“Not for me,” I said, still gazing into the muscat.
She laughed. “But you have done it before, haven’t you?” She paused. “Sleep with a woman, I mean.”
“Longer ago than I can remember,” I replied. “I think it was the Pleistocene epoch.”
“Otherwise known as high school,” said Jesse.
“And even then,” I said, “it took a great deal of effort. I swear, I must be a Kinsey 6.”
“Not even a 5?” she asked. “For me?”
Jesse chuckled from the other side of the table. “Between the two of us,” he said, “I’d say it averages out to a 4, so you’re in luck.”
Kim pushed her plate away and stood up. “Come on,” she said, reaching for me. “It’s like riding a bike.”
Her hand hung delicately in the air, waiting. “I was never particularly good at that, either,” I said, finally taking hold of her fingers. They were long and full of energy, and I recalled Jesse telling me that she’d played piano as a child.
And then we were all standing, spooling away from the table and across the room, holding hands like a chain of children on their way to recess.
It was dark in the bedroom, but thankfully no one bothered to flick on the lamp. The light from the living room filtered in hazily, just enough to turn the blackness to grey.
Jesse stood behind me, hands on my shoulders, chest pressed against my back – warming me, keeping me safe. Kim, before me, had kicked off her shoes, and now the top of her head barely reached my collarbone. I marvelled at how “the most natural thing in the world” could happen between such mismatched creatures.
She stood a foot or so away and lifted her hands to caress my chest. The fabric of my shirt crinkled softly against my nipples and I let my head drop back, into the crook of Jesse’s neck as she worked on the buttons, as her fingers found their way inside.
Jesse nuzzled me. His tongue flicked teasingly against an ear lobe, and then his mouth moved down, kissing my neck, closing softly against the skin and sucking. I called it his vampire kiss, pulling life from my throat. It was usually all I needed to give in to him completely.
Kim’s hands, cold at first against my skin, began to warm as she traced her way down to my belly. She unbuckled my belt, undid the button on my jeans, and a shiver rode my spine. I closed my eyes and breathed in the darkness. The zipper was just a sound in the night, the falling of my jeans just a burst of cold air against my skin.
She held me, still soft, in her hands – patiently, the way I held eggs to warm them before placing them into boiling water, to keep them from breaking against the heat. Her lips were full when she kissed me, opening against me to give me their warm undersides. Jesse’s teeth bit gently against my ear and suddenly I felt electricity around me, and my cock flickered to life.
And then, as if by magic, we were all naked, all on the bed – six hands softly caressing whatever they found, three pairs of lips gently kissing in turn. Jesse continued to kiss my neck, as his fingers roped their way through my chest hair, down to my navel. He clenched my cock in one hand and kissed me as Kim’s fingers followed his lead, tracing circles around my nipple.
I lay back and Jesse planted himself above me, holding his body aloft with outstretched arms, and smiled down at me as Kim took me back into her mouth. He lowered himself slowly, as if he were doing push-ups, and kissed me delicately on the lips.
We moved spontaneously around the bed, our gestures fluid, changing with no apparent reason – like children again, always in the moment, always ready to be surprised. At one point Kim lay back against the pillows, knees bent in the air, and Jesse sidled up between her legs. He buried his face against her, and she moaned, tossing her head from side to side. I stroked her face to gentle her and dropped my head to her breast. It was my turn to suck now, my turn to return to the buried memory of my own first nurturing. I licked the hard nipple hungrily and drew it into my mouth. Suddenly, this spot became for me the most erotic, the most essential place in the world.
She arched her back and I noticed that Jesse had slid away from her crotch. He was kneeling before her now. I looked up and saw the concentration in his eyes.
He scooted slowly forwards, hands resting on her thighs, and his cock – the head purple, fully engorged – flicked against his belly as if in invitation. He pushed against her, into her, inch by inch, as her gentle murmurs turned into moans, cries – the growing pleasure I so easily recognized. I knew what she was feeling, had felt it, lived with the incessant craving. I watched her face as the breath came faster, her cheeks flushing, her eyelids fluttering against her skin, and I knew at last what my face looked like when Jesse became a part of me, when he held me this close, when he pulsated inside me.
Kim pulled him closer and ran her fingernails down his back, cupped his ass cheeks with both hands – pushing him deeper into herself. Jesse arched his back in response, and suddenly we were eye to eye, our faces only inches apart. He pulled me with one hand against him and pressed his lips on to mine. His tongue forced its way into my mouth, fucking me as his cock fucked her. He groaned deeply, in that way of his, and my arm against his back traced the bucking of his body as he came.
I held him like that for a minute or so, until the last shudder, our lips still sealed against each other, our hearts pounding.
When I drew away, when he pulled out, Kim was rocking gently beneath us, like something bobbing on the waves of a once turbulent sea.
We rested for a while, the three of us, holding one another, leaning our heads together, sharing the warmth. We said nothing for a long time, until Kim rolled her face towards mine and leaned in close. “I need you now,” she whispered.
It was my turn. We were taking turns.
It was a shock at first – the moistness, the effortless way Kim and I moved together. I had forgotten how different it felt – those soft folds of female flesh, the way they mould themselves around a man.
We were using her, I thought suddenly, uncomfortably – not for sex per se, but for the anticipated result.
It was her gift to us, she’d said. An anniversary present, a love offering.
You guys are meant to be parents, she’d told us the night she’d first made the suggestion – planted the seed, so to speak. You’d certainly be better parents than me. And you love each other, she said, you should conceive your child in love – not with a turkey baster.
I lifted her towards me, her ass warm as I pulled it away from the sheets. I rocked with her, sliding myself in and out of her – slowly, tenderly. I was afraid to do it as forcefully as I fucked Jesse, afraid she might shatter beneath me.
She closed her eyes and threw her head back, a smile warming her face. I looked up, and it was now Jesse’s face I saw – Jesse’s blue eyes just inches away, his lips open in that familiar ellipse of passion. And he leaned forwards, pressed his lips against mine again, reached around my neck to hold my mouth close to his.
Someone’s hand stroked my side, another squeezed a nipple, still another gently swatted my ass. I kept kissing, kept fucking, eyes closed. It could as easily have been Kim I was kissing, Jesse I was fucking. In the darkness, it didn’t matter. In the darkness, we were simply making love. Literally making love – as if love itself were a thing, a product of sex, something we created together in the act of fucking. We were making this thing called love, this creature that would one day cry us awake in the middle of the night, skin a knee on the pavement outside, borrow the car and keep us up all night with worry, hold our hands years hence and let us go.
Jesse’s fingernails dug into my neck. His teeth closed gently on my lower lip, and I cried out – coming, pouring out my love, coming into the spot still wet with his own seed, mine now mingling with his, my sperm racing his for the prize. I was panting and sweating and smiling, imagining them all, millions of them, swimming together – a team, cheering one another on, not really caring which one made it to the finish line as long as one of them did. They – we – were all in this
together.
Hot Springs
Carol Queen
It was Sunday morning before I finally got out of the city, leaving the piles of books and notes that were my dissertation on my desk and closing the apartment door firmly on them. By the time I’d driven an hour north into the valley, I’d begun to relax. The leaves on the grapevines were beginning to turn, great clusters of soon-to-be-harvested fruit everywhere, but the October day was hot as summer. It was beautiful, and got more so as soon as I’d left the valley towns behind and began the drive up the old wild mountain, the road narrow, one switchback after another, and a slightly hazy vista of hill and valley and hill at every turn. Little enough traffic up there that I could take the mountain curves fast, two-handed, my car and I like one creature. I love this feeling, that I’m half man, half machine. Soon I reached the hot springs.
I was ready for a two-day soak, ready to sleep under the mountain stars, ready to be away. The springs were old sacred land, one place where the vast geothermal soup bubbling under the mountain broke through to the surface, appropriated lately as a kind of New Age resort. Still a powerful place, though, and its proprietors now tried to reinforce that sense of the sacred by dotting the place with little shrines, a Buddha here, a goddess there. Its specialness was most apparent in the demeanour of its visitors, all of whom seemed to sense and respect that it had been a healing place long before any of us were born. I lost no time in choosing a place to camp and then sliding into the warm pool, and my dissertation, already well out of mind, retreated a little further still.
I’d left the water to sun myself on the nearby deck when I saw her, unloading her car with her companion, probably her lover, by the way she spoke to and touched him familiarly, almost absently, for she seemed more absorbed in her surroundings. Perhaps a newcomer here. I caught her eye, and she let a small, wary smile slip; then they climbed the steps to the lodge. Not campers, then. I watched them leave their room to explore, strolling the grounds, locating the pools and the showers, passing me once or twice. Then they went back inside. I imagined them undressing, falling on to the bed.
But he was out before long and in the pool, and it was an hour or more before she emerged, clad in a towel. Their room key hung from one of her hoop earrings, and when she turned or shook her head, it grazed her neck, making a tiny jingle, I imagined, that only she could hear. The pool was so deep that the key’s tip touched the water, making a little wake as she glided through.
She stood alone for a while, eyes closed, feeling the warm silken water of the mineral springs on her skin. He saw her and moved to join her. Heads close together, they talked quietly for a moment, then left the pool for the sauna. I watched the door swing closed behind them.
She was probably still inside, probably lying flat on the smooth, hot wood of the benches, the heat searing into her with every breath, sweat pooling between her pretty little breasts – she had a tattoo on one, but I hadn’t been able to make it out from a distance – when he returned to the pool. He came in slowly, pearls of sweat on him, too, surveying everyone. Seeing me, he moved towards me through the water. Had he noticed me watching them?
He smiled, said hello, began to chat. He was gregarious but somehow sweet, with big blue eyes and the smile of a cherub. He asked my name, told me his, found out within a scant few minutes where I was from, where and what I studied, the topic of my dissertation, how soon I hoped to be finished, and what I wanted to do next. He and the woman were indeed first-time visitors to the springs. He talked about his work a bit – he was a nurse who cared for AIDS patients – but more about hers.
She was a sex educator, he said, who also did AIDS-related work, teaching people about safer sex. He’d been talking about her for a full five minutes when she emerged from the sauna, prompting an overly bright, “Well! There she is now!” from him.
She moved with the languor of one surrendered to relaxation. I could see the sheen of sweat on her eyes in the deepening twilight, and she carried her towel in her hand, not bothering to cover her nakedness as she approached the pool. The key swayed from her ear as she moved. Others in the pool were watching her, too.
Did I imagine the look of pleasure when she saw that he was talking with me? She slid into the water and moved towards us, laughing. “You’re such a friendly thing, honey.” When he introduced us, her attention turned to me. He told her what he’d learned about me; she asked me to tell her more about my academic work, more keenly interested than he had been.
Serious, intense green eyes. She reached to touch him but kept her eyes fixed on me. Her tattoo shimmered below the water. I thought I could make out the images of a moon and a star. Maybe I’d ask her about it later.
“I understand your area of interest is sexuality,” I said, imagining the leering way she must have heard it said before, hoping I sounded nothing like that.
“He’s been talking behind my back again, eh?” she said. She smiled at me, arched her eyebrows at him, and he laughed like a kid caught at a game and said, “Yes, I’ve been telling him all about you.”
“I used to read Kinsey out loud to my friends when I was seventeen,” she said. “The study of sex always fascinated me, but it didn’t seem a serious enough area to specialize in . . . too lightweight, too dilettantish. Until recently,” she added, with a little frown.
“Until AIDS?” I asked.
She nodded. “Now it’s too real, it’s crucial. People seem to have a lot of trouble adjusting to safe sex, or else they’re in such fear that they risk losing touch with their sexuality altogether.”
What a funny pair they were. He was listening to our conversation with satisfaction, blue eyes laughing, looking first at one of us, then the other, not seeming to respond much to her great seriousness. Some sex educators manage to make the juiciest pleasures sound dry and academic. Not her: she talked about sex like it was the grail, a higher calling – passionate yet earnest, like a Marxist talking about revolution. Tempted to make a wisecrack – “Well, I bet you excelled at your labs” – I decided instead to meet her devotion to her subject with the kind of respect I’d want anyone to show about my own work.
“I have to confess I’ve had some of those problems myself,” I said. “It can be so difficult to know when to talk about safe sex, and I can’t really say I like to use condoms.” It seemed perfectly easy to talk to her about it. But he was quicker to reply than she was: “You ’re in luck – we give lessons!” he said with a big grin. Her smile flashed back but she pretended to ignore him, saying, “The real key is having a casual experimental attitude, especially at first. Take it too seriously and it’ll seem like work, not pleasure.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard him, too. I regarded them. Were they coming on to me? Her earnestness in talking, her lack of flirtatiousness threw me off, though he was certainly forward enough for the both of them. Was she a participant at all? Surely this was not just an ingenuous act. I determined to wait until she extended me an invitation to decide whether to take it.
I didn’t have to wait long. He moved behind her as she and I continued to talk, and lifted her. He held her up with one hand – easily, she was buoyed by the water – and traced her body with the other. She sighed and settled back against him. She was more near my eye level now, her breasts above water. I could see the tattoo clearly, and even in the dimming light, I could see her nipples growing hard from the touch of the cool air. It was not immediately clear whether this was a show for me; I felt a little uneasy, not knowing, nor knowing how to proceed. Was I going to be a part of this scene?
He moved a couple of steps closer to me. She was now so near that if my cock were erect – which it was beginning to be – its tip would touch her. She looked me full in the eyes, silent. I wondered what she was thinking.
“What about it?” he said at last. “Do you want a lesson?”
That made her laugh again. “You amaze me, boyfriend,” she said to him. “You move so fast. Sometimes I think you move too fast.” And to me:
“Well? Since he asked – would you like to come with us?” Her eyes said, Come with us.
Decision instantly made. I touched her then, running my fingertips up her belly, across her breasts, over the tattooed crescent. She made a low sound. “I would love to come with you,” I replied, and he stepped closer again, so that she was held up by the pressure of our bodies on her. I felt four hands on me, and one of her nipples rubbed one of mine. She squeezed my cock between her legs for a second, then made way for his hand. She sighed deeply. Her fingertips slipped through the hair on my chest, freeing scores of tiny bubbles trapped there; they effervesced between us. He had my balls, holding with just enough pressure to make me want him to squeeze. I sighed, too. I wanted to kiss her.
“Let’s go before we get scandalous,” she said.
We carried her through the water, submerged hands still caressing. She led us back to the room, detaching the key from her earring as she walked, and led us inside.
Plain room, bed in centre, their things strewn about. The covers already down – she’d been napping earlier – and while she was pulling them down further, he caught her from behind, tumbled her on to the bed, and so I had to wait for my kiss. But from their embrace she reached for me.
I knelt over them, wondering where to start. The muscles of his ass were rhythmically tightening as he began to thrust against her, and she writhed against him in response. As he moved down her body, his mouth now on her breasts, she pulled me down to replace him in the kiss. Such hunger. She held my head, one fist curled in my hair and the other pulling my beard, biting my lips, tongue finding tongue.
I might have lost all awareness of everything but that kiss: teeth and tongue and lips, licking and sucking, tiny bites, feeding the heat and the hunger. But he reached for my cock and, in a couple of strokes, it swelled to fill his hand, splitting my awareness between her and him, kiss and cock. As she sucked my tongue harder, he began rubbing my cockhead with its foreskin. Wet with pre-come, it felt almost enveloped by another mouth; involuntarily, ecstatically, I thrust harder into his hand, moaned into her.
The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes Page 50
