As Charlotte walked to the small bus station she reflected on how much she was missing Jason, her boyfriend, who had flown back from Guatemala City three days previously. Well, analysing her own thoughts as she waited, amid the smell of diesel, sweaty bodies and poor sanitation, for the bus to take her to the El Salvadorian border, she wasn't so much missing him, as missing what she and he had done together. The sex had been raw and exciting after a months's enforced abstinence on her travels through Latin America. Jason had taken two weeks off from his City job to join her meeting her in Mexico City and travelling with her down to Guatemala.
In the days since he had left she had not even been able to masturbate. The basic hostels that were all she had budgeted for gave no privacy in bed or the showers. Even the toilets offered little to prevent her being heard, if not actually seen, had she tried to pleasure herself there. She let her thoughts linger a little more on the last night with Jason as she climbed onto the bus and won the scramble for a window seat. Sharing a joint, a rare indulgence for her, that night her responses had been heightened as Jason plunged into her, his athleticism and staying power making up for what he sometimes lacked in tenderness and finesse.
Her long legs were compressed by the bus seats originally designed for American schoolchildren, but now serving the largely Mayan- and largely short- people of central America. To make a little more space she crossed her legs, the angle forced upon her by the proximity of the seat back and the pressure of the Mayan woman next to her meant that her left thigh was pushing hard on the lips of her vagina. Already a little swollen and moist from her ruminations about Jason's lovemaking the sensation enhanced the feelings that were flowing from there.
The bus went a little too fast over the crude speed hump that marked the exit to the town. Her leg jerked and the pressure was suddenly directly on her clitoris. She closed her eyes not moving, but doing no more to enhance the pleasurable squeezing. For the next twenty minutes she half dozed and half day dreamed that it was Jason, well perhaps not Jason, better still a man she really loved, with her and would be satisfying her at the end of the journey. Her panties were sodden and she was relieved that, despite the heat, she was wearing a pair of dark jeans through which she knew her moisture would not show.
It would not take much for her to come. A few swings of her legs and she would be there. Would anyone on the bus realise what she had done? Did she care if she did? She tightened and then relaxed her legs a couple of times. The woman next to her turned and looked in a slightly disapproving way. Charlotte's movements might have pushed against her. Was she just reacting to that touch, or had she realised what Charlotte was doing. She knew she could not do this on a crowded bus. However strong the physical need, however discreet she could be, to masturbate in front of strangers was a taboo she could not overcome.
She adjusted her legs. The moisture between them remained but the throbbing subsided. She looked at her map. The bus would soon reach the border. There it would stop and she would walk over the bridge that separated the countries, and stay in a small hotel recommended by the Central American Handbook. There at least she would have some privacy, if not the male touch she really yearned for.
At the destination she dismounted the bus, waited for her rucksack to come off the roof, picked it up and walked the 200 metres to the bridge. Few of the other bus-travellers were crossing into Salvador, only three were in front of her as she waited while the customs officer- rather good looking with eyes that were dark even by Central American standards she noted- checked passports and performed a perfunctory baggage search on each.
He inspected and stamped her passport, and then asked to look inside her shoulder bag. Mildly embarrassed at the fact that it would reveal she was still carrying the condoms that had featured so frequently on Jason's visit she handed it to him. Behaving very properly, he gave no reaction as he saw those nor to the spare underwear, that it was a black lacy thong was another embarrassment, in there. Relieved not to be subject to the expected licentiousness, Charlotte saw with horror that he was pulling a half smoked joint from a pocket in the bag. "Oh fuck", They hadn't finished smoking it that last night and without thinking Charlotte had put the remains in her bag. Oh, she was so fucking stupid. Visions of Midnight Express, and emerging from a hellhole of a gaol in her middle age flashed through Charlotte's mind.
"Como este?" asked the officer holding it up.