Bahia
Still gripping her, the jaguar backs up delicately an inch at a step, until its bristly chin rests on her nape. The pointed tip of its prick slides inerringly down her crack, slurring fluid, snagging a millisecond on the ridged rim of her asshole, finally coming to rest between her cunt’s fiery lips.
The jaguar bucks, and its cock slides in up to the knot. She screams, falls forward from the waist. Then the cat pushes all the way in.
The right cheek of her face now cushioned on the grass, her nipples scribing the turf, she and the jaguar fuck.
Each time the knot is pulled out or pushed in, a wordless plosive exclamation escapes her. Her inner cunt lips invert on the inward stroke and evert on the outward.
The jaguar’s thrusts accelerate, and resonant undulations quake her buttocks. One final almost unbearable ramming triggers both the cat’s cum and her own titanic climax.
When the scalding fluid generously geysers up her—every drop contained within her uterine channels due to the knot’s blockage—the slumber-hosted transformation instantly begins. She feels her limbs melt and reconfigure, her torso elongate, her face reshape.
Within seconds, the lovers have collapsed to the verdant grass, two lithe black jaguars, one large, one small, lying entwined, licking each other’s muzzles beneath the sun.
Kerry Hackett awakes. Her dream orgasm quivers out its final fading traces along her bare limbs, ripples in her midriff. A flush spreads like a radiant gorget around her neck and upper bosom. So hot she has to kick the covers off, despite the apartment’s wintry unheated chill. (Electricity rationing again till noon today.) Her autonomous cunt’s made a soppy wet spot on the sheets. Will Tango notice? Doubtful, since the big man continues to sleep so soundly on his own side of the bed, like a semi-gaunt yet still wanly handsome corpse awaiting the tender ministrations of an embalmer.
The bedside clock reads a crimson six-thirty, half an hour away from its appointed shrilling. Kerry shuts off the alarm and slides out of the bed. The wood floor insults her bare feet, so she hastens to the bathroom, where at least a cotton mat interfaces between self and world.
In the lighted chamber, behind shut door, her breath plumes. On the chill toilet, she laves ceramic bowl with steaming piss. No toilet paper again, under dual constraints of meager money and short supply. No matter, since she’ll soon have a hot shower—assuming the city’s natural gas supply hasn’t been interrupted once more.
Before arising from the toilet, she checks for signs of her imminent period. Not yet.
Kerry cajoles hot water out of the sink tap, untenses muscles braced to receive only cold, and scrubs her face with suds from a sliver of yellowing soap. Dropping the towel from her face, she confronts herself in the mirror: short peltish black hair feathered across a high brow, cornflower-blue eyes, smallish nose, full wide lips, a pugnacious chin. But a portion of her features are swamped in noise: an enormous port-wine birthmark, permanent love-bruise from the gods, damage from a clumsy stork, sprawls across half her visage, a map of some terra incognita occluding an asymmetrical portion of forehead, nose, left eye-socket, cheek and jaw.
In the shower, Kerry soaps thoroughly, scrubbing hard between her legs as if to wash her recurrent dream away. She mashes her cunt as if to squeeze out the semen of the dream jaguar— or perhaps to drive it deeper in. Despite erotic satiation, her own touch is mildly arousing, and her nipples react. She offs the shower and steps out. The fall of water from her high-jutting breasts resembles the drip of light from the lianas in the oneiric jungle.
She brushes her teeth with raw baking soda and hydrogen peroxide, granular paste cupped in her palm. In the steamy mirror, she applies minimal makeup: frosted eyes, iced lips to match her painted nails.
Back in the bedroom, guided only by spill of bathroom light, Kerry dresses quickly. Azure bra and matching panties, black stockings that elastically grip her thighs up high where they narrow and tauten. Her second-best suit, the brown one, seems cleanest. A gold chain once her mother’s fits tightly around her sculpted neck, accessorizing her outfit bravely but without companionship of other jewelry. Old cloth coat with faux fur collar, boots suitable for snowy streets, sensible flats in her carry-bag. She picks up her wallet from the dresser and plumbs its disappointing depths, finally plucking out one of her last two NUfives. She pins the nudie bill under Tango’s six prescription vials on the galley table, where he’s certain to encounter it.
Her lover still sleeps, face pillow-buried. Kerry sighs, plants a perfunctory kiss on the back of his head, then leaves the apartment without breakfast or goodbyes.
Poorly brightened by a yellow bulb, the ground-floor vestibule—full of wind-sifted litter, its smashed-lock outer door ajar an inch—holds a dozing beggar cocooned in a greasy blue U-Haul blanket, nothing much showing except his tubercular bearded face, so grimy as to render his race and age indeterminate. The polyester chrysalis shifts as Kerry attempts to sidestep it, one of the beggar’s rheumy eyes open, and a frost-blackened hand extends.
“Spare change, miss?”
