Sacchi Green
It’s the Charity Sunday Blog Hop again, where I donate a dollar to a charity of my choice for each comment on this blog (and half a dollar for each view even without comments.)
My contribution this time goes to the International Rescue Committee, working currently to give aid to the Kurds in Syria, for years our valued (and valiant) allies, who have been forced to flee now that our own nation has abruptly withdrawn support and allowed Turkish forces to attack them.
International Rescue Committee
My heart aches for Kurdistan. In spite of fighting along with the British and allies during WWI, when the time came to re-map the Middle East, promises were broken and the Kurds and Yazidis still have no official country of their own. Now, suddenly and without warning, they’ve been abandoned by the US allies for whom they’ve fought so hard and well in subduing the ISIS forces. US troops have been abruptly pulled out and Turkey is free to attack and destroy the Kurds, as they’ve already begun to do.
I have a special interest in the women who have joined the Kurdish military and fight to defend their territory. In the course of doing a great deal of research on the history and landscape of the unofficial country of Kurdistan, presently carved up between Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, I was lucky enough to see a documentary, Gulîstan, Land of Roses, by filmmaker Zaynê Akyol. She traveled with a group of women soldiers, some seasoned fighters, some in training, on their mission of defending Kurdish territory and defeating ISIS, the so-called Islamic State militants. Zaynê Akyol even spoke at my local art house cinema when her film was shown there.
My research was, of course, for something I was writing, my first (and possibly only) novel, Shadow Hand, the final third of which takes place in Kurdistan, especially in the Zagros mountain range. Being able to see the actual terrain and real women soldiers there was invaluable, and inspiring. Full disclosure: my novel has a superheroine theme, and involves a very fictional campaign to rescue hundreds of women imprisoned by ISIS in an ancient, land-mine-surrounded fortress, waiting to be sold as sex slaves. Aside from the fact that some superpowers are involved, I tried to make it as realistic as possible.
Usually in these charity blog hops I include some erotic excerpts, and there are some in Shadow Hand—having the power of telekinesis, moving things with the mind alone, adds some intriguing possibilities to sex scenes—but right now I’m too distracted by the plight of the Kurds, and the chaotic state of the world. Instead, I’ll share a couple of brief scenes with dialogue that gives some sense of the history of the people and the country.
A few words about the characters speaking. Cleo is a former sergeant in the US army, working with her lover Ash, a former army lieutenant (and the one with the accidentally acquired superpower) to rescue the prisoners. Mac is a former US Colonel working undercover with the Kurds. Razhan is a professor in a Kurdish university but currently a Colonel in the women’s militia. Ariya is a young soldier and assistant to Razhan.
Onward to the excerpts:
“Nice! Recommended by former travelers, I see.” Cleo looked along
the stretch of rock wall where words, probably names, had been
chipped with tools or scrawled with charred sticks in the time honored
tradition of “Kilroy was here.”
Mac, also surveying the marks, spoke Cleo’s thought aloud in her
own inimitable style. “Ah yes, ‘I write my name, therefore I am.’”
The sun was so low now that its rays slanted deep into the cave.
“I am happy to see that there are no very recent names here,” Razhan
said. Her stern look at Ariya, who had been there two years ago, said
clearly that there had better not be. Ariya’s response was a smile of
exaggerated innocence.
“Kurdish…Turkish…Armenian…hmm, could be Italian.” Razhan turned back to them. “There are caves in the more travelled parts of these mountains, passes that were trade routes for thousands of years, where Romans trapping our bears and lions for their gladiator arenas left their marks in Latin.”
“Bears and lions?” Cleo managed to sound merely curious, which,
on the whole, she was. Bears were familiar from her New Hampshire
home; you just had to keep your food where they couldn’t possibly
reach it, hang it in bags on high ropes between trees when you were
camping. But lions? The fire pit in front of the cave might have more
significance than she’d thought.
“All gone, long ago. They say a few bears are left, in the farthest
reaches, and we have leopards that may not be quite extinct, but no
lions. Gone. Just as the great cedar forests were ravaged long ago to build the
palaces of sultans and Caesars.”
Ariya nodded agreement as Razhan spoke. This was the history taught in Kurdish universities, Cleo guessed. How strange it must be to belong to a land where mankind had lived and died, come and gone, and ravaged more often than not, for so many millennia. Not that her own country’s history had been all that different, but the ravaging by Europeans of the indigenous cultures in America had happened a few hundred years ago instead of thousands.
And one more excerpt, when Cleo wonders whether she should dye her red hair to pass as a Kurdish woman when she gets deliberately captured, as planned:
Razhan’s face was just perceptible in the faint glow from the truck’s
dashboard. “We’ll darken it a bit with nut juice, to keep you from
attracting too much attention, but red hair is not unknown here. Those Roman and Greek and even Nordic travelers who took so much from these mountains left traces behind them as well. A girl in the town has red tints to her hair, as have her mother and grandmothers through many generations. We also have fair-haired people. Prick a Kurd and you see the blood of the world.”
_______________
So there it is, my long-distance connection with the Kurds. But even without that, even if I had never researched and written about them, my heart would ache for them now.
See the links below to visit the other Charity Sunday blogs this month.
Reaching Out from a Mind as Dirty as All Outdoors
If you get lucky enough, I might post adult-only material from time to time, so be 18 or over, or please be elsewhere.
I'll be discussing erotica here, the writing of it and the people who write it, as well as what we've written. I find all these aspects stimulating, but if any of them bore you, feel free to skim. You never know what you might miss, though.
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Sunday, October 27, 2019
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Charity Sunday: The Lakota People's Law Project
My choice of charities this time is the Lakota People's Law Project, to help in their long struggle against letting the pipelines of Keystone XL be built across their lands and threaten their sacred water supply, as well as other causes pertaining to Native American rights. I’ll donate at least two dollars for each comment on this post, and in fact I’ll donate one dollar just for each reader, whether you comment or not.
I’m including an entire story this time, not especially appropriate, but as close as I’ve come. This appears in the first collection of my own work from back in 2011, A Ride to Remember from Lethe Press.
Petroglyphs
by
Sacchi Geen
Something moved among the Douglas firs where the forest sloped upward toward burnished rock. The short hairs at the nape of Sigri's neck prickled with the sense of being watched.
Outwardly undisturbed, she went about the business of pitching camp on the open plateau. No staring toward the trees or up where rocky crevices concealed, she knew, a narrow cave. No pausing to listen for movement. Just aware, as always, of every detail of her surroundings.
Copperlode grazed serenely on patches of autumn-browned grass between the gone-to-seed wildflowers, lupine and columbine and monkeyflower. She raised her chestnut head from time to time to cock an ear toward the forest, but without alarm. Sigri pretended not to notice. No grizzly, for sure. Even without the light breeze from that direction the horse would have been aware of danger.
When the mountain tent was firmly anchored and a small fire begun in the circle of blackened stones, Sigri went to lean her close-cropped head against Copperlode's glossy neck. She murmured a few words, stroking the soft muzzle, until the mare's head twitched and one ear pointed again toward the trees.
Sigri moved away at a tangent to the direction of the horse's attention. When she reached the brushy edge of the woods she drew her knife and hacked away at deadwood. Her only apparent concern was gathering fuel for the fire, but tension built in her gut as she progressed slowly, casually, toward where someone waited; a tension that spread in ripples up and down her rangy body. Still she gave no sign of awareness, or of the tingling in her ass whenever her back was to the treeline.
Finally she dropped the armload of small branches, sheathed her knife, and stood stretching and rubbing her back. Stetson tilted against the sun's glare, she gazed out over the plateau and beyond to the mountains and valleys of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.
Now. Any second. Now the attack would come.
She would come. Pi'tamaken. Running Eagle.
A whisper of sound... Sigri whirled to meet the onslaught, the thought flashing through her mind that twenty years ago Pita would have made no sound at all.
Arms raised, hands locked in each other's bruising grip, they strained together, strength against strength. Pita tried to hook Sigri's knee, but Sigri jerked a thigh hard into her opponent's elkhide-clad crotch. When they fell together her Stetson was jolted loose but she managed to stay on top, her cropped yellow-white head leaning above the other's bronzed face and tangle of long black hair.
Pita tried to twist away. Sigri's head plunged suddenly toward her exposed throat, teeth nipping hard at the salty skin, counting coup according to their private ritual. The familiar taste sent a ripple of heat through her own throat and chest and beyond. Once she wouldn't have hesitated to draw blood, but that had been long ago, and the world a different place. No knowing what might be in blood these days.
She raised her head. Pita glared up, eyes fierce in her angular face. Then she grinned, teeth flashing white. "Good one," she conceded.
Sigri worked her thigh against the elkhide with less violence, or maybe just a different kind. Pita began to arch toward the pressure. The old, imperative ache hit Sigri's cunt like summer lightning, but Pita lurched abruptly aside and then upward with a whoop of triumph, and suddenly Sigri was on the bottom, needles and twigs prickling into her back and ass. The scent of arousal mingled with the sharp tang of crushed fir seedlings. She could see in Pita's face that the moment had passed.
"Heluva place you picked for bushwhacking," Sigri said. "What were you gonna do if I didn't come close enough and then kindly turn my back? Wait to scalp me in my sleep?"
Pita rolled off, leaving Sigri dangling between chill and heat. "Something like that. If the smell of coffee didn't drag me out first. But you knew all along somebody was there. What made you think it was me?"
"What did you expect, ferchrissake? One, you only made about as much noise as a pair of bull elk in rut, whereas most folks would've trampled the place like a herd of bison. I nearly didn't hear you. Two, that's one of my own horses you've got stashed over behind those boulders." They eyed each other warily as they stood up. No need to add that it was twenty-five years to the day since they'd first discovered this place, and the cave beyond. And twenty since the last time they'd met here. Promises had been made. Not counted on, maybe, in recent years-- neither had gone so far as to remind the other--but here they were.
"Your pretty lady back at the ranch seemed to think you wouldn't mind if I trailed you up here. Even outfitted me and trucked me in." Pita eyed Sigri sidelong as they strode toward the campsite. "That's some mighty appetizing armful you got back there."
"Emmaline been giving out free samples?"
"Just coffee and pie good enough to keep any cowboy close to home. Doesn't seem to have fattened you up much, though." She tweaked Sigri's lean rump. Sigri tweaked right back, harder, finding more to get a handle on. Running Eagle didn't appear to have been doing quite as much running as she used to. Still not that far past slender, though.
"Guess you'll just have to put up with camp coffee for now." Sigri ignored Pita's unasked question as she added wood to the fire and set up the tripod for hanging the pot.
"So does she?" Pita persisted. "Keep you close to home?" The fact that the ranch was two hours of driving and three of trail riding away was irrelevant, and they both knew it.
"Emmaline's got no worries, no matter where I go. Or who I do." Sigri finished messing with the pot and sat down to wait for the coffee to boil. No need to mention that she'd had little enough inclination to wander these last few years. Sending Pita up here had been a generous gesture, and Sigri had no doubt that Emmaline had known just what she was about. Emmaline always did know.
Pita surveyed her closely for a moment, then nodded and went off to bring the hidden horse and gear to the campsite. When they sat side by side at last, devouring hot coffee and cold ham sandwiches, proximity and unresolved arousal went a long way toward restoring old bonds. But not all the way.
"Haven't heard from you in a while," Sigri commented. Two years since that last brief post card from Durango, down in Anasazi cliff-dweller territory. That had been about the time Emmaline moved in. Sigri'd be damned, though, if she'd let on that she'd kept count. "How's it been going? Still irresistible to all those eager young archaeology grad students? I don't imagine you have any problem keeping your bedroll warm out on those digs."
"Nope. No problem at all. But damn, they get younger every year!"
"What's the matter, Professor, you getting tired of teaching youngsters the same old games?"
"Most of 'em you made up in the first place," Pita said with a reminiscent smile. "That one about buttering the sweet corn always goes over real well, whether they're convinced it's a genuine ritual or not."
"Nothing like getting an ear of corn nice and slippery the natural way," Sigri agreed. Her boyish grin would never grow old, no matter how many lines time and weather etched on her face. "Sprinkling cornmeal on the belly and licking spirals through it was a good one, too. Can't go wrong with corn when it comes to ritual material." Her tone was light, but the way she remembered it, those things they'd done with and to each other all those years ago had always had a touch of sacrament about them.
Well, maybe not always. "I'll bet they appreciate the hell out of Little Big Horn, too," she added. "But I expect you've gone more high-tech by now, with silicone or whatever they're using these days." Not that Sigri didn't have her own fairly state-of-the-art mail-order equipment stashed in a handy drawer at home.
"Little Big Horn was always just for you," Pita said gruffly. "You made him. " She stared into the fire, which seemed brighter now that the sun had edged below the highest peak. "Like you made me."
Sigri sensed the sudden change of mood and searched to find the kind of words that seemed to be called for.
"Always struck me that was pretty much a team effort," she said, knowing it sounded lame. What was Pita looking for, after all this time? After all she could’ve had if she'd wanted to stick around for it?
But Pita seemed to have some words penned up that needed setting loose. "So how did it happen," she mused, eyes fixed on the stick she was poking gently among the embers at the fire's edge, "that I turned out to be the college professor, instead of you?"
She didn't look much like an academic just then, dressed in traditional elkhide, black hair streaming wild, her strong dark face needing only a few streaks of war paint across the high cheekbones to strike terror into the hearts of intruding settlers. "I never had any use for books or history or any kind of learning until you dug up those old woman warrior stories and made me read them. Woman Chief of the Crow. Running Eagle of my own Blackfeet tribe, who even took a wife. You gave me my true name."
"As I recall, I had to tie you to a fence post to get you to hold still long enough to listen to me read 'em out loud," Sigri said. "I got tired of the both of us always picking fights just for an excuse to grab each other, not knowing what we were doing or who we really were."
"Hah! You couldn't have tied me to anything on your best day!" Pita retorted. "But you did know enough to look in books, and those hippy magazines later with all those Two-Spirit movement articles."
"I had a little help from Miss Edmonds in the library behind the Post Office," Sigri said. Just knowing that Miss Edmonds had understood what she needed and not been scandalized had helped her as much as any book. Not many, she knew, were so lucky, even these days.
"So now," Pita said, as if she'd followed Sigri's train of thought, "I'm the one who passes along the lore, with everything else I can dig up, literally, about the ancient history of my people."
"And I'm the one tied to the land," Sigri said. "These mountains and plains. And the horses. That's all I need."
"And Emmaline?"
"She goes with the deal," Sigri acknowledged. "With the plains, and the ranch, and the horses. All part of the same thing." She flipped the dregs from her coffee cup into the fire and was on her feet before their aromatic sizzling had subsided. "How about you?" she asked, stretching out a weathered hand. "Is Running Eagle still part of the mountains?"
Pita reached up to grip Sigri's proffered hand. "I'm here," she said simply, and yanked herself erect. There was an instant when they leaned apart, balancing each other's weight; and then both arms tightened and their bodies collided.
It was a hug to leave bruises, more like two grizzlies than lovers. There would be finger marks on backs and asses for days. Sigri bit along the side of Pita's neck and stopped short of drawing blood this time only because her lips and tongue demanded their turn at feeling and tasting. Pita tore Sigri's shirt open with her teeth and chewed at a muscular shoulder as though softening up the sinews before devouring them. The old need rose between them, demanding, raising gutteral sounds to rumble in their throats.
"Here?" Sigri gasped, "or up there?" jerking her head in approximately the direction of the rocky cave on the mountainside. Pita's answer was a hand shifted from clutching at Sigri's ass to thrusting against her denim-clad crotch. "Plenty to go around," she muttered, ducking her head against Sigri's tingling chest so she could see to unzip the jeans and get her fingers where they'd do the most good. Sigri got her hand inside the elkhide trousers almost as soon.
It was all powerful thrusts and surging responses, heat and wetness and more, more, harder, faster, until tensions building for years found sudden, sharp release, as near to simultaneous as made no difference.
"God damn!" Sigri panted, when she could speak again. "We've still got it!"
"That's just for openers," Pita said, struggling to control her breathing. "I'll meet you up there." She knelt to dig in her pack, then moved off across the plateau, slowly at first, accelerating into a smooth lope that took her swiftly into the forest.
When Pita's lithe form had melted into the trees, Sigri turned away to bank the fire and check on the horses, then followed at her own striding pace.
The trail, such as it was, ran along beside a narrow stream. Sigri was glad to find no signs that any creatures besides wild ones had been this way in recent years, except for Pita, who, at this moment, was as good as wild.
The last stretch was steep. Sigri paused to try to catch her breath where the trees ended abruptly at the rocky outcropping. Anticipation had as much to do with it as exertion.
There were easy hand- and footholds in the stone at first, but higher up it would have been slow going for anyone who hadn't been this way before. Sigri pressed her body close against a vertical rock-edge barring the way and swung one long leg over to the unseen side. Her foot found the knob she knew was there, her hand reached out to find the slanting finger crack high above; and then she was all the way around, leaping from her tenuous hold into the narrow, gravel-floored entrance of the cave.
Sigri's eyes adjusted to the relative dusk inside. There had been a time when Pita might have lunged at her at this point, but their games had moved on to something more like ritual, and the place had taken on a touch of something close to sacred.
She almost wished Pita would lunge. But there she was, several yards inside, waiting as motionless as the stone pressing into her back; and as naked, except for a soft deerskin pouch on a thong around her neck. She had built a small fire with wood gathered along the way, and, though it gave off only a little heat, Sigri felt no chill when she, too, left her clothes at the entrance.
She stopped just inside for a moment to duck her head toward four small dark splotches on the cave wall. Painted handprints, left hundreds of years ago. Had they been messages, or a simple affirmations of someone's presence? Or existence? Twenty-five years ago two girls in need of affirmation of their own identities had drawn wishful conclusions. The prints were small enough, after all, to have been made by women. So they had left marks of their own to puzzle explorers hundreds of years in the future, deeper marks, laboring at them each time they returned.
Sigri moved on in, gripped by the increasing urgency of the present. Pita stood silently, pressed against the rock wall, arms at an angle from her sides, legs slightly spread. Only her black eyes moved, burning into Sigri's pale blue ones. Stifling the urge to lunge herself, Sigri fell into the remembered ritual, lifting the deerskin pouch gently from Pita’s chest and drawing out of it a stick of compressed charcoal wrapped in corn husks.
"Pi'tamaken," she murmured huskily. "Running Eagle." The roughness of the husks raised a flush on Pita's bronzed skin as Sigri rolled the still-wrapped cylinder along her collarbones and across her breasts, forcefully enough to scrape against dark, hardened nipples. Then down the curve of her belly, and lower, pausing to thrust a few times between her thighs until wet streaks darkened the pale, dry husks.
Pita stood outwardly unmoved, but a pulse throbbed in her throat and the beating of her heart disturbed the smooth skin of her chest. The tender flesh of Sigri's own cunt and clit swelled and moistened, and she knew that Pita's body mirrored that reaction. The mingling of their musky scents was intensified by the drifting smoke of cedar and sage.
Sigri lifted the cornhusk packet and tore away the covering with strong teeth. Pita's taste clung to her lips and tongue. When enough of the black stick was unwrapped, she splayed her left hand across Pita's belly and traced around it, leaving a five-fingered mark on her flesh. Then she drew a line down one side of Pita's crotch until she hit the rock wall. Sigri could feel, without seeing, the shallow groove she’d chipped into the stone years ago to follow the entire outline of Pita's body.
Down along the inner thigh, the muscular calf, the ankle's bones and tendons, she drew the charcoal, following that groove. Her left hand still pressed into Pita's flesh hard enough to leave bruises as she knelt to draw her line along the outer leg, hip, waist, arm, smearing the skin as well. When she stood to trace around shoulder and neck and head, her body pressed so closely against Pita's that she could feel their hearts pounding in counterpoint.
Sigri switched hands to draw the line down the other side. This time her fingers gripped Pita lower down, her palm pushing hard against the silent woman's mound.
"Don't move," she warned, kneeling to complete the outline, moving the charcoal inch by slow inch upward toward the triangle between Pita's thighs; but her left hand urged something different, sliding downward and kneading flesh grown hot and slippery. Still Pita stood immobile, except for her quickened breathing.
"Almost done," Sigri murmured, so close that her breath stirred Pita's pubic hairs; and then, as the lines met and the pattern was complete, she dropped the charcoal and leaned forward to taste what she'd been hungering for.
Pita did not move. Her stillness became a challenge. Sigri grabbed at her hips now with both hands and licked and bit at the flesh so clearly eager for what the will resisted. Pita's thighs tensed.
Sigri worked her tongue deeply into Pita's warm, welcoming cunt, then abruptly withdrew, and suddenly Pita's hands were clutching at her short pale hair and trying to force her head closer. Instead, Sigri's fingers took over, thrusting far into the depths she had once known better than her own.
Pita's head tilted back. A sound like the low rumble of a cougar sure of its prey began deep in her chest. Then, as Sigri pounded into her faster and harder, Pita's voice rose in pitch until her final cries could have rivaled the screams of an eagle.
When the echoes had subsided from flesh and stone, Pita slid down along the rock wall to slump against Sigri's shoulder. They leaned together for a few moments, in perfect balance, until Pita lifted her head.
"That's only half of what I came for," she said, not altogether steadily. "Up against the wall, now. If you dare." Intense emotion underlay the mocking words.
This ritual had always had more meaning for Pita than for Sigri, who looked up now at the cave wall. The newly-blackened outline overlapped another, the pair linked so that the grooves defining arms and legs and torsos intersected as though two bodies stood close together, each with a hand on the other's crotch. Their shapes were curved just enough to show that they were female, which, in Sigri's case, had required a bit of exaggeration of her rangy lines; and, between each pair of hips, a line coiled across the belly into a spiral. Future archaeologists should have no trouble interpreting their symbolism.
Sigri did, of course, stand and press her back against her own outline on the rough rock wall. If she didn't get fucked by Pita pretty damned soon she'd be banging her fist against that same wall. And when Pita stood before her, outlined by the glow of the fire, naked and wild as some shamanic spirit from the depths of time, Sigri felt the power of the ritual grip her.
"Sakwo'mapi akikwan," Pita murmured. "Matsops." Boy-girl. Crazy woman. Old words, signifying their connection to those who had gone before.
The stroke of Pita's hand along her side, drawing the charcoal through the stone groove, the clutch of Pita's fingers on her flat belly, heated Sigri's blood to boiling. She needed to move, to thrust her hips forward, to grab at Pita and force her to feed the hunger pounding through her body.
Still she stood, as Pita had, pressed against the stone. Part of the mountains. Part of time. Linked to those who had gone before, and would come after.
Pita's hand reached Sigri's wet folds, probing into her depths, and time and place were swept away by the surging demand of her body. She clenched around the pressure, demanded it, devoured it, until her final shout of triumph rang out like the bugling of a bull elk in rut.
Then, like Pita. Sigri slid down the rock wall, ignoring the scrapes its roughness imprinted on her back. They huddled in each other's grip until the little fire was almost out. Slowly they pulled each other upright.
"We have to go back," Pita said softly. Sigri nodded. Going back meant more than just climbing down to the campsite. It meant Emmaline, and the ranch, and classrooms and archaeological expeditions and nubile grad students.
But there was still tonight. Where the trees met the rock Pita turned to flash Sigri a grin of challenge. "I'll race you," she said, and then, shouting over her shoulder as she got a head start, "I did bring Little Big Horn, and first one back to camp gets him."
Here's a list of links to the other five posts participating in Charity Sunday today. Everything below these five links refers to last month's group, and may no longer be useable.
http://www.nomadauthors.com/blog/2019/09/21/charity-sunday-tunnels-to-towers-foundation/
https://www.jessicajamesbooks.com/2019/09/support-code-of-vets.html
https://lynceeshillard.wordpress.com
http://creative-hodgepodge.blogspot.com/2019/09/charity-sunday-mel-trotter-mission.html
https://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2019/09/charity-sunday-doctors-without-borders.html
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Charity Sunday: Planned Parenthood
Planned Parenthood Needs Us!
Charity Sunday is the invention of writer extradinaire Lisabet Sarai, and this month several more authors have pitched in to make it a group blog hop. Here's how it goes. Each writer chooses a charity and makes a donation to it for every comment you make on our posts. You get to read excerpts from our work, we make the donations ourselves, and we all get to feel a little better about our world. Links to all the blogs are way down at the bottom of the page.
I had a different charity in mind at first, but the timing can’t be ignored. We all know what Planned Parenthood does, and we know in light of recent news what Planned Parenthood needs from us. And I know, from a college friend, how much Planned Parenthood has done for women. Two years after graduation my friend needed their help, and was so impressed that after her daughter had been born and adopted she went to work for the organization. They got a good deal; her intellect and organizational skills are top-notch. A few years ago she reunited with her daughter, now a mother herself, and they have a close and happy relationship.
So thanks, Planned Parenthood, personally. I will make a contribution to Planned Parenthood for each comment to this blog post.
https://www.plannedparenthood.org
Now for a story excerpt. It was hard to think of a story of mine with any connection to this charity--I usually write lesbian erotica, and don’t include much about parenthood. Make that never. Except…this once…
I’ve edited fifteen erotica anthologies over the years, several of them award-winners, and contributed my own stories to many more. In a new collection of my own short stories, Wild Rides and Other Lesbian Erotic Adventures from Dirt Road Books, two of the stories are a pair, and the one that’s a sequel does involve a single mother trying to get custody of her six-year-old child. Not exactly Planned Parenthood territory, but it’s plausible that she might have had help from them at some point.
So onward! The first story in the pair, “Pulling,” is the heavy hitter when it comes to sex. The second, “Finding Carla,” has a good share of that, but also goes into the emotional depths of motherhood under stressful conditions, so I’ll give you two different excerpts from that story, with a gap between. For that matter, anyone who would like to read the entire story can just email me and I’ll send it along. sacchigreen@gmail.com (or look me up on Facebook) Or, of course, you could buy Wild Rides with all its wide (and deep) variety of stories.
(Note: The cover image does not represent these characters, but it comes close to one in another of the stories in the book.)
From “Finding Carla”
Sacchi Green
“Keep your skanky hands off me!” The words sliced through drifting aromas of coffee and pancakes and bacon. “Touch me again, and those fingers won’t even be able to fuck your own sorry dick!”
I’d know that voice, that attitude, anywhere. A truck stop where Vermont slopes into New Hampshire wasn’t high on my list of places to look, but how much, really, had I ever known about Carla? Apart from the way she sounded in hip-swishing, femme-top command of any situation—or with her hips so entirely out of control she couldn’t shape gasps into words—or steeling herself to mount my huge draft horse in spite of her terror. We hadn’t had much time for the getting-to-know-you parts.
I couldn’t see into the dining area past the family with fidgety kids ahead of me. Getting by without trampling them didn’t seem likely, but I was giving it a try anyway when a skinny whirlwind shot from around the cashier’s counter and whacked me from behind.
“Ree Daniels, move your butt!” The manager forged her way through the milling kids like an icebreaker. I was twice Lyddie Brown’s bulk and a foot taller, but I followed in her wake anyway.
It was Carla, all right, her pot of scalding coffee poised right above the hastily withdrawn hand—and the crotch—of a middle-aged truck driver I’d seen around before. On the skuzzy side, usually on the make, but Carla could’ve handled his kind in seconds with a sly quip, back when she’d been working arcade games on the county fair circuit.
Now her face and body were tense, brittle, close to panic. She looked as near to being spooked as any horse I’ve ever handled. What the hell had got into her? And what was she doing here?
It was my turn to shove Lyddie aside, with a look meant to convince her I knew what I was doing. “Hey Carla.” I moved in close. “Let me help you out with that.” My hand curled around her fingers on the coffeepot’s handle. My body edged hers away from the customer. “Let’s put it down over here, okay?”
The wildness in her dark eyes mellowed into recognition, and something I hoped was deeper. That last morning at the fair, while I was still asleep, she’d cleared out without any clue as to how to find her, and for nearly two years I’d figured all she’d seen in me was a hot enough two-night stand to pass the time with. If she’d thought that was all I’d seen in her, she’d been dead wrong. Okay, I lied about the getting-to-know-you bit. Two days and nights was enough for me to discover the vulnerability behind the bravado, the steel determination that overcame fear—and to want to know more.
“Sure,” she said now, “anything you say, big girl.” Her voice shook, but the old low, intimate tone was still there.
Remembered lust surged back in a rush. Carla had always radiated sparks of bad-girl eroticism. Even with her waves of black hair confined in a knot and her waitress uniform just skimming her curves, she shot off pheromones that could pierce a Humvee. I’d have felt some sympathy for the driver if he hadn’t started to bluster.
Lyddie rolled her eyes, jerked her head toward the office, and went into damage control mode.
I got Carla to the coffee station and deposited the hot pot. In spite of interested observers at every table, my hand settled into the sweet spot where waist curves to hip as I steered her into the office and kicked the door shut.
She was shivering when I put my arms around her. I’d never imagined Carla so shaken. Physically wary, sure—my big horses had scared her before she’d discovered the delights of naked bare-back riding at midnight—but nothing like this melt-down. “Oh, honey, what’s the trouble?” I used my soothing-skittish-fillies tone. “It’ll be all right.” I stroked her black hair, glossy as my Percherons. It came loose from its prim knot, falling into the wild mane I remembered whipping back and forth over my sweaty torso as she rode me.
“No it won’t,” she muttered against my chest. When her head lifted I saw that the glitter of tears in her eyes came as much from rage as from despair. It was oddly reassuring.
“There goes another job! That bastard! But I can handle his kind without lifting a finger. Usually.” Carla searched her breast pockets. I took pity and grabbed the box of Kleenex from Lyddie’s desk.
I dabbed at her damp eyes. No make-up beyond a subdued shade of lipstick. She still exuded that Jezebel-of-your-dreams air that had grabbed me the first time I’d seen her, but something else as well that grabbed me even harder, even as I shied away from examining it too closely. “So what went wrong?”
“Me. I went wrong. ‘Sorry, I’m not on the menu’ didn’t do the trick, but I could’ve just smiled and moved away. When he put his hand on my butt, though, I felt…I wanted…dammit, Ree, I needed to be touched so bad it hurt, but not by his kind!”
I could recognize a mare in heat long before I earned my veterinary degree, and my experience of women had tuned me to the similarities. Women aren’t as easily ruled by their hormones as mares, though; for Carla to go off the deep end, there must be as much turmoil in her head as in her body. Dangerous territory.
Just the same, my hand went to her thigh and would have traveled farther if Lyddie hadn’t charged into the office just then.
Carla tried to pull away. I kept an arm around her shoulder.
“How’s it going, Lyddie?” I hoped my grin still had the tomboy charm that used to get me extra pie as a kid. The manager had known me all my life, and my family even longer. We’d always stopped here when I was helping my dad transport horses to New Hampshire farms and fairs. The grin could have got me a whole lot more than pie if I’d been so inclined, once I’d grown up, cropped my straw-yellow hair short, and shown that I knew who I was and where I was going.
Lyddie looked us up and down, hands braced on hips, head shaking in exasperation. “Might’ve known you’d be acquainted. There’s gotta be an explanation behind this, but I don’t have the time or patience now.”
“It’s the old story,” I said. “Farm girl meets carnival huckster at the county fair. The Lancaster Fair year before last, when my team was in the pulling trials.” I realized too late that Carla might not have included the midway balloon/dart concession on her resumè.
“Judging by such a touching reunion, maybe you wouldn’t mind taking Miss Volcano-mouth off my hands for a couple of days until all this drama blows over.”
Carla stirred under my arm. “I’m sorry, Lyddie. I should just move on. Thanks for taking a chance on me, but I’ve always been bad news.”
I wanted to shake the old arrogance back into her. On the other hand, if it had been just a shield, I wanted to know what was behind it.
Lyddie softened. “You’re not bad, honey. You’re just drawn that way.”
Carla was right on it. “Thanks, Lyddie. Jessica Rabbit is my role model.”
“You’re a fine cashier and waitress,” Lyddie added. “Never did figure out what you’re doing in a place like this. You could make a lot more tending bar in the city or the tourist area over by Mount Washington. At least bars have bouncers.”
Carla’d begun to relax, but now she tensed and glanced away from Lyddie. “Can’t blame a girl for wanting to try out respectability for a change.”
I was tired of being left out of the conversation. “If riding in the cab of a horse van rates as respectable, I’d be glad of the company. I’ll be back this way tomorrow or the next day. We’ll see how things look by then.”
“Just let me get out of this uniform and grab a few things.” Carla wriggled out of my grasp. Lyddie and I watched her go, both our gazes fixed on her slender back and swaying ass, both of us exhaling when she’d gone. But Lyddie’s sigh was somber.
“Can’t get a job at a bar these days without a background check,” she said. “A police record will shoot you right down. She’s a whiz with numbers, too, took some accounting courses she says, but the same goes there.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” But I knew.
“Just something to bear in mind, Henrietta.” Lyddie tweaked my butt and left the office fast. Just as well. I don’t mind the occasional grope, but nobody gets to call me by my given name.
Carla met me at my truck. “You got Molly and Stark in there?” Face scrubbed, hair pulled into a flowing ponytail, jeans not too tight and plaid shirt managing not to gape across her full breasts, she’d still never pass for the girl-next-door type. Which was fine with me.
“Nope. Truck’s empty. I’m picking up a couple of two-year-olds in Maine and bringing them back to my farm for training.” I boosted her up into the cab, enjoying cupping her rump in my big hands.
“Haven’t taken the team on the competition circuit lately.” I settled into the driver’s seat. “Molly indicated in no uncertain terms last spring that she was ready to be bred, so all summer she got to laze around in the pasture with nothing heavier to pull than kids on a hayride, and this spring there’s one more black Percheron filly in Vermont.”
“A sweet little Molly!” Carla’s smile wavered, and she turned her face away.
Dangerous currents for sure. It occurred to me that I did know, or at least suspect, something intensely personal about Carla. Something she didn’t know I knew.
***
My eyes stayed fixed on the road ahead, neck cramping with the effort not to turn and stare. I knew a pull-off next to the river a couple of miles ahead, plenty big enough for the truck.
“How about you, Ree?” Carla knew she had me going. “You been getting plenty of action?”
“Haven’t let anybody else tie me to the bedposts with Mardi Gras beads and then dare me not to break them, but I get by.” I risked a sideways glance. “I still have some of those beads.”
“So do I.” Her wistful tone made me want to hold her close even more than I wanted to fuck her.
It was a good thing no fisherman was parked in my pull-off. A clash between a horse rig and a pickup would be no contest. And it was a good thing that a row of young birch trees, first tender green leaves unfurling, masked us from the road. Carla was on me before my truck stopped rolling. I grabbed both her hands and held her off, but she got a leg over my thigh.
“Carla, we have to talk. No fuck me and leave me this time. I mean it.”
She tried to laugh. “Anything you say, big girl. But can’t we fuck first and talk later? I promise I won’t leave. How could I? You’re my ride.”
I guess I gave in, since suddenly my hands were on her hips and she was, quite literally, riding me. I leaned the seat back as far as it would go. Even so her ass made the horn honk, so I squirmed sideways until my substantial butt was in the passenger’s seat and we had just enough room to loosen our clothes in all the right places.
The sex was fast and furious, nothing fancy, with her knee in my crotch and my fingers in hers and our mouths hungry for whatever they could reach. We kept it up through wave after wave until finally Carla collapsed on my breast sobbing for breath. It wasn’t all that cold outside, but the windows were steamed up, making the space inside seem safe and intimate. Breathing our mingled scents, her skin pressed against mine, felt like coming to a home I’d just discovered.
It was a while before I realized that her sobs were producing real tears. “It’s okay,” I murmured, stroking her hair, my hand sticky with her juices. “Tell me about it.”
“If only…” she nestled even closer against me.
“Tell me,” I said, and then, on a hunch, “Girl or boy?”
She stiffened. “Girl. How did you know?”
“An educated guess.” This was going to be tricky. “Okay, you know I’m a veterinarian.”
“Yeah, so?”
I blundered along. “So I have a problem. My hands are too big. Okay for delivering foals and calves, but not always for young ewes in trouble with their first lambing. Even with lube. In tough situations I need an assistant with, well, smaller hands.” This wasn’t going well.
Carla sat up straight and said it for me. “So when I could take your whole hand that night, you figured I’d had a kid.”
I shrugged. “Never found anybody who hadn’t who could.” No need to mention the faint stretch marks on her belly.
I thought a storm was brewing, but suddenly she grabbed my left hand and cradled it between her naked breasts. “Was that animal lube you used?”
“Horse lube. I never expected to get lucky at the fair, but I always keep some vet supplies in my truck, so…”
“Got any with you now?” This was the cocky, seductive Carla, even with a tear-streaked face.
“Maybe, but there isn’t room in here for that much action. And you promised we’d talk.” I draped her shirt around her shoulders and rebuttoned mine. “What’s her name?”
“Josie. She’s almost six.” Carla took a deep breath, looked away, and let it all come rushing out. “She’s been with my cousin in Boston since she was three. I…I couldn’t be with her for a while, and when I got out, I couldn’t find a job to support her, so I took whatever work I could get and saved up. It seemed like enough after the carnival gigs, but then my cousin said I wasn’t a fit mother so she’d report me to social services if I tried to take my child. Now Josie’s getting to be as wild as I always was, and they can’t handle her, but my cousin still thinks it’s her duty to try. And my cousin’s husband comes on to me lately when I visit. So I’ve been trying to get respectable—even got a job as a secretary, but of course my boss couldn’t keep his hands to himself. I did some damage and had to get out.”
No surprises there. What did startle me was my own sudden, certain determination. I turned her gently to face me. “Lyddie tells me you’re good with numbers. Business paperwork fries my mind. Being a bookkeeper for a lesbian veterinarian might not rank at the top of the respectability chart, and I couldn’t promise your boss would keep her hands to herself, but there’s a farmhand’s cottage you and Josie could have to yourselves, separate from my house. It’s yours if you want to give it a try.”
A light flashed in Carla’s eyes, then died. “Social services are such hard-asses!”
“It’s the 21st century. Massachusetts and Vermont and even New Hampshire are getting better. And…” I played my remaining card… “I know a good Boston lawyer.”
“Lawyers are expensive.” Before my mouth was halfway open, she added, in her don’t-cross-me tone, “No. You can’t pay.”
“No need. She does pro bono work for discrimination cases. And she owes me a favor.”
“Oh?” Carla’s expressive eyebrows arched. “I suppose you cured her horse, or something?”
“Her Great Dane. She has a vacation condo over toward Mt. Washington. I check up on the place now and then when she’s not there. That’s where we’ll stay tonight, so we’d better get on the road.”
“You must be real friendly with this lawyer,” Carla said pointedly as we rolled along through the wide valley of the Ammonoosuc.
I just grinned, and took a while to answer. Spring was greening up the fields and woodlands. In spite of uncertainties, I was feeling pretty spring-feverish myself. “I have plenty of friends,” I teased. “The favor she owes me is getting her together with another friend, a ski instructor at Wildcat.”
“And now you’re all pals together, right?”
“The condo does have a super-sized Jacuzzi,” I countered. “Big enough for three, even if one is my size.” She shouldn’t assume I only wanted her because my opportunities were limited.
***
Well. That’s too long already, so I won’t bore you further by including the scene where a feisty six-year-old girl with trust issues meets a skittish, shiny black Percheron filly.
Love at first sight.
***
Remember, comment here for me to make a donation to Planned Parenthood. Also, a comment will enter you in a drawing for a free ebook copy of my collection. If you wonder what the heck other kinds of stories I write, you could find out in Wild Rides. From a jeep-jockey WAC in Vietnam, to pirates in the South China Sea as WWII approaches, to gargoyles in Paris, a shape-shifting dragon, prison inmates matching strength to strength, and more, and more, and more.
Amazon-Wild Rides
Charity Sunday is the invention of writer extradinaire Lisabet Sarai, and this month several more authors have pitched in to make it a group blog hop. Here's how it goes. Each writer chooses a charity and makes a donation to it for every comment you make on our posts. You get to read excerpts from our work, we make the donations ourselves, and we all get to feel a little better about our world. Links to all the blogs are way down at the bottom of the page.
I had a different charity in mind at first, but the timing can’t be ignored. We all know what Planned Parenthood does, and we know in light of recent news what Planned Parenthood needs from us. And I know, from a college friend, how much Planned Parenthood has done for women. Two years after graduation my friend needed their help, and was so impressed that after her daughter had been born and adopted she went to work for the organization. They got a good deal; her intellect and organizational skills are top-notch. A few years ago she reunited with her daughter, now a mother herself, and they have a close and happy relationship.
So thanks, Planned Parenthood, personally. I will make a contribution to Planned Parenthood for each comment to this blog post.
https://www.plannedparenthood.org
Now for a story excerpt. It was hard to think of a story of mine with any connection to this charity--I usually write lesbian erotica, and don’t include much about parenthood. Make that never. Except…this once…
I’ve edited fifteen erotica anthologies over the years, several of them award-winners, and contributed my own stories to many more. In a new collection of my own short stories, Wild Rides and Other Lesbian Erotic Adventures from Dirt Road Books, two of the stories are a pair, and the one that’s a sequel does involve a single mother trying to get custody of her six-year-old child. Not exactly Planned Parenthood territory, but it’s plausible that she might have had help from them at some point.
So onward! The first story in the pair, “Pulling,” is the heavy hitter when it comes to sex. The second, “Finding Carla,” has a good share of that, but also goes into the emotional depths of motherhood under stressful conditions, so I’ll give you two different excerpts from that story, with a gap between. For that matter, anyone who would like to read the entire story can just email me and I’ll send it along. sacchigreen@gmail.com (or look me up on Facebook) Or, of course, you could buy Wild Rides with all its wide (and deep) variety of stories.
(Note: The cover image does not represent these characters, but it comes close to one in another of the stories in the book.)
From “Finding Carla”
Sacchi Green
“Keep your skanky hands off me!” The words sliced through drifting aromas of coffee and pancakes and bacon. “Touch me again, and those fingers won’t even be able to fuck your own sorry dick!”
I’d know that voice, that attitude, anywhere. A truck stop where Vermont slopes into New Hampshire wasn’t high on my list of places to look, but how much, really, had I ever known about Carla? Apart from the way she sounded in hip-swishing, femme-top command of any situation—or with her hips so entirely out of control she couldn’t shape gasps into words—or steeling herself to mount my huge draft horse in spite of her terror. We hadn’t had much time for the getting-to-know-you parts.
I couldn’t see into the dining area past the family with fidgety kids ahead of me. Getting by without trampling them didn’t seem likely, but I was giving it a try anyway when a skinny whirlwind shot from around the cashier’s counter and whacked me from behind.
“Ree Daniels, move your butt!” The manager forged her way through the milling kids like an icebreaker. I was twice Lyddie Brown’s bulk and a foot taller, but I followed in her wake anyway.
It was Carla, all right, her pot of scalding coffee poised right above the hastily withdrawn hand—and the crotch—of a middle-aged truck driver I’d seen around before. On the skuzzy side, usually on the make, but Carla could’ve handled his kind in seconds with a sly quip, back when she’d been working arcade games on the county fair circuit.
Now her face and body were tense, brittle, close to panic. She looked as near to being spooked as any horse I’ve ever handled. What the hell had got into her? And what was she doing here?
It was my turn to shove Lyddie aside, with a look meant to convince her I knew what I was doing. “Hey Carla.” I moved in close. “Let me help you out with that.” My hand curled around her fingers on the coffeepot’s handle. My body edged hers away from the customer. “Let’s put it down over here, okay?”
The wildness in her dark eyes mellowed into recognition, and something I hoped was deeper. That last morning at the fair, while I was still asleep, she’d cleared out without any clue as to how to find her, and for nearly two years I’d figured all she’d seen in me was a hot enough two-night stand to pass the time with. If she’d thought that was all I’d seen in her, she’d been dead wrong. Okay, I lied about the getting-to-know-you bit. Two days and nights was enough for me to discover the vulnerability behind the bravado, the steel determination that overcame fear—and to want to know more.
“Sure,” she said now, “anything you say, big girl.” Her voice shook, but the old low, intimate tone was still there.
Remembered lust surged back in a rush. Carla had always radiated sparks of bad-girl eroticism. Even with her waves of black hair confined in a knot and her waitress uniform just skimming her curves, she shot off pheromones that could pierce a Humvee. I’d have felt some sympathy for the driver if he hadn’t started to bluster.
Lyddie rolled her eyes, jerked her head toward the office, and went into damage control mode.
I got Carla to the coffee station and deposited the hot pot. In spite of interested observers at every table, my hand settled into the sweet spot where waist curves to hip as I steered her into the office and kicked the door shut.
She was shivering when I put my arms around her. I’d never imagined Carla so shaken. Physically wary, sure—my big horses had scared her before she’d discovered the delights of naked bare-back riding at midnight—but nothing like this melt-down. “Oh, honey, what’s the trouble?” I used my soothing-skittish-fillies tone. “It’ll be all right.” I stroked her black hair, glossy as my Percherons. It came loose from its prim knot, falling into the wild mane I remembered whipping back and forth over my sweaty torso as she rode me.
“No it won’t,” she muttered against my chest. When her head lifted I saw that the glitter of tears in her eyes came as much from rage as from despair. It was oddly reassuring.
“There goes another job! That bastard! But I can handle his kind without lifting a finger. Usually.” Carla searched her breast pockets. I took pity and grabbed the box of Kleenex from Lyddie’s desk.
I dabbed at her damp eyes. No make-up beyond a subdued shade of lipstick. She still exuded that Jezebel-of-your-dreams air that had grabbed me the first time I’d seen her, but something else as well that grabbed me even harder, even as I shied away from examining it too closely. “So what went wrong?”
“Me. I went wrong. ‘Sorry, I’m not on the menu’ didn’t do the trick, but I could’ve just smiled and moved away. When he put his hand on my butt, though, I felt…I wanted…dammit, Ree, I needed to be touched so bad it hurt, but not by his kind!”
I could recognize a mare in heat long before I earned my veterinary degree, and my experience of women had tuned me to the similarities. Women aren’t as easily ruled by their hormones as mares, though; for Carla to go off the deep end, there must be as much turmoil in her head as in her body. Dangerous territory.
Just the same, my hand went to her thigh and would have traveled farther if Lyddie hadn’t charged into the office just then.
Carla tried to pull away. I kept an arm around her shoulder.
“How’s it going, Lyddie?” I hoped my grin still had the tomboy charm that used to get me extra pie as a kid. The manager had known me all my life, and my family even longer. We’d always stopped here when I was helping my dad transport horses to New Hampshire farms and fairs. The grin could have got me a whole lot more than pie if I’d been so inclined, once I’d grown up, cropped my straw-yellow hair short, and shown that I knew who I was and where I was going.
Lyddie looked us up and down, hands braced on hips, head shaking in exasperation. “Might’ve known you’d be acquainted. There’s gotta be an explanation behind this, but I don’t have the time or patience now.”
“It’s the old story,” I said. “Farm girl meets carnival huckster at the county fair. The Lancaster Fair year before last, when my team was in the pulling trials.” I realized too late that Carla might not have included the midway balloon/dart concession on her resumè.
“Judging by such a touching reunion, maybe you wouldn’t mind taking Miss Volcano-mouth off my hands for a couple of days until all this drama blows over.”
Carla stirred under my arm. “I’m sorry, Lyddie. I should just move on. Thanks for taking a chance on me, but I’ve always been bad news.”
I wanted to shake the old arrogance back into her. On the other hand, if it had been just a shield, I wanted to know what was behind it.
Lyddie softened. “You’re not bad, honey. You’re just drawn that way.”
Carla was right on it. “Thanks, Lyddie. Jessica Rabbit is my role model.”
“You’re a fine cashier and waitress,” Lyddie added. “Never did figure out what you’re doing in a place like this. You could make a lot more tending bar in the city or the tourist area over by Mount Washington. At least bars have bouncers.”
Carla’d begun to relax, but now she tensed and glanced away from Lyddie. “Can’t blame a girl for wanting to try out respectability for a change.”
I was tired of being left out of the conversation. “If riding in the cab of a horse van rates as respectable, I’d be glad of the company. I’ll be back this way tomorrow or the next day. We’ll see how things look by then.”
“Just let me get out of this uniform and grab a few things.” Carla wriggled out of my grasp. Lyddie and I watched her go, both our gazes fixed on her slender back and swaying ass, both of us exhaling when she’d gone. But Lyddie’s sigh was somber.
“Can’t get a job at a bar these days without a background check,” she said. “A police record will shoot you right down. She’s a whiz with numbers, too, took some accounting courses she says, but the same goes there.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” But I knew.
“Just something to bear in mind, Henrietta.” Lyddie tweaked my butt and left the office fast. Just as well. I don’t mind the occasional grope, but nobody gets to call me by my given name.
Carla met me at my truck. “You got Molly and Stark in there?” Face scrubbed, hair pulled into a flowing ponytail, jeans not too tight and plaid shirt managing not to gape across her full breasts, she’d still never pass for the girl-next-door type. Which was fine with me.
“Nope. Truck’s empty. I’m picking up a couple of two-year-olds in Maine and bringing them back to my farm for training.” I boosted her up into the cab, enjoying cupping her rump in my big hands.
“Haven’t taken the team on the competition circuit lately.” I settled into the driver’s seat. “Molly indicated in no uncertain terms last spring that she was ready to be bred, so all summer she got to laze around in the pasture with nothing heavier to pull than kids on a hayride, and this spring there’s one more black Percheron filly in Vermont.”
“A sweet little Molly!” Carla’s smile wavered, and she turned her face away.
Dangerous currents for sure. It occurred to me that I did know, or at least suspect, something intensely personal about Carla. Something she didn’t know I knew.
***
My eyes stayed fixed on the road ahead, neck cramping with the effort not to turn and stare. I knew a pull-off next to the river a couple of miles ahead, plenty big enough for the truck.
“How about you, Ree?” Carla knew she had me going. “You been getting plenty of action?”
“Haven’t let anybody else tie me to the bedposts with Mardi Gras beads and then dare me not to break them, but I get by.” I risked a sideways glance. “I still have some of those beads.”
“So do I.” Her wistful tone made me want to hold her close even more than I wanted to fuck her.
It was a good thing no fisherman was parked in my pull-off. A clash between a horse rig and a pickup would be no contest. And it was a good thing that a row of young birch trees, first tender green leaves unfurling, masked us from the road. Carla was on me before my truck stopped rolling. I grabbed both her hands and held her off, but she got a leg over my thigh.
“Carla, we have to talk. No fuck me and leave me this time. I mean it.”
She tried to laugh. “Anything you say, big girl. But can’t we fuck first and talk later? I promise I won’t leave. How could I? You’re my ride.”
I guess I gave in, since suddenly my hands were on her hips and she was, quite literally, riding me. I leaned the seat back as far as it would go. Even so her ass made the horn honk, so I squirmed sideways until my substantial butt was in the passenger’s seat and we had just enough room to loosen our clothes in all the right places.
The sex was fast and furious, nothing fancy, with her knee in my crotch and my fingers in hers and our mouths hungry for whatever they could reach. We kept it up through wave after wave until finally Carla collapsed on my breast sobbing for breath. It wasn’t all that cold outside, but the windows were steamed up, making the space inside seem safe and intimate. Breathing our mingled scents, her skin pressed against mine, felt like coming to a home I’d just discovered.
It was a while before I realized that her sobs were producing real tears. “It’s okay,” I murmured, stroking her hair, my hand sticky with her juices. “Tell me about it.”
“If only…” she nestled even closer against me.
“Tell me,” I said, and then, on a hunch, “Girl or boy?”
She stiffened. “Girl. How did you know?”
“An educated guess.” This was going to be tricky. “Okay, you know I’m a veterinarian.”
“Yeah, so?”
I blundered along. “So I have a problem. My hands are too big. Okay for delivering foals and calves, but not always for young ewes in trouble with their first lambing. Even with lube. In tough situations I need an assistant with, well, smaller hands.” This wasn’t going well.
Carla sat up straight and said it for me. “So when I could take your whole hand that night, you figured I’d had a kid.”
I shrugged. “Never found anybody who hadn’t who could.” No need to mention the faint stretch marks on her belly.
I thought a storm was brewing, but suddenly she grabbed my left hand and cradled it between her naked breasts. “Was that animal lube you used?”
“Horse lube. I never expected to get lucky at the fair, but I always keep some vet supplies in my truck, so…”
“Got any with you now?” This was the cocky, seductive Carla, even with a tear-streaked face.
“Maybe, but there isn’t room in here for that much action. And you promised we’d talk.” I draped her shirt around her shoulders and rebuttoned mine. “What’s her name?”
“Josie. She’s almost six.” Carla took a deep breath, looked away, and let it all come rushing out. “She’s been with my cousin in Boston since she was three. I…I couldn’t be with her for a while, and when I got out, I couldn’t find a job to support her, so I took whatever work I could get and saved up. It seemed like enough after the carnival gigs, but then my cousin said I wasn’t a fit mother so she’d report me to social services if I tried to take my child. Now Josie’s getting to be as wild as I always was, and they can’t handle her, but my cousin still thinks it’s her duty to try. And my cousin’s husband comes on to me lately when I visit. So I’ve been trying to get respectable—even got a job as a secretary, but of course my boss couldn’t keep his hands to himself. I did some damage and had to get out.”
No surprises there. What did startle me was my own sudden, certain determination. I turned her gently to face me. “Lyddie tells me you’re good with numbers. Business paperwork fries my mind. Being a bookkeeper for a lesbian veterinarian might not rank at the top of the respectability chart, and I couldn’t promise your boss would keep her hands to herself, but there’s a farmhand’s cottage you and Josie could have to yourselves, separate from my house. It’s yours if you want to give it a try.”
A light flashed in Carla’s eyes, then died. “Social services are such hard-asses!”
“It’s the 21st century. Massachusetts and Vermont and even New Hampshire are getting better. And…” I played my remaining card… “I know a good Boston lawyer.”
“Lawyers are expensive.” Before my mouth was halfway open, she added, in her don’t-cross-me tone, “No. You can’t pay.”
“No need. She does pro bono work for discrimination cases. And she owes me a favor.”
“Oh?” Carla’s expressive eyebrows arched. “I suppose you cured her horse, or something?”
“Her Great Dane. She has a vacation condo over toward Mt. Washington. I check up on the place now and then when she’s not there. That’s where we’ll stay tonight, so we’d better get on the road.”
“You must be real friendly with this lawyer,” Carla said pointedly as we rolled along through the wide valley of the Ammonoosuc.
I just grinned, and took a while to answer. Spring was greening up the fields and woodlands. In spite of uncertainties, I was feeling pretty spring-feverish myself. “I have plenty of friends,” I teased. “The favor she owes me is getting her together with another friend, a ski instructor at Wildcat.”
“And now you’re all pals together, right?”
“The condo does have a super-sized Jacuzzi,” I countered. “Big enough for three, even if one is my size.” She shouldn’t assume I only wanted her because my opportunities were limited.
***
Well. That’s too long already, so I won’t bore you further by including the scene where a feisty six-year-old girl with trust issues meets a skittish, shiny black Percheron filly.
Love at first sight.
***
Remember, comment here for me to make a donation to Planned Parenthood. Also, a comment will enter you in a drawing for a free ebook copy of my collection. If you wonder what the heck other kinds of stories I write, you could find out in Wild Rides. From a jeep-jockey WAC in Vietnam, to pirates in the South China Sea as WWII approaches, to gargoyles in Paris, a shape-shifting dragon, prison inmates matching strength to strength, and more, and more, and more.
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Sunday, August 11, 2019
Midsummer Moonlight and "A Dance of Queens"
Sacchi Green
A change of pace from my series of teasers for the stories in Wild Rides, a collection of my own work. I’ll get back to those soon.
My news now is that I’ve just had a story accepted for The Nobilis Erotica Podcast (“The Most Prolific Science Fiction and Fantasy Erotica Podcast in the Known Universe”--nobilis.libsyn.com . I’m new to podcasts, except for a few times I've read my work when I was being interviewed by one blogger or another, but now that I’ve discovered some podcasts that allow submissions previously published in print, I’m sitting up and taking notice.
This particular story, “A Dance of Queens,” is one I wrote many years ago, for Best Transgender Erotica, edited by Hanne Blank and Raven Kaldera for Circlet Press. The setting is Elizabethan/Shakespearean England, on the banks of the Thames at the Lord Chancellor’s country estate where A Midsummer Night’s Dream is being produced. The three main characters are the actors who play Queen Titania and Queen Hippolyta, and Queen Elizabeth herself, nostalgic for her youth when she might roam free in disguise through Midsummer revelries. I had a great time writing this, doing research on the kinds of bawdy pantomimes and banter of that era, as well as getting deeply involved with my characters in their various twists and turns of gender complexity, even more than you might at first suspect.
Let’s see whether I can fit in enough excerpts here to give you a proper—or improper—taste of the whole.
From “A Dance of Queens”
Sacchi Green
Midsummer’s Night, the play safely done, dusk sweet as a languorous touch on yearning flesh...and still I could not take my love into the greenwood and lay her on my cloak and be consumed in her fire.
I cursed my own impatience. We should have pressed on without pause, but Quenta had tormented me so, slipping a hand beneath my shirt and then down into my breeches until I could scarce walk, and must stop for a taste of the feast to come.
So the Queen’s messenger had caught us. And truly, by the shimmer in the air at the instant she appeared, I knew there had never been hope of escape. In the Welsh hills and valleys we have tales, more than tales, of such creatures, though I had thought the filth and disbelief of London must repel them. At another time I would have been glad that the green countryside along the Thames still held such folk. Glad or no, we had no choice now but to let the greenwood’s promise fade into shadow.
Frustration pounded in my veins. I jerked away from Quenta’s touch, the mere
brush of her hand making me forget that I must not even think of “him” as “her” until we could be blessedly alone.
I focused on the wide skirt sailing just ahead. Though the farthingale was not devised with a lady dwarf in mind, its absurdity was more than countered by the messenger’s bearing and the Queen’s crest broidered on her sleeve. It scarcely needed Quenta’s nudge to put me on guard against those keen, merry eyes, though they had looked up at me from about the level of my belt.
Such danger should have chilled my ardor. But surely the Queen would waste little time on us, might have forgotten already her whim. At most there could be a gracious word or two, perhaps a small purse. Why, then, command that we bring our play-garb? A jest among her ladies?
But in the great bedchamber we found Her Majesty alone, a slim, pale figure whose aura crackled through the paneled room like heat-lightning.
Our diminutive guide swept a curtsy. “The player boys, Madam. Quentin O’Connor and Kit Rhys.”
Bright tired eyes assessed us. “Well enough, Gwen. Now keep us private for a bit.” The attendant gave me a wicked sidelong glance as she went to sit between the great oak door and the carven screen before it.
Quenta elbowed me sharply. I joined her in an elegant stage bow, feeling the royal glance caress our snug-hosed calves. Her Majesty was said to have ever an eye for a well-turned leg; if it went farther than a look, or a leg… But I had never heard so much as rumor that it did.
Her voice was cool enough. “So, Titania and Hippolyta. You played the queen’s parts well, each in your own way.”
“Never so well as you, Your Highness.” Quenta’s green eyes gleamed wickedly, and I suppressed a groan. This was no time for her sly wit!
An answering gleam lit the Queen’s eyes. “Ah, but I have performed the role far longer!” Her face seemed less weary now; it was hard to credit that she had more than twice our years. “Do you not think I could play Queen of Faery as well as England’s monarch?”
I tried to break the manic current between them. “Yes, in truth, Highness. Or Queen of Amazons, or any ruler ever conceived.” I knelt with Hippolyta’s tunic and gilded leather breastplate across one knee. Her gaze turned toward me, lingering on my long legs; I felt as when Quenta would stroke me from calf to thigh and beyond, and my flesh would melt and surge in sweet torment.
“I have not your height, lad, to play the Amazon,” she said. “You did well enough, though one could scarcely credit that you would yield to Duke Theseus, whether in battle or in marriage bed. But come, it was bravely played, if a slighter part than Titania’s.”
She turned to Quenta with a thoughtful look. “Have you two played Master Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet?’ You would suit well as lovers.”
Did she toy with us? What hope had we against the wits of one who played with envoys, kings, even the Pope, for her own and England’s gain?
“Quentin is acclaimed as Juliet,” I answered cautiously, “but to tell truth, Hippolyta is my first speaking part, and well may be my last. I am more like to play an accompanying lute, or rattle distant armor.”
“It is an awkward age, I know,” she said. “Your voice is nigh too low already for a woman’s part. Indeed...” Those keen eyes scrutinized us closely. “I might think you both somewhat old for boy players.”
I tensed inwardly, forcing my body to reveal nothing. To stifle Quenta’s special genius would be a crime against art, against life itself! But if she were judged to be a woman...A woman appearing upon the public stage was such outrage that the penalty could only be surmised.
Quenta laughed, and in that instant the tilt of her head, the cock of hip and shoulder, were entirely those of a brash youth. “I can play you any age, Lady, any sex.” She took on the bombastic voice and gestures of Bottom the Weaver. “I can play you a roaring Lion, or a most excellent Wall...” and then her voice softened, its husky purr making my flesh quiver with longing for the velvet touch of her tongue.
“Or I can be the Lady Moon herself.” She stepped toward the high window, every motion, every line now utterly female, despite the padded trunk-hose muffling the sweet curves of her hips. Had I been a jot closer my hand would have slipped of its own accord between cloth and smooth, seductive skin. And had she turned, and my fingers found what waited between her thighs...
“Look you, Lady, how the new moon burns, no silver bow, but a crescent slit through which the passions of the sky pour forth. Can you not see in me that same bright fire?”
And she was, in truth, the very essence of the new moon, its tremulous yearning in her slim grace, its hot intensity in her smoldering eyes. Then I stepped toward her and broke the spell, and it was not her madness but mine that gave us away.
“Sirrah! Do not force me to see that which were better kept hidden!” If the Queen sensed that we were lovers, she had no wish to bring it to an issue. I did not think that she had yet sensed more.
“But Titania may see what England’s Queen may not.” Quenta knelt, proffering her red wig, leaf-green draperies and silver demi-mask. “On Midsummer’s Night, the fancies of mortal and fairy alike may roam free. Come with us, Lady, to observe their merry frolics!”
Even through my outrage I saw what Quenta had recognized at once. Though the Queen might conceal it even from herself, it was for this we had been summoned.
[Then much later, after extensive viewings of many bawdy revelries and pantomimes outdoors in the celebration:]
A slim, imperious hand gripped my shoulder. “Enough, lad. You have done nobly, but the Midsummer’s magic I recalled is gone forever.”
“Nay, lady, there is magic still!” Quenta’s eyes glowed cat-like in the torchlight. “Kit has found a place a fairy queen might lie, and takes me there this night. We shall see what magic three queens together may ignite!”
I could have wrung her slim white neck. The Queen, though, waved dismissively. “I doubt not such a tryst is meant for two alone. Only see me back to the Hall, and then be off wherever youth and Midsummer madness lead you.” She took my arm. “You may divert me as we go. Is there indeed ‘a bank where the wild thyme blows...With sweet musk roses and with eglantine?’”
“As to that, Lady, the scent was more of mint and fern. I saw daisies but no roses, though there were berry brambles aplenty. Perhaps by daylight you might view it.”
“Ay, perhaps.” Her voice was bleak.
“Now!” said Quenta. “Now, by moonlight, or not at all!” Her fierce eyes held mine, her meaning all too clear. When I turned toward the greenwood the Queen, a gleam restored in her eye, did not demur.
[Then the erotica goes deeply into where erotica usually goes, and somewhat beyond, entangled with history and fantasy and layers of long-suppressed emotions. Oh, and here’s an inconsequential spoiler from Gwen near the end:]
“No matter. Our sweet Lady has more need of you than you can know, for service quite apart from this night’s frolic. Neither of you will strut upon the stage much longer; who would credit such protracted youth? But two who act so well can do it on the Queen’s behalf, and be her eyes and ears about the world. Be sure I will send soon to tell you of her needs.”
“We are truly hers, body and soul,” I said. “But Gwen...who, or what, are you?”
“Need you ask?” she said impatiently. “The realm of Faery takes yet a care for England’s welfare, and for her rightful monarch. As for me, think you the Puck must be ever confined in male form?” It took her sharp pinch to make me close my gaping mouth.
_______________
I don’t yet know when my story will be up on the podcast. I’ll try to mention that here when I find out. I’ll also mention that “A Dance of Queens” was reprinted in my first collection of my own work several years ago, A Ride to Remember from Lethe Press. It’s available in Kindle format on Amazon for $3.00, and quite likely on Smashwords as well. For that matter, just ask and I’ll send you a pdf copy. The book was a Lambda Literary Finalist, the year two out of four finalists in the erotica category were mine—but neither won. That’s okay, a good friend did win the category that year, and I’ve had winners both before and after.
A change of pace from my series of teasers for the stories in Wild Rides, a collection of my own work. I’ll get back to those soon.
My news now is that I’ve just had a story accepted for The Nobilis Erotica Podcast (“The Most Prolific Science Fiction and Fantasy Erotica Podcast in the Known Universe”--nobilis.libsyn.com . I’m new to podcasts, except for a few times I've read my work when I was being interviewed by one blogger or another, but now that I’ve discovered some podcasts that allow submissions previously published in print, I’m sitting up and taking notice.
This particular story, “A Dance of Queens,” is one I wrote many years ago, for Best Transgender Erotica, edited by Hanne Blank and Raven Kaldera for Circlet Press. The setting is Elizabethan/Shakespearean England, on the banks of the Thames at the Lord Chancellor’s country estate where A Midsummer Night’s Dream is being produced. The three main characters are the actors who play Queen Titania and Queen Hippolyta, and Queen Elizabeth herself, nostalgic for her youth when she might roam free in disguise through Midsummer revelries. I had a great time writing this, doing research on the kinds of bawdy pantomimes and banter of that era, as well as getting deeply involved with my characters in their various twists and turns of gender complexity, even more than you might at first suspect.
Let’s see whether I can fit in enough excerpts here to give you a proper—or improper—taste of the whole.
From “A Dance of Queens”
Sacchi Green
Midsummer’s Night, the play safely done, dusk sweet as a languorous touch on yearning flesh...and still I could not take my love into the greenwood and lay her on my cloak and be consumed in her fire.
I cursed my own impatience. We should have pressed on without pause, but Quenta had tormented me so, slipping a hand beneath my shirt and then down into my breeches until I could scarce walk, and must stop for a taste of the feast to come.
So the Queen’s messenger had caught us. And truly, by the shimmer in the air at the instant she appeared, I knew there had never been hope of escape. In the Welsh hills and valleys we have tales, more than tales, of such creatures, though I had thought the filth and disbelief of London must repel them. At another time I would have been glad that the green countryside along the Thames still held such folk. Glad or no, we had no choice now but to let the greenwood’s promise fade into shadow.
Frustration pounded in my veins. I jerked away from Quenta’s touch, the mere
brush of her hand making me forget that I must not even think of “him” as “her” until we could be blessedly alone.
I focused on the wide skirt sailing just ahead. Though the farthingale was not devised with a lady dwarf in mind, its absurdity was more than countered by the messenger’s bearing and the Queen’s crest broidered on her sleeve. It scarcely needed Quenta’s nudge to put me on guard against those keen, merry eyes, though they had looked up at me from about the level of my belt.
Such danger should have chilled my ardor. But surely the Queen would waste little time on us, might have forgotten already her whim. At most there could be a gracious word or two, perhaps a small purse. Why, then, command that we bring our play-garb? A jest among her ladies?
But in the great bedchamber we found Her Majesty alone, a slim, pale figure whose aura crackled through the paneled room like heat-lightning.
Our diminutive guide swept a curtsy. “The player boys, Madam. Quentin O’Connor and Kit Rhys.”
Bright tired eyes assessed us. “Well enough, Gwen. Now keep us private for a bit.” The attendant gave me a wicked sidelong glance as she went to sit between the great oak door and the carven screen before it.
Quenta elbowed me sharply. I joined her in an elegant stage bow, feeling the royal glance caress our snug-hosed calves. Her Majesty was said to have ever an eye for a well-turned leg; if it went farther than a look, or a leg… But I had never heard so much as rumor that it did.
Her voice was cool enough. “So, Titania and Hippolyta. You played the queen’s parts well, each in your own way.”
“Never so well as you, Your Highness.” Quenta’s green eyes gleamed wickedly, and I suppressed a groan. This was no time for her sly wit!
An answering gleam lit the Queen’s eyes. “Ah, but I have performed the role far longer!” Her face seemed less weary now; it was hard to credit that she had more than twice our years. “Do you not think I could play Queen of Faery as well as England’s monarch?”
I tried to break the manic current between them. “Yes, in truth, Highness. Or Queen of Amazons, or any ruler ever conceived.” I knelt with Hippolyta’s tunic and gilded leather breastplate across one knee. Her gaze turned toward me, lingering on my long legs; I felt as when Quenta would stroke me from calf to thigh and beyond, and my flesh would melt and surge in sweet torment.
“I have not your height, lad, to play the Amazon,” she said. “You did well enough, though one could scarcely credit that you would yield to Duke Theseus, whether in battle or in marriage bed. But come, it was bravely played, if a slighter part than Titania’s.”
She turned to Quenta with a thoughtful look. “Have you two played Master Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet?’ You would suit well as lovers.”
Did she toy with us? What hope had we against the wits of one who played with envoys, kings, even the Pope, for her own and England’s gain?
“Quentin is acclaimed as Juliet,” I answered cautiously, “but to tell truth, Hippolyta is my first speaking part, and well may be my last. I am more like to play an accompanying lute, or rattle distant armor.”
“It is an awkward age, I know,” she said. “Your voice is nigh too low already for a woman’s part. Indeed...” Those keen eyes scrutinized us closely. “I might think you both somewhat old for boy players.”
I tensed inwardly, forcing my body to reveal nothing. To stifle Quenta’s special genius would be a crime against art, against life itself! But if she were judged to be a woman...A woman appearing upon the public stage was such outrage that the penalty could only be surmised.
Quenta laughed, and in that instant the tilt of her head, the cock of hip and shoulder, were entirely those of a brash youth. “I can play you any age, Lady, any sex.” She took on the bombastic voice and gestures of Bottom the Weaver. “I can play you a roaring Lion, or a most excellent Wall...” and then her voice softened, its husky purr making my flesh quiver with longing for the velvet touch of her tongue.
“Or I can be the Lady Moon herself.” She stepped toward the high window, every motion, every line now utterly female, despite the padded trunk-hose muffling the sweet curves of her hips. Had I been a jot closer my hand would have slipped of its own accord between cloth and smooth, seductive skin. And had she turned, and my fingers found what waited between her thighs...
“Look you, Lady, how the new moon burns, no silver bow, but a crescent slit through which the passions of the sky pour forth. Can you not see in me that same bright fire?”
And she was, in truth, the very essence of the new moon, its tremulous yearning in her slim grace, its hot intensity in her smoldering eyes. Then I stepped toward her and broke the spell, and it was not her madness but mine that gave us away.
“Sirrah! Do not force me to see that which were better kept hidden!” If the Queen sensed that we were lovers, she had no wish to bring it to an issue. I did not think that she had yet sensed more.
“But Titania may see what England’s Queen may not.” Quenta knelt, proffering her red wig, leaf-green draperies and silver demi-mask. “On Midsummer’s Night, the fancies of mortal and fairy alike may roam free. Come with us, Lady, to observe their merry frolics!”
Even through my outrage I saw what Quenta had recognized at once. Though the Queen might conceal it even from herself, it was for this we had been summoned.
[Then much later, after extensive viewings of many bawdy revelries and pantomimes outdoors in the celebration:]
A slim, imperious hand gripped my shoulder. “Enough, lad. You have done nobly, but the Midsummer’s magic I recalled is gone forever.”
“Nay, lady, there is magic still!” Quenta’s eyes glowed cat-like in the torchlight. “Kit has found a place a fairy queen might lie, and takes me there this night. We shall see what magic three queens together may ignite!”
I could have wrung her slim white neck. The Queen, though, waved dismissively. “I doubt not such a tryst is meant for two alone. Only see me back to the Hall, and then be off wherever youth and Midsummer madness lead you.” She took my arm. “You may divert me as we go. Is there indeed ‘a bank where the wild thyme blows...With sweet musk roses and with eglantine?’”
“As to that, Lady, the scent was more of mint and fern. I saw daisies but no roses, though there were berry brambles aplenty. Perhaps by daylight you might view it.”
“Ay, perhaps.” Her voice was bleak.
“Now!” said Quenta. “Now, by moonlight, or not at all!” Her fierce eyes held mine, her meaning all too clear. When I turned toward the greenwood the Queen, a gleam restored in her eye, did not demur.
[Then the erotica goes deeply into where erotica usually goes, and somewhat beyond, entangled with history and fantasy and layers of long-suppressed emotions. Oh, and here’s an inconsequential spoiler from Gwen near the end:]
“No matter. Our sweet Lady has more need of you than you can know, for service quite apart from this night’s frolic. Neither of you will strut upon the stage much longer; who would credit such protracted youth? But two who act so well can do it on the Queen’s behalf, and be her eyes and ears about the world. Be sure I will send soon to tell you of her needs.”
“We are truly hers, body and soul,” I said. “But Gwen...who, or what, are you?”
“Need you ask?” she said impatiently. “The realm of Faery takes yet a care for England’s welfare, and for her rightful monarch. As for me, think you the Puck must be ever confined in male form?” It took her sharp pinch to make me close my gaping mouth.
_______________
I don’t yet know when my story will be up on the podcast. I’ll try to mention that here when I find out. I’ll also mention that “A Dance of Queens” was reprinted in my first collection of my own work several years ago, A Ride to Remember from Lethe Press. It’s available in Kindle format on Amazon for $3.00, and quite likely on Smashwords as well. For that matter, just ask and I’ll send you a pdf copy. The book was a Lambda Literary Finalist, the year two out of four finalists in the erotica category were mine—but neither won. That’s okay, a good friend did win the category that year, and I’ve had winners both before and after.
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
Teaser 6: Excerpts from “The Pirate from the Sky” and “The Dragon Descending” (Wild Rides)
These two paired stories involve the same characters, with “The Dragon Descending” being both sequel and prequel to “The Pirate from the Sky.”
The ship’s story begins like this.
The Pirate from the Sky
Sacchi Green
In Seok-Teng’s dream a great pale dragon twined through a labyrinth of shifting clouds. Opaline scales shimmered through intervals of sunlight, slipped into invisibility, then flashed out again in dazzling beauty. Its long, elegant head swung from side to side, tongue flickering like sensuous lightning.
A distant hum arose, a subtle, tantalizing vibration that teased at Seok-Teng’s mind and flesh. A song? A warning? A summons? In all her dreams of dragons, never had she been aware of sound. She strained to hear, to understand. But the hum became steadily louder, swelling to a growl, tearing her from sleep into darkness and sudden, stark awareness. If the roof of the captain’s cabin had been high enough she would have bolted upright.
Still the sound grew. This was no dragon, nor yet thunder, nor storm winds. The sea spoke to Seok-Teng through the ship’s movements as it had to her forbears for generations beyond counting; tonight it gave no cause for alarm. Japanese patrol boats? When she had taken her crew so far out of the usual shipping channels to avoid such pursuit? No, she had come to know that sound all too well. This one was different--yet not entirely unknown.
The cabin’s entrance showed scarcely lighter than its interior. Now it darkened. Han Duan, the ship’s Number One, squatted to look within.
“An aircraft,” Seok-Teng called, before the other could speak.
Han Duan grunted in agreement. “Not a large one, but low, and coming close. Who would fly so far from any land?”
“It is nothing to do with us.” Seok-Teng wished to resume the dream. She wished also to avoid resuming discussion of why a pirate ship would sail so far from any land, when it was accustomed by tradition to plying the coasts along the South China Sea.
“The Japanese have many planes,” Han Duan said.
“And better uses for them than pursuing us this far. We are very small fish indeed.” That was a tactical error, Seok-Teng realized at once. Evading a Japanese navy angered by the plundering of several small merchant ships off Mindanao had been her stated excuse for sailing so far to the east.
The small islands and atolls of the Marianas and Marshall groups were technically under Japanese control, but surely the eye of Nippon was bent too fiercely on the conquest of China to pay much attention to every far-flung spit of sand. On some of those islets distant relatives from Seok-Teng’s many-branched heritage still lived, and on others there were no permanent habitations at all. Good places for her crew to find or build a refuge while the world at large descended into war and madness—if a refuge was what they truly wanted.
She herself was torn by the desire to take part in the battle, to join forces with China’s defenders as pirates in the past had often done. In her small packet of private belongings was a small photograph, cut from a newspaper, of Soong Mai-ling, the beautiful wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and a leader in her own right. Seok-Teng longed to serve her in some fashion, but the way was not clear. The old pirate practices might suffice for the harrying of merchant ships, but the modern military craft of the Japanese were another matter.
Han Duan grunted again and stood, with just enough of a stoop to clear the low roof. The plane was nearly overhead now. Seok-Teng slid a hand under her pillow, ran a finger delicately along the undulating blade of her kris, then gripped its hilt. Both blade and hilt were warm. The dream, then, had been no accident, but a promise—or a warning. Seok-Teng would have spoken to the dagger if her Number One had not been present. Instead, she rolled from her bed into a crouch, pressed her brow to the weapon in mute homage to the ancestors from whom it had come, and, still stooping, emerged onto the deck of the She-Dragon.
Han Duan’s head tilted back as she stared upward. Seok-Teng straightened and stepped to the rail. Along the eastern horizon lay just the faintest hint that day might come, but overhead a low, sullen cloud cover obscured the stars. The airplane, now directly above them, could not be seen, though its roar seemed so tangible that Seok-Teng raised her hand, whether to grasp or fend it off she did not know. She had even forgotten that she held the kris, which now pointed into the sky.
“Would your demon blade lead us now even into the heavens? Let it fly then by itself!” Han Duan raised her voice to be heard over the noise of the plane. Her scarred face seemed demonic in the light of a single swaying lantern.
_______________
The other story, that of the shapeshifting dragon goddess, begins in the aftermath of the wild adventures and rescue of a most unusual aviatrix, when a question from Han Duan leads Seok-Teng to share a story from her past.
_______________
The Dragon Descending
Sacchi Green
“My first woman? As well ask if I recall my first dragon.” Seok-Teng scarcely realized she spoke aloud, still afloat in the ebbtide of the fierce coupling that followed battles won and prizes taken.
Han Duan lay intensely still beside her. When she spoke again, her tone was a study in idle curiosity. “Your first dragon, then. Surely not old Mountain of Wealth?”
“Blasphemy!” Seok-Teng managed a chuckle. “With a tentacle in every profitable pot, Madame Lai Choi San should be called Old Octopus rather than the Dragon Lady of Bias Bay.” Best to pursue this much safer line of conversation. “And you know well that I was no more a virgin than you when we met as her bodyguards.”
“Yet even I,” Han Duan admitted, “learned much from her beyond the management of pirate ships.”
“Is that how you formed your knack for domination of our young crewmembers?” Seok-Teng relaxed, confident that the dangerous topic had been circumvented. Han Duan held firmly to disbelief in her captain’s visions of dragons, yet as second in command she followed with complete trust wherever Seok-Teng led. Seok-Teng, and her kris, the short, undulating blade passed down through generations of her family until a woman was the only heir. A demon blade, Han Duan would say, in a tone that meant she did not believe in such things; but demon or no, the kris had bonded with its inheritor according to the old traditions. Always, after Seok-Teng’s dragon dreams, the kris would point the way the ship must sail, where they would find women skilled in the ways of the sea, or captives on their way to slavery, who would gladly join such a pirate crew.
Seok-Teng did not wish to speak now of dragons. “Those sleek young pearl divers we rescued were certainly eager for your domination.” Dalisay and Amihan should be good distractions.
But Han Duan would not be distracted. Not this time. “What color were their dragons, in your dream?”
For once, Seok-Teng would be open. Han Duan deserved that of her, and more. “They were the blue-green of shallow southern seas, twined about each other in a wheel like the yin and yang, spinning through the sky.”
Han Duan nodded, but pulled Seok-Teng closer against her lean body and murmured into her ear, “And what of your first dragon?”
A shuddering sigh swept Seok-Teng. Whatever the cost, she would be open at last with the comrade and lover who had been her lifeline for so many years.
“My first dragon was my first woman as well. Not a dream, nor yet a vision, unless visions leave scars. ”
“Ah! These?” They knew each other’s bodies as well as they knew each inch of their ship. Han Duan moved so that her fingers could trace the line of short pale ridges along Seok-Teng’s sides from armpit to hip. “Truly a dragon of a woman!”
“A woman who was truly a dragon,” Seok Teng said flatly. “But take it as merely a tale, if you wish. A tale worth hearing.”
_______________
And, to reward any reader who has persevered this far, a few snippets from that tale.
_______________
Ha Long, Bay of the Descending Dragons. Seok-Teng had heard of its beauty and legends, but never seen its labyrinths of vertical, time-carved islands until the day she sailed her junk-rigged boat through them in pursuit of her father’s killer. No time then to stare at its wonders, only to maneuver among them, searching always for the small motorized vessel whose lines were etched indelibly into her memory.
Once in Ha Long Bay, it should have been impossible to find one small boat hiding among the thousands of limestone islands with their caves and grottoes and thick pelts of greenery clinging to sheer walls. Impossible for a man—or even a girl with a warrior spirit—but not for the kris. It showed the way, through three days of a winding course.
On the third evening, the blade took on a glow that told Seok-Teng her prey was so close that she must approach with caution. She anchored and waited through the night. This time she would make sure her prey saw his doom coming!
At last the dawn mist began to dissipate, the islands took shape, and the sun’s first rays struck the leafy crest of the nearest island in a blaze of emerald flame.
Seok-Teng slid into the water wearing nothing beyond the kris belted to her naked hip. The boat she sought was there, just beyond the island, perhaps fifty feet away. When she reached its side, she listened for several minutes until she heard the man stirring, moving slowly about, then standing on the lee side and, by the sound, relieving himself into the sea. The perfect moment!
She was up over the side, kris unsheathed and raised, before he could turn; yet even at such a time he had kept a dagger in his hand, and parried the longer blade. Seok-Teng spun and struck again, knocking his weapon this time from his grip; he grasped her knife-wrist so tightly with his other hand that it took all her effort to keep from dropping the kris. Or almost all. Her knee tensed, began its upward strike toward his groin—but he fell back before it connected. She had only a fleeting glimpse of his eyes, widened in horror as he looked at something beyond her, his face as contorted as though her blade had pierced his belly.
Seok-Teng stumbled, unbalanced, and still managed to slice the kris across his throat before he toppled backward into the sea.
She swung around and saw what he had seen. A golden eye gazed down at her from the island’s greenery, and then two eyes, in a long, elegant, emerald-scaled head that lifted to regard her full-on.
“I had him! He was mine!” Seok-Tengs’s blood-madness ran still so hot that she felt no fear, no amazement that a dragon such as she had seen only on painted screens or the prows of festive longboats was here before her in the flesh. If indeed dragons were made of such. “I needed no help!”
The dragon seemed to laugh, though what difference there might be between a dragon’s laugh and its snarl Seok-Teng did not know. Indeed, as her blood slowed, she scarcely knew whether she herself dreamed, or imagined, or even lived. She held the kris upright, flat between her breasts, as talisman rather than weapon; it quivered, but gave off no heat.
Heat of another sort did warm Seok-Teng’s flesh as the dragon’s gaze moved slowly along her body. Did dragons lust after human women? She had never heard such tales, but after all, she herself lusted after women, though so far only in her dreams.
“Why not?” The voice was not her own, yet unmistakably female—and it spoke from inside her head. “Who can know so well how to please a woman as another woman?”
A dream, then. That sort of dream. Already Seok-Teng’s loins stirred with longing. Her bedroll would be damp and tangled when she woke. If only this dream would take her far enough for relief!
The boat she stood upon had floated nearer to the island. Seok-Teng looked full into the golden eyes, not flinching when the dragon’s green coils, their scales textured to resemble leaves, loosened from the rough limestone enough that its neck could arch outward above her and descend. Even when a flickering forked tongue, impossibly long, darted across her belly, Seok-Teng held her ground, though she could not suppress gasps and jerks at the tantalizing sensations it aroused.
“Set aside your noble blade,” the voice said, “if you would taste of more tender delights.”
She sheathed the kris but kept it belted at her hip. This time the dragon’s laughter echoed inside her head, drowned out soon by Seok-Teng’s own cries as the deep-coral tongue lapped at the paler coral tips of her high breasts, teasing and tweaking at them until they hardened and darkened and sent bolts of pleasure close to pain down through her belly into her cunt.
“How brave are you, girl? Enough to follow me?” The voice seemed uneven now, almost breathless. The long tongue reached down between her thighs and slick lips to find the jewel of pleasure there, and a low, rough moan was wrenched from deep in Seok-Teng’s throat, followed by a keen wail as the stimulation ceased.
“Come, if you dare!” The dragon launched suddenly from the rock, leaving it nearly bare, and dove into the water. Seok-Teng followed so swiftly that the wake of the great long tail swept her briefly off course. Attuned from birth to all the motions and secrets of the sea, she was back on course in a moment, and when the waters stilled beside an island much larger than the first, she dove unerringly through an underwater passage to come up in a pool within a grotto infused with green light.
On its far side stalactites hung nearly to the floor, chiming like bells as the dragon’s emerald scales brushed them. Nearer, an arc of sandy beach edged the water.
The voice came again. “One more challenge, if you are truly brave.” But this time it felt more like a plea than a dare. “Your blade…will you trust me with your blade?”
_______________
And then things get…interesting.
Labels:
Aviatrix,
Dragon Dreams,
Ha Long Bay,
Pirates,
Pre-WWI,
The China Sea
Friday, June 21, 2019
TEASER 5: Excerpt from “Lipstick on Her Collar” from WildRides
Lipstick on Her Collar
Sacchi Green
The DC-7 burst from clouds over the South China Sea at an angle so steep VC rockets had no chance at a target. My breath caught and my butt clenched. At the last possible instant the plane leveled off, touched down, and came to a jolting stop.
I'd seen the same thing too often to be seriously alarmed. But I wasn't on board. And I wasn't Miss Maureen O'Malley from the Boston Globe, getting her first taste of the adrenaline-mill that was Vietnam in 1969. I wondered whether Miss Maureen's panties were still dry. And how long she'd last at this war correspondent game. If she couldn't handle the heat, the sooner she headed back to the Ladies' pages, the better.
She wasn't hard to spot on the tarmac. Miss Boston's dainty sandals, blue plaid skirt and matching jacket were about what I'd expected. The fine legs beneath the short hem, however, exceeded expectations.
I wasn’t the only one looking her over, but I was a lot more discreet about it than the guys. Any overt attraction to women could have landed me, if not in the brig, at least back Stateside with a dishonorable discharge.
She showed the strain of flying half-way around the world. Sweating in the sudden, brutal heat of Tan Son Nhut airfield, lipstick blurred and tendrils of dark hair curling damply on her cheeks, she seemed absurdly young. I'd have been all encouragement with a nurse or WAC just arriving in-country, but the orders to ride herd on a journalist were really chafing my chops.
"Miss O'Malley," I said firmly, seizing her attention, "I'm Sergeant Hodge, your driver. Let me get that bag." I bent to the heavy suitcase. Yes, very fine legs, and naked. No pantyhose. "C'mon in under cover while they unload the rest of your baggage."
She focused on me hazily. Probably hadn't slept for at least twenty hours. I felt just a smidge of sympathy.
"Oh...thanks...this is all there is.”
Well, that was a point in her favor. "Okay, good, but I still have to pick up a few packages." I was about to offer to show her the rudimentary ladies' room when she blurted, "But...I was expecting a woman driver."
"And I was expecting Maureen O'Hara,” I said, amused. Passing for a teen-aged boy often comes in handy. "Southeast Asia needs more redheads." I shed my helmet and brushed back my russet forelock. My short hair didn't tip her off, but my grin did the trick. She surveyed the rest of me more closely.
"Oh! I'm sorry." Her face flushed from more than the heat. "That's WAC insignia, isn't it. I still have a lot to learn."
No kidding.I silently steered her into the terminal, aimed her toward the restroom, and left to retrieve packages I'd promised to pick up. It wouldn't hurt to let her stew in a bit of embarrassment for a while.
Not for long, though. She emerged looking tidy and composed, make-up freshened. As she stepped up into my jeep she caught me admiring the nice rear view, and her deliberate wriggle as she settled into the seat made me wonder with a touch of paranoia just what this reporter had come to 'Nam to cover. A juicy scandal about dyke WACs would put women in the military back decades, just when we were needed most.
.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
TEASER 4: From “Finding Carla” in Wild Rides
Sacchi Green
In my story “Pulling” (which is also included in the collection) the erotic charge is very much a matter of opposites attracting, which happens to be the theme of my bi-weekly post over on ohgetagrip.com. Ree is a horse trainer and veterinarian showing her draft horses at a county fair. Carla is a midway barker luring farm boys (and men) to her dart-and-balloon concession with sultry banter, but with no intention of letting any of them get under her short skirt. A big farm girl, though, is a different matter. When she and Ree get together at a cheap motel, Carla brings vicious clamps and mardi gras beads from the balloon game, while Ree brings a tube of horse lube. Vive la difference! What happens later? Carla disappears after their second night together. Not surprising. But the two-years-later sequel, “Findng Carla,” brings them together again, Ree more sexually experienced now, Carla with a desperate need for ordinary respectability. Here’s an excerpt:
_______________
Finding Carla
Sacchi Green
“Keep your skanky hands off me!” The words sliced through drifting aromas of coffee and pancakes and bacon. “Touch me again, and those fingers won’t be able to
fuck your own sorry dick!”
I’d know that voice, that attitude, anywhere. A truck stop where Vermont slopes into New Hampshire wasn’t high on my list of places to look, but how much, really, had I ever known about Carla? Apart from the way she sounded in hip-swishing, femme-top command of any situation—or with her hips so entirely out of control she couldn’t shape gasps into words—or steeling herself to mount my huge draft horse. We hadn’t had much time for the getting-to-
know-you parts.
I couldn’t see into the dining area past the family with fidgety kids ahead of me. Getting by without trampling them didn’t seem likely, but I was giving it a try anyway when a skinny whirlwind shot from around the cashier’s counter and whacked me from behind.
“Ree Daniels, move your butt!” The manager forged her way through the milling kids like an icebreaker. I was twice Lyddie Brown’s bulk and a foot taller, but I followed in her wake anyway.
It was Carla, all right, her pot of scalding coffee poised right above the hastily withdrawn hand—and crotch—of a middle-aged truck driver I’d seen around before. On the skuzzy side, usually on the make, but Carla could’ve handled his kind in seconds with a sly quip, back when
she’d been working arcade games on the county fair circuit.
Now her face and body were tense, brittle, close to panic. She looked as near to being spooked as any horse I’ve ever handled. What the hell had got into her? And what was she doing here?
It was my turn to shove Lyddie aside, with a look meant to convince her I knew what I was doing. “Hey, Carla.” I moved in close. “Let me help you out with that.” My hand curled around her fingers on the coffeepot’s handle. My body edged hers away from the customer. “Let’s put it down over here, okay?”
The wildness in her dark eyes mellowed into recognition, and something I hoped was deeper. That last morning, while I was still asleep, she’d cleared out without any clue as to how
to find her. For nearly two years I’d figured all she’d seen in me was just a hot enough two-night stand to pass the time with. If she’d thought that was all I’d seen in her, she’d been
dead wrong. Okay, I lied about the getting-to-know-you bit. Two days and nights was enough for me to discover the vulnerability behind the bravado, the steel determination that
overcame fear—and to want to know more.
“Sure,” she said now, “anything you say, big girl.” Her voice shook, but the old low, intimate tone was still there.
Remembered lust surged back in a rush. Carla had always radiated sparks of bad-girl eroticism. Even with her waves of black hair confined in a knot and her waitress uniform just skimming her curves, she shot off pheromones that could pierce a Humvee. I’d have felt some sympathy for the driver if he hadn’t started to bluster.
Lyddie rolled her eyes, jerked her head toward the office, and went into damage control mode.
I got Carla to the coffee station and deposited the hot pot. In spite of interested observers at every table, my hand settled into the sweet spot where waist curves to hip as I steered her into the office and kicked the door shut.
She was shivering when I put my arms around her. I’d never imagined Carla so shaken. Physically wary, sure—my big horses had scared her before she’d discovered the delights
of naked bare-back riding at midnight—but nothing like this melt-down. “Oh, honey, what’s the trouble?” I used my soothing-skittish-fillies tone. “It’ll be all right.” I stroked her black hair, glossy as my Percherons. It came loose from its prim knot, falling into the wild mane I remembered whipping back and forth over my sweaty tors o as she rode me.
“No it won’t,” she muttered against my chest. When her head lifted I saw that the glitter of tears in her eyes came as much from rage as from despair. It was oddly reassuring. “There goes another job! That bastard! But I can handle his kind without lifting a finger. Usually.” Carla searched her breast pockets. I took pity and grabbed the box of Kleenex from Lyddie’s desk.
I dabbed at her damp eyes. No makeup beyond a subdued shade of lipstick. She still exuded that seductive air that had grabbed me the first time I’d seen her, but something else as well that grabbed me harder, even as I shied away from examining it too closely. “So, what went wrong?”
“Me. I went wrong. ‘Sorry, I’m not on the menu’ didn’t do the trick, but I could’ve just smiled and moved away. When he put his hand on my butt, though, I felt…I wanted…dammit, Ree, I needed to be touched so bad it hurt, but not by his kind!”
I could recognize a mare in heat long before I earned my veterinary degree, and my experience of women had tuned me to the similarities. Women aren’t as easily ruled by their hormones as mares, though. For Carla to go off the deep end, there must be as much turmoil in her head as in her body. Dangerous territory.
Just the same, my hand went to her thigh and would have traveled farther if Lyddie hadn’t charged into the office just then.
Carla tried to pull away. I kept an arm around her shoulder. “How’s it going, Lyddie?” I hoped my grin still had the tomboy charm that used to get me extra pie as a kid. The manager had known me all my life, and my family even longer. We’d always stopped here when I was helping my dad transport horses to New Hampshire farms and fairs. The grin could have got me a whole lot more than pie if I’d been so inclined, once I’d grown up, cropped my straw-yellow hair short, and shown that I knew who I was and where I was going.
Lyddie looked us up and down, hands braced on hips, head shaking in exasperation. “Might’ve known you’d be acquainted. There’s gotta be an explanation behind this, but I don’t have the time or patience now.”
“It’s the old story,” I said. “Farm girl meets carnival huckster at the county fair. The Lancaster Fair year before last, when my team was in the pulling trials.” I realized too late that Carla might not have included the midway balloon/dart concession on her résumé.
“Judging by such a touching reunion, maybe you wouldn’t mind taking Miss Volcano-mouth off my hands for a couple of days until all this drama blows over.”
Carla stirred under my arm. “I’m sorry, Lyddie. I should just move on. Thanks for taking a chance on me, but I’ve always been bad news.”
I wanted to shake the old arrogance back into her. On the other hand, if it had been just a shield, I wanted to know what was behind it.
Lyddie softened. “You’re not bad, honey. You’re just drawn that way.”
Carla was right on it. “Thanks, Lyddie. Jessica Rabbit is my role model.”
“You’re a fine cashier and waitress,” Lyddie added. “Never did figure out what you’re doing in a place like this. You could make a lot more tending bar in the city or the tourist area over by Mt. Washington. At least bars have bouncers.”
Carla’d begun to relax, but now she tensed and glanced away from Lyddie. “Can’t blame a girl for wanting to try out respectability for a change.”
I was tired of being left out of the conversation. “If riding in the cab of a horse van rates as respectable, I’d be glad of the company. I’ll be back this way tomorrow or the next
day. We’ll see how things look by then.”
“Just let me get out of this uniform and grab a fewthings.” Carla wriggled out of my grasp. Lyddie and I watched her go, both our gazes fixed on her slender back and swaying ass, both of us exhaling when she’d gone. But Lyddie’s sigh was somber.
“Can’t get a job at a bar these days without a background check,” she said. “A police record will shoot you right down. She’s a whiz with numbers, too, took some accounting
courses she says, but the same goes there.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” But I knew.
_______________
The story ends with them together, but some rocky times ahead. I intend to take them through those in another story, still very different characters. You never know, maybe a novel will come of it.
In my story “Pulling” (which is also included in the collection) the erotic charge is very much a matter of opposites attracting, which happens to be the theme of my bi-weekly post over on ohgetagrip.com. Ree is a horse trainer and veterinarian showing her draft horses at a county fair. Carla is a midway barker luring farm boys (and men) to her dart-and-balloon concession with sultry banter, but with no intention of letting any of them get under her short skirt. A big farm girl, though, is a different matter. When she and Ree get together at a cheap motel, Carla brings vicious clamps and mardi gras beads from the balloon game, while Ree brings a tube of horse lube. Vive la difference! What happens later? Carla disappears after their second night together. Not surprising. But the two-years-later sequel, “Findng Carla,” brings them together again, Ree more sexually experienced now, Carla with a desperate need for ordinary respectability. Here’s an excerpt:
_______________
Finding Carla
Sacchi Green
“Keep your skanky hands off me!” The words sliced through drifting aromas of coffee and pancakes and bacon. “Touch me again, and those fingers won’t be able to
fuck your own sorry dick!”
I’d know that voice, that attitude, anywhere. A truck stop where Vermont slopes into New Hampshire wasn’t high on my list of places to look, but how much, really, had I ever known about Carla? Apart from the way she sounded in hip-swishing, femme-top command of any situation—or with her hips so entirely out of control she couldn’t shape gasps into words—or steeling herself to mount my huge draft horse. We hadn’t had much time for the getting-to-
know-you parts.
I couldn’t see into the dining area past the family with fidgety kids ahead of me. Getting by without trampling them didn’t seem likely, but I was giving it a try anyway when a skinny whirlwind shot from around the cashier’s counter and whacked me from behind.
“Ree Daniels, move your butt!” The manager forged her way through the milling kids like an icebreaker. I was twice Lyddie Brown’s bulk and a foot taller, but I followed in her wake anyway.
It was Carla, all right, her pot of scalding coffee poised right above the hastily withdrawn hand—and crotch—of a middle-aged truck driver I’d seen around before. On the skuzzy side, usually on the make, but Carla could’ve handled his kind in seconds with a sly quip, back when
she’d been working arcade games on the county fair circuit.
Now her face and body were tense, brittle, close to panic. She looked as near to being spooked as any horse I’ve ever handled. What the hell had got into her? And what was she doing here?
It was my turn to shove Lyddie aside, with a look meant to convince her I knew what I was doing. “Hey, Carla.” I moved in close. “Let me help you out with that.” My hand curled around her fingers on the coffeepot’s handle. My body edged hers away from the customer. “Let’s put it down over here, okay?”
The wildness in her dark eyes mellowed into recognition, and something I hoped was deeper. That last morning, while I was still asleep, she’d cleared out without any clue as to how
to find her. For nearly two years I’d figured all she’d seen in me was just a hot enough two-night stand to pass the time with. If she’d thought that was all I’d seen in her, she’d been
dead wrong. Okay, I lied about the getting-to-know-you bit. Two days and nights was enough for me to discover the vulnerability behind the bravado, the steel determination that
overcame fear—and to want to know more.
“Sure,” she said now, “anything you say, big girl.” Her voice shook, but the old low, intimate tone was still there.
Remembered lust surged back in a rush. Carla had always radiated sparks of bad-girl eroticism. Even with her waves of black hair confined in a knot and her waitress uniform just skimming her curves, she shot off pheromones that could pierce a Humvee. I’d have felt some sympathy for the driver if he hadn’t started to bluster.
Lyddie rolled her eyes, jerked her head toward the office, and went into damage control mode.
I got Carla to the coffee station and deposited the hot pot. In spite of interested observers at every table, my hand settled into the sweet spot where waist curves to hip as I steered her into the office and kicked the door shut.
She was shivering when I put my arms around her. I’d never imagined Carla so shaken. Physically wary, sure—my big horses had scared her before she’d discovered the delights
of naked bare-back riding at midnight—but nothing like this melt-down. “Oh, honey, what’s the trouble?” I used my soothing-skittish-fillies tone. “It’ll be all right.” I stroked her black hair, glossy as my Percherons. It came loose from its prim knot, falling into the wild mane I remembered whipping back and forth over my sweaty tors o as she rode me.
“No it won’t,” she muttered against my chest. When her head lifted I saw that the glitter of tears in her eyes came as much from rage as from despair. It was oddly reassuring. “There goes another job! That bastard! But I can handle his kind without lifting a finger. Usually.” Carla searched her breast pockets. I took pity and grabbed the box of Kleenex from Lyddie’s desk.
I dabbed at her damp eyes. No makeup beyond a subdued shade of lipstick. She still exuded that seductive air that had grabbed me the first time I’d seen her, but something else as well that grabbed me harder, even as I shied away from examining it too closely. “So, what went wrong?”
“Me. I went wrong. ‘Sorry, I’m not on the menu’ didn’t do the trick, but I could’ve just smiled and moved away. When he put his hand on my butt, though, I felt…I wanted…dammit, Ree, I needed to be touched so bad it hurt, but not by his kind!”
I could recognize a mare in heat long before I earned my veterinary degree, and my experience of women had tuned me to the similarities. Women aren’t as easily ruled by their hormones as mares, though. For Carla to go off the deep end, there must be as much turmoil in her head as in her body. Dangerous territory.
Just the same, my hand went to her thigh and would have traveled farther if Lyddie hadn’t charged into the office just then.
Carla tried to pull away. I kept an arm around her shoulder. “How’s it going, Lyddie?” I hoped my grin still had the tomboy charm that used to get me extra pie as a kid. The manager had known me all my life, and my family even longer. We’d always stopped here when I was helping my dad transport horses to New Hampshire farms and fairs. The grin could have got me a whole lot more than pie if I’d been so inclined, once I’d grown up, cropped my straw-yellow hair short, and shown that I knew who I was and where I was going.
Lyddie looked us up and down, hands braced on hips, head shaking in exasperation. “Might’ve known you’d be acquainted. There’s gotta be an explanation behind this, but I don’t have the time or patience now.”
“It’s the old story,” I said. “Farm girl meets carnival huckster at the county fair. The Lancaster Fair year before last, when my team was in the pulling trials.” I realized too late that Carla might not have included the midway balloon/dart concession on her résumé.
“Judging by such a touching reunion, maybe you wouldn’t mind taking Miss Volcano-mouth off my hands for a couple of days until all this drama blows over.”
Carla stirred under my arm. “I’m sorry, Lyddie. I should just move on. Thanks for taking a chance on me, but I’ve always been bad news.”
I wanted to shake the old arrogance back into her. On the other hand, if it had been just a shield, I wanted to know what was behind it.
Lyddie softened. “You’re not bad, honey. You’re just drawn that way.”
Carla was right on it. “Thanks, Lyddie. Jessica Rabbit is my role model.”
“You’re a fine cashier and waitress,” Lyddie added. “Never did figure out what you’re doing in a place like this. You could make a lot more tending bar in the city or the tourist area over by Mt. Washington. At least bars have bouncers.”
Carla’d begun to relax, but now she tensed and glanced away from Lyddie. “Can’t blame a girl for wanting to try out respectability for a change.”
I was tired of being left out of the conversation. “If riding in the cab of a horse van rates as respectable, I’d be glad of the company. I’ll be back this way tomorrow or the next
day. We’ll see how things look by then.”
“Just let me get out of this uniform and grab a fewthings.” Carla wriggled out of my grasp. Lyddie and I watched her go, both our gazes fixed on her slender back and swaying ass, both of us exhaling when she’d gone. But Lyddie’s sigh was somber.
“Can’t get a job at a bar these days without a background check,” she said. “A police record will shoot you right down. She’s a whiz with numbers, too, took some accounting
courses she says, but the same goes there.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” But I knew.
_______________
The story ends with them together, but some rocky times ahead. I intend to take them through those in another story, still very different characters. You never know, maybe a novel will come of it.
Labels:
County Fair,
Draft Horses,
Jessica Rabbit,
Wild Rides
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