Rich shades of orange and yellow flames flicker and crackle, their chaotic dance sending waves of soothing heat over my naked body. It’s a small comfort, but only just. I’m bound and blindfolded next to the fire, cold metallic cuffs locked loosely about my wrists, my slim arms stretched above my head to dangle helplessly, but not uncomfortably so.

I can hear my heart in my ears, pattering hard against my ribs, much like it did during that hail of bullets punching through stone a foot above my head during an assignment in Fallujah. Fear. Powerlessness. And a strange fascination in not knowing what would happen to me.

The feelings are cinched tightly together, humming like butterfly wings in the pit of my stomach, strangely similar to that day at the neighborhood pool as a kid, toes curling tightly over the edge of the springboard for the first time. And yet, oddly enough, the imagery winning out in my brain is something else entirely; an inexplicable desire to burrow deeper into the sheepskin rug beneath me, the flames reaching out with gentle warm hands until I’m consumed in hot primal energy, until I’m only a lick of flame, floating along a fever dream to something…more. Something different.

But honestly, that’s probably just the copious amounts of wine talking. If Miranda were around, she’d probably agree, but add a longwinded caveat about how my id is suffering an existential crisis that my ego hasn’t realized yet. Smart girl. Makes absolutely no sense half the time.

I smell her before I hear her and my mouth forms into a dopey kind of a smile. I can feel it stretch along my lips, tugging at the corners, barring the white teeth below. It’s the smile you get when you teeter on the edge of hug everyone tipsiness and fall over giggling drunkenness. Or, in my case, throwing your glass on the floor and proudly declaring you want another in a slurred and terribly over the top impersonation of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor.

My breath hitches as she crosses between the fireplace and me before continuing on. She’s a shadowy blur beyond the blindfold, light on her feet, like a ballerina. She’d have to be, considering the work she used to do for National Geographic.

There’s a loud squeak of a window being yanked open, followed by a rush of cold mountain wind that sweeps into the room. It isn’t powerful enough to snuff out the fire, but it’s plenty powerful to cast a chilly blanket of air over my flushed skin, leaving hardened nipples and raised hair in its wake.

I pull instinctively at the cuffs around my wrists and try to pull my knees to my chest, to curl closer to the heat. I can’t of course. My back arches and I moan in protest, half of me shivering, the other half still warm, for now.

I try to speak, form words on my tongue, but a delicate finger presses against my lips, stopping me. A soft voice whispers in my ear, the Spanish cadence relaxing me, reminding me, even if I can’t understand the language. Arabic was more my thing. Hence Fallujah.

But my journalistic mind still works, at least. So does my memory. Rules, I deduce. Don’t forget the rules.

I want to scream out, say, ‘fuck the rules!’

Fuck them indeed. Following rules aren’t what made me the youngest overseas correspondent. They didn’t lead to solar energy tycoon Max Gleason’s breakdown confession to yours truly about using government subsidies to payoff his eighteen-year-old floozy. Bending them did. Sometimes breaking them. You have to be cutthroat and proactive to get ahead. Or so said my socioeconomic journalism professor as he fucked me over his desk while changing an ugly little B- to an A.

But I can’t. Or won’t. Who’s to say? I agreed to the rules after all, wrote them down in fact, while she illustrated them with dirty photographs and raunchy humor.

I can’t really explain the why of it, which frustrates me to no end. It was during a Monday morning pitch meeting. Two highly recruited journalists, one investigative, and the other photographic. Two young, ambitious women salivating for the week’s lead story, both assigned to it to spare everyone else the headaches that would have followed if only one of us had gotten it.

Maybe what started it all was sexual frustration.

Or that tingling sensation when my finger brushed hers while reaching for the same pen.

Or boredom.

Or curiosity.

Or a simple coping mechanism.

Leverage to blackmail the other in the form of a glittering ring on her slender finger and the romantically themed photograph hanging in my cubicle.

Or maybe it was to experience something so depravedly wrong, that it felt perfectly right.

Maybe it’s none of those. Or maybe it’s all of them… hence the frustration. I don’t know. I don’t like not knowing.

A silken cascade of hair tickles my toes, hot breath warming the small digits cooled off by that gust of winter wind. Warm lips press against each perfectly manicured toe, tongue flicking out in a delicate tease. My face starts to burn in embarrassed shame. I used to think feet and sex just didn’t mix. I’d grimace in disgust when some girlfriends would talk about it during Wine Wednesdays. Then I discovered just how erogenous that area could be in the most embarrassing of ways. I’ve never had the courage to bring it up with Grayson. I doubt he’d ever go for it anyway.

But this woman… she seems to know exactly where to go.

She moves up my body, hot mouth alternating kisses with long sweeps of a cat-like tongue. The heat flares inside me again and I feel wonderfully dizzy, drunk on wine, drunk on fire, drunk on sheepskin rugs, and drunk on the sensations she’s awakening inside me.

Her lustrous hair tickles the expanse of my legs as she crawls upward with a titillating slowness that both frustrates and excites me. When her breasts finally flatten against mine, it’s like an electrical current sparking involuntary reactions. Salty tears of desperate need pool at the corners of my eyes and sticky cum starts drooling out of me like a busted wipe. I feel like one of those weak ass princesses in those Disney movies, beholden to man. Well, woman in this case.

She makes me feel desperate. Weak. Dependent. And the cuffs certainly aren’t making it any easier. When she licks the tears away, I feel another flush of embarrassment burn my cheeks. Anger and lust burn hot. If I could, I’d break the cuffs, pin her down, and ride her face to a trembling orgasm.

I settle for biting her lip when she leans in for a kiss and flash her a toothy grin when she reels back. An uncomfortably long pause hangs in the air as she perches astride my waist, hands cupping the small swell of my chest, fingers lazily tweaking my nipples. My throat tightens and I can’t help but think I just brought an end to it all. All I can hear is the fire and my heart beat. She doesn’t make a sound. And the damn blindfold hides all the finer details. I can make nothing of her out, just outlines and shadows.

So when a loud, husky giggle pierces the silence, I let loose a strangled yelp, my heart feeling like it wants to jump out of my mouth and run through the snow until it escapes into the night.

There’s a sharp click and the cuffs release their hold on my wrists. My arms, stiff and tight, start to fall limply to my sides. She catches them in surprisingly strong hands and plants a soft kiss on each sweaty palm, tongue lingering to taste the salty sweat. Then she’s pulling my arms around her and leaning close again. Her breath is spicy and she smells like wood smoke, clean sweat, and lemongrass.

Once more, I try to break the rules, to get some kind of word in. But she captures my lips with hers and I go nuclear. The kiss is frantic and messy. The metallic taste of blood from her split lip fills my mouth and stokes my arousal to even greater heights. Strength returns to my arms and I crush her to me, my fingers threading in her soft tresses.

Through the fog, an idea comes to me. The inner writer, the investigate reporter, always looking for an angle, always looking to get what she wants.

Panting, breathless, the kisses slowing to soft, almost innocent pecks, I start to write. I trace the letters slowly across her back. I repeat each word a half dozen times until she catches on, realizes the stroking isn’t a simple massage.

F.

The kisses slow even more.

U.

Her slick forehead presses against mine.

C.

Her knee slips between my legs.

K.

Her pussy smears hot juices along my thigh.

M.

Her fingers tighten in my hair.

E.

Fuck me.

Fuck me!

I trace the letters over and over until her mouth curves against my chin, until her heart races in tune with mine.

She shimmies down my body with cat-like graze until her breath is warm on my cunt, her hands pushing apart my now unbound legs. I lick my lips, uncertainty now flickering to life in my belly. I think back a mere two weeks, when we stole awkward kisses in the tenth floor lavatory, the button of my pants skittering across the tile floor, her needy fingers pressing against the damp fabric of my panties. That was a different kind of fear. Professional fear. The, ‘pack your shit up… you two are fired,’ kind of fear.

This is different. I can feel the cold band of metal on her left ring finger as her hands clench tightly over my thighs, the only place on her body that isn’t superheated. There’s guilt there, a fleeting image of kind, sweet Grayson with his dimpled chin and easy smile. That image puffs away like smoke when her tongue starts to trace lazy circles around my vulva before any second thoughts can solidify. The pad of her thumb strokes the small, downy triangle of golden hair just above my clit.

And there it is.

There it is.

I enter the fever dream the moment her full luscious lips brush my drooling wet slit. I let out a breathless moan and my hips arch upwards on their own accord. I grind against her talented mouth, smearing sticky honey from her lips to her small pointed chin.

Pure, hedonistic hell, I think. No way heaven feels this good.

Her tongue carves a sudden downward path through the folds of my cunt, nose nuzzling inside me for a moment, inhaling the scent of me, before continuing lower, then lower still. When her hot mouth seals over the crinkled rose of my ass and her slim tongue pushes past the tight ring of muscle, I convulse, muscles twitching erratically. I gasp when her hands hook under my knees, pushing them to my chest. Her tongue presses harder, sliding, circling, and fluttering like a hummingbird until I’m nothing but silly putty in her hands.

I want to howl. It would be so easy now to just rip the blindfold away, taste her name of my lips like syrupy sweet pineapple dipped in chocolate. Scream till my throat goes raw. And, in turn, to hear my name on her lips, that Spanish accent turning it into glittering champagne candies. My hands release the tight grip on her hair and move upward. But the time she realizes anything is amiss, my fingers are curled under the soft material, itching to yank it away and send it flying into the raging fire.

When it’s halfway down, I feel her body tense and her mouth throttle down to a dead stop. Divinci himself, returning from the grave with a not so mild case of arthritis, would marvel at the display of supernatural stillness that came over us. Neither of us moves, too afraid to break the spell of the fire and the winter wind. Afraid that when the spell is broken, the rules thrown out, the reality of what we’re doing will slap us in the face with cold, harsh logic.

We aren’t supposed to be here.

We aren’t supposed to be doing this.

We’re vile, selfish, horrible people.

The cold band of metal on her finger burns like arctic ice. I start to feel guilty and the feeling is soul crushing.

For reasons I don’t want to consider, I start to remember Fallujah again, echoes of fire, night terrors I thought expelled returning in horrible clarity. Bullets. Explosions. Death. A soldier cocooning me with his body as bullets rip him apart. The sudden, chaotic swirling of emotions punch me in the face - existential crisis indeed, Miranda, or latent PTSD. What a fucking mess I am, a girl who fucks a professor to maintain a spotless transcript. Destroys a man who was a shitty husband but a world-class father for a byline with her name stamped on it. This is what that soldier saved, a sex-crazed fool who’s afraid of commitment and cavalier with her personal relationships because she’s scared.

I start to pull away before I ruin what could still be a beautiful memory.

But… she surprises me.

The words fall from her mouth in a whisper. They come in Spanish at first, the same beautiful lilting of words over and over again like a mantra.

“Okay,” she says, switching over to English. “Okay.” Her voice is shaky, caught between primal fear and primal lust. “Okay,” she says again.

“It’s okay.”

She takes my head in her hands and peels the blindfold away completely. Her eyes are cinnamon swirls, her jet-black hair tangled and wild, the lower half of her face stained wet with my juices.

“It’s okay,” she repeats again. She pulls the ring off her finger, tosses it into the fire.

Nothing makes sense anymore.

But maybe that’s the point.

Nothing has to make sense in moments like these. You just have to feel your way through them.

I nod weakly and whimper her name. And it does taste like pineapple and chocolate. And that name alone is gateway to that something different.

She pulls me into her arms, mouth tentative as it slides against mine. I moan when our tongues collide, tasting the musky sweetness of myself. She whispers into my ear, tells me to wait a moment. I nod, too afraid to speak, this time for an entirely new reason.

Love.

A concept I know precious little about. Clearly.

When she returns, she tells me to close my eyes again.

I do.

She fiddles with something. It sounds like buckles.

She tells me no peeking.

For the first time in my life, I adhere to that request.

Then she tells me to trust her.

More difficult, but I nod again.

She giggles nervously and drops between my legs again. Her tongue is back on my wet center, then slipping low to give me a wet kiss.

I grunt like a well-oiled bitch in heat when a lubricated finger plunges inside my ass, all the way to the knuckle. Anal play was never part of my bedroom arsenal. Despite the long looks and the questing fingers while fucking me from behind, I never felt comfortable doing it with Grayson. Or doing it at all for that matter.

But… giving it to her seemed so perversely wrong that it became deliciously right.

My eyes snap open when something far thicker prods against my anal ring. A thin sheen of sweat shines on her forehead and her eyes are smoking coals of lust. She winks and the air in my lungs rushes out when a warm, lubricated phallic device is pushed inside me.

My world goes white. Everything disappears. Silly emotions. Painful memories. Miranda’s damned psychoanalysis reaching out from New York. All gone. Blessedly gone.

Then something else plunges inside me and I scream her name till my voice cracks. Her hips meet mine and my legs lock around her waist. My ass wiggles and squirms against her. Those emotions come throttling back as my pussy clenches tightly over chilled glass.

Pain and pleasure mingle together so intensely I can’t think straight. I feel wonderfully depraved. The warmth of the fire, of the plug in my ass, is in stark contrast to the thick cold glass buried deep inside me, pushing hard on my g-spot. My inner muscles clench tighter than a fist, fighting to regain heat. She whispers soothing Spanish in my ear until I start to relax, to loosen up enough for her to start moving. Our mouths meet again, hungry and greedy as we begin a dance of fire and ice.

I whimper and groan and claw at her back. It’s too much, way too much. I have to wander through the sexual fog, run through the library of stories and facts in my head to see if one can die from sensory overload, from too much sexual stimulation. No such door exists. That scares me.

My pussy spasms and leaks out over the glass dildo.

She continues to thrust with smooth steady strokes, straddling the line between pain and pleasure. We make music with keening moans, heavy grunts, and wet slaps of skin.

It’s all over when my toes start to twitch uncontrollably, nerve impulses on a collision course with the throbbing muscles between my legs.

She senses it and starts to pull away, the once cold glass now warm and coated with a thin film of clear cum.

My face flushes white-hot as I feel it, a jittery quake that causes my cunt to spasm out of control. She’s a second late as I start to squirt for perhaps the first time in my life. It arcs out, splashing across her forehead. She has time for a single naughty giggle before sealing her mouth over me, drinking down as much as she can, as fast as she can. When it’s over, my body slumps back down onto the rug while she continues to lap away, tongue flickering over my swollen clit.

/0\

I wake up when a set of warm, slippery lips press against my cheek, then my nose, before moving slowly against my mouth. My throat is ragged and parched and sore, my body sucked of all its energy. So I lie there while she shares my juices with me, a hand making lazy circles across my belly.

I don’t think I can put word to thought even if I could speak. We shared something. Of that I am most certain, maybe the most certain I’ve ever been life. That includes the bald faced lies from my interview with a Florida senator.

But I’m not sure what that something was that we shared. I still don’t even understand the why of it or the how of it.

Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s just an emotional release I’ve been putting on hold for three years.

I sigh into the damp curls of her hair, admire the golden bronze of her skin.

Another gust of winter wind pushes through the open window, trying to cool our satiated bodies. I smile, listening to her soft steady snores, her breath tickling my still hardened nipples. I let the gentle warm flames of the fire shield us and send us on our way to the completion of a fever dream I wish would never end.

/0\ 

A breeze slices through the office with chaotic efficiency, cutting off Matilda’s twelve point rant about the quality of the lead story we’d been assigned to. Someone didn’t shut the windows. Papers fly everywhere. Matilda screeches out a shrill curse, berating a cute little intern with a nice butt. He looks at us and flushes red. Lance, the international editor, drops a large mug of coffee that washes over the conference table like a tidal wave.

All hell breaks lose as reporters, editors, and interns all scream bloody murder as they dive for expensive computer and camera equipment.

All that happens in a separate world. I look at my watch. It’s been a five days, twenty-three hours, forty-two minutes, and exactly twelve seconds since that night in the cabin. We haven’t talked about it since. Ignored each other in fact.

Rules mean something after all and the consequences can be tricky little bastards when you break them.

But… her eyes right now, despite all the chaos, are locked on mine and mine on hers. Her cherry red smile is wide, a perfect black eyebrow rising inquisitively.

And I start to wonder.