Free Four Erotic Tales by K. D. West

along for drinks. She’s been excited to see you.”
    Veronica looked up at me with that serious expression again and said, “I don’t want to see Jenny. I came here to spend some time with you.”
    “Oh.” This time, the sexual subtext in her statement came through loud and clear. “Well, if you’d like, I have some nice homebrew back at my apartment. If you’d like.”
    “I like,” she said brightly, and gave my hand another squeeze.
    She followed me back in her own car. I was excited and frightened, the taste of that long-ago kiss back in my mouth. Having been trashed a few times when I was younger, I was always very timid about making being too aggressive in those days, so I was trying desperately to decide whether I should make the first move or not.
    I needn’t have worried.
    When we got back to my apartment, I plopped on some music — Dire Straight’s Love Over Gold , I think — pulled out a couple of bottles of my homebrewed ale, and sat with the still-elegant Veronica on my beat-up couch.
    “Have you been seeing much of Michael recently?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “He moved back up to Seattle. That was pretty relaxed anyway.” She tilted her face, and her blue eyes caught the light. “Still going out with Rose?”
    I laughed, and told her that Rose and I had very amicably gone our separate ways not long after Romeo and Juliet had closed; I’d told Rose I was going to be heading off to a graduate acting program the following fall, and — after one last night of fucking each other to exhaustion — she had said it was time for us to call it quits. It had been a rebound relationship for both of us, so once the damage had healed a bit, we were happy to move on from each other.
    Veronica asked me what I had been rebounding from and I told her the sad tale of my relationship with Cindy the latent lesbian, who had shrunk from my love while accepting my sex, emotional support, and money for two years while she wrestled with her own sexuality. I’d had a few lovers since — Rachel (with whom I’d had a wild weekend in New Orleans), Rose, and a few more — but I was just getting used to the idea of actually being in an intimate relationship again, one that wasn’t just about sex, not that sex wasn’t nice too.
    That Cindy had dumped me to be with a woman had been irrelevant. That she had trashed me utterly and then walked away had left me walking around like a shell for a long time.
    Veronica’s eyebrows pulled together. “It’s funny, what you said about who she left you for. People always assume because I’m bi that I’m a slut. But it isn’t that I want to sleep with everyone all the time; it’s just that their gender isn’t the thing that decides who I’m attracted to.”
    “What does decide?”
    She just smiled at me, her eyes suddenly half-lidded and cat-like, and I laughed nervously.
    Sipping on homebrew, we launched into a very intense discussion of love, life, and the pursuit of happiness. The deeper the conversation got, the quieter I became. I found myself wanting to drown in her, to lose myself in Veronica’s body, her mind, her heart.
    She sat back at one point and fixed me with the look of a scientist trying to identify a new species. “Sometimes,” she said, reaching out and touching her palm to my chest, “I wonder what’s going on in there. I want to rip your chest open and let everything out.”
    My breath caught. “Sometimes, I wish you would.”
    She smiled, and her hand drifted down and took mine. “Ken, how would you like have a nice summer affair? Just till you go off to grad school?”
    I smiled as dashingly as I could, leaned forward, and kissed her.
    Her mouth was as sweet as I had remembered, and this time her small tongue snaked into my mouth and set me on fire.
    My hands ran up the silk of her dress from her round hips to her champagne-glass breasts, which I cupped lightly. My thumbs circled her hardening nipples and she gave a gratifying soft