The Coming of Bright

by Sadie King

  For mixing his latest erotic elixir, Victor had a carafe of Baccarat crystal and matching stirrer. Zora turned her head to the left, rested her cheek with soft curiosity on the pillow to watch him work. She wore a smile on her face of impish reveries. She was starting to fancy him an alchemist, in the pantheon of the alchemists of yore, long-dead tinkerers with the mysteries of matter. Men with mysterious, ponderous names like Hermes Trimegistus and Albertus Magnus.

  In the same way that they had searched for the prima materia, the quintessence of the physical world, Victor was searching for the prima erotica. And his was no pure dream as was theirs, no pseudo-scientific quest: Zora had every expectation that Victor the Alchemist, with her body and soul as the stuff of his experiments, could achieve his goal. Could find at long last, in her and through her, the prima erotica.

  He filled the carafe half full of the Gran Patrón. It would be the base of his golden concoction. He poured in a lesser amount of the Pasión Azteca for good reason: the second bottle had cost him over $200,000, and he reserved it for special occasions like this one. This occasion was more special than most, by several orders of magnitude, and his hand in its excitement furnished the carafe with more of the Pasión than he had ever used before. By several orders of magnitude.

  Along came the trickling treacle of the blue agave nectar, to give the tongue the sweetness it desired. With a dropper he extracted the oils and added them to the sweetened tequila blend, needing only a few drops of each to impart the essential flavor of the plant from which it had come. Some of the most magnificent distillations that Mother Nature had to offer. He gave the elixir a few firm crystalline stirs to get everything mingling.

  From the back of the tray table, he lifted up the linen, revealing another lower tray obscured from Zora’s view. She appeared to be mesmerized by his mad-scientist, randy-alchemist routine. Not to mention the fact she hadn’t yet fully recovered from having her brain robbed of oxygen, ever so slightly, ever so delectably, by his life-and-death hands.

  He lifted the contents of the lower tray onto the top tray, where the only response they could possibly elicit from her was a giggle. Facing her was an ivory bowl with two brushes protruding from it by their ivory handles.

  The bowl itself was not giggle-worthy. It was about 8 inches in diameter, carved from a section of mammoth tusk. Zora might not have cared that the piece was incredibly valuable, had come from one of the largest mammoth tusks ever discovered, the find of a lifetime for Siberia’s Yakut herdsmen. What got her giggling were the 6-inch brush handles, a twin set of Japanese ivory. The bowl itself had been carved in Canton in the 1920’s. Victor had acquired the bowl and brushes separately.

  One of the brush handles was a pair of bare geisha legs pressed together, sultry feminine legs, seamless, culminating at the narrower end in feet pointing along the line of the legs. Exactly like the legs of a diver entering the glassy waters of a hidden grotto. The toenails were painted cherry blossom.

  The other brush handle, to put it bluntly, and bluntly is really the only way to put it, was carved in the shape of a rather bulbous penis. Unlike the first handle, the penis didn’t diminish in width along the shaft, it didn’t exhibit the converging grace of the feminine, but rather grew in girth down the length of the handle. Bulging all the way to the firm rounded end. The brush fibers themselves were sable hair from wild-caught animals on Hokkaido, a burnt orange color and sexy soft, softer even than the pubic hairs they were there to represent.

  “Let’s start with our lips.”

  Victor handed Zora the penis brush—she tittered holding it—while he took the geisha legs in his hand. From the crystal carafe he poured enough of the alchemy-infused tequila to fill the bowl about halfway. He wetted the sable bristles of his brush with the perfumed sweetened alcohol. And tickled Zora’s lips with the dampened animal hair. Quite the ticklish one, on her lips and in certain other choice places, she squirmed. Tittered again. Licked her lips.

  Up until then she could only have guessed what the blood of the gods tasted like. Somehow Victor—an ivory knife, perhaps?—had opened the neck vein of Jupiter and poured for her, brushed onto her lips, the élan vital of the king of the Roman gods. What did it matter to long-dead Romans if a little of Jupiter’s blood went missing?

  “Delicious, right? My very own recipe. Next time let me lick it off for you, and you for me.”

  Victor dipped the brush again into the ivory bowl, varnished Zora’s lips with the drippings of sable fur. She did the same for him. They brought their lips together, tasting for a split second the divine blood before tasting the equally perfumed, equally sweet, essence of each other.

  This ritual, this alchemy, this experiment to search out, to pinpoint, the prima erotica, would end differently than the previous ones. Yet it began in much the same way. Victor slid off her clothes, letting them lie where they fell. His tongue was clean, and so were his floors. She lay there on the couch, nude and sculpted, a Michelangelo dream.

  “Your turn.”

  He presented himself to her, invited her to let her hands play over his clothing, velvet or vicious, her choice. She raised herself up halfway, the light of mischief back on her face. She had chosen the latter. Revenge for the ecstasy of the neck.

  So much for his blue Charvet dress shirt from Bergdorf Goodman, Victor had been a bad, bad man, she ripped with full force at both sides of the shirt, tearing it open, buttons flying. Off it came, so much torque radiating from her arms that he spun around and almost fell over again.

  She stood, put herself in front of him, a dazed look on his face from her violence. She shoved him back, very hard. He fell seated onto the couch, the weight of his whiplashed body enough to actually lift the front of the couch into the air by several inches, pushing its back into the wall. The back of his head hit the wall, denting the drywall, stunning him momentarily. The bump wouldn’t form for another few minutes.

  Seized by a rage for desire, or a desire for rage—the two things indistinguishable in that moment—she flung off his pants. Almost getting herself kicked in the face by his flailing legs. She forced open the zipper with such savagery that the fabric below the zipper tore a good inch down. She tossed the pants across the room, caring not one iota for the condition of the Burberry Prorsum herringbone trousers from Barneys New York. She didn’t even care whether he had a good tailor. All she wanted to see now was skin.

  Paying attention, violent attention, to the little things, she tugged off his wristwatch, ripping the black alligator band from the dial in the process. She was rough but thorough. The band could be easily fixed; not so easily fixed was the cracked face of the dial after it hit the granite kitchen floor. Still Victor would have to try: he wasn’t going to let a Conquistador Tourbillon GPG go to waste, a watch he’d picked up on a trip to Geneva for a conference on international law. A mere 80,000 francs.

  Undressing him had burned more than a few calories, and racked up more than a few dollars in tailoring and watch-repair costs. Zora fell back onto the couch with abandon, exhausted. Victor felt almost as ravaged as his attire. It’s fair to say the sharkskin on the couch hadn’t seen so much violence since it was removed from the sharks whose bodies it originally graced. Completely out of breath, the lovers shared a few breaths with each other, or at any rate that’s how it appeared from the way they inhaled as they kissed. Kissing revitalized them.

  Victor stood. With a fraction of the pressure Zora had used to shove him onto the couch, he grasped her shoulders and moved her into a supine position.

  “I’ll start.”

  He grabbed the geisha brush from the bowl where it had been resting, in sable repose. He transformed himself from an alchemist of the erotic to an artist of lust. Time and again he went back and forth from the bowl to her body, brushing her skin with the eager bristles, imparting his alchemical elixir to her flesh with its delicate little bumps and delicate little hairs. Each time he used his lips and tongue to clean up after himself, to drink of the heavenly
blood, to stimulate her skin and her nerves and her spine.

  All the hairs on her body might have been delicate, but not all were little. When he meandered a certain distance below her belly button, not too far below, he got to a proud waving field of hair. The way a field of wheat would look in twilight. The bristles guided by his hand, and the bristles between her legs, brushed against each other in a perfect symmetry of hair, beckoning to his mouth to join them. He hardly needed an invitation. Still he waited to kiss with his mouth the part of her flesh unkissed by her own hair, her vulva in its true nakedness.

  He went lower, bypassing for now the pink skin ringed by the field of hair—the same hair he’d just infused with his tequila elixir and then licked clean. He’d return there in due time, give that place the attention it deserved. He moved down the front of one of her legs, around one foot and then the other, up the front of the other leg. He turned her over, with the antithesis of violence, started the process anew at the back of her neck, down her back, the small of her back, his kisses and licks felt as sensual to him as they did to her—against the rounded cushioned fruitfulness of her buttocks. He made sure to give the backs of her legs a full proper measure of devotion.

  To reach the climactic point in the story of her body, Victor took to heart, to tongue, the maxim of best for last. The finest tequila in the world, and the finest essential oils in the nature, have never been put to better use. Nor applied to a place whose tastes and fragrances were worthy of their own.

  Only one thing on earth can surpass the blood of Jupiter: the secret juices of a resplendent woman, sweetened with agave nectar. With every part of his mouth, inside and out, he drank of those juices, suffusing himself with them, physically, animalistically. His lips became as wet as she was, with the same wetness that she possessed. Her pleasure elevated her beyond the earth, his lowered him into the depths of consciousness. He was man and animal at the same time, she was goddess and woman.

  He got up, returned his brush to the bowl, handed her the other brush. They switched positions. Zora noticed that Victor was becoming aroused now to fullness, putting the ivory brush handle she was holding to shame. By a good inch, she estimated. That explained the Amedeo Testoni shoes, size 13. She reminded herself to do a side-by-side comparison, scientifically of course, brush and Victor, Victor and brush. When the moment was ripe. After she’d furthered along his arousal with the end of the brush and the tip of her tongue.

  Which she commenced to do, starting with the front of his neck, following his lead, the contours of his body, in the same manner he had shown devotion to hers. She kissed and licked her way around the front of his body, kissing more than licking. For sensual reasons—she simply found kissing more erotic than licking. And for practical ones—kissing was less likely to uproot any of his auburn body hairs.

  Profound kisses with a hint of tongue, kisses that showed worship of soul beneath skin. Victor would end up with more of the elixir on his body that way. A fine excuse to bathe again, another watery embrace, after the physicality of their evening had exhausted itself, had exhausted them.

  She flipped him over as he had done her—she had already proven she could be firm when she needed to be. She had tempered the violence of the unclothing of Victor, but not by much. From the nape of his neck all the way down to the lower curve of his buttocks, she added a little extra tongue to the play of her mouth.

  Her artistry was more interpretive than his, more emotionally nuanced, more impressionistic. More Monet, less Rembrandt. Moving her way around his feet, she refined with her palette their delicacy but also their muscularity. He was not a working man, a man of physical toil. He was a man who led a life of the mind, of books and high-flown ideas. Far from the sound and fury of tools.

  Yet he kept his body as finely honed as his mind. He had a room in the back of his townhouse where he had learned and practiced, thousands upon thousands of times, the exercises of ancient Greek athletes. Olympians beneath the gaze of Olympus. Filtered through the vision of Joseph Hubertus Pilates. He called the room his Pilatesium. He had every piece of equipment that Pilates had dreamed up, most of which resembled the gymnastic offspring of medieval torture devices. And they could probably be used for exactly that—if any of his guests overstayed their welcome, or if his ex-wife showed up.

  But Zora could hope to enjoy the fruits of his Pilatesium, of his labors there among its medieval machines. The two of them could add to the repertoire of Professor Pilates by sinfully transforming, delightfully debasing, a few of the exercises. Infusing Pilates with Eros. Take that Pilates! Rest in peace no more.

  Victor turned himself back over, facing up again. Zora imagined it must have been uncomfortable for him to have lain prostrate with such a protrusion in the middle of his body. Luckily the couch was generously padded beneath its sandpaper skin, had absorbed some of the rigidity. All it would take now to prepare him for the heat of her inner hips would be a woman’s touch, the touch of her lips.

  Zora wetted her phallic brush and generously applied the concoction around the shaft of Victor’s penis. Every texture and surface of her mouth, of skin and muscle and teeth, she focused on stimulating him. Yes, teeth, the most important part of the process. He was well enough endowed to tickle her uvula, and would soon be tantalizing her vulva—the rhythm of the words themselves would be every bit as playful as the rhythm of their lovemaking.

  Each time she took him into her mouth he glistened more and more. And each time she applied a new sheen of the elixir before leaving her saliva in its stead. Each time she took him in, molding her flexible palate to his penis, his face underwent a series of contortions of its own, from abject contentment (lips) to betrayed wonder (tongue) to perfect torment (teeth). Victor was shocked dumb at the oral thrashing she performed. She showed a devilish grasp of male arousal for a woman whose experience in that area, both literally and metaphorically, had been minimal to say the least.

  When she had reached his brink, when the action of her mouth alone had been enough to bring him to consummation, he pulled her forward and rolled over on top of her. She fumbled to put the ivory penis back in its proper place—in her distraction and haste, she missed the bowl and ended up dropping it on the floor, where it rolled a few times and came to rest next to the Dancer of Palmyra.

  Victor himself began to fumble—with the linen covering the cart. He managed to retrieve something from the cart’s lower shelf. The strangest condom she had ever seen.

  Bunched up, it looked like a pale red sea anemone, covered in knobby little spikes. Silicone. Victor handed it to her. She rubbed her hand over the spikes. They had a cool, easy rubbery feel and bounced back erect into place as soon as her hand had passed over them.

  “Ever heard of a French tickler?”

  Zora scrunched her eyes and vibrated her head side to side, trying as hard as she could not to laugh. She loved his brand of eroticism, tinged to its core with base humor. He wanted her to put that red knobby anemone on his penis. She knew full well that he had a stronger reason than humor for doing so—his sculpting of her erogenous zones, as if marble had melted into flesh. How could he have known she was made of such artistic stuff, both inside and out?

  Without another word she obliged him. He elevated his body above hers, enough for her to reach down and slide the French tickler onto his penis. Perfect fit, if anything on the tight side.

  “Need to grab one more thing.”

  He reached behind the linen one more time—who did he think he was, a fucking magician, a thaumaturge of sex, pulling so many tricks from behind the cloth?—and pulled out a wedge-shaped pillow.

  “The Liberator.”

  “Victor, I know you think highly of your virile powers, but I’m hardly a slave to your charms.”

  “No, you firebrand you, the pillow is called ‘The Liberator.’ Let me show you how it works.”

  He pried his hand under her buttocks, a liberating sensation in and of itself, slid the pillow under them. The Liberator gave her
hips a sinuous curve up into the air, and to make herself more comfortable, she rested her right leg on the top of the couch. He positioned himself over her, ascending with his legs so that he could enter her effortlessly, fluidly, with her hips in their liberated pose.

  She immediately saw the point of the Liberator—with the natural curvature of his penis, and the supple upward angle of her vagina, he would be able to liberate her G-spot without even trying. A marriage of the wonders of the human imagination and the majesties of the human body.

  She guided him into her, feeling the little silicone spikes play against the skin of her hand as he pushed himself inside. A fraction of the sensation a few inches away, the spot she had guided him into, a place waiting for him, layered in moisture and expectation. An eager chaos of nerves and veins, of hidden skin and open space. Lusher and lusher, more and more sensitive, by the second. There was no need for lubricant from outside her body, from a bottle.

  As the tickler moved into her vagina, with the momentum that Victor gave it with the pivot of his hips and the bend of his legs, his penis found her spot. Victor made a point of letting the tickler massage her spot with extra friction from the thrust. She arched her head back as far as it would go into the pillow, sucking in air. Dear breath, hot breath. Breath of death, breath of life.

  At the moment the arch of her neck reached its pinnacle, Victor kissed the skin next to her Adam’s apple. A kiss as tender as he was firm. She felt as if she would vanish into a burst of sparks cascading on air, die on a pyre of flames, her brain not able to process the surging electricity of her body.

  He quickly found the rhythm that would delay his gratification long enough to fulfill hers to its natural limits. The elastic boundary of sensual feeling that evolution had bestowed upon the human frame. Evolution’s most precious gift. Her gratification ebbed and flowed, flowed and ebbed, with every oscillation of his body against hers, inside hers. She opened herself, on every level of her being, to the undulations of his hips, the most earthly expression of loving being. Free of the weight of mind, their selves began to flow together in unison through their bodies, her hips retracting of their own accord as he moved out of her, surging forward as he moved down and deep.