Mendocino Coast

The woman in this story associates colors with sounds and with forces of nature, even sex. This is a story of her quest to capture those colors in her abstract paintings, and of her love life with a French wine merchant and art collector, Andre, and a French-American fashion model and artist, Claudine.

Chapter 1. Synesthesia; Andre

The sound of the fog outside the cottage was beautiful. It was lulling me to sleep.

I lay next to Andre, smothered under a blanket, our bodies still warm from our lovemaking, in touch from head to toe. We were past the panting and desperate recovery, but not yet passed into that deep post-coital sleep that sometimes followed our most passionate sex. He moved his body. Just a bit. Just enough so that I felt the hair on his chest drag tantalizingly across my still swollen nips. It was such a little sensation, but it brought about a complete change from fading into sleep to arousal.

"Listen to the fog," I said.

"Danielle, fog doesn't make a sound," he whispered. "It's the wind you are hearing. I'm sure of it." I loved his French accent, but at moments like this, and always in moments of passion, he would slip completely into French which I struggled to follow.

"No. The wind is a different sound. I hear it too, but fog makes its own sound, and it has a color just as the wind does. But they are different colors. Sometimes quite different." I moved my chest against his. Not much. Just enough to recreate the sensation of his chest hair tantalizing my nips. Why was I doing this? I had already lost track of the number of times I had climaxed since we arrived last night. I wanted more. I always wanted more of Andre.

"Let me guess. The fog is grey?"

"No, no. I've explained this before. Fog is grey, but only when all you do is look at it. You have to listen to it and hear its own sound, separate from the wind that carries it, and like all sounds, the sound of fog has a color. Fog is a force, it has a sound, and the sound has a color."

"But not grey?" He moved against me again, responding to my movement. He knew what I wanted, and this was his slow subtle way of saying yes without terminating our conversation.

"Sometimes, but usually not," I said.

I listened carefully. There were a lot of sounds seeping through the windows—the muted tones of the surf pounding on the rocks a hundred feet below (a swirling combination of pastel blues and grey), the gusting tones of the Pacific wind hitting the first solid object it had met since leaving Japan (a sharp, brittle, pale green that would break into an intense dark green when a gust smacked the side of the cottage), the occasional discordant screech of a gull (a glowing, intense, but brief, yellow, a streak across the canvas of my mind), the rustle of the tall grass that covered the highland between the thrusting mountains and the break of the cliffs down to the ocean (the softest pale brown you can imagine), the smoke drifting rapidly east from fire in the wood stove (yes, even wood smoke has its own sound to me, and today the sound had a pale ochre associated with it), and always, above all, the sound of the fog.

For me all sounds have colors associated with them. I'm a synesthesiate. That's a person who associates colors with sounds. I don't exactly see the color that goes with a sound. It's not a part of the visual context. It's just an awareness of color, sometimes quite intense, that occurs in my head and may be remembered, or forgotten, just as the sound is. When I was young my parents were afraid I was psychotic or had a brain tumor, so they took me to a series of doctors. But after pestering me with a lot of questions and tests, they all concluded I was just a synesthesiate, which is a condition that, although not common, is harmless. The business about forces having sounds and in turn colors associated with them—I just didn't bother the shrinks with that issue. They probably would have just wanted to dissect me like an unusual frog someone brings into a biologist's lab. Bottom line is my brain is not quite wired up like most peoples, but it's not a real problem for me.

"But it's not grey," I told him. "Not this morning. The fog's a soft orange. Perhaps with brown streaks following the twisting line of the wind."

He laughed. "I love you, but I will never understand you. How does your head do that?" He moved his body again and this time I felt his swelling prick dragged softly along my thigh.

"It's the way I paint," I told him. "I don't paint objects. Everyone can see objects, and there is no way I could paint a bowl of apples and make it more beautiful than it is to virtually everyone who sees it. But sounds. Sounds are different. Not everyone can sense the beauty of sounds and every sound comes with its own color and that's what I paint. My paintings are a re-creation of the sounds I hear and that includes the sounds that forces like the fog make for me." I moved my thigh, the one pressed against his prick. Not much. Just a little motion, but enough to rub his swelling cock.

"Does the sports car we drove up here in have a color?" he responded, moving to drag his prick along my leg again.

"Yes, of course. It's bright red. You and everyone else can see it. It's bright red, always. It's not a force. Just an object. The only color it has is the one it came from the factory with, and a few rust patches the sea has given it. Now sometimes it goes vroom vroom or there is a screech from the tires if I go around corners too fast, but those are sounds I cause that have their own colors, separate and apart from the red of the car. I moved my thigh again stroking his rapidly swelling prick.

"And the vroom vroom?" I felt his prick twitch.

"It's kind of a pale grey, usually." More motion from my thigh.

"And the screech?" He flexed his glutes, just the slightest amount, pushing his hardening cock along my thigh.

"Oh such harsh colors—screaming red with black streaks and bright sparks." I responded by dragging my nips through his chest hairs again, just the lightest bit. It sent sparks coursing through me.

"You need to understand," I continued, "The colors I'm talking about, the ones I paint, are the colors associated with the sounds made by forces—wind, water, screeching tires, and some that you probably can't hear, like the fog. The colors of the objects you and everyone else see are irrelevant to my art. The colors I am painting are not a part of the visual context my eyes are reporting in on." I put a hand on his ass. I didn't do anything with it. Just placed it there.

"And if you close your eyes?" he asked. He flexed his glutes again. My hand could feel it and my thigh could feel his cock moving against it again.

"Still there. They just occur somewhere in my head and I am aware of them. Sometimes I can almost tune them out, but at other times they overwhelm the visual component." I gripped his ass now, pulling him towards me.

"And this?" He rolled me over inserting himself between my legs. His prick, recovered yet again, forced its way into my sex filling me almost instantly with a pulsing force."

"Oh fuck!" I said.

"Yes, fucking," he said. "That's what you wanted isn't it? More fucking." He withdrew, and then rammed his cock back, stretching my already ravaged cunt to a shape and size I couldn't believe. He could be very aggressive at times. I loved it.

"Is that a force with a color?" he asked as he paused, my cunt fully impaled by his cock.

"Yes. Oh fuck yes." I wrapped my legs around him and held him in place as I tried, and utterly failed, to describe the bursts of colors, wild swirling colors in a myriad of shades and tones that spun through my head as he thrust that big, hard prick of his into me. I knew of no media: not oil paints; not acrylics; not pastels; not water colors; not even electronic media, with its palette of unnatural colors created by man rather than nature, that could accurately reproduce the burst of colors his thrust had unleased in my head. The amazing part is, it is always different. Each time he fucks me the colors that explode in my head are different from the last time, and they change even as we are fucking, fading, bursting forth in new shades and intensities as my passion ebbs and soars and then, as just now, it explodes in a blinding flash when my body capitulates and reaches its climax."

"Wow," I said gasping. "I didn't expect that one. It just kind of exploded in me." I gasped some more. He had brought me to a climax with just a few strokes of his hard cock. How did this man, this lovely man, do that? The colors from my climax were fading rapidly as I recovered.

He paused, letting me gather my wits. But he had not finished. I felt his hard cock still filling me, hot and bright. He wasn't thrusting. Just a steady red glow of power, until he began to move it again—a blizzard of colors broke out in my consciousness.

I rolled him over and rode him. I wanted to be in control of our fucking. I was painting a cavalcade of ever changing colors across the canvas of my mind as I rose and fell, thrusting his cock in and out. I was trying to control the wash of color blowing through my mind as his prick ravaged my cunt—and failing. Failing as I always did when we fucked and his power generated intense colors that flashed forth deep within my mind. I couldn't control it, I couldn't describe it as it occurred, and I was sure that I couldn't recreate it on a canvas.

My smallish tits were swinging back and forth on my chest as I fucked him. Oh my god, his cock felt so good as it plunged in and out of me, and the colors, the wild splashes of color generated on each thrust were more than I could rationally absorb—there for an instant and then gone, replaced by another crash of blinding color. He reached up and pinched my nipples sending streaks of energy directly to my clit and wild flashes of lightning streaking across the palate of my mind. It went on and on for minutes, hours? No not hours, but who can track the time of a good fuck and it was not just a good fuck, but a great fuck.

"Mon Dieu. I'm going to cum. Oh Yesssssss," he growled in his climax.

For the first time since he had arrived the palate in my head saw the colors of his passion, his climax—reds and greens, yellows and purples, swirled in mists of brown, loosing intensity as his climax began to fade. The colors came with the force of his ejaculation, much as my synesthesia could sense the colors generated by the force of a gust of wind, but so much more intense. Just as his climax died away, as his prick dripped the last drops of his ejaculate into me, another climax, this one yet another of my own but not as strong as the last, sent bolts of sparkling colors through my mind, overriding the fading shades of his climax. Both eventually faded to a soft grey as his prick and my spasming sex organs ceased to be color generating forces.

We rolled to the side, still coupled, and lay panting. The colors of our climaxes were gone, no longer exploding across my brain and fading fast from my memory. The colors of the present were only the soft pink of the warmth of his body against mine and just a faded trace of pale yellow coming from his shrinking cock slowly sliding out of my cunt. Then it all faded to black as I slipped into post-coital sleep.

We were here for a few nights, staying in a cottage high on a cliff above the Pacific, three hour's drive up Highway One to the north of San Francisco. The nearest community large enough to rate a post office is a very small town called Little River. The cottage and about 100 acres of Pacific headland surrounding it are mine, inherited from a deceased uncle. The headland breaks away a couple of hundred yards from the cottage and falls in a sheer, rocky cliff a hundred feet or more to the pounding Pacific. The east side of the property is bounded by Highway One, the twisting two lane highway that snakes its way up the rugged Pacific Coast to the north of San Francisco. A stand of twisted cypress trees along the highway protects my cottage from visibility from the highway. On the northern side of my property there is an inlet with a small beach at its end. A narrow trail leads down to the beach, but its start is hard to find, so the beach is usually empty and always hidden from the view of the highway. On the other side of the inlet there is an old resort which has a lodge and restaurant, and a series of very private cottages frequented usually by lovers from the megalopolis that has grown up around San Francisco. I have known the family that owns it since my childhood. To the south the ocean swings inland again and the cliffs and the highway rise steeply before dropping again as they approach Little River. My neighbor to the south is the Pacific Ocean, as it is to the west.

I had picked Andre up the day before at the San Francisco Airport when his plane arrived from Paris. He had slept most of the drive north. His flight had arrived at 4:30 in the afternoon, but of course, that was 1:30 in the morning, Paris time, and he had been up much of the night before trying to explain to his wife, Brigette, why he had to make a business trip to San Francisco in early August, just when she was about to depart for three weeks in Provence. It wasn't that she wanted him to go with her to Provence. In fact he was sure his presence there would be inconvenient for her. No upper curst Parisian wife wants her husband hanging around during her rendezvous with a lover in Cannes. But somehow the idea that he would be on the other side of the globe for a week, on what his wife was sure was a fabricated business need, was not acceptable to her. She wanted him away and not in her way, but not in a place 5,000 miles away where her friends would not be keeping tabs on him. Their marriage was not a happy one.

It was fine that he had slept. I didn't like to hear about his frustrations with his wife. No mistress does. Besides, if he slept, he would be at least partially recovered from his time change, and I would not spend my first night of our assignation being sexually frustrated by a jet lagged lover. This was a pattern we had followed for each of his every six month visits to the US. Our affair had started a few years before when I met him in a gallery I was working at in the Napa Valley.

By the time we moved his luggage from my car into the cottage he was wide awake. We started a fire in the wood stove and crawled out of our clothes and under the blankets. Pausing long enough for a glass of champagne, we picked up where we had left off with the passionate kiss I had greeted him with at SFO.

Our sex that afternoon and evening was ferocious. Neither of us had had sex with anyone for a couple of months and we were ravenous. We fucked in every position we knew—on the bed like good missionaries; on the floor, doggy style, my face on the floor and my ass pointing up at just the right angle to let his rigid cock pound my lusting cunt while his balls slapped against my clit on every thrust; cowboy style as I bounced on his hips, ramming his hard cock to the limits my cunt could accept again and again as my thick mat of curly red hair and my small tits swung wildly back and forth; upright, Andre standing and holding me off the ground in his arms, my legs around his back and leaning against a wall as he pounded that big cock into my cunt with me groaning with each thrust of his shaft; spooning; and oral sex in a myriad of positions. It went on for hours until we both reached a level of exhaustion that demanded sleep.

And the synesthesia was spectacular. Wild colors that came in broad fields and stripes, even patterns like cloth for clothing, but so much brighter. There were flashes of color overlaying other washes of color, and the explosions of color that crashed like a cymbal across my brain each time I climaxed.

When one or the other of us awoke in the middle of the night we again assaulted our partner and repeated our lustful encounter on a gradually weakening basis, the latest being the intercourse described above. Now it was early morning, and it was me who wanted to sleep. "All right Danielle," I heard him whisper as I faded into sleep. Two hours later I awoke to the sound of Andre poking at the fire in the wood stove and loading more logs into it.

I sat up, letting the blankets fall away from my naked chest. I wasn't well endowed, but I had never been embarrassed by it. I was always comfortable with nudity, even if I didn't meet someone in Hollywood or New York's standard for female beauty. I was tall and relatively thin, my breasts, as I have said, are nothing pretentious. My legs were long and slim. My hips narrow. Approaching forty, I was still at essentially the same weight I had been at in college. I had let the tightly clipped dark red hair of my years of law practice grow out into a rather wild mop of hair that hung down past my shoulders and was something I was always pushing out of my brown eyes.

"Bonjour," I said softly, pushing my French language skill to its limits. "Where have you been?" I had tried hard since the beginning of our affair to learn French, but somehow the only part I could remember were the naughty bits that he taught me as we made love. Conversational French was beyond me.

"You were sleeping so I went for a walk. I brought coffee and croissants from the lodge," he said nodding towards toward a pair of coffees and a pastry sack on the table next to me.

"Oh yum. I'm starving," I said as I opened the bag and retrieved a croissant. I took a bite, sending a shower of crumbs across the bed. I quickly followed the bite of croissant with a sip of coffee.

"Oh perfect temperature."

"You're going to get crumbs in the bed clothes."

"Certainly. Take your clothes off and join me. You didn't fly 5,000 miles to have your morning croissants and coffee at a table as you would if you were home with your wife."

He chuckled. "She would never be up this early." He walked to the bed as he spoke, flopping down on it.

"Given the limited amount of sleep we've had since we arrived here last night, I think this is more like being up late than getting up early," I said.

"Well that wouldn't happen with my wife. We haven't been up all night screwing in years."

"How do you live like that? A life without sex would be impossible for me."

"I don't live without sex, or haven't you noticed what we've been doing since we arrived here last night."

"Oh really. That's what all those wild colors were?"

"I don't know about the colors, but you were certainly doing a lot of screaming and groaning during the night."

"Oh yeah, that. I guess we were having sex, weren't we? Can we have more?"

Andre laughed, "Yes, but not now. You have worn me out woman."

I smiled with pride and brushed a croissant crumb off my breast.

"But we only see each other once every six months," I said, returning to his sex life. "What do you do in between."

"Same as you. There are others."

"But not your wife?"

"Not my wife. She and I are in agreement on that. It is a marriage in form only."

"Why don't you divorce? That is what I did when I decided my marriage was an utter failure." I usually shied away from this question because I feared sounding like the ambitious mistress seeking to snare her lover as a husband. My first marriage had been such a failure, I doubted if I would have said yes even if he had asked me.

"I have told you. My mother-in-law is a difficult woman. We call here Grand-Mere, even though she has no grandchildren, because she fancies herself the grande dame of the family. Importantly she controls all the family assets and has made it clear that if Brigette and I divorce she will disinherit us. Everything will go to her brother, John-Paul."