The Girl Next Door

"What, and you don't want to?"

I couldn't help groaning. "Oh Jesus, Angie, I always want to have sex with you, but why here?"

"Conner, I've spent the last week since you asked if I wanted to join you here fantasizing about taking your long, hard cock into my body. I'll have you know that I really have gone six weeks with only my rides on Jack's numb dick to keep me alive.

"I need this, Conner. I need a big jolt of passion and adrenaline to rescue my very sanity. And what could be more exciting than fucking at the top of this crane? There was a picture of a workman standing in this cage on the website, and I swore that I'd do whatever it took to bring you up here to break my drought. Don't you dare deny me this."

I nodded and drew her into my arms. "You could have picked somewhere a little more private." In truth, though, this was kind of a mixed bag.

We were within easy line of sight of about seven-and-a-half million people here, and the flashing red lights just above our heads were putting out a lot of candlepower. It was enough to make me feel like we were on stage at a strip club. On the other hand, the fog was now covering all but the spire of the tallest building below us and anyone working in this building would be in the fog as well.

"With the clouds below us, we've got this amazing full moon and night sky all to ourselves," Angie murmured, grinding herself against my crotch. "I couldn't have planned it any better."

Her belly against my hard cock felt amazing and I suddenly didn't care how stupid this was. I was going to have her.

I grabbed Angie's naked little ass and lifted her up so I could kiss her at my own level. She met my kiss with abandon and wrapped her legs around my waist. Her body was feather light, but hot as hell. I felt hard nipples poking me through my shirt.

I held her with one arm so that I could work at my pants with the other. By the time I'd worked my pants down over my hips, I was almost painfully hard.

I began to lower her, and she reached down to guide me. She was ready and we both gasped as her lips spread and she took all of me into her warm sweetness. I leaned back against the rail and let the sensations wash over me. She was so tight and wet and perfect, and I'd needed this for so long.

"Jesus, that's good," she gasped as I began thrusting with my hips, working in and out of her tight sheath. The cage was rocking a little now from our movement, and even the crane seemed to be swaying a little.

"Yeah, it's just what I needed," I gasped. It was amazing. So tight and so deep. I was worried that I might come too quickly, so I stopped thrusting and pulled her hips in tight, letting her grind her clit against me. I kneaded her tight little ass and caressed her pucker with my fingers, though I didn't try and penetrate her that way, seeing as how my hands were far from clean.

Angie must have found the climb quite exciting, because I felt her reaching a climax very quickly. "Fuck," she gasped. "So soon."

"Come all you want," I told her.

"I will," she said, shuddering. She tipped her face up and we kissed deeply as she orgasmed. Eventually, she rested her head on my shoulder and started to grind again. She did that three times in all, seeming to really enjoy herself, while I did enough thrusting to stay hard and in the game, but not enough to be in danger of coming.

"Okay," she finally gasped, "it's your turn. Just warn me before you come. I don't want to climb down with my pussy full of spunk."

"Deal," I said, as I began to thrust into her in long strokes. My arms were starting to get tired now and I didn't want to be up on this crane for any longer than necessary. I must have been closer than I'd thought, though, and after maybe a minute, I felt my release approaching fast. "I'm gonna come soon," I gasped.

"Okay, put me down."

I lifted Angie off of me and set her down carefully. "Quick, press up against the rail," she said. I moved forward, my cock sticking out into space. Angie spat in her palm and reached through the rail, stroking me smooth and fast as I rushed to my climax.

"Oh shit," I groaned as I pumped my wad out into nothingness. There were no other buildings visible now, and a stiff wind blew my issue away from us. I hoped that no one far below would have an unfortunate encounter with my falling semen.

At last I came down from my high, but my grip on the railing only tightened. The cage was moving around a lot now. Then I realized that it wasn't just the cage, it was the whole crane, moving back and forth in the suddenly strong wind. Angie and I had been so fully engaged with each other that we hadn't noticed it, but our position up here was now a lot more precarious.

"Oh shit," Angie said, clinging to me. "When did this happen?"

"Oh, in the last fifteen minutes when we should have been walking from the tower to the Hilton," I said, now really pissed that I had let this situation get away from me.

"It's getting cold," she complained, shivering. She reached down for her pile of clothes, but came up empty. They were long gone, carried away in the wind. I looked down the crane the way we had come and was startled to discover that I couldn't see the building. The fog had risen and was still rising. As I watched, a thick patch of it scudded along right below us, blocking out most of the crane.

If it had been just the wind, I would have insisted that we stay in the cage until it calmed down, but with the cold and the fog, which would be getting us wet very soon, we might be in danger of hypothermia if we stayed that long.

"We need to get down, now," I urged Angie. I started to pull off my shirt for her, but she shook her head.

"It's too baggy," she said. "It'd only get in my way. Let's go."

My macho pride said I should lead the way, but Angie was definitely the better climber, so I let her go up the ladder first. The steel was colder now and I could feel a light film of condensation on it. Shit! The mesh and the rail were going to be slippery. We were in serious trouble now.

"Okay," Angie said, any playfulness now replaced by sober forthrightness. "We need to keep moving, because it looks like it's only going to get worse on the way down, but don't go too fast and don't take any chances." Fine words coming from her, I thought, but she had more experience with these situations.

Just in case we thought that it couldn't get any worse, though, there was a blinding flash of light and then the loud crack of thunder just a fraction of a second later. I'd been looking in that direction and gasped as I saw the other crane light up through the fog as a lightning bolt hit it. For a long moment I was blinded, seeing the afterimage of the blue-white lances of current dancing on our companion crane on the other side of the building. It could just as easily have been us, and if we stayed up here very long, it would be.

"New plan," Angie said. Her hair was standing on end from the static. "Let's get down quick!"

I clambered up the ladder, any thoughts of just how high off the ground we were now forgotten in the desire to get us down before we were roasted alive. Then it occurred to me that electrocution wasn't actually the danger. The cranes were equipped with lightning rods of course, so we likely wouldn't get a big enough jolt to kill us outright. What would happen would be that the residual voltage that the rods didn't absorb would make us flinch hard enough to lose our grip. It would be the fall that killed us. Very comforting.

Angie led the way, carefully walking backwards step by step while keeping both hands on the increasingly slippery rail. I followed, doing it the way she was. After about the first ten feet, I looked over my shoulder to see how she was doing.

"Don't look at me," she hissed. "Keep your eyes and attention on what you're doing. And don't look down!"

Not that I could have seen anything by looking down anyway. The fog had surrounded us with a vengeance and I couldn't see more than about twenty feet up the crane. It felt like we were descending while encased in a giant ping pong ball. It had also gotten much darker, as the moon was now blotted out by the fog. In seemingly moments, the cage was lost from sight and all I could see was a small portion of the crane. The blinking red light at the top slowly became less intense, then almost faded away.

I could hear the sounds of Angie's shoes on the mesh and her hands on the rail. I could tell she was still close and appreciated that. I considered all of this her fault, since she'd lured me up here, but she was doing her best now to get us out of it.

The trip back down was a living nightmare. Lightning flashed all around us, the crane was moving back and forth wildly now, and the wind was howling. It was hard to tell if it was actually raining or if the fog was just so thick that it only felt like it, but the effect was the same. The rail, which had provided good grip on the way up, was as slippery as sin now, and required a firm grip to keep from sliding. My hands were feeling the burn and I was beginning to doubt that Angie and I would have enough strength to make it to the bottom. Somehow, though, we kept going.

It seemed like we'd been descending forever, but eventually I figured we must be getting close. I was feeling a glimmer of hope that if we didn't get hit by lightning, we might just get out of this alive.

It was then that Angie slipped. I heard her scream, then there were sounds of a mad scramble, and then silence. I looked behind me, expecting the worst, but Angie was still there. She was in an extremely perilous position, though, and I couldn't believe that she hadn't yet fallen. She was clinging to one of the cross braces along the bottom of the box frame, dangling from her hands, and her face was rightfully filled with near panic.

Being as good a climber as she was, she might normally have been able to have swung a few times, then gotten a foot up on to the mesh, then levered herself up, but the bar she was holding onto was made of five-inch diameter steel tubing. It was far too thick for her to wrap her small hands around effectively. I was amazed that she had been able to hold onto it at all, but just in that first look, I could see that her hands were already slipping.

I instinctively threw all caution to the wind, stepping quickly down the mesh. I knew I was taking too many chances, but Angie had seconds at most.

I was almost there when my own foot slipped, probably due to residual oil or something else that we hadn't noticed on the way up. It was probably what Angie had slipped on.

My legs splayed as they went out from under me, going on either side of one of the vertical bars. I held on as tight as I could with my hands, but they were almost completely worn out. My crotch slammed into the cross member hard and I felt that intense pain that comes with a good kick to the nuts, but it was the angle of the fall that actually tore my hands away from the rail. Like Angie, I flailed helplessly.

Unlike Angie, though, I had my legs around a solid piece of steel. I hooked it behind my knees as I slid on my stomach on the slick mesh, rotating around it until I was facing straight down the crane. Amazingly, I was now face-to-face with Angie, who was just a couple feet below me. Her hands were still slipping and I reached out, grabbing for her.

I was reaching for her forearm, but just as my hand touched her, her grip finally failed and she fell. What I got was her thin wrist, but I got a good grip and her momentum wasn't quite enough to tear her away from me. For a long moment she dangled, looking up at me with scared and pleading eyes.

"Please, Connor," she whispered. "Don't let me die."

I could see how far she would fall. "Don't look down, Angie," I said, my voice full of despair. "I've got the wrong grip. I can't hold on for long and I can't pull you back up. Can you get your other hand up and climb my arm?"

To her credit, Angie managed to lever herself upwards enough to get her hand on my wrist, but my forearm was too wet and thick for her to get a grip on. I tried to reach her with my other hand, but with my angle across the mesh, there was no way I could stretch nearly far enough.

We both knew now that it was only a matter of time. There was nothing more we could do about it. Angie was going to fall.

"Tell Jack that I always loved him and that he was the world to me," she said bravely.

"I'll tell him."

"And Connor, I know I've treated you badly so many times, but I want you to know how much I've always admired you. Kim couldn't have asked for a better man. She loves you to death." She sniffled, now evidently resigned to her fate. "And I want you to know, Connor. I love you too."

It was a startling admission, but sometimes people can't bear to admit what's in their hearts until death is staring them in the face. I knew I'd always treasure those words.

"And there's something you should know, Angie," I grunted. We could both feel that our grip was about to fail. She looked at me with expectant eyes, knowing that these would probably be the last words she would ever hear.

"Angie, I love you too, but I still think you're a wench." Her pretty face had only started to register my words when our grip broke and she dropped away from me.

I could see her begin to draw the breath that would precede the scream, but she'd only started to inhale when her feet met the heavy steel mesh of the platform that workers used to service the crane's bearings. Angie stumbled for a moment, but then gained her balance without even having to grab the safety rail. She'd fallen about a foot-and-a-half.

I was in pain, from my throbbing balls, to my scraped chest, and down to my burning hands, but I burst out laughing. She looked ridiculous, standing there in only her tennis shoes, trying to adjust to the fact that she wasn't about to die after all.

Angie did take that big breath though. She just used it for a different purpose.

"Connor O'Leary, you are one motherfucking son-of-a-bitch!" she screamed, but then burst out laughing herself, probably from the adrenaline and the sheer joy of having survived.

I hooked an arm around the crossbar she'd been clinging to, and let go with my legs. My body swiveled around and I dropped clumsily onto the platform next to her.

Angie leapt into my arms and I held her close. She clutched me with one arm, and pounded painfully on my back with the fist of the other. Neither of us said anything for a long minute as we let the adrenaline fade.

Finally, I put her down. This time she accepted my shirt, which fit her like a dress. "What do you say we finish climbing off of this stupid crane?" I said as she busied herself rolling up the sleeves. "We're still in some danger from lightning. Once we're down, you can grab your purse, and I know where they have a clean supply of coveralls."

"Sounds good. And when we get to the Hilton, you're going to spend some time making up for fucking with me."

"I think I can handle that."



* * * * *



The radiant heat from the blazing Vietnamese sun was warm on my skin as I wriggled slightly, feeling the sand shift under the thick terry of my beach towel. My muscles began to relax as the heat permeated through my body.

A soft, feminine hand slipped into mine. Its owner's firm, slim body was spread out on the towel next door. "Ah, it doesn't get any better than this," she murmured. "Warm breezes and my secret lover beside me on a private beach where no one will bother us."

Privacy was an especially good thing, because neither of us was wearing a stitch. She'd taken off her swimsuit as soon as we'd spread our towels and, not wanting to be a prude, I'd done the same. As a sop to my incredibly UV sensitive skin, we were under a large, colorful canopy set up by the very discrete and professional staff.

"Aaah," I replied. It had been two days since the ribbon cutting on the Ngo Quyen Tower, now the tallest building in Southeast Asia. My efforts over the last five months had evidently proven my worth to the firm, and as a reward, I.P. Sloane had paid for a week at this new luxury resort on the Vietnamese coast. I was savoring the time off, but my mind was already working on the design for a new building we were proposing. I'd be very busy when we got back to Seattle.

"So have you decided if you'll want to do the on-site supervision gig again?" she asked.

"Hmm. I'm gonna have to give that some serious thought. At the moment, though, I'm thinking about the design of the next building."

"Well I can see how much you enjoy thinking about things that tower straight up into the sky," she said. "There's one right here." She reached over and took me in her soft hand. I realized that I'd popped a boner while thinking of more graceful, yet dramatic ways to counter high winds.

"Nah, that's 'cause I'm with you." Which was true. Being in the presence of a beautiful, naked woman can do that to a guy.

"Good." She rolled over and slipped a well-toned thigh over me, then with practiced ease, slid down and took me inside her. She sat up and began to move up and down in slow, even strokes.

"Hope you were ready," she said with an impish grin.

"For you, always."

The other thing I needed to think about was what to do the next time I was sent off for an extended period to some far corner of the world. Having Angie with me had worked out well. Very well, as a matter of fact.

We had made the two-backed monster almost every night for the last four months, almost always in Angie's room since she slept in the nude and didn't see the point in getting dressed again. It had always been fun, always stress relieving, and always casual. By now we knew how to push each other's buttons with ease, so it had rarely taken us more than thirty minutes to get what we (mostly she) needed.

By mutual consent, and with only a couple of exceptions, we had never spent any time in each other's rooms when we weren't having sex. We were careful, and I don't think we gave anyone any reason to suspect our adulterous behavior, not that anyone would particularly have cared.

Rachel and Angie had taken to each other right away, and Angie had become like a member of the family. The kids loved her, and Angie really liked taking care of their kids. With the extra help, Rachel, who had eventually managed to learn functional Vietnamese, had been able to take the kids on many day excursions in the local area. Angie had indeed soaked up a lot of foreign culture.

The downside, unfortunately, was that Angie had been reminded daily that she would likely never have kids of her own. On more than one occasion, she had cried herself to sleep in my arms, just thinking about what she was missing.

Of course I'd left her bed as soon as she'd started her light snoring. Angie wasn't my wife. I hadn't been allowed to spend the night with Kim without being married to her, so I certainly wasn't going to do that with Angie.

When Angie cried over her childlessness, it hit me hard too. As the years had gone by, our lack of children had become a bigger and bigger deal to Kim and me. Family had always been such a huge part of Kim's life that our lack of offspring was a constant thorn in the side of her happiness. As for me, I hadn't just promised my dad that I'd build tall, beautiful buildings, I'd promised I'd take my son there with me.

But in the meantime, it had been a pretty good assignment here in Vietnam. I'd learned a ton about the practical side of architecture and felt that I had gone a long way toward earning the respect I'd need to eventually lead a design team. I was looking forward to going out in the field many times in the future.