Outside

She starts removing her clothes the moment she’s over the fence. Her top goes over her head, and for a moment she stands with arms raised and shoulders folded, her breasts heaving heavy against the satiny material of her bra. She’s looks so pale in the sunlight – her flat stomach and slender arms and shoulders all paper white apart from a slight blush of freckle that crosses the bridge of her nose.

The sun feels good, she says. Then she turns and is gone, unbuckling her bra behind her back as she goes. You follow as quickly as you’re able, scrambling over what’s left of the tall, barred fence. By the time your feet find ground on the other side she’s disappeared from view, but the trail of clothing she left behind is easy enough to follow.

Nobody comes out this way much anymore. And even those few hikers who do would never cross the fence. All the same, you pick up her top as you pass it, and pluck her bra from the low limbs of a tree like some odd fruit. Further up the dirt path you find her skirt, completely undone. Then her leggings, tangled in the undergrowth. You collect them up. Finally, splayed across the path like a provocation, her panties – little more than a scrap of black lace.

She is naked in the clearing, waiting for you. She smiles. Flicks back her pale red hair. You let her clothes fall to the ground in a pile and take a step towards her, but she holds up a hand. You can’t stop looking at her body – the way that everything is a curve that ends in another curve. No angles. No straight lines. The graceful weight of her breasts and the way he hips seem to narrow down towards her cunt like an arrow or a highway.

Why are you still dressed? she says. Because, of course, you are. You scrabble to unlace your boots, drag your t-shirt over your head, undo the fastener of your jeans. It’s difficult because you’re hard now, your cock pinned tight within your clothes. The sun feels good on your skin – buttery and warm, as though it’s a liquid and not just light. It feels good on your cock, when you finally free it, hot and engulfing.

Naked then, you move towards her, and she moves towards you, and you meet in the middle of the clearing. The sun has warmed her skin. When you run a hand down her side you can feel the radiant heat of it as if it’s inside her. For a while there’s no sound except the two of you kissing – the soft suck of your lips and the whisper of your bodies shifting against one another. Her hand encircles your cock and she flexes her fingers, turns her wrist. You look down just in time to see a glassy drop of pre-come burst itself into her grip.

From behind, she says, I want it from behind. And she’s kissing you, turning, rubbing her warm body up against yours. She’s on all fours and you’re behind her and she’s wet and slick and you slip right into her. There’s no other sound but birdsong in the clearing, and so you hear her groan with perfect clarity. You sink into her deep, and start to fuck, rolling your hips slow and languid.

Out here you both can be as loud as you wish. There is nobody to hear. Nothing but that soft sun on your skin and the open air. Strange, you think, how different it is when you don’t have to hush so that the neighbours won’t hear. When you can fuck on the surface of the earth with the sun on your skin, as though it’s something that isn’t shameful at all. You’ve never felt the sun on you while you’ve been inside her before. It’s never been possible. Only rushed, hushed moments, snatched privacy in one shuttered bedroom or another.

You push into her again, your hips against the curve of her buttocks. She wriggles, rears up on hands and knees, back arched. You wrap your arms around her and pull her warm body back against yours. You can feel something rising in pitch already, a tightening in your balls. It feels as though you’ve never really been able to feel it before – to pay attention to it so totally. To notice every little movement that she makes as you swell and twitch inside her, as she squeezes down against you, as her whole body ripples like a storm is running through it.

I’m coming, she whispers. And you are coming too, in the same moment. The exact same moment. You are clinging to her, and for a moment the limits of your sun-saturated body dissolve. For a moment you feel as though you’re floating, as though you’re breathing her, as though you don’t know where she stops and where your body begins. You dissolve. You spread. And even at the peak of it there’s no sound, no interruption, nothing surrounding you but birdsong.