Girl Fever (28 page)

Snow rose above the entrance. Wind howled across the tops of the ski-pole tubes, its unearthly sounds becoming almost soothing. I dozed too.

“Raf…” Katy woke shivering with more than the cold. “What time do you think it is?” Not quite panic.

I checked my watch with a penlight. Midnight. “Only
about seven hours until daylight. And the wind has died down. We'll be fine.”

“I could sure use more body heat now,” she said plaintively, panic subdued.

“Show me where you're cold.” I groped under her shirt and sports bra. “Pretty warm here.”

She gasped. Her nipples reached out for more as I tweaked them, but she managed to pull one of my hands down to her crotch. “Don't stop, but how about…how… ahhh!…how about…here?” She arched into my touch. I paused to pull her ski pants down for easy access.

“Nope, regular steam bath here.” I slid my fingers along her warm tender flesh, then underneath her. She squealed in frustration. “Your poor little seat is definitely chilly, though. Too bad there isn't room in here for the spanking you need.” I made do with a few firm pinches.

“Ow! Can I have a rain check—a snow check—on that? Right now I need more, please. More!”

In the confined space of the cave her scent was maddening. I struggled to keep a grip on my own needs. “No kicking or thrashing. There's nothing in here to tie you to.”

“I'll try…”

And she did try, while my left hand kept on with all the torment her breasts demanded and my right worked her slick cunt lips and clit with hard strokes that made her beg for even more.

“Deeper Raf, please!”

So I obliged, but not as deeply as I wanted to. The ski-patrol supplies didn't include latex gloves. There was no resisting getting my tongue on her clit, though, and giving her every intense stroke she needed to make her scream at a pitch as unearthly as anything the wind had managed.

“You now, Raf,” she managed to say at last.

“Make that a snow check, too. I kick and thrash enough to bring this whole place down.”

I wasn't at all sure about there being enough air to breathe if I got going, either. “Try to sleep some more now.”

Katy did. I didn't.

The pulsing of the helicopter penetrated our snow walls about when I'd expected. The pilot, a buddy of mine, would have seen the red ski.

I shook Katy awake. “Rescue time.” She clung to me all the closer, but I gently disentangled her and made sure her ski pants were well up. “Now we get to kick the snow walls all we want.”

I did the kicking. By the time we emerged into early morning sunlight, Katy's father was struggling through the deep snow to meet us.

“I'm fine, Daddy,” Katy called. “Rafaela saved my life!”

Once they'd hugged he gripped my hand and shook it fervently. “How can I thank you enough? They told me you'd take care of her. I insist on a big reward…I'll write a check…”

“Daddy, I'm a grown woman,” Katy said firmly. “I'll take care of that.”

“Oh. Right. Of course.” They'd clearly had similar issues before. He turned back to me. “Well, you have my sincere gratitude. What a good thing Katy's ski instructor was so competent! And…well…”

“And a woman?” Katy filled in. “Since we had to spend the night together?” She took my hand, with more of a squeeze than a shake. “I couldn't agree more.” A swift, relatively chaste kiss on my cheek gave her a chance to mutter in my ear, “Snow checks are the best kind.”

And they were. A reward that keeps right on giving.

 

 

 

 

 

B
ernadine stood naked against the red sandstone wall.
What would the priests and nuns think?
These river-carved canyons, all smooth curves and jutting angles and secret crevices, were as familiar and yet mysterious as her own body; she had never thought before how like a woman's body they could be. Like Janet's body.

The cleft in the rock face had seemed no more than a crack until Janet pulled a tangle of branches aside to reveal an opening wide enough for a slender girl to squeeze through. Inside, the walls opened into a small chamber, with room to walk about, then narrowed again. A shaft of sunlight slanted from the patch of blue sky far above onto the sandy floor, where a stream would flow in the wet season, leaping from the ledge outside and down over the cliffs to join the great river below.

“Forget the mission school.” Janet knew Bernie's mind. “There are no priests here, or even gods, only shadows of whatever was sacred to the Old Ones. No one had found this place before I did, no rafting tourists or rock hunters or even our own people. No one, since the Old Ones left their marks to defy time.” She traced, without quite touching, a spiraling line chipped into the stone. Above it, a shade darker than the red rocks, was the painted print of a hand. “See?” She held up her own hand, darker still than the rocks or the ancient paint. “The size of a woman's hand. Our hands.”

For the touch of Janet's hand Bernadine would risk damnation—or, worse, cease to believe in it. Still… “How can you know what rituals they used?”

Janet didn't meet her eyes, gazing instead at other figures on the walls, animals and birds and shapes beyond guessing. “I saw it in a dream.”

Bernie didn't entirely believe in dreams, either, in spite of the old traditions of their people. With Janet solemn before her, naked but for the deerskin pouch dangling between her breasts, it didn't matter. If Janet needed a sacred ritual to mark the bond between them before they could have more than stolen moments to touch and tease and press together in unfulfilled longing, so be it.

She raised her arms at an angle—
NOT like a crucifix!—
and spread her legs slightly for balance. When Janet opened the pouch and drew out a stick of compressed charcoal wrapped in corn husks, Bernie dipped her head.
Yes
.

Janet rolled the rough cylinder along Bernie's bronze skin, raising a flush. Across her collarbones, down to the stiffened peak of each breast, over the curve of her belly and lower it went, thrusting gently between her thighs until wetness darkened the pale corn husks. Bernie caught the scent of her own arousal.

Janet withdrew the packet, touched her tongue to the wet places, then tore at its covering with strong teeth. When enough of the charcoal was unwrapped, she pressed a hand into Bernie's belly and traced around it, leaving her own five-fingered mark on the tender flesh. Then she knelt and drew a black line on the rock down along Bernie's inner thigh.

Bernie tensed with the need to clamp her thighs around that hand, urge it into the secret places where the need was becoming a pulsing ache. Past calf, ankle; around foot; upward again along hip, waist, arm, shoulder—each moment, each touch of Janet's hand tracing her silhouette onto the canyon wall, was a torment and pleasure so intense it verged on pain.

“Don't move,” Janet warned, as the final line inched upward again between Bernie's thighs, but her other hand slid downward, pressing into flesh now slick and hot.

It was a challenge. Bernie, close to bursting, still did not move. Even when the charcoal lines met at last, and Janet leaned abruptly forward to thrust her tongue into that wet heat as though she too had barely resisted, Bernie stayed rock still. But when Janet grasped at her
hips, then dug demanding fingers into her buttocks to bring her harder against tongue and lips and teeth, Bernie clutched at her hair to force her even closer and met that hunger at last with writhing body and cries that echoed through the sandstone cavern.

When the sounds died away and their breathing slowed, Bernie fumbled for the husk-wrapped charcoal and nudged at Janet. “There's just room for your shape on the wall, if it overlaps with mine. And time together to etch them both into the rock, bit by bit, however many years it takes. Time to mark our place in time.”

So Janet stood against the stone, one arm and shoulder across Bernie's outline there, while Bernie took charge of marking, and tracing, and tantalizing, and riding Janet's thigh at the last, until the canyon rang again with cries from both of them.

They lay spent on the sand, wrapped close together. At last Bernie found her voice.

“It was a true dream, then?”

Janet pulled her even closer and looked deeply into her eyes.

“It is now,” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

T
he ferry goes from the island to the bay twice a day. I ride it to work a couple of mornings a week.

Annie rides it too. Not to work, not to anything. She just rides out to the bay and then back to the island. I'd like to think she's riding it for me, but I know that she was riding it long before she ever met me.

I met Annie at the little library on the island, where we were both looking up books on suicide by diet. Namely, how to bake ourselves to death with too much butter and too much sugar and not enough vegetables. It's the sweeter, tastier version of putting your head in the oven. We both put our hands on
Pastries and Pies: Full Flavor, Full Fat
at the same time. I thought she might fight me for it, but she offered it up to me instead. We laughed it off. But dying housewives can always spot each other.
It's in the too-easy laugh, the slightly haunted look in our eyes, that bit of gathered fat around the midsection.

Annie's got blonde-red hair, full of wild curls that whip in the salt wind. Her sunglasses are too big for her face, but they're not so dark that they hide her green-green eyes. Or the circles under them. She smokes—not at home, she says, just on the ferry—rolling her own cigarettes on the deck, not even noticing all the tobacco that floats away.

I sit with her outside on the front of the ferry, watching the waves splash up and get left behind, watching the island fall away and the mainland come closer, sipping my black coffee—burnt and astringent, but it keeps the cold out of my mouth. It's nearly an hour out and another back.

We talk for the first half of the trip, about nothing at all. We don't talk about home. Not about our kids or our husbands, not about the in-laws or the bills. That would bring them with us, out onto the wild sea, and the whole point is to leave them behind.

We say things like, “Look at that bird!” and “Water's rough today, isn't it?” and “Wonder what the weather's like across the way.” Annie's long leg accidentally touches mine when she turns away from the wind to light her cig, and she leaves it there, knee to my knee. I hand my coffee off to her, take it back to find it's covered in her scent of tobacco and lanolin. She picks something random out of my hair, and I'm so glad for her touch that I almost forget not to lean into it. These are our rituals, fallen into by
habit, by fear, but they give us the steps to keep moving toward the thing that we want, toward each other.

When my coffee's empty and she's rolled a fourth cigarette and tucked it into her shirt pocket for later, she faces away, across the water. Her profile is sharp everywhere except her cheeks, which are like big, soft scoops of ice cream. I want to lick her skin, taste the sea salt and wind.

“I'll be right back,” she says. Another part of our ritual. Part of our denial. Or maybe acceptance. Sometimes they look the same when the land has been left.

“Okay,” I say, and I lean back as though I'm going to keep sitting here.

The bathrooms have funny doors—magnetic, so they don't accidentally swing when the ferry tilts. I pull it open, feeling the resistance.

Annie's leaning against the sink, watching me close and lock the bathroom door. She says something, but I can't hear it over the liquid pounding in my veins. I go to her, waves of wanting streaming off me, powering me forward.

We don't kiss, not on the mouth. I don't know why. Maybe that's too real, too close to something. But we put our mouths everywhere else, on necks and shoulders, on palms and the hollows of throats. We are rough and tumble, grab and pull, closed eyes and open lips.

We have learned how to fuck without getting naked, without looking too closely, with our backs to the mirror. She grabs the bottom of my shirt and pulls it up, her nails
scratching my sides. Her hands are down my pants even as mine are opening hers. She doesn't wear underwear, and my fingers are caught between the soft of her skin and the rough of the fabric before they sink into her, into that deep wet that comes of waiting for pleasure. She scrapes my clit with her thumbnail and I see a bright spot of pain behind my eyes. It makes me want her more, this thing I feel, this ache and pleasure and forgetting all twisted up. We fuck each other hard and fast, leaning in, holding each other up with the weight of our desire, with the rocking of our bodies and of the ferry. We fuck until I feel like I'm all the way inside her, filling her, and her me and then and only then can I come, a wet crash of power that drowns me soundless, breathless.

When we're done, we're both panting, disheveled, grinning without being able to really look at each other. Annie pulls the cigarette from her pocket, clears her throat. Her smile is like a wave that can't stop rising.

“See you on the water?” she says. She slips out before I can even think about answering and I lean against the sink, my turn now, trying to let my heartbeat go down to something like normal.

We can't do this forever, hiding here. Leaving our husbands and families and lives temporarily behind. I can feel it coming into its own, this thing between us, like a rising storm. Unstoppable. Fearsome in its rolling power. It makes me nervous and dangerous and wet. The dry land of my life is far away and everything here is liquid.