would ever prefer them to Latino males: those guys—Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, some Italians, even—had absolutely no sense of humor about themselves and got angry over offenses so small a woman required a microscope to identify them.
As for Greek men, she was on the verge of tarring them with the Latino brush when her southern Anglo-Saxon groom, who, she was concluding, was preferable to many Mediterraneans, most South Americans, and all art critics, interrupted with a wave of his club. “Look there,” he called, pointing toward a cavity in the hillside just below a rocky overhang. “A cave.”
Indeed, it was. Due to the manner in which Ellen Cherry automatically looked at landscapes, squinting and widening, focusing and fuzzing, employing her eye game to drag God’s patio furniture from one retinal lanai to another, she probably would have missed it. For that matter, a conventional hiker might have passed it by, as well, since the cave was small and its opening partially obscured by juniper bushes and fallen shale.
As they climbed the slope to its entrance, they entertained similar ideas. The afternoon breeze had stiffened, and spring or no spring, it was chilly enough to pave their backsides with goose bumps at the very thought of undressing. Perhaps the cave would shelter them, provide a warm, cozy haven where they might launch their carnal canoe. They would still be out in nature, but as snug as if swallowed up by the turkey.
Naturally, Boomer insisted on scouting it first. Because the hillside was steep, a fair amount of light angled into the cave’s opening. “It’s shallow and right dusty, but it looks okay,” he reported when he was positive there were no rattlesnakes or bears lying in wait for his tasty bride. She dropped to her hands and knees and followed him inside.
Once in the chamber, they could have stood upright, but standing upright was not what they were there for.
“Have you ever done any spelunking?” Ellen Cherry inquired as she arranged the picnic.
Boomer knew perfectly well what speleology was, since Trevanian’s Shibumi , with its cave-exploring protagonist, was his favorite spy novel, but he replied, “Is that a fancy form of fornicatin’—or is it something married people can do?”
Ellen Cherry set down the pickles and regarded him drolly. For all of his rowdy bluster, she knew him to be actually rather shy in the trenches. “Oh,” she said finally, “ some married men are expert spelunkers.” She took his left hand and, lubricating his ring finger by licking it, removed his wedding band. His protests dwindled into grunts when she gave the finger a bonus suck.
Hiking her skirt up to her waist and pulling her panties down a few tantalizing inches, she slipped the wedding ring into her vagina. She gave it a poke to, well, ascertain that it was securely hidden; then, with a kind of reverse flourish, like a magician who has pulled a rabbit into a hat, she snapped her elastic and announced that he could try his luck at spelunking whenever he felt fit.
The um, the oh, the ah; the rubbery slap slap of bare bellies, damp as cavern walls; the clink of gold against tooth enamel as they passed the salty wedding ring from mouth to mouth; the almost audible vibration of her tiny stalactite.
He was lost among glowworms, among silky sprays of bats. Down the shaft of his explorer, he sensed a trickle, like mineral solutions slowly dripping into the eternity of a subterranean lake. There had been other spelunkers in these hollows, that she had confessed, but he took solace in the knowledge that he’d been first, that his was the brush that had left the hunting scenes upon her labial Lascaux.
Um oh ah , this troglodyte love was for him, he reckoned; this cave within a cave, this paleolithic pussy, this descent into the deepest dark of fuck. With what intensity they stared into each other’s eyes, their gazes roped together like the discoverers of Carlsbad!
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