“SHE CAME TO church with you and your grandmother?” Leo and Doug stare at me in the teachers’ lounge as they share a bag of baby carrots.
I nod my head. “I mean, we call it a synagogue. But yeah.” I tell them about Samantha inserting herself into my morning and how nice it felt. How I could almost allow myself to believe that this could be a regular thing. Not a one-off. Not some weird fluke where she got in a mood. I was the one in a mood… “She seemed eager to meet Bubbie for some reason.”
Doug shakes his head. “Not ‘some reason,’ man. She’s into you.”
I wince. Leo munches a carrot, nodding. “She’s definitely into you. I think it was the apology cake that sealed the deal.”
I reach for the bag of veggies, considering. “Do I really want to woo a woman who is actually turned on by my fumbling attempts at romance? I told you what I ended up writing on the cake note, right?”
“There’s a fish in the sea for everyone,” Leo says. “Or something like that.” The bell rings and Doug rolls up the carrot bag, sticking it back in the fridge. He and Leo grab their worksheets from the table by the printer, leaving me alone in the lounge. This is my prep period, but I’m not making notes about our upcoming unit on birds, or how they differ from reptiles.
No, I’m sitting alone in a room, staring out the window and thinking about how nice it felt to hang out with Samantha Vine this weekend.
Until Bubbie brought up Lara. Just hearing her name curdled my stomach, made me remember all the vows I made to myself about not risking that humiliation again. No more wealthy women, I swore. Or women who desired that sort of status. So what do I go and do? I start falling for a woman with a literal billion dollars of investment, whose name is all over the press and whose company swings Big Tech Energy.
I chuckle, remembering Samantha using that phrase. She’s always witty and self-deprictating. I try to remind myself what Leo has insisted all along, that Lara is an idiot asshole. Her words say more about her than me, I repeat. But it’s really fucking hard to change the thought patterns that have been etched into my life the past few years.
After school, I rush home to change into jeans and hiking boots before swinging by to grab Samantha for our birding date. I still can’t believe she’s into this idea. I’m mainly checking it out to see if it’s a good citizen science opportunity for my students. The local Audubon society hosts these events where people try to count the chimney swifts, keep track of how frequently the visit their familiar haunts. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that Samantha’s software would be perfect for this sort of project, especially the way it lets people share data.
I pull up to her house and nearly faint when she pops out her front door wearing tight jeans and a fitted flannel shirt. This woman has the body of a Baroque sculpture, with thighs I long to squeeze again.
Samantha opens the door to my car and climbs in, grinning. “I brought binoculars,” she says, shaking a small, expensive pair. “I wasn’t sure what all we’d need.”
“Just our eyes and something to take notes,” I say, still staring at her. My car is filled with her scent, her shampoo and her soap. It’s distracting.
“Notes?” She arches a brow. “You know what I do for a living, right?”
I nod. “I’d love to see how we can take field notes using Vinea.”
She smiles, a broad, bright expression that fills my car with light. I can’t go another second without kissing her, and so I do. I lean forward and wrap my hand around the back of her neck, pulling her close, and just kissing her. She moans softly, happily, resting her hand on my shoulder as she returns the kiss. “Hi,” I say when I pull back. She tucks her hair behind her ears and buckles her seatbelt. I grin and begin driving as she fiddles with the radio, clapping her hands when she finds the local public radio station, which is playing bluegrass.
“This seems like excellent birding music,” she says. “Although, I guess we need to be quiet while we’re watching?”
I nod. “But we don’t need to be quiet on the way there.” She taps her thighs along to the music and chats with me about the stress of her work day. She apparently intends to dive back into paperwork when I drop her off this evening. It’s just about dusk when we arrive at the park where we’re going to sit and observe the chimney swift tower, a tall wooden structure built by Audubon volunteers to attract the birds so they don’t try to nest in people’s active chimneys.
Samantha seems delighted as I grab a blanket and snacks from the hatch of my car. “I didn’t know you were going to feed me,” she says, settling next to me on the ground a safe distance from the tower. “How does this work?”
I shrug. “We just wait,” I tell her, offering her some crackers and pre-sliced cheese, which she takes, her hand lingering against mine.
“Aren’t you missing a meal with your family?” She whispers, which isn’t entirely necessary but I like how it necessitates us sitting closer together, so I don’t say anything about her volume.
“Nature calls,” I whisper back. “Or something like that.” We wait in comfortable silence for awhile and, seeing no birds, Samantha asks for more details about the project. I explain how the organization raised funds to build these towers throughout the area. “Hundreds of birds might roost in each one during migration, like right now, but the birds are extremely territorial. So only one pair will nest in each tower during nesting season.”
“So you brought me here to look at grouchy birds who like to be alone?” She nudges me with her shoulder.
“Not alone,” I respond. “With their mate. And their babies. But nobody else.”
“That actually sounds pretty nice,” she says wistfully, looking at the skyline again, pulling up her binoculars and frowning when she doesn’t see any birds. “Oh!” She exclaims and then slaps a hand over her mouth. “Are those the birds?” She whispers and points and sure enough, a dozen or so chimney swifts swoop and loop from above the trees, making their way toward the tower as the sky rapidly darkens.
“It smells like rain,” Samantha says, not taking her eyes off the birds.
“Petrichor,” I say, trying to count how many I see.
I lose my place when Samantha says, “Petri what?”
I start to count again, pointing with my finger. I note two dozen birds and then turn to her. “Petrichor. It’s the word for how it smells when it’s going to rain.”
“There’s an actual word for that?”
I nod, reaching for her. I drape my arm around her as we watch the birds tumble through the air. She gasps as they swirl, forming a funnel cloud, then a spiral, and then finally dive into the wooden tower just as the skies open up and rain begins to fall in the rapidly growing darkness.
But she doesn’t run toward the car. She brushes her wet hair back from her face and cuddles against me, mesmerized, until the last bird sinks into the roost. “Thank you, AJ. This is amazing.” Her lips are warm against mine as she turns in my arms in the autumn rain. We kiss until the world fades away, until I forget that we’re in a county park in a populated urban area. Until she presses gently on my shoulders and I lean back on the blanket, pulling her on top of me, and feeling her settle between my legs.
“Wait,” I say, clasping her hand. She looks around.
The park is deserted between the dusk and the rain. Samantha grins and shakes her head. “I don’t want to wait,” she says, sliding a wet hand down the waist of my jeans. I groan, feeling her fingers reaching for my stiffening cock. When she wraps her palm around my shaft I gasp. It feels so good to be touched, to be wanted this way.
“I don’t have anything,” I stutter around her kisses. “Condom I mean.” Samantha doesn’t stop stroking me but rolls to the side, resting her elbow on the blanket.
“Then we won’t have intercourse,” she says and, with a damp rush, she tugs my jeans open and sinks her beautiful mouth to meet my sensitive skin. If someone had suggested that I, AJ Trachtenberg, would be getting a blow job in the rain in the park, I…well I wouldn’t have laughed because I don’t do that very often. But I certainly wouldn’t have thought that was realistic.
And yet, here I am, gasping and moaning as my hands stroke Samantha’s golden hair, watching as her lips slide along my cock, dying of the pleasure of it. Of the forbidden nature of oral sex in nature.
“Fuck, Samantha, fuuuuuuck.” She holds me steady with one fist as the other traces along my stomach. She alternates firm sucks with long licks of her tongue. She swirls around my tip and my hips jerk up in response.
“Mmm,” she sighs as she works. “I’ve wondered what you taste like.”
“You have? Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit.”
“Mm hm.” She pops off the end of my dick, drooling a little in a way that should be disturbing but is instead deeply arousing. “You like this?”
“Oh, god, Samantha, yes. Yes, shit. I’m going—I’m so close. So close.” My entire body stiffens as I feel my orgasm building in my spine, overtaking my entire nervous system. Samantha lowers her mouth even further and I feel my tip slide along the back of her throat before I erupt into her mouth. I pant and gasp, shuddering as she swallows, stroking my thighs and my stomach as the waves of pleasure ebb.
“That was really hot, AJ,”she says. When I arch a brow in confusion, she laughs, leaning on her elbow on the blanket beside me as I lie in the rain with my junk exposed. “I like making you fall apart,” she says. And damn it, I like it when she makes me fall apart, too.