by Bethany Harvey
(04/30/03)

"Look." May reached out from where she sat on the rain-slick log, feet swinging over the water, to scoop two handfuls of soft clay from the riverbank. "This is you." She showed me one hand, then the other. "And this is me." She took the two lumps and pressed them together, squeezing until the slick mud oozed between her fingers. "And this is what I want to do." She opened her hands to show me the single lump, double-sized, with ridges marking where her fingers had been.

Her mud-caked hands and her voice stirred something deep in my belly. We weren't even touching, but it was as if she'd just kissed me, long and hard.

I stood in the river, leaning against the log with the water tugging at my legs. My jeans were wet up to the crotch. It was shallow here and rain-cool, and the water was the color of pale iced tea. In the deeper places, by the undercut banks, it was garnet-red, as though something other than cypress roots were bleeding into it. In the humid Florida spring the air was half water, my skin coated always with a glaze of sweat, the kind of day when you wear the loosest, lightest clothes you can find and they’re still too much. Watching May I felt even warmer, but it was a welcome warmth, spreading through my core and turning my legs liquid.

I hadn't expected this from her. Starting as casual lovers, we had become more like friends in the years we'd lived together. We'd never had the kind of sex they write songs about, but lately I had begun to wonder if she was interested in me at all anymore. In fact, I'd asked her to come to the woods with me because I missed her. I had intended to maybe sneak in a kiss or two to let her know that, although most of the time she was just my friend, there were times when, thinking about her, I was struck by an aching desire to sink into her; my whole body into her whole body, like those lumps of clay. I never thought she could be hiding such a feeling.

I stared at that muddy lump and the teasing brown eyes above them, and sloshed through the water toward her. I wrapped my arms around her waist, pulled her into the river with me. She let me, fell forward easily into me. She landed feet-first, splashing us with a wave of cool red water. Her body yielded against mine. May is soft and rounded in a way that screams sex. Without a bra, her breasts overlap her ribs and sway heavily when she walks. I am tall and unwieldy; my bones long and heavy and dense.

She kissed me, pried my lips open to draw me in. Our tongues twisted and wrestled past each other. I felt the ridges on the roof of her mouth, the sharp edges of her front teeth. Warm air from our nostrils billowed against our faces, mixing with sweat. The backs of my eyelids were garnet-red, river-red, kissing-May-red. When she pulled away, my glasses were fogged around the edges, so the riverbank was a green blur. Silt had settled in around my feet in the current.

We found a sandbar. I pulled her down with me, our legs trailing in the river. We peeled clothes off, our own and each other's, enough to get to skin, shirts bunched under our armpits, her shorts snagged around one ankle and streaming in the current as I bent over her. Sweat and water dampened her belly, and the hair guarding her cunt was coarse and wiry, holding water droplets at the ends, and long enough to catch my fingers in. My own cunt was swollen and drooling between my legs. I sucked her nipples, wore away at them with my tongue.

We were melting, blending into the water. Water was in everything; the ground was soft and muddy, the air steam-humid and sticky; and the two of us leaked moisture together.

I scooped my fingers into her the way her fingers had scooped into the bank. Inside, she was soft and slick, like wet clay in that state between earth and water. I molded her with my tongue, widening trenches, deepening valleys. She comes more easily when I use a light touch, but this time I didn't have the restraint, the distance, that takes. I wanted to bury my face in her cunt for a year, learn to breath the waters of her womb again. My own cunt egged me on, aching, a swollen weeping blister. Touch me and I would crack open like a too-ripe melon. May's soft thighs shuddered and gripped my head, and I kept on until she let me go. We panted together on the bank, lying still. My cunt pulsed, and I waited.

She thrust a knee between my legs, rolling us over and into the water. I went eagerly. Then, finally, her hand pressed between my legs. I tried to open my cunt like a mouth and suck her fingers in. I barely noticed her weight on my chest, the silt under my shoulders sliding and giving way.

And suddenly I was choking, gasping, water snorting up my nose and stinging in my throat; blind panic grabbed me and I heaved her off me and sat up. We stared at each other for a moment, me angry and coughing, her looking stung.

"You tryna kill me?" Fear does not turn me on. The ache consuming my pelvis, the swollen-to-bursting hill between my legs, was forgotten, drowned by panic.

She flinched. "Oh God, I'm sorry. I didn't mean.... Are you okay?"

Of course I forgave her. I always did. I forgave easily, suddenly; May was the one who held a grudge. Breathing deep between coughs, I tasted the bitter tannin of the water and smiled. "Yeah. Just let me get my breath."

May stroked my wet breast with one hand as I tried to stop coughing. Breathing and desire returned almost at the same time, and May's caresses gradually shortened, making smaller and smaller circles around my nipples.

I moaned through a tight throat, because she liked to hear me, and she took her hand off my breast and bowed over me to replace it with her mouth. I wanted my whole body to open up and gulp her.

She teased until she had me writhing and thrusting my cunt into her hand. Her thumb fit perfectly inside me, anchored me to her as her tongue lapping my clit sent me quivering. My head tried to float away and join the leaves shivering above us. I closed my eyes. The light-and-dark pattern on the backs of my eyelids danced and shuddered, and then my whole body was dancing and shuddering with it.

May crawled up beside me, and we lay together in the shallows, the damp yielding sandbar a pillow keeping our heads out of water. A breeze too high for us to feel stirred the treetops, making the splotches of yellow-green light and gray-green shadow dance over our bodies. My limbs were heavy, sinking into the sand and water, the current pushing at my thighs. I didn't want to move, ever again.

But after a while I started to notice the mosquitoes and gnats whining over our bare bodies, and the way the mud was drying on our bodies in spite of the sweat -- and May must have noticed these things too because she slid out of my grasp and got up and started getting dressed.

I dragged myself up to follow, pulled my own wet clothes on. I found her shorts downstream a few yards, caught on a branch, and fished them out of the current for her.

May reached up to run her fingers through my hair, playing with the sand-matted ends at the back of my neck. The woods lay quiet around us. We turned our backs to the river, trusting it to keep our secrets, and found the path back to civilization.

"Why don't we do this more often?" I said.

"I guess I forgot how much fun it was."

"So...now that you remember?"

May grinned. "Don't tell me this isn't enough to satisfy you for at least a week."

"A week's not so bad," I said, carefully neutral. I wanted to chew her labia.

May skimmed her wrinkled fingertips down the edge of my face, down my neck, reaching under my shirt; she brought them up again, and licked them. "So we have a date? Next week?"

"Hell, yes."

We ducked through the whippy sweet gum branches and out into the bright day-lit road. We swaggered home, feeling good, and the sun cracked the mud from off our skin, leaving little flakes of sex on the hot asphalt.

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