– the woman of my mind-fucks, only she was wearing this oddly strapped and buckled and reinforced-from-without blackish-blue bodysuit, which covered her entire body, fingers and all. For a second, I was reminded of some of Gunter Blum’s more personal-looking shots from the mid- I990s, the studies of that bald-pussied woman trussed up in those leather and vinyl corsets and lace-up bustiers, her legs encased in semi-opaque black stockings, but Claudia’s outfit didn’t look so much erotic as… functional. Like every strap and supporting rod had a very specific purpose.
When she took a step toward me, I recalled another image, also from the last century – that film about the robot-man with no hands, only flicking, twitching scissors, the man whose body was his strange leather suit. Each movement she made was twitching, seemingly isolated from the next, and her legs didn’t so much as scissor but jerk forward, forward, as if the strings guiding her were welded by a palsied hand. Her arms didn’t quite move in synch with her legs, but randomly pulsed out, to the sides, and back again, as if yet another set of hands were guiding those strings…
But when I saw her pinched, deeply concentrated expression, I realized just who those guiding hands belonged to… or rather, to what. I’d heard of suits like hers, read about the late-twentieth-century limbs-only prototypes which plugged directly into the limbs themselves. But I’d never before seen a full-body walking suit in action.
As Claudia reached the outer edge of the carpeting on the other side of the pool and paused to make the transition between the nubby surface and the slicker tile (I saw something move on her “booted” feet, and suspected that some sort of grippers were now positioned on her soles), I actually spoke to her… aloud:
“How did it happen to you? Was it… a diving accident?”
Stopping, but only as if she’d planned to, she awkwardly brushed at the sides of her tight-shorn head, and replied, using her own voice (which was quite similar to her mind-one), “Yes… I was at a diving contest… the board had a flaw in it. It broke and I fell straight… down, hit the edge of the pool. All this around you is part of their insurance settlement, and most of the lawsuit. Paid for this suit, too. Luckily, I still could breathe, after being weaned off the respirator. Had good muscle tone, so the suit was my best option… but, it isn’t everything -”
As in, it couldn’t give her back physical sensation, couldn’t feel for her… not in the way another empath could. Making my way closer to the edge of the pool so that I was stepping on the colourful marine-inspired tiles, I asked, “Was that why you… so I could be your skin, your…”
“ ‘Pussy’? Not actually… I can mind-fuck with the best of them, even before this happened… but, theres something else -
Unable to speak what she so deeply felt, Claudia felt it to me:
The fast-moving rush of flat water coming close, closer to my forward-pointed fingers, then the enveloping, sensual closeness of the water churning over and around me, seeping into my private parts, rushing across my close-cropped head, like being buried in the juiciest quim, flowing with musky oils.
Despite the exactness of all the sensations she felt toward me, I realized by their fuzziness in duration that I was actually feeling only a memory of sensation, not her current state of being.
As realization crept over me, I thought to her: You… you can’t get into that pool any more, can you? Not while wearing that suit -
And when it’s off of me, I’m helpless. Can’t get in or out of the pool alone. My attendants, they come by twice a day, to wash me, but… they’re mundanes. Not even gay or bi. To them, I’m just a limp body studded with receptor plugs. I can’t even get into water, not all the way. The plugs by my neck are water-sensitive. Have to be sealed shut just to wash my hair. Can’t even… can’t even dip my feet into the pool. But I like to see it -
Coming closer to her, to the pool, I began to unbutton my blouse, then dropped it onto the decorated tiles at my feet, while slipping off my clogs one foot at a time. Freeing up all my senses, leaving myself as wide open as mentally/physically possible, I stepped lightly across the cool tiles, my feet splapping with each forward, clothes-shedding motion, until I was standing slightly shivering and naked at the edge of the pool, directly across its shimmering surface from Claudia. She’d been watching my every move, feeling each sensation, and her eyes were half-closed in something far greater than ecstasy – something almost serene in its blissful intensity.
When I slid feet-first into that warm pool, feeling my skin goosebump lightly as it entered that swirling moistness, Claudia slowly, laboriously, got down to her knees, then stretched out alongside the pool, to better watch me swim across toward her. With each stroke, I was myself and Claudia, so that the waters around me were now an ocean kissed by a ruby setting sun, then the waters of the lake beyond the house itself, then a bubbling jacuzzi filled with champagne froth…
Each of her water-memories were so vivid, so detailed, I realized how hard it had been for her to give up her beloved seas in favour of an almost independent, if totally arid, life. When I reached the opposite side of the pool and was close enough to Claudia to reach out and touch her smooth cheeks, her firm chin, I whispered, “You promised to tell me what your name meant. I was rewarded with a burble of only slightly ironic laughter, as she said, It actually means lame of all the crazy things… one of my nurses told me, in the hospital. Showed me the name in a book, just to prove it. Isn’t that delicious? As if my mother was a PC instead of a mere empathic…
Her laughter was a brittle thing that echoed off the waters and distant walls around us, until I clambered out of the pool and sat down spread-legged and dripping beside her, and asked, “Do the fingers… work? If you’ll do me, I’ll share it with you… I love the feel of leather on my pussy,” while pulling up the top of my mound with my fingers, so that my slit was a taut, vertical smile before her. And when those band-reinforced leatherette fingertips caressed my labia, my clit, both of our eyelids became suffused with blood, as we peered at each other through the capri-shells of our lowered lashes, and everything in the room grew crimson-bright…
And when she creakily bent down her head (the neck encased up to the bottom of her hairline in a collar-like device) to tongue me, I stretched out with one hand lazily dipping into the pool, the other caressing cool, slick tiles, so as to give her the most sensation possible, until I was so blown away by my climax that my entire universe was that wiggling, supple tongue poking deep in my most sensitive fissures and folds…
Later, much later that evening, I watched as her attendant undressed and bathed her in that same blue-green-black tiled room she’d shown to me during the mind-fuck… only she’d left off the special plastic contour chair upon which she had to sit while being bathed from that sloping tub. She’d merely told the woman doing the bathing that I was a visiting friend from her college days, to which the woman (older, coarser, and totally disinterested) merely grunted.