“What was that?!” he yelled, thankful he was wearing a seat belt. Phoebe leaned forward, wiping the misty window with her hand. In front of them, only about a meter away, lay a large tree, the tangled abandoned mass of leaves and branches stretching from one side of the narrow lane to the other.
“Great,” Rupert muttered. Phoebe switched the car heater up and settled back in her seat.
“Look on the bright side—we could have been killed if we’d driven into it.” Surrendering, she smiled. “It’s wild out there, wild and unpredictable.”
As if in reply, there was a sudden loud crunch followed by a crashing just behind them. Both swung around—another tree had fallen, barely missing the back bumper by inches. This time it was a massive oak. It looked as if it might have been living for centuries.
“What is happening?” Rupert whispered, both terrified and awed by such carnage.
“This is,” Phoebe replied firmly, and turning around, she took his mouth in a long, deep kiss.
Rupert sank back against the seat as Phoebe, feeling blindly for the lever, pushed his seat back so that it was almost horizontal. Still kissing him, she slipped her leg over his waist and mounted him, her hands searching under his shirt, down into his trousers. Tongues still intertwined, Rupert moaned; he’d never wanted someone so immediately and without the usual courtship preamble, the crippling shyness he had on occasion experienced. The sheer sexuality of the situation felt almost spiritual to him. He didn’t think; his mind was blank except for the overwhelming drive to be inside her, to have his cock completely engulfed and buried within her. He tore off her jacket and then violently hoisted up her sweater; her ample breasts were cradled by a simple black cotton bra. The fullness and firmness of them amazed him (Penelope was small breasted) and he paused in his surprise.
Smiling down at him, Phoebe unclipped her bra, letting it slip down to the car floor. Her skin was milky white, her nipples wine red and large, and now pertly erect. She lifted his hands, fluttering her own fingers through his in imitation of the weather-telling gestures he used on TV.
“Cumulus or altostratus?” She laid his hands over her breasts, the nipples hard eager points in the center of his palms. An overwhelming sense of coming home flooded through Rupert—finally, here was a woman who spoke his language.
“Two large banks of fluffy white cumulus laced with sunshine,” he replied, abandoning himself entirely to the moment, his voice throaty with lust.
He reached across and, cupping one breast with both hands, took the large erect nipple between his teeth and bit down, ever so gently. Phoebe felt herself moisten; a delicious tingle ran like electric lines forming a vibrating taut triangle between each nipple and the tip of her clitoris. She wanted him so much it was as if she could taste him in the back of her mouth. One of Rupert’s hands found its way between her thighs, slipping in between the edge of her wet pants and her labia. He caught her hardened clit between two long fingers and began expertly pulling backward and forward.
“And what do we have here? A sudden wet trough . . .”
Between her gasps Phoebe managed to murmur back: “. . . leading to rain . . .”
“Of the relief variety,” Rupert added firmly, the image of warm moist air rising up from the sea over mountains to fall as rain now curled around his imagination in perfect synchronicity with Phoebe’s obvious excitement that was engulfing his fingers.
He pushed her back against the dashboard and lifted her skirt, pulling the edge of her underpants to one side of her sex. Engorged with blood and dramatically visible through her blond pubic hair, her sex looked like an exotic orchid with her clit a small dark red tongue. He pulled her legs and buttocks further up his torso so that arching, with her hands pressed palms up against the car roof, Phoebe’s sex was close to his face. Outside a sudden violent gust of wind shook the car. Mirroring the wind’s motion, Rupert blew across her sex, her labia quivering in response. Phoebe moaned, wanting him so much to take her into his mouth that the very anticipation of it was almost making her come.
Rupert blew again as the wind outside rattled the car once more.
“Take me,” Phoebe whispered, then, reaching down, tore the two sides of her underpants so she was able to rid herself of them. Rupert firmly grasped both her buttocks. She tasted like the sea, he thought, like the moist earth, like the wild rain that hammered against the sides of the car like thrown gravel. Sucking gently at first, his two fingers playing her, he accelerated his tongue circling around her clit between the sucking, his other fingers slipping in and out.
Above him Phoebe thrashed with pleasure, alternately trying to balance against the car roof and trying not to come. Outside in the lane the weather intensified, and a small stream hidden in the forest to the right of the lane burst its narrow banks as water began to race along the forest floor like the tendrils of some mud-covered spider. Finally Phoebe could stand it no longer. She pulled her hips away from Rupert’s mouth. She reached out and freed his cock from his trousers. The size of him sprung up rock hard. He had a kind of blunt tip, the kind she liked to fantasize about, and he was easily as large as she had allowed in her imaginary lovemaking with him. She held herself over him, catching his penis between her well-lubricated labia. They looked into each other’s eyes and both, within that moment, imagined they saw all kinds of swirling clouds and weather trapped within each other’s pupils, a meteorological drama that transcended the pettiness of their own existence; if it wasn’t love it was certainly passion.
“And now the apex of the storm.” Phoebe’s words hung within the confines of the car like a prophecy both now knew was impossible to escape. And with the word storm still sounding, she pushed down onto him. And oh, the size of him was magnificent; it filled her in a way she’d never been filled before, pushing out all memory of her husband or any lover before that.
She was born anew. The sexual pleasure mounting within her felt as if it were an extension of the accelerating storm around them, the crash of thunder, the loud creaking of the trees, all building to a crescendo. As for Rupert, the tightness of her held him like wet silk as she slid up and down, holding her lips apart so he could watch his cock push into her, playing her clit as his own groaning sounded around him. He had never felt more in his own skin, as if his consciousness now was his skin, as if all that mattered was the present tense and this excruciatingly pleasurable gallop toward orgasm. Phoebe arrived first, screaming suddenly as she contracted over and over and over again in the longest orgasm she’d ever experienced. Triggered by her contracting vagina, Rupert couldn’t hold off any longer. He too began yelling as he came. Just at that moment lightning hit a tree nearby and a heavy branch fell with a crack as loud as a gunshot, missing the car by just a few feet—but neither Rupert nor Phoebe noticed.
• • •
Phoebe woke first, with a terrible crick in her neck. She was still straddled over Rupert, her head resting up against the side of the driver’s seat, the gray of dawn illuminating the weatherman’s sleeping face. Gazing down at him, she wondered whether she should wake him. Outside it was still raining, and although there was a break in the clouds, there was also another bank of black sinister clouds creeping over the horizon, swallowing the blue before it like some huge evil dragon.
“Jesus, what time is it?” Rupert woke with a start. Phoebe disentangled herself from him and climbed back into the driver’s seat. She glanced down at the car clock.
“Six-thirty.”
“Christ, I’m screwed.” Rupert reached across and switched the car radio on. The car was filled with a burst of static, then, as he tuned the radio, a clear voice emerged.
“. . . the most severe storm seen this century has taken most of the country by surprise. The Met Office has even taken the unheard-of action of issuing an apology, claiming they had received no warning from Europe. The storm, which has been of hurricane proportions, has uprooted hundreds of thou
sands of mature trees, caused severe flooding in some parts, and ground all flights from Luton airport and further up the country. There have also been several fatalities reported. A twenty-three-year-old woman, Penelope Morgan, drowned in a swollen river in Kent . . .”
Rupert’s face turned ashen; Phoebe reached across for his hand.
“That’s not your Penelope, is it?” But Rupert’s face answered her question. Before she had a chance to switch the radio off, the voice had moved on to the next fatality.
“. . . while forty-year-old actuary Alan Rosehurst, working in the insurance industry, was struck dead by lightning. The Prime Minister will make a statement later . . .”