“Where’s the bedroom?” she asked after he had taken her cloak, fixed her a drink, and showed her the view.
“In a hurry?” he teased, running his fingers through her hair.
She leaned her head back against his hand and began to purr. His hand slid down, between her shoulder blades, down her spine, over her ass, and probed the crack between her buttocks gently. She tensed, relaxed, and then tensed again. It had been such a long time since she felt a man begin to make love to her. After the rigors of the Parlor and the pleasantries of the scenes with the women, it was an overwhelming luxury to sink into the old-fashioned associations connected with simple sex. He slid behind her, his hand now slipping around her front and going up to cup and fondle her breasts, his other hand stroking her thighs and cupping the hairy protrusion of bone and moist mucous membrane which constituted the overall gestalt of cunt.
She leaned back and rested against the front of his body, his already rising cock nestling into the soft ridge between her ass cheeks. She let her lips part and began to breathe through her mouth, one of the first signs of erotic excitation. Perhaps the central reason why those who have taken and who teach what is popularly considered a “spiritual” path have taken such a hard line on sex, is that while fucking, people fly into shallow and chaotic breathing, a state of affairs totally contrary to the teaching that one should breathe through one’s nose, calmly, and into the belly, with long regular rhythmic breaths.
She spun around and gazed fiercely into his eyes.
“If I let go, if I give myself to you, you will have my soul. You know that, don’t you?”
“The price you pay for saving your life. I believe it’s a fairly classic bargain.”
“Do I have to sign the contract in blood?” she quipped.
“Yes,” he replied simply.
She took his answer as a return jibe and dismissed it. She put her arms behind his head, her elbows resting on his shoulders. She pressed the front of her body against his. Her face was only a few inches away from his.
“Take me,” she said.
He looked at her for a few seconds the way a man might examine the gun he was about to use to blow his brains out, and then closed his eyes and covered her mouth with his. The instant their lips met, they ignited, fused, and burned with an irresistible flame. Heat began to radiate from them and fill the room. The mirrors strained to be looked into and the rug blushed. His hands roamed up and down the back of her freely.
“Oh, I adore the way you touch me freely,” she moaned.
His kiss went on a long time, long after she had gone slack and simply let him have his feel of her mouth. She had a fleeting recollection of Henry who had wanted this from her and had her tied in order to use her lips at will. It occurred to her that Robert also had her tied, if not with ropes then with the power of life and death he held over her.
“Maybe the only way a man can really feel comfortable with a woman is if he feels he has her under his complete domination,” she thought and began remembering all the men she had been with to check out the startling hypothesis. There were times when a man wanted a woman to be all activity, to moan and writhe and go mad with the sensations she was feeling, to let it all hang out. And times when he wanted them both to be lost in the same flow of movement. To lose distinction between self and other in the joyous melting of the give-and-take. But there were also those times when a man definitely wanted the woman just to lie there and be a source stimulus for his desire and otherwise to keep out of the way, not to move, speak, or even look.
“I can understand that,” she said. “There are times when I want the same from men.” It suddenly occurred to her that there was no difference between men and women in relation to what they wanted. The only argument was that they went to war over the available resources. In the same way that people are the same all the world over, everyone wanting happiness and well-being, all men and women want gratification in bed. And to get it, they are ready to go to terrific extremes, with men resorting to physical force and women calling on all the wiles of their emotional storehouses.
“Now, Constance,” Robert whispered. “Now that you are totally open, your body relaxed, your senses reeling, your mind romping in the wilds of its own game preserve, now you must look at me and see that I see you, and accept that seeing, acknowledge it, feel it penetrate to your center. And you must suddenly and fiercely forge your entire identity on that instant in which our truths touch, and pledge that no other voice within you shall ever take precedence before the one now speaking . . . the combination of our consciousnesses as embodied in the sound of my voice. And you must say, ‘Yes,’ and gasp and utter a little cry of ultimate discovery and fling your mouth onto mine and lose yourself in my arms and rub against me and want to turn your cunt inside out all over my tongue and cock and fingers. Then you must whisper endearments, and say things like, ‘My darling,’ or ‘Precious one,’ and cling to me as though I were a mighty oak in a hurricane, your only protection against being swept away by the storm. And yet know that within me there are realms of terror and chaos which make actual storms appear the stuff of fairy tales.”
“Robert, I love you,” she said.
He picked her up in his arms and strode with her across the length of the room to the bookcase at the far end. Once there, he pressed a tiny lever on the wall with his foot and the bookcase slid to one side, revealing a door that opened into a dark room.
“Now we’re ready for the bedroom,” he said.
As they moved into the space, Constance thought to herself, “I did it. I fooled him. But in doing it, I had to fool myself. I believed what I was saying, even if only for those few seconds. And now I must travel the thin edge of this new ambiguity.”
Robert put her down and she stood there for a few seconds, blinking. There were peculiar sounds in the space, muted whimperings. Abruptly, she was terrified. And at the instant of recognizing the feeling, the light went on.
“Oh my God,” Constance gasped.
It was a large, cavernous chamber. The walls were made of stone, cut right into the cliff against which the building was built. The space was like a museum of medieval horrors. All the implements of torture were there: the rack, the pincers, the thumbscrews, the open fireplace with a roasting spit over it, whips, a cauldron for boiling oil, and numberless other fiendish results of heated imaginations. Along one wall hung three oversized bird cages. In each one crouched a naked woman. The women were dirty, scratched, and the bottoms of their cages hadn’t been cleaned for some time, so that they sat in their own excrement and urine. Robert went over and banged on the cages with a stick, rousing them from their stupors.
“Feeding time!” he sang out. He turned to Constance. “You’ll excuse me a second, won’t you? I’ve been very neglectful of my pets. Have a seat. Get comfortable. There, there’s a chair you can use.”
Constance backed away until she had come to the leather chair and then sank into it with all the relief of a child finding its mother after being lost for half an hour. She watched with eyes that were glued open as Robert took a hose and washed out the cages, playing the water over the women who made pitiful efforts to scrub themselves while the water washed over them. Then, when he had finished, he filled three bowls with what looked like a kind of gruel and slipped them into slots at the bottoms of the cages. The women, to her dismay, buried their faces in the slop and sucked it up voraciously. She realized they must have been famished. When they finished, they slid the bowls back outside.
“Can’t you at least give them spoons?” Constance asked.
“I like to see them eat like dogs,” he told her. “When I take them out and put them in harness it retains the consistency of realism.”
She looked at him with an appeal in her eyes.
“They are here,” he said, forestalling the words that went with her look, “because they undertook to accept my offer. I took each of them on as a mistress at one time or another, and they all disappointed me. I told them the rules, the stakes, and the penalties, and they agreed to gamble. For my part, I have kept my promise. They are all exempt from the Snuff.”
“It makes one wonder whether that isn’t preferable,” she said, her aplomb beginning to return.
“Good,” he said, “I’m beginning to see some color in your cheeks again. And yes, it does make one wonder. But there it is, my dear. You can go back to the ranks, do your stint several times each week, live as luxuriously as you want, and wait that day which, after all, must come to everyone. Or you can try to make it to a staff level by pleasing me, in which case, after a while, you will get your own room and duties. But if you fail me, then I will put you in one of those cages, and treat you the way people treat their pet birds. Although I must tell you that I am usually more conscientious about keeping the cages clean and the ladies fed.”
“One thing I must say about you, Robert. You certainly know how to present a lady with a challenge.”
“Otherwise, what’s the fun of living? Yes?” He said the last word less as a question than as an invitation for her to join him in the complicity of his deeds and viewpoint.
“Compassion may indeed be the opiate of the congenitally weak,” she thought. “Maybe those who are ruthless enough to take what they want find exhilaration from total disregard of what pain they cause others. Maybe cruelty is a valid way of getting high.”
Yet, even as she formulated the thoughts, she heard another voice, that of an old teacher, telling her that a person was free to choose whatever way of life he or she wanted. Existentialism was accurate thus far. But that there was also a real truth of what a human being was, and that to use one’s free choice to become other than that simply marked the person as a cretin, not worthy of discussion or consideration by any mature man or woman.
And even as that voice trailed off, yet a third arose to note that the three women were going to stay in their cages no matter what she did. It was foolish to think of liberating them. They had chosen their own doom. So her choice had to be based on no other consideration than whether she could be successful in meeting Robert’s criteria.
“I’ll try,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Ah!” he replied. “Your first task in pleasing me is finding out what pleases me. I am going to put you in the role of the male who is attracted to a woman. How rare is the woman who will tell him how and where she likes to be stroked, or who will make his task of exploration easier, or who will instruct him in the intricacies of her timing? No, the man must lavish the totality of his entire range of performance upon her, so that she, like a bored countess at a fete, may nibble at her discretion . . . a bite of cheese, a spoon of caviar, a sip of champagne, and a peeled pear, perhaps. And when it is over, give him no indication other than a rolling of the eyes to indicate that his spilling his seed for her did or did not satisfy her for the nonce.”
As he finished speaking, he lay down on a wide mattress covered with a satin sheet, his ankles crossed, his hands behind his head.
“Do me!” he said, smiling, and added, “I’m predisposed to give you a good grade because I truly am fond of you. But if you prove useless, then I’ll have no choice but to hang you up.”
“What mark do I have to make?”
“Anything below a B+ fails,” he said.
“Can it really be,” she wondered, “that I am standing in a cave with a strange man, with three naked women locked in cages hanging from the ceiling, prepared to find some way to titillate his totally jaded faculties in order to win myself a position as a slave overseer, or to find myself caged for life in this sunless room?” She took a deep breath and looked around. “Yes, indeed, it not only can be, but is,” she concluded.
As for Robert, she knew that there was only one approach even worth trying, and that was one of absolute insouciance. She had to attain the state of one hypnotized and convinced that the circumstances were other than they were. Memories of method acting classes came to mind.
The worst thing to do would be to try to rouse him by some form of erotic melodrama. She had fleeting images of tying him, flogging him, fucking him with a dildo, sucking his cock for three hours, pouring an excess of sensation on him. Instead, she simply shrugged and slipped out of her negligee. She stood before him, naked and easy. She used no wiles, no artifacts, no little bits of theatre. Rather, she gathered within herself the totality of her courage, her awareness, her vulnerability, and then dressed herself in those realities. She stood before him, in short, in the blazing thusness of her womanhood, and hurled the full impact of that down upon him.
She watched his cock get hard inside his trunks. She watched desire-smoke curl in his eyes. She watched the facade of disinterest crack and crumble.
Then, when she had shown him the essence, the whole; when she forced him to accept the fact that she saw him with the same intensity with which he saw her, that she was his equal . . . only THEN did she let him have the specific-part pleasures.
Then she slipped her hands under her breasts and offered the nipples to him. She slid her fingers down between her thighs and opened her cunt lips for him to look at. She turned around so he could admire her ass and imagine what his cock would look and feel like slipping in and out of her asshole. She ran her tongue over her lips and tripped him out with promises of oral paradise.
It was, up to that point, a performance which had the advantage of distance. She was not committed in the sense that any sign of his losing interest could spur her into transforming what she was doing into foreplay. But now she had to take the final step. She walked forward, she sat down on the bed, she lay down on her back next to him, she took a deep breath, relaxed into the soft mattress, and then closed her eyes.
She waited what seemed an eternity before she felt his breath on her throat, and heard his voice, low and vibrant, say, “I been waiting for a woman like you for a long time.”
She opened her eyes. Robert licked her throat, kissed her ear, and brought his face over hers. She looked directly into his gaze.