Gracefully Aroused: The Best of K D Grace (9 page)

Seeing Red

Everything about the man pulsated in shades of tangerine and vermillion. His whole body seemed about to blow the end off the infrared spectrum. Jenny was surprised the bus didn’t burst into flame around him when he sat down across from her. His head glowed like his brain was burning up, like whatever he was thinking was too hot to be contained in the human skull. Mental focus that generated such internal heat would have completely enthralled her if it hadn’t been overshadowed by the deep scarlet glow pulsating around his groin. For a second she was almost convinced he actually
had
set the bus on fire. She blinked and tried not to stare. But even through the red shimmer, she could tell he didn’t have an erection, and yet the whole front of his trousers was a blaze of red.

It wasn’t like looking through rose-coloured glasses. It was more like looking through smudged stained glass. Very old stained glass. One day, Jenny woke and found she could actually see body heat, the body heat that showed up in the infrared spectrum in glorious swirls and splashes of colour from burnt orange all the way to spilt-blood black. Watching it was like watching fireworks, subtle living fireworks. It was impossible not to be drawn to it. Jenny had got used to seeing everything as though it were viewed through night-vision goggles. Maybe she was a mutant. Maybe she was just weird, but it was a secret she learned to live with. She had even learnt to interpret the variations in colour and vibration.

And by her interpretation, this man was a walking flame. This man should be ejaculating all over himself. Yet there he sat dozing in the seat, his head bobbing side to side with the motion of the bus. She fought the urge to move next to him, to let the red of him fondle and stroke her. Of course she wouldn’t actually feel anything more than his ambient body temperature. But it was what she would see that interested her. It was the erupting cinnabar dance that she knew would occur when she brushed against the heat from the furnace below his skin, the furnace that animated his heart, his head and, of course, his cock, nestled like a sleeping dragon low in his trousers. She knew what she would see would alter the rhythm of her own furnace until it spiked and fried circuits. Then it would expansively reroute them all until she could scarcely be contained within her own flesh. And that was just the act of touching.

The head and the cock, those were always the infrared hot spots. And though it fascinated Jenny – the flame halo that always surrounded the head of someone deep in thought – it did her no good. She couldn’t actually share what was inside a person’s head. They could only tell her, they could never let her experience it.

The cock, however, that was another matter. The heat flare around an aroused penis was a darker red with a bloody garnet effervescence that, to Jenny, was like a neon sign.  Every man had the hot spot between his legs, there at the centre of his identity. For her, sex was a visual smorgasbord, a light show that happened when heat penetrated heat and friction won the day. The pyrotechnic result was addictive.

For a fortnight the crimson man rode the bus with her, getting on just after she did and getting off just before her stop. Every day, he was redder than the day before, the hues shimmering and coalescing around him like he was the centre of a rubicund kaleidoscope. She stopped pretending not to stare, not that he ever noticed. He always dozed or meditated. But even if he had been looking right at her, she doubted it would have curtailed her hungry gaze.

She couldn’t sleep at night for thinking about the redness in him. She wandered the clubs and bars, all places she knew she would find plenty of red. If a man was red enough, if the colour around his cock danced and glowed just right, then there was nothing he wouldn’t do to relieve the heat. And she would take him exactly as he needed to be taken. Any place would do. She didn’t care where – the storage room, the alley, a cab, even in a crowded booth while his mates looked on. A bloke might not be able to see how red she was, but she never left him in doubt. She’d kiss him with lots of tongue, she’d rub her tits against him, or her arse. She’d give him tantalizing views up her skirt. Sometimes she’d even guide his fumbling fingers up to her hot spot, reassuring him of what his cock could have. All the while she watched the area around his groin grow redder and redder while the halo of heat around his head grew paler and paler until he reached the point of no return.

Sometimes she’d take the bloke in her mouth so she could watch the flames dance. His hand would curl in her hair as he thrust in an out of the tight O of her lips like flint and steel making fire. But she never let him come in her mouth. She needed the heat someplace more primal, someplace far away from the centre of thought.

It didn’t matter who he was, what he looked like, or if he thrust three times and shot his wad. What mattered was how red he was. What mattered was what happened when his heat met hers. The explosion, the eruption, the fireworks burned her eyes until she could see the afterimage burst and quiver and convulse behind closed lids, blinding her to anything else, filling her until she could feel it in her veins like the rivers of magma glowing beneath the surface of the earth. 

And that had always been enough until that first day
he
got on the bus. Now she felt his presence constantly, like a homing beacon somewhere in the city, waiting for her to come to him. Now, each time he got off the bus, she felt like her skin would crawl off her body and chase after him. The ache had grown to an anguished screaming need to see the dance of body heat and fireworks. So when the bus stopped and he got off, just before the doors slammed shut, she made her decision. She followed him with no thought that he might not want her, that he might be appalled at her need. The very glow of him broadcast the intensity of his own desire and of his readiness to satisfy.

She followed him down the street for several blocks before he turned into an alley between an off-licence and a coffee shop. Even in her peripheral vision she could see the pulsating waves of her own red, grown to consume most of her body, and still it gnawed like hunger that had come home to live inside her and rampage.

The rapping of her heels on the cobbles echoed off brick and plaster, telegraphing urgency. He waited for her, leaning against a metal door with a heavy lock. His trousers were open, and his cock glowed heavily in his hand. ‘What took you so long?’ he said. ‘This is what you want.’

She half stumbled, half fell in front of him, ignoring the bruise of the cobbles against her knees. He let her take him with a little hiss of breath at the first press of her lips around his expanding girth. He ran a hand the colour of body heat along the side of her face and her nape, sending a bolt of red all the way down to the grabbing gape of her cunt.

‘I know what you need,’ he said, pulling her to her feet and turning her to the wall. You go looking for it every night.’ His breath scorched a path along her neck, as he fumbled beneath her skirt and yanked her knickers down over her hips, shoving and pushing until they pooled around her shoes. ‘And you still wake up cold the next morning.’

‘I can’t help it,’ she gasped, biting her lip at the feel of thick fingers raking her open and probing her readiness. ‘I need to see them – the colours. I need to watch them move. Please, let me watch.’ She tried to turn around, but he held her pinned against the wall.

‘Not just yet. Close your eyes.’

She did as he said, struggling to control the desperation rising in her chest. He squatted behind her. She imagined the sizzle of colour as his hot breath moved over her splayed vulva, darted into her cunt, nuzzled her anus. ‘Please,’ she breathed. ‘I need to see. I have to see.’

‘You’re not a very patient woman,’ he replied. Then he pushed her folds open and his tongue snaked out with incredible speed, rolling and raking the hard nub of her clit, making her buck back against him, slicking his face with her heat. She cried out with the utter frustration of being able to see nothing but the fire-red glow reflected off the dirty brick.

Between shudders and quivers she undid her blouse, as he forced her legs wider with his elbows and plunged a hefty finger into her cunt while he continued to lick and suck and tug at her.

She shoved open her blouse and toppled her breasts out of her bra to admire the crimson glow staining her chest, pulsating deepest red against her heavy nipples, pulsating in time with her racing heart.

She was cupping and kneading and watching the heat when he pulled away, and she nearly fell backward before his body pressed in close and she felt him manoeuvring between her legs with his penis. ‘No!’ she cried out and pushed him back. ‘I have to see. You don’t understand. I have to see when you put it in me. I
need
to watch it happen.’

He pulled her to him and kissed her hard, making her whole head buzz, and yet all the deep red of her concentration was focused completely on getting his cock where she needed it. She reached between them and grabbed him, standing on her toes, fumbling and shoving, practically climbing up his body, but it was to no avail. He was too tall, and the angle was wrong. ‘Help me, damn it! Help me.’ She pounded on his chest in desperation until he relented.

Chuckling softly, he squatted just enough to get into position, while she held herself open, trembling so hard that the red around them shivered like fairy lights. He lifted her, hands under her bottom, and grunted and shifted until she felt the rough brick abrade her bare shoulder. Then her cunt yielded to the press of him, and he was in, all the way in, just exactly where she needed him to be.

And suddenly the world around them flashed nuclear, beginning at their joining point and exploding up over their bodies, searing her raw from the inside out each time he rammed her against the wall with great heaving groans.

She dug her nails into his back and drove her heels into his kidneys in the tight lock of her embrace. She kept her eyes wide open and wild, pupils pinpointed helplessly and still the inferno flashed and pulsated and scorched.

‘It only happens once,’ he gasped, hammering in deep, gouging thrusts. ‘For most people it never happens. So take all you can. There’ll be no more.’

The redness blinded her when they came together, and still she gazed into the flame. Life force, body heat, essence, going supernova down below her belly, down where the world heated up, then cooled into existence. Down where he flowed like a river of heat creating and destroying and hollowing her out until there was nothing but afterimages in the dark.

A long time later, she woke up shivering in the doorway. The sun shone pale and anaemic off the dusty brick. There was no smell of smoke, no leaping flames, no exploded buildings, and he was nowhere to be found. She dressed and tidied herself as much as she could.

It was only as she reached between her legs to clean herself with some tissue she found in her bag that she realised the red was gone. She fumbled for her compact and examined her face in the mirror, a face that was suddenly, disturbingly insubstantial. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. She lifted her skirt and examined her mound, now only skin laid thinly over flesh.

And just like that, Jenny’s stained glass view of the world was no more. After a period of mourning her loss, she stopped looking for the red. She married a man from Leeds. She never saw his red, but they made two children together, without explosions and novas. One day she bought a pair of sunglasses with rose-coloured lenses and wore them, imagining she could see just a glimmer of the red in her husband, in her children, in herself. Surely it must still be there just beneath the skin, just beneath her ability to see.

Pheromones

Chloe was 12 before she realised her ability to smell other people’s lives was not the typical olfactory experience.

As a child, she watched cats and dogs greet each other with a good sniff and a lick to the bottom. The tongue only served to stimulate that wonderful scent signature that said, ‘Hi, I’m Fido.’

‘Nice to meet you, Fido, I’m Fifi. Smell how friendly and unthreatening I am.’

‘I’m Tomcat, get the hell off my patch unless you’re a female in need of a fuck.’

Chloe also realised early that, unlike her feline and canine counterparts, if she wanted to live in polite society, she had to sniff covertly. Discretion and a sensitive nose uncovered a world that would have made the best equipped voyeur envious.

By his scent, Chloe could tell if her landlord had got shagged and if it had been by his wife. Chloe could smell every detail of her flatmate, John’s, sex life. His girlfriend, Kim, was an olfactory layer cake. Deodorant soap and perfume could never completely mask the fact that she worked at a chippie. All those smells fought a losing battle against the tidal pool of scent emanating from between her legs, a scent that was always flash fire urgent.

That the natural perfume of the female body unconsciously elicited in men the urge to copulate was biology bordering on magic. John had no idea how much the heft in his balls and the stiffening of his cock depended on Kim smelling ready for sex. When her scent permeated the flat, his grew to a pungent thrum that Chloe could almost feel against the back of her teeth.

Even from behind closed doors, Chloe could smell the moment of penetration. Each thrust of John’s cock stirred their mingled scents like rolling on rose petals, like crushing garlic. When the imminent explosion happened and John ejaculated, for one powerful moment, his scent dominated.

No matter where she was in the flat, Chloe’s nose recorded the climaxing of perspiration and pheromones, pussy juice and semen. Coded within each scent was the delicious, most basic need to couple. She smelled it all, and no one ever knew.

Though she was intrigued by the smells of others, she was never able to find anyone whose scent suited her. A lesser nose would not have noticed the minor differences, but for Chloe, they were glaring incompatibilities. As a result, sex for her was usually a solo act. It was the lack of a love life forced upon her by her nose that inspired her to apply for the position as Dr Matt Engel’s lab assistant. She hoped his research on pheromones would help her understand her gift and maybe help her find someone who smelled right for her. She hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly.

Even while she waited in his office for the interview, his lingering smell made her mouth water and sent tremors down through her crotch. By the time he arrived, it was all she could do to keep from rocking against the chair for relief. She barely noticed what he looked like. It was what he smelled like that told her exactly who he was. Underneath his desert heat, animal fur scent was the tiniest acrid whiff of ozone, like an approaching storm. It sparked against the back of her throat and nose, exciting the feral parts of her. She wanted to sniff between his legs and bury her face in his armpits to better take in that fierce male scent.

Unaware of her primal urges, he motioned her into his laboratory. ‘You’re familiar with the T-shirt test? The subjects go unbathed for a couple of days, during which time they wear, and sleep in, the same T-shirt. Then we bag it for testing. We’re all drawn to the scent of the person who is genetically what we need to produce the best offspring. Care to sniff?’

Her stomach did a little flip flop before she realised he was talking about the bagged shirts, not himself. She blinked and tried to wipe the puppy dog look off her face. ‘Sure.’

None of the bagged shirts appealed to her like his scent did. She stopped at shirt number five and sniffed again. ‘These are all supposed to be men?’

‘That’s right, why?’

She sniffed once more to be sure, but her nose was never wrong. ‘This is a woman’s shirt.’ She smiled apologetically.

He turned the bag over and looked at the label. ‘You’re right. All female test subjects are labelled with even numbers. It must have got mixed in by accident. How did you know?’

‘I have a sensitive nose.’

He studied her over the rim of his glasses until she felt uncomfortable and began to shift from foot to foot. ‘You can tell just by sniffing if the shirt was worn by a man or a woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wait here. I’ll be right back.’ He practically ran out of the room.

While he was away she sniffed the other T-shirts half-heartedly, but it was Matt Engel’s thunderstorm smell that intrigued her, crowding out the laboratory odours of disinfectant and plastic. The electric part of his scent was heightened here in his space, not from sexual arousal, but from excitement over his work.

She paced the room, sniffing, inhaling, taking in his scent message. She brushed her arm against the high-backed wooden stool. It was where he always sat, she could tell by the smell. Her nostrils flared. She opened her mouth just slightly to take in the tingle of a smell she could almost taste. It was faint, but once she had sorted sex from the other more immediate scents, it was obvious. He had definitely come here – more than once, she would guess. Breathing in deeply, she searched for the second signature, the scent of a woman, the scent of the blending, but it wasn’t there. Like her, the good doctor appeared to be practising sex for one.

Her own smell was heightened by the thought of Matt Engel sitting on the stool, head thrown back, cupping and tugging a weighty erection. The electricity of his scent would have buzzed like a high tension wire as he ground his arse against the seat, distended and uncomfortable.

Then it would have happened, the explosion of voltage, hot, sticky, animal-fragranced. Had his semen arced through the air to land on the spotless tiles of the laboratory floor? Or had he caught it all neatly, wiped the stretched length of himself, and stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket?

Would the women he worked with have caught that pheromonal hint as he walked past? Would they have unconsciously sniffed the air? Their prehistoric ancestors would have recognised the scent of a virile male. They would have opened their legs and thrust their arses out, making certain he caught their scent too. She imagined the scent of a woman blended with Matt Engel’s scent. Once imagined, there was no pushing the thought from her head.

With a quick glance at the door, she shoved a hand under her skirt, pulled aside the crotch of her knickers just enough to expose her vulva, and spread her lips. Then she hoisted herself onto Matt Engel’s stool. She bore down and, with a quick rocking of her hips, slicked her scent against his. The blending of their two smells, even though it wasn’t a proper blending, was completely intoxicating. Orgasm would have followed quickly if she hadn’t caught his scent just before the latch of the door clicked.

‘You don’t mind if I test you, do you?’ He burst into the room, his arms loaded down with bagged T-shirts.

‘Please do.’ Surreptitiously, she rubbed her pussy-scented fingers on the back of the stool, and she wasn’t quite sure, but she thought he might have sniffed the air. 

He brushed against her as he dropped the avalanche of T-shirts on the lab table. The weighted scent of his excitement swirled around her, making her dizzy. ‘Here, smell this one.’ He handed her a bagged T-shirt.

She opened it, sniffed, and wrinkled her nose. ‘Very pungent male.’

‘And this.’

‘Female. On her period.’

‘You’re joking, right?’

She shook her head as he handed her the next three shirts in rapid succession.

‘Female, male, male.’ She sniffed again. ‘This one’s had sex. I can smell female on it too.’

‘Unbelievable. How long have you been able to do this?’

‘All my life.’

‘What else can you smell?’

‘Everything. I’ve learned to block out unpleasant things. Most of the time.’

‘And you can actually tell when people have had sex?’

‘Yes.’

‘When they’re aroused?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about other emotions?’

‘Of course, but nothing smells stronger than arousal.”

She wondered at his thoughts as he held her in a gaze of disbelief, his face lit like a child who had just seen Father Christmas. Did he think her a freak, perhaps a throw-back to a more sensate, more feral past? 

She could smell his excitement.

The smile disappeared from his face as he realised. He dropped onto the stool. Suddenly his scent was augmented by the astringent tang of nervousness. His breath came faster, and she could see his pulse pummelling his throat. ‘You can smell me.’ His words sounded as though they had been evicted from his mouth against their will.

She nodded. Her own scent was now like a heavy blanket, wrapping itself around him, tighter and tighter, desperate to get his attention.

‘How do I smell?’ His voice was little more than a whisper.

‘You smell electric.’ She moved closer and sniffed, first the nape of his neck, then, unselfconsciously, she lowered her face to where his biceps rested tightly against his armpit. ‘Yes, you smell very electric.’

‘Is that good?’

‘To me it is.’

As she lowered her face for another sniff, he curled his fingers in her hair and held her to him. ‘I can’t smell you.’ He swallowed nerves. ‘That’s hardly fair, is it?’ His scent sparked against hers. The lab reeked with the serrated metal scent of uncertainty and the overriding need to blend, and she was desperate to share it with him.

‘You’re a mammal. You can smell me. You’ve just forgotten.’ With unsteady fingers, she opened her blouse, then guided his face to the valley between her breasts.

He inhaled. She could feel the warmth of his breath, smell the caramel tang of awkwardness. ‘Your skin. It smells like a hot day.’ He cupped her breasts and pulled them closer to his face, nuzzling and snuffling. His thumbs kneaded the rise of her nipples. His scent spiked until the deserty heat of him was nearly physical.

‘What else?’

He kissed a path over the mound of her left breast to where it joined her armpit. ‘I’m supposed to be sniffing, not kissing.’ He words were tight, uncomfortable.

‘Surely you’ve studied animals, how they lick, how they nip, how they taste. All that to stimulate scent. You of all people should know that our scent –’ she nodded to the T shirts ‘– is our identity.’ She pulled away and lifted her skirt enough to straddle him on the stool. Then she settled over the anxious stretching of his penis beneath his trousers and rocked up and down its length.

He groaned out loud and caught her by the hips, watching in fascination as she slipped the crotch of her panties away and rubbed herself against him. ‘I’m marking you with my scent, marking you as a strong, virile man, marking you as my territory. Surely you can smell me now.’

He caught his breath in a gasp. ‘I can. I smell you. You smell like honey.’ He sniffed hard. ‘Honey mixed with damp earth and other things, so complex. I want to smell more.’

Holding her to him, he stood, lifting her until her bottom rested on the cool metal of the lab table. Bagged T-shirts tumbled to the floor. He shoved aside her panties. She felt swollen enough to fill the whole room as she presented herself. He rested the flat of his hand against her spread labia, stroking and petting her with his palm. With each caress she could feel herself slickening, she could smell her sharpening scent on his hand.

As though he was Houdini escaping a straitjacket, he shrugged out of his shirt. Then he wiped his hand, glistening with her juices, across his chest and down over the flat of his belly. He paused to open his trousers before rubbing her scent against his erection, which jutted from a matt of dark, fragrant curls. ‘Your smell, I want it all over me.’ He buried his face in her pussy, lapping and suckling in an upwelling of fragrance, an exquisite chemical reaction that made her smell like hot metal and honey against each mammalian flick of his tongue.

Wild for the scent of him, she pushed him away and began shoving and tugging aside unwanted clothing until they were both naked. Then he climbed onto the lab table next to her, and she took his cock into her mouth, breathing in the electric desert of him as she stroked and caressed his pubic hair to heighten the fragrance.

After a few minutes, he pulled her away and repositioned her until her bottom shadowed his face. She could hear him sniffing, inhaling, gasping her scent as he lowered her until his tongue and his breath danced against her cunt. It was as though they were both lost in each other, licking and tasting, sniffing – wet, gulping snuffling sniffs, buried deep in the most fragrant places, places that made every part of her buzz with the electric bloom of his scent.

‘I’ve got to come,’ he gasped. ‘I can’t wait any longer.’

‘I want you to come. I want you to come on me, to mark me like I marked you.’ She could feel the pressure building, she could feel him tense until he was like iron, as she sucked and tugged at the length of him.

When the first splash of semen exploded onto her neck and breasts, her pussy clenched against his mouth as she came. She cupped and rubbed and stroked his wetness all over her, spreading the sticky ozone of him onto her tits and buttocks and face. Then she wiped the slippery fragrance of her pussy over his chest and stomach and down his thighs, until they were blanketed in the scent of their blending.

In a tangle of arms and legs, they caught their breath in the strong odour of mutually marked territory. A good sniff aimed in the right direction seemed much more effective than the complications of modern mating rituals. Perhaps Chloe was a throwback to a more sensate, more feral past, but as she breathed in the storm cloud scent of Matt Engel intimating more heat to come, that didn’t seem like such a bad thing after all.

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