Whispers of the Flesh (22 page)

A figure crossed the gym, almost as tall as Hitch, but much broader, carrying a barbell.

Elle and Lili looked at each other and smiled.

“
Now
where is he?”Lili asked as they scanned the empty gym.

Elle pointed to a T-shirt and a pair of shorts on the floor by the sauna. The view through its glass door wasn’t helpful—all she could see of the sauna’s interior was the other glass door on the back wall leading to the adjacent steam shower—but where else could he be?

“Feel like getting hot?” Elle asked.

“When am I not eager for a little rise in temperature?” said Lili as she untied her
lubushu.

Jason, lying naked on a towel on the higher of the two wooden benches against the sauna’s left-hand wall, bolted upright when Elle and Lili, also naked, entered the little wood-paneled oven of a room. Hastily wrapping the towel around himself, he said, “Oh, hey, sorry. I, uh, I wasn’t expecting anybody else at this hour, so, um . . .”

“No need to apologize,” Lili said as she laid a pair towels on the bottom bench, one on either side of his feet. “And please don’t cover yourself on our account. A sauna can only be properly enjoyed
sans vêtements, non
?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” he said, but he made no move to uncover himself, probably because of his physical reaction to their presence.

Lili smiled up at him through those thick black lashes as she seated herself by his left leg, her eyes glinting with sexual interest that wasn’t feigned—for Jason MacKenna
sans vêtements
was a revelation. The body that had looked thick under sweatshirts and baggy jeans turned out to be composed mostly of muscle, with just a modest layer of what Inigo liked to call “comfortable upholstery.” He was a big man, but in a good way, with a sturdy jaw, beefy arms, and shoulders like a prize stud bull. Without glasses to obscure his eyes, Elle could see that they were green—not hazel, but a remarkably vivid green—set off by dramatically arched blond brows.

Lili slid Elle an amused little look that said,
I know you didn’t think I’d view him as a
gabru,
but now I do, and you’ll just have to deal with it.
Whether in her male or female persona, Elle didn’t think she would ever get used to Lili making love to exceptionally desirable men. On the other hand, Jason’s unexpected hunkdom would make the collection of his seed a much more diverting enterprise than it otherwise would have been. Lili wasn’t alone in finding him suddenly very hot. His scent, enhanced by the heat of the sauna—shea butter soap, Johnson’s baby shampoo, a little hair pomade, and lots of aroused male—excited her intensely.

“Do you mind?” Elle asked Jason as she dipped the ladle in the wooden bucket next to the heater.

“Oh. Um, no. No, of course not.”

She poured a stream of water onto the hot rocks atop the heater. It evaporated instantly, steam billowing into the sultry air.

Jason was clearly trying not to stare at Elle as she came to sit on the bench, on the other side of his legs from Lili. Elle smiled inwardly, knowing what this young man saw when he looked at her: a six-foot, blue-eyed blonde with a spectacular centerfold body. Spectacular and naked, as was the exotic Lili, with her sheaf of glossy black hair, her drowsily seductive eyes, her golden skin. She was as narrow-waisted as Elle, her breasts not quite as large, but round and high, with nipples the color of wine. In keeping with current fashion, Lili had her pubic hair waxed into a sleek black strip. Elle’s was more or less
au naturel,
just neatly trimmed, since anything she did to it when she was a woman would remain that way when she turned back into a man.

“Elle,” Lili said, “this is the one I was telling you about, the genius with the wonderful hands.”

“You kidding?” he said, holding his hands out in front of him. “They’re freakin’ pot roasts.”

“No, they are
merveilleuse,
so
masculine.
” Lili tended to dial up the French when she was seducing Americans. Twisting around on the bench, her breasts brushing his leg, she took his jumbo-sized left hand in hers and caressed it. He bunched the towel in front of him.

Still holding his hand, Lili said,“Jason, this is my friend Elle. She’s been wanting to meet you.”

Elle turned and shook hands with Jason. She held on to his hand, grazing the big palm with her thumb; he drew in a breath. “Oh, you’re right, Lili. I can feel the strength in it.”

Jason looked back and forth between them as they stroked his hands, the wheels turning behind those crème de menthe eyes.

“Are these yours?” Lili asked, lifting the wire-rimmed glasses sitting on the bench next to her. Wincing, she dropped them and blew on her fingers.

“That’s why I’m not wearing them,” he said.

With a mischievous smile, Elle leaned closer to Lili and stage-whispered,“He can’t see us. We can do whatever we want.”

“My vision’s actually not that . . .” Jason trailed off as Lili touched her mouth to Elle’s.

They kissed with genuine passion, a delicate caress of their lips and tongues, their bodies pressed against Jason’s legs. Elle cupped Lili’s right breast, tugging the nipple erect as Lili fondled Elle’s already damp sex. It was a singular pleasure to be touched so intimately by Lili, a pleasure they reserved for when Elle—or Elic—would be taking a human, since that was the only way a dusios could climax. Unless it was foreplay for inter-course, that kind of direct sexual excitation could be frustrating to the point of pain.

The heat of the sauna penetrated Elle’s body, making her skin prickle with perspiration and heightening the stimulation of Lili’s deft fingers. Her pussy felt sizzling hot, the flesh there ultrasensitized. Lili’s skin grew slick to the touch, Elle’s hand gliding over it as if it were oiled. Elle stroked a fingertip along the cleft between Lili’s legs, which drew a soft moan from her.

Jason said, “Um, do you girls want me to get lost, or . . . ?”

“No, of course not,” Lili said in her throatiest bedroom voice, smiling into his eyes as she stroked his leg. “After all, you were here first.”

“Then, deal me in.” Jason levered himself down onto the bench between Elle and Lili with a self-assurance that Elle found surprising and sexy. He put his arms around both women, who immediately transferred their attention to him, kissing him as they writhed against his big, slippery-hot body.

“Have you ever done this before?” Lili asked him as she ran her fingers lightly up his rigidly erect cock.

“A threesome? Yeah, twice, but those girls didn’t hold a candle to you two.”

Elle and Lili looked at each other and then at him. They had speculated that the brainy bear was a virgin. Elle had even been prepared to use a
liggia spiall
on him if he proved resistant to seduction, so that he would not only submit willingly but remember it all as a dream. Clearly, no such measure would be needed.

“Coed dorms,” he said. “Greatest educational advance of the twentieth century. Listen, I’ve got some Trojans in my room. I can be there and back in—”

“We don’t need them,” Elle said. “It’s taken care of.”

“Um . . . Yeah, but . . .”

“Up to and including the clean bills of health,” Lili added. “So just relax and go with it.” Elle knew that Jason’s stock had just risen even higher in Lili’s eyes. A true
gabru
had brains as well as brawn.

Great.

Jason lifted Lili as if she were weightless and sat her astride his lap, facing away from him. “Here, you can lick us both this way,” he told Elle. With one arm, he tucked Lili up against him so that his cock was just south of her pussy; with the other, he played with her breasts.

As Elle dropped to her knees on the smooth wooden floor, Lili gave her a wide-eyed smile of delight that said,
Boy, did we underestimate this one.

Elle pleasured both Lili and Jason with her mouth while stroking her own clit to maintain the intensity of her arousal. When she took him, she should be ready to come, and come well, at the same moment he did. A dusian
transfert de sperme
worked best when all parties involved—the dusios, the harvested male, and the female recipient—experienced powerful, extended orgasms. On the male’s part, this produced an especially copious discharge. On the female’s, it caused the cervix to spasm, increasing the likelihood of semen being drawn up into the womb.

“Pinch her nipples hard, rolling them a little,” Elle told Jason as she finger-fucked Lili. “She likes that.”

Lili bucked and cried out as she came. Jason lifted her up a bit, aiming his cock between her legs, but before he could enter her, she rose off him, saying,“Much as I would love to keep you all to myself,
chéri
, it is Elle’s turn,
non
?”

Elle went to take Lili’s place on Jason’s lap, but he had a different idea. He grabbed one of the wedge-shaped wooden backrests, set it flat on the upper bench, and had her lie down on it with her hips on the high end, canting them up. Draping her legs over his thick shoulders, he buried his face between them and proceeded to do things with his tongue that had her moaning and clutching at his hair in short order.

He shoved a thick, long, deliciously calloused finger inside her, located her G-spot in about a second—of course he would, with his knowledge of physiology—and started massaging it in just the right firm, rhythmic way. Lili kissed her, whispering “Let me know when it gets to be too much,
Khababu
.”

Elle nodded, clinging to Lili as the pleasure rocketed higher, higher . . . At its breathless, heart-pounding peak, when a mortal woman would be convulsing in orgasm, Elle remained suspended in carnal rapture . . . until she began to sense the inevitable metamorphosis of unrelieved pleasure into pain.

“Now, Lili . . . Oh, make him stop . . .”

“She wants
this
now,
chéri,
” Lili told him, reaching between his legs. “She wants it deep and hard. She wants to come with her pussy stretched around this big, beautiful, hard cock.”

“God, you girls are
great.
” He mounted Elle with one foot braced on the lower bench, guided his cock into her, gripped her shoulders for purchase, and snapped his hips.

He groaned as he filled her, and then with each sharp thrust, droplets flew off his hair. With his size and ferocious energy, it was like being ravished by a sweaty, rutting beast.

Lili, kneeling on the lower bench, reached around Jason to cradle his balls while rubbing the root of his penis just above them. It was what she often did when she helped Elle in extracting a
gabru
’s seed, not to enhance his pleasure—although it certainly did, judging from his groans—but in order to monitor how close he was to orgasm.

When Lili felt his scrotum draw up tight and full, she caught Elle’s eye as if to say
Now,
while brushing a fingertip very lightly and rapidly near her clit. She knew just what she was doing, of course. Elle came explosively, as did Jason, who growled, “
Fuck.
Oh,
fuck.
Oh. Oh. Oh, shit. Fuck. Oh. Oh. Oh . . .”

He sucked in great lungfuls of air as the pulsing of his cock gradually slowed and then stopped. “Holy shit,” he gasped through an exhausted chuckle.

They washed up together in the adjacent oversized steam shower. Built to Inigo’s specifications—of course—it had walls of amber-colored Venetian marble studded with two dozen massage jets that were adjustable in intensity from “slow pulse” to “acupuncture.” There were four wide rain showerheads in the ceiling, a steam generator, two handheld showers, dimmable lights, stereo speakers, and a telephone, all of it controlled by a digital panel that looked as if it belonged on a space station. Built-in seats of different shapes and sizes facilitated sex play, as did the various handholds and trapeze rings.

After about twenty minutes of soaping each other up beneath a steaming rain shower, with Elle and Lili paying special attention to each other’s hard-to-reach places, the two women sat Jason on a corner bench with strategically placed jets and went down on him. They were going to finish him that way—in fact, they were having a friendly argument about whose mouth he would shoot into—but the young man had a different idea.

He stood Lili up facing the wall, lifted her a few inches off the floor with a massage jet thrumming directly between her legs, and had her grab a pair of handles near the ceiling. He pushed his cock deep inside her from behind and just stood there unmoving except for an occasional hard squeeze of his ass. Elle kissed them both, tongued his ear, suckled Lili’s nipples, fingered his ass . . . Lili climaxed over and over. Jason roared when his orgasm came.

“Damn,” he panted afterward, pushing his hair off his face with a shaky hand as he leaned against the wall for support. “You two are gonna ruin me for other girls.”

“We tend to have that effect,” Elle said.

Six

N
AKED AND HALF-NAKED hippie chicks danced and cavorted around a roaring bonfire in front of the bathhouse around dusk, breasts and faces polished with sweat, gypsy skirts whirling, streams of hair switching this way and that as they spun and laughed and passed their joints around. A few of the guys were dancing, too, beers in hand, as somebody slapped out a drunken rhythm on the lid of the cooler chest.

I was watching not from within their midst, but from the rear of the bathhouse, where I sat against the rock wall near the cave entrance with my own beer bottle, empty for the past half hour, observing the goings-on like an anthropologist studying the ritual of some primitive tribe.

The ceremonial consumption of these intoxicants induces a trancelike euphoria and diminished inhibitions. In this state of intoxication, the clan performs the sacred fertility rite, a period of ecstatic dancing followed by indiscriminate mating.

Said mating had already commenced, judging from the English-accented whispers of the couple lying under an afghan in a far corner of the pillow-strewn bathhouse. They probably didn’t think I could hear them, but I’d always had good ears.

“Lizzy, please, baby, let me put it in. An inch, that’s all. I just want to feel it inside you.”

“No way. I told you, I love George.”

“And I love Elaine, but they’re both in London. I’m here. Love the one you’re with, baby.”

“Nigel . . .”

“Come on, Liz, I’m begging you here. My balls are so blue, it’s killing me.”

“We should never have started this. I should never have let you kiss me.”

“Please, baby. I’ll make you come like you never—”

“Don’t touch me there.”

“Your knickers are soaked through. You want it as much as I do. Come on, Lizzy. One inch, that’s all. I promise. It’s not shagging if it’s just an inch. I just want to stick the head in and feel your pussy hugging it, all warm and cozy, and then I’ll pull out.”

“Yeah, right,” Lizzy said, but her next breath emerged as a soft moan.

“You like when I do that?” Nigel asked. “Right there? Mm, I can feel your clit right through your knickers.”

She gasped. “Oh, God. Oh . . .”

They kissed for a while, her breath coming faster and faster; his, too. I lit a cigarette, acting like I had no idea what was going on over there, knowing I shouldn’t be listening in, but doing it anyway for the vicarious stimulation—purely mental, of course. If Old Sparky had any voltage left, I would have been sitting there with a boner. Or I wouldn’t have been sitting there at all. I’d be off somewhere with one of those bonfire chicks, balling my brains out.

Actually, I wouldn’t have even been at Grotte Cachée. I would have been back in Chicago with Lucinda, making love or whispering in the dark, or curled up with my face in her hair. She had the silkiest hair I’d ever touched, and it had a pronounced, sweetly herbal scent from the shampoo she used. It was a popular shampoo with a strong fragrance, so I’d catch a whiff from time to time when I was walking down the street or whatever. Every time, it made my heart beat so hard my chest would hurt.

“Lift your bum a bit so I can get these off you,” Nigel whispered.

“Just . . . Just so you can touch me, right? You’re not gonna . . .”

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

I saw movement beneath the afghan, heard the rustle of feathers in the pillows they were lying on, then him saying “Oh, God, Lizzie, you feel so good. How’s this? You like being touched like this, nice and slow?”

She nodded, breathing raggedly. After a minute or so of kissing and petting, both of them breathless now, she said, “Wh-What are you—?”

“It’s just my finger. Oh, man, you’re so wet. God, Liz, you’re so fucking sexy. I’m so hot for you. I swear, I’m gonna explode.”

There came the metallic grating of a zipper.

“Nigel—”

“I just want to show you what you’ve done to me. Here, give me your hand.”

“I don’t think—”

“Feel that? It’s aching for you, baby. It wants to be inside you. Feel how hard it is.”

“Mm . . . Yeah, but—”

“Just one inch,” he pleaded. “Just the tip.” She must have shaken her head, because he said, “Let me rub it against you, then, slide it along the slit. No harm in that, is there?”

“Um . . .”

“Like this.” More shifting around, him getting on top of her with his hair hanging down. “Open your legs. It’s all right, you’ll see. Am I heavy?”

“No.”

“Ah,” he said gruffly, the pillows rustling in a slow rhythm now. “Oh, yeah. How’s that feel? Good?”

“Yeah,” she breathed.

I homed in on a distant figure beyond the bonfire. It was Madeleine, strolling out of the darkness on the path from the château, a beer bottle in her hand. She was wearing the same sleek blue dress she’d had on earlier, but she’d ditched the platforms. This was the first I’d seen of her since leaving Morel’s office that afternoon. Emmett still hadn’t returned, so I’d been flying solo for the past six or seven hours.

I waved to catch Madeleine’s attention, then raised my empty beer bottle and turned it upside down with a plaintive expression. She veered off toward the bonfire to snag another beer from the guys manning the cooler chest.

“Are you close?” Nigel whispered. “Are you gonna come?”

She nodded, her breaths coming in whimpery little pants.

Stilling, he said, “I want to feel it. I want to feel your pussy squeezing my cock when you come.”

“Don’t stop now. Oh, God, Nigel . . .”

“Let me put it in, Lizzy, just an inch, just so—”

“Yes, all right, do it. Just . . .
Oh,
” she moaned.

“God, but you feel incredible,” he growled. “Oh, fuck . . .”

“Don’t stop moving,” she implored. “Please, I’m so close.”

“If I move, I’ll go in deeper, and I don’t know if you want me to—”

“Oh, God, just do it. Just fuck me. Just—
Yes,
” she said as he began thrusting in earnest. “Oh, God, harder.
Harder.
Oh . . . oh . . .”

I chuckled.
Well played, Nigel, old man.

I grabbed a pillow and set it next to me as Madeleine circled the pool with that leggy, feline walk of hers, her half-empty beer dangling from one hand, my full one from the other. She turned and lowered herself onto the pillow in one fluid motion, holding my beer out of my reach when I went to take it. “Trade you for another smoke.”

“Deal.”

As I lit Madeleine’s cigarette, I could see by the trembling glow from my match that her eyes were a little puffy. “You been crying?” I asked.

“Hours ago, but I’ve got the kind of face that shows it for, like, days.”

“Morel?”

A cloud of smoke emerged on her sigh. In a broad imitation of
le seigneur
’s accent, she said, “ ‘You are very beautiful, but, how you say, not quite beautiful enough.’ ”

“He didn’t say that.” I took a swig of the beer; it was bitingly cold.

Madeleine drew on her cigarette, squinting at the heaving afghan in the dark corner. “Looks like Nigel finally wore Lizzy down.”

“He could give lessons. What did Morel really say?”

“He said he was in love with his wife.”

“Well, you’ve got to respect that.”

“Of course you’d say that. You’re an old soul, very mature, very into duty and honor.”

“How would you know? You’ve just met me.”

“Well, you
are
in the Army, but—”

“Air Force.”

“But that’s not why I know that about you. It’s your aura.”

I groaned. “You realize you sound just like Bernie.”

“Bernie doesn’t know shit about auras
or
chakras. He’s picked up a few phrases and now he uses them to get laid. Me, I’ve always been able to see auras, and over time, I’ve learned to interpret them. Yours tells me several things. It tells me you’re wounded. It tells me you have secrets.”

I studied her eyes, trying to figure out if she was bullshitting me, or if she was for real.

She stroked my face. And then she kissed me, or tried to. She touched her lips to mine.

I backed away.

“Okay,
why?
” she demanded, her voice quavering. “What’s the matter with me?”

“There’s nothing the matter with you, Madeleine. You
are
beautiful. You’re really sexy. I don’t know, I guess maybe you’re just not my type.” I winced inside at how lame that sounded.

She looked incredulous, as well she might have. Madeleine Lamb, with her Botticelli hair and her come-hither attitude, was every man’s type.

“What
is
your type?” she asked.

Lucinda’s face materialized in my mind’s eye: brown hair, brown eyes, standard nose, standard mouth . . . But put it all together with that smile of hers, that silly laugh, that warm, bottomless gaze, and it absolutely undid me.

I must have hesitated too long. Madeleine said, “Go to hell,” and walked away.