The Fabric — Jeremy Edwards

Federico had noticed her intelligent eyebrows the day before, as she glided past him in the expansive hotel lobby. He’d been with the rest of his group then; but this superficial taste of her personality had diverted him from pulling his weight while the five of them mapped out their recreational agenda.

Beyond the enticing eyebrows, and despite the brevity of her presence, he had admired what he thought of as the fabric of her thoughtful expression. While the others hunched over their guidebooks, Federico had examined that fabric in his mind and imagined how it might be transformed by undiluted pleasure—by a tongue dragged along pussy lips, for example.

She smiled now, smiled almost at him, an unspoken recognition punctuating the moment in which she seated herself, coffee and newspaper in hand, on a hassock whose location paired it ambiguously with his own.

Then she gave him the greatest gift in her power: she acknowledged him outright. “Where are your friends?”

“They all went to the movies.” It sounded absurd, when he articulated it. The image of more than three adults attending a motion picture together somehow evoked vintage college students piling into phone booths, and other such antics.

“Fun!” Her vicarious enthusiasm conquered the ponderous boredom of the plodding rain outside.

“It is, yes—for them.” He hesitated on the verge of a confidence. “Personally, I don’t like the movies.”

“You don’t like any movies?” Big eyes. Big, beautiful eyes.

“No, I like a few—or at least a few scenes.” He chuckled at himself. “But I don’t like the movies, going to the movies . . . that whole experience.”

The light in her pupils intensified. “Interesting.”

He realized how rarely he heard that word spoken sincerely, as she had spoken it. He realized she wanted more of him. “It’s too large for me, too much. Too long and too loud. Give me a postcard instead.” He let himself warm further to his theme, as he sensed her warming. “I like my pleasures parceled out in discrete moments.”

“You must get more out of them than most people. Your pleasures, I mean.”

“Perhaps I do.”

“That’s good, um . . .” Her eyebrows inquired his name.

“Federico.”

“That’s very good, Federico. Very sensual of you.”

He valued the implication that she was an authority.

“I’m Laurel. And when it stops raining, I want to go out there and glance at the ocean—then look away—then do it again. You see, we’re alike in some respects.”

He drank in the plumpness of her lips, the creaminess of her neck, the swell of her chest. “Yes, in some respects we are.”

Now it was her turn to take charge of the momentum. “I know exactly what you mean, about moments. Moments have crisp edges for people like us, don’t they?”

Damn, she’s more like me than me, thought Federico. He felt he’d known her always—or longed to.

She continued. “I love the thrill of the first ten seconds of a favorite song—the rest is commentary, as they say. And you know that sizzle you get from meeting someone’s gaze, just for an instant, at that sweet spot in the middle of a bout of shared laughter . . . when you nearly forget what you’re laughing about?” Here her gaze met his—just for an instant. “God, this is like we’re at a party after three beers. I’ve never had this type of conversation at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“It’s a vacation. We can do anything we want,” said Federico.

“Except take you to the movies,” she teased.

“Not unless it’s a metaphor,” he answered. “Or a euphemism.”

She chortled over her coffee cup, but her eyes said hold that thought.

“You are on vacation, Laurel, aren’t you? Your clothes . . .”

“I dress up when I’m on vacation,” she reassured him. “My job in the lab is grubby. This is my chance to give each of my cute little dresses its day in the sun.” She looked through the plate glass. “Or the rain,” she added cheerfully.

The hotel intercom monopolized the soundscape for a minute, and Federico again studied the fabric of Laurel’s expression, which projected contentment and bonhomie from above the lime-green confection she’d described as a cute little dress.

“I do like the fabric at the movies,” he segued, when the announcements had terminated and the subdued bustle of morning jazz had returned.

“The fabric?”

“On the seats.”

“Oh, I like that, too,” she breathed. “I never wear stockings at the movies.”

He savored the fact that she planned for pleasure, that she was sensitive enough to her own sensuality that she would make this calculated choice. The vision of her making that choice—of slipping her stockings off in the car outside the theater—sent a tingle through him.

Meanwhile, he noted, she had put her stockings on this morning; and he imagined he could see her skin becoming a degree more sensuous as she contemplated threaded textures and intimate, inanimate caresses. He could almost feel her feeling the clinging kiss of nylon, experience with her the static grope that titillated her smoothness like mustache stubble might.

Her bottom repositioned itself on the vinyl tuffet. Federico visualized a nexus of tension defined by the damp, narrow insistence of a thong.

“Small details make such a difference,” she said. “They can alter my whole mood. In restaurants, I order based on what the side dishes are.” She laughed as she spoke, and the self-aware humor construed by the laughter was beautiful to Federico, her revelation poetic.

“I love to eat quickly,” he confessed, “so that the flavors overwhelm my palate before I can analyze them. It’s the opposite of how most foodies are, but for me it’s orgasmic this way.” He was aware that his excitement was betraying itself in the pitch of his voice, not to mention his vocabulary.

“In every city,” said Laurel, “I pick one building that I like best.” They were blurting their confidences now, increasingly tipsy from her imaginary beers.

***

The stockings tickled her, going down. Federico saw it in the way the corners of her mouth curled, and in the way her thighs automatically clenched, prizing the silk triangle at their juncture, cosseting her cunt like a secret she was about to share.

Their conversation downstairs had been more than an icebreaker; more than a seduction; more than foreplay. It had been the key to this collaboration between the two of them—it had shown them the basis for it.

She’d allowed him to steer her, by a naked elbow, toward the skylit stairwell. She had kept this elbow tight against her body, and Federico had sensed that she was holding herself together, for fear the slightest touch to her torso would dissolve her . . . an outcome that would best wait for the bed.

He had worshipped the single, elegant drop of perspiration that clung to her neck as she preceded him up the stairs. On the landing, he had squeezed his hard-on into the cushiness of her skirt and kissed that bead of sweat, which tasted like woman nectar.

Now, in her room, with her ass on the bed and her stockings on the floor, she parted her legs, grabbing her own knees to frame her openness. “Let’s have some discrete moments, Federico.”

He sat with her and stroked the scarlet of her panties—right at the softest place, the center of her succulent crotch—stroking until the moisture wept through. There it was, the nexus of tension under his touch, the focal squirm of seeping desire around which everything else churned.

In the heart of the fuck, she kept her extremities immobile against him, clutching his wrists and bracing her feet on his legs, struggling to channel every iota of energy straight to her grinding core, to focus the impending explosion. He watched her twitch with deliberately deferred ecstasy, hovering on the lip of her bliss. And the way her eyebrows knitted became his own focus, resonating with his consciousness that these eyebrows were what he had first noticed about her. He obsessed delightedly on the knowledge that he was helping deliver this moment to the woman behind those eyebrows, watching the eyebrows tighten in preorgasmic jouissance, while his flesh throbbed at their taut, sleek intensity. They were going to come, those eyebrows and Federico.

***

“I drink half a glass of white and half a glass of red with my dinner. I enjoy that much more than a full glass of either.” Laurel’s fingers ghosted over her pussy, still puffed with satiation.

“I read books one paragraph at a time,” said Federico. “Epiphany. Rest. Repeat.”

____________________

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