Whispers of the Flesh (17 page)

“I’ll take it off,” she said, pulling the leotard down off one shoulder.

“Stop that.”Jo slapped her hand. “The whole op-art effect will be ruined. Here.” She handed Elic the scissors. “Problem solved.”

“Do you mind?” Elic asked Anna. “I’ll buy you a new—”

“Do it,” said Doobie, who seemed to have gotten that pesky jealousy thing under control.

Anna rose onto her knees to give Elic better access. Pulling the crotch of the leotard away from her body so as not to nick her, Elic cut a front-to-back slit, then did the same with her tights. The stretchy material pulled open, framing her pussy with its black pubic hair and glistening pink gash. She steadied herself with her hands on his shoulders as he gripped her by the waist to position her.

When his first attempt at penetration missed the mark, Lili sat up and reached between them. Taking hold of Elic’s cock, she tilted it toward Anna’s pussy, which she opened with the fingers of her other hand. “Wow, you really are wet. Okay, ease down. That’s it,” she said as Anna lowered herself, sighing in unison with Elic.

He stroked Lili’s hair as she lay back on the pillows. Taking his hand, she pressed it to her lips, the two of them exchanging a tender smile that kind of threw me for a loop, given that his cock was, at the moment, embedded to the hilt in another woman. But then, nothing in this place made any sense, especially when it came to sex.

As Elic started fucking Anna, his long fingers almost spanning her waist as he set a leisurely pace, it struck me that he’d been right when he said no one would know that it was just paint, not the leotard, concealing Anna’s breasts. Black and white from head to toe, with the exception of her nipples and palms, she could have been some weird, sex-starved alien from another planet, or an android programmed for exceptional sexual performance. And exceptional it was.

Still waters run deep,
I thought as I watched the soft-spoken ballerina go at it, her entire, lithe little body undulating with every thrust, the op-art stripes swaying and pulsing. It was exquisitely beautiful on the one hand, incredibly hot on the other, and damned near hypnotic.

“Hey, guys?” Lili said.

Doobie, Jo, and I wrested our gazes from Anna to find Lili smiling at us.

Indicating the nearly finished baroque guitar painted onto her, she said, “Are we going to finish this? ’Cause if not, I’ll just go run a bath and—”

Doobie wouldn’t hear of leaving it undone. I completed the bridge, then started helping Jo with the soundboard, painting the golden brown background while she added the wood grain over it. Doobie concentrated on finishing up the last remaining section of the checkered border, which cut across Lili’s breasts.

My job was simple and pretty quick. It wasn’t long before everything was filled in except for that triangle of glaringly bare flesh between her thighs. I’d never been shy around women, but there was something about painting a virtual stranger’s naked snatch that felt just a little too goddamned intimate.

Jo waved a hand in front of my face and snapped her fingers. “You worried it’s gonna bite? Come on, man. I can’t do my bit till you do yours.”

I dipped my brush in the paint and charged ahead, stroking it as gently as I could over each outer labium to the accompaniment of Anna’s increasingly urgent moans, each coinciding with the grunt of a bedspring.

“Don’t ignore the slit.” Jo handed me a small sable watercolor brush like the one she was using, saying it was “better for detail work.”

This is just too unreal.
I glanced at Lili, who was holding Elic’s hand as he banged Anna. He had his other hand cupped around the ballerina’s tight little ass while he sucked on a nipple, his eyes closed, low moans rising from his throat.

Lili moaned softly, which was when I noticed that Doobie was painting one of her nipples, using a stiff little brush and taking his time about it. His gaze, however, was almost exclusively on Elic and Anna.

“Move aside,” Jo told me, nudging me with a shoulder. “I’ll do it.”

I held my ground. “You’ve got a bossy streak, you know that?”

“Some guys don’t mind,” she said with a suggestive smile.

And those who did probably put up with it for the chance to get their hands on those tits. Jo was gorgeous, a walking wet dream, in a master race kind of way.
I wouldn’t kick her out of the sack . . .
I started thinking, before I remembered that yeah, I would.

Elic and Anna came pretty much simultaneously, it seemed like. Shortly thereafter, Anna started to rise off of Elic, but he pulled her back down, saying “Bored with me so soon? You’ll hurt my feelings.”

They started in again, Elic giving it to her just as enthusiastically as the first time, without so much as taking a breather. Damndest thing I ever saw.

As Jo finished up the wood graining, I dipped the brush in the paint and slid it along one side of the cleft. Lili let out a kittenish growl and parted her legs wider.

Oh, man.

“Get all the visible flesh,” Jo said.

Problem with that was, the more I painted, the more flesh became visible. Lili’s sex lips were swelling, the juncture between gradually widening to expose not just more of the outer labia, but the inner ones, as well.

“I, um, I guess this is where I call it quits,” I said as I rinsed my brush in the jar of clean water.

Lili arched her hips in a frankly carnal way, making a little mew of dismay. “Don’t stop.”

Rinsing out her own brush, Jo said, “You wouldn’t want to leave her unfinished, would you?”

I said, “Do you think it’s a good idea to apply paint to . . . you know, such sensitive flesh?”

“No.” She put the business end of the brush in her mouth, closed her lips around it, and pulled it out, shaping it into a perfect point.

Then she lowered it to Lili’s pussy and brushed it over the flesh in question, coaxing a deliciously carnal moan from her.

Jo took my brush out of my hand, reshaped the point with her mouth, and handed it back. “Two hands are better than one.”

It was the first time in a long time that I’d set about pleasuring a woman, and the first time ever that I’d done it with such a clever little tool. It was really perfect for the job, soft, but with a snappy resilience, and that nice, precise point was ideal for gliding in and out of the slick little furrows, petting and teasing the clit . . . Jo would attend to one area while I did the other. Lili writhed and panted as Elic, still fucking Anna, reached over to caress her breast. She came four times, and pretty hard, from what I could tell.

“God, that made me hot, watching that,” Doobie said huskily.

“It made
me
hungry,” Lili replied.

He looked puzzled until she unzipped him, and then the lightbulb went off. She pulled out his cock and had him kneel over her face with both hands gripping the headboard. Hooking her fingers around two belt loops of his jeans, she pulled him toward her. He let out a deep, long, ragged groan. “Holy
fuck,
” he gasped when she pushed him back, only to groan again as she tugged him back into her mouth.

He hadn’t been on this ride for very long when Elic and Anna shared another window-rattling orgasm, which apparently was the last straw for Doobie.

“Oh, God, I’m coming,” he moaned as he thrust hard and fast into Lili’s mouth, the headboard creak-creak-creaking. Reaching down to grab his cock, he said, “You . . . you want me to . . . ?”

She gripped his ass with both hands, holding him right where he was. He came with a long, strangled groan.

By the time he pulled out and zipped himself back up, Elic and Anna were at it
again,
which didn’t seem remotely possible, but there it was.

Jo said my name. I turned to find her long, Teutonic body sprawled at the foot of the bed, one hand down her unbuttoned fatigue pants, the other under her T-shirt, squeezing one of those glorious breasts. She smiled at me the way a lioness smiles when she’s lying in the grass testing the air for something raw and warm with which to slake her terrible hunger.

She said, “Did you kill people when you were in the Army?”

Lili said, “Jo, don’t ask him—”

“It was the Air Force,” I said.

“Did you?” Jo asked, still caressing herself.

I thought about all the bombs that dropped from the F-4 Phantom I piloted before it was shot down over North Vietnam. “Yes.”

She sat up and threw me to the bed, straddling me with iron-band thighs as she closed her mouth over mine. Her tongue was . . .
strong
. Damn, she was strong all over. It was all I could do to haul her off of me, saying “Look, Jo, I—”

“God, you’re hot.” She grabbed my crotch, expecting me to be hard, I guess, because she said, “Don’t tell me you’re gay.”

“What? No,” I said, yanking her hand away.

“So, what? I don’t turn you on?”

Yeah, right.
The carbon-based life-form didn’t exist that was immune to Fräulein Josepha’s robust if slightly rapacious brand of sexuality. “It’s just that I have to be someplace,” I lied.

“Me, too. I have to be underneath you as soon as possible.”

“Jo, that’s really not gonna work.”

“On top, then. I love it on top.”

Well, knock me over with a feather.
I looked toward our bedmates to see if they were enjoying the show, but they were making their own performance art, Lili getting it doggie style from Doobie while she kissed Elic, who had yet to disengage from his black-and-white ballerina.

“You can’t just get me this horny, then not let me come,” Jo said, doing her damndest to wrestle me horizontal.

“Fair enough.” I muscled her onto her back, whereupon she popped open the snap of my jeans and yanked at my zipper. “Will you just stop trying to rape me for one fucking second?” I said.

“Make me.”

I grabbed Jo’s T-shirt and whipped it up, but not off, pinioning her arms over her head and effectively blindfolding her in the bargain. God, those blue-ribbon tits! Her pants, I pulled down to immobilize her legs. With her hobbled this way, I was able to pin her to the bed, spread her knees, and go down on her.

She tried to free herself for a few seconds before she felt my mouth on her pussy and realized what was going on. She struggled a little as I started eating her out, not because she wanted me to stop, but because she still wanted to fuck me. But then she had a three-alarm orgasm, and another one close on its heels, which proved to be a pretty effective sedative.

I snuck out while she was lying there limp and purring, still with her T-shirt up over her face and her pants around her ankles, and ducked into the john. I splashed water on my face with unsteady hands and smoked a cigarette, listening to the music from downstairs, Jimmy Cliff singing “Sitting Here in Limbo.” The perfect sound track for my life.

“Don’t tell me you’re gay . . . I don’t turn you on?
”

“Limbo” yielded to a reprise of “You Can Get It If You Really Want.” An admirable sentiment, but not all problems fix themselves if you “try and try.” Some are just gonna hang in there for the duration, man, and there’s nothing you can do but set the throttle to low and hold a straight and steady course.

The Jimmy Cliff album ended as I was coming back down the stairs.

Ah. Blessed silence.
It wouldn’t last, though. I liked music as much as the next guy, but it seemed like nobody could go through life anymore without a sound track. I blamed it on the movies.

“Who’s got the sleeve for
The Harder They Come
?” asked Inigo, lifting an album off the turntable as I descended the spiral staircase. “It was right here.”

“Over here,” said a guy in two braids who was holding the album cover at an angle and shaking it to winnow the seeds and stems out of a handful of pot. “Hold on just one sec.”

“Don’t bogart that sleeve,” snorted Starbuck. He’d finished healing Willow’s chakras, and was now placing something invisible on her tongue, as if miming communion.

He noticed me staring and nodded toward a little open metal tin on the coffee table, which held a cluster of infinitesimally tiny, clear squares. “Windowpane,” he said.
“Acid,
”he added when I still looked confused. “Even you G.I. Joes must have heard of LSD.”

“Take a hit, Hitch,” said Willow in an airily drowsy voice that suggested her state of consciousness was plenty altered already. “It melts in your mouth, not in your . . . Wait a minute. It melts in your hand, not . . .” She frowned as she tried to puzzle it out.

“Melts in your mind, not in your hand.” Proffering the little tin, Starbuck said, “You
should
take a hit. It’ll open up your head.”

“I’m not sure there’s anything in there that should be getting out,” I said.

“Let your demons out, man. Let them do their thing. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“A complete nervous breakdown?” I said.

“They can actually be very liberating.” Gesturing with the tin, he said, “You should try it, man. Maybe make you loosen up a little, get you to grow that Ken doll haircut out, throw a little bleach in with those jeans next time you wash them.”

Turning my back on the arrogant little shit so as to resist the impulse to tell him what he could do with his life lessons, I asked Inigo if he’d seen Emmett, whom I’d lost track of that morning. “Doesn’t look like he’s here,” I said, “unless he’s in some other room.”

“Nah, man, this isn’t his scene. Wish I could help you, but I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

One of the bong smokers, his lungs filled with a fresh toke, croaked, “I think I saw him talking to that Morel guy out in the courtyard.”
That Morel guy
being their host, Julien Morel, Seigneur des Ombres.

“Where will I find Morel?” I asked.

“I’d check his study,” Inigo said.

“Where’s that?”

“I know,” offered Madeleine as she sprang to her feet. “I saw him heading up there a little while ago. I’ll show you the way.”

“Yeah, I bet you will,”sneered Starbuck. “Watch out, Soldier Boy. Those redheads leave scratch marks. Or could it be Morel she’s got the hots for?
Les femmes,
zey just love zee French accent,
non
?”