Hanna submerged herself in the dark water and then reappeared between my knees. She pressed her hands over her forehead to wring the extra water from her long brown hair and smiled.

“Ok, Adam, you’re next. Tell us something sexy.”

I thought for a minute, distracted by her palms bearing her body weight on the top of my bare thighs. I leaned forward and kissed her perfect mouth.

“I have sexy and sweet. Will that work?”

“It sounds even better,” she said into my ear, rolling the skin of my scrotum between her agile fingers.

…

I first met Samantha in our late twenties. She set up house in my imagination immediately, with her long brown hair and hazel eyes. She was little. Her genes, brought to New York by Sardinian immigrants fifty years ago, let her grow to just over five feet, and her preoccupation with her height drove her with an intensity that rivaled anyone I knew. Sam was used to running her own show – even as a child. I think that was part of what softened my heart to her.

We worked the same BLM engine together in the fire service. She was the leader for a trio of us who would drive out into the desert to back up a volunteer crew on a sagebrush fire or head the other way into the forest to track down the one smoldering ponderosa pine that had been lightning-struck days before. Sam tucked her femininity deep inside: inside her uniform, and inside her steady, guarded persona. But even in the shapelessness of our yellow and green Nomex clothing, I could read the curves of her body and there would be moments in the day when she would set down her Pulaski, wipe the sweat-streaked charcoal dust from her face, and be her open sincere self: absolutely radiant in the dappled light of the aspen canopy.

Like so many women in the fire service, Samantha had been forced to run a gauntlet of sexism that ranged from jokes, placed strategically on the boundary between humor and harassment, to sexual assault.  Always conscious of the potential hostility of her work environment and of her size, Sam would push herself physically much harder than the rest of us. She kept her emotions more buried. She never flinched at pain. She was determined to deprive anyone of a point of leverage – any way to use her physical self against her. And it took years to work through her armor. 

Sam and I were neighbors; her five-acres butted up against mine and we’d occasionally run into each other when I took a break from chopping firewood or when she was brushing down one of her horses. We were both pretty independent, so we’d go long stretches without seeing one another during the off-season. Every once in a while, I’d see visitors driving the long gravel stretch to her house, but I had no idea what she did for affection. I don’t know if I communicated my desire for her in my body language, but I tried to keep it in the background so that she had at least one safe place: one person she could let her guard down for. That was more important to me than fucking her.

And over the years, that trust brought me the deep satisfaction of her friendship. Our intimacy took the form of laughter at one another’s weaknesses. She saw my inability to ask others for help and mocked me affectionately over it. I could tease her about her hardness, her invulnerability, and the fear that I knew lurked beneath and that she had finally softened enough to acknowledge. We both saw, in the other, the marks of an eternal vigilance: an inability to ever completely put down the pager, the hoseline, the medical kit. We were always, in some small way, on the job. This recognition was our lovemaking.

…

“Are you on the job now, Beautiful?” Hanna kissed my forehead. I felt a wave of gratitude wash over me at her look of concern. In the shelter of the stars and the deep, black Rocky Mountains I smiled at her and at David. I brought them in for a three-way hug and kissed them both.

“I’ve never been more at ease in my life,” I smiled. “Thank you.”

Hanna seemed satisfied by my answer and held my hand in hers. “Continue, then, please.”

…

I got a text on a sunny October morning:

“I need a hand with my tailgate.”

And then a few seconds later:

“That’s not a metaphor.”

I replied back:

“Understood – lol”

“Enroute”

I pulled on a hoodie and walked through the shining frost to her driveway. Samantha was standing in the bed of her pickup. The morning sun behind her illuminated her exhalation like an aura, like dragon’s breath. She smiled.

“I’m still laughing at your message,” I said as I got near enough to be heard.

“I didn’t want to lure you over here on false pretenses,” she grinned. “This fucker acts up when it cools down.” She gestured at the offending tailgate. “Physics doesn’t permit me to hold the handle open and give the thing a swift kick.”

“I see what you’re saying,” I smiled. “I’ll take the dangerous end.”

I held open the handle and Sam gave the tailgate a severe whack in my direction with the heel of her heavy wildland boot. The resistance gave out with a satisfying thunk.

“Thanks!” she said happily. “I’ll take it from here.”

I saw the pile of split firewood that needed to be loaded. Sam was due to drop a cord off at Kate’s. Mrs. Wheelwright had lived in our town for all of her seventy-eight years, and she was only recently willing to let other people do her chopping for her. I started handing logs up to Sam so that she could set them in place in the bed. She gave me a smile acknowledging the time it would save her and a quick “Thanks”.

The rising sun had melted the frost and we rested against the bed, looking over the glorious green and gold morning.

“Coffee?” she asked. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Love some,” I smiled.

We stood side-by-side on her porch, outside her open door, with two steaming ceramic mugs between our palms. The caffeine diffused through our bodies with each pulse of our hearts. It was a miraculous gift each morning to smell and sip this remarkable fluid. Something about the visual magic of the day, the satisfaction of a bit of early morning work, and Sam’s uncharacteristic physical closeness opened me up – opened me completely.

We kept looking forward as we spoke: out onto the brightness of the morning, the yellow cottonwoods, the pale blue mesas beyond.

“You know I adore you, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. And a few beats later, “You know it’s mutual?”

I grinned on one side of my face – something she would understand about me well enough to know without looking.

“I’d hoped. Yeah -I guess I knew.” A pull of coffee.  “We’re solid, you and I. I value that more than anything.” I took another sip. “So, I hope you know that I’m coming from that kind of place when I ask this next bit.”

“Mmm-hmmm?”

“This bit about whether you’d like to add any benefits to our friendship.”

It was quiet for a while, but it was comfortable. It was OK. I hadn’t planned any of this, so I didn’t really have the time to anticipate or to be nervous about it. I might as well have asked her whether she thought we ought to change brands of class-A foam in the engine. I think that a part of me knew that the foam conversation might be more complicated, more heated than this.

“I’d like that,” she said softly.

We sipped our coffee. The reality of her sentence crept through me in the same energizing, fulfilling manner as the caffeine. After another sip, I stepped sideways, closing the gap between us. When I saw, in my peripheral vision, that she had turned to look up at me I took her mug, held both of ours in my right hand, and took her cheek in my left. We looked at one another with calm. With recognition. I leaned down and we kissed.

“Come on.”

Sam took my hand. I closed the door behind us, and she walked us upstairs. I’ve been watching her movements, her mannerisms, for years. There was something wholly new, however, in seeing her ascend her dark hardwood staircase. She had all her usual strength, her capacity, the same grace in her movement, but all of it was softer. I ascended closer to her and felt her long brown hair. I placed my free hand on her hip and felt her muscles lift her with each step.

In the bright blue morning light of her bedroom, she lifted my hoodie from the bottom and up over my head. We both smiled at my need to bend down a bit so that she could free me from it. Her hands went to the skin of my abdomen and chest under my t-shirt. I cradled her face in my hands and kissed her fully. We kissed hard as if making up for lost time: kissing as a measurement of the closeness we had been creating between us. We’d piled up the kind of sexual tension that romantic comedies are made of, and now we were finally free to explore it.

I unzipped her fleece jacket and took in the view of her in her sports bra. Her breasts filled it deliciously. Above them, her collarbones ascended to muscular, defined shoulders. Her belly was smooth and satisfying and I descended to my knees to kiss it. Her hands held me around my skull as I kissed and sucked at her and worked at her belt and jeans. Her fingers gripped my hair tighter as I stripped her to her thin blue cotton panties. Placing my hands over the arcs of her ass, I closed my eyes in pleasure and gratitude. I inhaled her.

“Those too,” she said.

Looking up at her soft, dreamy eyes, I slid her knickers down over her thighs, past her knees, over each foot. She was breathtaking above me and she grinned as she backed from my reach. Sam crawled backwards onto her bed, watching me as I unlaced my boots and then stepped free of my trousers. I walked to her, erect and slippery with lubrication, and crawled between her thighs to rest myself on top of her.

We kissed with the patience of a new beginning. We recognized the gift that we’d discovered and rather than ripping the paper and ribbons we caressed the knot and pulled it slowly. We felt the texture of the paper and unfolded it with care and fascination. Her fingers eventually found their way from my hair to my back. From my back to the bare skin of my cock. Mine, in turn, followed the contours of her body: her cheekbones and jawline, the pulse within her throat, the arcs of her breasts. I held her vulva gently in my palm and closed fingers. I felt the heat that radiated from this, the softest most personal part of her body. Our kisses carried our thanks. Our relief.

The chills that ran through my body are difficult to describe – but there was something transcendent about the way she massaged my wetness over my skin and tugged so gently. She fed me equal parts of satisfaction and desire: a fulfillment of my wishes with a new set of cravings queued right behind. I had her; and I needed her. I began to boil with a carnal hunger of violent intensity. Her breath – the gasps of pleasure as I stretched her labia and rolled her shaft within its silky hood - ramped up my arousal still further. When she grunted into my open kiss and flexed, spasmed, gasped and came, my pupils dilated and my cock swelled painfully within the grip of her shuddering arm and hand.

I rose to my knees and opened her thighs. Gripping them, I pulled her to me. She slid, bringing the blankets with her, arching and rolling as her pelvic floor continued to pulse. I watched the outward manifestation of it - the magical contractions of her perineum and anus - in fascination, just before pressing myself against her vulva and sinking into her. She greeted me with nails that carved trenches over the muscles of my back. I leaned in and rutted her like an otter.

…

“Wait…wait…” David seemed puzzled - nearly to the point of irritation. “Did you just say you fucked her like an otter? Who are you? Where’s your sense of metaphor?”

“Sweetie, be nice,” Hanna chided gently. She frowned at her husband and love-pinched him on the bicep.

“Yeah,” I laughed. “I get it. But hear me out. Otters are fucking cute – I get that – absolutely. But their cuteness is just a coincidence of their big frontal eyes and shit. Their nature doesn’t care that we think they’re velvety and cuddly. They’re badass, muscular animals. And their sex is no joke; it’s hardcore and fucking mean. They might make for adorable stuffies for little kids but they’re the rough-sex champions of the mammalian class.”

“I hear you, friend,” David grinned, “but rhetorically… seriously, Adam.”

I laughed out loud. “Yeah. You’re absolutely right.”

…

Sam ran her fingers down my back as I sank into her. I felt waves of frission crash over me at the feeling of her vagina’s grip around my cock and at her passionate embrace of the rest of my body. She wrapped her strong legs around me and pulled me tighter. Her nails held me tightly against her chest and we kissed and bit at one another in a noisy confusion of lips, tongue, teeth and spit.

“Fuck,” we both cussed, and I pulled her head into mine in the mistaken belief that I could somehow kiss her harder than I already had. She ground her pelvis at me forcefully, her hips lifting from the mattress and her thighs flexing with her effort. I took one fistful of her hair and another of her breast and ground into her with a sneer of arousal overlaying my kiss. She grunted, grabbed my hair in return, and yanked my head toward hers. Our teeth clashed noisily after a missed attempt with our lips and at one point she took my lower lip and bit into it so ferociously it drew blood.

I broke the grip of her legs and rolled her to her belly, punctuating the motion with a slap to her ass that bore the whole of my strength. Her spartan bedroom echoed with the sound of the impact and she barked in pain, combining it with a rapid “Fuck you!”.

We hadn’t established safe words. For two people who live their lives in a heightened state of situational awareness and who take safety incredibly seriously, this was an irony. I hit her again and called her a cunt. She lifted her haunches and taunted me with her reddened, breathtakingly beautiful vulva; I took her by the hips and fucked it. Our bodies smacked and squelched in our rage and pleasure. Winding her long brown hair around my fist like reins, I rode her: my selfless, deeply empathic friend. My boss, my colleague. My whore. My mare.

I pulled her toward me and pressed her back to my chest, both of us on our knees. We ground together and I took her shoulder in my teeth. She kept me there with her fist in my hair. I saw her other hand descend to her clit and that knowledge was more than I could bear.

My orgasm began as a long incoherent thread of profanities. I pressed as deeply into Sam as our bodies would allow, and there within her secure grip I felt her clench. Her pelvis began another series of twists and flexions that made her gasp and that brought me to immediate release. I felt the first surge and held her desperately. I kissed her skin wherever I could reach it and continued to spasm. My head swelled within her and she, in turn, compressed around me in the most intimate sensation I can imagine. There is absolutely nothing like the grip of kegels around a grateful penis. My oxytocin-addled brain was overloaded by pleasure and my whole world distilled down to that one singularity: that squeeze of her body around mine

~~~

I brought her a fresh cup of coffee, my penis still glistening from her - from us, I suppose.

“Shit, did I do that to you?” she asked, in response to the blood drying on my lip.

“The collateral damage was heavy,” I laughed, and I kissed the left cheek of her sore, reddened ass. My back was crisscrossed with lines like aerial contrails in various shades of crimson. We would both discover hickeys on surprising parts of our body later on in the shower.

She sipped her coffee and smiled sweetly. “I got more than I bargained for this morning.”

She kissed my nose.

“And you’ve got two fucked-up tailgates now,” I smiled. “Fucking lot of good I did you. That’ll teach you.”

“You’ll make it up to me later,” her eyes sparkled and narrowed with her smile.

Our next kiss was the first of many. Samantha is still one of the most important people in my life, but we only remained lovers for a few months after that. She took a job in Whitefish and I made my way south. But we transitioned out as beautifully as we transitioned in.

Sometimes it just works out right.

…

“Like with us,” Hanna said, and she kissed me sweetly and quietly on the mouth where I’d been bitten, as if to soothe the memory there.