Reverse Angle

Brigitte Vans came down off her own deck four days after the worst hour of her professional life and she did not pull the trigger on the long call she had been rehearsing in front of the bathroom mirror, did not file a restraining order, did not sell the house she had moved into out of pure sneering ambition six weeks earlier and walk away from the canyon with one of the worst mornings of her thirty-five years tucked behind her like a smuggled photograph. Instead she stood at the railing of her own deck for the long part of an afternoon with her platinum blonde hair washed and combed and pulled into a sleek wet helmet, with her bruised tanned cleavage covered by a clean white silk robe that hid the half-moon teeth marks Jamee Stringer's mouth had left in the upper curves of both her breasts, with the soaked agony between her thighs subsided enough that she could stand up straight, and she looked across the seventy feet of empty canyon air at the brunette's deck and made herself a private list. She had been beaten on Jamee Stringer's deck, in Jamee Stringer's pool, on Jamee Stringer's exercise mat, with Jamee Stringer's teeth on her tits and Jamee Stringer's clit grinding hers into surrender, and the brunette had given her one parting kindness on the way out: "Come back any time." Brigitte fully intended to come back. But she was not coming back to Jamee's deck a second time without first making it very clear that the next round was going to be on Brigitte's terms, in Brigitte's place, and that the brunette who walked across the canyon to claim it was going to walk back across the canyon flat on her back. Step one was the premiere. The Hollywood premiere of Jamee Stringer's new picture had been on Brigitte's calendar for three months, and Brigitte had been on the guest list since the production company had put her on as a courtesy because they were quietly courting her for the next slot on the same director's slate. Brigitte had nearly skipped it. She nearly skipped a lot of premieres now. But after Tuesday morning on Jamee's deck she did not skip this one. She had her stylist drape her in a backless honey-gold gown cut so low in front that the milky white tan-line patches across her bosom from the previous week's bikini glowed against the gold fabric as if lit from within; she had her makeup done so the half-moon teeth marks on the tops of both globes were invisible; she had her platinum bob trimmed and slicked back the way a body double wears it; and she walked down the red carpet at the Egyptian on Friday night five steps behind Jamee Stringer with a champagne glass in her hand and a smile so cold the photographers ate it up. Jamee saw her. Brigitte made sure of it. Halfway up the carpet she let her path drift just close enough to the brunette that their two cleavages pivoted toward each other in matched arcs for the photographers, and the flashbulbs went stuttering and clattering like a small artillery, and Jamee's wide brown eyes hardened over a smile that did not reach them. Brigitte tipped her champagne glass toward her old rival half an inch and let her own smile go just a degree colder. Jamee's lips parted around something she did not say. Brigitte turned away with the same casual flip of her hair the brunette had taught her was a perfect humiliation tool four mornings before, and her honey gold ass moved up the carpet ahead of Jamee Stringer's flame-red one. Inside the theatre Brigitte sat fourteen rows back and let the afterglow of the brunette's discomfort carry her through ninety minutes of an action picture in which Jamee's body was the only thing on screen anyone in the auditorium was actually paying to look at. Brigitte watched Jamee's bared muscular back, the long muscular legs in fishnet, the deep tanned cleavage in a torn shirt, the upturned bitchy nipples in a soaked white tank, and she sat with her own honey-gold gown stretched tight across the matching pair and let her platinum blonde head tilt sideways toward her companion the way a woman tilts her head when she is taking quiet pleasure in a thing nobody else in the room knows is happening. Brigitte had made all the same shots. Brigitte had been the body double on three of them. Brigitte was the only other woman in this theatre at this premiere who had felt under her own naked skin every contour the audience was watching on Jamee Stringer's. Brigitte was also the only woman in this theatre who had felt all of it tear, sweat, ride and break under her own hands four mornings ago. After party. The Roosevelt. Brigitte gave it twenty minutes in the main room. Jamee held court near the bar with a producer and two of the picture's other cast members, and the brunette's full bosom rose and fell under the flame-red bodice in slow contained breaths because the brunette was perfectly aware that her old rival had walked into the same room and was working her way around the perimeter without yet engaging. Brigitte watched her in the mirror behind the bar without ever turning her platinum head Jamee's way. She watched Jamee's brown eyes find her in the same mirror. She watched the brunette excuse herself from the producer with one hand on the producer's arm and a flash of the famous smoky smile, and she watched Jamee Stringer head for the women's lounge through the back of the room, and Brigitte set her champagne glass down on the bar without a sound and followed. The lounge was a long mirrored corridor with three stalls at the back, two leather banquettes near the door, and a single attendant in a black uniform handing out hand towels. Brigitte palmed the attendant a hundred dollars on her way past, smiled a smile so bright the woman did not even look down at the bill, and the attendant murmured something polite and stepped through the side door without looking back. The lounge was empty when Brigitte locked the main door behind her and turned the latch. Jamee was at the second sink, reapplying lipstick. She froze with the gold tube an inch from her mouth. "You'd better unlock that door, Brigitte," Jamee said quietly, her brown eyes meeting Brigitte's in the mirrored wall. "In a few minutes," Brigitte said, and walked the length of the corridor with her honey-gold heels soundless on the carpet runner, and Jamee turned slowly with the gold tube still in her hand and her lush red lips half-painted, and the two of them faced each other under the recessed lighting at four feet of distance with twin floor-length mirrors behind each of them that turned the whole confrontation into a four-way mirror tunnel. "What is this," Jamee said. Her voice was steady, but the high color was already up under the famous tan and Brigitte saw the brunette's nipples rise into the flame-red silk of the gown two seconds after she had said it. "This is a hello," Brigitte said. "I owed you a hello. I figured a public restroom was just the place for it, since you and I have a tradition there." Jamee's mouth tightened. She remembered the Oscars. So did Brigitte. Brigitte stepped forward another two feet and Jamee did not move, and now the toes of their heels nearly touched and their bare cleavages pivoted toward each other across the last yard of carpet between them. "You don't want to be doing this here, blondie," Jamee said softly. "Walk back out. Save what's left." "Save what's left of what," Brigitte said. She closed the last yard of distance and her two heavy honey-gold-clad globes brushed up against the two heavy flame-red-clad globes opposite, gown silk on gown silk, the ridges of Brigitte's hard nipples catching against the ridges of Jamee's hard nipples through both layers. Brigitte breathed in slow and hot through her nose and held the contact, watching Jamee's brown eyes go wide. "You think you finished anything Tuesday morning, baby? You think I came here Friday to bow out?" "Get your tits off mine," Jamee whispered, but she did not move backward, and her own pair pressed forward by the half-inch a press has to give to be real, and Brigitte felt the brunette's heart hammering through both layers of silk into her own. "Make me," Brigitte purred. She did not wait for Jamee to answer. Brigitte's right hand came up between them slowly enough that the brunette could have seen it coming and stopped her, and the brunette did not stop her, and Brigitte took the heavy round flame-red-covered weight of Jamee's left breast into her palm and squeezed. Slowly. With the deliberate dirty grip of a woman who had been planning the squeeze for four days. The pressure rolled the brunette's heavy gland out around the edges of her hand; Brigitte's thumb found the long stiff pink nipple through the thin silk and pinched it and twisted, and Jamee's brown eyes squeezed shut and the brunette's lipsticked mouth opened on a gasp before Jamee Stringer caught herself. "You filthy whore," Jamee hissed. "That's right, I am," Brigitte said pleasantly, and squeezed harder. "Now you can squeeze mine back, or you can squirm. Which one is it, sugar?" Jamee's right hand came up. Jamee's right hand took Brigitte's left honey-gold-covered globe in exactly the same dirty palmful and squeezed back exactly as hard, thumb finding the long stiff brown rod through the silk and pinching it, and the two body doubles stood there in a public restroom at the Roosevelt one yard from a mirrored wall and crushed each other's twin trophies in each other's hands while the muffled sound of the after party throbbed through the door. "That all you've got?" Brigitte breathed. "I'll bite this hand off you," Jamee said. "I'll bite yours off too," Brigitte said. She added one more half-inch of squeeze and rolled her thumb across the brunette's pink shaft until she felt a fine tremor go up Jamee's arm into the hand on Brigitte's own breast. Jamee's eyes opened back up, full of the kind of black hate Brigitte had been dreaming about for four nights, and the brunette's thumb rolled across Brigitte's brown rod with exactly the same payback violence. They held the squeeze. Brigitte counted. Twenty seconds. Forty. Neither of them made a sound. Jamee's nostrils flared. Brigitte's mouth was dry. She could feel the heat coming off the brunette in waves, smell the perfume on her, smell the scrubbed-clean sweat under it. Their pelvises had drifted in the half-inch the squeeze made them drift, and Brigitte could feel through both gowns the heat of Jamee Stringer's pelvis brushing the heat of her own. Somebody rattled the locked door at the front of the lounge. Both women froze. Their hands did not come off each other's breasts. Their thumbs did not stop rolling pink shaft and brown shaft. The door rattled again, then the muffled voice of the attendant on the other side: "One moment, please." Brigitte leaned forward by the last inch. Her honey-gold-covered cleavage piled up on top of Jamee's flame-red-covered cleavage, hand still rolling. She put her mouth an inch from Jamee's lipsticked one and she let her bottom lip just brush. "Saturday," she said quietly. "Tomorrow night. My deck. Eight o'clock. Bring whatever you've got, brunette, because I am bringing all of mine." "You couldn't take me on my deck four days ago," Jamee whispered, but her thumb on Brigitte's nipple had stopped rolling, and her wide brown eyes were on Brigitte's mouth. "Four days ago I came to your house," Brigitte said. "Tomorrow you come to mine. I dare you to show, Jamee." She squeezed the brunette's breast one last time, slowly, and let go. Jamee's hand stayed on Brigitte's breast a half-second longer than it needed to, then let go too. Brigitte stepped back. She walked the length of the lounge, unlocked the door, smiled at the attendant who came pouring back through with a hand towel, and walked back into the after party with her honey-gold ass perfectly aligned. She did not look back at the brunette in the mirror behind her. She did not need to. The handprint Brigitte had just left across the front of Jamee Stringer's gown was going to be invisible to anybody looking, and palpable to the only woman in the building who mattered, all the way home and through tomorrow morning and all the way to Saturday night at eight o'clock, and Brigitte Vans had four days' worth of revenge to spend on the brunette, and she had all of it in inventory now. Brigitte was on her own deck Saturday morning at half past seven, in a yellow string bikini cut so high on the hips it was barely a suggestion and so low on the bust it cleared the half-moon teeth marks Jamee Stringer had left in her by an eighth of an inch, with a bottle of cocoa butter in her right hand and the mirrored aviators on her face turned slightly toward the brunette's deck. She had not slept. She did not need to sleep. She had come down out of the shower at five-thirty, stretched her sore lower back through forty minutes of slow yoga, eaten exactly half a grapefruit, and walked out onto her deck with her platinum bob still wet enough to slick straight back off her sharp Nordic forehead and her honey-tanned skin oiled from the night before. Across the canyon Jamee Stringer's deck was empty. It did not stay empty long. The sliding glass door on the brunette's side opened at seven forty-five, and Jamee came out in her bright red workout bra and biker shorts with a bottle of water in one hand and her bare brown shoulders held a hair too straight, and she walked the length of her own deck and took up her exercise mat at the place Brigitte had been her last view of her four mornings ago, and she did not glance across at Brigitte's deck until she had already laid the mat down. When her brown eyes finally cut across the seventy feet of canyon air they found Brigitte exactly where Brigitte had been waiting to be found: on the lounge chair by the railing, on her back, knees up, oiled platinum body laid out flat, mirrored shades on, one arm draped behind her head so the bigger of the two half-moon bites Jamee Stringer's mouth had left in her cleavage four days ago caught the morning light just out of sight under the yellow bikini's edge. Brigitte smiled across the canyon. Just enough to make the brunette see it. Then she lifted the cocoa butter and squeezed a long bead of it down between her own breasts. Jamee did not start her workout. Jamee stood there in the bright red bra and the biker shorts at the rim of her own deck for a full quiet minute and watched Brigitte work the cocoa butter slowly into the bare skin between her honey-gold globes with the flat of one hand, eyes invisible behind the mirrored shades but the tilt of the platinum head pointed exactly at the brunette's the entire time. Brigitte saw the brunette's chest rise twice. Brigitte saw the brunette's hands curl at her sides. Brigitte watched Jamee Stringer turn deliberately away to start her sit-ups, and Brigitte watched the brunette do not one full set right. Twelve sit-ups in, the brunette stopped. She got up off her mat. She walked back into the house. Brigitte capped her cocoa butter, swung her legs off the lounge chair, slipped a thin honey-gold cover-up over the bikini and her platinum heels onto her oiled feet, walked through her own house, picked up the keys off the foyer table, walked out the front door, walked down her own driveway and up Jamee Stringer's, and rang the doorbell. The door opened on the third ring. Jamee was barefoot and still in the workout bra and biker shorts, brown hair loose, brown eyes already burning, the sweat from the abandoned sit-ups standing up in fine beads along the line of her collarbone. She stood with one hand on the doorframe and she did not say anything for a long moment. "Tonight isn't until eight," Jamee said finally. Her voice came out lower than Brigitte had expected. "This isn't tonight," Brigitte said. "Tonight is at my place. This is morning preview. May I come in?" Jamee did not answer that. She stepped backward without taking her brown eyes off Brigitte's mirrored shades, and Brigitte stepped past her into the foyer, and Jamee closed the door and locked it and walked Brigitte through the house to the deck the same way Brigitte had come four mornings ago, and the deck looked exactly the way it had looked four mornings ago: pool, exercise mat, the railing along the canyon side, the morning sun coming down hot across all of it. Brigitte slid the mirrored shades up onto her platinum hair and looked at the brunette in the bright red bra. "Is your boyfriend home, Jamee?" she asked pleasantly. "You know I don't have a boyfriend, Brigitte." "Just like four days ago. Good." Brigitte pulled the honey-gold cover-up off her shoulders and dropped it on a deck chair. The yellow string bikini was a formality at this point, two triangles of yellow over honey-tanned breasts that were already half-out of it on either side, a string at the hips and another at the buns, oiled, and Jamee's brown eyes flicked once across the half-moon teeth marks on the upper curves of Brigitte's bust before lifting back to Brigitte's icy blue ones. "What do you want," Jamee said. "I want a preview," Brigitte said. "I want you to know what's waiting for you tonight on my deck. I want to send you home with the rest of your Saturday to think about it." "You're insane," Jamee said quietly. "I'm right on schedule," Brigitte said. "Take the bra off, brunette. Or I take it off you." Jamee Stringer reached up, hooked the bright red lycra bra at the bottom and peeled it slowly off the heavy round full bosom, and shook her loose dark hair down off the bare cleavage one tug at a time, and the same two tan-lined milky white globes Brigitte had pressed against four mornings ago came back out to face the same two honey-gold globes that had pressed them. Brigitte reached behind her own back and pulled the yellow bikini top's tie. The triangles fell away from her own honey-tanned bosom in one practiced motion. The two body doubles stood ten feet apart on Jamee's deck under the morning sun, neither of them with anything covering anything from the waist up, and the half-moon teeth marks on Brigitte's bust caught the light in a way Brigitte had been waiting all four days for the brunette to see. Jamee saw them. The brunette's brown eyes went to the marks, and the brunette's lips parted slightly, and a flicker of something less than steady went across her face for just one second. "Yes," Brigitte said softly. "I kept those for you. They've been very nice to look at all week. They reminded me what I owe you." "Walk out of here, blondie," Jamee said. "Tonight. I'll come tonight. We'll do it tonight. Walk out." "Why," Brigitte said, "when we have all morning." She walked. She walked the ten feet across Jamee Stringer's deck the same way she had walked it four days ago, hands at her hips, oiled honey-gold bosom thrust forward, and Jamee dropped the bra she was still holding and met her halfway. They came in chest first. Their two heavy globes met dead center between them with a slap that rolled out across the canyon, and the impact rocked them both, and they both leaned in and slammed forward again and again. Hard, slick, hot, the way they had four days ago, and within thirty seconds Brigitte was riding the brunette backward toward the deck pool the way the brunette had ridden her four days ago. Only this time Brigitte did not stop and Jamee did not catch her stride. The brunette had not been ready for the morning when she came out onto her deck. The brunette's body was still sore from four days ago in places that Brigitte had been counting on. The brunette's nipples were tender. The brunette's heavy globes flinched a half-inch every time Brigitte's hard pink-bordered brown rods stabbed into them. Brigitte saw the flinch and Brigitte put her honey-tanned tongue between her teeth and Brigitte drove her bosom into Jamee's pair with the full weight of her ribcage behind it and she rolled the brunette backward step by sweat-slicked step and she did not let up. "Slow and hard, sugar," Brigitte purred against Jamee's ear at the seventh step. "Just like we said in the pool four days ago. You taught me. Slow. And. Hard." Jamee's heel clipped the lip of the pool and Brigitte caught her by the bare bicep so the brunette did not fall in this time. Brigitte was not done with her yet. Brigitte walked her sideways along the rim of the pool instead, breast crushing breast every step, and steered the brunette toward the shaded corner where the railing met the back wall of the deck and where the brunette had pinned Brigitte against the rail four days ago. Brigitte put the brunette's bare brown back into the corner this time. The metal rail caught Jamee in the small of the back the same way it had caught Brigitte. Brigitte forced the brunette's upper body just far enough out over the drop-off to let Jamee feel where she was, with the long ribbon of canyon and the white roofs of Hollywood arrayed below and behind the brunette's loose brown hair, and Brigitte stepped in chin to chin and pressed. "Fucking blonde whore," Jamee said into her face. The brunette's voice was steady but her ribs were heaving. "That is what I am," Brigitte agreed. "I am the fucking blonde whore who owns your morning, baby. Push me back. Show me the brunette I had on her knees inside of fifteen minutes is still in this body. Push me back, Jamee." Jamee pushed. The brunette put her hands flat on Brigitte's shoulders and shoved with everything she had, and Brigitte gave her one foot just to sweeten it, and then Brigitte locked her honey-tanned thighs and rolled her oiled chest forward and took the foot back. And another. And another. And before the brunette had fully realized that her own deck was now Brigitte's deck for the morning, Jamee Stringer's bare brown back was hard against the metal corner of her own railing and Brigitte's two honey-gold-oiled globes were piled up on top of Jamee Stringer's two milky white tan-lined ones with her brown shafts buried so deep into the brunette's aureoles that the brunette grunted at every breath. Brigitte leaned in and put her mouth on Jamee Stringer's mouth and bit her lower lip exactly the way Jamee Stringer had bitten Brigitte's four days ago, hard enough to spite, not hard enough to bleed. Jamee snarled. Jamee tried to bite her back. Brigitte pulled back the half-inch the bite needed to release and held the brunette's chin against the rail with her own chin and would not let her come forward. "You always wanted me," Brigitte whispered, parroting the brunette's own line back at her, four days late. "Ever since the beginning. And every time I did a body double scene I knew you were out there watching me work. Wishing it was you. Hating that it wasn't." "Get off me, you cunt," Jamee hissed. "Not yet." Brigitte's right hand came down off the brunette's bare shoulder and slid down the warm wet length of the brunette's torso and slipped under the waistband of the bright red biker shorts. The brunette stiffened. Brigitte's fingers found the hot tangle of trimmed brown pubic hair the brunette had displayed for her four mornings ago, slid past it the way Jamee Stringer's fingers had slid past her own blonde fur, and Brigitte's middle finger stroked the long pink shaft of the brunette's already-emerging clit one slow time from base to tip, and Jamee Stringer's whole brown body bowed against the rail. "There you are," Brigitte said softly into the brunette's open mouth. "You came out for me. Welcome back, sugar." She did not finger Jamee further. She did not need to. The brunette's pelvis had pushed forward involuntarily against the heel of Brigitte's hand and Brigitte had felt it push, and that was the lesson Brigitte had crossed the canyon to deliver. She pulled her hand back out of the brunette's biker shorts slowly enough that the brunette's clit got a second long stroke on the way out, and Brigitte stepped back from the railing one full step, and Jamee Stringer leaned forward off the rail breathing hard with her cleavage flushed and her brown eyes wet with something Brigitte had been four days waiting to see in them. "Eight o'clock," Brigitte said. "My deck. Don't be late, Jamee. And don't take a nap before you come over. I want every ounce of fight you've got left in your body when you walk through my door, because I am going to take all of it." Brigitte stepped forward one more time and squeezed Jamee Stringer's left breast in the same dirty palmful she had used in the restroom the night before, just enough to remind the brunette where the squeeze lived now, and then she released and walked back across the deck to where her honey-gold cover-up lay folded across the chair. She put it on slowly. She tied the yellow bikini top back up around her bosom slowly. She put the mirrored shades back down off her platinum hair onto her face slowly. Jamee Stringer stayed leaning against the rail of her own deck with her bare bosom heaving and her tan-lined cleavage flushed pink and her hand half-raised to her own mouth as if she were about to wipe Brigitte off it and could not quite remember how. Brigitte walked back through the brunette's house, unlocked the brunette's front door from the inside, walked down the brunette's driveway and up her own, and was back on her own deck in the lounge chair with the cocoa butter in her hand at exactly eight thirty-five in the morning. She did not look across the canyon. She lay flat on her back in the yellow bikini under the morning sun and let the half-moon teeth marks on her cleavage warm in the light, and she had eleven and a half hours to wait, and she did not move for two of them. Across the canyon Jamee Stringer's deck stayed empty for the rest of the morning. By three in the afternoon Brigitte saw the lights come on in the brunette's house, and saw the silhouette of Jamee Stringer pacing slowly through her living room in a robe, and Brigitte smiled into the rim of her champagne flute and did not need to see any more. The brunette had not gone out. The brunette had nowhere to go. The brunette was going to walk down her own driveway in seven hours' time and walk up Brigitte's, and the brunette knew it, and Brigitte knew it, and the day went over the canyon sideways in long red bars of late sun across the white stucco and the blue pool tile and the two empty honey-gold and bright-red exercise mats facing each other across the canyon air. At seven fifty-five p.m. Brigitte's doorbell rang. Brigitte was in the foyer waiting for it. Brigitte opened the door on the second chime. Jamee Stringer was on Brigitte's threshold in a black workout bra, black biker shorts, no makeup, brown hair wet from the shower and slicked back off her famously sculpted forehead the way Brigitte's was, no purse, no shoes other than the flat black sandals on her bare brown feet. The brunette had clearly come over directly from her own bathroom, eight hours after the morning Brigitte had spent in the brunette's deck corner, and the brown eyes that came up out of the wet dark hair to meet Brigitte's icy blue ones had had eight hours to put themselves back together. They were back together. Jamee Stringer had not come here to lose. "Good evening, Jamee," Brigitte said pleasantly. "Come in." Brigitte stepped aside and the brunette walked past her into the foyer the same way Brigitte had walked past her four mornings ago, and Brigitte closed the door and locked the deadbolt behind her, and Jamee turned in the foyer and met her face to face. Brigitte was in her own outfit for the evening: a simple white workout bra cut as low as the brunette's black one, white biker shorts cut as high on the hip as the brunette's black ones, platinum bob slicked back, the half-moon teeth marks on her cleavage on display above the bra line on purpose. The two tall body doubles stood in the foyer at the same height, the same width across the broad shoulders, the same heavy round full bosom under the same narrow band of stretch lycra, the same flaring sculpted hips, the same eyes-on-eyes, and neither one of them was the woman who had walked into a public restroom yesterday or the woman who had stood on the other side of a deck rail this morning. They were both the women who had known since Tuesday that this Saturday was coming. "Same rules," Brigitte said. "There weren't any rules," Jamee said. "Right. None. Anything goes. The dirtier the better. And whoever finishes the other one finishes the other one for good. That part is new tonight." "I can live with that," Jamee said quietly. Brigitte led her through the house. Not the living room, the deck. Brigitte's deck was narrower than Jamee's by a yard and longer by ten feet, the pool inset along the railing edge instead of in the center, the exercise mat already laid out at the wall end of the deck, two big floor lamps set up on the mat side throwing warm light across the canvas because the sun was almost down across the canyon and Brigitte had not wanted to fight in the dark. She had set the lamps up that afternoon. She had vacuumed the deck. She had cleaned the pool. The deck was hers and she had spent the eleven hours after Jamee's the way a stage manager spends the eleven hours before curtain, and the brunette walked out onto it now and saw all of it at once and her brown eyes went very flat. "You really thought about this," Jamee said. "For four days," Brigitte said. The brunette did not waste any further breath. Jamee reached up, hooked the black workout bra at the bottom and peeled it off the same heavy pair Brigitte had slammed into chest-first on three separate occasions now, dropped the bra on a deck chair, and walked the length of the deck to the dead center between pool and mat with her hands at her hips and her tan-lined cleavage flushed and her dark blonde nipples already long and hard. Brigitte mirrored her without breaking stride. White bra hooked, peeled off, dropped. Honey-gold tan-lined cleavage out, half-moon teeth marks visible. Long brown nipples up and out. Brigitte met the brunette dead center. They came in chest first one more time, in the warm orange light of the floor lamps with the canyon going lavender behind them, and the slap of two heavy bare globes meeting two heavy bare globes rolled out across the canyon for the third time in a week. They did not stagger this time. Both bodies had calibrated the impact in advance. They leaned into the rebound and slammed forward again. Hard nipple stabbed soft aureole; hard aureole rebounded onto soft outer breast tissue; the dense honey-gold pair piled flat against the dense milky-white pair and refused to give first. Brigitte breathed in slowly through her nose. Jamee breathed out slowly through hers. The two of them had been here three times this week and the bodies remembered. Brigitte led with her left breast. Jamee answered with her right. Brigitte led with her right. Jamee answered with her left. They started slow. Both of them were sore, both of them had been sore for a week, and neither of them was going to make the brunette's mistake from Tuesday morning of opening at full speed and burning down by the third round. Brigitte set the pace. Slow, hard, deep press. Long groan. Pivot half an inch. Long groan back. The exchange went five minutes that way before either of them broke the breast contact, and when Brigitte broke it she broke it to wrap an arm around the back of Jamee's loose wet brown hair and tug the brunette in close enough to bite the brunette's lower lip exactly the way the brunette had bitten Brigitte's at the Roosevelt yesterday. Slowly. Spitefully. Without drawing blood. Jamee bit her back. Slowly. Spitefully. Without drawing blood. Their tongues met inside the bites; Brigitte's pushed past Jamee's; Jamee's pushed past Brigitte's. They tongue-fenced for a long minute mouth on mouth with their hot bare breasts squeezed and slipping wet against each other and their white-and-black-clad pelvises grinding through two layers of stretch fabric, and Brigitte tasted the brunette's clean salt sweat and the brunette tasted her clean salt sweat back, and neither of them said a word because there was nothing to say that an entire week of body to body had not already said. Brigitte broke first this time. She broke the kiss to get Jamee's bottom biker shorts down. The brunette read her hand on the waistband and did not stop her, because the brunette's own thumb had hooked the front of Brigitte's white biker shorts at exactly the same moment. They peeled each other's shorts down at the same speed. Brigitte's blonde fur came out into the orange light and Jamee's brown fur came out into the orange light, and the two pairs of stretch shorts hit the deck and the brunette stepped out of hers and Brigitte stepped out of hers, and the two of them faced each other at the dead center of Brigitte's deck full nude under floor lamps with no one watching the canyon at this hour but a half-dozen production company men who were on Brigitte's email list and whom Brigitte had not particularly minded inviting to look out their windows at eight o'clock. "You set this up," Jamee said quietly. Her brown eyes had flicked once across the lit windows of three of the houses up the hill. "I set up everything," Brigitte said. "Tonight is mine. Every angle. Now come finish what you started Tuesday morning, or I do." The brunette came. She rushed Brigitte chest first the way the brunette had rushed her on her own deck Tuesday, only this time Brigitte did not stagger, did not give ground, did not let the brunette set the angle. Brigitte caught the rush with her right shoulder and pivoted at the hip and rolled the brunette's momentum sideways the way Brigitte had rehearsed under three different yoga teachers all afternoon, and the brunette went past her into the corner of the deck where Brigitte's pool railing met the back wall of the deck, and the small of the brunette's bare brown back hit the metal of the rail at exactly the angle Brigitte had set it up to hit, and Brigitte was on top of her by the time the brunette's heels had finished sliding. This was the corner where the brunette had pinned Brigitte four mornings ago. This was the corner where Brigitte had pinned the brunette twelve hours ago. Brigitte fully intended for this to be the corner where the brunette stayed pinned for the rest of the night. The brunette did not stay pinned without a fight. Jamee Stringer thrashed against her hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder and bare bosom to bare bosom with everything she had. Brigitte felt the brunette's legs hook around hers, felt the brunette's strong hands plunge into her platinum bob and wrench her head back, felt the brunette's teeth find her neck and dig. Brigitte rode it. Brigitte had been riding worse all week. Brigitte slid one of her oiled honey-tanned thighs up between the brunette's spread bare brown ones and ground her white workout-bra-toned belly against the brunette's tan-lined toned belly and rolled her two long hard brown rods one full circle around the brunette's two long hard pink ones, and the brunette's whole body twitched. "There you are again, sugar," Brigitte breathed against the brunette's collarbone. "Right where you were this morning. Right where you went on your deck Tuesday. You can't help it, baby. Look at you. You're already wet." "You're as wet as I am, you fucking blonde," Jamee hissed. "I am," Brigitte agreed. "And I'm winning." She rolled her belly down the brunette's belly and her oiled mound met the brunette's hot mound, blonde fur on brown fur, and Brigitte felt the brunette's already-emerged pink clit touch her own already-emerged blonde-furred pink clit and Brigitte ground them together one slow time and Jamee Stringer's whole muscular brown back arched off the rail. Brigitte caught her by the bare hips before she could fall forward off the railing, walked her bodily three steps along the rim of the pool, and tipped her in. The pool was not a wading pool tonight. Brigitte had filled it to the brim that afternoon. Jamee Stringer went under to her shoulders and came up with her wet brown hair plastered down across her smoky-eyed brown face and her bare tan-lined globes streaming water and her brown nipples standing harder and longer in the cool than they had under the orange lamp light. The brunette glared up at Brigitte from the water with her brown eyes wide and her chest heaving and her wet pubic mound on display through the surface, and Brigitte took the second yellow string bikini she had decidedly not put on tonight off the back of the deck chair behind her and tossed it deliberately into the pool next to the brunette where it floated on the surface like a small bright joke. "You can leave that here when we're done," Brigitte said. "Come back out and finish, Jamee." The brunette came up out of the water at the steps with her muscular wet brown body sluicing in long sheets, and Brigitte met her at the top step and took the wet brunette by the wet biceps and steered the wet brunette past the deck chairs to the exercise mat between the floor lamps. Jamee did not resist. Jamee had decided to fight this on the mat all along. The two body doubles came down to their knees on the canvas of the mat the same way they had come down to their knees on the canvas of Jamee's mat four mornings ago, only this time Brigitte's hands were on the brunette's hips first, and Brigitte's bare bosom was the one driving the brunette's bare bosom backward, and Brigitte's pelvis was the one closing on the brunette's pelvis with the angle of a woman who had spent the long hours of an afternoon thinking about exactly which angle she wanted to come in at. Their two long hard clits found each other. Brigitte felt the touch and Brigitte stroked. Slowly. Jamee's hips rolled to meet hers, a reflex now, after a week of Brigitte training the brunette's body for this stroke, and Brigitte rode the reflex one full slow circuit. Jamee groaned. Brigitte stroked again. Jamee groaned again. Their two heavy bosoms had piled flat against each other; Brigitte's brown nipples were buried in the brunette's pink-lipsticked aureoles and Jamee's pink shafts were buried in Brigitte's brown ones and neither pair of nipples was bending now because both pairs were wet enough and oil-slick enough that they slid past each other on every push. Brigitte tipped them sideways to the mat. The brunette went over with her, no resistance, Jamee was riding the same long climb up her back that Brigitte was riding, and Brigitte was riding it ten seconds ahead of her on purpose. They hit the canvas with Brigitte on top. Jamee's brown thighs spread for her without a fight; Brigitte's blonde-furred mound settled on Jamee's brown-furred mound; their two hard clits locked up clit on clit and Brigitte ground. She did not grind fast. She had four days of revenge to spend on the brunette and she was not going to spend it inside of two minutes. She ground the brunette's clit slow and long and deep with the full weight of her honey-tanned pelvis pinning the brunette's pelvis to the canvas, and she watched the brunette's wide brown eyes go heavy-lidded and the brunette's full lush mouth go slack and the brunette's whole muscular brown body start to shake under her, and Brigitte put her own bared teeth a quarter inch above the brunette's open mouth and stayed there, breathing the brunette's breath in and out, riding her down. "Look at me, Jamee," Brigitte whispered. Jamee Stringer's brown eyes opened. They were huge. "Tell me whose deck you're on." Jamee's mouth worked. Nothing came out. "Tell me, sugar." "Yours," Jamee said. The word came out small. The word had cost the brunette every ounce of pride she had brought through Brigitte's front door at eight o'clock. "Tell me whose body." "Yours." "Whose tonight." "Yours." Brigitte ground one more long slow circle and Jamee Stringer came underneath her, the brunette's whole muscular brown body bucking up off the canvas in one long gasping arc with Brigitte riding it, one hand on the brunette's wet brown hair and the other on the brunette's flexing bare hip and her own hot wet honey-tanned cunt riding the brunette's defeated long pink clit through every shaking second of it. Brigitte took her time. Brigitte rode the climax all the way down. By the time the brunette's body had stopped shaking and Brigitte's body had stopped riding and the only thing moving on the mat was the long ragged breath Brigitte was breathing in time with the brunette's, the brunette's brown eyes were closed and the brunette's lipsticked mouth was open and the brunette's tan-lined cleavage was streaked with the brunette's own sweat and Brigitte's. Brigitte had not come herself. Brigitte was going to come on her own time. Brigitte rolled off Jamee Stringer onto her back beside her on the canvas and let the canyon-cool evening air kiss her oiled wet skin for one long minute. Then she sat up on the mat with her back to the brunette and looked across her own deck at the two empty deck chairs and the white biker shorts and the black biker shorts in a small pile near the foot of the mat and she thought about whether to let the brunette walk back down the driveway tonight. She decided. She turned. She put her hand on Jamee Stringer's bare brown shoulder. The brunette opened her wet brown eyes. "Get up," Brigitte said quietly. "Go home. Take the yellow bikini out of the pool on your way. Come back tomorrow night at eight. I want a rematch tomorrow. I want a rematch every Saturday for as long as you can take it, sugar. Tonight was mine. So is tomorrow. So is next Saturday. So is every Saturday after, until you tell me you're done. And the day you tell me you're done is the day I admit you might still be a real woman in the morning. Until then, you're mine." Jamee Stringer got slowly to her feet on the mat. Her brown legs were not steady. She walked the long way around the pool to the edge of the deck where her clothes were and she pulled the bright black biker shorts back up her wet brown legs and she pulled the bright black workout bra back over the still-erect pink rods of her bosom and she tied the strap and she did not pick up the yellow bikini out of the pool and she did not look at Brigitte. She walked through Brigitte's house to the front door, unlocked it from the inside, walked down Brigitte's driveway and up her own, and Brigitte heard the brunette's door close from across the canyon over the quiet of the evening with the kind of finality a door closes with when the woman behind it knows she is going to be back. Brigitte stayed on her deck for the rest of the evening. She lay back down on her exercise mat under the floor lamps with the half-moon teeth marks that Jamee Stringer had given her on Tuesday catching the orange light, and she finished what she had not let herself finish a half hour ago with one slow hand on her own honey-tanned mound and the other on her own bare bosom, and she came hard and clean and deliberate the way a woman comes who has spent four days planning a Saturday and has had every minute of it land exactly where she planned it. Then she stood up, walked to the rim of her own pool, fished the floating yellow bikini out, wrung it dry, hung it over the back of a deck chair where the brunette would see it across the canyon in the morning, and went into her house. She slept for the first time in five nights. She slept twelve hours. When she came out onto the deck Sunday morning the brunette was already on her own deck across the canyon doing sit-ups in a fresh navy-blue sports bra, brown hair washed and slicked back the way Brigitte wore hers, and the brunette did not look across the canyon when Brigitte came out. Brigitte set her own coffee down on the railing and watched the brunette do five sets without missing a rep. The brunette finished the workout, stood up on her mat, looked across the canyon at Brigitte for one long slow beat, and walked back into her house. Brigitte smiled. Eight o'clock that night Brigitte's doorbell rang at seven fifty-five. Brigitte was in the foyer waiting for it.