The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine

by Krissy Kneen

  At the bottom of the stairs a vast lake spread out along the edge of the path. He put the box back into his pocket and smoothed the pages of his notebook out onto his knee.

  Holly approached him cautiously. A few commuters walked briskly past behind him, scurrying through the icy morning to their various jobs. She approached the bench quietly, still uncertain about what she would do or say.

  She could hear the little beeping start up. The man reached into his pocket and pulled out his instrument once more and held it up to the sunlight. He spun around, pointing the box in her direction. His open mouth stretched into a silent cry of delight. She took a step forward, and the beeping increased in volume. She saw a single tear form at the corner of his eye.

  She was dressed as O might have dressed. Full skirt, naked underneath, shirt that could be easily pulled down to reveal her breasts. This was a scene from the book. She wondered if she was, indeed, willing to be swept away to Roissy to become a slave to sex. But surely this thin mysterious man was not the man to subdue her, even if it was her fate to become an O: a nothing, a conduit for pure submissive sexual power.

  ‘You came.’

  Holly was surprised by the tears, which were now running freely across his cheeks. He fell to one knee as if he were a knight pledging fealty to his queen.

  ‘My name is Nicholson,’ he told her. ‘Nick.’ His head was bowed as if he was waiting for a sword to tap his shoulder. He reached forward and took her hand. Holly felt a sharp electric shock when he touched her and smelled an acrid odour of burning.

  ‘I have been waiting for you all my life,’ he said.

  The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety

  by WILHELM REICH

  His tiny flat was nothing like the Chateau Roissy from Story of O. Holly had to climb into the bed. It was high-sided, like a coffin but one large enough for a group burial. The sheets were soft black cotton and a mountainous landscape of pillows sprawled across it. Such an elaborate bed, given the sparse decor. Nothing on the walls, one simple wooden desk with a chair settled neatly under it.

  Nick opened the drawer in the desk with a key hung on a chain around his neck. He emptied his pockets into it and then locked it tight again. He climbed awkwardly up and over the walls of the bed. This wasn’t the kind of bed a man like this should have. He sat uncomfortably in the corner of it, leaning against the softly padded side. He looked nervous, fragile. Exhausted, like someone who had travelled a great distance. A poet who’d just finished an epic love ballad, a conductor, drained after a performance of the Gothic Symphony. Holly had the sense that her presence in his apartment was somehow an imposition. She felt like a hunter with her prey finally in her sights. Sad for the inevitability of the kill, yet thrilling to a blood fever that couldn’t be contained.

  There was no kitchen in this little apartment, just a loaf of bread on the counter and an empty wine bottle in a basket in the corner. The room reeked of transience. Perhaps Nick was a tourist like her. Perhaps the bed was a relic of a past resident. Someone more confident, surely.

  ‘I would offer you tea,’ he said, gesturing towards the bare walls as if to apologise.

  ‘I don’t need tea,’ she said. ‘I should have brought some wine.’

  It was barely midday. Holly regretted mentioning alcohol at this time of the day, but a drink would surely make her braver. She had had sex exactly three times. Her last two attempts had ended badly. It seemed impossible now to throw herself so soon back into the joys and terrors of the act.

  ‘Do you mind if I close the curtains?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He stood tentatively and pulled a silk cord that hung down from one of the wooden posts. The curtains, squealing rustily on the metal bar above, drew slowly, enclosing them one side at a time. Soft red brocade. Finally a hint of the sexual, a little nod to Roissy. Holly felt the excitement rise in her loins as the gloom of his monk-like room was replaced by a soft darkness that might invite intimacy. When the curtains were completely closed, Nick unhooked a gold cord and pulled at it. Another curtain creaked across overhead. A roof for their tent of lust. She looked up and blinked through the gentle spill of dust. It seemed that Nick was unused to this kind of visitor. The tent had not been closed over for some time.

  There was a single light bulb attached to the head of the bed but despite the darkness Nick did not move to switch it on. Instead, perhaps emboldened by the womb-like enclosure, he shuffled across the bed, settling himself beside her, and reached gently to touch the back of her neck. His fingers were four points of warmth. They brushed her skin so lightly and yet hijacked her awareness completely, moving in tiny circles. Holly felt her skin goosebumping up as if to affirm the fragile connection. Her hairs stood on end. She felt them rush against his touch. Her whole being was concentrated on the back of her neck. The moment stretched out, intensifying, and when she felt like she could not take the tease of his fingers for one second longer he leaned over and kissed the soft skin under her ear. His lips were the barest caress of flesh to flesh, his breath escaping in a gentle puff, amplified in her ear, made into a storm that made her shiver.

  ‘Nick,’ she said, trying out the sound of his name. He moved his fingers to the side of her throat, testing the vibrations of his name with his fingertips. ‘Nick. There is something I probably should tell you.’

  ‘Tell me after,’ he whispered, and then he murmured her name, aiming the breath of the word right into her ear. She was filled with the sound of herself, stretched tight as a balloon. Penetration, surely, would burst her. She reached out with her fingertips to find his prick, but he twisted away from her and her fingers fell instead on his clothed hip.

  He leaned closer then and the soft touch of his fingers tracked down across her neck past the nape of her throat to trace the gentle swell of her breast. Her nipple responded, reaching up like a single stretched finger to touch. The tiniest movement of his hand seemed huge in the close dark.

  ‘Nick, I really have to tell you something. I have to tell you before we go any further.’

  When O was first taken to Roissy she was told to remove her underwear. She experienced the feel of the leather couch on her bare skin, a dramatic concentration of sensation. Holly, deciding to follow in O’s footsteps, was not wearing any knickers. The smell of her was intense, the smell of desire. The smell of sex, with that faint overlay of electrical burning. She felt Nick breathe in. His face still pressed to her ear, his intake of breath seemed to empty her chest completely. When she breathed in he exhaled and she was filled with the scent of his desire too. Barely touching, as they were, they were so intimately and irretrievably connected.

  ‘I want you to look. Down. Between my legs,’ she said, and Nick took these words in as a sponge would suck liquid. He looked down at her crotch and she pulled her dress up, revealing the glint of her kindled desire. His mouth opened as if he had just been let into a room full of gold. His eyes sparkled, greedy. He reached down with his finger and touched the glowing blue ember of her sex. He pressed his finger to his brow, leaving a faint sparkling print in the centre of his head.

  ‘You are marvellous,’ he said. ‘Truly awesome.’

  Relief rushed out of her and joy surged in. Holly felt herself swelling up with
it. He wasn’t afraid of her. Nick had seen her secret and he wasn’t afraid. She moved her hand across his hip, caressing. Coming to rest on the soft swelling at his groin.

  ‘I can’t believe you still want to have sex with me.’ The swelling began to firm up under her fingers.

  ‘I have been searching for you since I was seven years old. I have been ready to have you since I was thirteen. I am desperate for you now.’

  ‘I can see that.’ Holly unzipped him. His cock leaped out, straining the soft cotton of his underwear. She circled it with her fingers, found the vent in the fabric and pushed his underwear back, assisting his penis to spring free. She pressed her hand to her own slit, slippery as split fruit, bright as a star. She dipped her fingers inside and the shimmering wetness soaked her fingers.

  When she touched his cock again her fingers slipped down along the shaft, painting it with luminous blue streaks like the Milky Way. His groan felt like a shriek, his lips pressed to her earlobe. It was as if he had bitten her, the shock of his mouth, the terrible amplification of his breath. He pressed his hand to her breast and her nerve endings leaped.

  She inched forward in the dark guided only by the light of her cunt until her breasts rubbed at his chest, sharp through the layers of interfering clothes.

  She leaned forward and he leaned back, she kissed him and their breath became twinned, the air passing back and forth between them, the pace increasing as their excitement grew. They were poised at the point of collapse, his cock straining towards the lodestar of her cunt as if it were true north. The wet trembling drop at the edge of her labia quivered above the head of his cock.

  ‘I have been waiting for you for so long, I had begun to wonder if you truly existed.’

  ‘I’m here,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m flesh,’ she said. And plunged her hips down onto him. He tipped back. His head thudded into a hillock of pillows as his hips thrust up into her.

  Her body spread wide above him, her cunt spilled white hot onto his cock, the lips pierced and parted, the guttural sound in her throat no more or less than the groaning creak of flesh on flesh. Like a boat she lifted and settled, bobbing on a gentle tide. She reached down to touch herself. Felt the hot swell of her clitoris, felt his thick cock and her own stretched lips around it. She knew she should wait but she couldn’t. Holly flicked her finger over the seat of her passion. She felt the crest of a wave coming, looked up in the lightless air and saw it approaching, a wall of pleasure, huge and ineluctable, a bright wall of water. She could not run from it. There was nowhere inside herself or on the bed to escape. She began to scream or perhaps to whimper before the blaze of water hit her and the sound of the climax was consumed in a sudden glare of blinding blue light. Not just her light, although her cunt flooded with juices bright as a falling star. But there was something else, a flash of something outside herself. She opened her eyes, startled, excited. The light at the head of the bed was blazing brightly. It was brief and it was gone and she was here now, limp and wrung out on the hard prong of him, defeated and triumphant all at once, covered in sweat that she did not realise she had shed, thudding with the last blood-filled pulsations of an orgasm she barely knew she had had. Still clothed and yet slippery shiny from crotch to knee with her own emissions.

  Nick seemed lit up even though the light from the bulb had disappeared. It was all darkness and yet he pulled her down and hugged her tightly and his own face was as wet as if it had been buried in her sex. Perhaps he had been crying again. She kissed his damp cheeks and they were salty with the receding memory of some oceanic upset.

  ‘The light came on,’ he said, his voice choked with emotion and, yes, it seemed clear to her now, tears.

  Holly nodded. ‘I don’t know why that happens. I always start to glow when I get turned on. It’s a bit embarrassing, to be honest.’

  ‘No no, not your light, the light. The light came on.’ He said again. He pointed to the bulb at the head of the bed. ‘Holly, you are the one.’ Nick scrambled up and over the high edge of the bed. He stood naked, staring over the edge of it, his eyes wide with awe. ‘My god. Not Orgone Man at all. You are Orgone Woman.’

  He dressed; offered her water straight from the tap and she took it, sipping carefully. She really felt like wine. With the curtains open again she could see the light bulb at the head of the bed. No fixture, just a naked glass sphere wired roughly to the high edge of the bed. Instead of a cord there was a funnel of flexible plastic tucked onto the base of the bulb and the tube disappeared into the wall of the bed.

  ‘But where’s the electricity? There’s no plug, no power point,’ she said, remembering the sudden external flare at the peak of orgasm. ‘How did it light up when there’s no electricity?’

  Nick grinned. His eyes glistened. He seemed agitated, full of nervous energy, a kind of excitement that was infectious. Holly felt her heart racing as if she too was on the edge of some life-changing discovery.

  ‘The light came on because it is powered by the bed, and the bed was powered by us. You, actually, your energy.’

  He ran his hand along the wooden surface and then knocked gently. The box sounded solid enough.

  ‘This is put together with layers of synthetic materials. The wood attracts the energy but then we have zinc, which repels it, wool, which attracts it once more and then more zinc. The orgone is gathered up. It is accumulated. That is why this box is called an orgone energy accumulator.’ Nick tapped the side of the contraption as if to prove its solidity. ‘The only thing missing is a proper lid. But can you imagine if I brought girls back here and then pulled a lid shut on top of us? They’d call the authorities. At the very least they’d talk about it to their friends and the authorities would get wind of it anyway.’

  He was pacing now. Holly sat as calmly as she could in the only chair in the room, her elbows balanced on the cold surface of the desk.

  ‘I don’t really understand what you’re talking about,’ she said.

  ‘You saw the light come on?’

  ‘I suppose so. I saw a flash of something.’

  ‘The light in your vulva,’ he pointed, ‘that blue light, it is pure orgone energy. There was enough orgone generated by your pleasure, Holly, to power that light. A fraction of a second, but we both saw it. I have brought girls back here…Not as often as I would have liked, but there have been a few.’

  She watched as he frowned, thinking back over his conquests, judging his prowess harshly.

  He shook his head and shrugged. ‘You, Holly, are the only one who has generated any orgone at all. You are unique among women. You are the source! I want to buy a bottle of champagne to share with you, a celebration. But I am afraid that if I leave you for a second you would disappear and your powers would be lost to me.’

  Holly stared at him calmly. It excited her to see the effect she could have on a man. She felt a smile break open. ‘If I were O and you were René, you would find ways to keep me here.’

  She stood and walked across to the bed. Rattled the frame, which seemed solid enough to take any binding. Tapped on the wooden sides and heard the dull thud of all those layers.

  She hoisted herself over the edge of the bed and bounced gently on the soft mattress. ‘This really is th
e most extraordinary bed.’

  ‘Accumulator. Orgone energy accumulator. Wilhelm Reich outlined it all but the authorities…The FDA burned all his books so that we wouldn’t know the secret.’ His animated features became handsome with his growing excitement. ‘I have a single volume of the lost notebooks, my father gave it to me. I am reconstructing the designs from scratch, testing them, as any scientist must test their theories.’

  Holly ran her hand along the thick wooden sides. ‘And you think this orgone is the reason my cunt glows?’

  ‘Of course. Orgone is everywhere but it is over-abundant in that light in your sexual parts. It is exactly the same as the stuff that makes your pleasure so intense. Did you imagine that bucking and pulsing and gushing in your body was an accident? Orgone is the single most powerful force in the universe.’

  ‘I powered your light?’

  ‘That was you. The intensity of the orgone channelled through your pleasure. Don’t you see? You are the one I have been looking for all these years. I smelled it the moment I saw you. My father used to talk about a superhero, Orgone Man, capable of focusing and gathering energy. I wish my father was alive now. He would be astounded to know that his Orgone Man is actually an orgone woman.’