Zarafa Rio sprawled on her belly on a futon, her Titian red hair spilling off the top of the mattress onto a woven grass tatami mat. Sunset bathed the room in a carmine glow that rouged her skin like petals of a dusky rose. A few thousand yards from her one-room bamboo-and-thatch hut, the surf crashed against white sand that powdered the islet of Aitanu like sugar on a donut.
Outside the glassless window, orange-throated tanagers trilled in orchid trees that hugged a verdant ridge sloping to the shore. A mixed choir of tree frogs and bell frogs chirped and chimed the first movement in what would become in another hour a white-noise symphony when the moon rose over the atoll’s central lagoon. Zarafa listened to the plaintive serenade of birds and frogs, pining for a mate, and knew a deeply human version of their songs. She closed her eyes, sinking one sigh deeper into a desolate mood. The evil mix of horniness and loneliness made her restless.
She could pleasure herself, of course, but she’d done enough of that during her four months on the islet to go through two sets of batteries for her vibrator. It was a G-spot vibrator and, oh yes, it really did hit the spot, but fantastic plastic was not what she wanted tonight.
“I so need a deep, sweet fuck!” She heard the raw honesty in her voice. A generous lover with slow hands and a magnificent cock would satisfy her desires quite nicely. Intelligent eyes set in a beautiful male face would make a wonderful additional touch, but brains and good looks were not mandatory for the animal sex she craved.
Damn, her thoughts were making her slippery wet. Firing up her erotic imagination was not a smart way to cope with horniness; it only intensified her ache.
Maybe a good cry would help. A long stroll on the beach might coax the tears to come, and afterward she’d feel sleepy enough to drift away in dreams.
She stood up and the bamboo floor creaked beneath grass mats. She took off a blue cotton summer dress that plopped to the floor around sun-tanned feet. Then she wrapped her bronzed waist in a crimson silk sarong the wet color of a bit-in-half cherry. Above the skirt-like sarong, she put on a white raw silk sleeveless shirt with a low-cut V-neck. The silk caressed her bare breasts and an instant of pleasure rippled through her lonesomeness like sheet-lightning through a dark cloud. The hut held no mirrors and now she wondered how she looked.
“Not that it matters.” Her own voice was the first she had heard in a week.
She crossed the room and chose a yellow hibiscus from flowers floating in a mahogany bowl on a wicker table and wove the blossom into her hair above her left ear. She couldn’t remember if that meant in Aitanu culture that she was unmarried or married.
But that didn’t matter either. Zarafa was the only Western woman on tiny Aitanu in the South Pacific, a day’s voyage from the closest island in the chain and 1,500 nautical miles from her home in Los Angeles. The one eligible bachelor was Frank Wellington, an alcoholic British widower who was the Anglican missionary in the single church in the village. About 120 natives inhabited the atoll, aboriginal hunter-gatherers with pierced noses, who scarified their bodies from head to toe.
Zarafa’s six-month-long research project for her doctorate in ethnomusicology was to study the unique whistle music of the islanders. With Frank serving as her interpreter she already had recorded hundreds of whistle melodies and dozens of interviews with the tribal musicians. But her fieldwork had gone so well that as of last week, it was fundamentally complete. Now she had little to keep her occupied until she could get herself into a music lab with a computer. Yet she would still have to wait another two months for the charter boat to pick her up and carry her to Fiji from where she could fly home to the States.
Two more months! How was she going to hold out that long? And what lucky dude back in Los Angeles was going to find himself on the other end of her pent-up sexual longing?
She stepped outside her round, conical-roofed hut. The setting sun dyed the western sky in pastel shades of orange and pink. Warm, powdery sand welcomed her bare feet. She strolled along a short path to the wide beach leaving size-12 footprints.
Zarafa meant “giraffe” in Arabic, and the nickname had stuck with the 6-foot-3 star athlete since her days as a volleyball forward with UCLA. Although she had been the tallest player on the Bruins team, Zarafa was not at all gangly, but curvy. Her leggy height carried her hourglass figure in such well-balanced proportions it often tricked men into thinking, from a distance, that she was much shorter. She had watched many a male facial expression change from desire to defeat as she approached them on a campus sidewalk and they realized she was an Amazon quite out of their league.
Cyndi Moore, her freshman-year roommate, had told Zarafa how her boyfriend called her “sweet little thing” when they made love, and how his endearment made her feel petite and cute and girlish and really turned her on. “I guess you’re never going to hear that,” Cyndi had said. She had not meant it in a mean way, but it had hurt, and Zarafa would sometimes remember Cyndi’s words and wince.
She sighed. “Well, it’s true. No one can call me little.” She towered over the tiny Negrito natives of Aitanu who in their pidgin trade talk called Zarafa, “She-Big-Fella.”
For obvious reasons, Zarafa sought tall boyfriends and had spent a year in an exciting but far-too-crazy relationship with a guard for the Lakers. Jordan had his good parts, a great sense of humor and an infectious laugh; and his bad parts, way too much swagger and an unfortunate fondness for cocaine and the high life. Among Jordan’s best features was his huge beautiful cock. Picturing it now, long and thick and dark purplish when engorged, made Zarafa feel dizzy with desire. Again, not the smart way to deal with horniness!
The dude who wrote the Kama Sutra understood, Zarafa mused. She wasn’t thinking of all the imaginative sex positions the writer had compiled a couple thousand years ago, but of how he had classified men and women according to their genital size, insisting that the best sex was between partners who matched down there: “hare men” with “doe women,” “horse men” with “mare women,” and “bull men” with “elephant women.”
She remembered a discussion with several college girlfriends about penis size. They all agreed that “Size doesn’t matter” was bullshit—invented to soothe fragile male egos. The other women went on to agree that a good-sized cock had more to do with girth than length—every pussy in the room loved getting stretched open by a fat cock. Donna had said, “They ought to change it to ‘Length doesn’t matter; thickness does.’”
But for Zarafa—an “elephant woman” to be sure—both girth and length mattered. She had experienced sex with half a dozen men who were reasonably well-endowed, but only her ex-boyfriend Jordan—a 6-foot-9 “bull man”—wielded a cock long and fat enough to satisfy her pussy’s hunger to be deeply and completely filled.
Zarafa had a vast libido and all her ex-lovers, even her first boyfriend back in high school, had been able to make her come. But only Jordan’s magnificent purplish-black manhood could pack her so full she would scream and come, again and again, driven to the heights of pleasure. It took months after she knew their relationship held no future, to finally admit that the only thing that kept her bound to him was his great big dick. Not in love with the man, just enthralled by his penis. Was that not the very definition of a slut? And to think that she had minored in Women’s Studies!
Breaking up with Jordan had been the right move, but the one man she had taken to bed since had left her feeling underwhelmed.
“I can’t help it if I’m a giantess,” she told herself aloud. Okay—and a slut, and a size queen. But who says a feminist can’t choose to be the slave of a big, beautiful cock?
“Damn, this isn’t helping!” She could smell her wet pussy. The scent of her womanhood and the salty aroma of the sea breeze seemed to her to be twin sisters.
Size queen. Ha. Now, as her gaze cast out over the Pacific, she felt she would gladly settle for a conjugal visit from a horny hobbit. She knew the darkening waters matched the deep cobalt of her eyes; tomorrow at noon, ocean and irises would brighten again to turquoise. For now, dark blue fits her frame of mind.
She stared up at the Southern Cross. The Milky Way sparkled like sequins on a black velvet evening gown. A snow-white tern zoomed across her field of view and glided out of sight, never once flapping its wings. So graceful and peaceful! What would it be like to be a sea tern? Do birds ever feel forlorn?
She stopped walking and plopped down in the dew-damp sand on her butt, elbows on knees, hands supporting chin. She found her mind wondering what sex with Frank Wellington, the missionary, would feel like. His body was tanned brown and crinkled like old leather, but the man still felt lust; he practically drooled over her as they worked together. But sex in the missionary position with a horny old alcoholic whose swollen red nose reached her collarbones was not going to bring release.
An hour later, she had been brooding so long that her neck was getting a crick. Meanwhile, the full moon had floated up midway over the horizon like a paper globe lantern, gilding a river of light upon the inky blue water.
Zarafa stood and walked to a patch of flat, hard beach. There she performed a connected series of yoga poses under the moon-bright sky. The series, called “Salutation to the Sun,” was meant to greet the masculine daybreak, but she dedicated herself instead to the luscious feminine moon.
When she was done with her impromptu yoga, she began to sing a pentatonic whistle tune the Aitanu natives had taught her. She sang the melody because—as irony would have it—she was a lousy whistler. But she had majored in voice as an undergrad and she was blessed with a fine soprano that her major professor had called the best voice he had ever trained.