he said.
“Thanks, I think,” I replied. He slid a finger into the upper part of my crack.
“Tell me—is your ass as tight as your pussy? I bet it is.”
“It might be,” I said, “but don’t go there.”
He pressed up close to me, and I could tell that he had started to recover from his last climax. “Why not?”
“Because I’d rather you didn’t. Isn’t that enough reason?”
He was distracting me by caressing my breasts with his other hand, and licking and nibbling at my neck and my ears. “Ah, c’mon, Esmé. I bet you’d like it.”
“I bet I wouldn’t. Don’t go there, Drew.”
He was sliding his finger up and down my crack, the pad of one string-hardened finger grazing my hole with every pass. In another minute, he had his finger, well lubricated with soap, up my ass. That was OK, but I knew I didn’t want anything bigger going in there.
“Now is that so bad?” He was maneuvering me so that I was caught between the tub enclosure wall and his body, which made me nervous.
“No, but that’s all I want in there.”
He was still finger-fucking my ass, and I was starting to get excited in spite of myself; nevertheless, that was not the part of me I wanted him in. I could feel his stiff cock nudging against my thighs and buttocks, and I nudged back against him, parting my legs, hoping that he would remember the perfectly good port of entry he’d used before; I wouldn’t have minded him stallionizing me. He had stopped stroking my body with his other hand; too late, I realized what else he was doing with the soap. The finger was withdrawn, but then in one lithe movement, it was Drew’s cock that entered me.
“Damn it, Drew…”
“Oops,” he said. I could tell he was smiling. I could hear the smirk in his voice.
If it had just been his finger, it would have been all right for a while; or if he had been fresh. But this would be his third climax and I knew this one would take the longest, and I was going to be in pain before he was done. I was starting to be in pain already. He had me squashed up against the wall of the tub enclosure, with his hands hooked under my shoulders. He transferred one to my pussy and I concentrated on that feeling. I felt myself tighten up but it was hard to identify why. I was on a knife-edge of sensation, between the pleasure his hand was giving me and the pain his cock was giving me
After a while he said, “You really aren’t enjoying this, are you?”
“Oh, honey, I’d like to enjoy it, but truth is, I—”
“All right.” He slid out of me. “But you’re not leaving me like this! Let me finish.” He backed me to the wall, his cock poking at my pelvis.
“Let me clean that thing off before you put it anywhere else,” I said, grabbing hold of it and soaping it up. I closed my fist hard around it, and he surged forward.
“Hey, that’ll work,” he said. He turned us around so that he was leaning against the wall instead of me. “That’ll work fine. Jack me off, Esmé.” I continued to slide my soapy hand up and down his cock. “Mm, that’s nice. But do it harder.” He stood braced, his hips jutting forward, away from the wall; his legs parted, their muscles tensed. “Harder, harder for God’s sake! I don’t want gentle. Come on, jack it like you mean it, I can take it, that’s what it wants, that’s what I need!” His voice had become an urgent snarl. “God damn it, do I have to do it myself?”
I snarled back at him. “No fucking way,” I said, and hauled away at it as if it was not even made out of real flesh. His face had assumed a closed, ruthless look and I knew he was close. I stood close to him; I had my other hand, liberally soaped up, behind his balls, rubbing that hard area back there that guys probably include when they are telling you how long their dicks are. Millimeter by millimeter, I worked my hand back further. I could feel his balls tense up. Turn about is fair play, I thought.
I turned him about with a vengeance.
The water from the shower poured down on us, roaring like jungle rain, unheeded. We were both of us squashed together in the bottom of the bathtub. Drew had his knees drawn up and he was resting his head on them.
“That’s interesting,” I said brightly. “I’d never actually heard a man scream before. Not in real life, anyway. Only in the movies. And then, someone was hurting him.”
He did not look at me.
“I’m not sure you didn’t,” he said.
“Uh-huh. I suppose that’s why you came like you’d been thrown across the room.”
“I was coming anyway. Jesus! Warn a man when you do that. And just one finger at a time, for Christ’s sake.”
“I warned you,” I said. “I said, ‘Don’t go there,’ didn’t I? What part of ‘Don’t go there’ did you not understand? You’re a hard-fucking little bastard, aren’t you?” I laughed a little. “I just wanted to give you a taste of your own medicine.” I was still hurting a little but I didn’t care. “A man’s got a sweet spot, too, and yours just got stirred up a little. Man! The way you looked, and, mm, mmh!—that sound you made—I will remember it to the end of my days, I swear. The end. Of. My. Days.”
He raised his head, and looked at me. The water fell through his hair, onto his face. Water stood in his dark-amber eyes. It gave him a drowned look, somehow.
“You’d let me in your other two holes, I thought I’d go for all three. I really thought you’d get to liking it if you just gave it a chance.”
“Oh, hell, Drew,” I said. “I should have communicated with you better. I didn’t want to bore you with my medical issues.” It was what old folks did; they bored you with their medical issues. Probably all someone like him ever had to worry about was injuries to his hands, bad food taken on the road, the odd sports injury, and STDs. “I’m OK, you’ll be OK, and by the way, I pity the guy who ever tries to bugger you without an invite. He’ll be lucky to get back what he put in. As it is, I’m glad I don’t make my living doing microsurgery, I’d need another week of vacation before I could go back to work.” I put my fist under his chin and raised his head. “We’re still friends, right?” He gave me an oblique look. “Right,” I said for him, and turned off the water.
We got out of the tub and dried ourselves off silently and abstractedly. I didn’t know what he was thinking; I was thinking still of the way his face had looked, the way he’d reacted, when I’d entered him. It had been so unguarded, so strong, so fine. His face a mask of ecstasy/agony. That scream in a voice that was surely never meant for screaming. Every time I thought about it, it felt like something arrowing through me and it felt good.
“You hungry?” I asked him.
“Now that you ask, I am,” he said. “I’m ’bout to starve.”
In the mini-fridge at the wet bar that I had been avoiding using, was a quarter of a muffalotta sandwich I had been unable to finish at lunch, and a bunch of cruelly expensive, out-of-season Champagne grapes I had bought on impulse in the French market. Drew looked askance at the grapes but inhaled the muffalotta as if it had been a petit four. I looked in the folder of restaurant menus the hotel provided. It was late, and there is never any hope of getting decent New Orleans cuisine during Mardi Gras, but you can always rely on Asian food, and that’s what we did. We ate seated at the small table in the sitting area, he kilted in one of the hotel towels and I in my favorite old white terry robe I’d lifted from another hotel than this one. He wolfed down an order of Kung Pao chicken, while I ate the fresh spring rolls he’d ordered with it and decided he didn’t like. We didn’t talk much; we were too busy eating, and Drew had found the remote and turned on the television.
It was late. Time for bed and fresh awkwardness. I wasn’t quite sure what I remembered about the etiquette of spending the night in a situation like this. Drew got into the bed I had been using, and I got into a short, thin silk nightgown and considered whether I wanted to lie next to him or sleep in the other one.
He held out a hand to me, looking appealing, and said, “Come on in here, Esmé. I’ll be good, I promise.” So again we were like old friends, cuddled together, still watching TV, and not talking about anything much except what we were looking at. He flicked through a bunch of music video stations with the air of someone who wanted to keep on top of what was going on in the business.
Suddenly I realized that he had quit saying anything for quite a few minutes; he was too quiet, lying warm, heavy, and inert next to me. The remote he had been holding fell from his limp fingers. It had been a long day for him; after an evening of hard work, having then been well fucked and well fed, he was down for the count. I studied his face as he lay there asleep. I noticed the translucent edges of his incisors, that I could see when mouth fell open a little; and the way the roots of his eyelashes could be seen going up into the skin of his utterly smooth eyelids. Even the beard hairs poking out through his skin looked soft, although I knew they were not. A kid, I thought; in a moment of irrational panic I wanted to sneak over to his clothes and get out his driver’s license and make sure he’d been telling the truth about his birthday, that his picture wasn’t a profile shot. Naah, I thought, he’s not that much of a kid. Just so much more so than I. I felt a rush of tenderness for him. I leaned down and kissed the end of his slightly outsize nose. A curled hand came up, and like a baby or a kitten, he vigorously rubbed the end of it; then he turned on his side and wrapped himself in deeper slumber as if it were an extra blanket. I turned off the light.
Sometime later I woke to find that Drew had spooned himself behind me, and I could feel his cock nudging between my thighs. I stiffened, unsure of his intentions. He snuggled closer, tugged up the bottom of my nightgown, and repositioned my leg. Knowing fingers fluttered the lips of my pussy. A sleepy murmur in my ear: “Is this the right place?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, and backed up to him, snugging my ass against his thighs. He entered me, the tip of his cock sliding against my anterior wall, where the sweet spot was, his leg slipping between mine. I reached down for his hand. He found mine; he tucked my fingers between my labia, bracketing my clit, laying his hand on top. We started a sweet, sleepy ride, with him pleasuring me from the inside and the two of us pleasuring me from the outside. I felt him tense, shudder and spurt inside me. His teeth were set lightly in my shoulder. He continued to stroke me with his still-hard cock, and our fingers, and I came, profoundly, blissfully sighing and whimpering. Poleaxed, I fell asleep again. I thought there was something that I really needed to see about before I dropped off, but I couldn’t remember what it was and if it involved getting up, I was too relaxed to.
Dawn, and I had to get up. I had to pee, and Drew was sleeping like the single man he was, swastika-style all over the bed, leaving very little room for the single woman that I was.
I thought about everything that had gone down last night, and felt nostalgic already. I knew that this encounter was a one-time thing. Most of this man’s life was ahead of him, and too much of my life was behind me. We’d had a good time. I wondered if we might have time for another round before breakfast, but wasn’t going to get my mouth set for it. It wasn’t Mardi Gras anymore. It was Ash Wednesday, and soon Sidonie would be stirring us all up. Later I figured she’d want to find us a church somewhere and have ashes imposed on us. By that time, Drew would be back at work. Just as well, when I reflected on the general craziness of standing next to him in line while a preacher smudged a cross onto our foreheads, thinking, remembering…I still had to think how he’d join the rest of us for breakfast. I wondered what he’d tell his fellow musicians about his evening.
When I came out of the bathroom I remembered what it was that I should have seen about before falling asleep: I should have locked the door on my side between my suite and the suite Sidonie and Gavin were sleeping in. I had not, and now I stood, paralyzed, watching the knob turn.
The door opened and Sidonie came in, wearing a bathrobe that was a twin of the one that I was wearing; she had acquired it at the same hotel.
“I just cannot drink like I use to could,” she said. Her face creased in the momentary agony of one who feels a bolus of hydrochloric acid trying to climb up into her throat. “It tears up my gut. You got an antacid?”
I went and peeled her one from the roll of Tums I kept in my purse. She took it and crunched it gratefully.
“Thanks,” she said. Then, “Whoo-ee! Do you ever look like you were rode hard and put away wet!” She grinned her trademark lecher’s grin. It looked like it should have hurt; her lips looked raw and blurred on the edges. There were deep shadows under her eyes. Her hair was as tangled as a witch’s.
“Ha! You should talk,” I said. “I suppose I shouldn’t ask what you were up to!”
“I was with my husband, whatever I was up to. I’m glad you found some action last night. I see that he bites…” Her gaze had fallen on where the collar of my robe had fallen aside. Perhaps Drew’s teeth had not been as light in my shoulder as I’d thought. She looked over at all our clothes, in haphazard heaps around the loveseat. “And that he’s still here. Oops! Sorry. I’ll leave you now. Bring him to breakfast, if it suits you. Um, by the way, what did you do with my cousin?”
While I was taking a deep breath and opening my mouth to think of a good answer, the Italian faun in my bed stirred, and stretched. A neatly made foot, not a hoof, extended from beneath the bedclothes. He rolled onto his back. His head pressed into the pillow as he stretched, and then it lolled to one side where his face could be seen, looking unbearably sweet as the sleeping young always do. His mouth fell a little open, and a beam of early morning sunlight sneaked between the curtains and fell on his face, shining on the corner of one of his incisors like a diamante.
Sidonie looked from him to the heaps of clothing to me and back again. Her eyes bulged slightly. She clapped her hands to her face and looked between her fingers at everything she had seen, and then she went into a paroxysm of incredulous laughter.
“Holy Jesus shitfire Lord!” she exclaimed. “Esmé, you didn’t! Tell me that you didn’t!”
“All right, have it your way,” I said blandly. “I didn’t.”