“Damn this narrow road,” Jaz thought as he hit the brakes on his rackety old Terios. He always seemed to meet somebody at this corner, and with one side a virtual cliff, both had to stop and silently negotiate who was going to back up or pull over. The area was the back of beyond on this little Caribbean island.

That doesn’t mean it was a charming little sandy track; it was a proper road topped with asphalt or, to his British way of thinking, tarmac. But roads have to be maintained and the authorities had neither the nous nor the inclination to do anything about decaying infrastructure until it was actually dangerous. Or perhaps they were just reluctant, because any year a hurricane could barge in and destroy everything anyway.

Today’s obstacle was that old silver Suzuki Ignis, an ugly little thing driven by a woman whose identity he didn’t know but who seemed attractive enough in a middle-aged way. There was just enough room to squeeze past if he took it slowly and she didn’t move, so he crept forward as his nearside wheels squeaked against the kerb and the unkempt grasses and weeds brushed his paintwork. Pulling alongside the Ignis, he lowered the window and looked at the woman. She lowered hers slightly nervously, wondering what he wanted.

What he wanted was to look at her. They were both foreigners, both living at this Caribbean branch of the end of the world and, he thought, she was probably as directionless as he was. The absent windows revealed a mop of dull, greying ginger hair and a long face awash with freckles. Her g reen eyes had untidy mottled whites and the remains of some gunk on the lashes, as if she had made herself up a week ago and just waited for it all to wear off naturally.

She looked at him quizzically.

“All right?” she asked, her eyes roaming his face and chest.

“Terrible road, isn’t it?” he replied and then eased past and drove off up the hill. She was going home at 9:30 in the morning and she was often driving around at odd times, so she couldn’t have a normal nine-to-five job.

Strange guy, she thought as she turned into the scruffy driveway of her once-proud home, now dilapidated and sad, like her. He was always up and down that hill with no apparent purpose, just driving for something to do.

= = = = =

They thought of each other on and off all day as they went about their mutually unimportant business, he teaching English and she doing a bit of painting and preparing for an art student the next day.

Five o’clock saw them both set off, a minute apart, for the supermarket to get something for dinner. Jaz had decided some vegetables were in order after several days of junk. He was just climbing out of the car when she pulled in next to him, so he waited and they went in together. Grabbing baskets, they hovered uncomfortably in front of the bananas and plantains, displayed confusingly adjacent, and a mumbled conversation began.

Her name was Zelma, with the z pronounced as an s, in the Dutch manner.

“It means helmet of God,” she explained in a Dutch accent. “I don’t know why I tell people this, I don’t know if there is a god, and if there is, I’m sure he doesn’t wear a helmet."

She was strikingly, almost shockingly tall.

“I know,” she said, guessing his thoughts. “I’m very Dutch. Very tall.”

She was clearly self-conscious about it, but what she didn’t know was that Jaz had quickly marked that in the not ideal column and moved on to quite pretty in a tired way and nice breasts hanging off that freckled chest.

They managed a bit of chit-chat about how they came to be there, on that particular blob in the sea. She and her husband had sailed there and just stayed, as many Europeans had, but he was now dead. She was an artist. As they spoke they roamed the aisles, and when they reached the wines, Jaz said:

“Red or white?”

“One of each,” she replied, grabbing a suspiciously cheap Chianti and a Pinot Grigio as if she knew exactly where they were and could have done it blindfolded. Jaz took exactly the same plus a bottle of St Lucia spiced rum, a pleasant alternative to the disgracefully expensive cognac he would have preferred.

“How about pooling our resources?’ he suggested, suddenly grateful that many Dutch people had an excellent command of English. “You doing anything this evening?”

“What a nice idea,” Zelma said.

After much humming and hahing they agreed to meet at Zelma’s house, where she had three dogs. Security, he thought. She couldn’t allow herself to be sucked into a strange man’s world so quickly, so her territory and protective animals constituted a good idea. And that was fine with him; there was nothing as sexy as a woman’s home, provided the dogs didn’t try to muscle in on the action, should there be any.

He wasn’t taking anything for granted, he told himself. It would just be a man and a woman in a house, getting along together quite well and seeing what came up. All the same, he chose his clothes carefully, showered and washed his hair even though he didn’t normally do that in the evening, and gave himself a few sprays of the cologne he kept for special occasions. Such was the dearth of such occasions that the black Bleu de Chanel bottle was dusty.

Two hundred yards away around the corner, Zelma’s tasks were threefold: tidy the house to a decent extent, get the pasta sauce going – she had bought mince and a tin of tomatoes plus some spaghetti – and make herself look less like a freak. Growing up in Eindhoven it hadn’t been a problem: yes, she was tall, but so was everyone. It was a national trait. It was only when she traveled to other countries that she found herself towering over people, and it was particularly embarrassing with men, especially those she wanted to find her attractive. Then she had met Kees, who was positively gigantic by British or French standards, while the little stocky Spaniards would have fitted in her pocket.

This Jaz was probably as tall as Brad Pitt or Roger Federer, she didn’t know, and you could imagine yourself in a clinch with them. Female tallness was an issue long overdue addressing in the public forum. We’d had race and creed and even fat-shaming, so why should she feel uncomfortable just because she was – what was that English word? – lanky.

All the same, she went for flat shoes and even kept her hair flattish on top. But if he was man enough he wouldn’t care anyway. He would deal with it.

=====

“They’re all the same lying down” was a useful, if churlish, expression from Jaz’s youth, when you could say such things among your friends and not be pilloried for it. And he and Zelma weren’t even going out. They weren’t going to be subject to public scrutiny. “Look at that shrimp with the Dutch willow. He’ll have to get a stepladder to kiss her. And he won’t even have to stoop to suck her nipples.”

The dogs gave Jaz a cacophonous welcome and he stood dutifully with his right arm outstretched so they could smell him and file him under “friend”. Then they followed Jaz and Zelma as they toured the house before she shut them out in the back yard.

The meal was fine, Zelma was relieved to find. She wasn’t a great cook and hadn’t really catered for anyone else since Kees died two years earlier. Jaz was polite and interested in her and seemed to like her cooking.

Jaz was pleasantly surprised at how peaceful the house was with the dogs relegated to sentry duty. Like many artists, Zelma was clearly not too concerned with neatness, either domestically or personally, but she looked good in a short, pale lemon, sleeveless dress, a style which he had seen before on Dutch women of a certain age. The colour accented her freckles, which were beginning to fascinate him. If they were all over her face and arms and chest, and… yes, her legs, would they also be on her belly and thighs and beneath her pubic hair? And would that hair be ginger? He was confident that there would be plenty of it, because that afternoon there had been some in her armpits. That had been got rid of, but he couldn’t see her having the time to shave and wax down below, even if she wanted to.

They progressed to the sofa, listening to music by Focus – her choice to buy, perhaps through patriotism - and his to listen to, as a little aural flirt. Jaz waited for the atmosphere to dip, that shadowy lull that says both parties are thinking of a kiss. When it came she snuggled down so his arm could go around her shoulders and he gave her silky knee a stroke as he put his face close to hers and they kissed gently, then inquisitively and finally eagerly, almost frantically.

“Been a long time,” she said quietly. “Too long.” And with that she initiated the follow-up, the kiss that sealed the deal. Jaz slid his hand up her skirt and touched her crotch through her knickers. She contorted herself to unzip the dress and pull the top down, revealing her bra-less breasts. Jaz turned his attention to them, kissing them where the freckles petered out and sucking her small, hard nipples. She gasped.

“God, yes,” she hissed, and he moved to the other breast. To his surprise she stood up and let the dress slip to the floor. She had a fine, strong body, and when she gave it to him in its pale nakedness her height suddenly mattered not a jot. It was a bonus, in fact: more of Zelma for Jaz to enjoy. She stood in front of him and he kissed her stomach and poked his tongue into her navel. Then he kissed her thighs and turned her round. There were no freckles in her middle region, he saw as he kissed her milky buttocks.

“Show me you,” she said firmly, sitting on the sofa. Jaz stood and removed his shirt, his jeans and his underpants, and she watched unabashed as his firm erection sprang free. She took it in her hand and kissed it, then pulled him to a sitting position beside her.

“I haven’t done this in so long,” she said distractedly, as her right hand instinctively held Jaz’s cock, and then she looked at it pensively and leaned down to suck him. Within seconds she was on her knees, sucking and licking him as if it were the last chance she would ever have to go down on a man. She sucked strongly but didn’t give it that theatrical head-bobbing and corkscrew manipulation such as some younger women do because they’ve seen it in porn and think they need to be proactive, equal to the man in their rudeness, their laddish lewdness.

Zelma sucked Jaz’s cock as if she loved it; as if she loved men and had fast-tracked him to full service lest she lose him on the way.

“Did you like that?” she asked, eventually coming up for air. “Or have I lost my touch?”

“That was fantastic,” he said truthfully. “Now I want to do you.”

Zelma breathed in and out, deeply and with unspoken significance, then lay back, making herself available to him.

She did indeed have a forest of red hair in the triangle of undergrowth and along the edges of her slit. She obviously didn’t wear a swimsuit very often, unless she just tucked the fringes in when she did so or, more likely, left them hanging there and fuck the world if it didn’t like it.

Jaz carefully spread her large labia, his thumbs also retaining the hair, and he lapped at her cunt with a freedom she had encouraged by her own oral performance. She tasted sweet and was very juicy. He knew that this was making not just her day but her week, her month, her year, her two years of sexual idleness after the passing of her partner.

But would she be receptive to his party piece, the thing that turned him on the most before penetration. You could never tell, so you just had to try. Giving her clitoris a last, loving suck and licking her cunt broadly and firmly, he whispered:

“Turn over.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked nervously.

“I’m going to lick your ass,” he said. He thought he detected a fleeting smile on her lips as she positioned herself perfectly to receive his ministrations.

Zelma’s freckle-free buttocks glowed like twin moons before him as he parted them and gazed at her pretty, light brown anus. He licked it and she shuddered.

“Nice?’ he asked.

“Fabulous,” she replied. “That has been even longer. Twenty years, maybe.”

Jaz loved being the bearer of glad sensations, delivering a lustful tongue where perhaps only one had ever been before. He and Zelma worked together in their perfect little contract that was so powerful for both of them. She wasn’t ashamed, she wasn’t embarrassed. She was enjoying a natural act which unfortunately was not often on the sexual menu. Kees had never done it and she had been too shy, then too devotedly wifely, to ask.

But this man, this nice, friendly, attentive man, was licking her ass as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Zelma felt she had to explain something.

“No penetration,” she said. “Not on the first date.” She herself felt no disappointment at that deprivation and she scanned the air for any on Jaz’s part. She detected none, even as he gave her one last dirty lick and she quivered as an orgasm swept through her. Then, as she turned around to look, she saw him masturbating behind her. He was going to cum in her crack.

How could he possibly know this was her favourite of all ways to conclude a sex session? She found herself tensing at the thought and forced herself to relax her muscles as he pumped his load into her cleft, his shiny fluid basting her tawny ring. He sighed as he finished.

She felt that unique feeling as this man's semen clung to her crack skin even as it crawled downwards, thrilling her as it went.  And then he said:

“You’re wonderful, Zelma.”

She passed him some tissues and he wiped his spunk out of her crack.