“Excuse me—excuse me…oops! Sorry about that…”
Juggling an armful of hard seltzers, Melanie shouldered her way through the throng of festival goers, shouting and stumbling as she went. The wait had been so long at the drink stand that the concert was nearly at an end. It was well past midnight now—pitch-black and muggy and roaring loud.
Melanie hastened as best she could through the din and the darkness. The distant glare of the stage lights through the haze of fog and pot smoke was all she had to illuminate her course. Packed in like sardines, the cheering crowd surged around her, against her, a balmy, intoxicated crush of human bodies that thankfully happened to propel her forward.
Even if the ground hadn’t been uneven, it would have been tough going. For about the fiftieth time that day, Melanie cursed herself for wearing these stupid platform heels. She’d wanted a few more inches of height, sure. But mostly she’d wanted to look sexy, and now she was paying the price. Every few steps she almost fell—and surely would have, if not for how tightly-packed the crowd was.
Her short skirt kept riding up her hips. Dangerously high now. She swore she could feel a draft licking the undersides of her ass cheeks. Her arms were too full of seltzers to even think of tugging that wayward hem back down again. She’d just have to trust that things were too dark and distracting for anyone to notice her ass was hanging halfway out.
The frosty aluminum drink cans raised gooseflesh on her arms and chest. Her braless breasts chafed against the ripped clingy fabric of her blouse. Another sexy fashion flourish she was presently regretting. Melanie grit her teeth at how painfully tight her standing nipples had become. Hefting up the seltzers, she soldiered on ahead, toward her gaggle of scantily-clad college girlfriends.
She found them more by luck than anything. She shouted and tried to wave awkwardly with her elbow, but they didn’t notice her until she was practically right on top of them. Clutching each other, they laughed and swayed as they drunkenly sang, too high on the experience—among other things—to even remember she’d gone for more drinks in the first place.
“Mel!” they cried, noticing her at last. “You’re back!”
“You got more booze—hell yeah!”
“What a doll!”
Melanie grimaced as her faded friends swarmed her. Tottering, shrilling and sweating, they clamped onto her with hot, heavy hugs that made her feel like a life preserver at maximum capacity. As she started to sink under the drunken weight of them, a new beat began to blare from the stage. Her friends broke from her with seltzers in hand, screaming.
“Oh my God—oh my fucking God! It’s the hidden track from Dead Idols! They’re playing it, they’re actually playing it!”
“My favorite song ever!”
“Mine, too! Holy shit…!”
Her friends weren’t the only ones losing their minds. All around Melanie the crowd was clamoring and seething, going wild. She was swept almost off her feet in the commotion, jostled this way and that. She’d barely had time to feel relief at being unburdened of the frosty drinks when she glanced around and realized she’d been separated from her friends again. Hopelessly so, it seemed.
“…Damn.”
The noisy throng was still herding her onward. It felt about as close to crowd surfing as she’d ever come. Probably about as close to crowd surfing as a person could get while still remaining vertical. Melanie had never expected to get this close to the stage. Wherever her friends were, she figured she’d outdistanced them.
The glare of the strobe lights blinded her, even through the haze. The electric shriek of the guitars tore across her eardrums, making them hum in the afterburn. A pleasurable sort of pain. Melanie felt a surge of adrenaline, raw excitement. She put her hands to her mouth and howled along with the rest of the raving crowd.
Her heart hammered. Her throat ached. Her nipples were hard again from the sheer frenetic energy of it all. She wasn’t even a big fan of this band. At least not as rabid for them as her friends were. Apart from being ‘the responsible one’ of the group, she hadn’t considered it a great personal sacrifice to be the designated driver for the night. None of those seltzers she’d been fetching had been for her. After the hassle and stress of getting them, she’d been itching for a taste. But now, pressed so close to the vibrant thrumming electric heart of it all, she felt mellow, lax.
Her whole body vibrated, a tuning fork to the rhythms pounding through the ground, through the air, through the teeming crowd. Resonating in her flesh and blood. She scintillated with it, this collective pulse. She’d never imagined she could be aroused by music, but that was exactly how she felt. It was intoxicating. For once, she stopped stressing, overthinking. She stopped thinking consciously at all. She committed herself to the sensual experience. Her soul stripped loose from its uptight restraints and ferried away.
Then the song ended. As the band struck up another, Melanie wasn’t jarred so much by the change in music as by the change in the tide around her. Now instead of being urged forward by the crowd, she was being thrust back, just as randomly and unexpectedly. It was disappointing, but it wouldn’t have been anything worse than that—except that as Melanie was being forced backward, she lost her footing.
Her stomach dropped. Her left ankle rolled. She flung out her arms in a panic, pinwheeling them as she screamed. She knew it was in vain, all of it. Visions of being trampled to death in the shadowy stampede around her flashed before her eyes. But before she could land hard on her ass, a pair of strong arms caught her from behind, steadying her.
“You all right?”
It was a guy’s deep voice, yelling near her ear. Melanie’s eardrums rang. Her ankle smarted. She winced as she straightened against his chest, which felt wonderfully warm and solid to her in the clamminess of her fading fright. He’d have a nice voice too, she thought, if he wasn’t having to shout to be heard.
Melanie nodded in response to his question. She figured that would be better than trying to talk. As he started to let her go, her rolled ankle screamed in complaint. Melanie hissed, hunching. He took hold of her by the upper arms again. She sighed in relief.
“Did you sprain your ankle?”
She shook her head stubbornly, having no idea whether she had or not. She just knew that she wanted to make it to the end of the concert. He seemed to pick up on this. He didn’t let her go, and she didn’t want him to. It didn’t feel so bad with him supporting her, taking some of the pressure off.
It didn’t feel so bad at all.
“You can lean against me, if you want.”
Melanie did. Closing her eyes briefly, she relaxed against him, into his solidness and bracing warmth. He stood tall behind her, even in her impractically high heels. Her head barely reached to his shoulder. But her hips were about level with his. Realizing this, her stomach gave a strange little flutter.
It was bewildering. She had nothing to go on, really. She hadn’t even glimpsed his face. But somehow she could feel that he was an attractive man. In his voice, in his build and his presence, she could sense it. In his touch, too. His hands slid down her arms, sure and strong. Her bare skin prickled. When his arms went around her, Melanie forgot about the concert. For a second, she forgot to breathe.
“This okay?”
Haltingly, Melanie nodded. Her long ponytail rubbed against his shoulder, catching there in the knit of his t-shirt. Adhering to him in the closeness and the damp. In his firm embrace, she started to swelter. Her heart started to pound.
His body heat pervaded her, incensing. This close to him, she could smell the spice of his cologne, or maybe it was his aftershave. He’d been out here all night like her, sweating like her in the late evening sun and the hot thick of the crowd. He was a little musky, but it wasn’t unpleasant to her. Fastidious to a fault, Melanie was taken aback by just how not unpleasant it was. His masculine scent enticed her. Viscerally so. Each whiff of him was like a hook to the belly, drawing her back and in. Sex pheromones? she wondered, biting at the inside of her cheek.
In the midst of her seemingly one-sided fixation, he said suddenly, warm and close to her ear, “You smell really good.”
Melanie flushed. “So do you.”
There was no way he could have heard her. She’d barely spoken above a whisper. But somehow she felt he’d understood her, just like before when he hadn’t let her go. It was totally bizarre, totally foreign to her. She was no free-spirited hippie, but she couldn’t dismiss the intuition that she and this stranger were on the same wavelength. It felt natural to her, this attraction between them. Primal, even.
It was an intuition which sharpened as he pulled her closer to him. The song had changed again. This one was slower, more of a ballad. As the crowd around them waved and swayed, Melanie and her mystery companion swayed with them. In his arms like this, it was almost like slow-dancing.
One of his hands fell from her shoulder to hug her around the stomach. High up, just under her breasts. Melanie arched against him slightly, half-wishing he’d skirt those braless undersides. Chiding herself for the dirty thought, even as she willed it. She wasn’t that kind of girl. She was the furthest thing from a slut. Her friends even called her a prude, and as much as she’d resented it, maybe it was true. But the idea of her loose breasts resting on his forearm titillated her. Only her thin excuse for a shirt would be between them, then.
His arm raised up, and her breath caught. Her nipples hardened as her breasts pillowed against him, faintly quivering. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. It was just incidental. So, too, she convinced herself, was the way his thumb curved against her, denting just barely into that tender outer swell.
His fingers settled into the spaces between her ribs. Melanie could feel the pressure of his touch sinking into her. The heat of him bleeding into her. Before she even realized what she was doing, she rubbed her ass back against him. It was just a light graze. It could pass for nothing. Purely incidental, too.
But in rubbing him, she felt something hard pressing into her back. Something unmistakable. He had an erection, she realized, as her pulse kicked up another notch. He had a hard-on for her.
Still, she tried to rationalize it. It was just a reflex. A physical response to their closeness. Nothing more than that. Then she felt his bulge nudging her tailbone again, almost like a question. All rational thought flew out the window. All sense of propriety. She ground back against him, and his mouth fell hotly to her throat.
“God, you’re so sexy. I can’t stand it.”
Melanie’s breath hitched. A cord of desire cinched low in her belly like a livewire. She’d never felt turned-on like this. It was electrifying. Her upper body was trapped under the supporting beam of his arm, but she managed to angle up her hand enough to take hold of his. She urged him up against her, cupping his hand over her pebbled breast.
His fingers molded to her with the most blissful pressure. Melanie sighed. Her head fell back against his shoulder as he palmed her, kneading her over. When the pad of his thumb rolled over the point of her nipple, she arched and moaned.
The throbbing in her ankle had recentered. She could feel the pulse of her own arousal steepening in her core. Hot and liquid. She welled, dripping, just as his hand left her breast. She whimpered a little, but then she felt his fingers trailing down her ribs, down her stomach. He bumped over the waistband of her mini-skirt, bunching the fabric slightly. A terrible anticipation built in her.
Drugged with desire as she felt, Melanie experienced a moment of sobering clarity. She didn’t even know this guy. He could be an axe-murderer. Some kind of sexual deviant. Judging by the rapid escalation of his advances, he almost certainly was. All this aside, she was in public, for Christ’s sake. Her eyes darted around in the darkness, half-expecting to find at least one person amid the throng scowling at her in judgment. But no one was. No one was paying attention to anything except the band on stage.
A strange, wild thrill overtook her at the knowledge. She wasn’t sure if it was excitement or trepidation. Maybe it was both. She’d never have imagined she could be fondled in the middle of a crowded space and actually get away with it. Her modest, ladylike sensibilities would never even have conceived of the possibility. Now confronted with the reality, she found herself in total uproar.
As his fingers slipped beneath the hem of her skirt, she scrambled madly for purchase in this state of inner turmoil, which for her was akin to an identity crisis. What the hell was she doing? What on earth had possessed her? She blamed her too-sexy outfit. She blamed her peer-pressuring friends. She blamed her cheating ex and the unmitigated failure her last relationship had been. Pathetic as it was, she’d been hoping for a self-esteem boost, but this was insane—
Wasn’t it?
His questing fingers skimmed up along her trembling inner thigh. He found the delicate crease where her skin met her pantyline. He traced it. His fingertips wedged underneath the elastic band, and Melanie’s anxious brain short-circuited. She jumped in his hold. His touch stilled briefly.
Then she relaxed, and he resumed exploring her under the front of her panties. His fingertips carded through her close-cropped curls, charging her like a static shock to the senses. He pressed into the soft puffy flesh of her mound, feeling out the contours, finding the silky inner cleft of it.
Melanie gasped. Her clit was raring just a hairsbreadth below, but he didn’t touch it. He drew back and fed more of his hand under the tented front of her panties instead. The damp crotch stretched away as he moved his palm over her to cup her. His fingers curved down and in, seeking her hot wet core and finding it. He sucked in a breath.
“…Fuck.”
Melanie’s cheeks boiled. Her peaked chest heaved. She’d never have thought one word could transport her—especially that one—but it did. More raw lust was condensed into that one raspy syllable of his than she’d ever felt directed at her in her life. Her head felt perilously light. Her whole body felt light, incandescent.
He traced her dripping slit, tapping into it just barely. Melanie shook, biting her lip. Whimpering in her throat. The periphery was so sensitized from all the stimulation of the evening that she felt she could have come just from him stroking her there. But he ventured out to get the lay of her, exploring the supple whorl of folds, slicking them as he went. Intent on her, but also intent on being thorough.
For her own part, Melanie strove not to hyperventilate. Her knees felt weak, but his hold on her was as firm as ever. He wasn’t going to let her fall, she trusted. She trusted him unconditionally, inexplicable as it was. She trusted him with her body. She didn’t realize quite how deep this trust went until he lighted on her clit at last and swirled his fingers over it.
Melanie tossed her head back against him with a full-out, bedroom cry. The screaming cheers of the crowd swallowed up the sound like she and him were actually alone. Secluded together in plain sight. Melanie bucked in his hand, grinding her ass back against the bulge in his jeans like an animal in heat.
“You want it?”
Breathless, she nodded. She didn’t just want it—she needed it. She felt like if she didn’t have his cock inside her she was going to die on the spot. As if her urgency were contagious, she heard the tempo around them rising. She realized the show was hurtling toward its finale. Catching him in the cleft of her ass, she ground back on him in desperation.
He chuckled. She couldn’t really hear it, but she felt the tenor of the laugh reverberating in his chest. With a parting stroke to her clit, he withdrew his hand from her skirt. Her heart thudded off the rails as she felt him unfastening his jeans behind her, freeing himself.
Melanie’s vision spotted when she felt his hard hot flesh graze her under her skirt. She thought she might pass out. She breathed slowly through her nose, dizzy with lust and abandon. His naked cock slid down between her bare ass cheeks. He leveled his shaft against her, skirting the sodden crotch of her panties. He felt huge to her, wedged up against her like this. The length of him speared through her thigh gap, extending beyond it. She felt the head of his cock lifting the front of her skirt. Her head spun at the obscenity of the image. But here in the shadows, no one could see it. Not even her.
Nestled against him, Melanie made a needy sound in her throat. He reached under her skirt again, tugging the soaked little gusset of her thong aside. He pulled back between her thighs. His tapered crown glided over her pussy as she bent, trying to catch him inside her. She was so wet—almost too wet, she thought feverishly. He kept slipping right over her slick slit, driving her steadily insane.
Just as she was about to sob from frustration, he shifted his hips and breached her from behind. Melanie’s eyes screwed shut. Her jaw fell slack. Just the head of his cock was buried in her, and already she could tell it was by far the biggest dick she’d ever tried to take. As he pushed steadily into her, she wished she had something to hold onto. Maybe even something to bite down on. Her slit felt stretched to the splitting point, and he hadn’t even seated himself in her yet.
“You’re so fucking tight. Jesus…”
Melanie nodded absently. Personally, she felt the issue of size lay more with him. She wriggled as she tried to adjust to the magnitude of him. He’d finally come to a rest against her, within her. She experienced for the first time in her life what it felt like to have a cock butting up against the hard limit of her sex. Her cervix warped around him as she shifted a little in her heels. Melanie hissed out a breath. It was strange and a bit uncomfortable, the depth of this penetration.
But she liked it.
He withdrew from her, almost entirely. When he pushed back into her and started to move, his upward strokes hit shallower. After the cervical prodding, it felt like teasing. A different sort of exquisite torture. Melanie spread her legs as she groaned, bearing down on him back. Impaling herself on him. The outer curve of his cock stroked like pure heaven against that sensitive spot at the front of her fluttering walls. She’d never felt so wonderfully full, so perfectly fleshed-out.
“Are you gonna come for me?”
Melanie nodded so furiously she almost gave herself whiplash. Her clit throbbed in the open air. As his fingers sought between her folds for it, she shook her head. She’d never had a purely vaginal orgasm before, but then she’d never been fucked like this before, either. She felt that she could do it. She was teetering on the ragged edge already, and more than anything, she wanted it. She wanted to come on his cock alone.
He took his hand from her pussy and grabbed her by the hip instead. His panting mouth latched to her throat as he started to pound her out. Under her slinky ripped tank, her loose breasts jiggled with the force of his thrusts. Melanie cast a frantic glance around again. But just like before, no one seemed to notice that the two of them were rutting like horny animals right there in the middle of the pack.
As the last song crescendoed, so did they. Melanie’s thighs tensed. Her stomach clenched. Her pussy drooled, going almost numb from the pounding pleasure. As her walls spasmed around him, her fingers bit back into his thigh. He groaned into her neck as he came with her, surging up into her so powerful and deep that he forced her up onto her toes.
Melanie sagged in his arms, boneless. He slumped into her in turn, holding onto her as they rode out the waves of their shared euphoria. Inside of her, she could feel the staccato of his heartbeat, thumping in perfect tandem with her own.
As their joined pulses slowed, the music trailed off. Melanie came grudgingly back down to earth again. Regaining her bearings, she heard the crowd around them screaming and applauding for the last. The show was over.
She straightened up, and he did too. His spent cock slid out of her. As it did, the sobering shame set in. She felt empty, used. Filthy to the core. She tugged her skewed thong back into place, but it didn’t help much. She could still feel the shameful evidence seeping out of her.
Melanie clasped her burning face in her hands. She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe what she’d done—letting herself get raw-dogged and railed by a stranger at a music festival. It was beyond mortifying.
Around them, the roar of the crowd began to dim. The festival goers started to mill and slowly disperse. He was still supporting her, but part of her wished that he wouldn’t. Part of her wished that he would just go away.
Only a few minutes ago she’d had all these romantic ideas about him. What sort of person he must be. Maybe her soulmate, even. But now that she had the chance to turn around and talk to him, she couldn’t face him. She thought she might feel better if he just went ahead and ghosted her, pathetic as it was. When he started to turn her around by the shoulder, she stiffened.
“Listen—”
“Mel! Oh, thank God!”
“There you are!”
“We’ve been looking everywhere for you! We were so scared—we thought you’d been nabbed by some psycho.”
As one, Melanie’s girlfriends hurled themselves at her. The mystery guy’s grip on her fell away. By the time she’d prised her friends off, she realized that he was gone. Gone for good.
Melanie’s heart sank. So much for her theory about feeling better if he ghosted her…
As she and her friends headed for the exit gate, she tried not to let her disappointment show on her face. It wasn’t easy. With every step she could feel his leaked cum cooling in the crotch of her panties. Melanie cringed, feeling dirty and raw in more ways than one. Her only consolation was that it was the best sex of her life. But there was a double-edge to that, too.
“What’s wrong, Mel?”
“Yeah, you okay? You’re walking kinda funny.”
Melanie mustered a rueful smile. “Yeah,” she said to her sobering friends. “I just tweaked my ankle in these stupid heels, that’s all.”
“Oh. Okay…”
They were almost to the gate when Melanie felt a sudden touch on her shoulder. As her drunk friends trotted on, heedless, Melanie turned around. Her eyes widened when she saw who’d touched her. It was a guy—tall and dirty-blond and good-looking in a jockish way. He crooked a smile at her as he pressed something into her hand.
“You dropped this.”
Melanie hadn’t dropped anything, but she curled her fingers around what he handed to her anyway. He walked off, vanishing into the crowd that was funneling through the gates. As Melanie’s eyes followed after him, she noticed her friends halted up ahead of her, watching her curiously.
“Who was that, Mel?”
Melanie shrugged. “Just some random guy.”
Her friends exchanged dubious glances. But Melanie didn’t care. As they continued on ahead of her, she hung back and looked at what the random guy had handed to her. It was a ragged slip of paper. It looked like a torn-off piece of a receipt. She flipped it over and saw a phone number scrawled in pen on the back, and a name beneath it—
Jesse
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Original Publication Date: 12/12/23
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In Rhythm © CS Dark Fantasy