Stripped Down (31 page)

 

Jez!! The sound of my own voice wakes me up. My own fingers in my cunt, still moving frantically, my dream orgasm slowly subsiding. I get out of bed, groggy but aware enough to know that I am still alone. I go to the shower, hoping to wash her scent off of me, anger now taking the place of sorrow. Last week we were fine, laughing over breakfast, talking about plans for the weekend, fucking in the shower…

 

I walk into the bathroom; I can see her washing, her outline slightly distorted by the glass. I snap the buttons on my harness and feel the weight of my cock in my hands. As she turns her back to the door, I silently enter, step behind her, and run my finger down the cleft of her ass. She stifles a moan and presses that luscious ass back against my hand. I tell her she is a naughty little slut while reaching around and testing her cunt. She is already open and waiting for me. I slide into her, inch by inch, pushing her up against the wall. I grab a handful of her hair and fuck her slowly until she starts pushing back, begging for it harder. I oblige, her moans fill the room.

 

I go on with my day, eating, breathing, moving, and just going through the motions. Twice I see a glimpse of red hair coupled with a heart-shaped ass. I chase after her, scaring the bejesus out of two women who think I am crazy. Maybe I am. Friends come by to check on me, invite me places, joke about “getting me out in the land of the living.” I respond that I would rather walk with the dead. I go to her grave, stroke the outline of her name carved into the stone. Just last week she was lying next to me in bed, six days later, thanks to an out-of-control Impala, I am lying on top of her as she lies in the ground.

I leave the cemetery, tears still coming, and go home. When I get there the rage that had started this morning over what happened finally overtakes me. I tear through the house, ripping pictures off the wall, throwing clothes in trash bags, making inarticulate sounds of grief as I go. I find the bottle of champagne we were saving for our upcoming five-year anniversary and drink it all. I pass out and sleep dreamlessly.

I awake to find the house in shambles, I had forgotten about my tirade the night before. As I walk through the house, surveying the mess, I see something peculiar. In the middle of our bed there is a pile of ripped photos. However, the center one is untouched. It is the picture of us on our wedding day, me in a tasteful suit and her in a gorgeous white slip dress. Lying on the picture is her wedding ring, the ring I could have sworn was on her finger when we—a new wave of hurt washes over me—buried her. I take the ring and slip it over my finger, nestling it next to mine. I try not to wonder why it is there, telling myself that she must not have been wearing it, and during my fugue last night, I created this weird shrine. I spend the rest of my day cleaning up the house, crying over the mementos
I so haphazardly destroyed and finding grim joy in the ones that survived.

I wait a few more days before visiting her again. I try and take my friends' advice and join the land of the living, albeit halfheartedly, for a short time. My well-meaning friends make this harder though, with their well-intentioned condolences and all the talk about her being in a better place. How can I join the living when all anyone wants to talk about is her? I smile, nod my head, and murmur all the things the bereaved spouse is supposed to say.

I find myself back at her grave, the living driving me back toward the comfort of the dead. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, a sane part of me says that this is fucked up, that this is not the way things should be. I, however, don't care. I lie there on the ground, knowing that the woman I love is silently moldering beneath me. Knowing the corpse below me bears no resemblance to the cherished body I once held in my arms, with its crushed back and shattered face. At some point I fall asleep, arms around the gravestone.

 

She is here, only this time I don't think I am dreaming. I can feel her weight settle on top of me, her lips kiss my face; and I hear her voice in my ears. She is naked, and I suddenly realize that I am too. I roll over, placing myself on top of her, rubbing my thigh into her cunt. The warmth from it is shocking compared to the coolness of the rest of her.

Where have you been? I ask. Why did you leave me? She places her finger against my lips, hushing me. I realize I don't care; all that matters is that she is here, under me, holding me in her arms. We kiss frantically; my hands explore her like it's our first time all over again. She moans as I suck on
her breasts, pulling her stiff nipples into my mouth. My hand replaces my thigh as I place it over her cunt. I always loved the feeling of it in my hand, the smooth skin, the heat and wetness leaking out. I reach down further, one finger gently tickling her ass, while she bucks against me trying to get something inside her. I'm beginning to lower my head to her cunt when she stops me. She twirls her finger in the air, motioning for me to turn around so she can get to me while I eat her. I happily comply, settling my cunt over her mouth. I reenter her with my hand, two fingers in her ass, while my thumb nestles in her cunt. I suddenly feel her do the same to me. Feeling her fuck me the same way I am fucking her sends me over the edge. I bury my face in her cunt, licking her clit, daring her to make me come before she does. We become one being straining at each other, melding together until our cunts begin to twitch at the same time. My orgasm hits me like a truck, lights swirling before my eyes, the brightness overtaking me, her answering wetness flowing over my face. All I see is white…

 

I am sure someone will find me, my cold body still clinging to the headstone, a peaceful smile on my face. They will say, “We should have watched over her better. We should have known something was wrong.” Or, “The poor dear, she died of a broken heart/exposure/grief. Blah, blah.” Or a million other equally clichéd things. They will blame themselves, blame others, and blame me. Then they will go home, maybe hug their loved ones and maybe even fuck, proving their life and virility in the face of death. But none of that matters now. You see, my love, my Jez, was gone. And now I am gone too.

VIRGO INTACTA

Anna Bishop

 

 

 

 

The little nun is seventeen.

Her name is Maddalena, and she's beautiful in a way that owes all its appeal to the freshness of its bloom. She reminds Andrea of those tiny red plums that grow wild on the scrubby trees circling the villa they've rented for the month, the ones that show the prints of her fingers in purple against their ruby skins. When broken open, their flesh is dark gold with a hint of rose-blush rising in veins to the surface. The little nun's skin is like that, too, plump and golden with youth between her collar and the white band of her novice's headdress. And like the plums, she's native to these sleepy hills, born out of their dusty soil and raised among their goats and grapevines. Andrea looks at her and feels like she's been taken back in time.

Ro says she'll bruise just as easily as the fruit, and spins elaborate fantasies about Maddalena when she and Andrea are alone together. Andrea's own skin testifies to the violence of their mutual ardor; she's long grown used to the garden of violets that blooms and fades and blooms again on her body when Ro is sublimating a ferocious new passion.

Maddalena is a player in Andrea's personal fantasies, too, but they're gentler encounters than Ro's gleefully imagined bacchanals. Hot afternoons, white cotton sheets, mosquito netting checkerboarding sunlight into tiny square dapples on their skins. Her face between Maddalena's olive thighs. Her own fingers reaching up to link with those small, capable, calloused hands, fluttering against her grip like frightened sparrows. Andrea can't remember her own first orgasm, and would rather not relive the loss of her virginity, so easing the little nun over that fragile bridge between innocence and carnality seems like the perfect way to redeem her misspent youth.

Not that this is likely to happen. The girl is the niece of old Elisabeta, the live-in housekeeper, and she's only here working in the villa because of Elisabeta's recent hip surgery. She arrives an hour after the convent's clock tower rings for morning prayers, half a mile down the road, and departs for evening Mass as soon as dinner is on the table. Elisabeta, the reluctant invalid, hobbles after her in the interim, leaning hard on her cane and scolding her in thickly accented Italian.

That the rich Americans vacationing here until the end of the month are both women seems to have played a role in securing the convent's approval of this arrangement. What the Mother Superior would say if she knew the details of their relationship (to say nothing of Ro's suspiciously deep voice and five o'clock shadow) Andrea can only speculate. If
Elisabeta knows anything, she appears to have kept the news to herself.

Certainly Maddalena has noticed. She cleans their bedroom, after all, and is as openly curious as she can be under her aunt's careful scrutiny. Andrea has looked up more than once from Ro's casual embrace to catch a flash of fascinated dark eyes, quickly averted. Later, passing Maddalena in the upstairs hall, Andrea is intrigued when the little nun blushes but doesn't look away.

She reports this to Ro, who promptly incorporates Maddalena's innocent show of interest into the ongoing fantasy that's encompassed their lovemaking for the last week and a half. An hour or so into it, Andrea is bowed back against the pillows, cunt skewered on three of Ro's fingers, clit being savaged by an expert thumbnail. She's juicing all over Ro's hand and biting her own fist to keep from screaming out loud.

“She's kissing your feet,” Ro says. “Crying. She's got nipples like cherries. You know that noise a newborn kitten makes? That's what she sounds like when I twist them.”

Andrea imagines that small round golden body arched in agony and pulsing with need, ruby-nippled, plum-cunted; imagines Maddalena in her place, impaled and squirming on Ro's fingers and crying with the need to come again, to stop coming, to be touched, to be left alone; imagines covering her mouth in a kiss and drinking those baby-howls like some sweet sticky elixir of youth. She comes, and comes, and comes again, Ro folding in her fourth finger and her thumb and shoving hard while she gasps obscenities into the sweating hollow between Andrea's breasts. When Ro finally fucks her, it's even better.
Everything's so pretty when it's new
, Ro whispers into her ear,
don't you just want to open her up and
see how she works? Put your fingers in; it's like kitten fur, like pink satin, like velvet that's never been touched. She's all blank in there, waiting for you to tell her what sex is. She's all new. She's all yours.

She's all yours and you're all mine. That means I get… everything
.

Fair enough
, Andrea thinks, and manages to say as much before she can't talk or think anymore.

Later, they turn on the ceiling fan and collapse back on the big white bed, letting the cool night air from the open window dry their bodies. Andrea drifts her fingertips over Ro's nipples lightly enough that they don't even harden, but just lie pink and quiescent like sleeping lips waiting to be kissed awake, and pretends she's touching Maddalena. A long inside quiver runs through her, interior walls clamping down on themselves in a delicious twist of pressure that grabs her by surprise.

“Ow,” Ro says without opening her eyes. “Easy, tiger.”

Andrea realizes she's pinching. “Sorry,” she says. “Got carried away.”

 

On Friday afternoon, Elisabeta tells them in halting English that she'll be gone to the big hospital in Grasseto from Sunday evening all the way through to Tuesday afternoon. Signora Abruzzi, their nearest neighbor, has agreed to cook for them in her absence, she says. As for the cleaning…well… Maddalena…?

Here she hesitates, small black eyes darting between them, anxious fingers twisted in the front of her apron. Ro, resplendent and unreadable behind dark glasses and a paperback novel, says nothing.

It's up to Andrea, then, to resolve the tension. She smiles
and sips Elisabeta's homemade lemonade, tart and thick and syrupy, like melted sorbet, squeezed from the tiny sweetish lemons that grow in aromatic groves all along the nearby coast. It's difficult to imagine a response that's going to please both the old woman and Ro, too.

“Ah,” she says finally, shrugging. “But of course there's no problem. It's perfect timing, really.” They've been contemplating a weekend of shopping in Siena. Signora Abruzzi needn't worry herself about the cooking. As for Sorella Maddalena, if she'd just be so kind as to turn down the linens on Monday afternoon in anticipation of their return and perhaps lay out a cold supper, they won't require anything more of her.

Ro shifts slightly behind her novel at this, though her expression doesn't change. Elisabeta breaks into smiles and relieved chatter.
Certo, certo, molto giusto, molto bene
. If the Signora and the…ah,
Signora
…are to be away…ah, then, everything is solved. Elisabeta can go to her appointment without worrying; Signora Abruzzi will not be overtaxed with work; Maddalena can observe Sunday services and be back on Monday morning to ready the villa for their arrival.

Grazie. Grazie. Molto, molto bene
.

Ro is less voluble, but equally pleased. “You're a better liar than you used to be,” she murmurs later, against Andrea's cheek. “It's hot.”

They're in the pool. Ro's lips are cool and wet, curled up just now in a knowing little half smile. The upper curves of her small high breasts, pushed up and out of her bathing suit by its built-in padded bra, are beginning to show a tinge of pink; she's always been more likely to burn than to tan.
I ought to make her put on more sunblock
, Andrea thinks, but Ro moves in closer, one hand pulling aside the wet spandex
that separates them, and it's far easier to succumb to the decadent zero-gravity delights of underwater fucking than to force herself to move away.