Chapter 4

I took a step back from her in response. She gave me a confused look.

“Woah, I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I understand,” I answered.

She cocked her head to one side.

I had no other way to put it. I just had to be straight with her.

I whispered in her ear so that those around us wouldn’t hear, not that they ever could with the music.

“You’re trying to seduce me into a threesome,” I accused.

Selena burst out laughing. Twirled her finger playfully through her curly hair.

“So, what if we are?”

That gave me pause. I never seriously considered that to be exactly what was happening. But now that I was, I was seriously turned on by it.

Selena narrowed her eyes on me, her smile triumphant. She put her hands on her hips.

“Are you being serious right now? Is that what you’re really trying to do?”

She tapped her chin, and in a voice singing with childish mischief, she replied,

I gulped. My heart thrummed with excitement. A pain of burning desire between my thighs. I could feel my pussy grow moist. As strange as it was for mild-mannered Julia, I took tremendous, vigorous pleasure in this pursuit. My stomach tightened as if I were on a rollercoaster at the top of a gigantic crest, awaiting the screaming plunge towards the Earth. I crossed my arms. Raised my eyebrow coolly, trying my best to not betray my excitement.

“Well, then what are you waiting for? Aren’t you going to seduce me?”

She licked her lips. She was hungry. She was ambitious. She glanced out towards the ocean. It was as black as the deepest part of space. But it roared and crashed with life.

She turned from me to face the dark shoreline past the crowd. She looked over her shoulder to see that I would follow her there. The confidence with which she assumed I would, meant that I had to.

When we finally broke through the crowd, she took off running through the sand. I chased her, and when we got to where the waves came up to wet the sand, we stopped and caught our breaths.

The reggaeton music was nothing more than muffled beating bass now. Lower than the rumbling white noise of the Waves.

The white curls of the waves glowed in the dim moonlight. Lights crawled on the horizon. Ships making their way through the strait of Gibraltar. A distant luminous amber sphere where Tangier sat on the African coast. Beyond it, I knew were the Atlas Mountains. And beyond the mountains were thousands of miles of Sahara dunes, and on the other side were the great Pyramids of Giza, where Santiago sought his personal legend. I would not have to go to Egypt for my own personal legend. Mine was right here.

Other people sat at the edge of the oceans. Lovers that valued the privacy of a dark beach. Silent silhouettes of couples muttering sweet nothings to each other. All in their own private worlds.

Though it was late at night, it was hot and rather humid. The heavy weather made me feel like I was floating through a dream. The water came up to our toes, and it was cool. The Atlantic currents brought water down from the Arctic. I felt a hint of that chill, and it was inviting in the sticky summer night humidity.

I looked back at Selena. Her body was outlined against the light from the chiringuito above us. The disco lights around her like an aurora. She pulled her dress over her head and let it fall to the sand. She reached up again and pulled the string of her bikini top loose. It fell to the sand, too. She then shimmied off her bikini bottom, moving like a belly dancer as she did so to make herself fully naked.

She slung it playfully at me. Her nude body seemed to glow silver like the moon.

“Let’s swim,” she said, and without giving me time to respond, she ran ahead and dove into the inky water.

At my feet were the twisted shapes of her clothes and her underwear. In the water, Selena waiting naked, eager for me to join. I took my clothes off. Savored a breeze that touched my nakedness. Took a deep breath and ran crashing through the waves.

“Venga!” Selena cried and splashed the water exuberantly at me with her arms.

The water was nice. It washed the sweat off my body. It moved with a freeing rhythm that encouraged me to float. So, I floated. I floated towards Selena. And she floated towards me. We were like two celestial beings pulled in by each other’s gravity.

“So, how is life?” Selena asked as she slowly orbited me, pulling a lazy breaststroke.

“Life’s good,” I answered. “Now it’s good.”

“Nice. You’re from the US, yes?”

“What do you do there?”

“Oh, nothing at the moment.”

“Yeah. I actually quit my job right before this trip.”

“That is a good thing?”

“Then congratulations! How does it feel?”

“Like taking a bag of bricks off my chest.”

“That is a good feeling.”

“And what about a partner?”

“You mean the second bag of bricks on my chest? Broke up with him the day after I quit my job.”

“Oh, I see. How long were you with him?”

It was a question to which the answer always made my stomach churn. An answer that always seemed to touch the tip of my tongue like a bad taste, the memory of which I badly needed to forget. A taste like battery acid.

“Eight years,” I replied.

“Wow! You broke up with a boyfriend of eight years and quit your job at the same time.”

“That is amazing. What a change.”

“Good for you then,” she said with a smile. “It takes a lot of courage to leave a life behind. Even a bad one.”

I sunk slightly deeper into the water and I blew bubbles with my mouth. A moment of silent reflection ensued. In truth, I had mixed feelings about the aftermath of the ‘great breakup’ as I had come to call it. On the one hand, I felt unequivocal liberation that I had finally let go of the things that were killing me slowly from the inside out. On the other hand, I felt a persistent uneasy anxiety lurking like mischievous little goblins in the shadows of my mind. Goblins that whispered reminders to me that I was alone, jobless, and listless. Goblins that riddled me constantly with nagging questions, consuming me with feelings of doubt, like, what now do I do with my life? Where do I go from here? Isn’t it too late for me to start a new career? A new relationship? And the most dreaded question of them all: What if I fall into the same patterns and the same traps that had made me so miserable for so long?

Before I could spin myself completely into another existential mindfuck, Selena had the courtesy to interrupt me, pulling me out of that spiral with another question.

“If you could be any animal, what would you be?”

“Any animal? Hmmm. A question I haven’t thought about since I was like, I don’t know, eight?”

“I’m giving you an opportunity to think about it again. You should take the opportunity. Who knows when the next time will be,” she replied.

“In that case… oof, I don’t know.”

“What did eight-year-old Julia want to be?”

“A cat? Really? Not an eagle? Or a dolphin? Or tiger? But a cat? Like a house cat?”

“Eight-year-old Julia had modest dreams.”

“I see. Well, you certainly should never ignore eight-year-old Julia’s dreams. I can see you as a cat. It suits you.”

“Cats are independent, and resilient, just like you Julia.”

“And stealthy. Don’t forget stealthy.”

“And they have many lives.”

“Eight-year-old me knew what she was all about.”

I felt something graze across my calf and flinched because I didn’t expect it, and I was wary of the creatures lurking in the darkness.

“Oh, shit!” I cried out and thrashed.

“Hey scaredy cat. It’s just me!”

Then the grazing again. It was her toes, again grazing my calf. This time, she dragged them slowly up my leg and inner thigh.

I stopped it with my hand before it could go any further and pinched her big toe.

“Hey!” She protested.

“Not so fast,” I replied and pulled her foot out of the water, flipping her backward to submerge her.

She came out of the water with a gasp for air. Her hair came down over her eyes. She pulled them aside like drapes.

I shot her a smug look. But she wasn’t going to let me get away with it so quickly.

She lunged after me. I tried swimming away, but she caught my shoulders and pushed me under. I twisted around and found her body and wrapped my arms around her to bring her down with me.

We held onto each other as if for dear life. Our naked breasts squeezing against each other. She wrapped her legs around my hips so that I could feel the warmth of her pussy against my abdomen. A lovely warmth enough to drive me crazy.

We came up for air together, laughing. We laughed like children, and my head pounded with a delirious desire. She felt it too, both in herself and in me. She was the first to stop her laughter. I stopped shortly after. So, for a silent moment, we floated, chin deep in the water, gazing into each other’s eyes. Her eyes shone with silver moon drops. Her lips moved open and shut with excited anticipation.

She moved closer to me. Her arms went around me. A hand at the top of my back, between my shoulder blades, pressed me towards her until our foreheads and noses touched. Her face went out of focus, but her desire became clear.

“Eliana picked a good one,” she said.

“I’m not a bottle of wine,” I replied.

“Mmm… you might as well be. A very good bottle. And I want to drink all of you.”

“In that case, you’ll have to uncork me first.”

A strange satisfaction to know that these two stunning Spanish women conspired secretly to have me. To feel desired in such a way was not something I’m accustomed to. It is a good thing to feel.

She pressed her lips against mine. Her fingers on the back of my neck curled into my skin. Her breasts pressed against mine so that I could feel her heavy heartbeats. I let my mouth open to take her kiss. Her tongue entered. It was warm. It was delicate.

We kissed for a long while. And as we kissed, her hands explored me. They ran down my back, my thighs, and my ass.

The waves hit relentlessly against us, but they were gentle, and we were in shallow water, so they did not overwhelm us. But they pushed us towards the shore. We crawled out of the ocean onto the wet sand, clinging to each other, naked, wet, and careless, perhaps like the first creatures to crawl onto land.

We held each other as the waves came gently over our bodies. We kissed madly. We touched each other all over. And then she went down on me, kissing me down my body.

She put her lips on my breasts, my raw, hard nipples. Raked them with her tongue, making them warm, making them conduits of lightning. My gasps the murmuring thunder.

Those around us might have noticed us. Perhaps they gawked. But I was too drunk, too beyond caring. I allowed her to suck on my nipples and lick them as if there was no one, and I arched my back to let her have every bit of them.

Her lovely moon drop eyes watched me. A grin curled on her lips. She realized she had gone further than Eliana and took tremendous joy in this.

She went farther down my body, raking my shivering abdomen with her tongue.

My legs came open automatically, like a night blossoming flower sensing the light of the moon, to unveil my wet, aching pussy for her, to have her taste its nectar.

But she wasn’t ready to relieve that aching feeling. Before diving right in, she planted kisses down the inner crease of my thighs. Then a light touch of the flat of her forefinger on my swollen clit. It was a light touch, but enough to cause my whole body to seize up from frenzied darts of pleasure.

Finally, she touched my clit, proceeded to rub it with slow circles.

“Had Eliana a taste of this yet?”

“No,” I muttered. My hands clenched the wet sand.

“Good. I like that I am first.”

She lowered her head between my thighs. She breathed me in, then her tongue flashed from her lips to lap my clit like a thirsty cat lapping at a water bowl.

My hands dug deeper into the sand. An oncoming wave splashed against us and made the sand softer, and I sunk a little bit into the sand.

“Yeah, that feels good,” I squeaked.

“Mmm…,” she responded. “You taste so good.”

Her tongue began to explore more of my pussy. She put it between my lips, flicked it up and down, and sucked on the flesh of my labia.

And when I was appropriately lubricated from my sex, she penetrated me with two fingers while she moved to suck my clit.

I felt the coming pulses of my inevitable orgasm. A building wave. A slow rhythmic building that grew stronger with every magical flick of her tongue and the pumping of her fingers inside me.

And when she sensed I was reaching the climax, she curled a finger up inside me to find my g-spot to finish me off. The pleasure blinded me. Or nearly blinded me because I still saw the stars above me and the wisp of clouds that sailed past them. And the crescent moon, silver against the deep night.

“I’m about to come!” I squeaked. My body tightened up. She answered with more vigorous use of her tongue.

But before she could finish me, laughter and drunken, jubilant shouting. A group came running from the chiringuito towards the waves, stripping down to their underwear. They all crashed into the waves, dove in, and splashed each other. They didn’t see us. They didn’t see the moment of climax that they ruined.

I wasn’t sure what that meant for the rest of the night, but we certainly couldn’t finish here. Selena didn’t seem put off by the interruption. She shrugged it off. Gave me a tender peck on my cheek and whispered,

“Come home with me.”

“Ok,” I whispered back.

We walked through the village, which was quiet and lit only by the dim moonlight. A stray cat darted across our path and into the tall grass along the side of the road. Shortly, we had walked to the other side of the village, where the road turned into a dirt path that wound up the hillside steeply. It took us through a juniper brush and then to a fence. She opened it and led me through into a clearing.