Carousel Ch 2

I woke with her against me. It was only the third time we had managed to stay all night together. I was actually worried this woman was getting too close.

The heat from her body was like a velvet blanket, covering us both. I listened to the sweet music of her breath, in and out, and smiled at my fortune, again. She had been a mysterious regular at the amusement park where I work to pay the rent, while I learn to write well enough for something to sell.

Then, one night she had appeared at the exit to the parking lot, made me follow her to a place to leave her car, and came home with me. Since then, nothing had been the same for me. Her name, she said, was Debbi.

She had long legs, dark red hair, freckles I had come to love, and an attitude that said, 'Screw it, I want you.' I knew she was married, but I had not inquired into her arrangements. She had hinted that he had been out of town when she had spent the night the first two times. I assumed this was the same.

Truth is, at the moment, I didn't care what arrangements she had at home. I was only glad her body was arranged on my bed, flanks resting comfortably against my front, arms stretched in front of her, eyes closed, the barest hint of a smile on those perfect lips.

I thought back a few hours to our last love-making session together. I am years older than this lady, but her intensity and focus was intimidating. She had in mind things she wanted, managed to communicate those needs, and made sure they were fulfilled. So far, that had been more than okay with me. Her needs fit well with what I had to offer.

I leaned up on one elbow, looking down at her face. All my weaknesses were manifest in red heads, but this lady was exceptional even for exceptions. Her body bore the marks of recent weight loss, prominent hip-bones, ribs visible when she stretched her arms over her head. … over her head… the thought engendered the vision of her hurried impatience last night. I had not known she was coming. I didn’t even have time to kid her about calling first in case one of my other girls was here. She knew better by this time. She had me.

Somehow she had managed to get from the front door to the bedroom, tugging me while discarding her clothes, all the while engaging us in one of those world class kisses that had changed a great many things I thought I knew about the world. Kissing this lady was more profound than being married to any other woman. It was the Olympics, the 500, the World Series. I had thought about it a long while in one of my forced writing sessions and come to the conclusion that when you were kissing this lady, you had to concentrate, because she was concentrating. She was concentrating on the kiss. Not on the trash, the kids, the mortgage, just kissing you. And she was demanding the same thing back. It was worth it. I know that usually a guy is thinking about many things while he kisses a woman: the chances of getting her into bed, is she going to want to stay all night, who was coming by tonight, all sorts of things. But with this lady, you had to stop all that, and think only of one thing - how her lips/teeth/tongue/mouth felt, and what it was saying to you on a much deeper level. She assured me this was new to her, too, but I had to think that somewhere, sometime, someone had known this level of kissing. It was the stuff of legend, poetry, inspiration to war, or peace.

Her arms had been over her head when she landed on the bed, reaching for the headboard, eyes seeking mine, telling me what she wanted, without a word. Only the little sounds of her overarching need filled the small room. I had knelt by the bed, caressing her legs, pushing them finally up off the bed, so her thighs were to me, my hands on the backs of them, her hands on mine. I remembered the fleeting look I got of her small hands atop mine, as I bent to the joyous task of sucking her lips and clit into my mouth. Her hands had tightened on mine as I grabbed her clit with my teeth.

Tell the truth, I could not remember if she was built like anyone else I had ever known. I'm past 50, and have been no stranger to the happy pastimes of erotic arts. But when this lady came along, everything else went out the window. I did not know anyone else, had trouble remembering anyone else, and could not put faces to the vague memories of partial names in my past. And that was okay, too. If I thought at all about the others, it was with a fond wish for their happiness, too.

This lady like biting. She liked to bite me, and she liked to be bitten. In one of the more coherent conversations we had, I had asked her how she found out she liked that. She had trailed a finger along my jaw and said, 'I didn't know it, until I was with you.' Hard as that was to believe, she had me in the frame of mind to believe 8 impossible things before breakfast.

I had pressed my bare teeth onto her soft flesh, hearing her say, 'harder…' in a hoarse whisper. I had yet to leave her wanting less. It put me into an unaccustomed position, though. I had to be the one worried about consequences. It made me think of futures, mingled, tangled, messy. And that made me smile.

But I had certainly tried to accommodate her needs, biting harder until I could not stand it. She never said quit, never said, 'too much.' I was careful asking her to do things. She might not know when to stop.

The rewards of biting her just right, at her wish, in the right place, for the right length of time, were majestic in scope. Her breath came in ragged gasps, her hands tightened on mine, her stomach pulsed and heaved, and her thighs would finally close tightly on my head, stopping the symphony of climax going on above me. Even then she never asked me to stop. Fine with me.

I remembered the last time we had spent a whole night together. I had finally slipped off the ledge into sleep, after worrying about what would happen when she awoke. She was up first, and the smell of coffee woke me sometime later. She made it clear she did not drink coffee, which made it even more unlikely that she had taken over my kitchen, found all the fixings, and made coffee. She said she approved of the organization of the room. I was not a neat freak, but I found I could write better if I was not haunted by the spectre of a biology experiment growing in the sink or the fridge. I kept it clean and things put away. Sometimes it was what I did instead of writing. Either way it was clean enough for most folks, and I had not worried about offending her.

I had sat at the dining table, sipped coffee and looked at her over the cup. "That robe looks odd on you," I said.

She turned, a coquette if ever there was one, and said over her shoulder, "Would you prefer I stood over this stove in no clothes at all?"

I shut up. Women and cats do what they do, and man best not interfere.

That morning, she had sat with her toast, drank her milk, and we had not spoken except with our eyes. My thoughts ranged from the lewdly erotic to the eternal. After she had left, without inquiry on either side as to when she might be back, I had written furiously for two days. Days later I picked up what I had written, and read it for the first time. It was good. It seems she was preparing me for tomorrow by making today's work better. I would settle for that.

Presently, she stirred, her eyelids fluttering in some species-memory of flirtation from the cave-era. She seemed un-surprised to see me looking at her from above. "What are you looking at?" she asked, turning away into the pillow. I leaned down and kissed her shoulder.

"I'm looking at you… and I like what I see."

This earned me a smile from beneath the hand she was using to hide her face. She peeked out from behind her hand, and dashed up to kiss me quickly on the cheek. Before I could trap her, she had managed to get away, out of the bed, off to the bathroom. Watching her walk away from me, I could not help once again reflecting on how lucky I was. She was gorgeous. And she had so far made no demands. In fact, I found that I was the one wanting something more. I wondered just how far I could push it.

I got up and put on the most casual things I had clean, shorts and a T. She came out of the bath, and came toward me, apparently refreshed and wanting a proper good morning kiss. I held her tightly. Anytime I held her it seemed tightly. I know we varied the intensity, with the long practice of good and familiar lovers, but anytime she was near me, I wanted to hold her closer. Closer.

We had by some un-spoken mutual consent managed to avoid always the subject of her home and marriage, when she might appear and when she might leave when she was here. Therefore I did not ask if she could stay the day. I didn't have to be back to the park until late that afternoon. A day spent carousing with this lady could be mind-altering.

"Breakfast?" I asked. She shook her head and continued kissing me, her mouth seeking, hungry, her tongue and lips playing back and forth against my teeth and tongue. I played back at her, trying to trap her tongue so I could bite it or suck it, but she danced away gleefully, laughing a good laugh deep in her belly.

She tugged me toward the bed. Now I was sorry I had dressed. But clothes are like that, they go both ways. I tugged at the cloth of the t-shirt, and she helped, all the while trapping me in a kiss. Our legs danced across the bedroom floor, hesitant steps making sure we would not fall until we reached the bed. By the time we got there, we were both naked again. A pretty state.

She pushed against me. I lay on my left side, my arms around her. She pushed harder and harder, tucking her body against mine. Our legs lay together, then intertwined, both of us using even that leverage to get closer together. Her left leg lay atop my hip, cocked up as far as she could get it. My right leg lay between hers, up as far as could be, against her vulva. I could feel the wet heat against the upper part of my thigh.

While we kissed, I ran my hand along the back of her thigh… I hinted that I would move toward the wet heat at the center of her legs, but by-passed that, and moved on down her leg, to her foot. I tickled her foot, lightly, and then held it tightly and pressed fingers into the sole of her foot, at the center. Her relief was palpable. She sagged against me, which I guess means she actually moved away from me, since she had been using her muscles to hold herself as tightly against me as she could. I continued pressing the sole of her foot, between the long muscles along the underside, and she gasped and held me tighter. She liked it. I wondered if anyone had ever rubbed her feet for her before.

I felt her struggling to remove her arm from underneath me. I helped. She moved it between us and lay it alongside my dick, teasing, working her knuckles along the underside of the shaft.

This was a game we played constantly while making love: If I distract you from what you are doing to me, I win. She loved giving oral as much as I did. It made for a potential conflict. She wanted to give, so did I. Sixty-nine had rapidly become more than another technique in the repertoire. It was a necessary compromise.

But I had noticed that I wanted more and more to take her away from what she was doing, and give her so much pleasure, she overloaded, and had to stop what she was doing to me, and just enjoy. I gathered great pleasure from those few times she had thrown her head back, let me go, and squeezed a tight-lipped nonsense word from her throat.

Since right now, the only distraction was kissing, I concentrated as I could on making her realize there were other parts to her that felt good, too. Her feet. Her breasts, her thighs. I trailed a finger back up her leg toward her middle. I am sure she was not fooled when I said, 'Scuse me, I have an itch right here, and have to take care of it," and proceeded to insinuate my hand between my upper thigh and her pussy. I pretended to scratch my leg, while she grinned at me, so close I saw both her eyes as one. I realized I had looked at her like that a lot. My knuckles moved between her lips, and I rubbed her clit thoroughly, roughly. My reward was to be grasped in an iron grip, her fingers busy along the shaft of my dick.

Our kiss only deepened at that. I remember the thought occurring to me more than once while loving this woman - 'How can you move on to anything else, when kissing her is so pleasurable?' Somehow we did, but I did notice that despite both of us saying that doggy-style was a favorite, we had yet to try it. We wanted to be face to face while we made love.

I caressed her back with my left hand, trailing my fingers along her spine, down to her ass, and back up to her shoulders. This served as background, almost like the bass line in a jazz piece. The tempo picked up when she ground hard against me. I slowly pulled my hand from between us. I had the thought that her pussy had tried to follow my hand as I pulled it up, but it needn't have worried. I reached around her ass, and pulled her lips apart from above, and slid the tips of my fingers along the crease between her legs. All the parts there were increasingly familiar - the smallish clit, the tiny opening, the inner lips that nearly were not there.

I was rewarded with another one of those deep seated grunts. I circled her opening with my finger, then two, while she held me tightly. I worked a finger inside her, and began fucking in and out with them. She was possessed of a slightly spongy area all along the front of her opening. I had found this to be an apparent source of great pleasure for her. I tended it, back and forth, in and out, much to her delight. I noticed I had managed to distract her enough so she was no longer rubbing me, but had her head thrown back and was enjoying herself. It's what I wanted. I concentrated on finding just the right spaces to put her over the top.

From somewhere, she managed to find space between us, and close it, because suddenly she was even closer to me. The part of her that was on the bed was now all the way against me, no room between us. We had been together enough by now that I knew, this was the signal, she was telling me, it's time.

I rolled her over onto her back, and knelt between her legs. Her eyes were saying things that only close lovers can hear, and I bent to kiss her. She reached up with her legs and captured me, raising her pelvis to me, as I slid farther down the bed to be between her legs. With no aid except nature and desire, we were joined.

Always in the first moments of our union, there is a feeling, almost of prayer, that makes me glad we are who we are, that we have become who we are. That thought overtook me again, as I slid into her, and felt her joy at having me there. Pulling out was harder, but had it's own reward in then being able to thrust back in.

I moved her arms once again above her head, flat on the bed. "You're trapped," I said. "You can't move." She struggled against imaginary bonds, but then smiled wickedly - "Who's trapped?" she said, as she squeezed me harder with her legs.

I looked down at her, knowing the answer. "We both are," I said. I bent to her face, and kissed her. I caught a glimpse of the pendant she was never without, a carousel horse, around her neck. I felt her grind her mouth and hips against me in some insane rhythm, a primordial beat that predated even humanity. Her mouth took what she wanted from me, as I gave her all I could between her legs. She pushed me higher and higher, up the mountain, closer to the top. I felt her legs flex and tighten as she came, and moments later had filled her with all I had to give. I had once again tried to kiss her as I came, and been unable to finish. She knew by now what I wanted, and had kissed me, without expecting anything back for the moment.

The last thing I wanted now was to not be on top of her, but I didn’t think it polite to keep her trapped below while we talked. I rolled off and lay on my back, expecting her to come and lay her head on my shoulder.

She fit herself to me, cocked her leg over mine, and put her hand on my chest, reaching for my hand. We intertwined our fingers, and I kissed the top of her head.

"Who are you, and why are you here?" It was breaking the rule. I knew it even as I said it, but I went ahead.

There was no answer for a moment, and she whispered, "I'm yours, while I'm here. Who I am when I'm not here can't matter much."

"What if you were here all the time," I ventured quietly. I realized then I was holding my breath to take in any nuance of her reaction. I had broken ALL the rules.

She pulled my hand to her mouth and kissed it. "You would tire of me."

"Hmmph," I grunted. I thought this might be the beginning of a longer talk, but she squeezed my hand to her face, reached up and kissed me, looked at me closely for a moment, and said, "I have to go."

Timing? I didn’t know if I had run her off or not. I didn’t' know what to say. I found myself that way around her a lot. I had never asked her, when will I see you again. I had never asked her to stay, either, but I had just broken than rule. I hesitated, though. The last answer I wanted to the question, when will I see you again, was, never. So, rather than hear that, I kept still and watched her dress. She flashed me an occasional smile as she pulled on her clothes. I was not re-assured.

As she neared the end of the process and moved to the bath to repair the rest of her look, I rose, slipped back on the shorts I had on earlier, and stood in the doorway, watching her ministrations. They were as intricate and choreographed as a ballet, a symphony. The result was just as lovely.

She stepped to the door. Kissed me and expected me to move from her path. It was hard, but I did, with as much good grace as I could muster. I smiled at her, determined not to show how much I wanted her, how much she had come to mean to me.

She gathered up the rest of her things, and turned to me. "One thing I know…I know this is not casual with you. It might have started out that way? But I know it's not now." I nodded. She continued, "For that, I cannot repay you enough. You don’t need to offer me forever, or even months. I love you, I love being with you, and I love my other life, too, for now. I will keep both, if you will let me." She had wound down at the end of this, seemed to deflate a bit.

"Debbi, whatever is okay with you, that keeps us as together as we are now, is okay with me." It was her turn to nod. "I have loved, or thought it was love, before. Now I know the difference, and I will take whatever there is to take from it."

She reached up and kissed me again. I held her with the conscious thought that I must not hold her too tightly, however I felt. I did not turn and see her out the front door. I heard it click behind her, and suddenly thought I wished I had given her a key of her own. I had not thought of it until this very second. I stood like the donkey between piles of grain, immobile, hesitant, undecided. Would my chasing her down in the parking lot or the street make it any easier on either of us? I decided not.

I also decided I would see her again, in her time, not mine.

I went to the computer, opened the file to chapter 33, and started in again. I found there was lilt to my thinking that was not there unless I had seen her recently. I used up all the psychic energy she had left me or given me to summon words and actions for characters that were no longer vital to me. She would not like hearing that my work had suffered on her account. I could not let it.

I found the state of mind she left me in let me write the darker passages that usually I shy away from. I broke a character, by the neck, and stepped on another. The result was a cleaner story line, clearer to the purpose. Even in uncertainty, she had served me.