Best Lesbian Erotica 2014

RUN, JO , RUN Cheyenne Blue

Run, Jo, run. Down London streets that are never silent, even in the hours just before dawn. Run, Jo, run, your thirteen-year-old feet pounding the pavement, the breath hot and rasping in your lungs, your skinny body bursting with the effort of your heart. Run, Jo, run, away from home where your parents are screaming at each other again, screams that end with breaking glass, and broken ribs, and the wail of the ambulance siren.

Jo can’t help her mother, although she’s tried and the scars on her own body attest to her failure. So now Jo runs instead of fights, dodging the partygoers, and the late-night drunks, the shift workers alighting from big red buses and the occasional policeman who assumes a fleet-footed teenager must be a pickpocket and gives chase but never catches her and never will.

Run, Jo, run, through the shadows of your life, away from parents, teachers and social workers who are supposed to care for you yet never manage to be there. At sixteen run from home and never go back. At seventeen run from the lover who promised to care for you but defined care as power. Run from the world, and learn eventually that the only constant is you and your body, its strength and speed.

Also learn that there are some things that you can’t outrun: the horror when you learn you’re pregnant, the sorrow when the baby is lost. And you can’t outrun the knowledge that life is passing you by, and you’re not ready for that. You’re not ready to be a thief, a con, a prostitute, even though you know they’re possibilities and they wouldn’t be the worst.

So Jo stops running, long enough to enroll at technical college, long enough to learn that she has an aptitude for computers, long enough to return home and find her mother is dead and her father has captured a new lover. Long enough to learn and embrace her own sexuality.

Never long enough to fall in love. Never long enough for that.

And although she’s stopped running from things that scare her, Jo knows she will never stop her real running. Not until her knees give out, not until she’s shaky and feeble and can barely stagger a fifteen-minute mile. Maybe not even then. Running is when she is truly free.

She joins a running club, hoping to meet a girl like her, a girl with whom she can run, but the preppy insistence on teamwork and the slavish devotion to the stopwatch isn’t her thing. After yet another evening nursing a glass of soda while conversation about road races she will never run flows past her, Jo leaves and doesn’t return.

Her running, she decides, like her life, will be solitary.

And solitary it is. Jo moves to Staffordshire and discovers fell running. In the long summer mornings when the light slants golden over the ground by 5:00 a.m., Jo jogs along the road and then up the footpath that takes her over the tor. The heather brushes her ankles, and she has to watch her footing on the uneven ground, so she doesn’t run as fast, but the freedom, the aloneness and the exhilaration it brings are worth it.

Run, Jo, run, along rough footpaths and bridleways, splashing through mud and soggy autumn leaves, run through the mist on the tor and the snow that lies thick and wet on the ground. Smile as a pheasant whirs abruptly from under your feet. Bound down grassy slopes and attack the uphills, learn to embrace your solitude, learn to live your life alone. Run through winter and into spring again. A full year passes, and you are content.

One day, when she reaches the top of the tor there’s a girl there. A girl like her, in shorts and a brief, bright singlet, with mud-splattered legs and dirty running shoes. Jo slows and observes her for a moment as the girl stretches her hamstrings methodically, her heel resting on the ordnance survey marker. The girl nods; Jo nods back and moves on, swooping into the downhill part of the run, leaping rocks and clumps of heather, splashing through the stream at the bottom of the valley, the girl already forgotten.

The next day, as Jo reaches the tor the girl is approaching on the other path. Jo slows enough to watch her power up the final slope and sprint for the survey marker. The girl touches it, then bends double, hands on her hips as she drags air into her lungs. As Jo takes off down the hill the girl is once again stretching.

Jo doesn’t see her for a couple of days, but on the weekend she’s curious enough to time her run to reach the tor at that same time. There’s no one there. Jo stops and stretches, but the other girl doesn’t show. Oddly disappointed, Jo moves on, and runs an extra couple of miles instead.

But on Sunday, when Jo reaches the tor, the other girl is there. She’s not stretching; she’s jogging loosely on the spot. Her breathing is easy; she’s obviously been there for a while.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” says Jo in return.

“You run well,” says the girl. “Do you mind if I run along for a while?”

“Not at all,” says Jo, and if her heart leaps wildly in her chest she puts it down to the sprint to the top of the tor.

“I’m Carys,” the other girl says.

“Jo.”

Side by side, they lope down the slope to the wooded valley. Soon the path is too narrow to allow them to run abreast, so Jo moves in front. She can hear Carys’s breathing behind her, the easy breath of the long-distance runner, hear the soft thud of her feet on rocks and dirt. Curious, Jo increases her pace until she’s running faster than usual, and although Carys’s breathing increases, she’s still there on Jo’s tail.

The path opens out again and they run side by side through the birdsong-filled wood, splashing through the stream, passing the occasional rambler. Two miles, three, four and their pace is still gradually increasing, until when they burst from the woods out onto the heath, they’re flying and this is now no companionable run: it’s a race.

The heath ends at a road, and Jo knows without saying that it will be the finish line. Three hundred yards, two, then one. Jo digs deep, focuses on the road, and ignores the heaviness of her legs, the way there isn’t enough air in her lungs and the floating light-headedness that threatens to swamp her. She’s aware of Carys at her side, matching her pace, sometimes half a stride ahead, and doesn’t let herself believe that Carys is only pacing her and that she will break away in the last few yards.

They reach the road together and if there’s a winner, Jo doesn’t know which of them it is.

She crashes to the grass as exhausted as if she’s run a marathon. Carys lies next to her, her body at an angle to Jo’s. After a minute or so, Carys stretches out a hand, finds Jo’s and grasps it.

“Great run,” she says, and her breathing is nearly back to normal.

“Yeah.” Jo lies still, listening to the thundering of her heart and savoring the touch of Carys’s hand in her own. She wonders what Carys’s touch really means, and then Carys squeezes her fingers, a swift caress with the pad of her thumb, and Jo wonders no more.

A routine develops. They meet at the top of the tor and run a few miles together, ending with the sprint to the road. Sometimes Jo wins, mostly Carys does, and then, if it’s dry, they lie on the turf together to recover and share snippets of their lives: where they live, where they work, what TV shows they watch.

One day Jo asks, with a studied casualness, “You have a girlfriend?”

Carys squeezes her fingers and replies, “No. Not yet.”

Throughout the days of summer and into autumn they run together. Sometimes they go farther, and the sprint for the road is replaced by long miles at conversational pace. Jo realizes she’s falling in love, and the thought scares her somewhat. She knows Carys is waiting for her to make the first move, but that’s the problem. Jo has no problem hitting on most women, but Carys is different. Carys could be more than a lover—she could be for life, and when Jo thinks of that, she gets a static buzz of white noise in her head and her mind spins onto other channels. Twice now, Jo has opened her mouth to say, “Shall we have coffee? Or a drink?” and each time fear has grabbed her tongue and forced the words back down.

And then one day, long into autumn, when the days are getting so short that it’s difficult to see the ground underneath their feet, Carys says, “We need to talk about this.”

“This?” says Jo, and the beat of fear swells, and then subsides.

“It’s too dark to see properly. I’m going to go arse over tit soon and be flat on my back on the heather. Where do you run on winter mornings?”

“Roads with street lighting,” says Jo.

Carys smiles. “Me too. How about I come to your house tomorrow, and you come to mine the day after?”

Jo goes home and as she takes her shower, as she cooks and eats dinner, she practices asking Carys in for coffee. For breakfast. On a date.

It’s raining the next morning, and the doorbell rings early, while Jo is still ramming her unruly hair into a ponytail and finding socks that match.

Carys bounds through the door when Jo answers it. “Nice.” She has yet to look at the décor of Jo’s small house, her eyes are fixed on Jo and Jo finds she’s transfixed by Carys’s direct gaze.

Carys comes closer. “May I look around?”

Jo nods, and straps her running watch onto her wrist. As she bends to pull on a sock, she sees Carys’s slender calves walking up the hall.

Jo follows Carys to the kitchen, where the coffeepot stands ready to be flicked on after the run. Jo has thought long, and intends a casual “Fancy a coffee?” as they return to the house.

Carys comes closer, near enough that Jo can see her eyes are golden. Tiger’s eyes, she thinks, with little dark flecks.

“It’s raining,” says Carys in conversational tones. “Do you really want to go for a run?”

“It hasn’t stopped us before—”

Carys kisses her, swallowing her feeble words, kissing her as if she means it, as if she desires Jo, as if she wants her more than her next breath, more than the promise of a good run.

Jo’s lips are slack for long moments as she wonders how they’ve come to this, why she hadn’t done this weeks ago. But then her brain kicks into overdrive and she realizes it doesn’t matter how they got to this point, or who initiated it. What matters is that they’re here and now they can move on.

Carys’s arms encircle her, smooth, hot and bare. Jo feels Carys’s breasts, constrained by the binding sports bra, pushing into her own. But mostly, she feels soft lips and hands, strong hands starting to roam around her body: up to her shoulders, down her back to grasp her buttocks and pull her even closer.

There’s a thrum in Jo’s head, one of expectation and excitement. She breaks the kiss and says, “We’ve never skipped a run before, but if we go out now we’ll get soaked.”

Carys’s eyes are dark and deep, the pupils so large that the dark flecks in her irises are nearly invisible. “I couldn’t be wetter than I am already,” she says.

Jo’s mind spins to the bedroom, trying to remember how she left it. A mess, no doubt, with clothes and sports gear strewn around the place. But the sheets were changed last night and she doubts somehow that Carys will care about the mess.

She entwines her hand in Carys’s and tugs her down the hall toward the bedroom.

The curtains are open to let the morning light in, and somewhere outside a bird is singing its heart out. Jo knows how it feels. The bed is unmade, but Carys doesn’t seem to care and bends to untie her Asics. She pulls off her trainer socks and stands there in strong bare feet.

Jo sits on the edge of the bed and urges Carys toward her. She runs a hand up Carys’s thigh—lean, strong, with defined muscles. Jo’s fingers toy with the hem of Carys’s shorts for a moment, before reversing course to meander back down. She notes how the tiny hairs, bleached blonde by the sun, are soft, and she traces her way down to curve over a calf muscle. Carys is lightly built and her running style is fluid and effortless. Yet her legs are like steel.

Carys places her hands on Jo’s shoulders, her fingers digging tightly into the muscle in anticipation.

Jo leans forward and moves Carys’s singlet top up, enough that she can see her flat belly. Bending, she places her lips on the soft, quivering skin: wet open-mouthed kisses, tasting her girl. She pushes the singlet up farther, revealing the bright sports bra that covers Carys’s small breasts. It’s raspberry colored and matches her shorts.

Carys winds her hands in Jo’s hair, tugging on the elastic that holds her ponytail until it comes free. Jo’s hair cascades down in wild curls, and Carys sighs and pushes her hands into the mess.

“I’ve wanted to do that forever,” she says.

Jo’s fingers creep higher, until she’s brushing the underside of Carys’s breasts, then higher still until she’s cupping their slight weight.

“And I’ve wanted to do this forever,” she says.

She stands, and Carys’s fingers fall away from her hair. In a swift movement she pulls Carys’s singlet over her head, and tugs at the sports bra. It’s elasticized, with no fastenings, and resists attempts to remove it.

Carys smiles, crosses her arms and pulls it up and off in a graceful motion. She stands, her arms high above her head, the bra wound around her hands.

Jo sees her slender figure, the small uplifted breasts and the illusion of restraint in the raspberry bra wound around her hands. Her stomach tightens at the thought, and for a moment she can’t breathe as an image of Carys in her bed, her wrists bound to the iron headboard, fills her head. Then Carys shakes the bra away and the image is gone, and instead, there’s the real Carys, naked except for the running shorts.

Jo lunges, white heat in her head, and her fingers and lips trace a path along that lithe body, until there’s a nipple blooming between her lips, and her fingers are delving down, under the shorts, into the mesh liner and there’s crinkly hair and soft skin underneath her fingertips. Carys doesn’t shave, and Jo is glad. She loves a natural woman, and besides, grow-back is a bitch when you run.

Jo’s own running gear, skimpy as it is, suddenly feels like too much. With shaking fingers she drops her shorts and pulls the singlet over her head. Her own bra is sturdier, more supportive than Carys’s, the better to bind her fuller breasts.

Carys is watching her and there’s a hungry expression in her face. “I’ve imagined you,” she says, “your sports bra binding your breasts flat to your chest underneath a white shirt and black tie.”

“I’ll do that the first time we go out to dinner,” says Jo, and then there’s no more talking, only mouths and lips, fingers and hands, freckled skin and lean muscles.

They sink to the bed entwined in each other’s arms and now Carys takes the initiative, unhooking Jo’s bra and palming her breasts, rolling her nipples around in her fingers.

Jo is a creature of light and flame. Every touch of Carys’s fingers on her nipples burns a molten pathway to her clit. She wants to be touched, wants to feel lips and fingers on her pussy, wants the jerking release of orgasm.

Carys moves in a meandering pathway down Jo’s body, until she’s poised between her spread thighs. In a swift motion she’s between them, her mouth on Jo’s sex, lapping in catlike motions at her clit. Carys’s fingers push into the wet heat of Jo’s cunt, and Jo closes her eyes the better to focus the sensation. She knows she won’t last long—this intensity, this heat, it’s too much—and she comes in a keening wail, her belly rigid, her thighs jerking with the force of the contractions.

When the heat haze clears from her vision, Carys is looking at her, a hopeful expression on her face. Jo considers the long black dildo in the drawer, but not for long. This first time Jo wants Carys to fly apart under her fingers, wants to feel her heat and wetness, wants to sink wrist deep into her cunt, wants to see Carys come with the same blind intensity that Jo did.

Carys reads this in her eyes and swings a leg over Jo’s hips, straddling her. Jo looks down along her body, sees where their pubic hair meshes together: Carys so blonde and fine, Jo so dark and wiry. She pushes her hand between them, palm up so that she can curl her fingers into her lover’s pussy. Carys is wet, drowned wet, sodden like the fell after a summer rainstorm, slick and sweet. Jo moves her fingers back and forth, sliding easily through the moisture. She finds Carys’s clit, caresses it with her thumb, even as her fingers clench and curl, stretching wide Carys’s cunt.

She looks up, into Carys’s face. Her eyes are closed, nostrils flaring. Jo pushes her fingers farther in, feels the channel tighten. She redoubles her efforts, circling the nubbin with her thumb, and feels Carys’s thighs tighten around her hips and then the quiver inside, the ripples and internal shivers of orgasm.

Jo pulls Carys down so that their bodies are aligned. She strokes her sweaty hair back from her face and lets herself sink down into the lethargy after love.

For a moment she’s scared; panicked that she can’t do this, that her family’s litany of bad relationships will drag her down; scared that her own poor history and the escape routes she’s taken will suck her in, and that she’ll run, run away from Carys, from the best thing that’s happened in her life so far. Then Carys sighs and her fingers caress Jo’s hip.

It will be all right.

Run, Jo, run. Along the quiet streets and footpaths, over the heather paths to the tor, brilliant in the morning sun. Run, Jo, run, let your legs take you far and fast, let your thoughts fly free. Run, with Carys by your side, your strides matched, the joy of movement in your veins.

Run, Jo, run, let the miles fly by, your lover and partner by your side. There are some things you can’t outrun, and you don’t want to.

Jo takes Carys’s hand as they reach the tor and kisses her in the morning sunlight.