Sunday, with Feral Lesbians

It gets busy around here in September.

We call them Peepers. They arrive in New England in droves, usually in rental cars, clogging up our otherwise empty country roads and serene two-lane highways. They cram themselves into our sugar shacks and roadside fruit stands, buying up leaf-shaped glass bottles of maple syrup and tea towels with moose on them. They tromp around our forests, frightening the turkeys, throwing litter every which way, and despite everything we say, every sign, every pamphlet, every PSA on North Woods Law -- feeding the fucking bears.

I write more tickets and deal with more human-animal altercations in September than the entire rest of the year.

"Out of milk," Moira tells me, closing the fridge and starting to eat her cereal dry out of the bowl with her fingers. "Should go to Shaws."

This a classic Moira linguistic maneuver. Note the utter lack of any kind of subject in this sentence. She does not say "I should go to Shaws." She avoids saying "you should go to Shaws," or even "we..." but rather mislays the subject of the sentence entirely so that she can tell me to do it without telling me to do it. "Should go to Shaws" means I should volunteer to drive the 20 minutes to the store and go pick up the milk, or I'm an asshole.

Brilliant.

I'm already getting up. Here's the thing about Moira. Six years later, she is one of the most deliberately manipulative and slightly evil women I have ever dated, and I'm head over goddamn heels with her. It's also true that when my dad died she spent three days managing my entire surly and taciturn family, herding them from the funeral home to the burial to the reception hall without losing too many of my large, bearded and enflanneled cousins at the local dive bars on the way.

I'm slightly baffled by, and fairly terrified of her. I'm also pretty sure that anywhere she is, is home.

"Be home before dark," she says as I'm pulling my coat and boots on.

"I'm a cop and I work night patrol," I point out.

"You write tickets and pull raccoons out of people's basements."

"Sometimes I call for backup."

"Only when there's more than one raccoon." She continues crunching her cereal, leaned up against the milk-less fridge, dark gaze roving up and down my body in a way that always, always makes me wet. Instantly. "You don't want to get caught by that pack of feral lesbians."

I laugh. This is the joke. Every time someone posts on the town Facebook page about the gays and pride flags and how we should be so "in your face" or flips out and calls the police when The Duchess shows up and reads to kids at the local library at Drag Queen Storytime, every time someone posts the classic "we must protect the high school bathrooms from the perversions of people who really honestly just need to fucking pee," we nod and smile and say "yes, the feral lesbians, they'll come get you in the night."

These are the monsters our neighbors are afraid of, after all. The face-shoving gayness, the confrontational presence of a couple holding hands or -- god forbid -- kissing in front of their children or, you know, using the bathroom that's right for their gender and now everyone's flipping out because they aren't willing to just say trans or nonbinary people exist when their kid wants to know why the pretty lady in the bathroom has a beard.

Because the worst thing we could possibly do is teach kids loving acceptance, after all.

"I'll be careful," I reassure her.

Outside the world is an autumn postcard come to life. Brilliant oranges and yellows, and as the sun is setting and a gold leaf turns in the wind, the light bounces bright, almost shimmery. Further down the lake road Mr. Vu has begun the long process of burning all the leaves he's painstakingly raked off his perfect lawns, and the air is redolent with woodsmoke.

Moira and I are a little more haphazard. Leaves stay on the ground in our yard, for the most part although I keep the walkways swept and rake a path for Moira for her motorcycle from the bike shed to the road.

What the peepers don't get is that it's not just September. New England life is good pretty much year round.

**

As it turns out Moira's warning wasn't exactly for naught.

I stopped to help a tourist change a flat -- and typical of someone not around here, he wasn't chagrined that a woman half his size had to change his tire for him; it has less to do with the gender thing than self reliance -- and dusk kind of caught up with me.

So when I stopped the second time for a figure waving me down from the side of the road, it was almost dark.

They waited until I'd pulled over, and gotten most of the way out of my truck. "Everything all right?" I called out, and stayed for a second behind the open truck door, also grabbing the mag light I keep for these kinds of situations. I also have a shotgun, but I can count the number of times I've used it around humans on one hand, after fifteen years of service as a country cop.

The figure didn't respond, but turned and ran into the trees.

"Hey," I called out again. This wasn't a mere raccoon situation. I wasn't sure it was exactly a backup situation either, and I didn't have a radio anyway. I pulled out my cellphone although I could predict what I saw. The granite hills wreak havoc with reception; no bars.

"Fucking peeper tourists," I muttered. Every local would be at home, having supper and cheering the Patriots on as they beat the stuffing out of whoever else.

You're going to ask me why I left the shotgun in the car, maybe because you watch too many cop shows or something. You'll ask and I'll tell you. You know when you don't use a gun? When you're dealing with a situation you know nothing about, with human beings running around in the mostly-dark. That's a recipe for fucking disaster, I'm telling you right now.

The mag light however was useful. It cast a massive glaring cone of light through the trees and undergrowth, and now I could pick out another figure there, moving. Then a third... then a fourth.

Jumping a log here, ducking behind a tree there. Always just in the light's wash for a moment, before disappearing out of sight.

A flash of long hair, a powerful but clearly feminine figure. And... skin.

No, really, that was skin, I realized, just as there was a thud and crunch of leaves to my right and I swung the flashlight around just in time to catch the flash of a bare leg, a bare foot.

Then something bolted by me. Someone.

With a smell of moss, and cedar. A brush against my right side, like an animal, more startling than real impact, but I still staggered, and fell.

The light went out of my hand, and rolled. I reached for it, but then there was another figure, just out of the low light's cone. That cone lifted, pivoted, blazed into the canopy over me for a moment and then --

All the light was gone.

"Fuck"

And then they were on me. How many I wasn't certain, but in the dark I heard multiple feet, the draw and exhale of many breaths.

And hands. Everywhere.

I struggled, immediately although what was happening I still wasn't completely certain -- they were human, right? Human... mostly women? I thought? Maybe?

Then my belt was being unbuckled. My shirt, pulled over my head just far enough to trap my arms against my ears, then held like that.

I was breathing through the fabric.

While my shoes went, and then strong hands, multiple hands pulled my pants off.

Loam, cedar, moss. That pleasant human smell, fresh sweat. And something else. Was that hot sweet smell my aroused wetness? Theirs?

A stupid time to be aroused and this was like a fifteen raccoon situation here but they were spreading my legs, hands were on my body, my hips, my sides, my breasts my

fuck my nipples

and deft fingers pushed into my cunt.

And then my ass.

Held. Shoulders in leaves and dirt, still trapped and breathing through my own sweatshirt, unable to see anything, hips lifted, thighs held apart and fucked. And fucked. And fucked.

Now the silence was broken by my cries, first startled and okay, maybe a little scared and then rough, needy, then pleading, and in and around that I could hear them, too. Low murmurs, without language. Warm, feral growls.

I came. I came multiple times in succession, hips bucking into the hands that felt like they were everywhere, in me and on me and over me, fingers in brisk tug of my nipples as I shuddered and bucked and wet soaked out of me to drip on the forest floor.

I came and writhed and they didn't relent, but pushed more fingers into my ass, and the first mouth fixed over my now drenched and dripping cunt.

Tongue delving and the scrape of teeth that seemed

slightly sharper than usual

I howled came again

And now my shirt was pulled completely off and I was naked among them. Figures of different shapes and sizes, barely visible not that I could see straight anyway, and then I found myself pinned to the ground, hands holding my shoulders down, a fist tangled in my hair so that when one of them spread herself over me and dragged her sweet folds across my lips and nose, I had no way to move, nowhere to go.

As if to demonstrate how it was done, the mouth between my thighs devoured my cunt greedily. Sucked. Probed. Licked. Flicked, Dragged. Fucked. The fingers in my ass hooked, and tugged.

As I came again, I told myself I had no choice, and the figure over me gave a moaning growl, as my lips parted and I drank in the wetness. Salt, sweet. More drenched my tongue, and she moved, rocked. Those pointed teeth dragged my clit.

The figure over me ground herself over my lips and tongue.

I came again. And again.

The woman over me was relentless. Her body was a demand; she needed no words, and said none. I knew what I was supposed to do and I did it. Even as she rode and then stopped, and I was held down, every hole taken, running out of air as her body stopped my breath.

When I got back something more like consciousness she was moving off of me, having just come.

They turned me. Ass up, knees held and spread apart, body suspended among them, hands and mouths and bodies everywhere. Under me. Against me. In me. Later I would remember the drag not just of hands over my breasts, my ass, tight grip of their hands around my skull as they rode me, rode my mouth, but also the soft spill of their hair over my naked skin.

Smell, that woods smell that I'd worked and lived in most of my life but was concentrated here and mingled with the headysweet musk of sex, so that I would never again go in the woods without remembering how they smelled.

They took my ass, my cunt, over and over. Mouths and fingers. Once, the thick insistence of a fist, every knuckle palpable inside me, like gnarled wood, while I wailed and thrashed, and the others groaned encouragement and held me open wide for her.

I would think I could take no more, not my body, not my ass or my cunt, or my mouth. Lips, bruised and thick and over-sensitive, just like my aching, clenching ass and abused, drenched folds.

But I could. I did. I lost track of time, among them. Somewhere simply gave up, and my body became theirs, deep in the woods.

**

I came to just before dawn.

Instead of finding myself naked under the trees, splayed-limbed, instead I found myself in a highly competent brush shelter. Clothes back on, tucked up into a pile of leaves with my mag light and keys set conspicuously on a flat rock at the shelter's small mouth. I was sore, pleasantly bruised. Everywhere. Also ... utterly cozy and warm.

Emerging I found I was only a few hundred yards from the road and my truck. Had I only come that far into the forest?

As I stood up, stretched, felt everywhere

fuck everywhere

they'd had me and touched me and gripped me, I considered the shelter. And then, like any good outdoorswoman, I pulled it apart and scattered it.

So that as I finally left that place in the forest, there'd be no sign anyone had been there at all.

**

Moira was lounging on our secondhand sofa when I came home and put the milk in the fridge (I judged the night had been cool enough that it wouldn't have spoiled in the truck).

"Get lost on the way to the Shaws?" she inquired, utterly unconcerned about my absence for most of the night, and total lack of phone call.

"Uh, no." I considered how to relate all of this, while that dark and a-little-too-knowing gaze pinned me into the cabin wall. "No, more on the way home."

"Hm." She smiled at me, that little lip-quirk that says everything and nothing and drives me completely bonkers. She picked up the socks she'd been knitting, and began another round, deft fingers working.

"Feral lesbians," I said, a little too quickly, a little too sharply.

She didn't even look up, just nodded.

"Mm-hmm."

##