longer.blue

Rain was drumming on the plastic roof of the hoop house the night she found me out there, a single shop lamp hanging from the ridge pole and throwing a low amber circle over the last of the tomato vines I was stripping before the frost came in. She stood in the doorway in her court clothes and my old barn coat, and she didn't say a word, which was how I knew. Eleven hours in a courtroom taking down every word of a trial over a logging truck that came across the center line on the pass. The widow on the stand. The driver who couldn't finish a sentence. The judge turning to her three separate times and saying, "Madam reporter, please read that back," so she had to say the worst parts out loud in her own steady voice. There was a fresh strip of white tape around her right ring finger, and while I talked to her about nothing, about the frost and the tomatoes, I watched her fingertips move in her lap. Little silent chords against her skirt. Her hands were still taking me down. I set the basket aside, wiped my palms on my jeans, and took both of her hands in mine until they went still. "Your hands are off duty," I told her. "Every word said tonight is mine to keep, not yours." I pulled a length of soft jute twine off the spool on the potting bench and let it rest across her palms so she could feel how light it was. "I want to tie these, loose, so you can't work even if you try. You'll come when I tell you, not before, and you'll ask me for it. If anything is too much, you say frost, and the twine comes off and I'm just here holding you. Say it plainly so I know. Is this a yes?" She looked at the twine for a long time, and then at me, and her chin came up the smallest bit. "It's a yes," she said. "I want this. Frost if I need it." I wrapped the twine twice around her wrists and tied a bow she could pull loose with one tug, and I kissed the tape on her finger, and then I made her wait. I unpinned her hair one pin at a time and dropped each one into the empty seed tray. I unbuttoned her blouse slowly enough that the rain got louder between every button. I knelt and slid her heels off and held her cold feet against my chest until they warmed, and I never once touched her where she wanted me, not until her breath was coming short and she was pressing her tied hands against her own stomach like she could hold the ache in. I spread the wool moving blanket over the straw between the beds and lay down on my back on it, and I looked up at her standing over me in that soft amber light with her skirt pooled at her feet and nothing left on but my barn coat hanging open. "Come here," I said. "Sit on my face. Hands on my chest, and don't you dare hold your weight off me." She hesitated, the way women do when they've been taught to take up as little room as possible, so I took her by the hips and pulled her down until she was kneeling over my mouth, and I just breathed on her first. Her pussy was so beautiful above me, small and tight and flushed dark pink, her soft lips swollen and already parted, her delicate inner lips peeking through her slit and shining wet in the lamplight. I kissed each of her outer lips like I was greeting them, slow, and then I opened my mouth and licked her from the very bottom of her slit to the top in one long heavy stroke, and she gasped and her bound hands fisted in my shirt. I held her hips and settled her lower until her whole weight was on me, and I ate her the way she deserved to be eaten after a day like that, slow and greedy and patient all at once. I traced her inner lips with the tip of my tongue and sucked them into my mouth, one and then the other, and let them slip free wet and swollen. I pushed my tongue inside her, as deep as it would go, and felt her clench around it, and then I dragged it back up and circled her clit, around and around, never quite on it, until her thighs were shaking on either side of my head. "Ask me," I said into her. "Please," she whispered. "Please can I come." "Not yet." I closed my lips around her clit and sucked it gently, flicking my tongue across the hood, and when I felt her stomach go tight and her breath catch high in her throat, I stopped and kissed the inside of her thigh instead. She sobbed. I did it again, and again, three times I brought her to the edge and held her there, praising her in between, telling her how sweet she tasted, how good she was being, how proud I was of her for letting me carry her weight. The fourth time she was rocking against my mouth with her tied hands braced on my chest, rain roaring on the roof, and she begged me with her voice breaking, "Please, please, I need it, please let me," and I pulled her down hard against my tongue and said, "Now. Come for me. Give it all to me." She came apart on my mouth with a cry so loud it bounced off the plastic walls, her pussy pulsing against my lips in long hard waves, her thighs clamped around my ears, her wetness running down my chin, and I held her right there and licked her softly through every single shudder until she slumped forward over me, gasping my name. I didn't let her go far. I lifted her off me and laid her down on her side on the blanket and curled in behind her, her back against my chest and my arm under her head like a pillow, and I kissed the back of her neck while I opened my jeans. "Still a yes?" I asked against her ear. "Yes," she breathed. "Please. I want to feel you." I lifted her top knee, rubbed the head of my cock through her soaked folds until she whimpered, and slid into her slowly from behind, one long patient inch at a time, feeling her stretch around me, so tight and hot and slick I had to stop and hold still inside her and just breathe. Then I moved. Long and slow and deep, my hand between her legs, two fingers rolling her swollen clit in small easy circles while I rocked into her, her tied hands curled under her chin. I talked to her the whole time. I told her the widow would remember that someone in that room was careful with her words. I told her nobody could read back what happened tonight because tonight was only ours. I told her she was enough, exactly as she was, tired and sore and soft. She came again with her face pressed into my arm, squeezing around me in slow rolling pulses, and I held her through it and followed her over, buried deep inside her, groaning into her hair as I filled her. Afterward I pulled the bow loose and unwound the twine and kissed the faint lines it left on each wrist. I bundled her into my barn coat and sat her on the overturned crate by the lamp, and I peeled the tape off her ring finger slowly and filled a steel bowl with warm water from the kettle I keep out there for the seedlings, and I soaked her hands in it while she drank a whole jar of water I held to her lips. When they were warm and loose I dried them on my shirt and rubbed calendula salve into every knuckle and every fingertip, pressing my thumbs into the sore pad below her thumb until she closed her eyes and sighed. Then I sliced one of the last ripe tomatoes on the potting bench, salted it, and laid it on a heel of bread with butter, and I fed it to her in bites while she leaned against my knee. "When did you eat?" I asked. "There was a recess," she said, "but I spent it rereading my notes." I kissed her forehead. "Tomorrow you eat lunch in the sun, and your notes can wait for you." Later, in bed with the rain still going, she lay with her head on my chest and her fingertips moving against my skin again, little quiet chords, slower now. "What are you writing?" I asked her. She smiled without opening her eyes and laid her whole palm flat over my heart. "Nothing you need a transcript for," she said. "That one's off the record." And for the first time all day, her hands were finally still.