A Bucolic Affair.

I park at the community hall on the top of the hill like she told me to. She insisted the car cannot reach her house and I know she meant that literally, she didn’t mean there is no available parking around her house, she really meant there is no road. I cannot believe that still happens. Almost three decades ago, we parked like that too, and we could never come back home after dark because we had to cut through the forest to get from the car to the house. In all these years, they’ve built a lot of stuff around here. They cut out a chunk of the mountain and built a mall, they stripped some of the forest and built swanky resorts with heated pools and roads to access them. They built artisanal bakeries that sell overpriced sourdough and vegan carrot cake to serve the bespectacled intelligentsia that come here to find themselves and they put in high-speed internet to ensure they could continue to do their jobs, yet they seem to have forgotten to build enough roads to connect the local population to bus-stops and schools.

As I walk towards the narrow path that cuts into the forest, I adjust my jacket and run my fingers through my hair to smoothen it out. I don’t think I care about looking good, especially since she’s already seen me a few times and seems interested, but maybe it’s habitual, one cannot help but wonder if they look good with their clothes on before they take them off.

She’s a state-affiliated social worker and I met her through the local queer foundation when I went down to their office to offer my services. She’s their liaison to the local authorities, the only woman associated with the organisation, and she helps them secure permits to host rallies, gets them into meetings with local representatives, accompanies them to villages when they make interventional calls and helps them talk to local families. Things they immediately told me I could not do because I am city queer and would not be accepted here. I would stand out and make them stand out even more. They pretended to humour me for a bit, telling me I could use my big contacts to fundraise, but within a few minutes they were complaining about us elite, city-queer folks who speak English and exclude everyone else from the movement. A part of me gets it, it is a real problem, but another part of me knows that most city-queer folks, are still rural-queer back home but I didn’t feel like explaining that. I talked to her instead, but when I asked her if it was hard for her to be a queer woman in this tiny, conservative hamlet in paradise, she balked at the suggestion.

“No, no,” she said, quickly, “I am not *like that*, I just work with them because I am assigned here and I think it’s important to do, but I’m not, *you know*, like that.”

She certainly is like that and told me as such a few days later when she started dropping messages to me late in the evening. She explained that she couldn’t come out, of course, it was hard enough getting people to accept even her association with the organisation and while she has managed to placate her family on the marital front for a while, eventually she expects to acquiesce to their wishes and just have a husband to keep the status quo. I get it. I grew up here and I know what it is like. These people are kind, beautiful monsters who will always offer you shelter in the cold and report you to the police for made-up crimes if they find out you are like that. Things change but things don’t really change, you know?

As I walk up to the front door of her house, I pull my phone out and call her. She answers immediately and I hear her scurrying towards the door.

“Come on, come in quickly,” she says, pulling me through the door, “I told you to call me right after you park, I didn’t want anyone to see you waiting outside my door.”

“Really?” I ask, trying to dust her frantic frenzy off me like lint as I enter her home, “Wouldn’t they just see a girl standing outside your house and assume I am your friend?”

“You don’t look like my friend,” she says, still irked, but simultaneously realising she sounds rude, “You know what I mean, right? These people know my friends and you don’t look like you’re from here, they’d assume something weird is going on especially because I work with those people.”

Things don’t really change, but also do, I guess. Apparently, I have changed so much no one will believe I belong here, but to tell the truth, no one believed it even when I was growing up here either. However, back then, if they saw me in the bedroom of their daughter, they did assume I was a friend—a weird friend—and they cast me as a potential bad influence instead of a lesbianiser. I guess I don’t really think about optics anymore, I have the access to date in environments where I don’t have to, and it’s made me a little impatient with the logistical nightmare of being in the closet. I should be more mindful and empathetic.

“I’m sorry,” I say to her, as I walk behind her into the living room, “I should have called you sooner.”

“Well, maybe I should punish you for being so thoughtless,” she says, turning around with the same abruptness as the sudden shift in conversation, “That’s what you’re into, no?”

I take two quicks steps backward and let her words wash over me like warm, liquid lust. I’m surprised. We did talk about it but I think I expected her to be more shy in person. That must be my own bias, I must have assumed that being forced to hide your identity meant one would experience the kind of shame that made them timid. I must have assumed that she wanted to talk about the complex social phenomenon of queer on a deadline and let that slowly evolve into a connection, but she just wants to get straight to the fucking. The logistics that make me so impatient are just that to her too, logistics that get in the way but this ideological conundrum is a practised deception for her. My impatience is for the world, hers is for me.

She holds my arm and gently pulls me towards her room. The curtains are drawn, but the sunlight is streaming into the room through the light-coloured fabric anyway, the bed has been made recently, there’s a lonesome chair standing over the carpet and over on the table by the side there is an assortment of objects. A bright pink vibrator, she told me she had that, a wooden scale like the ones tailors use to mark clothes, a rather large black strap-on and an assortment of strings, the kind you use to hold up pajamas. I suppose, the high-speed internet doesn’t just benefit the remote-workers, it brings prosperity and dildos to villages. Earlier, she described a strap on to me as a panty with a penis and I took that lack of language to mean she hasn’t seen one before but I was wrong about everything. She seems prepared and experienced, and all of a sudden, I feel out of my depth.

I don’t get it. I have an arsenal of toys and weapons in my bedroom that I enthusiastically use, I fuck strangers all the time and two weeks ago I negotiated a scene to whip needles out of my body and brought the needles with me. There is no reason I should feel how I feel, but I do, maybe I don’t feel like I was involved in the planning of this or maybe I expected to have to retain control of this encounter even as I went down on my knees before her. I expected to be the aggressor, the one in the know, the one who understood her sexuality because she can describe it better. Whatever it was, I was wrong and I find myself experiencing a tingling of nerves in the pit of my abdomen. I like nerves, they’re a constant reminder that you’re not too jaded to actually experience life.

“I want you to take off your clothes and sit on this chair,” she says to me, assuming an air of aggression that is so different from the frantic nerves she had on earlier, it almost alters her appearance, “Will you do what I say?”

“I will,” I tell her, as I begin to slip out of my clothes.

I am not normally shy about nudity, I don’t even think about it as an unusual state of being, but her gaze on my body feels like a laser, like it is cutting and cauterising my flesh. As I put my clothes away and sit down on the chair, she removes the claw-clip from her hair and let’s it fall all over her shoulders. She makes her way over to the table and returns with the strings she has ready.

“I will tie you to this chair and then I will undress in front of you,” she says to me, leans over to my ear and letting her soft curls brush against my breasts, “I will touch you and tease you with my body until you beg for it.”

“Are you going to narrate everything you do?” I ask, smiling, before kissing her neck.

She pulls away and digs her nails into my thigh, as if chiding me for sneaking touches she hasn’t yet permitted. Power is a toy that seems to know no barriers, I could own every fancy weapon and say all the right words about this game, and she may get her restraints out of the clothes in her closet, but we speak the same language. I understand half of the thing she texts me but everything she is saying now is crystal clear, like a language I learnt at birth and thought I forgot because I moved too far away to be around people who still speak it.

“I will narrate everything,” she says, standing in front of me and pulling her kurta over her head, “It makes me horny to say what I am doing, does it make you horny to hear it?”

It really does. It’s not even what she is doing as much as how sure she is about what arouses her that is working for me. As she leans over to clumsily fasten my arms to the chair, I close my eyes and take deep breaths. It’s like changing perspective, sometimes I need to consciously switch from the mode of detached, analytical existence to depravity and when I open my eyes again, the world looks different. I feel different, like I never left this strange town, like all my pleasure still had to lie behind closed doors in the middle of the afternoon, like her flesh was all that mattered in the world. She stands before me, her breasts tightly clad in a white cotton bra, her hands grasp the arm-rests as she sways her hips, so slowly, and I feel a little bit like a tormented pervert. I really do want to reach out and lick her waist and I let my tongue roll out of my mouth to indicate that. She comes close enough to let my tongue get a taste and then giggles as she pulls back. She turns around, toying with the knot that fastens her salwar, it’s almost as if she is dancing to music that only she can hear. She claws at my skin as she comes closer and then retreats to do her little dance until I am covered in scratches and moaning to her beat. I let out a gasp as she unfastens her bra, it’s amazing, you can see thousands of tits in your life but each one can feel like a revelation. Like the one you needed to see the most.

“Open your mouth,” she says, bouncing her breasts before my face, toying with them, “I want to watch you drool to get your mouth on them and if you don’t seem needy enough, I will hit you with my scale. I will go it bring it now.”

Her strange fetish for narration is such a turn-on for me, I like a good narrator, whether that’s in the theatre or standing half-naked in front of me and threatening to hit me. As she swats my thigh with her yellow scale, I let out a little yelp and open my mouth wider to beg for her breasts. She sways in my face and backs up to hit me, she doesn’t have any skill whatsoever at delivering pain but it doesn’t seem to matter to my cunt as I feel it leak onto the wood. She slides her hand between my legs and paws at it, I try to spread my legs but my thighs and the wood leave little space to do so. She pulls her hand out and I can smell myself in the air, she rubs her wet fingers onto her nipples and comes closer, sitting down across my lap, with her legs on either side and her breasts in my face. As I take her nipple into my mouth, she presses onto me, until my head is backed into the chair and I am being smothered by her flesh. She switches between breasts sporadically, grinding against me, letting me come up for air every once in a while, and I mumble into her flesh, still begging, even though she gave me what she said she would if I begged.

“Do you like sucking on my tits? Does it make you feel horny like I’m your mommy? It makes me so horny to make you suck my nipples,” she says, retreating to laugh a little, before standing up and unfastening her bottoms, “I will bring my vibrator and you will hold it between your thighs as you suck my tits and make me come in my panties and if you do a good job, I will take them off and put them in your mouth.”

As I watch her walk towards and back from her vibrator in her black panties, I wonder why I ever thought she was shy or wouldn’t know how to do this. They must be right about city queer folks, in all of the politics, maybe we forgot that knowing how to need and fuck isn’t just a matter of education and awareness. Desire comes for us all and is much better guiding sexual interaction than a unified language. As she turns on her vibrator and pushed it between my thighs, I understand exactly what this is, this is a woman who wants to use me like a filthy little object and I am here for it. She sits atop me again and pushes her breasts back into my face, but it is with an aggressive impatience. She puts her hands on the back of my head and grips my hair as she begins to grind into the vibration coming from between my legs.

“Suck my tits and do not stop, no matter what,” she instructs me, so clearly about what she needs, “I will come fast and I will ride you as I do, do not stop until I tell you to stop.”

She does come extremely fast, I haven’t looked at my watch in a while but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. She shakes my entire body and the chair as she orgasms, she is not loud at all, in fact, she gets quieter as she gets closer, she could orgasm while lying in bed with someone and they wouldn’t know it from sound, but she is so loud with her body. She shakes my head into her and even though I am suffocating, I have no desire to breathe until she gets what she wants.

“You can stop, you can stop,” she says as she climbs off me and takes the vibrator in her hand, “You did a good job, you can stop.”

She shoves the vibrator into my mouth. It is still on and the vibrations feel extremely strange inside my head, like looking at colours represented as code instead of hues, but the sentiment makes me want to ignore the unpleasant sensation and succumb to her need to shove things in my mouth. She makes me hold it in my mouth as she pulls off her underwear. She attempts to push it into my mouth alongside the vibrator but grows frustrated when it doesn’t fit and pulls the vibrator out instead, she pushes the fabric into my mouth until it is all in there and then rubs her hands all over her cunt. It’s a little hairy, but not too much, and now that I taste in inside my mouth, I really want to feel it on my face.

“Whenever I orgasm, I just immediately want to orgasm again, don’t you?” she asks.

I shake my head. I really don’t. Whenever I orgasm, I want to never orgasm again, but she doesn’t actually seem interested in the answer. It’s amazing how this feels a lot more like being used than it does like connection, as I had expected. I’ve learnt a lot about her. Clearly, she enjoys the smother, the tease, the power and being pleased and she volunteered all of that without ever having to say it, I told her in words exactly what I was into, but I wonder if I have shown it to her at all, and whether she even asked to look. Her dance is so perfectly choreographed to her needs, I feel entirely replaceable by any other body, any other mouth and any other list of fetishes.

“I will push the chair down and then I will get on top of your face, I want to rub my pussy on your face while you suck on my underwear,” she says, getting behind me and very gently, but very powerfully pulls the chair onto the floor so I am on my back.

This is a very uncomfortable position but I don’t care so much I feel her kneeling beside my head. She lowers herself and begins to grind against me, just like she did against the vibrator. I wonder if this is how she learnt to masturbate the first time again, grinding against pillows and chairs, until she started to picture faces under there instead. I often mind those early lessons in pleasure are so replete and pervasive. As she grinds, she grips between my legs. I cannot breathe so I shake my head around, she stops long enough to pull her panties from my mouth and let me cough before lowering herself again. This time I let my tongue out of my mouth and lick at her cunt but I can barely move my tongue under the force of her grinding. This is how I learnt to masturbate, pushing pillows into my face as I touched myself, imagining there was a cunt hovering above my nose instead. This feels much better than the fluffy cotton. As she grinds, she touches my cunt, but I cannot tell if she is trying to make me feel good, she claws and pinches, and pumps the flesh, but from her touch she feels like she has never tried to pleasure a cunt before.

It takes her longer to orgasm the second time but she seems to enjoy it more. It seems to catapult her into a silent frenzy. It’s not frantic but it is so fast. She slides off me, unties me and pulls me to the bed without saying a word, her narration completely falling off the cliff into a heady abyss. She seems to feel it so strongly that I can feel it too, it’s like she is continuing to orgasms as she reaches for the strap on, puts it on pushes me onto the bed. I land on my back and she stands on her feet, holding my legs up to her shoulders as she pushes into me. She leans over me, puts her hand over my face and starts to fuck me, I am surprised by her strength but I know I shouldn’t me. We are slight-looking people up here in the mountains, but fuck if there isn’t the proportionally extraordinary strength of an army-ant inside each one. She fucks me slower as she fucks me harder, lowering herself onto in her entirety and continuing to push on my face. Her mouth is next to my ear and she whispers into it loudly.

“Beg me to fuck,” she asks, repeating herself a few times before continuing, “Keep begging me to fuck your pussy.”

I beg her until she seems to orgasm again, or maybe it’s not that, maybe it is a different kind of peak. I know I experience a type that only seems to be released with tears and doesn’t feel like pleasure of the cunt, yet it feels like an orgasm nonetheless. When she pulls out of me, she seems done. She lays down on the bed and stays there for a while. I stay here, still focused on the throbbing I feel between my legs and wondering if there was any way to satiate that at all.

“My family will be home in an hour,” she says, finally, “You really need to go before that.”

I am surprised again. How and when did she have the awareness to keep track of the time? I wear a watch in the shower and even I didn’t know how long it had been since I was in that room.

“Yeah, I understand,” I say to her.

“Did you have fun?” she asks me, “I always like to have fun. I know eventually in my life I will have to get married and have babies, so I always think it is better to have as much fun as I can till I can, why be so serious?”

I have no idea what she is trying to convey and whether is has any motive whatsoever. It feels like she is telling me I am fun, like she would say that to a vibrator and it makes me feel worthwhile, but somehow, also reminded that I cannot be a greeting card or a warm blanket at night.

“I had fun,” I tell her, kissing her shoulder, before standing up to get my clothes, “You are very hot and I would lick you all day.”

“Good,” she says, “It’s so hard to tell with people like you, you never really say what you want.”

As I get dressed and exit her house, those words echo inside my head. People like you never really say what you want. I don’t know a single person in my life who would say that about me and I am not sure what places me in the category of people like that but I am certain it is something as arbitrary and misguided as whatever had me place her into a category of shy, repressed people. I laugh by myself as I realise the divine comedy of these categories, keeping us apart at the heart, and shoving us together at the genitals. As I climb up to the parking lot, I am stopped by someone who looks vaguely familiar, like I would have recognised her fifteen-years ago and for a second I worry whether she saw me at her house and will now cause trouble in some way.

“It’s been so long!” she exclaims, “How is your mother?”

I respond with empty words and enough familiarity to indicate I do recognise her and know which friend of my mother she may be.

“I had no idea you were in town,” she says.

“Actually, I live here now,” I tell her, I find that I repeat those words more than I need to.

“You do? That’s surprising,” she says, genuinely unable to hide her shock, “Never would have guessed that, you never seemed to belong here.”

Aliens never get to have homes, do they?