Zarafa Rio sprawled on her belly on a futon, her Titian red hair spilling off the top of the mattress onto a woven grass tatami mat. Sunset bathed the room in a carmine glow that rouged her skin like petals of a dusky rose. A few thousand yards from her one-room bamboo-and-thatch hut, the surf crashed against white sand that powdered the islet of Aitanu like sugar on a donut.
Outside the glassless window, orange-throated tanagers trilled in orchid trees that hugged a verdant ridge sloping to the shore. A mixed choir of tree frogs and bell frogs chirped and chimed the first movement in what would become in another hour a white-noise symphony when the moon rose over the atoll’s central lagoon. Zarafa listened to the plaintive serenade of birds and frogs, pining for a mate, and knew a deeply human version of their songs. She closed her eyes, sinking one sigh deeper into a desolate mood. The evil mix of horniness and loneliness made her restless.
She could pleasure herself, of course, but she’d done enough of that during her four months on the islet to go through two sets of batteries for her vibrator. It was a G-spot vibrator and, oh yes, it really did hit the spot, but fantastic plastic was not what she wanted tonight.
“I so need a deep, sweet fuck!” She heard the raw honesty in her voice. A generous lover with slow hands and a magnificent cock would satisfy her desires quite nicely. Intelligent eyes set in a beautiful male face would make a wonderful additional touch, but brains and good looks were not mandatory for the animal sex she craved.
Damn, her thoughts were making her slippery wet. Firing up her erotic imagination was not a smart way to cope with horniness; it only intensified her ache.
Maybe a good cry would help. A long stroll on the beach might coax the tears to come, and afterward she’d feel sleepy enough to drift away in dreams.
She stood up and the bamboo floor creaked beneath grass mats. She took off a blue cotton summer dress that plopped to the floor around sun-tanned feet. Then she wrapped her bronzed waist in a crimson silk sarong the wet color of a bit-in-half cherry. Above the skirt-like sarong, she put on a white raw silk sleeveless shirt with a low-cut V-neck. The silk caressed her bare breasts and an instant of pleasure rippled through her lonesomeness like sheet-lightning through a dark cloud. The hut held no mirrors and now she wondered how she looked.
“Not that it matters.” Her own voice was the first she had heard in a week.
She crossed the room and chose a yellow hibiscus from flowers floating in a mahogany bowl on a wicker table and wove the blossom into her hair above her left ear. She couldn’t remember if that meant in Aitanu culture that she was unmarried or married.
But that didn’t matter either. Zarafa was the only Western woman on tiny Aitanu in the South Pacific, a day’s voyage from the closest island in the chain and 1,500 nautical miles from her home in Los Angeles. The one eligible bachelor was Frank Wellington, an alcoholic British widower who was the Anglican missionary in the single church in the village. About 120 natives inhabited the atoll, aboriginal hunter-gatherers with pierced noses, who scarified their bodies from head to toe.
Zarafa’s six-month-long research project for her doctorate in ethnomusicology was to study the unique whistle music of the islanders. With Frank serving as her interpreter she already had recorded hundreds of whistle melodies and dozens of interviews with the tribal musicians. But her fieldwork had gone so well that as of last week, it was fundamentally complete. Now she had little to keep her occupied until she could get herself into a music lab with a computer. Yet she would still have to wait another two months for the charter boat to pick her up and carry her to Fiji from where she could fly home to the States.
Two more months! How was she going to hold out that long? And what lucky dude back in Los Angeles was going to find himself on the other end of her pent-up sexual longing?
She stepped outside her round, conical-roofed hut. The setting sun dyed the western sky in pastel shades of orange and pink. Warm, powdery sand welcomed her bare feet. She strolled along a short path to the wide beach leaving size-12 footprints.
Zarafa meant “giraffe” in Arabic, and the nickname had stuck with the 6-foot-3 star athlete since her days as a volleyball forward with UCLA. Although she had been the tallest player on the Bruins team, Zarafa was not at all gangly, but curvy. Her leggy height carried her hourglass figure in such well-balanced proportions it often tricked men into thinking, from a distance, that she was much shorter. She had watched many a male facial expression change from desire to defeat as she approached them on a campus sidewalk and they realized she was an Amazon quite out of their league.
Cyndi Moore, her freshman-year roommate, had told Zarafa how her boyfriend called her “sweet little thing” when they made love, and how his endearment made her feel petite and cute and girlish and really turned her on. “I guess you’re never going to hear that,” Cyndi had said. She had not meant it in a mean way, but it had hurt, and Zarafa would sometimes remember Cyndi’s words and wince.
She sighed. “Well, it’s true. No one can call me little.” She towered over the tiny Negrito natives of Aitanu who in their pidgin trade talk called Zarafa, “She-Big-Fella.”
For obvious reasons, Zarafa sought tall boyfriends and had spent a year in an exciting but far-too-crazy relationship with a guard for the Lakers. Jordan had his good parts, a great sense of humor and an infectious laugh; and his bad parts, way too much swagger and an unfortunate fondness for cocaine and the high life. Among Jordan’s best features was his huge beautiful cock. Picturing it now, long and thick and dark purplish when engorged, made Zarafa feel dizzy with desire. Again, not the smart way to deal with horniness!
The dude who wrote the Kama Sutra understood, Zarafa mused. She wasn’t thinking of all the imaginative sex positions the writer had compiled a couple thousand years ago, but of how he had classified men and women according to their genital size, insisting that the best sex was between partners who matched down there: “hare men” with “doe women,” “horse men” with “mare women,” and “bull men” with “elephant women.”
She remembered a discussion with several college girlfriends about penis size. They all agreed that “Size doesn’t matter” was bullshit—invented to soothe fragile male egos. The other women went on to agree that a good-sized cock had more to do with girth than length—every pussy in the room loved getting stretched open by a fat cock. Donna had said, “They ought to change it to ‘Length doesn’t matter; thickness does.’”
But for Zarafa—an “elephant woman” to be sure—both girth and length mattered. She had experienced sex with half a dozen men who were reasonably well-endowed, but only her ex-boyfriend Jordan—a 6-foot-9 “bull man”—wielded a cock long and fat enough to satisfy her pussy’s hunger to be deeply and completely filled.
Zarafa had a vast libido and all her ex-lovers, even her first boyfriend back in high school, had been able to make her come. But only Jordan’s magnificent purplish-black manhood could pack her so full she would scream and come, again and again, driven to the heights of pleasure. It took months after she knew their relationship held no future, to finally admit that the only thing that kept her bound to him was his great big dick. Not in love with the man, just enthralled by his penis. Was that not the very definition of a slut? And to think that she had minored in Women’s Studies!
Breaking up with Jordan had been the right move, but the one man she had taken to bed since had left her feeling underwhelmed.
“I can’t help it if I’m a giantess,” she told herself aloud. Okay—and a slut, and a size queen. But who says a feminist can’t choose to be the slave of a big, beautiful cock?
“Damn, this isn’t helping!” She could smell her wet pussy. The scent of her womanhood and the salty aroma of the sea breeze seemed to her to be twin sisters.
Size queen. Ha. Now, as her gaze cast out over the Pacific, she felt she would gladly settle for a conjugal visit from a horny hobbit. She knew the darkening waters matched the deep cobalt of her eyes; tomorrow at noon, ocean and irises would brighten again to turquoise. For now, dark blue fits her frame of mind.
She stared up at the Southern Cross. The Milky Way sparkled like sequins on a black velvet evening gown. A snow-white tern zoomed across her field of view and glided out of sight, never once flapping its wings. So graceful and peaceful! What would it be like to be a sea tern? Do birds ever feel forlorn?
She stopped walking and plopped down in the dew-damp sand on her butt, elbows on knees, hands supporting chin. She found her mind wondering what sex with Frank Wellington, the missionary, would feel like. His body was tanned brown and crinkled like old leather, but the man still felt lust; he practically drooled over her as they worked together. But sex in the missionary position with a horny old alcoholic whose swollen red nose reached her collarbones was not going to bring release.
An hour later, she had been brooding so long that her neck was getting a crick. Meanwhile, the full moon had floated up midway over the horizon like a paper globe lantern, gilding a river of light upon the inky blue water.
Zarafa stood and walked to a patch of flat, hard beach. There she performed a connected series of yoga poses under the moon-bright sky. The series, called “Salutation to the Sun,” was meant to greet the masculine daybreak, but she dedicated herself instead to the luscious feminine moon.
When she was done with her impromptu yoga, she began to sing a pentatonic whistle tune the Aitanu natives had taught her. She sang the melody because—as irony would have it—she was a lousy whistler. But she had majored in voice as an undergrad and she was blessed with a fine soprano that her major professor had called the best voice he had ever trained.
Then she found herself crooning one sad love song after another from her mom’s record collection, tunes she’d often heard growing up, like Cat Stevens’ “How Can I Tell You?”
I need to know you,
Need to feel my arms around you,
Feel my arms around you,
Like a sea around a shore.
She began walking again as she sang to warm herself against the falling temperature. Hordes of pink crabs the size of half-dollars skittered into the foam as she approached, their pincers clicking defensively with a chatter like popping corn. Breakers surged in and spun the crabs like pinwheels. Higher up the shore at the flow-tide line, heaps of kelp cast shadows like beached canoes and added a top note of decay to the ocean’s perfume.
Finally, Zarafa arrived at the saddest song on earth: the aria Un Bel Di from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. From her heart, she sang of Butterfly’s intense longing for the sea captain who had abandoned her, and her aching bliss as she imagined his return, and suddenly, Zarafa felt the dam burst and she started sobbing until the warm tears ran off her chin.
The coconut palms that rimmed the shore gyrated sensuously in their hula skirts. The whole of life seemed erotic, but what good was Eros to her when she was very much alone?
She turned around to trek back to her hut when she heard a loud commotion just beyond the shoreline. It took her a moment to recognize the sound of dolphins cackling and smacking their tail flukes on the sea’s surface. The creatures sounded too close. She hoped they were not trying to beach themselves.
She spotted the dolphins and something else caught her eye, bobbing and tumbling in the surf. Luminescent plankton turned each breaker into a green glass tube of flashing light, and Zarafa suddenly recognized, awash in the combers, the unmistakable silhouette of a human body.
“Ohmigod!” Zarafa raced toward the shorebreak.
Fins surrounded the body as a dozen dolphins nudged it toward shore while others kept up a racket of loud cackling.
The body tumbled toward her in a surge of foam and plowed into her legs, knocking her down. She jumped back up grabbed at the long hair, and yanked the bearded face out of the water as the undertow started to drag them both back into the next wave. She dug in her feet against the gushing flow and clung to her fist hold of hair.
The man opened his eyes and closed them.
“You’re alive!”
Bending at the knees, she scooped up the torso from under the arms and heaved backward, dragging him out of the sea. You weigh a ton! Even with adrenalin pumping, she could budge his limp weight only a few feet up onto the sloping wet sand before she had to catch her breath. She got her first look at the sprawled naked body. No wonder you’re so heavy. He was the biggest man she had ever seen.
The tide was coming in and a set of tall moonlit swells rolled shoreward, building fast. If she didn’t quickly drag him farther up onto the dry sand, the waves would grab him and suck him back out to sea. “Move it!” she shouted at herself. She heaved and grunted and hauled the unconscious body another few feet up the slope as the first big shorebreak exploded and a gush of white water surged and swirled around them.
Zarafa growled and hung on to the man, fighting the powerful backflow that tried to pull her heavy freight from her hands. “He’s mine!” she yelled, and with all her strength lugged him twenty more feet onto dry sand past the wavy border of seaweed that marked high tide. There she collapsed, panting, and turned toward the man.
Please be alive. Her mind raced to recap the basics of a CPR workshop she’d taken years ago in high school. “Airways… check for obstruction of air passageways, that’s first.” When she saw that he was regularly breathing on his own she blew out a sigh of relief. She wasn’t prepared for a pop quiz on lifesaving techniques.
The dark-skinned body sprawled supine in white sand, softly spotlighted by the zenith moon. Zarafa got her first clear look at whom she had rescued. Wow, she nearly said aloud, you’re a fucking giant!
She raised to her knees to better look him over. He was a naked colossus, unnaturally tall and broad in the chest and shoulders. Moonlight glinted like diamonds on water droplets nested in fur over hard muscle slabs bisecting his chest. His shoulders and arms formed convex bulges of polished mahogany, crusted at their edges with seashells and grit. Drenched hair, shiny wet, formed a black nimbus about his head. Zarafa could not keep her gaze from the mammoth penis slung between muscular thighs; its enormous bulk fit the rest of his proportions.
Seconds passed before Zarafa remembered to breathe. How could a nearly-drowned man look so damn beautiful? And she made that assessment before he opened his eyes.
He gazed up at her. Even in the subdued lighting, his eyes shone emerald green.
“Are you all right?” she said.
He stared at her, blinking.
She tried French: “Et tu bien?”
He only stared. He seemed dazed, uncomprehending.
“Do you speak English?” she said. “My name is Zarafa Rio. You’re on Aitanu Atoll.” She pointed in the direction she’d come. “There’s a village here, about three miles that way.” He seemed too groggy to understand, or perhaps he didn’t speak English.
He slowly rolled over onto his knees, and tried to stand.
“Better take it easy.” She stood and reached out to help to support him, but he wobbled and sank back onto his knees. Groaning, he hung his head and puked out a gut-full of saltwater.
Zarafa bit her lip, wondering how she could get him back to the village, when the man stood again, noticeably less shaky than before. The top of her head reached just above his nipples.
“There’s no hurry,” she said. “Better rest here for a while.”
He looked around, frowning in confusion.
She tried Spanish. “Justo recuperé aquí—just rest here.”
That got his attention and he looked down, studying her face with those green eyes.
“Llamo Zarafa Rio,” she said. “Qué es su nombre?”
Instead of answering, he turned and started to walk, reaching out to her for support. “Okay, we go,” she said. His height enabled him to easily drape an arm over her shoulders. Even Jordan had not been tall enough to do that. It felt like a tree trunk. Together they began to walk. After a moment he stumbled, and she sagged under his weight and they both fell to the sand where Zarafa found herself crushed beneath his naked length. His soft cock pressed against her ribs; even it felt heavy.
The man seemed neither embarrassed nor apologetic. He simply stood again and began to walk, this time without her aid.
They trekked in silence, and he seemed to grow stronger with each passing minute. Zarafa marveled at his rapid recovery, but of course, that was the least of her amazement.
Here she was, leading a giant, naked stranger along a deserted beach back to her thatched-roof hut. He hadn’t spoken a word, but he seemed unfazed at having just survived a near-drowning, and he acted as unabashed at his nudity as would a three-year-old child.
Could it get any more surreal?
Her eyes kept darting over to grab glimpses of his titanic beauty. His V-shaped back was bisected by twin sheaves of long, thick muscle, and his drenched black hair hung past his shoulder blades. Powerful muscles shaped his perfect male ass. With each stride, his glutes rolled under firm, smooth skin. It made her want to take a bite of each cheek! She knew that if the whole experience were not so uncanny, she’d be dripping wet with arousal. Not that her dirty mind wasn’t racing ahead at the possibilities, but the weirdness of the moment held her lust in check.
Zarafa pinched her arm, hard. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you’re not sure if you’re dreaming?
A thousand questions flashed through her mind like a school of minnows. It seemed a miracle he had managed to not drown. How far had he been forced to swim to arrive at the atoll? And how big a role did the dolphins play in his survival? When she had spotted the dolphins, they were shoving him toward the beach—or so it seemed. Had they actually kept him afloat and propelled him to the island, or was she projecting human motives on their behavior?
“Thank you, Zarafa.”
She nearly jumped at the sound of his voice, a soft bass, like the low thunder of the surf.
“Thank you for saving me.”
So you do speak English. “Wasn’t me. The dolphins saved you. A whole pod of them, I saw it, they pushed you through the breakers toward the shore. It gives me goosebumps to think about it.”
“Yes, they helped me make it to the shore. But I do not think they could have towed me onto the beach.”
“How’d you end up in the ocean like that, anyway? What happened?”
His brow furrowed but he said nothing.
She tried a different tact. “I’m from Los Angeles. You don’t sound American. What’s your name?”
He stopped walking. She turned back to him and his eyes locked on hers. “I fell.”
“You fell? You mean, in a plane?”
“I truly fell.” He seemed to marvel at his own words. He smiled for the first time and his smile was gorgeous, yet somehow sad. “I have heard tales about it, and now it has happened to me.”
Maybe it was an after-effect of singing all those forlorn love songs under the full ripe moon, but his green eyes looked impossibly sad to her, like the eyes of a soldier who has just bid farewell to his mother and is marching off to war, knowing he’ll not return home for a long time—if ever again.
“Did your plane ditch at sea?”
He shook his head. “I heard you singing. Oh, that was so beautiful! So very beautiful! It made me ache to comfort you.”
She felt stunned. “But…how could you have heard me singing? Weren’t you busy drowning right about then?”
“I heard you singing, and I fell.”
“I don’t understand. Did you survive a plane crash?”
He shook his head. “No Zarafa.” He reached out one hand and gently brushed wet hair from her forehead. “I fell for you.”
