He fucked Stephanie’s face for a while as Allison tongued him. He could have come on them then – Stephanie had never looked more fetching – but he wanted to run the gamut today. He put collars and leashes on them and led them around the room on all fours, lashing their rumps with a riding crop. He leaned them both over the couch, lubed their asses generously, and pounded first one, then the other. He lay down and had Stephanie straddle his cock while Allison sat on his face, and they kissed and fondled one another while he tongued and fucked them. He had Stephanie put on the new black strap-on, and they double-penetrated Allison, who whimpered as Max thrust into her ass, begging him to do it harder, harder. Then he had Allison put on the old strap-on harness, and let his wish girls fuck him – he went down on all fours, Allison sliding a smaller dildo in and out of his lubed ass, Stephanie shoving her big black dildo in and out of his mouth. After that he spanked them, whipped them, fondled them, caressed them and fucked them every way he could think of. By day’s end he was exhausted, sweat-soaked, and trembling from the exertion. His cock felt drained dry from the day’s several orgasms. The wish girls, of course, seemed as calm and well rested as always.
“I’m letting you go,” he said.
Allison and Stephanie looked at him, then looked at each other. They frowned, in unison. He’d never seen them frown before, except when they were playing Harsh Mistresses, and even that was a different, more theatrical expression.
“I appreciate all you’ve done for me,” he said. This was harder than he’d expected. “You’ve made my life wonderful. But . . . I don’t think this is good for me any more. I’ve met someone . . . well . . . It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re setting us free?” Stephanie asked.
Had Max ever taught her to say that, as part of some bondage role-play scenario, maybe? He didn’t think so. “Yes. You can go.”
“Turn your back while we get dressed,” Allison said.
Max knew he’d never taught her to say that. He’d seen her in every conceivable state of disarray – even now, his come was drying on her breasts. But modesty, he suddenly understood, was a privilege of the free. He turned his back.
“OK,” Allison said a moment later. He turned to find them dressed in jeans and grey sweatshirts, not outfits he’d ever have chosen for them, clothes they’d conjured for themselves. They stepped towards him in unison, each kissing one of his cheeks. “Bye, Max,” Allison said.
“We didn’t think you’d ever get to this point,” Stephanie said. She patted his cheek.
The wish girls left. They didn’t disappear; they just went out the front door. Maybe they’d get to be real people now, and make choices of their own. He didn’t know.
Max spent the rest of the evening filling heavy black garbage bags with sex toys, bondage gear and lingerie, then tossed them all into the big dumpster behind the apartment complex. The garbage men were sure to get a kick out of that. Maybe he and Kira would start playing with toys eventually, but he’d buy new ones for that. Even Max’s vestigial sense of gentlemanly conduct told him that was the appropriate thing to do.
Two days later, Max sat on his couch, and Kira knelt on a pillow between his feet, sucking his cock. He looked down at her closed eyes, the expression of tender concentration on her face, and he was overwhelmed with happiness. She was doing this because she wanted to, because she liked him, because she wanted to make him feel good. And because she knew he’d return the favour.
Kira’s teeth brushed against Max’s cock. It hurt, a little. He’d never been happier.
The Spark
Cecilia Tan
Glory picked a bad moment to check out on us. We were booked on Autarie- – one of those self-contained orbital casino resorts with nowhere to go but around and no easy way on or off – for six simulcasts. Lots of money, and every “night” a different time zone with no travelling or loading out for us. Sweet deal. Or it would have been if not for Glory’s sudden departure the night after the first show.
I suppose it was a trick of fate that I was the one who found her and not one of the others. There she was, stretched out on the coffee table in her suite as if it were a mortuary slab, her fingers cold and stiff around the neck of her trademark vintage Walker original. Her skin was all pastel shades of violet and blue, except where her black lipstick and eyeliner were smeared, as if at the end she’d shed a few tears for herself. Most don’t go so gracefully – history is full of those who went on wild rampages, died in flaming vehicles, collapsed of overdose in public places, or choked on their own vomit. But she just lay there, beautiful and dead.
She’d lost the Spark, and the grief I felt seeing her there, alone, cut off from us for ever, was at least partly for myself. I knew someday I might go to a similar fate. And with her gone . . . my day seemed like it might be closer at hand than before. My mind was starting to fill up with details: our unfulfilled six album contract with Warner-Sony, tour cancellation . . . and then some tears came and blurred away all the business thoughts for a moment.
Calla was the next to come in. She’d heard me sob and come to see what was up – she probably thought Glory, in one of her mercurial moods, said something horrible to me, made me cry. But then she saw what lay on the table and she took me by the hands. “Oh, Luna, Luna, I’m so sorry,” she said and it took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. My lover – in name if not in function recently – was dead.
I coughed a little but the tears had dried up already. “Shit, Calla, what are we going to do now?”
She leaned against the sloping, non-rectilinear wall and rested her eyes on her hand. She looked remarkably undebauched given last night’s events. Her blonde hair gelled into a neat twist and her face fresh and make-up free above her resort-issue bathrobe. She was a double-x realgirl, like me, her eyelashes blonde in the artifi cial light. “Did you guys have a fight?”
“Yesterday. Twice. You were there.”
It had started out a bitch session and ended up a screaming fit for Glory. She’d been going on and on about how a gig on Autarie was the ultimate ignominy. I’d tried to point out, as our booking agent had, that doing orbital simulcast was economical and easier on us. “But Autarie!” she’d screamed. “It’s like fucking Vegas!” At the time I’d assumed that “Vegaz”, as she said it in her Saturnál accent, was an ex-lover of hers who’d sucked in bed. Now little pieces of rock and roll history bounced through my moon-raised brain and I recalled an old interview I’d read with Mick Jagger – or was it Sting? – saying he’d never play Las Vegas and the meaning came clear: home of the has-beens. No one had been listening to her but me. Once she would start to go hysterical the others would tune her out. I suppose I only listened because I was the one trying to argue with her. “Oh, fuck,” I murmured. Even if I had caught the reference, though, what good would it have done? I couldn’t have stopped her, could I? She was gone.
Calla went over and knelt in front of the body. “It looks like she just . . . lay down and died.”
“She did.”
“What do you mean?” Calla had been with us a year, a great bass player, but neither Glory nor I had been sure she would stick with us. So she didn’t know about the Spark.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
“Well, we have to get a doctor in here, find out what happened . . .”
I held up my hand. “No, no doctors.”
“But Luna . . .”
“Not yet.” My mind tried to come up to speed, but last night’s party and the shock of seeing her there like that kept me partly paralysed. “Huiper. First call Huiper and figure out what to say about it.”
I put my head against the doorjamb and sighed. It was the end of Glory, the end of the Seekers in all likelihood, possibly the end of all our careers. Replacing a drummer or back-up singer is one thing, replacing the lead singer and founder is another thing entirely. I felt cold and lonely and sick and I sank down there in the doorway and almost wished it could have been me instead of her.
Basil almost tripped over me when she came in waving hard copy of a review of last night’s show. I liked Basil, even if I wasn’t sure if she was a double-x or some form of genderqueer. Those things never mattered to the omnivorous Glory. For me it was good enough that she used a female pronoun. She was about to begin crowing the good bits of it aloud when she caught sight of the spectacle on the table. I couldn’t bear to watch her face crumble into grief. So, I looked at my own whiter-than-white hands, and at Glory’s, still streaked with the indigo and violet of last night’s stage make-up, clamped tight around the neck of the guitar. I supposed that the Walker was mine now, but I couldn’t bring myself to prise it out of her grip.
I heard my own voice. “We can’t have her photographed like this, like some funeral or something.” Oh Glory, couldn’t you have lived up to your name and gone out with a blaze of it?
Calla did not turn around, but said in a weak voice “Was she . . . with anyone last night?”
I looked up at the two of them. Basil was taking it well. If anything she looked a little pissed off, and when she heard Calla’s question she stiffened. Young and spurned. “Not me. She took off during the party and didn’t come back . . .”
Until after we were all unconscious. Poor Basil, the newest of us, she’d only been playing with the Seekers for about six months and Glory had been leading her on for most of it. She cursed under her breath. Glory had liked her youthful fire, her defi ance. Perhaps she saw a little of herself there, or perhaps someone else she knew. She would have been a good vessel for the Spark, too, but Glory had held back passing it on. “Baz, could you get Huiper on a secure channel?”
“I’ll try,” she said, and went into her room to boot up a terminal.
Calla had left the room, too, leaving me alone with my dead lover. Ex-lover in any case now, I supposed. Although neither of us had taken up with someone else – we hadn’t “broken up” – we hadn’t had sex in a long time. A year, maybe two. And the fights recently had been worse, hadn’t they? I’d wanted to believe that Glory’s irritability, irrationality, and general out-of-control bitchiness was just a periodic magnifi cation of her lead-singer prima donna persona, just a phase that we’d work out. But all along she had been suffering. The burning out. The end.
And I hadn’t even felt it. Could I have helped her? Saved her? She’d been so distant from me, I doubted it. When the Spark is lost, there’s no getting it back.
The first one I’d ever seen was just a month after I’d joined the group. Glory’s ex-lover Saffron had split off to form his own band, but he came back once in a while to jam with us. His band wasn’t doing very well. The critics were lambasting them for repeating the formulas of the past, and even I thought his music was kind of dull. He went out with a super cocktail of drugs and stims. Repeating the formulas of the past, as it were. We found him with the injector still in his hand at one of Glory’s penthouse suites on Triton.
That one was easy for me to handle. I didn’t know him that well, I was in love with Glory, and I was so young and new to the Spark that I didn’t really connect Saffron’s fate with mine. Huiper, our publicist, did a pretty good job of spreading the dirt around about the wild rock and roll boy who didn’t know when to stop, and even made him into a kind of small-time martyr among his few but loyal fans. That was Huiper’s job. But what would he say when he heard about Glory?
He would, of course, look for an angle that would generate maximum publicity and make Glory into a posthumous legend. That wouldn’t be hard since she was already a legend when she was alive. We all were. It was all a part of the Spark, the magic. We were stars in the celebrity skies of the whole solar system. But Huiper didn’t know why or how she really died and this time I didn’t have a story to feed him. Mysterious cause of death unknown is what the headlines would have to say. The powers that be took her too soon, they’d lament. Or, maybe she died of a broken heart? Had our love really died? I shuddered at the thought. Huiper wouldn’t implicate me in such a thing, would he? A sordid affair of lost love and betrayal?
The first fight we’d had yesterday was at sound check. The kind of spat that turned the mills of tabloid rumour, and all too typical. One of those fights that started as a bad mood, became a disagreement, then a full-fl edged argument, and finally that hands and skin and bodies roughness that comes all too naturally with those who have been lovers. I had been tuning my guitar while she picked at the catered food backstage. Artifi cial gravity always screwed up her stomach for a couple of days but I didn’t see as how that was any excuse for her to treat us all like shit. So when she brushed past me and bumped my tuner I griped at her loud enough for everyone to hear. I would have, stupidly, made even more of it if Maynard, our stage manager, hadn’t called for everyone to take places for sound check.
Glory was the first one out of the room but the last one to climb on to the riser and sling her guitar over her shoulder. We were only on the second verse of “Tears” when Glory called for a halt. “I need this monitor up, less rhythm guitar.”
I tried to talk into my mic but it was off. I waved at Maynard to up it and everyone heard me say “. . . can’t do that. I won’t be able to hear myself and you’ll get off strum and you know it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She put her hands on her hips, the guitar hanging loose over her middle. Even under the house lights her skin had some hints of the lavender and blue that were her trademark colours. “You’re so loud I can’t hear the backing vox.”
“Glory,” I said, walking closer to her so she could hear my unamplifi ed voice. “That’s what you said at our warm-up gig on Metassus and your solo was completely off . . .”
I saw her jaw clench as she made a little starting/stamping motion. “You deaf wretch!” She took a step towards me, swinging the Walker off her shoulder and brandishing it in one hand like a sceptre. “You wouldn’t know a good solo if it split your skull.” Her voice had gone shrill and Maynard modulated it through the PA to save all our ears. “Which one of us is the lead here?” And then she broke down into hurling epithets at me in Saturnál.