Celine & Frieda

The bathroom door opened.

Frieda stood in the doorway, naked, bearing the marks of the night, smudged mascara, sex-tousled hair, a bruise blooming on her hip that matched the one on Celine’s neck. She didn’t speak. Just walked into the shower and pulled the curtain closed behind her.

The stall was barely large enough for one person. For two, it was impossible. Their bodies pressed together, slick with water and hotel soap, breasts against breasts, bellies touching, thighs interlocking.

Frieda’s hands found Celine’s waist. Her thumbs traced the curve of her hipbones.

“You okay?” Frieda’s voice was soft, stripped of last night’s bravado.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s ok.”

Water cascaded over Frieda’s shoulders, over her breasts, rivulets tracing the paths between her curves. Celine watched the droplets cling to her dark nipples, watched them slide down the soft expanse of her belly, watched them disappear into the thatch of dark curls between her legs.

“You’re staring,” Frieda said.

“I know.”

Frieda’s hands slid up. They cupped Celine’s breasts, thumbs brushing over her nipples, and the sensation was so different from Steve’s touch, softer, more deliberate, more knowing. A woman’s hands on a woman’s body. A body that understood, that had the same parts, the same sensitivities, the same secret places.

Celine leaned in.

The kiss was tentative at first. A brush of lips. A question. Frieda answered by parting her mouth, by letting her tongue trace the seam of Celine’s lips, by pulling her closer until their bodies were flush from chest to knee.

Water poured over them. Warmed them. Joined them.

Frieda broke the kiss and pressed her mouth to Celine’s throat. To her collarbone. Lower. She took one nipple into her mouth and sucked gently, her tongue tracing circles that made Celine’s knees buckle.

“Frieda ...”

“Shh.” Frieda released her breast and looked up, water beading on her eyelashes. “Let me look at you. Really look.”

She stepped back, as much as the stall allowed and her eyes traveled over Celine’s body. The slender shoulders. The breasts that had fed a child and still sat high on her chest. The belly with its faint silver stretch marks, the map of motherhood. The shaven mound between her thighs, the pink lips visible through the seam.

“You’re beautiful,” Frieda said. “I’ve thought so since high school.”

“You never said.”

“I never had the courage.”

Frieda dropped to her knees.

The shower floor was textured, designed for grip, but it couldn’t have been comfortable. Frieda didn’t seem to care. She pressed her mouth to Celine’s hip. Kissed the jut of bone. Kissed the soft skin beside it. Her fingers traced the crease where thigh met torso.

Then her fingers slid between Celine’s pussy lips.

Celine gasped. Her hands flew to Frieda’s shoulders for balance, for grounding, for something to hold onto while the world tilted.

“Frieda… what are you doing to me?”

“Nothing you don’t want.” Frieda’s fingers moved slowly, exploring. “Nothing you didn’t let me do last night.”

“That was ... that was different, that was Steve, this is ...”

“This is what?”

A single finger pressed inside her. Celine’s head fell back against the tile.

“Not enough that I cheated on JP last night,” she heard herself say, her voice breaking in strange places. “Now I’m falling for your touch. Now I’m ... aahhh ... ”

Frieda’s thumb found her clit. Pressed a slow circle around it.

“Don’t stop,” Celine breathed. “Please don’t stop.”

“I won’t.”

The water kept falling. Frieda’s fingers kept moving. Her mouth found Celine’s other hip, kissed it, bit it gently, sucked a mark into the skin that would be hidden under her clothes. The combination, the heat of the shower, the cold tile against her back, the steady rhythm of Frieda’s fingers inside her, built a pressure in Celine’s chest that had nothing to do with sex. Or everything to do with it.

“I feel I’m cumming,” she said, the words rushing out. “I feel I’m ... Frieda ... that’s it ... oh God ... that’s ... ”

The orgasm hit her like a fist unclenching. Not the explosive detonations of the night before but something slower, something that radiated outward from Frieda’s fingers and spread through her whole body in ripples. Her legs shook. Her breath caught. The sound she made was half-moan, half-sob, a release of something she hadn’t known she’d been holding.

Frieda rose to her feet. Kissed Celine’s lips. Kissed the tears she hadn’t realized she was crying.

Celine opened her mouth and let Frieda’s tongue slide against hers. The kiss deepened, grew hungrier, grew into something that tasted of salt and shower water and the lingering flavor of last night’s wine.

Frieda shut off the water.

“Come on.” She took Celine’s hand and led her out of the shower, dripping, not bothering with towels. “Bed.”

They fell onto the mattress in a tangle of wet limbs. The sheets were still rumpled from the night before, still smelled of what they’d done, but neither of them cared. Frieda’s mouth found Celine’s ankle. Kissed it. Kissed her calf. Her knee. The inside of her thigh.

Celine pushed herself up on her elbows, watching, breathing hard.

“What are you doing?”

“Kissing every part of you.” Frieda’s lips moved higher. “Every single part.”

“That could take a while.”

“We have until checkout.”

Celine laughed ... a startled sound that turned into a gasp as Frieda’s mouth found the crease of her hip again. She tugged at Frieda’s leg, pulling her around, and then they were arranged in a mirror - Frieda’s mouth at Celine’s sex, Celine’s mouth at Frieda’s.

A position Celine had tried once with John-Paul and found awkward and abandoned after three minutes. But this was different. This was Frieda’s taste flooding her tongue, salty, slightly metallic, clean from the shower but still somehow musky. This was Frieda’s tongue flattening against her clit, stroking, licking, opening her up. This was two bodies that understood each other in ways no male body ever could.

Celine pressed her mouth to Frieda’s folds. Licked. Sucked. Moved her tongue in the patterns she’d learned on her own body, the things she wished someone would do to her, the things she’d only ever done to herself.

Beneath her, Frieda moaned.

The vibration traveled through her mouth and into Celine’s body, a feedback loop of pleasure that built and built and built until neither of them could tell whose orgasm started first. They came together - Celine crying out into Frieda’s sex, Frieda’s thighs clamping around Celine’s head, their bodies shuddering in synchrony.

Afterward they lay still. Breathing. Wet hair plastered to foreheads and pillows. Fingers loosely intertwined.

They didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

---

Breakfast was eggs Benedict and coffee and the same buffet they’d eaten the morning before. The room was quieter now, the convention-goers filtering out with luggage and name tags and the haggard glow of too-little sleep. Celine and Frieda sat by the window, ate a role and an egg each and had a gallon of coffee. They did not talk about what had happened. "What happens at the conventions, stays at the conventions"

The RED COACH home was equally silent. Frieda fell asleep against the window, her dark curls pressed to the glass. Celine stared at the fields scrolling past and tried to catalogue what she felt. Guilt, yes. But also, she searched for the word, something like wonder, something like gratitude.

She’d had sex that made her body feel like her body. Maybe for the first time since her wedding night.

---

John-Paul met her at the station. He was leaning against the Honda, reading glasses on, tablet in hand. He looked up when they approached. He smiled the casual smile of a man who’d spent the weekend eating takeout and watching sports and missing her in the abstract way of long-married husbands.

Frieda greeted JP and hugged Celine "Goodbye ... I call you later this week ... hope you liked your first Amway convention."

Frieda turnd an walked toward the parking area.

“How was it?” He took her bag, kissed her cheek. “What did you learn?”

“A lot.” She slid into the passenger seat. “The meals were excellent. Dancing went late. The breakfast buffet was perfect - eggs made to order.”

“And the room?”

“Fine. Slept well, just not long. Dancing till late.” She said it smoothly, the lies sliding out like warm butter. Her heart beat faster but her voice stayed even. “Good contacts. Lots of product knowledge.”

“That’s my girl.”

He pulled out of the station parking lot. Celine watched her hometown unscroll through the windshield and felt the distance between her body and her life yawn wider with every passing block.

They took a walk along the river that afternoon. Celine clutched John-Paul’s arm, clutched it too tightly, she realized, clinging like a woman afraid of falling. He didn’t notice. Just walked, pointing out birds, talking about a new patient, discussing whether to repaint the guest bathroom.

The riverside restaurant was half-full with Sunday couples. The clink of cutlery. The murmur of conversation. And at a table near the window: Steff and her husband.

Steff looked up as they entered. Met Celine’s eyes. And smiled, a small, secret smile that said everything without words.

Celine smiled back.

They were seated three tables away. Close enough to see Steff’s husband lean over and kiss her cheek, close enough to see Steff beam at him like a woman deeply in love. And Celine understood, suddenly, what Steff had tried to tell her in that kitchen a month ago. That these things could coexist. That devotion and deception could share the same heart, the same bed, the same woman.

John-Paul ordered wine. Celine watched the bubbles rise in her glass and thought about Steve’s hands. About Frieda’s mouth. About the way her own body had shattered and reformed and shattered again.

“You’re quiet,” John-Paul said.

“Long weekend.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Good to be home.”

---

Monday morning she woke to the sensation of her husband’s fingers tracing the curve of her ass.

Soft. Gentle. Almost reverent. He thought she was still asleep, she could tell by the careful way he touched her, the restraint in his movements, the way he seemed to be memorizing her shape through the thin sheet. Morning light slanted through the blinds and striped the bed in gold.

She loved waking up this way. Had always loved it. The slow drift from dreams into the knowledge of being desired, being touched, being wanted by the man she’d chosen five years ago at a wild party where neither of them had planned to meet anyone.

She turned to face him.

His eyes were soft. His reading glasses were already on the nightstand. His pajama pants were tented in a way that made her smile.

“I love you,” she said. And meant it. “Fuck me, please.”

The words startled a laugh out of him. “Good morning to you too.”

But he didn’t argue. Their pajamas came off - hers the pale blue silk, his the flannel pants she’d bought him for Christmas. They rolled across the bed, tangling in sheets, and came to rest with her on her back and him above her.

She spread her legs. Drew her knees up. Looked up at the face of her husband and felt, for one sick moment, the desire to close her eyes and replace him with someone else.

She didn’t. She kept them open. Kept them locked on his.

“Come on,” she breathed. “I want to feel you. My pussy is aching for your cock.”

He moved between her legs. Sheathed himself inside her with a single smooth thrust.

Celine felt the difference.

This was John-Paul’s cock. Normal. Familiar. The cock she’d married, the cock she’d conceived with, the cock that knew her body because it had mapped every inch of it over five years of mornings and nights and lazy Sunday afternoons. It was a good cock. A reliable cock. A cock that had never failed to make her come when they tried.

But it wasn’t Steve’s cock.

The thought intruded unbidden. Unwelcome. She pushed it away and concentrated on her husband’s rhythm, on the way his breath shortened, on the small grunt he made with every thrust. She wrapped her legs around his waist. Dug her nails into his shoulder blades. Let him fuck her with the fervor of a man who’d missed his wife for two nights and wanted to reclaim her.

It felt good. It did. But it didn’t feel like the hotel. It didn’t feel like her body betraying her, dissolving her, remaking her. It felt like sex with her husband. Which was, she realized with a strange pang, exactly what it was.

She pushed him onto his back.

“Let me,” she said, and swung a leg over his hips.

But instead of facing him, she turned around. Reverse cowgirl. His favorite view - her ass, her spine, the curve of her waist that he’d complimented a hundred times. She sank down onto his cock. Rode him slow. Reached between her own legs and found her clitoris with practiced fingers.

She came like that, riding her husband while stroking herself, her orgasm a warm familiar pulse that made her gasp and tighten around him. She heard him groan. Felt him thrust up into her, once, twice, three times, and then release inside her with a shudder that traveled through his whole body.

He showered. Dressed. Kissed her forehead and left for the clinic.