The QQ Pt. 03

The year Livvy finished college she'd got a job, not quite full time because the owner was cheap and even then people didn't read, at a second-hand bookstore. The wage was glorified pocket change and she'd lived in a shared house in a borderline part of town. Her college girlfriend went off to medical school and they'd tried, they really had, for the first semester but time was a problem and the drive was impossible and eventually they'd knocked the thing on the head with a shovel. Livvy went back into the bars at first. Then she'd stayed in more nights than not with her housemate Sara, a trainee mortician, playing pool on the cheap table in the basement while the other house mate, a hairdresser with a taste for meatheads, dragged home an assortment of brawny men who all sounded alike through the walls. Sara and Livvy played rack after rack in the basement to avoid the noise until one rainy night Sara threw her cue across the room, looked at Livvy with molten eyes, declared she was dying, and suggested that they do it.

This had come as a surprise.

Sara -- the underfed, the apologetic, the slightly ferrety-looking - hadn't crossed Livvy's mind as a possibility until then but she turned out to be, if not dynamite, than a firecracker big enough to blow a hell of a crater in the lawn. They'd gone a little crazy for a few weeks, creeping from bedroom to bedroom at first light to fuck first thing in the morning and after work and half the night and all weekend, until Sara got strep throat and gave it to Livvy. Sex didn't survive exudative tonsils and then a little bit later Livvy met the next big thing, and eventually moved out. Sara had no hard feelings. Sex with her had always been an easy thing, temporary, and after the dreadful dissolution of her relationship Livvy had now and then thought back to that straightforward sex with something very like sharp longing. But it's a thing of age twenty-two and good luck getting it again in your thirties.

But then she's here, opening, in the empty house with the wind moaning around the eaves and weeping through the fences, up in this room lit only with nightlight, on this bed with bright white sheets and this woman whose skin glows pearly in the dimness. This woman who may after all only exist as a set of fingertips teasing her open and now this flame of tongue. This smooth mouth drinking from her cunt like a chalice, sipping from it, lapping at her clit while her spine twists and her breath hitches. The entire world boiled down to a single point, the tip of a tongue travelling what seems like an infinite distance. Pleasure like asphyxiation, her heart swollen and thick with it. The woman cradles her hips in her whipcord arms, humming deep in her chest, spreading her thighs wider. The flesh sings as the centre tightens. She seems to be following some rhythm in her head, a pattern Livvy tries to follow but keeps losing among the crests and troughs of bliss. She is stretched out, pupils wide to the dark, mouth watering, trembling now, beginning to tremble. The woman takes a mouthful of her, presses her tongue to it, bold now, now inside her, now at the tip, warm now, the world liquid, some silken liquor now, it's now, it's now, it's now, it's now it's now it's now

It's now

Now

Oh

"Why me," Livvy asks, later. She and the woman are lying face to face. Up close the woman is not as young as she looked at first, although Liv already knew that. She was too sure of herself in bed, too adroit. They have the covers pulled up over them as far as they will go; the cave thus formed is filling with the smell of sex.

"I liked the look of you," the woman says, eyes frank and clear.

"Is that all?"

A tiny shrug. "There's something about you."

"Hmm. There's something about you, too."

"Don't mock me."

"I don't think I am mocking you. I don't do this often." Liv considers. "I don't do this at all. I've never done this. I don't even know your name."

"Carmody."

"Elizabeth. Where are you from, anyway?"

"Here."

"Here? Enterprise, Wyoming."

"This ranch, actually."

"But you don't live here, do you?"

"Have you seen this town?"

"I don't like it either. Where is home?"

"Australia."

"Do you ever do this elsewhere?"

"No. I said there's something about you." The woman looks away but there's nowhere to look that isn't Livvy. She closes her eyes, opens them. They are shining. "I couldn't get your face out of my mind. I couldn't -- it got so I couldn't eat or sleep or anything. I was dreaming about you. You're a complete fucking stranger I've never even seen before in my life and I could not -- I could not function. I thought, it's a crush, but I haven't had this sort of crush on anyone since I was a teenager. I'd go into the bar just to be in the same place you were." The woman stops, shuts her eyes again. "I know how weird this sounds."

"There must be something," Livvy agrees. And then when the woman says nothing she goes on, "I just drove out to the middle of nowhere with a total stranger and fucked her before even thinking to ask her name. Chemistry. Maybe we were lovers in a past life or something."

"Unfinished business."

"It's as good an explanation as any."

"You are amazing. You are. You're -- astonishing. Everything. You're --"

"Ten pounds overweight."

"I was going to say you're beautiful. You're beautiful. Do you look at yourself? Ever? Do you know how gorgeous you are? Jesus. Your skin, your hands, your, your -- God, you're -- I've watched you pouring drinks for a month and been jealous of the fucking ice."

"You should have introduced yourself."

"And say what? Hi, hello, I know we've never met but the very idea of you makes me wet, let's fuck? You'd call the cops. I half-expected you to call 911 tonight, report me."

"Or I would have been yes hello there mysterious stranger, and we'd have been here three weeks ago."

"I didn't have the nerve."

"I'm glad you finally got it together."