Last Licks

by Troy Conway

  “I could never do that,” she murmured. “Not in public.”

  “Then, in private?”

  Her tongue moved wetly around her lips. “Ja In private!”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  I lifted out a few hundred-franc notes from my wallet and dropped them on the table. I hooked her elbow with a hand and lifted her out of the chair. The stage curtain had closed; the audience had been given a breathing space. I was tired of the role of observer, and I wanted in on the action.

  I brushed her thigh as she slid past me, heard her gasp as she felt the hard evidence of my own arousal. As she turned away, her hand brushed me as if to make certain of what her thigh had found.

  “Don’t waste it,” she murmured, moving between the tables.

  “No fear of that. I’ve already told you it won’t go down. Just relax, believe me—and prepare yourself for nirvana.”

  She sniffed, but she walked a little faster. I followed her swaying haunches out of the cave casino and up the stone steps to the clear Mediterranean night. A moment before she would have stepped out of the shadows, I reached out, swung her around and drew her in against me.

  Her breasts were rocks, her belly a soft pillow. The mouth that yawned to accept my tongue was moist as her neck muscles while she drove her own tongue at mine. She clung to me with all her strength, hips moving steadily.

  My fingers worked her mini-skirt up to her hips. Below it she wore only stockings and garter belt and her high-heeled shoes. I bent, I caught her underthighs, I lifted her. I drove forward, hearing her soft cry as she felt the fury of my need, all through her flesh.

  “No! Oh, God no! I don’t want it like this!”

  “An hors d’oeuvre only, sweets.”

  I carried her from the shadows and through the moonlight like that. Her arms were locked about my throat, while her legs, dangling at first as she fought the delight surging through her body, lifted and wrapped themselves about me. She tore her mouth from mine, she let her head fall back as if her neck were broken. She rode ecstasy across the cobblestoned street until the cool metal of the Alfa Romeo door made contact with her bare white buttockflesh.

  I had to use force to disengage her arms and legs, to thrust her away so that she leaned panting against the car, staring up at me with wild eyes.

  “What kind of man are you to deny me when you practically raped me there outside the door? Are you trying to drive me crazy?’

  She was panting and sobbing. Her eyes were big and round. I leaned to kiss the tip of her nose. “Be patient, honey. The night has just begun. You are going to sample a satyr this night. Say I’m punishing you for not having any faith in me.”

  I opened the door, I shoved her in where she rocked back and forth, hands gripping her nyloned knees. “Devil, devil, devil,” she whimpered.

  “Exactly. I am Beelzebub, prince of devils. Think pitchforks.”

  I got in beside her, started the car, and eased it away from the curb. There was a dry wind blowing, brother to the mistral that sweeps across the beaches and the high hills of the Riviera during the winter season. I took the road to Ramatuelle at sixty miles an hour, raising a cloud of dust. Ramatuelle lies close to the pointed rocks at Cap Camarat within viewing distance of the sea.

  It is glorious country on the French Riviera. The moon is a silver ball that looks down and chuckles at the men and women who crowd its beaches during the daytime and its shadows when the sun sets, who obey the injunction to love one another with all their hearts. The air is warm, perfumed. It is a land for lovers.

  I slid an arm about Zia and drew her over against me. She fought at first, but she let her body go soft when she saw that I had not hidden my manly strength. She gave a soft gasp.

  “Did you tell the truth about . . . that?” she asked in a little-girl voice, as if she needed reassurance.

  “Absolutely. Word of honor. It’s a kind of sickness.”

  “Sickness!” she breathed.

  She was staring, scarcely breathing. Both her hands were shaking. To encourage her, I said, “Go ahead. Make me out a liar, if you can.”

  A giggle was my answer. “Oh, no. I am taking no chances. I know you men, you are braggarts, most of you” As as afterthought, she murmured, “Liars too.”

  “Let’s bet,” I said casually.

  “What do you want to bet?” she asked dreamily.

  “If I can make you yell ‘uncle’, if I can tire you out with making love, then you’ll tell me what you know about the mermen.”

  Her head jerked up, her brown eyes staring hard at me. “Why are you so interested in the mermen?”

  “They tried to kill you—and me. Why shouldn’t I be interested?”

  “You sound like a flic—a policeman. Are you?”

  “No, ma’am. All I want are the facts, ma’am.” She was silent, scarcely breathing. I added, “Suppose—just suppose, now—I could do something about the mermen, so they’d never bother you again. How about that?”

  “You couldn’t.”

  I am trained to read the inflection of voice tones. It becomes important when you want to make sure a woman means yes when she says no. There was a tiny stab of hope in the baroness’ voice when she spoke.

  “Maybe not. Maybe yes. What’ve you got to lose?”

  She thought about that silently, then said, “It is true, what you say. The mermen are trying to kill me. What worse thing could they do? And it is a bet you cannot win.”

  “I can win it all right. My only worry is, will you welch on your bet?”

  I had to explain the term to her. When I was done, she shook her head. “No, I will not—what you call—welch on my bet. If I make it.”

  I did not push. I let her lie with her head on my shoulder and stare down at my manhood. I could feel her hips shift on the car seat, and I caught the muffled breathing she fought to stifle. Once she reached out, gripped me, tightened her fingers.

  “All right,” she whimpered. “I bet, I bet.”

  The car was rounding a bend onto the little driveway of her house. I touched the brake, slowing the Alfa Romeo, then swept her up in my arms. I drove my mouth on hers, my hands at her mini-skirt. I hiked it up until she was all bare flesh between the skirt and her stockingtops.

  I slid sideways from behind the wheel.

  My hands lifted her hips, poised her body, then let it slide downward. She groaned as she knew my full strength. Her head went back and forth as her hips picked up the beat.

  “Damn you, damn you! I wanted it indoors, in a bed.”

  “Don’t you like this?” I wondered.

  "Of—of co-course I do, but——”

  "Then relax and enjoy it.”

  Her brain did not believe me, but her body did. It leaped and flopped; it drove and darted. Her breath was a gale of perfume against my cheeks as she brought her lips to my face, as she began kissing all over my nose and eyes and chin, blinding me when I sought to open the glove compartment of the car.

  “Darling, oh, darling! Never stop! Never stop!”

  I opened the door. I caught her underthighs in my hands, I raised her, slid my feet out. We made it, with my feet on the ground and her legs locked around my hips. My hand fumbled in the glove compartment, drew out the flat packet I call my sex survival kit. Zia paused in her kissing long enough to ask me if this wasn’t tiring on me.

  “Not yet Besides, you’re the one who’s going to be tired before the night ends, remember?”

  Her laughter was an echo out of Sodom and Gomorrah as I carried her like that away from the car and toward her houe. She spasmed and went limp three times before I got her key into the lock and turned it. She was really hung up on me.

  I let her go her own way once the door was open. Her hand switched on a light. Then she sagged against the door jamb, shaking her head and staring at me, panting to get her breath back.

  “You’re unbelievable,” she whispered.

  “I hate to say it but I told you so.”

  Her
arm came up about my neck. She kissed me hungrily, then whispered, “But I’m not nearly done. Not nearly!”

  “I should hope not,” I chuckled. “To paraphrase a saying, I have not yet begun to f—” Her soft palm covered my mouth.

  “Don’t talk. Just follow me,” she murmured.

  I ran behind her shapely stockinged legs, bare thighs and buttocks, up a narrow stair to the second floor. A lamp jumped to life. I found myself in something out of a New England ski lodge, all flowered chintz, maple and walnut, with a couple of hooked rugs on the floor. It was a feminine room, with a touch of jasmine in the air, a memory of warm bathwater and soapsuds, of perfume atomizers and dainty underthings.

  I am a sybarite at heart. To me, a woman is fragrance and flesh, delicacy and hidden lusts. She is beauty and a kind of happy wickedness, a flower in bloom and a claw in a velvet glove. The Delphic oracle, the Mater Magna and Messalina, all wrapped up in skin like a rose petal.

  Zia put a hand to the buttons of her blouse.

  Her smile was a temptation and a challenge. She did not have to speak; I could read the message in her eyes. She was daring me to exhaust her, in more ways than one.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The blouse hung loose, and I could see the inner slopings of her big white breasts, startlingly white against the chocolate tan of her shoulders and midriff. As she moved, her breasts swung back and forth lazily and her rigid brown nipples scratched the misty nylon of the shirtwaist.

  Her smile was deliciously lewd.

  Her tanned shoulders went back, the blouse slipped to her upper arms and downward. Her breasts fell out into the lamplight, shaking. I stepped forward, caught them in my hands, bent to kiss them. She breathed faster.

  “Your garters,” I murmured.

  “What?” she asked dazedly.

  I knelt before her. On each thigh she had put a Gay Nineties garter, all red and black lace. I slipped them off as she looked down in complete curiosity. I got up and doubled the garters over.

  I slipped the garters over her breasts so that they were compressed and made more tumescent by their constraint. I stepped back and smiled.

  Her eyes lifted from her gartered breasts to me. “You have a thing about breasts?”

  “It’s to add to the pleasure, your highness.”

  Her slim brown eyebrows drew together. “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. You see, the squeezing process of the garters will make your lolos much more sensitive. Give it a little time.”

  “Is this something you teach in your League for Sexual Dynamics?” she mocked, half laughing.

  “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

  She shimmied her shoulders and gasped. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!”

  I began to take my own clothes off, while she went on shimmying, staring with wide eyes as more and more of my body came into view. When I plucked off the last sock and stood naked, she gave a little cry and caught her breasts in her hands.

  Her eyes flamed as her fingers squeezed. “Ja, ja! It is what you say! It is—more exciting this way!”

  When the breasts are erotically aroused, their blood vessels fill up, the breasts swell, the nipples enlarge, I explained. The garters would then act like valves to keep the blood in the mammary veins, so that the breasts cannot deflate but remain in that sensually exciting tumescence until the garters are removed.

  She asked, “Now what?”

  I bent and lifted my sex survival kit, undoing the snaps, throwing back the flat black lid. The baroness came two steps closer, her stockinged legs like passion pillars alongside me.

  “What’s that?”

  “The L.S.D. kit for sex survival.”

  I fitted three sulphur rings on the middle finger of my right hand. They were much, much too large, so I took them off.

  “What are they for?”

  “Silly girl! Come find out.”

  I paused to unzip her crumpled skirt, helped her slide her bare buttocks—they looked very pale beside the tan of her belly and thighs—out of the mini-skirt. I lifted two large pillows, fluffed them, then dropped them on the edge of the bed.

  She sat down on the pillows, eyes wide as I slipped on the sulphur rings. From time immemorial, man has sought to make Nature even better. Sulphur rings are brothers to the silver clasp employed by Hsi-men Ch’ing as related in the Chin P’ing Mei. These pleasure rings clasp the male member, helping it to prolong erection while at the same time stimulating the vaginal walls of the female. The sulphur in the ring I was going to employ works as an astringent to tighten the vaginal walls so as to add to the pleasure of the baroness.

  I moved into position between her thighs. “We shall begin with the ostrich tail position of the Arab erotologists—the hachou en nekanok.”

  “Begin with?” she asked, falling on her back, which was necessarily lower than her hips because of the pillows beneath her behind.

  “To be sure, begin with. In all, there are thirty-six positions that we shall sample. So begin slowly, and swiftly, as the runner says.”

  “Mon Dieu! Trente-six!”

  I gripped the undersides of her knees, pushed them back and upwards so that her tanned legs, upright above her head, formed the tail of an ostrich while only her head and shoulders remained on the bed. I drove deep. Zia convulsed, mouth and eyes wide open. To the ancient Arabs, the love art was devotedly studied as any astronomer might study the stars. Each movement, each change in posture, was duly and aptly named.

  In my role as sexologist, I believe that the study of human relationships between the sexes in the love act is the most single important phase of our existence. Most people do not know the name of a star, or how to find the angle of declination; few people have to fix a carburetor, or apply the value of pi; but everybody experiences sex during his or her lifetime. And the more skillful one is at it, the better it is for himself and his partner.

  Unfortunately our western world lags behind the east in this. Our Eastern brothers—Arabs, Indians, Persians—understand and value the love relationships. They have made a learning out of what, to Americans or English, Germans or Italians or Swedes, should come naturally. This is not so. There is an ability to excel at sex given to all of us, if we properly understand and apply its rules and methods of application.

  I continued with the ostrich tail posture, pointing out to the baroness—as if she couldn’t feel it—that the resultant depth of penetration was increased almost two fold by the backward thrust of her legs, which forced her genital region forward. The sulphur rings were merely an added excitant, but such a powerful one, due both to their size, clamped about my continually moving member, and to their astringent qualities, that Zia must have existed only at one point in her body. She cried out her delight, mouth wide open and wailing, as her head began a metronomic rhythm on the bed. Her body trembled in reaction to the strain of her position, but this appeared only to heighten the intensity of her ecstasy.

  The French tickler, the ampalang and other devices with lengths of hair or bits of feathers added, are mere variations on the sulphur rings, which prevent the male member from becoming overly excited. Thus the male orgasm is delayed. But I used the rings, not for my own sake, but for that of the baroness.

  Zia dug the sulphur rings. Did she ever!

  Her hips were gyrating, looping, lifting and driving. By this time, unconsciously forming the el mordefeda—the manner of the frog—she had fastened the heels of her Pappagallos on the edge of the bed for greater leverage so that the powerful muscles of her thighs could control and regulate the angle of penetration and the level of depth. The scraping of the sulphur rings along the vaginal walls—though, strictly speaking, there are few nerve endings in the vaginal channel itself—were an added excitation that drove screams of wild delight from her corded throat.

  I angled my own thrusts to involve her distended clitoral bud in the goings-on. The female epicenter of erotism is located in the clitoris and in the labia minora. Any application o
f the male thrust to include these regions builds a pleasure so intense as almost to become unbearable.

  We swung into the el mokefa posture, which is a variation on the others, in which the female places her underthighs against my chest so that her calves cross about my neck, without missing a beat. I drove forward as the Shayk Nefzawi advises, firmly and with the necessary hip movements, to vary the piston pulse beat.

  The baroness keened her appreciation in a thick cry.

  “Now for the el khouraki, your highness.”

  “No, please! Let me rest!”

  “Already? We’re only on posture four!”

  “But I can’t take any m-m-more!”

  I laughed. “You don’t know your own strength, honey. Give it all you’ve got and I’ll introduce you to the new Baroness von Osterreich.”

  Her gartered breasts were swollen beyond belief, they looked like turgid white balloons, tipped with intensely large brown nipples. I bent double and licked those nipples with my tongue. Her sensation was intensified by the strangulating garters. She screamed and screamed, hips lurching out of control.

  I moved her leg and swung her body around.

  “The fourth posture, your highness. The vyompadauttana of the Hindus. On your side—ah, that’s it. We aren’t taking them in textbook order, you understand. I don’t want things to get dull for you!”

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed, shifting and lifting a leg.

  I assumed the proper a’sana and drove deep. Zia shuddered. Her hips moved gently. The side posture is for gentleness, for prolonged enjoyment. On my side, with my leg uplifted above her hip and resting on it, I was able to move in a steady rhythm without tiring my muscles. This is the difference between the eastern and the western philosophy of making love. The easterner goes about it slowly, he sips tea, he nibbles upon fruit or nuts, he even smokes a pipe sometimes. The idea is to make it last. No easterner worthy of the name is a slam-bang-thank-you-ma’am lover.

  Neither is Rod Damon. I stroked, I showered thrills on her erogenous zones, I drove her off into that state of bliss the Japanese name gokuraku-ojo. There was a dreaming little smile on her full lips. Her breasts shook only very slightly, due to the tightened garters, but the flesh of her pallid hips and tanned thighs jellied and shimmied to my poundings.