Hue

“It’s over. The verdict is ‘not guilty.’ Will the Caucasians riot?”

She grinned impishly at him, her teeth gleaming whitely against her mottled skin, and he remembered how much he wanted her. Come on, he thought. A smart rejoinder is absolutely called for here. Tongue-tied at being in her presence again, so completely unexpectedly, he could think of nothing.

“Trial of the century, huh?” She went on. “Does that refer to how long it took?”

“Yes,” he said weakly, full of the knowledge that the time had come to act on his intention. But he could not formulate the question, regardless of how obvious it seemed that the answer would be yes. So he simply looked, drowning in her, and held out his hand.

She looked stunned. “I… don’t get off for an hour… uh…”

she looked around for coworkers. “Come back?”

He nodded.

The trial had lasted a year, with every pundit in the land pontificating about how the opinions, divided along racial lines, did not bode well for the country’s health. They’d been dissecting it in their own way when he last saw her. Her views, uniquely her own, always interested him, especially her humorous assaults on stereotyped racial reactions to the events unfolding on TV day after monotonous day. Then she’d disappeared from the office building where he worked, and from his life. Now, on the last day of the long ordeal, she was back, and he couldn’t care less about the outcome of the event which had dominated office chat for so long.

An hour. He wandered over to the library, passing through the section of town known as ‘the Dump’, a haven for poor black, ‘white trash’ and Latino families. He stood out in his tie and jacket, but the jeans and sneakers made him more acceptable. No one threw anything. Inside, he leafed through familiar novels and pondered the definition of adultry.

When the hour was up, he walked briskly to the Jeep, still parked in the lot at Roy’s, and waited for her to emerge. He craved a cigarette, but didn’t know if she’d find it disgusting, since he didn’t know whether she smoked. He didn’t know her name either, but that didn’t seem quite as important as the turnoff of death-breath to a non-smoker.

She came out, cautiously looking around. He flashed the lights. She walked with exaggerated casualness toward his car, carrying her uniform hat and apron, then jumped in and hissed “Drive!”

He peeled out of the lot and up the alley. Beside him, she giggled. “Boy, you do know how to be unobtrusive!” Then, softly, “What do you want to do?”

There was no discernible hint of suggestion in her voice, but he reacted as if it were a proposition. “I… uh…. are you married? And what’s your name?”

She laughed, a deep, rich roiling noise. “No. I’m Anika, and I’m too young to be married. I’m only twenty.”

He choked.

“It’s okay,” she murmurred, her voice a caress in his ear. “I won’t tell anybody.” Her breasts rose and fell in his peripheral vision, filling themselves like bellows, large and full, soft-looking, like all of her. Her hand lay on his arm, warm as a heating element.

He took her to his house. It was the single largest no-no in the world. He wondered if he wanted to get caught.

Inside, she reacted with awe. “This is all yours?”

He shook his head mutely.

“Ahhh. Your wife’s?”

“Both,” he said softly. “You want to go?”

She looked at him, her eyes soft, moist, liquid brown, melting chocolate, and shook her head. Before he knew what was happening, he had her in his arms, kissing her full lips wetly, his hands on her shoulders, hers on his hips. She ground herself against him like a cat, rubbing her groin to his. Then she extricated herself and stepped back, and with a deft motion behind her hips, she stood in her underwear, pants puddled around her feet, the thin white silk slicing sharply between her brown legs, her orange Roy Rogers shift still tenting over hard nipples.

With a groan, he threw himself at her, his pants pointing obscenely as his fingers groped under her shirt, releasing her full melons into his hungry palms. She laughed throatily, and her hands smoothly located his belt, lowering his trousers to his socks.

Holding up a finger, she stepped smoothly out of her pants, and motioned for him to follow her. He tried, and tripped on his own pants.

“Easy, big fella,” she whispered. He tugged the pesky trousers from his feet, shoes and all, and followed her toward the sofa, shedding his shirt as he went, and then, irresistably drawn to her, reached around and captured her retreating breasts, sliding his hands under the shirt to fondle them reverently. She stopped, and his erection, pressing his shorts, bumped her silk-covered cheeks hard.

She gasped softly, and reached behind her to seize it in her warm, strong fingers. “Oh!” she giggled, as her hand, freeing him, encountered the slippery wetness. Then, as he watched, she looked over her shoulder and licked her sticky palm teasingly. Her other hand on his hip pulled him closer, nestling her bare thighs around his equally-bare penis.

His basest impulses took over, and, gripping her breasts painfully tight, he thrust himself between her firm thighs, sliding over the thong a few times before catching and pressing the cloth into her folds, and up inside her body. She caught her breath in surprise, but did not stop him, as he thrust his silk-covered erection inside her again. “Oh, my!” she said, chuckling again. “You are a big fella in a hurry.”

In answer, he pressed hard, as deep as the restriction allowed, and held her breasts tightly. Faster, faster, the cloth adding an almost painful friction, then he pulled out, and came quickly, spilling his sperm down her legs.

She sighed.

When he’d caught his breath just a bit, he pushed her firmly onto the large sofa, and attacked her large breasts with his tongue, worrying each nipple to hardness, slurping them into his mouth, and nibbling them until she moaned. “God!” she said at one point. “You do know how to work titties.” He slid his hand into her cunt, and zoomed in on her clit with his thumb.

After about five minutes of her lusty moans, he was – miraculously! – hard again. With his head still nestled firmly among her globes, he parted her with a lunge, and she sang out as his turgid member went straight in to the hilt, deeper than had been possible with her underwear barring the way. “Oh, boy. Here we go again,” She rumbled with pleasure.

This being the the second time, he was able to last a respectable ten minutes, and her appreciation was evident. “Oh!” she moaned several times as he thrust particularly deep. She was slick and warm, snug, sheathing him like a wet suit. Her breasts heaved and shook with his pumping, and his mouth, still busy, made her nipples stand up like fingertips.

Finally, he went rigid inside her, and she moaned appreciatively again. Then, as she felt him burst, she whimpered, “Oh, no. Not yet, not yet…”

“Sorry…!” he gasped helplessly as he spent himself deep within her.

“Then do it real hard with what’s left!” she begged. He gave it his best shot, throwing himself at her with abandon, his hip bones banging hers, flesh smacking flesh, and she moaned with lust and despair. It was over too soon.

“Sorry,” he said again.

She held him to her breast again. “S’okay,” she murmurred. “It was pretty good anyway, and it’ll be better next time.”

His penis, resting pale and dispirited on her chocolate thigh, gave a last, frightened leap at the words. Next time?

***

When he met her, she was working as a cleaning woman in our building. Her breasts, naturally, were what most men noticed, but her personality was hard to miss as well. Outgoing and friendly, she almost bubbled over with goodwill, a sharp departure from the other people on the cleaning crew, most of whom could not even be bothered to return your greeting.

She walked among the scowling ladies, a motley crew of dour older women blacks, like an ambassador of sex appeal and friendliness. Office workers, evenly divided between those who were just naturally rude to those who they considered their inferiors, and those who’d lapsed into silence after being rebuffed by one or the other of the two he called The Sullen Twins.

She came in that first morning, tripping through the office like a Brownie Scout, singing out names of those she passed, leaving a string of startled people in her wake. Most had forgotten the name plates located somewhere in the vicinity of their desks, and stood in clusters pondering how the new girl could know all their names. Was she psychic? No one even felt the need to laugh at her stumbling, heroic attempts to pronounce the consonent-laden Eastern-European surnames which dominate our division.

For the entire summer and most of the fall, she’d been the source of sunlight for a number of the white-collar drudges in that windowless hole. The women, though most of them were minus the obvious physical attributes the girl seemed so unaware of, could not seem to muster her the ill will necessary to make their usual catty remarks, even though they all noticed with dismay the effect she had on the men, from the young just-graduated Midwesterners to the eldest, most jaded East Coast Wasps. Though the office harbored a number of not-so-muted racists, he’d never heard anyone speak disparragingly of the office’s dusky ray of sunshine.

The effect of Anika’s presence was palpable. We all talked a bit more nicely to one another, less afraid to interrupt someone’s work to say good morning, more apt to compliment a coworker on a nice outfit; less concerned about the ever-present spectre of sexual harassment misunderstandings. When Anika breezed through, the air seemed less stuffy, and many of us would invent reasons to keep her there. More than one old man would find himself in the corner booth – the private one – of the men’s room after she left for the day. But I never heard an off-color remark about her.

Then one day she vanished.

The office rocked with disappointed men, and not a few women. The other people on the cleaning crew were as uncommunicative as ever. When someone finally got the nerve to ask, we discovered we had no name to go with the face. “What girl?” they wanted to know. “We change peoples all the time. Dey leaves.”

We never saw her again until the day a few months ago when a couple of us walked in to Roy’s and saw the place light up with her personality. “Hey, guys. How you like that TV coverage of the trial?” she smiled.

We began to develop a taste, almost every day, for fast food.

It’s been a few months now. He comes into the lot late, certain nights, about once every two weeks. Not the Roy’s lot, like the first time; now he prefers the lot of the repair shop a few blocks away. She meets him there, driving her own car, and then follows him to the place where this week’s assignation will take place.

After the first time, he tried to stay away, haunted by the thought that, rather than a one-night fling, he was beginning a protracted deception. He was realistic enough to know that the risks would increase with each meeting.

But the temptation was too much for him, as temptation usually is. He’s not very good at restraint, and his excuse, of course, is the same one she alluded to earlier: he needs to make it up to her. Even when he’s finally learned to make her come repeatedly, some months later, when it’s obvious that the imaginary debt has been satisfied, he’s unable to break off the affair.

He’s hooked.

A few weeks’ withdrawal always brings him back, shaking with the need. And she’s always willing, always expectant, never demanding.

His conquest, as he sees it, is complete. He can bring her violently to climax anytime he wants, in seconds. She’s never boring, always exciting, and he can’t stop it, even though he knows the time is here.

She surprises him. Lying in the sand on the pitch-dark beach, she pulls him to her by his testicles, then climbs into his lap, screwing down on him so suddenly that he cries out. Is there sand inside her?

She shushes him with a breast in his face, like a baby, suckling, pressing him supine. In the dark, nearly invisible but for the occasional moon’s glint reflected in the liquids on her body, she is even more mysterious than usual. He thrusts upward, screws the darkness, formless, wet and inviting, and it responds with incoherent demands and exaltations, grasping, tugging, prodding, the flesh which touches his altering; firm, pliant, smooth, hairy, slippery, gritty and ultimately painful.

The breast in his face seems to have grown wiry hair, and his tongue finds its way into the musky tunnel, just as his penis is clamped again by a wet, superheated clamp, pressing down upon him. He protests and his flailing tongue brings a clenching reaction from above, his voice muffled. He clasps the flesh above to him, his hands slipping in the liquid, and his tongue, tracing, slides between the globes, into a tightening cleft. The flesh above him stiffens, strains as he touches the bud lightly with the tip of his tongue, then presses it firmly with his thumb. The shriek that greets his ears is followed by a sharp pain in his own anus, and he comes, violently, into the fleshiness which clasps him.

He feels the vacuum as she drinks him dry, pressing deeper into his rectum until he gives up all he has.

She withdraws her finger, and the nail grazes his inner thigh. Words he realizes he has been dreading chill him to his soul. “I want you to promise you’ll never leave me,” she says distinctly.

The silence lengthens, then:

“We’ll have to get rid of her,” he responds mechanically, his voice vacant and uninflected.

She sighs contentedly, and nestles her head in his lap. “Whatever you say.”

Somewhere a man, condemned by a majority in a racially-divided nation of getting away with murder, finds some inexplicable measure of peace.