Contours of Darkness (12 page)

At a point where the wisest thing two human beings can do is simply to leave one another alone, they often, with implacable perversity, proceed to embroil themselves more intricately. Cynthia opened Aaron's belt, grabbed the waist of his trousers, and tugged them down his legs, over his knees and past his feet. She was no longer thinking; it was as though some switch had been thrown in her mind and she was programmed to act out some mordant drama that had its well-springs in all the unexplored regions of her unconscious. Aaron was still clear enough to know that he ought to stop himself, but he translated that as an imperative to stop her, thus insuring that he would allow the thing to go on. She stooped forward and laid her tongue flat along the sole of one foot, and licked him, without stopping, up the length of the leg, plunging at last deep between his buttocks. She dug her nails into his legs until he arched his back and with a violent twisting motion turned herself over and like a mechanic sliding under a chassis pulled herself beneath his body. And then lay there, panting, waiting for him to succumb to gravity and sink slowly and heavily on top of her. Aaron felt himself come unstop-pered. What she offered him was past his ability to resist; he had only to let go and she would offer herself totally in fullest degradation.

'Don't do it.' Conrad tried to project the thought into Aaron's head.

But she began to moan and yearn, and the sound of her aggressive surrender swept him past all considerations of person, and he let the actual and symbolic massiveness of his buttocks swallow her face and crush her wide fragile mouth. With a whimper she licked the crusted shit from his arsehole, and glued her lips to the musty cleft.

She clung to him like a leech to its donor until she needed to breathe, and then let go all at once, her face falling to one side so that the buttocks crushed her cheek. She wormed out from under him and lay still, looking except for her size, like a baby that had just slithered from his loins. Aaron held his breath, for in the few brief seconds when her sucking lips and probing tongue had entered his clenched sphincter, he knew beyond all doubt that she had really wanted him to release the slow sliding wet fullness into her. A premonition of the vile filled him with loathing.

Cynthia rose and propped herself on her elbow; dazed, she swung her head around and found herself looking into Conrad's eyes. The contact stunned her, for she could see all that he could see of her, and knew that nothing was hidden from his view. Her embarrassment mingled with a wild exaltation as she recovered a hope that had been lost and even forgotten, that she would one day meet a man to whom she could give herself unreservedly, assured that he had the fullest appreciation of what a thing of wonder she was doing. It came with the delight of a spring breeze, the realisation that what she wanted was possible if there were two men: one to enter her through touch, the other through understanding, thus bringing both halves of her together. Disheveled, blown, ragged, the acrid taste still on her tongue, she was blessed with an awareness of herself as a woman. All her roles, fragmented aspects of the whole, manifesting themselves serially, bloomed in her consciousness, and she accepted that she was more than a lover or a wife, more than a slave or a witch, more than a queen, a friend, a seductress, a worker. She understood that she was a human being and heir to the full potential of the species. Anything that anybody was ever or ever could be also lived in her. The racial unconscious opened its doors and freed her of her partial vision. Through a mechanism she was not even aware of, her habit of being acted upon was temporarily broken, and she was able to act.

'What do you want from me?' she said to Conrad who was assiduously watching all the changes on her face.

1 want to be left alone,' said Aaron, hearing the question and arrogating it to himself.

'All right,' Cynthia said to herself, Til leave you alone.'

She smiled, and, never taking her eyes from Conrad's gaze unbuttoned her shirt and shrugged it off her shoulders. For the first time he saw her naked body as something which related directly to him and his mouth watered. She came up on her hands and knees and walked over to him like a four-footed-animaL Her breasts hung down, her rump shone in the dull light, and her cunt was tucked under, a patch of darkness accessible from behind. He imagined his cock sliding under her arched buttocks and into the sticky centre, and his heart skipped a beat. But he did not move.

They stared at one another like a boy and girl on a see-saw maintaining the contact as they rose and fell, always in opposite directions. A thin fury had begun to build in her, for she was going further and further out to spark some sort of response from the men, and they remained impassive behind the wall of their drug-induced self-sufficiency. The problem which arises the moment two or more individuals share the same space was now magnified by heightened circumstance. But she pushed on, thinking that a critical point would be passed, and one or both of the men would take a hand in directing the sexual proceedings. She sensed Aaron's presence behind her, and using that awareness like a swimmer propelling himself from the side of a pool, she dove in a long arc toward Conrad's crotch. The zipper opened easily, and she eased the limp cock out.

With a sigh, she took it in her mouth. Almost at once she was seized by excitement. She had known no other cock but Aaron's for several years, and the strangeness of feeling Conrad inside her was markedly thrilling. She sucked it in as far as it would go, and held it there, poised between the pressure of her tongue and the roof of her mouth. In the acquisition of a veneer of sophistication and boredom which had accrued to fucking only one man for such a long period of time, she had lost sight of how marvelously dirty the act of cocksucking could be. She remembered her dates during high school, and the boys who were constantly trying to get her to touch them while they struggled to reach her nipples, her arse, her cunt. Having been trained from childhood to regard such contact as powerfully shameful, she almost fainted with the joy of intense sinfulness she felt when she was seventeen and went to the apartment of a twenty-four-year-old man, who was able, through a combination of titillation and coercion, to get her to go down on her knees while he sat at the edge of the bed and put the forbidden cock between her closed lips which with virgin trembling, parted and accepted it inside her. He had stroked her cheeks as she tongued him and whispered, 'Oh yes, baby, suck it, come on you beautiful mouth, gobble it down,' and then very unexpectedly shot his sperm and held her tightly so that she gagged and then had to swallow, feeling the slime sliding down her throat.

Conrad's cock hardened. She licked it while it swelled inside her, and when it reached its full length she pulled back, leaving it exposed. She lay down in front of him, held the base of his cock in her two hands, and began to bounce her head up and down on its crown. She did not stop for niceties; she sucked him like a professional, interested in bringing him in one single rush to a spurting orgasm. She had grown hungry for completion, and wanted the cycle to come to an end in the most direct way it could, with one of the men coming and dispersing the energy which had risen to painful levels of reserve.

She heard a rustle behind her. She twisted her head to the side, continuing to move back and forth on Conrad's prick, and glanced as far left as she could. Aaron was watching her. It was the first time he had seen her with another man, and he was stung by the beauty of her. Even looking into the mirror while she was sucking him hadn't prepared him for the feelings he was now experiencing, the jealousy melting into yearning, the anger exploding into joy. He raked her body with his eyes, soaking up the lusciousness of her charms; he almost wept as he swept his glance from her feet, where her toes curled in pleasure, to her arse, which wiggled like an insect's in the midst of luring a mate, to her mouth, which stretched with such delicate intensity over the enormous cock. To her, his expression was unreadable, the distance, the darkness, and the motion she was involved in conspiring to veil him from her.

All at once she was frightened. She had proceeded along what seemed to be acceptable lines and had assumed that Aaron, by taking the acid, knowing of the electricity that flowed between her and Conrad, had given silent consent to sex between them. She couldn't be sure whether he was glowering at her, whether he was hurt or feeling mean. She knew that he could make her pay dreadfully for weeks afterward if she displeased him. But just then Conrad's cock pulsed in her mouth, and her attention was drawn back to her cocksucking, and she returned to the texture of the silky rim and the tough tender shaft, giving it her loving care. 'I don't have to stay with Aaron after tonight,' she thought, severing her fear. I'm a free human being.'

From his relative height, Conrad watchec
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*"he drama between them. What he could see and Cynthia could not, was that Aaron's right hand was curled around his cock, pulling it in counterpoint to the rhythms of Cynthia's mouth. An odd grasp of cosmic inference massaged his brain while he observed the three of them in their laconic performance. He knew that the event was working itself out according to a plan to which he had only partial insight, and thus was justified in holding back. But he bemoaned the lack of fullness, and wondered why Aaron hadn't got up to fuck Cynthia from the rear while she sucked his own cock. He speculated that the acid had put Aaron on an internal trip, and removed him from the arena of overt passion. Without his being conscious of the process, his attention split into several fragments, a piece on Aaron, a piece on Cynthia, a piece on the nature of the universe, and a dwindling piece on the sensation in his cock. Wrapped in his thoughts, he had lost his erection.

'Shit,' said Cynthia to herself. And with a stroke of boldness which so enlivened her that she almost pissed on the rug, she opened her mouth and let the limp tool fall out, and turned rapidly on Aaron, sliding across his thigh and scooping his cock between her lips. She picked up the same rhythm she had begun with Conrad, like a woman starting her knitting again after putting it aside. She was performing the act of cock-sucking for a specific end, to close some crucial gap within herself that could only be bridged by a male organ. The fact that she was switching cocks to accomplish that was a minor consideration. She wanted to feel the pulsation of the thick vein as the sperm gushed out onto her tongue; she no longer cared which of the two men provided the cock to do that.

Aaron lifted his pelvis off the floor to meet her approach, thrusting into her as she closed her jaws over the shaft. Watching her had brought him to a pitch of excitement and his movements were involuntary, following an inner arc of keen frenzy which sliced through the fog of introspection which had enveloped him. He sighed as she went to work on him. 'This time I'll come,' he thought, reverting to the insipid pattern which the brief boost allowed by the LSD had revealed in its poverty.

With thrilling perversity, however, she retreated. Having attained her aim of bringing him out of his shell and into strong contact with her, she was now in a position of strength; she had something he needed, and she momentarily blocked out the moral responsibility for having roused that need in the first place. She teased him, first stuffing his entire cock into her throat, and then pulling back rapidly, right to the rim, and slowly opening her mouth so that the sensation on his cock faded and disappeared. He tried to pull her head down but she resisted, and he was forced to reach up with his cock to find her mouth again. She licked him with her tongue and pulled back once more, repeating this until his muscles ached with the strain of trying to lodge his prick in her mouth again. And when he was at the bursting point, she simply stepped back, turned around, showing him her rump, and sprawled forward, starting in on Conrad, coaxing him into involvement, enticing him to a point where he could feel the ejaculation bubbling in his balls and then stopping.

It's all a game,' she thought. 'I don't owe them anything, and they don't owe me anything. We can all do what we like.' The drugs she had smoked and the contact high she was receiving from Conrad in his mescaline and Aaron in his acid had raised her consciousness to a state, rare among human beings, where she could perceive the obvious. If I could always see this clearly,' she said to herself. 1 would never have any confusion about anything.

Giddy with the power of the individual in a flurry of self-discovery, and chattering with fear that she might be careening down a dangerous blind alley, she went back and forth between them a dozen times until she could no longer tell any difference, having reduced their impact upon her to the single dimension of their maleness, and seeing in that context that there was indeed no way to choose between one and the other.

They're all the same once you put the lights on,' she thought, giggling to herself at the reversal of the old saw about women.

The men had darker perceptions. Caught in the spiral of their gnashing lust, and put in the position of erection producers, they framed Cynthia as a photograph of a woman gone wild. In their evaluation, stripped of all levels except the apparent, she was a dripping naked cockteasing bitch, her lips red from the friction against their cocks, her arse an open invitation, her cunt redolent with the aroma of heavy secretions. They were being whipped into an unthinking furor of desire as she played Russian roulette with their cocks, rotating them like chambers in a gun until she found one that fired.

Finally Aaron grabbed her. In the second his fingers closed over her skull and twined in her hair, he remembered who she was, and in a single flash the years through w
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hich they had passed together materialised and he was overwhelmed with the power of the reality they shared. He recalled how poignantly and terribly he loved her, and how ruthlessly he hated her, and in how many ways they simply rose and fell with one another, She received the impact of his insight as a rush of energy so strong that she could not fight it, and brought her face humbly to his groin, accepting his cock almost reverently. So she gave herself in her own way to something in him which she recognised as superior without knowing what that quality was. And at the precise instant she stopped struggling, he lapsed into nostalgia, and became once more a teenager with a sluggish date.