Vera and Maria

The afternoon heat lay over the coast road like a wet blanket, and Maria and Vera had walked it barefoot, skirts gathered in one hand, headdresses catching the light. The market was behind them now, the fisherman a story they'd already stopped telling, and ahead the road bent toward the salt flats where the old women dried fish and the children ran shrieking through the shallows.

They were arguing, amiably, about nothing—whether the priest had actually fled or merely had business elsewhere—when Vera stopped mid-step, jaguar ears flattening forward.

"Look there."

A figure sat at the roadside beneath a ceiba tree, dusty, strange, wearing clothes that belonged to no village on this coast. The women exchanged a glance. Outsiders came through sometimes—traders, missionaries, once a shipwrecked Dane who'd wept for three days—but this one had the particular stillness of someone who had woken up somewhere they did not understand.

Maria smiled, slow, and adjusted the fall of her round top so the center opening showed a little more of the shadow between her breasts.

"Hello," Vera called out, voice carrying easy down the road. "You look lost. Are you lost?"

They came closer together, two noblewomen of Remojadas in their long skirts and their pillbox headdresses, and the ground seemed to tilt slightly toward them as they walked, the way it did for men when they first saw the size of them—breasts vast and heavy under the cotton, each one three times the size of the head that wore the crown, dark areolas ghosting through the weave where the wind pressed the cloth. Their hips swung with the thirty centimeters of bubble butt apiece, and the ceiba's shade could not hide any of it.

"You're not from here," Maria said, stopping close enough that her shadow fell across the stranger's lap. Ocelot whiskers twitched as she looked them over, up and down, unhurried. "That's all right. Neither are we, really. We're from the north. Very far north. But we've been here long enough to know the rules."

Vera crouched down on her heels, knees wide, the skirt tenting over her thighs, and rested her forearms on them. At this angle the neckline of her top gaped, and the full weight of one enormous breast hung visible, areola broad and dark as a copper coin, nipple soft but heavy in the heat.

"The rules are simple," she said. "You're on our coast now. Our village. Our road." Her jaguar eyes crinkled. "We take care of guests. And guests take care of us."

Maria had already circled behind, and her hand came down on the stranger's shoulder, claws just barely grazing through the fabric. "You've been sitting here a while. Your mouth looks dry. Vera's got something for that."

Vera did not wait for an answer. She reached up, pulled the round top aside at the shoulder, and let the breast fall free into her own palm—immense, soft, the nipple darkening as the air touched it. She offered it the way one offers a cup of water to a traveler, matter-of-fact, generous, and utterly without shame.

"Go on," Maria murmured at the stranger's ear, breath warm, tail curling lazy at her ankles. "Drink. Then we'll find out what else you're good for."

The salt wind off the Gulf of Veracruz carried the smell of roasting corn and copal smoke through the plaza, and the sun had barely crested the eastern hills when Maria and Vera decided they'd had enough of the morning's dullness.

They were a scandal the whole coast knew by name—two American-born noblewomen who'd married into the Remojadas gentry and promptly set about scandalizing it. Maria, an ocelot with a coat of tawny rosettes that shifted like spilled honey across her shoulders, and Vera, a jaguar whose black-ringed spots broke across the pale gold of her skin like scattered coins. Both of them built the same impossible way: breasts so vast they were three times the size of their own heads, heavy and pendulous under the round white cotton of their quechquemitl-style tops, the fabric draped poncho-like with a central opening that did nothing to hide the deep shadow of cleavage. Big dark areolas pressed visible against the weave when the wind pulled the cloth taut. And beneath the long skirts that swept the flagstones, each carried a thirty-centimeter bubble butt that made the local women click their tongues and the local men lose their train of thought mid-sentence.

Their round pillbox headdresses sat low on their brows, beaded with turquoise and shell, exactly like the figurines the old Teotihuacano women had been carved wearing centuries before. They wore them without irony. They wore them like crowns.

"You see him," Vera said, not a question, watching a young fisherman haul his net up the beach. Broad shoulders, water streaming off his back, the kind of arms that had never once held a book.

Maria tilted her head, ocelot ears swiveling. "I see him."

They descended the plaza steps together, skirts whispering, and the market went quiet in a rolling wave from the top of the street to the bottom. Vendors stopped mid-haggle. A priest on the church steps turned and walked briskly the other way. The two women had a reputation, and the reputation had teeth—they'd fucked a magistrate's son on the dock at noon, taken a pair of mule drivers in the shade of the customs house, and once, memorably, had the entire crew of a tobacco ship in the space of an afternoon. Nobody had dared strip their titles. Their husbands were old, rich, and diplomatically blind. So the women had grown bold as brass.

The fisherman looked up as their shadow fell across him.

"Señoras," he said, wary.

"Vera," Vera said, extending a hand with claws retracted. "And this is Maria. We've been watching you work all morning, and we've decided you deserve a reward."

He glanced left, right, looking for the trap. "I—"

Maria stepped in close, and the sheer bulk of her chest pressed against his arm, soft and immense, the heat of her coming straight through the cotton. "Don't look for a way out," she purred, ocelot whiskers twitching. "Look at us instead."

They didn't wait for the beach to empty. They didn't even bother with the dunes. Vera simply took his hand and drew him down onto the sand where the tide had left it firm and cool, and Maria knelt behind him and unfastened the knot of his trousers with deft, practiced fingers. His cock sprang free, already half-hard from nothing but the sight of them, and Vera laughed low in her throat—a jaguaresque rumble—and pulled the neck of her quechquemitl aside so one enormous breast spilled out into the daylight, areola wide and dark as a priest's seal, nipple stiff in the sea breeze.

"Open your mouth," she told him, and when he did, she dragged the nipple across his tongue. "Good. Now Maria."

Maria had already hiked her skirt to her hips, and the thirty centimeters of her bubble butt caught the sun like a monument. She straddled the fisherman's lap facing away from him, reached back, and guided him inside her with a single slow sink of her hips. The wet sound of it carried across the sand. She began to ride him there in the open, ocelot tail lashing, headdress tipping back, while Vera knelt beside them and fed her breast into the man's mouth and then into Maria's, the two women kissing around the nipple, tongues tangling, milk-bitter and salt.

"Fuck," the fisherman gasped, and Vera put a claw—just the tip—against his throat.

"You'll come when Maria says," she said. "Not before."

Maria rode him harder. Her great breasts swung with each stroke, slapping against the round top until she yanked the whole garment off over her head and let them hang free, three times the size of her own head, swaying and shining with sweat. She reached back and gripped his thighs and ground down, and the whole beach could hear her—the wet clap, the low growl building in her chest, the way she said there, there, there through her teeth. Vera watched with lidded jaguar eyes, one hand between her own legs beneath her skirt, the other still holding the man's jaw open.

"Now," Maria said finally, and the fisherman came with a strangled shout, hips bucking up into her, hands fisting sand. Maria held him through it, rocking, milking him dry, and when she finally lifted off him and stood, a thin line of him ran down the inside of her thigh. She looked at it, then at the market crowd that had gathered at a respectful distance to watch.

"Tell them," she said to no one in particular, "that the noblewomen of Remojadas pay their debts."

Vera stood and rearranged her top, both breasts tucked back beneath the cotton, and the two of them walked back up the beach arm in arm, skirts dragging, headdresses bright, leaving the fisherman flat on his back in the sand and the whole coast talking.