Awakening

Laure awoke mid-moan, rolling forwards, pressing herself against the flat warmth of the bed. Eyes still closed, a dull pain registered a fraction of a second after the waking of pleasure.

The dryness of the roof of her mouth, the slowness of her tongue, and the thick weight of a movement induced headache contrasted strangely with the spreading heat of her groin and the languidity of her limbs.

She moaned again, a doubly committed groan, struck somewhere between horror and delight.

The fingers that had been gently stroking her mons and abdomen stopped, their cessation tolling in her like some bell of silence - disconcerting and agonising. Her breath caught.

She was in bed with someone.

As if to prove the point, and perhaps driven by her sudden tension, lips closed firmly on the back of her neck, their soft warmth drawing a ringing sensation from her whole spine and a slow, stuttering exhalation.

The fingers began to toy with the springy hair of her groin.

She was definitely in bed with someone.

How had it happened? She could not remember. The evening had grown hazy early on. The 'girly' evening to half celebrate and half mourn her newfound singledom.

Had they gone out? they must have done. Those fingers were too persistent to be a dream.

She groaned again as they brushed her clitoris and the lips released her. A foot stroked against her ankle.

Laure pulled forwards, away from the tightening arm and prying leg. Languidly aroused or not, her head was too thick for the inevitable penetration.

Why had she drunk so much? She had no memory of a club. Arousal was giving way to irritation and the painful ringing of her own pulse.

Her need for space growing, she rolled out of bed and stumbled towards her bathroom, grabbing her mobile from the bedside table.

In the mirror, she seemed pale, though her nipples were reddened. Another pointless one-night stand. Unremembered and unfulfilling.

Gently she probed her groin, seeking the aching signature of inconsiderate shagging. Nothing of that nature. He must have had too much to drink. A relief, though even more disappointing than the seven-stroke shock of her recent lover.

Cupping her hands to throw water over her face, she tried to recollect the evening. As her fingers brushed her cheek, she found the texture of her skin slightly altered, something slightly slick mixed in with the clean hardness of the water. Oral? With someone unknown. She felt slightly sick.

Bottles of wine, and cocktails of vodka and fruit-juice appeared in shimmering sequence. Memory began to fragment half-way through a film, somewhere around midnight.

She had gone to the door with one of her friends, Sarah, and wished her goodnight. Her dress had slipped and Sarah had tweaked her nipple and laughed as she left.

Had she felt better she might have smiled wryly at the memory, or perhaps blushed.

What then?

Her fingers were still slightly numb as she began to write a text to Catherine for a reminder. Presuming that she could remember anything herself - even when Sarah left, Catherine was curled on the sofa, standing an apparent impossibility.

No response. It was too early for Catherine to be alert to the vibrations of her phone. It was only because of those fingers that Laure had moaned herself into wakefulness.

She must face the moment alone.

She turned the lock, opened the door, and walked slowly back to the bed. Expecting the overcharged smell of alcoholic sex, she was slightly surprised at the smell of the room. But she didn't care at the moment. She did not want to see them. That would come all too soon, she knew how this went.

Climbing back into the bed, she planted herself with her back to the other body with the resolve of the condemned and fixed her eyes on the screen of her mobile, now returned to the edge of her table.

Her muscles tightened as the hand passed over her middle and took hold of her breast. She had known it would come. The pressure of the forearm pulling the mass behind her closer. The chest would come first, and then the penis.

She cringed as the chest met her back. He must be overweight. The softness was alien to her. She tried to pull away again, but the arm was insistent.

However, something was strange here. The warm softness of the man's abdomen absorbed her back, and she could feel the moving chest. Her buttocks touched his groin, but there was no hardness there. In fact there was nothing.

In confusion she tensed yet further, and those lips once more engulfed the back of her neck.

In a single quick action, she pulled away and turned around.

Catherine smiled, one eye-brow provocatively raised.

"Well good morning," she purred, a knowing smirk played on her lips, the hand lingering lightly on Laure's hip.

Laure's mouth was slightly open, her brow furrowed, and eyes slightly wild. She had not readied herself for this.

Catherine rolled backwards and spread her arm behind her, chuckling ironically, her long hair flicked out by her passing hand - the show of languor abandoned. "You seem surprised."

A difficult silence penetrated the air.

"Last night, you seemed so desperate..."

She turned her face towards Laure again, an unsmiling and less confident face. Finding Laure's expression unchanged, she quickly folded herself to sit on the edge of the bed, and muttered "I should go."

Laure stirred her mind. Had Catherine really said desperate?

"What do you mean?"

She abstractedly studied Catherine's naked form, now turned away from her, head slightly bowed.

"For comfort; for touch; for satisfaction."

Catherine looked back, her face part hidden by her hair, "Exactly what desperate normally means."

"But you're..." Laure broke off rather stupidly.

"A woman? - you didn't care last night."

As Laure turned herself to sit on her own edge of the bed, Catherine began to gather her clothes from the room, tugging them on awkwardly as she moved with that jerky haste only found in a distressed woman. Her top caught on the back of her shoulders.

Still distracted, Laure noted that its front had grazed her still erect nipples.

Her hand closed on Catherine's passing wrist, catching her mid-step.

Unbalanced, Catherine fell back, towards the bed, stumbled on an abandoned pair of jeans, and fell to her knees, her head coming to rest against Laure's thigh.

Again, silence.

Not knowing what else to do, Laure released Catherine's wrist and moved her hand to caress Catherine's head.

Eyes unfocussed and still half-dazed, Laure absorbed the sensation of the soft thickness of the hair as her fingers passed through it.

Something like tension was building under her chest.

What now?

The hair was locking her hand tighter against Catherine's scalp.

Catherine's breath warmed her thigh, and eddied coolly around her groin. Laure felt a hot dampness against her skin, and realised that Catherine was silently crying, the tears stopped between her cheek and Laure's thigh.

The tension in her diaphragm was growing.

What now?

Did it matter?

She tightened her grip through the hair, focusing now. Detached. Curious. Watching for Catherine's reaction.

Catherine turned her head slightly and soft lips settled slowly against the delicate skin of Laure's thigh.

It was like an electrification, an arcing of energy and tension around her groin and legs.

The lips left her skin.

Somehow she caught the fragmentary moment of realisation. She had closed her eyes, her breathing paused. It was too late to change course, to abandon the abandon that she had chosen. Her headache had been relinquished at the shock of seeing Catherine, and her feelings were now sharp with adrenaline.

Her eyes were still closed.

Catherine's head moved slightly beneath her fingers, following the weight of her arm, relaxing back into the soft skin of her thigh.

The lips began to work more evenly, exploring the soft-ripeness, the tongue tasting the charge locked beneath the soft flesh, in the reviving muscles.

Laure gave in to abandon.

Her pelvis rolled, turning her vulva toward Catherine, parting her legs, opening the shell of her groin.

As Laure reformed her posture, making a precipitate of her desire, so did Catherine's lips.

They closed a fleshy bite on the acute angle now exposed, that hard tendon resonating to the plucking of her tongue that tasted the ferrous tension of pheromonal need.

Her hand moved slowly up Laure's leg. Underneath her buttocks. Clasping her closer, drawing her towards Catherine's mouth.

Catherine's cheek was now being brushed lightly by the thickly pungent hair of Laure's groin, her mouth filled with arousal and anticipation, tasting the desire that clung there.

The intensely feminine scent of Laure's arousal was rich in Catherine's breath, she could taste as well as smell it.

With her thumb pressed firmly against Laure's stomach, Catherine eased her back, sliding her hand up her subsiding body and closing gently round her breast, circling round her expectant nipple.

As her body fully awakened, Laure drew breath.

She felt Catherine softly kiss her, the lips straddling her vulva, not pressing but alighting like sparks in tinder.

With the sparks came strobe-lit fragments from her memory or imagination: Catherine in ecstatic abandonment astride her mouth; lingering kisses; the long, slow caressing; the passionate engagement of grinding legs and groins. The forgotten hours of last night burned in her mind with magnesium brightness, melding with the present - a dream with sensation.

She could feel Catherine's breath pressing and drawing at her mound as those clinging lips formed a wide circle surrounding her clitoris.

She moaned softly, and curled her hips upwards as she shakingly released her breath; she felt the tightening of Catherine's lips - the tense suppression of a smile. Feeling the increased tension, she extended her back, vainly trying to press herself further into Catherine's mouth.

She could feel Catherine's lips still tightening, their aperture slowly shrinking around her clitoris. It felt as though that nub of sensation were entrapped, burning for release, fanned by the changing pressures of Catherine's mouth.

Laure took a sharp intake of breath as she felt the cold shock of Catherine's thumb catching once against her erect nipple.

Her breath was released as a great groan as she felt Catherine's fingers stroking delicately across her vulva, as her tongue finally brushed teasingly against her clitoris.

Craving penetration, the filling of her expanding body, she pushed herself against those fingers, pressing herself onto them, coating them with her arousal and feeling them entering slowly as she willed them in.

She was careless now, living only for this moment and the sensations it brought her.

Catherine, sensing this abandon, relaxed into Laure's groin, her tongue exploring, tasting, her lips kissing, her cheeks slipping against Laure's thighs. She began to move her fingers more firmly now, increasing pace, enjoying the fluidity of Laure's vagina against her fingers.

Laure instantly understood the beginnings of rhythm: she felt her body keeping pace; the walls of her vagina beginning to contract and subside to the pulse of Catherine's ministrations; the growing tension in the pit of her stomach, at her very core.

Tears came to her eyes. Her breathing was now uneven, held for an age after every inhalation, creating its own strain, making the blood sing in her veins.

With her pelvis thrust high by an agonisingly long contraction, Laure found release, breath bursting from her in ragged groans, her eyes closed, her head throbbing, her body locked in spasm, with Catherine holding her tightly, her own head tight between Laure's legs.

Relaxing her quivering thighs, Laure let her legs drop; taking Catherine's hair in her hands, she shakingly drew Catherine's reddened, glistening face to her own.

Clinging together, they rolled into a tangled embrace, kissing in unbridled closeness, Laure tasting herself hotly on Catherine's lips before they unjoined mouths, sinking into one another's shoulders, into their melded tears, and soft, interminable tenderness.