The Conquerer Frog

We fell into bed and were immediately all over each other, her leg around mine, pulling me against her, pulling my shirt up, kissing, sucking. Clothes came off in bits and pieces, with time for us to marvel and explore with fingers and mouths as each patch of bare skin was exposed.

"God!" I said, "This is crazy!"

"I know, I know," she arched her back to me as I sucked her breast, "I wanted you as soon as I saw you. I knew I had to have you!"

She opened her jeans, lifted her hips off the bed and peeled them down, pushing her panties and her socks off at the same time. Her skin was like cream and just as soft, and she settled herself into my bed as if she'd been living there for years, kicking the blankets back and moving the pillows out of the way. She was wonderfully excited, as excited as I was, maybe more, and she could hardly keep still for me to find her. I finally had to take her wrists and press them down into the mattress to keep her in one place, and when I did she turned those green eyes up at me and told me yes, now.

I sunk into her and her eyes closed. She clenched her teeth together and gave a great sigh of relief.

"Oh yes!" she whispered, "God that's so good! So fucking good!"

She was quiet for only a moment, and then she started to move, and when she did I knew immediately I was with a woman who loved to fuck. She knew just what she wanted and knew how to get it, and it was an absolute pleasure to be there with her letting her use my body for her own selfish pleasure. I helped her where I could, but for the most part it was her show, and she gave me a master class in lovemaking. Just as she'd shown me how to caress her breasts, she showed me now how to use my cock in her, when to thrust hard and fast and when to grind against her, when to just stop and let her savor the feel of me inside her; when to give her my tongue and when to let her lick the sweat off my chest.

"God, I hope you don't mind," she said at one point with a weak, self-conscious smile, "but you just feel so fucking good. I just can't help it!"

Then the smile was replaced by a look of rapt astonishment as another little thrill passed through that voluptuous body, and it was back to fucking me again, hips thrusting at me, hands caressing me.

She was more than good. She was perfect. She was like what my dream of sex would be, and by some miracle I had the presence of mind to know that it was great at the time, while it was happening, and not just discover it later as a memory. I knew this was something special, and all my senses were open. I was paying absolute attention to everything we did. I was right there, more alive than I'd ever been.

This was the secret of the night. This was the wildness outside, what everyone was looking for. This is what you wanted when the wind blew over the dark streets, and this was why strangers gaped at one another across smoky rooms, looking for that person, that one person who held the key to the hot sexual mystery. This was why J.B. Hutto made that cheap guitar howl, and why we sat rapt at his feet and let him slice us to pieces with his incandescent blues. And this was why I walked the streets with that dead frog in a box in my pocket. Right here, right now. The sweet soul-sucking pleasure of sex, of this woman, being with her, holding her, reaching for it, reaching for it.

"Unh! Fuck me!" she grunted. She held her knee up to her chest, holding herself open for me.

She turned, twisted till she had one foot on the mattress, her body turned slightly, and she kept her eyes closed and her mouth open as she climbed the hill to her orgasm. We were both filmed with sweat, and the air was thick with sexual humidity, the smell of her perfume and the apartment's steam heat. She was greedy for it now, hungry for her come, and she started panting and mewling like a runner with the finish line in sight, using me, not caring what I thought.

"Yes, Jayde!" I gasped, fucking her hard, "Yes, baby! Get it! Come for me, baby! Come for me Jayde!"

Her face clenched as if in denial, her mouth opened and her hands scrabbled at me, trying to push me away and pull me close at the same time. Her body arched off the bed, lifting me up with her. She cried out and snarled like a tigress, then pulled me tight and with a groan of savage sexual pleasure began to come.

It was too much for me. I had my fingers dug into the softness of her ass, pulling her up against me, and as I felt her convulse in climax, I just let go and let all the tension out. All that anguish that had gathered in me just boiled up and I began to spurt into her in shuddering release, wracking with sobs, digging my toes into the mattress to push that last final inch into that woman's heaven.

And as wild and wonderfully selfish as she'd been in the build-up, now in orgasm she was all giving, hot tenderness and surrender, stroking me, kissing me, urging me on, begging for my come, licking my face as I shot into her again and again.

We lay gasping for breath, her arm thrown over her sweat-soaked head. I was too drained to move and could just lie there and marvel at what had just happened.

"Christ, Jayde," I panted for breath. "That was…that was…"

"Shhh, shhh." she said, squirming out from under me so that she could enfold herself against my chest. "I know. I know."

She waited till our breathing slowed, then she smiled at me and said, "I knew you'd be good. I knew it as soon as I saw you, outside the bar."

I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Slowly, consciousness and coherence were returning to me. "You saw me outside? I didn't see you."

"I saw you while I was talking to Chapman outside the bar," she said. "I went inside just when you crossed the street."

"You know Chapman?" I asked.

"Yeah. Not well. I told him to give you the frog."

Now I sat up. What was going on here?

"Wait a minute," I said. "You told Chapman to give me that frog? Why? He told me it was some sort of love charm. Where did you get it?"

My sitting up had left her alone in the bed. She pulled the blankets over her breasts and rolled over on her back, smiling and pleased with herself. "I teach high school bio. I found it a few weeks ago when we were cleaning out the stockroom. All the formaldehyde had evaporated probably years ago, leaving that weird little mummified frog. It was too cool to throw away. It looked like it had magic powers."

"So why'd you want him to give it to me?" I asked her. "He wanted fifty dollars for it!"

"I saw you outside," she said, lifting her eyebrow slyly. "I wanted you to have magic powers. I wanted you to enchant me. It's Halloween. I needed to be enchanted."

I just sat there and looked at her. She seemed to be serious.

"You don't believe that stuff, do you?" I asked her. "That it had some sort of magical powers?"

"Not for me it didn't," she said smiling. "That's not how love charms work anyway. You can't make them for yourself. You can only make them for someone else. Then you've just got to make sure you get in their way."

What a remarkable woman.

"And did I enchant you?" I asked her.

She beamed at me. "Totally."

I tried to figure out if I'd been had, then decided that I didn't care. I kissed her and felt her smile as we kissed, then she asked, "Did you really pay him? He wasn't supposed to ask you for money. Fifty dollars is a lot of money for a dead frog."

"I gave him twenty." I said.

She looked at me and laughed. "Was it worth it?"

Down at Wise Fools J.B. Hutto must have been starting his third set about then. His eyes would have been bright with excitement, his fingers sure on that guitar, gazing over that packed and smoky room with the calm eyes of a blues Buddha. The crowd would be thicker now, and more restless; more costumes probably, people coming and going, stopping to look in, always looking for something, looking for someone. The Halloween moon had risen above the buildings that front the alley that runs by my place, and inside, in my bed Jayde opened her mouth to my kiss and let me toss the blankets away from her warm and naked breasts. She already knew the answer to her question.

That's how magic happens on Halloween. It doesn't happen with wands and spells and crystal balls, and it doesn't happen with love charms and conquering frogs. It happens with eyes across feverish bar rooms and piercing wails out of cheap guitars handled by master musicians. It happens when the big cold winds gather out of Canada and come sweeping over the Great Lakes and into the streets of town setting people to wandering in search of they know not what.

And most of all it happens between people who look for it, between people who really want it to happen.