Coldheart Canyon (34 page)

“Pleasure. You call that—” He glanced back at the Pool House, where he’d seen the excesses of so many of these people, recorded for posterity.

“We had no shame then. We have even less now.”

As if to prove Katya’s point there was an eruption of libidinous laughter from somewhere nearby, and Todd followed the sound to see a woman tied up in the trees, naked but for a long string of pearls which ran like converging rivulets between her breasts. Her wrists were bound together, and her arms lifted high above her head, so that she hung, her pale body shaped like a bow, her toes grazing the ground. It was she who was laughing, despite the apparent vulnerability of her situation. There was a man on the ground between her legs, licking the base of her feet, while another, standing behind her and massaging her breasts, bit into the tender flesh of her shoulder and neck. The hands went from her breasts CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 253

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down to her groin, and parted the lips of her pussy, from which came a shimmering arc, raining down onto the man adoring at her feet.

The recipient began to masturbate, obviously moved to fever-pitch by the shower.

Aware of Katya’s gaze, Todd glanced over at her.

“Would you like to fuck her?” she said.

The girl
was
beautiful, with long red hair and that frothy laugh of hers, which sounded so very much more innocent than what she was up to.

“She’s yours if you want her. Ava!”

The girl looked up.

“This is Todd,” Katya said.

“Hello, Todd.”

“Go on,” Katya said. “Don’t worry: I’m not going to get jealous. I’d like to see how you give pleasure to a woman.”

Despite the hint of judgment in this remark, Todd might have taken the opportunity to have the woman if the man at Ava’s feet hadn’t suddenly begun to moan, and raising his hips off the ground ejected a copious load of semen. The sight of this eruption was enough to keep Todd at bay.

“Another time,” he said to Ava, moving away.

She called after him, but he didn’t look back.

“There’s plenty more where she came from,” Katya said, catching up with him. Her hand casually brushed the front of his pants, as though to make the point that she knew he was aroused. “You should go to one of them,” she said.

“Why?”

“Just to see what it’s like . . .”

“Fucking a ghost?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“I don’t know. It’s weird. I’m not sure—”

Her hand went back to his hard-on. “Yes you are. You love the idea.”

Her hand went from his groin to his wrist, which she caught hold of, drawing him away from Ava into a kind of bower lined with honeysuckle CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 254

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and night-blooming jasmine, their mingled perfumes so strong they were practically intoxicating. It was darker here than it had been under the trees where Ava hung, but Todd could see bodies on the ground, in various combinations of coupling. Somebody reached down from a branch overhead, and ran his or her fingers through Todd’s hair; someone else came up behind him and pulled his shirt out from his trousers. Again, he looked for Katya; and again found her close by, smiling.

“Katya?”

A girl’s voice, off to the right, and Todd saw a naked young woman being carried toward Katya on the shoulders of three men, one at her head, the other two supporting her knees, in such a way as to hold her legs wide open. Even in the dim light Todd could see what a gloriously tender sight the girl presented. She had been shaved between her legs, making her look even younger than she was, which was surely less than twenty.

“Lick me, Katya,” she said, her voice dreamy. “Will you please?

Nobody does it to me like you. Lick me deep.”

Katya glanced round at Todd.

“Do you mind?”

“Help yourself,” he replied, as though the girl were a plate set before her.

Katya smiled, her hands going up to the insides of the girl’s thighs, venturing up to the spot where they met but then before they quite reached the place and offered any satisfaction, retreated again. It was a tantalizing game, and it drove the girl crazy with anticipation.

“Oh
please
,” she said. “
Please
, Katya,
please
.”

Todd stepped a little to the side so as to have a better view of what was unfolding here. Katya had very quickly bared her breasts, so that now, as she approached the divide of the girl’s legs, her nipples stroked her partner’s thighs. Her hands were delicately parting the girl’s labia, as though investigating the most exquisite of flowers.

Todd could feel the blood thumping at his groin. Was there no end to Katya’s capacity to surprise him? Whenever he thought he was beginning CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 255

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to get a grasp of the woman, she changed the rules in some subtle fashion and found a new way to astonish him. Was this really the same woman he’d discovered in bed a while ago, looking like a disheveled angel?

Katya glanced back at him one last time—just to be sure that he was indeed watching her—then she applied her mouth to the girl’s flesh.

The recipient of this tonguing let out a long, contented sigh, stretching out on her bed of hands, opening her legs a little wider. Katya proceeded to press deeper into her, advancing with lickings and nibblings, occasionally seeming to murmur against the woman’s sex. The girl was no longer relaxed. She had grabbed fistfuls of the hair of the men who supported her knees, pulling herself up almost into a sitting position one moment then falling back, her body convulsed with little shudders, her tiny nipples hard, her flat belly shiny with sweat.

Katya slowly escalated the sensations she was inducing in the woman’s body until her victim (there was no other word for it) was thrashing and sobbing beneath the tiniest of touches.

Somewhere in the midst of this, another occupant of the bower, on her knees in the shadows beneath the spread-eagled girl, came forward and freed Todd’s erection from his pants. He didn’t attempt to dissuade her.

The girl took him into her throat and kept him there. The mingling of the sight of Katya working on the girl and this new sensation was almost too much for him. He had to gently ease himself out of the girl’s mouth so as not to lose control too quickly.

She seemed to get the message because she crawled away, beckoning him to follow. He pulled off his shoes and socks, and then hauled down his trousers, stepping out of them as he followed. He doubted Katya had noticed what he was up to: she was too deeply engaged in driving her partner to distraction: the girl’s sobs of pleasure were the loudest sound in the vicinity.

At ground level, beneath the spread shadow of the ecstatic girl, was a sub-world of shadowy bodies, touches and whispers. There were probably a dozen men and women down here, variously intertwined. Todd CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 256

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felt their hands at his backside, his face, his erection; heard an appreciative coo from someone who weighed the mass of his balls (a man’s palm there, surely; but he was past caring); and the girl who’d beckoned to him grazing his lips with hers, saying something he couldn’t catch.

He lost sight of her for a little while, then he heard her ahead of him, gasping with delight. Somebody had got his hands on her before him. He felt a spasm of possessiveness, and crawled on, over a couple of sweating bodies, to catch up with her. He’d got it into his head that the nameless girl was his for the having, and he wasn’t about to be denied her.

She wasn’t hard to find. In fact she found him: catching hold of his hand and drawing him toward her. The shadow of Katya’s sobbing victim spilled across much of her body, but her face lay clear of it, and Todd saw that this girl who’d gobbled him down so gluttonously looked barely old enough to be out of her parents’ charge. She was dark: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. And she was already lying back on a bed of bodies. She pulled him eagerly toward her and cupped his face with her hands, bringing his mouth to hers. There was some confusion of bodies around and beneath her, but he was too turned on to pay much attention to such details. He kissed the girl (wondering, indeed half-hoping, that Katya had paused in her ministrations to see what he was up to; wishing she’d feel just a little pang of jealousy), and the girl returned his kiss, lavishly.

Was there something in her kiss—some subtle tang to the juices of her mouth, some coldness to her lips—which would have given away the fact that she was a spirit? Not that he could tell. If anything she was hotter than most women he’d been naked with; almost feverish. And despite the fact that his eyes had for so long failed to see the ghosts in the Canyon, she—and all of those around him—now seemed absolutely solid.

His dick had lost none of its rigidity through this fumbling pursuit; the fact that the air was humid and pungent with the heat given off by these spirit-forms only aroused him more. Katya had prepared him well, with her talk of shamelessness. He wanted the girl, and she wanted him: what else mattered?

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He put the head of his cock into her. She lifted her legs a little, to help him. There was undoubtedly somebody else beneath her, but he or she didn’t seem to care that he was kneeling on them.

“All the way,” she insisted.

He slid into her, as she instructed, all the way to the root, and began to work his hips against her.

Her cunt was as agile as her throat; he felt a counter-rhythm moving beneath his dick, passing through the lower half of her vulva. The sensation was like nothing he’d ever experienced before; after just a few strokes he was brought to the edge. He slowly pulled out of her, to be sure he didn’t ejaculate too quickly.

“You like that?” she said, putting her hand down between her legs, and guiding him back in.

“Yes. I like it a lot.”

“Good.”

“But go slowly. Please.”

He let her take him inside again and she threw back her head, expelling a sigh of satisfaction.

“Go on,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed. “All the way. Both of you.”

Both?
he thought, raising his head from her breast.

And as he formed the question he felt an arm, twice, three times as thick as hers, and deeply muscled, reach over and grab his neck.

He lifted his head as best he could, and saw the face of a man over the girl’s shoulder. She was apparently lying on him, her back against his chest. He was black, and handsome, even in the shadows.

“She’s good,” he said, smiling. “Yeah?”

Tentatively Todd reached down into the moist muddle between their legs. He felt himself, hard as ever; and then, further back, buried in the girl’s ass, the other man’s dick. So that was what he had been feeling as he moved inside her. It wasn’t a muscular contraction; it was the black man sliding in and out of her. In any other situation he would have been repulsed; would have pulled out and retreated. But this was the Canyon; CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 258

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Katya’s Eden without the serpent. The part of him that would have been revolted had been sweated out of him. It only made him harder thinking about the woman being sandwiched between him and the other man; the fine sheath of her muscle dividing the two of them. He brought his hand up from the swamp between their legs and grabbed hold of the black man’s wrist, tightening the three-way knot.

The man laughed.

“You like that?” he said.

“I like that.”

“Good,” he said, licking the girl’s neck, but keeping his eyes fixed hun-grily on Todd. “ ’Cause we like to get real crazy.”

Todd had found the rhythm of this now; and together they played her until she started to scream with ecstasy.

Somewhere in the midst of this, the girl Katya was pleasuring began to utter gut-wrenching cries. A little time later Katya must have had mercy on her, and allowed her to be carried off, because when Todd was next getting close to coming (for the fifth or sixth time) he looked away from the blissed-out faces beneath him, and saw Katya sitting among the jasmine and the honeysuckle, with a young man lying naked at her feet, covering them with reverential kisses.

She was watching Todd, her expression inscrutable. Somebody lit a cigarette for her. Todd smiled at her, and then—before she could choose to either return the smile or ignore it—he fell back into the bliss of his ménage-à-trois, thinking that if this was what sex with the dead was like, then the living had a lot to learn.

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F I V E

Tonight was one of those nights when Marco had decided to get drunk.

“An honorable occupation,” as his father had always said. He didn’t like to drink in company; in truth, he didn’t much like company at all. People in this town were full of bullshit (his boss included, half the time) and Marco didn’t want to hear it. He’d come out to Los Angeles after his career in professional wrestling had come to a premature conclusion, half-thinking he might have a crack at acting. Then someone had suggested that personal security might be a good job for a man like himself, since he not only looked intimidating, but had the moves to back up his appearance. So Marco had joined an agency, and after working for a succession of spoiled-brat movie stars who treated him as though he were something they’d just found on their shoe, he was ready to head for home. Then, within days of his planned departure, the job with Todd Pickett had come along.

It turned out to be a perfect match. He and Todd hit it off from the start. They had the same taste in girls, cars and whisky, which was more or less the contents of Marco’s fantasy world.

Tonight, he wanted a girl, and was tempted to go out, hit the clubs on the Strip, see if he got lucky. If not there was always the credit card: he had no qualms about paying for sex. It certainly beat the five-fingered widow.

But before he went out he always liked to get mellow with a whisky or two: it made him more sociable. Besides, there was something strange about the house tonight, though he didn’t know what. Earlier on, he’d been tempted to go out and take a look around, just to be sure they didn’t have any intruders, but by now the whisky had got him feeling too lazy to CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 260