E Is For Exotic

Welcome back to the Fleshbot Book Club-your chance to get a sneak peek at some of the hottest erotic literature out now. Today's selection comes from Cleis Press's E is for Exotic, edited by Alison Tyler.

The following excerpt is from "Arizona, Ireland, New England," by Cheyenne Blue.

Every year, summer comes to the Arizona desert, although some say it never leaves. And summer comes to Ireland, although some say it never really arrives.

Jessamy emails Dara, a woman she's never met, although she knows her better than she knows her own sister. They met in an Internet chatroom, although both of them have forgotten which one. It's unimportant now. What matters is their friendship, and they exchange copious emails every day. They talk about important things: how to stretch their unemployment benefits; their neighbors, their infrequent middle-aged
nights out; and whether Irish boxty is more like American grits or potato pancakes.

Dara tells Jessamy about the greenness and the quaintness of Ireland, painting a picture of a tranquil, rural life; where donkeys carry the turf to white-painted cottages, a story as appealing as it is inventive. Andin return, Jessamy relates tales of coyotes, saguaro cacti reaching imploring arms to brilliant skies, and the merciless Arizona sun that shrivels all to bleached bones, a tale as fascinating as it is tall. Dara sits in her tumbledown stone cottage in County Cork, which reeks of damp, and says wistfully, wouldn't it be a grand thing indeed if she could see the desert blooms for herself. She dreams of wide, white landscapes, and rattlesnakes in the laundry, and wakes in the morning with the smell of sage in her nostrils.

Jessamy slouches in her trailer on the edge of Tucson, wishing the landlord would repair the air-conditioning, and agrees. Dara would love the desert, and she, Jessamy, would love the curling turf and
emerald wash of Ireland. She imagines a checked apron and herself carefully putting hens' eggs into the pockets.

A plan is made. They will swap houses for the summer, meeting when their flights connect in Boston, to hand over the keys, and again on the return trip to exchange tales.

They know each other instantly. The fuzzy scanned photos didn't do justice, of course, but they link arms like the bosom pals they are, and share a cab to the Holiday Inn. Two nights they have; two nights to see if their friendship translates into Real Life.

The friendship does more than merely translate, and on the first night one offers, the other accepts, and the air-conditioned room on the seventh floor turns into a trysting house. They explore, pressing and caressing flesh that is so familiar, yet eerily strange. Jessamy hovers, then delves between Dara's spread thighs and bites and laps, curling female moisture onto her tongue. Dara tastes of clover honey, she thinks fancifully, and dreams of lapping the cream from the top of a pint of Guinness.

Dara fingers and fondles, pistoning assertively into golden-pink yielding flesh, and curls her fingers around to seek the pleasure points. She compares the rush of moisture to the summer monsoons, which turn the arroyos into rushing torrents. She suckles at her lover's breast, and traces the suntan lines with her tongue. At the end of the summer she will be like this-a tawny creature, with long limbs of sun-gilded skin, and heat-streaked hair.

Jessamy compares her dark, dry hide to Dara's softer skin, clotted-cream pale. The gentle Irish summer will curl Jessamy's hair, soften it so that it hangs in springy curls on her shoulders. The temperate climate will be kind to her body, and she thinks of lazy days in a tiny bathroom with floral curtains at the windows, stroking lotion scented like tea roses into her skin. She runs gentle hands over her lover's flesh, feeling the slight catch as her rougher hands slide over skin as smooth as water.

Dara undulates up her lover's body to catch her lips in a kiss as fierce as the wind that curls along the desert pavement, whipping the sand into swirling eddies that beat against exposed tender flesh. Her tongue plunges deep, stabbing like cactus spines into flinching flesh. Dara's hands are firm, running in assertive patterns, pinching a nipple, biting on a yielding inner thigh so that the bruise blooms, cloudy, crushed purple marks of possession.

Jessamy yields, her body melting bonelessly into the bed, soft, springy like the sodden tea-colored turf, as she raises a leg and clasps Dara so that her head is encompassed between her fleshy thighs. Dara's mouth can now flicker with glorious friction on Jessamy's sex, so that the orgasm builds, slowly, wetly, until it breaks in a sun-gold crimson tide, sweeping her away from the Holiday Inn.

In a fluid motion, their positions change, and Jessamy pushes and rubs with a deliberate finger frottage, exploring through folds and damp crevices. She insinuates her way so slowly, stimulating so gently that Dara is not aware of the rising climax until it seeps over her, washing from fingers to toes, swelling outward from her sex in deep, dark pulses.

Their sleep is disturbed by dreams, fractured images of waking dreams to come. Dara dreams of how the light will fall clear and sharp over the Sonoran Desert. How she will fearlessly sweep a scorpion from the kitchen bench with a swift flick of a tea towel. Jessamy falls into dreams of drowning; black tea pools of bog land, hazy in the twilight, blurred by the soft rain. Herself, sipping on a pint, playing the fiddle with men in tweed caps, her foot tapping the rhythm.

By day, the women explore Boston. Jessamy buys a porcelain coyote figurine, a bandana around its neck, head raised and howling. She will stand it on Dara's bathroom window ledge, next to the red-haired girl in a step-dancing costume that she knows is there, and it will remind her of what she's left. In an Irish shop, Dara buys a St. Brigid's cross, woven not of reeds but shaped in clay. She will hang it above the doorway of Jessamy's trailer, above the Navajo rug on the floor, and it will be a small image of home in an alien landscape.

That night, they return to the Holiday Inn and they return to each other, falling onto the bed with indecent haste, shedding clothes, baring flesh to latch on to a nipple, part pale or golden thighs and dive between. The Holiday Inn is insulated from the real world outside; the summer can't penetrate its walls and the air-conditioning negates any trace of heat or humidity. But to Dara, the room and her lover are as exotic as the surreal cacti that she'll see tomorrow. The sharp taste of Jessamy's cunt is as unusual as the nopalesand scrambled eggs she'll eat for her first Arizona breakfast. Taking the razor she uses to shave her underarms, she scrapes her lover's pussy bare so that the folds stand out in stark relief. A paradox; bare abraded flesh outside, but inside, secret moist places, slick as summer rain.

Jessamy considers the razor but sets it aside. She tangles her fingers in Dara's abundant thatch of turf-dark pubic hair, parting sodden curls to find the drowned, wet depths they guard. To her, this room is secret and dark, and the things they do here will be forever held close to her heart, as mysterious and strange as the holy shrine where she'll light a candle tomorrow.

That night, neither of them dreams.

Every morning, Dara opens the door of Jessamy's trailer, sketches the sign of the cross, gives a quick flicker of acknowledgment to the St. Brigid's cross above the door, and sits down on the step with a cup of tea. She stares at the desert and shudders as a centipede runs across her foot. Then she goes into the small kitchen to cook what passes for bacon here, throwing the scraps into open bins, which will be raided by scavenging coyotes. Later, in bed, Dara will shiver under the thin sheet, as she listens to their snarls, and prays that they don't attack her.

Jessamy shivers, stepping into the damp bathroom. Every day, the mold creeps further across the ceiling, an advancing olive bloom. She bemoans the absence of real coffee, and sits inside at the kitchen table, watching the rain stream down the small panes. Turning the heating up another notch, she contemplates a visit to the village shop, where, once again, she will not understand a word of the thick local accents. Later, she will go to the pub and stare into a pint of Guinness, trying to convince herself she likes the taste. Both women dream of two nights to come in New England.

Excerpted from E is for Exotic an anthology edited by Alison Tyler and published by Cleis Press.

The book is also on sale at Amazon.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Cleis Press.

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