Sweet Neighbor Jane

"Are we saying goodnight?"

"I can feel the crash coming on."

"Really?"

"Oh yeah. It's just, I'm usually a 10 pm person."

"I was going to offer you a killer back rub."

I said, "I'm afraid I won't be able to stay awake to enjoy it."

Jane stood and took my face in her hands and kissed me on the lips, holding our mouths together long enough to stir my fear that she would push too far.

She broke off and said abruptly, "Raincheck. Sleep tight," then wore the robe home, leaving her clothes where she'd taken them off by the pool. The gate clicked shut and I felt a sense of relief. A few minutes later came amnesia and the happy expectation of seeing her tomorrow.

In bed I thought of her wicked idea and could not fall asleep until I had spun out a twisted scenario of a threesome -- Jane and me and a feral young male with a wicked hard-on, hot in our hands.

/ / /

Jane came at twilight the next day.

I had completed a marathon of intricate transcription, nonstop since morning, and was decompressing by the pool, starting to doze with a tablet in my lap. The sound of the gate woke me.

"Sorry," she said.

"What for?"

"Last night, being a skank."

"I had fun."

"My clothes, too. I got sloppy."

"They're in the house, folded."

"Did I just wake you up?"

"I was reading and nodding off."

She sat beside me and took hold of my fingers. "I kissed you last night," she said. "I

thought about it later. Didn't you?"

"It was a sweet thing to do."

"I mean more than that."

I sat up.

"A kiss like that," she said, "didn't you feel something more could happen between us?"

"It was affectionate, friendly."

"You're always telling me I'm beautiful," Jane said. "The way you look at me, I know you feel it." She brushed her fingertips along my forearm. "You're beautiful, Connie. Kinda hot, like I said."

I fumbled to find a self-deprecating reply, but she said, "I rubbed off last night. Did you?"

Jane waited until I said, "That doesn't mean ..."

"You did! You did, see?"

The light was fading. She fished for something in her pocket and leaned back with a

grin.

"I've been waiting to do this," she said. "Going to loosen you up, my Connie girl."

"Kissing my neighbor goodnight isn't loose?"

"I did the kissing. You were paralyzed."

She stuck a short cigarette between her lips and lit it with a box match. In the light of the flame I could see it was rolled.

"Is that weed?"

Jane wiggled her fingers and said, "It brings out my best."

As she inhaled, the tip of the joint caught flame and became ash as circles of glowing worms ate around it. She held her breath, then blew the smoke upward in a long jet, then turned the tip of it toward me.

"That's the skunk," I said. The night we met, through the fence, I'd thought I smelled a skunk."

"It's smellsome, but it's smooth," she said, "It'll set you up nice."

"I haven't smoked since twenty years before it was legal," I said. "It's dangerous for me. I don't think I handled it all that well."

"All you need's a small hit. Try it."

"I can't, really. It used to make me all talkative and silly."

A grey-blue haze lingered above the umbrella. Jane smiled and struck another match.

"I'll get silly with you," she said, then relit the weed and sipped on it. She held her breath and shifted position to face me from the side, then blew a stream of smoke under my nose.

She leaned back with a glazed smile. "Get any?"

"A whiff. Probably enough."

"Try once more. Just breathe."

She drew again, pursed her lips and jetted smoke. I inhaled and took in more than intended. The moment the smoke hit my lungs it ballooned and threw me into a fit of coughing.

The rush came as I caught my breath. My heartbeat ran up. A flooding sensation pressed the back of my eyes. I must've looked stupefied.

Jane said something, probably my name.

Then I regained just enough orientation to mutter, "Holy ...."

"In a minute you're going to feel like you're floating."

She stood up and I expected that she was going to take her clothes off again. An

important thought relating to her habit of stripping in front of me came and went in a wisp.

"I think people have to have shadows," I said.

"Like Peter Pan."

I giggled. "Not Peter Pan. I mean like ..."

Her hands landed like birds on my shoulders. They began to walk outward, an easy kneading with her thumbs and fingers, nudging the little knots that they found along the way. It became difficult to keep any thread of thought. Soon I felt fluid to my knees, as fluid as a wave.

"You were telling me about shadows," Jane said.

"Dark places inside."

"Like secrets?"

"They give you depth. Like waves on the shore."

"Hmmm. You're stoned."

"Your hands're melting me."

"You know what really feels great?"

Jane pressed the heels of her hands just below my collar bones and pushed outward

from the center, an exquisite stretching of the upper chest.

"Lots of tension up here," she said.

Her next pass gave my breasts a pleasurable downward push.

On the third, her fingers slipped under my suit. One of her nails raked a nipple and an electrical spark jumped from there to my clit to my toes. I bent back to look up at Jane.

"Like it?" she said.

I had to nod.

"Slide down a little more."

I eased lower on the lounge chair. She bent and kissed my forehead, then my eyelids, then my mouth, an upside-down touching of lips, followed by another and another.

I put my hands up to slow her.

"What?" she said.

"I told you I get silly."

"You lose control."

She slid a fingertip over my hardened nipple. I grabbed her wrist.

"Let me do it, Connie."

"It makes me weak."

"And pot makes you horny."

Jane pushed her hands under the top of my suit and flattened my chest. She caught each ready nipple between a join of fingers and lifted. My head swam with the feeling that I was being hoisted with points of fire.

She let go, then slipped the straps from my shoulders and rolled the suit down. In a daze, I looked up at her.

"You did this to me before," I said.

"But not this."

She rolled each excited bud. My back arched -- I couldn't help it.

She quivered her fingertips, and I pressed myself deeper into the chair, a feeble attempt to escape.

"Connie, Connie, Connie," she said. "Such a slutty, slutty girl."

She plucked and released. Then, suddenly, she became still and looked at me with a gentle face. She grew tender and kissed me so that our mouths fit perfectly together. As we kissed, she cupped her palms to the sides of my breasts and cradled their weight back and forth, back and forth, slowly, gently, back and forth, seesawing waves.

"Want to do it here, or inside?" she said.

"Do? Where?"

She tugged my arm. The stars and the dark shape of the umbrella rolled as I stood up. Replies to her question were tumbling in my head, but each one dissipated before the words could fit together. She held my hand and I followed her across the lawn and into the house.

\ \ \

We kept the lights off. Jane backed me to the wall.

"I think I'm too stoned," I said.

She kissed me again, roughly this time, to pin me in place. My half-peeled suit had bunched around my hips. Jane took hold of it like a belt and began a teasing game, using the fabric to tug at my puss and draw my hips farther and farther from the wall. She kept me in that position, hips way forward, making it easy for her to cup her fingers between my legs. I craved her rub. She took one of my nipples between her teeth and nibbled. My resistance burst into a fireworks of sensation.

One of her fingers found the moist slit and worked its way in. As it advanced, I rose dizzily onto the balls of my feet, balancing in a flexed position, like an Indonesian dancer, hips rocking with sweet fuck as I took her to the full knuckle. Thighs on fire, I danced her fingertip onto that ultimate spot that ignites all of the arteries of pleasure at once -- and I felt myself implode and ignite at the core.

/ / /

Once I regained my steadiness, we went downstairs to the den, and Jane said, "Ever eaten pussy, Connie?"

I shook my head no.

"Mine'll be the first! Now go lie on the rug in front of the couch, on your back," she said. I felt weak and needed to lay down anyway.

She took the bottom of her bikini off and then straddled me with a towering stance.

Already we reeked of musk and sweat, of vaginal bouquets.

"Ready?" she said, then knelt over my mouth and maneuvered her puss to touch lightly, ever so lightly, the tip of my extended tongue. I was enveloped by a splash of scents and she told me, with her hips now swaying in fluid rhythm, how much and where and which way she loved and loved to be licked.

\ \ \

But she didn't stay the night. She seemed far less affected than I was. I had a sense, just a hint of intuition, that the experience for her was anticlimactic.

Still, I slept very well.

/ / /

The alarm woke me and I made a strong cup and, to keep myself from utter distraction, worked nonstop until 2:00. I called Jane and left a message, asking her to come over as soon as she could. By sundown she hadn't returned my call. I sat outside with a snack and a glass of wine and listened to the shouts and splashes of kids playing in a pool a few backyards over. Jane's house was dark. About a block away, some stupid car alarm, was going off every two minutes .

At 8 PM Len signaled that he was on channel and we connected and the first thing I said was that I missed him.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, but we've got a lot to talk about."

"There an emergency?"

"Not per se."

"Something happen in the past twenty-four hours?"

"I'm feeling desperate for love."

"Oh-ho, just hold on, hold on, Con. We're already halfway through this. I'll be home

soon enough," he said.

"This isn't home, Len. It's nothing like a place I feel I belong to. I need your touch."

"Keep keeping busy."

"Can we play a game?"

"It'll have to be quick."

"Oh, no," I said, "for this we take our time."

"Hey, Con," my husband said, "this isn't a secure connect, you know? So keep it clean."

"Who's listening -- Internals?"

"Should it matter?"

I said to him as a sign-off, "I'm hungry for you, Len. I'm going to feast on you with love when you get back. Listen in on that, butt wipes."

He let it slide. We said goodnight. Up theirs, I thought, and up his too.

\ \ \

That night the dog came again. A lucid dream. I felt her menace.

The dream took me into a room made entirely of black and white marble. Across the floor stood a doorway without a door and the rectangle inside the stone frame was pitch-black-dark. The closer I moved toward the dark, the more I felt a malevolence on the other side, an evil spirit so dense that it had teeth. That's where she would be of course, the bristling bitch, in the absolute dark. I stepped through the doorframe, quite afraid.

There was firelight without a source. It glowed through the stone walls of a curving tunnel that soon branched. The branch I chose led to a domed circular room. As I approached the entry I thought, It's a tomb.

She snarled -- slaver flew in arcs -- and she leapt from the threshold, snapping for my face. Vip vip, I don't know how. I leapt to meet her and felt us join in the air. I passed into her and she passed into me and I absorbed her form with a surprising affinity.

Then I walked into the room, tracking the high shadowy recesses of the dome. Before reaching the center, I woke up realizing, It's a womb.

/ / /

Jane called an excruciating 48 hours later.

She said, "I'm coming over."

"Did you get any of my messages?"

"Just now."

"I started to believe you were avoiding me," I said.

"What? No. Why?"

"I won't be free until seven," I said — an arbitrary time, a show of indifference.

"I'll come earlier and swim."

"Fine."

We call-ended. My heart kept knocking like a fist.

\ \ \

In the middle of some dense material, I heard the springboard's heavy flutter and the splash of Jane's entry. The time read 6:22. I fought the impulse to get up from my desk and go to her. "Seven," I had said. Seven, seven ... For fuck sake, show some backbone, Con.

But only ten minutes later I was out the door.

/ / /

Jane was treading at the deep end of the pool, her form below the surface of the water sliced by moving shadows, her form above, shoulders and hair, a calm silhouette. It might have been a trick of the lights, but she looked unnaturally buoyant.

She cocked her head to one side and said, "Don't you do anything but work?"

"That was mean of you, Jane," I said.

"Me? What?"

"Not to call."

She took a stroke backward, raising her navel to the surface, kicking with hardly a ripple.

"You disappeared for two days."

"Connie, come on," she said, "take your clothes off and get in here with me."

"You can't be so intimate with me like that and then just disappear," I said.

"I'll make it better."

"I feel manipulated."

"My phone was dead. I was away for a day and a half, that's all. Gee, Connie."

"I'm overreacting?"

"You are."

"I felt alive again, Jane."

She turned and swam toward me, and drew up to the side and crossed her forearms on the rim. "Drop yourself in here," she said.

She watched and smiled as I undressed, and reached out to squeeze my ankle, then place her palm on the boney curve of my instep. I pinched my nose shut and stepped vertically into the water. When I came up, Jane was positioned nose to nose.

"Turn around, please," she said.

I did and she steered me toward the wall, at a depth on the slope where we could stand, and she rubbed her palms in circles across the back of my shoulders.

"Tight again," she said.

"Are you high?"

"To do my best."

She did have gifted hands. Once I softened, she had me float on my back. The more I relaxed, the more her support shifted down the length of my body, until I was all but unmoored, utterly at ease, supported only at the heels by Jane's fingertips.

I practiced slow breathing. Ears underwater, outside sounds became muted and remote. Ears above, after that little pop when the water clears, Jane was humming a lullaby.

\ \ \

I learned something new that evening. Jane had a strap-on and we used it. She used it. We agreed I would wear it next time.

/ / /

Talking to Len became difficult.

"If I can't have your body, Len, I can't have my own."

He inhaled and exhaled to a count of ten, then said, spacing his words, "What in

fudge does that mean?"

"It means I can't enjoy my body to the fullest without you."

"You're not 'without me'."

"Yes, I am. More and more. I've been feeling alone for a long time now, a long time -- before the transfer, before the shit that got us here."

"Con, we have got to talk about your needs."

"My needs?"

"Yes, you know ..."

"It's my love, Len. It's my love for you."

"Sure. But --"

"It's not just needs."

"You're right. It's not just needs. Right. And we'll talk about it, I respect that, I do, I

promise you. But it can't be right now, Con. It can't. It's just too far away from what I have to do here. Con?"

Then I said spontaneously, "I had sex with someone. A woman."

"Con, what don't you get about keeping the connect clean?"

"We've had sex twice."

"Do you want to disconnect?"

"Do you?" I said.

"If you continue this track."

"I want to be open and truthful."

"I'm signing off."

"My soul, Len. It's in the act of love."

He disconnected.

\ \ \

When he signaled to connect, sometime later, I answered reluctantly.

"Con," he said, "are you taking your meds?"

"Yes, I am."

"Faithfully?"

"One lapse in two weeks."

"You see?"

"Missing a dose doesn't affect me."

"Have you missed two?"

"Stop it, Len."

"I don't know what to tell you, Con," he said. "I'll be there soon. What you said earlier, about a woman, was that part of the game you wanted to play? Con?"

"I wanted to get a rise out of you."

"Well, you got one. Really, what can I do to help you right now?"

"Let me know you miss me."

"You know I do."

"Then it should be easy to say."

"Don't tell me we're in trouble."

"We're in trouble, Len."

I hadn't meant to say it. It took him aback.

"Con, I am up to my chin here. Please, don't do this now."

"Okay," I said. "Okay."

"I'm training for command, right?" He took a heavy breath. "I promise you, Con, you will have your fill and more."

"Okay. But I have to tell you that I feel like my heart is wasting away."

"Fortitude," he said. "Remember we drank to fortitude. I have to go now."

And he went.

/ / /

The next time I saw Mr. Cut-offs, Bryce, was at my place. He had just finished mowing, shirtless, seamlessly tanned and cut and lean. Before I turned to go inside, he said, "See Jane?"

"See her where?"

"Her house, your house, aroun'."

"Almost daily."

"Choice

"Are you friends?"

He wagged his empty drinking bottle.

"Mind if I get a refill?"

For some reason I said, "There's filtered water in the fridge."

"Help myself?"

I slid the door open and said, "Come in, cool off. I'll get it."

He followed me into the kitchen and handed me the bottle. I felt his scrutiny on the back of my neck, then he said something troubling.

"Talk to Jane about me?"

"Talk about you, why?"

He shook his head. "She didn't say anything to you about it?"

Cold water trickled over my fingers. I'd over-poured and spilled.

"You and she talk?" I said.

"Nah. We tease. We -- she flirts. She let somethin' slip, that's all."

I screwed the top back on and handed him the bottle without wiping it dry.

"I'm just invitin' you to it."

"What are you talking about?"

"You thinkin' about, you know, liking handjobs."

The backs of my eyes grew hot . He held out his hand.

"Are you out of your mind?" I said.

"I'm offerin' you the opportunity."

"You've got some goddamn piece of nerve," I said. "Out of the house. Off the premises, now."

"But you invited me in."

He had kept his hand extended all the while, long fingers open in invitation. His voice softened.

"You thought about it," he said.

"She thought about it."

"You think about it," he said, "why not do it?"

"Jane sent you?"

"Nah. She just let a little somethin' slip."

"About handjobs."

"Nobody ever got to know," he said.

"Bullshit, mister. Bull—shit. Out."

He shook his head solemnly, placed a hand over his heart. "Tell nobody ever."

I should have kicked him out for real, screamed, called his boss and pressed to have him fired. I should have shot him, but no, no, instead the dream I'd had came back to me, the image of the empty marble room and the doorway without a door. The malevolent dark on the other side. The changes in me that awaited, once I met it.

Step through.

Again, that lightning image — his cock sprung hard.

"I'm married," I said.

"You think god watchin'?"

"Of course not."

"Just you an' me, ain't it?

He flashed a smile, a shit-eating spread of teeth, as if he'd just ju-jitsued me into

compliance.

"Fuck you," I said.

The smile vanished.

"Ain't gonna fuck you, lady, just gonna let you handle my dick."

His smile restored itself, and he offered his hand again, the son of a bitch.

It's ugly, but step through.

Before taking his hand, I told him I would do this once, only once, here and now. No second time, ever.

His fingers closed around my hand and he drew me toward him. He would've taken me all the way to the swelling in those cut-offs if I had let him.