He winked and I laughed, unwrapping my square. Once again, I couldn't have dreamt it more perfectly. I thanked him, and sank my teeth into the richest brownie I'd ever tasted. It was like an injection of solid chocolate in my jugular vein. I couldn't even taste the herb. I ate the whole thing in three bites and finished almost breathless, licking my fingers ravenously and fumbling for my bottle of water.
Marlon was licking his own fingers and laughing at me.
“I was the same way the first time I had Cassie's brownies. They were so good I ate three of them before I could stop. I was high for two and a half days. I've since learned one is enough.”
He picked up the brown bag and our empty drink boxes and pointed out where the brownies were kept. “You're welcome to them,” he said. “Anytime.”
He squeezed the top of my shoulder and crossed behind me, heading for the kitchen. His casual stroke was firm and warm and reached so far down into my weary muscles, I almost moaned. He stopped behind me and kept his hand in place, carelessly working my clenched flesh and reducing me to a babbling idiot.
“Damn, woman. You've really been working, huh?”
My head did something affirmative from where it was lolling over one shoulder. His touch felt good. Beyond just “the-man-is-fine” good. I mean, really good.
“You want me to rub your shoulders down?”
I nodded again. Got my eyebrows into the act and asked a wordless question. Something like, “How are you doing this to me,” but more professionally phrased.
“I did a massage therapy certificate soon after I moved out here,” he said, squaring off behind me and grasping my shoulder joints in his hands like ben wa balls. “Four years ago, now, I guess. Right after my divorce.”
His hands were working light and magic into my spine. I sat up straight in the papasan chair and slowly leaned forward as his hands worked their way to my lower back.
Did he say divorced?
asked my mother's voice in my head.
You're almost thirty-three, Taya. Remember the last time youâ
I did remember the last time. I'd come out here partly to be as far away from Mr. Last Time as humanly possible. I forced my mind back from where it was racing. Marlon was a trained professional, I thought sternly at myself. He sees a cramped muscle; it's his job to ease it. And you, Little Miss Chocolate Orgasm, are here to work.
After five heavenly minutes, Marlon had kneaded my back into a pliant pulp. I was so well-wrung that I whimpered a little when he stopped.
“I'll finish that job up for real when you're done moving,” he said, standing up again and picking up his stuff. “You'll
feel like a million dollars.”
“Well, I already feel like half a million,” I muttered into the pillow. “I might have to make change after next time.”
He laughed and walked toward the kitchen with our trash. I just lay there, breathing deeply. Trying to keep my thoughts chaste.
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Brownies always hit me late. When I went home that night I loaded the last of my materials into the pickup, trying to wait it out. In the end my exhaustion won and I went to sleep thinking I'd missed my high. Not so. The early morning sun streamed into the room with a liquid sweetness that meant the glory had arrived. I rolled over onto my sketchbook and was scribbling wildly, trying to hold onto the ends of my dream and catch up to the day's ideas already plunging around in my head. I read a little, cracked up watching Rikki Lake, wrote my sister an e-mail. I sat on the balcony in the deepening heat eating cold pineapple chunks from the fridge. Then I rinsed the sticky juice off my forearms and dove into the pool.
Swimming was a glorious dance of water and human molecules, but I didn't swim long. I couldn't wait to go to work! This time, it was not only the heat that influenced my choice of dress. A slew of not-so-innocent thoughts about Marlon whirling through my head, I put on the merest Indian cotton halter, a similarly scant denim skirt, and some sneakers. Vanilla body spray, just because. Threw work gloves and Vaseline into my bag and jumped into the truck.
I really wanted to get the rest of my stuff unloaded early. After yesterday it was clear Marlon wasn't the kind of man to let me lift alone, and I felt kind of bad about disrupting his process. I moved around the new space like a dynamo in the morning's deepening heat, working to finish fast.
I was wheeling Dolly, empty, back out to my truck when Marlon's battered blue Cherokee pulled up. He jumped out
in an orange T-shirt and khakis, resplendent in the sunlight. Hair tied back tightly in a piece of leather and hanging down to his waist. He shaded his eyes with his hand.
“Hey, Taya. Heading out or coming in?”
“Neither,” I said. “I just finished with the last load of stuff from my apartment. I'm taking Dolly back to the truck and then I'm here for the day.”
He smiled.
“â¦So you're finished moving?”
I nodded my head, pure joy leaking out of the corners of my grin.
Marlon stepped to me and spun me right around, gripping my shoulders and upper arms with those amazing hands.
“Well, then, we've got one celebratory welcome massage due in full, don't we?”
Dolly stood abandoned in the drive but I was in no condition to move her, having already melted.
Marlon spread the bright Mexican blanket over his metal-topped work table and topped it with the big round cushion from my chair. With great ceremony he arranged me face down on it and the miracle began.
He slathered his hands with a cooling peppermint lotion and started on my bare upper back. His fingers were dancing between my muscles, squeezing life into every pore of my skin, deftly untying the back of my halter to stroke down either side of my spine.
His hands skirted down the outside of my hips and worked the soothing lotion from the backs of my thighs, over the curves of my calves, to the arches of my feet. I chewed on my lip to keep my vocalizations to a minimum, but nothing could completely stop the sighs and occasional groans as he manipulated every fiber of my body.
My muscles were whirling under the surface of my skin. He chased three days of accumulated work-weariness down
each limb and out my fingers, my toes. Pushed strain out from my lower back and up along my ribs. He squeezed and stroked the palms of my hands, the bottoms of my feet, the nape of my neck, my lower back. I fell spinning into a pool of peppermint light.
I thought I felt the air of a soft laugh against the back my neck. I thought I felt him kiss me, very lightly, behind my ear. But I was asleep five seconds later. So I might have been dreaming.
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I didn't sleep long. About fifteen minutes, Marlon told me when I awoke with a start. I was sprawled out belly down on the cushion and he was sitting cross-legged on the table an arm's length away from me, acting like he was resuming a conversation with a participating individual instead of with me, a dazed, catnapped woman just blinking into embarrassed consciousness.
“It's a great compliment when someone falls asleep after a session,” he continued. “To me, it means I've relaxed you greatly.”
“You can say that again,” I said, moving my body around experimentally. “I feel like I should have some new magical power, or be glowing or something.”
“Who says you're not?” he asked. His eyes swept down me. I crossed my legs a little and perched my chin in my hand. Watched a sliver of colored light slip between the rustling fabric at the windows, slide up Marlon's arm, over his shoulder, and away. “You are very beautiful, Taya,” he said. “I took the liberty of watching you while you slept, I hope you don't mind.”
Under other conditions, I might have blushed, or thought about changing the subject. Instead, I smiled. Laid my head back down on the big round cushion and made a confession of my own.
“I think it's kind of sweet. Plus, I have a confession to make, anyway: I watched you while you worked that first day I came to see the place. Almost took a picture, I couldn't help it. Even your back is beautiful.”
I reached out lazily and briefly interlaced my fingers with his. Brushed the roughened surface of his palm with my thumb, ran my small, square fingers in and out of his larger, squarer ones. I turned it over and traced the veins on the back of his hand and asked about a small scar there. For a number of minutes, we talked across arm's distance, squashed flat by the midday heat and all my muscles feeling like rubber bands. Electricity crackled between us, almost visible, running up our arms like lightning.
“What's the name of that fellowship you're on, Taya? The Ford?”
“The Newcombe,” I said. “They call the program the Roaming Residency.”
“And you could've gone anywhere you wanted?”
I nodded. His hands were moving up my forearm now, chasing the electricity up past my elbow. I watched in pure wonderment as he worked his way up to my shoulder.
“What made you choose Taos? So far away from everyone you know?”
His face. His chest. His sleepy-looking eyes. His dancing, twisting metal work. I kept watching his hands on the skin of my arm. Little shocks shook my flesh.
“I don't know,” I said. “I guess I just wanted to be alone.”
I sensed the little smile before I even saw it play across his face. I looked up, saw the dimple; it was gone; there it was again.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
Marlon raised my hand to his mouth and kissed the palm, softly, squarely in its center. His lips parted and the tip of his tongue darted out, painting delight down my lifeline. He
bared his teeth and bit succulently at the flesh padding the base of my fingers, ran his tongue briefly between each joint, watching my face with open eyes. I never knew my hand could make me feel so good.
I think I breathed that last out loud.
To prove that my hand could feel even better, he slipped two of my fingers joint-deep into his mouth and I lost all will to breathe. Surprising myself, I accomplished my most superhuman feat of strength ever: I wrenched enough energy together to untie my halter with my free hand. Spent, I rolled over and looked up at Marlon, framed in rainbow light and kneeling above me with a look of smiling anticipation.
I had already surrendered my body to this man and with oil and pressure he'd put me to sleep. Now, with tingling electric touch he was waking me up. His hands were suddenly everywhere, chasing little jolts of awareness down my back, up my stomach, behind my knees, over my nipples, between my thighs. I hardly knew where to focus my attention, I felt so surrounded by him. I couldn't move a muscle except in reaction to his touchâwhich means I was thrashing all over the cushion.
And he was only just beginning. Marlon kneeled between my thighs, and ran his finger down the front of my cotton thong, hovering over the moist heat at my center. He sucked my middle and ring fingers back into his mouth, biting their tips, scraping rough, hard licks down their fronts, planting wet slurps at the base. One of his fingers dove under the elastic between my thighs and painted swirls around my clit. He plunged his finger into my pussy and, at the same time, scissored hard between my fingers with his tongue.
I had no bones in my body.
My underwear was gone. My thighs were rubber, wide open and trembling worthlessly for all their much-admired latent muscle power. I coalesced, became a point of dense
liquid swirling around his hands. He curved his finger upward, pushed slowly in and out of me, my walls yielding juicily to its calloused grain.
He let my hand out of his mouth and folded over me, hungry, chewing, sucking on one of my nipples and pinching the other. My fingers felt so abandoned that I thrust them into his hair: rough and warm on the top of his head; wiry, soft, and hot near his scalp. I untied his leather cord and a thousand tickling tentacles fell forward onto my breasts, shoulders, throat, smelling like frankincense where they fell onto my face. I writhed, gasping, as his hair cascaded around me, changing the light into a rough and shadowed thing. He slid another finger into me alongside the first.
I got my muscles to move.
Some of them, anyway. Legs were still worthless, splayed wide and quaking around Marlon's diving fingers, but control of my hands was returning. I unbuckled the belt of his jeans in a hurry, opened the button, lowered the zipper. He raised his kissing, nibbling head from my rib cage and kissed me, seriously kissed me, while I coaxed his heavy dick out of his clothes with both hands.
His cock fell free into my palms and I could tell that it was sweet. Didn't even have to sneak a look. I dove my tongue around his mouth and stroked his rigid length with both my hands. When I ran my thumb up over the head I slid into a pearl of slickness. My favorite. I brought my thumb into my mouth to taste him while I smoothed my other hand over the slippery head of his dick. A tremor went through his body, starting at his hips and ending when he dropped his head back into our kiss.
Sucking on his tongue, I placed the head of his cock at my entrance. The first of its inches pressed in easily. He stayed there a moment, a solid surprise, then gripped my shoulders and drove deeper, steady, rocking, carving himself in gradually
and resting only when the base of his pelvis pressed against mine. I wanted to say somethingâ“Bravo!” “Pleased to meet you!” “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” â¦Something. But my mind was completely blank for the moment. Marlon hung over me with a pleased, slightly expectant expression, looking like he was about to do a push-up. We stared at each other inside the curtain of his hair.
Then we laughed. He moved down onto his elbows and I clenched my vaginal muscles around the heat of his dick, and didn't have to say anything.
He started to push in and out of me, slowly. “Rock-hard” meant something different now that I'd felt him inside. He slid out repeatedly, keeping just his head between my lips and then running his solid length back up into me. Each time our pelvises met, my pussy got happier, taking his size with growing enthusiasm, gobbling his dick completely. Succulent noises squelched between us.