Since they seemed to be going in pairs, Evelyn cleared her throat to remind them it was her turn. Of course sex is exclusion when you have to wait in line. Her fantasy had been about something beyond waiting your turn.
Hal raised his hands to her shoulders. “You’re tense,” he said, with a tone of surprise.
“Yes,” Evelyn agreed, thinking, Who wouldn’t be after watching your boyfriend make it with your lover right in front of you. But then she remembered a former self, who would have wanted this experience. Perhaps what was wrong with this scene was her own reluctance.
She let Hal rub her shoulders while she lay on her back with her head in his lap, the Herald limp beneath her cheek. Great, she thought. My turn and he’s dead.
But that was exactly the problem: this wasn’t supposed to be about turns, and it was up to her to change the action. With one foot she nudged Rebecca, who had picked up the camera. “No pictures,” she whispered.
Rebecca looked puzzled.
“I want the three of us together,” said Evelyn.
“A picture of the three of us?”
“No, the real three.”
Her mind moved quickly. Intercourse wouldn’t do because clearly that would only work for two. Hal’s hands moved to her breasts, fingers circling the nipples until they hardened, helped by Evelyn’s own remembrance of Rebecca’s ass, whipped pink and glowing. She rubbed her foot on Rebecca’s hand until Rebecca finally bent her head to Evelyn’s clit, moving her jewel tongue over and around it.
“Turn around,” Evelyn whispered. “I want to see if your ass is still pink.”
“It can’t still be.” Rebecca laughed as she turned and straddled Evelyn, never taking her tongue away.
Evelyn reached a hand to Rebecca’s ass, stroking one cheek, then the other, enjoying the smooth, loose texture like a pudding, like a risen soufflé, looking almost like something rich she could plunge her hands into, except here she couldn’t because flesh was resistant; unlike baked concoctions of milk and egg, it was alive. She put a finger in Rebecca’s creamy cunt, then two, then three, pressing her thumb to the button of the clit. Rebecca’s tongue froze, the jewelled frog resting on Evelyn’s own swollen gem for a moment before resuming its circumrotation.
Evelyn rolled her head over the Herald, who was gradually rising again. She lifted herself, reaching for Him with her free hand, but this was awkward and made her neck ache. She closed her thighs on Rebecca’s head.
“Rearrangement!” she called. With three people someone had to give orders.
Rebecca and Evelyn disentangled themselves and sat up. We need a map, thought Evelyn, and suddenly laughed out loud.
“What?” asked Hal, his hands empty at his side.
“All right, I’ll direct this shot. But no camera,” Evelyn warned Rebecca, who appeared to be reaching for it again. “Now, let’s get into, like, a circle.” She was improvising, but she didn’t want them to suspect because she understood that what she was enjoying most about this evening was the sense of being in charge. Under her control, nothing bad would dare happen. “A triangle in a circle. Rebecca, on your knees behind me. I love that frog so I wanted you to press it into my cunt. And I’ll be on my knees behind Hal. And then Hal . . .” She arranged him so that he lay on his side with one hand on Rebecca’s mound. Now Evelyn could take the Herald between her lips, but could give no more orders. She concentrated on sucking while simultaneously feeling Rebecca’s jewelled tongue nudge her clit-button, then dip to the buttonhole.
She was amazed this was working. Every once in awhile Rebecca would suck in her breath and pull out her tongue, which meant Hal was doing his part. She could hear them all breathing in unison, incredibly, unbelievably coordinated, three bodies moving as one. She wondered if this could happen with five people, six, an infinite orgy, the whole world coming at once in a giant circle, one orgasm that would end war, poverty, starvation; human meanness forever wiped from the globe.
Hal felt Evelyn’s mouth, firm and warm on the Herald she knew so well, and realized he’d never properly introduced him to Rebecca, not by name. The Herald hadn’t seemed to think that was important so neither did Hal, who was now at one with his Herald, moving slightly in Evelyn’s eager mouth. He pulled his finger from Rebecca’s cunt and sniffed its strange sweet scent, something like an oatmeal cookie, a yeasty vanilla. Evelyn, he reflected, was more smoky, earthy; he remembered sitting outside by his grill, smoking a salmon while thinking of her. He ran his fingers from Rebecca’s clit down to the opening and back, finally sliding in four fingers, moving them in and out while his palm pressed her mound in a rhythm to match the motion of Evelyn’s tongue, reflecting how the part and the whole of him were also pulsating rhythmically together.
Hal came first, the Herald squirting deep into Evelyn’s throat, and while she swallowed she felt a rush of warmth across her stomach as her own contractions began, exactly like Hal’s but with nothing coming out except the liquids already swimming between her thighs. Rebecca still kept up the rhythm of their former joint breathing until with one large exhalation, she stopped, collapsing on top of Evelyn, who waited for her to start breathing again.
“Well,” Evelyn said. She wanted to give linguistic form to their success, but she couldn’t get her tongue to move. She thought that she had, finally, learned something, though she wasn’t sure what. That three could be as good as a pair? That it was perfectly fair for Hal to have two orgasms because the first had been for the Herald, the other for him? She lay between Hal and Rebecca, holding their hands. “Reach over me and hold each other’s hands, too,” she said, adding, “please,” so as not to appear to be ordering them around. But when they did clasp hands, she realized this was a circle, not a triad. It was an enclosed, fluid shape, without angles, that could function with many, or just two. The circle drifted, the circle slept as one.
Hal woke by habit at dawn, warm enough on the pile of cushions because the gas heater still hissed across the room, but hungry, no, starving. The food in the oven was probably dried crispy; he didn’t even want to look. He extricated himself from the two women, and shook Evelyn’s shoulder.
“Wake up,” he whispered. “When do you have to be at school?”
She grunted as she sat up. “It’s morning?”
He searched around for their clothes and they quietly dressed. Evelyn put on jeans that were way too long because they were Rebecca’s, so she had to take them off again and feel around under the cushions until she found her own. Together they tiptoed out of the apartment.
At home in the shower as he soaped Evelyn’s breasts while she washed her hair, Hal asked, “So, was last night what you wanted?”
She let the water run over her head and cascade down her breasts, carrying sweat, soap and dirt. “Yes, it was,” she said. “I think we’re learning what to do with three, don’t you?”
“It worked,” he said. “I liked it. But this is nice, too.” He soaped her breasts again, rubbing his palms in circles over them.
She sighed as she placed herself under the flow of warm water again. “I’m glad it worked out, I just wouldn’t want to lose track of this, though. Us. The pair.”
“I don’t think we ever would,” he said. “It’s just nice to have variety, someone like Rebecca, a different taste. I’d like to have many different tastes to share with you.’
“What?” she said, stopping with her hand on the faucet. She felt a physical shift, as though they had momentarily uncoupled and changed directions before rotating together again.
“You seem surprised. But you were a different person, too, with Rebecca there, and that was really interesting. Maybe confusing at first, then just exciting.” He began to whistle, which Evelyn realized she’d never heard him do before.
“We have time for boiled eggs before I have to leave,” she said, turning off the faucet, and grabbing a towel off the rack.
Rebecca woke alone. She’d heard them leave earlier, as she’d known they would, but had preferred no
t to let them know she cared about being left alone, calmly rolling over and drifting back to sleep so they wouldn’t realize she’d been awake. Why fuss about it? She pulled a large cushion over herself, thinking of moving out, finding a bigger place, a better job, a lover who wanted only her.
“Enough of these screwed-up sex fiends,” she mumbled to her pillows, including herself in that description because she had to admit last night had been a charge, until they’d left her. If she had the energy, she’d climb up to her loft bed for the rest of the day, but no, she decided it would be better to clean out her cupboards, throw out that Chinese food, probably rancid by now, and invite Hal for lunch. The best part of last night, she decided, was when she’d had him in her mouth, shutting out Evelyn, even the mainframe of Hal, just his cock in her mouth, like everything she’d ever wanted.
She dialled their number, knowing Hal would be working at home alone by now. “Hi,” she said when he answered brusquely with a single “Yes?” no doubt expecting a call from work.
“I loved last night,” she said after a pause. He didn’t recognize her voice, after all that?
But then he said, “Rebecca!”
She listened to his breathing quicken. “I was just thinking, you guys left so suddenly I didn’t even wake up to say goodbye! Would you like to come over for lunch?”
“Well . . .” He sounded doubtful. “Evelyn’s at school, so I don’t think she could make it.”
“She used to come over for lunch all the time,” said Rebecca. “But I guess she’s having a busy day today.”
“Yeah,” said Hal after a pause that made Rebecca smile to herself. “She sometimes serves lunch at the Culinary Institute’s restaurant. We should go there, it’s a great deal.”
“And let student cooks practise on us?” Rebecca protested. “No, I’d rather have you to myself today.”
“We’d have to make reservations in advance anyhow, it’s really popular. So, OK, I’ll come over. Not for that old Chinese food, I hope.”
“Oh, God, no, I tossed that out. How about soup? Tomato soup with cheese? We called it Blushing Bunnies in Girl Scouts. Hardly gourmet, but good.”
“Blushing Bunnies?” he laughed. “Sounds as good as your blushing behind. I’ll be there.”
Well, well, she thought as she got ready, putting blush on her lips, her cheeks, and thinking about doing her ass, too, but that would probably just rub off on her clothes. She didn’t think he’d be ready for a nude greeting at the door, but maybe soon. She found two cans of tomato soup in her cupboard, and some rather hardened cheese in the fridge, but grated and melted it would taste fine. At least it wasn’t turning green.
When the bell rang at noon, she buzzed him in and greeted him at her open door with a kiss. “Back so soon?” she murmured, then, daring, slipped a hand over his cock, which rose beneath his jeans in a greeting of its own.
Take Me to Carnevale
Maxim Jakubowski
They had arranged to meet in a small café on the left hand side of Campo Santa Maria Formosa, right opposite the church and the hospital. It was February. It was Venice. A thin morning mist still shrouded the city, floating in from the lagoon, like a shimmering curtain of silk, half obscuring the old stones, the canals and the normal sounds of the floating city.
The connection had been made over the Internet.
He hadn’t even brought his laptop with him on this Venice trip, but the apartment they were staying in, which he had agreed to house-sit for friends travelling in India, had a computer in almost every room and a wi-fi connection and it had been, for both of them, almost too much of a temptation. Like allowing their fate to be decided by the vagaries of electronic availability.
Emma had been sitting on one of the sofas, half reading and half daydreaming, while he listened to music on his iPod. Right then the soundtrack by Nick Cave for The Assassination of Jesse James, he would remember later.
“I don’t know,” Emma had said, and he had known exactly the precise words she had uttered, just from reading her lips behind the threnody in his ears. It was something she often mumbled when things were not quite right.
He’d switched off the music and turned towards her. “What is it?”
The green of her eyes emerged from a sea of sadness. “You know . . .” she replied.
He knew. Oh yes, he knew. They were just going nowhere, and no earnest conversation could put them back on track. Even in Venice.
They had reached the city a week or so earlier, arriving at Marco Polo airport. To save money, they had not gone to the extravagance of taking a water taxi but, instead, the bus which took them across the Ponte Della Liberta to Piazzale Roma where they had caught a vaporetto down the Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge stop and, following the map they had been emailed by his friends, had somehow made their way on foot to the apartment, dodging the customary labyrinth of small bridges and lesser canals.
By now they had seen a multitude of churches, several handfuls of Titian and Canaletto paintings, eaten too much exquisite food to jade the best of palates and suffered an indigestion of baroque and classical architecture and the silences between them were growing longer.
From their bedroom window, they could see St Mark’s Place and the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile across a bend in the Canal. But the weather was cold and humid and the old building’s heating was stuttering at its best and they’d had to wear sweatshirts most of the time both inside and outside.
Maybe he should have chosen the Caribbean where they could have lazed naked on a beach and the warmth might have seeped into their mood. But Emma had never been to Venice and he had promised her he would take her anywhere she wanted, and she was aware that Roberto and Marta had offered them the apartment here should they ever wish to visit. Geoff had been to Venice several times before and, to be frank, had never been too much of a fan. In summer, the canals smelled and he disliked being just an anonymous part of the tourist crowds. In truth, he was not a great traveller.
Emma, on the other hand, was twenty years younger and always sported an enthusiasm for new places and experiences that he no longer could pretend he had. And he secretly knew he’d never possessed the joy or curiosity even when he had been younger himself.
Although it remained mostly unsaid they both knew to a different degree that their relationship was doomed. The age difference, the opposing temperaments, the cultural differences, the weight of his own past, her own ambitions in life. But love still bound them. His, full of despair that she might well happen to be the last great love of his life; hers, full of wonder that Geoff had somehow become the first great love in her life but with her mind, her imagination nagging her daily about the roads not taken and all the future roads that were still to be reached.
In an effort to combat the due date on their affair, they had come to Venice. In her mind, she had wanted to confront beauty. In his, it was just a melancholy vision of past literary memories of Thomas Mann, Byron, Dickens or Nic Roeg, which resonated in the greyness of his soul, the delusion that a trip to a new place could repair the stitches that were coming apart in their affair.
“Carnival begins tomorrow,” he had pointed out to her.
“Really?” she had exclaimed, her eyes widening in anticipation.
“Yes.”
“Will you buy me a mask?” Emma had asked.
“Of course.”
“And I will get one for you,” she suggested. “Something darkly romantic, that would just suit you.”
“Why not?”
“And we acquire them separately, and they remain secret until the first evening we go out and wear them. A surprise!”
“A lovely idea,” Geoff had readily agreed, the fleeting thought of Emma quite naked except for a delicate white Carnival mask shielding her face, and her green eyes peering through the disguise already warming his heart and suggestible loins.
His finger lingered on her knee, and he shuddered. The electricity between them still worked.
; “Can we go online and read all about the Carnival?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said. They made their way to the guest bedroom where the nearest connected computer stood on a rickety trestle table their host often used to mix his paints on.
Above it, by coincidence, hung slightly crooked on the wall by the window, was a gaudy painting of a woman in chains wearing only a black mask which obscured her eyes. Roberto’s latest BDSM variation.
They surfed freely for the next couple of hours, learning all about Carnevale and its origins, the stories of Casanova, the types of masks and their significance. One link led to another and yet another until an aimless stroke of the keyboard took them to the website where out of sheer prurient curiosity they arranged for the meeting in the bar on Campo Santa Maria Formosa the next day.
At first, Geoff had been somewhat hesitant, but Emma’s enthusiasm had swayed him.
“It will be an adventure,” she said.
“I suppose so,” he answered.
“Don’t be so old,” she added.
Geoff smiled wryly. She always knew how to silence him.
“Yes, it’s all because of Attila the Hun.”
They were sipping espressos at the back of the small café. The man was in his fifties and had silver hair and was explaining how the earliest inhabitants of Venice had been exiled all the way to the lagoon by the invasion of their native lands by foreign hordes.
“Fascinating,” Emma commented.
“And the bridge that connects us to the Italian mainland was only built by Mussolini under a century ago. Before that we were isolated and you could only reach the city by water.”
Geoff ordered another round from the hovering waitress. Mostly San Pellegrino mineral water; neither he nor Emma could cope with too much coffee at this time of day.
“It’s a party,” the man who called himself Jacopo said. “But we try to organize matters so that we adhere to all the old traditions of the Venice Carnevale, not the diluted versions that have sadly evolved over the years since Carnevale’s heyday.”
The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes Page 17
