Surrender by Alicia Night Orchid :: Sliptongue Magazine

Surrender

by Alicia Night Orchid

I love it when we are swept away by our passions like young girls carried off by pillaging Vikings, when unanticipated animal need triumphs, however briefly, over prudence and punctuality. Like when you meet a stranger at a beachside bar and opt for a wallow in the sand rather than returning alone to the safety of your hotel room, when an afternoon at the office is hijacked by an old lover’s phone call that leaves you dripping at your desk and unable to focus, or when you go astray at a convention and take a trip down the “O” highway with someone you’d just as soon not have to explain to your people.

I think it’s the abandon of it, the risk of it, maybe the humanity of it. The simple truth is we all work too hard, bear too many responsibilities and suffer from moral restraints that are too harsh. And we do it all under the shadow of terror and nuclear obliteration. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to surrender now and then? Not to the work, the responsibilities or the moral restraints, but to our basic humanity.

* * *

Not so long ago, I traveled to New York to meet with my agent and editor to discuss details of a book deal. My first novel was about to be released by a major publishing house. They wanted to schedule book signings, interviews—all of the usual marketing schlock. I just wanted people to read the work that I’d put my heart into for three years.

The meetings stretched into two long days. I hate being alone—I don’t consider my business associates as company—but I especially hate being alone in New York in the winter. I’m a Southern California girl. I live in a condo that overlooks Manhattan Beach. The sun shines nearly every day. I can reach out and touch the tanned, beautiful people passing by on The Strand.

By comparison, New York is cold and gray with people who keep their heads down as they brush past you on a busy street. Nothing makes me feel so alone as sitting at a crowded restaurant with 12 million people within ear shot and not a person listening.

I get a little crazy when I’m alone in a cold, gray place. I can’t sleep. Writing is out of the question. I end up watching cable until I fall asleep, standing naked in front of the window at all hours—will someone notice me, please—and taking long, withering baths while wondering if the water is toxic. I mean, if you won’t drink it, why should you put your body in it? Can toxic water penetrate the walls of your vagina? Your anus? What about that cut on your toe?

See what I mean by crazy?

Twice, I’ve been so lonely in New York, I called a pay for phone-sex service. They don’t know what to do when they have a woman on the line. Polite, yes. Willing to take your money, yes. But they don’t know what to do. Both times I talked to a Caitlin who always wanted to be a writer. Or, so she claimed. She politely listened to me read from my then unpublished novel, until we both fell asleep.

Once, I’ve ventured as far as the hotel bar, initially luxuriating in the attention paid any single woman as she sips her Chardonnay. Exhilarated for a while by the glances of men each time one shifts one’s ass or crosses one’s legs. But ultimately dismayed by the experience, realizing that they are more interested in your orifices than your soul. Ultimately depressed by the knowledge that if one of them showed even the slightest interest in that inner sanctum, where your deepest, darkest, dirtiest desires reside, he could have the physical you and you could have the physical him, until both of you lay as exhausted and spent as driftwood on the shore.

This last visit to New York, after saying good evening to my agent and editor, I retreated to my room. I slipped into sweats, opened a box of chocolates and reclined on the bed with my laptop. For hours, I ate exotic Vosges truffles and searched the Internet for that one erotic story that ignites you like a gas-soaked torch. For me, it’s the words, always the words that triggers the passion. I found it, finally, the perfect combination of deftly turned phrases and a writer’s filthy mind. I found it as I teetered on exhaustion, yet incapable of sleep. And, like a desperate teenager in her parent’s home, I rubbed one out, rubbed one out under the covers with a hand deep in my panties, my hips clearing the bed and my lungs screaming my orgasm into a down-filled pillow.

The heart, they say, is a lonely hunter.

* * *

My last meeting ended at 1:00 PM. My flight was at 4:00. I’d get home around midnight. The weather looked bad, but no worse than it had been. Except they were predicting a Nor’ Easter, something we don’t get in LA. The freezing rain began in the morning, continued over lunch and accompanied me on the cab ride to Newark. By the time I got to the airport and figured out what an ice storm was, the planes had half an inch on them, even driving was out of the question and all of the airport hotels were filled.

At least I made it through security into the terminal where a few restaurants and bars still catered to the stranded. All seats were taken, so I found a place in a far corner, against the wall and on the floor, and hunkered down. All about me the world hummed with anxiety—businessmen demanded concessions, mothers with children begged frazzled ticket agents for assistance, pleasure travelers paced and gesticulated over a lost vacation. It was great entertainment, better than reality TV.

But, after a couple of hours, the entertainment value wore off. The businessmen paired up and headed for the bars, the mothers and children piled onto each other like rugby players in a scrum and the pleasure travelers circled their wagons to commiserate. The loneliness set in. The New York loneliness, the hotel loneliness, the airport loneliness.

Besides that, I had to pee and faced the dilemma of what to do with my laptop, carry on and coat while I went to the bathroom. There were plenty of us “unattacheds,” scattered throughout the terminal, hiding behind our books, computer screens and cell phones. But, who do you ask to watch your stuff? The geeky guy chewing his lip and pounding his keyboard as if he has a grudge, the Asian girl bobbing to her head phones, the middle-aged man reading John Le Carre’s latest effort?

Fortunately, I was spared a decision by the woman who suddenly rolled her carry on in front of me, draped her coat over the handle and asked if I’d keep an eye on it while she visited the Ladies’. A simple act of humanity, right?

“No problem,” I told her behind a weak smile.

I’d seen her earlier, but had lumped her into the business crowd. Dressed in a gray flannel skirt, white silk blouse, and judging from its feel, a cashmere overcoat, I took her for a professional woman, probably a lawyer, accountant or banker. Blonde to my brunette, blue eyes to my brown, peaches and cream to my olive skin. I’m curvy and buxom. She was petite and tight. My ass is broad as a washtub, hers you could have cupped in the palms of your hands. I figured her for late thirties, early forties. She flashed a perfunctory smile and made her way across the terminal with a confident stride, high heels clicking.

I squeezed my legs together and waited for her to return.

“Thanks,” she said curtly. “Do you need to go?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

When I came back, the woman had taken up residence along the wall to my left.

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all.” I was just glad someone had spoken to me. I was afraid I’d become invisible.

She extended a perfectly manicured hand. “Marilyn,” she said.

Her hand felt like a small, warm bird in mine. “Alicia.”

“Isn’t this a bitch?”

“I just want to get home to LA. Does the sun ever shine here?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m from Chicago.”

* * *

I make a better listener than a conversationalist. After all, a writer borrows other people’s lives and entwines them with her own, so listening is a skill I’ve cultivated. I encouraged her to tell me about her life.

She taught Constitutional Law with an emphasis on First Amendment rights. In an era where personal freedoms were under constant assault, she viewed her work as increasingly important. She seethed with passion as the words flew from her mouth—freedom of speech, privacy, assembly. I watched her grow more animated as she made one logical point after another. I have never been attracted to anyone who didn’t love her work. I feared that people who were dishonest in their work would be dishonest in their relationships. On the on the other hand, people who love their work resonate with a oneness that attracts like a magnet.

When she paused for breath, fixed those blue eyes on me and asked what I did, I grimaced. I’ve never been comfortable telling people I’m a writer, even after publishing several short stories and now a novel. Somehow, I forced it out.

Her eyes widened. “Really, what do you write?”

“Mainstream fiction, mostly short stories and a novel. And,” here I hesitated, “some erotica.”

She raised the inevitable eyebrow. “Published?”

I explained the reason for my trip to New York, the recent book deal. In response to the inevitable question about the novel’s subject, I gave my pat answer—love and hate, betrayal and redemption, all that good stuff.

“That’s wonderful. How exciting.”

People always say this and I usually let it lie, but as the natural light faded, as the cries of babies retreated into background, as the stranded travelers strained to make the best of a bad situation, I thought why not come out with it. “Actually, it’s a hard business. Most of the time I live in the minds and actions of my characters and the space between my mind and my computer screen. I’m an introvert but, even so, it gets lonely sometimes.”

She gave me a sympathetic look and bit her lower lip. “It’s none of my business, but do you have anyone special in your life?”

“Just my characters. There’s Willis who’s divorced and trying to restablish his life, there’s Miranda who lost her lesbian lover in a car accident, there’s Nick who sells tax shelters by day and spies for the IRS by night.”

She laughed, a laughter full of warmth and understanding. “Yeah, well.”

“How about you? Anyone special?”

She stared into the distance, looked suddenly serious. “Not at the moment. I just ended this thing. She…”

I could have let it go, but I know how to make people talk. “I see,” I said, and didn’t offer another word.

After a moment, she began.

* * *

We talked late into the night. The lights dimmed to a subtle glow, the children and mothers slept, the business men snored.

She’d grown up in the Midwest, studied harder than most, was smarter than most. She attended the University of Wisconsin and majored in English as an undergrad. She edited the law review at U of C and clerked for the Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit before taking her first post as a professor. The one thing that got lost along the way was her personal life.

Oh, there had been a fling or two with boys in high school and college, an affair with a married professor in law school, but it wasn’t until she was teaching and on her own that she had her first lesbian lover. Before then, sex had been routine—open your legs, let them finger you, let them lap at you, suck their cocks, let them hump you until they squirted. But that first woman, that first woman who she met at a party, who took her back to her condo, who stripped her and caressed her and turned her inside out—that was something else. It lasted six months.

What about me? Grew up on the beach—sun, sand and surf. My father was a director, my mother a film editor. Our house hosted a constant parade of funky folks—writers, musicians, actors—rocked with the beat of Sixties music, hummed with creativity. Everyone read, everyone wrote. Everyone believed in the power of language. Wasn’t it only natural that I’d fall in love with simile and metaphor, with plot and dialogue? Wasn’t it only natural that I’d fall in love as easily with the characters in a story as with the characters I met in real life?

Believe me, I’ve had my share of both. The first time I masturbated was with a book in one hand and my pubescent pussy in the other. I came right along with Molly Bloom and the whores in Anais Nin’s house of love. Once in college, I placed a hard copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, borrowed from the library, between my pantied thighs. Kneeling over it, I rocked back and forth, while the girls in the next room played Leonard Cohen’s Future.

Since I can remember, I’ve been attracted sexually to certain people. It’s never mattered so much if were they male or female, only if they had that something, that quirky sense of humor, those uncanny smarts, that special look. I enjoy a rowdy fuck, bent over in a shower stall, love the feel and taste of a hard cock sliding in and out of my mouth until it pulses and explodes like an overheated éclair. Just as much, I enjoy another woman’s touch, her fingers opening me like a delicate flower, her tongue teasing my clitoris as if it were a religious icon to be worshiped, her pussy releasing its nectar onto my lips.

Sometime deep in the night, Marilyn and I stopped talking, She turned her pretty face toward me, stroked my cheek with her knuckles and kissed me. One of those kisses you never forget. One of those kisses that begins with a tentative brushing of your lover’s lips against yours, that continues as your mouths open and tongues swirl, that ends with both of you gasping for breath and glad for it.

“I want you,” Marilyn said.

“I want you, too.”

* * *

To prevent discovery, the logistics of our lovemaking are complicated. I’m taller, larger than she. Under our winter coats, we wriggle out of pantyhose. I hike up my dress and open my legs. She sits between them, skirt up over her hips, knees bent and tilted outward, and reclines against my chest. Her tight bottom is pressed firmly against my sex. She’s wearing a thong underneath. I’m in my white Jockey for Women panties.

I nuzzle her hair, inhaling its fragrance as if it were life itself. I kiss her ears, run my tongue over the cartilage inside, suckle an earlobe. I reach around her, inside the silk blouse and push the bra up and over her breasts. They are tiny, hard as fresh autumn apples in my milking hands. I roll each nipple between anxious fingers, She sighs, turns and kisses me again. It’s like falling from a dizzy height into a warm pool . Our tongues duel like desperate swordsmen.

Her arms are at her side, her hands on my knees. She massages my thighs, trails her fingertips along the inside, into the hollow spaces that cup my cunt. I’m drunk with lust. When she grinds her ass against me, I grind back.

I slide a hand down her belly, push past the thin band of fabric. She’s unshaven, but her hairs are fine and soft as corn silk. She already wet, as wet as if she’s squatted in a puddle of exotic oil. Her body is so familiar, yet so strange. In my mind’s eye, I follow the path of my fingers as they open her supple lips and trace the narrow ravine that lies inside. I work there for long moments, drawing the female moisture from inside her. When her breathing quickens, I apply the lubricant to her clit—hard as a pebble.

“Ooh,” her mouth nips at my ear, my neck.

I fit the pebble inside the space between two fingers and begin a slippery up and down motion. “Wait,” she says.

She reaches for her purse, withdraws a chrome vibrator no larger than a fingertip and presses it into my hand. It is nearly soundless, but powerful. I urge the thrumming little bullet into her folds and she undulates beneath me in earnest. Is this how she does it on her own, in the privacy of her office, her toilet, her bedroom? Will she henceforth fantasize only of Alicia when she plies herself in the dark of the night with this tiny machine?

She mouths her fuck noises into my shoulder, her butt thumping against me. I feel her tighten, then twist and writhe in my arms, her final moment a hushed oh god, oh god, oh god.

She pushes the bullet away, rendered overly sensitive by her orgasm, and sinks into me. I hold her and rock her, butterfly kissing her neck, rejoicing in her hard nipples, the sweet cum juice dripping down the crack of her ass onto my white panties.

After a few moments, she half turns into my arms, She fumbles with buttons, pushes my dress aside and suckles my breasts, Sharp little teeth. Tongue quick as a flame. Further down, she presses her bullet against the soaked wisp of cotton covering my pussy. I buck against it, letting its vibrations roll through me like shocks from a distant earthquake. But, I want more. I want to be filled with her.

“Put a finger inside,” I direct her.

She knows what I need. She pushes first one, then a second digit into my pussy. “Fuck it,” I tell her.

She begins slowly, gently, but I want more. Soon, she’s pistoning into pink yielding flesh, curling her fingers around, seeking my pleasure points.

“Oh, yeah.” I come on her pumping fingers like thunder rolling across the water. I come and come and come like water breaking in a sun gold-crimson tide on a California beach. I come to her, for her, with her until I’m washed away from New York, from this airport, from this loneliness.

* * *

By daylight, the airport stirred to life. Marilyn and I untangled and put ourselves back together. We kissed long and hard over a cup of coffee, not giving a fuck. By noon the ice on the runways capitulated to the salt, the ice on the wings submitted to torrents of de-icer and the airline personnel yielded to the mounting pressure to assign seats and get on with it.

Marilyn’s flight departed first. I walked her to her gate, held her hand and kissed her goodbye. I had a book signing in Chicago in a couple of months. Maybe then.

But as I watched the wings of her 727 glistening in the sunlight, I knew it wouldn’t be the same. Never again will the two of us be together for the first time in a dark place with only our passions and our vulnerabilities. Never again will the two of us surrender to each other like young girls carried off by pillaging Vikings.

I refused to wash my hands. At least there was that on the long flight home, her scent on my fingers. Until the next moment of surrender.

_______________

Ms. Orchid's mainstream fiction has appeared in Independence Boulevard and The Dekalb Literary Review. In addition, her erotic story, On Convention, has appeared at www.cleansheets.com and another erotic story, Taste of Love, has been accepted for publication in www.mindcaviar.com later this year. A sensualist, chef, and author, readers can visit her website at www.anightorchid.com.

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