Chapter 5
They moved together, fingertips sketchily touching, out of the room and into the corridor where they immediately encountered a wandering guest: a fairy tale princess drenched to the waist in hair the color of Caribbean moonlight, silver white, and with eyes as blue and bright as the light from a star. She was wearing a sleek, clinging, creme de menthe wrap robe with white scroll embroidery on the sleeves and on its high conversative neckline. Her skin was that rare combination of healthy brown golden and carnation pink coloration that one associates with technicolor debutantes and ingenues. But there was a look of experience and perception and sensual effervesence on her face.
"Oh, hi," she said, seeing Diana and Hera, misting to a stop before them, smiling with an odd detached warmth.
"Hi," Diana and Hera both echoed simultaneously, moving closer to her, Hera's bronze nudity in bold contrast with the black velvet and satiny green of the dresses Diana and the other woman wore.
"I've just been roaming around taking in some fantastic sights," the woman said with a becalmed smile. "Have you both?"
Diana looked sharply at the woman and it seemed to her that there was something familiar about her face, that she had seen her somewhere before or met her-but the circumstances eluded her. The woman noted her expression and gave a subtle nod, her smile broadening. "You recognize me," she said.
"I ... don't know-" Diana began, staring uncertainly.
"Have you seen the play in North Beach-Black Vanilla Blues? Or the one that preceded it earlier this year-The Qwertyuiop Machine?
Diana placed her, then, remembering the impressively talented new young acress who had personified Thursday Afternoon in The Qwertyuiop Machine. But she couldn't recall her name.
"Of course, I remember you-I saw the play," Diana said. "But I'm afraid I don't remember your name. You were very good I"
"Anima de Verite," Anima told her, pleased to have been recognized. She looked at Diana and Hera inquisitively, waiting for them to introduce themselves, and Diana said, "I'm Diana Summer, this is Hera Yellow Wing." To Hera, she said, "Anima is a marvelous actress, Hera. A show stopper!"
"You're lovely," Hera told Anima without timidity, their eyes meeting. "I'd love to see you in action."
"Thanks," Anima said, smiling, not missing the intended ambiguity of the remark. She glanced momentarily back the way she had come, then declared, "Mad goings on here I My first orgy, and it's no misfire, that's a fact."
"What's happening?" Hera asked her.
"There's a room back there with a sign that says EXPERIENCES on the door," Anima said. "I just left it and my pussy feels like a drunken old cat that's been out in the sun too long. It feels like a hot coal slowly cooling in warm water."
"Really?" said Hera, her brows knitting, an intrigued little smile on her lips.
Then Diana saw something she hadn't detected at first-a finger-length pearly glimmer on one of the sleeves of Anima's robe, more of them punctuating the fabric where it draped over one of her hips. She couldn't stop herself and reached out with impulsive curiosity, touched the glimmering sleeve, and brought the finger back to her face; it gleamed with a dab of semen. She held it to her nose, then offered it to Hera, wiping the come on Hera's full lower lip.
"Oh," Hera said, startled, her tongue gathering it in. "Oh, wow!" she enthused, the taste registering.
"I just made love to some of the nicest people," Anima explained, the soft fabric of her gown advertising the peaked nipples of big firm breasts as she moved her arms as if they were trailing in water beside her.
"How many?" Diana asked her.
"Counting the dildos?" Anima said, and smiled. She shrugged. "Just enough," she said.
Diana kept staring at the smirched dress, her heart beating faster as her mind conjured up images to account for it, orgiastic montages that made her aware again of the heat of her cunt.
Anima moved a few steps to the stairway, and sat down on the top step, indicating with a small sigh that she needed a rest from her activities. Hera and Diana followed her and she looked up at them standing over her, blue gaze cooling a little as the wonderment in her eyes lessened, her smile becoming more relaxed. Her cheek was so close to the long svelte contour of one of Hera's calves that a few errant pale threads of her silver-blonde hair touched wispily against the leather-dark flesh, Hera's leg shifting discernibly in response, her unshod toes tightening against the pile of the stairway carpet.
Anima's tone was nostalgic, as was her smile, her gaze strangely dull as she began, "Three men who looked like they might have grown up on a beach somewhere. Hawaii, Jamaica. Mars. Salty bronze bodies, heavily muscled, white teeth, manes of sun-bleached hair. And a woman about forty, with a handsome strict fact, eyes as yellow and bright as a cat's-or bird's. All of them were dressed formally, then men in Victorian dinner jackets, while she wore an orange and gold gown and smelled like an Italian garden after a storm. They were all very supercilious, aloof, clannish, asked me if I would like to be their table. I told them yes, it seemed like a good method exercise. Be a table. So one of them took a pair of golden manacles. He asked for my permission and I told him to go ahead. He locked my hands behind my back. She bound my ankles with a fox wrap. They laid out pastries and biscuits and wine in small glasses on my back and shoulders and my ass. And they dined...." Pausing, her eyes were wide with enchanted reminiscence. "Yeah. Very slowly. Slowly. I had my face on the floor, one cheek on the floor, and I could just hear the sounds of glasses tinkling, the cold touch of glasses on my flesh, the feathery weight of the pastries as they picked them up and put them down, crumbs falling. And when they were through there were crumbs all over my back, and little oases of spilled wine. I heard the woman say she'd clean off the table, and then I felt her mouth on one of my shoulder blades, nibbling up the crumbs, and she worker her way down my back to my bottom, using just her lips, no tongue. A minute or so of that and my nipples were stiff, my cunt was aching and I wanted her. She made little trails of phantom grazing kisses back and forth down my back and I couldn't bear it any more by then and I asked her to kiss me, please, and she put her face down beside mine and let her open lips touch mine, barely, just the corners of our mouths touching-I tried to kiss her but she laughed and moved away. She let her breath breeze over my face, warm and fresh, a forest breeze-but she wouldn't kiss me. By that time I realized, in some dumb dull daze, that someone's cock was rustling against one of my thighs, getting hard. They were getting undressed, all of them. She kept teasing me with her lips just out of reach while she got her gown off. Her breasts were small, very small, but curvy and beautiful, nipples thick as raspberries, and she stood up in front of me, her cunt peeled open and she smiled like a hothouse orchid. I begged her to give me a taste of herself and she laughed. She put her cunt right down near my mouth and I could see the lips warping into wet depth, then they had me on my back and there were three hard ons massaging my tits, my stomach, my legs and arms. Cocks so warm and nice I could feel the pulsing, the heat, and then the first little warm spills and threads of cocky juice as they started to glow and blaze. I begged to be fucked, but nobody would make a move. It seemed like time was frozen, nothing would happen, everything was standing still. Then after hours and days and years of waiting I finally had a cock in my mouth all the way back to my throat, balls dragging my chin, cocks pressing at my ears, and she was with me, both of us sucking all three of them and I was drowning in roses and honey. Somebody was stroking my clit, my nipples. I wanted to use my hands, but I was still wearing the manacles, couldn't, so I sucked like a maniac. I kept trying to kiss her in the melee but she wouldn't let me-I could hear her laugh every time she pulled away, but then she passed a cock on to me so well basted with her saliva that I came the moment it was on my tongue. I've never felt such an orgasm. Like I'd fallen off the moon or been side-swiped by a meteor. My cunt was like a forge. Then everybody was coming. All I know is I suddenly felt like I'd fallen down in the surf. My mouth was full, my breasts were splashed, an ear was full of come. I died and was reborn."
Anima stopped talking and looked up into the eyes of Hera, who had been gently and steadily buffing the warm moony arc of her cheek with the slender configuration of her thigh as she told the story.
"And then what?" Hera asked in a scarcely perceptible voice, increasing the motion of her leg with just enough vigor so that the satiny and silky surfaces of calf and cheek translated tactile vibrations of warmth, Anima's cheek brightened pinkly against the tan of her thigh.
Anima shrugged, nuzzling the thigh and licking it with a swift pinkness of tongue, tersely. "I put on my dress," she went on, "and was getting ready to leave. Then I saw the woman strapping on a dildo-one of those enormous phallus replicas, perfectly modeled, almost as thick as-" She hesitated, the fingers of one hand encompassing Hera's wrist, fingertips touching her thumb as the grip tightened. "Your wrist," she said, grinning impishly. "And I didn't say anything at all. I got back down on the floor and asked her to fuck me until that thing melted between us. I left my dress on this time, just hoisted it up and let her mine for gold. I could feel our stomachs lock together, our bushes blending, and she fucked me like a champion. You could smell the rubber melting, I started coming right away, orgasms" were banging through me from the cellar of my cunt to the attic of my brain, and I was like a big soft pinball machine with every light and bell going and all the flippers. I begged her for a kiss, but she wouldn't; she just kept fucking me like she'd been born to do it, and then one of the guys got back into the act standing over me, facing her and she started to work him over with her mouth while she rode me. My legs were around her back, my heels on her ass and I came like I'd been sucked through a black hole into some other space and time. The guy came, too, mostly on me, and he ended up crawling away from the scene. But she did kiss me, finally. A nice, soft, teddy-bear buss on the nose. Then I left."
-Finishing, she cast a penetrating look at Hera, her cheek still floating along the warmness of thigh. As if anticipating Hera's request, she said, "I'm a little worn for now. I think I need a drink. But maybe we could get together later ... do you think?"
"I hope so," Hera said, disappointed, but understanding.
"All of us later," Anima said, giving her smile to Diana as well, Diana nodding her approval.
Diana and Hera left her sitting on the stairway, temporarily spent, her shoulders sagged, an outlandish smile rifting her lips, her eyes shining.
"Looks like I almost lost you," Diana said when they were far enough away not to be overheard.
"You won't lose me, Diana," Hera assured her, with a faint smile, not looking at her. "I'll get your phone number."
"I work for a publishing company," Diana told her. "Marble Island Press. Remember it, sweet." She felt Hera's hand take her own and her heart and mind radiated a marvelous mixture of gladness, erotic excitation, and affection, feelings so strong she closed her eyes for an interval of seconds to treasure them.
The corridor ahead was long and empty. Glass-encased candles in sconces along the way flickered shifting patterns of light and shadow gelatinously over the walls, clarifying framed prints by Beardsley and prints illustrating Boccaccio and surreal sketches of aerial phalli, polychromatic genitalia, incubi and succubi sporting with obsequious victims, landscapes and seascapes analogous to lovers in postures of copulation, maidens in petticoats and chemises with the heads of wolves and lions and swans, androgynous fishermen/women retrieving nets writhing with lewd blue and pale mermaids and sea-empurpled sirens and enchantresses.
"Where are we, The Musuem of Erotic Art?" Diana asked, her eyes wandering from one picture to the next, taking in all in admiringly.
"Looks like it," Hera nodded. "But what's this," she said briskly, eyes glancing from the pictures to a door a few feet ahead. They approached it slowly and looked at the sign it bore on a redwood plaque: the word DARK in black script greeted them.
"Dark," Diana said.
"Dark," Hera repeated.
Their eyes met. "Go ahead," Diana said. "I'm right behind you, of course. In the dark."
"Sure," said Hera, and she opened the door and let herself into the waiting darkness, and explorer stealing with her companion into a void of absolute and uncircumscribed blackness. The door closing behind them enclosed them in black unseeable space. A blackness so solid it balked the senses and brought Diana and Hera to a halt, both of them standing motionless while they wondered what tactic to employ or plan to follow and what to expect in such a black and anarchic realm. Yet there were sounds: sounds that shaped themselves plainly from different quarters and corners of the room: the slow panting shared breathing of some unseen couple, a woman filtering gasps between her teeth on the precipice of a supreme revelation, a droned murmur here, a fragile effeminate moan, a whispered endearment. The sounds made a theatre of the darkness, the invisible players like phantoms in the throes of unknown pleasures. And the air was ripe and sifted with fran-grances: the loamy smell of female heat, turbulent and fermented cunt, mingled sweats, floral redolence, brine of cock, vaginal wines, leather, sweat, and nylon, miscellaneous leakages and sweetness and sensual sours and whiffs of goatish glee.
Diana, letting go of Hera's fingers, partially by choice but not without a surge of apprehension, stepped, one foot at a time, like a cautious stalker in a silent film, into blackness, reaching ahead of her to analyze the darkness and encounter its surprises with excited trepidation. Nothing and nothing seemed to surround her, yet the sounds were omnipresent. She stopped and listened, then set out obliquely anew, sidling along with one arm paddling at her side, the other drawn out ahead, fingers poised.
Nearby, somewhere, Diana heard a female voice whisper, "It unsnaps, julep, it unsnaps. Please don't tear it." And a mildly impatient male voice replied, "You breasts feel beautiful." The exchange was followed by a murmurous sob off to her right, very close, and she turned to the sound, fascinated, visualizing everything and nothing. Then from the same site a sound like wet rags being kneaded began and the sob sounded again, again, turned to a tranquil-ized murmuring that rose slowly in volume and intensity, overshadowing and drowning out the moist kneading. Making up her mind, Diana moved toward the sounds with sudden resolution, deciding to find out what was happening there.
One hand prodding the space ahead of her, ready for contact of some kind, she took small slow steps, expecting something, anything. Her seeking hand encountered, first, flesh, and she jerked it back instantly, not wanting to frighten anyone or seem an interloper, to interrupt. Her heart was flailing against her breast, adrenaline rushing, a delicious sense of perilous excitement scattering hher thoughts. What now? she wondered. Reach again, tentatively? Yes. Tension and uncertainty made her hesitate, but she forced herself to act, to reach, touch. Her fingers, all five of them spread and arched in the darkness, touched softness, warmth of flesh, and this time, as if she had tripped a trigger, a male voice said in a clear whisper, "Hey, who's that?"
"Diana," Diana said, her voice sounding too thin and unnerved, she thought.
"Well, Diana," the voice replied above the sluicing and murmuring, "welcome, welcome, Diana."
The soft steady murmuring broke, then, ending momentarily, fading into a heavy breathing that yielded after a few seconds to a familiar female voice that exclaimed, "Ohhh, Diana, hi, how are you, babe?"
The voice caressed Diana's memory and her thoughts raced for a moment, then slowed, comprehension touching her mind like a butterfly lighting on a seductive flower. "Tracy," she said, reaching out in the darkness. Her hand enclosed the velvety soft hummock of a tit, a fullness and width her clasp could not span, and she realized as she fanned her fingers out across its broad slope that she had not really noticed Tracy's breasts and that they were apparently extremely large. The nipple was a rubbery thick nub jutting against her palm. Tracy was on her back, it seemed, a fact she confirmed by letting her other hand touch out around the curve of a shoulder pressed against the floor, then reconnoiter down along the curvaceous flow of waist and hip to the pillowy plumpness of an ass cheek upon the floor.
"Tracy," Diana said, surprised, "you're being...."
"Fucked," Tracy stated in a thick whisper, "yeah, am I ever."
"But I thought you were a lesbian."
"Nope, not any more, no more," Tracy said, her her either with her eyes sprung wide and staring voice so filled with conviction that Diana pictured into the total darkness or shut so tightly that she was layered in worlds of duplicated and reduplicated darkness where the only hints of light were the lucent penumbras nickering hazily behind her burning eyelids.
Eager to know more, to feel more, Diana trust both of her hands into the space between Tracy's thighs, finding that her thighs were pointed outward from her body and raised slightly, the man between her legs being slumped snugly into the resultant arch, connected with her. The fingers of one hand pressed into the juncture where both bodies became one, exploring, and found the moist point of linkage where submerged cock breached its sodden aperture. As aperture that was not, her touch told her, Tracy's vagina. Her fingers skittered around the pressed base of the cock, tickling the rim of Tracy's gorged asshole. Tracy moaned loudly like someone in an intolerable delirium. Diana, smiling to herself, pushed and slithered her middle finger along the length of the thick cock into Tracy's ass beside it, wriggling the finger teasingly against the membranes interior and the hard flexible throbbing of the wedged prick, the entrapped digit sliding in the greasy flex and pull.
"Oh, Diana," Tracy moaned, "Diana, Diana,' Diana, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, both of you, both, please...." her voice melting lustfully in the warm darkness. The cock then began to veer in and out, carrying Diana's finger with it. Diana felt a spill of liquid warm and thin broth from the vessel of Tracy's pussy and her own cunt seethed in instant reaction, her thighs slippery. She bent down, let her face descend and her lips sipped along the hot, soft, groovy length of Tracy's cunt, her tongue stealing now on impulse into the boggy gully where finger and cock plunged in unison. A confectionary fragrance expanded Diana's nostrils and her mind reeled, filling with music, love, just, desire, intense need, her own cunt exuding warm juice over her thighs, her tongue struggling to push into the crowded slot, licking the lovely tasty fragrances and fluids, her lips warm with them, her mouth and tongue circling the arroyo. Her eyes were closed, wrapping her brain in darkness and kaleidoscopic jets and pulses of light snowflaking her mind, her senses jolted, everything twisting and convoluting, odors tingling her nostrils, heat spreading through her body, the taste of genitalia ravishing her mouth. She was still wearing her dress, but there was no time to undress now. No time. Tracy's cries were wild and uncontrolled, almost as if someone were slapping her face repeatedly, slapping cries from her. Barely thinking, Diana rolled one leg over Tracy's body, getting her calf over her head, and pulled her dress up around her hips with her free hand, the middle finger of the other hand still snaking in and out of Tracy's ass with each forward fucking motion of the invisible man. Invisible. It didn't matter.
Didn't matter. Somehow, she knew, it was even better that way, better, more exciting. She twitched and shivered as Tracy's lips pressed a palsied smile onto her cunt, kissing the smile between the soft labia and onto the softer softness where a bright thermal spring filled with cunt flavored fish rippled under the sirocco of her tongue. Diana floated. On water. In space. Under water. Through thin and airless bodies of space and water, unable to breathe or see or hear anything. She could feel only her cunt. It was molten and lave was running down the slopes from the volcano, lava, lava? Come, come, a vintage brewed in her vagina filling Tracy's busily dedicated mouth.
They both came together, coming, coming, coming, coming, then going, coming, going, the spasms and tremors of fulfillment passing through one body and into another until the bodies were indistinguishable. Diana didn't even know who she was, or where, on top? bottom? Inside Tracy's ass she felt the male organ pulse, going off, climaxing, and her finger beside it was abruptly seized by a series of muscular contractions. Her eyes glazing in the darkness, she pulled the finger slowly out, holding it out, holding her hand up, and she let herself slip face downward between Tracy's thighs, her hand thrust up like the hand of an expiring swimmer vanishing in deep water.
For a long while the darkness reverberated with sighs, Diana's, Tracy's, and the anonymous male's, Tracy's hands flung slackly across Diana's back, Diana's cheek pillowed in the canyon of Tracy's thighs, the man clinging to both women, one hand wrist deep in the lush mane of Diana's hair, the other clutching one of Tracy's ankles. The sounds of harsh breathing subsided slowly, dwindled to a near silence, and finally Diana lifted her head with weary effort, rising onto her hands and knees, pausing while a renaissance of gathering energy restored her strength, then got to her feet, a licentious Venus rising from a sea of satiation. Her hands in the darkness touched around the man's face and she kissed him firmly and deeply, tongue streaming between his lips. Turning, she knelt beside Tracy and kissed her, their tongues curling sweetly together.
Tracy said, speculatively, "Now that I'm bisexual, I can't help wondering who the man is that did it. How he looks, and so on."
"And I wonder who I just made love to," the man replied. "A redhead and a blonde? Two blondes? A brunette and a blonde? Who? What Chinese? Black? Caucasian?"
Diana felt one of her breasts being hefted as he finished speaking, and he added, "Very nice breasts, I'm sure of that."
In retaliation, she closed her fingers around the shrunken tube of his cock, which seemed enormous despite its flaccidity and was damp with Tracy's fluids and her saliva. "And I can't help wondering just what kind of boy wonder we've got here," she gibed.
Tracy said, "But we'll never know, Diana, right? That's the whole point of this dark room, right?"
"Hey," the man protested, "that isn't like a strict rule or anything, is it? I mean, I'd like to-"
"Nope," Tracy cut in. "Don't try to spoil this now. Just relax. It's time for something else. Another scene."
"You been here long, Tracy?" Diana asked her. 'And you just getting started, or what?"
"This is the first room I've been in," Tracy said "I've been here for twenty minutes and already my sexual orientation has changed. How long you been here, honey?"
"No more than an hour or so." It seemed strange, Diana thought, but it was true. An hour of eternities and infinities. "And I haven't even been with a man yet," she said. "Uh-except for a snack, you might call it. Shared."
"One needs a good-sized meal, not just a taste," the man suggested, his tone implying that he would be only too willing to assist.
"But it's too soon right now," Diana told him. "Really. I'm sorry. Maybe we should just drift along. Tracy?" she asked. She was not especially eager to investigate the house by herself, not when someone she liked and trusted and felt comfortable with might accompany her.
"Sure," Tracy said, "why not?"
Their hands touched in the darkness and their fingers locked together, their lips brushed, pink tongue tips barely licking against each other between their parted mouths. In the same moment Diana's senses focused on the phenomenon of the room again, impressions she had been detached from confronting her all at once: the moans and whimpers of men and women (Hera?) in different stages of sexual emotion-drowning in fulfillment, swimming in sensation, wading yet, beached, some of them, in receding tides of arousal; and the quintessential oceanic scent of so much sex-aromas of acidic sweats and cider sweet cunts and the vinaigrette of plumbed rectums, woodsy smells of pubic thickets and minty redolence of golden and dark hair, phantom tinges of perfume, sweat, sensual spices and salts. Diana licked her lips, taking it in. Too much, too much, she thought. Completing her kiss with Tracy, she put one arm around her and helped her up, turning with her toward the general direction of where she remembered the door to be.
"Incidentally," Tracy said, as they passed their male companion en route to the exit, "I'm an albino fishwife, and my hair is the color of Dracula's rug!"
His good-natured laugh made both of them smile as they felt their way toward the door, and they carried their smiles out of the shapeless blackness of the room, into the hallway.
A few yards along the hallway, Diana and Tracy encountered the next door: it was labeled TALK. They listened but there was no sound from within. Nobody could be heard talking.
"Want to go in?" asked Diana.
Tracy shrugged. "Let's try 'em all, Diana. That's why we're here."
"Yeah, well-" Diana put her hand on the knob and opened the door, both of them stepping slowly inside.