The QQ Pt. 02

In the middle of the dead-of-winter night in a big old empty farmhouse pretty much in the middle of nowhere, Livvy Hardy, bartender, lately of somewhere further south and east and much less windy, falls naked backward onto a bed in an upstairs bedroom. Her lover's skin shines like a pearl in the nightlight from the uncovered window. At the foot of the bed she's standing stripping a shirt off over her head while Livvy stretches like a cat, the air cool against the flushed skin of her thighs. She's wet there, where the woman's hands have been, still swollen, alive with the skin's memory of that sliding fingertip, that rough clever hand. The woman straddles her hips and bends to kiss her, the skin of her thighs fantastically warm against her own skin, her spine a strong rope under Livvy's hands, her shoulders hard.

She arches into Livvy's fingers as she digs them into her back, slides her legs over hers to bring their hips together. For a while they kiss, Liv and the stranger, as they each learn the other's geography of hip and thigh, flank and belly. The woman has hard wrists Livvy finds she likes to hold, a long neck, a body that suggests movement, work, long hours outdoors. The curve of Livvy's hip delights the woman, who snakes down to kiss it, a line of small soft kisses from her knee to the hollow at her hip. She delights in Livvy's breasts, tongues the dip at the base of her throat, wander down her chest to her belly, and -

"Wait," pants Livvy, sitting half up, drawing her hips away. The woman stops, her fingers tracing an absent arabesque on the back of Livvy's thigh. She is enchanted, deep in herself; this woman she knows from nowhere, the spring of her flesh, the lushness of her, her rich and velvet skin. This close to her cunt she can smell it and the scent makes her lightheaded, almost.

"I'll wait," she says softly to Livvy, "but what am I waiting for?"

"I need a moment. Come up here."

They stretch out side by side. Livvy, on one elbow, tastes the skin of the woman's throat, the strut of her collarbone, finds the flat pink bar of a scar there. She mouths the pebble of the woman's nipple, strokes her breast until she twists, inhales sharply. Her lips count her ribs, her flat tense belly, the rise of her hipbone. She is wet; Livvy startles at the heat of her against her palm. Her pulse taps steadily against the flat of her other hand pressed hard to her chest.

"May I," she whispers. Her answer is a breath caught high in the throat. Then she is in the first knuckle, the second, first one finger and then another, deep in a well of lushness you wouldn't expect from this hard, thin body, though her flesh knew long before her brain did that it would of course be here. And it is like satin, silk, like nothing else; the skin of an eyelid, of a lip. She moves up to the woman's mouth, swollen with the ache, and her hand keeps its pace, leisurely, a slow lazy spread and gathering that the woman receives almost in silence, only her breath giving it away as the pleasure mounts, her shout as unexpected as breaking glass, the long delicious shudder of her orgasm just behind it, the skin scalding where they press together.

Then they lie for a moment, undone, hands loosely laced together. Outside the wind ratchets up another notch, ice in it, carried high. The sky is hard and brilliant ove the rivers of air. It might snow before morning; the sun might swallow the earth. Neither woman lying on the hard bed in the top bedroom of the old house cares. The walls creak like a pirate ship. In a bathroom downstairs water drips ceaselessly down a stain into an old enamel sink. The barns are cold; the stables are deep in dust. A loose wire in a fence round the back of the house waves and dips in the wind, waves and dips, waves. The only heat in this whole damn cold dusty world is in their hands, mouths, loins. They know each other now; the room is full of the smell of them. The scent hangs like some rich smoke. The air is warming in the room. In each of them a slow animal throb, building.

"And you said there's nobody else in this house," asks Livvy, who doesn't know if it would make a difference at this point. It has been months since she felt like this, even longer since she was in bed with someone, and she wants this woman. Wants her like fire wants fuel.

"Not a soul," says the woman.

"And nobody that might come in -?"

"Nobody."

"Then take me again."