April gets down and dirty with a tool kit with a difference.
I’m staring at Fenceguard, even though I don’t have a fence, when I hear her behind me. Lori. It’s her voice that I know best; it creates an itch that I can scratch with a vibrator, but would rather surrender to her strong fingers. Or her thigh. Yeah, I could spread myself over her green-trousered thigh and grind to a hot, wet conclusion. Sure I could – if I got the chance.
Apart from her voice, what I know is her hair: short, too curly to be truly butch, and as black as those liquorice wheels I ate as a child; and her hands, the colour of soy latte, extra cinnamon. She has short nails and a battered gold ring on the littlest finger of her left hand. Her eyes are dark, but I’m not too sure about them, as whenever she’s near I become a semi-melted puddle of gooey stupidity, gazing at my girly shoes that look daft against the concrete floor of Dewars DIY.
The butch/femme thing is hard enough – I am not supposed to be making the first move here. But it’s worse than that. Lori works with men: big, meaty, pot-bellied, builder’s-bum-showing men. Dewars is about as femme friendly as an MOT Test Centre.
So, apart from spending all my disposable income on paint, glue, tiles and grout, all of which are piled up in my hallway, I have no idea how to let this stern goddess know I am interested. Interested? Who am I kidding? As soon as I think about her my knees open, as though I’m a tin of paint and her hands are on me, about to pop my lid off. And my lid would pop off, too – it would be a complete, screaming, head-thrashing, sobbing, knuckle-biting orgasm. I know this because twice now I’ve gone out into the car park, got into my little pink Smart and had a quiet, carefully-controlled, silent orgasm, my hand pressed against my clit through my clothes until I’ve brought myself off.
So when I hear Lori behind me, talking to one of her ape-like colleagues, I don’t need to turn round to know that she’s wearing a canvas carpenter’s belt that holds her price gun, the thing she uses to open paint tins and a bunch of labels and pens. On the guys it looks twee but on Lori it’s packed with erotic promise, as is her T-shirt. She’s ripped the hem so it doesn’t cling, and the sleeves are tight to her smooth arms. On the left hand side the sleeve is a bit stretched because she tucks her mobile under it, like butch gals used to do with packets of cigarettes back in the 70s.
I hear her say, “I’m just going to advise this customer,” and her footsteps get closer. Advise. I never thought of it as a term of seduction until now, but suddenly my mind is yelling, advise me, advise me until I scream with pleasure!
I feel a touch on my shoulder. Her fingers are warm and I lean backwards, letting my hair brush her hand, before I turn.
“Hello,” she says. “You look …” There’s a pause and I wonder what she’s going to say, because I know I look like a cat in heat, “… as if you need some help.”
“I do,” I say and my eyes have already slipped to her chest. I’m sure she lifts weights because she’s so strong: she carries six cans of paint like I’d carry my handbag, but also because she wears a sports tankini instead of a bra. I can imagine her breasts – large nipples and a deep undercurve like a shadowed cliff – mashed together by her constricting underwear, and I just want to ease her out of her clothes and rub her compressed flesh with coconut oil until her breasts glow like varnished wood. I can’t look up and risk Lori reading what I’m imagining, so my eyes slip lower, to that damn carpenter’s belt. I sigh, a huge, gusty, lusty sigh. I don’t mean to, but it slips out before I can stop myself.
Lori leans towards me. “I think you need some fresh air,” she says, and takes hold of my arm, turning me round so that I’m facing the back of the store and walking me, no, marching me, out through the swing doors that are clearly marked STAFF ONLY, into a small yard full of pallets and dented cans. She steers me through all this and I’m aware of her fingers around my arm, how warm they are, how strong … how close I am already, to moaning.
“So,” she says, once she’s got me close to the back wall, hidden from view behind a stack of breeze-blocks. “You’re April Janssen. You live at 17 Cross Grove.” I nod without looking her in the eye, wondering why she’s telling me my name and address. Because I can’t meet her gaze, I’m watching her throat, the deep shadow that sits in the hollow of it, where my lips would fit perfectly.
Lori takes hold of my other arm, so she’s got me in her grip.
“We have another customer who lives at 17 Cross Grove. Her name is Jesse Holt.” I want to shrug, but with the way her hands are locked, gently but inexorably, around my upper arms, I can’t.
“Uh huh,” I say. She shakes me, not roughly, but enough to make me look up into her face.
“You both live at the same address,” she says, as though I am half-witted.
“Yeah,” I say, mesmerised by her dark eyes that are definitely smiling at me. “It’s a block of flats, lots of people live there.” Lori starts to slide her hands down my arms.
“I know. I know that now. I didn’t know that until yesterday. I thought you and Jesse Holt were …” I let my spine collapse into the wall. “You thought we were a couple?” Instead of answering she presses her mouth onto mine. Everything about her is strong. Her hands, holding me in place, her lips, opening me like a gift she’s been made to wait for, her hips, butting up against me. I feel something in the carpenter’s belt shoving into me, and I start to move, working my hot groin up and down over it, whatever it is. Lori pulls back and smiles at me, as my hips follow her movement, yearning out from the wall to try and stay in contact with the thing giving me such pleasurable pain. She undoes the belt and holds the canvas strap against my body, slicing me in two between the thighs, one of her hands hard against my navel, the other with its knuckles against the wall between my legs.
Now, as she’s bent slightly over, so her face is level with mine, I have no choice but to look into Lori’s eyes, and she grins, a wide, slightly cruel grin that shows her perfect white teeth and her generous lips, curling up. She looks mischievous. I feel my own lips starting to smile, to grin, and then she says,
“Go on then, I’ve seen you in the car park. You can do it yourself, can’t you, my sweet?” And I’m staring into her dark eyes and realising that this woman has watched me get myself off over her, and even as I feel the shame of it, I’m sliding my slit up and down that canvas band, dividing myself into two wet, equal halves of pleasure, and pulling my skirt up so that the soaked fabric of my knickers is bisected by the strap, and every detail of its weave is being pressed into my clit, only separated from my actual flesh by the clinging, soaking cotton of my underwear.
“You owe me this,” Lori says, her voice rough and low. “For the time I’ve wasted watching you, and not touching,” and she tightens the strap so that the pressure becomes intense, unbearable, and I come.
And when I’ve come, and I’m leaning my head against her breasts, babbling nonsense, she lifts my chin with her strong hands.
“I’ll be round tonight,” she says. “Some jobs you can’t do yourself, sometimes it needs two of you.” And I grin back and know that I’ve put myself in capable hands.
