Cougar Rarity 3: Jim Morrison versus Patti LaBelle

“You’re meeting my sister today”, she informed him as he stepped through the door, calling down to him from the floor above. “Come up and take a shower before we leave.”

 

That was fast, he thought. It was usually a few minutes before she started telling him what to do. He trudged up the stairs, dropping his backpack by the door as he did so. “Where are we going this time?” he asked.

 

“Oh, nothing too upscale. You needn’t worry yourself.” He rounded the corner and nudged the door open. Her appearance seemed to contradict her words. She did so enjoy making an appearance. She wore two towels—one around her body, covering her from breasts to knees, and one up in a beehive about her head and hair—as she sat in front of a mirror, putting on her face. “One of the necessary evils of age”, she had once told him. But hung up on the rack beside her, he could see one of the most ostentatious, gaudy pieces of clothing he was sure must exist in the world: a mess of fur and purple and white cloth. It was hardly a ‘nothing too upscale’ sort of outfit. Still, he couldn’t see anything laid out for him next to it, so perhaps there was still hope that he wouldn’t have to get dressed up too.

 

It was an awkward silence as he undressed, showered, and undressed again. She didn’t even bother to nag at him about his clothes as he changed. There was none of the flirting, none of the playfulness that he’d come to expect from her. It was like the calm before a very, very powerful storm. As soon as he was done, she kicked him out, back downstairs, where he busied himself watching professional wrestling for a few hours until she was ready.

 

“Ready to go?” she finally asked him, no light in her voice. Just a cold, competitive edge. He turned to the stairs, and he was almost floored. If this was what happened when she wasn’t playful or flirty, maybe she shouldn’t be playful or flirty as often. It wasn’t exactly the most understated out outfits: something halfway between a dress and a coat, purple, with massive swaths of white fur—perhaps mink—around the collar, sleeves, and hem. It stretched down to just below her knees, and buttoned diagonally, moving from her left shoulder to her right hip, though it wasn’t done up at the moment. Beneath, he could see a white dress that accentuated every last bit of her body, cut low and tight, with fishnet stockings so tight he could almost see furrows being dug into her legs, feet clad in a pair of impossible heels three inches high, that seemed to taper to a point a single atom wide. Her face was flawless, almost too perfect, with porcelain skin, ruby lips. Her cheekbones looked sharp enough to draw blood, and her high, haughty nose seemed disdainful of the very concept of “average” and “good enough”, with blood-red nails on both her toes and fingers. She always claimed her family was descended from Russian royalty. He had to admit: tonight was lending some credence to that particular theory.

 

It was a similar story as they walked into the garage. Tonight was not a Fiat night, nor was it a Jaguar night. Tonight was a night for her third (and if he had to be honest, his favorite) car: a Mercedes SLS, as subtle and restrained as getting hit in the face with a sledgehammer. Her knuckles were white on the wheel as they flew through the streets, and he could see a small, hungry smile playing across her face in the soft glow of the dashboard.

 

He realized she wasn’t lying as they pulled into the parking lot. It really was nothing too upscale. Hardly a dive, but a far cry from her usual haunts. He was wondering why she’d bothered to get so thoroughly dressed up as he held the door open for her, but then he saw her sister sitting at the other end of the room, and he suddenly got his answer.

 

“Is there anyone in your family who isn’t a fox?” he whispered to her as they approached. She pinched him, lips pursing in a brief flash of annoyance. She sat at a table near the bar, on a stool, half-standing, letting her leg—a dancer’s leg, long and strong, with a thigh that stood out in the poor light of the bar like glistening bronze slabs, and a tattoo, a single musical note, inked into the flesh of her foot, clad in a shoe he’d heard Rarity mention having come off the runway in Milan not a week ago—stretch down to the ground. The leg disappeared into a slinky black affair, body twisting in a decidedly feline manner, arms crossed and nursing a drink in one hand. She looked bored, casting a long, lazy, pouting glance about the room, almost daring someone interesting to show up and entertain her. She perked up as she saw Rarity, a smile spreading over her face and a light coming into her eyes. She practically jumped out of her seat, hurrying over to the two of them just as fast as her ridiculous shoes would allow, embracing Rarity in a fierce hug, the both of them breaking down into a fit of giggling and small jumps. They talked over each other all at once, too loudly and too high-pitched for him to glean anything more than cursory details from the conversation. Apparently, the sister had been in Europe for the better part of an eternity, busy with a show. Finally, they calmed down enough to notice him.

 

“Oh, hello, darling”, Rarity laughed. “I nearly forgot about you. Darling, this is my sister, Sweetie. Sweetie, this is—“

 

“Oh, I know who he is, all right. I never forget a cute face. Didn’t you and I go to high school together, cutie?” She winked, and he could see Rarity’s face lose some of the sororital shimmer it had just a moment before. This wasn’t lost on Sweetie, who looked at him like a cat with a canary. Now he understood why Rarity had been so single-minded earlier. Tonight was going to be a war, the bar a battlefield.

 

*

 

They went blow-for-blow most of the night, maintaining a banter the entire time, their arsenals including everything from subtle digs, all the way to outright attacks, but always friendly and fun. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters, but he understood well enough the concept of sibling rivalry. It wasn’t until the night wound down, until the two of them had a few dozen drinks in them, that it started to really get interesting.

 

“Ooh, I love this song”, Sweetie purred. A jukebox, probably older than the three of them combined, sat in the corner, flooding the room with its crackly, vinyl recording of Labelle’s Lady Marmalade. “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? Se soir?” it crooned, and Sweetie kept up, matching the Seventies note-for-note. She stared straight into his eyes, her singing curling up around him sensuously, kissing his skin with each tiny inflection and flick and roll of the tongue, each puckering of the lips. He didn’t need to take years and years of French lessons to know what those words meant.

 

She snickered, whether at his attempt not to show just how attractive he found her or Rarity’s own indignance at being upstaged, he wasn’t sure. “This is where you say ‘why, yes, miss Sweetie, I’d love to dance with you’”, she chided him, and he snapped out of the haze she’d put him in. He glanced at Rarity, who waved her permission, knocking back yet another drink. He stood up, scooting the stool back. “Would you care to dance, miss Sweetie?” he asked, more out of habit than anything else.

 

“Ha! What do you think, cutie?” There were a few women on the floor, dancing, but none of them moved with even half the grace that she did. She simply floated through the room, arms a blur of motion. “Did I tell you what I was doing in Europe, cutie?” she shouted to him over the din of motion and music. “I was in a musical! Singing was my main talent, but I guess I picked up a few dance steps on the say.” It was surreal, he realized. He’d seen Jacob’s Ladder. He was familiar with what happened when you danced with somebody to this song. She pressed her body against his, arm crooked about his neck and writhing about. She dug her ass into him, pressing it against his groin, letting out a delighted squeak as she felt his growing erection. The music built, built, built to its crescendo, then, finally, at last, mercifully, stopped. By the time the music faded and the next song was being filtered, in its tinny way, through the ancient speakers, he could do nothing more than simply stand there, transfixed, mind blank and mouth hanging open slightly. He knew a line had been crossed with that dance, that he was going to get in trouble—he could see that from here, Rarity’s arms crossed and fuming, face contorted in an almost cartoonish scowl. He was a bit surprised smoke wasn’t billowing from her ears, too.

 

She grabbed his hand and started to lead him back to the table. “Let me take care of her”, she whispered into his ear. “Trust me, she has it coming. I can’t count how many boyfriends I lost to her when I was younger.”

 

She sat him down on the stool, then jumped up lightly, settling in his lap. She wiggled about for good effect. “I approve, Rarity. Probably your best one so far. Little young for you, though, no?” He couldn’t see her face, but he could tell from the way she was shaking against him that she was laughing.

 

Rarity was reaching critical mass, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to survive when she did finally explode. Then, strangely, cracks started appearing in the scowl. First a snicker, then a giggle. A snort. A chuckle, a laugh. Another laugh, then another. Before he knew it, she was laughing alongside her sister. Sweetie slid off of him, clawing her way back to her seat before collapsing in laughter. “Oh, Lord”, Rarity managed to choke out between fits of giggles. “I’m going to beat the hell out of you two.”

 

Finally, the three of them caught their breath, huffing, gasping, dopey grins of their faces and tears in their eyes. “I swear, I really am going to kill both of you when I sober out”, Rarity sighed, the last few giggles dying away as she tilted yet another drink to her lips. “But I suppose I had that coming, wouldn’t you say, dear sister?”

 

She fished around in her purse, pulling something out, and stood up. “Back in a moment”, she promised, and she disappeared into the crowd. He watched her go, and then looked to Sweetie, quizzical. She shrugged, nursing her drink.

 

It was a long moment, and he and Sweetie were left alone—really alone—for the first time in the whole night. They talked, first about mutual friends (discovering that, yes, they did indeed go to the same high school, and confirming that, yes, Diamond Tiara was indeed still a bit of a bitch), and then about each other. He told her his story, and she listened attentively, laughing, sighing, and cooing in all the right places. Then it was her turn. She told him about how she had been all over the world, drifting between projects and passions for ten of her twenty-five years on God’s green Earth, never staying in one place, with one career, for too long: singing in a Berlin nightclub, managing the campaign of a Prague dogcatcher with political aspirations, belly-dancing in Turkey, a “gentleman’s companion” in Monte Carlo, and even a brief sting as her sister’s model on a Parisian high-fashion catwalk. “That was probably them most fun I’ve ever had”, she recalled fondly, her eyes taking on a faraway cast. “She had to sneak me into the show, of course. I wasn’t a model, just a dumb kid. God, I don’t even think I was old enough to drink back then.

 

“So there we were, her standing in front of me as I put on this over-the-top outfit; good Lord, it was gaudy, more sequins than Elvis Presley had ever seen, and ugly as sin, but then, I guess I don’t know fashion. Maybe that was the point, avant-garde and all that nonsense. Anyway, the girl who was supposed to wear it flaked—fiery Latin temper, don’t you know—and I think Rarity had a few drinks in her, because she asked me to fill in. So there we are. I’m standing in the supply closet in a hallway, trying not to fall over in the shoes they had—you think these are extreme?” She gestured down her legs. They were indeed what he would call extreme. “Those bad boys made these look conservative.

 

“She keeps a lookout, and eventually I manage to get the damn thing on and stand up. So we almost get backstage without incident, to the runway entrance, when all of a sudden, this security guard—a mountain of Russian meat—notices us. Aleksandr. I’ll never forget his face, giant scar through his lip” She showed him what she meant, tracing a line from below her eye down to her collarbone. “And he’s all like, ‘Hurm, da, are you be have-ink passki to backstageski?’”

 

Her face takes on a mock-seriousness, and she gestures wildly, doing her best impression of either Boris Badenov or Ivan Drago, he wasn’t sure which. “’Because I can be of not let-ink you backski thereski viss-out pass, Comerade.’ And Rarity, God bless her, she flutters her eyelashes, pouts hard enough to melt a rock. She starts speaking perfect (and I do mean perfect) Russian to him. He gets this look like he’s seen a ghost, starts apologizing, and waves us on. Let us right through.” She sits back and shrugs, sipping loudly.

 

“What’d she tell him?” he asked.

 

“She told him I was the special-needs daughter of the Brazilian ambassador to France, and that it was always my dream to become a supermodel. So she took pity on me, as a close personal family friend of the ambassador’s family, and was gonna put me in her show.” She laughed, rolling her eyes. “So, basically, my sister called me a retard. Bitch.

 

“He got the last laugh, though. He saw me leaving without supervision and figured it out. Chased me down and called the cops on me. I spent six hours in Parisian jail before Rarity got me out.” She sighed, wiping a tear of laughter from her eye. “Y’know, I miss those days. We always used to run into each other. It’s how we started this little contest of ours, always trying to show the other up, you might’ve noticed it. Now she spends all her time over here, helping Daddy run the business. Not that I minded the money, of course, but I missed having a playmate.”

 

She sighed again, this one longer, heavier, sadder. “She’s been a pain in my ass for twenty-five years, but... I’m glad I’m back home.”

 

Finally, Rarity reappeared. “So sorry, children. The line for the restroom goes, I’m not kidding, all the way from there to there.” She gestured across the room with her finger. “And, ugh! Ghastly. Unisex, don’t you know. You men are disgusting creatures”, she teased, poking him in the ribs with her elbow.

 

Her ears perked up. “Oh! It’s starting. Come along, darling, I’ve bought us a song”, she said, grabbing his arm and practically dragging him off the stool, onto the floor. “You’re pretty good, dear sister, but not quite good enough. Now, let the adults play.”

 

“Well, she’s fashionably lean, and she’s fashionably late, never wreck a scene, never break a date”, belted out Jim Morrison’s big, brassy, inimitable voice from the jukebox in the corner. She ground against him, forcing him deeper into the pack of dancers, bodies all about them. Her long limbs caressed him with small, quick motions, a thousand slinky, sultry strokes a second. She wriggled all about him, dragging her ass down over the growing bulge in his jeans.

 

“She’s the queen of cool, and she’s the lady who waits, since her mind left school it never hesitates”, Jim continued. He was actually starting to wonder, with the song slithering around his head and this fantastic woman slithering around his body: had Jim written the entire damn song about her? He could certainly think of worse muses for a rock star to have. She spun to face him, giving him a wicked smile and raising her leg up along his, taking his hand in hers and guiding it to her thigh. Her flesh was yielding, malleable, and he could see marks, grooves from where his fingers dug into her leg, but strangely firm at the same time. She bucked against him, harder and harder, faster and faster. He soon realized why when he felt her fingertips pawing at his jeans. “Ever seen Dirty Dancing, lover-boy?” she hissed into his ear, giving the lobe a tiny nibble. She tugged aside her panties—he silently thanked God that she wasn’t wearing pants too—and impaled herself on him. They rocked against each other, the heavy drumline thudding through the air, bass deep enough to make the floor beneath them tremble with reverberation. The crowd pressed against them, bodies as tight as sardines in a tin. They were overwhelmed by the sensations assaulting their minds and bodies, by the surge of endorphins they caused to flood through each other’s brains, and by the thrill of fucking like this, in public, on a dance floor, for God’s sake. “Well she’s a twentieth century fox, yeah, a twentieth century fox”, Morrison continued in the background, spurring the efforts of their copulation on even further. His hands pressed into her waist, the small of her back, and hers wrapped under this shoulders. She arched her back as the music reached its crescendo, and so did they. “Twentieth century fox, twentieth century fox!” he was reminded one last time as he came inside her, the both of them clutching each other just as tightly as they could, practically merging into one single being.

 

You have no idea, Jim-boy, he thought.

 

He pulled out of her, or she climbed off him; they weren’t sure. He tucked his cock back into his pants, and she straightened her dress, and they both strutted back to the table, arm-in-arm. It was a new song on now, fast and electronically brutal, but they weren’t interested in any more dancing. Without a word spoken between them, they both knew that this dance-floor quickie hadn’t done anything to satisfy them. If anything, it had just whetted their appetites, and they were both very, very hungry. It was a good job that neither of them had anywhere to be the next day.

 

They hurried back to the table, a bemused Sweetie watching them with interest. Her hands came together slowly, giving a polite round of applause in appreciation of the show she’d just witnessed. “Well, I don’t think I can beat that. Or rather, I don’t think she’ll let me beat it.”

 

“Damn right”, he heard Rarity growl under her breath, into his neck, biting at the loose skin around his throat. They were like a pair of horny teens, unable to keep their hands off each other. Sweetie stood up, recognizing the hungry look on her sister’s face. “Ha. You crazy kids go ahead, we’re already all paid up. Rarity—great to see you. Let’s do this again sometime, just a girls’ night?” They hugged each other tightly. “And as for you,” she broke the hug, turning to him. “You gimme a call sometime, if you ever get the jonesing for a girl born after the discovery of electricity, hmm?” The sisters smiled at each other, and then, as if on cue, stuck their tongues out at each other in a perfectly-coordinated display of childish petulance.

 

As they walked out, Rarity in front of him, he noticed something, and he couldn’t help but laugh: she was dripping him all over the floor. It was going to be a very long night, indeed.

 

*

 

The night out with Sweetie was a Friday night, and they lay in bed together, watching smoke rings drift up through the air and get torn apart by the ceiling fan, on a particularly lazy Sunday afternoon.

 

“So what did you think of her?” she asked, passing him the cigarette.

 

“I told you already. I liked her. She seems like she’s got all kinds of stories. Cool chick. Wish I had a sister like her.”

 

Rarity laughed as he puffed, mangling yet another attempt at a smoke ring. “No, darling, keep your tongue in the back of your throat, pointing at the bottom of your mouth. Here, gimme. And no, trust me: you don’t.”

 

She took another drag, holding the smoke in her throat, lips locked into a perverse ‘o’, and made a small sound, like the sound of choking, forcing the smoke through her lips. Yet another perfect ring floated through the thick bedroom air. “She’s a pain in the ass”, Rarity continued. “And she’s been a pain in my ass for twenty-five years. But... I’m glad she’s back home.”

 

He smiled to himself, lying on his back next to her, passing a cigarette between them. He had told his mother he was going up to see some friends for the weekend, so he knew he had all the rest of the day with her to learn how to blow smoke rings.

 

He took a drag, holding the smoke in his throat. He brought his tongue to the back of his mouth, and made a small sound, like he was being choked, exactly as she had shown him. And at last, the fruit of his labor: a thick, grey ring of smoke flew through the air.

 

“Oh, nicely done, darling”, she congratulated him, clapping lightly, cheering for him.

 

“Yeah. Think I deserve a reward?” he asked, extinguishing the dying smoke in the ashtray.

 

“Maybe”, she purred, stretching languidly, her breasts heaving forward and her flat belly making the covers rise. “What’d you have in mind?”

 

He didn’t bother to answer, instead lunging forward, lips meeting hers. He could taste the smoke on her lips and his own both. “I figured as much”, she said, whispering into his kiss, smiling. “But I thought you were hungry?”

 

“I am. But ignoring a live cougar generally isn’t the best way to live a long, happy life.” He rolled her atop him, and they resumed the business that had kept them preoccupied for nearly two days now. She’d already taught him how to blow smoke rings. Maybe now she’d teach him how she did that thing with her hips. He had all day. He was in no hurry. Smoke drifted lazily through the air, up from their entwined bodies, to the waiting clutches of the fan above their heads.

 

Twentieth century fox, he sang to himself.