The Girl with the Zipper Tattoo

"Why, what will happen?" He tried to sound joking, but the question came out more serious than he intended.

"Something wonderful. Oh, the moment before! Wonderful!"

She pulsed inside in an ecstasy of anticipation, her sweet wet flesh milking his cock in great waves. His body convulsed with it and the pleasure seemed to pull him down, down. His hands, moving of their own accord, also pulled down, his fingers still gripping the zipper pull.

Slowly, as he watched, the zipper's slider moved down the tracks of the teeth. It felt exactly like every other metal zipper he had ever undone, on every girl's pants and on his own, on every jacket and warm sweater. But it wasn't parting cloth, it was parting flesh, and underneath it there was no skin. At first, as it crossed over her breastbone, all he saw was darkness, and then a wet gleam. As he pulled it lower, down towards her belly, the black became red, and the gleam welled up around the shapes he could barely name or comprehend. Is this what inner organs were supposed to look like? She seemed so very full, stuffed with pulsing, raw, wet shapes. Having never seen inside someone before before, he couldn't tell if that's what a human was supposed to look like or not. Where were the bones? Where were the recognizable bits, like intestines? He didn't see any of that. It just looked like a ruby-red maze of translucent flesh. It would've been jewel-like if it weren't so carnal, so obviously alive and reactive. A trickle of vivid scarlet, almost too bright and beautiful to be blood, ran down her flanks. He found himself thinking about the ichor of the ancient gods, the ethereal fluid they had instead of blood...

Hunter looked to Adeline for an explanation, but her head was thrown back in sublime pleasure. Her hands gripped the saturated sheets, twisting the fabric into knots. As she began to spasm, Hunter felt her tight, hot pussy grip his cock harder than ever, something inside her sucking and stroking him with wild abandon. He began to peak. He couldn't help it. His body was no longer under his control, and it felt so good that he didn't want to stop what was coming. Without knowing what she was, or what she could do to him, still he gave himself up to her. He closed his eyes as he exploded blindly into her. A cry of pleasure wrenched itself from his throat, primal and guttural.

Gripped by the 'little death,' he fell forward against her after he finished. She was so soft and warm and damp below him. He could feel her silky wetness, all the way down her breast and belly where the zipper had opened. But that was impossible. He closed his eyes and tried to relax into the afterglow. Nothing wrong with her. There couldn't be. That slick feeling between them was just the sweet sweat of lovemaking. Right?

When Hunter finally opened his eyes, he expected to find himself back in his own bed, waking up from a dream. He wasn't, though. He was still in the windowless, soundless room 713, with Adeline sprawled out beside him. The zipper was closed up again. It looked like a tattoo. There was no sign that it could open. A hallucination, then. He'd downed a glass of scotch on an empty stomach while hot and dehydrated. Yeah, that was it. He was just drunk and he got pulled into her fantasy of opening the zipper.

He rolled over to tell her about his strange experience and felt the sheets sticking to his back. He glanced down. The sheets were soaked in scarlet. Patches here and there were pinkish, as if the blood had mixed with other fluids. It was way more than anyone should be able to lose and still be alive.

He looked again to Adeline. She smiled languorously at him.

"Don't you worry about a thing now. I'm just fine. And you are an incredible lover. Now that I can see you're up for it, we can do more. That was only a taste. Foreplay. Do you want to go all the way?"

"What...what do you...I don't..." Hunter stammered.

"I mean, we can try some different positions. Reverse, inside out. You could open up more too, you know."

She reached for his throat. Hunter clapped his hands there and for a fleeting second he thought he felt a lump beneath his skin.

"Nope! No, that's ok!" Hunter scrambled off the bed. His feet got tangled in his pants and he nearly fell against the wall, only managing to catch himself with his hands at the last instant. Hardly daring to look away from Adeline, he grabbed his pants and pulled them up. He was shocked to discover that his cock was bare and once again rock hard. His body was still yearning for her, for the strange potential she offered. But he had a feeling that if he got back into bed with her, he might never get out again.

It was as if a spell had been broken. Adeline sat back on the bed, her fingers stilling on the smooth, flesh-bound zipper pull at her throat.

"Oh well. Your loss. See you at next year's conference, maybe."

She sounded so normal. So reasonable. For a moment he hesitated. One of Adeline's dark, perfectly manicured eyebrows went up.

"Unless...?" she said. She gave a tug. The zipper moved. He swore it moved down a centimeter or two.

"No, I'm good! I had a great time, really. You're incredible too. But now I'm, uh, really tired. I'm gonna go back to my room. Um, enjoy the rest of the conference!"

Hunter wrenched frantically at the locks on the door. Without meaning to, he threw the door open so hard that the outside handle slammed into the wall and left a dent in the plaster. In one of the other rooms, someone yelled "Asshole!" at the noise he made as he pounded down the hallway. It wasn't until he got into the elevator and saw his own reflection in the mirrored walls that he realized he had no mask, no shirt, no shoes or socks, and he was covered in something that looked suspiciously like blood. He looked like a crazed murderer. Oh god they would think he was a murderer. He held his breath when the elevator light lit up for his floor, praying there would be no one there to see him when the door opened, no one to call the police on him and lock him away for a crime he didn't commit. 'It was her, the girl with the zipper tattoo, she made me open her zipper!' Who would believe that?

The door opened. Hunter winced as he stared into the harshly lit corridor, waiting for the screams. No one was there.

He found his way back to his own room and had a cold shower, as icy cold as he could make it. He couldn't bear the thought of heat and humidity. Her heat, her wetness clinging to his skin, the uncanny gleam of that scarlet ichor...he had to wash it all off. He had to forget it ever happened.

Hunter would eventually convince himself that he didn't believe it had happened. Of course he had never unzipped a woman's tattoo during a hook-up at a sociology conference. He had imagined it all all. But he would never forget what he'd imagined. And he would never again feel quite comfortable when there were days of unseasonable heat in October, when zippers were pulled down and sweaters thrown off in that last breathless moment of abandon before the cold and the dark set in.