Inspiration

Authors Note: This story was originally written for the Sapphic Erotica Festival. The parameters for the story were that it involved one of the muses and was a lesbian tale.

Clia Johansen sat at the very back of the darkened auditorium fighting to keep her eyes open. At the podium Professor Roberts rambled on about Alexander the Great or Hannibal or some other long dead person that Clia really couldn’t care less about. She had been dumped in this class to fill her history core requirement and hated it with the same passion she hated Algebra and Biology. Clia was going to be a writer and she detested wasting her time in mundane courses when she felt she should have been taking more important things. Unfortunately for her the school had a large number of journalism majors and all the good classes were filled with upperclassmen before she was allowed to register. Her faculty advisor, an old bat named Mrs. Krieger had suggested she knock off a lot of her core classes and worry about the writing classes when she was a junior. So instead of sharpening her skills as a writer she was the only sophomore stuck in an auditorium full of freshmen and one of several students trying not to fall asleep while the professor droned on.

Clia had chosen the second to last row on purpose. Partially to avoid the notice of the prof, she was sure she would be sleeping away many of his lectures and partially to avoid unwanted attention. She had avoided the very back row because she knew in classes like this the Profs often had TA’s patrolling to make sure the students weren’t napping.

Clia was tall and had the blonde hair, big bust and fair skin that were a gift of her father’s Swedish forbearers. Her mother’s only real contribution to her looks had been the dark eyes and soft features of her Greek ancestry. She was exotically beautiful and wore baggy clothes and no makeup to down play her looks. Clia told herself she wanted to be known for her writing and not her looks, but secretly she had never been comfortable with the attention the young men had been giving her since high school.

Whenever she thought of this she was forced to grin. Here she was, hoping to be a writer of love stories and she had never even been in love. She had won a few local awards for her erotic poems and she had never even more than kissed anyone. I should be in a class learning about writing, not wasting my time in this godforsaken auditorium, she thought. I hate history.

“Why?”

The softly accented voice behind her startled her and she turned towards it without thinking. The speaker was a girl seated behind her and one seat to her left. She was small and had a very lush figure with dark curls and dark eyes. The indirect light made her olive skin seem to shine and the short skirt and poet’s shirt accentuated her heavy breasts and wide hips. Her long legs were bare and beautifully sculpted. From her vantage point Clia could almost see up the girl’s skirt and blushed in confusion when she realized she was trying to do just that. The girl’s dark tresses were held back by a green hair band with tiny golden leaves embroidered into it. Her dark eyes seemed to be bottomless and very wise for someone so young.

“I’m sorry, did I say that out loud?” Clia stammered.

“No silly, I read your mind,” the girl replied in that same softly accented voice. It was musical, melodious in it’s own way, but deeper than Clia would have expected and the accent was very sensual.

Clia wasn’t sure if the girl was being sarcastic or not. Obviously she has said it out loud, she felt like she should be angry but was unsure of exactly what she should be angry at.

“You still haven’t answered my question, why do you hate history?”

Clia glanced around to make sure no one had noticed them talking in class, but everyone seemed oblivious to them both. She felt like she should resent that last statement. The implication that she was expected to answer annoyed her, but she found herself fascinated with this girl and her strange accent. She wanted to impress her for a reason she could not define. Not wanting to sound like your average college kid complaining about classes and professors she thought about it a moment before carefully wording her answer.

“I am going to be a writer. I don’t need to know all this stuff, I mean really, it’s not pertinent to my life,”

“Indeed? What exactly do you write that is so brilliant that it allows you, an author, to claim a right to ignorance?”

“I write love stories, epic romances, love poetry, I don’t need to know anything about history for that. I mean, they are all long dead so who cares? And I am not ignorant!”

The girl chuckled softly and picked up the single book on her desk. It was a large volume, like an unabridged dictionary. She slipped it into the simple canvas bag she carried and picked up the black instrument case on the floor by her desk.

“Ignorance is not becoming to anyone especially an author,” she said.

“Stop calling me ignorant!” Clia exclaimed as her anger finally overrode whatever power had been in possession of her before.

“As you wish,” the girl said as she stood up, “class is over, by the way, Miss. Know-it-all,”

Clia turned to find Professor Roberts gone and most of the students as well. She turned back to find the dark haired girl had vanished as well. Wondering how she could have missed an auditorium full of freshmen bolting for the doors like a cattle stampede she grabbed her books and walked briskly out the double doors.

By the time she reached the quad Clia knew she was cutting the rest of her classes. She wasn’t feeling quite right and wanted nothing more than to get to her apartment and lie down. The long walk to day-student parking left her feeling even stranger, her skin was tingling and she was short of breath. The interior of her little Celica was broiling and by the time the air conditioner finally began to make some headway she was bathed in sweat.

Once home she stripped off the sticky clothes she had been wearing and turned the small window unit in her room to full. Something was wrong, but she could not decide what it was. It was a feeling the likes of which she had never known. Clia decided to take a quick shower before putting on clean clothes. She started the water and waited for it to get hot. Her father had always teased her about liking hot showers even on the hottest of days. He was second generation Scandinavian and loved the cold. Clia took after her mother there and preferred it to be warm, but she didn’t tolerate it being hot well either. She climbed in and pulled the curtain letting the hot steam engulf her. There was nothing in the world that relaxed her like a hot shower and soon her mind began to wander.

Who was that strange girl, she thought. Why have I never noticed her before? What kind of accent is that anyway? Clia remembered what the girl looked like, the dark eyes, beautiful skin, heavy breasts, and long legs. She was startled to hear a low moan over the pounding spray of the shower. She was even more startled to realize she had made it. She was shocked to find her left hand gently massaging her pubic mound. Confusion, embarrassment, and arousal all mingled to leave her standing as still as a statue under the spray. Clia forced the girl from her mind and quickly finished her shower.

She dried herself briskly and returned to the now cold bedroom. Clia put on a comfortable bra and panties and pulled her big nightshirt on. She curled up in the bed and closed her eyes. She was asleep almost instantly.

----

She was standing on a beach with incredibly blue waters lapping at the shore. In this distance was an island that was dark and close to the water and it resembled a woman in repose. The sun was directly behind it, lighting the sky in a series of layers, purplish at the horizon, turning to a rosy red, then a fiery red with yellows and oranges above that and the deep blue of the heavens on top. Clia could not tell if it was rising or setting, but it was breathtakingly beautiful. A woman sat on the edge of the sand before her with her back resting on a large moss covered rock. She had a stylus in her hand, and a tablet across her knees and penned lines occasionally with a dreamy expression. Her clothing consisted of a simple white dress cut in a style Clia had never seen before although it seemed very archaic. The woman’s eyes never seemed to leave the island and Clia’s eyes were drawn back to it, as the sun fell she realized it seemed the island had changed, it still resembled a woman but she seemed to have moved now and the small knoll that was her bust seemed more prominent.

Clia sensed a presence behind her, but try as she might she could not turn her head from the scene of the writer and the beach. She started when long, olive arms slipped around her waist and a soft pair of lips grazed her exposed shoulder.

“What? Who’s there??”

The arms pulled her back against a warm soft body with large breasts and wide hips. The lips kissed up the rise of her shoulder and then up her neck while the hands gently stroked her hips. It felt so sensuous and so nice Clia was caught between fear and enjoyment. She struggled to turn her head, but all her efforts were in vain. When the lips reached her ear small sharp teeth seized her earlobe and firmly nipped causing her to gasp.

“Ohhhh, please, what’s going on?”

“Shhhh, it’s just a dream child,” a vaguely familiar and softly accented voice whispered in her ear.

“Why can’t I turn around?”

“It is not time yet for you to see me. Now, relax, no harm will come to you I promise,” the voice whispered seductively. The warm breath on her ear sent a shiver through her and when the soft tongue returned to lightly trace her earlobe a stab of excitement shot through her.

“Where am I?” she asked, the question seeming inane as soon as it left her mouth. In a dream you idiot, she answered herself.

“On an island in the Aegean sea,” the voice replied as the hands traveled up her body to cup her breasts. Clia gasped when they began to gently knead her tits and she had to bite her tongue to keep from moaning out loud when the thumbs grazed her nipples.

“Who is that woman?” she managed to ask, trying to find something to focus on other than the magical hands and sensuous lips.

“She is a poet, from long ago,” the voice replied in a breathy whisper. It returned to delicately tonguing her ear and Clia found it hard to think. The hands on her breasts were gentle but firm, and they slowly built the pleasure of their manipulation until her nipples ached.

“Which poet?”

“What does it matter? She died a long time ago,” the voice replied before the lips slipped back to her neck.

The writer’s face was now rapt and Clia was shocked to see the woman’s hand had left the tablet and was now rubbing gently between her legs. Clia gasped again when one of those magical hands slipped down her tummy to massage the crotch of her panties. She felt certain her own expression mirrored that of the poet.

“Please, I have to know, who is she?”

The hand rubbing her crotch slipped under the waist band of her panties and the contact of that soft skin on her own excited flesh nearly made her cry out. The index finger forced it’s way between her now slick lips and began to deftly stroke her clit. Clia’s pelvis humped involuntarily against that hand.

“Ohhhhhhh.. please,” she moaned. Clia was no longer sure if she were begging for the woman’s identity or for release.

“You would know her as Sappho, this is the Isle of Lesvos, and perhaps history is not as uninteresting as you think?” the voice said. There was amusement in the tone, but before Clia’s reeling mind could put all of the information together the fingers suddenly squeezed her clit.

Clia came awake as they dying echo of her scream reverberated around her room. Her nightshirt was up over her bust and one hand was squeezing a breast. Her other hand was wedged between her legs and still furiously stroking her throbbing clit. Her hands slowly ceased their attentions as the powerful waves of her orgasm passed. She felt so calm, so relaxed and almost drifted back into sleep before her mind put all the pieces together.

Sappho! Lesvos! Those lips and hands! That voice! She sat up violently in her bed while her eyes darting around the room seeing nothing. In her mind’s eye she was still seeing a sunlit beach, with a small woman masturbating as she wrote. As the image faded her bedroom slowly replaced the beach and her breathing returned to normal.

“What a dream,” she muttered to herself.

-----

Friday was the worst day of the week for Clia. Not only did she have to contend with the anticipation of the weekend making her classes seem longer, but also she had four in a row and she detested them all. She looked at the stack of books on the dresser as she rose and winced. Algebra, Biology, Chemistry and Statistics books sat there, seeming to taunt her. She cursed her adviser and herself as she stripped off her nightshirt. While it was true that she would have all of her math and science requirements filled after this semester, she was beginning to doubt she could pass them all. Looking at the books again as she stepped out of her panties she realized she hadn’t done her algebra homework again. She was saying a quick prayer that the Prof wouldn’t take up homework when she noticed the tell tale stains on the crotch of the pink garment.

The dream flooded back into her head as vividly as it had been the evening before and Clia blushed deeply. She rarely masturbated, and never while thinking of a woman. The entire episode left her feeling confused and a little disconcerted. The panties in her hand were stark evidence of her excitement and pleasure and she quickly tossed them in the hamper by the bathroom door. This brought her eyes to the clock on the wall and she realized she was going to have to run or she would be late. The prof always took homework from late students and she just couldn’t afford a zero in his class.

Clia ran a quick shower and threw on the first things that she pulled out of her drawers. A red bra and panty set, tight jeans and a white tee shirt. She was already in the car and on her way when she noticed that her bra could easily be seen under the shirt. There was no time to turn back and day student parking was almost full. Clia jogged to class and made it a full fifteen minutes early. This class had assigned seating and she had just settled in when she noticed several guys in the front row whispering conspiratorially and looking her way. The sniggering, obscene gestures and hungry looks made her want to find a hole to hide in and she had never been so happy in her life to see the professor come in and call the class to order. The moment she dismissed the class Clia practically ran out of the class and from the building. She couldn’t bear the thought of one or more of those guys approaching her.

Biology was in an auditorium and she sat near the back. It was dark and she received none of the stares that had so unnerved her in the smaller classroom. It was cool and dark and as the professor droned on about mitosis she began to nod off.

She was standing on the beach again but it was darker. The sun smoldered on the very edge of the waters turning them a molten red. The poet was still there, her hand still inside her toga, but she was no longer staring at the island. Clia followed her eyes to see two nude figures entwined on a blanket that had been thrown carelessly on the white sand. The two figures were writhing in each other’s embrace as the poet watched. Something was different this time and it took Clia a few moments to realize she was alone this time, her phantom lover was not there and she could turn her head and examine things freely. She glanced back to see towering cliffs, but her attention returned to the poet.

As Clia watched she said something in a language Clia did not recognize and the two figures on the blanket changed positions. The poet’s free hand slipped inside the neckline of her gown to caress her breast as she watched the two figures on the blanket. The motion of her hands was slow, sensuous and unhurried, but it belied a pent up intensity. Clia felt that the poet would bring herself to the edge of bliss, but would not allow herself to cross over. Once in that heightened state of arousal she would take up the tablet and write. Clia had used the same technique, minus the visual aids, in her own erotic poetry.

The strange scene before her piqued her curiosity. Clia wondered just what it was that the poet found so engrossing and so powerful that it could move her to write verse that was still held in highest regard centuries later. Clia moved closer and closer, intently scrutinizing the poet as she played with herself. Her expression was indescribable, a mixture of abandon and concentration, while her dark eyes were wild, euphoric and dreamy all at once. Clia stood close to the writer now, and she observed the soft rippling of the woman’s small breasts under the tunic. Clia could see the thick black pubic hair that covered her mound and could smell the musky aroma of her arousal faintly on the breeze. The woman’s hands moved quicker now, but as Clia had predicted the poet tore her hands from her body before orgasm overtook her. She snatched at the tablet like a drowning woman would grab a live preserver and began to write at a frantic pace.

The poet’s eyes lifted from the tablet to the two figures and then back to the tablet as more lines poured from her hand. It was then that Clia realized she wasn’t visible; the poet had looked right through her. Entranced by watching the artist at work Clia had totally forgotten the figures behind her until a ragged moan eclipsed the sound of the surf and brought her attention back to them. It was no surprise to Clia that both of the nude figures were women. In the position they were in she couldn’t see either of them well. They lay one atop the other, but inverted, so that she could see the woman on the bottom’s long legs and only the top of the other woman’s head and her back.

Clia felt drawn to them, and moved closer making no more sound than the wind across the sands. The woman on top was small with a thick head of dark curls. She lay on atop the other woman, with her arms under the other’s thighs and her head buried in her lover’s crotch. Clia could see noting of the woman on bottom save her long legs; even her sex was hidden from view by the brunette’s hair, which obscured her hips and inner thighs. As Clia watched the woman on bottom began to thrash and moan. The smaller woman kept her face glued to the bucking hips of her lover and without warning an animalistic howl rang out. The long legs tensed fiercely and then slowly relaxed. Clia had moved closer or perhaps it was just a trick of the dream, but she was looking down on the pair when the brunette’s head came up.

Clia gasped and sat up straight in her seat. The students near her turned to look at her, many smiled sympathetically and returned their attention to the black board. Clia wrote furiously, trying to get all the notes on the board that she had missed, but her thoughts were disjointed and slow. Only with great effort could she keep her thoughts off what she had seen in her dream. The face she had seen when the brunette had looked up continued to float before her vision. It was beautiful and soft with lovely dark eyes, and a rapturous expression and glistened in the red light with the juices of her lover. It was none other than her mysterious classmate.

Clia stumbled through the rest of her day in a dreamlike trance. She could not seem to make the distinction between reality and her suddenly very vivid dreams. Everywhere she looked she would see her mysterious classmate. She was always a face in the crowd or a glimpsed figure moving just out of her line of sight. If she stopped moving or stopped making her mind focus on something tangible she found herself on that beach drenched in the red of a fading sun, like liquid fire.