The Coming of Bright

by Sadie King

  “Listen, the role of the justice system is to serve justice. Not worry about what might happen. Justice means righting the wrongs of the past, not predicting the wrongs of the future. Nobody could prove Dorothy had any direct connection to the victims, there was no motive, there was no evidence of premeditation or even intent to kill.”

  “Victor, wake up and smell the crazy. She’s psychotic. You don’t have to have a motive that people can understand when you’re psychotic. You don’t have to kill someone over money or jealousy. Maybe Dorothy thought her victims had nice fingers and she wanted to add them to her collection, maybe she thought they were possessed by demons, who the fuck knows. Doesn’t change the fact she needs to be put away for the rest of her life.”

  “I have another saying for you. Veritas caecans. Know what that means?”

  “Of course, Truth is blind. Although Victor caecans seems a lot more fitting right now.”

  “Got you. It actually means, Truth is blinding. The truth of what happened to those people is hiding behind Dorothy, concealing itself behind the tragedy of her life. The President is right. Dorothy is a scapegoat. The truth doesn’t want you to see it, and so you don’t.”

  “A scapegoat? Murdering people and then hacking them to pieces? Calling me a slave to my face? God Victor, even for a lawyer you like to coat shit in sugar a little too much. You like Latin, how about Libido caecans? I don’t think I need to translate that one for you.”

  Victor was never one to let his libido go to waste, and even the word itself was enough to put him in a much less confrontational mood. The word was his cue, his code. Without giving her fair warning, he brought his body close to Zora’s. He rested his hands on her hips. Pressed inward with his fingertips. She tried to squirm away, still indignant, but his fingertips held fast.

  “Why don’t we translate it together? For you Zora, Amor aperio omnes fortes. Love opens all doors.”

  Zora was sick in her soul of talking about the Gatekeeper. She wanted that door to close. There was nothing she could do about it now anyway. And Victor had a playful aura about him, a mischievous radiance in his face, passing into her hips through his fingers, up into her heart, that melted her last vestige of resistance to his wayward charms. To his very, very inventive libido.

  She smiled and let herself fall fully into his arms. She placed her right hand on his hip as he had placed his hands on hers; her left hand, the one that trembled at that very moment, trembled violently, she placed open-palmed on his chest, over his heart.

  “Let’s open a door together my love. A door in my house. I have already chosen our mantra once we’re inside. Amor exercendi, fortissima exercitatio amoris. The love of exercise is the ultimate exercise of love. Remind you of anything?”

  She shook her head, her right hand starting to move on its own accord from his hip to a softer, fleshier resting place around the bend.

  “My Pilates room. My Pilatesium. I have a few things to show you there, a few things to teach you. A few exercises that Pilates never intended. But would wish to hell he had.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In his Pilatesium, Victor had it all. Equipment wise. Of course he had the Reformer. And the Trap. And the Ladder Barrel. The Electric Chair. The Guillotine. The list goes on. The place looked positively diabolical.

  And it could be if you didn’t know what the fuck you were doing. Victor did. If anyone alive could out-Pilates Pilates, it was Victor. Especially when it came to using all that equipment for sexual release. That was where Victor surpassed the Master. Pilates had thought of the human body as the domain of Apollo—a reservoir of pure physical light. Victor gave equal billing to Dionysus—the body as an organized chaos of sweet dark pleasure.

  Zora knew the Hundred and that was about it. She’d never done Pilates beyond the mat. She was a nibbler in the world of fitness—a little Pilates here, a little tai chi there, yoga here, Zumba there, cycle, treadmill, Qigong. Shit, she’d even done some Feldenkrais. She was an opportunist of the latest fads. She was putty in Victor’s hands.

  He brought her to the Reformer. It looked like a narrow wood-frame bed with a moving platform running up and down the length of the frame. Not the kind of bed you would want to sleep on. The kind of bed that Procrustes would reserve for his guests. Speaking of torturing one’s guests, Victor had some very sinful reformation in store for his very special visitor.

  “One thing I should tell you is that I do Pilates in the nude. Hope you don’t mind, mea venusta culpa.”

  Zora was touched that he would call her “my lovely guilt.” She had every intention of provoking and impassioning his guilt, of making it unbearable. As he would not doubt do to her muscles, stretched out on these machines.

  He was only inches away from her. Smooth as an expanding coil of spring, he sidled up to her so that the entire length of her body was touching the entire length of his. His gravity took over. She wrapped her right leg around his left, put her hands on the small of his back. He started sowing her neck with kisses dulcissimus—of the sweetest music. With the frantic deliberation of lovers practicing their craft, exercising their passion, they undressed each other, clothes falling away and lips falling onto unclothed skin.

  Naked and excited, equal in the knowledge of flesh if not in the world of knowledge, they stood before the Reformer. He would be the teacher and she the student. Roles they already knew.

  “This move is called the Elephant Arabesque.”

  He showed her how. The theme of the evening would be inversion, everything upside down, inside out. Outside in. The physical union of a man and a woman requires it.

  The Elephant meant hunching your body, back facing up, in an elephantine arc, the downward extension of your arms and legs making you look like the four-legged beast. Simple enough, animalistic enough. The Arabesque part came from ballet—it meant extending one of your legs smoothly, streamlined, into the air. An elephant doing ballet. Only from the mind of Pilates.

  On the footbar at the end of the Reformer, Victor placed his hands, palms open and forward. He rested the very tip of his left foot on the left shoulder pad at the end of the carriage. His right foot he extended into the air, doing his best imitation of Baryshnikov. If Baryshnikov had been an elephant.

  “Now it’s your turn.”

  He hopped away from the apparatus. Zora was a fast learner, and she adapted her body to the pose with every ounce of her sultry femininity. Nature had never designed an elephant so sexy. Pilates would have salivated looking at her there in the nude. Sorry, Pilates fans, but it’s true—he would have. He probably would have wanted to do a lot more than salivate. The Master was only human, only a man. A man who clearly had an aesthetic appreciation for the female body. A man who worshipped the female body. As Bernini had worshipped marble in his “Pluto and Proserpina,” or Jakuchu had worshipped silk in his “Old Pine Tree and Peacock.”

  Zora on the Reformer was the culmination of the genius of Pilates. A visionary of the body who used wheels and wires and wood to bring out every beautiful line and pose of the human form. Who realized in mind and in matter every aesthetic possibility of the body of the mortal Venus.

  “Hold that pose, my anima and my skia. I’ll come join you.”

  Zora knew anima meant soul, but skia escaped her. She fancied it meant sky, my soul and my sky, a beautiful turn of phrase. But Victor had suddenly switched to Greek for the second term of endearment. To shadow. My soul and my shadow. Darkly sweet and sweetly dark. Dionysian love. Apollo banished to the shadows.

  He straddled the Reformer while standing behind her. He helped her maintain the pose by grasping her right thigh with his right hand, letting the weight of her extended leg settle into his hand. She was almost ready for his coup d’amour, but not quite. With his left hand he reached between her scissored legs, her divided hips, and began to rub. Wetness didn’t take long to come, and then he entered her.

  “Move your body against mine.”

  He showed her what he mea
nt by pushing her body forward along the line of her elevated leg. With her hands against the bar at the end of the Reformer, she slid back and forth along the track of the device. Her body moved just enough to cover the entire length of Victor’s penis. This Pilates session clearly belonged to her—she was doing all the work, and he was reaping the friction and fluidity of her movement.

  Not wanting to be selfish—heaven forbid—he followed the undulations of her body with his left hand, exercising his fingers against her clitoris. Never had a Pilates workout been so vocal, or so athletic for the person on the machine. Soon Zora was glistening with iridescent sweat, her chest heaving. Her hemlock hand was perfectly still. Victor had barely begun to perspire.

  Midway through one of her slides, he withdrew from her. He lowered her leg, helped her off the Reformer. He needed her to conserve her energy, and he needed to conserve his seed. Coitus interruptus, Pilates style. They still had two more poses to go on two more devices. Pacing was everything when it came to Pilates. Especially sexual Pilates.

  He took her to the Electric Chair. Electricity would be flowing through both their bodies, but only of the erotic variety. Neurons would be pulsing, blood pumping, muscles tensing and relaxing. The Electric Chair was a high-backed seat made of flame birch with a clear finish. Victor had removed the high arm handles that would normally grace the frame of the chair. They would have gotten in the way.

  “This is the Swan Dive my love.”

  Inversion would once again be the theme, and Victor once again the teacher. He knelt at the base of the chair and planted his hands firmly on the spring-mounted footpetal that ran along the base. Using nothing more than the strength and heft of his arms, he pivoted and lifted his body up onto the chair so that the lower portion of his stomach rested on the padded lip of the chair, and his legs extended in a straight line over the top of the chair’s solid back. The posture was held in place by sheer power in the arms, and by the person’s center of gravity located right on the edge of the seat.

  Zora would be his swan, and this her day to dive. The fall can truly be more exhilarating than the ascent. She was not strong enough to get into the position by herself, so he helped her. Once she had her hands positioned, he lifted her legs up and over the back of the chair. Now he had to get himself onto the chair. As Victor straddled the seat of the chair with Zora in her downward bend, he held and spread her legs, placing each leg on either side of his neck. This would be a new version of the Swan Dive, and she would be a swan with wings spread.

  He braced himself with his legs, spread wide apart to give Zora space to move. With his right hand he angled his penis downward and into her waiting vagina. Because his penis was angled so far from its natural curve, almost as far downward as it could bend, he would move inside of her with extra friction. Not to mention extra stimulation. The back wall of her vagina had better be strong.

  “Push with your hands, and I’ll slide your hips.”

  Victor would be stationary again. The spring action of Zora’s body, with some help from his hands, would allow him to flow in and out of her. Rhythmically, she started to push and then relax her arms. He pulled up on her hips, providing most of the strength for her upward thrust, then let her hips slide back down. Repeating the process. He didn’t want her to tire too quickly. The chair itself accentuated her pleasure, compensating for her exhaustion. The padding of the seat rubbed continually against her clitoris, chafing not too much and not too little. Pilates would have been proud. Victor certainly was.

  After a good long while, and enough clitoral chafing to give half a dozen women an orgasm, Victor pulled out of her. He helped her out of her Swan Dive. By now her body was almost completely spent of physical energy. She was powered almost entirely by adrenaline and the simple yet primal desire to please her lover. To pleasure him. And be pleasured by him in turn.

  Together, nude and perspiring, they faced the Trap. The final contraption of the evening. The final erotic ordeal. Call it what you will, the Trap, the Cadillac, the Trapeze Table, it was the most diabolical, the most sensual, of all Pilates machines. By far the most elaborate. It resembled another narrow-frame wooden bed, a Procrustean torture device, this time with a large metal-pole canopy built above the padded lower platform.

  All manner of Pilates paraphernalia were attached to the canopy—a Push Through Bar, a Roll Down Bar, the Trapeze itself, Arm and Leg Springs, and some fleece-covered hanging straps. This was no ordinary fleece. Golden Merino lambs’ wool. If one is going to break one’s body on the rack—or in this case on the Trap—it might as well be done in luxury.

  “This one is called the Bird’s Nest. You’ll be hanging upside down.”

  The Bird’s Nest was Pilates at its most strenuous, its most devilish. It could turn the practitioner into a paraplegic if they weren’t careful. To demonstrate the right way to do it, Victor grasped the upper side bars of the canopy, one with each hand. Putting his right foot on the trapeze, he leveraged his left leg up into the air, resting it on the cross-bar directly above the trapeze. His right foot stayed on the trapeze. The rest of his body just hung there. Some people’s asses may sag under gravity, but not Victor’s. It stayed tight and taut. Zora wanted to reach out and spank him in that vulnerable position, spank him hard, but she managed to restrain herself. She didn’t want to cause an accident. Paralysis would make lovemaking much more difficult.

  Victor wasn’t into position yet, spanking or no spanking. He used the natural springs in his legs to flip his entire body around, keeping his left foot on the high middle cross-bar and swinging his right foot all the way over to the high cross-bar at the end of the canopy. Try to visualize that if you dare. A naked man doing that.

  Finally he swung his left foot over to the cross-bar where his other foot already rested. He let his body hang there upside down. He looked like Icarus falling to the watery depths, stripped of his wings. Plummeting with his face down to the sea.

  “You expect me to do that? I’m a person Victor, not some kind of jungle animal.”

  Victor released his legs and dropped back to earth. Safe and sound. He even survived a spanking that never came. But one that would have been richly deserved.

  “You don’t have to. I’ll lift your legs into position. Here, grab the side bars. Hold on tight.”

  She did, and he swept her legs out from under her, lifted them by the ankles up to the level of the end cross-bar. He placed her feet into position on the bar, soles up. He spread her legs apart just enough so that he could insert his body between them. All the way up to her hips, his navel overlooking her buttocks.

  Of all the poses they’d done that day, the Bird’s Nest had to be the most Dionysian. The most creative. The most ethereal. The most perfectly wrong. It molded the human body into a form that nature by herself never could have imagined. Only the human mind, touched by the gods, reaching for the heavens, looking to the earth, could have conceived of it.

  “See, that wasn’t so bad. How do you feel?”

  Zora’s fear of flying had disappeared. She was a bird, and goddammit she was going to sound like one. Loudly.

  Cock-a-doodle-doo.

  Only one problem: no rooster could ever sound that feminine. Or look that beautiful.

  “Exactly, cock-a-doodle-doo is right. Hold on, I’ll support you in the middle.”

  Standing against her spread hips, he wrapped his left arm around her stomach. He elevated her entire body a few inches, to relieve some of the strain that gravity was putting on her poor arms and legs. For the third and final time that day, he entered her in an inverted position. Ever the gentleman, thinking of her pleasure before his own, he began to massage her clitoris with his right hand. The moisture of their bodies, from his chest, between her legs, began to drip onto the platform of the Trap.

  “Ready to swing back and forth a bit?”

  With his arm around her middle, he started her swaying on the canopy. The pendulum of her body swung the perfect distance in its arc to uncover
and then cover again the full length of his penis. This time around he didn’t have to worry about conserving his seed, restraining his own excitement. After a few swings of the pendulum, he started swaying her in a wider arc, his penis coming completely out of her vagina and then diving back in all the way up the shaft. The feeling of coming completely out of her, feeling first the humid warmth of her body, then the colder drier air of the room, brought him to arousal much faster than expected. A few of these wider swings and he ejaculated, right as he came out of her. There would be some cleaning up to do.

  The timing of his release had been impeccable. Even with him supporting most of her weight, Zora had been about ready to let go of the bars. Ready to tumble with him onto the platform. After all, they could have just as easily made love there. But the full otherworldly potential of the Trap would have been wasted if they had.

  After he had climaxed, she released her legs from the cross-bar, landing back on terra firma. She collapsed onto the platform, heaving and shivering hot, oblivious to the cooling juices beneath her back. He joined her there and they huddled and embraced, legs and arms and lips tangled, the wreckage of a bird’s nest knocked from a higher place.

  Finally they got up, slowly, stiffly, achingly, and removed themselves to the bedroom. Not for more lovemaking, God no, hell no—simply to get a good night’s sleep. In the arms of a beloved. A basic human need. Victor had a small decanter of ouzo on the nightstand and poured a glass for them to sip and share. The ouzo burned going down her throat. Zora felt the need to press him on a burning question. Coyly, of course.

  “Was that the answer to my question? You love Pilates most of all? Jesus, Victor, I never knew you swung that way.”

  He reached down under the sheets and pinched her on the ass in retaliation.

  “I think I showed you tonight how I swing. But truth be told, I haven’t answered your question yet. Tomorrow I will.”