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Desdmona's Erotic Story Contests
2005 Shivering Short Story Contest
First Prize

Let it Snow

The snow lands on Robyn’s face in big, flat flakes. She holds out a red mitten, palm up, to catch them, but they melt as soon as they land. “These flakes are as big as my head,” she says. “Good thing we started on you early.”

Jack is pretty sure Robyn’s talking to her snowman, not to him. Or maybe she’s talking to herself. Since this summer, she no longer looks at Jack when she talks to him. Instead, she keeps her eyes focused on the cat or a piece of lint on the couch, her words drifting toward him so indirectly that he isn’t sure if they’re really meant for him.

Jack pushes a coal button into the belly of his snowman, but really he watches Robyn work. Robyn runs the mittens she’s wearing to smooth out the face of her snowman, creating the perfect round snow canvas. The snowflakes stick on her red hat. She must be getting cold already—even the snowflakes that land on the back of her bare neck stay solid for a few seconds before melting against her skin.

Robyn’s creation looks like a person. Jack’s looks more like something that a snowplow might leave: three lop-sided, almost round shapes stuck on top of one another with pieces of coal scattered across the white surfaces. Oh well, that’s what he gets for marrying an artist. He’ll just do what he usually does—turn his into something funny. Last year, when he couldn’t get his snow balls to stand upright, he’d laid them side by side and turned them into a pig, complete with an old Halloween mask and a pipe cleaner tail. His snow pig had made Robyn laugh and laugh, that loud belly guffaw that sometimes embarrassed him in theaters. But he loved it too, the way she used to let go when something delighted her. He wants to delight her. Especially now.

“I’ll be right back,” he says.

She’s bent down, poking her mittened thumb into the chest of her snowman, creating little holes for her stone buttons. “Okay,” she says, her eyes on the snow in front of her.

He goes around to the back of the house, to the fenced garden, half-buried in snow. They’d had such high hopes this year—the Farmer’s Almanac promised good growing weather, and April and May found them outside every weekend until dusk, their fingers tucking seeds and roots into the warming soil.

The last day of May, they’d planted the tomatoes, digging deep holes with shovels and their hands. Robyn had worn cut-off jeans and her favorite blue tank top, no bra, and every time she bent down, her breasts pressed round and heavy against the fabric, like early fruit waiting to be tasted. He worked next to her until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and when he reached his hand out, her nipple bloomed into his palm. “Yes,” she’d said, her sky blue eyes on his face, her hands too, and then her lips. The two of them, down on the dirt, trying not to roll on the budding lettuce plants, the baby tomatoes. And then entering her, root to soil, and not giving a damn about anything but the tomato taste of her fingers in his mouth.

That was their last day in the garden. When June came, with its sunshine and its sickness, they’d let the garden grow on its own. Robyn didn’t have the energy, and he didn’t have the heart.

Now, the forgotten tomatoes and pumpkins show their dark reds and oranges through the snow. When Jack finds what he’s looking for, he wipes the snow off and carries it behind his back so she won’t see.

By the time he reaches the front of the house, Robyn has turned her snowman into a gentleman: stone buttons up his front, a black satin bow tie around his neck, a baby carrot for a nose. Even a smile made of red rose hips.

“Showoff,” he says. Still, he’s delighted. It gives him hope that she might paint again, that he might come home soon and find her in front of her easel in the basement, her pale fingers flecked with blue and purple. Jack holds his own find behind his back, wondering if he should actually use it. It seems silly next to her creation.

Robyn stands up, brushes snow off the knees of her jeans. “Yeah,” she admits. “But you like it. Plus, he’s a perfect gentleman, which is more than I can say for some other people around here.” There is a tease in her voice, in the crow’s feet at the corners of her blue eyes. Her pale cheeks are flushed pink from the cold. The color makes her look healthy.

“Come here,” she says. When he does, she holds an acorn up next to his eye. “Perfect. It’s just your shade.” She scoops a little eyehole out of the snow face. When she pushes the acorn into the hole, pointy side out, he realizes she’s right—the green-brown of the nut is the same color as his eyes.

“See,” she says. “It’s a portrait. Remember?” At first he doesn’t, but then he does: Robyn’s gallery showing in May. He hates suits, hates the dress-up and pomp of it all, but he’d gone for her, for Robyn in her maroon dress that showed just a hint of chest and thigh, her long hair pulled up off her shoulders. Just watching her walk through the room made it worth every minute his shoulders were tucked into a jacket. Afterward, they’d come home and Robyn had dropped to her knees in the living room, pulled him to her and unzipped him right there. “You’re so sexy, I can’t wait,” she’d said. And then those lips, that tongue swirling around him...

His cock stiffens at the memory. His look-alike smiles back at him from the snow, as though it’s remembering too. “It’s beautiful,” he says.

She smiles and gives him a quick kiss with her cold lips. Her lips are soft, and he finds himself falling toward her, as though he is drunk. Robyn pulls away and reaches out to adjust the snowman’s bowtie with her mitten. “I had a good model.” She turns toward him, sees his hands still behind his back. “Please, please, please tell me that’s not another pig mask.”

“No,” he says. “Close your eyes.”

He takes the turban squash from behind his back and settles it onto his snowman’s head. It’s the perfect hat, with its yellows and greens and oranges. He is surprised to realize that with the hat, his snowman has become a snowlady. All of the lumps he couldn’t smooth out become curves—white swells that form hip and belly and thigh.

“Okay,” he says.

Robyn opens her eyes and claps her mittens together. “She’s beautiful.” Jack gets another kiss—this one a little longer. The chill of her lips and the warmth of her breath sweep inside him.

She turns her attention back to his snowlady. She tilts her head to the side. “Is she me? Cause if she’s me, then she really needs bigger boobs.” Robyn cups her red mittens at the front of her snow jacket. And then she drops one mittened hand to her side, puts it in her pocket as though there is something she expects to find in its fabric folds. “Okay, well one bigger boob anyway.”

Jack squats down and forms a loose snowball. He presses it against Robyn’s chest, on the side where it is flat beneath the puffiness of her winter jacket. Then he puts his other hand over Robyn’s mitten. “I think you might be right,” he says. “I may have given you the short end of the stick there.”

He knows what he’s saying might make her laugh, but it might make her cry too. But he feels like she’s opened a door for him and he has to step through, he has to take the chance that he might hear her laugh again.

She looks down at his gloved hands against her chest. “Well, what’s the diagnosis, doc?” It’s the first time he’s heard her say that word since this summer. For a second, he can’t think of anything to say.

A snowflake lands at the corner of her eye. He wants to kiss it off, but it melts before he can. Instead, he says, “Perfect.” He takes the snowball and presses it onto the snowlady’s chest. He takes off his glove to work the cold snow, smoothing and shaping it until it is Robyn’s breast, as best as he can remember.

Robyn watches while he adds more snow, putting the finishing touches on her look-alike. When he’s finished, she nods in approval. “Much better,” she says. She takes one of her mittens off too and steals a rose hip from her snowman’s mouth. She crouches down and pushes the pink fruit into the center of the mound.

It is suddenly obvious what they have built. “Robyn!” he says and then regrets it as soon as he does. What does he care if the neighbors see?

Robyn shrugs her shoulders inside her snow jacket. “What? It’s cold out here,” she says. And she doesn’t laugh, no, but she does smile up at him, her own lips the color of rose hips.

“Plus,” she says, leaning down to pick up a long thin carrot from her collection of snowman supplies, “that’s how I would react if I got to stand next to this guy all day.” Robyn snaps the carrot in half and pushes the skinny end into the bottom ball of her snow gentleman until it sticks out a couple of inches.

“Jesus,” he says. The nipple people might have mistaken as a fallen necklace or something. But this, a bright orange carrot sticking out at groin level? No way. Still, something about it intrigues him. And saddens him a little—it’s not a very big carrot. Is that how she sees him? Has it been so long that she’s forgotten him too? “That’s all I get?” he asks.

Robyn looks up from where she’s kneeling, piling snow between her mittens. “Ah ha,” she says. “The truth comes out—you don’t care that the neighbors are going to know your wife’s a perv. You just don’t want them to think that you’re little!”

She scoops up a handful of snow. “Don’t worry, I’m just getting started.” She pats snow tight around the carrot, covering up all the orange. When the snow is all packed, and she’s built a long shaft, she takes her gloves off. With her fingertips and palm, she smoothes out the snow, using long strokes from one end to the other. She’s on her knees now, her face close to the snowman as she works.

Jack feels the blood rush through his head as he watches her, her fingertips along the shaft, thinning it gently until a head appears at the end. Beneath her fingers, the snow compacts and hardens, forms until he almost believes he can see the veins along the shaft.

“Wow,” he says. He is overwhelmed. Not just by the movement of her hands against the snow shaft, but by the way she can take the most ordinary things—snow, a bowtie, a carrot—and turn them into something so sexy and alive.

Robyn leans back and tilts her head, looking. “Something’s not quite right,” she says. She holds her palm flat up and watches the snow melt against her skin. “I think the snow’s too dry.” And then she licks her palm, her fingers, all the way to her fingertips, watching him the whole time. Him, Jack, not the snowman. He knows for sure this time who she’s talking to. Then she turns back to the snowman, wraps her wet palm around the snow shaft, strokes until it is slick and glistening.

Jack’s cock tightens. He has to close his eyes, just for a second. It’s too much to watch. When he opens them again, a second later, she is standing, pulling her mittens back on. “Ta-da!” she says.

She leans her back into him, her butt against his own hard shaft. She feels so good against him, her curves and warmth. Jack puts his arms around her waist.

They look at their snow couple for a minute. His snowlady with her big glorious gourd of a hat and her pink flower nipple. Her snow gentleman wearing nothing but a bow tie and a sly smile, his erection curving just a little toward the snowlady. His snowlady is a little crooked, leaning toward the snow gentlemen, as though she’s reaching for something.

Robyn leans her head back and looks up at him. Snowflakes fall onto her cheeks and lips. “Shall we give them a little privacy?” she asks.

And this time he does kiss the flakes away. Her lips beneath his are cold, but when she opens her mouth to him, her tongue is strong and alive. Very alive.


Shanna Germain divides her time between writing for money and writing for pleasure. Erotica definitely falls into the pleasure category.

She is grateful for the many things that make her writing easier, including soy mochas, her 8-pound laptop (aka her cat) and all the lovely critters in Desdmona’s Fishtank.

You can see more of Shanna’s work in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Clean Sheets, Heat Wave, The Many Joys of Sex Toys, and Salon.com, as well as on her web site, http://www.shannagermain.com.


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Desdmona's Erotic Story Contests
2005 Shivering Short Story Contest
First Prize