She put it out of her mind until she got up later to go into the kitchen and get a soda. The music had stopped and when she stepped out of her room, the living room was empty. She assumed the guests had gone home, but then she heard feet running and laughter coming from the bedroom area upstairs, and it sounded like there were more than two people involved. She assumed their guests were staying the night.
Nothing wrong with that, she thought. But a nagging question stayed with her.
Just how hip and cool was the Gilbert-Williams couple?
23
Marlowe had been with the couple for nearly three months when Sean made an unusual proposition to her. They hired a babysitter and took her to the Tiki Room at the Fairmont Hotel, her choice for an eighteenth birthday dinner, to discuss the proposal.
She had gotten to know—and like—both of them, but had to admit that the two were not only strange animals by Modesto standards, they were not quite typical for the city, either. They had mostly a “don’t ask” relationship with Marlowe. She didn’t raise her eyebrows when guests disappeared upstairs with her employers and wild party noises flowed down, no explanations were offered when Sean was out of town and one of their friends stayed the night with Val upstairs—and it wasn’t always a male friend.
They didn’t bother Marlowe. While they never asked her to join them with guests, or serve food or drinks when they had guests over, they were very laid back and she knew they would welcome her if she decided to sit down and light up one of the joints that were neatly laid out on the coffee table when guests arrived.
There had been a couple of incidents when she went upstairs and had gotten a quick glimpse of Sean in his birthday suit as he wandered from his study to their bedroom, but it appeared innocent on his part and she simply averted her eyes and went into the baby’s room. Neither of them seemed to have much of an affinity for clothes once they reached the upper limits of their apartment—Val had walked butt-naked into the baby’s room once to ask Marlowe a question.
Marlowe’s imagination worked overtime wondering about the two, mostly about their sexual activities. From what she heard and read about group sex and the wild things going on at college campuses, everybody seemed to be doing it—except her. In Modesto, her sole sexual experience other than minor petting and making out was letting Billy Meter finger-fuck her in the backseat of his car at a drive-in. She had experienced pain and her panties had some blood on them afterward. Her girlfriend Betsy told her that his fingers had broken her hymen and that she wasn’t a virgin anymore. Like other girls her age, she hadn’t resisted going all the way because she lacked the urge, but out of the fear of getting pregnant.
She suddenly wondered what it would be like to have sex with Sean. The fact that he was of a different race made it a taboo subject for a girl from Modesto, but the forbidden thought kept sneaking into her head. Sometimes in bed at night she would fantasize walking into their bedroom and catching Val and Sean doing it, their skin glistening from sweat, a stark contrast between the white and black of their naked skin.
Pot seemed to be the drug of choice with them. Although Marlowe suspected that cocaine was occasionally used by guests, Val and Sean didn’t seem to be into it. Cocaine was an excited high, while they were looking for a different feeling, a lush low—pot went with the laid-back mystical music they liked, their Bohemian lifestyle.
She had learned a lot being around them, not the least of which was how diverse the world was. It wasn’t unusual in their living room for Buddhists to drop by and chant, an African drummer to pound a frantic beat, or a folksinger to drum a guitar while bemoaning the sounds of war coming from Southeast Asia. It was all interesting and sometimes exciting, but it wasn’t for her. As Sean jokingly put it when Marlowe had turned her nose up at raw fish at a Japanese restaurant, “You’ve come to us meat and potatoes, but we’re going to turn you into escargot.”
She turned her nose up at snails, too. “How can you eat those nasty, slimy, wiggly things? Without even gutting them? You eat their poop and all.”
“They’re fed cornmeal or something similar to clean their intestines before they’re cooked,” Val said.
“So you’re eating cornmeal-flavored shit?”
Marlowe noticed Val didn’t eat any more snails that night.
Sean broached his proposal when they were having dessert. “If you’re looking for extra money, there’s a project at school you might be interested in joining. Keep an open mind as I explain it.”
What they didn’t know was that she was looking for extra money to move out. She was tired of being a glorified babysitter and wanted the privacy of her own place. She was over eighteen, an employable age, and knew enough about the city to realize some jobs—being a waitress, clerking in a store—were low pay, but she could work hard and rise to better things. And after listening to the Gilbert-Williams couple talk about the benefits of an education, for the first time in her life she thought about college.
“Have you ever heard of psychedelic drugs?” Sean asked.
“I’m not sure, it sounds familiar.”
“You’ve heard of mushrooms that Indians eat and a drug called LSD?”
“Sure, they get hallucinations.”
“We don’t call them hallucinations, that’s what people who don’t understand them call the experiences. A hallucination would be a false image, something you’ve imagined but isn’t real. There are a number of groups who have studied the effects of the drugs, the most famous being a Harvard study headed by a professor named Timothy Leary.”
“I think I’ve heard of him. Are you doing it, too?”
“Our psych department has a grant to study the effects. Both Val and I have also experimented personally with some of the substances, mostly psilocybin, which is obtained from mushrooms grown in Mexico. The Aztecs used the drug both spiritually and medically as part of their pharmacology. Some people say they have mystic experiences after taking it. A much more common reaction is an OBE—an out-of-body experience in which they can see themselves interacting with other people.”
“Wow, that’s wild.”
Val said, “I had a much greater sense of awareness, experiencing a cosmic consciousness. Everything around me became clearer, more vivid. I was able to see things that I never even realized existed.”
“It’s seeing life through a microscope,” Sean said. “Not a speck on a petri dish, but everything around you. With ordinary consciousness we see sunshine and a field of grass. When our consciousness is expanded, we see all the colors of the spectrum.”
“How does it happen?” Marlowe asked.
“That’s what the experiments hope to determine. We believe the drug focuses our perceptions dramatically, slowing down our senses, permitting us to study a meadow and see the individual blades of grass as opposed to our eyes and mind simply skimming the surface.”
Val said, “It made me supersensitive—I became acutely aware of everything around me. While I did nothing more than physically lie on my bed, my mind traveled around the room, seeing things I’d never noticed, like the dust on the top of a door, a place we never look. After a while my mind left the room and went around the apartment, seeing Sean and the baby in ways that I had never experienced before. I was able to study them and the whole place, I had an awareness of everything, even a little spider under the refrigerator weaving a web.”
“Wow.”
“My experiences were similar,” Sean said, “but I had a broader consciousness—it seemed to make me one with the universe. One thing is clear: We all have individual visions, there are no common threads except the expansion of consciousness. Where our minds take us is unique to each of us.”
“You don’t want me to take this stuff, do you?”
Sean chuckled. “You’re always one step ahead of me. We have funds to hire a subject and I wanted to run it by you first.”
Marlowe shook her head. “My brother died of an overdose of drugs.”
“You told us he died
of a heroin overdose. Heroin in and of itself is not evil, it’s basically a powerful painkiller, a form of morphine. The problem is that it’s so strong and its side effects are so dangerous, it’s risky if it’s not administered under strict medical supervision. The drug we use is not addictive like heroin, and is being administered as part of a program similar to the one Harvard had.”
“Sean is just trying to do you a favor, Marlowe. We know you need money and it’s a way to make five hundred dollars for just relaxing for a few hours and later being interviewed about your experiences.”
“It’s not dangerous?”
“Not a bit,” Sean said. “You can trust me on that.”
“Don’t you have students who want to do it?”
“I want someone who has had no prior experience with the drug and no preconceptions about how it will affect them. Many of the students are affected by the results they hear from other kids. But I don’t want you to participate if you’re not a hundred percent—”
“Just as long as it won’t hurt me.”
“I guarantee it won’t hurt you.”
24
The experiment was set to take place in her bedroom. Sean set up a tape recorder on the end table next to her bed.
“Our research indicates that the dose you’re getting should start having an effect in about twenty minutes and the period of increased consciousness, the time during which your mind expands, will last several hours.”
“I’m not going to see monsters, am I? Like in the movies?”
Sean smiled. “I don’t know what you’re going to see. Everyone goes into a dreamlike state—”
“A trance?”
“No, more like how you’d feel if you took a sedative to relax, one not strong enough to put you to sleep, but that puts you into that twilight between sleep and being awake. But we haven’t had anyone see monsters and freak out. Most people find the experience very pleasant.”
“Okay. But if I start seeing the Blob, you better warn the neighbors, because I’m going to scream my head off.”
Val came in with a glass of water. She set it on the end table. Sean set a pill next to it.
“Get yourself comfortable, in your bedclothes. Turn off your light, lie back, and relax. When you feel like it, take the pill. Then close your eyes and make your mind blank. If you feel like communicating, just speak out loud, the tape will be running.”
“Where will you guys be?”
“Upstairs. We’re going to bed, but I set the alarm so one of us will come down and check on you periodically.”
They left the room. Marlowe slipped off all her clothes and pulled a simple cotton nightie on.
She was a little nervous, but she trusted Sean and Val. They were a little too cool for her in terms of their lifestyle, but she didn’t sense any malice in them toward her. Besides, she needed the money to get out and get her own life going.
She slipped inside the bed, took the pill, and turned off the light. She stared up at the darkness. There was no window in the room and the only light that entered was a faint glow at the bottom of the door. Her first sensory impression was that her heart beat rapidly and her breathing came fast. Nerves. Sean told her that might happen. She started relaxing, telling herself that she had nothing to fear but fear itself.
She lost track of time, but she soon realized she felt light-headed. The feeling slowly spread through her and she experienced a feeling of her body weight fading, a feeling that she could rise up from the bed and float to the ceiling.
The sense of weightlessness grew. She strained to see the ceiling, but it was a black void. She imagined herself floating, lightly floating up to the ceiling and looking down, seeing herself on the bed.
The image faded and everything went dark.
She didn’t know how long she had slept, wasn’t sure she had slept at all, but she had the sense that time had passed. She was hot, sweating under the covers. She kicked off the blankets and pulled off her nightie. She lay back on the bed, naked.
Her eyes closed, she imagined again that her mind had left her body, that she was overhead looking down at the glow of her pale body on the bed. An image of Sean naked, his smooth ebony body glistening, appeared. She saw him slowly come toward the bed. As he came toward her, she felt her own hands touch her nipples, then slip down between her legs and caress the fleshy mound there. She was wet and ready for him. She pushed her breasts up at him as he hovered over her.
Then he was gone. She was alone again, on the bed.
I’m hallucinating, she thought. Or maybe she said it aloud for the recorder, she wasn’t sure. She was in a warm, wet, lush, dreamy state. “I’m horny,” she said.
She got up from the bed and walked across the dark room. She opened the door and stepped into the living room. She would never have left her room naked, she wasn’t like Val and Sean, who walked around without clothes on.
Being uninhibited in the warm, safe cocoon of a hallucination was titillating. It’s fun, she thought.
She went up the stairs, slowly, reaching the top of the landing. It all seemed so real to her, almost as if she were awake.
Light spread out into the hallway from the open door to their room. She went to the light, seeing herself barefoot and naked. She came to the doorway and paused in it. No one was in sight. The door to their bathroom was open and she heard the shower going. As she stood in the doorway, Val came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her head. The shower was still going, which meant Sean was in it.
In her dreamy state, Marlowe stood silently as Val came to her. Val reached out and touched her cheek. “Hello, sweetie,” the woman said.
She cupped Marlowe’s chin in the palm of her hand and leaned toward her, brushing Marlowe’s lips with her own. The kiss felt real to Marlowe, real from head to toes.
Val put her arm around Marlowe and led her to the bed. While Marlowe lay on her back, Val kissed her again, softly at first, then harder, her tongue pushing between Marlowe’s lips as her hands explored Marlowe’s body.
The woman’s titillating fingers traced the outline of Marlowe’s breasts and gently caressed the tips of Marlowe’s nipples. Her lips slid down to Marlowe’s neck, making small sucking noises on her neck, then she encircled her naked breasts with her tongue, and sucked each one of Marlowe’s erect nipples.
Marlowe felt dazed, in a state of wonderful abandonment. She put her hands on the woman’s ample breasts and squeezed as they kissed. She slipped down and took one breast in her mouth, sucked it, then moved to the other breast, enjoying the strange feeling of having another woman’s breasts in her hands and mouth.
Val’s hand slipped between her legs for just a moment, feeling the soft, wet flesh, and she rolled Marlowe over on her stomach and started kissing her at the back of her neck, working her way down her spine, sending a tingling sensation through Marlowe, before she massaged each of Marlowe’s buttocks, giving them a playful little bite.
Marlowe had never experienced anything as sensual as this before. Her body tingled with excitement, sexual arousal mounting in her.
Val positioned Marlowe so that the girl’s legs were split above Val’s face. She pulled the girl onto her face, parting her pubic hair with her fingers while the tip of her tongue found the sensuous nodule between the fleshy lips. Marlowe squirmed and wiggled as the older woman’s tongue licked her sensitive clit. Marlowe’s arousal ignited as flashes of pure ecstasy vibrated from her head to her toes, and she gasped in delight. She rolled off Val and spread herself on the bed, wet with sweat, still shuddering from her climax.
She opened her eyes and saw Sean was standing next to the bed, a towel wrapped around his waist. He let the towel slip off and she stared at his long black stalk. Val moved her into a half-sitting position so that Marlowe’s head and shoulders lay against her.
Sean moved closer to the bed until he was only a foot from her, his long hard penis at her head level. She grasped his stalk, gliding her hand back and forth along its length,
then cupped his testicles in her hand. As she stroked his penis, Val caressed her nipples.
Marlowe leaned in closer and kissed the tip of Sean’s penis, rubbed her lips around its head, then slid down the length with her tongue. It throbbed against her tongue.
“Put it inside your mouth,” he whispered. Hesitantly, she slowly put it into her mouth, until her mouth consumed it. He slipped it back and forth, in and out, slowly, never forcing it hard against her.
Sensing the urgency in him growing, her own body started to tremble with excitement. “I want you deep inside me,” she whispered.
He sat on the edge of the bed and spread her legs as she came onto his lap, bringing her down onto his hard penis, slipping inside her easily.
The wave of her pleasure spread in her as she sank deeper on his penis. He lay back on the bed, Marlowe on top of him, while Val knelt forward above Sean’s face and spread her legs, lowering herself until his tongue found her clit.
Marlowe kissed Val on the lips, harder and harder, as the fire between her legs sent excited bliss throughout her whole body.
25
“It wasn’t some goddamn dream, it was the real thing.”
She had awakened naked on Sean and Val’s bed. There were no telltale marks of heavy sex, but there was plenty of soreness in private places. She was alone on the bed when she woke up and realized that she had not fantasized what happened between her and the married couple. It was nearly nine o’clock. That meant Sean had gone off to the university an hour earlier. She heard the toilet flush and Val appeared a moment later, dressed for work.
“You finally woke up, hon?” The woman stopped in front of her vanity and checked her hair.
Blood Royal Page 14
