“Baby, you haven’t told a story yet,” said Hanna sweetly, her fingers combing their way through David’s moistened hair as she kissed his temple. “Tell us about someone you liked.”
The ripples of dark water were streaked with narrow lines of reflected starlight. The night was quiet and the sound of Hanna’s body emerging from the water in order to place her breasts at her husband’s mouth overwhelmed all other noises around us. David took one of Hanna’s areolae into his lips and latched onto her. She closed her eyes in deep pleasure at the drip of oxytocin into her system and she kissed the top of his head in gratitude.
With a wet pop and a grunt from Hanna, David looked up at her and said “Annie.” And he let the name hang in the air for a moment.
…
Annie had a beautiful multisyllabic name, packed with ‘r’s and ‘h’s like the purring of a cat, which she shortened to ‘Annie’ in order to make introductions easier. Her intense brown eyes communicated mischief, and kindness, and a burning intelligence. She was lightning-quick and played with humor, sarcasm, and double-entendre the way that master tennis players can return anything that comes at them and tailor it to the capacity of their partner.
I met her in grad school at a party. She was with a friend of mine – I don’t know how long they had been going out by then, but I felt chemistry with her. I tried desperately to hold it at bay, but she was enthralling… impossible to ignore. Through the rest of the night, I would see her talking to other people and I watched the way she held herself: confident and strong, but with this undertone that held a bit of geeky vulnerability. I’ll be damned if that didn’t make her that much more magnetic.
I didn’t see her again for a long time and then one quiet Sunday afternoon I was in the back of my mountaineering shop and heard the chimes of the front door. There she was: a little over five feet of her but she was so fucking authoritative. She had a light fleece jacket on over a thin yellow sundress. It was late spring – I could hear birdsong over the traffic and the air smelled like the way she moved.
She needed boots.
She unzipped her fleece sweater and placed it beside her on the bench. She was leaving soon for a year-long internship with an NGO in Europe. We talked about break-ins and blisters and of waterproofing. When she slipped off her sandals I worked a new hiking sock over her slender manicured toes. There was a thin silver ring around one of them. I felt it in my chest.
I brought her a pair of lightweight Scarpas. The leather was fragrant and mirrored the warm brown color of her skin. When she leaned over on the bench to cinch the laces tight, her partially-buttoned sundress opened onto a view of smooth and unrestricted breasts that I can see in my mind’s eye as vividly as I could that afternoon: tan and round, and I had the briefest glimpse of the umber nipple that tipped the one to my left. I was careful with my gaze and conspicuously redirected it to the boots and volunteered useless information about the brass eyelets. I hid my distraction poorly.
Annie was unfazed and calmly tied each boot. I could see in my peripheral vision the satisfying resilient shake of her breasts when she yanked the double-knot. She rose and walked around the store, checking the clearance of the toe, gauging the lift of the heel. She tried on three different pairs and each time she rewarded my professional attention with another display of her riveting body. Her nipples were erect, turgid, and ringed by a constellation of tiny goosebumps at the edges of her areolae. It was clear that her exposure was not accidental and the tone of it was exquisitely-done. The way she carried herself, the way she was dressed, her self-possessedness… it was calm, it was beautiful, and it was one of the most erotic encounters of my life.
When she settled on the boot she’d be taking she thanked me. She was warm and polite and I knew she was going away. I handed her one of our business cards with my number on the back:
“I don’t know your situation, but I’d love to know you better, and I get it that you’re on your way out of here for who knows how long. Can I buy you dinner? Take you to coffee? Think about it, and if that appeals to you at all, you know how to get ahold of me. Thanks again, for coming in, Annie. It was a pleasure to see you.”
She looked at the card quietly. Then lifted her eyes to mine without tilting her head. Her right hand made a scribbling gesture in empty space. I handed her a pen.
She slid the card, now bearing her address, back across the table and cocked one eyebrow: “You don’t have to buy me dinner. You needn’t bring me flowers. Lock the door behind you.”
She pivoted on one heel, and before exiting into the beaming late afternoon sun, she said, simply: “Ten.” And her smirk widened into a genuine and deeply affecting smile.
…
“Oooh, Sweetie,” Hanna cooed, “Annie is a woman of mystery. I like her.”
“I think you would like her, my beautiful Dear.” David kissed his wife’s forehead and then gestured to me to sit closer. I swirled the coffee bean from my Sambuca in my mouth and nestled in. Hanna placed my right palm on her nipple and smiled.
“I think she’d like you back,” he continued, “and what an absolutely gorgeous sight the two of you together would be.”
…
Her apartment was on the second floor of a nineteenth-century brick building along the river, sheltered by massive maples and sycamores. Crickets called for summer in the distance. As directed, I latched the deadbolt and, boiling with nervous excitement, ascended the gleaming wooden staircase. Her living room was spartan. Tasteful. Candles lit the space with a warm glow that mirrored the calming scent of expensive incense. I set down the flowers that I was told were unnecessary but that I bought anyway and followed the endlessly stretched and layered notes of what I would years later recognize as Anoushka Shankar.
The door was ajar, and this room more brightly lit. She lay facing away from me: one leg tucked beneath her duvet, and the other slung over it. Her contours were heightened by the intensity of the white of her sheets and the darkness of her skin. Each curve was buttery. Sublime. One hand was held over the breasts that had been so generously shared with me that afternoon. Her short black hair was tucked behind her ear and it rolled lazily off of her forehead as she turned to look back at me.
“I’m glad you came, David,” she said softly and articulately. She smiled again and I was absolutely lost in the sweetness of her face.
She reached up and tugged at my clothing: “This should go.”
She kissed like she spoke. Her lips were confident and sweet. Engaging. She passed her hands over my biceps and back, felt the sweep of my pelvis, and cupped the muscles of my ass. Every change of touch set waves of chills in motion. She was warm. Smooth. She smelled floral. I pulled her bottom lip into my mouth. She ran her fingers up into my hair from my nape. We made out like this for an hour, savoring each touch before I began passing kisses downwards along her body. I pulled at the skin of her throat gently with the suction of my lips, teasing each bit with a pass from my tongue’s tip. While kissing her neck I kneaded her breasts and rolled the nipples with careful swipes from my thumb. She encouraged me with coos and moans, and with ‘yes’ and ‘fuck’ when it was done right.
When I’d made my way along her length, kissing and biting at her mons, I took up space between her splayed thighs. She watched me watch her: getting off on my fascination with her swollen and soft outer labia, and the delicate pink textures of her minora. I inhaled her and nuzzled the shaft of her clitoris with the tip of my nose. I closed my eyes at the thrill of the first taste of her: the savory earthiness that is like nothing else. She thanked me and ran arabesques across my scalp with her fingertips.
I, in turn, looked up and thanked her before running my tongue along the length of her from her rigid perineum - as deeply between her lips as I could reach - to a figure-eight up and over her shaft. I alternated between this motion and sucking her lips into my mouth where I caressed them with my tongue. I held her magnificent ass in my palms, felt her thighs, and ran my fingers wide over her abdomen and breasts. I sank into a sensual mosaic of her textures and flavor alongside the sound of the music, the drawing of her breath, and the scent of spring air, incense, and cunt.
I reached inside of her and watched, transfixed, as my fingers disappeared into the soft caress of her body. I fucked her with two fingers and ran them up along her internal clitoris. I held her in my grip until I felt powerful orgasmic contractions. She shuddered and gasped and held my hand in place as her vagina clamped around me and then released. Another would come and she would arch lightly, riding the wave of sensations, releasing, and then one more contraction. It was terribly beautiful.
When I finally let go of her I was away only long enough to roll a condom on and climb back onto the dark line that ran down the center of her abdomen. She pulled my face to hers and we kissed passionately. The scent of her was on my fingers and across my face. She reached downwards, took my erection in her hand, and assessed it sweetly. Thin fingers grasping its girth, feeling my testicles…pulling at them. And then as we continued to kiss and lick at one another she maneuvered me inside. Warm, wet, and sensual beyond comprehension. We fucked slow, grinding against one another. She rolled her hips and pulled at my triceps. She fucked me back with a smoldering intensity.
At one point she stopped and gently pushed me upward and away from her kisses. She smiled and then pressed her lips against my chest and sucked my blood to the surface while dragging her nails across the breadth of my back. And when she released me from the painting of her maroon mark she rolled me to my back, threw one leg over me, and dropped back onto my grateful cock.
As she rode me I was able to feel her selfishly: passing my hands up her thighs, to her bare hips that gyrated to the slow rhythms of the ethereal music. I felt her belly, lifted her breasts, and massaged the muscles that coil along each side of her spine as she rose up off of me and then ground down, mashing her clit into my pubis. Her breathing intensified and I sat upwards slightly. She cradled my head and presented a nipple which I pulled thankfully into my mouth, stirring it with my tongue. I reached behind to the flawless curves of her ass and passed a finger between them. I introduced myself softly to her anus and when she had warmed up to its presence I hooked her and pulled her into me with each of her descents.
We kissed noisily and I penetrated her thoroughly: wanting to consume her, to somehow incorporate her…merge with her. My tongue found hers within the crisp enamel of her teeth. My cock ran across the gentle corrugations of her vagina as she rode back and forth and my finger passed more deeply into her as our passion built. We spoke little, but our breathing and grunting communicated our approval, our desire, our rapidly increasing arousal.
And when she came, it was signaled by the clenching of that powerful pelvic floor. Her delicious anus clenched me…gripped me in the same way that the muscles of her vagina held and embraced my penis. She called out and the eroticism of her pleasure overwhelmed me. I felt myself crest and I gasped at the pleasure. Eyes gripped shut, I held her body close – grasped for her in the overwhelmingly pleasurable darkness. She pressed her forehead to mine and fucked me from base to tip again and again as I released. It was otherworldly. It was more than I could have wished for.
And we held each other tightly, sweating and breathing. Eventually, we kissed the parts of one another that we found ourselves resting against. Her lips on my shoulder, mine on her blue-black hair. Slowly we found each other’s faces again and kissed through the waves of chemicals we had generated in one another. It was like magic that two people could create this kind of sensation. Better said, it was magic: it was the power that creates life itself and that’s a strong goddamn force to bump up against with just a thin bit of latex.
…
Hanna kissed David on the forehead. “Wow, Baby, that sounded like something special.” She passed kisses over his temple and then ground a bit on his thigh, aroused from the thought of him and Annie.
David returned the kisses and stroked Hanna’s cheek with the knuckles of his right hand. “It was,” he said with a smile. “It was on another level. We stayed in that bed well into the next day. We talked, we would doze, we would wake and touch again and again. And then she was gone.”
“You must have been sad, Sweetie,” Hanna ran graceful fingers along his face as if tracing the paths of decade-old tears.
“I was. She was one that I wanted to keep.” David sat up straighter and took his wife’s face in his hands. “But then I met you.”
…
David and Hanna kissed deeply, with the kind of passion that grows increasingly solid over time and which has a different flavor and texture than the thrill of a single magical night. I took the opportunity bus the dishes, slipping quietly from the dark sulphuric water of the hot tub, to give them a moment of quiet in the massive expanse of the Rocky Mountains at midnight.
