Moonlight Stroke

“"A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless…She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before."  --Kate Chopin, The Awakening 
 
 
“Touch here,” Kennedy instructed, unbuttoning the bottom buttons of her filmy white blouse, curling the fabric under as she pressed my palm against the naked surface of her swollen abdomen, the heat of her palm pressing into the back of my hand, my hand nestling the tight drum of her skin.   
I felt the pulse, I felt the flutter of her baby’s kick under her skin--fluid as a ballet, slippery sweet as a swimmer‘s butterfly stroke.  An hour earlier, Kennedy had called, breathless, to say she’d felt the first kicks of her little daughter, to say she was coming over.  Fast friends since sophomore year, she wanted me to feel it. 

“Incredible,” I whispered, and Kennedy smiled back, her dark pageboy skimming angular against her cheekbones, just now, like the rest of her, beginning to plump, beginning to soften like charcoal lines against a night-black board, smudging so prettily it made fingers ache to touch the print of her, to take away the dusting of her flesh. 

“I think Josh is relieved I didn‘t stay home tonight,” Kennedy admitted, rolling her shirt back down over the curve of her tummy. 

“Why’s that?”  I asked, as we stood together at the bay window. Kennedy’s fingertips reaching for the curtain, peeling back the sheers to overlook the almost-empty two acres.   

There were neighbors in the development out front, but the back of the property was a tangle of rural emptiness dotted with scrub oak and blackberry brambles and our one concession against all of our bills-- the tile-bottom pool the previous owner had installed, the love nest where my man and I so often took our love-play au natural.  Lately, though, he’d been on the road more than getting off with me in the shimmering water.  I missed his smile, the way his eyes went all warm at the edges just coming into any room where I waited for him, god knows I counted off Friday as if it were every holiday rolled into one, as if he were every lover coming into me and leaving me with the sweetest shatter after. 

“The first three months, I pretty much spent on the floor of the bathroom, worshipping the porcelain goddess.  Then the switch flipped, I hit my fourth month, and all of the sudden, I’m turned on 24-7.  Josh didn‘t even make it through the front door last night, and I was on him.  I mean, literally ripping his shirt off in my bare hands, I was that charged, poor boy.  I’m fucking insatiable all of the sudden.  We made love three times last night, and I woke him up this morning to get some doggy style before work. I think I‘m wearing out his dick.”   

 “Most men would kill for that problem,” I answered, watching the way she stared out into the yard, the way the harvest moon glowed golden off the pool’s surface, reflecting back against her pale cheeks, making her shimmer.  “Hell, I’d kill for that problem.”   

We laughed, but Kennedy knew there was hurt in it-- that my man and I were starting to have problems.  That he’d been away on business lately more often than he’d occupied our bed.  My lover--Tuscan tonight, Maryland or Minnesota  by Thursday, I couldn’t remember.  All I knew-- I counted Friday.  All I knew, lately, even when he came back to me, it wasn’t quite the same, he rushed through what had often occupied midnight hours, he abbreviated the foreplay that had so long been the frenzied frosh of our love, that had made me cum in his strong arms.  Now I was reclining most nights on empty cold sheets, now I was relying most nights in his absence on strawberry scented lube and my pocket rocket from the top drawer, buried beneath the sachets and lacy slips he’d once lowered over my shoulders and ridden down over my hips.  When my man did arrive home, he was distracted, citing paperwork and climbing the work ladder.  It had been three weeks since we’d made love.  I was starting to ache for a body over my body, taking me with hungry lips or fingertips, out beyond the constrictions of my own self. 

“I’ve even thought,” Kennedy exhaled a smoky laugh that vibrated richly in my abdomen, “don’t tell Josh this, but I’ve even thought of  taking a lover now and then, just to scratch the itch, just to alleviate this constant arousal …. A little, you know?”  

Her lips parted, emitting the sugary-strong musk of soft strawberry lip balm with the pungent nip of the dip we’d eaten earlier.  Our gaze locked for a beat longer than necessary.  A flutter rippled through my female center.  Her eyes hungered in a way I’d frequently recognized in my own mirrored reflection by morning.  My own lips parted, enough to exhale, enough to offer-- 

She turned back toward the window.  “God, look at the moon off the water like that.  I bet it feels delicious,” She ran a tiny hand along her spine, massaging the small of her back, her cherry red nails rubbing ember-lit sparks of circles in her skin.  “Too bad I didn’t bring a suit.” 

“Who needs a suit?” I responded, not wholly thinking it over, “We skinny-dip all the time.  Besides, we’re all girls here, right?” 

Kennedy let the sheer curtain fall, she rubbed the spot on her stomach where the baby bump was beginning to doggy paddle in its embryonic pool.  “We are all girls here,” she smiled, and the warmth in her voice gone intimate sent a shiver along my spine and into my clit. 

I watched her palm sink beneath her denim waistband, tugging pants to the kitchen floor, she was already walking through the open glass double-doors by the time her polka-dot panties, with their scrim of lace trim, dropped to the deck boards.  Her laughter was light as a gale, pressing into the evening chill.  I followed her in bare feet and a strappy summer sundress that it was almost too late for, now that the nights were getting dark earlier and nippier and the ice pink fabric left a little too much exposed.  Still, without wrap or deeper reason, I followed after, settling into a reclining deckchair as her fingers found the undoing of the seven pearly buttons of her shirt, as the moonlight played a minuet across her creamy white shoulders, caressing the smooth seam of her spine in back to the linea negra from front to core.  Moonlight glossing her black pageboy ‘til it shined, a black cat’s fur, slinky and satisfying.  An arc of her arms, and her body plunged whole into the reflectant pool, taking her down, down, down, under, and shooting her upward with the pull of a firecracker’s spark against ebony.   

“Damn!” she surfaced, breasts swollen and supple, taking the warm water for her berth, nipples already engorged for the baby, now erect, budding hard petals in the autumn breeze, she arose a Venus from a cracked open shell, a pearl from a bed of the oyster, ready-made.   

“I was thinking the same thing,” I replied, my voice gone husky despite myself as the moon dripped glow across her body’s curves and pockets.  She bobbed up out of the pool and towards where I sat, predatory and fierce in a sway of sashay, her bright eyes marking mine as she approached, nude and without shivering, slink as a feline marking its prey.   

Majestic and mouthwatering to watch her, in her newly-acquired pregnancy skin. She was pendulously ripe, she was shimmering as she sank onto the edge of my chair.  Without further words, she reached to take a strand that had fallen from its chignon, tucking the curl behind my ear, her palm turning into a caress of my cheek. Within my veins, the molten heat ran, a pulsing not even the harvest moon could turn amber.  She was all the amber I wanted drenching me.  

Before our eyes could lock, before she could confirm a yes, a no, to what was a ticklish maybe forming in the back of my brain, her palm wandered down my dress to the undercarriage of my breast, a supple squeeze, neither hard nor soft, just melting, melting, as her nearness, as her lips teasing in to take my lips, as her first kiss on my face, my neck, my shoulders.   

“I need to taste you,” she whispered in my ear, a panting desire coursing a white-hot volt through my core as her tongue flicked the fold, then sucked the lobe, an offering of what lay ahead. 

I lost little time reaching the clasp of my bra, letting the cotton shift dress fall to the moon-soaked deck boards.  As the golden glow spread to take our naked bodies, I reached for her breast as a child needing sustenance, suckling first one taut bud then the next into the heated nest of my mouth.  Her bucking exhale intermingled moan and pleasure.  Slit already slick, I tickled at the tangle of her womanhood, drenched with water and the swim.  My fingertips feathering her pleasure pocket, our mouths a tangle-deep of tongues, of kisses, nesting, the baby in her belly arcing, kicking, somersaulting as we mated. 

Playful, suddenly, Kennedy batted my hand away.  “Not yet, baby-- I eat first,” a honeyed whisper now along my torso, her pageboy tickling at my ribcage as her face continued its further pilgrimage, her tongue lapping at the bowl of my navel where the diamond stud glittered, then lower, lower, lower pockets of warm exhales as I arched against her breasts, her swollen belly, as the whisper of her nail gently pulled my pink satin panties down to reveal the garden I’d just shaved bare for him, hours earlier, disappointed at another, “honey I’m late” “honey, not tonight, but I want this as much as you do,” call.   

My man now the farthest from my mind he’d been in the past year of our cohabitating as Kennedy flicked my clit with tongue, with lip lock, with breath-- paradise, she understood my body with a symmetry unrelenting, swollen and moon-full, she understood my body as she understood her own--bucking my wetness she rode, my body stroking the wet length of her body, her baby floating in the pool of pleasure we made, as we came bathed in the yellow of evening, the pendulous orange disk far from the first or last voyeur to the next five month‘s lovers‘ tryst, unfolding as a pleasure cry between us, my Kennedy, my supple Venus. 

Marina Kris has been a sculptor, vampy camp counselor, nude figure-study model, occasional coffee-shop waitress, and office slut for far less than what she’s worth. Her Exotica story, "Traversed By His Longing," was published in the October 29, 2008 issue of Clean Sheets, at: http://www.cleansheets.com/exotica/kris_10.29.08.shtml