“No,” she said. “You aren’t going to get off that easily.”
She moved again, crawling up his belly so that her breasts grazed his cock in passing, and he felt the whole delicious length of her settling against his chest. When he opened his eyes, her face was there, now suffused with sensual passion; her lips seemed fuller and redder, her eyes alight with desire. She said, “You have to fuck me now.”
“Make me.”
With a movement of her hips, she found the tip of his cock and he gasped; she had taken off the panties without his knowing it, and his cock was now poised, pressing against her wetness, the lips of her pussy parted to receive him. She held the pose, letting him feel it, teasing him. He caught his breath, waiting for her, his cock throbbing, aching to thrust into her. But she still didn’t move, looking down at him with an expression of languid yearning. At last she said, softly, “Fuck me.”
At that, he drove into her, his cock feeling rock hard and huge. Her cunt was so wet and tight, it seemed to sing with the friction, and he seized her hips, holding her in position above him as he fucked her. She was crying out with each thrust, her head tipped back, her body arched to receive him. It felt at once necessary and perfect—and too much to bear. Her hips were turning in a slight, unconscious circle now, so that his thrusts moved into an ever-changing realm of sensation. When he let go of her hips to take her breasts in his hands, she immediately began to ride his cock, moving up and down on top of him with a desperate need that echoed his own. He was squeezing her breasts and pinching the nipples between his fingers, drawing a series of harsh, high cries from her until she suddenly tensed and a longer, sweeter sound came as her pussy began to spasm. That was too much for him. He grabbed her hips again and drove her down onto him hard, his hips rising simultaneously to send his ejaculation deep inside her. For a minute, the whole world disappeared in a white-hot flood of ecstasy. Only slowly did reality begin to seep back; the bed underneath him, the girl in his arms, the faint scent of the roses in the vase beside the bed.
He whispered, “Zaza. Marry me.”
Her body tensed, and for a second he was afraid he’d gone too far. Then she whispered back, “Of course.”
The words sent an even more exquisite pleasure through him. He was lying in the darkness of shut eyes, feeling a little frightened by the intensity of his feelings; it was as if he could melt in them. Then he suddenly laughed.
She pulled back slightly. “What?”
He looked at her, still smiling. He said, “I didn’t really think anything could feel better than fucking you just now. But when you said ‘Of course’—my God.”
“Oh. I know exactly what you mean.”
They smiled at each other, and Jared guessed he must look as dazed and smitten as Zaza did—more smitten, if anything. He reached up to touch her cheek, and she rubbed it against his palm, her eyes half-shutting with bliss while still holding his gaze. He said, “This morning turned out all right after all. That plane trip was miserable.”
At that, a shadow passed over her face. She said, “Oh, the plane trip.”
“Right,” he said, in a jealous tone that was only half joking. “So, who did you share that water bed with?”
She said in a hopeless voice, “Babylona.”
“Babylona?” He frowned, feeling the real world wash back in the most annoying fashion. “What did she want with you?”
“Oh, it’s okay. It’s just that it turns out that . . . I’m her niece.”
Zaza outlined the revelations that Babylona had made on the flight about her parentage, while Jared alternately laughed and shook his head in amazement. At last, he said, “But she’s not going to make you take over the family business or anything cataclysmic like that?”
Zaza bit her lip. “Um.”
“No! You’re messing with me!” Jared burst out laughing in earnest. “I guess my idea of sending you away to school to be educated is out the window, then.”
“Well, you weren’t going to send me
away.
I mean, I wouldn’t have gone away.”
“Okay, not away. Just, to be educated out of your uncouth ways.”
“Oh, well. If you insisted, I don’t know . . .”
“No,” Jared said. “I’m just kidding. I don’t care whether you ever go to school. All I ask out of life is that you never change and you never leave. I mean, we’re talking about you moving into production, right?” As he said it, an awful anxiety twinged in his chest. It was almost like a physical pain. He imagined Zaza in the arms of a series of naked men, all—
“Oh, right,” Zaza said. “I told her, you know, that thing about being too sensitive. And she was pretty dismissive, ’cause I don’t think she’s sensitive at all that way. I mean, she’s one of those people you talked about who are fine with doing porn.”
“In spades.”
“Yeah, but the point is, she was okay about it. She said that it took all kinds to make a world.”
“That’s very open-minded of her,” Jared said wryly. He was feeling a keen relief that was instantly darkened by the idea of Zaza spending her career watching a series of men having sex. That is was the lesser evil didn’t stop it being an evil. She was younger than he was; wouldn’t she someday want someone else? But then he remembered that he was supposed to fuck someone else the following day, and said, “Oh, well. It could be worse.”
She hit him lightly on the shoulder. “Come on. It’s great. You’re supposed to be happy for me.”
He said, a little vengefully, “Oh, I’m just wondering who Babylona wants me to have sex with tomorrow.”
“Ha!” said Zaza. “Now I’m going to have a jealous rage and make you quit your job!”
“I already quit my job.”
“So why are you even doing it, then? You see? You must want to do it. Jealous rage is definitely coming on.”
“It’s already in the schedule,” he said wearily. “I have a contract.”
“Lame excuse!”
At that moment, his cell phone rang. Since it was in his pants pocket, now shoved halfway down his leg, he had to push past Zaza to get it, while she shouted happily, “Avoiding the issue! No way! You’re going to answer that
now
?!”
At last he’d fished it out, restraining the struggling Zaza with one arm while he pressed the button and put it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Jared,” came Babylona’s voice. “Are you in your honeymoon suite?”
“Oh, um, yeah,” he said, shaking his head at Zaza, who was giggling and trying to bite him. “Thanks—it’s . . . awesome.”
“Well,” Babylona said with a satisfied tone, “I did want that to be a disinterested gift. But it so happens I need a favor from you.”
Jared’s heart sank. At his look of alarm, Zaza stilled and frowned, trying to catch his eye, “So what’s the favor?” he said.
“I’ve figured out who I need you to fuck.”
SEVENTEEN
E
mily took a shower and spent almost an hour putting on makeup and trying on different outfits before venturing out of her room. The room itself was comfortable but unremarkable—white walls, basic bed, handsome modern desk. Only when she looked out the window at the weathered stone of the medieval town below was she reminded that she was thousands of miles away from New York City—and Ralph.
Her feeling of helplessness about the Ralph situation had eased into an almost luxurious misery. It reminded her of being a teenager lost in one of the many unrequited loves of youth—the football captain, the college guy who kissed her at a party, the almost-successful local singer-songwriter who met her eye in the crowd. It was a consoling, peaceful sorrow. She couldn’t tell whether the feeling meant that deep down she trusted Ralph to come back, or that she’d given him up for good. Either one was better than the anger she had begun to feel toward him for deserting her.
And, as had happened to her before in moments of extreme stress, she felt drawn toward the decadent fellowship of her colleagues. Friselle Belesci’s (or Babylona’s) philosophy of life was oddly comforting to Emily at times like these. All she had to do was let go of her habits a little and walk downstairs, and she would be among the happiest people imaginable, having the most fun possible in the nicest way. Usually it just didn’t appeal. She preferred the quiet of her own room. Today, though, she was walking downstairs—in a lacy black minidress that set off her milky skin and emphasized her shapely legs. And as she heard the sound of revelry and laughter coming up the stairs, she relaxed as if she was slipping into a warm bath.
The noise was coming from the ballroom—a colossal room set off by white marble pilasters, with a painted ceiling that showed nude cherubs and clothed angels frolicking in a blue sky. The wooden floor had been strewn with the thick sheepskin rugs that the XTV old hands called fuck rugs. They were just large enough and soft enough to take the place of a bed in case of need. Still, most of the people who had felt that need were arranged in various orientations on a gigantic dining table on one side of the room. Looking at the mass of nude and skimpily clad flesh there—some six or seven people pleasuring one another around a massive punch bowl—Emily could immediately see what had happened. The little orgy had begun as the line for punch. One hand, held clear of the melee, still held a glass of punch, which was sloshing from side to side as its bearer was fucked heartily by a gorgeous man Emily suddenly recognized as the rock star from her interview a few weeks earlier, Greil Gage. The girl he was fucking had her head turned to one side to suck the dick of an equally handsome blond man wearing only a baseball cap, whose head was resting between the legs of the black-haired star of
The Mountain Lion,
Lila Parker, who was . . . and here Emily’s ability to sort out limbs into personalities gave out. Emily had never joined one of these groupings—what Jared called a spider’s nest for the seething complication of legs that first struck one’s eye. But seeing it gave her a thrill of preemptive nostalgia for the world she was leaving, where intimacy was just that easy and ecstasy was available for the price of saying yes. And she felt a shocking heat in her body, a longing to strip her clothes away and let herself fall into a world of flesh and kisses and nothing but sex.
“Admiring our centerpiece?” said a cool, low voice behind her.
She turned around and laughed up into the face of Liam “Pony” Peterson. She had gotten to know him—and fuck him—when she once appeared on an episode of
The Mountain Lion
as a girl disguising herself as a cowboy in order to go on a cattle drive. Of course, the sheriff had figured out her disguise and taken her aside in his office to try to talk her out of it. The sex scene occurred toward the end of the episode, after various shoot-outs and near rapes and rescues. Emily couldn’t exactly remember how the script writers managed to get Liam and her into a situation where fucking on horseback made sense. But she clearly remembered fucking on horseback—her leaning forward, holding on to the mane of the remarkably patient horse, while Liam let his dick find its way into her. Then the motion of the horse, walking, did most of the work, an experience that was strange, sensual, and alarming. Who knew a horse could be so tall? Even while Liam was fucking her, she couldn’t stop watching the ground and imagining what would happen if the horse bucked.
“Hey, Liam,” she said now, getting on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.
He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently, saying, “I heard you were getting out.”
“You make it sound like it’s prison.”
“Oh, well, I was thinking more of the army, you know.”
“Because of all the discipline,” Emily said, looking from the spider’s nest to the tipsy, semiclad couples fondling each other here and there throughout the room. As she said it, a naked girl ran past with a pair of boxer shorts in her hand, pursued by a naked man who was shouting, “It was a loan! Not a gift!”
Liam and Emily laughed. He said, “Well, maybe not the army. I was just working up to saying I was going to miss you, anyway.”
“Oh . . . well, thanks.”
She slung an arm around his waist and he pulled her against him. For a minute they stood there companionably, watching the spider’s nest move through various configurations. One girl climbed out, looking tousled and red in the face, and stood catching her breath while a stray hand from the table continued to caress her buttocks. Emily began to focus on one couple who were quietly, intently fucking in the midst of the fray, without bothering with all of the people around them. It was vanilla sex, missionary position, slow but emphatic. The man was kissing the girl deeply, passionately, while he fucked her. They could have been alone in their bed at home rather than being jostled by a half dozen other strenuously sex-engaged people. Watching it was making Emily both wistful and increasingly aroused. The pressure of Liam’s strong body against her, his broad back under her arm, were triggering a familiar sweet alertness in between her legs.
At that moment, Javier appeared in the doorway, wearing black suit pants, a white shirt that was half-unbuttoned, and a loosened tie that hung askew. Spotting Emily, he smiled and headed toward her with a purposeful stride. Emily only had time to say “Uh-oh,” before he was in front of her.
Immediately, he put his hand to her cheek and stroked it familiarly, saying, “What’s this I hear, gorgeous? You’re leaving us?” His dark eyes were soulfully wounded as his hand trailed down her throat and came to rest at her neckline, fingering the lacy cloth there. “Trail of broken hearts, needless to say.”
Emily and Liam exchanged glances. Emily was about to take Javier’s hand in hers and extract it from her dress; she was about to dismiss him with a pleasantry and go on with her evening, but something stopped her. She found herself meeting his dark gaze, noticing his ridiculous good looks and his leonine poise. When he added, “You know, you owe me a fuck. You really are bad for wanting to sneak off without paying,” she should have pointed out that she owed him nothing. But she said, “Well, what if I pay?”