And there was always so much silence when bodies fell still, unable to give or take any more. It always felt as if the world had just ended, and they all lay naked and wet in the ashes.
“You’re ravenous,” Daniel told her. Blond, well-toned, he lay in a sweaty half-curl near her side, reaching over with one finger to probe beneath the edge of the black corset. Jill and Mitch lay in their own raw exhausted tangle a few feet over. “I’d like to see you again.”
“You might,” she said. “I’m no stranger here.”
“So I understand.” Grinning, he elbowed closer, crawling like a soldier. “How long’ve you been coming here? Double entendre not intended.”
“Look, you don’t have to engage me in conversation, all right? I fucked you tonight, and I’ll probably fuck you again.”
He rolled onto his back, relaxed, unfazed. “I wish I was nineteen again,” he sighed. “I could come five times a night when I was nineteen. But the sad thing was, I was alone for most of it.” He peeked at her, hopeful. “Are you feeling pity for me yet?”
He was so obvious, and knew it, that Elle had to laugh in spite of herself. “You late bloomers, you’re so maudlin when you start dwelling on what you’ve missed.”
Daniel said he was valiantly fighting the pull of gravity, here on the downhill side of the sexual bell curve. Confessed he was thirty-five — coincidence, or karma? She was closing fast on thirty-five herself, but then weren’t they all, for the first or second or tenth time.
She let him talk, and he was pleasant enough without seeming possessive. A few of the guys in these places, in spite of their laissez-faire posturing, they nailed you once and it was as though they’d staked a claim. So she let Daniel talk, but already her thoughts were drifting ahead. Tomorrow night, or the night after … future nights at other clubs, wondering where she’d be, what she’d be doing, who she’d be doing it with.
Maybe at the Purgatorium, with the rings through her hardened nipples and chained to a leather belt while some hooded dominatrix violated her with a strap-on.
Or maybe with the Jezebel Society, where gangbangs were a specialty, and where, on knees and elbows, she could be triply penetrated while massaging a cock in each hand.
Or elsewhere, with company even more exotic, but always sure to wring more from the experience than her partners. It was a kind of challenge, something bone-deep and primal.
And she wondered if, wherever she’d be, after she was sated and lay breathing heavily, she’d once more start dreaming of the next time before the sticky fluids of that night had even dried.
Could you even completely look forward to that next time when you could so easily forecast your pose by its end? Even in private clubs like the Inner Circle, the Purgatorium, the rest, sex could get as routine and predictable as some fat suburban couple’s half-hearted hump scheduled for the second Tuesday of each month. It was only a matter of degree.
And she wondered if considering these things, in a room with three other nude people whose potent sexuality had just soaked the walls, meant that she was bored.
Figuring that, in the asking, she already had her answer.
*
A few days later Ellen came back from lunch, took one look behind the counter, and wondered if one of Jude’s facial nips and tucks had begun to unravel. The woman’s forehead appeared ready to burst veins.
“He’s … upstairs,” she said through clenched teeth.
Ellen frowned. “Who? Who is?”
“That … that creature.” Jude seemed to need the counter to remain vertical. “From the alley.”
“Ohhh,” she said, and frowned again, more thoughtfully. “Was everything in place when he came in?”
Jude’s eyes widened, horrified at the very notion she’d have glanced down to check. “You see, you see — it’s types like his that make me think Affirmative Action is a terrible imposition on the rest of us. No telling what he’s doing up there.”
Ellen started for the stairs. “Maybe he needs help reaching a book. We don’t have elevators for the shelves, did you ever think of that?”
“You’re going up?” Jude clutched the counter, all bony white knuckles and maroon nails. “What if he has his willy out again?”
Over her shoulder, Ellen smiled with reassurance. “Then I’ll suggest he find a more appropriate bookmark.”
This befuddled poor Jude. Upstairs, Ellen began to check the aisles, the shelves older and taller and dustier up here, home to the store’s used and vintage and rare books. She’d always accorded a greater respect to the browsers who spent their time here.
She found him in fiction, as sturdy and vital in his chair as if it were an outgrowth of him. He sat engrossed in a book, not so deeply that he didn’t notice her approach. His face lit with a self-effacing smile, and she tried not to recall how it had looked the other day, self-pleasured and unashamed. And so powerfully attuned to his body. Not one in a thousand could get past his lack of discretion, and she supposed that finding this a simple matter made her the odd one as well.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
He pointed at the second shelf from the top. “Even chimps use tools to get what they can’t reach, but…” He spread his empty hands. “Eleventh from the left, if you wouldn’t mind.”
She stretched, pulled it down, looked over the cover before handing it to him. “De Sade, Justine. Not too much call for that.”
His grin was apologetic, wholly engaging, set in a weathered ruddy face. A shock of hair tumbled over his forehead. “Loaned mine out and never got it back. Home feels incomplete without it.”
Ellen smiled back. Or maybe it was Elle this time. Elle in daylight, rattling at her prison. “Myself, I’m partial to 120 Days of Sodom.”
He seemed merely delighted, not surprised. “I’m sure we each have our reasons.” Vigorously, he patted Justine’s cover as if it were the shoulder of an old friend. “I appreciate his philosophy here. The utter lack of reward for living a virtuous life. And every one of these sick sons of bitches in here states his reasons for acting like a depraved monster with such eloquence it makes you want to cry.” He shrugged. “But obviously you know that.”
Her grin turned mildly wicked, and she checked to make sure they were alone. “You want to know what I found most eloquent? When Justine’s captured by the bandit, and de Sade gets across the idea of a blowjob without using one concrete anatomical reference. I loved that.”
And thus it went on, impromptu critiques and appreciation of the works of a man who’d scandalized a continent, whose debauches were legend, whose name itself had enriched the vocabulary of the erotic. Time got away from them, and once she started to laugh as she imagined what by now must have been going through Jude’s mind downstairs. The poor woman frantic, calling paramedics, priests, a SWAT team. She should go quell Jude’s fears.
“I’m enjoying this,” he said at last. “I really am. You know the way you can just tell, sometimes, that you can talk to someone and let a half-hour go by and you won’t even know it? I knew you’d be someone I could talk to.”
“And how’s that?” She had to know. He was either far more intuitive than Jude, and most of the day-herd who muddled through downstairs, or she’d let something of night inside shine free.
“You didn’t look away on the street the other afternoon. You held your ground … and watched.” His eye contact was bold, candid.
She stood there, tongue-tip wedged between her front teeth, clothed yet her garments may as well have been sheer. Caught. She was caught. Knowing it had to come someday, but always taking for granted the person would at least have legs. Caught.