The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes

by Linda Alvarez

The wish girls left. They didn’t disappear; they just went out the front door. Maybe they’d get to be real people now, and make choices of their own. He didn’t know.

  Max spent the rest of the evening filling heavy black garbage bags with sex toys, bondage gear and lingerie, then tossed them all into the big dumpster behind the apartment complex. The garbage men were sure to get a kick out of that. Maybe he and Kira would start playing with toys eventually, but he’d buy new ones for that. Even Max’s vestigial sense of gentlemanly conduct told him that was the appropriate thing to do.

  Two days later, Max sat on his couch, and Kira knelt on a pillow between his feet, sucking his cock. He looked down at her closed eyes, the expression of tender concentration on her face, and he was overwhelmed with happiness. She was doing this because she wanted to, because she liked him, because she wanted to make him feel good. And because she knew he’d return the favour.

  Kira’s teeth brushed against Max’s cock. It hurt, a little. He’d never been happier.

  The Spark

  Cecilia Tan

  Glory picked a bad moment to check out on us. We were booked on Autarie- – one of those self-contained orbital casino resorts with nowhere to go but around and no easy way on or off – for six simulcasts. Lots of money, and every “night” a different time zone with no travelling or loading out for us. Sweet deal. Or it would have been if not for Glory’s sudden departure the night after the first show.

  I suppose it was a trick of fate that I was the one who found her and not one of the others. There she was, stretched out on the coffee table in her suite as if it were a mortuary slab, her fingers cold and stiff around the neck of her trademark vintage Walker original. Her skin was all pastel shades of violet and blue, except where her black lipstick and eyeliner were smeared, as if at the end she’d shed a few tears for herself. Most don’t go so gracefully – history is full of those who went on wild rampages, died in flaming vehicles, collapsed of overdose in public places, or choked on their own vomit. But she just lay there, beautiful and dead.

  She’d lost the Spark, and the grief I felt seeing her there, alone, cut off from us for ever, was at least partly for myself. I knew someday I might go to a similar fate. And with her gone . . . my day seemed like it might be closer at hand than before. My mind was starting to fill up with details: our unfulfilled six album contract with Warner-Sony, tour cancellation . . . and then some tears came and blurred away all the business thoughts for a moment.

  Calla was the next to come in. She’d heard me sob and come to see what was up – she probably thought Glory, in one of her mercurial moods, said something horrible to me, made me cry. But then she saw what lay on the table and she took me by the hands. “Oh, Luna, Luna, I’m so sorry,” she said and it took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. My lover – in name if not in function recently – was dead.

  I coughed a little but the tears had dried up already. “Shit, Calla, what are we going to do now?”

  She leaned against the sloping, non-rectilinear wall and rested her eyes on her hand. She looked remarkably undebauched given last night’s events. Her blonde hair gelled into a neat twist and her face fresh and make-up free above her resort-issue bathrobe. She was a double-x realgirl, like me, her eyelashes blonde in the artifi cial light. “Did you guys have a fight?”

  “Yesterday. Twice. You were there.”

  It had started out a bitch session and ended up a screaming fit for Glory. She’d been going on and on about how a gig on Autarie was the ultimate ignominy. I’d tried to point out, as our booking agent had, that doing orbital simulcast was economical and easier on us. “But Autarie!” she’d screamed. “It’s like fucking Vegas!” At the time I’d assumed that “Vegaz”, as she said it in her Saturnál accent, was an ex-lover of hers who’d sucked in bed. Now little pieces of rock and roll history bounced through my moon-raised brain and I recalled an old interview I’d read with Mick Jagger – or was it Sting? – saying he’d never play Las Vegas and the meaning came clear: home of the has-beens. No one had been listening to her but me. Once she would start to go hysterical the others would tune her out. I suppose I only listened because I was the one trying to argue with her. “Oh, fuck,” I murmured. Even if I had caught the reference, though, what good would it have done? I couldn’t have stopped her, could I? She was gone.

  Calla went over and knelt in front of the body. “It looks like she just . . . lay down and died.”

  “She did.”

  “What do you mean?” Calla had been with us a year, a great bass player, but neither Glory nor I had been sure she would stick with us. So she didn’t know about the Spark.

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  “Well, we have to get a doctor in here, find out what happened . . .”

  I held up my hand. “No, no doctors.”

  “But Luna . . .”

  “Not yet.” My mind tried to come up to speed, but last night’s party and the shock of seeing her there like that kept me partly paralysed. “Huiper. First call Huiper and figure out what to say about it.”

  I put my head against the doorjamb and sighed. It was the end of Glory, the end of the Seekers in all likelihood, possibly the end of all our careers. Replacing a drummer or back-up singer is one thing, replacing the lead singer and founder is another thing entirely. I felt cold and lonely and sick and I sank down there in the doorway and almost wished it could have been me instead of her.

  Basil almost tripped over me when she came in waving hard copy of a review of last night’s show. I liked Basil, even if I wasn’t sure if she was a double-x or some form of genderqueer. Those things never mattered to the omnivorous Glory. For me it was good enough that she used a female pronoun. She was about to begin crowing the good bits of it aloud when she caught sight of the spectacle on the table. I couldn’t bear to watch her face crumble into grief. So, I looked at my own whiter-than-white hands, and at Glory’s, still streaked with the indigo and violet of last night’s stage make-up, clamped tight around the neck of the guitar. I supposed that the Walker was mine now, but I couldn’t bring myself to prise it out of her grip.

  I heard my own voice. “We can’t have her photographed like this, like some funeral or something.” Oh Glory, couldn’t you have lived up to your name and gone out with a blaze of it?

  Calla did not turn around, but said in a weak voice “Was she . . . with anyone last night?”

  I looked up at the two of them. Basil was taking it well. If anything she looked a little pissed off, and when she heard Calla’s question she stiffened. Young and spurned. “Not me. She took off during the party and didn’t come back . . .”

  Until after we were all unconscious. Poor Basil, the newest of us, she’d only been playing with the Seekers for about six months and Glory had been leading her on for most of it. She cursed under her breath. Glory had liked her youthful fire, her defi ance. Perhaps she saw a little of herself there, or perhaps someone else she knew. She would have been a good vessel for the Spark, too, but Glory had held back passing it on. “Baz, could you get Huiper on a secure channel?”

  “I’ll try,” she said, and went into her room to boot up a terminal.

  Calla had left the room, too, leaving me alone with my dead lover. Ex-lover in any case now, I supposed. Although neither of us had taken up with someone else – we hadn’t “broken up” – we hadn’t had sex in a long time. A year, maybe two. And the fights recently had been worse, hadn’t they? I’d wanted to believe that Glory’s irritability, irrationality, and general out-of-control bitchiness was just a periodic magnifi cation of her lead-singer prima donna persona, just a phase that we’d work out. But all along she had been suffering. The burning out. The end.

  And I hadn’t even felt it. Could I have helped her? Saved her? She’d been so distant from me, I doubted it. When the Spark is lost, there’s no getting it back.

  The first one I’d ever seen was just a month after I’d joined the group. Glory’s ex-lover Saffron had split
off to form his own band, but he came back once in a while to jam with us. His band wasn’t doing very well. The critics were lambasting them for repeating the formulas of the past, and even I thought his music was kind of dull. He went out with a super cocktail of drugs and stims. Repeating the formulas of the past, as it were. We found him with the injector still in his hand at one of Glory’s penthouse suites on Triton.

  That one was easy for me to handle. I didn’t know him that well, I was in love with Glory, and I was so young and new to the Spark that I didn’t really connect Saffron’s fate with mine. Huiper, our publicist, did a pretty good job of spreading the dirt around about the wild rock and roll boy who didn’t know when to stop, and even made him into a kind of small-time martyr among his few but loyal fans. That was Huiper’s job. But what would he say when he heard about Glory?

  He would, of course, look for an angle that would generate maximum publicity and make Glory into a posthumous legend. That wouldn’t be hard since she was already a legend when she was alive. We all were. It was all a part of the Spark, the magic. We were stars in the celebrity skies of the whole solar system. But Huiper didn’t know why or how she really died and this time I didn’t have a story to feed him. Mysterious cause of death unknown is what the headlines would have to say. The powers that be took her too soon, they’d lament. Or, maybe she died of a broken heart? Had our love really died? I shuddered at the thought. Huiper wouldn’t implicate me in such a thing, would he? A sordid affair of lost love and betrayal?

  The first fight we’d had yesterday was at sound check. The kind of spat that turned the mills of tabloid rumour, and all too typical. One of those fights that started as a bad mood, became a disagreement, then a full-fl edged argument, and finally that hands and skin and bodies roughness that comes all too naturally with those who have been lovers. I had been tuning my guitar while she picked at the catered food backstage. Artifi cial gravity always screwed up her stomach for a couple of days but I didn’t see as how that was any excuse for her to treat us all like shit. So when she brushed past me and bumped my tuner I griped at her loud enough for everyone to hear. I would have, stupidly, made even more of it if Maynard, our stage manager, hadn’t called for everyone to take places for sound check.

  Glory was the first one out of the room but the last one to climb on to the riser and sling her guitar over her shoulder. We were only on the second verse of “Tears” when Glory called for a halt. “I need this monitor up, less rhythm guitar.”

  I tried to talk into my mic but it was off. I waved at Maynard to up it and everyone heard me say “. . . can’t do that. I won’t be able to hear myself and you’ll get off strum and you know it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She put her hands on her hips, the guitar hanging loose over her middle. Even under the house lights her skin had some hints of the lavender and blue that were her trademark colours. “You’re so loud I can’t hear the backing vox.”

  “Glory,” I said, walking closer to her so she could hear my unamplifi ed voice. “That’s what you said at our warm-up gig on Metassus and your solo was completely off . . .”

  I saw her jaw clench as she made a little starting/stamping motion. “You deaf wretch!” She took a step towards me, swinging the Walker off her shoulder and brandishing it in one hand like a sceptre. “You wouldn’t know a good solo if it split your skull.” Her voice had gone shrill and Maynard modulated it through the PA to save all our ears. “Which one of us is the lead here?” And then she broke down into hurling epithets at me in Saturnál.

  I didn’t hear what she called me; I started to shout back, “Fuck you, you egoistic bitch.” But all I got out was “Fuck . . .” and then I threw off my head-mic and put my guitar in its stand and started to stalk off the stage. I couldn’t be reduced to calling her names. I had to walk past her to the stairs and, as I did, she pushed me on the shoulder. My arm fl ailed back and connected with her cheek and then she was trying to grab me by the hair and strangle me and bite me all at the same time. Then the road crew, uniformly burly, uniformly imperturbable, were pulling us apart. She’d scratched my arm hard enough that bright crimson blood began to trickle down my skin, lurid on the paleness of flesh that never sees sunlight. And she said, “You ungrateful bitch! Without me you’d still be rotting on your ass in moondust! You’ll never be anything more than a second-rate fill-in back-up stringer!”

  I was gone before I heard any more – I didn’t need to. Fact is without her I’d never have been in this band or for that matter ever made it away from suburban Luna. Fact is I mostly believed the rest, too. Sometimes she told me I only had that one good song in me, and sometimes I believed her. We never recorded another one of mine after “Tears”, that’s true. Huiper, the paparazzi, the fan sites, were always making up stories about us. Sometimes it was hard even for me to tell truth from fiction. The legend they tell about me is that I sneaked backstage at a Seekers show on Luna with a demo in my back pocket, and, when she heard it, she fell in love with me. In some versions she is heartbroken over Saffron leaving, and that’s why she swore off men, and fell for me.

  The true story is not like that. First of all, Glory’s heart never broke. And second, although I did go to that show on Luna, it hadn’t been my intention to meet her. My own band had just broken up from the force of apathy and neglect. I’d been ready to sell the guitar, maybe move to Earth where my parents wouldn’t have any more say about me, but I decided to spend at least one night forgetting all of that, suped up and dancing like a banshee at their show. It was at the Dome, huge crowd, thousands at the biggest gathering space on all of Luna. It was being simulcast all over Earth, a big event. I was in the general admission section down front where I elbowed my way to the stage. I can only speculate that she saw me then, and liked what she saw. Halfway through their final encore one of their road crew pulled me out of the crush at the front, over the security wall into the tech pit. I couldn’t make out what he was saying but I got the vague idea that I wasn’t being busted but invited to some kind of party. There were some others there, dressed like fans, looking lost too, so I figured we were all either equally safe or equally endangered.

  It was a party. A tremendous party at the Lunar Grand Hotel. We were all a part of the entourage and never before had I felt so welcome wearing ragged black denim in the retro-look of the times. We were ushered into a grand ballroom where food and swirling lights were already in attendance as if the inanimate party had already begun. And at some point I recall being near her, Glory, and wanting to tell her something about how much I had enjoyed the show. Maybe I did tell her. Anyway, she led me to the true party within the party, an inner sanctum penthouse where the band members and all manner of miscellaneous wildlings were lounging, boozing, orgying and so on. And eventually she pulled me even deeper into things, and we were in her own room, and in her own bed, in the dimness, as I traced the curve of her stomach by the shine of the glitter there and she breathed hot on my sex and we did not sleep until well into the next morning.

  I only remember that night in snatches now. I remember lavender lips and the way she closed her eyes when she kissed me. I kept mine open to watch the way her mouth moved, then closed them as her hand sought deep into my jeans. I remember her left hand seeking between my legs and I imagine that I even felt the callouses on her fingers as she dragged them over my slick clit. I remember being on my back on the expanse of her bed, her body pressing mine down as her tongue hunted in the forest of my bush and I stared at the cleft of her ass, her cunt, pistoning above my face until I reached out with my own tongue. I remember what seemed like hours with my legs over the edge of the bed, and her quick fingers playing over my clit again and again, and sinking her hand into me, first the cone of her fingers, and eventually her entire hand, balled inside. There was probably more, but it has been obliterated by time and drugs and overlayers of bad memories.

  It wasn’t until after we woke up that afternoon that she began to ask me about myself. Or maybe I shou
ld say tell me about myself. I played guitar, right? And I sang. And I wrote about what was black and dripping in the human soul. “How do you know?” I must have asked, my jaw fl apping as she ran her fingers through my straight black hair and remarked how even my lips were moon-dust pale. And she started calling me Luna right then. She hinted that she was very good at reading people through sex, though of course now I know it could have been the Spark.

  Then she told me she wanted to hear me play. She forced the Walker into my hands and made me play. I was too nervous to sing, but I let my fingers go by themselves, through riffs I’d fought with Derel over before we’d both begun to act like we didn’t care about the band or each other. And at the end of the song, the one that would later become “Tears” when I wrote words for it, she did have tears in her eyes and she told me she knew just how it was with me.

  There is nothing like making love with your lover’s tears wetting your face. She kissed me then, and laid the guitar aside, and pushed me back on the bed, and it is not like we were wearing clothes anyway. She dragged her cunt along my thigh, hot and slick like her tear-stained face, until she came, and then I flipped her over and fucked her with my fingers and ate her at the same time, until I don’t know how many times she came, piling orgasm on top of orgasm, until she turned the tables and did the same back to me.

  That was probably the last time I had been in charge at any time in our relationship. Because when her fingers were still inside me, after my third or fourth orgasm, as she sank her other hand into my hair, she asked me if I was interested in leaving Luna, and joining her as rhythm guitarist.

  That’s the real story of how I got whisked away. Because of course I said yes. Had she already passed the Spark to me? I think she had. I think it happened when she fucked me right after I had played. What would have happened if I had said no? Would the Spark have died, and me with it? I just didn’t know. There was too much we didn’t know. I know that through the fire and heat of music and sex and losing ourselves in both she passed it to me, but even ten years later, I knew very little more than that.