Beautiful You (7 page)

Penny gasped. She cried out, as much from discomfort as pleasure. She felt wetness escape her and soak into the bedclothes. She felt the liquid expanding inside her. In vain she squirmed, trying to escape the sensation. As the pleasure grew, seizing control of her, Penny understood why Alouette had
been so bitter and enraged. Whatever the pink fluid consisted of, Maxwell’s pumping buttocks and probing cock seemed to force it into her bloodstream. Gradually her legs felt so relaxed she would swear they were floating. The feeling spread to her arms. Her breasts seemed to swell. Her mind stretched to accommodate a joy she’d never known existed.

She was only vaguely aware of Maxwell. While his hips bucked slowly into her, his bland stare observed the reactions on her face. He licked his fingers and softly tweaked her nipples, as focused as a safecracker. Without missing a thrust, he lifted the pen and scribbled a note in his book.

He petted her inner thighs and clitoris. With his hips, he made infinitesimal adjustments in the angle and speed of his thrusts. Gauging her reaction, he calibrated the depth of each stroke. Addressing the recorder, he said, “The test subject’s pelvic floor has relaxed in extremis.” He reached one latex-gloved hand around to the small of her back, brailling her spine until he found what he was seeking. On that one small spot, his fingertips intensified their massaging.

“Just so you understand what’s happening,” Maxwell explained, “I’m using two fingers to compress your anterior Hibbert artery. It’s a simple tantric technique a yogi in Sri Lanka was kind enough to teach me.” He talked like a tour guide, chatty and slightly patronizing. “By restricting the deeper blood flow to your groin, I’m numbing your clitoris.” Whatever he was doing, he didn’t need to look. His fingers knew their task. His eyes continued to hold hers.

“Your feedback is very important to this process,” Maxwell said. His voice sounded fuzzy, but Penny tried to concentrate. “Do you understand?” he asked. “Nod your head if you understand.”

Penny nodded.

“You must ready yourself. Do not be frightened.” He said,
“Do not be afraid of crying out. You must let the pleasure pass through you.” He leveled his eyes gravely. “If you hinder the flow of satisfaction, it could kill you.”

Penny nodded. She was barely in the world. As pleasure drowned her, there was no past and no future. Nothing existed outside of this moment of peaking sensations. There was no world other than the energy surging in her body.

“In a moment, when I release the pressure, the blood will rush to your uris major, and you’ll experience more satisfaction than you ever dreamed was possible.” With that warning, Penny felt the fingertips retreat from her spine. Something, something bright and enormous flared within her.

“Cry out!” commanded Maxwell. “Don’t contain your ecstasy. Don’t be a prudish fool, Penny. Cry out!”

But Penny could not. A long scream of obscenities built in her throat, but she kept her teeth clenched. Her limbs thrashed and twitched beyond her control. A torrent of animal gibberish and profanities threatened to boil out of her mouth, and the digital recorder was running. She choked back the howls. A cold hand touched the side of her neck and lingered there.

Maxwell announced, “For the record, the subject’s pulse is rapid and irregular.” He was speaking for the recorder. “Her respiration is extremely shallow, and all signs would indicate that she is entering an erotically induced coma.”

Penny sensed that she was dying. Her view of him frosted and grew dark around the edges.

Maxwell reached for something on the bedside table. With the latex-gloved pad of his thumb he lifted one of her drooping eyelids and shined a bright penlight into her iris. “Pupil dilation is sluggish,” he announced. Throughout this entire ordeal his hips continued to pump, steadily planting and withdrawing his steely erection.

“Why should sex be any different?” ranted Max. “Everything—films,
music, painting—is calculated to manipulate and excite us.” He licked two fingers and scissored them against Penny, flickering fast touches against her engorged lady-parts. Such small tricks flooded Penny with more pleasure, wiping her mind clean. Whatever she’d been thinking, it was instantly forgotten. “Drugs are designed to be as effective as possible,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we devote the same attention to the details of sex?”

Penny shook like a criminal being electrocuted. Her limbs jangled, and her flesh jiggled like a nervous puppet. Her tongue jutted from her mouth and lapped at the air.

“Stay with me,” he coached sternly. “You’re going into shock.”

Penny felt something rest against her forehead.

“The subject’s temperature is falling … ninety-eight-point-five degrees. Ninety-seven-point-five …” It was a temporal thermometer. A cold mouth pressed itself over hers. These were Maxwell’s lips. His lukewarm breath filled her throat and inflated her lungs. “The subject has stopped breathing,” he announced. His lungs once more filled her lungs. Just as his penis was filling her. “I am attempting to resuscitate the test subject.” Throughout all of this, Penny was dimly aware that he was still fucking her with the same cadence of long, smooth strokes. He was monitoring the pulse in her neck. “Use my breath,” he demanded. “Use the breath I’m putting inside you to cry out. Express your exaltation.” In a flat, expressionless voice he said, “Do not die while you have so much pleasure still awaiting you.…”

Now Penny knew why the tabloids called him “Climax-Well.”

That would be the first and final time Penny would see him naked. There was plenty of sex to come, too much perhaps, but none of it would involve Maxwell’s sexual organs.

Once Maxwell had excused himself to use the bathroom, Penny rewound the recorder and tried to find her outcry. To erase it. The filth that had poured from her mouth was totally degrading. To her own ears she sounded like someone possessed by a demon. Out of her mind. The voice was less hers than it was the howl of some animal in heat baying at a primordial moon.

If Climax-Well could be believed, it was that beastly outburst that had saved her life. With it, she had allowed the tension of a life-threatening orgasm to pass through her without lasting damage. A woman’s purpose, he claimed, was not to be a vessel, but to be a conduit. For her to survive, all things must pass through her.

Between marathon sessions of arousal culminating in mind-shattering orgasms, Maxwell lectured Penny. He slipped a wet finger into her, matter-of-factly saying, “This is your urethra.” Rotating the finger, he said, “And this … this is your urethral sponge, often called the ‘G-spot.’ ”

The walking tour his fingers took sent shivers through her body.

He oiled his hands with a pink, rose-scented gel and slipped two fingers into her. “When I massage the rear wall of your vaginal vault …”

Unseen, he must’ve done so, because Penny twitched and shivered with uncontrolled joy. Whatever Max was doing, she drove her hips against his hand, wanting more.

“That,” he explained, “is your perineal sponge, a mass of erectile tissue that connects through the pudendal nerve to your clitoris.”

Penny didn’t need to look to know that her clit was stiffening. Untouched, it was achingly engorged and throbbing.

Massaging whatever he’d found, Max was stimulating her clitoris by remote control. “The perineal sponge is the reason women can achieve orgasms while having anal sex.” He slipped
a third and a fourth finger inside. “Good girl, your vagina is ‘ballooning.’ ” During arousal, he explained, the inner vagina expands, lengthening to create a dead end beyond the cervix. Now his entire hand was inside.

Penny looked down to see only his smooth, pale wrist disappearing into her. At the sight of it, she moaned.

Maxwell’s eyes had a glazed, faraway look, not focused on anything. Through his hand, he was clearly exploring a hidden world. “This, I believe, is your cervix,” he said. “If I apply a steady pressure …”

Penny’s fingers went involuntarily to her mouth, and she bit down on a knuckle, whimpering. She closed her eyes, embarrassed by the mewling that rose from deep in her throat. It was terrifying being coaxed this far beyond her own rational control. It was as frightening as she’d always imagined a heart attack would feel, but she never wanted it to stop.

His voice muted with admiration and wonder, Maxwell said, “This is exceptional. Do you always ejaculate this much?”

Penny opened her eyes and peeked. A rivulet of shimmering juice was erupting from near the top of her pussy. It flowed down Maxwell’s arm until it dripped from his elbow. “Sorry,” she whispered, instantly ashamed.

“But why?” asked Maxwell, twisting his hand deep inside her.

“I’m peeing on you.”

He laughed. With his free hand he collected a smidgen of the liquid. He rubbed it between two fingers, brought the fingers to his nose and smelled it, tasted it with the tip of his tongue. “Enzymes,” he pronounced, “from your Skene’s glands. That’s why it vents from your urethra instead of your vulva.” He brought the wet fingers near her mouth and asked, “Would you like to taste yourself?”

Excited as she was, purring and thrashing like an animal,
Penny couldn’t bring herself to lick his fingers. She didn’t have to.

He shoved them into her mouth. Gagging her. Choking her. The taste of her own sensual emissions was metallic and salty. For a short eternity she couldn’t speak or breathe.

Maxwell’s voice was reproachful. “I thought you said you were wearing a diaphragm.”

She wasn’t. Her diaphragm was in Jackson Heights—securely locked in a safe-deposit box at Chase Manhattan. Penny wasn’t trying to get pregnant. She just hadn’t planned to have sex tonight.

The fingers withdrew from her mouth, allowing her to draw a new breath.

“Don’t think you can trick me, Miss Harrigan.” The fingers within her were still roving, mapping that hidden world. “When and if I ever marry anyone it will be for love. I had a vasectomy many years ago.”

Penny wanted to explain, but she was exhausted. Instead, she lay back, sinking deeper into pleasure as he petted the glans of her clitoris. He described how the short clitoral shaft descended into her skin. Using gentle pressure, he traced the shaft to where it divided into two legs which he called “crura.” These legs, Maxwell explained, wrapped around the vaginal cavity.

He said more, a long, rambling travelogue about a land Penny had never visited. A history lesson about the world contained inside her.

Maxwell explained how physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s had always been formally trained in how to bring their female patients to “paroxysm.” Using fingers and oil, it was standard practice for doctors and midwives to treat hysteria, insomnia, depression, and a host of conditions common to women.
Praefocatio matricis
it was called. Or “suffocation
of the mother.” And even the great Galen recommended that the vagina must be vigorously manipulated until it readily expressed the accumulation of fluid.

Vibrators, he claimed, were among the first household appliances to be powered with electricity. In 1893, a man named Mortimer Granville built a huge fortune when he invented a battery-driven vibrator. A full range of such sex toys were commonly sold through national mass-circulation magazines and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. It wasn’t until they appeared in the crude pornographic films of the 1920s that vibrating dildos became shameful.

Galen. Hippocrates. Ambroise Paré. Penny couldn’t keep the names and dates straight in her mind. After the sixteenth century, she fell asleep. She dreamed of plummeting from the top of the Eiffel Tower. She was falling because Maxwell had pushed her.

When she woke, Maxwell’s side of the bed was empty. The bathroom door was closed, and from the far side of it came the sound of running water.

Was it Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem? Penny couldn’t remember, but she thought one of them had written about the “zipless fuck,” an ideal kind of physically satisfying sex that left no emotional obligations. Sex with Maxwell might very well be what the author had in mind. It left Penny weak, feeling as if she’d suffered the flu. That was only for a few minutes; beyond that she was ravenous. They ate and fucked and ate and fucked. Endlessly. Ziplessly.

It was official. Until now, Penny Harrigan had never experienced an actual orgasm. Not like the thrilling sensations that Maxwell coaxed from her eager body. For once, the descriptions
of fireworks and convulsions she’d read so often in
Cosmo
, they seemed like understatements instead of exaggerations.

Stroking her pubis, Maxwell said, “I would like to shave you. It would make the testing more accurate.” She’d acquiesced. No biggie. She’d been shaved before, and waxed, to be bikini-ready for spring break. “This time,” he warned her, “it will never grow back.” He used a special formula passed down through millennia of Uzbek tribesmen, a lotion of aloe vera and pureed pine nuts that would forever leave her as smooth as a child.

Penny looked forlornly at her shorn curls lying among the bedsheets. She told herself she’d never liked being bushy.

The aspect of sex that Maxwell seemed to enjoy most was finding ways to coerce her to greater satisfaction. That seemed his sole source of pleasure. Whenever Penny asked whether he wanted to come, he’d simply shrug and say, “Maybe next go-round.” Beyond their first encounter he never so much as removed his shirt. Soon he came to don a white lab coat to protect his clothing.

For a beauty like Alouette, a woman accustomed to driving men to fits of lust, Maxwell’s failure to come must’ve been maddening. Penny tried not to think of the French beauty who’d threatened her life, but that wasn’t easy. Alouette had enjoyed 136 days of intimacy with Maxwell. Gwendolyn had enjoyed 136 days. The
National Enquirer
never lied. Unless she’d miscounted, Penny figured she had 103 days to go. If the sex kept up like this, she doubted whether she could live that long. But what a great way to die!

If she could just find the recording of her howling, find and erase it, Penny’s happiness would be complete. The bathroom door remained shut. Behind it the water continued to run.