The Runaway Niece

Literotic asexstories – The Runaway Niece by mildlyaroused,mildlyaroused This piece is a little slower: it takes a couple pages to get into the thick of the eroticism. If you don’t want a slow-burn, turn back or skip ahead. You have my horniest sympathies. For those who stay, your thoughts and ratings are greatly appreciated. Xx.

———

The Runaway Niece

For a while Kerry doesn’t even register that someone is knocking. His bed is too comfortable to consider the outside world, and the hour is too early to expect visitors, so he stays buried in his pillow with his cold feet folded up underneath his weight. The knocking might be a broken drainpipe, or the garage door unlatching itself again, or that family of wild rabbits who take him as a fool.

It is only once the sound takes on a rather hysterical rhythm that he sits up. This is no rabbit. Someone is at the front door.

Kerry parts his bedside curtain to peer through the rain. The world had been suspended in a state of calm all week, like a snowglobe, but now the storm has hit in full force. Trees tilt on their axes. Raindrops are like skiers on his window. From this vantage point he can’t get a good view of the doorstep.

The visitor seems unlikely to stop knocking. Deciding there’s nothing for it, Kerry pulls on his socks, wraps up in his dressing gown, and heads downstairs. When he steps into the hallway, he stops and stares at the front door. Skeletal hands are silhouetted on its frosted glass window. They are knocking with their palms, rattling the door in its hinges.

Kerry approaches the door silently. He stops a foot from the threshold. The hands at the window freeze, fingers splayed on the glass.

“Hello?” It’s a girl’s voice. “Hello, did I see someone?”

Kerry tightens the cord of his dressing gown. He leans in. “Who is it?”

“Is this Kerry? Does Kerry still live here?” The hands slide an inch or so down the door’s window, as though from exhaustion. “I swear to fucking God, did he move? If he fucking moved—”

“Who is it?”

A pause. The girl’s hands vanish. “Is this Kerry?”

He hears her slump her weight against the door. There’s a plea in her tone. The hall is cold.

“Yes,” Kerry says finally. “It’s Kerry. Now, tell me—”

“Kerry, it’s Iona. Let me in or I will freeze to death on your doorstep.” The girl’s voice breaks. She throws her weight against the door. “Come on. They’ll lock you up for negligence or something. Just open. The door.” Another thud. “Fuck.”

And Kerry opens the door. The girl almost topples inside. He catches her fall, recoiling at the cold of her flesh. She is sodden-wet. Her clothes and hair drip all over the threshold. The cuffs of his dressing gown dampen. The girl slams the door shut. For a while there is silence but for her shallow breathing. A steady pink-plink as she drips onto his floor.

“You took your sweet time,” she tells him. “Is your back going? Struggling out of bed?”

“Hold on.” Kerry tears his eyes from her face. Her features are soft in the half-light, like those of an old photo. He fumbles for the lightswitch behind the coat rack. “There.”

The hallway is illuminated. They stare at one another.

Iona’s soaked clothes cling to her like wet fur. Her hair is red, down to her shoulders. It criss-crosses her face in stray strands. A smattering of freckles. Hazel eyes. She is his niece.

He reaches over her shoulder to lock the door. “Iona?”

“Kerry.”

“Iona…” A beat passes. A thousand raindrops, and he exhales. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. It’s really quite awkward, you know?” Iona raises her arms, which are weighed by soaked clothing. “I thought you’d let me in. Some food maybe. But no, I guess we’ll stand here by the door till the storm blows over and fucking Itsy Bitsy Spider comes out. That’s cool too.”

“Iona, you know what I mean. It’s three in the morning.” Kerry lays a knuckle against her icy cheek. “Why are you here?”

“I just am.” Iona plucks his hand from the air, gives his fingers a smart pinch, and holds on tight. She says, “Please let me stay.”

For the first time since he let her in, Kerry hears that note of urgency in her voice again. Iona’s pale lips teeter towards a frown. It is the same stern expression she used to wear as a child when Kerry babysat her. That was twelve years ago. Now her fingernails bore into his hand.

“Okay. Just—okay.” Kerry nods. He ushers her down the hall. “A hot shower, maybe? Towels are in the bottom drawer.”

He guides her to the bathroom, then goes upstairs to find her a change of clothes. The house rattles in the wind, cold seeps up from between floorboards, window panes straining their brackets; and the rain streaks its windows like hail. Kerry tracks an old towel up and down the hallway till the floor is quite dry. He brings a pot of milk to the stove and stirs cocoa through. The trick, he always used to tell Iona, is to heat the milk so slowly it doesn’t realise what’s happening till it’s too late. Then it won’t curdle. She used to scold him and say milk wasn’t alive.

Kerry adds sugar, vanilla, and a pinch of chilli. Iona emerges from her shower after some fifteen minutes with her soggy clothes in a bundle, one towel tight in a turban around her hair and another around her middle. She leaves silent, damp footprints on the floorboards.

“Is this the Iona special, then?” she asks, standing on the other side of the kitchen bench and eyeing the pot of hot chocolate. “I can smell the chilli.”

“Just a smidge, don’t worry.” Kerry gives a little salute with two fingers. He fills two mugs to their rims with drink. “Oh—here. Chuck your clothes in the laundry, I’ll get them clean tomorrow.” He takes the bundle from her arms.

Iona gives a mock curtsy. “Ta.”

“The spare room is set up for you,” Kerry says. He deposits her clothes in the laundry. “It’s across from mine upstairs, when you want to sleep.”

“Yeah. I remember it.”

He returns to the kitchen and gives her one of the hot chocolates. “Right, well… cheers.”

They clink mugs. The drink is rich and thick as ice cream. Iona adjusts her towels and goes to sit on the couch, looking out over the paddocks through the living room sliding doors. There isn’t much to see in the dark, but there is a certain satisfaction in the way the wind rolls all the way over the hills to buffet the house while they sit comfortably inside. Defying the cold bite of nature with hot drinks in their hands. Iona runs a finger around and around the rim of her mug.

Kerry watches her nervously from the kitchen bench. He doesn’t want to press her, but she looks like a ghost—a snarky ghost with all the wit of her human self, but a ghost all the same. He’s never seen her in such an anxious state. Her white shoulders glisten from the shower. Several bits of red hair have escaped her towel, falling down her neck at random.

“Iona.” Kerry crosses from kitchen to living room. He sits beside her on the couch. “I need you to tell me that you’re safe…”

She stares ahead. “I’m safe.”

“Did you walk here from London? That’s a hell of a distance.”

“And I have a hell of a blister.” Iona gives a dry smile, still not looking. She takes a deep swig of hot chocolate and sighs. Her eyelids flutter. “Do we have to talk about it tonight?”

Kerry swishes his own hot chocolate around his teeth. He can smell her conditioner. For a long while neither of them speak, and the proximity is enough to constitute company. The paddocks outside roll like black waves. Kerry throws glances to his niece, who sits like a bird in the rain: ruffled, smaller than life, wings pegged in the wet. Her collarbone stands out. She is too pale for a tan line.

Iona raises a hand to bite hard at a nail.

“Hey.” Kerry takes her hand and guides it back down. “Save your nails, they’re nice. We don’t have to talk about it tonight.”

Iona smiles. She clings to him.

“Look, I found some more clothes. From Aunt Kath’s collection.” Kerry gets the pile of fluffy gowns from the kitchen. “I was always her second love, see. Her first was the creature comforts.”

“Will we visit Aunt Kath?”

“We’ll see after the rain.”

Iona heads off to bed with the bundle of gowns. Kerry rinses out their mugs and goes to take a shower himself. The bathroom is still hot and steamed out, but he doesn’t mind. The heat is comforting; he savours it till his fingertips wrinkle. Odd as the night’s events were, it was pleasant to drink hot chocolate with his niece as he always had in the past.

He is not alone in the storm tonight.

———

Though the spare room is quite comfortable, Iona doesn’t get much sleep. Instead, she fishes old paperback novels from a trunk at the foot of her bed and reads them with her feet tucked up under her bum. Pages worn by the oil of a hundred fingerprints. Her room has a marvellous view of the countryside out the rear of the house. When the sun rises to kiss the morning clouds, she thinks she hasn’t seen anything so serene as those paddocks and hills in all her life.

Kerry is not yet up when she descends to the living space. Iona takes the time to peruse the house. As she does, she gets the impression that Kerry has been alone for a very long time. His place smells richly of coffee. It could have been a workshop: spare screws scattered like ornaments, everything furnished with wood still coarse to the fingertips, all of it touched by the fragrance of sawdust. The homemade woodwork and rustic edges are charming.

When Kerry emerges from upstairs, he smiles at her. “Up like the sparrows, are you?”

“I found photos of us,” Iona says. She picks one up in its frame. “Look—we’re sunbathing in the autumn leaves here. By one of the swimming holes, I guess. I’m about ten…”

“Mm, that’ll be just downstream.” Kerry gestures vaguely out the rear sliding doors. “Coffee?”

“Thanks.”

He makes it on the stove with an old pot. Iona stands by the kitchen bench and watches, and for a short while she is hypnotised. Kerry’s hands are very gentle. He does everything with such little hurry that Iona forgets what he’s making, and starts only to appreciate the click and clack of the equipment and the various stages of preparation. The dance of metal and fingers. When he sets the finished cup in front of her, she meets his eye, and finds his expression incredibly soft. She smiles.

“Eggs for breakfast, too.” Kerry claps his hands. “But first—let’s visit Aunt Kath.”

They each find a pair of gumboots, then they take their coffees and set out into the expanse of green field behind the house. All that remains of last night’s weather are small branches scattered by wind, and the excessive squelch of wet grass underfoot. The horizon is clear.

They cross a paddock and veer to the right, alongside a river which cuts the countryside down its torso. Trees and thickets flank its length. Iona remembers wading through this river with uncle Kerry, in gumboots of all different sizes at all different ages. Playing pixies or aliens or werewolves.

“Kath always liked autumn,” Kerry says. The river runs high today, swelled by the night’s downpour. He goes on, “When the leaves went yellow she said it was a permanent sunset.”

Iona likes the autumn leaves too. She breathes deep through her nose.

Kerry stops in his tracks. “There she is. Bless the old fool.”

He puts his arm around Iona’s shoulders, and they both bow their heads. Aunt Kath’s headstone is nestled in the ground beneath an ancient beech tree. It’s flecked with autumn leaves and bits of soil. The sun heats the back of their necks. They wipe the headstone clean.

“It’s funny, don’t you think?” Iona says, as they retrace their steps through the grass. “How the world can hurt us, then we wake up and it’s just another Tuesday.”

“And the river keeps flowing,” Kerry says.

“Yeah.” Iona looks up at him. “And the river keeps flowing.”

They take a longer route back to the house so as to pass by the vegetable patches and chicken coops. Kerry digs a number of potatoes out from a patch of dirt, plucks tomatoes from their vines, and takes avocados from their trees; and all the while, he speaks to his plants in a low voice as though they are pets. Iona waits outside a mesh fence while he fetches eggs from the chicken coops.

“Poor girls, they survived the apocalypse last night.” Kerry eyes his birds. He hops the fence. “Mind, they had shelter. You walked from bloody London.”

“I… well.” Iona hugs her shoulders. The grass is like the sea in the wind. “I didn’t really…”

“No?”

“Not from London, no.”

Iona meets his eyes. They’re cracked at their edges by a frown.

Kerry took her in even when he didn’t understand why she was there. He gave her comforts she didn’t deserve. His house is beautiful, the clothes he provided cosy, the countryside lively and green—and beneath it there is the bleating heart of opportunity. He gave her freedom. All at once, she finds herself crying by the chicken coops.

“Hey.” Kerry stows the eggs on the grass and closes his arms around her. “Hey, what’s happened? I’m listening.”

“I didn’t come from London.” Iona clutches him. “It was… God. Shit.”

She doesn’t know where to start; how to untangle the past few months from the thorns and brambles to explain it all to him. She sees a hundred images in the mud: a car door opening, raised voices, collapsing on a gravel road. Fingers where she didn’t want them. Tears, over the dinner table, over a pillow, in the back of a fucking taxi. A thousand numbers to call but none seemed to fit.

Kerry walks her back to the house, sits her down on the couch, and cooks their eggs up. They eat to the sound of knives scraping on plates. Iona flushes scarlet. The egg yolks bleed all over her plate. They run down her throat like honey.

“Iona. Listen.” Kerry lays a hand on her shoulder. His touch is like the sun. “Listen. That bed up there, all those books in that crate—they will always be there.” His hand drifts in subtle circles on her back. “Every night, however many you need. They will be there.”

Iona nods. Kerry leans her onto his shoulder. He kisses her on the top of her head. The contact is very clean. Spring water.

“So, then…” He smiles sadly down at her. “It’s not just another Tuesday after all…”

Iona looks at the sky through the window. She wants to look at the sun.

“I just let it happen,” she tells him.

———

Kerry is true to his word. Each evening when Iona showers, reads on the couch, or is otherwise occupied, he sneaks up to the spare room to place a vase of flowers on her bedside table. He picks them from a spot by the river. Sometimes he and Iona sit cross-legged on her bedroom floor and discuss all the books in the crate at the foot of her bed. It is a privilege to get lost in a story, and a special privilege to get lost in it again with someone else as company. They talk for hours.

It is only with his niece flitting around all week that he realises the silence he had been living in. It is very noisy to have another body in the house: footsteps creak down the hall, dishes accumulate twice as fast, and the hot water runs thin. They go through eggs and veggies at a rate of knots. The washing line strains under the doubled load of laundry. Several times as he’s washing up the kitchen, Kerry finds himself staring out at Aunt Kath’s old clothes, back in use. Drying in the breeze.

Iona insists on helping around the house wherever she can. Cooking becomes a joint affair, as does tending to the garden and property. Kerry drives into town a week on from her arrival to buy her a new pair of gumboots, so they can garden together. He presents them as though they’re a rite of gardening passage.

And slowly, she opens up to him.

One night, when the sky is clear, they stroll through the paddocks with a bottle of wine. Iona stalks ahead of him. A poke around the attic had turned up several boxes of Kath’s old wardrobe, and Iona had luxuriated in the clothes like royalty.

She’s dressed in a fur coat and gypsy skirt, and no shoes at all. Her feet slide as she runs and skips on the dark grass. They pass cattle and troughs. Through the ambience of crickets.

“Joints not what they were?” Iona calls back to him. She waves her hands. “Come on, pick it up.”

Kerry runs to keep up.

“We walk, my good uncle!” Iona shouts into the dark. “We reach the horizon tonight…”

“Hey.” Kerry catches her and wraps an arm around her middle. “We can’t walk too far.”

She wriggles in his grasp. “Oh, we are walking, my friend. Onwards.”

“Just… rest. I’m an old man.”

Iona laughs. She turns on the spot to face him. A gentle breeze plays with her hair.

“Isn’t it wonderful, though?” she says. She pokes his nose. “We can walk as long and far as we want and nobody cares. Nobody cares. We’re like the birds, Kerry.”

He looks down at her, smiles, and takes a swig from the wine bottle. Iona takes it and drinks too. A moment passes under the wind, in which Kerry stares at her and she stares right back. She’s stopped trying to break free of his grasp.

Another swig of alcohol. “Are you okay, Iona?”

“I’m wonderful.”

“No, but really.” Kerry drops his hand from her back. He taps her on the forehead with the tip of the wine bottle. “Are you okay, really?”

For a moment her smile dips, then it comes back. “I’m okay.”

They share the wine and stroll on without much purpose. Eventually they come to a fence. Neither feels sober enough to scale it, so they follow it blindly until they reach a wooden stile.

“This will do.” Kerry sighs and sits down. “No more fucking walking.”

Iona stops walking a little clumsily. “No fucking walking?”

“No more fucking walking.”

She drops down beside him. They lean against one another. No words. The closeness is enough. Iona’s freckles are sharp on her pale face. Strands of her hair flick into Kerry’s face. He leans against her and feels the rise of her body as she breathes.

After a long time: “Kerry, I’m not okay.”

“No shit, Iona.”

“Yeah, no shit?”

“Iona.” Kerry clears his throat and points a finger at her. “You turn up like a drowned rat—”

“I’m a rat now?”

“A drowned rat.” Kerry tuts. He feels young. “You turn up at three in the morning and you’re acting like a crazy bitch and won’t explain anything. Did you think you played it off?”

Iona raises her eyebrows. “Obviously not. We are not all senile.”

“We’re both senile. We have alcohol.”

“All right.” Iona takes the bottle. “Yeah, I’m not okay.”

Kerry takes her free hand. Small, warm fingers. “I’m listening,” he tells her.

Iona squeezes him back. For a moment as Kerry looks over her freckles and the ridge of her nose, he has to bite back a pang of nostalgia: this is not Kath whose hand he holds. Iona runs a tongue over her teeth and hovers on the precipice of speech for one beat, two three four, then she sighs and looks away. There are tears in her eyes. Glitter in the dark.

“You know, I felt so good when I left school.” Iona wipes her eyes with a slender knuckle. “To be an adult. I had my lovely fairytale path ahead.” She bites her bottom lip and gives a silly laugh. “Ugh, fuck. Fuck. He fucked it up.”

“Was this the same boy you were with at Kath’s funeral?”

She nods. The fresh air burns. Kerry has to keep still. He doesn’t want to stop her from talking, but there is a knot in his throat. The thought of what this boy might have done mixes poorly with the wine in his stomach.

“I can’t really explain. I just…” Iona looks around, erratic. As though searching for the right turn of phrase in the night stars. “Every night I would promise myself. Next time I say no. Next time I won’t let him bully me, but then…” She snaps her fingers. The sound is sharp. “I broke so many promises, Kerry. So many you have no idea.”

“Iona.”

“It’s like when you’re a kid and you freeze up and—”

“Hey. Iona, look at me.”

Her gaze comes to him, unfocussed.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Kerry.” She raises a hand to brush his face. “This wine’s so good, Kerry.”

“Listen to me, nothing you did made it happen.”

“Mm. You know what the worst part is?” Iona asks. She cocks her head and stares at him. “I miss him, Kerry. Still. Like I can’t just fucking respect myself.” She makes a violent motion across her wrist. “It’s like this, yeah? I’m the one doing it.”

“No.” Kerry takes her into his arms. “You’re safe now.” He runs a comforting hand in circles on her back. “You’re okay. It doesn’t have to hurt.”

But it does hurt. They leave the wine bottle behind. He holds her and they rise from the stile, and he spins her as though they are waltzing over the muddy grass. Heel toe, heel toe. They walk back along the riverside with their hands brushing the tops of tall flowers. There is some strange dependency between them now, an affection strengthened by talk of abuse and loneliness.

That’s life: there is defilement, and there are beautiful flowers. The sting of a honeybee.

———

Iona wakes to the hot embrace of a hangover. She rolls over and breathes. Heartbeats. The birds chirrup through her window. She goes downstairs to find the living room in a state of disarray: more than one empty wine bottle on the floor, a selection of half-eaten cheeses on the coffee table, Aunt Kath’s gypsy skirt in a grubby heap by the sliding doors. Iona stops. For a second she looks around at the remnants of her late night with Kerry, and slides a hand under her shirt to the flesh of her nauseous stomach. She can’t remember what they had talked about once they’d come back inside; all she has is a vague reminiscence of tears, and of cuddling up to him. She makes herself busy cleaning up the living space before he wakes.

When Kerry finally emerges from upstairs, it’s close to midday. He pauses in the hall for a moment or two, surveying her. Messy hair.

“You’re bleeding,” he says. His morning voice is lethargic.

“I tried to get eggs from the coops,” Iona tells him. She drums her fingers on her forearm, which is pink with cuts. “But your chickens scratched the shit out of me.”

Kerry waves a vague hand and goes to the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“Thanks.”

“Be careful. Those chooks are feisty.”

“I realise that now.” Iona perches on a bar stool while he makes the coffee. “You know, I’m sorry I broke down last night.”

Kerry pauses with his back to her. He chuckles. “That’s okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Well I thought it’d be insensitive to say it was good that you broke down.” Kerry turns and smiles. “But yeah—it was good. I’m glad we could talk about it.”

“The wine helped.”

“Oh, Iona. Wine always helps.”

Her nausea is telling her otherwise, but Iona wouldn’t trade the hangover for anything.

The day is bright. The sun throws the fields into a golden-green glow, and there are sparrows playing on the deck. Each time Iona meets her uncle’s gaze that morning she has to fight to keep her smile down. She can’t remember much of their night, but she knows there had been affection and care in his words that she hadn’t heard from anyone for a long time. They had danced and laughed and eaten cheese— all of it so spontaneous.

After breakfast they change into swimwear and take to the countryside river. Iona wears one of Aunt Kath’s bikinis. The fit is a little loose, but she loves the vintage style, and as she runs through the paddocks with Kerry she feels like she’s been plucked from an old movie. They run till they’re out of breath and they pick up a sweat; till the river widens into a deep swimming hole.

Iona flings herself off the riverbank, hitting the water like a stone, revelling in its cold touch. The chill seeping to her scalp takes her right back to her childhood. Kerry follows her in, and for a while they pretend it’s one of those weekends in which Iona’s parents were away. They splash and race, and tread water with frozen muscles. In some backwards way the discomfort is cosy. Iona’s face tires from smiling. Maybe she will climb out and leave all her pain in the riverbed.

She massages her scalp, and calls across the water to Kerry. “Way to fix a hangover!”

“Yeah, but I’m fucked with cold now,” Kerry says. He rubs his arms up and down. “I brought those chocolates we used to like. Let’s have ’em in the sun.”

They clamber out and sit cross-legged on the grass. Kerry gives her first pick from a cardboard box full of intricately-patterned chocolates. She chooses salted caramel. They clink their chocolates like wine glasses before eating. Those little bits of choice and agency he gives her feel like the whole world.

“That sun is gonna put me to sleep,” Kerry says. He lies back and stretches his bare torso over the leafy grass. “At least we’ll work up a tan…”

Iona lies back too. “I never work up a tan.”

“No?”

“I’m too pale. I just turn pink.”

“Oh, yeah.” Kerry laughs. He meets her eye. “I used to get in trouble for that, you know? Your mum said no swimming around midday, but we always did anyway.”

“Then I got burnt.”

Kerry smiles. There are leaves in his hair. “I sent you home like a beetroot.”

Iona pokes his arm. They lie in the quiet birdsong with their bodies a foot apart and their minds even closer. Iona could get used to it. She watches the gentle rise and fall of Kerry’s chest. He’s well built from his time on the farm, away from the sounds and stresses of the city. His hands pick at the grass by his legs as though they have all the time in the world.

Iona sits up. “Another chocolate?”

“Please.” Kerry doesn’t even open his eyes. “Surprise me.”

She picks one out for herself, pops it into her mouth, and finds one for Kerry. Chilli fudge. She puts it on his closed lips and watches him eat it with his eyes closed. A moment’s pause.

“You’re a lazy man,” she tells him. She picks out another chocolate. “Last slave, and all that.”

He chuckles. “You’re not grabbing another one, are you?”

“Nuh-uh.” Iona lies down. “Shut up.”

She nestles up beside him. He doesn’t pull away, but opens his eyes to meet hers. They stare at one another for a short moment, then Iona rests her head down on his chest. Her hair falls down his shoulder. She closes her eyes, slows her breathing to his rhythm, and they lay there in the sun with their skin touching: flesh and warmth, and the brush of his fingertips as he hooks his arm underneath her to lay a reassuring hand on her side. They are entwined. She has no words for the peace she’s found. Her stomach pokes into his side, and she hooks a knee onto his leg…

That image of the old film comes back to her. Movies have happy endings. Mostly.

———

Kerry spends that afternoon in a state of limbo. He tends to all the usual chores around the farm, stamping around in his boots and preparing for the next produce market, but his mind drifts like the clouds. Iona is curled up on a deck lounger, absorbed in a paperback book. Her hair stands out from a distance. Those red locks must catch his eye more than a dozen times while he’s in the yard. It is a feeling he hasn’t had since Kath was alive.

He digs up potatoes for a shepherd’s pie, and he and Iona spend a pleasant dinner talking about how she could help with the weekend market. Kerry is a little uneasy about her leaving the house. There is still a fragility to her voice and actions.

Iona finds this notion hilarious.

“You fucking tyrant! I’m an adult.” She glares at him. “Not a fugitive. And I’m sure the marketsfolk aren’t all predators.”

“Whatever. Have you talked to your parents since… you know?”

“No one cares where I am,” Iona says. “I fucked up.”

“More than already?”

“Ha-ha.” She shoots him a little smirk. “But yeah, I kinda fucked things up with mum and dad. They didn’t approve of me leaving London.”

“Ah. With him, right?”

“Yeah. We said some awful shit, but whatever. I guess they were right.”

“You don’t want to see them?”

Iona shakes her head. “Not yet. I like it here.”

After dinner, she sifts through a dusty crate of DVDs while Kerry does the dishes. They shout back and forth about the different movie options—a roundabout conversation that leads to no consensus, and ends with a dozen different shortlisted titles on a pile in Iona’s lap. Kerry joins her on the living room sofa with the rest of their box of chocolates. The paddocks are black outside.

Iona drums on the DVDs. “Your collection, my friend, is shit.”

“It is not.” He grabs a discarded DVD from the floor. “What about this one?”

It’s Gaslight. Ingrid Bergman’s face smiles up from the cover.

“Wow. Real fucking funny…”

“I’m just saying—”

“Don’t just say.” Iona puts her hand over his mouth. “We’re not watching a romance, either. So there goes eighty percent of our options.”

“Why no romance?”

“Because romances are silly and soppy.”

Kerry tuts and pulls her hand away by the wrist. “Romance is soppy in real life too.”

“Yeah, well…” Iona’s eyes stray to the pile of DVDs in her lap. “I guess I just don’t like watching other people in love. When it doesn’t work for me.”

An awkward silence passes, in which Iona pretends to sift through her pile once more and Kerry only watches. Her red hair shields her face from him. Kerry regrets letting go of her hand. Now there is no way to give her a comforting squeeze or look, without intruding. She’s wearing Kath’s green turtleneck, and a pair of baggy pyjama bottoms. She looks grown-up, somehow—or maybe his eyes are getting younger.

They start picking at the final few chocolates.

He says, “It’s worth trying again, Iona.”

“Uh-huh.” She sighs down at the DVDs. “You were married for twenty years. It’s easy for you to say.”

“And you’ve barely been alive twenty years.” Kerry scoots closer on the couch. Their weight on the cushions tilts them towards one another. “You’ve hardly had time to find someone.”

“You know that feeling of being alive?” Iona asks. She looks up at him. Eyes alight. “You know that feeling of waking up, excited to see that person? They always describe it.”

“I know. It’s worth living for.”

“I’ve never had it.”

“I haven’t had it for years.” Kerry reaches forward and moves a strand of hair out of her eyes. He hesitates, then goes on, “I’ve been alone. It’s lonely, I know. I get it. But you gotta keep living.”

Iona smiles, almost sadly. She plucks his hand from her hair and squeezes it with warm fingers. The blue static of the waiting television – NO SIGNAL – throws half her face into a soft glow. It accentuates the ridges of her lips and nose, and the curve of her lashes. She looks poised to say something, eyes roaming over his face, but she doesn’t. His hand grows hot in hers.

“Anyway, we don’t have to watch a romance,” Kerry says. He shrugs. “And your love life is your business.”

“Yeah. It is.” Iona rolls her eyes, but her voice lacks its usual mocking conviction. There is hesitancy, absent-mindedness. “I just need a break from romance.”

“Yeah?”

“Probably.” Her hand shifts where he holds it, her fingers lacing into his. “Maybe.”

A heartbeat, or a hundred. Kerry’s eyes flit down to their hands and up again. He edges closer.

“It can be beautiful,” he says. He searches for the words in her eyes. “Love. Sex. It can ruin lives, but it can also make them worth living.”

Iona leans her face closer and whispers, “I know I’m young. But I wanted to find someone. I wanted to be young and in love.”

“Yeah, I know… Can I ask you something?”

She raises her eyebrows. He can make out their individual hairs.

Kerry pauses. He leans a little closer. Closer. Then he closes the gap between them and plants a kiss on her mouth. Her lips are soft as a breath of wind. Her nose bumps into his as they tilt their heads. Her hand tightens around his fingers like a vice.

After a second, he breaks off after a second and meets her gaze. She doesn’t blink, or even seem to breathe.

“Kerry,” she says. The syllables come out stilted, as though they are foreign to her. “I…”

He waits, then squeezes her hand. “You?”

“Kiss me again,” she tells him.

The words set him alight: muscles sharpening from head to toe, the pit of his stomach turning over, a heat in his chest and throat as he leans in again. He doesn’t compute the scene—and he isn’t sure he wants to, for how can conscious thought do anything but break the magic? He hardly feels in control of his body as he leans back in and gives her another kiss, this one longer than the first. Her lips move to his tempo. She draws air. He can taste the chocolate on her mouth.

The DVD stack falls to the floor as Iona leans forward, still cross-legged. She breaks away from the kiss, staring into his eyes, and gently untwines her legs from their knot so she can shuffle herself into his lap. Kerry looks up into her freckled face. Their hands are still laced, now slicked with sweat. Her weight is on his legs.

“You’re gentle,” she tells him. She seems to fight off an unbidden smile.

Kerry plants a kiss on her knuckle, and another. He hardly breathes. Her slender body is poised over his. The dressing gown he’s wearing is hot, so hot that he sweats as though back outside doing farmwork.

“Iona.” He cranes his neck to meet her ardent gaze. “I’m your uncle…”

“I’m your niece. Funny how that works.”

“Shocking,” Kerry agrees. His free hand strays to her back. “But…” He trails off.

“But…” Iona grapples with his meaning, seems to chew it in her teeth. Then she cups his chin with her free hand, and runs its thumb over his cheek. So soft it tickles. “This still feels nice, right?”

“You’re my niece.”

“I am, yeah.”

Kerry’s hand is still in hers. It is hard to think of them as separate objects now, so he keeps holding on. His other hand makes affectionate circles around the small of her back. The house around them is alive, full of energy as it never has been since Kath died. Kerry exhales one more time, very slowly.

Then he says, “Kiss me again?”

“Hey, that’s my line.” Iona leans forward. Her hair falls down to his chest as she presses her forehead against his. Her words come as a whisper. “Old man…”

Their lips meet, more forcefully than before. She finally lets his hand go, leaving it lost and confused in its emptiness, and her fingers stray under the hem of his dressing gown to brush his chest. Kerry tenses in his seat. The pressure on his legs and lips blinds him to the rest of the room. He has to cling to his wits like a lifeline to stop himself moving his hands where they cannot return; for in that instant, he wants only her body and nothing else.

Iona’s hand splays beneath his dressing gown. It glides to the flesh of his stomach. Kerry massages her back and shoulders. He parts her lips with his tongue and slides it into her mouth. They are linked into one, shrouded in the blue glow of the boxy television. Windows black with night, and draughty floorboards. None of it matters. Her tongue is damp against his, and surprisingly dexterous.

“Mm. Kerry.” Iona breaks off and leans her forehead on his. Her smile is an inch away. “What are we doing, then?”

“Shh. We don’t have to talk about it. Not yet.”

Kerry runs his hands down her back to her hips. He gives her a cursory kiss, closes his teeth gently on her bottom lip, and gives it a soft tug. Her saliva clings to his mouth. There is sweat between their brows, and an intensity in her eyes. Iona’s eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” he says. “When did you become such a proper lady?”

“A lady,” Iona echoes. She flicks her hair dramatically over her shoulder. “Yeah, you best believe I’m a proper lady.”

She stares at him for quite some time. Her expression is playful. Then she grabs him by both shoulders and tilts him so they fall down across the length of the sofa. Kerry is pressed between the softness of the cushions and the even softer feel of her tender skin. Iona takes him back to his youth. They kiss till his legs are numb from her weight, till his tongue knows her mouth like his own.

At some point Kerry’s hands stray under her turtleneck to the bare flesh of her back. He explores her like a teenager, rapt by lust and hormones. Some time later, Iona fastens his hands tight together with his dressing gown cord and traps them beneath her body. She feeds him the last of their chocolates from the cardboard box and tells him he’s handsome.

They talk about life and a broken taboo. They kiss with a chocolate melting between their lips.

———

Iona wakes to the dawn chorus, wedged between Kerry’s body and the couch backrest. Sunlight streams in through the sliding doors. The TV is still on. For a moment she just breathes, her extremities chilly in the absence of a blanket, then the previous night hits her like a shot of alcohol. Kerry—oh, Kerry… Iona raises a pale knuckle to touch her lips, tender and dry, and oddly weightless when they are not pressed against his. Have lips always felt this much like nothing on her face?

She is hot to her core. Motor control comes awkwardly as she sits up, creeps over Kerry, and stands on the cold floorboards. A tingling sweeps her body in waves, down to her stomach and pelvis and into her thighs. Heartbeats and the dawn chorus, and heartbeats again. Kerry looks peaceful on the couch. One arm dangles to the floor. Iona tiptoes to the bathroom to pee. The strain on her bladder is almost arousing.

When she’s finished, she stares at herself in the mirror. Knuckles white on the sink. Her hair is out at odd angles, and her eyes are bagged, but as she stares at herself she feels no shame. She wants to turn the page right back to evening. She wants him.

Foolish girl, she tells herself. Foolish indeed.

Every path of thought turns to Kerry; to their sprawling chats, to the dance of his fingertips on her back. Iona strays a hand under the waistband of her pyjamas, over the fabric of her panties. She crosses her legs where she stands, squeezes her thighs tight, and holds the position—her hand pinched in the warmth. This position had always been a pleasure point for her.

“Iona?” Kerry’s voice from outside.

She withdraws her hand from her panties. Still keeping her legs crossed so tightly it tingles, she calls back, “Yeah? Sorry. Just brushing my teeth.”

“Just checking on you.”

A plateau of subtle pleasure. Iona uncrosses her thighs and runs the tap. She neatens her hair, her breaths shallow, and she really does brush her teeth.

When she opens the door, Kerry is standing there in the hall. He looks rather tired. Scruffy hair, stubble like grass, his dressing gown hanging open to show his underwear.

Iona had not expected him to wake so soon. Another sweep of warmth runs down her abdomen. She steps forward and extends onto tiptoes to kiss him on the mouth. The contact lasts only a second. Then, with the smallest of smiles, Kerry breaks away, passes her into the bathroom, and closes the door behind him. She breathes once more.

They have toast for breakfast. Kerry makes coffee, then he dresses and goes out to perform his daily routine on the farm. Iona watches him from paddock to paddock through the farmhouse windows, sipping away at her coffee. All the grassy fields are tipped white by frost. She picks at her fingernails. How can she hope to reconcile her role as a niece with the events of the previous night?

Perhaps more pressingly: does she really want to? Her lips are dry.

Iona goes up to her spare room and reads on the bed for a while, but loses interest fast. Her mind strays back to where it must: his breaths on her face, his body on the couch. She closes her eyes and imagines a continuation of the scene: Kerry’s dressing gown coming off… his hands unclasping her bra. His head between her thighs.

Images run through her mind like film.

Iona pries her hand under her pyjamas, and this time she strays her fingers beneath the hem of her panties too. They touch the soft crest of her mound. Iona spreads herself out on the spare bed, working her breaths up into soft moans. She remembers his taste. It is still in her throat. Her fingertips run the length of her labia and up again. Small motions around her clitoris. She gives a sharp exhale, and pretends her fingers belong to Uncle Kerry.

———

Iona scarcely knows how she spends her time that day. Minutes and hours slip by without warning; time running too fast to grasp. She and Kerry interact a little, over lunch or in the moments he comes inside for a drink, but their conversations are airy. Twice more they share a short kiss as though they are casual lovers. Over the afternoon, Iona flits from couch to lounger, chair to bed to shower, from window to window like an anxious cat. Her body is on edge, such that it physically aches in her stomach and thighs.

When Kerry finishes up his work for the day, he goes to take a shower.

Iona listens to the sound of the running water from outside the bathroom. Her body is restless with pent up energy. Breathing fast, she runs upstairs to change into a shirt and set of underwear. Heartbeats in her throat and groin. She picks out a white bralette, and one of Aunt Kath’s stylish skirts. It suits her, she thinks. She tucks her blouse into the skirt.

When Iona gets back downstairs, the shower is still running. She stands in the hall on legs made of matchsticks, spinning through a thousand illicit scenarios in her mind. What if she miscalculates? What if Kerry says their kiss had been a mistake? The wait for him to finish is agonising.

At last, the bathroom door opens. Kerry appears with a towel around his waist, droplets of water clinging to his torso and face. Hair in his eyes.

“Iona,” he says. He takes a step forward and closes the door behind him. “Good day?”

“Not bad. You?”

“Yeah. Listen.” Kerry looks down and puts his hands on her shoulders. “I’ve booked a plot for the market. It’s on Saturday.”

“I’m coming.”

“Yes, great. Anyway, I thought on Monday we could go to the shops. Get you some rations.”

“Rations?”

“Well, we’ll make some spare money selling produce at the market.” His hands stray down to her upper arms. “So I thought… you know, you’re mostly living out of Kath’s wardrobe at the moment. You might want to buy some creature comforts of your own. Liven up the spare room.”

Iona considers this. She tries really hard to consider the proposal, to run it through her logical mind, but her attention is split. Her eyes rest on Kerry’s damp, fresh body. His stubble. His eyes.

All she manages is, “Kerry…”

“Iona?”

“This is happening,” she tells him.

Before he can respond, she stretches up and latches onto his mouth with her own, her hands gliding over his wet back. He takes her in his arms without question, stumbling back under her momentum till they hit the bathroom door with a thud. She can smell his shampoo. Her fingers are crushed between the wooden door and his shoulders. Stubble tickles her chin.

Kerry cups her face in his hands and breaks off. “You’ll tell me if we’re going too fast?”

She slides her hands around to his front, over the tones of his bare chest. “Why’s that? Did you have something in mind?”

“I’m just saying. I want you to be comfortable.”

“Listen. Old man.” Iona kisses his nose and cheeks, then over the edge of his jaw to his neck. She looks for a thousand words of gratitude, but none seem to fit. All she can say as she meets her uncle’s gentle eyes is, “This is how it’s meant to feel. Okay?”

A small smile on his lips. “Okay.”

And she returns to his body, kneading the skin of his neck between her teeth. Soft breaths. His hands massage her lower back and, as she continues her exploration of his flesh, he pulls her tight against him; so tight that her breasts press against his chest. One of her legs slides between his knees. Her head now over his shoulder, Iona nibbles at his ear. Her calves hurt from staying on tiptoes for so long, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing does.

“I’m fucking glad you came to my door,” Kerry says over her shoulder.

He runs the fabric of her blouse between his hands, whispering compliments into her ear. With each breath and quiet word, he slides the blouse up a fraction. Little by little it is being untucked from her skirt, almost too subtly to be noticeable. But Iona does notice. And it is electric.

“That night, I mean.” He kisses her on the head. “This house was so empty before you came.”

“Uh-huh. I almost froze to death out there. Your poor old niece. She almost died, Kerry.”

“Mm. I’ll have to make it up to her.”

“And how do you plan on doing—”

Kerry moves one arm to her legs and the other around her back, and in one quick motion sweeps her from her feet into his arms. The sudden bout of strength is surprising. For a second Iona flails. She thinks she might fall, but he holds her tight. He carries her down the hall to the kitchen.

“Was that too much?” he whispers to her.

Iona gives a little shake of the head. “No.” A pause. “Thank you for checking.”

She thinks they are heading back to the couch, but Kerry stops in the dining room. He plants mini kisses all over her lips and nose, each of them a pinpoint of damp that Iona will never forget, and he lays her down on the kitchen table like a tablecloth. The hard wooden surface puts her in mind of an operating table, or a stage. Her legs dangle from the knees downward.

“I’m a star,” she says, spreading her limbs over the table. It can easily fit her arm span across its width, with only her hands hanging off the edges. “Kerry’s star?”

Kerry leans over her, his exposed torso gleaming above her as the sun streams in through the sliding doors. She can make out each stub of hair on his chest, every pore on his face as they embrace. He kisses her mouth, then her chin. Lower. His tongue flicks out over her chin and throat, down to the neck of her blouse. Every hair on Iona’s body stands up.

“God, Kerry,” she says. Her thighs are permeating with heat. “This is insane.”

Kerry raises his head to meet her gaze. He props himself on one elbow. With the other, he starts fiddling with the top button of her blouse. It comes away easy. He undoes the second button too, revealing her white bralette neckline. His fingertips brush the edge of the lace. Iona’s toes are curled with tension.

Kerry leans in to kiss her now-exposed collarbone. His every movement is so slow that Iona almost scolds him, nauseous to the bone with tension. She throws her head back and exhales as he gives all his attention to her upper chest and neck. Then he retreats, back onto an elbow, fiddling with the next button. And the next. Iona’s view of him inching down her body is tantalising. Kerry waits until he’s undone every button, then with a flourish he parts the blouse down its middle as though opening a book.

Iona gasps. The air on her abdomen is immediate. Her thighs give a muffled contraction beneath her skirt as Kerry’s eyes roam over every inch of her exposed body: her belly button and the smooth plain of her stomach, her bralette and the shape of petite breasts beneath the lace fabric. They meet eyes. Staring.

Kerry chuckles at her expression. “What do you want me to say?”

“Maybe that they’re nice, asshole.”

He laughs, and raises his eyebrows. His eyes on her bralette. “Or… I could say nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” he whispers. He lowers his head to kiss the peak of a covered breast. “Nothing at all.”

Iona shivers at his touch. She tangles her fingers in his hair while he bobs his head around every part of the bralette, his mouth traversing the crest of each breast and everywhere in between, his tongue working circles on the fabric. Iona squirms under her uncle’s weight. He moves his mouth down to her stomach.

“Oh, Kerry…”

“You’re perfect,” he tells her. His tongue coasts over her belly button. “Iona, don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Kerry.”

She can’t contain herself. The tightness in her muscles is verging on painful. Legs numb, mind numb with arousal, Iona drifts a hand down her body to the hem of her skirt, and under the band of her panties. Her short patch of pubic hair is saturated by sweat. Kerry draws back into a standing position to watch as her fingers disappear beneath her skirt.

He stares. His face is locked in place, lips apart, eyes unblinking like marbles. Iona smiles up at him, revelling in the effect she seems to have on him. For a moment the throb in her crotch is so strong that she doesn’t quite register her fingers reaching her labia. She brushes her clitoris and squirms where she lies.

“I…” Her fingers part her labia. “I don’t know how long I’m gonna last.”

Kerry looks into her face and smiles. “Who says I want you to last?”

“Yeah?”

“We have all the days in the world, Iona.”

She nods. She touches herself. A fleeting grin, and a moan. Legs tense. Kerry is so tall, watching her, standing there before the table. In just his towel. Iona runs her fingertips around her clitoris. Her knuckles grow wetter by the second. Another moan. She drops her head back against the table with a thud as a terrific heat crawls to her extremities, pleasure building in her veins.

“Iona.”

“Mm. Kerry… God.”

“Iona, look at me.”

She raises her head again.

His body shines. One of his hands is fingering at the edge of his towel.

Iona meets his tender gaze and nods; she gives him permission, approval, working her slick fingers over labia and clitoris faster and faster. Her free hand clutches the edge of the table like a vice as Kerry unwinds his towel.

“This is how it’s meant to feel,” Iona says again.

Kerry lets his towel fall to the ground, and he’s standing there in the nude.

His cock stands over her, contorted by arousal. The thought that she is responsible burns Iona like the sun. She is responsible for the precum clinging to the head of her uncle’s cock. There is a sheen of moisture over Kerry’s body—residue from the shower. It accentuates the troughs of his joints and the hills of his muscles. Each of his dark hairs on his arms and legs is slicked down to his skin.

As she watches, Kerry runs his hand down the length of his shaft. His member is still damp from his shower. He pumps it to the sound of Iona’s shallow breaths, slow at first, then faster. Iona gasps. The image is too much for her to stand. She shudders, her thighs and core tensing up beyond belief. Agony. Her whole body convulses, then contracts. She arches her back off the table as she hits her orgasm.

“Kerry, I’m… fuck. Oh!”

Her hand freezes up, and she moans out to him as she reaches the peak of her climax. Every fibre of her body tingles. Pleasure climbs up each rung of her spine. She feels lightheaded, and for thirty seconds she isn’t quite sure how to keep her breathing steady. The dining room spins. She’s murmuring something to Kerry as he keeps pumping his erection above her. She’s murmuring, gasping for air. Still gasping as the crescendo subsides. The pleasure ebbs and flows, in waves that leave her body splintered by goosebumps.

“Don’t stop,” she tells him. “Don’t stop.”

Kerry is quickening his pace.

“Don’t stop,” she says, again. “Cum for me, Kerry.”

“Fuck… Iona.”

“Mhm.” She smiles up at him, bites her bottom lip. Her body still tingles. She isn’t sure she will ever have the energy to touch herself again. “Keep going. Here.”

She sits up on the edge of the table, dizzy for a moment. Kerry strokes his cock a foot from her face. Iona pries her trembling fingers under the neckline of her bralette and pulls each half down over its shoulder so that her breasts come free. Kerry stares. Iona cups them and looks up into his eyes. Her nipples are swollen from arousal.

“Cum on my tits,” she says. “Do it for me…”

And Kerry does. He releases his load with a great gasp of air, his cock quivering and pulsating in his hand as though of its own accord. Iona watches his face twist and split with pleasure. His cum spatters her chest and breasts in spurts, one after the other after the other.

Hot semen runs over her nipples and stomach, and she leans in to the stream as though it were rain. Kerry gasps her name. He strokes himself to his final spurt of arousal. His semen is all over her body—hot, cooling fast. It oozes down her stomach to the waistband of her skirt in dollops.

“Oh, Kerry.”

“Iona.”

Blood rushes back to Iona’s mind at a rate of knots. She lets out a nervous laugh. Only now that the house is silent does she realise how loud they must have been. She can hear the birds again, and the rattle of the window panes in the wind. The smell of his sex in her nostrils.

“I haven’t…” Kerry begins. He hesitates. “It’s a been a while since…”

Iona smiles at him.

“You look incredible,” he tells her.

She looks down at the mess strewn over her pale body: milky-white sap on her paper-white skin, lines of his most intimate liquid inching down her figure. Gauging tracks into her like tyres into mud. She cups her hands at her skirt’s waistband to stop any of it running beneath the hem to her panties.

Iona looks back at him. “Did we just do that?”

“Your hands…”

They are pooling with liquid. The absurdity of the whole situation overcomes the both of them, and they break into hot, happy laughter. The sort of uncontrolled laughter that happens between old friends. Iona takes a shower while Kerry gets dinner on. The water washes his sex from her body, leaving her pink. She can hardly process her emotions.

They indulge in frequent kisses and airy smiles that night. Iona is pleased to find that their latest step into the illicit doesn’t make things awkward. Kerry is just as chatty as ever. As she wraps herself around him in bed that night and knots her tongue into his, she feels she belongs in his arms.

———

Kerry spends that night in the spare room. He and Iona take thermoses full of tea upstairs and hunker down under the covers. They tell stories and jokes, and discuss all their favourite books. Kerry sleeps to her scent and heartbeat. Her body fits into his, their limbs entwined like wire. Warm skin, and the ridges of bones. He rests with a hand under her pyjamas on her stomach. It’s a single bed, and not the most comfortable to sleep with the two of them squeezed inside—but he wouldn’t disturb their tender embrace for the world. Their embrace is the world.

Friday is hot. The cows and sheep hide under trees to escape the sun, and the hens stay in their cool coops all day. Kerry runs the sprinklers to keep the garden moist. He and Iona spend their time indoors with the doors open wide, sipping on berry smoothies and gimlet cocktails made from homegrown limes. Iona makes him dance back his years out on the deck. He kisses her between songs. Her lips are damp. Her red hair is like summer fruit.

“The market will be glorious,” Iona says. She brandishes an old pair of Kath’s sunglasses. “We’ll be proper farmers, the two of us. Cork hats ‘n black sunnies.”

———

But they are not so lucky: the next day brings with it a downpour, and certainly no call for sunglasses. Black clouds squeeze the life from the sky. Rain pummels the local market till the ground turns to mud. The wind strains gazebos in their brackets and tears banknotes from cold fingertips. Kerry and Iona sell their produce from the back of Kerry’s old station wagon. The pair sit in the boot among the fruit and veg, taking orders from sodden customers who stand under the open tailgate.

They persist with their makeshift stall even as the rest of the field empties out. Kerry maintains the pretence of making what cash they can—but privately he elects to stay because of Iona’s enthusiasm. She holds her spirit high, chatting with sodden customers, kissing Kerry from underneath her hood whenever they are sure no one is watching. He leans against one side of the boot, and she against the other.

Sometime around lunch, Iona tells him: “Mum and dad called me last night.”

“Really?” Kerry looks over at her. He hesitates. “Did they find out about—”

“No, they just called.” Iona adjusts her raincoat hood and gives a dry laugh. “They wanted to make up, and… they invited me round for dinner on Monday.”

“So they don’t know you’re single yet?”

“No.”

A long silence. The pair of them look out over the barren country paddock. Barely a dozen market stalls remain now—scattered crumbs in the hazy rain. Some distance away, a pair of dogs are having the time of their lives in the mud. Iona throws Kerry a sad smile, slides out of the boot, and skirts from sight around the edge of the car. He hears her get into the passenger seat at the front.

Kerry stays in the boot for a while longer. The world stands still. What would Iona’s parents say if they knew what their daughter had been up to? Kerry has seen her figure exposed as he never should have. His lips have met hers, their flesh has touched; his orgasm has run down her body.

He peers around at the emptying market. They are unlikely to make any more sales, so he hops out into the wet and closes the boot. Mud squelches underfoot. He hobbles around to the driver’s door and slides inside. Thud. Quiet in the sealed car, but for the fall of rain on the windscreen and roof.

“I can’t bear to tell them,” Iona says. She looks over at him from the passenger seat. “Mum and dad, they were right. Christ. They’ll have a fucking laugh about it.”

“They weren’t right.”

“Yeah, Kerry. They were.” She stares ahead at the windscreen. “Because they told me not to go off with some boy and I did it anyway. And look where it landed me.”

“It was never about the boy,” Kerry says. He takes his jacket off and throws it into the backseat. “It was about you leaving London. It was always about control.”

“Uh-huh… control.”

“Yes. Your mother never had any in our family. I was the oldest child; I got the freedom.” Kerry shrugs. “When I fucked my education to go be a farmer our parents were… mortified.”

Iona’s expression lightens a little. She turns her eyes to him, small dimples at the edges of her smirk. “Didn’t you slap your lecturer?”

“Don’t you worry about that. When I left school, your mother suffered for it.” He leans his hands on the steering wheel. “Our parents couldn’t have two lowbrow children. So all the pressure went to Alesha.”

Iona scoffs at her mother’s name. “Bitch did not break the generational cycle.”

They take off their boots and put those on the back seats. Kerry clambers through the car to the boot, to pick out a selection of their unsold fruit. He and Iona eat in the front seats and listen to the rain. They are quite happy, though their trousers are wet. A chill seeps in from the misting windows. It’s an adventure.

Iona briefly fiddles with the radio, but gets only static. She glares over at Kerry. “So what’s with you and the shitty car? It’s old as I can remember.”

“Would you rather we were sat in a wheelbarrow?”

Iona laughs. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Before this shitty car, I walked to the market. Six miles with my barrow of veg.” Kerry runs a hand over the dashboard. “I must have sold a million cucumbers before I got her. And she’s never failed me.”

“It sounds peaceful.”

“Hm?”

“Slapping the lecturer,” Iona says. She plucks his hand from the dashboard. Her fingers are damp with orange juice. “Leaving the city.”

A short pause: the patter of rain, the static of the radio. Their eyes meet.

“It is peaceful,” Kerry says. He holds on to her hand. “It can be lonely, though.”

“Not recently.”

“No. Not recently.”

Her gaze strays to their linked hands. “So what do we do about this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I…” Iona breaks off. She peers into the back of the car at the crates of fruit, as though they had been eavesdropping. “This. How long do I stay in your spare room overlooking your garden?”

Kerry looks at her, sitting in his passenger seat, in a rainy field on a cold Saturday like any other. For all the thrills she has given him in the pit of his stomach, for all the hot affection they have embraced with, for all those gimlet cocktails; there is a melancholy at the bottom of the jar.

They can never be lovers, not as he once was with Kath. Not in this life, with these fingertips.

“We can have this conversation,” Kerry says. He pauses, and draws her hand up to his lips to kiss her knuckles. They taste like orange juice. “But do you really want to?”

“I’m seeing my parents on Monday. It kind of feels like a return to real life, you know?”

“But it isn’t Monday quite yet. It’s still Saturday.”

She rotates her hand, offering a new finger to his probing lips. “That’s true.”

“Or maybe it’s already Tuesday…” Kerry closes his eyes, holding her fingers tight, kissing every knuckle she possesses. “The radio hasn’t worked for years,” he says. “It could be Tuesday already, for all we know.”

“Yeah. Or Wednesday,” says Iona’s voice. “Or Friday…”

“Friday sounds good. Let’s pretend it’s Friday.”

“Happy Friday, Kerry.”

He opens his eyes. She is staring at him.

“Happy Friday, Iona.”

It’s silly, but his words come out with a quaver. It is somehow beautiful, to pretend that it’s a different day. To pretend the real world doesn’t exist. As long as they are in this car, with static coming from the speaker grille, with an empty rural paddock around them, they can ignore real life.

Iona withdraws her hand from his grasp, rotates herself clumsily in the passenger seat, and crawls over the centre console. Her legs knock the gear shifter and handbrake. Her brilliant red hair dangles as she clambers her way across the car to Kerry, to take up a position in his lap. It’s a tight fit. Her tailbone touches the steering wheel as she straddles him.

Kerry looks up at her face. It strikes him as he sits beneath her weight just how beautiful this girl is. He stares at her marshmallow-pink lips, at her gentle features framed by hair. Iona is a woman of contrasts: pink lips and a pastel face, scarlet hair and pale skin. Feisty, and quiet underneath.

She leans in to kiss him. Kerry recalls the sight of her on the kitchen table back home, half-nude, fingering herself to climax as he watched by. The thought sends prickles through to his stomach. He feels himself hardening under her weight.

“Kerry,” Iona whispers, breaking away. “Tell me something.”

“Yes?”

There is still rain lashing the windows, but her closeness takes all the chill from the air.

“What are you thinking about right now?”

“Your body,” Kerry tells her. His eyes stray down her freckled arm to its joint, over the ruffles in her shirt and cargo pants. “Your face. Your lips.”

“What else?”

“Your voice. The sounds you make when I kiss you.”

Iona chuckles softly. She looks around to see if there is anyone nearby in the paddock. Satisfied that they are not being watched, she pulls her shit over her head and drops it aside. Then she removes her bra. Her breasts are firm hills. In the shadow of the rainy windscreen and windows, her body shimmers.

“What about now?” Iona asks. “What are you thinking about now?”

Kerry exhales slowly. He runs a hand up her arm to an exposed shoulder. “I like the way your freckles taper off,” he says.

“Hmm… what else?”

“I…” He meets her eyes. Her lashes are like small strands of copper wire. “You’re pretty, Iona.”

“You’re pretty too. For an older gentleman.”

“An older gentleman?”

She smiles. “Uh-huh.”

Kerry upturns his face to kiss her again. He runs his hands in circles on her bare back, over her warm skin, and around to take her breasts in his grasp. Iona murmurs something into his mouth which he cannot decipher. She strays her hands to his waist and pulls his shirt up, over his head. When they embrace next, their naked torsos touch.

“You’re so warm,” she says. She lays a hand on his forehead. “How are you always so warm?”

“I don’t know. I’m used to it. The heating’s never worked…”

Iona laughs. “It’s such a shitbox, Kerry.”

“Maybe.”

The rain picks up, to the point where Kerry feels sure no one would be able to see them even if they came right up close to the car. With their hair damp and their shirts removed, the English weather saps them slowly of their warmth, and their embrace takes on a note of necessity—if they stop kissing, the cold creeps in. So Kerry takes Iona in his arms and kisses her without pause. Her body heat is everything. The windows mist up around them.

At some point the pair of them cross an unspoken line. There is no discussion, other than the roaming of their hands, but they both come to an unvoiced agreement: there is no backing out of this embrace. Now that their clothes are coming off and the rain is picking up, there is only one direction in which their nervous excitement must lead them. Kerry wants her, and he is sure she wants him.

Iona removes his belt in one fluid motion. She tosses it into the back seat and turns to his jeans, to the cold buttons and fly at his crotch. Kerry checks his shallow breathing. He can feel himself hard with arousal beneath his clothes, growing still harder with every moment Iona’s nimble hands work to unzip his jeans. Soon she is successful, and she slides his trousers down his legs to his knees.

“Kerry…”

“Iona.”

His underwear are pitched into a tent. Iona sits over his thighs, her cargo pants rough on his skin. As he watches, she contorts herself in the small space between him and the steering wheel, twisting her limbs to find the right angle to remove her own trousers. When at last she manages, she reveals to him a pair of plain high-cut underwear. They are white, and made from cotton.

Kerry thinks the underwear enhance the natural grace of her body nicely. Iona is a girl who doesn’t need lingerie or an elaborate coaction of fashion—rather, she suits something simple to accentuate the organic lines of her figure. Here, sitting atop of him in only her cotton panties, she seems to be the softest and smoothest thing in the world.

He decides to flip her earlier question back at her: “What are you thinking right now?”

“If I told you, there would be no going back.”

“No?” Kerry smiles up at her. His heart races. “And what does that mean?”

Iona adjusts her position in his lap, kisses him, and says, “It means, Kerry, that I don’t want to go too fast.”

“You don’t?”

Iona pauses. Then she amends her statement: “I don’t know if we should go too fast.”

“For whose sake?”

“Both of ours. If I told you what I wanted, I wouldn’t be able to take it back. Then it’d be out in the open, you know. Like a secret.”

“Like a secret,” Kerry echoes.

He runs his hands over her bare torso, around to her breasts. Iona rocks gently in his lap, resting her chin atop his head, and he plants a kiss on each of her nipples. She wriggles for a second, tickled by his stubble, but Kerry is careful. He runs his tongue between her breasts.

“I just…” Iona rests a hand on the back of his head, entwining her fingers in his hair. “There’d be no going back if I told you what I wanted. But I don’t know if we can go there. If you can go there.”

He is dimly aware that what she’s saying is sad, or at least that there is some truth to it. But for now, he just enjoys the sound of her voice and ignores the words themselves. Her voice is so sweet. Kerry moves his lips from one of her areolas to the other. He takes her nipples in his mouth, kneading them with his teeth and warm saliva. They have a small, understated texture on his tongue.

Iona kisses the top of his head. Her breathing grows airier.

“I don’t know if we can go there…” she repeats. This time she trails off, as if she lacks conviction in what she says. “I don’t want to spoil things.”

For a long time they don’t say anything more. Kerry moves from her breasts to her neck, tasting her flesh as she presents it to him. He lays a line of kisses up to one of her ears, to the edge of her hair, where there is a fine layer of sweat forming. Iona massages his back and chest with slender fingers. Her hair falls in elegant red locks about her shoulders.

Kerry’s legs are growing numb beneath her weight, but he wouldn’t trade her body for anything. If she fell asleep in this position, he would let her rest, even if his legs lost all circulation. The rain picks up outside into something torrential. The windscreen runs thick with water. The paddock is almost completely empty now.

Trees shudder in the wind.

After what might be an hour, Iona whispers into his ear: “Can I touch you, this time?”

Kerry draws back from her pale neck to plant a kiss on her mouth.

“Yes,” he breathes.

Iona smiles. She tucks several strands of vibrant hair out of her eyes, then turns her gaze down to his lap, where he is still hard with anticipation. Iona strays a finger beneath his waistband and, in one quick movement, pulls his underwear down and hooks the hem over his testicles. The relief is instant. Kerry’s cock stands to its full height, unimpeded by fabric. There is a sudden chill around his thighs.

Iona doesn’t say anything. Her eyes flit from his shaft up to his face, and back down again. There is a small smile teasing the edges of her lips, as though they are sharing in something mischievous. As Kerry sits motionless, she hooks both hands back around his underwear and pulls them farther down his legs, to join his trousers at his knees.

“You’re so patient,” she whispers.

“I try my best.”

“Uh-huh.”

Iona raises an index finger to her mouth, holds it against her lips, and lets a bubble of saliva form. Her gaze stays locked on Kerry’s upturned face. When the tip of her finger is glistening-wet, she lowers it and touches the head of his waiting cock. Kerry’s thighs tense. Her spit is warm, but cools fast. Iona uses a single fingertip to run the saliva around every part of his tip, including the slit at its crest.

Kerry exhales slowly.

When she has worked a film of moisture over the head of his cock, Iona leans her face closer to his lap, and works up a fresh string of saliva between her lips. Her hair dangles down on his thighs. This time she lets her drool fall on its own. Kerry flinches in his seat as thick, warm tendrils of spit drip onto his shaft like dollops of syrup. It turns him on beyond belief—the sight of Iona’s face so close to his crotch, the wet sounds of her mouth as she salivates, the tickling of her hair on his groin.

“Fuck, Iona…”

“Uh-huh.” She sits back up straighter, eyeing him. “Say it again.”

“Fuck.”

Iona tuts. She strays her hand to his shaft, wraps it with her pale fingers, and begins to work her saliva around its full length with long pumps. She is slow but firm. Each pump makes a squelching sound which fills the small car interior.

“I meant my name,” she says. “I like it when you say my name.”

“Iona?”

She quickens her pace. “That’s the one…”

“Iona.”

As he sits there in her grasp, beneath the weight of her marble body, it occurs to Kerry just how pretty her hands are. They are gentle, but not too gentle. Their knuckles are pronounced, but not overly so. Her fingers are smooth, but not artificial. There is a definite crooked charm to her fingers. They strike him as very human, as very Iona-ish.

“Iona,” he says. He cannot find the words. “You’re so pretty.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes.”

All at once, Iona stops pumping his shaft. She pauses, her fingers wrapped around its base, touching the hair on his pubis, then she lets go. A thin string of saliva follows her hand as she withdraws it. Kerry’s cock is overcome with a fresh wave of cold.

“You’re pretty,” Iona says.

She adjusts her position across his legs, her large eyes upon him, then she leans slowly back. The dreary light of the rain catches her stomach as she tilts her body until her back touches the steering wheel. As she does this, she parts her thighs to show him her underwear once again. There is a hint of grey across them, as though by shadow, right over the point where they form a small mound.

Kerry raises his gaze to her face. “Are you…”

“Yeah. I’m wet,” Iona says. “Will you touch me, Kerry?”

Kerry reaches out to lay a hand on her hip. “You can lean on the steering wheel,” he tells her. “The horn doesn’t work.”

“Typical.” Iona smiles. “I told you: it’s a shitbox.”

She leans back, resting her weight on the steering wheel. Her feet are planted on the seat either side of Kerry’s legs, thighs opened to welcome his attention. He reaches forward, a tremor in his outstretched hand. The damp patch on her underwear is tantalising. Her stomach forms a concave line, from her breasts down to the hem of her garment.

“Tell me,” he says, “if it’s too much.”

“I will.”

Kerry nods at her. He runs his hand around from her hip onto the smooth flesh of her abdomen. His fingertips glide. They pass over her belly button and brush up against her underwear. For a moment he is tempted to draw beneath that waistband and pull it away, to see her in her complete and naked form for the first time, but he resists the impulse.

Instead, he moves his hand down farther, over the fabric between her opened thighs. Iona lets out a breath of air. She shifts slightly where she sits. Kerry is transfixed. He runs his fingers over her underwear, feeling the warmth emanating through the fabric. The softness of her waiting flesh is tangible, even through this thin barrier.

Iona returns one hand to his cock to continue pumping him.

“Keep going,” she whispers.

There is a nervous, hot energy in the pit of Kerry’s stomach. Each pump of Iona’s hand seems to bring the excitement closer to the surface of his skin, as if she were tempting some animal slowly from its den. She briefly leans in to let another string of saliva drop onto his shaft. Her strokes quicken.

Kerry presses a knuckle against her underwear. He knows what lies beneath the fabric—he knows, and he feels. Her moist mound is waiting for him. The heat against his finger is strong and, as he presses a little more firmly, he feels her sex compress beneath his touch. When he draws his finger back, it is damp with moisture. The wet shadow on her underwear is widening.

Kerry looks at her. “Is that okay?”

Iona nods. Her eyes are very large.

Kerry touches her over her underwear for some minutes, marvelling at the immediacy with which she responds to his direction. When he applies pressure, she takes sudden breaths. When he forms small circles over her underwear, her body quivers. Her thighs grow moist with sweat. Her skin glistens.

“Can I take them off?” he asks.

Iona slows her progress at his cock and nods once again.

Kerry leans forward, caressing her hips, and slips his fingers under the high-cut underwear. He draws them down by their hem, inch by inch, farther away from her belly button. Fresh, soft skin reveals itself to him. Then he reaches the edge of her crotch. She has a short, neat patch of pubic hair, deep red like her hair. It seems to form a path, guiding him on. In a final motion, Kerry pulls the underwear free. Iona puts her legs together and raises her feet, so that he can pull them away from beneath her body and throw them into the passenger seat.

She plants her feet either side of him again, opens her legs—and at last, she is there before him in her entirety. Kerry withdraws his hands, almost on impulse, content for a moment just to observe her naked body. Her features seem to rhyme. Everything fits. She has red hair on her head, and red hair above the folds of her sex. Her skin is pale near her centre, and freckled in her extremities. The sun has printed a perfect gradient onto her body. And those eyes… their lashes flicker.

“Is this okay?” Iona whispers to him. She parts her thighs a little more. “Kerry…”

“Iona.”

“Kerry.”

She adjusts her spot on his legs and slides her pelvis slightly closer to his standing cock. His stomach turns over. It’s all he can do to watch. Iona briefly looks out of the window around the paddock, then raises her feet from the seat. She puts one on the centre console beside him, and the other up near the driver’s side window. The movement gently draws open her labia. Kerry can see the moisture clinging to her pink flesh.

He says her name again: “Iona…”

“Will you touch me?”

“Yes.”

Kerry reaches forward and slides a knuckle down her stomach, into her meadow of red hair. Iona keeps her feet high and wide. She watches his progress with her chin bowed. When at last he passes his knuckle onto the crest of her labia, she lets a little sound into the air—something halfway between a moan and a gasp. Her body presses down on his legs.

Kerry spreads his hand apart, tracing the edge of her inner thighs. He runs his fingers up and down, bringing them closer towards her centre with each pass. Soon he brushes her labia again. Iona twitches. He massages from the outskirts of her pussy into its middle, moving her folds beneath his touch. Her sex is wet. It is very warm. Iona moans.

As he touches her, she reaches out with one hand to clutch his cock. She resumes her slow pumps. Her hand glides from head to base in fluid motions. Though the rain is deafening, the pair of them feel separate from the rest of the world in Kerry’s old car. They bring each other to heights of pleasure with their fingers. Sometimes they make eye contact and smile breathless smiles; often, their eyes just roam the other’s body. Iona’s cheeks are flushed. Kerry wonders whether his are too.

“Kerry,” Iona says, after a long while. Her hand pauses at his shaft. “I’m ready to tell you now.”

“To tell me?”

“What I was thinking. I’m ready to tell you what I was thinking about now.”

Kerry draws his hand away from her sex. His fingers are slicked by her liquid. It runs down to his wrist. “Go on,” he says.

Iona runs her hand to the top of his cock, enclosing his head in her hand. “I think you already know.”

“Maybe I do. But I want you to tell me.”

“I want to have sex.”

Kerry stares at her. He knew what she was going to say, but that doesn’t make it any less disarming to hear directly from her marshmallow lips. His shaft is straining in her hand. He feels at once as though he’s in some unreal domain: the paddock outside might be painted in place, and the raindrops might be made of plastic. The only real thing is Iona, and her face, and her warm sex.

“Not tonight,” Iona says. She starts pumping him again, slow at first. “I’m too sensitive. But soon. I want to. I’ve never made love to anyone. Not really.”

“No?”

“I’ve had sex. With him. But it wasn’t proper. I want you to take me, properly. Like a gentleman.”

Kerry takes a moment to catch his breath. It is difficult to concentrate, to consider things logically, when Iona is quickening her pace and pressure at his cock. Her hand is sweeping his length faster and faster, slick with saliva. She leans in to let down another line of drool. He lets out a soft gasp as the heat and wet is renewed. Her fingers squelch.

“How about tomorrow?” Kerry says. His voice quavers. “Tomorrow night.”

Iona’s eyes seem to come into sharper focus. It’s as though they are mirrors wiped free of fog.

“Tomorrow night,” she repeats. A soft laugh. “Eager beaver, are we?”

“I mean…” He hastens to clarify. “Only if you’re comfortable—”

“I’m teasing. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

Kerry’s lips are dry. He can only manage a whisper: “Okay.”

Iona pumps him harder. Kerry returns a hand to her hot mound, his mind racing with a great unreality. They are going to have sex. Kerry parts her labia with two fingers. He guides them into her opening, up to their first knuckle, then out again. Iona encourages him with moans, so he goes deeper. Up to the second knuckle.

“God…” Her feet tense up on their high perches. Her legs tense. “I’m so sensitive.”

“Should I go slow?”

“No. Just…” Iona wriggles her bum on his legs. “I don’t think I can cum tonight. Last time a man touched me it wasn’t so fun. I need to… acclimatise.”

Kerry pauses, his fingers enveloped in her wet sex.

“It’s okay,” she says. A small, teasing smile. “You’re a gentleman. I’ve loved it, Kerry.”

“You’re sure?”

“Every second of it.” Iona leans in, her breasts glancing his chest. She kisses him and whispers, “I promise. I can’t even tell you how much.”

He whispers back, “No? You can’t even tell me?”

“Nuh-uh.” She chuckles, and nibbles at his ear. “You can feel, though, can’t you? You feel how wet I am?”

“Yes.”

“Exactly. Really, really wet. I like you touching me. I’m just sensitive.”

“Okay.”

Iona leans back against the steering wheel again. “Can I finish you off?”

He withdraws his fingers from her body. “I’d be a fool to say no…”

“Is that right?” Iona smiles. Her eyes flit towards his cock, then back. “Can I finish you off with my mouth?”

Kerry stares at her.

Iona stares right back. She runs a tongue along her teeth, as if to draw his attention to their presence, then she twists where she sits and slides herself down his legs. Kerry sits up a little straighter. His heart is racing. Iona gets into a kneeling position before him, her fair body catching the half-light, her deep hazel eyes turned up towards his. The steering wheel makes it a tight fit, but she manages to kneel on the driver’s floor mat.

“Are you close?” Iona asks. She gets comfortable in her position and takes his cock in her hand once again. “God, you’re hard.”

“I’m close.”

“How close?”

Kerry’s legs are tense. He clenches his hands. “Quite close…”

“Good.” Iona leans in, her mouth an inch from his purple tip. “Tell me when.”

“Now.”

She gives a mock frown. “Like you mean it, Kerry.”

“Put it in your mouth, Iona. Put it in your little mouth.”

Iona leans in, but she doesn’t put it in her mouth.

Instead, she lowers her head farther, down to the loose flesh of his testicles. She runs her tongue around his balls, then envelops them with her lips. Kerry’s thighs are taut as wire. He moans, absorbed by the sight of her. Iona takes his sac in her mouth, dousing it in the warmth of her saliva, her hair tickling his cock as she works. The sound she makes is transfixing, such that Kerry isn’t sure he’ll be able to hold his orgasm even long enough for her to turn her attention to his shaft.

She moves on quickly, however. Hazel eyes upon him, Iona leaves his testicles with a string of saliva dangling from her lips. She smiles. White teeth, marshmallow lips. She lays her hands on each of his thighs and runs her tongue up the length of his cock, from the roots of his pubic hair right up to the slit of its erect tip. Kerry moans again. She licks him as though she is captivated by his taste. Her eyes flash.

“Fuck…” Kerry presses his head back against his seat. “I’m close, Iona…”

“Just a little longer.”

She abandons the solitary use of her tongue. With a glance at Kerry’s contorted face, she slides her lips overtop of his cock, cheeks growing concave as she sucks hard. There is a beat of pleasure growing in Kerry’s core, rising from the pit of his stomach to the base of his crotch. Iona bobs her mouth upon the head of his shaft and, with each tantalising dip of her lips, she takes him deeper. Her saliva runs down his length, glistening. Viscous.

Kerry clenches his legs tight. The soft, swathing warmth on his member is immense. It feels as though he’s been coated by a pot of warm honey. Iona keeps her jaw open wide and pushes her face down—down till her nose almost touches the flesh of Kerry’s pelvis. He feels the tip of his cock probe deep into her welcoming body, brushing the roof of her mouth and hitting resistance as it reaches the front of her throat. Iona shudders where she kneels.

“Iona.” Kerry lurches in his seat. He puts a hand in her long ginger hair. “I’m gonna cum.”

The tip of her nose brushes his pubic hair. After a second’s resistance, the threshold of her throat opens to him. His cock slips deeper, through very tight flesh. Iona gags. He feels a renewed wetness on his balls as saliva leaks from her crowded mouth. At the same time, he feels his body pass that familiar point of no-return. Goosebumps run up from his crotch to his stomach, to the ends of his arms and legs. Kerry gasps as a wonderful feeling of lightheaded pleasure takes over.

He unloads his first spurt of cum right into Iona’s throat. She gags again, her arched body convulsing as she leans over his cock. Her hair dangles into his lap, so Kerry cannot see, but he feels a wave of mingled spit and semen ooze out from her mouth as his cock pulses a second, third, fourth time. Iona raises her lips to his tip as he rides his climax out, spurt by spurt. She swallows once, the sound thick and heavy, then a second time. Her breaths through her nose are laboured.

When at last his pleasure subsides, Kerry is left with a feeling of enormous sensitivity in his shaft. It is almost painful to remain in Iona’s mouth as she sucks the final dregs of his orgasm out from his body. His hairs are on end. His heart is beating. She lifts her mouth away from him, letting his cock fall damp against his skin. There are remnants of saliva and semen on his thighs.

Iona meets his gaze. Her lips sparkle.

———

Kerry fishes a box of tissues out from the glovebox, and the pair of them tidy up as best they can in the confines of the car. There is no telling the hour, but their old station wagon is the only car left in the field, and the clouds overhead are black as tarmac. The rain falls without pause. If they peer out of the windows, they can scarcely make out the treeline at the paddock perimeter. A thick mist has descended.

It becomes clear over the next several hours that they are in no fit state to drive home.

“I don’t know the roads well enough,” Kerry says. He pulls back on his trousers and shirt. “And I can’t see ten feet forward. It’s not safe.”

Iona appears unbothered by this fact. They have a stock of unsold fruit in the boot, and he always keeps a selection of aged woollen blankets in the vehicle, so it’s not as though they are too uncomfortable. She returns to the passenger’s seat. They fling blankets over their legs and dig their teeth into fresh apples. The drum of the rain soothes them to their core.

“You know,” Iona says. “I wouldn’t mind just settling in for the night. It’s cosy with the rain.”

Kerry looks sidelong at her. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Come on.”

So they clamber over the centre console and lie across the width of the back seats. Kerry takes her in his arms. They rest beneath the sound of rain on the thin car roof. He roams his hands over her breasts, stomach and shaven legs.

Iona brings him to orgasm twice more that night. Each time, she does it just as she had earlier: first with her hand, then, when he is close, she finishes him off by slithering down his body and sliding his cock into her mouth.

Kerry touches her too. He does so gently, because she is sensitive, but still his fingers grow moist in the snugness of her sex. Iona’s moans are like breaths of wind in his ear. Night falls, and with it comes sleep. It is very comfortable beneath their woollen blankets.

———

Iona wakes before he does. The rain has abated overnight, leaving a gleaming blanket of dew in its wake. She spots a number of cows in a far corner of the field. They eye the station wagon with interest, their jaws working on mouthfuls of damp grass. The sky is pastel blue.

“Kerry?” She leans over him. “Are you awake?”

He is naked—and, for the first time since she has seen him without clothes, he is completely unaroused. Flaccid. The sight of him in such a casual state of nakedness is somehow attractive. It feels to her that they are lovers, content to be vulnerable in one another’s company. The thought stirs something hot in her stomach.

“Kerry? Hello?”

“Iona?”

She leans over him and kisses his mouth, his chin, his nose. Kerry responds without opening his eyes. His voice is rusted by sleep. His hair is a mess. By instinct, Iona slides her body overtop of his. She kisses him very slowly, as if to suspend the moment in time.

“Where are the keys?” Iona whispers.

“Hm? I dunno.” Kerry rubs his eyes with his knuckles. “Glovebox, I think. Why?”

“I’ll drive. You stay here.”

“No, no. I can drive—”

She silences him by putting a finger on his mouth. “It’s the least I can do.”

The old station wagon starts up on the third try. Its tyres take some time to gain traction in the rainswept grass. When they do, they leave great muddy gouges in the ground.

Iona enjoys the drive back to Kerry’s farmhouse. She doesn’t have to focus, beyond following the main road and remembering the turn-off onto his driveway, so she gets to appreciate the country scenery. Everything is lush. Paddocks roll to the horizon. Birds fly in formation overhead. When she turns into Kerry’s gravel driveway, she is struck by how different the old farmhouse feels now. Last time she came up this drive, she had been in a state of nervous collapse.

Now the farmhouse feels comfortable. Like home.

———

Once they’re inside, Kerry makes a hot pot of coffee. They drink it alongside breakfast, but though the brew is strong, it doesn’t quite do away with Iona’s feelings of tiredness. Neither of them slept very well in the car, so they agree to spend the day on the living room couch with blankets and a selection of DVDs. Iona showers and gets changed into a cosy set of Aunt Kath’s pyjamas. Underneath she wears a set of seamless cotton underwear. She doesn’t bother with a bra.

They start with Gaslight. With Kerry at her side, the antics of the manipulative Gregory Anton all seem rather comical. Iona nestles up to her uncle’s chest on the sofa, shrouded in the smell of shampoo and coffee. At several points during the flick, she closes her eyes and listens to the slow rhythm of his breathing. He kisses the top of her head.

After Gaslight, they turn to Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of Misery. This story is fitting enough, being set in a solitary rural cabin, but Iona has seen it several times before and quickly loses interest. Kerry mutes the film with the remote, and the pair of them turn to kiss one another instead. His stubble tickles her chin. The smell of coffee is on his breath.

“Are we still on for tonight?” Kerry whispers to her.

Iona’s stomach lurches. She gives his ear a nip with her teeth. “Yes…”

They make scones for lunch, eat them hot with jam and whipped cream, then settle back down onto the couch. Iona unbuttons her pyjama top and drops it to the floor. She lets him nuzzle up to her exposed breasts. His breath is hot.

“Kerry,” she says. Her voice shakes. “Will you touch me?”

He puts a hand beneath her underwear. Iona lets out a sound as his fingers come into contact with her moist sex. When he passes his fingers over her labia, she feels as though something is rising up from her vulva to her stomach. Little dancing fireflies. She ventures her own hand beneath his waistband to clutch his cock. He is hard. Iona is growing familiar with the shape and feel of his arousal in her fingers.

So they sit side by side; half-watching Misery, half-kissing, stimulated by the constant and modest contact. Up on the TV, Paul Sheldon is being ‘hobbled’ by Annie Wilkes.

“You feel incredible,” Kerry tells her. He slides one finger all the way inside her. “Really incredible, Iona.”

She can still taste the whipped cream in her throat.

They don’t discuss the prospect of sex that afternoon, though it hangs over their every breath and moan. Iona has questions, to ask of herself and of Kerry—will her body let another man in? Does he have condoms on hand? Is this a line they really ought to cross?—but she cannot bring herself to voice any of them. Every time she thinks of the evening, drawing events out in her mind, her vocal cords seize up as if with ice. A dizziness comes over her head, a flush plays upon her cheeks, and the walls of her pussy tighten upon Kerry’s fingers as her body tenses.

It is a wonderful feeling, but the anticipation is almost too hot to contain.

Sometime after Misery ends, Iona goes down on Kerry’s cock once again, and this time she does so with more force than before. He lies out straight on the living room couch, naked and flung by daylight. Iona caresses his stomach, her breasts laying upon his legs. She looks him in the eyes and slides her mouth down over the head of his cock. His flesh fills her mouth. It brushes the inside of her cheeks. The look of uncontained pleasure on his face spurs her on.

“Iona…” Her name sounds sweet on his lips. “God, you’re incredible.”

The Notebook is playing on the TV now.

Iona bobs her head up and down, fast. She forces back a gag as his cock jabs the back of her mouth, once, twice, and a third time. Kerry’s breathing grows ragged as she works his tip deeper, to the back of her tongue and beyond. After several moments, her body complies, and she feels her throat open to let him in. Kerry moans. Iona works him up to his climax, and when he cums, she makes a seal over his shaft with her lips, careful to contain every drop of his semen.

“You’re beautiful,” Kerry tells her.

“You’re incredible,” Kerry tells her.

Oh, he tells her so many wonderful things.

Those compliments are like small bursts of flavour, and she holds them close. She and Kerry cuddle well into the evening, pausing only for a hasty dinner of packet lasagne. As Iona lies in her arms, she finds her mind wandering back along the path that led her to this farmhouse. She remembers the final fight which led to the break-up. She remembers walking in the rain, grazing her knees on the road.

Now she has Kerry. It is cleansing.

Spring rain.

———

By the time the sun sets that Sunday evening, Iona is almost nauseous with anticipation for what she knows must happen next. It has been at the forefront of her mind from the moment she first voiced her desire to Kerry in that old car of his. Now, with darkness descending on the countryside, the nervous energy she carries is such that her legs feel fatigued.

Night falls. The chickens go into their coops.

Iona takes a shower at eight o’clock. She massages hot water into every muscle and every joint. It leaves her skin pink and soft. When she steps out onto the bathmat, she towels herself down, and pulls on a thin cotton dressing gown. No clothes. She considers herself in the bathroom mirror. The girl who looks back looks pretty. Iona feels pretty.

She checks the colour of her teeth. She tests her smile, and likes what she finds.

Kerry has showered too. Iona finds him in the living room, bustling about in his own gown. She pauses in the doorway, watching him arrange the couch cushions into shape. Her feet are cold on the floorboards. It is difficult to stand still. She is pent up, giddy. She shifts her weight from foot to foot and observes the man who took her into his house.

Kerry notices her. He smiles. “All clean?”

“Yes. All fresh.”

“Lovely.”

For all their mutual excitement, there passes a moment of awkwardness between them. Iona bites a lip. There’s an odd sensation in her stomach. She feels that if she could only kiss him, the rest would follow as naturally as dawn follows night. But the matter of actually crossing the room to his arms is complex. The floorboards are flat, but she thinks she might trip on her way to the couch.

“I thought you could choose the music,” Kerry says. He points to a crate by the TV. “I have CDs. Maybe from a different generation to yours, but still.”

“I don’t think we need music.”

“No?”

“No.” Iona takes her first step into the living room. Her foot wavers. “I want to hear you.”

Kerry’s eyes stray down her body. “All right,” he whispers.

She crosses the room to stand in front of him. He is tall. She scarcely stands up to his chin.

“You shaved,” Iona says. She smiles. “You look younger.”

“Ha. I’m getting along these days.”

“Maybe…”

His body is less than a foot from hers. It would be so easy to reach out now and lay a hand on his chest or waist. It would be so easy to rise onto her tiptoes and kiss him on his rugged lips. But she doesn’t. They only stare at one another. The gentle glow of the dimmed lights highlights the curve of his chin and nose, and the ridge of his brow.

“Will you take off my gown?” Kerry asks.

“Yes. I suppose I shall.” Iona reaches out to touch his shaven face. “Will you take off mine?”

Kerry smiles. She feels the expression beneath her hand. Slowly, as if direct contact might cause an electric shock, he unties the cord at her waist and lets the knot fall apart. Iona feels a breath of cold against her now-exposed stomach and breasts as her dressing gown falls open. Kerry lowers her gaze down her strip of uncovered flesh, from neck to pelvis. Iona’s thighs are hot. She feels his attention on her flesh.

“Do you want to sit down?” Kerry asks. He puts a hand on her hip.

Iona shrugs her gown off her shoulders. It falls to the floor with a rustle. She edges backwards towards the waiting couch, fiddling at his dressing gown cord with nervous fingers. When at last she gets the knot free, the two sides of his gown fall apart like curtains, and she finds him already hard with anticipation. The tip of his cock bumps into her belly button as the backs of her legs hit the couch.

“Are you gonna take me, Kerry?” Iona whispers to him, falling back into a sitting position. “Will you take me, like I’m yours?”

The couch is fluffy on her back and bum. Iona stares up at Kerry’s figure, unsure of what to do with her hands, hot with the idea of him. Naked, Kerry follows. He puts his knees either side of her legs, leans in, and kisses her. His lips are like silk. There are no bristles tonight.

His cock pokes her stomach again. Iona’s muscles tighten. She breaks through his lips with her tongue, seeking his warmth. The hot inside of his mouth, his saliva mingling with hers, his weight upon her—it all turns Iona on right to her core. She runs her hands over his shoulder blades, down to the small of his back.

Kerry’s fingers stray to her vulva.

“You feel so soft,” he whispers, so close she can feel his breath. “So smooth.”

“Mm. Kerry…”

A moment later, he parts her labia and edges the tips of his fingers into her moist body. Iona feels her muscles contract at his touch. She breaks away from his kiss with a little gasp. In that instant, her legs are overcome with such a sweeping surge of goosebumps that she writhes where she sits. It almost hurts. The arousal is nauseating.

“God. Kerry.” Iona closes her eyes, sensitive in the extreme. “Fuck!”

He spreads his hand over her crotch, fingers tickling the inside of her thighs. Iona rests her head on the cushion behind her, hands wandering aimlessly around his back. He plants one final kiss on her mouth then, still massaging the folds of her labia with one worn hand, he starts trailing a line of kisses down her neck. He reaches her chest. Then he reaches her breasts and takes her areolas in his mouth, one then the other. The alternating pressure around her nipples makes Iona squirm.

“I can’t believe that you’re all mine,” Kerry murmurs.

Iona opens her eyes. “No?”

“How did I get so lucky?”

She shakes her head. She can’t think of a response.

Kerry moves on from her breasts. He kisses down her abdomen, inch by inch, each kiss turning her stomach over more than the last. Iona can feel her thighs tingling with humidity. The winding of his fingers on her labia grows faster as her pussy slickens beneath his touch. When Kerry inserts two fingers into her opening, they are met with almost no friction.

He kisses her belly button, then the skin in line with her hips, then he reaches her pubic hair. Kerry glides his tongue over her patch of red fur. Iona wriggles beneath him. It tickles. His face is so close to her sex now that his chin almost brushes the cleft of her mound.

“Is this okay?” Kerry whispers up at her.

Iona nods. He looks incredible, framed above her opened legs.

Kerry hooks her under the legs and pulls her forward, so that her bum comes right to the edge of the sofa. He kneels on the wooden floor before her. Fast, shallow breaths. Iona opens her thighs to their fullest extent, her feet hovering in the air either side of his head. Kerry removes his hand from her sex and licks his wet fingers.

“You taste amazing,” he says.

Butterflies in her stomach. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” Kerry leans closer. He pushes her legs down. Her feet touch the floor. “Is this comfortable?”

“I’m comfy…”

Kerry smiles. He lays one hand on her stomach, and with the other he reaches up to clasp her hand. Iona clings to him. Fingers—warm fingers. There passes between them a moment of absolute tension, in which she holds her breath, then Kerry leans in and plants a kiss on the crest where her labia peak. More than the sensation, it is the sight and knowledge of what’s occurring that makes Iona cry out into the semi-lit living room. She feels her pulse in her pelvis.

Kerry plants another kiss in her pubic hair. He leaves one on each of her sweaty thighs. One right at the base of her mound. Iona digs her heels against the wooden flooring, pent up to breaking point. She needs a release of energy, but it’s all she can do to lie still and watch. Transfixed.

“Keep going,” she whispers. “Keep going.”

Kerry gives her hand a squeeze. He plants a final airy kiss on her crest again, draws out his tongue, and pokes its tip between her labia. After a second in which she feels something wonderful, he withdraws. A slack string of moisture comes away on his nose.

“You’re killing me,” Iona tells him. “Honestly, Kerry…”

Another squeeze of her hand. She squeezes him back.

Kerry leans in and runs his tongue between her labia, from their base to the point where her clitoris sits. Iona lets out a whispered moan. He repeats the motion again, and again. Each time, her labia part a little wider. He strays a little deeper. The licks sweep through her like wind, to every inch of her body. Their hands are locked together with hot sweat.

“Fuck…” Iona shudders. “Kerry. Ow… don’t stop. Don’t…”

Kerry caresses her stomach with his free hand. He runs his tongue around the surface of her pussy in fluid motions. His lips touch the edges of her labia, his hair brushes her thighs—and he goes on, working up a slow but constant speed. Deeper. Farther into her sex, into the taboo. His nose rests in her pubic hair, such is the depth with which he plays his tongue into her.

Iona squirms on the sofa. She rocks her hips gently to his rhythm. An intense feeling of weight comes over her body, as if the progress of his tongue is shutting down her faculties. Each time she shifts position, it takes some moments to find and contract the necessary muscles. All her focus is on Kerry, and Kerry’s lips on her labia, and Kerry’s tongue in her depths.

“Keep going,” she whispers. It comes out as a moan. “Keep… going.”

Motor control shuts down. Iona closes her eyes. Her hand slackens in his, as she lets him take control of her absolutely. The couch beneath her fades. She hasn’t the mind to consider how much time is passing, and she doesn’t care to know. It might be an eternity. She’d be okay with that.

There are tears in her Iona’s eyes.

“Don’t stop,” she tells Kerry. A tear rolls down her cheek into her scarlet hair. “Keep going, please.”

“Are you okay, Iona?”

“Keep going.” She does not open her eyes. “You have to keep going, Kerry. I need this.”

A moment later, she feels him return his mouth to her mound. His thumb strokes her hand. Her muscles are starting to tauten around her stomach. Her sex is leaking out onto his face, onto the sofa. She can feel something hot in her stomach, standing hairs on end. A hint of her coming climax.

“Don’t stop…”

She might still be on the living room couch, but she isn’t sure. For a moment, she thinks she’s back in the car in that rainy paddock. They are eating apples. Or maybe she’s lying on the kitchen table. Her time at the farmhouse is rewinding: she and Kerry are kissing on the couch, swimming in the stream, wandering the dark fields with a bottle of wine. They are visiting Aunt Kath’s headstone. She is hammering on his front door. Walking through the rain. Crying, bruised. Far from home.

Something shifts in Iona’s core as she lies there. A clarity comes over her. For the first time since arriving on Kerry’s doorstep, it truly hits her how foolish she had been to run off with some young boy, and how lucky she is to have been taken in at this farmhouse.

“Kerry,” she says. “You are wonderful.”

Iona opens her eyes once more. The living room comes back to her in a rush—and so does he, kneeling there in front of her, his tongue exploring the depths of her pussy. Her heart is racing. The threads of her orgasm are spinning into place.

“I’m close,” Iona cries. She smiles down at him, out of breath. “Fuck, Kerry. God. Touch me. Oh…”

Kerry takes his hand from her stomach. Without removing his tongue, he lowers his fingertips to her mound, to the pink flesh of her clitoris. He is delicate. She arches her back off the couch as he rubs a circle over her clitoris. The sensations of his probing tongue, and now of his fingers, draw up a harmony together. Iona is weak at the knees.

“I’m…” Words fail her. “Yes, Kerry. Yes.”

Her body rocks. Goosebumps shake her from head to foot. They are quickly followed by a feeling of such weightlessness that she thinks she might faint: her limbs feel hollow, her head spins, she loses track of his tongue and fingers. Iona moans, sweat beading on her skin. She calls Kerry’s name over and over. Heels planted on the ground. Breaths coming in sudden, catching waves.

“God,” says Iona. “God. Mm…”

When her orgasm subsides, and conscious feeling returns to her body, she is left so tender that the contact of his tongue hurts. Her muscles are fatigued. A gentle headache presses at the edges of her temples. Iona nudges him away. He kneels up, looking down at her strewn form.

“Was that okay?” he asks, squeezing her hand.

Iona lets out a small, wild laugh. “Yes, Kerry. That was okay.”

She sits up on the couch. There’s a dark patch beneath the area she’d been sitting, from her sweat or cum or both. There is a sheen of moisture over her body. Straightening up where she sits, Iona feels off balance for a moment, as though some critical structure in her body has turned to liquid. Kerry clambers onto the couch beside her and they embrace. Minutes drip by. Her breathing returns to normal.

“So, then.” Kerry presses his body against hers. “What were those tears about before, hm?”

“Ha. It’s okay. They were happy tears.”

“You’re sure?”

“I think so.”

His expression is hazy. He reaches out and brushes several strands of ginger hair away from Iona’s face. His fingers are damp.

“Drawing a new page?” he whispers.

“Something like that,” Iona says.

“Mm. Do you want to rest now?”

“We’re not finished here.”

“I didn’t say we were.” Kerry smiles. Worn, human teeth. “But if you want, I could scrounge up a little brain snack. An intermission, if you will…”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

She pokes his nose with a finger. “Okay, Kerry. You do that.”

He kisses her and bustles off to the kitchen. His naked body is pale. It takes only a few minutes for him to return, with a plate of plain cheese on water crackers. For one reason or another, Iona finds it incredibly enjoyable to crunch down on the salty morsels. She polishes them off so quickly she gets something wedged temporarily in her throat.

By the time their brain snack is concluded, her attention is on Kerry again.

He takes her in his arms more carefully than before. Perhaps it is because they are about to go all the way. Perhaps it is because he has tasted her now; he has seen her at her most vulnerable. Kerry kisses her with such grace that for a while Iona is content to just embrace him. She holds him tight. Their sweaty bodies touch. She thinks she could sleep in his arms, and never wake up.

After a while, however, the exhaustion of her orgasm starts to wear thin. As strength returns to her body, the prickling in her stomach renews itself in full force. She strays her hands to his cock and massages him up to his hardest extent. Their tongues meet. The smiles they exchange are breathless. Fleeting.

The nervous energy between them is toxic and wonderful.

“Shall we do this?” she whispers to him. “Let’s do it, Kerry. Now.”

He breaks away. His eyes shine. “Yeah?”

“I…” Iona lets go of his cock. Her hand is sweaty. “Yes…”

Everything is falling into place. She feels it now, more than ever before: everything is working itself out. Kerry kisses her. He wraps his arms around her and leans her back until she’s lying down along the length of the couch. His weight is overtop of her. Iona tries to contain her breathing, but finds it difficult to draw air. Her breasts lean gently to the sides in this reclined position.

Kerry straddles her legs, his cock poised above her pelvis. He reaches over to the coffee table and picks up a thin packaged condom. Blue like the river. Iona watches him fiddle with the packaging, her heart racing as it never has before. Her eyes fall to his cock, hard and darkened by arousal at its tip. Her mound is tingling, as if with pins and needles.

“Kerry…” she whispers.

He looks up, the small square package rustling in his fingers.

Slowly, Iona shakes her head.

Kerry stares at her. “No?”

“I need you, Kerry.” Iona reaches out and takes the condom from his grip. “All of you. I… want to feel you properly.”

She drops the condom over the side of the couch, onto the floor.

Kerry stares at her a moment longer, then leans down to kiss her. His cock bumps her thighs.

“Are you ready?” he breathes. His lips are warm. “Tell me when, Iona. Just tell me when.”

“I’ll tell you.”

He straightens back up. “You tell me.”

Iona smiles up at him. “Now.”

Kerry adjusts himself into a kneeling position on the couch. He hooks one hand under each of Iona’s calves, raises her legs up, and rests them on either side of his waist. She feels her muscles contracting between her thighs as if by their own accord. All that separates his cock from her waiting sex is several inches of cool, nondescript air.

“You’re still wet,” he says softly. He runs a finger down her labia.

“Uh-huh…” Iona quivers. “I suppose so.”

For a moment the world stands still. How she has got herself into this mess, Iona does not know, but she wouldn’t undo the past days for anything. If she had never left London, things might have been better, but they never would have led to this couch with this man. It is surreal. Unreal.

Kerry takes his shaft in one hand. He leans forward, his face set with a slightly dazed expression. Iona braces herself. Her every muscle tautens like a twisted line of rope. Then, moments later, she feels his hard flesh as Kerry touches the head of his cock against her waiting sex. Iona writhes. Kerry himself lets out a soft breath of air.

“Are you ready?” he whispers to her.

“Yes,” she says. “Ready.”

She reaches out and clasps his hand in hers, so tight her fingers cramp. The moment is so tender it’d fall apart if she thought about it too hard. Kerry rocks his pelvis gently, running his tip up and down the waiting gates of her labia. His flesh glides over hers, hot. Firm. Iona is sick to her stomach. There is a film of moisture on her sex—the remnants of her last orgasm, and the product of her renewed arousal. She feels her pussy lips inch apart as Kerry rubs against her.

They hold hands. Tight.

Iona gasps as he pushes inside her. He enters only an inch at first, so that for a moment the tip of his cock is suspended in time, surrounded by the tight heat of her flesh. She feels sweat running down the back of her neck. Kerry slips deeper: two inches, three inches, four. Each passing moment has Iona shivering. Her muscles quaver as the solid shape of his shaft passes between them.

“Oh. Kerry.”

“Is this okay?” he whispers. He makes a small sound. “Fuck…”

“Uh-huh.”

Iona meets his eyes. His rugged, familiar facial features.

Kerry slides his cock into her depths to its fullest extent, so that a wonderful sensation of fullness overcomes Iona’s pelvis. His testicles touch her bum. For a second they stay like that, bound by their arousal into one hot form, then Kerry withdraws his hips and slides his cock back, nearer to her entrance. Iona can hardly breathe. He thrusts into her, and out again.

“Oh, God. Kerry…” She leans her head back and clutches onto his hand. “Keep going.”

And he does. In and out, to a perfect and wonderful tempo. Iona’s body is so sensitive she thinks she might cry. She can hear the sound of him penetrating her; a moist, thick sound of flesh gliding against flesh. If she looks at him, the sensory overload would be too much, so she closes her eyes and focuses every fibre of her attention on the feel of him inside her. The tap of his balls against her flesh as he pumps himself into her crevice. The depth to which his cock reaches.

Kerry’s breathing is very ragged. She clings to his moans.

“Keep going,” she whispers. “Just keep going. You feel fucking amazing, Kerry… fuck—”

His tempo rises. Iona feels the small weight of her breasts on her chest as they sway back and forth, as her whole body begins to rock to the rhythm he’s establishing. The couch creaks beneath their joint load. Kerry’s breaths are hot and fast, his hand sweating into hers. He raises her legs higher, as if to find an angle at which to penetrate her even more deeply.

Iona lets him in, as he had let her into his farmhouse. She welcomes his presence.

“Don’t stop. Just keep going, Kerry.”

“You’re stunning, Iona—”

“Keep going. Fuck me. Just do that for me.”

She opens her eyelids to watch. The scene falls onto her eyes as though from a dream: there he is, between her legs, the length of his cock disappearing into her depths with each thrust. So wet. So hot. Kerry repositions himself and pulls her pelvis hard against his body, so hard that their pubic hair touches. Iona thrusts against him. They are crazed, desperate to find the most absolute state of penetration they can.

“Mmhm.” She moans, over and over. “Kerr-ry…”

Kerry lowers his free hand to her sex. At first Iona hardly feels, such is the intensity of her arousal, but then he presses his thumb to her clitoris. She buckles where she lies. Her back arches off the sofa as she cries out, floored by his touch. Kerry runs fast rings around her clitoris as he fucks her, working her up to a state of nervous collapse. She struggles to draw air. His fingers are slick with her juices.

“God, fuck.”

“I’m close, Iona.”

She meets his gaze. “Keep going.”

“I’m close, sweetheart.”

The final word falls on her like sugar. She smiles—she cannot help it. She smiles up at him and knows she is safe. In his arms, tight around his member, everything is well and right. The farmhouse is her old and marvellous friend.

“Fill me up, Kerry,” Iona whispers. She gives his hand a squeeze. “Cum inside me. Like I’m yours.”

He looks too overwhelmed to speak.

“Deep inside me,” she goes on. Her voice trembles. “Fill me up so that I overflow.”

Kerry thrusts into her. Beads of sweat on his chest and neck. His cock touches something in her core.

“I’m close,” he says again.

“Call me sweetheart again.”

His eyes are so warm. “Sweetheart.”

Iona moans. She rocks her hips against him. “Again.”

“Sweetheart…”

There is a sweet scent in the air.

“Again?”

“Sweet-heart…”

His hand tenses up in hers. Kerry lets out a gasp, then his body shudders, and he comes to an instant halt with his cock slid deep inside her—as deep as it can go. Iona holds her breath. It seems to take a lifetime for him to empty his load into her. They stare into one another’s eyes as his member pulses, time and time again. Iona is so overstimulated that she can hardly point to a physical feeling, but the knowledge that he is filling her up is intoxicating.

“Fuck,” says Kerry. He leans in, putting his weight over her, to kiss her on the mouth. “Iona…”

“Kerry.”

They lie there for a time, lips touching. Iona runs her hands down over sweaty back. Her breasts are squished between their embrace. She kisses him slowly, deliberately. Relishing the modest feel of his mouth in contrast to the heat of her sex.

He whispers in her ear: “You’re incredible.”

When Kerry straightens up and withdraws his cock from her tired sex, there passes a second in which Iona can see no sign of his climax. Her labia are cherry pink. They shine with moisture. Iona squeezes the muscles in her thighs and stomach.

Then he makes a small sound. They watch as his cum comes bubbling to the surface of her sex, milk white and viscous. It gathers like sap in the opening between her labia—then, as Iona gives her muscles another squeeze, a great pale dollop oozes out from her pussy and runs down the curve of her body to her bum. Several droplets fall to the couch.

“God,” she whispers. A playful tone. “How could you, Kerry?”

He smiles down at her.

Iona smiles back. Her whole body is still buzzing with the thought of his semen inside of her. It is permeating her sex, hot and thick. Exploring the folds of her fertile flesh. Another dollop oozes out from between her labia. Iona reaches out and scoops it up with two fingers. She puts it in her mouth, her eyes still on Kerry.

“Thank you,” she whispers to him. “For everything.”

When he has recovered from his orgasm, and his cock has returned to a state of hard arousal, Kerry slides back inside her. His cum penetrates her depths.

———

They sleep in separate rooms that night. Iona is so comfortable she thinks she might never wake up.

There are no awkward feelings between them, but it feels somehow right to be alone: after crossing their final and most illicit line, it seems proper for them to withdraw to their own thoughts for a while. Iona hugs her bed sheets. If she were to stay in Kerry’s arms that night, she is sure they would end up having sex again. The thought is intoxicating, but she needs rest.

In the morning, she wanders barefoot through the farmhouse. The building feels odd. The soiled rafters watch her through the living room as though trying to gauge her character. Iona brews herself a pot of tea, puts on her new gumboots, and wanders out into the cold country morning. The fields are wet underfoot. She says hello to the chickens, then walks on through a paddock. Eventually she comes to the wine bottle she and Kerry abandoned those many nights ago.

It is cool to the touch, and wet with dew. Iona picks up the bottle and goes on. She skirts the edge of the paddock river till she finds Aunt Kath’s weathered headstone. Here, she kneels. The morning birds sing strange otherworldly songs in their trees.