Cavanaugh’s Ridge — Jeremy Edwards

Estelle was so tense, she was ticklish. I don’t mean “hee hee, do that again” ticklish; I mean so ticklish that if I kissed her between the legs, she’d leap three feet in the air—from a horizontal position, mind you. 

So it had been weeks since I’d kissed her between the legs. 

Oh, we had sex. Good sex. I was a creative guy, and there were a lot of things I could find to do that didn’t involve kissing Estelle between her luscious thighs. I did them all. And she did things, too. She may have been tense as a guitar string, but she knew how to get both of us off. 

But my face missed her pussy. The intimacy of my lips on her most personal flesh, right there. The delicate flavor, so elegant and yet so animal, the perfect essence of beauty in heat. And I missed getting a full nose of the accompanying aroma—because if I’d stuck my nose in there, she would have jumped four feet. 

Sometimes I would lie there at night after coming heavily into her, after pumping and grinding her into her own tense little orgasms . . . and I would imagine her pussy in my face. It became an obsession, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Yes, I’d been inside her moments earlier; but now I dreamed of making love to her all over again with my lips, of tasting her on my tongue. 

I could visualize Estelle’s pussy in complete, meticulous detail—just as I could visualize the topo map of our county if I shut my eyes (and had nothing better to visualize). No two landscapes look alike, and I had studied every valley, slope, swirl, and crevice of the private national park between Estelle’s legs. As I lay there at night imagining her map spread out for me, I felt like a horny park ranger, giving myself a tour. 

I even invented names for some of the geographical features of Estelle’s vulva. There was one lovely fold at the left that I dubbed “Cavanaugh’s Ridge.” I had no idea where I got that—I’d never known anybody named Cavanaugh—but it just sounded right. It sounded right in my head, to be more precise. I didn’t actually tell Estelle that I’d embellished her genitals, in my mind, with cartographic nomenclature. I was afraid that might make her tense. 

Eventually, I figured out how to get my lips as close as I could to Estelle’s snatch, without setting off her tickle alarm. To be specific, I learned that I could kiss her on the knee without it bothering her. On the front of the knee or the outside edge, that is. Not on the inside—and definitely not around back, behind the joint. No way. 

Why was Estelle so tense? There was no overriding reason. But there were a lot of little reasons. Estelle was tense because two of her coworkers had resigned, and she was picking up the slack. She was tense because her mother was getting married and felt obligated to consult Estelle about every fucking detail regarding the wedding plans—though she never, ultimately, paid attention to any of poor Estelle’s suggestions. She was tense because she’d committed to training for a 10k with her buddies, but she kept standing them up for runs because of the situation at work. 

Nothing serious, nothing that wouldn’t fix itself . . . but in the meantime, Estelle was tense. 

We had strategies. The self-hypnosis made her a little more mentally placid, but I still couldn’t get near her delicious juncture with my lips. The wine put her to sleep. That was good, insofar as she could use some extra z’s—but it did not address the issue at hand. 

I suggested massage, but Estelle gently reminded me that she didn’t have the patience to lie still for that sort of thing. I might as well suggest she take a goddam thirty-minute bath, she told me. 

Estelle was as discouraged as I was. She missed my mouth down there. 

Then I realized we were approaching this from the wrong direction. We’d been assuming that the first step was to relax her, and that this would then open up a route to Cavanaugh’s Ridge and environs. It finally occurred to me that the road to success didn’t just end with my mouth on her body—it began there.

 *** 

“Lie as still as you can,” I quietly advised, on the night we’d set aside. “Don’t worry about relaxing, because that might make you unrelaxed. Just lie there, and let me worry about everything.”

I found the spot on her left kneecap that represented, in my experience, the northernmost place, below the waist, that I could kiss her these days without her squirming in an unerogenous fashion.

 I kissed her there—not too softly, not too intensely. Solidly.

“How does that feel?”

“Nice,” she said pleasantly, if not exactly passionately.

 I did it again. And again. I knew I had to kiss her kneecap till the sensation became so predictable to her that it was downright boring.

“How you doing?” I asked, after a few dozen knee kisses.

“Okay.”

“Getting a little bored?”

“Well, you know . . .” She was too kind to actually say it.

“I’m going to try something different now.” And I did: I began kissing her right kneecap, in the same manner.

“Randolph . . .”

“Shh,” I urged, soothingly, resisting the impulse to say that counterproductive word, relax.

Truth be told, it wasn’t that boring on my end. Maybe I was imagining things, but I could swear that Estelle’s right knee tasted different from her left knee. They were both savory—fresh and feminine and familiar—but the right knee seemed a smidgen saltier, where the left was slightly sweeter.

But this wasn’t about knee-to-knee recipe tests. This was about kissing Estelle at the edge of her safe zone until she was so used to the feeling—so totally, tediously accustomed to it—that her nervous system’s irrational defenses would flag, and her skin would welcome my mouth’s ascent like in the old days. That was the theory, anyhow.

Finally, I could tell that if I kissed her knee one more time, she would be likely to sit up and start doing a crossword puzzle.

“Hey,” I said, softly.

“Hey.”

I positioned my lips about a centimeter farther up her leg, just enough to cross from knee territory to thigh jurisdiction, in the eyes of an anatomy specialist. Then I gave her the lightest possible kiss, and I braced myself for the dreaded feeling of Estelle tensing up and shivering.

She didn’t. She didn’t do anything, in fact. I wondered if my kiss had been so light that she hadn’t even felt it. Maybe it didn’t count.

“That feels good,” she said quietly.

Those three words made me want to cry with hope. But I knew I still had a long way to go, and I had to keep both my calm and my momentum. So I tried not to think too much, and I focused on kissing her thigh again—just as lightly, but another centimeter higher.

Again, I waited for a reaction—I was prepared now for either a positive one or a negative one—but all I perceived was Estelle’s regular breathing. That was good, though.

And so I went higher still. Emboldened, I advanced up her thigh without waiting to see how she would react to each and every touch of my lips. I trusted in the inevitability of my progress and the regularity of my rhythm to keep her body from freaking out. I trusted in my knowledge that, despite the obstructive behavior of her nerves in recent weeks, Estelle wanted this as badly as I did.

On some level, I still couldn’t believe it. I was kissing Estelle’s sweet upper thigh, and nothing bad was happening. She was even purring a bit now.

But I knew the proof was in the pudding, and I hadn’t yet gone near her pudding. With that dessert in mind, I took two bold steps, in conjunction with each other: I shifted my focus to the inside surface of her thigh; and I introduced my tongue into the equation.

I licked her flesh with a slow, even pressure. I wanted to ensure that it was a caress and not a tickle. Someday, I knew, little tickle games could once again be a part of our love life. At the moment, however, tickle was a dirty word.

When I found that I was painting Estelle’s inner thigh with my tongue and she was, believe it or not, relaxing into it, I became incredibly hard. Up until this point, I’d been treating this encounter as a sort of experiment, and my commitment to it, though emotionally impassioned, had not been notably sexual. Now, with her body beginning to melt for me and the first wafts of her arousal luring me closer to her pussy, my cock was waking up—and making up for lost time.

As I slowly, carefully kissed and licked my way up her thigh, I kept my eye on the pot of gold. There it shone, in all its natural beauty: the majestic clitoris that I’d nicknamed “Pleasure Rock”; the sculpted region at the base of her opening, where her wetness had a tendency to pool—as it was doing now—and which, on my mental map, was labeled “Slick Shallows”; and, of course, Cavanaugh’s Ridge.

It was all I could do to resist rushing in there, drooling and smooching and tonguing her like a wild beast. But the high I was getting from knowing how far we’d come gave me the self-control to maintain the pace. So I inched my way up, cautiously but unhesitatingly, and I listened to the intense—but reassuringly serene—moans from Estelle.

When, at last, I arrived home, I wasn’t sure whether to start with my tongue or my lips. But she made that decision for me.

“Lick me,” she whispered.

So I licked her—first, around the periphery, the very outer edges of her sex, which had remained largely dry, though moisture was trickling earnestly from her cavity down onto the mattress.

Then, when I was pretty sure the market would bear it, I moved my tongue down to the Slick Shallows and began to lick upward—straight up and down the center of her slit this time, right where she was weeping shimmering fluid.

Her folds tasted even more succulent than I’d remembered; and as she squirmed—erotically, thank goodness, not hypersensitively—I felt her pussy licking me back. I kissed her cunt now, repeatedly, the way I’d kissed her face at the train station a couple of months earlier, after we’d had to spend a week apart. Next, I let my tongue penetrate her, and I danced it inside her while listening to her gasp—sensuously, not nervously.

Then, while holding firmly on to her knees, I licked Pleasure Rock. Once. Twice. Three times.

And Estelle came for me, shuddering and wailing as if she were releasing every last drop of tension that had been trapped inside her for so long. She came for me and, most important, for herself, as if a thousand little corked vials of stress had opened all at once and were spilling out from between her legs.

I kept licking her while she came, until she was so transported by ecstasy and relief that my tongue became superfluous to her experience. At that point, I pulled my face back—still holding her knees—to see her pulses of pleasure throb across her beautiful vulva landscape.

And I watched Cavanaugh’s Ridge twitch like my own dancing cock, which now spurted dollop after dollop of gratitude onto Estelle’s right ankle.

____________________

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Jeremy Edwards is the author of the erotocomedic novel Rock My Socks Off and the erotic story collection Spark My Moment (both published by Xcite Books). His libidinous short stories have been widely published online, as well as in over forty anthologies. His work was selected for The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, vols. 7, 8, and 9, and he has read at New York’s In the Flesh and Philadelphia’s Erotic Literary Salon. Jeremy’s greatest goal in life is to be sexy and witty at the same moment—ideally in lighting that flatters his profile. Find Jeremy here: http://www.jeremyedwardserotica.com.

Cavanaugh's Ridge -- Jeremy Edwards, 4.9 out of 5 based on 11 ratings