In The Aftermath 1

"I don't know how to feel about this," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"This..." I waved vaguely. "Talking about payment, about ... services."

I frowned, and so did she.

"I just..." It took me a long time to find the words.

"I spent a lot of my life trying not to treat women as objects," I said finally. I gestured at her body. "Trying to see past the skin, the legs, the..."

I trailed off helplessly.

She stood from the chair and walked slowly across the hotel room. The sea breeze through the open French doors blew strands of hair loose from the braided crown on her head.

"Listen," she said, coming to a stop about six feet away.

It was the closest we'd been to each other. We both knew that any closer would be a new barrier broken, a new line crossed—not so much for her as for me.

"I'm here," she said, "because I want to be."

She reached behind her neck and untied the string of her white bikini top. It fell without ceremony from her breasts as she reached behind her back for the other string.

"I'm doing this," she continued, "because I want to."

It dropped to the floor and she stood topless, tan skin traced with the faint lines of the sun, shoulders dotted faintly with freckles. Her nipples were stiff, pert caps of pale pink against delicate mauve discs.

I swallowed.

Her string bikini bottoms were a siren singing for me to complete the act, to forget my hangups and crash on these beautiful rocks. These graceful, slender, feminine rocks; to cure me from a year of isolation, of never feeling the skin of another person against my own.

But in that year, I had been rewired. My brain shuddered like an antique truck coughing to life. Like it had forgotten the motions, forgotten how to be with another person.

She saw my hesitation.

"Sweetie," she said.

It was a surprisingly intimate word to use for—well, for whatever this was. Its use dislodged me momentarily from my stupor.

I looked up at her, and her eyes flared, lashes splaying in pretty twin coronas around dark irises.

I was noticing her face for what felt like the first time—her body had so thoroughly distracted me, and my panic had kept me from making eye contact from almost the moment she had arrived.

Her cheeks were narrow but her mouth was wide. Her nose turned up at its tip in a way that somehow recalled a baby seal, or a cute otter or something. Adorable, was the word. She was so adorable.

What was this young woman doing? I was suddenly once again thrown into my overwrought cycle of care and concern.

How do women move through the world like this? I thought.

Why do we objectify them, why do we strip them of their humanity? How can I help this girl? Having sex with her was surely not the solution.

"Sweetie," she said again, seeing my face flash through its stages of worry and distraction. "Look at me."

I obeyed.

In a flash, the bikini bottoms were off, unstrung and driven from her body by a deft flick of long fingers, landing three feet away on the rug.

She was naked in front of me, and I was jarred loose from my trance once again.

"I am an object," she said. Her hands slid up her breasts, then loosed them to bounce delightfully, taut and firm against her chest.

"Right now," she said, "I am your object."

She bent at the waist, running her hands from her knees up her thighs, fingers dimpling her sun-dappled skin as she raised herself up to full height, lifting her arms high over her head, one knee bent, bare hips cocked to the side.

"In fact," she said, "being your object is the only thing in the world right now that I care about."

She dropped her hands to her sides and took a step toward me. My heart skipped.

"I want this as much as you do," she said.

She bent and reached out, resting a finger against my lips.

"Trust me," she said. "You and I do not need to dance around what's proper. Or wholesome. Or safe."

She closed the distance and lifted a knee to rest on one side of me on the mattress, lowering herself suddenly into my lap.

Her hands found my shoulders and my hands found her waist. Her forehead met mine.

"I'm yours," she said with a deep exhale. Her breath tingled against my lips.

This was the first physical contact I'd had since the world had gone to pot. Since we'd all holed ourselves away in isolation, afraid of touch, afraid of breath, afraid even of proximity.

What I hadn't been prepared for was the distinct vibration I would feel in that moment.

It was a tremor in my wrists at first, a pulse that moved like an electrical surge up my arm, not pleasant, but not unpleasant. It reached my cheeks and my face began to hum. My muscles ached all over.

I opened and closed my mouth several times.

She picked up one of my hands from her waist and placed it on her breast. It was cool and taut, and I could feel the nipple digging into my palm the way one feels a friend tap them on the shoulder, signaling the start of an encounter, an exchange.

It unlocked something.

I turned suddenly feral, an electric cloud of feeling pressing in on me from every direction. She's done it, I thought. I'm free. Hours would pass before I would feel another ounce of reservation or anxiety.

Her name was Bianca, and she was pure, sexual medicine, a guide to the lost wilderness of sexuality I'd been aching so long to explore.

We had sex not once, not twice, but six times.

Almost from the moment we started, I couldn't keep us on the bed. The entire suite was our playground.

Two minutes after she had ripped off my shirt and I had kicked off my boxer briefs, two minutes after my cock had finally screamed to attention, throbbing and full, I had Bianca naked out on the balcony, of all places.

We weren't being quiet about it either. What was there to hide? For too long we'd all stayed inside, all feared projecting ourselves into the world, forgotten what it meant to live out loud.

She flung a leg up onto the railing of the balcony, and I gripped her from behind as I pushed my aching mass of flesh, veins and muscle inside her for the first time.

It was a dream: the sun, the warmth, the sound of cars a block or two away, the wind wrapping soft, warm fingers around us as we wrapped ourselves around each other. And the grunts and groans of a man and woman having sex like primates, the sounds of it reverberating off the walls of the colorful buildings that lined the small street below us.

I slid fingers up her thigh, looking at her form, the waves of tan skin. I noticed the texture of her body, the details. The small goosebumps standing out on her arms as she shuddered under my thrusts. Her scrunched shoulders, her braided hair glittering bronzish-red in the afternoon sun. She looked back at me with a smile as I slipped a hand over her breast.

"Mmm, that's nice," she said. Her eyes danced and she shimmied her hips back against me.

I had never been naked in public before. I felt strangely unaware of it, and free—the feeling one gets in a dream when things are totally out of place and upside down and yet somehow completely normal.

Bianca was vocal.

"Baby, you're so hard."

"Oh, FILL me. Yes. More."

"Oh god, I feel you in my stomach. God, it's like you're filling up my whole body. You're so big. Yes, god yes, don't stop."

Grunts echoed from her slender throat, full of youth and bliss and lust.

I gripped the railing of the balcony with my hands on either side of her. She twisted, turning her body to face me. My entire length hung exposed to the summer air, and she pulled me close, pinning my cock against her flat belly, with her thighs touching mine.

She gripped me with soft fingers.

"Let's pop the cork on this champagne," she said with a grin.

She began stroking me gently, never once breaking eye contact.

"But first, I need you to answer a question for me," she said.

"OK."

"I need to know what position you'd like me in when you fill me with your cum." She said it as if it were a simple question one might ask of a stranger in line at a grocery store.

Her hands picked up their rhythm.

Below us on the street, an older woman passed, looking up at us for several seconds before she realized what she was seeing. With a scowl and a huff, I watched her turn her head and continue walking.

In Bianca's grip I was a cannon with a lit fuse, and a cannonball's worth of cum waiting in the tube. I knew I had to subdue this wild creature, and I had to do it now, before the inevitable happened.

She willfully obliged, flinging herself back into the room at my direction, down onto the big rug that ran the length of the floor from the bathroom to the balcony. Her legs splayed wide, and I pounced on her, wrapping an arm under her shoulders and positioning myself for entry.

It was rugged and breathy and intense, a faster rhythm than before, but easier, and less strained.

Feeling her skin against me was everything. Her voice in my ear, telling me every sensation she was feeling. Her thigh and her butt cradled in my hand as I pushed my cock down and through her, railing her, filling her up completely with my girth.

Her neck tasted like strawberries. I thrust and kissed and fondled her till I thought my heart would give out. And she never once stopped giving.

A woman I had barely met was satisfying the most empty part of my soul in a way I had dreamed of for months, always hoping but never allowing myself to actually believe could really happen.

"You've almost gotten me there sweetheart," she said finally. She gripped my buttocks, pulling me down against her eagerly.

Her long legs wrapped me without warning, and she reached up to grip the sides of my head, pulling me down against her shoulder and biting my ear.

"Yes," she said, and it was a whisper, warm breath tickling my ear lobe. "Fuck meeeeee." She moved under me, back and forth like a rocking horse.

My shaft struck against her insides like a hammer on a chime, and every stroke drew music from her lungs, beautiful, urgent, wild.

The force and strength of her legs was what turned me on the most. Trapped between her thighs, her smooth calves against my back, ankles clasped, I grew impossibly hard, spreading her out wider. She felt it and cried out, scraping and grunting and pulling me down into a fierce, choppy ocean of panicked, unchained lovemaking more rabid than anything that had come before it.

After a few minutes, my inner tsunami alarms sounded. I was close.

I reared up, resting one hand beside her head while my other clutched her breast, thumbing her nipple.

"Baby," I said, and she closed her eyes as I lurched with a winded gasp, digging into her with my mouth hanging wide open.

The vibrations roared back, flooding my muscles with heat, my skin alive with ten thousand volts of testosterone. I broke the dam with a final gulp and shudder, and I flooded Bianca's canal with my semen.

"Ohhhh..."

She bit her lip, brow creasing, thrusting her hips up against me, and a moment later she screamed like she was being torn apart. Her back arched and she flailed her legs out, rippling on the rug in soft, girly spasms that went on for what felt like a full minute.

A few quiet moments passed. Then from outside somewhere above us, a male voice called out, "Now that's how it's done! Woo!" followed by the sound of several pairs of hands clapping.

Bianca shuddered. She opened her eyes and looked up at me, and we both laughed.

She fingered a breast, jutting her tongue slyly at me from the corner of her mouth.

"Go again in a few?" she asked.

I nodded, and then I leaned down and we kissed.

My cock twitched. I was getting my second wind already.

-

"What was it like where you were?"

She sipped a cup of tea, shoulders draped with a white hotel robe as we stood barefoot on the patio.

"I mean, before everything happened."

"It was nice," I said. "I lived a quiet life. Saw my friends on the weekends."

"What did you do for fun?"

"Mostly we stayed close to the beaches," I said. "Sometimes I would head into the mountains and take a weekend just to be alone."

"Sounds picturesque."

"It was, I guess," I said. I stared off toward the coastline. The haze of the afternoon heat rippled the air and made the glittering caps of the waves dance like a chorus line.

"But I guess nothing lasts forever," I said.

"Hey," she said. "We're here now."

Her hand slipped under my chin and pulled my gaze toward her. And then her lips were closing around mine, and I was sinking back into bliss.

The cup of tea sat cooling on the cement of the patio and her robe fell open, and I fingered her down below as our lips tangled above.

When I was hard enough, she hefted herself upward against the railing and I entered her as she wrapped her legs around my waist. We fucked until a gasp trickled from her throat and she twitched against me with a snarl. Then she disengaged herself hastily and dropped to her knees, throwing off the robe and closing her mouth around me.

Her hand cupped my balls, fondling them as she moved back and forth on my cock, her tongue circling its bulging, mushroomy tip.

I was her lollipop, and the warmth and wetness of her, the petty teases of her tongue flicking against me when she'd pull back to leave me hanging in the cool air, sent my senses reeling. I came quickly in her grip, a burst of cum that laced its way in a short arc into her waiting mouth. She swallowed eagerly, her tongue darting out to scrape the excess from my tip.

Her lips rested against my cock and her eyes met mine.

"Stand up baby," I said. She did, and I led her back through the doors. We plodded into the dark bathroom, and I flicked on the sconces on the wall as I began to draw a bath.

She draped herself around me from behind, her hands nursing my cock back to life.

The water rose up from inside the clawfoot tub, bubbly with the scent of lavender. From the shelf beside it, I plucked a lighter and lit three small candles.

We stepped into the tub, pressing ourselves together as the calf-high suds warmed our feet and legs. My cock stiffened as her lips met mine. I ground myself between her thighs, passing back and forth against her warm mound. We stood there for several minutes, just kissing, taking our time with each other, our hands each scanning the body of the other, memorizing every curve and muscle and detail.

I'd known long ago that this was what I wanted—an unhurried, intimate escape with a beautiful woman. But my mind was still catching up to the reality of it all.

I cupped one of Bianca's breasts as I pulled back and looked deep into her eyes. They glistened with twin points of light, piercing the dusty veil of loneliness that had shrouded everything around me for so long.

"This is nice," she said. I nodded.

"Bend over, sweetie," I said. She smiled and winked.

She turned and offered me her backside as she scooped a handful of water and suds up over her, letting it pour through her fingers down her back to run in gleaming rivulets over her buttocks.

Her pussy lips bloomed out at me from between her thighs, pink and swollen.

"Is this what you wanted?" she asked. I nodded again.

Her hands gripped the edge of the tub and she adjusted her feet, spreading her legs apart slightly. Through the open french doors of our hotel room, I could hear the faint prattle of conversation in the street, a man and woman happily regaling each other with stories of their days' events.

There in the bathtub, in the candlelight, I held Bianca and leaned forward as her body parted around me, her insides adjusting as I moved into her, and with a groan we were together again.

When her thighs shifted, mine moved alongside them, and when her back arched, I arched mine, like a marionette held erect by her practiced fingers.

Finally we collapsed down into the warm bath. I sat back against the tub wall as she squatted and lowered herself down onto me.

I slipped comfortably back inside her and we moved together like lovers who had done this a thousand times.

I played with her breasts, feeling the slick, soapy film coating her delicate skin.

"You know, I've seen a lot of breasts in my life," I said with a grin, "but these are easily the most beautiful ones I've ever seen."

I squeezed firmly and her eyelids drooped.

"Mmmm," she said. "What's mine is yours." Her hips ground down against me.

I stiffened inside her. "Touching you feels like coming back to life," I said.

She placed her hands over mine and began to pump herself up and down on top of me, knees and thighs flexing with the practiced grace of a gymnast.

I relaxed and let her move me closer to the brink, never letting go of her breasts. Her eyes closed. My body strained under her.

"Fill me with your cum," she said. Her mouth dropped open and her face turned up toward the ceiling.

I lay my head back against the tub, bracing my toes against the opposite end, and with a lurch I came, as if on command, spurting forcibly up into her. A happy warmth flowed through my chest and arms and danced in my finger tips. My hips jerked reflexively over and over as I emptied the last remaining drops of my seed.

With a soft splash, Bianca collapsed down beside me spent, strands of her auburn hair plastered wetly against her cheeks and forehead. She draped a slender, milky thigh across my lap and nestled her fingers in the dark hairs on my chest.

As we drifted into a dreamy stupor, a smile rested on each of our faces.

It was good to be back in the land of the living.