Anjali's Red Scarf Ch. 03

"Okay. I've, uh, I've read a few things online, but I'm not really sure how. I mean, I've had it done to me, but that's different."

"That's okay." I took her by the hand, climbed onto the bed and scooted back, drawing her with me until she was crouching over me; I clasped my hands behind her neck and pulled her in for a soft kiss. "Every woman is different. Even from day to day, it changes. The number one thing is to pay attention to what she wants, how she's reacting."

"Okay."

"Kiss my breasts." I guided her head down. "Mmm. Yes, like that... feel how I'm pulling you, that means you can go a little harder. You can touch with your fingers, too, that's nice... you can bite just a bit, too. Just a little pressure. Mmm. Don't forget your tongue, darling, yes. Like that."

I stroked the sensitive skin behind her ears, and stroked, and then after a while I took her by the back of the neck, and softly pushed her downwards.

Later, some other night, I would teach her the art of it. The secret places that nobody thinks of as sexual like the back of the knee, full of nerves waiting to be awakened; the subtleties, how to tease with warm breath and soft fingers and strands of her own hair; how to nibble at my thighs and set my skin a-tingle; how to open me slowly, slip her fingers inside me, and curl them just the way I liked it. If she was to be my lover, I wanted her to be an accomplished one.

But not tonight. Tonight I wanted to enjoy her rawness and inexperience. So I drew her down between my knees and whispered, "Lick. And don't stop until I tell you I'm done."

It was fierce, selfish sex. Hadn't I earned a little selfishness? I guided her head with both hands, controlling her, setting the pace. She was inexperienced but she was eager to please, and I was already wet before I first felt her tongue between my thighs.

At first she was tentative, her ministrations tickling me more than stimulating. But quickly she learned from my reactions that I expected more than that. "Harder, girl." I punctuated the words with a jerk of my hips, muffling her response. "Lick like you're being paid for it." She intensified her efforts, and soon we settled into a rhythm, her tongue lapping up between my lips, sending shivers through me, up to swirl around my clit like she was savouring an ice-cream, and then back down again.

Out of nowhere I imagined myself a domina of ancient Rome, petty and indolent, taking some unlucky serving-girl on a whim. The thought inflamed me, and I ground hard against Anjali's mouth until she gasped for breath. I let her up to suck in air, one, two, three deep breaths, and then I pulled her down again.

Somewhere the thunder grumbled and I thought of electric charge gathering, building, until at last the force becomes strong enough and lightning surges through the air... and at that moment her tongue flickered against my clit again, and the jolt ran through my body, and I groaned and shuddered as I came.

I held her there, still licking, until the last wave of pleasure had rippled through me, until I was ready to let her up again. Her hair was thoroughly mussed, her face was sticky, and I tasted myself when I kissed her.

"Well, that was most enjoyable," I said. "We'll be doing that again."

"Thank you," she murmured. She sounded drowsy, and I glanced at the clock; it was almost midnight.

"Come on, cutie, let's get some sleep."

As we drifted off, my last thought was: well, that's the first time a girl's gone down on me and thanked me for it.

This time when I woke, Anjali was still in bed with me, but not asleep. She was propped on her elbow, looking down at me. She was still quite rumpled, and I thought the dishevelled look rather suited her.

"Well, you look like somebody who's been thoroughly fucked," I said.

For a moment she looked startled by my coarseness, and then she smiled. "I could say the same for you."

"Mmm." I ran my hand up her thigh. "By the way, miss Early Riser, next time you stay over... I've always thought it would be lovely to be woken up by a cute girl using her mouth on me."

"Oh," she said. "Do you know any cute girls?"

"I'm looking at one."

She stroked my chest with one soft fingertip. "You were going to tell me about your tattoo."

"I was." I stroked her hand and closed my eyes, so I could speak without the distraction of seeing her. "So, I was an only child. My parents split up when I was ten, and it wasn't great for me. I was a pretty insecure kid and I blamed myself. I lived with my mother, and when I was twelve we moved. New school, new town, Aspie kid, closeted and still figuring it out. Not a lot of friends."

Not any, in fact, but that was hard to admit.

"I got bullied a lot. One of them was a girl called Cassie, a year older than me. Not one of the worst, but not great. Anyway, her dad met my mum at a parent-teacher night, and long story short, a few months later they were engaged, and, well..."

"That must have been difficult for you," Anjali said.

"Yeah, I was stressing out like you wouldn't believe. Well, maybe you would. I was just furious at Mum. Told her that she hadn't thought about me at all, how horrible it was going to be for me living with Cassie. I'd told her about being bullied, but I don't think she'd really understood how bad it was.

"Anyway, so. I think maybe Mum talked to John and John talked to Cassie, I'm not sure. But a week or so later, she rang up after school and asked to talk to me. I don't remember exactly what she said, I don't think it was quite an apology, but she wanted to let bygones be bygones. I thought she was just playing games, but she wasn't. She stopped picking on me, and then she started standing up for me, and the others eased off.

"Mum and John got married, and we moved into their place, and we ended up becoming really good friends. Like, people who didn't know the background just assumed we were sisters. I helped her with her maths homework sometimes, she helped with social stuff and kept people off my back. When I was fifteen she asked me if I was gay and I told her yes. First person in my family I came out to. And she was cool about it."

Anjali snuggled down beside me, one arm around me. "Well, that sounds quite lovely. I wonder why she changed?"

"I've never entirely understood, and by the time I would've been ready to ask her about it, she wasn't around any more. But I think... her mother died a year before I met her, and I think maybe she was still trying to deal with it and acting out. Sometimes people don't pick the best ways of coping. And then she grew up a bit and decided she didn't want to be that kind of person any more. Maybe John talked to her."

"You said she's not around any more. Does that mean...?"

"Yeah." This part still hurt to talk about. "Stupid accident. I was seventeen. She'd just started uni, one day she didn't come home for dinner, a couple of hours later the police knocked on our door. Best guess is she was taking a short-cut across a train line and didn't hear the train coming. She wore headphones a lot."

"Oh, Sarah. I'm so sorry." Anjali hugged me tight.

"Yeah, it messed me up pretty badly. I just didn't have the tools to deal with it. I kept going around in circles thinking about how easy it would've been to prevent if I'd known it was going to happen. It just didn't feel fair, such a massive cost for such a little mistake. You know how hard it is to get something like that out of your head."

She squeezed me again.

"The only thing that got me out of thinking about it... I spent hours and hours working about this maths problem. It came out of history class, of all places. I had a project on historical marriage customs around the world. Have you ever heard of Oneida?"

"Oneida, Oneida, the name rings a bell... don't they make silverware?"

"Yes, they do now. But back in the nineteenth century they were a fringe-y religious community. They had a thing called 'complex marriage' where everybody was married to everybody, and they just brought the kids up together as a community. And, yes, they paid the bills by making cutlery, among other things."

"Sarah, are you joking?"

"All true. Cross my heart. So, I was thinking about how with a society like that, inbreeding would be a problem. If you don't know who your father is, how do people avoid sleeping with their brother or your cousin? And then I got to thinking about Australian Aboriginal moiety systems - do you know what a moiety is?"

"Do I... Sarah, I'm Indian, remember?"

"Right, yeah, of course. Sorry. So, some of the Australian Aboriginal peoples have moiety systems too, but they work a bit differently. Indian system... if your parents are Brahmin, you're Brahmin, right? And the same for other castes?"

"Right."

"With the Australian systems, moiety still determines who you're supposed to marry, but you always have a different moiety to your parents. So I realised that could be a way that you could have communal marriages without inbreeding.

"So you split your group marriage commune thing into three moieties. Everybody's only allowed to have children with people from their own moiety. When somebody from Moiety One has children, the sons go off to Moiety Two and the daughters go to Three. From Moiety Two, the sons go to Three and the daughters to One. And from Three..."

"The sons go to One and the daughters go to Two."

"Exactly right. So your sons and daughters always end up in different moieties, so if everybody follows the rules you'll never have siblings hooking up. Well, not opposite-sex siblings, which is where the issue is."

"Okay... but your son and your daughter's daughter would be in the same moiety."

"Right, exactly. So with three moieties you can make sure first-generation descendants don't interbreed, but you can't do any better than that. So I tried to figure out what sort of system you'd need to prevent inbreeding down to grandchildren. Spent ages trying to figure it out with pen and paper, got nowhere, ended up programming a computer to do it by brute force. Took a few days to run, but I found the solutions. You need at least nine villages, or nine moieties, and there are four different solutions. And they looked really pretty when I plotted them, sort of like magic circles. Smaller, simpler versions of this." I indicated my tattoo. "I still have them on disk somewhere, if you want to see them later."

"I would like to," said Anjali.

(How often do you find somebody who's actually interested in that sort of stuff, who's not just being polite? Not very often, I can tell you that.)

"So then of course I wanted to find a solution for three generations. But the brute-force approach doesn't work there, because the problem just gets much too big. I played with it for a while, I didn't get anywhere, and I lost interest, so I left it alone for a while.

"Then Cassie died, and I obsessed about that for several months, just going round and round in my head and wearing myself out. Then one night I came back to that problem and it broke me out of those patterns. Like when you get a song stuck in your head and the only thing that can drive it out is another song... sort of meditative. I thought about it as two kinds of energy flowing into every moiety and mixing and transforming, then two kinds flowing out again to form these cycles that go on forever."

Anjali stroked my hair, and said nothing.

"I spent months on it, trying out all sorts of different ways to look at the problem. One night I finally cracked it. Took me a few days to code up the idea, and then a few hours to run the program, and voilà." I touched my tattoo again. "I found this pattern. And the funny thing is, I'd been worried that if I did solve it, then it wouldn't work for me any more. But instead I felt a lot better about Cassie. Still grieving, but not overwhelming me any more. I'd sort of tied my feelings about her to that problem, so once I solved it I felt like I had a little control over it. And when I turned eighteen, I got it tattooed on me as a memento of her."

"What was that like?"

"Well, it hurts a lot. Not a lot of padding on the ribs. But after a couple of minutes I just drifted away to this weird place, in a kind of trance. I could still feel the needle but I didn't mind it at all. Sounds weird but I kind of wanted it to go on forever. When it did stop I was just exhausted and shaky, but it all felt right. Good pain. And afterwards... I felt like I was carrying Cassie around on my skin, instead of in my head, and that's a lot easier to live with. It's a complicated thing."

Anjali was quiet for a little while, and then she said, "Thank you. All this time I've known you and I never knew you'd had a sister."

"I don't talk about her often, no."

"Are you okay?"

"Dunno."

She paused, frowned in thought for a moment, then spoke. "Did I ever tell you about the time when I was in med school, and a woman showed up at the ER with her son? He'd grabbed a bunch of coins out of her purse and swallowed them."

"No, I don't remember that one."

"She was quite worried. We told her it happens all the time, and she just needed to wait a couple of days for nature to take its course. But three days later she called back."

"Oh? What happened?"

"There was no change."

It took me a moment, and then I groaned and hit her with a pillow.

*****

Author's note: In fact, Oneidans kept careful records that allowed them to track their children's paternity but Sarah didn't know that. Neither did her author... thanks to my beta readers for spotting that and other errors!

Next time: Sarah goes on a business trip, and discusses the logistics of modern-day tulip exporting, because no erotica is complete without that.

By the way, if you've been enjoying this story, you might also like last year's "Riddle of the Copper Coin" over in Sci-Fi/Fantasy: https://www.literotica.com/s/riddle-of-the-copper-coin