by Sadie King
Whoever had invented the French tickler was a godforsaken saint of female arousal, as holy a lover of feminine pleasure as the inventor of The Liberator. Her fingernails were making carnage of his back. And despite the synergy of their hips, she gave his buttocks a violent squeeze at the deepest moment of each of his thrusts. For good measure. Making the force of his body against hers more palpable, more physical than it already was. A manifestation of love of lust and lust for love. Shit, who are we fooling—she simply loved grasping his toned ass. Just as he couldn’t help caressing and kissing her breasts every so often—so very often.
Victor had planned out in great detail their first foray into lovemaking, had devised a way to stimulate both epicenters of her pleasure at the same time. Now don’t get the wrong impression—the missionary position was working wonders on Zora’s libido, giving her vocal chords a healthy workout. To really overwhelm her, though, Victor needed access to her clitoris. He needed his hand to become the real liberator.
And so after both of their heartrates started getting close to the limits of medical propriety—sexual propriety was another matter entirely—he pulled the pillow out from under her, tossed it away. They rolled over so that she was on top.
Both his hands firmly on her hips, he pulled her forward, pulled himself out of her temporarily. He pivoted her body over. Now her back was pressed against his chest and their legs were pressed against each other. With his right hand, he guided himself back inside of her, and their bodies began anew their sinuous dance, moving with the power of his hips and the force of her hands pressing against the sides of the couch. Her body was stacked on top of his, a perfectly straight line, the simplest erotic geometry, the most profound. The tightness of her legs pressed together made his pleasure as ethereal as hers.
As he had planned, his right hand sank into her vulva, practically dissolving in her wetness and warmth, while their bodies crescendoed. His fingers played and vibrated and pulsed against her clitoris. With her on top, her vagina in a downward curve like the path of a waterfall, his penis didn’t need any pillow to reach her spot. In that flawless configuration, he was able to stroke her spot with the same intensity his fingertips lavished on her clitoris. He gave both parts of her the attention they so richly deserved. Dual liberators. Duly liberated.
He held out as long as he could, and she held on as long as she could, but eventually his body reached its limit, and her strength was sapped. A moment of mutual release. He ejaculated while thrusting into her spot, alongside the last flurry of his fingers upon her clitoris. He cried out, an animal cry, and she sighed, a heavenly sigh. The movements of their bodies ceased, they sagged onto the couch. Her head tipped back to kiss him.
They remained like that for a while, a long while, kissing one moment and collecting their breaths the next. Their legs were wrapped around each other, their arms embraced the other bodily soul in front of them. Their heads faced one another. Physically and psychologically, spiritually and sexually, enveloped in one another, as lovers should be.
Finally Victor reached over, poured the remaining elixir from the ivory bowl back into the carafe, brought the carafe to her lips. Thirsty from desiring devotion, enthralled by the taste of the concoction, she took several gulps. Liquid spilled around her lips onto the couch. Victor drank; the fluid was gone. Both felt the sting of intoxication, the tequila merely the catalyst.
But Victor had hardly forgotten the final reason for their passion that night. The password of the Juris Club. The final clue that Zora would need to enter into the hallowed meetings of those shadowy figures who plotted a brave new world of brave new laws. A sanctuary of conspiracy where they were watched over by the ghost of Voltaire. Or more likely, by his demon.
“A pretty peso.”
He gestured to the empty carafe, set back upon the tray. Zora was offended.
“Money at a time like this? I should tape your mouth shut. So you won’t spoil the mood by opening it.”
“Not a bad idea.”
The thought crossed his mind to bring up yet another use for tape, more diabolical than a taping-shut of the mouth. A use the Marquis de Sade would have approved of. Victor didn’t give voice to his sticky little rumination. It could wait. Another day, another adventure. He still needed a retort.
“Untape your ears. I’m trying to give you a clue. The password, remember?”
Yes, she did remember—her memory had not been completely wiped clean by that pale red thing lying on the shag in front of the couch. The French tickler. She dared not look inside it now.
“How could I forget? And the clue?”
“The tequila. Cost me a pretty peso.”
Victor put enough extra stress on the final word that Zora got the hint.
“An anagram for the password. Using the language of law.”
That was easy enough—the language of law was Latin. But an anagram in Latin of peso? Her two semesters in college on the foundations of Latin, junior year, were not helping. Nor was that senior seminar on Virgil, thank you very much. Seemed like eons ago, in fact. Aeternitatem. Virtually dead to her. She’d have to hurry back to her room, bury herself in some conjugations and declensions.
“Victor, I get the point, but I really need to leave. It’s getting late and I have class tomorrow, remember?”
He looked instantly crestfallen. As though his performance on the couch had turned the energy of attraction into the energy of repulsion. Far from it. But now was not the time to reassure him, to inflate his ego with praise of his libido. She truly was buried under work—her devotion to their relationship was having an inverse relationship to her devotion to law.
There was more to it than that. She didn’t want to sacrifice all of her coquettish slings and arrows just yet either. Sweet delay. His was the power of consummation of her body, the consumption of her self—hers was the power of deferral. The greater power of the two.
“Now who’s trying to spoil the mood?”
“Mea culpa.”
A sly Latin grin from Zora. She had an idea for absolution. For cleansing.
“Before I leave, I really wouldn’t mind another bath.”
On their way into the bathroom, her nude body slung in his arms, her arm draped around his neck, his voice against her ear:
“Remind me to give you something on the way out. A note. It’ll prepare you for the meeting on Sunday.”
He knew she would read it as soon as she got home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The note was written on the same off-white paper that Victor had used to prick her fancy in class. The stationery of the billet-doux, the love letter that had ushered her into a world of wormwood and chocolate and spice. And a very special pestle.
This note was all business. No mystical Chinese character in the red wax seal meaning forbidden. Instead, invitingly, an impression of the sun with its rays radiating straight outward, reminding her of the old Japanese flag before the fall of the empire. Her hands pried open the note, tearing the rays from the sun, an empire falling with barely a sound. Whimpering. T.S. Eliot would have understood.
Once you determine the password and gain entry to our meeting, you will be inducted into the Juris Club and be given your insignia. You must learn the order of rank and insignia of our members, and you must address each member according to his rank.
Rank and Insignia
Caesar—Radiant sun
Patrician—Golden statue
Consul—Eagle
Prefect—Obelisk
Praetor—Imperial chair (Sella curulis)
Centurion—Sword
Magister—Open book
Lictor—Ax
Plebeian—Bundle of wheat
Servus—Inscribed collar
Upon reading the note, Zora had an immediate blinding thought:
Servus? No fucking way.
The lowest rank. A horror. An abomination. That word she knew. Servus. The Roman word for slave. And then there was the collar. At the discretion of his
master, a slave in the Roman Empire could be fitted with an iron collar. Complete with various inscriptions that voided the self, gems of subjugation like Servus sum—“I am a slave.” Along with the name and address of the master in case the slave made a play for freedom.
There was no fucking way Zora was going to be called Servus—not now, not ever. The masculine ending of the word had nothing to do with it. Fuck the feminine form. Serva was equally unconscionable, unthinkable. If those fascist pricks at the Juris Club tried to call her either one, there would be a bloodbath of gladiatorial proportions. And if Victor was Caesar as she suspected, he would not be spared— the fate of Julius Caesar would be his fate. His last words on earth, sputtered in blood, would be Et tu, Zora?
She was starting to get a much clearer picture of the Juris Club. It discouraged her and inspired her at the same time. Infuriated her, fired her up with zeal. The Club was obviously enamored of the sad old theme of blind naked power and male privilege, white male privilege. Not exactly shocking in the annals of American history, but among the top lawyers and judges in the country?
This went way beyond hunger for power, lust for money. This was evil. Whatever their agenda was, whatever twisted idealism they espoused, Zora was going to put her heel down. Viciously. Murderously if necessary.
And she had the means to do it, to bring about a revolution among the revolutionaries, from the inside out. She had access to their beloved Caesar. Very special access. Unless they were the orgiastic kind of fake Romans, she was the only one who had seen their Caesar naked. The only one whose leverage over him included the infliction of impotence.
She would prefer to use love instead. A woman they would dare call slave, whose own ancestors had been slaves, would bend their Caesar to her will, replace their idealism with hers, or bring their collective downfall trying. She would be their Hannibal, and Founders would be their Cannae.
First she needed that goddamn password. On the back of Victor’s note, she started working out anagrams of “peso.” Ten tries later, none of which made any sense, her mind wandered back to her Virgil days. Less than a year before. A span of time trebled through the distorting lens of memory, the sheer turmoil of intervening events.
Not her virgin days, although the two were not that far apart. Her virgin days had ended during her Virgil days—she and Kyle had been going together for about a year by then, celibate as a monk and a nun, when one evening he had swilled one glass of lonely wine too many and pounced. Fucked her—without romance, without passion, breath hot with Chardonnay. Yes, a college kid who drank Chardonnay. Such people do exist. The grape falls not far from the vine. He hurt her. A brute. She forgave him, that was her way, a romantic in the darkness, love trumped all, some would have called it rape, the law would have called it rape, she called it Kyle being drunk. Not himself.
She made sure it never happened again though, not that way, not like a brute, she told him what would happen, how he would suffer. And she meant it, he would have suffered, terribly. What she had done to Victor with her heel would have been a gentle overture to a greater justice. Kyle would have felt, inscribed in his flesh, deeply, beyond the power of flesh to heal itself, the true meaning of the lex talionis, the ancient Roman law of an eye for an eye. Zora believed in the law, she believed in the spirit of the law—she believed in justice more. And she was perfectly capable of meting out justice when the law would not, when the law hesitated, contemplated. She believed above all in symmetry, that justice had to be symmetrical to be just. Centered.
What drew her to Virgil was this conviction. Reading the Aeneid, she was struck by the invocation of higher justice, the equilibrium between choice and fate. The suicide of Dido, the proud queen spurned by Aeneas, he who cared more for empty piety than love, made her cry and made her rage. Had she the power of life over art, she would have jumped into the page and twisted Aeneas’s head from his body. Or killed him with the same sword, his sword, upon which Dido skewered herself in despair.
A beautiful double symmetry—once when she wielded the sword fresh with Dido’s blood, and then again when it passed through the very center of Aeneas’s chest. Mixing his lover’s blood with his own.
Zora had fallen in love with the Aeneid, memorizing dozens of lines. Not simply because the professor insisted on it, but also because she was seduced by them, by their wisdom. And one of those lines passed through her mind at that moment, a line about the thing she hated most about the law she loved. The immortal marriage of money and power.
Contemnere opes, et te quoque dignum finge deo.
It meant: Despise the power of wealth, gain the worth of a god.
Zora did despise the power of wealth—and Victor had mocked her for it. The password was mocking her again. Opes. A word that meant money, riches, the root of power. Of course the Juris Club would have that as their fucking password, didn’t they believe in that as much as she believed in justice? Wasn’t that their definition of justice just as symmetry of wrong and right was hers?
She dreamed that night of bondage and death, of being collared and shackled in the inner sanctum of the Juris Club, of men calling her slave, abusing her flesh. And then of her breaking free and killing every single one of her tormentors.
She wielded in the dream a sacrificial knife, made entirely of ivory, that had been lying on an altar at the front of the room. The blood of the men splattered onto the altar, and she was satisfied that the place had finally been sanctified. She did not spare Victor—him she killed last, cutting his throat. As he died she kissed him passionately on the mouth, and whispered into his ear, Contemnere opes, et te quoque . . . He died before she could finish.
Sunday night, she showed up early, quarter to five, navigating her way to the head of Voltaire. The head had been shrouded in a plain black cloth. Voltaire had been blinded. Someone new was there at the door—a university police officer, gun holstered at his side. Zora wondered if the university would assign an officer to guard the Club’s dealings if they knew how the entire organization was covered in fascist shit. More than likely they’d assign two. In case protestors somehow showed up.
Without even having stepped through the door, Zora knew what she’d find inside. The makings of a second American Revolution. Sort of like the French Revolution in reverse—minus the guillotine. At least Zora hoped the Juris Club hadn’t included a revival of the guillotine in their glorious plans. She was certain what the end result of their revolution would be though: the haves ending up with everything and the have-nots with nothing. The strong completely destroying the weak.
She approached the officer, who bristled at her, barked at her.
“You can’t go in there. It’s a private meeting.”
She barked right back.
“Believe it or not, I’m here for the meeting. The password is opes. Now why don’t you let me in.”
Despite her demeaning tone, he softened up.
“Oh, you must be the lady the Judge was telling me about. Everyone else is already inside.”
He turned around, his body blocking the keypad on the door, typed in the correct numerical code. The door opened and her body whispered into the room. The officer closed the door behind her.
“Why the hell is she here?”
The voice was Vane’s, the vitriol of his look making the officer’s glare of moments before seem like seduction. About 20 men were sitting around a large three-sided grouping of tables in the shape of the Arc de Triomphe. They all wore black silk jackets that buttoned down the left side instead of the center. As if Gucci had gone into the business of making fencing lamés.
Zora was almost disappointed to see there was no altar at the front of the room as she had dreamed, nor any sacrificial knife lying about, ready to be applied to living skin and the liberation of blood. What did impress her was the phantasmagoria of tiles that ringed the room. Two-thirds of the way up the walls and about 3 feet from bottom to top. A brightly colored frieze of thousands upon thousands of mosaic tiles.
At the far end of the room, just below the frieze, was a large inscription set in white mosaic tiles on a black tile background:
Virtus legis, lex opis.
The word opes again, this time in genitive form. The inscription meant, The power of the law is the law of power.
The motto of the Juris Club.
Zora took all this in quickly, in a matter of seconds, before the resonance of Vane’s words shook her, before it registered that he was attacking her. His hostility would be her greeting, his anger her salutation.
She opened her mouth to answer, to introduce herself and feed the gathered throng some bullshit about how honored she was to be there.
Victor answered for her. Ever the gentleman.
“My fellow Blackcoats, this young lady is Zora Bright. One of my students. My very best students.”
