They horse around, hotdogging with each other, working up a sweat. They play at their public roles as they have before but the buffoonery gradually thins and disappears until they are testing each other seriously, one on one. He wears her down though she never concedes, only eventually making the time-out T with her hands. She sinks, panting, to her haunches.
“Lesson time,” he advises.
She groans and comes to the line he toes onto the grungy floor. Standing close behind her, hands on her hips, he straightens her stance, nudges the hollows of her knees into a slight bend, draws her elbows down parallel to her body and steps back. She cups the ball in her hands. Placing his hands over hers, he rolls the ball to the needle point where it is inflated.
“Put your finger on the ball’s belly button.”
“Belly button?” she giggles.
“That’s what I call it. You call it anything you want. Needle head, sweet spot, whatever. Now look for the point on the floor where the key is centered in line with the hoop. Now head up.”
She sinks a little, bounces the ball once, spins it a couple of times looking for the ball’s navel, all the while never taking her eyes from the hoop. One arm pistons the ball at the net. The shot sprongs on the rim and falls off.
He hooks the ball as it rebounds off the floor and passes it to her.
“Hold the ball close. Do it.”
As instructed, she begins with the ball at breast level, elbows in line with her knees, and then she heaves it onehanded again, and the shot misses.
From behind her, he puts the ball in her hands and tucks her elbows again and then his hands cover hers.
“Stop slinging it. Shoot it with both hands, Deanie. Guide and push. All you have to do is sink it. Little spring in your knees, little spring in your wrists.”
He takes his hands away and steps back.
And this time it works. She makes it again. And again, and gives him a cocky look.
“Eat me,” she taunts.
He sweeps her, squealing, from her feet. “Okay.”
When he drops her onto the counter in the cubby, she gives him a shove on the chest. Her eyes are narrowed, her mouth wobbly with alarm. Hands on the insides of her knees, he wishbones them against the counter and sinks between her legs, head into her crotch. The worn soft fabric of her jeans, the silk of spandex underneath, the rigid rickrack of her chains, are damp with exertion. They smell of her. He bumps his face into the soft infolding of her pudendum beneath the ledge of pubic bone against his nose. Her thighs quiver and tense under his fingers. He sniffs deeply; the scent’s a jolt to his nervous system. The tightening in his groin becomes a whiplash and his cock stands up, swelling against his buttons. For a moment he buffs his face against the crotch of her jeans, before he reaches for the clasp of the chains at her waist and the buttons of her fly and reluctantly raises his head.
She’s flushed and accusing. “Jesus, you’re weird. Like some big dog.”
Settling his chin on her pubis, he growls throbbingly in his throat and she laughs.
While she undoes her traps, he sheds his own, and the sight of his cock, bobbing and swaying as he kicks off his jeans, strikes him as funny. Her nakedness is still riveting, though, the tremble of her bare breasts, the seamless whiteness of her skin against the black pointer of pubic hair and the shy pink underneath. While she refastens her chains, he makes bold to ruffle her muff with his fingers, and drifting over the cleft to cup the whole sex as she passes the chains between her legs.
She tenses again when he spreads her on the cot and looks down on her, the crotch chains slack against the hollows of her thighs. He’s seen her sex before, in brief glimpses, and he’s seen others, in stroke books, but it’s still startling and strange. It’s small, for one. And complicated. The blue-tinged pinks blend into one another. In the middle, it is undeniably wound-like and raw. That hooded little bit like the tip of a very small tongue at the juncture of the outer lips is her clitoris, not difficult to find at all.
It strikes him suddenly he has only the vaguest idea how this is done.
She lifts her head from the forearm she is resting it on. “Ugly, isn’t it?”
Startled, he shakes his head. “No! It’s just I don’t know what I’m doing,” he confesses. “Bear with me.”
“Great,” she mutters.
The tongueless mouth of her sex gives him no coaching. He kisses the rosebud tattoo above her knee. Lowering his head, he breathes in the musky odor, not the fishy smell of dirty jokes at all but more reminiscent of her armpits, only intensified and complicated. It makes him think of the dry astringency of unripe banana.
He closes his eyes and presses his face into it, a fringed fleshy sea thing, one of those exotic faceless submarine delicacies, half-plant, half-animal, floating and swaying like a transparent shadow. She flinches away and he grasps her hips to draw her back down. He tries to really kiss her there, rolling his lips against the swelling rim of her labia, letting his tongue slip over them, tasting them, sliding it into the cleft, tip touching the slick curled bud of the closed aperture, exploring the small confusing petals. The taste is of a foreign spice, a dusty mouth-drying
