It was their last night in the woods, camping. Tomorrow, they’d pack up and go. Back to life, reality. The city, university.

“So let me watch,” David had said. And grinned at her, drunk on whiskey and beer.

She shrugged, and he followed her away from the campfire.

As if on the dare, she raised her shirt up, her legs strong and pale in the moonlight, classically curved, though she wasn’t wearing heels. Alabaster, David thought, distracted and jolted by something half-recalled. Alabaster, like poetry, like statures, something some teacher had rambled on about in high school. He wasn’t in dusty, dreary school, high or law, now. He’d never been farther away. The pines were sharp and clean in his nose, mixing with the rich smell of earth. Tall trees loomed high, sheltering them, but when the breeze shifted, he got the river-smell again. Whiskey burned hot and smoky at the back of his throat, and stars he missed back in the city dazzled the night sky.

The long flannel shirt Holly wore as a nightgown was rising high, inevitable now, and marvellous as opening-night curtains. The dimpled innocence of knees, then the heartbreaking curve of thigh. Whiter than her skin, her panties flashed at him, a secret signal, a triangle of white, of triumph or surrender. Her grin was quick and wicked. Not surrender, then. Complicity? Nervousness?

Her panties were down and off before he knew it, nonchalant, as if she were not awarding him this strange gift of her body. The triangle of hair was dark against her skin, a beckoning blackness. Smudge, he thought. Her little bush. His cock twitched. He swallowed more whiskey.

“I love your little bush,” he said, and grinned. The whiskey burned in his belly, and he felt strange. I’m drunk, he thought. Oh, boy.

A hesitant trickle. The sound of mere water joining the night noises, a delicate spatter on the forest floor. Then her sigh as she relaxed. Hiss. Sweet splash. And his instant erection, an iron bar of insistent desire. Silence. He waited again.

She stopped, as if gone shy. Not now, he thought. Don’t stop.

Then another spurt, a quick hiss, and a dark thrill, sending his heart beating and his mouth gone dry—her beer would be cold heaven right now.

Doors opening into infinity.

And they were going to fuck, always nice enough, always more than nice, but first she had to do this. Hence, the discreet withdrawal from the circle of firelight. And his impulse, tongue loosened, everything loose. There was only the silence of the woods, the distant sound of river-run. She was going to let him have her, fast and furious fucking, or slow and endless rocking under the trees, in the circle of their campfire, their primal hearth in the late spring night.

The spurt gathered, became a rivulet.

Hiss. Steady now. And Holly was looking at him, and he knew that it felt good, what she was doing. Pissing down onto the damp leaves and fallen needles. Ache building, higher, hotter, insistent, and then sweet release, like sex itself. He couldn’t look away, sensed somehow that she didn’t need or want him to, not any more. His erection throbbed with need, desire, overwhelming everything else in the world. She knew he was staring, and she smiled again, sweet mischief in the strange darkness. She seemed unselfconscious now as she pissed, half-crouched before him, steadily wetting the ground with her stream of water. David could hear it. Could see it. He burned.

Doors. Opening. Infinity.

He couldn’t look away, fascinated by the narrow, delicate and strong stream she made. It was a creation divine and obscene, framed by her sex.

She even pees cute, he thought, and then thought of nothing more but need.

David would remember all this, next week, the year after, ten years later. Standing there in a swirling mixture of lust and taboo, drunk, horny and helpless. How she had stood before him because he asked her to, stood with her thighs spread open, open as they would be for his cock only minutes later, his cock steely and omnipotent as it had been when he was seventeen.

How she had stood, then crouched closer to the ground, as she poured out her flow for him—all because he asked her to.

Then he was unzipping himself, releasing his erection, pointing at her. His jeans were down around his thighs, and his hand was stroking, stroking. He swayed over her, the pine scent strong again, never had he been so big and hard before, he could fuck the whole world and never tire, watching it all fall away under his erection of steel. She was still pissing. For him.

He stood over her, dizzy with lust, taking her hand in his, guiding her back to the fire. The pine was gone in woodsmoke and his need, almost rage, his hardness straining, becoming everything. He took her down to the ground, rolling around on the old sleeping bags, frantic for her mouth, her nipple, his hand gone clumsy on her body. On top of her now, pushing into her, trying not to tear her, rolling again on the old sleeping bags on the ground before the fire.

He entered her, and she was wet from what she’d just done, and there was no resistance. He stroked, panting, silent, frantic. His lovemaking wasn’t slow and it wasn’t lovemaking. Fucking her, primal by the fire, with no words of love or endearment, only hot urgency.

Twenty years later the sound of his wife, innocent in the bathroom only steps away from the bed, would give him an erection. Darkly pleasurable as always, if not quite as stony as it had been that spring.

© 2004 S. Stephens Smith. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.