Fireworks on the Beach

The southern breeze blew a salt-caked wisp of her brown wavy hair against her mouth. The tip of her tongue slipped out and deftly hooked the end of it trapping it between her slightly sunburnt, tingling lips. She sucked on the salt, twirling the hair around and around her tongue, then chewing on it slightly as her eyes continued to race over the lines of her book. As she shifted her weight onto the one elbow to free her other hand to turn the page, she impatiently brushed the now wet, straightened strand out of her mouth and looked up at the sea stretching before her. She lay there, propped up on her elbow, the fingers of her other hand suspended on the corner of the page, looking out at the waves rolling in. High waves today! Maybe that’s why there was no one on the beach. The southern wind had washed in some seaweed andshe could see the brown line of it floating unappetizingly just where the water started to deepen. But she didn’t mind it. If you waded in and then dove over it, you could swim vigorously out and get to the clear blue-green swell to bob playfully in the waves.

She bent her head down again, flicked back to the previous page to pick up the sentence from the beginning and re-immerse herself in tales of people coming together in London, Tokyo, Paris. But fortunately there were no stories of people of meeting on a Greek island in the North-Eastern Aegean, just across the way from the shores of Turkey. All she wanted now was to read about others and let their couplings carry her away from herself. She had wanted to visit the island of Chios for a long time because she had heard of the beauty of the island. What she wanted was peace and quiet. Time to be with herself, gaze at the sea and mountains, take pictures and read her books without interruption. Her divorce from her husband a few months ago had left her drained and in need of escape. And here at last was her little getaway. She could wake when she wanted, dine when she wanted, explore the island without destination, wandering where she willed on her motorcycle, charging her emotional batteries with the beauty of the craggy mountains, thick cool pine forests, low marshlands all a-flutter with herons and long deserted beaches like this one.
She could feel the sun burning her shoulders and the backs of her legs. The first application of sunscreen had probably washed off during her first dip but now that the droplets of seawater had evaporated from her skin, she was feeling too comfortable to get up and slather herself in lotion again. And she liked this feeling of baking in the sun and salt on the pebbly sand. Soon she would have to take refuge in the shade of the stony cliff at the end of the beach, but! just a little while longer here.

She gradually realized that a new sound had entered the symphony of waves crashing and seagulls cawing overhead. What was it? The crunch of footsteps on the pebbles andapproaching footsteps. No! She didn’t want her peaceful solitude broken. She decided not to look up, hoping that the footsteps would pass her by and disappear, that she would merge with sand in camouflage and go unnoticed. She plunged into her book with renewed determination, her ear still cocked to the intrusive crunch.

Then the sound stopped. It hadn’t gradually faded away. She ventured a peek and there, not even a meter a way, were two sandal-clad male feet, pointing in her direction. Through the weathered leather straps she could see they were athletic feet, the claw-like tendons ridging the arches. Her gaze slowly traveled up, past the slender ankles, past the hairy muscular calves, to the hem of khaki shorts just above the kneecaps, to the belted waist, then past the expanse of a roundish stomach, a chest covered in graying fur, to a square grizzled chin, full well-defined lips, up over the ridge of a slightly hooked nose till her gaze rested on two dark eyes shaded by the brim of a straw Panama hat.

“Hello.”

“Hello!”

“I was walking down this beach and saw you alone here. I thought maybe we could keep each other company for a bit.”

Damn him for spoiling my solitude! Now how do I get rid of him? Contracting her abdominal muscles for support, still supine, she reached behind her to tie the loosened strings of her bikini top around her back again and then the other strings around her neck, catching a few wisps of hair in the knot and then angrily yanking them out. She looked up and saw he had been watching the proceedings with a hint of a smile. Placing the palms of her hands by her shoulders, she pushed herself back on to her knees. He took this as an invitation and plopped himself down on the sand next to her towel, his legs bent, ankles crossed and forearms resting on his knees, one hand clasping the wrist of the other. His smile broadened. “How did you know I spoke English?” she asked him a little irritated.

“I didn’t,” was his quick reply. “Just took a chance.” And his eyes sparkled.

“Hmmm.” She wished she could up with some quick-witted reply, but she just couldn’t. It seemed out of place for her to tell this man to get lost and leave her alone. He seemed a little lost anyway, but at ease with it. Although he wasn’t what you would exactly call handsome, he had an relaxed calm about him and a keenness in the eyes. His legs and chest were tanned as if he spent most of his time walking in the sun and his round gut showed he rather enjoyed his food and beer. But his hands were what drew her gaze: large, wide palms, veined backs, strong giving hands. And calm, sure of themselves.

“Sorry to interrupt your reading,” he said. “Would you like me to let you get back to it?” So! He was giving her a way out! What could be simpler than for her to say, ‘Yes, thank you. I’d rather be alone now’? But, on the other hand, it had actually been days since she really spoke to anyone, except for the waiters at the little seaside tavernas she dined at. And he seemed harmless enough.

“No, that’s OK,” she said a little recklessly and she brought her knees round. She searched for something to mark her place in her book, fished a papery sliver of seaweed out of the sand and stuck it in the pages, then tossing the book over towards her beach bag. He reached over and picked it up.

“Oh! Angela Carter! Fireworks! What do you think of it?"
He knows Angela Carter! can’t be all that bad, she thought. Plus he asks me what I think without trying to show off too much. “I think it’s wonderful!”
“Yes, it certainly is.”

“I love her imagery. There are some pretty straightforward stories in this collection but also a couple fantasy tales! You know, the stuff she is better known for.” Now she was the one showing off.

“Which is your favorite story?” he asked as he skipped a flat stone over the water’s surface.

“Is this a test?” she asked with a chuckle.

“No test, just wondering!” he asked but with no smile this time.

“Just wondering what?” she suddenly became serious herself.

“Just wondering if it was the same as mine.”

“Well, if I tell you, then maybe you’ll just say that was your favorite too.”

A hint of a smile this time. “Alright then. I’ll go over there and write the title in the sand, where you can’t see it and then you tell me. Then you can get up and see if it’s the same. How’s that?”
“Sounds like a plan.” She watched him rise to his feet and scan the beach for a spot where the sand was fine and wet. He lithely bent over and picked up a stick. She looked out at the waves as he scrawled in the sand and then heard his approaching footsteps. He had sat down again next to her, a little closer this time, before she looked over her shoulder at him. Bemused, he raised his eyebrows into question marks.
“ ‘The Mirror’.” It was her turn to smile at him questioningly. He just teasingly shrugged his shoulders. She rose to her feet now. But instead of going over to look at what he had written in the sand, she walked in the other direction, towards the water, waded in to her knees, feeling his eyes boring into her back, and then in an expert dive, again showing off for him, plunged into the water. She athletically swam out, expecting him to follow, expecting to hear the splash of his strokes coming up behind her, but he wasn’t there. When she finally lifted her head out of the water and looked back at the beach, treading water, she saw he still sat in the same place, next to her towel, his face turned towards her, watching her. She felt silly now and started the freestroke back. As she emerged from the water, her dark hair slicked back, her eyelashes triangled together, the seawater making her reddish brown skin glisten, again she felt his eyes piercing her. She walked back to her towel, forcing herself not to glance over at his writing in the sand and flopped down on her towel, a little out of breath.

They both ignored their little challenge and started chatting about the island, its beauties, the history. The conversation flowed, wandering from topic to topic at an easy pace. How long it had been since she had an interesting conversation with an intelligent and articulate man! And with a stranger at that. But it wasn’t just the conversation. The way he sat, comfortable in his body, looking at her from time to time, intensely, as if he could see right through her, but not for too long and always with that enigmatic smile. She could see him taking in her every move: the way she hugged her knees and rested her head on them, the way she gestured when she spoke, the way she shifted to stretch out on her side facing him and flicked back her drying hair and then clipped it back in a twist. Even the pauses in their exchange were pleasant. Neither feeling they had to say something, they sat just looking out at the sea, letting the sand sift through their fingers, leaving the coarser pebbles in their hands and then tossing them into the water. The two of them were comfortable in their mutual silence.

After a while her hand went to her shoulder. The seawater had evaporated from her skin and she could feel it burning. She leant over and dug in her beach bag for the sunscreen. Sitting cross-legged, she squeezed a dollop into her palm and started to rub it into her shoulders. “Here, let me help you with that,” he offered.

“No, no! It’s quite alright,” she spurted almost too quickly.

“You can’t reach your back and it’s starting to burn,” he said firmly and took the bottle of lotion out of her hand. Avoiding his eyes, she lay face down on the towel, reached for her book and started to read, feigning total composure. She felt him kneel next to her, felt him pluck at the bow of her bikini top in the middle of her back andthe bow she had decorously tied before andand she reached behind her neck to untie the other bow before returning to her book. She heard the farting squirt of the lotion as he squeezed some into his hand and felt the firm pressure of his wide palms on the middle of her back. He started to slowly move them in an outward circular motion, gradually working the lotion into her hot skin, the traces of sand on his hands making the massage pleasingly abrasive. His hands were firm and strong as she knew they would be. His touch electric. He rubbed and rubbed, pressing his fingers into the muscles of her back, working out the kink under her right shoulder blade, slowly steadily moved his fingers up either side of the nape of her neck, forcing her to bow her head down and she slowly starting losing all sense of time and place!

She jerked herself back to reality and fantasy by immersing herself in her book anew. And then she started in amazement when she read the lines before her andlines she had seen before but now seemed to take on new meaning. The words came out of her mouth and she had no power over them.

“ ‘The mirror distilled the essence of all the encounters of strangers whose perceptions of one another existed only in the medium of the chance embrace, the accidental. During the durationless time we spent making love, we were not ourselves, whoever that might have been,!’”

“ ‘!but in some sense, the ghosts of ourselves’,” he completed. She caught her breath. He applied more and more lotion, rolling her arms, pressing his thumbs into the nape of her neck, just under the twist of dark brown hair clipped to the back of her head.

“ ‘But the selves we were not,’ she continued, “ ‘the selves of our own habitual perceptions of ourselves, had a far more insubstantial substance than the reflections we were. The magic mirror presented me with a hitherto unconsidered notion of !’”

“ ‘!myself as I,’” he murmured.

He stopped massaging for a moment. And knelt there next to her legs. They both looked out at the sea. A strange calm now. No crashing waves. A smooth glass-like surface. Their mirror.

She folded her hands on her open book and laid her head down on it. He took up his task once more, slowly, skillfully, knowingly. His attentiveness, her abandon. It had been so long since a man had touched her, especially like this, not asking for anything, only wanting to give and knowing what she wanted, not having to ask.

He scooted down a bit and positioned himself next to her calves. He started to work her feet, bringing first one and then the other level to his chest by bending each leg at the knee. After gingerly picking off the papery strips of silver-brown seaweed from each foot, he proceeded to massage each sole with his thumbs and then even each toe. He made his way to her ankles and rubbed the deep indentations next to her Achilles tendon. His hands slid steadily up her muscular calves and he rolled and relaxed them in his fingers.

He was lavishing her legs with adoration, she knew, and she responded by bending her knees slightly and lifting her calves with her toes pointed. Then, without realizing when or how, she felt him straddling her calves, now clad only in his swimming trunks, his bermuda shorts having mysteriously disappeared.

And she almost involuntarily arched her back and tilted her pelvis back as his hands glided up the backs of her thighs, only just brushing the soft insides, now totally abandoning herself to his hold on her. She could feel the sun beating down on her body, but she knew the warmth between her thighs was not solely due to the sun. His thumbs started to explore the creases at the top of her thighs, where her buttocks started to round out, gliding back and forth on either side as he now straddled the back of her thighs, using his knees as leverage so as not to let all his weight on her. Her back arched even more and she was startled to hear herself practically purr with pleasure.

In a brash move, but brash to her no longer, he hooked his thumbs into the bottom of her black bikini and pulled it up, gathering it into the juncture of her buttocks. His fingers now splayed he held both buttocks firmly in his hands and squeezed hard and then went on to massage and roll the muscles of her round ass. Her hips started to involuntarily rotate in his grasp. She wanted his touch now, had to have it, needed it. Like the sand needed the waves to lap on them.

When finally he let his fingers slip in between her thighs, grazing her outer lips it was as if a jolt of electricity had shot through her. Touch me more, harder, slip your fingers into me, she prayed silently. She felt him lean forward, felt his bare chest against her back and his hardness nestled between her buttocks over the bunched up bikini. “Is this yourself, or the reflection of yourself?” he rasped into her ear simultaneously giving the crescent a lingering lick. “And which self do you like more?” She lifted her head slightly, bringing her ear closer to his mouth, and freeing her folded hands, reached down to her hips and pulled at the bows on either side of her bikini bottom, releasing it with a bounce. She heard the sharp intake of his breath and felt him sit up again and pull down the scrap of material, fully exposing her ass to him. For hours it seemed that he massaged and rolled her cheeks in his hands, strong and firm, but it could only have been a few minutes. Occasionally he leaned forward and she could feel his hardness, still clad in his trunks, nestled in the crack of her cheeks. Up and down his hands roamed. Trailing his fingers lightly along the sides of her torso, giving her goosebumps despite the intense heat, he let them wander to the sides of her breasts, mashed against the towel. She lifted her chest slightly letting him slip his hands under them and twitched involuntarily as he tweaked her hard, erect nipples, tugging on the internal wire connecting her nipples with her groin and she felt herself swell even more. Oh, let this never end! I like this self! I need this self! Let the sea see, let it reflect us, drink us up, nothing else matters!

As if he had been reading her mind, he lifted himself off her and she knew he was pulling his trunks off in one swoop. Again he straddled her, positioning himself at the top of her thighs and she felt the tip of his swollen cock touch her slick swollen lips. Up and down her slit she felt him explore her fleshy folds with the tip of his tumescence and then distribute some of her juices along the junction of her buttocks, which he pushed together with his hands and rubbed himself up and down it. Their breathing now rapid, the sighs coming faster on her part, low groans of pleasure on his, she ached to feel him inside her, fill her, just as she knew he ached to plunge into her. But he was prolonging it, making her voice her desire.

“Oh!!.. Take me now, take me!” she finally moaned. And in a split second grabbing onto her hips, he thrust himself deep and hard inside her. “Ah!” How sweet! How electric! How perfect! How full and filled! He stayed there. Not moving, both of them just feeling, savoring, relishing their union. Her pussy muscles clenched him and she knew how warm and close and enveloped his cock was feeling. Slowly he pulled back, and she could feel every millimeter of his glorious muscle sliding out of her depths, until only the tip was buried in her opening. “More!” she squealed and with a growl he grabbed her hips, she arched her back and he thrust into her again, harder, deeper, stronger, surer. She pushed herself up on to her knees, bringing him to his knees, and like a cat stretching luxuriantly, offered herself to him. In and in and in he went now, again and again and again. And as the hot sun beat down on them, he beat into her, their rhythm building, the slap of their bodies on the sand playing counterpoint to the slap on the waves on the shore.

Suddenly he stopped, pulled out of her and flipped her onto her back. “I want to see your face,” he rasped as he knelt over her, his slick thick cock waving in the air. “I want to see the desire wash over it, I want to see the ecstasy in your eyes as I take you, I want to see those red lips open and gasp for air. I want our mirror to reflect us as we are now.” And she opened her thighs in reply and he fell upon her like a seagull swooping to pluck a fish out of the water, conquering her anew. She grabbed at the back of his neck and pulled him down to her, their mouths finally coming together and his kiss was like nothing she ever known. He filled her mouth with his swirling dancing tongue just the way he swilled her pussy with his cock. She squeezed him tighter and grabbed at his back, scraping her nails along it, but he pushed himself up to support himself on his hands and watch her face as her head began to toss back and forth. She could feel him rub the pubic bone against her clitoris as he hilted himself in her, sending waves of pleasure through her rippling body. They were fluid, they were water and they were riding the most wondrous wave together. Their bodies tightened together as if on cue, the soles of her feet pressed against his ridged arches, their shins slanting together, the tops of their tense thighs in frantic friction and their united groins intense suns growing brighter and brighter. Now! They both screamed in their minds and her high-pitched squeal echoed the cawing gulls circling overhead and his low moan the shifting pebbles on the shore as the waves broke on it, oblivious though they were to these sounds now. She felt the spasms of his cock within her, spurting his warm semen into the depths of her being and her body convulsed in wave after orgasmic wave. Their bodies bucked and shook in a soaring climax that seemed to last forever, for an infinity.