Stripped Down (32 page)

Ro turns her to face the villa. She grabs the pool's slippery tile edge with both hands to steady herself.

“Look at the windows,” Ro directs from behind her, holding her by the hips and navigating past her swimsuit bottom with one practiced, determined thrust. Andrea was expecting that, but it's still a thrill; something about the dichotomy of lapping water and sun on her shoulders and Ro inside her makes her helpless and liquid from the neck down, as if her brain turns off the minute her sex engages. “She's watching us, isn't she?”

It's true; the sheer white curtain on the French doors leading off the terrace into the cool interior of the villa has been tugged slightly askew. The sun glinting off the water makes it difficult to tell, but if Andrea squints hard she thinks she can make out a shadowy figure behind the curtain. The possibility that it's Maddalena sends a throb of longing through her that rides the border between pain and pleasure. She bites her lip.

“Isn't she?” Ro prompts again, low voiced and pleased with herself. She slides her hands up to cover Andrea's breasts, finds her nipples through the wet fabric of the suit, and pinches hard.

Andrea groans, nods, groans again.

Ro half-lifts her until her upper torso kisses the hot terrazzo tiles at the side of the pool and moves in close. She braces herself against the side of the pool, finds a better angle, fucks harder.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” she pants, pulling Andrea's head back by a handful of her wet hair so she can't
look away from the window. “If I'm going to do all the work, you can at least show her what she's missing, can't you?”

Andrea—humiliated, uncomfortable, unspeakably and astronomically aroused—is happy to comply.

 

“So we're not really going into Siena, then?” she ventures that night after dinner. She's just finished brushing her teeth. Ro's sitting up in bed with her laptop open on her knees.

“Oh, we're going,” she says, hitting the enter button with a flourish. “Too much relaxing in the country is bad for the soul. Or the digestion. Or something.” She closes the Power-Book, pushes it off her lap, and gives the comforter beside her an invitatory pat. “How long we'll
stay
, now…” She strokes Andrea's hair, her eyes gleaming and far away. “
That's
another question entirely.”

They leave Siena directly after breakfast on Monday morning. The drive back is silent and tense with expectation—so charged, in fact, that Andrea starts to backpedal.

Maddalena won't be there, she tells herself. She'll be gone already. Or prudently out of sight. Or she'll scuttle out the door the moment their car pulls up.

She'll be afraid. She'll be indifferent, or righteously indignant, or disgusted.

It'll never happen.

But when Andrea, laden with shopping bags and the smaller of their suitcases, gets to the top of the stairs and opens the door to the master suite, Maddalena's bent over making the bed. She looks up and spins around with a gasp. She's holding a pillow that's half-in and half-out of a freshly ironed pillowcase.

“
Signora
,” she says, catching her lower lip with her teeth.
It's too perfect, like a porn movie, or a
Penthouse
letter. Andrea can't help but think that it isn't really happening, even as Ro comes in with the big suitcase and puts it down inside the door, even as she's caught up in an embrace that's at once frankly sensual and bone-meltingly tender.

Ro's at her best when she's kissing for an audience. By the time she comes up for air and pushes Andrea gently to the side, they're both breathing hard and trembling with excitement. Maddalena hasn't moved; she's watching them wide eyed from the other side of the bed, still clutching her pillow. Ro sinks down sideways on the bed, takes the pillow away, and reaches for the girl's hand. Maddalena flinches and lets out her breath in a little huff, but doesn't pull away.

It's that easy, that surreal. Andrea blinks at the pair of them, at the virgin in sensible navy blue now held swooning in the cradle of Ro's arms. She watches Ro unpin the white-linen headdress, watches Maddalena's hair tumble down her back in a pair of heavy dark braids. Ro wraps the braids around one fist and tugs with more tenderness than force, just enough to make Maddalena's head fall back against her shoulder. Her throat bends into a line as pure and golden as an Italian sunset. Ro kisses it, and the little nun makes her first sound, a moan that's far more capitulation than protest.

For Andrea, who has expected at the most to be the one holding Maddalena still, the one offering kisses and comfort as a foil to Ro's ferocity, this tableau on the bed is at least as perplexing as it is arousing. Even before she looks, she knows there's a challenge in Ro's eyes:
Well, what now?
she seems to be asking. Andrea remembers those words from the middle of some other, earlier night, and shudders.

She's all yours. You're all mine
.

She kicks off her shoes, sits down on the foot of the bed, and puts her hand on Maddalena's ankle. There's something building in her that she can't identify for a moment; it's her sun-dappled fantasy from a week ago, she realizes, the one she'd thought lost in the aftermath of Ro's more colorful speculations.

Sunlight. White sheets. Two women in a quiet bedroom.

Well, okay. Make that three.

She looks up and meets Maddalena's frightened, fascinated eyes. “Shhhh,” she says, one finger on her lips, and smiles.
“Sta bene
.
”

Her hands slide up under the navy blue cotton of the habit to rest on Maddalena's knees. Far above her, Ro whispers something meaningless and comforting as she strokes the small round face. Maddalena's knees part on a little sigh, and Andrea's hands move higher, leading from the balls of her thumbs, tracing tiny circles. She skims one thumbnail in a light vertical line over the cotton barrier covering Maddalena's mons, then down over where the fabric stretches tight and damp. Andrea can feel the flesh underneath it straining toward her touch. A shudder, another sigh, more whispers from Ro. Andrea lifts the navy blue skirt in both hands and settles its folds just below Maddalena's navel.

She looks up. They're kissing now, a pretty Italian girl in braids and a fiercely beautiful woman who can make Andrea come just by looking at her the right way. Maddalena's hips have begun a slow instinctive roll that's only too familiar to Andrea.
This is what I must look like
, she thinks, blushing. She watches the kiss deepen for just another moment before she hooks her fingers under the waistband of Maddalena's panties and draws them down and away.

She wants pictures, she wants video, she wants to freeze this moment in amber forever, but that little patch of ebony curls is lifting off the bed in mute entreaty and Andrea plunges recklessly ahead, too fast really, two fingers drawn down the slit and between the lips, fiddling them up and apart until Maddalena's clit is caught between them and the girl arches toward her with a yelp of such surprised, half-panicked pleasure that she slips off Ro's lap. Ro laughs and drags her back up again, away from Andrea's fingers, and to their delight she starts to fight, whimpering protests in time with the fast pulse in her throat.

Maddalena's head tosses and her trapped hands beat ineffectually against the white chenille bedspread. Andrea holds her cupped palm half an inch away, just close enough to brush the black curls, and watches Maddalena struggle and thrash until she's tired herself out and has to collapse back against Ro's chest. She's gleaming with a fine film of perspiration. Her habit is rucked around her waist now, all modesty forgotten.

“Don't tease her any more,” Ro says in low tones. “Show her what it's all about.”

Andrea nods, drags the ball of her thumb through all that syrupy wetness around the girl's desperately clenching cunt, and rolls it over her clit. It feels grape sized and twice as thin skinned, like it'll burst if it grows any bigger. Andrea starts a slow circle, and has to throw her free arm over one of Maddalena's thighs as the clit hood slips back and her wet thumb grazes the surface underneath it. She does another circuit, and another, and another. Ro has the girl's hands pinned above her head and one arm clamped around her waist. Maddalena is panting and shaking her head and talking a blue streak in Italian.

It's like the beginning of a joke, Andrea thinks:
How do you make a nun curse?

But it's not funny, really. Just…amazing.

She pauses to let Maddalena catch her breath, just for a second, and slides her middle and index fingers south, buzzing on those breathy little pleading sounds and the way Maddalena's cunt flutters against her fingertips and the intense, half-feral satisfaction that flashes across Ro's face just before she lowers her mouth to Maddalena's throat.

Maddalena convulses. Andrea slides two fingers inside her.

Like kitten fur
, she remembers Ro saying.
Like pink satin
.

She's never been touched here
, Andrea thinks, and feels her own clit pulse.
By anyone. Ever
.

Virgin skin
.

And it's easy, it's wet, it's tight but it's yielding and altogether wonderful and then Maddalena gives a little gasp just as it gets not…
quite
…so easy.

Andrea stops pressing. Their eyes meet.

“Per favore
,” Maddalena says, in a broken whisper that makes the hair on Andrea's arms stand to attention. “
Per favore…no
.”

Has she ever felt so powerful? Ever?

She hesitates, just for a moment, then washes her thumb once again over Maddalena's engorged clit. The little nun's eyes well up and spill over, two big tears that make tracks all the way into her hairline. Andrea half expects to see them drip off the ends of her braids. Maddalena's body shudders; her head lolls; she quivers and clenches under Andrea's hands. Andrea pulls out her glistening fingers and fiddles them ruthlessly north again.

Virgo intacta
, she thinks, sending Maddalena over another
edge.
But let's make no mistake, little nun. No one's ever going to touch you again, without you wishing they were me.

It is the sexiest thought she's ever had.

 

They are halfway home on the airplane, sipping lime tonics and arguing amiably about whether or not to take a taxi back from the airport, when Andrea realizes that that last little bit of arrogance that had come to her as she touched the little nun was exactly like something Ro would have said. Of course, Ro would have said it
aloud.

First, she's shocked. Then she laughs.

Ro arches an eyebrow. “Something's funny. Care to share?”

Andrea thinks about it, then shakes her head.

“No,” she says, and links her fingers through Ro's. It feels good. Familiar, like a little homecoming. She squeezes. Ro squeezes back.

“No?”

“No,” Andrea says, and smiles. “I don't think so. Not this time.”

INTO THE BAPTISMAL

Peggy Munson

 

 

 

 

Kay was the one who broke my virginity pledge, when I was just fifteen.

Barreling through the country in a bus, I stroke myself as I think about seeing her again. My pussy is a glistening night-light beneath my old brown coat, guiding my frantically rubbing hand. Across the aisle, a curdled man chews his floppy lip in sleep. Through the windows, the taffy of headlights stretches between mile marker signs. We near a leaning, eavesdropping barn as I jiggle my clit to come.
Oh God,
I moan into the travel pillow fluff. The barn listens to a clothesline of flapping shirts that flirt with midnight sylphs.

 

We were naïve at fifteen, grappling for our own religion. A pair of plaster prayer hands
sat on the dresser, as small as elm leaves. Midway through a languid summer, we bull rode the old propane tank on sunny days, hot metal against our cotton underwear, trying to feel sensations down there. Kay's dad had been a rodeo clown, and we still pretended to be cowgirls. Some nights we threw Kay's sister's Barbie clothes in gas-can-fueled fires and made “polyester pyrotechnics,” as Kay liked to say. She had flint eyes that promised a hot meal on a shipwreck island.

Our hormones were starting to rise. “Dare you to moon the moon,” she said one night, when the moon—as my aunt used to say—was in estrus. So full you want to jab it with a stick.

“You're on,” I replied, and dropped my pants to my knees. I thrust my butt up and shook it. That's when Kay ran her finger up my crack and said, “Check out your furry caterpillar crack,” and made my asshole shiver.

It was my first inkling that I liked my cousin Kay. I had never felt that kind of want—the kind that leaves you trembling.

But we had signed virginity pledges with Faith Baptist Church, and we were also big recruiters. We used to troll through school and find some limp-haired Mary and wax hellfire and brimstone until she contracted her body to Christ. Still, things had shifted in Davis City, and our best recruiting happened before the paper screens came to town—before the car plant rose amongst the cornfields and Japanese businessmen demanded restaurants with Shoji screens. The first time I tasted raw fish, I watched a boy punch his fist through the Shoji paper and saw how much disdain boys have for flimsy white contracts. The sushi chefs circled the boy with choppy words but what did they expect? The puppetry of shadows made boys stiff with rage. Boys spent hours
tocking
lampshades, wishing they could punch their way through skirts. Girls needed more armor than pulp and ink.