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Want Me As I Am

Nothing to Hide · Book Three · Vera Calder

Opening chapter · 15,615 words · Explicit erotic romance for adults 18+.

Read after Touch Me Like You Mean It and Watch Me Want You. The numbered volumes form one continuing story.

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Opening chapter: The Crowd at Thirty Feet

Los Angeles had been getting smaller in the mirror since they passed downtown. By the time the freeway opened south, the basin was mostly a brown shelf behind them and the air coming through the windows had lost the hot-metal smell it carried near the river.

 

Marissa had her huaraches off and her heels on the dash. The fold-over shorts had ridden almost to the top of her thighs. Wind went in through one arm opening of her plunge tank and out the other, lifting the fabric from her ribs, and her tied-back hair kept escaping an inch at a time. She had been back in Los Angeles since the lake. This time, the distance itself felt like relief.

 

That thought lasted perhaps a mile.

 

DeShawn had adjusted the driver's seat as far back as its rails allowed. Even then his right knee rose close to the steering column and his head left only a hand's width of clearance beneath the roof. The SUV had been chosen for him or by him, probably both. His hands made the wheel look undersized, one spread across the top whenever traffic was easy, the other loose near the console, and every control he touched seemed to have been put slightly too close.

 

DeShawn was talking. He had started somewhere around summer conditioning and now had his head coach, two defensive assistants, the temperature of the practice field and an argument about cleats all going at once.

 

"—so I'm tellin' the man, you cannot run me on that surface in this heat. This is not a dialogue I'm here to have—" His laugh got there ahead of the joke. It often did. "And then they run me on it anyway. Eight in the morning and I done already sweated through everything I own."

 

"His conditioning coach probably has reasons."

 

"Oh, he got reasons. Many reasons. I just think they wrong." He drummed the wheel once with his thumb. "How your volleyball girls doing?"

 

She told him about the beach league. He knew enough to ask about the bracket before the result.

 

She gave him the team with a club coach who called timeouts as though the women were twelve, the setter from Irvine who dumped on second contact whenever Marissa drifted early, and the crosswind that had turned one side of the court into the bad side for most of the afternoon. DeShawn followed all of it. He asked whether they had committed their blocker or left her reading, then argued for leaving her reading until Marissa explained the setter's shoulders. That took them from the East LA Interchange past the first long warehouses south of Commerce.

 

"Y'all in a competitive division?"

 

"Competitive. Last match was a club team out of Irvine."

 

"Y'all win?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Good."

 

That satisfied him. He asked one more question about the opposing setter, got an answer, and was off again, this time on the problem of football camp food and a freshman lineman who had tried to live on protein bars for six days. The story wandered. It doubled back for a name DeShawn had forgotten, took a side trip through a cafeteria in Tempe, and eventually reached the freshman asleep in a film room with half a peanut-butter wrapper stuck to his cheek.

 

Marissa laughed. The windows stayed down.

 

At San Clemente the hills gave up and the Pacific appeared on the right, blue all the way to the horizon. She turned her face toward it. Camp Pendleton went by in long undeveloped reaches, fence and scrub and occasional strips of water. DeShawn had switched to the acquaintance who had told him about Black's Beach.

 

The air through the window changed too. Los Angeles freeway air left a film on the mouth, especially in heat; this carried salt and sun-cooked vegetation, then diesel again whenever a truck boxed them in. Marissa put one bare foot against the windshield and watched a train run parallel to them for several miles before it fell behind.

 

Billboards thinned, freeway walls gave way to dun hills cut for the road, and every few miles the ocean returned between buildings with enough blue in it to make the commercial strips on either side look temporary.

 

"Fifteen people, he said. Maybe twenty by the end. They didn't come running in. Just sort of moved."

 

He lifted one hand from the wheel and spread his fingers.

 

"Nobody got close. Nobody filmed. Beach took care of itself. Been taking care of itself fifty years, that's what he told me."

 

"Where were they?"

 

He described the south end of the clothing-optional section, then admitted he was working from somebody else's directions and could be fifty yards off.

 

"Open sand, though. Three sides."

 

"How long before people moved?"

 

"Ten minutes. Twelve. He said it was almost polite." DeShawn tasted the word, liked it, and laughed. "Whole beach rearranged itself around them, then rearranged back after. Like weather."

 

"Polite is interesting."

 

"That's exactly what I said. I said, man, I don't know if that's polite. But he swore."

 

His acquaintance had also described the beach regulars, the absence of phones, and a man who had calmly told a visitor to put his camera away. DeShawn repeated the warning with obvious approval. Nobody had touched the couple. Nobody had spoken to them during. At the end, people had returned to their own towels, including one man who had walked directly back to a crossword puzzle and picked up his pen.

 

"What happened to the couple?" Marissa asked.

 

"Went swimming."

 

"Reasonable."

 

"That's what we're doing. Salt water. Reset. Then the climb, because apparently I agreed to climb a cliff after all this."

 

"You did."

 

"I was distracted during negotiations."

 

DeShawn spent the next several exits reconstructing the negotiation, assigning himself poor counsel and Marissa predatory advantage, until his own case collapsed under questions about who had bought the bikini and suggested the beach in the first place.

 

Traffic thickened south of Oceanside and the SUV slowed to a crawl. DeShawn reached across, hooked a finger inside the wide arm opening of her tank and drew it toward him. He looked down the front. The glance was frank and lasted as long as the traffic allowed. Then the fabric slipped from his finger.

 

"They're even more beautiful than I remember," he said. He checked the brake lights ahead. "And I remember them very clearly, so that's saying something."

 

She received the compliment and left it alone. His right hand returned to the wheel.

 

La Jolla showed below them near sunset, white stucco and red tile packed into the slope, the ocean beyond the roofs. The hotel was two stories around a courtyard where a little fountain worked at half pressure. Through a gap in the rear wall she could see the beach. DeShawn parked. Marissa was on the pavement before he shut off the engine.

 

The village had the quiet of expensive places that had been expensive long enough to stop advertising. Bougainvillea covered one stucco wall and dropped purple scraps into a gutter. A man in deck shoes carried a bakery box across the street. Even the traffic moved at a mildly self-satisfied pace. It reminded Marissa of parts of Pacific Palisades without Edward's hillside distance, all of it closer to the water and a little older around the edges.

 

One man staffed the lobby. He looked up from the computer, saw DeShawn, saw her, and needed a second attempt at arranging his face. He asked for the reservation name.

 

While the key card programmed, she hooked her arm through DeShawn's and watched the clerk. He glanced up again. She met him squarely. The arrival list on his screen became fascinating.

 

They had the key inside three minutes.

 

The clerk watched them cross the lobby in the reflection of a framed aerial photograph, thinking himself hidden there, and Marissa saw his eyes track DeShawn's hand at the small of her back before the outer door shut.

 

Halfway up the exterior stairs, DeShawn said, "Man did an entire assessment in about four seconds. Came to conclusions."

 

"Probably several."

 

"Oh, several."

 

He was laughing again by the landing.

 

The room had been refrigerated all day. Marissa opened the door, felt the cold hit her bare shoulders and went straight to the thermostat. Thick brown curtains covered the window, with parking-lot light showing in narrow bands at both ends. There was one queen bed, a desk, a television on a wall bracket and a chair upholstered in a red pattern that might once have hidden stains. It did not anymore. She put her overnight bag on it.

 

The bathroom counter was barely wide enough for two toiletry bags. A wrapped plastic cup sat beside a travel-size bottle of shampoo and one square of soap. Through the wall came the muffled rise and fall of somebody's television, too low to identify as a show, then a laugh track arriving alone. DeShawn opened the closet, found three wire hangers and shut it again.

 

"Amenities," he said.

 

DeShawn opened his bag and pulled out a hot-pink micro-bikini.

 

He held it by the top cord. Two pink triangles dangled from clear plastic strands, each triangle about the area of a Mini Post-it. The bottom was a patch of semitransparent mesh attached to a T-string. He had been saving the reveal, and saving it had cost him. Delight was coming off him in waves.

 

"Oh, no," she said.

 

"Oh, yes."

 

She took it. At her scale the top could cover her nipples if she positioned it carefully. Her areolas would remain outside. The mesh panel might lie over her labia; it would hide nothing once light reached it. Its waistband belonged below her pubic patch, leaving the hair and the top of her vulva bare.

 

"Where did you buy this?"

 

"A respectable establishment."

 

"This is fishing line."

 

"Stretch fishing line. Quality material."

 

She pulled one cord and let it snap back.

 

The bottom had required more engineering than the top. Its mesh triangle narrowed below her vulva into a clear strand that would vanish between her buttocks, while the front stopped low enough to expose the whole trimmed patch above. Whoever had designed it understood that a transparent garment could make a body more conspicuous by assigning tiny borders to what remained uncovered. The thing offered no support, sun protection or useful modesty. It did, however, contain an argument.

 

"I dare you," he said. "Parking lot to beach. In that right there."

 

Marissa considered the descent, the state-land ambiguity at the trailhead, and what the garment would do on three hundred feet of switchback. Two seconds, perhaps. She folded it into her bag for morning.

 

"You didn't let me finish the dare," he said.

 

"You did finish it."

 

"There was going to be a speech."

 

"Save it for the parking lot."

 

He attempted three opening lines from the abandoned speech while unpacking, each grander than the last, and she rejected them in order without offering a replacement until he accused her of sabotaging the dramatic arts.

 

"I had structure."

 

She laughed then, an actual laugh that bent her forward once, and the transparent cord slid through her fingers onto the bag.

 

DeShawn laughed before the bundle touched the bottom.

 

They walked two blocks to dinner. By the restaurant her hair was down on her shoulders. The patio faced Avenida de la Playa, and if she listened between cars she could hear surf. She ordered two halibut tacos and used too much tomatillo salsa from the ceramic bowl. It was tart enough to hurt a small cut at the corner of her mouth. She drank cold domestic beer and nearly ordered a third taco.

 

DeShawn ordered enough food for an offensive line meeting and ate it with no ceremony. He talked through most of dinner. A story about a teammate at camp lost its point three separate times, then found a better one. Marissa listened and ate and, once, caught the ocean behind the street noise.

 

The better point involved compression shorts cut open by athletic trainers, a missing room key and an assistant coach trapped in the wrong elevator, though DeShawn needed so many corrections to reach it that the gull lost interest first.

 

His order included a plate of grilled fish, rice, black beans, two additional tacos and the fries that came with neither entrée but had appeared after a brief conversation with the server. Halfway through he gave Marissa one fry, remembered she had not requested one, and took the plate back without apology. A gull landed on the patio rail and studied his food with more concentration than the teammate story deserved. DeShawn warned it off twice. The gull stayed.

 

The beer brought the ache at the corner of Marissa's mouth back whenever she drank. Tomatillo salsa had found it and kept finding it. She dabbed it once with the napkin, decided the cut was too small to deserve management, and used more salsa on the second taco.

 

She caught it again later.

 

Morning did not come up. It sat beside them anyway: a small pink knot in her bag and the beach two hours before noon.

 

Back in the room, she stepped out of the huaraches at the threshold and crossed to the window. Both curtain panels dragged on their track. She pulled them all the way to the walls.

 

Outside was the second-floor walkway, its waist-high rail, twelve feet of concrete and a sightline straight through the glass. The room's ceiling fixture threw everything outward. Anyone passing would see the bed, the floor in front of the window, most of the dresser mirror and whoever stood among them. The courtyard dropped away below.

 

A motel ice machine stood beyond the stairs. One door faced theirs across the courtyard and another sat four rooms down on the same walkway. Both had been painted recently enough that their numbers looked old by comparison. A person coming from either direction would have the lit room in view before reaching the window; someone at the rail could remain out there indefinitely with no reason to be challenged. Marissa opened the glass a crack and heard the courtyard fountain worrying at its shallow basin below.

 

From inside, the arrangement had the plain usefulness of a stage nobody had built for them: one bright rectangle, a narrow public passage, and enough darkness beyond the rail to conceal a watcher better than it concealed whoever stood in the room.

 

She set a 6:30 alarm and left her phone face-down on the nightstand. DeShawn sat on the bed with his back to her, pulling at one sneaker.

 

The micro-bikini came out first. She wanted its answer before morning.

 

Her tank went over her head and landed near the bag. She unfolded the waistband of her shorts, pushed them over her hips and stepped clear. The bottom cord felt cold against her for a moment. She settled the band below her pubic hair. Mesh lay over the front of her vulva and turned transparent under the ceiling light, outlining the edges of her inner labia. The T-string disappeared between her buttocks.

 

The top required attention. She centered one little triangle over each nipple, tightened the clear cord around her ribs and checked the dresser mirror despite herself.

 

Six feet of pale Nordic skin under an ugly hotel fixture. Yellow-blonde hair down. Pink at the nipples, pink at the labia, and bare body everywhere the eye would naturally go. She turned once. Her buttocks were uncovered except for one clear strand, almost invisible.

 

Her Apple Watch and earrings were in the travel tray beside her phone; the ankle chain remained, a fine gold line above one bare foot. Without the usual red watchband on her wrist, the bikini looked even more isolated, less like clothing chosen to go with anything and more like three bright annotations on a naked body. She raised one arm, checked whether the top shifted and watched the left triangle slip half off her areola while leaving the nipple covered. Exactly as expected.

 

When she rolled one shoulder and twisted at the waist, clear cords cut temporary lines into her skin while the pink pieces stayed improbably near their assigned positions, which qualified as construction success under generous standards.

 

DeShawn had stopped with one sneaker halfway off.

 

"Worth every penny," he said.

 

She walked to the window and faced the corridor; nobody passed, but she stayed long enough to make staying a choice before she reached behind her neck, lifted the cord over her head and stepped out of the bottom. On the chair, the bikini became three scraps and a tangle.

 

Nakedness simplified the picture but also made it less theatrical, removing the absurd pink markers and leaving her body under ordinary hotel light, with one ankle chain and the red chair behind it.

 

DeShawn removed the stalled sneaker and the other one. His T-shirt followed. The room looked cheaper around him. The short ceiling made the breadth of his shoulders a practical issue, and the brown polyester curtain pooled near one bare foot. Years of real weight had built his chest and arms without leaving anything decorative about them. He pushed his shorts down.

 

His cock hung heavy at rest, deep brown, already substantial. She remembered the girth before she remembered the ten inches. In the dorm it had required a recalculation of what her body could take; under the hotel light the memory returned first to her jaw.

 

His thighs were almost as disruptive to the room as his shoulders, thick through the quadriceps and hamstrings, football built rather than gym built. A pale scar crossed the outside of one knee. She did not remember it from the dorm and did not ask. His hands hung beside them, long-fingered and broad enough that one would shortly cover most of her lower abdomen. The room made each proportion measurable against something ugly: knee above desk chair, shoulder near lampshade, palm wider than the bedside radio.

 

She crossed the room. Their eyes met. Then she looked down and went to her knees.

 

He began to harden before she touched him. Her right hand closed around the base, fingers failing to meet underneath. He thickened the rest of the way in her palm. With her other hand she weighed his balls once and felt his abdomen tighten above her.

 

She opened her mouth over the head.

 

The glans filled her mouth before she had taken enough of him to call it taking him. She pulled back, changed her grip and tried again with the shaft angled across her cheek. Better. DeShawn's abdomen drew tight above her and a pulse moved through the cock in her hand, not climax, only his body answering the wet enclosure and the pressure of her tongue.

 

The width stopped her almost at once. Her jaw found its limit and stayed there while her tongue worked the groove under the glans. His breath changed above her. That was enough guidance. She took the first two inches with her mouth and used her hand on the rest, wetting him, moving both together when she could and letting the rhythm come apart when her jaw needed relief.

 

Cold air from the vent ran down her bare back. DeShawn's palms settled into her hair, broad enough to cover most of her skull, holding without steering. She tasted salt, clean skin and a faint bitterness she remembered from the dorm. Her breasts hung between her arms and shifted against each other. Once, one brushed the inside of his thigh. The contact startled her more than it should have.

 

He grew harder in small increments she could feel better than see. Veins rose under the dark shaft; the head became smoother and more difficult to keep in her mouth when saliva gathered. She let it run over her lower lip and onto her hand. Each downward motion brought the head against the back of her tongue and forced her to choose between more depth and keeping her jaw open enough to breathe. She chose differently from one pass to the next.

 

Sometimes she held the head against her tongue and worked only the shaft with her hand; sometimes she pushed until her eyes watered, backed off before gagging and returned with saliva running over both wrists.

 

DeShawn's fingers moved once in her hair. He caught a strand stuck to her cheek and drew it aside, surprisingly delicate for a hand that size. Then the palm returned to her skull and his hips came forward half an inch before he stopped them.

 

She looked up. He was watching her. His mouth had gone slack at one corner and his breathing had slowed because he was trying to keep it there. A muscle jumped once in his jaw. She lowered her eyes and kept going until the ache in her jaw became the loudest thing in it.

 

When she stood, saliva shone across the head and down the shaft. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.

 

Her jaw clicked once when she closed it. She rubbed the hinge and looked at his erection standing against his abdomen. The blunt fact of having put it there pleased her. So did leaving him there for the moment.

 

"Bed," he said.

 

"Bossy."

 

"You like me bossy."

 

"In narrow applications."

 

He put a pillow behind her head and eased her onto her back. The bedspread scratched one shoulder. She shifted off its stitched edge, opened her knees and watched him fit between them. His hands took her inner thighs and moved them wider.

 

His mouth touched the outside of her vulva first. No hurry, hardly any pressure, then his tongue slid between her labia and the room disappeared from the useful part of her attention. Lubrication had already gathered at her entrance. He spread it upward with his tongue. Her lower abdomen clenched when he reached her clitoris.

 

Her inner labia were prominent before arousal and more so now, the edges thickened enough for his tongue to lift and separate them. He traced one edge downward, crossed the wet entrance and came up the other side. She felt where the sequence was going and waited for the clitoris. He stopped short, returning instead to the opening, and the refusal sharpened everything above it.

 

His tongue went inside her far enough to make depth the point for a moment, then flattened on the return and pushed her wetness across the swollen inner lips, leaving every exposed surface newly sensitive to chilled air.

 

There.

 

DeShawn stayed close to the reaction instead of chasing it. He flattened his tongue, drew back, returned with the tip, changed pressure after she moved rather than before. Her inner labia thickened against his mouth. The soft wet sound carried in the cooled room, indecently small beneath the vent fan. One of his hands moved from her thigh to her stomach and lay there, the heel of it below her navel. His palm rose and fell with her breathing.

 

She tried to keep watching. That lasted until his tongue went firm across the clitoral head and her eyes shut. The bedspread bunched in her fist. She opened them again to find the ceiling fixture buzzing inside its frosted bowl. There was a dead moth in it. Of course there was.

 

His mouth did the same thing once more and the moth was gone.

 

Heat gathered in her pelvis, then wetness, then an urgency too blunt for her usual internal vocabulary. The AC lifted the damp hair at her temples. Her thighs pressed inward around his head. She said, "Don't stop."

 

His hand on her abdomen shifted lower. The heel pressed into the taut muscle just above her pubic bone, pinning a region that wanted to lift away from the mattress. The pressure made his mouth feel deeper than a mouth could be. She turned her face into the pillow, found hotel detergent and the stale ghost of somebody else's cologne, and turned back.

 

Her hips began following him. She tried to hold them down because movement kept changing the pressure she wanted held. DeShawn solved it by catching both sides of her pelvis. One large hand stayed at her stomach, the other hooked beneath her thigh, and the next pass of his tongue landed cleanly enough to empty her lungs.

 

He didn't.

 

Her body closed hard around nothing. The force snapped her hips up and shoved a raw sound out of her, then another, and her thighs locked until she had to make herself release them enough for him to breathe. He kept his mouth on her through the shaking. Nothing arrived in neat order. Her back was off the mattress, then down, one heel dragging across the sheet, the hand on her abdomen holding her to a world that had become mostly his tongue and the ache-bright center of her clitoris.

 

The force broke unevenly. A hard clench came after she had thought it was over and made her laugh once, surprised, breathless. Then her legs loosened.

 

Wetness had soaked the sheet beneath her. Her clitoris continued to jump at light contact, each response smaller but meaner, and DeShawn seemed willing to test how long it would continue until she pushed his forehead away with two fingers. He kissed the inside of her thigh instead. The change from tongue to closed mouth was almost tender and therefore intolerable for another second.

 

DeShawn lifted his head. Her wetness shone on his chin.

 

"Come here," she said.

 

He moved over her. The mattress dipped under his knees and the pillow slid, leaving half her head on the bare sheet. She ignored it. His cock pressed along her vulva, enormous even after memory had warned her, and the blunt head found her entrance in the slick he'd already made spread everywhere.

 

He pushed until the widest part met resistance. She drew one knee higher, exhaled into his shoulder and felt herself open around him. The stretch hurt cleanly at the rim. He stopped. Her fingers dug into the muscles above his shoulder blade.

 

She could feel the head occupying her entrance and almost nothing beyond it, an impossible division of her body into the ring taking his width and the deeper space waiting untouched behind that pressure.

 

His body covered most of hers without bearing down. Forearms planted beside her head, knees spread outside her legs, weight controlled through a chain of muscles she could feel working wherever they touched. The head of his cock remained inside the stretched opening, pulsing faintly while he waited. She adjusted beneath him, shifting her pelvis an inch and then another, searching for the line that allowed her body to accept rather than simply endure.

 

"More."

 

The next movement filled her past the place she'd been attending to. Friction caught along the front wall; she made a noise against his neck. He paused again, though this time she had not asked. She rolled her hips, took another inch and lost track of how much remained. It became irrelevant. When his pelvis finally met hers, the pressure at the back of her canal was sharp enough to make her bare her teeth.

 

"You okay?"

 

"Move."

 

He did.

 

For the first several strokes, motion was a negotiation restarted each time. Her opening tightened on the withdrawal; he returned through resistance and paused when her breath changed. By the next pass the pain had moved outward to the edges, leaving the center crowded with pressure, and the difference let her bring her other knee higher. His chest brushed her breasts. One nipple dragged across the hair there and hardened again.

 

The withdrawal was almost worse, leaving a sudden hollow where his girth had been, and the return was thick, wet, exact in a body that had needed him to wait. Soon she could hear each stroke. His weight moved above her; the cheap mattress squeaked somewhere under his left knee. She pulled both legs around his waist. The angle drove him along her G-spot and brought a clear yes out of her.

 

Once the friction settled into her, she stopped hearing individual mattress noises and caught only their combined racket, the repeated impact of wood and springs under the ventilation fan and their breathing.

 

He found pace gradually. She watched his face until watching became one task too many. Sweat appeared at his hairline despite the AC. The muscles in his neck stood out. Her clitoris, oversensitive from his mouth, took pressure whenever his pelvis met hers and began building again before the rest of her had caught up.

 

The mattress complained in three different places. A spring popped beneath her hip, the headboard tapped the wall, and from the neighboring room came a burst of canned laughter with timing so perfect she opened her eyes. DeShawn heard it too. His mouth twitched. Neither slowed.

 

She ran both hands down his back and felt sweat gather along the central groove. At depth he made her cervix announce itself; on the shorter strokes his shaft ground the front wall. There was no position inside her left neutral. She had forgotten the practical inconvenience of a penis this large, how pleasure required constant recalculation, and remembered it now with a hungry irritation.

 

She locked her arms behind his neck.

 

DeShawn understood the request in the movement. His hands slid under her buttocks. He lifted.

 

For one ugly second her left knee caught his ribs and the pillow went to the floor. Then her legs closed around his waist, his cock remained inside her, and he stood with her weight in his arms. Gravity changed the penetration. She gasped into his shoulder.

 

Four steps brought them to the window.

 

He set her down. They separated just long enough for her to turn and place both palms high on the glass. It was cold enough to sting. Feet apart, back arched, she looked at the empty walkway through the faint reflection of her own face.

 

DeShawn entered from behind. Her body was open for him now; he slid to depth without the earlier negotiations. His hands wrapped around her hips. Her breasts hung forward and moved with the first stroke, almost brushing the pane.

 

The standing position made his size feel different again, her legs carrying her while his grip fixed the pelvis above them, every return sending force downward through her thighs and upward across the front wall at once.

 

Beyond the glass, the corridor was empty.

 

The glass reflected pieces of the room over the outdoor dark. Her own arms rose pale in it, DeShawn a dark mass behind her, the bed and its fallen pillow floating across the courtyard rail. With every thrust the reflections misaligned, came together and slid apart. She watched this until footsteps approached from the stair end.

 

Then a man in his thirties walked into view carrying an ice bucket. He caught the lit window at the edge of his vision and stopped. The bucket swung once from his hand. He looked at her, at DeShawn behind her, then turned his face away with visible effort and continued toward the stairs.

 

DeShawn did not miss a stroke.

 

The man returned with ice and walked more slowly. His face stayed forward. His eyes did not. Marissa saw him for longer this time and let him see her seeing him. DeShawn's fingers tightened over her hip bones. A little more force entered the next thrust.

On the third pass the man had no errand left to pretend. He stopped beside the rail and looked directly through the glass.

 

Marissa turned her head. Their eyes met. She winked.

 

He broke contact, took half a step out of the window's center and remained there.

 

DeShawn pulled her back into him. The new angle dragged his cock across her front wall and set off an internal clenching that had nothing to do with the clitoral orgasm on the bed. This one was building deeper. Her bladder took pressure on every thrust. So did the tissue around it, a broad pelvic insistence she could locate without knowing yet where it was going.

 

His rhythm shortened. The room filled with the wet sound of their bodies meeting and the softer scrape of her palms on glass. Each impact drove her pubic bone toward the pane without touching it. She tried shifting one foot wider and nearly lost traction on the carpet. DeShawn caught the error through her hips, held her upright and used the altered stance anyway.

 

The pressure stopped resembling the G-spot stimulation she knew. It spread through the pelvic floor and upward behind her pubic bone, immense and oddly directional, as though something in her body had turned toward the window before the rest of her understood. She wanted to tell him. What came out was his name, once, clipped at the second syllable.

 

She lifted her hands from the glass. Both arms reached back over her head until her fingers found DeShawn's skull. Her back bowed. She came onto her toes and the tilt of her pelvis moved the pressure again.

 

"Oh."

 

Her nails dragged a thin squeak down the glass.

 

The man remained outside. For a moment she found him through the glass, the reflection of the ceiling light laid over his chest. Then DeShawn drove in and the sensation became too large to share with a stranger's face.

 

Her walls clamped around him. Fluid struck the bottom of the window with a slap loud enough to hear over the vent. It splashed the glass below her waist and ran toward the sill, warm over the backs of her thighs, sharper-smelling than the lubrication already coating them. She had no time to be surprised. The clench kept going and another one came through it.

 

For a fraction of a moment she saw the splash rather than felt it: droplets scattered over the parking-lot reflection, one larger run dividing around a speck on the glass, the man's face beyond it changing. Then her vision shook with the rest of her and the image broke apart. The release had come from inside the broad pressure, an expulsion rather than a leak, and her body was already preparing to do it again.

 

She heard fluid continue to strike the sill in smaller taps beneath the wet percussion of DeShawn's hips, an obscene second rhythm the corridor man could probably hear through the glass if he stood close enough.

 

DeShawn's hips stuttered. "Shit—" His body went rigid against her, caught by the grip inside her. He held there rather than pull free.

 

One arm circled her abdomen. His other hand came up along her neck.

 

He placed his fingers on the lateral sides, clear of her trachea, where pressure would narrow both carotids. She knew the anatomy. She also knew, in the same instant, that he knew it. He drew her backward against him.

 

Her feet came off the carpet.

 

Barely. An inch or two, enough. His arm carried her middle and his fingers at her neck tipped her head onto his shoulder. With no floor under her, every upward thrust drove through the whole suspended weight of her pelvis. The aggression arrived suddenly and suited him so well she almost laughed, except her voice had stopped behaving like language.

 

Her legs hung apart, toes searching uselessly below. DeShawn's forearm pressed across the soft part of her stomach, a hard bar beneath her ribs, and the lift made her breasts rise and sway without any surface under them. His mouth was near her ear. She heard teeth close on a breath, then the effort in his throat when he thrust upward and had to carry her at the same time.

 

His grip at her neck was powerful without being crude. Pressure at two narrow points, no crushing across the front, and the precision frightened her only after it had already excited her. A bad grip would have made her fight. This one made her give him more of her weight.

 

Warm pressure climbed from beneath his fingers into her face. Her pulse hammered in her ears. The corridor narrowed at the edges, first the rail, then the parking-lot lights, then the man outside until he became a central shape with darkness feathering around him. She kept breathing. The breath sounded far away.

 

DeShawn thrust up again.

 

Another release spilled straight down from her, the new angle sending it between her thighs instead of toward the glass. It pattered on the carpet. Her hands had nowhere useful to go; one stayed tangled in his hair and the other gripped his wrist across her stomach. Her body kept contracting around him, messy and hard, and for a stretch she couldn't count or name she was held between the pressure inside her, the measured closure at her neck and the floor missing beneath her feet.

 

She made sounds into the narrowing room, open vowels with no attempt at volume or shape. The man outside had become a pale face beyond her own faint reflection. Somewhere below, the courtyard fountain continued its inadequate splashing. The detail entered and vanished; she had no use for it, no argument with it, and then DeShawn drove up again and every part of her that could close around him did.

 

He came with a broken sound against her shoulder. His cock jerked at depth and heat spread inside her. She felt it among everything else, then lost it, then found it again when his body shuddered once behind hers.

 

His fingers left her neck first. The room widened. Air and noise came back badly aligned: the vent loud, the glass cold against her forearm, DeShawn breathing at her ear. He lowered her until her toes found carpet, then her heels.

 

Neither moved for a while.

 

Her legs gave one abrupt internal clench around him after the rest of her had gone slack. He swore softly and kissed the back of her shoulder.

 

They stayed joined while her weight returned to her feet by degrees, his forearm easing away from her abdomen only after her knees stopped threatening to fold and her fingers released the hair at his scalp.

 

The kiss felt almost comic after his hand at her neck. She laughed into the glass, one short breath of it. DeShawn laughed too, chest moving against her back, though neither could have said what had been funny.

 

When he withdrew, Marissa straightened and looked through the pane. Breath fog marked the glass near her face. Fluid had dried in pale tracks at the bottom and continued onto the sill. The man outside had one hand at the front of his pants. He did not pretend otherwise now.

 

She met his eyes, turned away and nudged the thermostat one degree warmer.

 

The curtains stayed open.

 

They got into bed without cleaning the glass or the carpet. DeShawn pulled the sheet over them. The television remained dark on its bracket, and the chair with its red pattern held the pink bikini and both their bags.

 

Sex remained in layers now: the mineral smell of the fluid drying near the window, semen beginning to leak from her, sweat, her arousal on his face and the bed. Cold air pushed all of it around instead of removing it. Marissa put one hand between her thighs, felt how wet she remained and wiped the hand on the already-ruined sheet.

 

His voice came out of the dark after her breathing had nearly settled into sleep.

 

"You see that man out there?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"More than once?"

 

"Yeah."

 

He exhaled. "That man was there the whole time. I mean, after the ice. He wasn't passing. He was watching like he had paid for the seat." A pause, then his laugh began under the next words. "He was rubbing himself."

 

Marissa turned her head on the pillow.

 

"I kept thinking he was going to pull his pecker out right there on the balcony. Just lose every bit of dignity God gave him."

 

"Did he?"

 

"No." DeShawn's laugh rolled through his chest. "Almost, though. Very, very almost."

 

He supplied an unnecessary physical demonstration under the sheet, one hand miming the corridor man's indecision with escalating flourishes, until Marissa covered his wrist and told him the reenactment had become longer than the event.

 

He turned, cupped her jaw and kissed her. Brief. Affection without a new request in it.

 

"God." He shook his head. "You are a sexy fuck, girl."

 

She waited.

 

DeShawn looked up at the ceiling, apparently searching for language that could survive her answer, then looked down at her again and opened both hands beneath the sheet in surrender.

 

"The grip. I have never in my life—" He stopped and tried again. "Never had a woman do that. Never even close."

 

"Yoga," she said. "Swimming."

 

"Yoga." He considered this. "I'm taking yoga."

 

He rolled onto his back and pulled her into the crook of his arm. She put one leg over his thigh. His quadriceps made a poor pillow and she left it there anyway.

 

After a moment he raised the sheet and looked down. "You're still leaking my cum all over me."

 

She started to get up.

 

His arm tightened. "Don't. Leave it." Then, quieter: "It's nice."

 

Marissa settled against his chest. The wetness between them cooled slowly. The vent cycled down and, through the rear wall, she heard the Pacific again.

 

DeShawn's breathing found sleep before hers. His arm grew heavier across her ribs and his thumb, which had been making an absent movement against her shoulder, stopped mid-pass. Outside the window, the corridor man eventually left. She did not see him go. A door opened somewhere, shut, and the ice machine dropped a new load with a crash.

 

She listened until she didn't.

 

The alarm was set for 6:30. Her body woke her before five.

 

Morning had not improved the room. The brown headboard, four uneven pillows and last night's smell were all clearer in the gray coming through the uncovered window. DeShawn slept across most of the queen bed, one arm thrown into her side. She worked out from under it, lowering his wrist onto the sheet so gradually he never stirred.

 

The floor in front of the window was the only place long enough for yoga. She took the quilt from the foot of the bed, folded it twice and laid it over the carpet, including the darkened patch she did not inspect closely.

 

At the base of the glass, dried pale marks ran to the sill.

 

Hands at her sternum. Breath in. She began.

 

The first sun salutations were tight through her hips. By the fourth her body had found itself again. Plank, descent, upward dog facing the window, downward dog with both heels reaching for the doubled quilt. DeShawn slept behind her. The corridor stayed empty.

 

She moved quietly enough to hear the shift of her own hands on the quilt. Last night's exertion showed up in inconvenient places: adductors first, then the muscles along one side of her neck when she turned her head in the lunge. Neither sensation was an injury. She tested both, adjusted the depth of one pose and continued. In upward dog, the cold glass framed her naked reflection above the dried splash marks. Her shoulders trembled before she lowered.

 

Light came by degrees. The parking lot changed from yellow-black to gray. Marine layer separated itself from the last of night. She moved through warrior one and warrior two, then held the twisted low lunge longer on each side because her hip flexors complained about the window and about DeShawn, and there was no point deciding which deserved more blame.

 

On the floor she took pigeon, forward fold and spinal twist, then lowered into savasana with her arms loose, the vent humming and DeShawn breathing across the room, and remained there five minutes because she always did, even in hotels.

 

Forty minutes of movement left sweat along her sternum despite the cold room. In savasana her pulse slowed against the carpet's faint vibration from the vent, and a delivery truck backed somewhere outside, beeping at steady intervals until somebody shouted at it. The shout stopped. The beeping continued.

 

When she put the quilt back, he had migrated toward the far side. She tucked a corner over him and got into bed again.

 

He woke twenty minutes later with a yawn and both arms above his head. His fists cleared the headboard. He blinked at the ceiling, found her watching, and smiled before he had enough wakefulness to edit it.

 

Then he threw the sheet off.

 

His erection lay along his abdomen. He glanced down, advertising what she had already seen, and ran a hand from below her arm to her hip.

 

"Oh, no," she said. "We have a beach to get to. Save your sperm."

 

He stared at her. "Girl. I can fill a cup every hour. Don't you worry your pretty little pussy about that." His morning voice was rough enough to scrape. "Come on. We got time."

 

She looked down the length of herself. Nothing about her was little.

 

"I'm sore. I want to keep enough of myself for the beach."

 

That reached him. His hand stopped on her hip. He watched her for a beat, slapped her ass once and sat up.

 

"First shower. Go."

 

She showered while he brushed his teeth at the sink. They switched. DeShawn carried the beach bag, car keys and both overnight bags downstairs while she dressed.

 

The shower took last night's sweat but could not take the soreness between her legs. Hot water found it immediately. She washed her hair only from the scalp down enough to remove sweat, left the ends alone and used the hotel's square soap because her own body wash remained buried in the bag DeShawn had already taken. When she stepped out, the mirror was fogged except for a hand-shaped clear patch he had left while shaving around his jaw.

 

Dressed was the wrong verb, but it had to do.

 

The garment required more adjustment than everything she had removed the night before: clear cords twisted, one triangle reversed itself, and the mesh caught briefly on her thumbnail before settling where it was supposed to pretend to cover her.

 

She stepped into the T-string bottom and settled the mesh. The top took the same careful positioning as the night before: one pink triangle per nipple, cord tight enough to keep them there. In the mirror, the arrangement looked more unreasonable in morning light. Good.

 

She bent, twisted and lifted both arms to test it, watching the cords travel across her skin while the triangles made tiny corrections over her nipples and the mesh remained entirely transparent.

 

DeShawn stood at the driver's door in board shorts when she came down the exterior stairs wearing the bikini and huaraches. He watched her cross the parking lot. The smile at one side of his mouth kept getting loose.

 

The night clerk had gone. A housekeeping cart stood outside the lobby and two women in uniform were loading folded towels onto it. Both looked up. One nudged the other with an elbow so small it could have been accidental. Marissa descended the stairs with the clear cord bright at her hips, crossed past the half-working fountain and put her overnight bag in the rear seat.

 

"McDonald's," he said when they reached the street. "What you want?"

 

"Coffee. Black."

 

He waited.

 

She touched his shoulder with two fingers. "Like my men."

 

The laugh lasted through the left turn.

 

At the drive-through she could see the service window ahead and said, "This might be awkward."

 

"For them," DeShawn said. "I'm having a wonderful morning."

 

He ordered two breakfast burritos and a large orange juice for himself, then her coffee. The employee at the window looked nineteen. She wore a paper visor and had the emptied-out face of someone near the start of a shift. She reached for DeShawn's card, looked across the vehicle and stopped with her hand in the air.

 

Two beats later she covered her mouth and laughed. Color climbed into her face. DeShawn winked. That made it worse.

 

Marissa faced the windshield. The employee had not asked for a nearly naked woman at her window before eight in the morning. Eye contact would turn surprise into an audience requirement. Marissa gave her the choice to look without being caught looking.

 

The coffee arrived with a lid that had not been seated correctly. A drop ran over Marissa's thumb. She pressed the rim down and held the cup in both hands while DeShawn opened his first burrito before they reached the street.

 

He ate half of it between the exit and the first traffic light. Orange juice rode between his thighs, the cap loosely replaced, and Marissa waited for the inevitable spill until he finished the burrito and put both hands on the wheel without incident. She looked back once at the hotel strip. The fountain, clerk and corridor were already out of view.

 

La Jolla Shores Drive climbed north. Marine cloud still clung to the hills, white above the darker scrub, though blue had opened directly overhead. The coast went by on their left: beach, bluffs, then glimpses of water through eucalyptus. Sage and dust came through the cracked windows once they left the houses.

 

The Gliderport lot was gravel and pale dirt. Eight cars. People were unloading hang-gliding equipment from a pickup near the operations building, two hikers adjusted poles beside a Subaru, and a man in his fifties stood at the trail sign with a water bottle.

 

The operations window remained shut. A bleached sign warned about unstable cliffs and asked hikers to stay on marked trails, though several footprints left the official route within ten yards. On the launch ramp, aluminum tubes and bright sail fabric lay in pieces waiting to become a glider. The air up there came hard off the water, snapping one loose strap against the pickup bed.

 

Marissa got out.

 

Morning wind reached through the mesh and around every cord, making the distinction between dressed and naked mostly visual, while gravel pressed through the thin soles of her huaraches and the lot's attention arrived from several directions at once.

 

Attention moved across the lot one person at a time. The hikers looked together. The man with the bottle glanced, turned away, then decided the first look had been insufficient. Two younger men near the sign raised both thumbs in cheerful unison.

 

Near the pickup, a woman holding a bundle of aluminum struts lost her place in the loading sequence, passed the same tube to her partner twice and accepted it back before either of them noticed.

 

She nodded back.

 

Her sweep found no ranger vehicle, no uniform and nobody showing an interest in becoming official. DeShawn came around the SUV with the towel bag. Board shorts, bare chest, twice her coverage by accident. He had seen every reaction in the lot. The pressure at the corners of his mouth meant laughter was available if requested.

 

At the trailhead the Pacific lay three hundred feet below them, a blue-green sheet past the pale strip of beach. Marissa tied her hair back and went first.

 

The descent made the bikini absurd in a new direction. Eighteen-inch switchbacks cut through loose sandstone over hard pack, and each foot slid before it held. Her huaraches had no tread to boast of. She kept her weight over the front foot and tested the steeper steps before trusting them. DeShawn followed two paces behind, towel bag over one shoulder.

 

At one turn a couple climbing out flattened themselves against the cliff to let her pass. The woman looked first at Marissa's face, then down at the pink mesh, then at DeShawn filling the trail behind her. Her expression traveled through surprise into private calculation. The man watched his own feet with heroic commitment. Marissa thanked them and continued.

 

On the first rope section, her hair tie pulled at the back of her head whenever she looked down. She took it out with one hand and looped it around her wrist. Wind caught the yellow-blonde halfway to the beach. The surf rose through the air as they descended, beginning as a bass note and becoming the air itself by the last turn.

 

She stepped from packed trail onto sand and stopped.

 

Behind her, DeShawn came off the last ledge with one hand on the rope and the towel bag knocking his hip, then stopped beside her when he saw that she had stopped, both of them reduced beneath the cliff.

 

The cliff was huge from there. Rust-orange and cream bands climbed straight above her, fracture lines running through three hundred feet of stone. Up top it had been a drop. Down here it was a wall. DeShawn came beside her. Neither spoke.

 

Then he looked south and began reading the beach.

 

He chose a broad open section within a minute: sightlines from the trail side and both directions along the water, no nearby family group, plenty of room between towels. They put theirs down. He set his Tevas at one edge. Marissa kicked off the huaraches, pulled the bikini cord over her head and slid the bottom from her hips. The whole costume took four seconds to become a hot-pink tangle on the towel.

 

She lay on her stomach.

 

Her ankle chain had survived the descent and caught sunlight whenever she moved one foot. She propped her chin on crossed forearms, let the front of her body settle into the towel and felt sand reshape itself under her breasts and hip bones. A little grit had already made its way between her toes. She flexed them once, accomplished nothing, and stopped caring.

 

Morning sun came laterally over her left side. Sand beneath the towel had begun to radiate through the cloth. The beach smelled of salt and hot stone, then sage when wind dropped from the bluff.

 

DeShawn's board shorts landed beside the bikini.

 

In the hotel, ordinary furniture had made his size conspicuous. Out here there was only cliff, water and sky; none of them reduced him. The sun cut detail into his shoulders and chest that the room's ceiling fixture had lost. His cock hung heavy between his thighs, the shaft thick even at rest, its deep brown skin catching a narrow line of light. Marissa had recalibrated twice. Her body began doing it again.

 

Daylight removed the erotic usefulness of shadow and left particulars instead: the weight of his balls, the loose skin at the base of the shaft, a vein along one side, sand already stuck above his ankle.

 

Other people noticed too. A few heads turned and stayed turned while the older regulars mostly continued reading or sunning themselves, leaving the newer arrivals to reveal who had not yet learned the beach's code of selective attention.

 

Farther north, two nude men played paddleball badly and with great confidence. The wooden ball made a flat pop every few seconds, then silence, then somebody retrieving it near the water. South of Marissa's towel, the woman in the floppy hat read a mass-market paperback with a cracked spine. None of this belonged to the plan. That helped.

 

DeShawn dug in the bag.

 

"We got time," he said.

 

"An hour or so."

 

"Let them fill in."

 

"Let them."

 

The sunscreen cap popped. He knelt beside her and spread lotion over her shoulders with both palms. Each hand covered an indecent amount of back. He worked down her spine, along her arms, then over the backs of her thighs and calves. Cool from the tube, gone by the second pass. When he reached her feet he dragged one finger over her arch and made her kick.

 

"Ticklish," he said.

 

"No."

 

He did it again. She kicked sand onto his shin.

 

"Hostile."

 

"Scientific repeatability."

 

"Turn over."

 

She rolled onto her back. He began at her feet and moved up, taking the front of each leg in long strokes. By the time his hands reached her thighs, her inner labia had begun to swell. He ran sunscreen across her vulva. The lotion was cooler there and she felt every finger.

 

His hands continued over her abdomen and ribs. He paused at her breasts.

 

"Particularly these," he said. "Medical necessity."

 

"Is that the consensus?"

 

"Peer reviewed."

 

He sat behind her, gathered both breasts in his palms and rubbed sunscreen into them. His thumbs crossed her nipples. They hardened at once. Nearby, a paperback lowered. Someone shifted on a towel. DeShawn covered her face and ears last, getting lotion into the edge of her hair despite her warning.

 

By then his hands had passed over nearly every inch of her, sometimes functional and sometimes unmistakably lingering, and the difference between those modes had become a running joke neither of them needed to say aloud.

 

His fingers pressed deep enough to move the weight of each breast rather than skim it. He circled the nipple with one thumb, caught it between thumb and forefinger and rolled until her back straightened. Lotion made his grip slide. He corrected by taking more of her breast in his palm, and the next pinch went sharper. Marissa's wetness increased beneath the public harmlessness of sunscreen application.

 

Marissa took the tube from him.

 

His body was a large job. She covered his feet, calves, thighs, chest, arms and shoulders, using more lotion twice and making him turn for his back. His skin drank the first layer across his shoulders. Sand stuck to one ankle. By the time he lay down again his cock was halfway hard from her hands moving over him and his own time on her breasts.

 

She saved it for last.

 

His balls rested heavy against one thigh, skin drawn tighter now that his cock had begun to rise. She spread sunscreen over them first, lifting each enough to reach underneath, and felt DeShawn's abdomen react before she touched the shaft. Two men near the water had abandoned any pretense of looking elsewhere. The couple remained seated but had angled both bodies toward them.

 

Fresh sunscreen in her palm. She closed one hand around the base and smoothed upward. The shaft grew under her grip until she had to change the angle of her wrist. His glans flared. She covered him thoroughly, went back down, and continued after no uncovered skin remained.

 

"More," he said.

 

"You are protected from the sun."

 

"Could be more protected."

 

She looked around. Six or seven people within easy sight had altered their positions. A couple in their forties now faced the towels. Two men were touching themselves separately. The woman with the paperback had stopped turning pages. Farther down, the man from the parking lot sat with his water bottle between his feet.

 

Their separation kept the gathering from becoming a huddle; open sand remained between every watcher, giving Marissa isolated faces to meet and no single mass she had to answer.

 

None had crossed the open sand around the towels. The distance mattered. It made the looking consensual in both directions: they could watch, Marissa could offer, and the empty space stayed visible between those acts. One man at the north end raised his chin when she caught him staring. She returned the smallest acknowledgment and kept her hand on DeShawn.

 

Marissa held DeShawn upright and stroked. Anyone watching could see all ten inches of him against the sky. His breathing deepened; his hips rose a fraction to meet her hand. When the muscles at the base tightened, she lifted her hand away.

 

"Enough. You get the rest when we start."

 

His groan broke into laughter. "Aww, babe. The crowd was enjoying that."

 

"They'll survive."

 

"Cruel to your public."

 

She put on her sunglasses.

 

They lay back. The sun moved and the beach acquired more voices, more towels, the coconut smell of somebody else's sunscreen. Marissa dozed at the edge of sleep. Once she heard a gull fighting with a paper bag and opened her eyes, but the fight was somewhere behind her and she never found it.

 

Time loosened. Warm sand pressed through the towel beneath her shoulder blades; a bead of sweat moved from her ribs toward the cloth and stalled. DeShawn's breathing beside her deepened without quite becoming sleep. People arrived by ones and pairs, spoke in low voices, undressed, and became part of the beach with the efficient lack of ceremony that nudity produced there.

 

When the dozing ended, DeShawn was already awake. He turned toward her. She turned too.

 

The kiss began soft enough to preserve the drowsiness, then DeShawn caught her by the nape and opened his mouth wider, pulling her across the seam between their towels until one knee landed on his thigh.

 

They kissed. Open mouths, no preamble. What began on the towel was visible from every direction she had checked when they arrived.

 

DeShawn rolled onto his back. Marissa knelt astride his thighs and closed her hand around his cock. It thickened quickly now. The beach had changed around them; his body had not. She bent over him.

 

The downward angle gave her jaw a different problem than kneeling in the hotel. She found what worked. Mouth over the head, tongue tight to the underside, right hand below. His hips stayed on the towel. His palms came to rest at the flare of her pelvis.

 

She could take less of him from above. The curve of her neck limited depth, so she used the limitation: lips sealed hard around the head, tongue pressing into the groove, hand twisting over the shaft where her mouth could not go. Sunscreen mixed with the taste of him and left a chemical edge she disliked. She swallowed once, shifted lower and found clean skin nearer the glans.

 

Open air stole most of his sound. What she felt was breath across the back of her neck and, later, his fingers closing a little harder whenever her tongue found the groove below the glans. Sun warmed her spine. Her breasts hung beneath her and moved with her head. Sand gave under both knees.

 

The people gathering around them remained at the edge of sight. Nobody rushed. The beach shifted by inches: one towel angled, a man stood and settled elsewhere, the couple moved closer without seeming to move at all. Marissa let them exist there. Her mouth had enough work.

 

Her raised hips gave the people behind her an unobstructed view of her vulva. She knew because cooler air touched the wet surfaces between her thighs and because the human noise at her back had gone oddly sparse. Her inner labia were exposed, pink and lengthening with arousal. She widened her knees and raised her hips another inch.

 

Lubrication had gathered enough to string briefly between her inner labia when wind separated them. She felt it cool, then felt another thread take its place. The position pulled her buttocks apart and lifted her anus into view as well, every opening offered to the quiet group behind her while her mouth worked a cock too large to hide with either hand.

 

There. Let them see.

DeShawn tasted of salt, sunscreen and the faint clean bitterness she remembered. A deep Mmm... vibrated out of him. His left hand entered her hair and spread over the back of her head. She looked up once. His eyes were shut, his mouth open, every effort aimed at staying beneath the point where he would have to stop her.

 

She gave him more pressure and felt his cock twitch against her tongue.

 

His thighs tightened beneath her forearms. One heel dug a trench in the sand. She knew he was nearing the place where her mouth would have to leave him, and she held him there for a handful of strokes, easing whenever his hand closed in her hair and returning before the sensation could drop too far. The control pleased her. So did the people watching her exercise it.

 

Then she sat back.

 

Her jaw hurt. Her vulva was wet enough that shifting on her heels drew a slick line along one thigh. She wiped her mouth with her wrist and looked around.

 

About twelve people had formed a loose perimeter. Thirty feet, mostly more. The older regular with the paperback had returned to her book, although it was upside down now.

 

DeShawn saw it too and started laughing.

 

"Don't," Marissa said.

 

"I didn't say anything."

 

"Your face did."

 

He denied making any face while continuing to make exactly one, eyes fixed beyond her shoulder at the inverted book, and Marissa had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from encouraging him.

 

He reached for her. She went onto her back.

 

His hands opened her thighs, and his mouth replaced the moving air between them.

 

His face disappeared between her legs from most angles, which made the posture more explicit rather than less. Her knees were apart, her vulva lifted toward his mouth, and anyone along the perimeter could see his jaw move and her body answer. DeShawn spread the outer labia with his thumbs before putting his tongue back on her.

 

The first touch ran over her outer labia. He used his tongue broadly, parting her, gathering the wetness already there and carrying it upward. Salt air moved across the rest of her body. The contrast was ridiculous. Her stomach pulled tight when he found her clitoris.

 

He left it again.

 

"DeShawn."

 

His laugh warmed the inside of her thigh.

 

He took her left inner labium between his lips and drew it outward. The tissue stretched farther than she expected, thin and intensely sensitive, the pull spreading sensation along its whole length instead of concentrating it at one point. He held it there, released, and did the same on the right.

 

The stretched lip snapped wetly back against her. He soothed it with his tongue and drew the other one farther, testing rather than repeating. Sensation ran into the crease of her thigh and up through the clitoral hood. She looked down and saw the top of his head, one huge hand splayed across her hip, her own labium extended from his mouth like a narrow pink ribbon. The sight made her wetter immediately.

 

Marissa's hands went flat on the towel. She had not known she would like that.

 

One finger pressed into her. DeShawn curled it toward the front wall and found the raised ridge of her G-spot. Her hips jumped. The sound that came out of her carried cleanly over the towel and into the beach.

 

Several people reacted in the same small instant, shoulders lifting or heads turning toward a sound they had expected eventually, and their collective effort to remain casual made the beach seem briefly rehearsed.

 

He withdrew to the fingertip and pushed in again, this time with two. The stretch was modest after his cock, but the control was better: two fingers could stay on the swollen ridge and work it directly while his tongue dealt with the clitoris. Wetness coated his knuckles. Every curl pulled an audible slick sound from her entrance, a close private noise made public by the silence around them.

 

She almost reduced the next one. Habit. Then the Pacific broke behind him and a second finger joined the first and she had no interest left in being quieter.

 

"Oh—right there."

 

He worked her clitoris with his mouth and her G-spot with his hand. Sometimes together. Sometimes badly out of phase in a manner that was worse, then suddenly much better. Her inner labia grew heavier against his face. Lubrication ran around his fingers and onto the towel. She could smell herself whenever the breeze turned back from the water, intimate and animal against sunscreen and stone.

 

The sun reached the center of her body. Sweat gathered under her breasts and at the backs of her knees. Somebody coughed beyond her left foot. A man whispered something she could not hear. The crowd had become present through small failures of silence.

 

DeShawn pressed his fingers harder into the front wall.

 

His fingertips hooked into the tissue and dragged toward the entrance before pressing back. Marissa's thighs shook once. She tried to plant her feet, discovered one heel was off the towel in hot sand and left it there because correcting the problem would require being a person with a plan.

 

"Yes. That."

 

His tongue stayed on her. She lost the thread of the sentence she might have said next. Her legs drew inward, then fought his shoulders because she also wanted them open. Both happened. Her pelvis lifted from the towel and the world turned into a coarse handful of things: the scrape of cloth under one heel, his mouth, sun in her eyes, the wet knock of his fingers, and the awareness that people thirty feet away could see every part of it.

 

The orgasm struck through her pelvis and folded her upward. She shouted. No graceful progression followed, only force arriving wherever it found room, her abdomen hard, her walls gripping DeShawn's fingers, her thighs shaking against his ears. His free hand held one hip to the towel. She covered her face with her forearm and laughed or cried out again; she could not tell which sound she'd made.

 

The clitoral pleasure stayed bright and surface-hot while his fingers pulled something heavier through the front wall, two kinds of sensation colliding badly and then locking together. Her inner labia slapped wetly against his hand when her hips bucked. One breast rolled against her upper arm; the other lifted with her chest, nipple hard in sunlight. She heard a man nearby exhale through his teeth.

 

For several breaths his tongue became too much. She pulled at his shoulder. He eased off, then returned with one light pass that sent another convulsion through her and made her swear.

 

"Okay," she said to the sky. "Okay."

 

Beach noise seeped back. Surf. Wind. A gull farther north. No conversation from the loose ring around them.

 

Marissa reached for DeShawn.

 

He rolled and she climbed over him facing west. Knees on either side of his hips, Pacific ahead, the crowd strung out along her peripheral vision. His erection lay against his abdomen, dark and wet with her saliva. She reached behind herself and fitted the head to her entrance.

 

The first inch stopped her.

 

She remained above him with her arm twisted behind, holding his cock in place while her entrance adjusted, and the posture became part of what the crowd saw: effort, scale, a body taking time.

 

Her thighs were open enough to show the entire attempt. The head pushed her labia inward, stretching the entrance into a wide pink ring around the dark glans. She reached down and used two fingers to free one folded edge. DeShawn waited beneath her, eyes on her face, his hips quiet although his cock jumped in her hand.

 

Her opening stretched around the glans, sore from the night before and from his mouth now, yet slick enough to take it. She breathed out. Sand shifted under one knee. DeShawn's hands closed over her hips without pulling.

 

She lowered farther and sensation went everywhere at once: the girth along her canal, the raw rim at the entrance, his shaft catching her front wall, and an ahh that escaped her and kept going past the breath that had started it. She paused halfway because her body insisted. Then she sat down the rest of the distance and the ten inches reached her cervix with a bluntness that flashed almost white.

 

"Fuck."

 

DeShawn squeezed her hips. "You good?"

 

She nodded once. It took another breath before she could move.

 

Her cervix objected to the depth, a hard bright ache at the back, while the rest of her body wanted motion. She lifted only a little and circled her hips, letting the shaft rub the inner walls without losing the pressure at the end. DeShawn groaned. His thumbs moved over the points of her hips, neither soothing nor urging, simply attached.

 

Thirty feet in front of her, a woman in a floppy hat had lowered her book completely. Two men stood near the waterline. The couple sat shoulder to shoulder on their towel. Nobody spoke.

 

Marissa lifted. His cock slid nearly free and her entrance contracted around the last of the shaft, unwilling to let it go. She came down. Friction dragged across her G-spot, then the sharp stop at depth. A different stroke next, shorter because her thighs complained. Then a long one. She found a rhythm by trying several and keeping the one that made DeShawn's fingers bite into her hips.

 

Each failed variation stayed visible long enough to feel honest, her balance pitching forward once, one knee slipping toward the towel edge, DeShawn correcting her without turning the correction into control of the pace.

 

The towel wrinkled under his back and sand pushed through at his shoulders. Marissa leaned forward to change the line of entry, watched her breasts hang over her thighs and felt the shaft move toward the rear wall. Wrong for what she wanted. She sat upright again, pulled her knees a little closer and got the front-wall friction back with the next descent.

 

"Uhh... uhh," she said. The sound fell into the surf and disappeared.

 

He answered with a deep Mmm... that she felt through his abdomen. His hips began to rise beneath her, meeting every downward motion. Her breasts moved freely in front of the crowd, heavy and sunlit, and sweat ran between them. She braced both hands on her thighs. Fine sand from the towel stuck to her palms and scratched when she gripped.

 

She looked straight at the people watching.

 

Heat climbed from her sternum to her face when she met their eyes. Her vulva was spread around DeShawn in open daylight. They could see the base of his cock vanish into her whenever she lifted high enough, see the stretch at her entrance and the wetness coating him on the return. She drove down harder. Cervical pain rang through the pleasure, sharp enough to make her cry out, and she did it again.

 

Several faces were openly aroused now. One man stroked himself in long movements, unashamed. The woman in the couple had one hand between her own thighs while her partner watched Marissa. Farther out, a person walked through the edge of the group, understood what was happening and slowed without stopping. No phone appeared. Nobody crossed the invisible line in the sand.

 

Her pace broke loose. Long stroke, two quick ones, a pause at the bottom while she rolled her hips over him. The broken rhythm suited her. She drove down again.

 

Then she wanted them to see more.

 

Marissa moved from her knees to the balls of her feet. DeShawn steadied her while she rose into a crouch, still impaled on him. Her thighs burned at once. She held there for a breath, then leaned backward and lowered herself onto his chest.

 

His arms came around her. Both hands covered her breasts and held her against him. She planted her feet, spread her knees as far as the position allowed, and felt him shift his legs beneath hers. Their bodies found the mechanics through several graceless adjustments, one of her heels sliding off the towel, his elbow digging into sand, her hair caught between their mouths when he tried to kiss her shoulder.

 

When the position finally held, the base of his cock was visible below her pubic bone at each withdrawal. Semitransparent strings of lubrication stretched from his shaft to her labia and broke across the dark skin. His scrotum struck the cleft of her buttocks on deeper returns. The crowd in front had the clearest view of the morning, and Marissa spread her knees another fraction until the pull in her hips stopped her.

 

"Hair," he said.

 

"I know."

 

She yanked it free and laughed.

 

Now the crowd had an open view between her thighs. His cock moved in and out at the base of her body, coated in her wetness, framed by her spread labia. DeShawn began with short strokes from below. The new angle put pressure across the thickened front wall in a tight, abrasive range. Her laugh stopped.

 

His hands kneaded her breasts in counter-rhythm, one closing while the other released, sometimes catching a nipple between two fingers when impact moved it there. She put her hands over his and held them harder. The extra compression changed her breathing. It also displayed her breasts between four large brown hands, a tableau so blatant that the woman in front shifted closer to the edge of her towel.

 

He went fast.

 

"Uhh—uhh—uhh—" Each impact broke her voice into pieces. His palms closed over her breasts, thumbs dragging across the nipples whenever her chest jerked. The crowd, cliff, Pacific: all of it went soft at the edges while the contact inside her became brutally clear.

 

Then he changed to long strokes without warning. The first deep return hit her cervix and tore a shout out of her. He withdrew almost to the head and drove in again. Pleasure and pain traded places too quickly to separate.

 

"Yes," she said. "Yes, do that."

 

He did it until one withdrawal went too far.

 

His cock slipped out. The next thrust struck below her entrance and skidded against wet skin. He tried again from under her, blind to the angle. Missed.

 

The interruption was stupid and bodily and therefore perfect. DeShawn muttered, "Hold on," though he was the one thrusting at empty air. Marissa laughed once, still breathless, and his cock slid along the cleft between her buttocks on the next attempt. The crowd watched the failure as intently as it had watched everything else.

 

Marissa sat up and reached back. Practical. She took the shaft in her hand, but the movement brought the crowd into focus before she could guide him.

 

The couple had moved. They were inside twenty feet now, directly in front of her. The woman's mouth was slightly open. Her partner's hand rested between his own thighs, forgotten there.

 

They had given up the plausible distance of passive spectators and now sat close enough for Marissa to see sunscreen shining on the woman's collarbones, grains of sand stuck to one forearm and the pulse in her throat.

 

DeShawn's arms looped around Marissa from behind. One hand came over her breast and his thumb found the nipple. Her other hand held his cock at her entrance.

 

The woman's eyes met hers.

 

Something in Marissa came unfastened. She opened her mouth too.

 

The woman's expression held surprise, appetite and something close to embarrassment at having been caught so directly. Marissa knew those parts because they crossed in her own body too, except embarrassment had nowhere useful to land. She kept eye contact and guided the swollen head along her opening, letting the woman watch her prepare it.

 

Without looking down, she pressed backward and seated herself on DeShawn in one hard motion. The entry hurt. It also put the woman's eyes on the exact place their bodies joined. Marissa watched her look down.

 

Then she lay back on his chest again.

 

DeShawn rebuilt his motion from below, but there was no patience in it now. A deep stroke. Half of one. Two quick impacts that made her breasts jump inside his hands. He muttered into her hair. She could no longer tell whether she was moving or being moved; her feet pushed at the sand, slid, found purchase, and her hips kept answering him.

 

His semen from the hotel had left her sore deep inside, and now every return found that soreness beneath the new pleasure. The mix sharpened rather than softened. She wanted the impact harder and resented the part of her body that might impose an end before she was finished, so she pushed back against him, changing the complaint into participation.

 

The woman in front stayed with her.

 

Marissa's walls began to grip. She felt it happen around the shaft and knew he felt it too because his breath broke at her ear. He tightened both arms around her. The crowd remained in view, a scattered row of faces and bodies beneath the Pacific horizon, but her attention kept snagging on this one woman and on DeShawn's cock driving through the clench inside her.

 

There was no last warning. Her back bowed off his chest. Both breasts lifted in his hands and a long aah came out of her, then another, chopped apart when her body jerked. She kept thrusting through it, could not stop, would have bitten anyone who tried. The woman's eyes went wide. Marissa watched that reaction until the force in her pelvis shut her eyes.

 

Her heels dug holes beside the towel. Every clench pulled DeShawn deeper and briefly prevented the next withdrawal, turning his rhythm into a struggle against her body. The public part of the pleasure became brutally simple: she was being watched lose control and the watchers could see the loss in her mouth, breasts, open thighs and the cock disappearing inside her. Her mouth stayed open after the sound ended.

 

DeShawn made one raw sound behind her, drove up and held. His cock pulsed at depth, semen coming hot against her cervix while her walls closed over him again and again. Both hands pinned her breasts to her chest. The sun burned her eyelids red.

 

When she opened them, the woman was gone from her field of focus. Or still there. Marissa did not care enough to find out.

 

Sunlight returned in pieces: red through her eyelids, white on the top of one thigh, a flash on her ankle chain. DeShawn's semen remained hot inside her. His cock softened only slightly, trapped by the spasms that continued to move through her walls, and each small change of size produced a new wet slide she could feel with absurd clarity.

 

Her body gave one last hard grip around DeShawn and then went loose. He remained inside her until his hands stopped trembling.

 

She lay against him through the awkward interval after force had left both bodies but position still held them together, knees open, his softening cock deep inside, sweat cooling under his palms on her breasts.

 

She rolled off him carefully. Semen followed in a slow warm spill onto the towel. One leg stayed across his abdomen because moving it farther seemed like committee work.

 

The Pacific kept breaking on the same beach.

 

People began to redistribute themselves. Nobody announced that the event had ended. At the water, the two men walked south. The couple spoke to each other at last. The woman with the book found her page, or pretended to. Sweat dried on Marissa's ribs as wind moved over her.

 

The empty ring around the towels loosened first. A man crossed it on his way to the water without looking down. Another gathered a shirt and moved back toward the bluff. The social shape broke apart so casually that a late arrival would have found only thirty nude adults spread along a beach, some breathing harder than the walk required.

 

DeShawn had enough breath to talk before he had enough breath to sit up.

 

"All right. I need to say, that was the best Friday morning I've had in a long time." He looked at the sky. "And I've had some good Friday mornings. This one has its own category."

 

Marissa made a noncommittal sound.

 

"Your crowd was dedicated. Two fellas down there actually relocated. I watched them identify better angles and move. That's work ethic. That's applying yourself."

 

"You were watching them?"

 

"I read fields for a living. I saw everybody."

 

He laughed before his next observation and told her, at length, about a man near the bluff who had attempted to relocate without getting up. The effort had required dragging his towel by its corners while sitting on it. Marissa had missed this. She was sorry she had missed it.

 

DeShawn reconstructed the migration with directions, distances and the man's facial expression at each stage, adding enough detail that the story acquired a second invented spectator and nearly became a military campaign.

 

One regular had opened a paperback and returned to reading. Done with them. The book was right-side up now.

 

Marissa stood and stretched both arms overhead. Her back objected to the towel. She bent left, then right, and walked toward the water.

 

Two men had been near the shoreline since morning. As she passed, one looked up and said, simply, "You're a star."

 

"Thanks," she said.

 

Cold water ran over her feet with the next wave. She bent, put both hands into the retreating surge and felt sand pull from under her fingers. Then she walked in.

 

The Pacific in early July was cold enough to get an involuntary noise from her at the hips. She kept going. At her ribs the shock erased the last hour from her skin without erasing anything else. She went under once.

 

Salt water closed over her head. When she came up, hair pasted across her face and one contact lens threatened to fold. She blinked until it settled.

 

From the water the cliff looked complete. Three hundred feet of rust and cream behind a narrow beach, their towels reduced to one bright patch among many. The people were ordinary at this distance. DeShawn stood at the edge in board shorts, watching her. She floated for a few strokes, then came back in.

 

The hike out took twelve minutes of real work. Loose sand stole a fraction of every uphill step. At the rope sections she used both hands and hauled, forearms taking the load while the sun struck the exposed cliff. Huaraches, micro-bikini, three hundred feet. Nobody could say the equipment was ideal.

 

Sweat ran between her breasts and under the clear waistband, salt drying almost as soon as it appeared, while each sliding step loaded the quadriceps again before the next rope section demanded shoulders and grip.

 

DeShawn stayed two paces behind.

 

"You've got one sexy ass, chile," he said on a switchback. "Improves the climb tremendously."

 

"Focus on your footing."

 

"I'm focused."

 

His idea of focus included a running appraisal of her buttocks through three more switchbacks, interrupted only when the trail steepened enough to require the rope and his breath became more useful elsewhere.

 

Beach voices disappeared first. The surf lost volume as the sage smell returned, and by the last turn the Gliderport office was open and a pale-yellow hang glider rode the air north of the launch ramp. She had caught pieces of it from below without ever making it into an object.

 

The parking lot held more cars now. Marissa changed beside the SUV. Top cord over her head. T-string down. Fold-over shorts on with no underwear, then the plunge tank with no bra. Thirty seconds. The micro-bikini went into her bag and she felt relief at being rid of the ridiculous thing.

 

She did not look back down the trail.

 

Northbound, the morning sat between them without needing discussion. Marissa put her feet on the dash again. Her hair was damp at the ends and smelled of Pacific water beneath the sunscreen on her arms. Muscles from her jaw to her calves had begun submitting separate complaints. None required action.

 

DeShawn kept an old R&B station quiet. He could talk for two hours and he could also leave a silence alone once it arrived. Traffic thickened south of Oceanside. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the seat pushed all the way back, shoulder near the window.

 

Forty minutes inland, where the ocean had become an idea behind warehouse roofs and freeway signs, he asked whether she wanted food before traffic got worse.

 

"Yes."

 

They took an exit with a Shell station, tire warehouse and Del Taco arranged around one long signal. Marissa ordered a breakfast burrito despite the afternoon. DeShawn ordered two and a Mountain Dew. She ate with her feet on the dash and got hot sauce on the heel of one hand.

 

The burrito was adequate. She finished it.

 

Grease soaked through the paper near the bottom, hot sauce collected in one folded corner, and the final bite contained almost nothing except potato and tortilla, which suited the job better than the restaurant tacos would have.

 

Back on the freeway, DeShawn talked about training camp. By August his Muscle Beach games would drop from four a week to two because the practice field would own most of his legs.

 

He explained the weekly load in terms Marissa understood, practice volume against recovery, the hidden cost of lateral work after sprint drills, and why beach sand could turn an otherwise easy session into a bad decision by Thursday.

 

"I play beach volleyball," she said.

 

"You look like you play beach volleyball."

 

She nearly asked whether he meant her height, shoulders or the current state of her hair. The question had no useful answer. She crumpled the burrito wrapper into the bag.

 

Outside Los Angeles she slept for half an hour, shallowly, with whole stretches that were probably thought rather than sleep. She woke as the city thickened around them and sat up somewhere on the 10. Her hair had dried however it pleased. She pushed it behind one ear and let it remain bad.

 

DeShawn turned into Cindy's driveway but left the engine running while Marissa reached into the back for her bag, his hand settling where her neck met her shoulder and holding there until she pulled the canvas strap forward.

 

"So, look. Muscle Beach Tuesday or Wednesday, whenever you're free. We have very good chemistry, and you can handle everything I'm bringing, which I want you to know is rare." He paused, apparently dissatisfied. "I mean the sex is excellent. I like you too. I'm saying both things."

 

"I'll be at the Venice courts Tuesday."

 

"Tuesday is perfect."

 

She picked up the bag and reached for the door.

 

"Hold on."

 

Marissa stopped.

 

DeShawn looked at the front of her shorts, then at the house. "You have about twenty feet between this door and that door. Straight walk. No obstacles." He pointed toward the entrance. "You've earned that walk. I believe in you."

 

She looked down.

 

A wet oval the size of her palm had spread along the inner seam of the fold-over shorts. It had not been there at the Gliderport. Three hours without underwear had given the semen deep inside her time to choose fabric, and the pale jersey had not helped.

 

The stain darkened the cloth from the crotch forward along the seam, unmistakable at standing height and probably worse from the driver-side view DeShawn had enjoyed before deciding to offer tactical advice.

 

DeShawn started laughing before she raised her head.

 

"I told you. Fill a cup every hour." The words came apart inside the laugh. "Now you know."

 

She stuck out her tongue at him, opened the door and crossed the front walk. Fourteen steps. She did not wave at the neighbors.

 

Inside the front hall, the bag dropped at her feet. Her phone was already in her hand. She had no memory of taking it out.

 

Its light reached her thumb and the wall beside her while the house went on around her, water moving in a pipe, a door closing in back and the refrigerator beginning its faint mechanical hum.

 

The screen held a day's worth of ordinary claims: three texts from Tina about a party that had ended, a long volleyball-team thread, two from Cindy. The first asked for oat milk. That opportunity had expired somewhere south of Irvine. The second asked whether she was back.

 

Marissa answered the second. She skimmed the team thread without reading it and cleared Tina's notifications.

 

No text from Isaac.

 

Six days. He had sent nothing and she had sent nothing. Each time she checked, the silence acquired another hour while remaining exactly the silence both of them were making.

 

Cindy moved somewhere in the rear of the house. A cabinet shut. Marissa stood in the hall with beach water dried into her hair and the bag by her ankle.

 

Whore.

 

Isaac had thrown the word at the lake campsite that Saturday morning. Anger could make a person reach for the nearest weapon. It could also make him say the thing he had been keeping polite. She had replayed the moment enough to make either explanation fit, which meant the replay was useless.

 

If he believed it, she was done checking for his name. If he had wanted to hurt her and chosen that word because it would, then there was something else to account for. She did not yet know what. The distinction mattered. She was tired of constructing both answers for him.

 

All week she had supplied intention, counter-intention, revised intention and the argument each version would require, doing both halves of a conversation Isaac had never been invited to enter and still failing to produce an answer she trusted.

 

His next Aldercroft shift was Sunday, pool rotation; she knew when the indoor lap pool would leave him alone for a few minutes and would go there, wait for that interval, then ask him once whether he had meant it.

 

The plan settled before she had a chance to improve it. Direct question. Direct answer. Whatever followed could wait for the answer.

 

Marissa picked up the bag. She stripped off the damp shorts in the hall and dropped them into the laundry basket against the hall wall. They landed badly, one wet leg hanging over the rim.

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© 2026 Vera Calder. Explicit erotic romance for adult readers.

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