La Scorsa Notte [FF]

‘*Grazie*.’

Alex mumbled her thanks to the waiter, but he was moving so quickly, his hands so precise as they balanced the tray of drinks, that he had disappeared a split-second after her second glass of Nero d’Avola hit the table. It was late in the evening. The bar was a stone’s throw from her apartment on the Via d’Aragone, a narrow and dust-coloured street where the cobblestones had been polished smooth by generations of feet, and it was alive with chatter. Customers, Alex among them, spilled out onto the mismatched tables which were scattered along the road and into the square.

Alex looked around her for a moment, long enough to confirm her suspicion that, of the cheerful Friday-night crowd here, she was the only person who had a table to herself.

It didn’t much matter, she thought. Her flight left early tomorrow morning. But still, she had to admit that her two weeks in Palermo hadn’t been quite what she expected.

But what had she expected, exactly? She knew what she needed, which was a few thousand miles of distance, and enough time to be confident that the slew of text messages, by turns plaintive and threatening, might have ceased by the time she flew home to London. This, she had to admit, she seemed to have got. Along, really, with plenty of other things: sunny days and warm evenings, good wine and good coffee, a high-ceilinged Airbnb with a balcony from which she could practically touch the houses on the other side of the road. She had climbed nearby peaks like a pilgrim, eaten her weight in ice cream and *panelle*, and sat reverently in cold, staggeringly ornate churches which, a plaque might casually announce, were as old as twenty or thirty Alexes laid end-to-end. It was just that she had, throughout, felt like such a fucking tourist.

Alex felt she might have arrived at the real problem, since thinking of the words ‘laid’ and ‘fucking’ so close together had made her wince involuntarily. She had, at least, not begun to miss this aspect of the relationship she had left behind. It was rather that, a week into her trip, she had felt the first stirrings of a newly-liberated desire: she caught herself staring at poised women in floaty summer dresses, and at statuesque, bronze men; she drifted occasionally into elaborate fantasies even as she sipped her morning espresso; she shifted her position, naked under a thin cotton sheet in the middle of the night, and felt that she was wet down to her inner thighs.

But no real satisfaction had come, and Alex was beginning to wonder if her three-year, drably manipulative relationship had done something to dent her confidence for good. Men had caught her eye, of course, but she had always looked shyly away, suddenly finding herself in a hurry to be somewhere else. A chatty and handsome fellow tourist, an American, had bought her an Aperol spritz, and she had politely said goodnight twenty minutes later. She had been strikingly, painfully attracted to a shy, slender and soft-faced waitress, who had slipped her a second limoncello-heavy, slushy cocktail on the house as she sat in the long shadow of the cathedral. That time she had stood up, woozy and unsteady on her feet, and collapsed back to her apartment to sleep it off.

This hadn’t, in fact, been the end of it: the long nap might have banished the alcohol, but it had done nothing to make her any less horny. Alex had dropped her clothes on the terracotta floor of the bedroom, walked naked to the bathroom and taken a very hot, very long shower; acting on a sudden whim, she had shaved every visible hair from her neck downwards, with lingering care, admiring in the mirror the various shades and textures of her bare skin. Afterwards, she had thrown open the doors to her balcony, as dusk began to fall and the street began to fill with jovial laughter, then lay back on the bed, her damp hair staining the pillows, and touched herself with the careful and meticulous interest of a new lover.

She had traced her collarbones, the muscles of her neck and the supple skin of her throat with her fingertips. She had forced herself to use a delicate, teasing pressure as she circled her nipples. She had found that she could produce, in herself, that evocative tingle of a partner applying a gentle pressure just inside her hip bones, and then enjoyed the distantly-familiar sensations as she stroked the taut skin on the mound of her pubic bone. She had lingered in the gentle, indirect sensations as she played with her outer lips, and then in the warm, saline pool she found when she finally let her fingertips slip between them.

The curtains fluttered, delicate in the light breeze, doing next to nothing to block the view from across the street. Alex made herself come three times in a row, using her hands alone, applying to herself as many sensations as she could, permitting herself a whimper that turned into a moan as she kneaded her clit and twisted a fingertip into her ass.

Outside in the street, someone had wolf-whistled.

—

‘*Buona sera*.’

It took Alex a moment to realise that the improbable was happening, and that the woman who was speaking was talking to her. It took her a moment longer to realise that the impossible was happening: the woman who was speaking was the waitress, from a different bar, who had got her staggeringly drunk, and mercilessly aroused, a few days ago.

‘*Buona sera*,’ she said, in her shakiest Italian.

‘*È libero questo posto*?’

Alex didn’t have a clue what this meant, but the other woman, after standing expectantly for a moment, took a step toward the stool across the high table, and gave a little sideways point at it from her hip. She smiled, and Alex giggled slightly back at her as she nodded.

Alex could, she decided, be forgiven for not having recognised the waitress straight away. Before, she had worn a simple uniform: a bland grey t-shirt, an apron, a ponytail. All of this she had dispensed with: she now wore a leather jacket, over a loose white top and skinny, ripped jeans. Her dark blonde hair now spilled in waves down to her shoulders, and a deep red lipstick stood in bold contrast to her eyes, which were a soft and crystalline blue. Alex’s stomach swooped.

‘*Sono Rosa*,’ the other woman said. She had slipped her jacket deftly onto the back of her seat, and she laid the fingers of a slender hand on her breastbone as she spoke.

‘*Rosa*,’ Alex repeated. ‘*Sono Alex*.’

‘*Piacere*,’ Rosa said.

‘*Piacere*,’ Alex repeated.

They both spoke in sombre voices, Alex’s still a little shaky, but as she met Rosa’s eyes, the slightest blush began to spread across her cheeks, and seconds later both of them had begun to laugh again.

The waiter melted back into view; Alex caught the word ‘Grillo’, the fruity and sharp white wine which she herself had drunk by the shockingly cold glass for much of her first week. She couldn’t help but notice that Rosa’s drink arrived a lot faster than her own had, but she was grateful: the two of them sat, now, in nervous silence. When the glass appeared, beading already with condensation, Rosa took a grateful sip and then placed it back on the table, where she became very interested in the base and the stem, circling them with a pair of caressing fingers.

‘Thank you,’ Alex began saying, ‘for the drink…’ she tailed off, and pointed down the road in the vague direction of the bar where Rosa worked.

Rosa smiled.

‘Did you like it?’ she said, and Alex was deeply relieved to hear Rosa begin to speak English too.

‘Yes,’ Alex said, and then, after a pause, ‘it made me sleepy.’

She thought better of telling Rosa what else an afternoon in her presence had done to her. But she did wonder, as she looked at the flirtatious way Rosa was playing with her wine glass, whether she might like to hear that story after all.

As if she had felt Alex watching her, Rosa drew her hand rapidly away, and then moved it self-consciously to play with her hair, tucking it repeatedly behind her ear on one side. It was a nervous, shy-looking gesture, but which had the effect of exposing more of her skin, the curve of her ear, the angles created by the bones of her cheek and jaw.

God, Alex thought. She is gorgeous.

Gradually, as Rosa drank her glass of wine and began to catch up to Alex, they spoke more easily, mostly in English but peppered with Alex’s lip service to Italian, which always made Rosa smile, in a way which grew steadily less self-conscious as an hour passed. Rosa asked Alex about her trip, about how long she was staying, about what she had left behind, and Alex found she opened up easily and archly, throwing in a few of the choicest shortcomings of her last relationship. Rosa’s self-consciousness, it turned out, did not extend to the subject of sex, details concerning which she gleefully requested, and which Alex provided.

What grew between them was not so much sexual tension as sexual relaxation. Rosa grasped expressively at Alex’s hands across the table. She said quite sincerely that what Alex must need, after three unhappy years with a man, was to be with a woman. The wide neckline of her top slipped gradually down onto one shoulder. Reasoning that she had nothing to lose and everything to gain, Alex waited until Rosa was walking back from the bathroom, then stood up and extended her hand slightly toward her. Rosa returned the signal as much as she needed to, taking Alex’s fingers and pulling her in, and then their lips met.

They kissed tentatively for a moment and then more deeply. Alex settled her other hand on Rosa’s hip. Her mouth was cool, and she tasted of the lingering, glassy nectarine flavour of the wine. Everyone else, Alex suspected, was watching them.

—

Alex fumbled around for her keys as they came to the big, heavy wooden door of her building. She had them in her hand when Rosa slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her back against the wood. As they kissed more hungrily this time, Rosa’s hand came up to stroke Alex’s hair from her face, and then to caress with gentle fingers the soft skin behind her ear, at the corner of her jaw, and down the sinews of her neck.

It felt as though the whole left side of her body relaxed at Rosa’s touch, and Alex shuddered, hard enough that Rosa noticed, pulled away from her for a moment, looked deeply into her eyes and smiled. Alex paused too, looked back at Rosa and reminded herself to take in every part of her soft-featured, self-effacing beauty, feeling she could now grant herself the time to enjoy it properly, safe and secure as she was in the knowledge that, once the door was opened, she was going to lead Rosa up the granite staircase to her apartment, scatter her clothes across the terracotta floors, and fuck her until the sun was starting to rise.

She wished she knew how to say all of this in Italian.

The trip upstairs turned out to be a lot slower than Alex had envisioned. They lingered on the first landing of the staircase, in fact, for long enough that the timer-operated lights in the building clicked off, dropping them into total darkness. They both laughed and kissed again, and Alex savoured the heightened sensations, now that they were blind, of Rosa sucking gently at her bottom lip, and the taste of Rosa’s cool and softened tongue in her mouth, the delicate skin of her cheek, and the woody, herbaceous scent of her hair. She pressed her face into the warm hollow of Rosa’s neck and breathed deeply for a moment, and then she felt Rosa’s hand sliding deftly up her skirt, and remembered how impatient she was to get upstairs.

In fact, it was Alex’s own clothes which hit the floor first. As she closed the door behind them, Rosa, who hours ago had been shy and blushing, seemed happy to take the lead, and Alex was grateful; the memory of those three years with the same man, again, flickered through her head, quietly telling her that she wouldn’t know what to do with her hands or her mouth. Rosa’s hands, though, were less hesitant, deftly allowing Alex’s skirt to fall to the floor, beginning to lift her top over her head as the two of them stumbled toward the bed.

Alex had again left the doors to the balcony open; this time there was quiet outside, and only a gentle shaft of moonlight fell through as the curtains flickered in the breeze. She could just see a narrow strip of the sky, a few stars in it, from her position on her back on the bed, as Rosa eased her panties down her thighs and threw them aside.

‘*Come sei bagnata*,’ Rosa said.

Alex didn’t know what this meant, but from the breathless tone of voice, she guessed it meant that Rosa was as excited as she was. Any uncertainty she might have felt passed quickly: a second later, Rosa’s mouth was on her, kissing her cunt as delicately as she had kissed her mouth. Her tongue was delicate and unassuming, licking her with short and gentle strokes, but her lips were strident. Alex sighed deeply, her weight collapsing somehow even deeper into the bed as Rosa’s lips closed around her clit and sucked her with a practiced and steady pressure.

‘*Amo il tuo sapore*,’ Rosa said, as she took her mouth away for a moment, gently stroking Alex’s inner lips with a fingertip as she looked up at her. ‘*Ti piace cosi*?’

Again Alex didn’t understand, but she heard a question, and said ‘*sì*’. She had the feeling that, regardless of what Rosa might want to ask her tonight, the answer would be yes.

She gasped. Still looking up at her, Rosa slid her middle and ring fingers into Alex’s cunt, gently twisting and fluttering them inside her while that now-familiar smile played across her features, her lips still glistening slightly in the moonlight. Alex writhed as Rosa moved her fingers in deliberate, teasing motions, then whimpered as Rosa slowly pushed her fingers knuckle-deep into her, carefully hooking them inside her as she returned her mouth to Alex’s clit.

Caught between an urge to cry out and a strange respect for the calm and crystalline night outside, Alex frantically stuffed her knuckles into her mouth and bit them, hard enough to hurt. She moaned into the bones of her hand as Rosa fell into a slow and delicious rhythm, her fingers massaging just the right spot inside her, her tongue drawing circles on her clit. In what seemed like mere moments later, Alex sunk into an orgasm which radiated outwards from Rosa’s touch, tingling in her feet and echoing in her head.

Alex’s lay back, her eyes closed, and felt Rosa withdraw from her for a moment, planting a few tickling kisses on her thighs as she went. It was so very strange that, a few days ago, she had lay in this exact position, a little earlier in the day, and made herself come, and imagined roughly the kinds of things which were happening to her now.

She was struck by the bizarre notion that everything that had happened since then was one extended version of the same fantasy, and her eyes burst open in a brief frenzy. She blinked, and she was reassured: framed by Alex’s spread thighs and softly lit by the moonlight, Rosa stood at the foot of the bed, slowly and carefully undressing. The wedge of her hair which was lit looked almost white, and it cascaded now over her face. She stuck her thumbs into the waist of her jeans and underwear together and eased them down her slender hips. She twisted on the spot as she pulled her shirt over her head, and the moonlight caught the delicate skin of her stomach. Finally, she added her bra to the small pile she had made of her clothes, and Alex remembered that she hadn’t yet removed her own, which now she did.

Rosa joined her on the bed and fell gratefully on her breasts, kissing her nipples with attention and care, kissing her sternum, then eventually kissing her mouth. Alex tasted herself on Rosa’s lips and her tongue, musky and salty and sweet. Rosa’s thigh fell in between her own.

Gradually, as they lay with their bodies bound together, their skin radiating warmth as the cool of the night air washed over them, Alex allowed her hands to grow bolder. She savoured those places where Rosa’s skin was the softest: her wrists and forearms, her stomach and the bottom of her back, the base of her neck. She pinched Rosa’s nipples, so pale and pink that they were almost invisible in the semi-darkness, hard enough that she moaned, and then kissed them tenderly.

Eventually she drew her fingers through Rosa’s warm and dripping slit, and felt her whole body shudder in response, and then carefully licked her fingers clean and kissed her, the taste of them both mingling in their mouths. Hungrily, Alex fell between Rosa’s legs and allowed her lips and tongue to explore every millimetre of Rosa’s hips, her thighs and, as Rosa grasped at her hair and whimpered desperately, her shockingly wet cunt.

Rosa threw back her head and gasped ‘*sco per venire*’, and Alex knew exactly what she meant.

—

The sounds of morning came unevenly through the open doors of the balcony; the breeze through the curtains, the muffled clatter of feet on cobblestones, the singing of far-off seagulls. And closer at hand, as Alex lay there with her eyes still closed and the sheet loosely covering her, was the soft and even breathing of Rosa. She reached out a hand and made contact first with the small of Rosa’s back, and she stroked it for a moment before she opened her eyes.

Rosa lay on her stomach, her face angled toward Alex, who reached out and brushed some strands of hair from her face.

‘*È così presto*,’ she said, and kissed the back of Alex’s hand with her eyes still closed.

It’s so early.

It wasn’t. As Alex contemplated the sun streaming into the room and casting a brilliant light on the thin white sheet which outlined the contours of Rosa’s body, she felt quite certain that she had missed her flight. She didn’t mind at all.

Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/hpaawh/la_scorsa_notte_ff