Alice Close Your Eyes. Averil Dean

draws the fabric aside and runs a finger along the lace edge of my bra. “I like your clothes just fine, so long as they’re on the floor.”

      He unhooks the front of my bra and pushes the cup aside. Then he settles over me, his warm tongue curving around my nipple, his dark hair curling around my fingers. I watch his mouth, entranced by the contrast of his darker, stubbled skin against the pale swell of my breast. He takes my silver hoop in his teeth and tugs gently as he gathers slow handfuls of my skirt and finds the bare curve of my hip, grinning at my thigh-high striped socks.

      “I take it all back,” he says.

      I get to my knees and take off my blouse and his shirt, my skirt and underwear, run my hands over his chest and the hard slope of his shoulder. I unbutton his jeans and reach inside, wrap my fingers around the solid, dew-tipped length of his cock, and move down his body to take him in my mouth. His skin tastes clean, faintly salty, like the back of my hand before a shot of tequila. I weigh his testicles in my palm, run a thumb across their wrinkled surface and follow the fat speed-bump under his dick with my tongue as I take him to the top of my throat. We fall into a natural cadence, his hand at the back of my neck.

      He leans against the cab of the truck, holding my hair aside, watching. His face is impassive, but his body begins to shift. His breathing picks up. The texture of his skin feels smoother and more taut. I want him inside me and worry that he’ll finish in my mouth, but he stops me, pulls me away with one hand tangled in my hair.

      He digs a condom out of his wallet and rolls it on, motions for me with his fingers. I straddle him and ease down the length of his cock. I close my eyes. I have never had sex outdoors before, never felt the night wind on my bare breasts or felt this cool lick of air on my clitoris as I am spread apart. It’s electrifying. The heat between my legs crackles like molten lava spilling into the sea, hot meeting cold.

      Jack groans and holds me in place. “Jeeeesus,” he says. “Wait, baby...”

      I am still, imagining what distraction he turns to at times like this. Work, maybe. Measurements and angles, building codes and deadlines and the drying time of a slab of concrete. I wonder what this feels like to him, how wet, how tight I am around him. Already my cunt is clenched like a fist, contracting in upward ripples as if to draw him deeper inside me.

      I open my eyes and he opens his. His gaze sweeps over me with dark appraisal, a fierce masculine pride, proprietary and urgent, and my body answers with an almost painful thrill from someplace low and deep inside my belly. He lifts me up and presses me down, fixated on the connection point between us, his hands splayed wide over my hips.

      I lean forward to brace myself on the rim of the truck bed. The tips of my breasts graze his bare chest. He guides my nipple to his mouth, pulls me closer with one hand around the back of my neck, the other stroking my ass, sliding between my legs.

      My breasts grow heavy, tingling, wet from his tongue and cold from the night air. My breath whistles past my teeth. He flexes his thumb against my clitoris and lifts me with each thrust of his hips, up and down. I feel him growing thicker inside me. I open my legs, arch back, leaning on my hands with my breasts raised like an offering to the sky. The stars seem to circle overhead. The night air moves over my skin like a cool cotton sheet, catching at my breasts, sliding across my thighs.

      He turns his thumb so the tip is pressed right into the cleft of my clitoris, and that feels so good, unbearably good, as though he’s tripped a wire inside me, cut me loose and catapulted me into a rush of pleasure that shoots through my limbs and right to the top of my head. I come and he is chasing me with long hard strokes, clutching at my hips as if he can find more of me if he tries. A deep groan stutters from the back of his throat. His abdomen contracts under my hand.

      It takes a few minutes for him to soften, for me to get my bearings and enough strength in my thighs to crawl away. He wraps the blankets around me and we share a cigarette as the moon beams down upon us and the crickets resume their song.

      * * *

      “Watch yourself,” Jack says.

      “Watch your own self,” I tell him, picking my way across a cluster of damp rocks. “You keep watching me, you’re gonna wipe out.”

      It was Jack’s idea to go hiking today, up the Chulapai Trail where the flat, loamy footpath wanders through an undergrowth of ferns, and gradually upward between slabs of mossy granite, rising like the ruins of a long-dead city in the forest. He is sure-footed as a mountain lion, graceful and swift, with an inaudible loping gait that makes it difficult to tell where he is when he follows behind me.