The Beast That Was Max (20 page)

Kueur, naked, pressed the heel of his hand against her sex. Her pubic hair scratched his skin.

"Like the prostitute you saw us with, in the Bois," she said. She brought his hand up to her mouth. Put his thumb in her mouth, ran her tongue along the edge of his nail. Sucked.

Bit.

Max flinched and tried to pull his hand away. But she was strong, and his thumb stayed in her smiling mouth.

Alioune circled his neck with her lean arms and whispered, "Do you remember his eyes, Tonton?" Her hot breath sent a shiver down his spine. She thrust the tip of her tongue into his ear, then gently kissed her way down the back of his neck. "Do you remember the look of his pleasure? He had given up ever feeling anything again. From trick to trick he went, selling himself for nothing, for the money to feed himself. So he could survive. So he could live for another night of searching for what he'd given up finding. Until he met us." She thrust her tongue against the hollow at the base of his neck, pulled back enough to speak. "We felt our pleasure through him, and he felt ours. But he was not as strong as you, Tonton. He did not last. None of them ever do. But you will. You will, Tonton."

Max moaned, sagged against Alioune. She supported him as she worked her tongue up and down from the hollow to his ear and back. He looked up at Nicole suspended above them. Her eyelids twitched.

"You had to leave the narrow path of your life before you could find what you needed," Kueur said, twisting his hand into a wrist lock.

He cried out and jerked his free hand over to try for a release. She let him go before he could strike her. Alioune pulled his hand back, pressed it against her breast. "Because the pleasure you seek is ours, channeled through you," she said.

"Our conductor of flesh and emotion," Kueur whispered, driving her nails into the flesh under his arms. "Of sensation, and pleasure."

"Our soul. Our Tonton."

"And here, I think," said Kueur, looking up at Nicole's vacant-eyed form, "we have two such special conductors."

"Thank you, Tonton." Alioune settled Max's head on the floor. "We have never tried with four." She stood, lowered Nicole, unbound her.

Kueur reached for Nicole's hand. Nicole whimpered, stared at Alioune, then at Kueur's hand. Finally, she took it, allowed Kueur to pull her down to the floor beside Max. Kueur slapped Nicole's face with one hand, scratched Max from armpit to hip with the other. Max gasped, Nicole grunted.

Kueur smiled and said, "We should have known that when your time came to be with us, Tonton B`eb`ete, you would make it special."

Alioune settled between his legs like a butterfly in the cup of a waiting flower. She kissed his balls, ran her tongue over them, licked his thighs and hardening cock. Her hands caressed his legs as he squeezed her body between his knees.

Kueur turned to Max and kissed him, pushed her tongue into his mouth, probing. She tasted like lemon ginger. He breathed her in and swallowed her taste.

Nicole, responding to Kueur's encouraging hand, rolled over his body. She lay on top of him, arms at her sides, legs on the outside of his. Her hair fell across Max's eyes, found its way with Kueur's tongue into his mouth.

Alioune moved his cock into Nicole, maneuvered the woman's hips from side to side. A faint moan escaped Nicole.

Kueur pulled away from Max, leaving him gasping for more of her kisses. She drew Nicole's head up by the hair, scratched Nicole's cheeks and drew blood. Suddenly, she slammed Nicole's head into his chest. Max grunted from the impact of her forehead on his collarbone.

The shock and pain of bone hitting bone traveled through Max, and he kicked his legs instinctively.

"Yes," Alioune whispered, her voice hoarse. She shuddered between his legs, then pushed Nicole's hips back and forth to a faster rhythm. The warm moistness of her mouth covered him where Nicole's did not.

Pain evaporated. Max gasped at a sudden shot of pleasure running through him, exploding from between his legs. He forced himself up, saw Alioune had jammed her fingers into Nicole from the rear.

Kueur cried out, laughed.

Max looked to her. She grabbed his hair and banged his head hard to the floor. He heard a crack, and his vision blurred. Pleasure shattered like a crystal vase thrown to the floor. The knock on the back of his head sent a cold wave down to his toes.

Alioune moaned.

"Do not be shy, Tonton," Kueur teased, nuzzling his neck.

Max shook his head, grabbed hold of Nicole's shoulders and threw her off, then climbed on top of her, ignoring Alioune's twisting body between his legs. He thrust himself into Nicole, bounced against her hips, grasping for the pleasure that seemed to be rolling back and forth through his body like a tide, just out of his grasp.

Alioune jammed her hand into him. He arched his back, reaching for sensation. Kueur sighed, caught her breath, then scratched his back, drawing blood. Max cried out, but the pain drained out of him as Alioune began to pant.

"Work harder, Tonton," Alioune commanded, massaging his butt and back with one hand while the fingers of her other hand still worked like snakes inside of him.

Max complied, his body tingling as the pleasure and pain passing through him was beginning to carry him along on its surging waves.

Kueur drove her finger into a nerve cluster at the base of his jaw, sending a sharp dagger of pain into his brain. Almost immediately, the pain was consumed, absorbed, sucked away by a powerful undertow. He did not have time to cry out; it was Alioune who screamed. He felt the pain blossom in her. It was like watching a nuclear detonation from a distance. Moments later, the aftershock rushed through him, propelled by Alioune's massaging fingers and eager tongue. He was carried by the wave front of sensation headlong into Kueur's next torture: biting his earlobe. Back he went, driven by pain, to Alioune. Faster, he jerked between them, between extremes of sensation, the back-and-forth tide rising, trapping him in its tempest waves.

And beneath him, barely conscious, her humanity stripped until she was responding to him on only the most primitive levels, Nicole grunted and moaned, her pain and pleasure a shifting bed over which the storm cycle of sex and sensation raged.

Alioune screamed for Kueur, drinking the pain from him and Nicole.

Kueur cried out for Alioune, downing their pleasure, as well.

Together they shouted his name. Tonton, they called. B`eb`ete.

Max.

And the Beast howled as sensation filled the pit of its appetite. Blood pounding in his ears, the smell and taste of sweat and sex and blood on his tongue, body heat burning his skin, Max surrendered to the Beast, to the storm, to Alioune and Kueur and the dark sorcery of their sex. The thunder of their ecstasy boomed through him. His own pleasure screamed like a hurricane wind, amplified beyond limitations in the twins' all-encompassing bond. He thrust and grabbed and tore, choked on what he put in his mouth, shut his eyes against the lightning-bright flashes of overwhelmed nerves. He shook and trembled, and finally convulsed, as the twins rose to their climax like two goddesses on pillars of volcanic fire.

He came as if he were in a dream. Hot, pulsing, endless. A throbbing beam of joy cut his body in half and scrambled his mind until he could do no more than moan and mewl and twist his body, stretching for one more pulse of pleasure. And when the beam faded enough for him to think, the first thing that came to his mind was the certainty that what he had experienced was as pale as a distant star compared to the glory of the sun that had burned in the bodies of Alioune and Kueur.

"Sweet Tonton," Kueur whispered between gasps for breath. She crept away, bloody, hair matted, and braced herself against a wall, legs folded under her.

Alioune said nothing, but crawled on all fours to the bathroom, coughing, her sex swaying casually. She cast razor glances over her shoulder. Her body moved with primal, carnal strength. Like a jaguar with its mouth still painted with the blood of its kill.

Max stood up on trembling legs. Muscles twitched randomly in his back. He ran a hand over the back of his head, felt the bumps and cuts, checked his wounds. None were serious. Nicole's, he noted, were fatal.

She looked like any of the twins' lovers he'd cleaned up after one of their wild nights.

"Your place is just as good as our Box," said Kueur. Her breathing had slowed to normal. "So private. But of course it would be. You are our Tonton B`eb`ete."

Max picked up a piece of the blouse he'd ripped off Nicole when he first brought her in, and wiped his face.

"I hope this doesn't mean I'm falling in love," he said with a glance at Kueur. "People might talk if they knew I'd turned to incest." He cocked his head back and laughed, feeling giddy. It was as if he had been transformed, as if he had been crawling like a worm through daily existence, and suddenly discovered one day that he had become a butterfly, beautiful and glorious. A butterfly capable of tasting the sensual depths of any flower he wished to taste.

"Do not worry," Alioune replied from the bathroom. She turned on the tap and splashed water on her face. "Love is no more a part of your future than guilt was a part of your past. You are beyond the shallowness of emotions, Tonton. More so now than you ever were." She shook her head, flinging water and blood on the walls. "You are a part of us. Your Beast is tamed, your hunger fulfilled."

"For now," Max said.

"Forever," Alioune replied. She turned and faced him as she slicked back her hair.

Max stood still, let the blood-soaked blouse fall to the floor. The Beast was quiet. Invisible. Consumed.

Max suddenly felt light, almost insubstantial. Like a butterfly fluttering in the air. His future without the Beast flashed in his mind: drifting from flower to flower, aimless.

"But," he said, his voice thick, "I need my hunger. It gives me strength, it drives me, makes me fight for life."

"We are your strength, now," Alioune said. She braced herself with one arm on each wall of the small bathroom. The curving lines of her slim, dark body stood in sharp contrast to the filthy, flat surfaces and straight lines surrounding her. "We are your hunger. We are your reason to fight."

"You killed the Beast yourself, by sharing," Kueur said. "We only consumed its corpse."

Max crouched, stared down, considered the bits of rubble and refuse littering the floor. He felt as if he had been gutted and nothing remained of him except for a dry husk drifting on a breeze.

"Our bond is much deeper than love or hate, Tonton." Alioune walked to him, put her hand on his shoulder. "We belong to one another. There is only us. You felt what we are like, what we do. How can anything else be important? How can anything else matter?"

Her pubic hair brushed against his cheek. The smell of her filled his lungs. Her hand warmed his shoulder. He searched for some reaction in himself, a glimmer of feeling, but found none. He knew then that only when they were joined together in their singular act of love would he taste sensation again. Their sensation. As the conductor of their passion, he had no feeling left for himself. The twins could ignite his capacity to feel, but they would also consume it, allowing him to feel only after they had used his body and nerves and mind to fulfill themselves.

They were his Beast and his prey. And he, like the more fragile lovers they had taken on over the years, was the hunting ground on which they played.

"Sex, love, death, they are all the same, Tonton," Kueur said. "Pain, pleasure, what is the difference? Words. Little labels people put on the things they find to distract themselves from what is important." She sat up against the wall and spread her legs, opening her sex to him. "We are what is important, Tonton. The rest, they are the feast we consume."

Kueur's honey laughter rolled over Max as he looked away from her and met Alioune's razor-pit gaze. He broke off quickly and, sinking to his knees, hugged Alioune around her hips. Kueur came to them and embraced them both, and the pulse of their life beat in his ears.

In that moment, he was surprised to discover he had surrendered so much, surprised he had possessed so much to give. And he wondered at the hunger he would never feel again, the hunger for the love of Kueur and Alioune that had driven the Beast that was Max to its destruction.

"Time's catching up to me," Max said, slipping into a white terry-cloth robe on his way out of the Box. "I should stop trying to keep up with youngsters like you." A spasm seized his back muscles and his legs felt weak. He stopped and leaned against the marble counter separating the kitchen from the rest of the loft. Time, and the blur of lives he and the Beast had claimed, left him breathless.

Kueur Ba swept past him, a golden brown blur of lean muscle leaving a wake of laughter. She threw herself down on the black leather sofa facing the picture window looking out on the Hudson River and Jersey. "Tonton B`eb`ete, you know you can't help yourself. We're all bound by desire to our fates." She looked over the top of the couch at him, smile wide and almond eyes bright. A patina of sweat glistened on her skin. With a wink, she drew a large towel around her shoulders and lay back down on the couch. "You are not as old as you believe, nor we as young as you think," Kueur's twin sister Alioune added as she shut the door to the soundproof Box.