Penthouse (15 page)

“Pick two,” I say, “and follow me.”

I hear him swallow hard as I head for that huge, inviting bed. I wait until he is again standing behind me before climbing
the ladder. I want to give him the chance to look up my skirt as I climb. He does me one better; he climbs faster than I do
and ducks his head under my skirt and nuzzles the cheeks of my ass. I can feel the stubble on his face through the thin fabric
of my damp panties. I leap onto the bed. He climbs up after me, two books spreading wide the fingers of his left hand.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and
Interview with the Vampire.

I take the Anne Rice book from him and start flipping the pages.

“Are you gonna tell me your name?”

I shake my head over the top of the book and don’t look at him.

“So this is gonna be one time only?”

“Depends on how well you read.” I hand him the open book and lie back on the cushions.

He reads to me of the vampire Louis stalking the night and coming upon a woman sweating over a cook-fire. The rumble of his
voice shakes something loose between my legs. The sweating woman mistakes the vampire for a
partygoer and directs him upstairs. He goes for her neck instead.

I groan and squirm on the bed; he stops reading.

“Liked that, did you?” he asks.

In answer to his question, I fan my skirt over my thighs as if trying to cool myself off.

“Let it get hot,” he says.

“It already is.”

He spreads the book facedown on the bed and cups his hand over my crotch. “Warm, but not hot yet.”

“How hot does it need to be?” I ask.

He looks toward the windows. I can see his pulse in his throat, his Adam’s apple twitching with each swallow. “It’s awfully
cold out there,” he says. He’s not talking about the weather.

“Come back.” He only partially obeys, turning to face me again, but the look in his eyes is far away.

“Take your shirt off.”

That brings him back to me. He sits back on his haunches, looks down at the mattress, chews on his lower lip. That reflexive
swallow again.

“Slowly,” I instruct him.

He nods. Says, “Yes.”

The blunt, padded tips of his fingers are too big, and he fumbles with the tiny white buttons down his front. It takes forever
for him to expose the coarse hair on his chest and the tight, puckered little nipples. His pecs are molded, his arms a series
of swollen clumps of muscle leading to the big hands. He follows my line of sight and stretches his hands flat, palms up.

“What?” he says.

“Gimme those hands.”

He crawls forward on the bed. “What do you want me to do with them?”

“My panties are wet.”

His grin is crooked. “I hope so.”

“No, no. I sat in water on the bus. They’re soaked. Will you help me out of them?”

He says, “Okay,” but doesn’t move toward me.

“Want me to?” I reach under my skirt and lift my ass off the bed.

He puts one of those big hands on my belly to stop me. He looks at my crotch, at my tits, at my mouth. When he reaches my
eyes, he looks back down. “It’s been a while,” he says.

“And you’re hungry.”

His inhalation is a sharp catching of breath. His body twitches again. I can see his erection. It’s straining straight up
and making his zipper bulge out. He grabs at it and squeezes. Hard. He clenches his teeth and exhales through his nose.

I raise my ass off the bed again, and flip my skirt up on my belly. I wait for it, for the first touch of those hands on my
bare skin. When it comes, it’s terribly gentle. My pussy clenches. He rolls my panties down my legs with such deliberateness.
I lower my bottom; raise my feet. He pulls the damp fabric the rest of the way off, grasps my ankles, and spreads my legs
as far apart as they will go.

His face is inches from my pussy. He inhales deeply and closes his eyes. Now it’s his turn to groan and squirm.

Suddenly, he lets my feet go. He rips his pants off. He’s not wearing underwear. His cock points up at the ceiling between
us, at the roof that’s being beaten by the rain.

He stretches his body over mine, reaches over my
head. It takes him a long time to find whatever it is he’s looking for. I rub my face in his chest hair.

When he sits back, he’s already ripping the wrapper of the condom with his teeth. I raise up on my elbows and watch him put
it on. Watch him hold the head of his cock with the fingers of his left hand and roll the rubber down with his right. He kneels
like that for a moment, pinching the head and letting it pulse back against his fingertips.

He grips my ankles in his big hands again, arches his back, and guides his cock into me with just the action of his hips.
I know this man is gonna rock me. I reach behind my head for something to grab hold of. Something to anchor me so I can move
against him.

I feel my pussy start to spread open, start to suck him inside. He moves just a little—that beginning ache and spread and
throb. He looks down at the juncture of our bodies, amazed at his own control.

“Can I?” he asks, his voice tight and high like his cock.

“I think you’d better,” I say.

And he does. Pushing hard into me, filling my pussy, pinning me to the bed, and bouncing me up off it when he pulls out. Almost
all the way. Long strokes. Hard. To the depths of me, and back. Keeping up a relentless rhythm in time to the pouring rain.

“Bring your legs together,” I say.

When he does, the angle shifts, and the mound of his pelvis bumps against my clit. A tickle and a tease. My own orgasm starts
to build, but it’s not enough.

“I wanna roll over.”

“Yeah.” He stops moving in me then. Pulls back. Lets my ankles go. I spin around on his cock, without dislodging him, until
I’m on all fours. He grabs hold of my hips, and with the leverage he finds there begins to thrust and
thrust and thrust. I reach up to touch myself, to touch both of us. My pussy lips are all slick and swollen. I raise up so
he’s fucking up into me. I cup his balls in my left hand, squeeze my clit between two fingers of my right.

He is grunting now, and the push between us expels the air from my lungs. A shudder of pleasure passes through my body, from
the soles of my feet to the crown of my head. He pulls out of me, quick. My pussy is bereft. I lower myself, trying to find
him again. He slides between my pussy lips, against me, not inside. The head of his cock finding the hard knot of my clit
again and again. I press my hand against him to keep him in the right place.

“I am so close. I’m gonna come so hard.”

“Tell me when it starts,” he whispers in my ear.

The wail that is the voice of my orgasm erupts from me. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.

He pushes back into me, spreading open my clenching muscles, and I go over the edge. He wraps his arms tight about my waist,
buries his head in the crook of my neck, and comes. I can feel the pulse of his cock, the shock of pleasure as he moves his
hands up to cup my breasts and pinch my nipples hard.

Slowly our breathing synchronizes. He lowers me to the bed and stretches his body out on top of me. He kisses the sweat at
the nape of my neck and tells me what a sweet pussy I have.

BY
G
ABRIELLE
I
DLET

I
have never liked pretty boys. My neighbor Jack is no exception. He has that polished, varsity look, like life has stroked
him smoothly, evened out his edges. Worse still, he has woken me many times hosting late-night parties for gangs of college
jocks. Someone inevitably pisses on my mailbox or falls asleep along a row of my freshly planted bulbs. I wake to roars of
laughter and fragments of conversation about women’s bodies. “Tits,” I heard them scream last month. “Tits, show us your tits!”
And I looked out my window in time to see a frail woman being passed over the heads of the partygoers in Jack’s backyard.
Although she wriggled and winced with anxiety, she pulled off her shirt to reveal a black push-up bra. “Not your bra, baby,
your tits,” someone called, but the woman drew the line there, and was allowed down after much begging and squirming in the
air.

My straight girlfriends frequently remark how handsome Jack is when they see him shooting baskets against his garage. I challenge
them on it, describing what I’ve
seen of his ugly lifestyle. It never seems to matter, though. People drift into fantasy watching beauty from a distance.

Despite my disgust, Jack interests me. Perhaps this is only because his bedroom window faces mine, just a bit higher on the
hill. Jack closes his blinds most of the time. I never close mine. I took my curtains down at first because I hate to feel
closed in. I enjoy the night sky, the moon; I like to wake up to the sun on weekends. I’ve since realized there is a second
benefit to stripping my window: I can give Jack an education. That is, like the public-school system, I can offer it to him
for free, and he can do with it what he chooses.

Martha will be visiting from New York. She’s a friend from college, a tall woman with short blond hair who works as a botanist
and carries herself like James Dean. Martha and I always make love when she comes to town, then catch up on old times and
mock jealously at each other’s more serious romances. Ultimately, she’s a friend, not a lover. But I’ve never been able to
keep my hands off her.

The night Martha arrives, I spot Jack early on. He glances out at us, then ducks behind the molding to switch off his light.
He seems to feel invisible with his room darkened. But the light from my nightstand falls across him, and I can see his expression
as he sits down on his mattress to watch.

Martha drops her leather jacket on the chair near the bathroom, then corners me against the closed closet door. I haven’t
had sex with anyone in going on eight months, and so I press against her with more greed than usual. I yank the hem of her
T-shirt out of the rear of her jeans, run my nails up her back, then unclasp her bra in the same gesture I use backward on
myself undressing at night. Only now the familiar motion is charged: The faster I pull her
bra off, the faster I’ll have one of her pale, full breasts in my mouth. She lets me push her away just far enough to pull
everything off her upper body. I see Jack leaning closer to the windowpane.

Martha begins to break a fine sweat, as she does when she gets excited. I ask her, “How was your flight?” as I bend to kiss
her navel. She gasps and her pelvis leaps toward me involuntarily, then she straightens and pulls open the buttons of her
jeans. No underwear—just that gorgeous thatch of sandy-brown hair, straight as the hair on her head, in a dense V. It travels
in a line up her belly, even sprouts loose strands around her nipples and in the crease of her chest.

I tug her jeans down to her knees and blow on her shining slit just long enough to make her lurch again. I want her unbearably
wet a few minutes from now. But my body can’t tolerate skipping over her breasts. I stand up, still fully clothed, and turn
her around by the shoulders so that she’s pressed against the wall and on full display. I don’t want to interrupt Martha’s
passion by pointing Jack out, but she and I have had public sex a number of times— in cars, in parks at night, once on the
roof of her dorm, and many times before windows. She has described how aroused she can get thinking someone might see her.
Anyway, she’s naked now, fully lit, and aware at least that she is facing a wide, blank windowpane, about to have her breasts
sucked by a thirsty friend.

I lean into her, take the white skin of her right breast between my lips gently, surrounding but not quite touching the areola.
She moans quietly, and I feel her legs strain to open against the jeans that hold her fast at the knees. I like the idea that
she wants slightly more freedom than she can have just yet, as her pussy gets wetter and hotter.

I open my mouth wide and suck as much of her breast as I can. Then I let a little slip back out so I can focus on her tiny
peach-toned nipple, by now hard as a pearl. I squeeze her other tit, flicking its nipple gently with my fingertip, while I
suck and lick this one. In a minute she’s rocking against me and reaching for her cunt with a clumsy, wild hand. A pulse starts
in my crotch as Martha begins to jack herself off, thrumming her clit with her thumb while jamming three or four long fingers
at a time into her hole. When her breath catches and she lets out a rough groan, I decide it’s time to take things into my
own hands.

Martha is big and broad, and though I’m stockier than she, I enjoy the leading role sometimes when we fuck. Frequently, she
pushes me away and takes over, but this time I think she’s enjoying my intensity. My hunger comes not only from an absence
of sex. Knowing that Jack is watching—and that at this point he must have a rock-hard cock—makes me wetter still.

I pull Martha onto my bed, which is angled—truly by accident—so that Jack can see us completely. The lamplight falls across
Martha’s belly and hips, and sparkles on her wet mound. I pull her jeans all the way off now, remove her shoes and socks,
then push her legs apart with my knees, so that I sway above her. I kiss her briefly, lick her tongue with my own. “There
was turbulence,” she says.

“What?”

“You asked how my flight was. There was turbulence.” She laughs to herself. I close my eyes, take a breath, run my tongue
from the bottom of her throat down the center of her body all the way into her cunt. She sighs loudly. I readjust so that
I will be able to eat her for a while without straining my back. I can see Jack this way, off to the right. I suck in air.
He has his pants down and is stroking his
penis slowly, watching us with dazed eyes. He spits into his free hand, then smooths the wetness over his cock, repeating
the move several times so that the thing begins to shine. Perhaps we look like his late-night cable porn, I imagine, or some
dirty movie he’d watch with the guys from the team. I like being clothed for this show. Even my audience is stripping.