hotsauce's Date with a Princess part 1

hotsauce presents:

Date with a Princess

I slumped into the chair at my desk, defeated after another shitty day at work. I switched my computer on and spent the minute waiting for Windows to load thinking about how depressing my life had become. No girlfriend, a long commute every day to work a dead-end job with colleagues who were complete douchebags, and this dismal studio apartment.

But then the login screen appeared and I was dragged away from these grim thoughts by a request for my password.

I checked my emails. Some v1@gra spam, a chain letter from my mother, ANOTHER chain letter from my mother (no, mom, I wasn’t aware that a recent study showed that 85% of the cans from a coke machine have been tainted by cat pee…), a chain letter from my sister, an email from my sister asking for money, an email from someone called LittleMissSunshine…

Wait a second. LittleMissSunshine? Why was that name familiar?

Oh shit! Now I remembered. I’d joined one of those internet dating sites a few weeks back and sent of a whole bunch of ‘kisses’ or ‘pokes’ or whatever the hell they were called to girls who seemed interesting. Disappointingly, I hadn’t received any replies back – until now.

I sighed and cracked open a can of coke, cat pee be damned! Knowing my luck, LittleMissSunshine was a troll or a hooker or a Russian mobster or a Nigerian scammer or a god knows what else. The chances of her being a normal female human being were just about nil. Better to just tag it for deletion and…

I must have missed the tick box and accidentally clicked the mail itself as it popped open. I shrugged. Well, fate I guess. Maybe I should give it a read.

Dear anonymous1991,
I was very pleasantly surprised to find your hug in my inbox.

Hug? Oh yeah, that’s right. They were called ‘hugs’.

I’d like to say that I originally joined this site as a bit of a joke (my little sister suggested that I do so), but the truth is that I’m usually so busy I don’t really get any time to meet eligible males – and the ones I do meet are all under my authority so it would be indiscrete to date one of them. Also, I apologise for taking so long to get back to you – there was an incident that had to be dealt with straight away….

I took a sip of my soda. So LittleMissSunshine sounded like one of those corporate HR manager types. Interesting! I wondered if she’d have anything in common with a guy like me though. But I did enjoy her writing – she seemed a little unsure of internet terminology, so I was guessing she was probably older than me – but that wasn’t so much of a problem. Maybe she was a totally hot cougar. Unlikely, yeah, but a guy can dream.

I put my soda down, my interest further piqued, and kept reading…

Even though I’m surrounded by others all day, I often feel quite alone. I’d love to just be able to enjoy a nice quiet dinner and some conversation with an interesting male. No pressure, just a chance for the two of us to get to know each other. You seem like a genuine young male – your profile was lacking all the usual kinds of half-truths that one finds on such sites. And there was just something about your way of writing that intrigued me. So why don’t we meet for a drink, and then if that goes well perhaps dinner?

I found her use of ‘male’ a little peculiar – maybe English wasn’t her first language? But I was flattered by her compliment about my writing. I was a failed writer – but a failed writer who never told anyone he was writing, one of those individuals who hides their manuscripts and if they get caught writing they say they were beating off instead. Because if you say you’re a writer, the next question is always “Have you had anything published yet?” and if the answer to that question is “No,” then you’ve just introduced yourself as a kind of freakish failure who takes pride in that failure. And I’d had a big enough dose of failure in so many aspects of my life that my writing was one that I wanted to keep sacrosanct.

I brought up LittleMissSunshine’s profile again. There was no photo, but that was never an indication of anything. Plenty of good looking women left their profiles pictureless to weed out time-wasters, right? At least there wasn’t a MySpace angled shot or ducklips or some other photographic atrocity.

Likes: sunshine, honesty, justice, sugarcubes, rainbows, friendship, big words
Dislikes: swearing, rainy days, disorder, big dumb males

And there it was!

Age: 2000

It was a typo, of course, but I wondered how old she really was. I’d been a little reticent about asking her in my email – you know women and their hang-ups about their age – but I guessed that she must be somewhere in her mid to late thirties at least based on her style of writing, her job in upper management and her ignorance about the internet.

Well, I decided, I wasn’t so sure about sugarcubes, but I liked sunshine. Maybe we were meant to be together! Anyway, it would give me a chance to get out on a Saturday night – so I suggested a mid-tier hipster-free trendy bar for us to meet at.

Before the date I went and got a trim, shaved a week’s worth of neckbeard off and hit the gym for some half-assed reps so that I had a bit of tone to my body, but when I looked in the bathroom mirror I still saw the poster guy for average looks staring back at me. Ah, fuck it. From her email and her profile she sounded like the type that liked intellectual guys, anyway, so hopefully I’d be able to charm her that way.

After getting my cheap ass across town on the bus I was soon sitting at the bar itself cradling my scotch in my hand and watching the door. It was snowing out, and flurries of white slipped in every time the door opened. A woman came in, stripping off her scarf and long coat. Nope, not her.  LittleMissSunshine had said that she’d be wearing a sun-shaped gold brooch, so I was on the lookout for it. She took all this sun stuff seriously, I realized. Well, everybody has their thing. It didn’t mean she was crazy, did it?

Every few minutes a woman would come in through the door from the snow outside alone, and each time I scanned them as they stripped down for the brooch. A few times I was relieved, a few times disappointed – but still LittleMissSunshine didn’t appear.

I looked at my watch. She was thirty minutes late! Well, that was it. I’d been trolled and trolled hard. I guessed LittleMissSunshine was somewhere in the bar with her girlfriends having a good laugh at my expense. I looked around but the bar was so full now that even if they were there I’d never find them.

Well, fuck it. I downed the rest of the scotch and was just about to get up when I glanced across at the woman who had just come and sat down at the bar next to me.  And what I saw made me stop and sit right back down again.

She was older than me – but wait, was she really all that much older? It was difficult to say exactly how old she was – her face had a kind of timelessness to it that some Asian women have, her skin smooth and unblemished with only the hint of some age at the corner of her eyes.  If I had a gun to my head, I would have guessed she was in her late-thirties, early forties - but it was hard to say.

Her features were delicate but striking, her nose and cheekbones giving a regal cast to her face that might have tended towards aristocratic sternness if they hadn’t been off-set by her two large darkly-lashed eyes and a dainty, perfectly-formed mouth with lipsticked lips that made her seem gentle and curiously doll-like. Her long brown-blond hair was done up in a casual style, adding to the overall effect of an unselfconsciously elegant woman who was concerned with looking her best yet not at all vain.

But it was the colour of her eyes that most gripped me. Those huge eyes were such a strange color – they must have been gray, but in the light of the bar they seemed almost violet, and within them I could feel a cheerful honest energy that you encounter pretty rarely in the savage city.

“I’ll have a dandelion wine, please,” she said to the bartender. Her voice was smooth and confident, modulated like she was used to speaking professionally, but underpinned with a warm friendliness. That, and the dress she was wearing, one of those casually elegant black sheath dresses, sleeveless, with a bolero jacket on top – the kind of simple carefree luxury that inner-city legal or managerial types like to wear –  made me immediately think of LittleMissSunshine, who I’d decided was probably an upper level manager of some sort.

And so my heart skipped a beat , but as I looked on her chest for the brooch I saw she wasn’t wearing one. But what I did see was her deep décolletage, delightfully bare above her V-neckline. She was surprisingly busty for such a slim woman, and her skin was creamy white turned white-gold under the soft lights of the bar, like chryselephantine.

All of this took just seconds to go through in my mind, but I must have kept staring at her while as I was lost in thought, because she noticed me looking and turned her head and smiled.

“Oh hello!” she said.

“Ah hi,” I said, a little lamely. She’d caught me staring at her and I felt ashamed of myself. But the feeling quickly passed – the woman’s eyes were crinkled at the edges in a genuine smile, and there was something about them that calmed me and made me feel comfortable in her presence – which was strange, as I’m usually a bit nervous around good-looking women. She was definitely extremely attractive, even if she might have been old enough to be my mother.

“You know, I don’t usually go out at night,” she said. “But there’s a definite charm about it, especially with it snowing out.”

I nodded. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I’m a bit of a night owl, myself.”

The woman smiled. “You sound just like my little sister! She loves the night as well. But I’m more a daytime kind of p- person,” she said. She took the dandelion wine and was about to take a sip when she noticed the bartender looking at her.  She looked back, but he said nothing and merely coughed and her eyes went wide. “Oh of course! Money!” She chuckled, slapping a hand on the bar and reaching into her handbag. She took out a wallet and opened it, flipping through it for a second as if she had no idea what she was looking for, and finally took out a hundred dollar bill. “Is that enough?”

The bartender and I both looked at each other. The wallet had been stuffed to overflowing with bills, and they’d been all hundreds.

As the bartender went to get her change she turned back to me and at last took a sip of her dandelion wine, her eyes narrowing in pleasure. “Oh, it’s so good to get out! I haven’t had a chance to enjoy myself for a while. I just hope my little sister can be relied upon to look after the place while I’m away.”

“Are you here alone?” I asked.

She shook her head, and I felt my heart sink. Well, of course she wasn’t alone. A woman who looked like her! What the fuck had I been thinking? It seemed my evening was a total waste of time after all.

But then the woman’s eyes went wide a second time and she put down her glass and started rummaging around in her handbag again. “Oh, I just realised I’m supposed to be wearing a brooch!” she muttered. “No wonder he hasn’t come up to me yet! Oh Celestia, you’ll forget your own head one of these days!”

At the word brooch, my heart leaped up in my chest. No way. No fucking way. Could it be that this was…?

“Little Miss… Sunshine?” I asked.

The woman stopped rummaging through her purse and looked up at me. A bright smile played over her lipsticked lips.

“And you must be anonymous1991!” She laughed and the sound was so warm and honestly effusive that it was like a sudden burst of sunshine in the bar. ”Oh what a lovely piece of serendipity!” She looked me over and tapped her chin with a perfectly-manicured finger. “So I guess 1991 was the year you were born in, right?”

I nodded, suddenly feeling sheepish in front of such an elegant and self-confident woman. But she just winked at me and said “Oh, I know I shouldn’t tease, but sometimes I just can’t resist the urge! But where are my manners? I’m Celestia.”

After I introduced myself I said “Celestia? That’s a unique name. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Celestia before.”

“Oh please, call me Tia,” said Celestia. “It’s kind of my pet name – my sister came up with it.”

“I guess you and your sister are pretty close then?” I asked. “You mentioned her in your email as well.”

“Me and Lulu?” She nodded. “Oh definitely. Although we haven’t always been close – we had a bit of a falling out a few years ago, but we patched things up recently. ”

“Family can be difficult,” I said. “Does she ask you for money all the time? That’s what my little sister does.”

“Oh no!” laughed Celestia. Her laughter was deep but light, warm like morning sunshine, happy and unselfconscious. “She knows I’d just say no. Besides, she has everything she wants. But you’re so right about family being difficult.” She sighed. “After our parents passed away I guess I was a bit of a surrogate mom for her, but I think I did a very bad job of it.” She took a sip of her drink. “But now it looks like our roles have been reversed! It was Lulu’s idea that I start dating again. She said that it wasn’t healthy for me to be stuck all alone in that draughty c… house of mine. And I’m glad I did!” She smiled at me, and it was like being in the path of a beam of light so pure and beautiful was the look on her face.

I couldn’t help but smile back at her – it was a smile that forced you into her cheery world. Even after being with her for only a few minutes, I realized that there was something special about Celestia that made you feel at home in her company. I guess she had that kind of charisma a lot of people who are high-fliers have.

I usually find it pretty difficult to find things to say when I first meet someone, so I was relieved when Celestia took it upon herself to tell me more about herself. “I’ve been – how do you say it?” She tapped her chin with a finger. “-out of the market for a while now, I guess you could say. My last real relationship was with this… well, I know what a faux pas it is to talk about previous relationships so long story short, things didn’t work out between us – they say opposites attract, but sometimes I think you can be too different. I like order and harmony, while he was more into chaos and, well… discord. I should have known better, really – after all, Discord was his name after all.”

“Discord?” I repeated. “Wait, that was actually his name? Don’t tell me – he was in a band, right?”

Celestia arched her eyebrows. “Oh, he wasn’t in a band. And anyway, he’s ancient history. I dealt with him a long time ago so let’s forget I ever mentioned him.” She made a sweeping motion with a hand as if casting him off into the wind. “But let’s just say I haven’t had the best track record with guys, which is why I was a bit unsure when Lulu suggested I join that dating site…”

I ordered another scotch as we continued made small talk. It turned out that I’d been correct in my guessing that she was in upper management.

“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain, really,” Celestia said. “But I guess you could call me a manager. I mean, I have quite a large number of individuals that I’m responsible for.” She sighed deeply. “And they always seem to be getting into one kind of trouble or another! I mean, just today I got a scr- I mean, a message from my top student asking for my help with an invasion of dragons!”

“An invasion of dragons?” I laughed. “Really? Oh wait, it’s some sort of corporate jargon, right?”

Celestia brought a hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry – I guess you’d call it a…” She spun a hand around in the air as she searched for the right word. “…hostile takeover? Twilight – she’s my top student, you see – usually deals with these things fine on her own, but this proved to be too big a problem for her to handle and she needed my advice. But with a bit of reassurance from me she managed to find a solution meant which meant that I could actually get out and enjoy myself for a change! And here I am.”

“I’m really glad you could,” I said. “From the sounds of things you lead a very interesting life.”

At the word ‘interesting’, Celestia’s eyes glittered in pleasure. “You could say that,” she said. “Do you know, nobody’s ever said that to me before? That my life is interesting?”

“What, really?” I said, incredulous.

She nodded. “I think sitting here and talking to you I’ve just realized how little I’ve actually connected with anyone recently. Apart from Twilight and Lulu, there’s not really anybody I can talk to. Twilight doesn’t have much life experience, and Lulu – well, she never takes anything seriously. Her heart’s in the right place though.”

“I thought you were just in upper management,” I said. “But it sounds like you run everything. Are you like a vice-president or something?”

She blushed. “Well, maybe it’s a bit of a higher position than just ‘vice-president’.”

“President?” I suggested. When Celestia shook her head, my eyes went wide. “CEO?”

She lowered her eyes in embarrassment and looked at me through those dark lashes of hers. “Actually, my title is ‘Princess’”

“Princess?” I repeated, incredulous. “I have to admit, that’s a lot higher up than I expected.”

“It’s more ceremonial than anything else,” explained Celestia hurriedly.

“So you have to open sporting events and town halls and stuff like that?” I asked.

Celestia blinked at me. “Promise you won’t laugh?”

“Not unless it’s really, really funny,” I said.

“I raise the sun,” she said.

“The son? Wait, you have a son?” Well, that fig…

“No!” she laughed. “You know – the sun! The big orb of fire that brings light to the land? It’s my job to perform the necessary rituals that raise and lower it each day.”

That was a little more ceremonial than I was expecting. “And you do it every day? Sounds like a 24/7 job.” I took a sip of my drink.

“Well, 12/7 anyway,” replied Celestia. “Lulu deals with raising and lowering the moon, so I do get the opportunity for a bit of sleep.”

I nodded. “It must be a lot of responsibility.”

Celestia’s eyes went wide. “Wait, you believe me?”

I put my drink down on the bar. “Of course I do,” I said, looking in her eyes. “I know it’s probably a strange thing to say, but I don’t think you’d make a very good liar, Tia. You look too honest to me.”

It was flattery, maybe, but I only said it because in some strange fashioned I believed what she was saying. There was an earnestness in her eyes that didn’t allow me to doubt her. And yet it didn’t make Celestia happy to be called honest – in fact, her face became a little distant for a moment. So I decided to change tack and rescue the situation.

“Hey,” I said suddenly. “I just had a great idea. Do you like karaoke?”

“Karaoke? What’s that?” Celestia blinked at me.

“Once you finish your drink I’ll show you! I’m sure you’ll love it.”

* * *

Have you ever hit it off with someone right away? I mean, after those initial introductions are out of the way and you get to really talking, it’s like you’ve switched on two faucets that just won’t stop running? They say it’s what happens when you put two people who are usually listeners together – and it happened with me and Celestia. As we sang and drank and talked in our private booth at the karaoke place, the spaces between songs became longer and longer as we shared anecdotes and got to know each other. And even the few little silences that naturally happened now and again felt totally comfortable, like punctuation for our conversation rather than proof of that horrible fact that you often have to try to keep yourself from admitting on a date – that you and this person have nothing in common.

But it wasn’t as if we were similar people. We seemed very dissimilar, actually. She was from a country called Equestria (I was guessing it must be in Europe somewhere – my geography’s always been pretty terrible), where her family came from old money. Her childhood had been tea parties and elocution lessons and pranks played on the foreign dignitaries who visited her mother’s home with the aid of her little sister – I wanted to learn more about her childhood, but mention of her mother seemed to sadden her, so I didn’t press very far in that direction. She loved books and nature and candy and, just as her profile had said, sunny days.

It all seemed to make sense now. There was an exotic foreignness about Celestia that had been hard to place. As we’d been picking songs to sing, she’d seemed ignorant of almost all the music, even the golden oldie stuff you’d expect anyone to know – she didn’t even know who The Beatles were! But after listening to a song once, she was able to sing it. She had a quick mind and a quick wit, and I found myself wondering at how my fortunes had changed with the sudden arrival of this beautiful and brilliant woman into my life.

But she was still mysterious. The more I learned about her, the more I realized I didn’t know. It wasn’t that she was hiding anything per se, just that – well, she had a very elliptical way of expressing herself and I felt it would be impolite to push her too far. As it was, I was enjoying the mystery – Celestia was marvellous company. Witty, clever, well-spoken – just about everything the girls I usually had a chance to meet weren’t. Her age made no difference to me whatsoever, but I didn’t mention that, of course.

Soon we’d used up our few hours and it felt as if the evening were coming to its natural conclusion. I didn’t want it to, of course, but for a first date things had gone far better than I’d ever hoped.

“I had a wonderful time,” said Celestia as we walked out into the street. It was early in the am and the snow was falling stronger now, such that the world seemed silent except for the few couples like ourselves. Did I say like ourselves? I guess I was getting ahead of myself, but as we walked together it felt as if we’d already been together for a long time.

As we walked along the embankment next to the river that ran through this part of the city, the streetlights making the water shine like polished bronze, Celestia suddenly sighed – but it was a happy sigh. “You know – I knew when I read your profile that you’d be just right for me. An honest and straightforward gentleman.”

“Well, if by straightforward you mean average, then yes,” I chuckled. “But I had a great time tonight as well.”

Celestia said nothing, but she gently slipped her hand into mine, and from then on we walked together hand in hand while I grinned like an idiot to the silent city.

We walked in silence for a little while, the snow slipping down around us, crisping the air and smothering every sound. It was just the two of us, separated from the rest of the universe in our own private little world.

Finally we stopped and just stood together, watching the snowflakes lifted by gusts of air flutter over that glowing river. Celestia snuggled into my coat closer for warmth, and all I could smell was her soft perfume, and all I could feel was the heat rising from her body.

She looked at the snow that was falling about the two of us. “So strange,” she whispered. At first I thought she was echoing my earlier thought, but then she continued: “Not knowing what weather you’re going to get. It might snow or it might not. So strange!”

As we stood there in silence Celestia gazed up at me, inquisitive. I looked down at her, and then – well, call it a sudden attack of bravado, or whatever. I’m not usually so bold or forward. But something inside me demanded that I kiss her. It was barely volitional.

Celestia closed her eyes as I brought my face down to hers. I felt a sudden flash of heat lift up from her skin, the scent of her perfume intensifying – and then our lips touched.

Now, I’ve kissed a few girls and a few women in my life, but kissing Celestia – well, it was as if I was a boy again and I was kissing my childhood sweetheart – that innocent, fresh, excruciating kind of pleasure that strikes you for the first time in your life and feels so strange and yet so familiar, as if it’s the gate to all the other kisses that you’ll enjoy in your life. Time stopped and contracted and for a moment and an eternity I felt that the only people in the universe were me and Celestia, standing there in the snow on that embankment.

“Hey, get a room you guys!” The spell faded as a harsh, accented voice pierced the air. A drunk blond girl was stumbling along the street that ran parallel with the embankment, only kept from falling by her girlfriend who looked at us apologetically.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “She’s from Australia.” As if that somehow explained things!

But I wasn’t really listening. I was still looking at Celestia, who was blushing fiercely, her gaze averted, a smile playing on her rosebud lips made even redder with the cold.

“That was-” said Celestia. “That was- I guess I’d just forgotten what it’s like to be kissed.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘awesome’,” I said with a smile.

She nodded, beaming. “Awesome.”

Maybe I’m just old fashioned or maybe there’d always been the heart of a die-hard romantic hiding in that chest of mine and I just hadn’t realized it. Whatever the reason, I left things at that kiss on our first date. It wasn’t that I didn’t think things would go any further between the two of us – it was just that part of me wanted this to go on forever. It seemed wrong to try and get Celestia into bed right away – she was the sort of woman that deserved to be wooed. Yes, wooed. That word had always seemed strange and archaic to me, but with Celestia it seemed exactly the right one to use.

We said our goodbyes and parted. I started to walk to the bus stop, but then I looked back, just to make sure Celestia was really real – but she’d had already vanished behind the veils of slowly-falling snow.

When I got home, I was gripped by the sudden need to write an email to her. I tried to stop myself, but when I opened my mail I found there was an email already waiting for me. It was from her.

Dear anon,
Thank you so much for tonight! I realize now what a fool I was to have ever struggled against Lulu’s suggestion. I have to admit that she helped me chose your profile – I think she knows me far better than I know myself sometimes! Tonight, with you, I felt as if I was allowed to be who I truly am again after a long, long time- a woman rather than just the one everyone goes to if they have a problem. Thank you so much for that gift.
Let’s meet up again for drinks as soon as possible!
Tia

I shook my head, scarcely believing that the evening had actually happened. My life had shifted from shitty to amazing in a couple of hours. Truly a god or goddess somewhere must be smiling on me, I decided.

The next couple of days of my life were just a gap of meaningless blankness as I waited to see Celestia again. My job, my family, everything seemed to have become a shadow or a dream. It was infatuation rather than desperation – but could anybody, when faced with being with someone like Celestia, be criticized for feeling the same way?

And that was how our next few dates progressed – we’d meet in the same bar and then go on from there, doing the usual kind of things couple do. But wherever we went and whatever we did, we always ended up spending most of our time talking, and yet the more she told me about herself, the less I realized I knew.

“I wish we could meet more often,” Celestia said to me. It had been about a week since our previous date and the longer than usual wait had been agony. “But you know Equestria – there’s always something that needs sorting out.” She sighed and took a sip of her dandelion wine, leaving a smear of lipstick on the rim of the glass.

“Dragons again?” I asked.

“Hydras,” she said. “Lots and lots of hydras.”

I sat there wondering what ‘hydra’ was the Equestrian word for. By now I was getting used to Celestia’s strange way of speaking and I preferred not to get bogged down in long conversations where she tried to explain things about her strange native country. So I just smiled at her and took another sip of my drink.

Soon she excused herself to go to the bathroom and I was left alone with my scotch and my thoughts for a few moments. Did I really believe Celestia was in charge of a small country and visiting here by plane every couple of days? Not for a moment. I’d looked up Equestria on the internet and found nothing more than references to a children’s cartoon. But whatever Celestia’s reasons were for being cagey about the truth, the time I spent with her filled me with such delirious happiness that any concerns I might have had were soon driven away.

I turned to see her walking back to the counter through the crowded bar. Tonight she was wearing a short-hemmed black skirt and a purple blouse and I felt my chest tighten as I was reminded how curvaceous a woman she was. She had really taken good care of herself – it wasn’t a young woman’s body, but the mellow sensuality and ripeness of her mature figure was something a young girl just couldn’t compete with. That narrow waist with her curvy hips and round butt combined with a substantial bust to form a gorgeous hourglass that got me hard just thinking about how she looked naked.

Celestia noticed me ogling her and she winked at me, and when she sat back down she smiled a sudden and secretive smile.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “You look especially happy all of a sudden.”

She sat down and smiled at the bartender, who by now knew us well and brought her another dandelion wine. She took a sip and said “I was just talking to Lulu. Apparently everything is quiet at the moment, so I don’t have to hurry back for once.”

“That’s good,” I said. It always seemed as if things were dragging her away from me for one reason or another. “You can relax and enjoy yourself then. Why don’t we have a few more drinks?”

She leaned over close to me. “OK,” she said.  “But take care not to drink too much – I don’t want you falling asleep in bed.”

I’d like to say that I spurted scotch out of my mouth in surprise, but that doesn’t really happen in real life. Instead I just kind of choked a little, and after swallowing the offending liquor I came back with “Last drinks, then?”

Celestia nodded, taking a sip of her wine. “Should we go back to your place?”

My stomach did a backflip. “Oh no! It’s – well, it’s a bit of a mess.” God damn it, why hadn’t I cleaned the damn place? “Why don’t we just…?”

“A hotel?” she replied, amused. “Is that the usual way things are done in your country?”

I smiled in embarrassment. “I guess you could say that.”

***

As we stood outside the door to the room I’d just rented I fumbled for the key in my excitement, dropping it on the carpeted floor of the hotel corridor. I quickly snatched it back up and as I was steadying my hand to put the key in the lock, Celestia slipped up behind me, put her arms around my waist and started to kiss the back of my neck.

I don’t know how the hell I opened that door, but it got open somehow. I dragged Celestia into the room with one hand as I slammed the door shut with the other, and straight away we were kissing like we were trying to devour each other. I brought my hands down to squeeze that amazing ass of hers while she pulled my shirt out of my pants and slid her own hands up along my stomach.

Breaking the kiss, she began to lick and nip teasingly at my neck as she unbuttoned my shirt and ran her long nails up through my chest hair. “You know, I’m not usually so… forward,” she whispered. “I just have this incredible compulsion all of sudden. I guess it’s your animal magnetism.”

“Sure it’s not all that dandelion wine?” I asked.

Celestia snorted in annoyance and pushed me down onto the bed. Now, I’m not a small guy – she had some serious hidden strength behind those slim limbs and that soft voice! And she laughed as I hammed things up, rolling over and falling off the other side of the bed and then suddenly springing up from the floor.

“It’s alright!” I said, brushing myself off and sitting on the edge of the bed. “I’m ok!”

Celestia got onto the bed beside me, but as she leaned over to kiss me I rolled her over onto her back and got on top of her, unbuttoning her blouse and pulling it open to reveal her bra while she squealed in mock-dismay. Her breasts, barely held back by the white, lacy material, were round and full, and I was pleased to find that they were totally natural – they felt satin-soft under my hands as I eagerly pulled her bra down rather than taking it off and let them spill out. They were big, but surprisingly pert, and I straightaway squeezed them together so that I could glue my mouth to both cherry-pink nipples at the same time, which hardened rapidly as I tongued and mouthed them.

“Bite them,” she whispered hoarsely. “Hard. Please!”

I knew better than to refuse such an order, and I grazed them with my teeth, eliciting moans from Celestia who grabbed my head and pushed my face deeper into the gorgeous, softly-perfumed warmth of her chest.

As I continued to suckle and nip at those gorgeous breasts I stroked her flat stomach with one hand, and I slid my other down along a pantyhose-covered leg, delighting in the contrast of the three textures I was experiencing at the same time.

Celestia began to pant deeply as I caressed her. But then she suddenly pushed my head away and sat up on the bed, and reaching behind her back she undid her bra, letting those huge breasts of hers fall free.

“Holy shit,” I said. Having her sitting there on the bed in front of me, topless, suddenly made me realize the reality of the situation, and my dick grew even harder.

I moved towards her but she pushed me away with a sudden fire in her eyes.

“Take off your pants,” she ordered. Her voice was different from any I’d heard her use before – it was deep and imperious and brooked no disobedience, and I was suddenly reminded that she was a woman who had spent most of her life ordering people about.

“Yes ma’am,” I quickly replied. I sat on the edge of the bed and fumbled at my belt-buckle, but I eventually got my pants off. Celestia got off the bed and knelt down on the floor in front of me, a wide smile forming on her lips as she slipped her slender fingers into my boxers and drew my dick out. I was beyond hard already, but as she held it in her hands and looked up at me, I somehow got even harder still. Her intense violet eyes gazed into mine as she leaned forward and brought my rigid cock to her mouth. Her lipsticked lips slid over the head, and after a few gentle licks of the sensitive underside with her tongue she popped it out again, now glistening with her saliva.

I couldn’t remember ever being as turned on as I was at that moment. Those few seconds in her mouth had been so exquisite it was like my nerves had been peeled back to rawness and then dipped in the warmest honey imaginable. It was the kind of sensation that makes your balls ache straight away, and I prayed to god that I wouldn’t come all of a sudden and fuck everything up. And I didn’t, by some miracle.

As Celestia started to suck my dick in earnest, I looked down at her – her short dress had slipped up over her butt, revealing low-cut lacy white panties underneath her pantyhose, and her breasts hung free and pendulous from her open blouse. It was beyond hot. I reached down and cupped those gorgeous weights in my hands, delighting in the satiny soft skin as I flicked my thumbs against the large pink nipples I’d hardened with my biting, and all the while she bobbed up and down on my dick, making me moan like I was dying. Maybe I was. I couldn’t remember feeling like this before.

An eternity of pleasure later, Celestia unwillingly pulled her mouth from my glistening dick with a gasp, then clambered onto the bed and lay back with her legs gently parted.

“I want you to rut me,” she said, her face flushed as she reached forward to pull me on top of her. “Hard.”

But I had other ideas. Taking her by the shoulders I rolled her over onto her stomach with a yelp and pushed her gently so that her front was flat onto the bed and her ass was in the air – the hem of her dress had worked its way down to her waist and the area of white skin that was revealed between the top of her pantihose and the crumpled material enflamed me. I brought my hands down her body and slipped my fingers into the top of her underwear and pantihose and drew them down together to slowly reveal that amazing ass of hers at long last.

For a woman with such a slim frame she had a pretty round ass, but as I slid the material down off it the flesh that was revealed was like that of a teenager – white and soft and bouncing back into an excruciatingly perfect curve as it was released from the confines of her clothing. Then I continued peeling her underwear down until her thighs were bare and I discovered that they were already sticky with her excitement. The sudden thick scent of her sex set my head reeling. I stopped pulling down her pantihose and, taking both perfect globes of her ass in my hands, I parted them and drove my face into ass, sliding my tongue into her warm anus.

Celestia gasped and squirmed like she was trying to escape from the attentions of my tongue, but I slid my hands up and held onto her waist as I licked at her tight ring. After a few delicious minutes, I licked my way down to the heat and wetness that had been against my chin and burrowed my tongue deeply into her pussy from behind. The intensity of the scent and taste of her as I drank in her juices was almost overpowering.

And the effect was like Viagra a hundredfold. My dick was an iron bar of steely rigidness and so engorged that it was bigger than it had ever been before. There was something about the taste of Celestia’s juices – they were like an erotic narcotic saturating my body, and the intoxicating effect drove me to drink them down as if my life depended on it. And I would have continued to indefinitely if Celestia hadn’t at last squirmed out of my grasp and turned and thrown me backwards then straddled me, her hair dishevelled and her face flushed as she kissed her juices from my mouth.

“So fucking intense!” I gasped as she broke the kiss and stared at me, licking her lips.

“Oh, you think that was intense?” she asked.  She scooted back on her knees then dove back down onto my dick, driving it down her throat as if she was trying to swallow it whole.

It was too much this time – I think I had to come or else my dick would have exploded. I arched my back as I came, for pleasure was pulsing up my spinal column like I’d had starter cables attached to the top of my head and my prostate, the pleasure emanating from those two places like twin starbursts.

More semen than I had ever produced in my life, as if the sticky white fluid was being drawn from everywhere in my body, spurted out of the end of my dick as Celestia kept sucking. The first blast filled her mouth and she choked it back a little in surprise, but a rapid swallow later she pulled my dick from her mouth and let it jet the next waves of fluid all over those red lipsticked lips of hers. It was coming out as if under high pressure, and it managed to splatter up onto her fringe and forehead and even onto her lashes and that regal nose of hers while she giggled like a virgin schoolgirl. As the bursts grew weaker she popped it back into her mouth and swallowed down the final spurts.

I must have blacked out for a second, for when I came to Celestia was licking my now soft dick, cleaning it of the last of my cum.

“Did you enjoy that?” she asked, looking up at me through those black lashes, her tongue lapping at the head playfully.

“Fuck, I’m so sorry,” I babbled. Through the ebbing those still intense pleasure I was gripped with sudden regret – I hadn’t had a chance to bring her to climax yet.

But Celestia wasn’t at all worried. “Oh, I think we have a chance of a second round,” she said as she tongue-basted the head of my cock and stroked its length in her hand. What the hell? I was already getting hard again! And not that kind of lousy semi-hardness you sometimes get right after coming, but that same steel rigidity I’d had earlier was returning to my dick.

“Jesus,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut as those waves of pleasure started to flow over me again even stronger than before, spilling up from between my legs where Tia was already mouthing the length of my dick up and down and running the flat of her tongue all over the now super-sensitive head.

“Looks like you’re ready!” she said, slipping my cock from her mouth. She moved to lie on her back, but I stopped her and rolled her onto her stomach so that her round butt was sticking up.

Celestia looked over her back at me, wide-eyed. “You want to do it pony style?” she asked, incredulous.

Pony style? Well, ponies do it the same way dogs do, I guess. It was probably just a literal translation of an Equestrian expression, so I didn’t say anything and just nodded. I crawled up to her and grabbing her hips I mounted her, positioning the head of my dick at her dripping entrance and sliding it in.

Penetrating Celestia was like plunging into molten honey – the heat inside of her was intense. Her pussy gripped me with a steely satin hold – she was as tight as any teenager I’d fucked, maybe even tighter – but one thing she had over a teenage girl was her exquisite control of the muscles inside her pussy. With each thrust she squeezed herself tighter around me and I groaned as she literally milked my dick.

As I fucked her from behind the cheeks of that amazing round ass of hers flattened up against my abdomen with every thrust. There’s just something incredibly hot about having a woman laid out in front of you as you plough into them - it’s the reason I prefer pony style.  I guess I just like asses. The only downside of course is that you usually can’t see their face, but luckily there was a mirrored wardrobe on the far wall so I was able to enjoy Tia’s facial expression as I fucked her hard. Her huge violet eyes, usually so bright and intelligent, were staring into space, unseeing, and her mouth hung open like she was drugged, a string of saliva threatening to drip from the corner of her mouth.

The look of complete abandonment on her face drove me over the edge. I started spearing my dick into her as if I was trying to stab it through her and she moaned deeply as my dick bottomed-out inside her. Then I felt her vaginal tunnel spasm and grow hotter and her nipples become even harder against the palms of my hands and I knew she was coming. Three balls-deep thrusts later I came a second time – and as God as my witness, I came just as much this second time as I did with the first, so much so that wads of semen spilled out around my ploughing dick and dripped down out onto the bedspread while I kept fucking her. But as the waves of orgasm burst over me and then rippled away, I found I was still hard.

“Fuck, did she slip something in my drink?” I wondered in total disbelief. As I kept up my thrusting Celestia just kept coming. My hips were a blur at this point, and I slid my hands up around her sides to stroke her sleek back which was now moist with perspiration. Her breasts, released from my hands, hung down and swung back and forth with their pendulous ripeness, and I took hold of her hair and pulled it back so that her hips were smashing back even harder against mine.

“Rut me, rut me!” she demanded, her voice hoarse between the gasps of pleasure but imperious all the same. That intoxicated, ecstatic voice, the thick scent of her juices and my semen mixed together with our sweat, the thought that I was fucking someone so beautiful and smart and probably old enough to have given birth to me – all these thoughts coalesced with the excruciating pleasure wracking my body and drove me over the edge. I came inside her a third and final time, filling her womb to overflowing with my boiling semen.

This last time finished me – I think I even stayed hard after coming, but my muscles literally went slack with exhaustion and I slid out of her, a wave of her juices and my rapidly liquidizing semen spilling out with it and pooling on the bed. Celestia slumped forward and lay there, the whiteness of her upper thighs, bare butt and back glistening with sweat.

Afterwards I felt like I was just a collection of raw nerves; that electrical pleasure still coursed and flowed through the inside of my bones as I lay there. Part of me wanted to just throw myself on her again and fuck her again and again until it was blood that was coming out of my dick, but I was so drained I literally couldn’t lift myself from the bed.

Celestia slid up next to me and began to smothered my face with little wet kisses. “I haven’t come like that for a very long time,” she said with a sigh. “A very long time.”

I barely had any energy left so I let my head fall sideways to face her. “I haven’t done it three times in a row like that for… well, since I was a teenager!” I said.  “You just have some strange power over me, I guess.”

Celestia blushed and burrowed her face into my chest.

For a long time I lay there in post-coital exhaustion, that beautiful state of half-sleeping, half-dreaming, where your body aches with the pleasure of your exertions. A typical woman, Celestia had gone to have a shower worrying that she smelled bad, but I just lay there in the bed, arms and legs splayed out and smelling her scent everywhere around me. I’d never, ever been fucked like that before.

“I think I could get used to that,” I thought to myself.

A short while later Celestia came out of the shower, towelling herself dry. The sight of that curvaceous body, pink and glistening from the hot water, started to get me hard again and when she sat down on the edge of the bed I got up and threw my arms around her, kissing her moist shoulder and neck. Celestia turned and looked at me apologetically.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Something has come up suddenly that Lulu can’t deal with and I have to get back right away.”

“Wait,” I said. “Did you just get a call?”

Celestia blinked at me. She’d already slipped her panties on and was in the process sliding her long legs into her pantihose. “A call? Oh, yes.” She leaned over and kissed me, her eyes full of remorse. “I’m so sorry to do this to you. I promise I’ll make it up to you next time we meet.”

Although I liked the sound of that, I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to spend the rest of the night with her sleeping beside me as I’d been looking forward to. “Do you really have to rush home?” I asked, crestfallen.

“I’m afraid I do,” she replied. “Lulu’s having trouble getting the sun ignited, and if I don’t get back in time to help her the day won’t start and everyone will think I’m – how do you put it? – asleep at the switch.”

“I understand,” I replied, not understanding a single word of what she was saying.  As I watched her clip on her bra and button up her blouse I was gripped with a terrible feeling of loss. Suddenly I needed to let her know how I really felt about her.

“Tia, I…” Man, I knew it was just all the opiates bouncing around in my body, but I had to tell her. “I’ve fallen in love with you.”

Tia’s eyes went wide and I saw a sparkle somewhere deep within their magenta depths, but then she looked away and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

“Tia, is… did I say something wrong?” I asked, an iciness gripping my stomach.

Celestia looked suddenly distraught. “So… our differences don’t worry you?”

“Differences?” I repeated. “Do you mean um, age or-?”

Celestia nodded. “Among other things.”

I shrugged. “Age has never meant that much to me. The way I see it, if two people like each other, then age or race or whatever shouldn’t make a difference.”

Celestia smiled sadly. “Age or race or… species?”

“Species?” I laughed. “Well, I guess it would depend on the species!”

Celestia’s face fell. She closed her eyes, and I thought I could see the beginning of tears glistening at the corners of her eyes. “I… I’m so sorry,” she said. “You’ve been so kind and honest to me and all this time I’ve been lying to you, right to your face!”

“If it’s about the age thing, I understand,” I said., slipping my arms around her shoulders.

“The age thing?” she whispered, looking up at me, the tears trapped in her long, black lashes glittering.

“Oh, you know – your profile listed your age as two thousand,” I laughed. “Look, I realize you’re older than me, but you’re not really two thousand years old, are you?”

If it was my idea of a joke to lighten the mood, it backfired completely as Celestia’s face suddenly crumbled. “It’s a much worse lie than that.”

Suddenly I thought I guessed what the problem was. “Wait. Tia, you’re not… married are you?”

Celestia shook her head. “No, my lie is much, much worse.” Her tears were flowing freely now. “I… I have to go!” She leaped up off the bed and grabbing her handbag she was out the door before I even had a chance to move.

“Tia, wait!” I cried. I pulled on my pants and grabbed my shirt and flew out the door after her. By the time I reached the elevator at the end of the corridor, its doors were closing so I threw open the door to the fire escape and ran down the stairs, jumping two and three steps at a time as I pulled on my shirt madly.

I was absolutely sure I’d got ahead of her, but when I reached the lobby Tia was nowhere to be seen. The guy at the front desk stared at me and shook his head in response to my breathless questioning. He hadn’t seen anyone come down in the past half an hour.

How the hell had she slipped away so easily? I pushed the front door open and rushed into the snowing street outside, straight away making myself the centre of amused attention from some passers by because of my still-dishevelled hair, my unbuckled belt and haphazardly buttoned shirt, but I didn’t give a shit – Tia was the only thing on my mind. I ran up the street towards the subway station but I couldn’t spot her anywhere, and when I ran across the road to see if she’d gone in that direction I was almost hit by a taxi cab which came to a screeching stop only a couple of inches from me.

A long time later I finally gave up looking for her and slunk away like a loser, not bothering to hail a taxi and instead walking home through that bitter snowstorm, beating myself up mentally as I went over and over that last disastrous conversation.

“’Species’? It was a joke or a test or something and you fucked it up. You fucked it all up! Why the fuck did you have to tell her you loved her?”

But the truth was I did love her. And that’s what made the pain of rejection all the more intense.

When I arrived at my apartment at last, cold and drunk and bleary-eyed, I fumbled around for the front door keys for what felt like an hour before finally stumbling inside and scrabbling about for the light switch. I had a bad case of cottonmouth and a splitting headache, but there was only one thing on my mind. I switched on the computer and was soon typing out an email.

Tia,
I told you the truth tonight. I’m in love with you. I’m sorry if this puts you in a difficult position for whatever reason. Maybe I shouldn’t have said it, but staying silent would have felt too much like lying to you Tia, and I couldn’t do that and live with myself.
I need to see you again.
Anon

I hit send and with that I threw myself into bed and after what felt like hours of tossing and turning, I was eventually overcome by an angry and restless sleep.

The next morning I woke up, returning from the blissful ignorance of unconsciousness to a mire of depression as the memories of the previous night flooded back. I swallowed a couple of Tylenol while I waited for Windows to load, and when it finally did I checked my mail to find a reply from LittleMissSunshine waiting for me:

Dear anon,
Thank you so much for your lovely email. I want to meet you again, but I know it’d probably be a bad idea. I want you to know that I had a wonderful time as well. For just a little while I was able to escape my life here and feel free, like I once was a long, long time ago. It was just a few precious evenings, but I’m afraid that I can’t continue to lie to you as I have been. The woman you fell in love with doesn’t exist – you’re in love with a lie. I told you that I value honesty above all else, but in the same breath I lied to you. I’m so terribly sorry to have played with your feelings like this. I despise myself for doing this to you for my own selfish reasons, and all the more because I know that I’ve fallen in love with you too. But we can never be together. I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.
Goodbye,
Tia.

Goodbye? She was in love with me – and goodbye? I angrily smashed escape, sat there for a moment and then in a blind rage tore the keyboard out and slammed it hard against the wall and dropped my head onto my desk. The pain felt good and focused me. God damn it all so much! The first time in forever that I’d had a connection with someone and she’d turned out to be a psycho. It wouldn’t have been so hard to take except for the fact that my time with her had made me feel such intense happiness. To have it snatched away from you, even before you had a chance to realize what you had – that was the cruellest thing. It was if I’d been released from prison into the fresh light of a summer morning just to be suddenly thrown back into my cell with no explanation for what I’d done.