Chapter 2: Flight Line

20 December 2014

I was getting anxious, shifting from foot to foot like a four-year-old in need of a bathroom. Criminy! I’d just seen her four months ago. You’d think this would be easy. But here I was, waiting at the exit from the concourse, afraid that she’d...

Fuck! What was I afraid of? Since Alice sent me her flight details two weeks ago, I don’t think I’d slept through an entire night. I’d sat in front of my computer with stories in progress and had written nothing. I had an idea for a Valentine contest story. I knew Blackfeather needed work. I’d written about half of the first chapter of LNDtH Part VI: El Rancho del Corazón. I’d written another Pygmalion Revisited story. And all I could think about was Alice. She’d be with me for three solid weeks. With me. Loving me.

I wish she’d get off the fucking plane!

“Is that all the greeting I get?”

I whipped around and saw the beautiful young woman in front of me. Shit! She’d walked right by me and I didn’t recognize her!

There was some justification for that. She was dressed. Not that I expected her to get off the plane naked, but I’d never seen her in a dress. When I met her, it was summer and the girls were all in short-shorts at the carwash. Then at the club ... well, the clothes were negligible. When we went to Yellowstone, she’d been in cut-offs any time we weren’t in the trailer. But this young woman was ... dressed!

I wrapped her in a hug and she kissed me warmly. Then I had to hold her at arm’s length just so I could look her up and down. And up. Her heels were high enough that even my inch-high cowboy boots left me looking up into her eyes. Eyes that were hidden beneath her sunglasses and floppy hat. The charcoal gray dress was tightly fitted through the bodice and fell loosely from her waist to mid-calf. She wore a purple scarf that matched her shoes and a light gray jacket. She pulled her little carry-on suitcase behind.

“Wow! Just, wow! How can you be so much more beautiful than I even remembered? Alice, you’re simply so ... beautiful.” Yeah. I’m a writer. I have so many descriptive words to use about how people look and the only one I can think of is ‘beautiful’.

“Ari, you’re staring at me. Is it okay?”

“Okay? Sweetheart, I want to take you to dinner and dancing and show you to the world! I’m sorry I’m not more dressed up.” I was wearing jeans and my cowboy boots, but I’d also put on a white shirt and was wearing my Singapore-tailored sport coat. I didn’t look too bad. Still, by comparison... “Do you have luggage to pick up?” I asked.

“Everything’s in this,” she said glancing at the little bag.

“You packed light.”

“We’re going to a nudist park. I wore most of my clothes,” she giggled. “Ari, it was so cool. It was my first time on an airplane. I was so nervous! I wished you were there with me. The flight attendant was so nice. She offered me a drink and when I said I was only nineteen, she just gushed over me. She made me a virgin bloody Mary. That was the closest I’d been to virgin since I was thirteen. And then she moved me to the front of the plane and gave me a window seat. I saw all the clouds and during her break she sat beside me.” Once the little ice had been broken when she arrived, she couldn’t stop talking about her trip. She punctuated her sentences with little kisses and we’d barely managed to move out of the flow of people rushing from the gate area to their waiting rides. “Oh! There she is! Kim! Over here!” Alice waved at a flight attendant.

“Oh, Alice. Did you find him? Is this your lucky young man?” the attendant asked as she approached us. “Oh! I’m sorry. You’re...”

“I’m her lucky young man,” I said extending my hand. “Aroslav.” She was obviously shocked by my age, but she recovered quickly.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Aroslav,” she said. “I’m Kim. It was such a delight to have Alice on our flight.”

“I can’t thank you enough for taking such good care of her.”

“Can we take you to your hotel, Kim? I mean, do you mind, Ari?” Alice asked. She leaned close to me. “I just adore her. Don’t you?”

Now that she mentioned it, Kim was adorable. Well, I’d always had a bit of a thing for flight attendants anyway.

A Long Time Ago: The Lion City

It was my first trip to Singapore and I was pretty damned excited. I’d been invited to speak at a writers’ conference on the effect of eBooks on the publishing industry. That was how I had gotten into high tech. I’d been earning a living in the industry for several years publishing trade journals and extolling the benefits of electronic publishing. The work got me noticed and I was recruited to work on the new technology that would put books on portable readers that my employer was convinced would be the wave of the future.

When I’d spoken at my first conference and had shown the palm-sized device with books on it, the twenty or so people in my session laughed at me. Literally laughed! The consensus had been that no one would give up paper to read on a miniature computer. I was talking to a bunch of Luddites.

Just a year later, though, and this conference had latched onto the idea that everyone was going to read on little devices. They wanted to know how it was going to affect their publishing prospects. I had answers—or at least prognostications.

The flight from LA to Singapore is long. This was years before non-stop service between the cities and even that was nearly nineteen hours. Add a layover in Tokyo and you have a twenty-two-hour trip, but with the International Dateline, I left LA in the morning and arrived in Singapore at ten at night—the next day. It was the eight-hour flight from Narita to the Lion City that was interesting.

It might sound demeaning, but the flight attendants all wore print sarongs. They were stunning—most of Chinese descent. My flight attendant was no exception.

I always request an aisle seat. I hate having to climb over people to get to the restroom. Having people on the inside needing to get out just means that I have to get up and stretch occasionally. And it gives me better access to the flight attendants as they go by.

I had a very attentive attendant.

I’d tried to sleep as much as possible on the leg from LA to Tokyo, assisted by having stayed up most of the night before. My task on the Tokyo to Singapore leg was to stay awake while many others were nodding off to sleep. I was doing pretty well at it until the dinner menu came around and I saw Macallan 12 scotch. I’d ordered that before I got my dinner order organized. Straight up. Very mellow. I don’t remember what I ate.

Guan-yin, my flight attendant, brought coffee after my dinner and asked about my plans in Singapore. She was quite chatty and I realized that everyone around me was asleep. I suppose she had little else to do. Another flight attendant was similarly engaged up the aisle. I saw no sign of the other four.

“Of course, being a xīfāng rén, you must go to Raffles and drink a Singapore Sling,” she laughed. “They will serve it with a bowl of peanuts. It is a test. If you eat the peanuts with your fingers, you are of no ... What word do I want? Value? Worth? Um ... Character! In any restaurant, when you are served peanuts, eat them one at a time with chopsticks.” I’d eaten my meal with chopsticks and felt pretty good about my skills.

“I don’t drink very much,” I said. “Though scotch is a weakness. What is it you said I am? Xīfāng rén?” That was back in the days when I could still hear out of both ears and I was pretty good at repeating languages, even if I didn’t know what I was saying.

“Oh. That is a ... um ... westerner. A báirén. A white man. There is a very good scotch bar near the water. We were once an English colony, you know.”

“I take it that a rén is a man?” I asked.

“I must be very careful what I say to you,” she laughed. “You will speak Mandarin Chinese soon.”

“I doubt that. I wonder, though, will I have any difficulty communicating in Singapore?”

“Everyone speaks English. At least everyone who went to school in Singapore. English is the official language of education for everything except Mother Tongue. There are three other official languages in Singapore: Tamil, Malay, and Mandarin Chinese. All students take classes in Mother Tongue, depending on what ethnicity they are. English students must take one of the other three and most choose Chinese. So, nearly everyone in Singapore speaks English and at least one other language,” she said.

I was getting an education, but at that point my delightful teacher had to tend to the next round of drink service. The next time around she brought me another Macallan 12.

I found my way to my hotel by midnight and was sorry that I was unable to talk to Guan-yin any longer. I had a day to explore Singapore before the conference started and hopefully adjust to the clock change. I get the days confused, but there was either fifteen hours or nine hours’ difference between here and California. Either way, it was almost impossible to communicate. Noon on Wednesday was nine p.m. Tuesday on the west coast. I think.

Fortunately, I was met by a business associate Wednesday at noon and he showed me several areas, including Raffles. He was impressed that I snatched peanuts out of the dish with my chopsticks as I drank my Singapore Sling. Believe me when I say I only needed to drink one and was glad I had the rest of the day to recover. Gin, cherry liqueur, Cointreau, Benedictine, grenadine, pineapple juice, lime juice, and bitters. We sat and talked for nearly two hours as I nursed the tall drink that would have been easy to guzzle.

For dinner, we went to the Long Beach Restaurant for chili crab and pepper crab. Steven, my host, told me that I had to compare the flavors of the two spicy dishes. It was impossible for me to choose which I liked best. But even more importantly, this is where I was introduced to watermelon juice as a before dinner drink. I didn’t sit down to another meal in Singapore without a tall cold glass before I ate.

The conference got started on Thursday. Like most of these conferences, it ran through the weekend. The attendees were largely independent writers and had to arrange time off work. I attended the keynote and dinner on Thursday and by Friday felt ready to face the conference with my own presentation. What a difference. There had been twenty uninterested people at my session in Seattle a year previously. There were over a hundred writers hungry for information in Singapore. After the presentation, I stood in the hallway with a cup of coffee and a line of people with questions that I didn’t have time to answer during the session.

I’d noticed a pretty girl waiting patiently until the line died down. I excused myself from the last questioner and turned to face her.

Like most xīfāng rén, I find it almost impossible to guess the age of an Asian woman. She could be twelve or thirty. Personally, I use clothing as my clue. This young woman was wearing a fashion I’d seen while strolling through the shops in the business district the day before. She had flat shoes with no socks, black leggings that stuck out beneath a very short bubble skirt and stopped about mid-calf, and about four layers of different styles of shirt that hung off her shoulders in different directions. I guessed fourteen.

“If I had known I was serving someone so important, I might have asked you back to the crew quarters,” she said when I took her offered hand. What?

“Um ... Do I know you?”

“How soon these báirén forget,” she laughed.

“Guan-yin? Oh, my! You look so different out of uniform,” I said. Honestly, she looked much older on the airplane. I mean, not old, but... Oh, shit!

“I look even more different when I am out of these clothes,” she whispered.

We had a lovely evening. I found out over dinner that she was also a writer and already had a reader on which she had downloaded a number of books.

“Mostly fan fiction right now,” she said. “I’m shipping a Star Wars pairing of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker that is very hot.” I have never figured out what it is about gay male sex that turns on so many straight women. I guess it’s the same as lesbian sex turning on men. My head wasn’t cooperating.

“Do you live here in Singapore?” I asked.

“Yes.” She looked me in the eye. I hadn’t felt that hungry appraisal since Jodie back in grad school. “I wouldn’t have to go home tonight, though.”

“I’d love to show you the beautiful room they gave me at the Fairmont.”

“I’ve always wanted to see their rooms.”

It was a beautiful room. I’d been surprised that I had such a nice space, but the company had a corporate account there. We stood by the window and looked out over the red roofs of Clarke Quay. I turned to Guan-yin and met her lips as she lifted them to me.

We took our time and undressed each other as we continued to watch the lights of the city below us. We were illuminated only by the light that came in through our window. No matter what style she dressed in or how juvenile her taste in literature might be, Guan-yin was no child. Her breasts were a perfect size for her small frame and I answered the call of her nipples to be sucked. She was barely over five feet tall and I easily lifted her in my arms to carry to the bed. She had curly dark hair on her mons, but was smooth below. She rolled toward me and gasped.

“What is it?” I asked as she pushed away from me slightly.

“Oh! I thought it was just prejudice.”

“I don’t think I’m prejudiced. Did I do something to offend you?”

“No! Not that. Chinese women ... They ... We never have sex with western men. I thought it was just prejudice that my mother passed on to me and I was happy to defy her and take a western lover. But I don’t think that will fit.” She touched my erect cock and stroked it softly. “I will suck, Aroslav, but I don’t think I can put something that size in my yīndào.”

“I’m just barely average,” I laughed.

“For a white man, perhaps. Chinese men are as long, but they are slimmer. I think you would hurt me.” That sucked. What could I say?

“I certainly don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “If it is too much, we don’t need to have intercourse to enjoy each other. For now, why don’t you relax and enjoy it while I eat you.”

“Really? You’d do that?” I started heading south, sprinkling little kisses across her breasts and abdomen. “Ari, before you do ... I have a nǎiyóu yīndào. A very ... creamy pussy. If it offends you, you do not need to touch it.” You’ve got to be kidding! I continued south and soothed her back as I opened the petals of her tiny flower.

I love cunnilingus. From that first time with Cher when I was bicycling cross country, I have relished the opportunity to lick any pussy I could get my tongue into. But I have never met a pussy that dripped such copious amounts of thick white lubricant. It even tasted creamy.

“Oh, yes! Lick my yīndì!” she cried. I wasn’t sure what she was specifically referring to, but I made sure to lick everything that was available. Those were the last mostly English words that I heard for the next several minutes.

No matter how much I licked up, there was an unending supply of creamy lubricant filling her pussy and I had to see if I’d be accepted. I kissed my way up Guan-yin and she hungrily met my lips, cleaning her own fluids off my face. I pressed the head of my cock against her pussy lips and felt every muscle in her body tense up.

“Don’t hurt me.”

“Guan-yin, no matter what you may have heard about American men, I will not hurt you. If it doesn’t work, we’ll do something else,” I said as I pushed forward. We both groaned as I began to penetrate the tight confines of her tiny pussy. By this time, I wasn’t sure it would work either. I paused and rested periodically, but Guan-yin pulled me forward and I sank deeper. When I was fully lodged in her home, we stayed still and both panted. I’d never felt anything so tight on my cock and Guan-yin had never been so stretched.

“Ari, it is okay. I can take you, but be gentle and not too long. If we are too vigorous, I am certain I will be stretched beyond the use of normal men.”

“It won’t be long, I promise,” I said. Just starting to slide back and forth a little let me know that I would not last long. She slipped her hand between us and I could feel her begin to work her clit. As soon as she touched it, I felt a new surge of lubrication deep within her and her muscles truly began to relax. I moved more freely and as I did, Guan-yin ramped up quickly to another orgasm. When she came, there was no holding back and I let go while pressing our pubic bones tightly together. She squealed when the first pulse hit and came again.

Pulling out was almost painful as my sensitive cock was dragged through her tight sheath.

“I have never been so filled!” Guan-yin exclaimed. “Or thrilled. Oh, Ari, I loved it, but I don’t think I can do that again. Am I all stretched out?” I kissed my way down her body and between her legs. There was so much cream dripping from her pussy that it looked like I’d come in her unprotected. I pulled off the condom and checked it to see that it was quite full. I tossed it in the wastebasket. Then I cleaned her thoroughly with my tongue and she rose again to a climax in just a few moments.

“My dear, I don’t believe you have suffered. You are so tight I could barely get my tongue in to lick you.”

“Could we just do that the rest of the weekend?” she asked. “Until, maybe, just before you leave. I do want to feel it again.”

Hmm. I could do that.

Back to Alice and Kim

It turned out that Kim was based in Phoenix and her apartment was only about a mile from our condo in Scottsdale. There was a lot of chit-chat about flying and Kim’s schedule. She had to be back at the airport Sunday morning for a long day flying from Phoenix to LA to Reno to Seattle to Salt Lake City and back to Phoenix. But then she would have three days off.

We made arrangements to have dinner together on Monday. Then I took Alice to our little condo.

It was a nice place. One-bedroom, full kitchen, balcony overlooking some kind of prize-winning golf course. And in the courtyard, a beautiful pool and spa. Before Alice could strip, though, I wanted to take this stunning young woman out to dinner.

“Don’t you have food in the condo?” she asked.

“Alice, I’m an old man...”

“You are not!”

“An older guy in the company of a drop-dead gorgeous young woman who is dressed to the nines. Please don’t blame me for wanting to show her off to the world,” I said. “You are just so beautiful!”

“I get it. You want to strut around in front of all the old men in the restaurant showing them what you get to go home with,” she said.

“No! That’s not it,” I hastened to object. Then I thought. “Yeah. I guess that is what it is. I feel like I’m somebody when I’m with you and I want to show off.”

“Ari,” she whispered as she closed the gap to kiss me lightly. “You are somebody. Somebody I love. I’ll agree to let you show me off under one condition. No. Make that two conditions.”

“What is it you want, sweetheart?”

“First, when you are done showing me off and we’ve eaten our fill of whatever you’re going to feed me, we come back here and you remove every stitch of my clothing and see how long we can make love tonight. Ari, I want you.” I was enthusiastically nodding my head. I wouldn’t be drinking tonight. I needed all my stamina. “And second, Monday, when we pick up Kim at her apartment, you help me seduce and ravish her.” I caught my breath.

“Really? Why do you even want me here?”

“Because I’m scared a little.” I held her in my arms and led her to the sofa to sit while she explained. “I work in a gentlemen’s club. I’m a stripper. The other employees are strippers. We watch each other strip. We bump into each other in the dressing room. We even become friends and hug each other while we’re naked. Sometimes we kiss. But I’ve never gone further than kissing or some good natured tweaks of a girl’s nipple or slap on the ass. Girls turn me on, but I’ve never met one I wanted to go down on. Until today.”

“So you’ve never gone down on another girl?” I said. She shook her head. “And you’re afraid you won’t like it?”

“Not exactly that,” Alice said softly. “I’m afraid she won’t like me.”

“Honey, I will make love to you as long as we are both awake tonight,” I said. “And I will do my best to help you seduce and make love to Kim. As long as it’s seduction and not coercion or force.” She nodded her head. “And my sweet girl, I will do this even if we don’t go out to dinner tonight. I love you.”

Alice bounced off my lap and grabbed my hand, dragging me off the sofa. I was ready to just undress the girl and start making love.

“Where are we going for dinner?” she asked brightly.

On Sunday, Alice and I commandeered the fireplace grill. No one else seemed interested. Alice had left ten inches of snow in Montana and I was still in shirtsleeves. But most of the snowbirds were freezing in the sixty-two-degree weather. We wore our swimming suits and took a blanket with us. We had a bottle of champagne and had grilled a steak and asparagus for dinner. It was fully dark by six o’clock and the temperature had been dropping for two hours. Still, we were warm and cozy wrapped in our blanket in one of the lounge chairs we’d dragged from the pool.

“I’ve never celebrated Solstice with you, Ari. Tell me about the ritual. Including making love at the end.”

“Well, typically, I’d have twenty to thirty guests. Everyone brought food and we’d have a regular feast. I especially looked forward to Mary’s chocolate covered brittle. Whatever it was she did when she made it, it was the one sweet that I looked forward to every year. Before it was gone, I tried to squirrel away half a dozen pieces to eat later.”

“I didn’t know you like sweets!”

“Mostly, I just like sweet women.”

“What did you serve?”

“I changed it up each year. One year I wrapped a ham in pastry dough and baked it. I have this incredible recipe for solstice turkey that includes stuffing it with oranges, inserting a thousand slivers of garlic under the skin, then cooking it on the grill while basting it with orange juice, whiskey, and butter. Pretty remarkable. I served prime rib one year. I cooked a leg of pork, which is not the same as a ham. I even made an Italian timpano one year. I can’t even begin to describe it. You have to experience it. Or watch the movie The Big Night sometime. That’s where I got the idea. One year, I made it four different times for different occasions.”

“And now you just grill a steak for two. It seems like so much is missing.”

“I loved the celebration every year. It’s my favorite holiday. But sharing a simple meal with you for this celebration ... It’s the best.”

“What else happened?”

“One of the things that has been missing in my private celebration since I moved into the trailer is lighting three candles to represent the goddess as maiden, mother, and crone, and then telling the story of the goddess in the underworld. There’s an official version someplace of Persephone and Hades, but every year I wrote my own. I did one where I rewrote Christmas Carols and did the entire story musically. One year, I told it as a story in the old west. Once it was set in Afghanistan. I made it different every year.”

“Tell me, Ari. Tell me the story.”

A Few Years Ago: The Goddess in the Underworld

The last time I told the story, I was an angry and bitter man. The love of my life wasn’t interested. It was a shock that sent my entire system into spasms. My back was wracked with pain and I was leaning heavily on my ritual staff. But we were still celebrating solstice with our friends. It was my thirtieth solstice celebration. I stood in front of our friends knowing—knowing!—this would be the last time. I rapped.

I was tossing and turning in my rocky bed.
It wasn’t visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.
The longer I slept the more my mind was filled with dread
When in the middle of the night, midnight, a voice said,
“Poor man.”
I was floating up above and could see I was dead
The panic in my chest was being fed
By memories of darkness and light and that led
To philosophers and poets and something I read
About yin yang.
Poor man.
No yin. All yang.

I clawed my way to the top of the bottom of the heap
Where I learned the art of how to keep
A spark of light alive in the dark of the deep
Chasm that opened beneath my feet
I discovered that opening was more than a well
As I slipped at the edge and tumbled and fell
And my voice was silent ‘cause there was no one to tell
That just because it’s private doesn’t mean it’s not hell.

Then you came to me, gagged and bound. You
Wore nothing at all but the pain that hounds you—
The source of which still confounds you
‘cause there’s simply no reason for the empty around you.
Poor woman.
You carried a grudge for all that you’d lost
And wanted to blame me for all that it cost,
But I cut the cords that bound you and tossed
Them in the flames of hell where they burned with the dross.
Yin Yang
Poor woman
All yin. No yang.

There was a deafening crash when we came together.
Nature abhors a vacuum whether
It’s in outer space or in the nether
Reaches of an empty heart seeking something better.
We reached the heights as lover to lover
And danced in the brightness under the cover
Of the sun. We never thought to discover
Whether two empty vessels could fill each other.

You said it was nice but you had to be going.
There were seeds to be planted and crops to be growing
In fields of plenty where warm winds were blowing
Across the tulips and the love we were sowing.
My heart shriveled up; it was so complicated
I didn’t want you to go; I was so frustrated
Over losing the throne I’d abdicated.
But it seemed life alone was the one that was fated.

Then you took my crown
And turned it around
Put it over your hips instead of a gown.
When I said “don’t leave,” you said, “don’t frown,
Enter into me and you will have new life
As the prince of light and I’ll be your wife
Even though we’re surrounded by a world that’s rife
With terror and hardship and hatred and strife.”

Wherever you walked there was hope and good cheer
And I learned to be brave and to show no fear
Of the haunting ghosts of sadness and tears
That waited below in the winter each year.
By autumn’s first frost I was pushing up daisies
While you wandered free in the places
I’d come to love; it just drove me crazy
That I was again consigned to Hades.
But now there’s the hope of life anew
If I just have the courage to wait a few
Months until the wheel turns true
And I can be reborn to be with you.

Because that’s the promise of the eternal wheel:
What comes around goes around, that’s the deal.

Back to Alice

“You still love her, don’t you, Ari?” Alice whispered.

“Always will, sweetheart. But there is no going back. I’ve left that life on the log,” I said. We kissed and talked about our memories of the past year, especially our week together at Yellowstone.

“What are you hoping for the future, Ari?” Alice asked as we held our candles.

“I’m hoping,” I said, looking into her eyes and feeling a connection that went beyond her sitting on my lap, “that my goddess will visit me again.” She smiled and kissed me. I lit my little stub of a candle and set it on the fireplace. “And you?” I asked.

“I’m hoping to celebrate Solstice with you again next year,” she whispered. She lit her candle and pushed me back on the lounger. She straddled me and I flipped our blanket over us. Before she settled into my lap, Alice dragged my swimming trunks down to free my cock. It wasn’t very impressive at the moment, but that didn’t stop her from settling on top of me. She pulled the gusset of her bikini to the side so her labia could nestle with my cock.

And we kissed.

I pushed her bikini above her breasts and she pressed them against my bare chest. We could have just packed up our things and gone to our room, but under the dark of the moon and next to the glowing embers of the fire, the union of god and goddess took on a mystical life of its own. As we kissed, I became hard. When I was hard, Alice simply moved forward and slid back down, taking me into her warm depths. My hands found the round globes of her butt and rode with her as she moved up and down my shaft.

And we kissed.

She clasped me in her warm sheath and I lost myself in the sensuality of my goddess. I have spoken of many women as goddesses, but that is the essence of woman. The young woman writhing on my dick was just that. Perhaps she was Selene, the maiden goddess, but she was no virgin. She was far from the crone, Hecate. But the mother goddess, Demeter, seemed too focused on the hearth to capture the spirit of the woman in my arms. There must be another goddess—one that is hot and wet and demanding of the essence of man, her god, to fill her. My heart raced in syncopation with the strokes she took on my staff. I suckled her breasts, not for food, but for passion. I captured her buttocks in my hands and held her to me. I breathed out my passion and my love.