The Glass-blower

JENNIFER DIDN’T KNOW WHAT the hell she was doing on a singles holiday, let alone in Venice of all places. Everyone on the trip denied they were looking for love, or even sex. Just enjoying the view with like-minded people. But why else had they paid through the nose to join a dating agency? Why else were they spending a long weekend traipsing round the most romantic city on earth?

And what a motley crew they were. At least Jennifer had a couple of broken engagements under her belt, and could prove, if necessary, that she’d lost her virginity. This lot were like some kind of sociological experiment deposited from outer space. The men were like defrocked priests, blinking dazedly in the cold light of real life. And the women were like kids playing dress-up in their too tight clothes and too bright lipstick.

And yet. Like the animals in the Ark they were, stealthily, pairing up. Keith and Vince, the accountants, had been seen slurping oysters in a dingy waterside bar with Serena and Alissia, the highlight-flicking chalet girls. And Michael, the psychotherapist, had definitely copped off with Jane the violin teacher. You could tell by the love bite.

‘I’m not sure I can stand it another day. Don’t know why I signed up for this in the first place,’ muttered Jennifer to Hazel, the pale gardening columnist, as they sat on the windblown Zattere fulfilling the pizza-eating section of the itinerary. ‘Ain’t never going to have sex again at this rate, let alone find the man of my dreams.’

‘Forget romance, then,’ replied Hazel, licking olive oil off her lower lip. They both stared through the steamed-up window at a huge cruise ship plying down the Giudecca canal, dwarfing the city.

‘Concentrate on finding pure sex, do you mean? Because I’m frustrated as hell! It’s been months –’

‘Me too!’ Hazel blushed, then laughed. ‘But what I meant was, we’re all desperate now we’re forty, but that’s no reason to be a quitter.’

Jennifer hadn’t realised how husky Hazel’s voice was. In fact, she’d never heard her speak before. The heat in the restaurant had made her cheeks glow, and the oil had made her normally chapped lips glisten.

‘But they’ve marched us round all the sights, haven’t they? Rialto Bridge, the Jewish quarter, coffee at Florians – what else is there?’ Jennifer swallowed her cold beer. ‘It’s all very lovely here, but I ought to get home before the credit crunch closes me down completely –’

‘But what’s waiting for you in London, apart from your shrinking property company?’ asked Hazel, curling her tongue round a long strand of melted mozzarella. ‘The singles scene there is shit.’

‘Too true, sister.’ Jennifer dabbed a blob of melted cheese off Hazel’s chin and then they clinked their thick beer glasses, blushing.

‘Anyway, there’s one thing we haven’t seen yet,’ Hazel winked. She had very long eyelashes and zero make-up. ‘Tacky and touristy it may be, but you can’t leave Venice without seeing them blowing glass.’

* * *

Which is how they came to be standing round a kind of freezing warehouse on the island of Murano. In front of them, blazing heat like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, complete with doomed souls. Behind, a vicious breeze cutting straight off the iron grey water separating them from the domes and spires of the city, rising like a herbaceous border on the horizon.

Then this guy sauntered out from a back room, unbuttoning a loose white shirt. No fanfare, except some sort of greeting and a long hard stare straight into Jennifer’s eyes. The tour leaders clapped, but Jennifer was rigid with excitement. The shirt came off, and as he took up a long metal pipe and plunged it into a bubbling furnace the back of his head, spine and legs were splashed with darkness, his face, chest and arms thrown into relief by the roaring light.

‘Caravaggio, wasn’t it?’ Frederick the ex-police officer remarked from the back of the watching group. ‘Didn’t he paint Bacchus and all those tortured saints in exactly this half-light?’

‘I think the tourist board makes them do this deliberately,’ Hazel giggled softly. ‘You know, look all virile and sweaty.’

‘Sexy as,’ breathed Serena.

‘Open fire, bare hands, unprotected face. Obviously have no truck with health and safety,’ added Keith.

Everyone spluttered like school kids trying to be good in church.

The muscles in his shoulders and arms flexed as the glass-blower grasped the pipe. His ribs jabbed through his skin, the heat must knock the breath out of you, and running down his stomach – the jeans low-slung, hanging off his hips – a thin line of dark hair ran from his navel down, down into his jeans. Into his boxers where the hair would fan out round his big, sleeping cock.

Jennifer’s pussy twitched. Sod this bunch, she thought, tracing hearts in the dusty floor with the pointed toe of her boot. I’ll have this one washed and brought to my tent.

Now a wedge of muscle thickened down each side of his back as he manipulated his iron pipe, dipping it into the furnace again. Jennifer’s stomach swallow-dived.

‘Apparently that’s called the glory hole!’ Hazel whispered. Her blonde hair tickled Jennifer’s face like wisps of silk. ‘How naughty is that?’

Jennifer squealed with laughter. ‘He can plunge his pipe into my glory hole any time!’

The glass-blower scoped out a sort of jelly and skipped like Nureyev across to a slab of marble where he rolled and flipped it, constantly lifting and twisting and swinging his pipe. Then he lowered his mouth and his cheeks pulled in as he started to suck. Jennifer gasped. She put her hand into her coat, down between her legs. Her pussy felt hot and damp under her jeans. The glass-blower rotated and twisted his pipe as his cheeks blew life into the red-hot globule gathered at the end and coaxed it into shape.

‘Magnifico,’ sighed Hazel.

The glass elongated at the end of the pipe and, as it swelled and grew, yes, just like a hard-on, a frantic desire gripped Jennifer. Her pussy felt really wet now. She wanted something, the pipe, the guy’s cock, whatever, hot and hard, filling her. He sketched another pas de deux with his instrument, loving it, his fingers coaxing the elegant line of metal as he breathed air down the tube, and look how the globular mass responded, fading from garish tangerine to a rosy hue and conformed into a lovely oval.

‘That’s the sexiest thing ever.’ It came out as a growl. She could hardly breathe. She wanted those hands running over her, coaxing her into amazing shapes and then a mind-blowing climax. ‘I’m going to follow him home. I’ll go mad if I don’t have him.’

‘Christ, you really are horny, aren’t you?’ Hazel was still very close. She slid her arm briefly round Jennifer’s waist. Jennifer liked the feel of it there, and it was cold when Hazel moved away. ‘But you’re crazy! You’ll get lost.’

‘I want an adventure, Hazel.’

The ballet slowed as the glass-blower, still swinging his pipe to keep the momentum, rolled the dark pink mass onto another slab and then suddenly, with his free hand, took pincers to the neck of the glass, which had stretched into a column. Jennifer expected it to screech out for mercy as he tightened his grip and decapitated it. Then it was over. The glass had turned into a beautiful vase and the glass-blower wandered out of sight.

Jennifer clutched at some nearby display shelving. There was a frantic rattling of fragile glassware as she rapidly, and silently, came.

Magnifico was the word.

Hazel was right. Jennifer did get lost. At first the solitude was blissful. The strain of being nice to all these earnest strangers was getting to her. She wriggled away from the others and followed the glass-blower on to the vaporetto, back into the city. The alleyways cobwebbed like veins as she tried to keep up with him. Then he ducked through a green stained arch into a tiny dove-grey- and honey-coloured campo. No one passed her. There was the odd tinkle of music through a half-open window, the clatter of cutlery, the snap of a bed sheet, but only brief snatches, as if voices or music or footsteps were an interruption to some other, deeper, process flowing through the water beneath.

She had only paused for a second. But the glass-blower had vanished.

She panicked, then, heart thumping. Glanced around wildly. It was dark, and she had no idea how to get back to the hotel. Suddenly she missed the others and their inane laughter. Hazel with her map.

Then someone sighed, across the square, quietly, definitely female, and answered by a rough male sigh. No words. So quiet they were just like breaths, in and out. Surely it was him. The glass-blower. She looked around. A curtain curled like a red tongue out of a window in the corner, but nothing else moved. Somewhere a bell tolled.

The private sighs stretched into elongated moans. The hairs on her arms started to prickle. She walked towards the house, stopped by the door. There was a creaking of bed springs which sang slowly, in a rhythm. The ragged moans rose into wordless gasping, so close to fear or pain, now panting in time to the creaking. Jennifer’s nipples stiffened, her silk underwear clinging to the hard points, and once again she felt moisture seeping into her knickers. It was like she was in there with them, whispering, kissing, touching, arousing each other in their secret room. The square reverberated with the rhythmic sounds, their animal groaning as the man’s cock thrust into the woman. The bed was banging and they were groaning, the moans rising to that uninhibited pitch where pleasure meets pain. Jennifer was rocking, too, on the doorstep, cold hands rubbing at herself under her coat, one finger matching the heady rhythm echoing from the window, finger running up, down her crack, making it wet, making her so jealous, she could picture the sex-soaked scene through that shuttered window, the wrinkled sheets, the bed thumping against the wall, a man’s muscular buttocks slamming between a woman’s wide-open thighs.

Like a wildlife film when you see lions humping. They were hard at it up there, and her fingers rubbed faster across her crotch and then the woman was straining for breath, hissing ‘yes, yes’, though surely it should be ‘si, si’, maybe she was riding him, breasts bouncing, hard nipples catching between his teeth, his fingers digging into her haunches to keep her rammed onto his big cock. Jennifer moaned as her pussy clutched frantically at nothing real and then she subsided on to the step, cold and exhausted.

‘Jennifer!’

‘Sssh, don’t disturb me – them.’ She pointed to the window. The lovers were done.

‘The glass-blower wasn’t the answer, sweetie. Come on. Let’s get you back!’

‘How did you know I was here?’ she asked, letting Hazel lead her through another archway, down another silent alleyway.

‘Followed you, silly. Look, here we are already!’

Hazel pushed her into a little yard studded with lemon trees and up a stone staircase. Ripples of watery light slipped through lamplight. Somewhere out there gondolas and vaporetti plied the khaki water, carrying tourists, barge-loads of food, works of art.

‘And here’s my little room.’

It was enormous, like a palace. Arched doors looked over the Grand Canal. Acres of marble floor stretched from the door to a four-poster bed at the far end. Hazel lit some red candles round the bed and waved a big bottle of Chianti.

‘How the hell did you score this?’

Jennifer sank into mounds of duvet and pillow, kicking off her tight boots and taking a big swig of Hazel’s wine.

‘Persuaded the manager on the first night, of course. I sucked his cock.’ Hazel sat down beside Jennifer and pulled off her coat. ‘I’m sick of hotels taking the piss out of us singletons and putting us in broom cupboards with a supplement. This is the honeymoon suite.’

‘I don’t believe you, Hazel. Seducing that great lummox? You’re just a wee mouse!’ Jennifer took another swig of wine and lay back. ‘And anyway, what about the honeymooners?’

Hazel pulled her woolly jumper over her head, kicked off her jeans. ‘Who honeymoons in December?’

‘Always moving, always busy, Hazel.’ The wine had gone straight to Jennifer’s head. Warmth was seeping through her, loosening her limbs. ‘What are you doing now?’

‘Need a shower. Cocktails at the Danieli, remember?’

Jennifer closed her eyes. ‘Too tired to get ready.’

‘Just watch me, then.’

Something in Hazel’s voice pricked at Jennifer. She opened her eyes. Hazel was by the bed, wrapping a towel round her naked body. Her skin was translucent white and with her pale blonde hair she looked like an angel in the candlelight.

Jennifer gasped.

‘Christ, you look amazing, Hazel. Almost as if clothes get in the way! If you did seduce Signor Whatsit that first day he’d have died and gone to heaven.’

‘Not just the first day.’ Hazel shrugged. She opened the towel briefly, showing her milk white body, then tucked it in again. ‘He sound happy to you just now?’

Jennifer blinked.

‘In the square? You had no idea that’s the back of our hotel? The couple you were listening to just now was him and me.’ She took Jennifer’s jumper and pulled it over her head. ‘I pleasure him every evening, before he opens the bar.’

‘Pleasure him?’ Jennifer shivered as the cooler air crept over her arms. ‘Oh, darling Hazel, I love the quaint way you talk –’

Hazel lifted one long pale leg and sat astride Jennifer, her towel falling open over her thighs, slipping down over her breasts.

‘But at least I’m having sex, Jenni.’

‘OK, OK, don’t rub it in.’ Jennifer slapped at Hazel angrily. ‘So everyone’s at it except me!’

Hazel caught Jennifer’s arm and held it down. ‘You don’t have to be left out, not now you’re with me. I really fancy you, Jenni,’ she said quietly. She leaned over and brushed her lips across Jennifer’s mouth. ‘You see, I know I’ve been fucking the manager, but actually it’s women I’m really into.’

Jennifer was too stunned to stop her. The other woman’s lips felt so soft compared with a man’s. Like pillows. And wet.

‘You’re in the wrong place,’ Jennifer muttered, when Hazel pulled away. ‘I’m not a lesbian, you know.’

‘Oh fuck it, who needs labels?’ Hazel’s face was close. She smelt of warm skin and sweet custard. ‘It’s sex you’re after, isn’t it, Jenni? Well, I can give it to you, right here on a plate.’

‘Not what I want.’ Jennifer tried to slide backwards off the bed. ‘I mean, that doesn’t really count as sex, does it?’

‘You do talk bollocks.’ Still pinning Jennifer down with her legs, Hazel unbuttoned her shirt and opened it. Jennifer’s breasts rose up, shocked at their exposure. ‘So if you haven’t been touched by a woman before, I want to be the first.’

Jennifer turned her head, tried to move away, but the bed was so comfortable. The sounds outside so foreign. The candlelight so hypnotic. And Hazel’s hands, sliding down Jennifer’s ribcage, over her hips, pulling off her jeans, were so soft and gentle that Jennifer was powerless.

Suddenly Hazel reached round and unclipped Jennifer’s bra. The breath rasped in her throat as Hazel took Jennifer’s breasts in her hands. At the touch of her fingers Jennifer pushed herself towards Hazel, she couldn’t help it, her nipples shrinking into points as the air met them. Her insides started swirling as Hazel sat across her legs, fondled her breasts, biting her lip with apparent pleasure, squeezing and pressing them together as each forefinger circled each hard raspberry nipple, flicking at them until they were sore and tingling with shocked desire.

And then Hazel leaned down and took one nipple into her mouth and started to suck it. Jennifer’s pussy went tight as she watched Hazel’s lips pucker and suck, lick and kiss, and the nipple growing hard and wet with Hazel’s saliva. Then Hazel pinched that nipple and started to suck the other one. Jennifer fell back on her elbows and realised that she was spreading open her legs under the weight of Hazel’s bare bottom, and grinding up against her automatically, her frustrated, empty, hot cunt aching for something to fill it.

Hazel felt her move, and lifted her face.

‘This girl stuff not right for you?’ she asked in her customary whisper. Her mouth, wet from all that licking, slid over Jennifer’s face. She flicked her tongue across Jennifer’s lips, coaxing her mouth open. ‘Want me to stop?’

‘God, no don’t stop. I want you to keep doing it!’

Jennifer’s head felt as if it was going to fly open. She started to suck on Hazel’s tongue, circling it in and out of her mouth, then probing in, hard, like a penis, and then she realised that this must be how men felt. Because suddenly she wanted to dominate little Hazel, take her over, touch her, feel her. All over. She reached up to pull the towel off, running her hands over Hazel’s cool white shoulders and spine and then brought them round to the front and nearly screamed as Hazel’s soft white breasts bounced heavily into her hands, big and warm, similar yet so different from her own, and anyway she had never really fondled her own, just let others do it, but now she relished the sexy softness of another woman’s tits.

She pulled away from the wet kiss and watched her fingers pinching and teasing, arousing Hazel, watched the pale nipples filling with colour, growing long and tight, demanding to be suckled and there, that was the entire point of them. To be suckled.

Electrical charges sizzled through Jennifer. She fell onto her back and shifted Hazel slightly up so that the nipples were dangling above her like ripening berries and Hazel hung there, smiling down, as her breasts crushed into Jennifer’s nose and cheeks, warm skin and a musky perfume as everything pressed into her face and she took one hard nipple into her mouth, feeling it grate against her teeth, slide onto her tongue, and then she sucked, hard, stroking the soft flesh of Hazel’s breasts pressing into her face, biting first one nipple then the other, feeling her own nipples burning in response.

‘That’s it, Jenni, suck me.’ Hazel’s voice was a whisper as she pushed her nipples into Jennifer’s mouth and now she was pulling at Jennifer’s hips, lifting them so she could slide her knickers off, and then her pussy was rubbing against Jennifer’s, neatly at first and then spreading open the wet lips to expose all the tender bits. Then she was touching herself in little darting movements, grinding cunt on cunt, how about that, wet clit bumping over wet clit.

‘And look, Jenni. See? Watch us in that amazing mirror.’

Hazel pulled her nipple out of Jennifer’s mouth and turned her face on the pillow. The wall beside the bed was hung with an enormous Venetian mirror, reflecting not only the bed but also the windows and the lights of the city, that strange watery light ripping across the mottled walls of the bedroom.

‘How kinky is that?’

In the mirror a blonde woman sat astride a redhead, her sweet breasts wobbling, her nipples jutting like nuts. The redhead was grasping the blonde’s buttocks, her long fingers digging hard into the plump flesh there, and their legs were twined round each other. The two women were joined, glued together, at their pussies, and that sight made them both, still watching in the mirror, move, rock together, Hazel lifting her hands to fondle her own nipples, Jennifer staring at that magical reflection as her cunt heated up under Hazel’s hot pussy, her sex lips grating against the other woman’s, opening her right up, desire shafting through her as they rocked faster, Hazel tossing her silky hair, totally abandoned now, grinding furiously against Jennifer, staring at the mirror then down at Jennifer as Jennifer’s fingers dug deep between Hazel’s buttocks, found the warm crack there, probed greedily to find the little arse hole hidden, never even thought of that before, but Hazel’s eyes went wider and she bit her lip hard when she felt Jennifer’s finger pushing up, forcing open that cute butt hole, forcing it to suck her finger right in to the tight slippery warmth.

‘Oh, fuck me Jenni, now fuck me baby!’

‘Christ, you’re sexy when you talk dirty,’ Jennifer groaned, fucking Hazel’s arse with her finger, loving the way the tight tunnel sucked her finger in and up, and feeling the wild bundle of excitement start to unravel as Hazel’s head fell back and she went limp, jerking uncontrollably, her sweet lips flashing red and swollen as her pussy tilted towards Jennifer and she came, almost singing with ecstasy.

Jennifer kept her impaled on her finger because that was driving her wild, too, and then she took Hazel’s fingers and shoved them up inside her own convulsing pussy and then Hazel, still gasping from her own climax, fucked Jennifer with her long white fingers, pushing them up into her hot tight cunt. Tongues of ecstasy started lapping at her, shafting out of Hazel’s clever fingers, which pumped rapidly in and out while Jennifer’s wet pussy sucked at them with its spasms. Her fingers and thumb played Jennifer like a rasping violin and then juices dripped down her trembling legs and the climax came, hot and quick, and shook her until at last she came, gasping with surprise and shuddering with pleasure.

Hazel laughed softly then fell down on top of Jennifer, breasts squashed against breasts and hearts banging together.

‘If only I’d known about you from the beginning.’ Jennifer murmured after a while, tangling her fingers in Hazel’s hair.

‘There’s plenty more where that came from.’ Hazel rolled off and wandered across the room, bare bottom gleaming in the candlelight. She leaned down to pick up a petticoat. ‘Unless you want to go looking for the glass-blower again?’

‘Yeah, how about that? We know where he lives. A threesome, maybe?’ Jennifer jumped off the bed and grabbed Hazel from behind, running her hands over her bottom again. Already her stomach was twisting with fresh excitement. ‘But it’s our last night. We’ve no more time.’

Hazel wriggled against Jennifer.

‘Oh, haven’t you heard? Those floods in Piazza San Marco? The manager tells me the aqua alta is the highest it’s been for 20 years. Hotels are closed. Ferries cancelled.’ Hazel turned round slowly and pulled Jennifer towards her, sliding her fingers between her legs again, tickling her open. ‘Honey, we’re stranded.’