REVENANT
Vanessa de Sade
It had been over twenty-five years since Trudy had last seen Fiona, and she stands hesitantly now on the immaculately scrubbed doorstep, not quite sure if she should press the bell or just run away. The two of them had been as thick as thieves back in their art school days, of course, sharing a studio and gleefully getting themselves covered in gouache on a regular basis, frenzied young painters hell-bent on becoming the next Jenny Saville. But that was before Fiona had gone and met some dick-head bloke and ditched college to marry him; and Trudy herself had taken a U-turn and changed her art degree to one in Renaissance history. And yet here she is today, trim and successful in her immaculate Calvin Klein suit, inhaling the scent of polish and trying to still her beating heart.
They had drifted apart after Fiona had married. Jack, the new husband, was disapproving of Trudy and Fiona’s other arty friends; and though the pair still exchanged Christmas cards— Trudy’s expensive gallery reproductions of Renaissance masterpieces; Fiona’s bland supermarket representations of robins and pinecones—they had not spoken in over two decades. And yet, here Trudy is like the proverbial bad penny, deep in the heart of suburbia, surveying the neatly mown lawn and regulation flowerbed with two stultified rosebushes not quite daring to bloom, milk bottles carefully rinsed and stacked in a little metal container on the step, an old-style coir doormat hesitatingly bearing the word WELCOME, and everything polished to within an inch of its life and gleaming like a new pin.
Oh, what the fuck! Trudy swallows and rings the bell. She can hear it chiming somewhere deep in the bowels of the house. Ding-dong. Avon calling. Hell, this is a really stupid idea. Fiona probably won’t even know her. Probably isn’t in. This is a fool’s errand! Yet she hears the unmistakable sound of slippered feet and a shadow passes over the sunburst window in the paneled front door, the paint blistering just a bit, but still a definite shade of old-fashioned baize green.
And the scent of polish is so much stronger as the door opens. Lavender polish. The kind your mother used to buy from the Betterware man. “Yes?” It’s a woman’s voice. Brisk. Defensive. Who the fuck are you implied in its tone.
“Hello, Fiona…”
She’s blinking uncertainly in the bright light of the afternoon sun. The hair that used to be an untamed tangle of unruly blonde tresses now cut short and showing some traces of gray. Salt and pepper her mother would call it. Wearing an expensive but shapeless slubby dress and a precisely pressed floral apron. Tan tights. Tartan slippers on her feet. In the background Trudy can hear a radio and the closing music to “The Archers,” the tweet of a canary in a cage. There is cabbage-rose paper on the wall and a collection of Goldscheider plaster masks tapering back into the gloom.
“Trudy? Holy fuck, Trudy? Is that really you?”
They look at each other for a long moment, staring in disbelief at what they’ve become, and then suddenly they’re in each other’s arms, embracing, the years melting away, and they’re just two young hopefuls taking on the world once again.
“Trudy, Trudy, look at you in your power suit and heels. What happened to you?”
Trudy laughs. Points. “Look at yourself, Mrs. Home Counties, when did you go and get all twinset and pearls? Not to mention this house. It’s like something out of a museum…”
Now it’s Fiona’s turn to laugh, putting her arm around her friend and leading her inside. “It is a museum. The museum of Mabel, my dearly departed mother-in-law. We inherited this place when the old girl kicked the bucket and Jack insisted that we keep it just the way she left it. Wait till you see the living room!”
“And you’ve lived here like this, all these years? What happened to your dreams? Your painting?”
“Ah, I could ask you the same question, Mrs. Chair of Renaissance Art. What happened to your dreams? And your painting, for that matter. What happened to that?”
Trudy looks sheepish. “Seems that talking about dead painters pays a lot more than creating your own art,” she admits. “That’s the world we live in…”
They’re both in the lounge by now, leatherette suite and a low-slung coffee table with spindly brass-tipped legs and a kitsch painting of flamingos on its glazed upper surface. Scores of pictures of Jack as a boy lining the top of an upright piano that doesn’t look as if it’s been played in decades. Wallpaper in a chintz pattern, faded where the afternoon sun slants in through the big bay window.
Fiona sighs. “What a pair of turncoats we turned out to be. But why are you here, Trudy? Not that I’m not delighted to see you, of course, but why now after all this time?”
Trudy shrugs. “I was on the way somewhere from someplace else and I suddenly thought of you. My flight’s not until tomorrow and I thought, well, why not. So, here I am. I thought we could maybe spend some time together, you know, catch up…”
“Catch up?”
“Yes, you know, talk about old times. Reminisce.”
“Reminisce?” Fiona’s eyes are suddenly blazing. “I don’t want to fucking reminisce.”
Trudy meets her gaze. Defiant. “Then what?”
“You know what.”
“Seriously? Now?”
Fiona nods, her big breasts rising and falling, her voice breathless.
“Oh holy fuck…”
“Holy fuck is right,” Fiona says in a low voice, a deep and bestial voice that comes from some other Fiona, some other life. Reaching for Trudy, pulling her close.
And their embrace is sudden but sweet. Their kiss hard and penetrating as they melt into each other’s arms, tongues already inquisitive, the electric current between them palpable and crackling in the afternoon air like something out of an old monster movie, their two hearts hammering as they eat each other up.
“You always said no. Before, when I asked you, you always said no…” Trudy protests as she comes up for air.
“I was nineteen and wanted to have babies, you idiot, of course I said no. It doesn’t mean I meant it…”
They kiss again. Desperately. Hot and horny for each other. Trudy smells of some expensive perfume that comes packed in a sculptural bottle and costs the earth. Fiona’s aroma is simple own-brand apple shampoo and more powerful than any pher-omone. And Trudy wants to gobble her up like a homemade cherry pie, all soft and sugary pastry on the outside with a thick sticky sauce beneath that oozes onto the plate and has to be licked.
“Come on, upstairs. He doesn’t get home till after seven on a Thursday. We’ve plenty of time…”
“I didn’t come here to do this…”
“Like fuck you didn’t. You’re as ravenous as I am!”
They’re in the bedroom by now. A slightly musty smell of old wardrobes and camphor. Same cabbage-rose paper as the downstairs hall. The light low, like an old cinema before the matinee. Velvet drapes drawn in daylight to save the carpet. A neat dressing table with an unused silver brush and mirror set, a double bed with a green satin coverlet. Embroidered with a simple central flower. A homemade rag rug, incongruous on the thickly carpeted floor. Trudy recognizes the style. This is Fiona’s one attempt to assert herself in this silent temple to a dead woman’s taste.
And in the slight chill of someone else’s domain Trudy feels suddenly dwarfed, and so Fiona takes charge. Kisses her again. On the lips then down the whole length of her long white swan’s neck. Turning Trudy’s knees to water. Oh yes, this is what she came here for, yes indeedy, but she had never even dared to hope.
“Do you have anyone? Can I mark you?”
“No, no-one. And yes, yes please, do it all you want…”
She feels Fiona’s lips sucking hard on the fleshy nape of her neck, then her teeth sink in and she wants to weep with pleasure. She’s due to give a lecture on the metaphysical imagery in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in Copenhagen two days from now and will have to find a suitable scarf to cover the huge red blemish on her throat, or maybe not. Fuck it, let them all conjecture. Out loud, she groans: “Naked, I want you naked!”
Fiona grins and pushes her down onto the bed. “You’ve seen me naked before, what’s the big deal?”
“Stop teasing and get your kit off before I rip that awful dress down the middle and rape you.”
“Promises, promises. Here, unzip me…”
She slides out of the slubby green sheath like a serpent shedding its skin and transforms into a symphony in creams and whites, her body an arctic landscape of untouched snow, Leda and the Swan, Venus ascending, rounded and pleasing despite the unflattering white bra that fails miserably to contain her big, full breasts. Hipster panties in ivory cotton beneath the tights, her belly rounded, pudenda huge and pronounced under the knickers, hint of a tantalizing camel toe nestled at the crotch.
“You still like?” she asks, kneeling over Trudy’s recumbent form, straddling her like a colossus. “Still as desperate to fuck me now that I’m a fat old woman?”
Trudy nods, breathless. Oh fuck yeah! Pulls the waistband of the tights and panties out with one trembling hand, slides the other deep inside. Feels smooth skin like silk, thick fur, slippery wetness. “Take your bra off.”
Fiona tries to smile but she’s panting by now and her clit is as hard as a lubricious pecan. And her hand shakes as she reaches for the catch on her own brassiere, her huge tits tumbling out like a snowy avalanche, the nipples up like ramrods, unexpectedly dark garnet red in color, not sugar pink like most of the blondes Trudy has fucked. Then Fiona yanks her own pants down to her knees, ripping her panty hose, and flops down on top of Trudy, the two of them kissing like their lives depend on it.
“Have you done this before?” Trudy asks, pulling Fiona’s panties right off and feasting her eyes on her friend’s cunt, the thick white-blonde hair so fine it’s as if she’s shaved, her pouty pussy lips begging to be kissed.
“Yes. With my best friend when I was fourteen.”
“Shit, everyone does it with their best friend when they’re fourteen. I mean have you ever done this properly, with another grown-up woman?”
Fiona closes her eyes for a moment, luxuriating in what Trudy’s fingers are doing to her cunt, slowly pulling it open like a split fig and circling that big throbbing clit. Treating it to the occasional flick that drives her wild. “No,” she whispers. “You’re my first.” Though this isn’t strictly true.
Because there was that day when she found the box of magazines under the bed in her sons’ room, and she’d pored over page after garishly colored page of splayed women, black and white, fat and skinny, hairy and shaved, big tits, little tits, a cornucopia of female pulchritude, and she’d touched herself. Yes, touched herself right there, rubbed herself, massaged her big fat clit until the orgasm ripped itself out of her and made her scream with pent-up rage. Sneaking up to the boys’ room every afternoon to do it again. Bereft when they both fucked off to university without a backward glance and took their wank-stack with them, leaving her alone with the knowledge of exactly what she was.
And now Trudy was back in her life for one magical afternoon. Insistent little Trudy who had always been so desperate to experiment in their tiny attic studio, with each of them taking turns to pose nude while the other drew, Trudy’s furry little pussy with its tight and secret slit like a perfect keyhole so delicious and appealing. But Fiona had wanted babies and a husband who would provide, hadn’t wanted to bump cunts with another girl now that they were grown up and responsible adults. That wasn’t how it was done, she had told herself. Had even believed it for a while.
“You’ve had girls though?” she asks now, maybe accuses, tugging impatiently at the buttons on Trudy’s white silk blouse, the suit jacket lost somewhere between the lounge and here. “You’ve fucked other women, I know you have!”
“I have, but I’ve always hungered for what I couldn’t get,” Trudy pants, ripping off her shirt and wriggling out of her skirt. She has on a tiny Westwood thong in deep pomegranate and black with a matching bra cupping her small breasts, and soft chestnut curls peep deliciously from the hinge of her thighs. “Sooner or later, I’d end up imagining that they were you.”
Fiona pulls the silken ribbon on Trudy’s hip and gasps as her panties unfurl, Trudy’s bush like a soft puffball, a catkin, a sexy bunny tail at the gateway to enchantment. “I always think about you when Jack fucks me,” she confesses. “I visualize sucking your tits when I want to come.”
“Suck away then,” Trudy groans, pulling off her bra and baring her little nubs, the perky brown nipples erect and rubbery. Areolas huge, like old half crowns.
“God, I want to eat you,” Fiona gasps. “Will you show me how?”
Trudy laughs though the breath is rasping out of her like an exhausted long-distance runner’s. “Do to me what I do to you,” she manages to gasp, shivering as Fiona’s fingers stroke her tits and pinch the nipples.
“I’ve never touched another woman’s pussy before,” Fiona admits, one hand circling Trudy’s chubby little pudenda. “We just touched tits when we were kids…”
“You’ll love it, and touching yours is pure heaven,” Trudy kisses back into her ear, her breath hot. “Just pet me gently like this, that’s right, just stroke the hair to begin with, now press a little harder, yes, just like that, now push inside, I’m so wet that you’ll slide right in…”
“You’re so slippery, and so hot. Oh god, Trudy, I think I’m going to come!”
“Me too, rub me hard!”
And they could both feel it, feel the throbbing ache within themselves like a piece of machinery being wound past its limit and about to snap, a river in spate beating at its banks, a dam about to burst, and then suddenly they are kissing and scratching and screaming and bucking like unbroken mares, their fingers deep in each other’s slit, humping furiously against each other, their fervent kisses sharing each other’s orgasm as wave after wave engulfs them.
“And now you’re going to get eaten,” Trudy manages to whisper, as she flips herself around and bends her head to Fiona’s fat and furry cunt. “Now I’m going to show you what a real orgasm feels like!”
“I never came like that in twenty-five years of marriage,” Fiona’s voice filters down as she rubs her face against Trudy’s bush. “It can’t get any better. Can it?”
“Wait till you taste me,” Trudy promises, her own tongue starting to map all of Fiona’s secret pink lips like a cartographer measuring contours. “Believe me, once you’ve eaten pussy nothing else will ever compare. Oh, holy fuck, Fiona, I’ve waited all my life to do this…”
“Me too,” Fiona agrees, kissing, kissing, a sugar baby oozing sweetness, not daring to lick quite yet, just breathing in all Trudy’s scents, pheromones, hungering for her taste. Her honeyed nectar. “Do it really slow,” she breathes. “I want this to last forever…”
They make love all afternoon and dangerously late into the pink-streaked sky of early evening, and it won’t be long before Jack’s sedate little car pulls into the drive, his key slides into the worn brass lock on the old green-baize door downstairs. Does he shout, Honey, I’m home, Trudy wonders as she gathers her clothes from where they have been strewn all over the bedroom floor, her hair still damp form the shower where Fiona slid into the cubicle and went down on her as she shampooed. It has been heaven on earth, a fairy-tale romance, but like all good fairy tales the princesses must make themselves scarce before the giant awakens, or suffer the consequences in the land beyond the beanstalk.
“I don’t want to go,” Trudy whispers, holding Fiona tight, traitorous tears betraying how much the ice maiden really feels inside.
“You have to go,” says the ever-practical Fiona. Coldly, Trudy thinks. “You have a job. Commitments.”
“Fuck my commitments. It’s you I want.”
“You mean that?”
“With all my heart.”
“Then…”
“Then?”
“Then there is a way. I have a little money put by and Jack’s Range Rover is in the garage. I paid for it, and I’m an excellent driver. We could buy a caravan. I’ll have you in Copenhagen in time for your lecture if we go now, catch the last ferry from Folkestone tonight.”
“But your home? Your children?”
“Another woman’s home, and my children don’t know I exist. Jack saw to that…”
“Your marriage was… terrible?”
“Yes it was, but there’s no time for all that boo-hoo stuff right now. Yes or no, Trudy?”
Trudy pauses. Doesn’t hesitate. Pauses. She always was one for dramatic effect, the cow. “What do you think?” she grins. “Pack your stuff!”
But Fiona just picks up the keys to the Rover and puts her passport in her bag. “I don’t need any stuff, and I don’t want any of it, I’m starting a new life.” Kisses Trudy. “With you.”
“With me,” Trudy grins, beaming like an adolescent being asked to her first prom. “You’re starting a new life with me!”
And they kiss again, right there in the driveway for all the neighbors to see, before backing the Range Rover carefully onto the street and then speeding away toward the darkening eastern sky. And Fiona knows it won’t be easy and they’ll both have to give and take, have to learn each other’s habits all over again; but they’ve lived together before and she knows that they can do it again. And, of course, there’s so much beautiful sex they’ve yet to experience, so much love to make. And a caravan is a dull structure that won’t take much looking after, maybe she could decorate it, stencil a pattern around the window frames or perhaps even design a mural for the interior walls. Maybe even start painting again…