The Pleasure Quartet (38 page)

Here, the faint smile of a young girl with a strained air of dramatized innocence at the instant of feigned violation by her supposed teacher that unconscionably gripped his heart, the emotion
immediately transferring down to his handheld cock which hardened, pulsed in his hand.

There, the panicked look in a Czech would-be-model’s eyes as she auditioned in a hotel room, asked to strip and examined from every close-up angle by the camera and the interviewer when
the unlikely agent promising her modelling gigs makes it clear she has to suck him on camera to determine her talents.

His cock hardens again towards the end of a lengthy sequence in which she has been used repeatedly in all openings by two tattooed studs, the resigned fall of the shoulders of another young
woman as she is dragged towards a bath tub to be urinated on as a final insult in the story of her degradation.

He felt ashamed at the way some images or situations could arouse him even further as he stroked away, his cock now at full length and hard as far back as he remembered in his grip, moving up
and down across the ridges of his glans, his veins at bursting point, trying to hold the orgasm back just a little longer when he would somehow reach the image, the woman, the act that would make
the explosion inevitable and even painful in its intensity.

Noah flew from clip to clip, sometimes just a few seconds here, seeking the ideal face, the right emotion.

Still dissatisfied he noticed a provenance link for a brief GIF of a faceless girl whose ‘master’ was tracing clumsy letters from the alphabet across her offered rump, with the
letter O strategically placed to advertise the availability and popularity of her anal aperture. It was not an uncommon image but the shape of the woman’s pale arse intrigued him and Noah
clicked on the link to a Tumblr page he couldn’t recall encountering before.

The screen went blank for a few seconds and he reckoned the link had expired, the account been closed.

The page opened slowly, the buffering agonisingly halting as the screen filled up. He scrolled downwards to hurry it, but it was no help.

He was edging his cock, tiptoeing on the precipice of his own sought-after eruption, anxious to come, to lift the burden from his mind and body, impatient to reach an image that would form the
perfect trigger to his orgasm. Noah held on, waited for a quartet of images to finally come to life on his laptop screen.

The photos were of poor quality. An amateur production. They were sequential.

The first one was just a repeat of the one he had linked from, reposted on a BDSM site about reputedly beautiful slaves. The apple-shaped pale arse, its opening red and distended, the back of
the young woman’s thighs, tense, sinews on alert, the fall of her back an exquisite curve expanding to an unknown horizon, a promise of further forbidden delights.

The second image repeated the initial one but was shot from the side so you could trace the sketch of a breast, small, its curve an exquisite geometry, and beyond the bent over body the legs of
a group of men. Onlookers, previous users or users still to come? The blurry background was a white wall. Some form of cellar, a dungeon? He peered closer, seeking out details. A tile caught his
attention. A sauna, he decided.

The penultimate photograph appeared to have been taken later, following the inevitable excess and plundering of the victim. It was clear to Noah that what had occurred on the occasion of these
photographs was real, not a set-up with professional participants. This had happened in real life, it wasn’t a scenario elaborated for a porn clip. The photographs taken had been incidental
and maybe the young woman at the centre of attention had not even been aware they were being taken. Might not have allowed them had she known. Her body was splayed, as if stretched on an invisible
cross, drenched in sweat and the assorted men’s come, as if broken, but there was a pride in her abandon, the looseness of her limbs, attitude. The photograph was cropped so you
couldn’t see her face, ending at her neck, a delicate extension to the ravaged body that lay fully exposed, betraying all the indignities she had just suffered.

Noah swallowed hard. His cock hurt. His chest felt tight.

With his free hand he rapidly scrolled down the page to the final image.

It was similar to the previous one but the crop was different. The image was slightly out of focus, a garden of shadows, taken by a cheap device in badly-lit circumstances. You could distinguish
the woman’s chin and her mouth. It was half-open, an horizon of white teeth profiled beyond the dry lips (how many cocks had she sucked? How many times?), but there appeared to be an
ambiguous grin there. No sadness or resignation, or shame, or a reflection of hypothetical tears flowing from her eyes. No. There was something oddly triumphant about the downturn of her lips, as
if in her degradation there was some form of victory achieved, that the pleasure she had extracted from the men still surrounding her was her own accomplishment, a measure of her will. A caricature
of insubordination. Which added to the sheer obscenity of the series of images, screamed a mighty defiance. Damn, he wanted to see her whole face, her eyes. To witness how the pleasure in her gaze
combined with the unavoidable pain.

Noah’s throat felt terribly dry.

He highlighted the final photograph and tried to lighten the image better with the software he stored on his laptop.

Yes.

That was a bit better.

And from the murky depths of the image he finally noticed the young woman’s hair, laid out behind her, a darkness against darkness, untidy, unkempt, wet from her exertions and the ocean of
fluids released earlier.

It was red.

Gorgon-like.

Striking. Like a beacon being lit up in his soul.

His heart stopped.

He groaned.

He came.

His cock shuddering out of his control, spilling his seed across the desk and even the keyboard before he could control its terrible and powerful flow.

By the time his orgasm had faded, he was exhausted, his mind running around in circles trying to interpret what had happened and why it had proved so strong. There was much similar porn on the
internet, he knew, but this had been different. Not the scenario, to be sure, but an unholy combination of elements: the pallor of the woman’s skin, the allied grace of her curves, some hint
of the intensity of her submission, the curl of her lips, and in his imagination, the look he knew he would have witnessed in her eyes had the photograph been more informative.

That red hair, like a stain in the night sky!

It began to haunt his nights.