“How?”
“They’re feeling each other. Taking stock. Relearning. Peter’s hand is sliding down Sam’s back, reaching beneath the waistband of his jeans, under the drawers, squeezing his ass,” she said. Vern squeezed her thighs together as tightly as she could to sate the yearning nested between her legs. Gogo moaned on the other end of the line. “You touching yourself?” asked Vern.
“Yeah.”
Vern was already shot through with desire, but hearing Gogo made her weak. She whimpered and said, as if seeing the two men before her weren’t enough, “Tell me what you’re doing.”
“Pressing my hand between my legs through my jeans.”
“Where are you?”
“The grungy bathroom of some fucking truck stop, Jesus. I’m leaning against the door to keep it shut cause it doesn’t even have a fucking lock.”
Peter and Samuel’s boldness spread to Vern. If they could touch and kiss and feel right in front of her without shame, she could tell Gogo what she wanted. “Slide your pants down,” she said.
“Underwear, too?”
“No,” said Vern. “I want you to rub yourself through them.” She closed her eyes, embarrassed by her own desires, but she refused to take it back. There was nothing wrong with wanting.
Peter, ever so cautiously, slipped his hand from Vern’s. Sam followed suit, and Vern was untethered. She regrounded only when she heard Gogo mumbling, “Want you so bad, wish you were here. I hate how we left things before.”
Hands unencumbered, Vern unzipped the jeans shorts she’d borrowed from Michelle and pushed them down to her ankles. Licking her lips, she reached for her clit and pressed her fingers into it.
Peter turned toward her and rested his palm on her thigh. His jeans were off now, and his penis, hard, poked above the band of his boxers, the tip shiny with droplets of pre-semen. His body and Sam’s body flexed and moved in startling detail.
Peter’s hand slid farther up Vern’s thigh till his fingers touched her where she was wet. He hesitated, watching her eyes. She nodded. It didn’t matter in this moment that usually her affections belonged to women alone. The need to connect and be a part of this rebirth of lust and love trumped all. Peter shoved two fingers into her as she circled her clit. Sam’s mouth descended on Peter’s penis, and Gogo was moaning on the phone, rubbing herself through the thin cotton of her underwear, the fabric surely wet and slick by now, friction and fluidity in synchronous harmony.
“So close,” Gogo mewled.
“Reach beneath your underwear,” said Vern. “Imagine me taking you in my mouth.”
Obeying, Gogo moaned as skin touched skin. Vern jerked her hips up into Peter’s fingers and into her own as the sound reached into her and pulled her apart. She loved to hear Gogo lose it, and it brought on her finish. She came on the fingers of this stranger and didn’t feel bad about it. Cainland had so confused her notions of goodness, pleasure, and degradation that she’d never thought there could be sex without guilt and self-loathing, without a streak of squalor.
Vern breathed rapidly in and out, nerves frenetic. Peter re moved his fingers from her, then guided Samuel onto his back, his knees bent and his hips raised. Peter dragged teeth and lips along Samuel’s thighs, working his way toward Samuel’s ass. Samuel, unable to take more teasing, grabbed Peter’s head and drew his partner’s mouth to his anus, where Peter gladly placed his tongue.
“What’s happening now?” asked Gogo.
“That thing I do for you,” said Vern, whispering. Gogo was still touching herself, holding herself at the edge, and Vern bent her legs at the knees and raised her hips up. She reached her fingers to her asshole and pressed inside, using her other hand to rub her clitoris. She narrated each action to Gogo, letting herself be laid bare.
Gogo cried out as she came, and Vern reached her finish a second time, this time in a short, sharp burst. Peter and Samuel continued to fuck, Samuel’s hand on his cock as Peter licked his ass.
When the haunting faded, the bedspread smoothed out, and Vern was left by her lonesome, she spoke Gogo’s name aloud.
“Yeah?”
Everything Vern could think to say sounded corny or trite. “Nothing.”
Gogo sighed and the line became muffled. Vern guessed she was doing up her jeans, the phone wedged between her cheek and shoulder. “I should get back to the others,” Gogo said.
“Yeah,” said Vern.
The tap water ran, then the hand dryer went off.