Contrast Ch. 03

When their calendars align, he's at her place four or five times a week, fucking her for hours on end. When he has to work late, or she's on a night shift, or one of them can no longer put off family or friends, they might go three days without hitting it, but by the fourth they're finding some way to make it work, whether on his lunch hour or in the brief gap between her classes and her job, whether at her apartment or in whatever secluded back room they can find in a business or office building that lies along her bus route.

He has never come into the same woman so many times, not even Ariel, who'd been his fiancée for a brief six months after two years of dating.

Since offering herself up to him that fateful morning, she has achieved more orgasms from intercourse than with all of her previous sex partners put together.

They both exist in a state of constant amazement that they have found this thing, this treasure, that absorbs virtually their every waking thought.

On a Saturday morning, they wake up in her bed.

"Uhhh," she moans as she rolls over and cracks her eyes to see sunlight sneaking its way in past the blinds. His hand finds her hip beneath the sheets and slides up it, past her waist, around her ribs to cup one breast. She feels his lips on her shoulder, covers his fondling hand with her own, turns her face to receive a slow, simple kiss. When it breaks, she finds herself staring into his grey eyes. "Goddamn," she says. "How many times was that last night?"

He smiles and kisses her again, their tongues meeting in the less-than-perfect taste of two mouths that have spent an entire night ripening their respective coatings of sex juices. The flavor does not bother either of them.

"I don't know," he says. "I fell asleep after five. Did you wake me up by sucking my cock in the middle of the night?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, so if that wasn't a dream, did I wake you up by getting in you from behind?"

"Uh-huh. But I think we both fell asleep without coming. Does that one count?"

He counts steps, pressing a different finger into her breast with each one. "Erection, penetration, motion, moaning. I think that's enough to count as sex even without any orgasms."

"All right, then, that's seven, right? I'm thinking seven's a record. What do we do to celebrate a new record?"

He raises an eyebrow. "We could fuck."

The pulse of his cock against her ass cheek almost makes her want it, but she scoots away instead and sits up at the edge of the mattress to stretch. "Mmfff. We could, but I am raw and hungry and I need to piss like a motherfucker."

He laughs and raises the sheets to look down at himself. "I was mostly joking. I think it could use a couple more hours' worth of a break."

Standing, she says, "Then you probably don't want to get in the shower with me, because I will soap the shit out of that thing until whatever spunk is left in your balls squirts onto my tits."

"I don't think there's enough for a squirt," he replies, rolling onto his back. "Maybe a trickle. The rest is inside you already."

"Tell me about it," she says, looking down at her sore and cum-leaking vagina.

While she's eyeing herself, he's looking at her one tattoo, a full moon nestled in clouds, the whole thing no larger than a quarter, just above her right hip. "You go ahead and get cleaned up. I'll switch out with you when you're done. Then maybe we can go out for breakfast to celebrate."

She throws a look at him. They don't eat out much, usually just order pizza or Chinese and fuck at her kitchen table while eating it. The fact that he likes mushrooms in both is one of the few things she knows about him.

But his eyes have closed, so she can't see if he means anything significant in making the invitation. She heads into the bathroom.

Between her shower and his shower and her hair and getting dressed, it's forty-five minutes before they're ready, and she hasn't put on any makeup yet.

"We going someplace nice?" she asks from the bathroom door, waving her compact.

He loves the way she looks with nothing on her face. The smooth, deep, even color of her skin, nothing on her cheeks to accent their curves, no eye-shadow to vamp her lids from naturally beautiful to carnally provocative. He speaks without thinking.

"If you're there, it's going to be nice no matter where we go."

She feels herself flush. "You forgot to put the word 'bitch' in there somewhere, dumbass."

"Okay, you're the one said she was hungry, bitch," he tells her, grinning. "So put the makeup down and let's fucking go eat."

On the way down the stairs, he watches her ass in its tight denim skirt, thinking it may be the same one she wore that first time he saw her. But she's got a lot of denim skirts, as far as he can tell, and the top today isn't the camo tank but a sunflower tube top. That top is the main reason he keeps his eyes on her tush - if he watches her bare, dark shoulders above its golden rim, he's going to grab them and pull her to him and put his chin over her shoulder to stare down her cleavage while he fondles her.

"Who's driving?" he asks as they reach the parking lot. He's pretty sure she doesn't have a car, and she's pretty sure he knows it. But their bargain is to keep as much personal information back as they can, so on the rare occasions when they use transportation, he always gives her the opportunity to maintain the uncertainty.

"You drive," she says casually. "If you're sure we gotta drive somewhere. I'm good with the Mexican place across the street there."

He shakes his head. "That's where I was heading the day we first met. I got detoured from that place, and I like the detour. I'm damn sure not ready for it to be over."

She feels odd in her chest at the words. He's not saying anything out of the ordinary for them. They're a thing, a fling, a temporary craziness that can't possibly last. And he was emphatic there about not being ready for it to be over. That's good, right? Plus, he was taking her out to breakfast. So why did the word "detour" make her feel ... whatever it was that it made her feel?

He notices she's quiet. She knows his car, she's headed for it through the lot. She's not usually a quiet person. What the fuck, dude. "Detour?" Something inconvenient and in the way? What an asshole. He hadn't meant it that way at all - he'd meant that she'd changed something in him and he never wanted to get back to where he'd been going that morning.

He catches up to her, sneaks a hand around her elbow, pulls back gently to stop her and turn her around. She looks uncertain, but he does not hesitate. His arms go around her and he puts everything he can into a kiss - everything he's not allowed to say, everything he's not allowed to ask.

She kisses back the same way. It ends when her stomach growls loud enough for both of them to hear. They laugh and get into his car. Sore pussy or no sore pussy, she's wet and electrified as she sits beside him watching the familiar stores and strips and apartment complexes of her street roll by.

Breakfast is unexceptional. He tells her to point out anything that looks good, she stops him at the pancake place two blocks down, not because it looks good but because she's ravenous. She orders sausage, biscuits and gravy, bacon, eggs. He gets a big plate of waffles. They trade bites, feeding each other across the table. There's nothing special about any of the food, they talk less than they normally do when eating, probably because all their conversations are about sex, and there are people in the booths to either side, an old couple behind him and a family behind her.

She can't remember a breakfast she has enjoyed more. He eats as slowly as he can to draw it out as much as possible.

When they're both full and the server has cleared away their plates, he says, "So we've got all day now. I don't think we can top the new record. What should we do?"

Tell me your name.

"You know what we've never done," she says instead, "we've never done it to music."

He sips at the last bit of his coffee. Is she deliberately testing the line?

"True," he says, putting the cup down. "But whose would we use? And you know, for some people, music is pretty personal."

That's the whole idea.

She shrugs. "I don't think one CD's going to tell you my life story. Hell, it might even be a CD somebody left in my apartment that's not my sound at all."

He nods slowly. "Cool. That's actually a really good idea."

She grins, her teeth shining and perfect between supple lips. They pay up, they leave. He's simmering with anticipation - not only has he never done her to music, he's never done anyone with a soundtrack. Ariel was extremely conventional, and he'd only gone to bed with one girlfriend before her. Since then ... nothing had lasted more than a few weeks. Until now.

As they pull out of the parking lot, she's wondering what she should put on once they get home. He won't want her to read off a bunch of possibilities for them to choose from together, won't want them to be delving with one another into her musical tastes. Or maybe he wants it like I want it, but he can't say so either.

She's just about worked up the courage to put on her Best of Debussy CD - not sexy enough? too beautiful? too likely to make her cry in the middle? - when she realizes they're passing her complex.

"Where're we going?"

"You'll see."

They pull into a shopping strip. He wheels his aging Nissan into a spot in front of a buy-sell-trade CD shop. Debussy fades from her like a moonset, but ... he's charged up, eager, quickened by some plan that's put a wickedly pleased smile on his face. She lets her disappointment be pulled into curiosity. Is he going to look for some fave of his? What's playing in that head?

The shop is small, a little dim, just recently opened for Saturday-morning business. The only person in it is the college-age clerk, a wiry kid with glasses, fuzzy hair, and the kind of chin beard only the young or the genuinely eclectic could pull off. The kid looks up from his work sorting jewel cases just long enough to give a casual wave of acknowledgment, then gets back to work.

"Hey, could we get a little help here?"

The kid looks up again at the request, seemingly indifferent about being interrupted and asked to exert himself.

"Sure," chin-beard says, coming round from behind the counter. "What d'ya need?"

"I want you to pick out four CDs for us, any four, whatever you want. The only guidance I'm going to give you is, we want something we can fuck to."

"Whoa." The kid's eyebrows go up above his glasses, though the rest of his face remains blank. He reaches up and scratches behind one ear. "Yeah, uh, lemme see what I can do."

She lets a stifled laugh escape as the clerk moves off. "You're so bad. Poor kid..."

"Okay, so here's the deal," he says. "We can each veto one CD and have him pick something else, but only once. We don't tell him why we're vetoing, we just ask him to put that one back and choose something else. Then we're stuck with what he brings back."

She nods, smiling, then raises an eyebrow. "What if he's some kind of fucking Lawrence Welk freak, or decides to be a prick and sticks us with a bunch of Barney sing-along CDs?"

"Then I won't be able to get it up and our genitals will have a little more of the day to recover from last night."

"Don't you threaten me with not getting it up," she says, stepping close and running fingernails down his chest. Her eyes hold his with a fire of promise, though he can't help noticing the dark swells of her breasts within that golden tube-top at the edge of his vision. "I will make you eat those words and all kindsa other things besides."

He bends and kisses her, gets a hand into the small of her back, bare and cool between the tube top and the waistband of her skirt. His tongue is in her mouth, his other hand slides up her hip and over and up her belly and onto the rich curve of one breast within her top.

The clerk clears his throat.

He's brought back four CDs: a collection of swing era hits, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, the Basil Poledouris soundtrack to Conan the Barbarian, and something by a rapper whose name is apparently so scurrilous that there's an Explicit Lyrics sticker plastered across it.

Scheherazade, Christ, he thinks as the clerk hands the CDs over. It's one of the few classical pieces he really knows, and he's almost certain he should veto it. The raw, mournful emotion of it gets him every time he listens to his copy, and the last thing he'd want would be to break out in tears in the middle of sex with her. But then the tiding, oceanic rhythms of the suite start to flow through his memory, and he imagines their bodies sliding together in time to that beauty, and his throat goes dry and he knows he has to come inside her with this music playing, tears or not.

She's pissed at the rap CD. She likes her share of hip-hop, but can't stand the hardcore bitches-and-hos gangsta shit. He does get off calling me his bitch, though, doesn't he, she thinks. He loves doing that white on black nasty, I know he does. And it don't get much nastier than this crap. What the fuck, just go with it.

In the car, though, she makes like she's offended, shuffling through the CDs and holding up the rap one. "Motherfucking racist little shit. Look at this! Three CDs for the white boy and one for his N-word ho."

He glances at her to see if she's really mad, but he can't tell. "Why didn't you veto it, then?"

She gives him a completely blank face, then raises her eyebrows. "Well, maybe coz I like it. Or maybe because I just want to see if your nice white weenie gets up for the stuff, or goes limp from it."

There's enough humor in her voice for him to relax. "We'll see. And anyway, maybe he wasn't being racist. Maybe it's what he fucks his girlfriend to."

That word shivers right through her: girlfriend.

"What's that mean, exactly?"

"Huh?" They're almost back to her complex now. "I don't get you."

"His girlfriend. The way you said the 'his,' sounds like you're making a reference to somebody else having a girlfriend too."

"Oh. Oh, you mean was I saying that you're ..." He knows that without having thought about it, that was exactly what he was saying. He wonders if his face is going red. "No, I just meant that he must assume we're an item, I wasn't saying I ..."

She makes a lazy, overhand wave at him and settles back in her seat.

Inside the apartment, she locks the door and asks, "How we gonna decide what to put on first?"

"Here," he says, taking the discs. He puts them behind his back, mixes them around. "Pick a number between one and four."

"Four."

He brings the stack out, peels off the top three as he counts. "One, two, three ..."

The rap disc is on the bottom.

Aw, shit, she thinks.

Shit and damn, he thinks. He would have vetoed the thing if he hadn't been worried it would look as racist as the clerk picking it out in the first place.

"So let's go, then," she says, taking it from his hand and marching over to the boom box beside her television. "Where we gonna do this?"

"Uh, I'm guessing this is more on-the-couch or maybe on-the-floor music, not in-the-bed."

"Baby, I'm guessing this is up-one-side-and-down-the-other, no-place-is-safe music, and we're going to do some serious migrating while it's on or else we're going to have to shut it off and switch to something else."

"Hit play then, and come over here so I can peel that top off of you."

She hovers her finger over the button and waits, one eyebrow raised.

"What?" In his head, he's already yanking that golden band down to pop her full, ripe tits out in the open, so it takes him a second to remember. "Oh, right. I mean, bitch."

She grins. Her finger goes down. She cranks the volume.

Snaking, looped synthesizers and a plosive, throbbing bass ejaculate from the speakers. She struts toward him, her hips rolling extra-slow as concussive profanity jumps out on top of the ... music. His hands are itching to get at that tube-top. Halfway to him, she stops and turns, pelvis still rotating elliptically at the base of her spine. She watches him over her shoulder, hands going to the side-seams of her skirt, dragging them up, dragging the hem skyward, revealing inch after inch of her sleek, round, brown legs.

Only in the very back of his mind does it click how fantastically offensive the lyrics of the song are. The rest of him is fully absorbed in the grinding fullness of her ass, circling in front of him to that beat as her skirt climbs higher along those unbelievable thighs. He takes a step toward her, but she puts a hand straight out, palming him into immobility. The hand goes back to the denim of her skirt. Her eyes are narrowed and her lips turned up in a deliriously wicked smile. Up and up and up goes the skirt.

Of course she doesn't have anything on underneath it. Why would she?

The lips of her cunt wink in and out of view with each slow rotation of her ass, each slurred cycle of the synth loops, each rattling line of n- and ho- and bitch-filled poetry spilling out of the speakers. He can almost see them glistening wetter and wetter every time they surge into view.

She steps back toward him, languidly, patiently, pushing that beautiful ass closer and closer to him, never breaking its motion loose from the pounding rhythm. She is eight feet away now.

"Undo your belt buckle."

He does what she says. His cock is begging to be let loose anyway, painfully hard within his briefs.

Six feet away. A bead of moisture actually breaks loose and runs down the inside of her thigh.

"The button," she says.

He unsnaps it.

Four feet away, just out of arm's reach. She stops closing in, but continues to roll her gorgeous butt and pussy at him, ever-so-subtly squatting lower with each circle.

"Unzip."

He does. Words hit him suddenly from the boom box: "Fuckin' you, and fuckin', and fuckin' up your -"

Her knees are to the ground now, and one hand. The other is spread across her tailbone, middle finger pointing straight down her crack.

"Get them down."

He shoves his pants to mid-thigh, popping his cock loose so that it waves straight out toward her.

She licks her lips. "Ooh, do I like the look of that. Closer."

He drops to his knees, moves one and then the other of them forward. Her ass is still grinding, near enough to touch now, but he doesn't, because she hasn't told him to. She's like a cobra, the music like a snake-charmer's flute, both of them mesmerizing him.

"Get it in me," she says. "No hands."

They've played "no hands" before, but never with her cunt twisting and circling like it is now. He edges closer, his prick jutting stiff and straight toward her. That finger down her ass crack beckons him. His calves slide up along hers. His half-lowered pants make it awkward to get in place. She rolls and rolls and rolls her hips, grinning across her shoulder in a challenge. The music is filthy. It tugs him toward her in throbs.

"pumpin' this ho-"

Jesus, do people really write these lyrics?

But even as the thought flits through his mind, it's gone again, and the leering words turn back to noise, below the level of consciousness, as her latest twist of the hips brushes one ass-cheek against his tip.

He moves one knee forward, tilting his pelvis down on that side, angling his steam-tempered steel rod for her orbiting hole, but only succeeding in jabbing a streak of pre-cum along the juncture of her ass and thigh. He tries circling with her and immediately proves the stereotype about white guys having shit for rhythm. She laughs and drops from a rotation every four beats to one every eight.