Chapter 3
Nan Mikell sat up, legs crossed lightly, on a corner of the huge couch in the upstairs sitting-room, staring abstractedly at her reflection in the vast, lightly tinted floor-to-ceiling mirror that ran half the length of the wall opposite her. A half-finished cup of tea-her third-sat unnoticed on the table beside her. Next to it, an ashtray bore witness to her indecisive, nervously brooding state of mind: three broken cigarettes, stubbed out just after she'd lit them.
Nan Mikell was naked. She'd tossed her robe to one side to look at herself, hopefully with an objective eye. She was naked of make-up, hairpins, of rings or jewelry of any kind: she'd even removed the polish from fingers and toes, the better to see herself as God had made her.
She wanted most of all, right now, to see herself as a woman. What had that-that girl in the darkness the night before wanted of her? What had she seen in her?
What, after all, did a woman look like to another woman? If she wanted her that way?
She looked at herself now. The pert little breasts, tipped with a tasty brown in the odd light of the tinted glass, peeped back up at her. The little belly was spare and rounded softly at-oh yes, just the right places. From the place where her slim thighs came together, swirls of luscious auburn hair were visible. Below, the legs were softly rounded, with slim ankles and graceful feet, their toes dug sensually into the deep pile rug.
What would a woman lover do to me? she wondered.
And, almost shyly, she opened her legs to look at Herself.
The auburn bush was lush, curling. But that was almost all there was to see of her from right there. She put her hand on herself, down there, pushing the hair away from her cleft. Not much better, she thought Oh, come on, Nan, Don't be that way. Lets find out. Let's find out everything.
So she leaned back against the couch, opening her legs wide, raising her feet high, the better to see inside herself, perhaps for the first time, really. And, peeping between her own firm brown legs at the image in the mirror, she reached her slim fingers in and opened herself wide.
How...how wide it would open!...But of course, she'd had Mickey. A baby's head had had to come through there. She looked, and a certain objectivity developed in her viewpoint for a moment
It was...it was like some lovely flower of flesh; it was a shining, pink, delicately wet sort of orchid, rising from the auburn mat. The larger lips, where her fingers were, were turgid, fat, protective of the soft thing inside her. Inside was sweet pink flesh, a dark and secret hole, and above it a pink pistil...that grew as she watched. Grew longer, grew red with excitement. Ah, lovely! Hard and upstanding, like a baby boy's little cock! Innocent and delicate!
She blinked, looked harder. Her leg muscles spasmed involuntarily. She moved her hand, looked at it; it was trembling. She put her feet down on the couch, spread wider, looked hungrily at the vision before her.
And suddenly she saw herself in the imaginary lover's eyes: she saw her own face bending to the lush bush spread out so invitingly before her, saw her own shameless tongue dart out to lick the luscious pink flower before her, her own red lips close around the darker pink of the little rod that poked so delightfully out from between the twin folds of flesh at the top of the soft flower....
"Oh, God," she said in a hoarse voice. Her legs fell, squeezed tightly together around her furiously working fingers. Her eyes closed, her head whirled helplessly about, shivers of pleasure-pain ran through her....
...And she opened her eyes, suddenly, to see behind her in the mirror the trim, pink-liveried form of the maid Helga. Even in the strange light of the tinted mirror she could see the livid blush on Helga's fair face. Her hand was over her mouth; the other held a dost rag, which dropped to the floor as she watched; the hand flew to her breast
She looked the mirrored Helga in the eyes. And they knew each other for the first time. And a series of shocks ran through Nan Mikell: one, two, three. And her brain reeled to hear her say, "Come. Come, Helga." The voice was deep and dark; it wasn't hers at all.
"Lieber Gott," the German girl said softly. Her face livid.
The strange new person who had taken Nan Mikell over said again, "Come." And she saw the strange naked figure in the glass beckon invitingly to the maid. And she saw Helga's steps bring her haltingly around the couch...to kneel before her, between the brown thighs. Looking her once, very deeply, very soulfully, in the eye.
And then the soft fair face of the girl, red in the cheeks with passion and embarrassment covered-she saw now, in the diffused light-with a microscopic, soft-as-chinchilla-fur down, dipped before her to lose itself in the lush mat of curling auburn hair..
The soft lips kissed her-once, twice. Once on the brown fingers that held her vaginal lips open before the girl. Once, softly, ever so softly, on the very tip of the straining, blood-engorged button.
Then the girl tenderly laid her soft cheek, sideways, against the wet gaping maw before her. Nan Mikell felt the squishy wetness of herself touching-almost gripping-the dry, soft, tenderly fair cheek as the girl softly kissed the inside of her thigh, the skin, thin as a baby's, of the spot where torso and leg came together, her lips parting the reddish muff, her little pink tongue darting forth to lay its own brand of barely-damp kiss on the velvety skin.
"Oh...oh, Christ!" Nan Mikell heard the strange new voice say, "Oh, please! Please do me! Please love me...there...oh, Helga, please!"
As if in direct response, the girl's blond head turned; the blue eyes looked hotly up at her, with the rare sort of transported passion that only light-colored eyes can express, looked deep into her soul and found there the essence of the strange new person Nan Mikell knew was taking over her body. And, again-this time all but completely-they knew each other. Nan-the part of her that remained the same person she'd been all her previous life-felt almost like a stranger before these two new personalities-the maid, whom she'd never noticed, even, since her husband had hired her, and the odd new person inside her who was, at the moment, so completely in the ascendant in the strange struggle for control of her wayward body. "I make you come," the girl said. "Then I go...Nan hardly heard her, hardly noted the hot blush of sudden embarrassment on the girl's face. To her, for the moment, there was no question of mistress and maid, no problem of caste that would have to be solved, or resolved, the moment their mutual passion was spent. The future didn't exist, in her frenzy to taste this new outlet for her pent-up passion-only the present, the marvelous present. Gasping, she threw one naked leg over the linen-clad back. God in heaven, she was naked as a baby and the girl was completely clothed! Even to stockings and cap! There was something devastatingly exciting about that! "Come...quickly...please," she said in a breathless voice.
"Oh, yes, my dear," the girl said, just once. And there was a strange, soft half-smile, full of passion and a faint tinge of regret on her face, with its thin, naturally red lips and transparent skin as she hesitated. And the passive watcher inside Nan helpless to change things or stop them, noted almost casually: how lovely she is! And I never noticed....
Then the pink face buried itself between the brown thighs. And eight, ten shocks went through Nan Mikell! Her legs spasmed! Her whole body was shaken by tremors! Her own strong thighs wrapped themselves around the blond head, knocked the pink cap awry, spilled the soft blond hair loose in sweet abandon!
For the hungry mouth descended directly to her clit The thin lips closed softly around it. And the hungry, rasping tongue went to work on it with a wildness that shocked her to the core. The mouth hardened; the tongue flicked rapidly up and down the length of the little tube of flesh; the lips closed in a thousand wet, purposeful kisses on the very head of it. Nan's body shook in a dozen wild convulsions; screams shattered the air, from an unrecognizable voice she yet knew to be her own; and her bare heels drummed on the girl's back.
Now, in response to her own body's ecstasy, the girl stepped up her attack. Now she abandoned herself to the thrill of her domination of Nan Mikell's body, and used her own pink hands, tipped with clear nail polish, to open Nan wide. And her head bobbed awkwardly np and down as the licks grew longer and more avid.
The wet, slightly rough tongue flattened, and dipped all the way down her wildly aroused body to lap at the tightly clenched buttocks, tickling the flesh around her spasming anus, before licking slowly and with abandon all the whole length of Nan Mikell's wide-open vagina and rasping deliciously along the hard little head of her clit. And the action was repeated. Again and again. And the motion of the voracious mouth and tongue grew faster and more fervid, and the sound of it grew wetly audible, and Nan's body shook with spasm after spasm....until....
"Oh, God!" she said. "Oh, no...no...NOOOoo!"
Her body relaxed; her brown feet fell softly on the girl's back. Her arms fell akimbo. Helga kissed her softly on the lips of her closing slit, once, twice, and, smiling softly, looked up at her. The strange, regretful smile played across her lips again. "Now...she said, "now I go."
She sat back on her heels and looked at Nan Mikell who, exhausted, unable to move, regarded her with mixed feelings. The girl's lips and chin were smeared wetly with the musky-smelling juices of Nan Mikell's own body; she wiped her face with the back of one hand. How lovely she was! How delicately beautiful the curve of her chin, the sweet bow of her thin lips.
How could she not have noticed earlier? "H-Helga, she found herself saying hoarsely.
"I go now," said the girl. She stood up, not ungracefully, the strange smile still on her face.
"No," Nan Mikell said weakly. "No, don't...." But her hands did not rise to stop her, her voice carried no conviction. She lay, still passive, looking at the girl. She felt as limp, as emptied of volition to move, to affect the world about her in any way, as a puppet whose strings had been cut. Very well, she thought-this new half of her who coldly watched the after effects of what had just happened, disclaiming all responsibility for what had happened. Very well, let the girl go back to her duties. We will call her when we want her...
And all the time Nan Mikell, the one who lived and breathed and felt, and whose heart went out to the girl, sat and watched, unable to move a muscle.
"I will leave an address for Mrs. Johnson," Helga said, looking down at her (did her eyes sweep lustily across her still-naked body? Lingering on her crotch again?) with that wistful and enigmatic smile. "Where she can send the check."
"Check?" said Nan Mikell.
"Yes," said Helga, a firmer note in her voice. "I not work here any more." There was a wryly understanding twist to the corners of her pretty mouth. "I not whore."
"You...."
"I am servant, yes. Or I am lover, yes. Not both together, you see. You pay servant. You love lover. See? You choose. Not both." There was a sadly disappointed look in the blue eyes. "You agree? You understand?"
Nan Mikell looked at her. She still had not made any move to sit up. It was as if something were stopping her. "N-no, I don't understand," she said. "Won't you...stay?"
"Why I stay?" the girl said. "You make love to me? You want make love to me? No. You not want to give self to me. You not want to give serf to any person, man or woman. I stay, you pay me, I become whore." The smile was sad; perhaps a little hurt
Yet Nan Mikell still made no move to stop her. "You not want to love anyone. You want be loved, not love back." She sighed. "Goodbye, Frau Mikell." And she wheeled and walked with a certain admirable dignity out of the room.
Nan Mikell watched her departing steps, seeing the long, strong, firm legs under the white stockings, watching the fine muscular bulge of the taut buttocks move under the pink livery. God, she was a handsome woman! She was....
...She was gone. Nan Mikell knew she'd never see her again.
And the thought was a pang of regret that burned inside her now as she lay back, nude and exhausted, on the couch, hardly able to move a muscle. Yet she did absolutely nothing to stop her; and she had know all along that it would be this way.
Why?
What was there in her that kept shrinking away from the giving of herself? Had something in her changed? Hadn't she been a giving person before...before Ed?
The thought was sobering. She sat up now, her feet flat on the floor, looking at herself dispassionately in the mirror. Had she given in to Ed! Really?
Or had she been a disappointment to him, too?
She'd always been so slow to respond. That had been a problem. Ed could rouse her; he could...he could fuck her (yes, yes, use the word now) for quite a long while, and would take a great deal of pleasure in her growing arousal...but then he'd come, and she wouldn't, and she'd know, even as she held him and made nice little bed sounds at him afterwards while his passion subsided, that his failure (he always saw it that way: his failure, not hers; Ed was a gallant man in his way) to bring her all the way down the road to orgasm had been a thing that hung heavily on his heart.
Could she have helped him, now?
The question was another small shock to her. But it was time for the shocking question, the straight answer-as straight as she could make it
After all, she'd always kept that lovely body she now saw before her, nude but somehow sexless in the mirror, now that passion was gone...she'd always kept it in the best of shape. She'd always wanted to look pretty for Ed. He had always been quick to compliment her on her trim figure, and nights, naked and alone with him, she'd felt little chills run up and down her spine sometimes at the thought of his appreciative eyes on her body; her nipples would tingle and grow long and hard at the thought of it, and she'd feel little tinges down below.
But pretty, she knew now, staring at her own naked body in the mirror, wasn't enough. She'd failed him, again and again, leaving him to come off alone.
No! her mind said now, rebelling. She'd tried! She'd tried!
But had she?
Had she, for instance, asked him for all the things he could do for her that might have turned her on all the way for him? Or had she...dear God, she'd gone shy on him when it came to "other" ways of doing it! She remembered now. And with the first memory, all the flood of pent-up memories she'd been refusing to acknowledge since his death started coming back. And the face in the mirror became a horror-struck mask, the lovely nude body a starveling skeleton. God! Memories! What he'd wanted, she'd held back from him...even when she'd given him what he wanted, or let him do what he wanted to her, she'd given in with a bad grace, destroying his pleasure in it. How could she? How could she?
She looked at the stranger in the mirror, that strange, thin, brown naked woman with the disheveled hair and the haggard expression, and relived the past with the new, more understanding eyes her experience had given her....
Flash:
She was big and heavy and pregnant with Mickey. There came the night when she definitively decided he couldn't get on top any more, he'd hurt the baby. And she couldn't get her legs up any more. And she really wasn't in the mood tonight, she didn't really-you know?-need it tonight
But: "Nan, I started thinking about you in the car on the way home from the office. I got so hot I would have whacked it if the chauffeur hadn't been there. I've been dying for you all day. I've got to, you understand, honey..
"But Ed. Couldn't we just...cuddle."
"Nan, Nan. I love you, I want you."
"Yes, but.. . "
Here, dummy. You damned fool, her mind told her. Right here. Any woman who was a whole woman would have been so flattered, so excited, by the thought of her husband still getting hot about her when she was big and fat and ungainly, that she'd do anything, anything, to please him.
But you?
"Here. Feel this." His hand had guided her fingers to that big rod of his, pulsing, hard. And she'd blushed! Actually blushed! And she'd even tried to pull her hand away, for God's sake!
(Nan, thinking about it sobbed once and caught herself. Dear Ed! How she'd love to have him back right now! She'd do anything-anything-to please him!)
(...And the cold-eyed devil within her, cutting through her veil of hypocrisy, said back, Sure you would.)
"Nan, do something for me, darling."
"Sure I will, Ed."
"Take me in your mouth, please. Please. Now."
"In my...my mouth?"
"Yes. Suck me off. Please, Nan. I need you."
"But Ed, I...oh, you darling. All right" (See? She'd loved him; she'd done it!)
"Oh, yes...that's right...your lips around the head of it Right...now, yet please, touch my balls, now...softly, lightly...now, please, lick the bottom side of it....Oh, God, that's good...yes...yes...now take it all in, as far as you can...yes...now...." Now he was on his knees before her on the bed; her fingers guided his erect and straining rod into her mouth; his hard belly was taut before her, flat and muscular; she could feel his dear hands in her hair, caressing softly, guiding; and now his buttocks started a slow, purposeful, back-and-forth rhythm, driving the long hard rod, with the lovely big rigid head of it bulging and pulsing, in and out of her mouth like...go ahead and say it like fucking her mouth...and she'd felt her own loins getting hotter, and at the same time she'd heard the drab Polack voice inside her saying no, no, you shouldn't do it and if you should do it, you shouldn't enjoy it you got to make him pay for asking for it the dirty man. "Now...now," Ed was saying, beside himself, "now, darling, please take me, all of me, in there, and when it comes, don't spit me out don't please, just take it in and swallow me, all of me, oh God, you'll make me so happy...." And it'd grown bigger and harder in her mouth and the back-and-forth motion had grown steadier and more powerful and-
God, that was it, he was fucking her in the mouth, that was it, and it was dirty, dirty, and God would punish her, and she wasn't supposed to like it, and it was supposed to make you go crazy, swallowing that awful stuff, if you got even any of it in you it would make you sick and nuts in die head, and here he was, getting ready, and he was going to come, and he was-he was-coming in her mouth....
...And at the last split-second she'd pulled her mouth away, gagging, and it hadn't been quite in time and a big gob of the heavy stuff had gone into her mouth, and she'd gagged, and vomited all over the bed, and been sick as a dog, and she'd gone out, hating him, and slept on the bed in the guest room and not let him close to her. But she hadn't slept at all well, and she'd had dreams about it later in the night, and they'd made her so hot she'd gone back in to him and cuddled with him and said she was sorry. But she hadn't made him feel all right about it And he'd never tried it again....
Flash:
"...No, Ed, please, don't you don't want to kiss me there...I mean, please, Ed, darling, I love you, but.. . "
Flash:
"Ed! No! Please! Not back there. That...Oh, its stretching me, oh, it hurts, it hurts, Ed.. .
(But it had hurt good-it had, indeed, and when she thought it all out later, it made her hot thinking about it. His-his...dick...up her ass-hole...Oh, God.
Oh, God, don't punish me for wanting it, for wanting him to do that thing even if it's bad and dirty....)
But had she ever brought it up again? Had she ever let him know it'd be all right if he tried it again?
(Filthy! Dirty! Exciting....)
And, now, sitting here alone in a post-coital gloom, looking, flat-eyed, unhappy, at the naked body that suddenly seemed not so pretty, not so inviting, she knew precisely what she thought about Ed and his "other ways" of doing it. She'd give a million dollars to have him right there beside her now, making her own flesh glow with his bright, warm, lusty thoughts about her undeserving body, and she knew she'd give him anything he wanted with a glad heart, and she'd learn to love all of it and to let everything he wanted, no matter how freaky, turn her on-all the way-and she'd make him feel happy about the way he felt about her. She would! She would....
...Oh, God, she'd eat that big dick of his now. Dick. Cock. Prick. Lovely, filthy, shit words, dirty words. They're words of love, you damned fool! Enjoy them. Savor them. Lovely dirtiness. Dirtiness that makes you feel good, dirtiness that makes love.
God, she'd suck him off! She'd tease that big cock of his until he couldn't stand it, and when he started fucking her in the mouth she'd open up her throat and take him all the way down until she had hair in her teeth, and when he came she'd swallow it all down gladly, hungrily, and thank God she had a good man's mouthful of come to swallow....
But Ed was dead, and it was too late. She sat there, letting the awful truth sink in again, looking at her naked body, this whole year unwanted, unused....until today....
Nan Mikell sat up straight, looking herself in the eye. "Better get it together, sister," she said. "I'm about to take you for the ride of your life."