Flash and Burn: Second Five (Flash and Burn #2) (2 page)

It takes her a moment to
realize the students around her are gathering their things and
moving towards the exits. The professor himself is waving casual
goodbyes and making light chatter with his pupils as they file out.
The girl sits as if frozen, making no move to load up her backpack.
Her sexual bucket list is long and varied and largely intact. She’s
never seduced anyone before. She watches the professor settle
himself at the ancient wooden desk–the hall must be vacant for a
while–and she lightly strokes the envelope peeking out from her
homework assignment.
It’s
time,
she decides.

The walk to his desk feels
long and forbidding. It weakens her resolve.
I bet he’s worried about a lawsuit. Or pining
after his ex-wife, the glamorous Egyptologist who once appeared on
the cover of Cosmo.
Still, her feet
keep moving forward, one after the other, and she hopes her nerves
give her an enticingly wobbly gait. When she reaches his desk and
he regards her with a wary, guarded expression–she’s always been a
competent but indifferent student–she can’t quite
decipher.

She has no idea what to say, so
she does the only thing that comes to mind. She circles his desk;
he watches her intently. She pretends to fall and allows gravity to
pull her into his arms. As she fumbles, ostensibly to right
herself, her lips find his. After a moment of hesitation, he
surrenders to her kiss and returns it two-fold, his tongue probing
her mouth as if he were searching it for meaning. His beard is
scratchy on her cheeks and neck–a strange, absorbing sensation
she’s never experienced before–and she barely notices as he backs
into a padded chair and pulls her onto him.

His hands travel under her long
white T-shirt and roughly shift her bra, exposing her young, firm
breasts. He holds them gently in his hands for a moment, taking in
their size and weight. “Peaches,” he murmurs before tweaking her
nipples with one hand and unfastening his pants with the other. He
pushes up her skirt and frowns with disappointment. “Take off your
leggings,” he commands.

She shimmies out of her leggings
and glances towards the door to the hall, which is still ajar. She
marvels at the extreme risk they are taking, especially him. She
straddles him, planting her feet firmly on the floor, and slides
onto his erection, which pokes through the opening in his jeans.
She reaches under her T-short and rubs her clit as she rises and
falls, sending electric pulses of desire through her core. They
quickly find a rhythm that brings them to a wrenching, silent
climax.

***

It’s late afternoon, and the
bar is practically deserted. She rests her drink on the torn
envelope and takes a generous swallow. She re-reads the paper one
more time.
Positive for BRCA1.
Consider counseling for prophylactic mastectomy and
oophorectomy.
The bartender is tall
with long, dirty blond curls and a roguish glint in his eye. She
stuffs the letter in her bag and smiles.

He watches her guiltily from his
kitchen window. The small, slender woman who lived across the
street struggles up her driveway, lugging an enormous trash can
almost as tall as she is. Her skin is an unhealthy pale and her
cheeks bloom with roses. Her dark hair is piled into a messy bun.
The Twilight suits her. When her trash is finally arranged at the
curb just so, she pauses to gaze at the last glimmers of sunlight
as they wink out and turn the neighborhood entirely
gray.

***

He walks his dog in the small
hours of the morning. His hound-shepherd mix is querulous around
other animals. After midnight or so, he only has to worry about the
raccoons and the skunks, not the easily angered humans with their
-oodles–the carefully groomed hypoallergenic poodle mixes that have
become so fashionable. He notices that the lights are still on
across the street. The pale glowing windows seem questioning,
almost sentient.

He dog strains to expel a
hard, bone-colored stool–
I’ve got to
get him to the vet
, he thinks. He
glances at his neighbor’s trash can. Suddenly and inexplicably,
he’s seized by a strange desire. He turns off his flashlight and
removes the reflective hunting hat from his head, leaving it on the
ground. He walks across the street carefully and gingerly, as if
he’s trying not to wake up a sleeping child, and warily approaches
his neighbor’s trash can.

This is
sick,
he thinks,
I don’t even know her name.
Nonetheless, he opens the can and looks inside.
The thin light of the streetlamp illuminates a neatly sealed black
bag. It doesn’t have the characteristically sweet, corrupted small
he associates with garbage. Furtively, he looks around and makes a
small tear in the bag. He isn’t sure what he sees, but it looks
medical. Everything is plastic or glass, a bag or a vial or a tube,
and labeled with hazard tape.

God, I am such an
asshole.
He calls his dog and
scurries into his house.

***

It’s trash night again. His
neighbor is obviously sick or even dying–her pale, bony frame and
the medical waste in her trash seem to be conclusive evidence–and
he is resolved to do the decent thing. He will drag her trash to
the curb and offer to do it every Tuesday. As he approaches her
door, it strikes him how different her house is from the others on
the street. It’s covered in ancient ivy and has the look of a
crumbling monastic retreat.
She must
know someone on the town zoning committee.

She opens the door before he
even knocks and he regards her with awe and wonder. She is
beautiful. Mahogany hair frames her flushed face, and her eyes are
wide and warm. There’s a small splotch of what appears to be red
sauce at the corner of her lips.
I
must have interrupted her dinner.
He’s about make his offer–which now feels so insignificant,
he should be offering her a fortune or a crown–when he follows her
inside, a man with no will but infinite desire.

***

He doesn’t understand what is
happening, but it fills him with an overwhelming warmth and sense
of well-being. He is naked and, technically speaking, chained to an
enormous, gothic-looking bed. She is lush and fleshier than he
expected. Her breasts are the size and shape of ripe pears; her
nipples are burgundy colored quarters, and her mound is marked with
a neat dark triangle.

Her ruby red lips travel between
his mouth, he neck, and his throbbing erection. There’s something
hungry in her expression, but he understands it. If his limbs were
freed, if he could move and touch at will, he would bite and nuzzle
her dove-white breasts and subject her to his throbbing, driving
need. When she impales herself on his impossibly swollen cock, some
kind of red liquid is dripping from her mouth down her chin and
neck.

He is watching a rivulet
snake between her gently swaying breasts when he reaches a whole
body climax with the intensity of a grand mal seizure. He is trying
to make sense of things–
what just
happened? where am I?
–when the world
around him browns out.

***

He sits in his wheelchair, gazing
out the window, his loyal if constipated hound at his feet. The
abandoned house across the street is for sale, and real estate
agents are swarming like flies on dog shit. He wonders if that
house has always been an eyesore with boarded up windows and
knee-high grass. Before his mind can probe the issue any
further, a shuddering chill passes through him along with a
fathomless hunger.

Did you enjoy these
stories?

Check out
Flash and Burn: First Five
, also free on Smashwords.com. If you
really
enjoyed these stories,
visit
my
webpage
for free books from my
backlist (published under other pseudonyms), fresh new stories, and
more.

Official-sounding
bio

E.J. Swenson is a business journalist by day
and a writer of quirky, romantic, and downright dirty stories by
night. She writes under a pseudonym because her colleagues and
family would be shocked―SHOCKED!―to see the dark and twisty places
where her imagination likes to roam. When she's not tethered to her
computer, she's avidly reading all kinds of genre fiction, baking
(and resisting the siren call of excess baked goods), and keeping
track of her two small children.

Find me online

Website:
http://ejswensonwrites.com

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