Wildwood Read online

  He hitched the bag onto his shoulder. ‘It could be, in the right circumstances. Go on and try.’

  Snorting, I rose to the challenge and set off in pursuit of a leaf. It was a bit childish, but I figured that if I could get scared like a kid by the big city then I could enjoy it like one too. It wasn’t as if I had much dignity to retain in front of Ash. I’m pretty athletic but the chestnut leaves seemed determined to dodge my grasp and I darted about in vain for a minute or so, snatching at thin air while Ash watched. When I finally caught one I whooped and brandished it in triumph.

  ‘Don’t speak your wish aloud,’ Ash warned with that crooked smile of his. ‘It’s got to be kept secret if you want it to come true.’

  Grinning down at the fat fingers of the big leaf, now crinkled and ragged, I decided what to wish for and took a deep breath, shutting my eyes.

  I wish …

  It was a silly superstition, but I put my whole heart into that petition.

  When I opened my eyes again he was close enough for me to smell the bonfire tang of smoke on his clothes, and he reached out for me and cupped my face in his hand and kissed me, long and soft and a little tentative, his lips begging my forgiveness even as they stole my breath away. And all of a sudden my breast was full of autumn leaves whirling about in a wild dance, and my pulse was hot under his palm, and there was no doubt and no shame and no hurt any more because his tongue was on mine and his breath was mine and my blood was thundering to the beat of his own pulse.

  After a while we broke the kiss just so that we could look one another in the eyes and see the delight shining there.

  ‘How did you guess?’ I whispered.

  ‘Magic.’

  Then Ash kissed me again, drawing me up against him, and this time there was nothing tentative about it. I slid my arms about his neck. I was starving, and he filled my mouth with kisses that only increased my hunger. His hand was up under my T-shirt on the small of my back, skin on skin, holding me close. Our bodies burnt where they touched. My nails raked the nape of his neck. He kissed my throat and, as my head tipped back, I opened my eyes upon a deep cerulean sky filled with whirling golden leaves and I felt as if the whole world had been picked up by the wind and was dancing around us. But he couldn’t leave my mouth alone for long and he returned to it hungrier than ever. His hands clasped my bum cheeks and squeezed voluptuously, pulling me up even tighter against the delicious bulge burgeoning in his pants.

  ‘Do I have to catch another leaf?’ I moaned into his mouth, writhing my hips to make the most of the embracing pressure behind and the jutting hardness before. ‘I want this as well.’

  His chuckling gasp tasted of sunlight on unfurling beech buds. God, he didn’t laugh often enough. ‘This you get for free. I’ve been wishing too, Avril.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Every day. Ever since the night I found you running about the lawn stark naked like a dryad.’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘You beautiful crazy tree-nympho, with that stupid bloody climbing harness round your bum and your breasts all scratched and moss stains on your thighs … Oh, I’ve wanted you so much.’

  Then what were you waiting for? Why did you keep pushing me away? I longed to ask, but I knew what the answer was: he’d been waiting for me to prove that he could trust me. ‘You took your time,’ I chided.

  ‘Now that I’m good at,’ he answered, and I didn’t miss the promise in his words. Our mouths melted together, tongues fusing. And then, somehow, yet again he managed to pull away. ‘I’ve got my limits, though. We … really should stop now,’ he warned, breathless. ‘Or else I’m going to have to have you right here … and that might draw some attention.’

  God, I wanted him to fuck me right then and there. I wanted him to put me up against a tree trunk and shaft me senseless. I wanted him to throw me to the park turf where so many couples had lain and touched each other into a frenzy, and fuck me with my ankles over his shoulders. His erection was a knotted fist pushing into my belly. I could feel myself melting against his hardness, grown so hot and soft and slippery that he could have plunged his hands into me and moulded me like warm wax to any shape he pleased. ‘You’re right,’ I acknowledged, biting his lip and running my hands down his hips, my thumb skimming his imprisoned cock.

  Ash gasped out loud and lunged to catch my ear lobe in his teeth. ‘Stop,’ he growled. Bright little points of pain danced sparkling down my neck, stinging my nipples with their electric tingle. ‘Jesus. Please. Just stop.’

  I pushed him away. Our eyes locked. ‘Promise you’re going to fuck me,’ I said, and I don’t know if I was demanding or begging. ‘This time. Promise.’

  ‘Oh.’ His eyes were like green stars and he was shaking with the effort of reining in the overwhelming imperative of his flesh. ‘I promise. Trust me.’

  ‘All the way.’

  ‘I promise.’ He stooped to kiss my lips one last time. Then he touched them softly, tracing their full lines with his fingertips, as if sealing his kiss inside me. I felt my spine turn to shimmering mercury. He held me tight for another moment longer, his hard cock an oath sworn in stone. ‘Come on,’ he whispered.

  It was a good job he had that long coat of his to spare his blushes as we walked on. My own legs seemed to have lost all co-ordination. He held my hand tight, his fingers interlaced with mine, and luckily he knew where he was going because I wasn’t paying attention to anything but the brush of his body against mine. He could have walked me off the edge of a cliff and I wouldn’t have noticed. I hardly registered the renewed press of the crowd as we descended into the bowels of the earth again, sharing a single step as we rode the escalator, and the warm foetid breeze of the tunnels billowed up to meet us. I didn’t mind the scurry down the tiled corridors or the wait on the platform. I was too happy to care.

  Our train turned out to be the most crowded yet; perhaps it was the beginning of the commuter rush home. There were no seats available so Ash took one of the overhead straps and pulled me snug up against him with the other arm, slipping his hand beneath my coat. The rucksack was my charge, nestling between us. He was my only support as the train lurched into motion, and I leant hard into his chest and thigh. His grip was unmistakably possessive, but despite all temptation we weren’t touching each other up; my mound was pressed against his hip and Ash’s splayed fingers were equally firm but unmoving on the highest curve of my bum. We didn’t even kiss, though his face was inclined to mine, his expression grave. A pulse beat, slow and hypnotic, in my groin. It was the strangest, strangest thing I felt then. I was aroused – horny beyond words, slippery with readiness, weak at the knees – and yet, for all my aching pussy and my fluttering breath, an extraordinary sense of peace was what filled me. No impatience. No anxiety. No greed. He could have held me there forever and I would have been content to stay that way. I felt as if he were already inside me and there was no more to fear. I felt as if I were already his. I felt surrendered.

  I’ve no idea how long that journey lasted. I was in another place altogether, a place I’d only previously visited in passing.

  ‘This is our stop, isn’t it?’

  I shook myself out of my trance. I’d forgotten I was supposed to be the one guiding the way to Miranda’s flat. Squeezing out of the carriage we made our way upstairs and onto the street. I was familiar with the route and it wasn’t hard to find her apartment block, a tall red-brick Victorian building. As I stood in the porch searching the list of names over the electronic lock Ash moved up to embrace me from behind, sliding his hands over my torso and cupping my breasts. If Miranda had responded to the buzz I don’t think I’d have been able to speak coherently. But the doorbell went unanswered.

  ‘She’s not back,’ I pointed out after Ash had run his tongue up my neck and circled the sensitive rim of my ear. My voice came out husky. ‘She’s probably still at work.’

  ‘We’re a bit early,’ he murmured, his fingers closing deferentially on my proud nipples. ‘We can wait for her. I’ll try and
think of some way to pass the time.’

  The words made me shiver with delight. ‘Where? I know where she keeps her spare key, inside, but I don’t know the combination for this door.’

  ‘Hm.’ Ash reached out over my shoulder and hit one of the other intercom buttons, seemingly at random.

  A female voice answered: ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s Serge,’ said Ash, leaning in to the speaker. ‘Can you buzz me in?’

  ‘Oh right – come in.’

  The door buzzed and he pushed it wide. ‘Serge?’ I mouthed at him.

  He shrugged. ‘The first name that came into my head.’ Then he pulled me inside. Miranda’s apartment block had been converted from a railway hotel, as I remembered, and still boasted elaborate glazed tiles in deep greens and blues and an openwork wrought-iron lift in the centre of the lobby, cables and pulleys exposed for all the world to see. Miranda had claimed that the rats and the leaks in the guttering were original features too but I’d had to take her word for that.

  ‘Fourth floor up,’ I said, pushing the button for the lift. As we waited for it to descend he took me in his arms and we kissed again, slow and dirty. Ash slipped his fingers experimentally down the loose front of my trousers and tickled the skin below my belly button, making me giggle and squirm. His fingers brushed the front panel of my knickers, finding heat and the rough lace of my pubic fleece underlying the smooth triangle of cotton. ‘Oh,’ I said appreciatively.

  His eyes were wicked.

  The inner and outer lift doors folded open and then closed again with a great clashing of metal and, as we started our ascent, Ash pushed me back, took my wrists and spread them wide against the wall of the elevator cage. I furled my fingers around the metal bars and bit my lip. He liked that, my arms held out, leaving my body vulnerable. He sank to his knees before me, opening my coat wide, and sucked my nipples through my T-shirt and the bra beneath, wetting the cotton so that if they weren’t prominent enough before they now stood out like boiled sweets. There wasn’t much time; the lift was slow but we would get to our floor soon enough – and we were visible on every floor as we passed. Ash pulled up the front of my shirt to tongue my flat belly and my navel and, while his mouth was at that, his hands were busy too on my belt and fly. Those combat trousers were really baggy; when he got the zip down they hung loose enough to expose the whole of the front of my panties, which were a hot pink today. He slipped a finger beneath the fabric to stroke me.

  ‘Ash!’ I hissed, scandalised but grinning from ear to ear. My expression changed when without warning he bent still lower and gently, but with great precision, bit my pubic mound. Sensation flashed through my body like an electric shock and I jerked wildly against the bars. As the lift rattled to a halt he did it again, teeth on damp, fragrant cotton, and this time I did come; a magnesium flare of an orgasm that was there and gone in an instant. I cried out too, mostly in shock. ‘Oh my God,’ I whispered as I recovered.

  Smiling that smug bloody smirk that men get when they’ve brought you off, Ash opened the doors and ushered me out into the corridor. I was glad the building seemed deserted. I had to zip my trousers up before I led the way, my legs unsteady enough to make me weave a little. The kissing didn’t speed our progress up either. Miranda’s door, surrounded by plants in Chinese pots, was locked of course but after we thumped up against it in a clinch I knocked loudly, just in case she’d been in the bath or something and not heard the buzzer.

  ‘Miranda!’

  No sound came from within. Ash took my hand and ran my open palm firmly over his trouser crotch, making clear the state of play there. I nearly gave up on the idea of getting into the flat at all, I was so distracted. ‘Oh, that’s nice.’

  ‘Nice?’ He cocked an eyebrow, clearly pained by my faint praise.

  ‘Nice and hard.’ I squeezed his shaft through the fabric.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Your come tastes good too,’ I murmured. ‘As I remember.’

  ‘I’m pleased you like it.’ He was having some difficulty speaking.

  I grinned, taking it slowly. ‘I’d like a great big chocolate cake for my birthday, covered in your cream.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘I’d like to take a wedge and smear it down my tits and down between my legs and I’d like to lick chocolate icing and your jizz off my fingers.’

  ‘Ah. Who gets to lick the cake off?’

  ‘You. I’d make you get down and eat it out of my pussy.’ I was torturing him now, barely moving my hand.

  ‘Make me? So you’re into that?’

  ‘For my birthday I’d tie you up in red ribbons and make you eat me out.’ I pouted thoughtfully. ‘If it was your birthday you could do it to me.’

  Ash’s face was a picture. ‘Where’s the key, Avril? Or am I going to have to fuck you right here in the corridor?’

  I retrieved the key from its hiding place under a pot and we bundled through the door. Miranda’s flat was as I remembered it: a corner apartment, open plan, the kitchen area in the far corner. It smelt like a branch of Lush. A framed poster of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus dominated the wall over her bedhead, which was the only one that wasn’t put to shelving. The whole place was mounded with stacks of books and papers – books on every horizontal surface, and clothes dumped on top of the books. It was impossible to tell if the laundry was discarded or merely stored there. The one thing Miranda really needed more of in her life was wardrobe space.

  ‘Looks like she’s tidied up,’ I said weakly.

  Ash shucked off his coat. ‘What’s that door?’ he asked, nodding at the only other one in the flat.

  ‘Bathroom.’ Then I called, for the third and last time, ‘Miranda!’ getting exactly the same response as on previous occasions.

  Ash was nothing if not cautious. Reluctantly he released me to go over and check and I took the opportunity to double-lock the flat door and dump my outer layers, stowing the rucksack under a dining chair. ‘She’s fairly laid-back, your friend?’ he asked as he returned.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Then she won’t mind us using her bed.’ Ash picked me up bodily and dropped me on the duvet, among heaps of Miranda’s underwear and rumpled dresses. My squeal was only a token protest and was cut off anyway as he moved down on top of me and captured my lips. We wrestled the clothing off one another as we kissed. I was more successful than him as I didn’t have the bed to contend with, and managed to get him bare from the waist up. I raked my nails down his ribs, mesmerised by the pink tracks I could leave on his ivory skin. Ash shuddered rewardingly. He pulled up my top and sports bra to my armpits and sucked my puckered nipples until they pointed stiffly at the ceiling. He licked down my flat belly to my navel and gave it what was indisputably oral sex, while my trapped pelvis heaved frantically beneath his heavy body. Then he sat back up between my feet, picked up one of my ankles and, holding it high, stripped the laces out of my trainer. Yanking off shoe and sock in one motion he pressed his mouth to my instep and kissed it, letting me feel teeth as well as lips there.

  I cried out, shocked by a gesture that felt, weirdly, more intimate and daring than anything he could have done to my pussy. Ash bared the other foot and licked from instep to big toe, making me squirm wildly. Then with swift impatient movements he pulled down my trousers and threw them aside. For a moment he looked down with predatory satisfaction at my legs and the pink thong that was so inadequately concealing my swollen sex, then he lowered himself to the bed, lifting my legs over his shoulders, and kissed his way up my silky inner thighs to my muff. I was entirely overwhelmed: by the sight of him breasting between my thighs as if I were a sea he were swimming through; by the way he brushed his nose and lips to the gusset of my panties, revelling in my scent; by the burning charge his touch sent through me.

  My poor knickers. After what I’d put them through they were already drenched, barely containing their sticky-slippery contents. Ash ate me through the cotton, all heat and teeth and friction, driving me wild
with his determination not to rip off the little triangle of fabric and press home between my lips. Sometimes his tongue would delve behind the elastic and tease my slit, but then he’d pull out at once as if I were some precious virgin who had made him promise that the clothes had to stay on. He reduced me to squirming, gasping, writhing desperation. My panties were soaked in equal measure with his saliva and my eagerness. I put my hands on his head and tried to hump up against his mouth but he chuckled dirtily into my pussy and drew away, kneeling up on the bed. His boots were making a hell of a mess on the duvet but I was incapable of worrying about Miranda’s laundry right now.

  ‘Thought this was what you said you wanted?’ he murmured, opening his flies and easing out his tumescent cock from its red-gold nest. He cupped his balls with one hand.

  ‘Yes,’ I moaned, stretching out my hand. He let my fingers brush his length briefly. After all these years I’m still amazed that any part of the body so soft can get so bloody hard. He was hard like rock – and all for me. I anointed the tips of my fingers with the dewy moisture that oozed from his cock’s slitted opening and then brought them to my own mouth to lick the salty-sweet lubricant, frantic with want. I think something inside him broke then. Something icy and obdurate and frightened to let go. I saw the look in his eyes.

  He said nothing as he came down over me. He didn’t bother to remove my wet knickers; he just eased the gusset aside with his fingers and entered me as I spread my thighs to welcome him. Both of us were still partly clothed and it underlined the urgency of our rutting. We kissed again but I broke to groan from the pleasure of feeling him move on and within me. His cock was so hard and so, so good. Like waves we heaved together, deep-ocean waves that have the power to level islands, but roll slow and strong, their violence hidden across hundreds of miles until they approach the shallows and curl to white-topped foaming breakers. I ran my hands across his skin and gripped his thighs with mine and felt his lips on my jaw. I heard the breath catching in his throat. His fingers bit into my shoulders like he’d never let go. ‘Avril,’ he groaned under his breath.