a little so that I could feel the hard bulge of his cock straining under the fabric of his shorts and enjoy the feel of the rough material against my skin.
Before Chey I’d only been kissed by one boy. One who had found his way to me and the red brick wall at my school through Valya. The only one who hadn’t wanted his cock sucked, who preferred a little tenderness. Or maybe he had just been shy. His name was Sasha, and when I fell to my knees and moved my hands to his trousers, he pulled me up again, and instead pressed his lips to mine.
Now Chey pulled me lower and kissed me. He tasted of champagne. His lips were firm and his tongue probed mymouth gently. He held my chin in his hand, directing our kiss. Then ran his hands over my shoulders, caressing my arms, my breasts, stopping at my waist. I shimmied down in one sudden movement and began to undo the tie and button that held his shorts together so that I could show him my trick, the only trick that I knew.
Chey laughed when he realised what I was trying to do.
‘No, my mermaid, allow me,’ he’d said, pulling me up and flipping me over so that I was on my back, staring up at the stars that shone like fireflies in the night sky as he dropped his face between my legs and pressed his firm tongue to my pussy.
I gasped in shock as a wave of pleasure coursed through me.
It had never occurred to me that a man might return the favour so quickly, and I’d never had any cause to wonder how it would feel if he did. In the dormitory back in the Ukraine, we had gossiped feverishly about many things, but this had always been one of the most shocking for us somehow. The girls boasted about their skill at taking cocks into their mouths, but the idea of men going down on us had been unspoken, shameful.
Of course, I had touched myself many times and orchestrated a whole palette of pleasure in the process, but all so often in the dark, beneath the sheets and the bed covers, straining to remain silent. I knew the geography of a penis like the back of my hand, but I’d never had the opportunity to see myself in the light, had never imagined what it might be like for the boys learning to pleasure women. If that was part of their high school education, if they came hoping for more than just their trousers pulled down and if they left wanting.
So the touch of Chey’s tongue against my nub was like a stab to my heart. Electrifying. The physical experience immediately transmuting the psychological one and setting off a blazing fire at the core of my being.
It felt like falling into the sun and I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the sensation of his strokes, sometimes quick and sometimes slow, short and sharp or long and languorous, moving in time with the rise and fall of my body as I responded to each new caress.
He followed with his fingers, and that too was a revelation. I’d never used a dildo. I wasn’t too embarrassed to be seen in the shops off Broadway with their pink, red and purple window displays and tacky lingerie on plastic hangers, but I budgeted each dollar I earned with military precision and had just enough for my rent, food, subway fares, emergency savings and books, the one luxury that I allowed myself. Spending money on sex toys would have been a ridiculous extravagance.
Chey’s dance with his tongue had made me wet, and his finger slipped in easily, moving inside me, exploring, teasing, and he soon followed it with another.
‘God, you’re tight,’ he breathed, as I thrust my hips against his hand, wanting him to fill me more, go deeper. I’d been a virgin long enough, I felt, and this was the last hurdle that I had yet to breach on the road to womanhood.
I hadn’t been saving myself for marriage. I was far too practical for that. I just hadn’t wanted it to be with one of the boys against the red-brick wall, or some man in a bar with fierce alcoholic breath who would leave me with a baby and no future, like Zosia in the yard with the skeleton