Isla Almost Seen

I had spent three weeks watching Isla Brown laugh at the edge of the water before I asked her on a real date, and she had said yes as if the rest of the sentence might arrive later. She was twenty one, a Gold Coast girl who talked into a microphone for a living and still managed to sound unhurried when the crowd was gone. I was twenty five and I taught people how to stand on a board, which felt like the quieter kind of life I wanted to offer her tonight. We were walking the lookout path at Burleigh Headland after dark, the summer air still holding the heat of the day, and the ocean below us was a black sheet with a few lights riding it.

“You did not have to bring me all the way up here,” she said, and then she let the thought hang while her shoulder brushed mine. I told her I liked the height and the quiet, and that I had been thinking about her mouth since the last lesson on the sand. Isla made a small sound that was almost a laugh and did not finish whatever she had been about to add. The path was narrow enough that we had to walk close, and the rail was warm under my palm when I stopped her beside a break in the trees.

I kissed her there, with the dark water under us and the path still public enough that anyone coming around the bend would see two people who had forgotten they were outside. She kissed back slowly at first, tasting of the beer we had shared in the car, then with a hunger that surprised me, her hands finding the front of my shirt as if she had been waiting for permission to stop pretending this was only a walk. I could feel her through the thin dress she had worn for the heat, the press of her thighs and the warmth of her stomach, and I wanted her with a force that made the lookout feel like a private room even though it was not.

“Dan,” she said against my mouth, my name arriving clean and then going unfinished again. I asked her if she wanted to keep walking or if she wanted me to take her off the track. She looked down the path both ways, that easy tilt of her head that made every decision look lighter than it was, and then she took my wrist.

I led her into the scrub just below the rail, where the grass was dry and the light from the path did not quite reach. Isla stood with her back to a tree and let me lift her dress with both hands. She was not wearing anything underneath, and the discovery went through me like a wave breaking late. I went to my knees in the sand and put my mouth on her cunt without asking twice, because the way she had taken my wrist had already been the answer.

She tasted of salt and summer and something I wanted to stay inside. I licked her slowly at first, spreading her with my thumbs, then harder, my tongue working over her clit while she held my hair and tried not to make a sound that would carry. Her hips pushed forward against my face. I could hear her breathing change, that unfinished quality moving into her throat, and when I slid two fingers into her she was already wet enough that they went in easy, her cunt closing around them as if she had been waiting all evening for this exact pressure.

“That is,” she started, and then she did not finish it, because I sucked her clit into my mouth and she had to bite her own lip. I fucked her with my fingers in a steady rhythm and kept my mouth on her until her thighs started to shake against my shoulders. Someone laughed far down the path and Isla’s hand tightened in my hair, not to stop me, only to hold on. I did not stop. I wanted her to come like this, standing in the dark with the path ten metres away, and I could feel how much she wanted it too from the way she opened her legs wider and tilted her hips to give me more of her.

She came on my tongue with a broken little sound she tried to swallow and failed to hide. I kept licking her through it, slower now, until she pulled at my hair and I stood up with my mouth wet and my cock painfully hard against my shorts. Isla looked at me as if she were still catching the last of the sentence she had never said, and then she reached down and palmed me through the fabric, unhurried, unfinished, exactly like her voice.

I turned her toward the rail where the lookout dropped away toward the water. Isla put her hands on the metal and looked back at me over her shoulder, that unfinished smile still there, and I pushed my shorts down just far enough to get my cock free. I rubbed the head of it along her cunt, coating myself in her, and then I pushed into her in one slow thrust that made both of us go still.

She was tight and hot and I had to breathe through the first seconds so I would not lose it against her back. I fucked her standing, my hands on her hips, the dress bunched at her waist, and every time I bottomed out she made a sound that belonged in a bedroom and not on a public track. The ocean kept its own rhythm below us. I reached around and found her clit with my fingers and she pushed back onto my cock harder, meeting each stroke as if she had decided the risk was already paid for.

“You feel,” she said, and left it there, and I told her she felt like I had been waiting all summer to be inside her. I lifted her a little so the angle changed and she gasped, her fingers whitening on the rail. Then she turned in my arms with a determination that made me laugh under my breath, and she made me sit back against the warm metal so she could climb into my lap facing me.

Isla rode me there, her knees bracketing my hips, the drop behind us, her cunt sliding down my cock in a wet, greedy rhythm that I could hear even over the water. I held her ass and let her set the pace. Her dress was still on, barely, and anyone coming up the path would see a couple against the rail before they understood what they were looking at. She knew that. I could see it in her face, the way her eyes kept flicking toward the dark stretch of track, and I thought she was afraid. I did not yet understand that the fear was part of what she wanted.

She fucked me with her forehead against mine, breath shared, and I told her she was going to make me come if she kept moving like that. Isla only smiled and went slower, deeper, grinding her clit against me until I had to grit my teeth and hold her still for a second so I would not finish too soon.

Voices came up the path, a man and a woman talking about the heat, close enough that I could hear the scrape of their shoes on the packed dirt. Isla froze on my cock, still filled with me, her dress rucked up and my shorts around my thighs. I held her there, both of us barely breathing, my hand splayed on her back as if I could make us smaller than we were.

The couple passed within a few metres of the rail. I saw the woman’s pale shirt and the man’s phone light swinging and then they were gone around the bend, still talking about nothing, and they had not looked down into the scrub where we were half naked and joined. Isla’s cunt clenched around me in the silence they left behind. I felt her heartbeat against my chest, fast and shameless.

“That was close,” I whispered, and she made a sound that might have been agreement and might have been something else entirely. I was still hard inside her. She started to move again, tiny rolls of her hips that I felt all the way into my spine, and I had to stop her with my hands because I was not going to last and I did not want to finish against a rail with the next walkers already on their way down from the higher lookout.

“Car,” I said. “My car.”

She climbed off me with her dress falling back into place as if nothing had happened, and I tucked myself away with my hands shaking. We walked back along the path like two people who had only been looking at the view, and I kept waiting for her to laugh or to tell me we had been stupid. She did not. She walked beside me with that same unfinished ease, and I wanted her again before we even reached the steps.

The car park at the bottom of the headland was half empty and badly lit. I had parked under a tree at the far end, and I opened the back door for her because I already knew we were not done. Isla slid in across the seat and I followed, shutting us into the close dark that still smelled of sunscreen and old wax from the boards I kept in the boot.

Another car rolled in before I had even got my hands under her dress again. It parked in the space beside us, close enough that I could have reached out and touched the glass if the window had been down. Two people sat in the front seats, their faces lit by the dashboard, talking, not getting out. Isla looked at them and then at me, and I thought she would want to wait until they left. She pulled me over her instead, her mouth already on my throat, her legs opening as if the other car had been the thing she had been waiting for.

I got her dress up and my shorts down and I pushed into her cunt from behind as she knelt on the seat, my chest to her back, the leather sticking to our skin. The other car’s radio was a low murmur through the glass. I put my hand over Isla’s mouth because I knew she could not stay quiet, and because I did not want those strangers turning their heads and finding us.

I fucked her in the back seat with long, deep strokes, my other hand on her hip to keep her where I needed her, and she was so wet that the sound of it felt louder than it should have been in the closed car. My palm sealed her moans. She reached back and held my wrist, not to pull my hand away, only to keep it there, her fingers tight around the place where I was silencing her. Through the window I could see the couple in the next car still talking, still not looking, and every time one of them shifted in their seat I felt Isla tighten around my cock as if the nearness itself was what she was fucking.

She wanted this. I understood that much even if I told myself it was the scare making her shake. I drove into her harder and she pushed back to meet me, her cunt gripping me on every withdrawal, wet and open and greedy for the risk I thought we were trying to avoid. When their doors slammed, both of them at once, Isla came with a cry I caught in my hand. Her whole body locked and then shuddered, and I kept fucking her through it, my own orgasm right behind hers, spilling into her in thick pulses while those two people walked away toward the lookout without ever glancing at my car.

Nobody looked in. I held her afterward with my cock still inside her, both of us breathing hard, the windows starting to fog at the edges. I kissed the back of her neck and told her I had not meant for it to go like that, that I had wanted a date, not a near miss in a car park with strangers close enough to hear us.

Isla was quiet for a long moment, still kneeling, still full of me. Then she said, almost lazily, “You wanted a date,” as if she were handing my own sentence back to me a little warmer than I had given it, and waiting to see what I would do with the heat.

We got our clothes in order in the cramped dark, my come already sliding down her thigh when she tugged the dress back into place. I asked her if I could come home with her. I told her I did not want to sneak, that I wanted to be seen with her in the morning, coffee and the rest of it, nothing hidden and nothing we had to explain to a path. Isla listened with her head tilted, that unfinished quality back in her face, and then she smiled at me in a way that made my chest hurt because I already knew the answer.

“You do not want to sneak,” she said, feeding the words back, and she let them sit between us until I understood she was not going to invite me in. She kissed me once, slow and almost tender, the kind of kiss that belonged to the quieter night I had been trying to give her, and then she got out of the car and walked toward the street as if the lookout and the other car had been exactly what she had agreed to and nothing more.

I sat there with the other car’s empty space beside me and tried to decide whether I had nearly been caught or whether I had been used for the chance of it. I did not have an answer. Later, when I was home, a friend who had been on the lookout sent me a message that made my stomach drop. I texted Isla that a friend at the lookout thought he saw her. I did not know if it was true. I only knew I had not asked her what she really wanted from the dark, and she had not told me.