Midwinter greetings, people! Here is an exactly seasonally appropriate short story for you. It was written about five years ago and tagged on to a self-published novella, but today seems like a good day to share it in its entirety. For those who liked Black Heart, it features earlier incarnations of some of the characters. And sex in the snow.
Solstice Yells
Malorie stood in the doorway at the bottom of the brick staircase that led from their flat to the yard at the back of the shop, her beautiful floor length leather coat thrown on over a too-big, old black t-shirt and Ricky’s other pair of DMs, unlaced. He banged the back of the van shut and saw her glancing petulantly at the sky.
‘It is going to fucking snow. It’s nearly Christmas, what the bloody hell does it think it’s doing, trying to snow at Christmas?’
‘Go back to bed,’ he said, trying for stern and not making it. Her nose was red with the cold, her silver-blonde hair a tangled mess, but she still looked horny as hell, he thought. She did that exaggerated bratty pout of hers as the cold wind rattled some dead leaves by the gate, and then winked at him, the way she often did mid-bottoming, knowing it drove him wild. There hadn’t been any heavy roleplay half an hour ago, no time or inclination for it first thing in the morning. It had been bloody freezing indoors, too, cold enough inside the bedroom for her to keep that baggy t-shirt on when she got on top of him. Cold in the bedroom but hot enough inside her for his cock, gorgeously warm and wet as she rode him. He had slid his hands up under the t-shirt to hold her breasts and rub his thumbs over her nipples while she pinned him down and moved on him, both of them ignoring the shrilling of the alarm clock. It had been a quick, basic fuck but a good one, an almost-guilty pleasure for him given that he’d meant to let her sleep longer. No reason for both of them to start the day this stupidly early, after all. But when it was done and she’d rolled off him and back under the duvet he’d kissed her and gone to shower; showered and dressed, he’d made his way down the back steps, thrown open the shop’s rear doors and got on with loading the rope spiderweb and its frame into the van. He came back to the stairwell and kissed her hard. ‘I’ll be back this evening. See how we feel about going to Natasha’s thing.’ She wrapped her arms round him, hugged tight then let him go.
‘Drive safely, love. Give them my best wishes, or Solstice greetings or whatever. Should be a busy day.’
‘Go back to bed, then,’ he said again, but he knew she wouldn’t. She’d be into the shop within minutes, running around and rearranging everything to take advantage of the space released by the departure of the spiderweb piece. He got into the van and started the engine, watching her go back up the stairs before he actually moved off.
Thrillers, Ricky and Malorie’s fetish/bdsm/sex shop didn’t do much in the way of dungeon furniture to sell, usually only keeping one or two items that were regarded by their makers as long-term loans and advertising tools. But the House of Correction in Sheffield had wanted to buy the bondage web as listed on Sinmasters’ website, and they had wanted it for their Midwinter Night event, and there hadn’t been time for George at Sinmasters to build another one, so they had paid an extra £100 to have the one from Thrillers and for Ricky to drive it up to their club, so there was Ricky on the shortest day of the year in a borrowed Transit van, onto the motorway and heading north into what looked like shitty weather. Neither of them were religious, just another of the many things they had in common, but he had a sneaking fondness for that old marking-of-days thing, keeping of festivals, and Malorie didn’t mind about it in the least, having something of a gleeful flair for updating the shop’s decorations at the least excuse. A week or two back, she’d picked up a selection of slightly battered second hand Father Christmas figures from a car boot sale they’d gone to with a mate who was an inveterate crap-collector, and she’d been fitting the damn things out with tiny bondage accessories and installing them round the shop ever since.
By 10 am, the snow that had been spattering the windows of Thrillers had stopped, leaving the pavement outside glistening wet, with a few lightly-dusted white patches here and there at the edges. Malorie picked up the can of silver glitter paint and got spraying. She had rung Dizzy about an hour after finalising the sale of the spiderweb, and luckily the eccentric propmaker had not only liked her idea but had been able to complete the commission. ‘Straightforward flat on a couple of weighted planks, shaped like a Christmas tree, with rings for cuffs and that – no problem, got a nice bit of wood here not doing anything, girlie.’ It wasn’t that much of a silly idea really: Dizzy would give them a discount on the build cost anyway, their profits were healthy and a Bondage Christmas Tree would be a talking point in the shop for the next fortnight and could be hired out to fetish photographers and different clubs’ festive special nights for the next few years, and spend the off-season times in their own private playroom upstairs. Dizzy had painted it black but Malorie had wanted to finish off the decoration herself.
Once she’d sprayed the tips of the branches with a thick enough sparkly coating, she capped the paint and stuck it behind the door to the flat before heading for the display cabinet that housed the current selection of handcuffs and fetters. Better pick a basic set they had a few of in stock really – or something that was sitting there not selling and might be more fun put to actual use. Malorie grinned to herself and went and turned up the music she’d selected: a compilation of the worst novelty Christmas hits from the past 30 years.
Denise sat quietly in the front of the van, watching the snow get thicker in the headlights’ beam. She was beginning to think it might have been better to outface her family’s wrath and stay in Sheffield for the festive season: either that or brave the engineering works on the railway given that at least they’d have put her up in a hotel for the night if they couldn’t get her home. But the idea of getting a lift from the infamous Ricky Smith had been slightly too tempting to pass up. She sneaked another look at him and pressed her thighs together. There was a definite spark between them, she knew; they’d found plenty to chat about for the first hour or so and though the conversation had rather languished once the weather worsened, the atmosphere was still amicable. More than amicable, it was lightly but deliciously charged. The few pictures of Ricky and his partner Malorie Jackson that popped up every now and again on fetish websites’ clubbing galleries or feature pages had shown her he was a good looking man, but it was more the stories that had aroused her interest. The pair of them seemed to incur as much rage as admiration, she’d often felt. Whether it was because some people didn’t like switches, or moaned about anyone who actually made a living out of the BDSM scene, or whether it was all that business about these two being bad people to cross, Denise had just found them intriguing for quite a while. Particularly Ricky, and now here she was in his van. Stuck in his van, pretty much, now that they had been obliged to get off the motorway after a succession of lane closures, and the snow had been falling relentlessly for the past half hour.
‘Do you think we’ll get through all right?’ she ventured as the van’s wheels seemed to slither beneath them.
‘Should do,’ Ricky said, squinting through the windscreen. His fair hair fell over his face and he lifted one hand to shove it back yet again. ‘Don’t worry, I know where we are. Just wish I’d not forgotten to charge the fucking phone up back at the club.’
Lights in the distance grew larger, and within a minute or so another car had passed them, lumbering steadily along though it was impossible to see what make it might be, and Denise noticed that, in the middle of the other lane as well as in theirs, there was a growing band of white between wheel tracks.
‘Um, mine’s all right, I think,’ she said. ‘If we do get stuck, I mean. I’d be able to ring the AA or whatever.’
‘Probably be a long wait for the buggers though, wouldn’t it?’ He turned his head to smile at her and she felt an abrupt cramping shiver of lust run through her. ‘We’d have to huddle together for warmth.’
Ricky had been rather taken with Denise the minute he set eyes on her. She was small and slightly boyish in shape, with spiky light brown hair and her attitude was a kind of diffidence that wasn’t weakness, more a matter of keeping her thoughts to herself. He had a pretty good idea that she found him attractive, though, and that was just fine by him. It took a certain mix of qualities to be, or want to be, house sub in a club like House of Correction, and that she’d been introduced to him as one spoke well for her. The promoters, a couple of cheerfully vulgar Yorkshiremen, didn’t put up with anyone who was fucked up or crazy or stupid in their loose circle of club crew, so he had known she wouldn’t give him any crap on the journey home so he hadn’t minded at all being asked to give her a lift. And, to be honest, with the journey turning out to be this much of a pig he was glad of the company.
They crawled steadily up a hill, crested the top and began to move downwards. Now the snow seemed to lessen in its fury, for which he was not ungrateful, even if being stuck in a snowdrift with a girl like Denise might have been entertaining.
‘I read something once about screwing in the snow,’ he remarked. ‘Supposed to be a BDSM experience all on its own. You ever done that?’
‘Would it work, though?’ Denise said. ‘I would have thought any bloke who took his clothes off in the snow would find it pretty much impossible to get a hard on.’
‘I think you’d be thinking wrong, though,’ Ricky replied and, to his delight, Denise simply said, ‘Well, prove it.’
Denise was slightly surprised at her own daring, yet aware that her physical responses were way ahead of her verbal ones. She could feel her nipples tightening at the realisation Ricky was flirting with her, and couldn’t resist throwing him a bit of a challenge. He said nothing, and she wondered if she’d offended him, but then realised he was bringing the van to a halt at a point where the road widened out into some sort of layby.
‘Oh, nothing’s impossible around me, girl,’ he said, putting on the handbrake. She stared at him for a moment, able to see him in the odd heightened glow of the snowy landscape, and then he put a hand on her shoulder, leaned in close and kissed her hard, lips closed until she parted hers, then his tongue slid into her mouth. He broke away first, but before she’d had time to realise it, he was saying, ‘Come on then, let’s try it,’ and reaching behind him to open the van door.
The sky was darkening steadily, but the snow had in fact slowed down its assault and almost stopped: still, as she slid across the seat to jump down from the van, she saw the soft, thick mass of it was almost up to Ricky’s ankles. Apart from one huge tree at the edge of the layby, there was nothing but white-covered fields, divided here and there by hedges or fences, and some distance away a cluster of buildings in whose windows lights were beginning to glow. With the van between them and the road, given the way it curved down the hill it was highly unlikely that anyone would see them even if another vehicle did happen to be heading this way, and Denise felt full of a sudden wild exhilaration.
‘You really reckon we should get naked?’ she asked, unfastening her heavy black wool coat. Ricky grinned at her, clearly considering it. ‘You game? I dare you,’ he said, stripping off his own leather jacket and tossing it back onto the driver’s seat. Denise caught her breath for a moment, sudden vague childhood memories of snowbound travellers’ tales and the effects of hypothermia popping into her mind, then just as quickly out of it. She leaned back against the van to remove her low-heeled boots, tugging the socks off with them, and undid her jeans, watching Ricky pull his sweater over his head and start unbuttoning the flies of his Levis. Her nipples were up, tight and hard, and though it was partly the cold causing it, her excitement was intense, stoked by the glorious stupidity of what she was about to do. They finished stripping within seconds of each other, shoving their clothes back inside the van, and then Ricky took her in his arms again. His body felt blazing hot against hers, in contrast with the icy air, and it was impossible to judge whether she was shivering more with exposure or with arousal. To her delight, he hadn’t been lying about the possibility of staying hard, his cock was a rigid staff of warm flesh against her belly.
‘It’ll be a quickie, won’t it,’ he murmured against her ear, and she laughed. ‘This time it had better be.’
He went down to his knees, taking her with him, running his hands over her back and shoulders, kissing her neck and then moving his head down to suck on her nipples. ‘Who – who’s going on top?’ she gasped, wondering how it would feel to press the length of her body down into the icy whiteness.
‘You want me to be a gentleman, or a bastard?’ Ricky smirked. ‘Cos I’ve got a better idea, get on your hands and knees.’
Seeing the sense in what he said, she turned away from him and tipped herself forward, going to her elbows in the snow, spreading her knees and thighs. She turned her head as far as she could to see him as he stroked her clit and pussy, opening her, probing the wetness of her sex, but the light was fading fast now and she couldn’t crane round all the way. She felt the head of his cock at the entrance to her quim, and parted her thighs a little further, wanting him inside her, and then there he was, gliding in, covering her back with his hot body, wrapping his arms around her and stroking her breasts, and now the cold didn’t matter at all. The snow shifted and crunched underneath her as she pushed back against him, her breath making steamy little puffs. His cock in her cunt was a kind of elemental heat, she rarely came from basic fucking but often felt, as now, that the fact of fucking was enough, that there was pleasure to be had in the sheer experience, but now his hand was skating down her body, feeling for her clit, and he started to rub her there while he was filling her with his rod, and it was all right there, right in the spot, a dizzying mixture of hot, cold, audacity and surprise, fucking this man right here right now, and Denise tensed her shoulders and neck and suddenly let out a real howl of release, her body jerking in climax.
Ricky was away with the sensations as well, riding the thrill of it, his awareness almost entirely concentrated in his cock, buried deep in Denise’s juicy quim. She had a lovely body, not too sparse and not flabby, she just felt damn good to fuck. He hugged her as he moved with her, remembering to find her little love button and caress it, clenching his arse cheeks and driving in harder. He hadn’t been quite sure how it would work, despite the bravado, it was bitterly cold but at the same time that enhanced the excitement. And now she was shaking and gasping and her cunt muscles clamping down on him; almost in surprise he gripped her tighter, thrust in harder and came.
They rolled over in the snow, laughing in exhilaration and helping each other up. ‘Come on, quick, back in the van, before Farmer Parmer on his tractor comes out hunting up his sheep and catches us,’ Ricky said. He grabbed her hand and pulled her round to the back doors of the van, clumsily yanking them open.
‘I’ve got a couple of old blankets in the back, here; let’s have a quick rub down.’ It was much darker inside the vehicle, but there was enough of a reflecting glow from the rising moon for him to find some ratty old rug and bundle it round her, scrubbing her through it while he yanked a similar mothfest round himself. Both of them were shivering now, teeth chattering, but once he’d switched on the inside light and dredged up their clothes from the front seat, getting dressed made the cold start to diminish.
‘Got everything on?’ Ricky said after a few minutes. ‘Right, let’s get moving. We can get back on the motorway in about twenty minutes, and stop somewhere for coffee.’
Denise couldn’t help giggling at that. ‘Isn’t it more normal to have the coffee before the fuck?’ He was at the back of the van now, opening the door so they could run round to the front seats. ‘Yeah, but who needs normal?’ he said.
Outside Thrillers, the snow was still falling, but rather half-heartedly. Malorie looked at her watch, sighed and moved towards the front door, intending to lock it. Trade had been pretty good, lots of people dropping in for assorted naughty novelties: OK so it had mostly been small stuff, but the volume had been there. Her thoughts strayed briefly once again to Ricky and how he might be doing on the journey home; she had a feeling the weather might be a whole lot worse further north. If it was really awful, she hoped he’d have the sense to hole up in some Travelodge somewhere.
She’d tried ringing him about an hour ago, but gone straight to voicemail. She hoped that meant he was just somewhere with a shitty signal rather than having let the battery run out, it wouldn’t be great to get himself stuck in a ditch somewhere with no mode of communication. She gave herself a slight shake and turned the shop sign round to Closed, locking the door and throwing the bolts. Ricky would be fine, he would be home soon. She ran through the contents of the kitchen cupboards in her head: there was plenty of soup she could heat up when he got there. Then maybe they could slip back downstairs into the shop and try out the naughty Christmas tree.
Ricky drove the van through the gateway into the yard behind the shop and parked it up with a sigh of relief. The air was icy cold and getting colder, when he dropped Denise at the top of the road where her parents lived, the Arctic blasts as she opened the van’s door had startled the pair of them.
They’d parted with a hug and a kiss and mutual good wishes, he thought they might well meet again at some point, but his focus had switched entirely to getting home without any mishaps. Jumping out of the van, he looked up at the balcony of their flat and saw the kitchen light was on, and it was only with a real effort that he took the stairs, which were getting slippery with ice at the edges, at a sensible pace. Malorie was opening the door before he’d reached it, imperious in her high-collared thick pink sweater and PVC jeans.
‘What time do you call this? You’re at least three minutes late.’
‘Yeah, but you can do a lot in three minutes, can’t you?’ Ricky said, putting his arms around her and revelling in the heat of her body, detectable even through the layers of clothing. Malorie wriggled her hips comfortably against him, pushing hard, feeling his cock start to harden. ‘Did you miss me, then? Or were there a few nubile hitchhikers to play with?’
Ricky kissed her. ‘Just the one. And she wasn’t a hitchhiker, she’s one of the HOC crew. Nice girl. Might be worth asking her round to play some time.’ He ran his hands down over the curve of Malorie’s bottom. ‘Or we could take a trip up North together in the New Year.’
‘Nice idea,’ Malorie agreed. ‘OK, do you want some soup, or a fuck, or just a hot bath and an early night, or shall we go to Natasha’s party?’
‘In any particular order?’ He started unbuttoning his coat.
When the phone rang, Malorie was the one who went to answer it, as she was – for once – the closer to being ready to go out. As Natasha’s party was a small affair for close friends, Ricky had decided that it would be a good night to bring out his tarty alter ego, and was therefore tightly corseted in black latex and making full and free use of Malorie’s make up. Malorie padded into the kitchen and snatched up the phone with one hand while opening the fridge to extract a beer with the other. The caller was Natasha herself, the usually cool and commanding dominatrix in a state of incoherent distress: the cold snap had done something appalling to her central heating and it had completely given up the ghost a couple of hours previously.
‘The whole flat’s fucking freezing, no engineers will come out till tomorrow and Les has just knocked the Christmas tree over. So I’m basically calling to say it’s all messed up and the party’s off, sorry love.’
‘Oh Nat, come on,’ Malorie said, the idea instantly presenting itself, fully formed. ‘Look, has Les got the car? Well stick the food and stuff in it, and send him round here, we can party in the shop. And you can stay with us tonight, both of you if need be. Just ring everyone else and tell them to come here, and stick a note on your door or something.’
Once she’d obtained Natasha’s almost tearfully grateful agreement, she opened the beer and went back to the bedroom with it. She’d been planning to keep the existence of the new festive bondage frame from Ricky till the morning, but now there was a sudden and irresistible opportunity to inaugurate the thing and give her lover what he most needed and deserved.
‘Hey slut,’ she said, and he swung round, lipsticked lips parting in anticipatory delight as he read the look in her eyes.
‘Ever fancied being the fairy on a Christmas tree? Because tonight’s your lucky night.’
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO YOU ALL