"Abby, this is crazy!" I can hear under the exasperation and anxiety in my voice the thinnest thread of excitement, and I don't like it. "I'm going to get arrested, indecent exposure or something -- "
Abby made a derisive snort and tossed her dreadlocks back into as tidy a cable as she could manage as she continued work on her canvas -- that is to say, me. "Are you kidding me, sunshine? This is downright modest compared to some of the other stuff that'll be on display out there this weekend. Trust me, if the cops can't be bothered to shut down all the mobile pharmacies and smoke shops, they're not going to give a sweet shit about your cute ass."
She gives my cute -- if a little soft -- ass a smack. I wince. It doesn't feel bad ... in fact it feels pretty goddamn good ... but it does seem more sensitive than usual. Maybe it's the paint. More likely it's my imagination. I wonder for the hundredth time how I let Abby talk me into this. She's always been the oddest of my friends, but despite that -- maybe because of it -- she's also been the closest. Outgoing where I'm shy; outrageous where I'm reserved; a tree-slobbering hippy where I'm a buttoned down conservative; and, of course, cheerfully bisexual while I've always been straight as an arrow.
Okay, there was that one time we made out in college, but it never went anywhere and I couldn't look her in the eye for the next three weeks. She, of course, merely collapsed into giggles whenever it was mentioned.
But one thing I can say for her -- she always knows when to swoop in and cheer me up. So when my marriage, already on the rocks, sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic along with the Titanic, she was on my doorstep within a week of the divorce papers being signed, handing me a brand new knapsack and a backstage pass to the Widening Gyre Festival. "It's just what you need," she insisted, quite deliberately not giving me time to think. "You've been all caged up and locked away for much too long. Go wild for a few days, why not?"
Why not? At least it wasn't Burning Man. And as Abby pointed out, I was always a Yeats fan. "Not that nine tenths of the people there will get that joke," she grinned, a merry and mischievous gleam in her eye. I should have known not to trust that little gleam -- it always spelled trouble.
So here I was shivering in nothing but a much too small thong and a spiked leather collar, hands stretched over my head like a figure on a Grecian urn, the tarpaulin that covered the floor of Abby's pavilion (closed to the public at the moment, thank god) splattered with white and orange and black splashes of paint, a Jackson Pollock frenzy of a tiger. And a rather more convincing tiger glaring at her former best friend. "You're nuts! Give me a jacket or a sweater or something, ok? I mean this is ridiculous -- "
"No, this is Art." I could hear the capital A. "You agreed to be my entry into the living canvas contest, and I am sick of taking home the second place ribbon. And you'll make much more of an impression if you're out there on the hunt as much as you can be -- as much as you want to be."
"I thought competition was a tool of the pig patriarchy?"
"Not when I win, it isn't. Now hold still." She knelt down behind me, her slender brushes teasing at the backs of my thighs, putting finishing touches on my stripes. Involuntarily, I shivered. Despite my protests, this whole process had aroused the hell out of me, and I had no doubt Abby knew it. Kneeling down at my feet, turning my legs into the powerful hindquarters of a bipedal tigress, she could probably smell it.
I chanced another glance in the mirror she'd set up, not recognizing myself. I was glad I'd lost a bit of weight the last six months; I didn't relish the idea of prancing around like this showing off a decidedly un-feline muffin top. There was still a bit of softness around the edges, but my curves were firm enough, and what had aged Abby had managed to disguise with her paint: orange and black melding together seamlessly into tigerish stripes, a blaze of white from my mouth down my throat, cresting along my bare breasts, down my belly to disappear under the thong, which was itself a pale orange, intended to blend with the greater mass of the paint. My face was perfectly adorned in the suggestion of a feline muzzle, whiskers and all, my mouth drawn in gleaming black and my eyes made huge and almond shaped with that same distinctive hue. The blues of my irises were hidden under unnervingly convincing pale gold contact lenses, the pupils correctly round instead of slit. "They're going to be looking at your stripes, not your tits," Abby had insisted. I wasn't so sure.
"And now for the piece de resistance ... " Her hands looped a slender silver chain around my waist, a long plush tiger tail depending from the backside, heavy and strangely comforting against the cleft of my ass. Abby tightened the chain, two strands of slack dangling over my left hip, chiming musically as they rang together. She leaned back, studying me critically, then clapped her hands together with an enormous, fiendish grin. "You look perfect!" Experimentally she ran a hand down my spine, hard enough to make me yelp. "And it's not smearing at all! Oh, Kathy, you are going to have fun."
I scowled. "I doubt it. I think I'm going to hide in the back of your tent."
"You'll do no such thing. You're going to get out there and prowl. Have fun. Be wild, for once in your life!"
She shooed me out of the tent, and I found myself at the edge of a seemingly endless crowd, shivering, my arms crossed over my bare breasts. I'm too old to be here, I think at first ... but among the wildly dressed people milling about, laughing, beating drums, passing joints back and forth, and seemingly having the time of their lives, I see quite a few people my age, and some a lot older. And more than a few of them are even more outrageously clad than I am. I feel myself blushing under the paint. Slowly I relax my arms and wend my way into the crowd, toward one of the musical pits where a punkish band is playing something loud and energetic.
People cheer me. People point -- not laughing, but in delight. One girl remarkably in looks likes Abby feigns terror and I laugh a little, raising my fingers and hooking them, showing off the little black claws Abby pasted over my nails, faking a snarl until I dissolve into self-conscious giggles. The sun beats down on my painted skin and for the first time in ages I feel freed and wonderful, warmed by the sun in nothing but my skin ... and my stripes, of course.
Widening Gyre takes place in a northeastern river valley, not the desert, and so there are a goodish number of hilly outcroppings for people to camp out on, rocks for a Kat to climb. Feeling adventurous I clamber atop one of them, feeling the air lift my long red mane of hair (carefully clipped to conceal my ears, so the only ears people see are the tufted black tiger ears perking from my scalp). Below me is a circle of nine or ten college students, enthusiastically debating whether Eliot or Pound was the worse anti-semite.
"Pound," I say, authoritatively. They all look up at me, startled, giving into delight as they see the craftsmanship of Abby's paints ... or the crazy naked broad painted as a tiger, whichever. "Eliot was only an anti-semite as a hobby. For Ezra it was more like a profession."
"Better listen to her," says a young man with tumbled jet black hair and keen grey eyes, smiling up at me with total fearlessness. "Cats would be the experts on Eliot."
He invites me down to the circle, introducing himself as Nash. "Not Ernest Hemingway on safari?" I inquire, grinning lopsidedly, bracing down on my hands and knees as if I'm about to pounce. Maybe Abby is right. Maybe I do need this.
"Miss Tigress, even if I had a rifle on me, I wouldn't have the heart to point it at you."
I laugh and leap from the rock, landing beside him, catching his shoulders in my pawed hands, the two of us tumbling to the earth, laughing. He's just barely young enough to be my son, but something in his eyes tells me he doesn't care.
Later in his tent, the thong carelessly torn away, our bodies joining in a rhythmic pulse, sweat mingling, the tent explosive with the heat of our bodies, my clawed fingers hooking into his naked chest, riding his cock, crying out against him, mewling, his hands greedy on my ass, one thumb pressed confidently to the tight hole under my tail -- he didn't ask if I'd like that; just knew what it would do to me -- I don't even remember how I got here. Not kissing him, but licking his lips, panting against his throat, lapping up his sweat, sinking my teeth into his skin as my orgasm twists deliciously through me, drawing both a cry from his lips and a hot jet of cum from his cock.
Slowly I relax against him, licking the place I bit. His cock slips easily out of me as my striped hands wander his rangily muscled chest. Abby did her work well -- the stripes haven't run a bit.
"Is your name really Cat?" he asks breathlessly, stroking the back of my neck. I lower my head to his chest, delighting in the touch.
"What else would it be?" I ask throatily.
He laughs, uneasy for the first time. "Could you at least tell me what color your eyes are? I mean ... I know you must not have anywhere to put those lenses ... but I just ... I'd really like to know."
I raise my head and peer deeply into his eyes, my own feline irises inscrutable and depthless. "They're just what they seem to be." My tongue darts out and flicks at his mouth.
Nash sighs, then smiles ruefully. "Well, I'm sorry you want to remain anonymous. But tell whoever painted you ... they did incredible work. But they had something incredible to work with." He blushes, as if he's not used to such sentimentalism coming from his mouth.
"I'll tell her." I stand up, stretching languidly, shivering as the secret places in my body clench with the memory of him. "In fact, I should go find her. She's probably looking for me now."
"All right." He bites his lower lip. "I'm going to be here the whole festival."
"So will I."
"All right," he says again.
And maybe I'll look for him. But right now I want to prowl. I blow a kiss -- then make the same clawing gesture I did to the girl earlier. He laughs a little, absently rubbing a place on his chest where I scratched him.
I step out into the night, delighting in the warm summer breeze on my naked skin, savoring the smell of sex that clings to me. It's funny -- I hadn't thought Abby had painted me under the thong, but the stripes and white blaze continue uninterrupted between my legs. She even frosted my little patch of red hair a soft, silky white.
They've lit the fires. I hear primitive drumbeats like tom-toms, calling all wild things to them. I turn and slink toward the glow of the fires, my eyes reflecting their dancing lights, the tail swaying from the silver chain against my calves, the tip curling and uncurling as if it were alive.
Submitted September 25, 2019 at 05:22AM by selennamoon https://ift.tt/2ly5uGW
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