Belonger (An erotic novel): Part One (56 page)

Ione stared across the City, contemplating
the traffic and clothing changes required to join her friends at
the Club, decided she would drive back the following morning.
Manassa didn’t know when her own affairs were destined to conclude
that evening either and had told them not to expect her any time
specifically. Emma would worry, and so would Mark, but Ione planned
to return before they were awake and could explain everything then.
There was much to tell.

Right now all she wanted was to indulge
herself with a long shower, maybe masturbate for a while. Sometimes
it helped her think…

Orientation

The Merkin perched on his
billowing narrator’s seat in the loft
above
the stage,
sipping warm berry tea.
The Stage Manager was busy with final preparations
for the scene he had devised.
The sun had
just set according to the mannermen, several of whom had recently
returned from out in the City. By now the women auditioning tonight
had already been carefully groomed
and
dressed by the slippers who worked under the Manager’s
authority.

The Merkin
smoothed
the thin delta of
hair about his lips
with
a flourish,
contemplating
the fastidious soaping and scrubbing of flesh his instructions
required. He had not allowed himself to watch the women prepare
Manassa, or any of the slippers carefully chosen to perform with
her. It would have weakened the whole proposition of the evening to
see them naked beforehand.

The glow gnomes ranged about him in the
lighting grid beamed a deep red radiance onto a richly decorated
set designed to simulate the environment of a rubber lingerie
boutique. Manassa had been provisionally hired late yesterday at
one of his busiest clothing shops by the park, and had spent most
of today learning its customs and procedures. The mannermen had
sent runners with regular updates about her performance, and the
Merkin had emptied one capsule after another from their limber
vaginas, anxious for news of the big woman’s progress.

Then, later in the day they had ushered
Manassa herself into his Tent.

Script pages were prepared for the evening;
something he hadn’t bothered with forever it seemed. While he might
have written these on paper for a single use, he had instead made
the investment in hand-stitching the words into canvas pages that
could be used again and again without being scrambled by dream,
even laundered.

Manassa had not been given a copy of the
“orientation” scene of course, and as such she would not be
rehearsed like the other performers. It had been explained that she
would be observed by an audience of employees, ostensibly to
determine whether she would be permanently hired into service. The
Merkin was curious to see how she reacted to the massive theater
environment where she found herself.

The audience was heavy tonight, by no
accident; the Merkin had let it be known throughout the whole
society of the Tent that a specially titillating audition was in
progress. It was the first time he was going to be showing them
more than games and informal skits actually, and he would have to
be specially vigilant for deviations from the script, which might
quickly ramify to ungovernable circumstances. He was already
anxious enough about his first encounter with Manassa—albeit from
the circumferentially skirted protection of the loft above the
stage and the cloudlike construction of his narrator’s seat, which
together rendered him invisible to the audience and thespians
alike.

The Manager indicated his crew was ready. The
Merkin verified his script was open to the right page and called
down for him to proceed. His hands were shaking.

“
Heads onstage! Performers
on the deck!” the Manager shouted, and the last of his crew
departed. The noisy conversation of the audience faded to a murmur
of excited voices.

The women were let out from a talent
vestibule under the enveloping ascent of theater seats, and the
Merkin watched them stroll onto the round stage; a dox or so of
slippers garbed in stylish, rubber-accented dresses suitable for
the theme of the evening.

He reflexively stroked his fringed lips, then
let his voice boom down, reading directly from the script to limit
the possibility of error.

“
A new employee has come
to a clothing boutique for orientation. Previously acquainted with
the sale of ordinary attire, she will now practice with erotic
rubber fashions. She circulates among the more experienced shop
personnel as they wait for customers, ready to accommodate them in
any reasonable way.”

Which one was she? The Merkin scanned faces
in perplexity, noticed the performers were mostly looking back
toward the vestibule.

There was a piercing slap and a bouncy blond
came tripping in after the rest of the auditioners, giggling
indecorously. The Merkin stared in disbelief at the woman that
followed her, one hand still playfully raised.

She had midnight-black hair that wove gently
about her neck, framing a lovely countenance filled with an
innocent exuberance for life. Her shoulders were high and shapely,
her slender arms tapered to gracefully fingered hands. Her breasts
bulged under the rubber-laced bodice of her frilly white and red
lingerie dress, and the Merkin fixed upon their bulky perfection
for a moment before his gaze lowered to the most sumptuously
rounded hips he had ever seen. She was easily taller than anyone
else on the stage, and wore high-heeled shoes added to that.

The other women were apparently just as
enthralled; they were crowding around Manassa in obvious
contravention of their roles as “established employees.”

“
Wow,” he heard the big
woman say. “This is crazy. All these people watching! And I thought
we were just gonna mess around with some new clothes or whatever.
Maybe go drinking afterwards…”

She turned to the flirtatious blond. “What
store are you from? I just got hired at the one by the big pond on
the Dowser’s side of the park.”

“
Dowser? Park? What are you
talking about?”

Manassa looked around at the theater, brow
furrowed. “I can’t hear the City at all. Are we really still in the
warehouse? And what was the deal with that water elevator thing? It
took forever to get to the fourth floor!”

“
What’s a ‘city?’” a woman
asked.

Manassa stared down in perplexity at the
other performers, who were fingering her dress now, exploring the
round form beneath it by coy exploits of pressure and estimation.
The crowd was whispering in awestruck appreciation for her
beauty.

The Merkin felt his penis surge against the
cramped regulation of his briefs, shoved his script down hard to
suppress it. His script. He stared at the pink-bound valley of
pages in his lap, laced with neat lines of hand-sewn writing. They
were completely off course and the scene hadn’t even begun! He had
to take control.

“
The employees circulate
among the various items of apparel on display, making ready for
customers.”

He delivered this as an imperative and they
did as ordered, straightening rubber lingerie and clothing arranged
in low displays, commenting on the style and presentation of
various items; gloves and whips and belts, and rubbers mounted on
plastic peckers.

“
Oh, here’s the ‘changing
room,’” Manassa tittered, stepping playfully over a knee-high wall.
“Quite a setup just for training, eh?”

She inspected a rectangular series of low
wall segments, intended to represent what were normally private
rooms lined with mirrors. The Merkin was quite aware of the drastic
failure of discretion inherent in this design, a practical
consequence of the visibility requirements of theater-in-the-round,
where the audience lay in every direction. But there was a deeper
meaning to the setup as well; he had actually devised the whole
scene around this compromised place of privacy.

Manassa looked straight up at him then, eyes
narrowed with mischief, and he almost lost the courage to proceed.
She didn’t seem at all intimidated. But the cloudlike narrator’s
seat was camouflaged in darkness, and he knew she could not see him
among the gnomes beaming down. He let his eyes dive into her husky
decolletage, fed his lust on the swaying mass of her skirted rump
as she sauntered off to play with the whips.

Where was the first customer? The Merkin
fretted for a moment, then belatedly diagnosed the delay; the man
had seen Manassa, and now he had stage fright. But all he had to do
was walk in and ask for a belt.

“
A patron arrives to peruse
the fashions,”
he boomed, superimposing his
will on the fellow.

A handsome actor in a brown leisure suit
emerged from a talent vestibule under the audience, slowly ascended
to the stage, entering the boutique.

One of the employees was supposed to step
forward to greet him, but was flirting with Manassa instead. The
customer edged over to them both, trying to get the scene
started.

“
I’d like… um… I’d like to
see your panties.”

The crowd tittered and the Merkin seethed.
The idiot had blown his line, flummoxed by the transition into
Manassa’s presence.

The big woman shrugged in quizzical
acquiescence and gamely twitched her hem up to oblige. The customer
stared at her midsection in stupefied arousal. Half the audience
fell silent. The spectators seated to her rear clamored insistently
for a look. The Merkin could sympathize—from his vantage on high he
wasn’t privileged to witness the sight either, though he knew her
panties were pink. He had designed and tailored them for her
reported proportions.

The employee next to her stepped forward
uncertainly, dragged them all back to the script. “Can we show you
like, a belt maybe?

“
Oh. Yes! A belt. That’s
what I’m after,” he agreed, eyes rooted to Manassa’s crotch till
her hem fell again. The Merkin resumed breathing.

“
I need one to coax my
lover’s… uh, her sulky bottom,” he stammered.

“
Right this way,
sir.”

The employee consulted with her customer at
the appropriate display, and they fumbled to deliver the
reasonable-sounding repartee that had been scripted.

“
How about this
one?”

“
I think not, sir; it’s too
flimsy to inflict a satisfying censure on the buttocks.”

“
What about
this?”

“
Well…”

They dithered under Manassa’s interested
gaze, stymied by her presence. This inability to bend with
circumstance was the reason the Merkin had employed games with
precise rules and structure for auditioning, rather than dialog
memorized and performed. He needed thespians with the wit to
improvise—especially on opening night, when the context of reality
itself would be in negotiation.

“
The shop assistant selects
a belt,”
he grumpily directed, trying to
contain the damage to the night’s credibility.

“
This is it. This is what
you want,” the employee hastily declared, and handed her client an
effeminate rubber strap adorned with pink and blue hearts and
moons, more likely to provoke laughter than humility in anyone
destined to receive its touch. The Merkin cringed.

“
Very well. This will do,”
the man skeptically agreed. With a last, infatuated look at
Manassa, he was gone from the stage.

The crowd noisily deconstructed the exchange
as the Merkin waited for the next customers to arrive, fuming at
the ineptitude of the performance. It wasn’t that his people were
stupid; far from it. Despite their apparent sophistication, even
the brightest residents of the City were skulks and slippers by the
standard of the stage—their lives seldom called for extemporaneous
demonstrations of wit.

He thumbed to the next page of the script,
gingerly balanced on his erection, let a brief interval of
undirected time elapse, watching Manassa’s restless physique under
her jealously clinging dress. He sighed when it was clear the scene
had stalled again.

“
A couple enters the
boutique,”
he declared, hoping for a better
result this time.

Two casually attired people sauntered onto
the deck, awkwardly holding hands.

“
Can I help you?” said a
pert redheaded employee, managing to conduct herself with
reasonable believability.

The customer stepped away from his companion,
a lovely woman with an air of quiet anxiety. He regarded the
contents of the shop with a frown, then addressed the redhead in an
irked tone.

“
Well the situation is this;
the lady disturbs my sleep on a frequent basis with her
masturbation. She means to be discreet I’m sure, but at some point
every night—when she decides after endlessly rubbing and teasing
herself she wants to climax after all—I am awakened from dream to
find myself haplessly involved in her fantasy.”

The employee displayed a scandalized look, as
scripted. “I see.” She regarded the woman with a puzzled air. “Why
do you touch yourself when fulfillment is impossible without his
participation?”

There was no answer. “Tell them!” her man
railed, and she was bullied into stammering the truth.

“
I just like the feeling of
my vagina,” she admitted. “I like to rub it very slowly and
imagine…”

“
But no one can orgasm
without the intentional contact of another person…” the employee
carefully explained.