Chapter 46 Crotch

The ghosts of her areolae were deliriously obvious beneath the flimsy material. Touching her body – and painfully aware of how close I was to properly touching her breasts – I came near to shivering in spite of the sweltering heat. “Well?” Katy prompted. She stroked my hand back and forth over her chest. Her skin was moist velvet with perspiration lubricating my caress. The ball of my thumb glanced against her breast and I was sure I felt the nipple stiffen. “Do you think that feels unattractive?” she asked. “I don’t recall touching anything that ever felt better,” I answered honestly. Her questioning expression turned into a mischievous grin. She lowered my hand to one breast so I was cupping her through a film of damp cotton. In the stillness of that moment I could feel her pulse through the hard bead of flesh that sat at the center of my palm. “In that case,” she whispered, “if perspiration suits me so much, why don’t you see if you can make me sweat a little more?” It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Maybe there was something appropriate about the fact that it began at the end of the day? I don’t know. I only know that, once we’d started, our passion quickly became boundless. Perhaps I should have noticed there was something a little kinky in her desire to excite me on the porch. The exhibitionism of what we were doing didn’t cross my mind until afterwards, when I realized that any passing neighbor could have seen us and been shocked or offended by our intimacy. But at the time it simply felt natural to do everything Katy asked. I was content to bury myself deep inside her smoldering depths and bask in the cries of her encroaching orgasm. Once again it was her beautiful voice that musical cadence and enchanting lilt – mesmerizing me and blinding me to everything except Katy. And, from that moment on, I was oblivious to everything except the pleasure that came from being with her. But I only began to suspect that she had unusual appetites after a month of our relationship. We’d tried a million and one variations on the traditional themes of sex, going from her porch, to the bedroom, detouring via the kitchen/diner, and the stairs on the way there. She invited me into every recess of her body, welcoming me with her mouth, sex lips and other places. She worshipped my erection with caresses from her breasts, tongue, hair and hands and we took each other to climax after climax in a splendor of shared bliss. I spent endless, happy hours watching her tease herself. And I particularly adored the way she would trill her fingers against the beautiful split of her sex – parting the dense, dark curls that covered her labia – while she charmed me back to arousal with the whispered promises of what we would do next. Each step further in our relationship seemed more like a declaration of our love, rather than another jolt down on some descent toward a perverted conclusion. We made love in semi-public places – under the stars and sometimes under the noon sun. We played power games and water sports, screwed while we were drunk, fucked while we were high, then made love when we were grounded and stone cold sober. We confessed our wildest fantasies, then endeavored to make them reality for the pleasure of each other. And, although I’m probably wrong with saying we did everything, it’s true to say: we did everything we wanted. Which is why I had no problems with the ropes Katy brought to the bedroom. The contrast of coarsely woven hemp against her dainty wrists was ugly, but somehow exciting. The vulnerability of her naked form, spread-eagled for me and available for the satisfaction of my every whim, was infuriatingly arousing. When I placed myself between her legs, then rode her helpless frame as she sobbed and moaned through a multiple orgasm, I could totally understand what those psychologists meant when they referred to “the good place”. At those moments, when Katy was screaming with joy and her inner muscles convulsed around me in the throes of ecstasy, I knew we were both in the good place. But, I suppose, good places were never meant to last and ours ended two nights after Katy first suggested we bring another rope into the bedroom. The term anoxia is cold and clinical – a million miles removed from the joy of Katy’s last moments or the liberating release of her final climax – but it was bandied around a lot by my defense lawyers in court. It was usually lumped with a string of other fancy words and supported by dry accounts of the reported stimulation that comes from autoerotic asphyxiation. The prosecution simply called me a strangler. The jurors were won over by their succinct use of words and, because I was convicted of first-degree murder with more than one of nine aggravating circumstances, I found myself a resident on death row. Which, until last week, had been the total antithesis of the good place Katy and I had known. But, on the morning when I was ready to meet the attorney handling my final appeal, Katy decided to speak to me again. At first I thought I was dreaming – I hadn’t properly climbed out of my bunk and was enjoying the sounds of the morning calls from bluejays and chickadees – when she whispered in my ear. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?” I could hear her voice as clearly as when she used to nibble on my lobe while we were locked in a post-coital embrace. It was that familiar Virginia drawl, deep set with a throaty chuckle of mischief. Death hadn’t killed her sensuous way of speaking, nor had it stifled the effect she had on me. As my erection grew I began to wonder if I was either insane, or mistaken, or still asleep. Unable to stop myself, I spoke her name aloud. “Katy?” “Do you like being inside?” she breathed. And, in that moment, I knew it was her. I didn’t know how she was talking to me. I didn’t know why she was talking to me. But I knew my own imagination could never have supplied such a perfect Katy-esque innuendo. With that one question I was beyond being skeptical that the voice was the product of my own diminishing faculties. I knew that Katy was back by my side. “I’ve missed you, lummock,” she confided. “I’ve missed you too,” I admitted. Her words were a balm, soothing and massaging away the tension I had suffered since incarceration. She hadn’t said anything overtly sexual, yet already she had excited me to the point of full arousal. An appreciation of my responses told me that it would only take another couple of sentences and she would have me ejaculating like some over-excited schoolboy on his first real date. I closed my eyes and easily pictured the way she had looked when she was speaking.