It was at Jaker’s Grill that I learnt about the mad Englishman with the plummy accent who was planning to leap off Perrine bridge in the middle of the night. Twin Falls, Idaho is a quiet place, but it’s also the only part of the world where base jumping is legal every day … and night … of the year. Since something really newsworthy happens pretty rarely in this corner of the planet, as a reporter for the Times-News, Twin Falls’ own local newspaper, I’m always on the lookout for something juicy. For want of anything better, we sometimes have to make do with human interest stories about eccentric Englishmen leaping off bridges. Man confronting his fate … staring death in the face … that sort of thing.
It’s usually darkest just before dawn and that’s when I was told he was planning his leap. I wasn’t too keen to abandon my bed so early in the morning and drive out to the bridge to document this lunatic, but duty beckoned. Naturally, I wasn’t at my most cheerful when I pulled up in the middle of the bridge behind the enormous SUV that was already parked at the curb. It was deathly quiet and there wasn’t another soul in sight. He had already stepped over the guard rail and was poised on the thin ledge that runs along the length of the bridge. It’s a sight that never fails to send shivers down my spine – the sight of a man or a woman poised on that impossibly thin sliver of metal 500 feet above the Snake River Canyon, preparing to launch themselves into nothingness, separated from oblivion by the uncertain canopy of a parachute. The fact that this man was planning that feat in utter darkness made me queasy. I thought, what hubris!
I leaned over the guard rail to look down into the darkness beyond. The night was like velvet, the only hint of light the landing circle of glowlamps that he had set up on the bank of the river. There was nothing else to aid the senses except the soft gurgle of the river beneath. I leaned against the guard rail directly opposite where he was standing. He was leaning backwards into the void, his only points of contact with the bridge his feet and his gloved hands wrapped around the railing. His eyes were closed and his expression was utterly calm, almost beatific. He seemed to be breathing in the world around him. If he became a part of it, perhaps it would refuse to kill him. I remained silent, worried that I would startle him into dropping like a stone if I were to speak.
He opened his eyes after what seemed like an eternity. There was a strong wind and my limbs had already frozen stiff. It wasn’t base jumping weather. He didn’t seem surprised to see me there.
“Howdy,” I said, sounding more cheerful than I was feeling.
“Hi,” he responded, his voice noncommittal, “Can I help you?”
That was an odd question, seeing that he was dangling over a 500 foot drop.
“I’m a reporter from the Times-News,” I said, “I thought I would drop by to watch you jump and ask a few questions.”
“Ask away,” he replied cheerfully.
“Now?” I asked, flustered. I had thought he would want to wait till his jump was done and he was back on the bridge. But the man seemed nerveless.
“Yes,” he said, his body still at a precarious angle to the bridge.
“Well,” I started, clearing my throat, “Why are you doing it?”
He looked vaguely disappointed.
“Why do people climb Everest?” he replied, “Because it’s there.”
He seemed all of a sudden to have lost interest. I felt as though I had let him down somehow.
“Say, listen, if you would care for a coffee, we can grab some after I’m back.”
He flexed his knees as a prelude to flinging himself into the darkness. And then caught himself.
“I have, you know,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Climbed Everest.”
And then he was gone. For two heart stopping seconds, there was nothing and then with a rush of relief, I saw his chute deploy. He seemed to know what he was doing. The colorful canopy landed and then collapsed dead center of the ring of lights that he had set up in the abyss.
We sat in the back of his SUV sipping the coffee that he had poured from a thermos flask into two exquisite cups of blue china. Their delicate beauty was incongruous in this wilderness. The Snake River Canyon may be a lot of things – majestic, evocative, powerful. But nobody would accuse it of being delicate. I was grateful for the warmth of the cup in my hands. He smiled as I placed it momentarily against my cheek to thaw myself. He had a wonderful smile, warm and friendly and not in the least bit ingratiating. This man was growing on me.
“So,” I asked quietly, “Was it worth it?”
“Always,” he responded, his expression serious, “Pushing your limits is always worth it.”
He was very easy to talk to. He had no airs about him. He seemed indifferent to the fact that I was a reporter. I was just a stranger he had met on a cold morning on a forlorn stretch of road and he was happy to converse. He told me a great deal about himself as we waited for the sunrise. He lived in London when he wasn’t traveling, which I gathered wasn’t often. He had been fortunate to inherit enough wealth to be able to follow his dreams. And all his dreams seemed to involve testing himself against the elements and then writing about it. He had been surprised that his books enjoyed an audience and that he could actually make money from his passion. I told him that he shouldn’t be. People love to participate in lunatic enterprises from the safety of their armchairs. He laughed without a trace of self-consciousness. He seemed secure enough to be completely indifferent to what I or anyone else thought of him. I found that refreshing.
He was also a good listener. We had a breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup at Kelly’s on Main Avenue and washed it down with another cup of coffee. By the time our meal was done, there wasn’t very much that he didn’t know about my life. Not that there was much to tell. I hadn’t driven a team of dogs to the south pole or skied down the face of Kilimanjaro. I ran off for an hour to file my story at the Times-News office and then rejoined him for a day of just loitering about the county in his SUV.
One thing led to another and before I knew it, I was at the house that he had hired for the fortnight, lashed to the four corners of his bed, spread-eagled. The house was poised on the lip of a cliff. One wall of his bedroom was clear glass and it framed the distant spray of the Shoshone falls. He made love to me as no one had before – softly, firmly, tenderly. My mind melted into mush and I could barely recognize as my own the noises that dribbled from my lips. Before he was done with me, I begged. I had to. I wanted to earn the release he allowed me.
I finally came with his swollen cock pulsing inside my cunt. He held me tenderly through the tremors of my release, cushioning my body against the aftershocks. When I was finally still, he softly whispered in my ear, “Was it worth it?” I don’t think he expected an answer. I think he knew what the answer would be.
For the next two weeks, we were inseparable. He took me in more ways than I had imagined possible, his ingenuity combining with my new found capacity to absorb pleasure. My body had become a sodden sponge, soaking in erotic sensation and never having enough. After one night of frenetic sexual activity, he marveled, “Your body is so honest, so free.” Yes, I thought, that’s really what I have become – free. He had set me free in a way that every woman deserved to be.
The day of his departure was awkward. Neither of us knew what to say. Words seemed inadequate. What words could measure against the intensity of our shared days … and nights? I sat stiffly beside him in the lounge of the Magic Valley Airport as we waited for the desk to announce the departure of the SkyWest flight to Salt Lake City. I didn’t dare look at him. I was fighting back tears and I didn’t want him to see that. I didn’t want him to remember me as weak, but as sensuous and hungry and passionate, all the things I had been for him those last few days.
Suddenly, his hand shot out to grasp mine. That little gesture communicated such urgency that I pivoted towards him. He was staring at me with an intensity that made me blush and my pussy leak.
“Come with me,” he said, “Just leave all of this and come with me.”
He seemed filled with a new exuberance and his lips were stretched in a boyish grin. He seemed years younger.
“We can travel the world,” he said eagerly.
“You can spend the day shopping or sipping coffee at a quaint café while I throw myself off cliffs for a living,” he teased, “And in the night,” he grinned, “I can toy with your beautiful body.”
For one heart-stopping moment, I was tempted. And then the voice of sanity kicked in … and of reason and common sense. He saw my answer in my eyes before I voiced it.
“Never mind, Sylvia. This is all much too sudden. I’m not being fair to you,” he said, masking his disappointment, and then added more brightly, “May I write to you?”
“Of course,” I said, glad to be able to grant him something. I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. To be completely honest, I didn’t expect any letters. I was beginning to see it for what it was – a passing romance, full of madness and lust and uncontrollable passion, wonderful while it lasted. And it had run its course.
Two weeks later, the letters began. They were written on custom-made paper that oozed elegance. Each sheet bore his name and a crest – of a dragon battling an enormous serpent, all fire and forked tongue. Each letter was written by hand and beautifully, the pages not marred by a single erasure, not even a scratch wounding the fluid lines of the lettering. Surely, no writer could be so self assured, I thought. Perhaps he ran through several drafts, I flattered myself, until he was perfectly content with the tone, the sound, the shape.
Each letter began with “Dear Sylvia” and ended with “Yours, Andrew”, no hint of intimacy in their quaint formality. But those stiff words, so beguilingly proper, fenced in a swirling, tumultuous torrent of passion. His words – unbearably erotic, unremittingly salacious – took my breath away and left an aching emptiness in my cunt.
He knew exactly what buttons to push. Our time together had been an extended confessional. While he made love to me, he wrenched my deepest, darkest secrets from my soul. Desires and fantasies bubbled up to the surface that I didn’t even know I had. I seemed more surprised than he was at some of them. What can I say? When his fingers danced in my cunt and those dark inscrutable eyes gazed into mine, I just blubbered.
Those letters gently stroked my darker side, stirring it to life. I waited for each letter with bated breath, my hands almost trembling in their eagerness to rip it out of its envelope. It came to a point where I was for all the world like one of Pavlov’s poor little bitches, My slit would begin to drool each time I heard the mailvan pass my door. I would rush to the window in a fever of anticipation. More often than not, the parted curtain would reveal only the receding back of the vehicle and I would stand there, disappointed, my fingers gripping the lace tightly, resisting the temptation to dip into my cum soaked pussy. And then, of course, there were those times when I would spot the van parked in my driveway and follow with my eyes the uniformed figure walking up to my door. On those days, I would almost weep with relief.
Replying to each letter was a torment. Did I want the sweet torture to stop or did I want it to never end? Should I shoot off a reply in a rush of passion or should I place his letter on my mantelpiece and wait for a day or two for my hunger to cool and be assured of some semblance of reason?
These questions caused me endless torment and through it all was the knowledge that until he received a letter from me, there would be no more of his. What if mine was lost in the mail? London was light years away. As a self-confessed e-mail junkie, I distrust all primitive modes of communication, which actually involve physically transferring an object from one point to another. What a quaint notion! But I knew instinctively that he expected me to reply to him in the same manner he had chosen to write to me. I actually had to go out and buy stationery.
And then after all the painful deliberation and the hours of chewing my nails down to my cuticles and the agonizing over that word and this line; in the end, I would just beg … beg to be teased and to be tormented and to be driven mad with lust. And he would. The letters came … in a steady inexorable trickle, setting fire to my senses. This is how it began.
Dear Sylvia,
As my flight took off and the ground fell away, I felt a pang of loss, almost as if I had left a piece of myself behind in Twin Falls. Back in London, as I melted into fog and incessant rain, I was tempted for a moment to just forget … to kill the memory of you spread out on those sheets on what seems now a different planet under an alien sky, softly undulating, as pleasure that you could barely endure tore through your body. It seemed easier … to forget.
My memory of you was rescued by a small voice that refused to give up, which insisted against all odds that distance was but a minor irritant, that we were entitled, even on opposite sides of an ocean, to weave our own private universe … a universe in which you are mine and I’m yours, where our limbs are intertwined and we share the air we breathe.
In that universe, it was evening. Isn’t it always? We had resolved for once to go out … to wrench ourselves away from those sheets already rumpled by an afternoon of lovemaking. We showered together, washing away the accumulated traces of our passion – sweat, spit, juice, cum. I gently ran my hands over you in an act of purification, which you knew was only a prelude to another orgy of violation. I was thorough. After your body was glistening with soap, I slid one slick finger into your anus, softly exploring your most intimate orifice, relearning the contours of the hot tight tunnel that I had plundered again and again.
You were writhing on my finger, your hips rotating in a tight circle. You wanted to be taken again. I ignored the soft pleas leaking from your throat and slowly withdrew my flesh from yours. There would be time for that. Now, I wanted you aroused … wet and swollen and hungry. Tonight, you would be a bitch in heat. Nostrils would dilate as you passed and the air would be heavy with the scent of your sex. I would decide at leisure how you would be fucked tonight.
It was early and the restaurant I had picked, a discreet little place, quietly expensive, with soft lighting and softer music, was nowhere near full. We were shown to a table in the corner, which had the advantage of an unhindered view of the place.
I noticed her because of the glances she was throwing in the direction of our table. She was tall, the lines of her impeccably cut suit clinging to the lines of her body, which was lean and muscled. Her face was a perfect oval, with features that were sharp and well defined, her platinum blonde hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, her baby blue eyes the solitary hint of softness. Her eyes were running over you with a hunger that she could barely conceal.
You were clad in a dress of scarlet silk, which seemed to flow like water over the contours of your body. Its plunging neckline did little to conceal the soft mounds of your breasts. If you leaned just a little forward, the rim of one soft brown nipple would glide into view. You were utterly oblivious to the effect that you were having on your audience, unconscious of that quiet beauty that makes my heart stop. Your midnight curls fell in soft ringlets, still damp from the shower, to frame the outline of your face. And your lashes fluttered becomingly as you fixed your liquid brown eyes on mine. I couldn’t blame her for looking.
I offered to get us drinks and drifted to the bar. I sidled up next to her and ordered a martini for me and a glass of wine for you. You aren’t much of a drinker. Now that you were alone at the table, she saw even less reason to conceal her interest and her eyes were fixed upon you. If you were on the menu, I knew exactly what she would be ordering tonight. But then, perhaps, you were.
I whispered softly in her ear, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
She started like I had stuck a needle in her rear. She did have a shapely one, a rear that begged for things to be stuck in it. Maybe she was on the menu too. She quickly regained her composure and regarded me with a level gaze, which gave little away. I peered at her over the rim of my glass and asked her quietly, “Do you want her?”
“What’s the point in wanting? It doesn’t look like she’s mine to have.”
“Oh, maybe she is,” I said.
She couldn’t conceal her interest. But she still looked skeptical.
“Exactly what do you have in mind?”
“Well, what about if you join us, reach beneath that table and bury your fingers in her cunt?”
My voice was level and my face betrayed no emotion, but she wasn’t so collected anymore. Her breath escaped her lips in a tiny moan and I could see that hunger was battling fear in her eyes, fighting the suspicion that she was being had.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, “What’s in it for you?”
“You assume that I want something for myself,” I replied, my voice level, “I don’t. I enjoy my partner’s pleasure. And I think you are exactly what the doctor ordered tonight. I would love to watch as she goes to pieces in your arms.”
“Oh, God … yes,” she gasped, her mind exploding with the image of you shattering, She was eager now to get on with it. She seemed afraid that I would change my mind. She stuck out her hand, “Katherine.” Boy, I thought, she’s an eager one. But then, if you insist on looking like you did tonight, who wouldn’t be?
Well, she clearly wants you, but then the question is … do you want her? The night is ripe with promise, but you will have to ask, sweetheart, ask for what you need.
Yours,
Andrew
Dear Sylvia,
You certainly asked nicely, my pet. Ahh … how I love to hear you beg! And you know it … You know that I find your voice, broken with hunger, hard to resist. You certainly have earned your reward.
You wore a bemused air as we walked upto you, our drinks in our hands.
“Katherine,” I introduced and then added with a perfectly straight face, “She tells me that she wants to slide her fingers into your wet little pussy. I told her she could. I hope you don’t mind, honey.”
Kathy’s eyes were starting out of their sockets. You blushed fetchingly before nodding shyly. Oh, my hungry little baby! Always up for a long, wet fingerfuck.
The leather couch ran in a liquid curve around our table along the corner of the room. You and I were sitting along one wall, you nearer the corner. She slid onto the couch from the other end and sidled up to you. Now that she had you where she wanted you, she seemed a little unsure of herself. She turned her body half around, bending her left leg to rest on the couch, her right thigh parallel to the edge. She reached out and placed a hand tentatively on your knee.
When she encountered no resistance, her fingers crept upwards along your inner thighs. You sighed softly as they did. While her fingers on your thighs felt great, you wanted more, didn’t you, honeybun? You wanted those fingers trailing along the soft heated flesh of your pussy. From where she was, there was no way she would be getting that far even if she leaned forward. You looked around carefully and then slowly slid your tight little butt to the edge of the sofa. Now she was in with a chance, if she slid slightly forward. It wasn’t lost on her that you were being such a helpful little whore.