'I would lose Aaron, and any other man I hope to make a life with,' she said, her voice flat and distinct.
'Marriage is the most vulgar form of folly. As an escape, it is equal with all other human activity. But why condemn yourself to the subway when you could be gliding over the city on a magic carpet?'
'These are just ideas. There's no chance I'm going to become a high-priced call girl.'
'Perhaps. But here is something more cogent. The chance to be the highest paid cocksucker in the world for a few brief minutes.'
She looked up at him. Her chest was heavy. She felt a sudden wave of fatigue. 'Sure,' she said. 'Why not?'
'For the money, right?'
'You bet your sweet arse,' she said.
'Do it on your knees,' he said.
She slipped off the couch and knelt in front of him. His cock was inches from her mouth. She looked at it dispassionately. Removed from all its associations, detached from any inner excitement on her part, it was a flap of skin, no more or less remarkable than a finger or a toe. She was drained of all sexual feeling, and approached her task the way a woman will take on a pile of clothing that needs ironing; it was a thing to be done, and she did not like or dislike doing it. Its major quality was that it would involve time and work.
She brought her mouth forward but Clive held her head back. 'Wait,' he said. 'Before you start, I want you to say something, so we both have everything perfectly clear.' His fingers touched her temples. 'Say, "My name is Cynthia. I am a whore. I suck cock for money."'
The words richocheted around the walls of her consciousness, knocking over all the images that still stood in her definition of herself. For a moment she tried to tell herself that what he said wasn't true, because she would only be doing it once, and mostly as an experiment, although she could not deny that the large amount of money swayed her significantly. But she could not escape the truth that for the length of time she had his cock in her mouth, his description of her was absolutely accurate. And now he was asking that she say it too, so that it became her description of herself also.
'My name is Cynthia,' she said. 'I am a whore. I suck cock for money.'
'Start sucking,' he said.
She brought her hand up and squeezed the base of his cock, making it bulge at the tip. The head flared once and the shaft began to swell. She watched with a kind of wonder she had never before attained during a sexual act, astonished by the sheer physiological miracle of the process whereby a cock becomes hard. The almost insignificant tab of flesh was, before her eyes, transforming itself into a long, solid pole, rigid and thick. At its full length it gave the effect of a man just tall enough not to be considered a midget. Any shorter and it would not have seemed like an actual cock, but some toy fashioned to look like one. When it stuck out at ninety degrees from his body, she took it in her mouth.
To her surprise, once the visual impact was removed, his cock was extremely pleasant. Smoothly textured, evenly curved, manageable size. She sucked it all the way inside her, and when she had taken his entire cock between her lips, the top of it just reached tlie opening to her throat. He could thrust his full length into her and she wouldn't gag or choke. As though reading her mind, he put his hands on the back of her head and pushed her face into his groin. She opened her lips so that the distance between her teeth and her throat would be shortened and he could push in a slight bit more. She wanted to feel the head of his cock sliding a tiny bit into her gullet. And even at that, she found she could still breathe, the air passage wasn't blocked.
Emboldened by the knowledge that his cock could not hurt her throat, she began to suck the length of it in long wet slurping motions, her tongue protruding and her lips parting as she slid forward, her cheeks quivering as she sucked backward. His cock rode in and out of her mouth with smooth regularity, gleaming with the saliva she covered it with. Cynthia became engrossed in the technical facility with which she performed the task, and forgot all other ramifications. For the first time she lost any sense of what the man's pleasure was and tuned in on her own activity. Without articulating it as such, she was working like a professional.
Clive's voice fell into her ears like gentle rain, influencing what she did but not disrupting it. 'You are almost perfect,' he said. 'The pose is classic, on your knees, naked, cheeks caved in, breasts jiggling, arse protruding. And you aren't bothering with fluting fanc-iness, dallying around the edges of my cock with your tongue. You aren't there to please me, you are there to make me come. And so you cease to be of any concern to either of us, you are too absorbed in your work to let your ego interfere. My pleasure is my business, it is what I derive from the act. For I have paid you to do what you are doing, and I need give you no more. I won't be like your Aaron or any other man trapped by your wiles. I have no need to moan to let you know what I am feeling, or to twitch gratuitously to indicate that you are transporting me with pleasure. My feelings are my concern; you are not being paid to know what I feel, only to produce feelings inside me. I need only watch you as you cover my cock voraciously, the spit sliding out from the corners of your mouth, the froth bubblng on your lips. And listen to your breathing as you attempt to coordinate each breath with so many strokes in, so many strokes out. And I can wait until you are, perhaps, taken by your own stimulation, and give me more than I bargained for.'
Cynthia let the words flow in and out of her. She had reduced all variables to a single objective, to spark Clive's ejaculation. She wondered whether Jackie or Maureen might come back into the room, and found she didn't care. It struck her at once that they wouldn't think more or less of her for what she was doing. They were interested in her, not in her codes of personal behaviour. She couldn't help contrasting that to what
Aaron would do if he walked in at that moment. She reached a brief flash of the picture she would present to his eyes as she lavished her attention on the cock in her mouth. Without her awareness of it, she began to curl her toes, push her breasts against Clive's thighs, and roll her arse around to give her head further momentum. She put her hands on either side of his cock like a kitten kneading the flesh around its mother's tit.
Clive looked down and smiled. It's so easy,' he thought. 'They are such simple creatures. Once one has made the proper adjustments in their minds, their bodies revert spontaneously to unbridled sensuality. And the pity is that so few of them realise that, so few understand that they can make their own adjustments and need not rely on a man to set them loose. How much she enjoys it, kneeling and gobbling, letting the cock rampage in her mouth. God knows what's going on in her mind, what rationalisations she's giving herself. I wonder if she truly knows that wantonness transcends intellect.' The sensations he felt were not extraordinary. He had known them countless times with numberless men and women, both as recipient and donor of the oragenital favour. 'I wonder why I even bother any more?' he said to himself. There's nothing more in sex that I hope to discover. It's become just a habit, like smoking. Not unpleasant, and not injurious if kept within moderation. I suppose it's as simple as the fact that I enjoy it, and there are few other things I would rather do with my time than idle it away in those infantile preoccupations.'
He felt the first stirrings of orgasm and he put his attention fully on the juncture of his cock and her mouth. 'I'm going to come soon, Cynthia,' he said. 'In less than a minute the sperm will pop out from the tip of my cock and fill the back of your mouth. You know what it will taste like, musty, pungent, salty, bitter, cloying, sharp, all at once. And then it will slide down your throat and you will make swallowing motions, easing the deposit into your belly. Your nostrils will fill with the smell of it, like raw wheat germ in a freshly opened container. And that will be it. My cock will become limp again, and you will hold it in your mouth until it grows too small to make it worth the bother any longer.'
He bent his knees as the bubbling began in his groin. He dropped his hands to his side, let his head fall back, and allowed his mind to go blank. He gave himself up to her insistence, the constant friction of her tongue and lips on his cock. Like a man dying, his world became one of stark sensation, a sloshing sound, a tingling feeling, the whiteness of the ceiling, the smell of bodies in exertion, the stale taste of tobacco. He groaned once and a shudder rolled the length of his spine. His cock jerked and throbbed, and the thick rich fluid spurted out in a series of powerful jets, six or seven times, until Cynthia's mouth was flooded with sperm. His discharge was incredibly copious and she almost gagged at the volume accumulating at the base of her tongue. When she could wait no longer, she swallowed once, taking the viscous syrup inside her, like a teen-age girl downing the last mouthfuls of a malted milk. Her head spinning, she took a deep breath and swallowed again, pulling in the residue. She clamped her jaws and sucked the cock once more, very hard, draining it of any sperm left in the tube. She swallowed the third time, and then let his cock fall from between her lips. She knelt in front of him a long time, panting slightly, her eyes closed, rocking back and forth. She felt utterly spent, and wondered how she could have become so involved in sucking his cock when she had thought she was at such a distance, and was doing it only for a lark. She had never gone through such an intense experience of cocksucking even with Aaron, at times when she was brimming with love for him. And it came to her with undeniable clarity that there might be more to sexuality than she had always believed, that it might be a power which superceded all other human bonds, and could capture her in its demands despite anything she might think to the contrary.
She opened her eyes. Clive was bending over the table, picking up a cigarette. Maureen was standing at the entrance to the room, looking at her strangely. Cynthia shook her head and sat back down on the couch. Clive handed her a lit cigarette which she gratefully puffed.
'Breakfast is ready/ Maureen said, 'we're eating on the back lawn.' She looked at Cynthia for a few seconds longer and then disappeared into the other room.
'Shall we go,' said Clive.
Cynthia stood up. She began to walk in the direction of the kitchen. But Clive caught her arm. 'Don't forget this,' he said holding out the five hundred dollars. He smiled into her eyes. 'Whore,' he said.
They ate on the grass, bathed in sunlight and the smell of eucalyptus. Maureen produced an exotic omelette and a loaf of freshly baked bread. With it came butter, honey, several kinds of jam, and a pot of breakfast tea. It was after eleven when they sat down, and almost twelve when Maureen began stacking the dishes. Clive rolled several joints and they smoked slowly, enjoying their digestion and the sweetness of the air. The day began to slip gears, to lose the sense of time and purpose and move once more into a mood of drifting and observing. Cynthia felt the first tinges of anxiety. Used as she was to a life of schedules and directed activity, the ambience of the house rendered her like a compulsive without her obsessive behaviour. She had no capacity for idleness.
She looked around the circle, at Maureen whose cool exterior hid such scorching ardour, at Jackie whose clear intellect matched her unfailing warmth, at Clive who went through life as though it were his private berry patch. Their naked bodies gleamed innocent in the sparkling daylight. She wondered whether she would see them again, knowing that in a few days this entire incident might appear as though it had been a hallucination.
'I think I should go soon,' she said. Her words were slow and distant, already affected by the marijuana that passed from mouth to mouth.
'Not really,' Jackie said.
Tm beginning to feel overwhelmed,' Cynthia told her. 'In less than twenty-four hours I've done things I haven't even imagined doing during the previous twenty-four years. And all of this after a traumatic day with Aaron.'
'Still Aaron?' Clive said.
'I've been with him for three years,' Cynthia replied. 'And by tonight the whole thing may be over, but I owe it to myself, if not to him, to find out where we stand with each other.'
'You only have to consider yourself,' Clive said.
'I can't treat people I'm close to like used toilet paper, to be thrown away when I'm finished with them.'
'Nice try, Cynthia, but you going back has less lofty reasons,' Clive said. 'How many times have there been crises in the past? Quite a few, I imagine. And each time the reconciliation has followed the same pattern, hasn't it? Distance, anger, violence, tears, sex, regret, and recapitulation, ad infinitum. Isn't that so?' He didn't wait for a response. 'That's all so tedious; why repeat it now? Why not make a clean break altogether. Tell no one where you are, not Aaron, not your employers, not your family. Take a new name. Wear totally different clothes. Cut your hair. Change yourself.'
She smiled and shook her head. 'I wish it were that easy.'
'No one is preventing you except yourself,' he said.
'Don't you think I know that?' she snapped. 'The only one oppressing me is me. But I have to find my own way.'
'Excuse me,' said Jackie, T^ut I think Clive is right about one thing. If you see Aaron again, it's almost certain you'll be drawn back into that pattern.'
'And if I stay here I'll be drawn into this pattern. I become a victim of circumstance in any case.' She closed her eyes tightly and then opened them again. 'You must understand. I couldn't relax here until I confronted what's back there.'