Red Grow the Roses. Janine Ashbless

I go into the kitchen and find a J Cloth and some glass cleaner under the sink. But when I get back into the hall there’s no spunk on the mirror at all. Not a drop. Just the mothprint of a pair of lips, halfway down the glass as if someone had knelt there and kissed the hard surface. It’s almost invisible unless you’re looking for something. I spray the smudge and rub hard with the cloth but it’s no good: the kiss is on the other side of the glass.

      * * *

      Worse than the prohibition on beating off is the one that says No Blowjobs – not even as an opening move, because saliva inhibits sperm motility or something. Which is especially cruel as Penny used to give head so good that it’d make my brain melt. I miss that. I fantasise about oral all the time. Even when I’m on the job, I might be humping away on top but I’m imagining sinking my cock between her lips, smearing her high-gloss scarlet lipstick all the way up my shaft, feeling the lap of her agile tongue on all the right places. Or I’ll be banging her from behind, those ass-cheeks which appear so neat when she stands looking huge now, uplifted under my hands with that black satin corset cinching her waist, and I’ll be thinking about how good it would be to slip into her tight pucker instead and waste all my jizz in the wrong hole. Because that one’s way off limits now too.

      I fantasise about coming on her breasts. She has fantastic breasts, neither flabby nor flat but a good handful each, still as firm and perky as a younger woman’s, with the most beautiful big nipples that go hard as pink icing rosettes when I tease them. The areolae crinkle to the texture of cookies. Remember those Iced Gem biscuits you used to be able to buy? That’s what I think of when I’m sucking Penny’s nips. They’re that sweet. Her skin is the colour of rich cream and there’s a scatter of tiny moles or freckles from her left shoulder to her nipple, like the splatter flicked from a paintbrush, like droplets of dark cum already spilt in homage to her beauty. And her breasts are full enough that I can straddle her torso and slip my shaft into the valley between them as I cup and squeeze them together, making a sheath for my length. I remember leisurely tit-wanks that seemed to go on for ever, her tongue lapping the head of my knob as it popped out of the ravine to wink at her. I fantasise about doing that again. About taking myself in hand as my orgasm approaches. About feeling the cum gather in my balls and surge up and out to rain on the uplands of her breasts, obliterating the freckles, painting her creamy skin in my whiter shade of pale.

      I want to come on the small of her back, and on her bottom and her thighs. I want to watch my spunk slowly dry on her hot skin and ease away the flakes between my fingers, feeding them between her lips to melt upon her tongue like communion wafers. I want to see her kneel before me one more time, the shiny brown swing of her bobbed hair framing her face, her mouth open like a baby bird begging to be fed, her tongue pink and eager to taste my spilt salt.

      I miss her.

      * * *

      I wake in the middle of the night, or perhaps don’t wake at all. The covers are thrown back and I’m sweating, I’ve been having restless dreams and perhaps this is just another of them. There’s a glow emanating from the mirror over Penny’s dressing table, the reflection of the bedroom light, but it takes me a moment to realise that our own bulb isn’t on. And as I contemplate that, my head still full of sleep, the mirror-ghost appears and, stooping forward, steps out through the frame. Just like the girl in that Japanese horror movie, only without the jerky corpse/insect shuffle; she’s consummately graceful in fact. She stands on the dressing table with her bare feet not stirring the myriad bottles of perfume and moisturiser and pigment. Naked.

      Naked, except for a veil of gauze that wraps spiralwise about her body in that way fabric only ever does in paintings, hiding nothing. I can see the tremble of her breasts as she breathes. Then with a light step she lands on the footboard of our bed. There’s no bump, no sensation of descending weight. I feel nothing. Thank God, I think: this is a dream.

      She looks down at me with a slow, sweet smile. She’s beautiful, my mirror-ghost. Almost girlishly delicate, with a hairless sex, but with curves to her hips and breasts that are far from childlike. And the eyes in her piquant face are ancient and knowing, her lips lush with promise. She is a fairy maiden, a nymph risen from some still and secret pool. If only she weren’t so pale she’d be astoundingly beautiful, but she’s the colour of the Portland Stone statues that grace the pediment of the mayor’s residence; not a warm and creamy pallor like Penny’s, but a delicate grey. I’m reminded of the allegorical figure of the City who sits with her scales and her portcullis in either hand. Even her eyes are colourless, and her erect nipples are white like quartz pebbles.

      Down to her knees she slides, slow as oozing cement, eyes huge and fixed on my uncovered form. I think maybe I should protest. But this is only a dream, nothing to worry about – and if it isn’t a dream then I’ll have to wake Penny, who sleeps beside me, still muffled under the duvet.

      I can’t wake Penny. It’s too much. She can’t be expected to deal with this too.

      With softly creeping movements the mirror-girl inches her way up my legs, her lips almost brushing the hair that stands erect on my spooked skin but her shining eyes fixed on me. Her own hair billows around her head like smoke: it’s a grey like the rest of her but streaked with rust. I think she must have been a redhead once. The lips in that pointed face are incongruously full, almost swollen. The tongue that laps out between them is the palest shade of pink and as she kneels over my crotch and takes me in her mouth I catch a glimpse, the merest hint only, of teeth.

      She’s cold. Her mouth is cold. It’s like being sucked by a cream dessert, yielding and smooth and sweet. My cock responds to the slick embrace with an instantaneous surge of heat, and I arch my back off the mattress as my whole body goes rigid with shock and pleasure. Then she drops me, letting me ease from between her lips as she withdraws her head – only it takes much longer coming out than going in because it’s twice as long now and getting longer by the heartbeat. Her saliva gleams on the ruddy column, giving it a pearlescent sheen. She smiles at me questioningly and bats at the crown of my cock with teasing little licks. My hands are pinned by my sides, too heavy to lift from the sheet.

      This has to be a dream.

      With a tilt of her head she crouches lower, her mouth opening wide to suck my scrotum. Into that cool cave goes first one bollock and then the other, bathed in her wetness. I am shaking now where I lie, every fibre quivering, and my erect cock points up at my face and nods against my belly with every jerk. But as she releases my balls and licks her way back up its length it rises clear of my supine form, twitching. It doesn’t give a stuff about dreams or reality, cold or hot. It just wants her mouth. So she engulfs me, a cool ocean in which my body swims, my mind trailing helplessly behind like a plastic float. I surrender all control of my limbs and give myself up to her moon-cold kisses until I’m leaping wave after wave of arousal and surging toward the light. When she bites, I barely feel the pain. I feel the pelagic upswell that follows in its wake though: the perfect wave. It drags me down into the deep and everything turns to black.

      It was certainly a dream. I wake in the morning with a monumental hard-on and mount Penny almost before she’s awake. And she doesn’t object, of course, even though it takes me – despite my breathless horniness – nearly for ever to come.

      * * *

      I’ve been having these lurid fantasies, sleeping and waking, for months now. It’s a case of what you can’t have, that’s what you want. And what I want is sex that hasn’t a thing to do with procreation. It’s become an obsession. I used to be so pedestrian in my fantasies, I’d imagine what it would be like to fuck newspaper models and pretty Australian soap starlets and that girl in the canteen I never spoke to. Now I catch myself in crazy musings. There’s a big Catholic church with a convent attached to it down the end of our road: I’ve screwed Penny while picturing myself standing on the altar, cock in hand, jerking off an impossible spunk-shower over the upturned, outraged faces of the nuns kneeling before me. There’s a public garden where, if it’s a quiet day at work, I take my packed lunch to eat; there are often students there sketching the statues and the plants because there’s an art college on the boundary road, and for some reason a lot of them seem to be Italian or Spanish. I find myself eyeing them up, fantasising about having three