If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. His hand became a little more daring, the fingers straying over her collarbone and lightly tracing the cleft of her cleavage. He said, “I expected nothing less of you.”
Liam said, “Hey, you’re stealing my girl.”
Emily realized that he was trying to protect her from Javier, in case she was being pressured into something she didn’t want. At the same time, she realized that she didn’t want to let go of Liam. Well, it was a party, after all, and if things went the way she planned, she wasn’t likely to be in another situation quite like this.
She looked from one to the other: the handsome, solid blond leaning toward her protectively; the dark and sexy man who stood in front of her, his hand moving suggestively over her breasts now. She felt a warmth growing where her body pressed against Liam’s, her nipples grew hard in response to Javier’s touch, and a heat spread from her breasts. The glow spread on into her belly, the warmth from each of them, and it met between her legs, blossomed, and she felt herself grow wet, hot. She looked down and said quietly, “Don’t you want to share?”
“Share?” Liam asked, confused for just a second. He didn’t have long before Emily made her meaning clear. She took their hands, one in each of hers, and knelt down on the rug, pulling them with her. Both the men knelt down, and she saw them glance at each other. A smile came to Javier’s face, infectious, it seemed, because the same hungry smile came to Liam’s face a second later.
“Of course we’ll share, my dear,” Javier said, and reached down to lift her dress up and off, over her head. He dropped it to the floor beside them, and then leaned in to kiss her. His arm around the small of her back, he laid her down gently on the rug. His tongue darted into her mouth, found hers, and Emily kissed him back enthusiastically.
She felt a tugging at her hips and she lifted them up off the ground so that Liam could remove her underpants, as Javier’s lips moved down her neck, then lower, reaching her breasts. He took a nipple between his lips, sucked her softly, then harder, his tongue circling the sensitive spot. A second later, Emily felt a second set of lips on her other breast, as Liam took her other nipple into his mouth, flicked it with his tongue.
Electric jolts shot down from her nipples to her pussy, connecting them, as a first moan escaped her. A hand pressed down against her mons, a steady, gentle pressure, and then there was a fi nger exploring, parting her now slick pussy lips—whose hand, whose finger, she couldn’t say. That idea, that she didn’t even know who was touching her so intimately, was itself exciting, and she parted her legs to let him in.
As if he had read her mind, Javier said, “Let me make this a little more special for you.” He took off his shirt, and with a loud rip he tore a sleeve from it. Emily watched his pectoral muscles grow pronounced with the effort, mystified by why he would do such a thing. With a chuckle he reached down and covered her eyes with the cloth, tying it into a blindfold.
“Oh,” Emily said, surprised, and then she said, “Oh,” again louder, and then “Oh!” Liam had pressed his mouth to her cunt and had found her clit. His tongue moved over it slowly, up and down, and then rapidly as she squirmed and rocked to his attentions.
Standing up now, Javier removed his pants, tossed them aside, and knelt over her head. Even through the blindfold, she could see the bulk of him, a shadow, and she opened her mouth, knowing what he wanted. She wanted it, too, the salty taste of it, the feel of her mouth being filled by thick, hard dick. He pushed himself forward into her mouth, and she began to move her tongue back and forth along the underside, stroking the sensitive spot right below the head. Her hands moved to the firm, muscular cheeks of his ass, bringing him deeper into her mouth, her head bobbing back and forth in a slow, sensual rhythm.
It took her a moment to realize it was the same rhythm she felt between her legs as Liam continued to tongue her, two of his fingers moving in and out of her at the same time.
And suddenly, they were gone. At the same time, Javier pulled himself out of her mouth. Emily let out an involuntary cry of disappointment—she wanted more. “Don’t worry,” said Liam. “We’re not done with you.”
He reached down, lifted her up, and she felt all four of the men’s hands on her, stroking her, caressing her breasts and ass, as they guided her back to her knees and then down on all fours.
“Switch?” Javier asked.
“What?” she said.
“Not you,” he replied, and it dawned on her—they were changing positions, trading ends.
She spread her knees farther apart, pushed her ass up to welcome him in, and lifted her head up for Liam’s dick. Liam knelt in front of her, and as he pressed it against her lips, she remembered why they called him Pony. Javier’s dick was large but still normal; she had thought it filled her mouth, but she realized now that it hadn’t. She opened her mouth wider to take Liam.
Behind her, Javier put his hands on her hips, pressed his dick against her pussy, so wet now that there was no resistance at all. It slipped right in. She pressed back against him to draw him in deeper, then leaned a little forward to move her lips farther down the mass of Liam’s dick. Back and forth, again and again. The men stayed stable where they were, and let her rock back and forth between them. As she felt the first deep tingling that told her an orgasm was beginning to build up within her, she moaned in her throat, the sound blocked by the dick in her mouth, exciting Liam further with the vibrating hum of it.
She rocked faster and faster, filled from both ends but still wanting more, and it felt like she was fucking one man, a perfectly made creature equipped to fill her however she wanted him to, with one dick or two or three. She moaned again, or thought she did, but it hadn’t been her; it was Liam kneeling in front of her, moans and grunts escaping from his lips, and behind her Javier joined in the deep-throated bass chorus of male sounds, animal sounds. Javier took over now, grabbing her and pumping in and out of her, and as he thrust forward into her, it pushed her forward to take in Liam’s dick, and then back again.
She felt the two dicks inside her, and she imagined that she was the link between them, that through her, the two men were fucking each other: She translated Javier’s thrusting dick into her sucking mouth. As she thought about this, pictured their two dicks coming together, felt them in her but saw that they were thrusting against each other, imagined that over her back above her, they were looking deep into each other’s eyes, her orgasm began to gather, to build, the delicious tension becoming unbearable. She moved faster and faster, both the men moved faster and faster, and when she felt them come, the thick come filling her mouth and her pussy, she exploded, the orgasm so strong that behind her blindfold she saw stars.
There was a minute of confused tumbling, the two men collapsing around and over her in a way she couldn’t picture; arms hugging her and lips kissing the nape of her neck. Then she pulled the blindfold off and found herself staring into Liam’s eyes. Then, behind him, she saw Javier sitting up, looking dazed and pleased. He said, “Thank you, my love, but next time I want you to myself.” She let herself relax onto the rug and what she realized now was Liam’s upper arm, cradling her head. She said, with a smile that probably mirrored Javier’s, “Oh, but my retirement begins now. . . .”
Javier shook his head disapprovingly and began to pull his clothes back on with the neat, precise movements of a cat. “Nothing so terrible could happen,” he said. “It would be a loss to international culture.”
Liam had begun to laugh, and Emily smiled cheerfully at him, then blew a kiss at Javier as he rose to his feet and turned to go. He blew her a kiss back and then instantly fell into the orbit of a passing blonde. As he went off, he was saying, “My darling, the very one I came here to fuck . . .”
Emily made a face, and Liam laughed again. He said, “I don’t know about international culture. But that was pretty fantastic.”
“Thanks,” Emily said, feeling a little bit uncomfortable now that the blindfold was off, now that she could see the big, populous room in which their threesome had taken place. “It was . . . pretty fantastic for me, too.”
Liam looked into her eyes with a slight reserve. “I wouldn’t expect it from you, though. I mean, is something going on?”
Emily considered confiding in him, but she already felt too exposed to want to open herself further. She shook her head. “Just a last hurrah, I guess. The party . . . stuff going on.”
“Okay. Stuff,” he said. Then he kissed her on the tip of her nose and said, “Well, I guess stuff was working in my favor today.”
“It’s not your thing, either,” she said, a little defensively. “Is it?”
“Oh, well, I don’t mind telling you I’m having a crazy couple of weeks,” he said. “Stuff galore.”
“What kind of stuff?” When he looked at her narrowly, she added, “Well, you don’t have to tell me. I know—”
“No, it’s okay,” he said, and his face settled into a dreamy expression. “Love stuff. Falling-in-love-with-someone-who’s-a-little-troubled stuff. Trying to solve all their problems when all you want to do is make them stay with you—that stuff. Wonderful, and enough to drive you crazy.”
At this, Emily couldn’t help sighing. “Don’t I know it.” When she met his eye again, she was surprised to see him smiling at her as if he knew more than she realized.
“Well, I better get going,” he said. “I got to be on set in an hour.” As he helped her up and handed her her dress, though, his face continued to wear its bemused, knowing expression. And when he kissed her good-bye, he said, “Listen. Your stuff—a little bird told me it’s going to be all right.”
“What?” she said. “What do you mean? Nobody knows about—”
He put his finger to his lips and winked.
Then he was walking off briskly, leaving Emily standing naked, with her dress in one hand and her panties on the floor at her feet. Across the room, she caught her image in a full-length mirror and at first mistook herself for just another of the debauchees having a wild time at the party. By the time she realized it was her, she had had time to be moved by the girl’s expression of fragile, hopeful love.
It’s going to be all right,
she thought.
A little bird told me.
She shook her head, turned away from her reflection, and headed upstairs to wash off her last hurrah. In an hour, she, too, had to be on set.
EIGHTEEN
T
he interview was set in the Pope’s Chamber, a spacious corner room with a view of the cherry orchard on two sides, furnished with gigantic pieces of furniture that were all Gothic in appearance though they dated variously from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A huge mirror had a heavy mahogany frame carved with gargoyles. The armchairs were the size of thrones. There was a dark and humorless grandeur about the room that made it seem like the setting of a ghost story, even with the morning sunlight streaming in the windows and with the camera equipment set up in the middle of it, amid a mess of cables. It was called the Pope’s Chamber because, according to the brochure produced by the toothpick mogul’s grandson during the castle’s brief period as a museum, a seventeenth-century pope had stayed there once. The story was a little improbable, however, since the room was on the fifth floor, and in the seventeenth century the castle had only had four stories.
Valerie was sitting in a gold plush chair that dwarfed her; the back of it was eight feet tall. It was counterintuitive to sit on such a gloomy object naked, and it contributed to her rising sense of panic. Although she had spent half her career posing naked, speaking naked, chatting to cameramen naked, she now felt horribly self-conscious and exposed. After this interview, she would be fucking someone on camera. She couldn’t help thinking that everyone was staring and snickering at her, the terrified “virgin.” Probably everyone knew already that she wasn’t really a virgin. Or else the man who was fucking her would notice and expose her lies. He would thrust into her and immediately say, “Hey! There’s no hymen here!” Then stalk out in disgust, leaving her humiliated, facing the cameras alone.
Of course, the idea was ridiculous. No one would do that. But Valerie couldn’t help thinking that it was fated to happen, it was certain to happen. It would happen because she deserved it.
The past two weeks had transformed her so much that she sometimes felt as if she would go crazy from it. It was like being turned inside out. Some nights she’d been up until dawn, with scenes from the past ten years haunting her, all the tantrums she’d thrown, the threats she’d made, the sheer blindness of her behavior. The worst of it was that when she had to go into the studio to film another show, and was confronted by the stresses of dealing with last-minute production problems, empty time, and people’s mistakes, she threw a tantrum again. But this time she knew how awful she was being even as she did it. Still, she wasn’t able to stop. After the show, she made herself go up to Nan, the producer she’d insulted, and apologize. At first, the woman had been cautious. But when Valerie impressed upon her that she was genuinely sorry, Nan smiled and said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, Val. We all get stressed. It’s sweet of you to think it matters.” There was something in her manner that was like a mother being moved by a child’s first attempt at adult manners. The experience left Valerie in the torment of shame.
For the first time, also, being naked in public was difficult for her. She kept thinking of Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden. They had realized they were naked for the first time. Well, she had, too, but it wasn’t physical nakedness—it was the nakedness of being hated and pitied by everyone around her without knowing it was happening. At times, the craving to go back to pretending was so strong that she wondered if anyone could really repent of bad behavior—it seemed to be beyond her strength. But more than anything, she was afraid of going back to her former blindness.