Opposites Are More Fun

Sacchi Green

When your main characters are of the same sex, you have to differentiate them in other ways than by gender. In actual relationships similarities may be fine, even necessary, for permanent bonding, but in fiction characters with pronounced differences are much more fun to play with. Maybe not entirely opposites, but diverse enough to be bringing different things to the metaphorical table. Their differences could be complementary, as in one athletic and outgoing, one analytic and introspective, and together they solve…oh, wait, never mind, that's just in detective stories. Or they may be combative, from different sides of “the tracks,” or different cultures or political tribes, enemies at first sight, flint to steel, striking sparks. And then there are the power play ploys, dominant or submissive, master (or mistress) or slave, and then age differentials whether actual or another kind of play. And it goes without saying that in same sex arrangements one character may identify as masculine-of-center while the other is clearly of the femme persuasion.

*Edited--see note at the end.
Some of these differences matter the most during sex scenes, while others have as much effect on the development of the plot or story arc, but they're still equally essential to the story as a whole.  

Now I get to steer all this into my turn for promo! My latest book, Wild Rides and Other Erotic Adventures from Dirt Road Books, is a collection of some of my own work, both reprints and new (or new to most readers) stories. I’ve been posting ‘teaser” excerpts from some of them on Facebook and my blog, www.sacchi-green.blogspot.com, and I intend to do more, but right now I’ll see how far I can twist some of the stories into representing the attraction of opposites and what happens to them later.

Let’s see. I use this example too often, but in my story “Pulling” (which is included in the collection) the erotic charge is very much a matter of opposites. Ree is a big farm girl showing her draft horses at a county fair. Carla is a midway barker luring guys to her dart-and-balloon arcade concession with sultry banter, but with no intention of letting any guy get under her short skirt. When she and Ree get together at a cheap motel, Carla brings clamps and mardi gras beads from the balloon game, while Ree, who is also a veterinarian, brings a tube of horse lube. Vive la difference! What happens then? Carla disappears after their second night together. Not surprising. But there’s a two-years later sequel  in the collection, “Findng Carla,” that brings them together again, Ree more sexually experienced now, Carla with a desperate need for ordinary respectability. Here’s an excerpt:
_______________

Finding Carla
Sacchi Green

“Keep your skanky hands off me!” The words sliced through drifting aromas of coffee and pancakes and bacon. “Touch me again, and those fingers won’t be able to fuck your own sorry dick!”
I’d know that voice, that attitude, anywhere. A truck stop where Vermont slopes into New Hampshire wasn’t high on my list of places to look, but how much, really, had I ever known about Carla? Apart from the way she sounded in hip-swishing, femme-top command of any situation—or with her hips so entirely out of control she couldn’t shape gasps into words—or steeling herself to mount my huge draft horse. We hadn’t had much time for the getting-to-know-you parts.
I couldn’t see into the dining area past the family with fidgety kids ahead of me. Getting by without trampling them didn’t seem likely, but I was giving it a try anyway when a skinny whirlwind shot from around the cashier’s counter and whacked me from behind.
“Ree Daniels, move your butt!” The manager forged her way through the milling kids like an icebreaker. I was twice Lyddie Brown’s bulk and a foot taller, but I followed in her wake anyway.
It was Carla, all right, her pot of scalding coffee poised right above the hastily withdrawn hand—and the crotch—of a middle-aged truck driver I’d seen around before. On the skuzzy side, usually on the make, but Carla could’ve handled his kind in seconds with a sly quip, back when she’d been working arcade games on the county fair circuit.
Now her face and body were tense, brittle, close to panic. She looked as near to being spooked as any horse I’ve ever handled. What the hell had got into her? And what was she doing here?
It was my turn to shove Lyddie aside, with a look meant to convince her I knew what I was doing. “Hey, Carla.” I moved in close. “Let me help you out with that.” My hand curled around her fingers on the coffeepot’s handle. My body edged hers away from the customer. “Let’s put it down over here, okay?”
The wildness in her dark eyes mellowed into recognition, and something I hoped was deeper. That last morning, while I was still asleep, she’d cleared out without any clue as to how to find her, and for nearly two years I’d figured all she’d seen in me was just a hot enough two-night stand to pass the time with. If she’d thought that was all I’d seen in her, she’d been dead wrong. Okay, I lied about the getting-to-know-you bit. Two days and nights was enough for me to discover the vulnerability behind the bravado, the steel determination that overcame fear—and to want to know more.
“Sure,” she said now, “anything you say, big girl.” Her voice shook, but the old low, intimate tone was still there.
Remembered lust surged back in a rush. Carla had always radiated sparks of bad-girl eroticism. Even with her waves of black hair confined in a knot and her waitress uniform just skimming her curves, she shot off pheromones that could pierce a Humvee. I’d have felt some sympathy for the driver if he hadn’t started to bluster.
Lyddie rolled her eyes, jerked her head toward the office, and went into damage control mode.
I got Carla to the coffee station and deposited the hot pot. In spite of interested observers at every table, my hand settled into the sweet spot where waist curves to hip as I steered her into the office and kicked the door shut.
She was shivering when I put my arms around her. I’d never imagined Carla so shaken. Physically wary, sure—my big horses had scared her before she’d discovered the delights of naked bare-back riding at midnight—but nothing like this melt-down. “Oh, honey, what’s the trouble?” I used my soothing-skittish-fillies tone. “It’ll be all right.” I stroked her black hair, glossy as my Percherons. It came loose from its prim knot, falling into the wild mane I remembered whipping back and forth over my sweaty torso as she rode me.
“No it won’t,” she muttered against my chest. When her head lifted I saw that the glitter of tears in her eyes came as much from rage as from despair. It was oddly reassuring. “There goes another job! That bastard! But I can handle his kind without lifting a finger. Usually.” Carla searched her breast pockets. I took pity and grabbed the box of Kleenex from Lyddie’s desk.
I dabbed at her damp eyes. No makeup beyond a subdued shade of lipstick. She still exuded that seductive air that had grabbed me the first time I’d seen her, but something else as well that grabbed me harder, even as I shied away from examining it too closely. “So, what went wrong?”
“Me. I went wrong. ‘Sorry, I’m not on the menu’ didn’t do the trick, but I could’ve just smiled and moved away. When he put his hand on my butt, though, I felt…I wanted…dammit, Ree, I needed to be touched so bad it hurt, but not by his kind!”
I could recognize a mare in heat long before I earned my veterinary degree, and my experience of women had tuned me to the similarities. Women aren’t as easily ruled by their hormones as mares, though. For Carla to go off the deep end, there must be as much turmoil in her head as in her body. Dangerous territory.
Just the same, my hand went to her thigh and would have traveled farther if Lyddie hadn’t charged into the office just then.
Carla tried to pull away. I kept an arm around her shoulder. “How’s it going, Lyddie?” I hoped my grin still had the tomboy charm that used to get me extra pie as a kid. The manager had known me all my life, and my family even longer. We’d always stopped here when I was helping my dad transport horses to New Hampshire farms and fairs. The grin could have got me a whole lot more than pie if I’d been so inclined, once I’d grown up, cropped my straw-yellow hair short, and shown that I knew who I was and where I was going.
Lyddie looked us up and down, hands braced on hips, head shaking in exasperation. “Might’ve known you’d be acquainted. There’s gotta be an explanation behind this, but I don’t have the time or patience now.”
“It’s the old story,” I said. “Farm girl meets carnival huckster at the county fair. The Lancaster Fair year before last, when my team was in the pulling trials.” I realized too late that Carla might not have included the midway balloon/dart concession on her résumé.
“Judging by such a touching reunion, maybe you wouldn’t mind taking Miss Volcano-mouth off my hands for a couple of days until all this drama blows over.”
Carla stirred under my arm. “I’m sorry, Lyddie. I should just move on. Thanks for taking a chance on me, but I’ve always been bad news.”
I wanted to shake the old arrogance back into her. On the other hand, if it had been just a shield, I wanted to know what was behind it.
Lyddie softened. “You’re not bad, honey. You’re just drawn that way.”
Carla was right on it. “Thanks, Lyddie. Jessica Rabbit is my role model.”
“You’re a fine cashier and waitress,” Lyddie added. “Never did figure out what you’re doing in a place like this. You could make a lot more tending bar in the city or the tourist area over by Mt. Washington. At least bars have bouncers.”
Carla’d begun to relax, but now she tensed and glanced away from Lyddie. “Can’t blame a girl for wanting to try out respectability for a change.”
I was tired of being left out of the conversation. “If riding in the cab of a horse van rates as respectable, I’d be glad of the company. I’ll be back this way tomorrow or the next day. We’ll see how things look by then.”
“Just let me get out of this uniform and grab a few things.” Carla wriggled out of my grasp. Lyddie and I watched her go, both our gazes fixed on her slender back and swaying ass, both of us exhaling when she’d gone. But Lyddie’s sigh was somber.
“Can’t get a job at a bar these days without a background check,” she said. “A police record will shoot you right down. She’s a whiz with numbers, too, took some accounting courses she says, but the same goes there.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” But I knew.
_______________

The story ends with them together, but some rocky times ahead. I intend to take them through those in another story, still very different characters. You never know, maybe a novel will come of it.

Some of the other pieces in my collection concern opposites of one degree or another. A cowgirl from Montana with an equestrienne from Amsterdam; so far there’s only been a hint of future connection. A self-centered top-drawer model trying to break into movies, and a much older rock-climbing photographer who knows just how to give her what she needs to feel real; I’ve written three stories so far about those two, and there will probably be more.
Let me think. I guess the young future pirate and the dragon goddess in Ha Long Bay don’t count, or a perky boi with a fetish for gargoyles on a honeymoon trip to Paris with a gruff older butch.  Or the young army mechanic rescued from an explosion by an older Staff Sergeant who then becomes paralyzed going back to save someone else. Or the jeep jockey in Vietnam and the female journalist determined to cover the ”real war.” None of these really rate as opposites. And the pair of prison inmates who clash in more ways than one, a stone cutter unintentionally mixed up in a drug smuggling operation versus a former Russian Olympic wrestler hired as an enforcer by a Chechen drug lord in the US, are very much the same at heart, and not that far apart in body. There are other stories in the book, too, with pairings that aren’t exactly representative of opposites, but distinctive in their ways.

Opposites or not, though, I like to think that all of my characters are distinctive enough that a reader can tell by their dialogue which one is speaking. Opposites may not always be more fun, but at least you always know who is who.

* EDIT
Here's the stupid way I said this at first:
"Some of these differences matter more in erotica, while others play more of a role in stories with plots or story arcs. I like to think that my work qualifies as both. That’s probably a delusion, but usually I get away with it."
[I totally blew this part, in spite of being on a mission for years to promote erotica as being the equal of any genre in terms of complex characters, story development, creativity, and brilliant writing in general.]

Deadlines Whooshing By

Sacchi Green

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
Douglas Adams, in The Salmon of Doubt

Procrastination isn’t quite the same thing as inertia, but close enough, right? Objects in motion or at rest have inertia, the tendency to keep on exactly as they are unless something interferes. People (and for all I know, animals and plants) can be physically inert, and they can also be mentally and/or emotionally inert, but toss a deadline or some other time-related factor that should ideally interfere with inertia  into the equation, and we get procrastination. That resistance to getting moving or changing direction in order to get something done on time is thus a natural desire to remain inert.

Okay, my attempt to equate inertia and procrastination is pretty weak. We can procrastinate in one area and merrily charge ahead or from side to side in several others at the same time. Procrastination is selective inertia, the reluctance to move forward in some areas rather than others, even when what we’re avoiding is more important than what we’re doing instead. We can even want very much to accomplish a thing, or at least to have accomplished it, and still get bogged down in trivia. Determinedly, even obsessively, bogged down.

Yes, I admit it. When I say “we” procrastinate, I mean “I” procrastinate.  I’m not even talking about procrastination with regard to things I don’t want to do, like housework or difficult phone calls, but about what all of us here do want to do, which is to write. I know I’m not the only one, but I may be among the worst. If it weren’t e-mail and Facebook and endless “research,” it would be something else. No deadline looms with enough threat to get me focused on dealing with it until it’s very nearly too late, and sometimes it really is too late. As an editor, I haven’t yet failed to meet a contracted deadline for turning in an anthology manuscript, but neither have I managed it much before midnight on the final day. As a writer, I often miss deadlines, although I sometimes make good start when it’s too late, and if, as sometimes happens, a deadline is extended (I don’t ask for extensions myself) I can come through at the last minute. If not, well, I have a good start, and may manage to finish the next time a suitable market comes along. This is not, I know, how a professional writer behaves, and I feel guilty about it, but guilt isn’t enough to counter my inertia.

On the plus side (clutching at straws here,) as an editor I’m sympathetic to writers who ask for extensions, and in fact I figure time for that into my schedule (but don’t tell anybody or they may count on it.) Sometimes the stories I get that way are among the very best. There’s a good chance that someone who asks for an extension has finally got well underway with an idea worth pursuing, and inertia is no longer a factor. Most submissions arrive in the last couple of weeks before my deadline, which makes me a bit nervous as the time approaches, but I regard it as good planning. I’m absolutely in awe of those few who send me really fine work within the first couple of weeks, clearly written specifically for my theme (unlike the flurry of quick submissions just as clearly written unsuccessfully for some other anthology, although some of those turn out to be quite good.)

I hoped that by the time I got this far tonight (why yes, I procrastinated until Sunday night for my Monday post) I’d have come up with a graceful segue into mention of my two current Calls for Submission, but I’m coming up empty (as I so richly deserve) so I’ll get right to it. Let’s just think of this as a substitute for a story excerpt, since I can’t think of a story about inertia. It’s hard to make characters subject to inertia interesting to read about. In any case, here are links to my two sets of guidelines. No, wait, I’ll include one here in its entirety, and link to the other. Yes, procrastination can rattle the mind.

Here’s the one of most potential interest to erotica writers:

Thunder of War, Lightning of Desire: Lesbian Historical Military Erotica (Working Title)

Edited by Sacchi Green
Published by Lethe Press

More than six hundred women—most likely many more—passed as men to fight in the American Civil War, and that’s not counting the nurses and spies. In WWI women served as nurses and ambulance drivers, and in Russia Maria Boskareva’s Women’s Battalion of Death was not the only group of female fighters. By WWII women were ferrying fighter planes in the US and the UK, and in Russia the “Night Witches” flew bombers. For the nurses and WACs in the Korean and Vietnam Wars the front lines were everywhere, and the “long-haired army” on the Viet Cong side fought al least as fiercely as any men.

Give me stories about passionate women finding each other amidst the storm of war, coming together for comfort, driven by adrenaline and hormones, hurling their pleasure into the teeth of mortality. From the nurses with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea to those with MASH units in Korea and Vietnam, from female soldiers taking shelter behind stone walls at Chancellorsville to French Resistance operatives trysting behind haystacks in Normandy, from any military conflict anywhere between 1850 and the 1970s, find a period you can be passionate about, research it until you know it more intimately than you remember yesterday, and write characters and a plot and fiery sex that can sweep readers right along with them. Diversity of characters is more than welcome.

I’ll only be taking a few stories from each time period, sometimes even just one, so feel free to tell me what you’re working on so I can tell you whether too many others are doing something similar. Inquiries are advisable, but not mandatory. Historical accuracy counts, and so do originality and intensity and all those elements we need to see in the best erotic fiction. Give me brief encounters or lifetime commitments even when life is in the balance; desperate embraces or dark humor; whatever your characters need to get them through the night, and through the war.  Know your history as well as your characters, and write a story as intriguing as it is steamy.

The preferred story length is between 3000 and 6000 words. Payment will be from $50 to $150, depending on length, and two copies of the paperback. The deadline is April 30, 2015. Queries are welcome; contact me at sacchigreen@gmail.com

Here’s where to find the other one, which is romance, not erotica, but still with historical elements:

http://sacchi-green.blogspot.com/2014/12/another-new-cfs-for-lesbian-historical.html 

Now I have to overcome inertia and get myself off to bed. I have a couple of difficult phone calls to make early in the morning, and procrastination is not an option.

Faraway Places, Faraway Times

Sacchi Green

Long ago, as a kid, I dreamed of traveling around the world, living in very different places, seeing people and countries like the ones I encountered in my voracious reading. The India of Kipling. The China of Pearl Buck. The Thailand of Anna and the King of Siam. Yes, I realized later that everything I’d read was written by European observers. Europe and the UK were closer, but seemed just as entrancing; the England of Jane Austen and Sherlock Holmes, the France of Colette’s Claudine at School. Yes, I realized even at the time that it wasn’t just faraway places I craved, but faraway times.

Thinking about places that inspire me, though… That’s a different matter. I’ve written several stories set in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where I have a cabin retreat beside a river that flows down from Mt. Washington, so I could truthfully say that I was inspired by that region.

But there’s another place, one I’ve tried harder to describe in writing than any other. One that defies description. The Grand Canyon is as much a place in time as in space. I’ve only been there three times, but dreamed of it long before that, ever since my favorite aunt gave me a subscription to the magazine Arizona Highways when I was about twelve. None of that excuses my presumption in using it as a setting for erotica, but after all, the Canyon doesn’t care. It just is.

Here’s a series of excerpts from my story “Bright Angel,” published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2007 (Cleis Press) and again in my collection A Ride to Remember (Lethe Press). I hope it’s not too disjointed this way to make any sense, but I tried to pick the passages most related to the setting.
_____

 Bright Angel
Sacchi Green

Maura lounged against the railing, gazing out over the vast, bright gulf of stone dropping away at her feet. Dark sunglasses masked her green eyes, and those famous waves of long chestnut hair were tied down by a Hermes scarf rippling in the breeze. "Are you trying to tell me all this was carved by that little trickle of a river?”

In spite of her studied nonchalance, I could tell she was as awestruck as any other tourist.  "The Colorado's wider than it looks from this distance. And it was carrying billions of grains of rasping sand over millions of years." I didn't look toward the river at all, gazing only at Maura's slim, vivid form. The view of the Grand Canyon from Mather Point had gripped me often enough over the years, and I had photographed it for many a magazine and guidebook, but long ago I'd come to terms with the inability of the human mind to fully comprehend its grandeur. Comprehending Maura, however, might still be within my grasp.
***
Did I even know who she was any more?
"Hey Roby," Maura said, without turning her head, "Too bad you don't have the balls to fuck me right here." Oh yeah. I still knew exactly who she was. "If you'd had the foresight to wear a skirt," I told her, "You'd be bent over that railing right now praying you could hold on long enough to ride my fist to glory." I pressed closer and reached around to unzip the fly of her elegantly cut jeans. "You could still drop your trousers and make all these amateur photographers rich on sales to the tabloids. Or you can let it simmer a while, and I'll fuck you somewhere even better."
***
While I checked in at Bright Angel Lodge, Maura watched the tourists signing up to ride down the nearby Bright Angel Trail tomorrow morning. Even in April, well before the high season, there was heavy traffic along the route. This late in the afternoon we wouldn't have had long to wait to see the mule train returning from the river at the bottom of the canyon, four-fifths of a mile straight down and eight miles of switch-backing trail below, but I had no intention of waiting. Our cabin out behind the Lodge perched close to the edge, with just room for a narrow path and a wind-gnarled pinõn pine between its wall and the canyon's rim. Even a year ahead of time it had taken luck and the pulling of few strings to get the reservation.
***
The furnishings were of comfortably updated 1930s craft design, highlighting natural wood tones and artistically simple lines. The stone fireplace incorporated specimens of all the different rock strata revealed by the river's carving of the canyon, from pre-Cambrian black Vishnu Schist to the Kaibab Limestone of recent millennia. The platform bed was modern, wide, and inviting. Maura prodded the mattress with a manicured finger, sat on the edge, then lay back. She eyed me speculatively.

"You must need to rest a while after your trip," I said with exaggerated solicitude. "Go ahead, take it easy. I understand." I began to unpack, hanging things in the closet, watching for her next move. She got up and started to unbutton her shirt. Not a bad idea. The day was getting hot. So was I, but I wasn't ready to take her deceptive bait. Maura is never that easy.

My own bait was more subtle. I moved into the living room, pulled open the curtains of the window beside the fireplace, and crossed to the far side to set my cameras and equipment out on a table. Maura followed.  I didn't let her catch me watching, but she knew I could see her in the mirror as she shed her jacket and peeled off a tank top damp with sweat. She hadn't bothered with a bra. Then, to enhance the temptation, she turned around to present a rear view while wriggling out of her jeans. Her lovely ass-cheeks paused in mid-wriggle as she saw the view presented by the wide window.

The vista, tinted gold and copper by the late afternoon sun, was breathtaking. Maura gripped her loosened jeans tightly and edged past chairs and coffee table to gaze out, spellbound. It was the same scene she had surveyed from the rim outside, but somehow intensified, made more personal, more deceptively comprehensible, by the framing effect of the window. From inside it looked as though the cabin extended right out over the shining void.
***
I gathered her thick chestnut hair in my fist and yanked her head back. "Surprise, my knees aren't all that decrepit yet," I hissed into her ear, and brought my right one hard up against her ass. She jerked, but spread her legs to let me thrust between her thighs and nudge into her crotch.  "You wonder how the river carves a canyon through rock?" I asked. "You think you're stone? Haven't I cut my petroglyphs into you?" My other hand worked its way around to her belly and slid down to her shaved pubic mound. The scars I'd given her, where even bikini photo spreads wouldn't reveal them, were too shallow for my fingertips to find like this, but I knew they were there; four tiny, curving lines forming a delicate circle like a secret mandala, cut by the business end of an ice-climbing screw.

"I suppose you think the water always flows gently, smoothly, taking forever to wear away resistance." My fingers moved lower, stroking gently, too gently, over her clit and lush outer lips. "Working down through layer after layer, " I went on, going deeper, sliding back and forth in her growing slickness, keeping it up slowly, slowly, as the silk gag muffled her accelerating whimpers of demand. When she arched into my touch, desperate for more, harder, faster, I drew my fingers away and approached from the other side, starting with long strokes down between her buttocks and into the tender strata of her soaking crotch.  "But sometimes storms batter at the rocks, and spring floods from mountain snowmelt surge through the ravines." I was really getting into it now. "The water pounds, thrashes, filled with sharp silt and uprooted trees." I raised my hand suddenly to the nape of her neck, still holding her hair roughly back. The scent of her juices on my fingers roused my own..  ***
I spread my fingers then and slapped hard, again and again, marking her buttocks with red hand prints like the marks on the walls of ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings far below in the Canyon. Suddenly Maura lurched backward, pushing off from the window sill, nearly toppling me. I lifted her just enough to swing her around and then dropped her hard onto the Navajo rug in front of the fireplace. In the seconds it took for me to get a latex glove from my pocket onto my hand she had torn off her gag and kicked her pants free of her ankles, and now she crouched, long hair falling forward to veil her face, her butt lifted toward me and her swollen labia exposed.  "Do it!" she snarled, so ready that there was no need for lube. I thrust into her, slid out, thrust again, and then she was pumping herself onto me, heaving, panting, her cries rising higher as my other hand pinched her nipples. When the spasms struck, tightening her cunt around my hand and wrist like a trap, I supported her until her grip finally loosened and I could withdraw, gently, holding her wide open for a few seconds and admiring her glistening folds. "Dusky rose," I said softly, "Like the sandstone layers of the canyon wall at dawn."

Maura whispered something I could barely hear. I leaned closer. "Was this the 'better place' you had in mind?" "No," I said honestly, not sure whether she was working up to another challenge. "This was just an opportunity seized. You'll know when you get there."

And she did.  It wasn't along the rim trail or at any of the famous points where cameras clustered, not even Pima Point at sunset when the river winding far below to the west turned briefly into a ribbon of gold. It wasn't the moonlit vista of the canyon as we leaned together against a spreading branch of the pinõn pine outside our own cabin. It wasn't anyplace that easy.

We were up at dawn the next morning, breakfasting on the Bright Angel Lodge terrace. "Why 'Bright Angel?'" Maura asked.  I told her about Major John Wesley Powell's exploration of the Colorado River, and the story that after his men named one muddy incoming stream the Dirty Devil, the Major had compensated by dubbing the first clear creek they came to Bright Angel, flowing down from the north to join the river across from what later became Bright Angel Trail. I thought, watching Maura's beautiful face, as luminescent in its own way as the morning light suffusing the mist rising from far below, that he must also have been thinking of Lucifer before the Fall, Milton's "angel bright" of Paradise Lost.

Or, just possibly, he had known someone like Maura.
***
"Just a little farther," I said, urging her past the spring, its fringe of greenery lively with small birds. "We'll fill our water bottles on the way back." A hundred feet off the trail, through a crevice between boulders, we were on a narrow shelf out of sight of passing climbers at our own level. Our view of sky and rock seemed as wide as infinity, and hikers and rafters deep in the Canyon could see us easily if they looked up; see us, but not clearly enough even with binoculars to recognize Maura's features from past magazine spreads or future appearances on the big screen.

Maura stood with her arms outstretched like wings and her back to the cliff. Just above her head a twisted juniper grew out from a cleft in the rock, casting a tracery of shadows across her face. "This is the place," she said with certainty. "Right here. Right now."  I drew a wet trail with my tongue along her dusty cheek and kissed her, for once, gently. For once, she allowed the tenderness, kissing back with more sensuality than challenge. Maybe wearing her out was the secret. Or did the vastness of the world spread out before us make petty conflict seem too insignificant? More likely, it was just that she had grander things on her mind than private games.

"Roby...do you think anyone is watching?" Her fingers scrabbled in haste at the buttons of her shirt, and when she'd cast it aside and yanked off the tank top beneath, she went to work on the silver Navajo belt buckle purchased just yesterday. Sunlight glinted from its highly polished surface like spears of fire.

"I'd bet there are at least a dozen pairs of binoculars and as many cameras aimed right up there," I told her, pointing out the peregrine falcon riding the breeze above us, undoubtedly watching for one of the small birds by the spring to stray from the sheltering shrubbery. "And now that you've been wriggling hard enough to flash signals from that silver mirror sliding down along with your pants, most of them must be checking you out, and calling their buddies to look, too."

Maura kicked aside her jeans and raised her arms. Her fingers could just grasp the gnarled trunk of the juniper. "Tie me," she said.  I pulled the bandanna loose from her hair. A twist around slender wrists and up over the juniper, and she was bound just far enough out from the cliff for me to slide behind her and press my thigh hard up against her butt, bending my knee slightly, taking some of her weight. That juniper must have been clinging to life here for a hundred years or more; I hoped to spare its roots for another hard-won century, in spite of her thrashing. And she would thrash.

"So show them what you've got, girl," I muttered in her ear as I pulled on a latex glove. I'm not sure she even heard me. Her focus was far out over the bright canyon, past labyrinthine ravines and spurs and phallic turrets carved by water, wind, and time. The sharp pinch of my fingers on her breasts grabbed her attention, though, and over her shoulder I watched pink nipples swell and darken into nubbled peaks as wildly beautiful as any rock formation.
_____

To tell the truth, I am a bit ashamed of using the Canyon like this. But after a bookstore reading a few years ago a young man, a beginning writer, came to me afterward and thanked me, saying he’d never realized you could do all that in erotica. So there’s that.

“Bright Angel” is the second of three stories I’ve written about these characters. The third one, “Meltdown,” takes place in my other inspirational place, the Mount Washington Valley, and has just recently been published in Don’t Be Shy from Ylva Publishing.

Below and Behind--All the Things, Things, Things

Sacchi Green

There’ve been just a few nights lately when I’ve been able to go to bed pretty sure I’d done all the things that had to be done that day. Just a few nights. Not tonight.

Selling my father’s house has suddenly become real, and hectic, with a buyer and all sorts of requirements to be met in a fairly short time. And all the stuff to be sorted through! Next week, the septic system inspection, and the house having been built 64 years ago, I’m sure the regulations now are much different than they were, if any, then. Something expensive will have to be done. And today, searching for the kind of smoke-plus-carbon-monoxide detectors that the fire department requires has been somewhat harrowing. No simple battery-powered ones these days; I’ll have to get an electrician to connect them, assuming the aging electrical system is even compatible. And I’ve lost the key to my father's bank deposit box (that I looked through just a couple of months ago) so I’m waiting for the bank to set up an appointment with a locksmith to bore through the lock, and that will be expensive too. Just papers inside the box, but some that I’ll need for the house sale, and some of great interest in terms of the family history.

Oh, and when I got back from the smoke-detector search, I found that the bear had returned while I was away, and taken down the bird-feeder post.

Serves me right, all of it. It’ll all work out eventually, including the emotional chaos. Maybe, in spite of all the driving back and forth, I'll even get my garden all planted before it's too late. But I’m feeling more Below and Behind than Above and Beyond. Not good to write about.

So clearly it’s story-excerpt time! What could be farther Above and Beyond than heroism in battle? Here goes an excerpt from one of my favorite stories, “Sgt. Rae,” originally published in Kristina Wright’s Duty and Desire, reprinted in Best Lesbian Romance 2013, and some time this year or next to be reprinted in a collection of my work which, in spite of all my warnings as to why they shouldn’t do it and how badly collections (and erotica in general) sell these days, is going to be published by Dirt Road Books.

____________

Sgt. Rae

By Sacchi Green

Sgt. Rae was so strong she could carry me at a run through gunfire and smoke and exploding mines. Two years later, she’s that strong again. With just one hand she can keep me from getting away, no matter how hard I struggle. Even her voice is enough to stop me at a dead run, so it doesn’t matter that she can’t run any more. And anyway, I’d never want to run away.
I’m smaller, but I’ve got my own kind of muscle, even if it doesn’t show. A mechanic in an armored tank unit has to be strong just to handle the tools you need, and if you’re a woman doing the job you need a whole extra layer of strength. I’m not an army mechanic any more, but I can still use tools; Sgt. Rae isn’t an army Sgt. any more, but she’ll always be in charge. At the town hall where she’s the police and fire department dispatcher, they tell me she’s got the whole place organized like it’s never been before.
In our house, or in the town, I’m supposed to just call her Rae these days, and mostly I remember. I’m just Jenny. In the bedroom, we don’t need names at all, except to wake each other when the bad dreams come, and whisper that everything’s all right now. Or close enough to handle, as long as we’re together.
Out here, though, on this trail I’ve made through the woods and across the stream, we play by my rules, and that means I’m Specialist 2nd Brown and she’s the ball-buster Staff Sergeant, even though neither of us has any use for balls.
She’ll be coming along the trail behind me any minute, coming to see what new contraption I’ve constructed. What she expects is something like the exercise stations I’ve built for her into every room in the house, chinning bars and railings and handgrips at different levels, and in a way that’s right, but with a different twist. She expects I’ll want her to order me to drop and do fifty push-ups or sit-ups, or run in place until I’m panting, but this time I want something else.
I check the gears and pulleys one more time, even though I already know the tension is set right. It’s my own tension that’s nearly out of control. The posts and crossbars are rock-solid, while I’m shaking in my old fatigues, so nervous and horny that I can’t even tell which is which.
I hear the motor now. I could’ve made it run quieter, but if you’ve been where I’ve been, where we’ve both been, you want to be sure you know who’s coming around the bend.
She’s crossed the rocky ford in the stream where no regular wheelchair could have gone. I salvaged tracks from old snowmobiles at the repair shop where I work, and they’re as good as any armored tank tracks, even though they’re made of Kevlar instead of steel. Fine for this terrain, and even the steel kind got chewed up in the desert sand in Iraq.
Mustn’t think about the desert now. Here in New Hampshire, green leaves overhead are beginning to turn orange and red. This stream flows into a river just beyond our house, and we can watch canoes and kayaks pass by; no desert in sight. This is home. We’re together. Safe. Except that safe isn’t always enough, when you’ve known—had to know—so much more.
Now I hear Sgt. Rae veering back and forth through the obstacle course, steering the mini-tank around trees, stumps, boulders, right over small logs. With a double set of the tracks on each side, the only way to steer is by slowing one side while accelerating the other, and that takes strength. I think of her big hands on the levers, the bunched muscles of her arms and shoulders, even stronger now than in the army because she insists on a manually powered chair anywhere but in these woods. Gloves help, but her hands get calloused from turning the wheels. Calloused, and rough, even when she tries to be gentle… Anticipation pounds through my body.  
 I kneel on the ground, close my eyes, try to clear my mind—but on the distant bridge over the river a truck backfires, and in spite of the leafy dampness the desert flashes around me again, the clouds of dust, the explosions, the machine gun fire on that final day. I think of Sgt. Rae’s powerful voice, how it cut through the pain and confusion and kept me breathing when I didn’t think I could last another second. “Brown!” she bellowed, again and again, coming closer to where the shattered truck cab trapped me. “Brown, damn you, report!” That sound gripped me, forced strength into me, so that I moved, just a little, no matter how much it hurt, and she found me.
I never remember what happened next. I don’t think Sgt. Rae does, either, but somebody told me later they found a bent assault rifle barrel nearby, and maybe she levered the truck cab up enough with that to drag me out. I just remember being slung over her shoulder, feeling her run and swerve and run some more, and hearing her voice drilling right through to my heart in a tone I’d never heard before. “Jenny, Jenny…hang on…”
Right then, with bullets still screaming around us, it was like I’d died and waked up to a new world. Ever since the day we met, Sgt. Rae had mesmerized me, obsessed me, and I’d worked to hide my foolish longings behind hard work and casual jokes and chatter. But in that moment, as her strong voice shook, a window opened in the midst of hell and gave me a glimpse of a heaven better than anything they’d ever preached about in church.
I passed out when she set me down behind a sand bunker some of our guys had piled up in a hurry. Maybe I heard somebody say another soldier was still out there, or maybe I just heard later how she went back into that hell. Either way, I know she went.
It was a month before I saw Sgt .Rae again. I was still bandaged but up and walking. She wasn’t. At first, when I stood beside the hospital bed, I wondered whether she was really there at all, inside, until she saw me.
“Jenny?”
I could scarcely hear the word. But then strength came back into her voice, and the power I’d always felt surrounding her was there again as though a light had been switched on. “Specialist Brown, report!”
So I did, listing my injuries and treatments and recovery, even though her half-smile softened the formal order. Later, when she’d had her meds and fallen asleep, I pumped the nurses about her injuries and prognosis, and from that day I was never away from her for more than a few hours. There were some rough parts, and sometimes I had to be the strong one to get her through. A nurse or two caught on that there was more to it than just that she’d saved my life, but they never made any fuss. It helped that I could fix mechanical glitches in the orthopedic ward’s equipment, and even make some things work better than originally designed; I think somewhere along the line they claimed me as an adjunct physical therapy technician.
____________

Hey, look, I’ve finished my blog! That’s one thing done today, at least.

High Anxiety

Sacchi Green

Sometimes writing what you know is the last thing you want to do, and the last thing people want to read. I’ll tack on a short story excerpt at the end of this, so feel free to skip to that if you’d like. The story is from an historical anthology coming out later this year, and is about PTSD (or shell-shock as it was called during WWI), which may or may not qualify as angst, but is probably close enough.

 First, though, before the story excerpt, here's my write-what-you-know tale of angst, or something like it.

I’m not sure how different angst is from common anxiety—maybe an upscale, existential form. In any case, I have all too much of both for comfort. There are valid reasons for my anxiety, but when it extends into unrelated areas of life, becoming the default setting of one’s mood, I think we’re pretty much in angst territory. Situational angst, if that’s even a thing.

I’m not really that badly off, except when I’m semi-awake and it isn’t really quite morning and my defenses are down and I still need more sleep but worries both genuine and imagined get tangled together in dreams that feel too real. Daytimes, most of the time, I cope with whatever needs coping with, which right now means writing about angst.

In a stroke of serendipitous coincidence, I just came this bit of information in a local newspaper, a welcome aid to putting off getting personal:  

“Research suggests that anxiety is at least partly temperamental. A recent study of 592 Rhesus monkeys found that some of them responded more anxiously than others and that as much as 30 per cent of early anxiety may be inherited. Yet what is inherited is the potential for anxiety, not anxiety itself.”

How can they tell that a trait like anxiety is inherited rather than learned unless they separate the youngsters from their parents? And wouldn’t doing so quite naturally cause anxiety? Well, never mind. Let’s not get anxious about those poor baby monkeys.

Back to the hereditary theory. My mother was always on the pessimistic side, apparently in the philosophical belief that it was better to expect the worst so that it wouldn’t take you by surprise. That’s not to say that she was always in a state of anxiety, but especially in her later years she went out of her way to find things to worry about. She’d answer my phone calls, even those she was expecting and knew to be on benign topics, with a lugubrious, “What’s wrong?” (I don’t ever recall telling her anything was wrong over the phone.) In her last several years, when her health was declining and there were real things to worry about, she accepted her own condition fairly calmly, but worried all the more about other family members and various other factors. When I semi-kidded her about some really far–fetched idea, she admitted it, but said with a bit of a laugh that worrying was her hobby. “What else do I have to occupy me?”

I have plenty to occupy me, but lately I find myself getting uptight with far-fetched (but not impossible) worries. If family or friends are traveling I’m on edge until I know they’re safely home. My granddaughter is the light of my life, but as soon as she was born I thought of her as another hostage of fate. I think my mother did, too. Well, if anxiety is hereditary, I hope we haven’t passed it on to that next generation.

I’m not obsessed with worries all the time, or if I am, it’s more of an undercurrent. I don’t have a real claim to angst. I’m sitting beside a swift mountain stream right now, enjoying my surroundings, pleased to have harvested at least two gallons of wild blueberries in the last three days, plus a bountiful crop of wild golden chanterelle mushrooms, one of the kinds you can find in Whole Foods, but mine are much fresher, and free.

Life is, on the whole, good. Even when death has to be taken into account. A week from next Saturday I’ll be taking my ninety-five-year-old father for a PETscan, one more test for what looks right now as probably, but not quite conclusively, lung cancer. He knows this. He’s still quite sharp, just a bit on the forgetful side. He tells doctors that I come with him because of his poor hearing, but we both know it’s just as much so that I can remember and keep track of what’s going on. It’s also because he isn’t driving any more, thank goodness!

I know how lucky I’ve been to be on good terms with my parents, and how remarkably lucky I’ve been for them to live so long. My mother made it to ninety-three. What we’re dealing with now usually happens to people far sooner, and is a natural phase of life. But it’s never easy. Uncertainties, tough decisions to be made, questions that can’t be fully answered. If he does have lung cancer, we have to think in terms of how much arduous treatment would be worth it, and what the prognosis would be with treatment or without it. If it turns out that he doesn’t have cancer, he still has recent and worsening breathing problems, even though his health in most other ways is remarkably good considering his age. He was heroic in taking care of my mother the last while before she had to be in a nursing home for care, and he visited her there every single day. (My brothers and I made sure one of us went with him three or four days a week.) But he has a horror of being in a nursing home situation himself. He has so far resisted living with me, an hour or so away from where he lives now and where I grew up, or at an assisted living place near me, but those options are open to him. He wants to stay in the home he shared with my mother, with friends nearby, his church, his twice-a-week bridge games at the senior center.

I want whatever is best for him. I worry about what is best for him. I’m the one he depends on, and however much I worry in those early morning hours when I need to sleep but can’t, and often in the earlier night hours when I’m first trying to get to sleep, I’ll cope with whatever needs coping with. Anxiety is a natural phase of life, too, a repeating one.

Now for the story excerpt. This will be in Through the Hourglass, one of the three anthologies I’ve been editing lately, and isn’t actually erotica, although I’m tempted to expand on it sometime in the future and include the steamy bits I know are there between the lines later in the piece.

Crossing Bridges
Sacchi Green

Upstream the river riffled over stony outcroppings, but under the bridge it ran deep and clear.  Reggie leaned over the wooden railing and stared down into those amber-green depths, willing herself to see only the great speckled trout balanced in perfect stillness against the current. An ordinary Midlands English stream, all green shadow and shimmering sunlight and blue reflected sky. Just a big fish. Yet she could not block out visions of bodies submerged in other streams flowing ever redder with blood through the ravaged countryside of France, until they reached the Somme. Even the songs of birds in flight, spilling over with rapture, warped in her mind into cries for help, help that could never be enough.

"Shell-shock," the doctors might say, but it scarcely mattered what one called it. Pure, searing grief, not war itself—though war would have been enough—had breached her defenses. Grief for Vic. For herself without Vic.
             
Reggie's hands tightened to the point of pain on the railing. By what right did England bask in such a May morning, calm and lovely, while over there artillery’s thunder still shook the fields, and men rotted in muddy trenches? How could she bear to stand idle in the midst of such peace when her place was over there, even…even with Vic gone? All the more with Vic gone.
 
But she must adjust, must let the peace of home heal her—not that anywhere felt like home now. Or ever could again, without Vic. If Reggie could prove herself recovered, not just from her physical injuries but those of the spirit--capable once more, normal, clear-minded--they just might send her back to the war.  An experienced ambulance driver, strong as most men, skilled at repairing motorcars and field-dressing wounded men; here in pastoral England she was of no use, but over there she was desperately needed.

Reggie straightened abruptly, trying to focus on the tender green of new leaves, the glint of sunlight on the flitting gold and peacock blue of dragonflies. She shook herself like a retriever emerging from deep water.

“Don’t move!”

The low, terse command froze her in mid shake.

“There’s a nest…” The voice came from below, less peremptory now, but Reggie’s mind raced. A machine gun nest? She fought the impulse to drop to the wooden planks of the bridge. Surely not gunners, not here. A nest of wasps?
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” The speaker was almost whispering. “It’s just that swallows are nesting below you on the supports of the bridge, and I’ve been sketching them, but they get uneasy when you move so suddenly and might leave the eggs.”

A flush of fury heated Reggie’s face. Forced to the verge of panic by some silly schoolgirl! She bent over the wooden railing, an angry shout surging into her throat, and saw, first, a head of tousled light brown hair cut short about the ears. A schoolboy, then! All the worse! “WHAT do you bloody mean—“

The artist looked up. The remainder of Reggie’s words halted, burning like mustard gas in her mouth.

Not a boy. Not a child at all, though she might have been taken for one if it weren’t for tiny lines at the corners of mouth and eyes, and a certain look in those eyes that spoke of a share of pain in her life; rather like what Reggie saw in her own when she was careless enough to look in a mirror. Her hair was really no shorter than Vic’s pale curls had been in France, and Reggie’s own dark thatch had been cropped a good deal shorter then, a necessity in the filth and chaos of battlefields. She realized uneasily that it was about time she cut it again. Five months in hospital had left it just long enough to tie back in a straggly knot, which she would have hated if she had cared in the least about appearance these days.

“I really am terribly sorry,” the woman said. “I shouldn’t have startled you like that. I get too engrossed in what I’m working on; it’s my besetting sin. One of them, at any rate.” A flashing smile turned her rather ordinary face into something quite different, almost enchanting, in the elven manner of an illustration from a fairy tale. “You must be Lady Margaret’s cousin, and this is her bridge, so really you’ve much more right here than I. We’d heard you were spending the summer with her. I’m Emma Greening from downstream at Foxbanks.” She stood from her perch on a mossy rock and made as if to extend a hand, then realized that she couldn’t possibly reach up to where Reggie stood and withdrew it in some confusion. “Just a second and I’ll climb out of here with my gear.“

Reggie found her voice, or at least a version of it just barely suitable for the occasion. The hoarseness couldn’t be helped. Vic had claimed to quite like what being a little too slow to get her gas mask on had done to her tone.

“No, you can go on sketching. I was about to move along at any rate.” Emma Greening…what had Margaret said about her? Something, in all that chatter about the local population, something about being an artist, but Reggie had paid no attention to any of it. No one in this dull, placid, countryside mattered to her.

Now she wondered just how much Margaret had told the local population about her. Or how much Margaret herself understood.

“I should be going myself,” Emma said. “I can sketch swallows in my sleep—it was the bridge itself I wanted to catch in a certain light, and I think I have enough now to be going on with.” She packed her sketchbook and paint box into a satchel slung over her shoulder, and stepped from the rock onto the steep riverbank.

“Here, I’ll give you a hand with that.” Reggie heard the brusqueness in her own voice, and couldn’t quite erase the remnants of her angry frown, but found herself reaching down from the top of the riverbank without remembering how she’d got there. Emma’s sun-browned hand met hers in a firm grip, and she was up the slope so quickly and easily that it was clear she hadn’t needed any help at all.

“Thanks. I’ll be getting along now, and I do apologize for disturbing you.” Her smile now was merely polite.

This would be as good a time as ever to practice behaving normally, Reggie thought. Best to scotch any gossip about her being a bit odd. “Don’t leave on my account, Miss…Greening, is it? I’m Regina Lennox. Make that Reggie. Sketch here all you like. I’m the one who should apologize for being such a troll when you startled me.”

Emma’s smile flashed brilliantly again. “A troll? How funny that you’d say that! This is indeed a perfect troll bridge, which is why I was sketching it, for a book I’m illustrating. A children’s story, the one with the three goats.”

“Trip, trap, trip, trap over the bridge?”

“That’s the one,” Emma confirmed. “For now I wanted to get the bridge itself, rustic and charming, with the swallows, and that wren darting in and out of the bittersweet vines on the other side—she must have a nest there—and the clump of purple orchis just where the bridge meets the bank. All lovely and peaceful before the goats or troll appear. A lull before the storm sort of thing.”

“So the troll got here prematurely.” There was something comfortably familiar about the conversation.

Emma tilted her head, surveying Reggie with mock seriousness. “No, I wouldn’t cast you as the troll, exactly. In any case, I was the one below the bridge, or nearly so, so I’m a better candidate for trolldom.” She leaned her head the other way with a frown of concentration belied by a twitching at the corners of her mouth. “I see you more as the biggest Billy Goat Gruff, stern, shaggy, putting up with no nonsense from any troll.”

“Certainly shaggy…” Reggie stopped short. Memory hit her like an icy blast. Vic used to tease her, rumpling her hair when it got shaggy and needed cutting, calling her a troll—often followed by, ‘Well, get on with it, you slouch, kiss me if you’re going to!’ She felt her face freeze into grim stillness, bracing against the familiar onslaught of grief.

Emma stepped back. “Sorry again,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “I have such a bad habit of blurting outrageous things without thinking.”

“It’s not you,” Reggie got out, but no more words would come.

 “I really should be going now, anyhow.” Emma said quickly. “I’ll just leave you in peace.  I expect we’ll run across each other in the village from time to time.”

Reggie watched in silence as Emma picked up the bicycle lying beside the lane, settled her art supplies in the canvas panniers at the back, mounted it, and rode away. Her divided skirt revealed a brief glimpse of quite nice lisle-stockinged calves above sturdy boots—and a smudge of moss stain where she’d been sitting on the rock.

So much for behaving normally! Reggie’s spasm of grief was subsiding, and she wished she could call Emma back, but the bicycle had disappeared around a bend edged with dense shrubbery. And what could she have said? “I froze up because you reminded me of someone.” Which wasn’t even true. Emma didn’t particularly resemble Vic. It was more the light, pleasant conversation, the brief exchange of banter…

Ah. That was it. Just as the rehabilitation counselor had said, but Reggie had resisted. Guilt. Survivor’s guilt, they called it. Why should she be the one to survive? How could she deserve, or accept, even the least bit of pleasure?

Well, she had enjoyed herself, if only for a few minutes. Maybe that was a sign of healing. She rubbed her hands across her eyes, then turned back to the bridge. A swallow darted under the arch, and a second bird took flight from the nest on the wooden underpinnings while the first took over hatching duty. On the far side a wren darted in and out between clusters of tiny white flowers on a trailing tangle of vines—bittersweet, Emma had called it. A small butterfly speckled like polished tortoiseshell flitted between masses of ferns on the upper bank. Emma would probably know what it was called.

It occurred to Reggie that this side of the bridge was the farthest she’d been from Margaret’s house since she’d come here, and also that it must be close to time for lunch. A quick sound in the water and a spreading ring of ripples showed that the trout concurred, and had snatched a mayfly from the surface.

She went back across the bridge, pausing to look down into the water. Only when she was well along the lane did she realize that her mind had played no tricks this time, and she’d seen only the river, and the fish, and reflections of a swallow in flight.
__________




     

Midsummer Moonlight and "A Dance of Three Queens"

Sacchi Green

I’ve known about The Nobilis Erotica Podcast (“The Most Prolific Science Fiction and Fantasy Erotica Podcast in the Known Universe”--nobilis.libsyn.com) for a long time, and finally got around to submitting a few stories. Reprints are permitted, although a podcast isn’t exactly printed, so maybe “reprint” isn’t the right term. In any case, I sent three, the maximum allowed at once. The Podcast is specifically for erotic speculative fiction short stories, and I certainly have some of those, but it turned out to be harder than I’d expected to choose some that seemed likely to fit.

It was even tougher than I’d thought. The “first reader” got back to me very quickly, and turned down the two I’d thought most likely to work. “Freeing the Demon” is too close to horror for their purposes, which I should have realized; after all, the demon trapped in a stone gargoyle does eat several bad guys in the course of the story. And “Jessebel,” an old-West vampire story, took too long to get to the actual sex. Too much story up front. Okay. Good to know. The third story, though, was passed along as a borderline possibility. The reader said she couldn’t quite decide which side of the border it belonged on, but if she didn’t pass it along, she thought she’d keep reading it over and over to try to figure out why it was borderline. And it was accepted!

This story is one I wrote many years ago, for Best Transgender Erotica, edited by Hanne Blank and Raven Kaldera for Circlet Press. “A Dance of Queens” is quite an odd story, actually, set in Elizabethan/Shakespearean England on the Lord Chancellor’s country estate where A Midsummer Night’s Dream is being produced. The three main characters are the actors who play Queen Titania and Queen Hippolyta, and Queen Elizabeth herself, nostalgic for her youth when she might roam free in disguise through Midsummer revelries. I thought this one might be too story-heavy, too, but apparently I spread the various kinds of erotic action and allusion thickly enough that it worked, and it also covers various twists and turns of gender complexity, more than you might at first suspect.

Let’s see whether I can fit in enough excerpts here to give you a proper—or improper—taste of the whole.

From “A Dance of Queens”
Sacchi Green

Midsummer’s Night, the play safely done, dusk sweet as a languorous touch on yearning flesh...and still I could not take my love into the greenwood and lay her on my cloak and be consumed in her fire.
I cursed my own impatience. We should have pressed on without pause, but Quenta had tormented me so, slipping a hand beneath my shirt and then down into my breeches until I could scarce walk, and must stop for a taste of the feast to come.
So the Queen’s messenger had caught us. And truly, by the shimmer in the air at the instant she appeared, I knew there had never been hope of escape. In the Welsh hills and valleys we have tales, more than tales, of such creatures, though I had thought the filth and disbelief of London must repel them. At another time I would have been glad that the green countryside along the Thames still held such folk. Glad or no, we had no choice now but to let the greenwood’s promise fade into shadow.
Frustration pounded in my veins. I jerked away from Quenta’s touch, the mere
brush of her hand making me forget that I must not even think of “him” as “her” until we could be blessedly alone.
I focused on the wide skirt sailing just ahead. Though the farthingale was not devised with a lady dwarf in mind, its absurdity was more than countered by the messenger’s bearing and the Queen’s crest broidered on her sleeve. It scarcely needed Quenta’s nudge to put me on guard against those keen, merry eyes, though they looked up at me from about the level of my belt.
Such danger should have chilled my ardor. But surely the Queen would waste little time on us, might have forgotten already her whim. At most there could be a gracious word or two, perhaps a small purse. Why, then, command that we bring our play-garb? A jest among her ladies?
But in the great bedchamber we found Her Majesty alone, a slim, pale figure whose aura crackled through the paneled room like heat-lightning.
Our diminutive guide swept a curtsy. “The player boys, Madam. Quentin O’Connor and Kit Rhys.”
Bright tired eyes assessed us. “Well enough, Gwen. Now keep us private for a bit.” The attendant gave me a wicked sidelong glance as she went to sit between the great oak door and the carven screen before it.
Quenta elbowed me sharply. I joined her in an elegant stage bow, feeling the royal glance caress our snug-hosed calves. Her Majesty was said to have ever an eye for a well-turned leg; if it went farther than a look, or a leg… But I had never heard so much as rumor that it did.
Her voice was cool enough. “So, Titania and Hippolyta. You played the queen’s part well, each in your own way.”
“Never so well as you, Your Highness.” Quenta’s green eyes gleamed wickedly, and I suppressed a groan. This was no time for her sly wit!
An answering gleam lit the Queen’s eyes. “Ah, but I have performed the role far longer!” Her face seemed less weary now; it was hard to credit that she had more than twice our years. “Do you not think I could play Queen of Faery as well as England’s monarch?”
I tried to break the manic current between them. “Yes, in truth, Highness. Or Queen of Amazons, or any ruler ever conceived.” I knelt with Hippolyta’s tunic and gilded leather breastplate across one knee. Her gaze turned toward me, lingering on my long legs; I felt as when Quenta would stroke me from calf to thigh and beyond, and my flesh would melt and surge in sweet torment.
“I have not your height, lad, to play the Amazon,” she said. “You did well enough, though one could scarcely credit that you would yield to Duke Theseus, whether in battle or in marriage bed. But come, it was bravely played, if a slighter part than Titania’s.”
She turned to Quenta with a thoughtful look. “Have you two played Master Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet?’ You would suit well as lovers.”
Did she toy with us? What hope had we against the wits of one who played with envoys, kings, even the Pope, for her own and England’s gain?
“Quentin is acclaimed as Juliet,” I answered cautiously, “but to tell truth,Hippolyta is my first speaking part, and well may be my last. I am more like to play an accompanying lute, or rattle distant armor.”
“It is an awkward age, I know,” she said. “Your voice is nigh too low already for a woman’s part. Indeed...” Those keen eyes scrutinized us closely. “I might think you both somewhat old for boy players.”
I tensed inwardly, forcing my body to reveal nothing. To stifle Quenta’s special genius would be a crime against art, against life itself! But if she were judged tobe a woman....A woman appearing upon the public stage was such outrage that the penalty could only be surmised.
Quenta laughed, and in that instant the tilt of her head, the cock of hip and shoulder, were entirely those of a brash youth. “I can play you any age, Lady, any sex.” She took on the bombastic voice and gestures of Bottom the Weaver. “I can play you a roaring Lion, or a most excellent Wall...” and then her voice softened, its husky purr making my flesh quiver with longing for the velvet touch of her tongue.
“Or I can be the Lady Moon herself.” She stepped toward the high window, every motion, every line now utterly female, despite the padded trunk-hose muffling the sweet curves of her hips. Had
I been a jot closer my hand would have slipped of its own accord between cloth and smooth, seductive skin. And had she turned, and my fingers found what waited between her thighs...
“Look you, Lady, how the new moon burns, no silver bow, but a crescent slit through which the passions of the sky pour forth. Can you not see in me that same bright fire?”
And she was, in truth, the very essence of the new moon, its tremulous yearning in her slim grace, its hot intensity in her smoldering eyes. Then I stepped toward her and broke the spell, and it was not her madness but mine that gave us away.
“Sirrah! Do not force me to see that which were better kept hidden!” If the Queen sensed that we were lovers, she had no wish to bring it to an issue. I did not think that she had yet sensed more.
“But Titania may see what England’s Queen may not.” Quenta knelt, proffering her red wig, leaf-green draperies and silver demi-mask. “On Midsummer’s Night, the fancies of mortal and fairy alike may roam free. Come with us, Lady, to observe their merry frolics!”
Even through my outrage I saw what Quenta had recognized at once. Though the Queen might conceal it even from herself, it was for this we had been summoned.

[Then much later, after extensive viewings of many bawdy revelries and pantomimes outdoors in the celebration:]

A slim, imperious hand gripped my shoulder. “Enough, lad. You have done nobly, but the Midsummer’s magic I recalled is gone forever.”
 “Nay, lady, there is magic still!” Quenta’s eyes glowed cat-like in the torchlight. “Kit has found a place a fairy queen might lie, and takes me there this night. We shall see what magic three queens together may ignite!”
I could have wrung her slim white neck. The Queen, though, waved dismissively. “I doubt not such a tryst is meant for two alone. Only see me back to the Hall, and then be off wherever youth and Midsummer madness lead you.” She took my arm. “You may divert me as we go. Is there indeed ‘a bank where the wild thyme blows....With sweet musk roses and with eglantine?’”
“As to that, Lady, the scent was more of mint and fern. I saw daisies but no roses, though there were berry brambles aplenty. Perhaps by daylight you might view it.”
“Ay, perhaps.” Her voice was bleak.
“Now!” said Quenta. “Now, by moonlight, or not at all!” Her fierce eyes held mine, her meaning all too clear. When I turned toward the greenwood the Queen, a gleam restored in her eye, did not demur.

  [Then the erotica goes deeply into where erotica usually goes, and somewhat beyond, entangled with history and fantasy and layers of even deeper emotions. Oh, and here’s an inconsequential spoiler from Gwen near the end:]

“No matter. Our sweet Lady has more need of you than you can know, for service quite apart from this night’s frolic. Neither of you will strut upon the stage much longer; who would credit such protracted youth? But two who act so well can do it on the Queen’s behalf, and be her eyes and ears about the world. Be sure I will send soon to tell you of her needs.”
“We are truly hers, body and soul,” I said. “But Gwen...who, or what, are you?”
“Need you ask?” she said impatiently. “The realm of Faery takes yet a care for England’s welfare, and for her rightful monarch. As for me, think you the Puck must be ever confined in male form?” It took her sharp pinch to make me close my gaping mouth.
_______________

I don’t yet know when my story will be up on the podcast. If I can possibly fit it into one of these posts, I will. I’ll also mention that “A Dance of Queens” was reprinted in my first collection of my own work several years ago, A Ride to Remember from Lethe Press. It’s available in Kindle format on Amazon for $3.00, and quite likely on Smashwords as well. For that matter, just ask and I’ll send you a pdf copy. The book was a Lambda Literary Finalist, the year two out of four finalists in the erotica category were mine—but neither won. That’s okay, a good friend did win the category that year, and I’ve had winners both before and after.    

Pirates and Dragons and Airplanes, Oh My!

Sacchi Green

Here I go again, still promoting my collection Wild Rides with teaser excerpts from each story, or, in this case, two connected stories with the same characters. “The Dragon Descending” is both sequel and prequel to “The Pirate from the Sky.”  Both are appropriate for our current theme, since both concern dragons, and what could be more representative of traditional fantasy? Only in “The Dragon Descending,” though, do you find explicit hot dragon sex, while "The Pirate from the Sky," in the midst of a great deal of adventure and danger with a fair bit of history thrown in, has the kinds of sex that best suit long voyages on shipboard combined with the tensions of battle.    

The pirate story begins like this.
_______________

The Pirate from the Sky
Sacchi Green

 In Seok-Teng’s dream a great pale dragon twined through a labyrinth of shifting clouds. Opaline scales shimmered through intervals of sunlight, slipped into invisibility, then flashed out again in dazzling beauty. Its long, elegant head swung from side to side, tongue flickering like sensuous lightning.
A distant hum arose, a subtle, tantalizing vibration that teased at Seok-Teng’s mind and flesh. A song? A warning? A summons? In all her dreams of dragons, never had she been aware of sound. She strained to hear, to understand. But the hum became steadily louder, swelling to a growl, tearing her from sleep into darkness and sudden, stark awareness. If the roof of the captain’s cabin had been higher she would have bolted upright.
Still the sound grew. This was no dragon, nor yet thunder, nor storm winds. The sea spoke to Seok-Teng through the ship’s movements as it had to her forbears for generations beyond counting; tonight it gave no cause for alarm. Japanese patrol boats? When she had taken her crew so far out of the usual shipping channels to avoid such pursuit? No, she had come to know that sound all too well. This one was different--yet not entirely unknown.
The cabin’s entrance showed scarcely lighter than its interior. Now it darkened. Han Duan, the ship’s Number One, squatted to look within.
“An aircraft,” Seok-Teng called, before the other could speak.
Han Duan grunted in agreement. “Not a large one, but low, and coming close. Who would fly so far from any land?”
“It is nothing to do with us.” Seok-Teng wished to resume the dream. She wished also to avoid resuming discussion of why a pirate ship would sail so far from any land, when it was accustomed by tradition to plying the coasts along the South China Sea.
“The Japanese have many planes,” Han Duan said.
“And better uses for them than pursuing us this far. We are very small fish indeed.” That was a tactical error, Seok-Teng realized at once. Evading a Japanese navy angered by the plundering of several small merchant ships off Mindanao had been her stated excuse for sailing so far to the east.
The small islands and atolls of the Marianas and Marshall groups were technically under Japanese control, but surely the eye of Nippon was bent too fiercely on the conquest of China to pay much attention to every far-flung spit of sand. On some of those islets distant relatives from Seok-Teng’s many-branched heritage still lived, and on others there were no permanent habitations at all. Good places for her crew to find or build a refuge while the world at large descended into war and madness—if a refuge was what they truly wanted.
She herself was torn by the desire to take part in the battle, to join forces with China’s defenders as pirates in the past had often done. In her small packet of private belongings was a small photograph, cut from a newspaper, of Soong Mai-ling, the beautiful wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and a leader in her own right. Seok-Teng longed to serve her in some fashion, but the way was not clear. The old pirate practices might suffice for the harrying of merchant ships, but the modern military craft of the Japanese were another matter.
Han Duan grunted again and stood, with just enough of a stoop to clear the low roof. The plane was nearly overhead now. Seok-Teng slid a hand under her pillow, ran a finger delicately along the undulating blade of her kris, then gripped its hilt. Both blade and hilt were warm. The dream, then, had been no accident, but a promise—or a warning. Seok-Teng would have spoken to the dagger if her Number One had not been present. Instead, she rolled from her bed into a crouch, pressed her brow to the weapon in mute homage to the ancestors from whom it had come, and, still stooping, emerged onto the deck of the She-Dragon.
Han Duan’s head tilted back as she stared upward. Seok-Teng straightened and stepped to the rail. Along the eastern horizon lay just the faintest hint that day might come, but overhead a low, sullen cloud cover obscured the stars. The airplane, now directly above them, could not be seen, though its roar seemed so tangible that Seok-Teng raised her hand, whether to grasp or fend it off she did not know. She had even forgotten that she held the kris, which now pointed into the sky.
“Would your demon blade lead us now even into the heavens? Let it fly then by itself!” Han Duan raised her voice to be heard over the noise of the plane. Her scarred face seemed demonic in the light of a single swaying lantern.
_______________

The other story, “The Dragon Descending” about a shapeshifting dragon goddess in Ha Long Bay, begins in the aftermath of the wild adventures and rescue of a most unusual avaitrix, when a question from Han Duan leads Seok-Teng to share a story from her past.
_______________

The Dragon Descending
Sacchi Green

“My first woman? As well ask if I recall my first dragon.” Seok-Teng scarcely realized she spoke aloud, still afloat in the ebbtide of the fierce coupling that followed battles won and prizes taken.
Han Duan lay intensely still beside her. When she spoke again, her tone was a study in idle curiosity. “Your first dragon, then. Surely not old Mountain of Wealth?”
“Blasphemy!” Seok-Teng managed a chuckle. “With a tentacle in every profitable pot, Madame Lai Choi San should be called Old Octopus rather than the Dragon Lady of Bias Bay.” Best to pursue this much safer line of conversation. “And you know well that I was no more a virgin than you when we met as her bodyguards.”
“Yet even I,” Han Duan admitted, “learned much from her beyond the management of pirate ships.”
“Is that how you formed your knack for domination of our young crewmembers?” Seok-Teng relaxed, confident that the dangerous topic had been circumvented. Han Duan held firmly to disbelief in her captain’s visions of dragons, yet as second in command she followed with complete trust wherever Seok-Teng led. Seok-Teng, and her kris, the short, undulating blade passed down through generations of her family until a woman was the only heir. A demon blade, Han Duan would say, in a tone that meant she did not believe in such things; but demon or no, the kris had bonded with its inheritor according to the old traditions. Always, after Seok-Teng’s dragon dreams, the kris would point the way the ship must sail, where they would find women skilled in the ways of the sea, or captives on their way to slavery, who would gladly join such a pirate crew.
Seok-Teng did not wish to speak now of dragons. “Those sleek young pearl divers we rescued were certainly eager for your domination.” Dalisay and Amihan should be good distractions.
But Han Duan would not be distracted. Not this time. “What color were their dragons, in your dream?”
For once, Seok-Teng would be open.  Han Duan deserved that of her, and more. “They were the blue-green of shallow southern seas, twined about each other in a wheel like the yin and yang, spinning through the sky.”
Han Duan nodded, but pulled Seok-Teng closer against her lean body and murmured into her ear, “And what of your first dragon?”
A shuddering sigh swept Seok-Teng. Whatever the cost, she would be open at last with the comrade and lover who had been her lifeline for so many years.
“My first dragon was my first woman as well. Not a dream, nor yet a vision, unless visions leave scars. ”
“Ah! These?” They knew each other’s bodies as well as they knew each inch of their ship. Han Duan moved so that her fingers could trace the line of short pale ridges along Seok-Teng’s sides from armpit to hip. “Truly a dragon of a woman!”
“A woman who was truly a dragon,” Seok Teng said flatly. “But take it as merely a tale, if you wish. A tale worth hearing.”

And, to reward any reader who has persevered this far, a few snippets from that tale.
_______________

Ha Long, Bay of the Descending Dragons. Seok-Teng had heard of its beauty and legends, but never seen its labyrinths of vertical, time-carved islands until the day she sailed her junk-rigged boat through them in pursuit of her father’s killer. No time then to stare at its wonders, only to maneuver among them, searching always for the small motorized vessel whose lines were etched indelibly into her memory.
Once in Ha Long Bay, it should have been impossible to find one small boat hiding among the thousands of limestone islands with their caves and grottoes and thick pelts of greenery clinging to sheer walls. Impossible for a man—or even a girl with a warrior spirit—but not for the kris. It showed the way, through three days of a winding course.
On the third evening, the blade took on a glow that told Seok-Teng her prey was so close that she must approach with caution. She anchored and waited through the night. This time she would make sure her prey saw his doom coming!
At last the dawn mist began to dissipate, the islands took shape, and the sun’s first rays struck the leafy crest of the nearest island in a blaze of emerald flame.
Seok-Teng slid into the water wearing nothing beyond the kris belted to her naked hip. The boat she sought was there, just beyond the island, perhaps fifty feet away. When she reached its side, she listened for several minutes until she heard the man stirring, moving slowly about, then standing on the lee side and, by the sound, relieving himself into the sea. The perfect moment!
      She was up over the side, kris unsheathed and raised, before he could turn; yet even at such a time he had kept a dagger in his hand, and parried the longer blade. Seok-Teng spun and struck again, knocking his weapon this time from his grip; he grasped her knife-wrist so tightly with his other hand that it took all her effort to keep from dropping the kris. Or almost all. Her knee tensed, began its upward strike toward his groin—but he fell back before it connected. She had only a fleeting glimpse of his eyes, widened in horror as he looked at something beyond her, his face as contorted as though her blade had pierced his belly.
Seok-Teng stumbled, unbalanced, and still managed to slice the kris across his throat before he toppled backward into the sea.
She swung around and saw what he had seen. A golden eye gazed down at her from the island’s greenery, and then two eyes, in a long, elegant, emerald-scaled head that lifted to regard her full-on.
“I had him! He was mine!” Seok-Tengs’s blood-madness ran still so hot that she felt no fear, no amazement that a dragon such as she had seen only on painted screens or the prows of festive longboats was here before her in the flesh. If indeed dragons were made of such. “I needed no help!”
The dragon seemed to laugh, though what difference there might be between a dragon’s laugh and its snarl Seok-Teng did not know. Indeed, as her blood slowed, she scarcely knew whether she herself dreamed, or imagined, or even lived. She held the kris upright, flat between her breasts, as talisman rather than weapon; it quivered, but gave off no heat.
Heat of another sort did warm Seok-Teng’s flesh as the dragon’s gaze moved slowly along her body. Did dragons lust after human women? She had never heard such tales, but after all, she herself lusted after women, though so far only in her dreams.
“Why not?” The voice was not her own, yet unmistakably female—and it spoke from inside her head. “Who can know so well how to please a woman as another woman?”
A dream, then. That sort of dream. Already Seok-Teng’s loins stirred with longing. Her bedroll would be damp and tangled when she woke. If only this dream would take her far enough for relief!
The boat she stood upon had floated nearer to the island. Seok-Teng looked full into the golden eyes, not flinching when the dragon’s green coils, their scales textured to resemble leaves, loosened from the rough limestone enough that its neck could arch outward above her and descend. Even when a flickering forked tongue, impossibly long, darted across her belly, Seok-Teng held her ground, though she could not suppress gasps and jerks at the tantalizing sensations it aroused.
“Set aside your noble blade,” the voice said, “if you would taste of more tender delights.”
She sheathed the kris but kept it belted at her hip. This time the dragon’s laughter echoed inside her head, drowned out soon by Seok-Teng’s own cries as the deep-coral tongue lapped at the paler coral tips of her high breasts, teasing and tweaking at them until they hardened and darkened and sent bolts of pleasure close to pain down through her belly into her cunt.
“How brave are you, girl? Enough to follow me?” The voice seemed uneven now, almost breathless. The long tongue reached down between her thighs and slick lips to find the jewel of pleasure there, and a low, rough moan was wrenched from deep in Seok-Teng’s throat, followed by a keen wail as the stimulation ceased.
“Come, if you dare!” The dragon launched suddenly from the rock, leaving it nearly bare, and dove into the water. Seok-Teng followed so swiftly that the wake of the great long tail swept her briefly off course. Attuned from birth to all the motions and secrets of the sea, she was back on course in a moment, and when the waters stilled beside an island much larger than the first, she dove unerringly through an underwater passage to come up in a pool within a grotto infused with green light.
On its far side stalactites hung nearly to the floor, chiming like bells as the dragon’s emerald scales brushed them. Nearer, an arc of sandy beach edged the water.
The voice came again. “One more challenge, if you are truly brave.” But this time it felt more like a plea than a dare. “Your blade…will you trust me with your blade?”
_______________

And then things get…interesting.



 

When Promises Have to Be Broken

Sacchi Green

Sometimes you really can't help breaking promises. Sometimes you have trouble convincing yourself that you can't help it. But I'm in no mood to go there just now, so I tried to remember any story of mine that referred to a promise. I opened a folder of my many past stories, prepared to even run a search for the word "promise," but right there, almost the first piece I saw, was this one, and right away I remembered that a promise was involved, and came pretty close to the beginning. Just the thing!

This is one of the very few stories of mine that have never been published. I wrote it so long ago that I'd have to update it quite a bit for it to be usable, but I may get around to it someday. It's a ghost story, not really erotica in spite of the beginning, but I had it rejected at least once because a publisher thought that anything about lesbians must be erotica, or even porn.

In any case, it's just what I need now. The whole story is too long to bore you with here, though, so you don't get to see the ghost parts, but you do get a bit about trying to find an excuse to break a promise.  


In the Flesh

Sacchi Green

The fuchsia-topped cupcake was still there in the morning. Worse, so was I. Last night some darkness all too close to my own had roiled beneath the surface of her mind, some pain as sharp-spiked as her day-glo fuchsia hair; now she was all matted bed-head and muted mood. I didn't care enough to probe.

Waking up was all I could handle. Waking from dreams of Allison, vibrant, sensuous, her breasts warm against mine, her thigh teasing my crotch... But Allie was gone.

I had thought I would hold some part of her forever, all those times I cradled her essence, shielded her, bore what I could of her pain; until that final time, her own will driving me (Go for it, Lexie, do it, Love, now, please!) when I pressed the pillow over her face and felt the life drain from her body...her spirit fade…fade…into infinite distance. Leaving me empty, and alone.

The message light pulsed in counterpoint to the throb in my head. Last night I'd ignored it; now I resigned myself to the inevitable.

"Lexie? You're still in New York?" I had a sudden, gut-wrenching hunger to hear Allie's husky-sweet voice--but it was only Janet calling, trying for casual and not quite making it. "Let me know when to meet the train again, okay?" She drew a shuddering breath. I dropped the receiver and burrowed under the pillow.

When I came up for air last night's little distraction had the phone. I’d expected her to take a stab at my wallet once I'd zonked out. Maybe, if I were lucky, a stab at me. She hadn't even picked up the bills on the dresser.

"Don't you wanna know what else she said?"

God, an emotional voyeur. My head pounded. When Allie and I were young there was no such thing as too much wine--too much anything. I curled into a ball of black misery.

"If you don't get back today she's gonna come find you. And then she said, 'Lexie, you promised!'"

"I didn't promise her!”

The musk of sex hung heavy in the air. I lurched into the bathroom, hoping she'd get the hell out. No such luck. When I stumbled out of the shower she eyed me in obvious hope of earning an honest bonus.

"I didn't think you'd be so...well, I've never been with a silver butch before."

"Yeah? You want some referrals?" A year ago my hair had still been dark. Six weeks ago, for the memorial service, I'd let Janet crop it down to the new gray. The only touch I would accept.

"You must work out or something."

"I split a lot of firewood. You don't get calluses like this at a health club."

A flush tinged her neck as she glanced at my hands, reminding me briefly of Janet. Inconsequentially I wondered whether I'd left enough wood to get the house through a Vermont winter. Janet is strong enough, and willing, but a klutz with an ax.

"The good life." I said. "Right. Fresh air, organic veggies, exercise..." I'd tilled gardens, shoveled snow, rousted bales and boxes; and all I had to show for it was the strength to carry Allison in my arms, when it came at last to that, and never stumble.
I had the right to stumble now.

"Get dressed...Nyx, is it?" Her body didn't particularly appeal to me. Fashionably bony, marginally perky; perky leaves me cold. In Allison's bountiful joys I could lose myself. But Allie was gone.

Diversion had been my goal last night, not pleasure. I couldn't remember what impulse had driven me toward Nyx, but the kid had done well enough. In reward I'd impelled her to a mewling extremity that seemed to astonish her. By her look at my callused hands, she wanted more.

Then she astonished me. "You get into people's heads, don't you."

"What, because I knew how to push your buttons?" Kids never believe in the value of experience.

"Besides that." Her neck reddened again. "I felt you at the trade show, checking me out."

She must have some rudimentary talent herself. "Yeah, well, reconnaissance never hurts," I said. "It wasn't women you were trolling for, but I figured you might settle."

That was unfair. She'd been paid to make the fuck-me leather butt-sling with the gold zipper down the back look good to buyers for leather/fetish shops. I'd been the one trolling, checking out the pseudo-street-smart section of the show. None of that stuff is right for our...my...store. What tourists will buy in the Village or Soho isn't what they're after in Vermont. Always play to the customers' fantasies.

"My boss was pissed that you didn't place an order," she said.

"Did you tell him my card had my hotel room number on it?"

"He figured. He's not so dumb."

"So are you still trying to sell me?" She had some hidden agenda, all right.

"More trying to buy something. Some help. But...it could be dangerous, and I don't have much to pay with." If she'd planned to bargain with her body, she knew now that all the bargaining power was on my side.

I started to yank on some clothes. "If it's dangerous enough I just might bite." I felt her nudging at my mind and blocked her.

She picked up on my mood anyway. "What's the matter, you into suicide or something?"

Too perceptive. But Allison had made me promise.

"Just get on with it.”

"I need to find somebody. I mean, I know where he is, sort of, but...he isn't really there."

I sprawled on the chair and covered my eyes. Was this going anywhere? If there was ever a time for a cigarette! But I hadn't had any for fifteen years. Could ignoring the Surgeon General's warning be considered a suicide attempt?

"Tim is...was...my room-mate, a real sweet kid from Kansas. We helped each other through some tough shit, had sort of a trust thing going. Not much sex because of his medication, which didn't matter to me; I kinda like women better anyway, but there's more to love than that, isn't there?"

I grunted assent.

"It mattered to him, though. He stopped his meds and got so paranoid I couldn't get him on them again. Somebody told me about a doctor who treats that kind of stuff without pills, and I talked Tim into going, but after his second appointment he just...didn't come back."

"Did you check out the doctor?"

"Her office wouldn't give me the time of day. Neither would the police. Known crazies aren't high priority on the missing persons list."

"But you know where he is." I'd given up hope of anything useful, but it wouldn't hurt to let her vent.

She sat cross-legged on the bed. "Yeah, but...it's him and not him. A girl I know works at a health club near Washington Square. A couple of weeks ago she saw him there, and when she checked the club register he had a different name and an upscale address. I cruised that neighborhood till I saw him, but...he really, really didn't know me! He brushed me off, hard, and the doorman wouldn't let me past. And then, when I was almost home, I felt somebody following me, and started to turn around, and a knife whipped right by my neck and into the door! Clipped my ear right here."

The scar might have been from a torn-out earring. If anything, it had been only a warning; there are less dramatic tools than knives for getting rid of somebody.

 "Lucky move, huh? Anything else?"

"I didn't wait to find out. Been crashing at my brother's place in Jersey."

"Why didn't you stay there? And why the hell are you trusting me?"

"I've gotta know what's happening! Besides, the modeling gig was lined up already, and my sister-in-law doesn't feed me for free." She let the spread slide from her naked body and flopped back, legs splayed. "Anyway, you were pretty up front about what you wanted." She wriggled her skinny hips.

"So are you, but I'm not in the mood now. Look, I'd like to help, but there's nothing illegal about multiple personalities."

"Tim had delusions, sure, but not that multiple stuff! And...something else. I looked real close to be sure it was him, and saw a humongous scar on the back of his neck going up under his hair."

Right. Maybe the guy's delusions were contagious. "Who told you about this doctor?"

"The bartender at a club in Chelsea. The Gay Cuntessa."

"No shit, they really call it that? We just used to kid about it when it was Marlene's, twenty years ago.” She gaped at me. "Hey, I haven't always lived in Vermont."

I hadn't looked there for diversion for fear somebody would recognize me and ask about Allison. Sooner or later I'd have to face it. If there had to be a later.

"Okay." I swung to my feet and waited for the pounding in my head to subside. "I'll pump the bartender and maybe go by the doctor's office. I'll take a stroll by your guy's place. But even if I get a chance to probe I won't know whether he's himself, since I've never met him."
"I could come with you...."

"I'll call if I need you. Get some room service. If I'm not back in twenty-four hours--well, tell Janet I was helping out a friend."

As good an excuse for breaking my promise as I’d ever find. I could walk now, cease to exist, loose ends as tied-off as they'd ever be. Janet would get the house and store. She'd kept the business going when Allison got too sick for me to leave; she deserved more than I could ever give her.