Initial Public Offering

"It was great to see you," he says, almost uncertainly, and as if sensing something, glances out his window around the restaurant parking lot. He wonders if he's dreaming. He hears the first tentative tink of big summer raindrops on the roof of the van.

She unbuckles her seatbelt, slips out from behind the steering wheel, and straddles him, pins him, in his front passenger seat. He begins to say something but cannot because she has already pressed her mouth thickly to his, found his tongue with her own ...

There's that great, slick, feverish rush of undivided tactile attention; she senses herself needing to feel more skin and so pulls at the buttons of his shirt, releasing two—just enough for her to get her hands inside and press them flat against his chest, run them up and then over his shoulders.

It's gotten much darker suddenly, the rain increasing, pinging musically off the roof before intensifying and clattering loudly. Quickly, it's a deluge, closing them in, and as she pulls her mouth away from his—her upper lip already feeling slightly fattened—a little silvery string of saliva hangs between them. At that moment everything is mightily shaken by an enormous thunderclap, like the crack of doom directly above them, and they both convulse, startled. She thumps her head softly off the padded roof and laughs, partly from surprise and partly from relief that they are still alive, that that lightening bolt wasn't for her, or him. Swimming curtains of rainwater are draping the outside of the windows; inside, steam has already mostly sealed them away. They can't be seen and, as long as this downpour continues, probably won't even be noticed or approached. Her hands are still flat against his chest; she dips her head toward him, pausing, as if at a decision point (or a thousand of them) and he kisses her hair lightly.

"You know—" he begins, whispering.

She slides her hands up the sides of his neck, holding his face on either side, her head still bowed, and whispers: "Shut up."

She bends his head back firmly and holds it fast, so that his throat is exposed, and presses her open mouth hard against his windpipe so that he gasps, she thinks he gasps; with her tongue tip she can feel those fine membranous muscles trembling slightly over cartilage. She feels she's too hungry and it scares her a little, but in some measure it's fear that's compelling her: fears says stop, fear says go. The whole conflict spreads through her like something flammable.

She stops again, and pulls away, tries to breathe, feels strangely and suddenly like she's the only thing real here, like she's making it all happen, like he is just the product of her imagination and can only do or say what she wills. This sense of being alone thus also makes her feel like she can do or say what she wants with complete anonymity, something she doesn't think she's felt before, or not for a long time, anyway. A moment of confusion, then: is it his dream or hers, and does it matter now? Might they not have both passed on to a realm where the consequences are nil, and the only substantive fear is waking. If some measure of guilt will result, she figures she's already earned it, by thinking, dream-acting thus far. To think, to plan or dream, or just use up the dream-time, she's held him at bay these moments—her eyes closed—by massaging his cock, straining hard inside his trousers, and suddenly thinks that her choices go beyond yes or no. Does she want to be romantic, or erotic, or just plain bad?

"It's still just a dream," he says, reading her mind.

Bad, she thinks. This is a good world in which to be bad.

She opens her eyes and is surprised to find her blouse undone. His hand is spread open against the middle of her back, like a dance partner's, and he presses her forward to him, bends his head so he can reach her nipple with the tip of his tongue, draws a wet circle around it again and again. She lets her sandal slip off her foot, and gropes along the side of the car seat with her toes, finds the switch to send the seat sliding back to give them more room.

"Do you want to go somewhere?" he says.

"Eventually," she grabs his hair and pulls him back to her chest. He works on her other nipple, flicking it with his tongue, then sucking it to make it stand more stiffly before taking it lightly between his front teeth and biting it lightly, sending a zizzing kind of pain thrumming through her.

"Fuck," she breathes, barely a whisper, barely audible. She pulls back and he looks at her expectantly.

"I need to know you're going to stay with me on this," she says seriously.

"Where else would I go?" he says. "We've already broken a couple of laws, I think. You could turn me in."

"I mean for the afternoon. One dream, one afternoon. You can't wake up until I'm ready, until I'm done with it. Don't bail out on me."

"I'm your dreamer," he says.

She slides down and kneels on the floor of the van before the front seat. He has prudently dream-engineered the concealing rain to continue beating down around them. The inside of the van seems unbearably hot, smells like bodies, and they're both gleaming with sweat. He undoes his belt while she kneads the crotch of his trousers and slowly, theatrically, unzips him.

"You really are going to be bad, aren't you," he says as she yanks his pants down to just below his buttocks and closes her small strong hand around his erection.

"Bad meaning good," she says, taking the head of his cock between her lips. She feels his legs get rigid beneath her, press against her ribs. He digs the heels of his hands into the leather seat and thrusts his hips forward, pushing more cock into her mouth.

Quickly, she learns the whole geography of his penis with her tongue, drips extra saliva over it and strokes the length of it with her fist.

"My plan," she says matter-of-factly, "is to suck you off, right here, right now. I figure you're pretty excited at this point, and if we fucked, you wouldn't be able to last very long before you had to come."

"At least one of us is thinking clearly," he says.

"So don't hold back," she says. "I've got other stops for us to make before this dream is over."

She rises up straight on her knees, places the flat of her tongue at the base of his cock and licks it thickly, fully, all the way to the tip while he writhes in the seat and thrusts his hips toward her. This won't take long, she thinks. She gently, wetly screws her mouth down overtop it, her tongue cushioning the underside, the sharp edge of her front teeth carefully grating the swollen head and then the thin skin of the shaft. She bobs it slowly, incrementally taking in a bit more with each thrust, muscling her tongue against it, at the same time gently but firmly sucking at it, drawing it to a dense, meaty hardness, her fist still working the shaft. She pulls free of it with an evocative sucking sound, to catch her breath, jerking it faster while she's disengaged.

"Howmy doin'?" she breathes.

"Can't. Speak," he gasps.

"Good," she says, then lowers her voice, talks from somewhere smokier, deeper in her throat. "I want you to come for me now. Hey, look at me."

He looks down to where she's gazing back at him with hooded eyes, flicking at his cockhead with the tip of her tongue.

"I want you to watch me," she says, jerking him even more quickly. "I want you to watch me eat your cum."

She takes the head between her lips again and sucks it, taking in just a bit, swirling her tongue hard against the underside, and pumping it vigorously with her hand. She cups his testicles with her other hand and softly holds them, squeezes, lets them rest heavily in her palm.

"I'm gonna come, baby, 'kay," he whispers, lifting his buttocks up from the seat, " 'kay?"

She's touched that he alerts her after all. A thick, warm jet of semen hits the roof of her mouth, followed immediately by another, then another, melting back down over the cock pulsing atop her tongue. The scent swarms through her head, is dense and familiar, and fills her with a quickened desire to be stroked down between her legs, a zone that feels sodden and tender. She swallows some of the cum, lets the rest slide back down the length of his penis, which she pulls at with long, sticky strokes. His cock is red, glistening, and she begins licking clean the shaft, her fingers. He places his hand beneath her chin and lifts her face up from him, leans forward and puts his tongue in her mouth. She holds her hand aloft, still shiny with his cum. He takes her by the wrist and presses that hand to her chest, rubs the spunk on her plump breast, then strains forward to suck at her nipples again.

"Let's go somewhere," she says, stroking his head as sucks her. "You drive." *

He had first met her almost ten years ago. She was one of the students in his non-credit writing course at the local community college. She was not only the most beautiful woman to sit in on one of his classes, but perhaps the most beautiful woman with whom he had ever been personally acquainted. That beauty was in such considerable supply that she could bear it with an almost careless insouciance. Quite blonde, so clear and flawless of feature, so blessed in her physical endowments, he speculated that she intentionally neglected her appearance to a certain extent in order to minimize her distinction not only from the other women in the class, but from all other women in just about every walk of life. She always wore jeans that were slightly baggy, worn completely through at the knees, and tops or blouses that were often wrinkled or had obviously seen better days. But her somewhat unremarkable appearance was still only exhibited—he surmised—to avoid emphasizing her gifts, not necessarily detract from them. She could have worn baggy sweat suits and ball caps and combat boots and more effectively disappeared behind such camouflage. With that habitual writer's reflex of trying to get behind the eyeballs of his characters and simulate their vision, as well as their psychologies—including the real, flesh-and-blood characters making appearances in his life—he concluded that she was not indifferent or dismissive of her beauty, only that she did not wish to be defined by it.

It was part of his job to treat everyone with perfect equanimity: the beautiful and the profane, the lyrically gifted with the hopelessly prosaic, the teenager and the sexagenarian. The only common feature among his class rosters was sex. His students were mostly women. There were men occasionally, but they were always outnumbered, and in his last couple years of teaching the course, his classes had no men at all. Because his course was non-credit, open to anyone, his female belle-lettrists usually encompassed a sweeping age demographic. He was assiduous about giving each person's work equal time, care, and attention, even though there was often an inequality of intentions behind his students' presence. Some wanted to be serious writers. Others simply wanted him to tell them how to sell their romance stories. Some people, out of pure desire, had written much on their own. Others attended without every having written a word creatively but thought it would be fun, and expected him to tell them how to go home and do it.

Everyone got the same treatment, the same attention, the same consideration. He had to willfully resist demonstrating even the subtlest preference towards those to whom he was intellectually or physically drawn. Failing that, he knew he would lose all credibility with those selfsame people, as well as all others. With regard to her, this was no small effort. He not only wanted to look to her often during class, but stare at her, to gaze uninterrupted at her full breasts, her incredibly sensuous and plump lower lip, the delicate pale whorl of her small ear when she tucked her corn silk hair behind it. He struggled to keep a smile from creeping over his features when they did, appropriately, interact in class. The others would have noticed; in fact, he fully expected that they were looking for it. Sitting there two seats away from him in the class circle in a faded Grateful Dead t-shirt with the sleeves rolled, faded old jeans with the wide black belt, her precious, slightly grimy little foot waggling a sandal, she was heartbreakingly sexy.

"I can feel my face get hot," he told a friend of his, "whenever I speak with her in class. I have to force myself to think of puppies, or dental work."

"Wow. So she's really a bona fide flamethrower?"

"Certified. I'm surprised I have any eyebrows left." * Tentatively, he swings her rented van out of the restaurant parking lot and heads toward downtown, the rain still drumming the roof and air conditioning roaring to take away the steam that has made the windows nearly opaque. He reaches across to her with his right hand, smoothes it over that deliciously bare expanse of skin below her navel and dreamy indentation of hip bones—the fashion industry's miraculous gift to me, he thinks, these low-rise jeans; where did his lust find its locus before these were popular?—then down over the snug mound of her crotch, before tugging on the taut zipper.

"Trust me," he says.

She does, and helps him, popping her pants button.

"Panties, too. Down around your ankles, please."

Reclining the seat, she complies, her ass feeling sticky on the leather.

He places the first two fingers of his hand in her mouth and she sucks on them ardently, soaking them with her spit. Delicately, he places them down between her legs, rubbing a small circle around her clitoris, and then parting her labia, which are slick and astonishingly hot. He groups in a third finger and carefully works them inside her cunt, pressing and fluttering the tip of his thumb against her clit. Her eyes are closed and she feels her throat pulsing and gently valving, a low-level kind of electricity working her nerve endings, her buttocks tightening and relaxing, her Kagel muscles flexing and then not.

"Tractor trailer passing on our right," he says. "Free show."

"Fuck it," she says breathlessly. "Just jack me off."

This seems to inspire him and she feels his mass of fingers more deeply inserted, almost filling her, and it makes her gasp. The tractor trailer thunders by and its driver apparently does not fail to notice, letting loose an appreciative blast of his air horn, which makes her start, and clench her cunt hard around his envaginated fingers. He begins pistoning them in and out now, pressing and wiggling the flat of his thumb against her clitoris, a stiffened little knob. She bucks her hips into it, feeling the wild speed and motion of the van and the vibrations of highway imperfections shimmer up through her legs, run the nervy bud of her anus. Some lucky dexterity permits him to strum her perineum with his little finger and she doesn't care if they crash, doesn't care if they take off into space or burst into flame, doesn't care about anything at that moment except that orgasm that is filling her brain, her toes pointed so stiffly that her calves begin to cramp and she's forgotten how to breathe and she feels a fluttering in her abdomen of muscles reacting or rebelling, she's not sure which, not sure, not sure...

Her climax is like an impact; her whole body jackknifes forward, and a plume of something soft and warm slides up through her frame, up through her cunt, directly up the middle of her insides, between her breasts, up the back of her throat and moves through her head like an insect swarm. The crack of her ass feels cool with moisture and she can't quite feel his fingers anymore, aren't sure if they're still inside her, instinctively reaches her hand to grab his but he rolls his wrists and knocks away what would be her grip.

"Uh-uh," he says, "we're not there yet. Again."

"Again?" she breathes, wondering what that means, but the stiff second and more articulate third fingers of his hand are making long strokes against her clitoris, and she wants to tell him, no, too soon. It is, however, not; a second wave—smaller, more compact, not as lengthily rich but nevertheless real—seems to swirl rapidly into place like a dervish, an aftershock. This short, hard one packs more of a stun; her eyes and mouth are both open wide, she sees the road swimming toward and away beneath her, sees the dashboard and the glove compartment, looks down and sees her own thighs joggling from the lash of it, the delicate exclamation point of pubic hair, is turned on further by the sight of her own cunt, her own nakedness here in this van, sees his fingers glossy with her cum still working her, feels the muscles in her stomach pull incredibly tight and snap back, feels her fingertips tingle like they're lacking blood, and wonders why she didn't know about this phenomenon before—the motion, the speed.

She slouches in her seat and gulps a few times, catching her breath, groping down toward her ankles for her jeans, which are no longer around her ankles, having been kicked free just before her first orgasm so she could extend and spread her legs to smooth the occurrence of the convulsion. With her eyes still closed, things seem to be spinning a bit, spirals going in her head, until she slits her eyes open and sees that they are curving down into a parking garage, van tires lightly and fairly squealing. She reassembles herself deftly. *

As that semester wore on, he grew accustomed to her presence. That strength of will paid off. The tone in the class grew lighter. As student work proliferated, stories were read and discussed gently and constructively, and he won a certain measure of credibility and respect. And, as typically happened, the class developed its certain identity; consciously or not, they considered themselves a group and recognized their various personalities. Once—apropos of what particular class discussion, he cannot recall: probably something in someone's story—she confessed that she only showered once a week. Some of the other young ladies in the class laughed, good-naturedly.

"Really?" he said. "Just once a week?"

"Sure," she said, seemingly surprised that anyone found this odd, and then added, almost apologetically, "I don't smell."

After a suitably comic pause, he said: "Somewhere in D.H. Lawrence's letters to this wife Frieda, when he was abroad and she was back in Taos, he wrote something like 'I will be home in a fortnight. Don't bathe.'"

Luckily, perhaps miraculously, he hit the right note: an erotic overtone, but with a literary context, and attributed to someone else.

Another time, the week after a surprising little story she had turned in was well-received during class discussion (an erotic, admirably sensual piece, with an O. Henry twist at the end—that is, if O. Henry believed in vampires), she charmed the class by bringing in a plate of homemade apple cake for all to share.

"This is good," he said. "Thank you." The other chimed in their thanks as well. "I'm surprised, though," he said. "You left the peel on the apples in this. I've never seen anyone do that."

"They're good for you," she said. "I never peel fruit when I bake something with it."

"No kidding? Well, I'll think I'll probably have to pass, then, when you bring in your banana bread." Again, the right note, though this time more for the benefit of the class, gently chiding her in a public way that someone who had any aspirations of fucking the daylights out of her probably would forego.

But he had no aspirations, only fantasies, and even these became somewhat difficult to entertain because there seemed to be a fairly wide gulf separating them. He was thirty at that time, seven years older than her, and married for that many years, already with two small children. She chatted with him occasionally after class, and he learned that she lived with someone—who she described as a cynical, unemployed, brilliant alcoholic who sat around listening to the Grateful Dead day and night—but with whom she seemed to suggest she had a bond to which she was resigned. She struck him as slightly sad and a bit neurotic. Maybe just confused and irresolute. At the conclusion of the semester, she told him she had decided to go back to school and pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, and asked him if he would write her a recommendation, which he did.