The Devil's Sperm is Cold (Vassi Collection )

One

The conference was staggering on into its third hour. Joan was bored. Almost unable to stifle her yawns, she screamed inside herself as the voices droned on. As always, when meetings reached this point, she began to look around for a sympathetic eye, a reassuring smile, to tell her that all hope for humanity had not been abandoned to the necessities of the business machine. But most of the people there were men she barely knew, salesmen who had traveled to New York City for a week of gatherings just like this one.

She glanced over the faces. Lou Morris, president of Centaur Publishing, was listening to a complicated report from the Midwest representative. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands folded over his chest, and staring at the ceiling. She would find no support there. Jack, Centaur's top salesman, and one of the few of that breed that Joan could relate to, was drawing elaborate doodles on his scratch pad. Joan continued to scan the room, and was brought up short when she found herself staring into the eyes of Margaret Hayes, Lou's executive secretary, a tall, cool career woman who rarely spoke except by way of giving orders. Now, surprisingly, she narrowed her eyes and insinuated her gaze into Joan's, indicating not only that she knew what Joan had been feeling, but that she empathized with her.

Joan looked away hurriedly. It was perhaps the sixth or seventh time within the past month that she had been captured by the other's awareness. Something about the experience frightened her, although Margaret had not done or said a thing which could in any way be considered threatening. Rather, it was some sense within herself that responded peculiarly to Margaret's attentions. She had thought about it, but had not been able to come to any conclusions about the matter.

She raised her eyes from the table top, and glanced back in Margaret's direction. The eyes were still there, looking back at her. This time they held a glint of amusement, as though the two of them were partners in some naughty secret. As Joan felt herself pulled into Margaret's gaze, getting lost in the other's grey-green eyes, fascinated by the highlights in her golden hair which was swept back severely and wrapped in a tight bun, Margaret slowly and deliberately ran the tip of her tongue along the entire length of her full lower lip, moistening the soft maroon flesh in such a way that it glowed. Then, to Joan's astonishment, she wrinkled her nose impishly and smiled.

It was one of those moments of exquisite uncertainty. On one level, Joan took the gesture as an extension of the comment on the sterility of the proceedings; but on another it seemed to contain a provocation that had Joan's breath sticking in her chest. Joan let her gaze fall from Margaret's face to her body. Margaret was dressed in a black knit turtleneck shirt that gripped every square inch of her torso. Her high, aggressive breasts bulged shamelessly forward, climaxing in half-dollar nipples that seemed blatant on such a sophisticated woman. Seeing Joan examining her breasts, Margaret twisted in her seat so that the twin mounds shifted dramatically, jiggling slightly with the movement. The movement was an unmistakable sexual signal, but for a few seconds, Joan couldn't understand why it was being sent to her. And when it did become clear, she looked away in confusion.

"And that's it, Lou," the representative from Chicago was saying. "We're doing so badly that we wouldn't be operating now if we didn't have support from Zenith."

The company had been in a decline for over a year. For a long time prior to that, it had succeeded as one of the few sources of literate pornography in the nation. But with the sudden upsurge of smut since the late 1960s, it was being squeezed out on two ends. On one side were the West Coast sex factories, run mostly by young people who knew how to circumvent the guilt-and-dirt syndrome which had permeated all erotic writing in America since the first copies of Fanny Hill had been secretly printed a century earlier. The California atmosphere provided a natural base for orgiastic attitudes, and books, magazines, and movies had been pouring out from Los Angeles in tidal-wave proportions. On the other side was the constant pressure from federal and state authorities, forcing Centaur to tone down its output. Since Lou didn't have the volume or exuberance or the shoestring budgets of his California competitors, he had been pushed out of the market until now his back was to the wall and Zenith, the distributing company which owned Centaur, among a score of other properties, was demanding a radical change.

Lou shifted his weight and his chair came back to the upright; he leaned forward with his elbows on the table. His face was drawn. It was obvious he would have preferred being anywhere else but at that spot at that time. Joan, who was fond of him, looked away; she could see the mortality in his eyes and it disturbed her. She glanced at Margaret again, but the other woman was staring out the window, at the thin, grey New York sky. Across the street, in a building almost exactly like the one they sat in, a hundred windows exhibited scenes not unlike the one now, going on at Centaur.

"It's extraordinary," Joan thought, "there must be a million meetings like this going on in the city alone. And millions more in the nation, and all over the world. What an enormous waste of time."

"Joan." It was Lou's voice. She turned back to him. Her presence at the meeting was purely formal. As a copy editor she had nothing to do with policy, but Lou had wanted her there. "Maybe you can add something from a fresh perspective," he had told her.

"Would you get us some coffee?" he asked.

She suppressed the impulse to make a face at him. She resented doing what she considered maid duty, but there was no gracious way to refuse. Besides, her relationship with Lou was more complex than a simple employer-employee bond. Almost a year earlier, ragged and unhappy, her savings gone, working as a night waitress in Bickford's, her dream of becoming an actress mocked by the realities of the theater scene in the city, she had decided to find a regular office job and pull her life together. She couldn't even consider going back to Arkansas, which she had left, a diploma in hand certifying that she had graduated college as a drama major, to conquer Broadway. She grimaced now when she thought of how naive she had been. Two years of workshops and making the rounds had taught her much about life and what went on behind the productions. She had done the customary things, getting odd jobs, having an affair, dabbling in promiscuity, seeing a therapist, and gradually come to love New York. Then, sadly aware that she would not make her way on the stage, she was forced to consider ways of earning a living. Through a friend of a friend, she got an interview with Lou, who was looking for a copy editor.

She remembered the afternoon clearly, one of those false spring days in March when the city seems in the throes of rebirth. She was then almost twenty-four and had forgotten how attractive she was, since she had had her ego badly bruised by the refusals at off-Broadway and Broadway tryouts. She was five-and-a-half feet tall, thin, and with a look of intensity that sometimes flared into rich beauty. Her features were standard American, that is to say, she was pretty enough to have served as a model in a Pepsi ad, with a long straight nose, a wide generous mouth, and deep black eyes. Her auburn hair, with glints of red, came down almost to her hips in a shimmering shower of silky invitation. Ordinarily, she wore it in a pony tail, and let it hang loose only when she went to bed. Her legs were slightly longer than was strictly proportional, two tapering stems that were lost beneath the short, loose skirts she generally wore. Unable to make the full step into clothing ease, she still kept her breasts encased in a brassiere, complementing the panty girdle she sometimes wore as a shield over her arched buttocks.

Lou had been gracious and demanding, confronting her with complete honesty and yet not trying to force her. It hadn't taken more than five minutes for him to understand exactly what Joan's situation was. And after a quarter of an hour of formal interview, he had leaned forward over his desk and said, "Look, without experience, you really aren't qualified for this job. But you seem intelligent and quick, and I'm sure you can learn as you go, and within a month should be doing fine. It's a pretty good job, not bad pay, and nice people to work with."

Her mouth went dry. From one standpoint, the job wasn't much, but from another, it was like salvation. She could get out of the hectic restaurant where she rushed about for eight hours each night, find a decent apartment, start to involve herself in studying again. In her state of confusion and fatigue, the job seemed heaven-sent, and Lou like an angel. He watched her carefully.

"Frankly," he went on, "at this point it's a buyer's market." That was a lie; he was desperate for help. "And if you want to sell your talent and time, you must be aware I'm interested in more than your literary skills." He had paused for a long moment and then added, "Perhaps we can continue this interview at my apartment later."

Her face flushed. Not only because of the openness of his request, but because she felt a strange tingle of excitement at the idea of prostituting herself in that way. She had slept with men several times on the off-chance they might be able to help her, but she had never given her body in direct exchange for a solid offer. A slow warmth filled her breasts and made her nipples sweat, and her thighs squirmed ever so slightly on the chair.

Now Lou looked around the table. "Coffee for everyone?" he asked.

Joan stood up, pad and pencil in hand, to write down their preferences. To her amazement, Margaret got up also, and walked around behind her and went to the door.

"I'll give you a hand," the other woman said. "I'll start the water boiling."

"Shouldn't you be in on this?" Lou called out to her, a ring of harshness in his voice.

"You know my feelings about all of this," she told him.

The two of them had been arguing policy for six months. Margaret insisted that the only way for Centaur to get out of the hole was to inaugurate a radically new line of books. She had evolved a theory of pornography, which Lou refused to take seriously. His contention was that people who bought "dirty books" cared for nothing except their excitation value, and the thing to do was to increase the percentage of explicit sex per chapter and to run hotter covers and more suggestive titles. Margaret argued that pornography was a valid genre, like science fiction or gothic novels, and that its real audience was among the college crowd, and the generally literate public. She wanted to scrap the entire Centaur approach and work from a concept which would be revolutionary among publishers of pornography: to put out no more than twelve titles a year, and to invest all their money and distribution talent and advertising potential to sell those dozen to respectable bookstores and chains.

"Before anything else," she said, "pornography is literature."

"Before anything else," Lou countered, "pornography is a way to get your cock hard."

"And what if you don't have a cock?" she had replied.

"Then go find one," he had yelled, ending their discussion as their talks usually ended, in a flare of anger.

Finally, Margaret had taken matters into her own hands. She had been given the sales figures now being discussed a few weeks earlier by Jack, and fortified with the knowledge that Centaur could do no worse than it was doing, no matter how else they approached the problem, she had decided to see Al Leeds, the president of Zenith, the parent company. Thus, her attitude toward the present meeting was one of disdain.

She left the conference room, and Joan, after listing who wanted cream and who wanted sugar, followed. But as she turned to leave, she was seized with a bizarre psychic convulsion. Perhaps it was the fact that the eyes of every man in the room were riveted on the cleft of her ass, boring holes through the cloth and into the damp darkness beneath. She could feel the pressure of their gazes tugging at her panties which had worked their way up until they were jammed tightly in her crotch, causing her cunt to twitch. For an instant she imagined what it would be like if the conventions of civilization were suddenly suspended. She could feel the mass of male bodies rising behind her, surging over her, bearing her to the floor. She could feel the hot breath in her ears, the frantic lips seeking hers, the tongues over her face, in her mouth. Quick hands peeled the clothing from her body, from a body that was, despite herself, beginning to respond to the terrible excitement. Fingers probing, pulling, pushing. She, half-naked, her stark white thighs flailing about, half-protesting, half-desiring, as her legs are spread, and urgent flesh is thrust against her skin. Then, a hand reaches the curled lips of her cunt, pries apart the fragile defenders, and thrusts rudely in, to find a cavern that is already hot and wet and throbbing. Wanting. Needing. She opens her mouth to make a sound, and she is filled with a large anonymous cock, ingratiating itself with her tongue and invading her throat. She gags and her legs come up, her knees rising to her chest, exposing the long curves of her tender ass. Her bra is yanked off, and more hands and mouths descend on the tossing breasts. There is a long moment of indecision, and suddenly she is opening herself up, letting the channels into her body fall loose and inviting. The cocks in her mouth and ass and cunt multiply and interchange, there is the smell of sweat, of sperm, the sound of deep grunting, and before she is lost entirely she gets a glance at herself from the ceiling, a naked lustful woman sucking into herself a roomful of insatiable men.

A low whistle caressed the backs of her knees as she went through the door, and was followed by the sound of low laughter. The whole fantasy had gone through her in a split second. Her chest heaved with heavy breathing.

"Can they possibly know what I've just been thinking?" she wondered as the hallway tilted before her eyes.

But the moment passed, and ordinary reality returned. She went off toward the office kitchen, tailored, prim, and there was no trace of the drooling lapping animal that lurked just beneath the surface.

"I must be schizophrenic," she thought, musing again on the fact that she was capable of diametrically opposed types of feeling and behavior within practically the same record. The idea returned her to her first meeting with Lou, in which that quality of her personality was most sharply underlined.

She had gone to his apartment, caught up in the slight sense of degradation involved. She was going to take her clothes off, lie on her back, and let a complete stranger fuck her as he wanted. And she would enjoy it, not only the sensations, but the experience of giving herself like a whore. "I wonder what it is inside me," she thought, "that gives me pleasure in this kind of scene? Or is it that I am in touch with something that exists in all women and only I have the honesty to admit it?" It was a far cry from her teenage years when sex was considered a function of what was called love; a girl was supposed to like a boy before she let him touch her. It took many years before she understood that liking him was synonymous with wanting him to touch her. And that was the thing about Lou. She actually liked him, from the first moment she saw him, and wanted him to touch her. He was almost fifty, heavy-set, with thick features, but his physical appearance was not important.

He mixed very strong martinis, and made a great show of the splendors of his apartment. She was impressed with his obvious wealth -- by the opulent Moorish furniture, by the expensive rugs, by the nine rooms and balcony which overlooked Central Park. The entire place was wired like a single electrical gadget, with stereos, radios, videotape recorders, vibrating beds, and even a movie projector. To her chagrin, as he took her coat and had her sit on his seventeen-foot kangaroo-hide couch, her knees wobbled and she felt that unmistakable quickening between her thighs which told her that her cunt was beginning to secrete.

He brought out a pile of manuscripts and while they worked their way through a third drink apiece, he talked about his concept of pornography. "It is a valid function," he said. "Sex is at the core of the human condition. After all, what are we but the result of a meeting of cock and cunt? Sex is our origin, and our continuing fascination with it is perfectly understandable. I publish over three hundred books a year. There must be thousands of titles coming out yearly in this country alone. And considering that there are a very limited number of things that can be done with the human body, and that most sex books are a repetition of the same behavior, it is amazing that millions of people keep buying them and reading them. It proves conclusively that sex is the most important of our involvements, and pornography is perhaps the most vital of all the arts. Of course, given the nature of our civilization, it is considered the lowest."

She ran her eyes over one of the manuscripts. It was titled Sentimental Swinger , and she opened it at random. " Marcia knew that she had lost him ," it read, " her own sweet Jim. As he pressed his cock between the undulating cheeks of the other woman's ass, he closed his eyes and moaned, and Marcia knew that he no longer cared who it was that gave him so much pleasure. 'Is this how it all ends?' she asked herself, 'the so-called sexual freedom, the experimentation? Wasn't it better when a man and woman had sex because they loved each other, and not because they were hungry for excitement?' But even as she watched the thoughts go through her mind, one of the men at the orgy they had come to had moved up behind her and was running his finger up and down the crack of her cunt, teasing the outer lips, pushing slightly into the moist center. And as her heart broke, her thighs moved; as her dream of romance faded, her scream of lust welled in her throat. Fuck me,' she moaned, 'you big-cocked stranger who doesn't even want to know my name. Shove your hard prick up my cunt and make me come like crazy.' He pushed her to the ground. 'First suck it,' he said. And then with tears in her eyes, listening to her husband's groans of passion, she curled her tongue to lick the underbelly of the thick cock that descended to her face ."

Joan looked up from the manuscript to see Lou smiling down at her. "What do you think?" he asked.

"It's like a soap opera with sex," she said.

He clucked his tongue against his palate. "That's right," he said. "And that's the sort of thing we want. You catch on fast." He squinted and stared at her. "Don't you?" he added. And after a pause, "Well, do you want the job?" he went on and glanced down at his crotch.

She leaned forward. "If I take the job," she said, "how often do I have to be available for these private consultations?" Her breath was hot against his thighs and he swayed where he stood. Her mouth was slightly open and her tongue was a pink shadow in its depths.

"I'm a busy man," he told her, "and my main interest is money. I love sex, but not if it distracts me from my most important direction. And quite frankly, once I satisfy my initial curiosity about a woman, she doesn't hold too many charms for me. I don't know. I may want you again a month from now, or six months from now, or never again. No, what I'll enjoy is knowing that you are available to me. I'll enjoy watching you walk around the office, all corseted and clean, knowing that whenever I want I can have you rolling naked on my rug, spreading your pussy wide for me, licking my balls, letting me fuck you up that pretty little ass of yours."

He sat down next to her, and like an actor switching costumes he said in a gentle voice, "I hope you don't mind my being direct. I mean, I think you're an intelligent woman and you understand the way the world works. If you're looking for romance, do it on your own time; if you're looking for freedom, go live in the woods. In the office, you belong to me. I'm an old-fashioned kind of capitalist. I don't hold with euphemisms. People who work for me are wage slaves. I pay the wage; they are my slaves. When I buy you I buy your skills and your body. Because I don't beat about the bush, you always know where you stand, or. . ." he smiled, "where you kneel."

"Well," she said, emboldened by his honesty, "then I might as well be a whore on the street."

He chuckled. "No," he said, "that kind of life is too rough for a nice middle-class girl like you. The competition would kill you, or the cops would get you, or you'd wind up working for a pimp. I'm offering you a respectable job, with good pay, and regular hours. It's not asking you to do anything that will permanently fuck up your life."

"Except to act as your sexual plaything."

He laughed, a deep, resounding baritone laugh, much like that used by men who play Santa Claus in department stores at Christmas. "No," he said, "we're doing that because you enjoy it. And because I don't like to run an office rife with sexual hypocrisy. If you worked there and I didn't try to fuck you, I would be lying to myself and to you, and the tension would mount. This way, we stay clear with one another." He put one hand on her breasts, and the sudden warmth made her lean back against the arm of the couch. "Besides, it's just perverse enough to titillate you."

She lay back and her lids lowered as she watched him through the prism of her oddly mounting desire. He loomed over her, huge and indistinct. Her eyes went to where his right hand moved, and she could see his erection already outlining itself against the fabric of his pants. He stroked his cock slowly, and she watched like one hypnotized. Her breathing became shallow and, to her amazement, she could smell the secretions from her cunt as her ass dug into the leather couch. A strange lassitude crept over her and her mouth dropped open even wider than it had been. Her tongue wet her lips, leaving a thin glistening of saliva over the red lipstick she still wore, against the advice she received about its being out of style. He laughed again.

"Yes, I know all that," he said. "You respectable girls are the ones who want it most badly. You're the dirtiest ones. Growing up in those small towns with those picture-postcard families, with nothing to do but dream about it, and no one to relieve you except dumb high-school kids. You build it up, year after year, until you're eating and drinking and breathing sex. I can see you, night after night in your bed, rubbing your clitoris sore, pushing candles up your cunt, harder and deeper, never able to get enough. And the next day dressing up all neat and proper and pretending you're a nice little girl, just like momma wants you to be. And the real you is naked and writhing, begging for cock, licking the air with your tongue and wanting desperately for there to be a man standing over you, a man who will look at you and see what you are and who you are."

He reached forward and in one motion slid his hand under her skirt and up to her cunt. He grabbed her fiercely, pinching the sensitive flesh between his thumb and forefinger. She gasped and her knees flew apart, tossing her skirt higher on her thighs. He had her at her most vulnerable point, and they both knew it.

"And then one day you read a book," he went on, "or see a magazine, and there they are, real people doing things you didn't dare to dream about. And that's what you really want, isn't it, to do those things, those things you think deep down are dirty and nasty and depraved? Well, all right. With me you can do them all, because I understand all about it. And when we're finished, maybe you won't be so serious anymore, and think what a great big sin you're committing, and maybe you'll get over the melodrama and enjoy it for its own sake." His hand squeezed her cunt harder and she moaned. "Now take off your clothes, and then roll over on your belly and let me see your ass while you put my cock in your mouth and suck it until you go wild."

The effect of his words was like that of an earthquake. All the codes and inhibitions by which she attempted to define herself melted and a deep blackness overcame her. All her intelligence went into her belly, where a deep warmth began to throb and spread down into her thighs and up into her breasts. Her nipples were on fire, and her cunt was like the mouth of a volcano, hot and red and shooting fire. She itched as though she were covered with biting ants and she began to toss and writhe on the couch.

"Take off your clothes," he reminded her.

And as he watched, she squirmed before his unflinching gaze, and began to peel her clothing off. First she kicked off her shoes, and then reached up under her skirt and unhooked her nylons. She pulled the sheer hosiery down her long legs, revealing full thighs and rounded calves. First one leg and then the other until they were naked, open to his eyes, young, firm, fresh, and inviting. He couldn't resist and leaned forward to run his hands up and down her legs, stroking and massaging, feeling the soft flesh under his greedy fingers. His cock was aching in his pants and he wanted desperately to pull it out and sink it into her flesh, but he knew that his patience would be rewarded.

"Keep going," he rasped. "Little copy editor, take off all your clothes and show your boss what a hot little bitch you are."

She unhooked her skirt and yanked it down her legs and over her ankles in one motion, so that now she was bare to the crotch. Slowly, she started to undo her garter belt, but he stopped her. "Leave that on," he said. And she hooked her thumbs into the elastic of her yellow panties and began to push them down. He watched hungrily as the small triangle of silk was worked down her legs. She brought her knees to her chest so she could slip the panties over her feet, and the globes of her ass poked out from under, opening as a succulent frame for the patch of hair between. Before he could look at her cunt, however, she brought her legs down again, and he had to be momentarily content to stare at the bristling bush which covered it. Without stopping in her dance, she pulled her blouse up, and now was naked except for bra and garter belt.

"Classic," he said. He reached down beside the couch and took out a Polaroid camera. "This may interest you," he said in an oddly professional voice. Before she could protest, the flash had gone off, and the timer on the back of the camera was buzzing off fifteen seconds.

"Here we go," he told her, and peeled off the wrapping to reveal a picture of herself, looking like the cover of one of the books sold by his publishing house. She blinked. "Is that me?" she asked. The woman she looked at appeared so sexy, so voluptuous, so willing for any experience, that Joan could not relate the image to herself.

" 'Life imitates art,' " Lou Morris said and smiled to himself.

He took the picture from her hands and put it on the table next to the couch. "Get on your belly," he told her. "We'll take more pictures later."

"Yes," she said, her voice trembling.

She rolled over and pressed the front of her body against the couch. She began to pump her pelvis against the leather, feeling the mounting heat and tension as her cunt pushed into the soft hardness. The picture she had just looked at would not leave her consciousness, and she began to be aware of herself as she looked from the outside. Her young lithe body framed in a frilly bra and belt. Her ass exposed and circled by the elastic straps. Her hair falling down her naked back. And her cunt pressing frantically into the couch, silently begging to be touched, to be fucked. Lou moved next to her. "So nice," he said, "it's so good to let it all hang out, isn't it?" And to punctuate his remark he put one hand on the cleft between her buttocks, lightly, his middle finger dipping down to touch the unguarded hole at the core. She clenched her ass tightly and trapped his finger, and then let loose, arching her pelvis so that her ass rose high in the air. And then clenched again, so that it became like a mouth rising and falling to pull in the desired food.

She lifted her head and found herself staring at the giant bulge in his pants. She made a low sound that was unlike anything she had ever heard come from herself before, and checked it. Lou grabbed her ass more firmly and began to move even lower, toward the already yearning cunt that opened each time she raised her hips. "Let it go," he said. "You can do anything you want with me. I've had thousands of woman where you are now. And you all do the same thing. It's all one cunt, one ass, one pair of tits, one mouth, wanting the same thing. Don't be ashamed or think you're any different. Let it happen and let me watch. It's all I really want from you, you know, to see you when you're really naked, and really beautiful."

She sobbed again. "Lick it through the cloth," he said.

She pressed her face into him. Her tongue found a life of its own and curled around the tube, finding the ridges around the head of his cock. She licked up and down the entire length, sensing the difference between the rough fabric and the swelling softness underneath. Added to the sensations was the picture of herself, her young innocent face buried in the crotch of this old man, this stranger for whom sex was an amusement that had to do with aesthetics only, and didn't care who the personalities involved happened to be. She thrashed more wildly against the couch, her need growing, her ass a sea of convulsive movement, as she forced herself more deeply into his thighs.

"Oh please," she moaned.

"Please what?" he asked.

"Please give it to me," she whispered.

"Where do you want it?" he went on, teasing her.

"Put it in my mouth, in my ass. Stick it in my cunt. Just give it to me." It seemed that she was the vacuum that nature is reported to abhor, and she cried out to be filled. She didn't care what form the fulfillment took, or how it looked, or what it meant. She was ready to accept that she had to have something inside her to complete her emptiness or go raving down the corridors of her want.

But, at that very moment, he stepped back. She was left frozen in her posture, raw and ragged at the edge of her willingness to submit to anything he wanted to do with her, amazed that he was able so quickly to find just the exact switch to unleash the energies that had been so long suppressed in her. But then, he was one of the few great pornographers of the twentieth century.

"Would you like some coffee?" he asked in a conversational tone.

"Coffee?" she repeated stupidly.

He smiled gently. "You're beginning to get a bit carried away," he said. He sat down next to her. "I must confess something to you. I've already had one heart attack, and I've been told that if I don't watch myself, I could collapse at any time. According to my doctor, I shouldn't even look at women, much less engage in these scenes, but if I have to give up sex altogether, I might as well be dead. So, I compromise. I indulge, but I pace myself." Seeing the look of chagrin on her face he went on, "Forgive me. I didn't mean to frighten or disappoint you, but these are the facts of life."

She looked at him with concern. He went instantaneously from a horrid but fascinating lecher into a tired old man with a bad heart. Mixed with his rank sensuality and his pictorial grasp of sex was his actual humanity, the fact that he was only a mortal. She felt a pang of empathy with him, and from that flowed the compassion which was to bring them together in friendship.

She went into the kitchen to put coffee up to boil. He disappeared into his bedroom, and when he came out he was dressed in a satin dressing gown. They sat and sipped the hot brew in silence, each enjoying the relaxation of the moment. And after a while she spoke. "Does that mean we're not going to. . . have sex any more tonight?"

He laughed again, a sound that she was beginning to find heartwarming. "Not at all, young lady, we will almost certainly have sex for the next three or four hours. It's just that when the fires burst from inside you, I'll have to stand back from time to time and let you, as they say, do your thing. I won't be able to meet you at the peaks of your ecstasy. But then, I will be here, quite sober, should you plunge from those peaks into valleys of despair and self-disgust."

She gave him a questioning, appraising glance.

"Don't try to figure me out yet," he said. "Look upon me as a teacher, perhaps," he went on, launching himself into his favorite image of himself, a kind of sexual guru to the nation, both in the books he published and in the private scenes he mounted.

"It's hard to switch from such wild letting go to such rational conversation," she said. "I don't know if I can get back into sex again."

He put his coffee cup down. "Come with me," he said, and taking her by the hand led her into a small room that he had specially constructed himself. She felt like a child being led by her father into a garden of delights. The room was covered with photographs and drawings, and it contained a water bed in one corner, a leather message table in another, and row upon row of gadgets, the use of which she was unable to discern without a studied look.

"Lie down there," he said, pointing to the water bed. And when she did, she found herself staring into a mirror which had been cemented onto the ceiling. She had forgotten how she looked and was now rudely reminded, as her long legs kicked idly about on the undulating surface, and her cunt winked lewdly from around the edges of the garter belt. He knelt next to her.

"Now let's take this off," he said, expertly unhooking her bra, allowing her breasts to fall out, thick, creamy, lush, tipped with purple nipples. His head fell toward and in a moment she felt his hot tongue laving the soft mounds, while his fingers tenderly tweaked the tender tips. A gasp escaped her lips and her thighs parted of their own accord. As though his hands had eyes of their own, his fingers found their way down her flat belly, past the humped hairy mound of Venus, and into the sticky hole beneath. Her cunt, hot and pulsing with a life of its own, sucked three of his fingers into its depths.

"Oh God," she sighed as his hand slid back and forth, in and out of her tingling pussy, his fingers twirling against the slimy walls.

He let out a single surprised breath. "I'll bet you can take my whole fist in your cunt already."

In response, she opened her legs wider, spreading her ass on the warm support of plastic and water. "Do it," she murmured. "Put your fist up my cunt, Lou, shove it in all the way to the elbow."

She closed her eyes and let him do what he wanted with her, and even when she could sense a bright light go on, and knew that from somewhere a camera was recording her every moan, her every thrust, she didn't care. She had wanted for her entire life to let go and put herself in the hands of a man who understood what she wanted, when she wanted to be passive. And now that she had found one who was not only expert, but kind, nothing in the world would have prevented her from draining the experience of its last drop.

"I'll get to your cunt," he said in a low, firm voice, "but first I want your mouth." And he knelt above her, his bulk hovering over her head, as she opened her lips and curled her tongue out to receive him.

"That's good," he said, "that's what I want to see. Show it to me, show me your cocksucking mouth." And again, the phrase pressed a certain button inside her, and she began to whip her head from side to side, her lips opening and stretching as wide as they could, while her tongue danced in a frenzy of lust. She twisted her pelvis, humping her cunt into the air. He seized one of her breasts and kneaded it like dough.

"Oh, give it to me," she moaned. "Please, put it in my mouth."

"Yes," he said quietly. "I'm going to put something in your mouth, and as soon as you feel it, I want you to swallow it. Do you understand? Now, reach your lips up toward me."

Frowning, she made sucking noises as his body descended toward her face.

That had been almost a year earlier, and since that night, Lou had taken her to his apartment a dozen times, with each visit finding her stretching the limits of the spectrum of sexual expressiveness, until one time he invited two of his friends to visit and spent the evening working her up to greater and greater peaks of desire, and then giving her to the other men to use as they wished. "It's easier for me this way," he had explained. "Not so much strain on the heart when a younger man finishes what I begin."

Finally, he had let her know, gently, over dinner, that he did not think there would be any further meetings. He had pleaded increased business, schedules, but she put her hand on his arm.

"You're bored with me, Lou, isn't that it? There's nothing more I can show you."

He nodded. "I didn't want to put it that way," he said, "and maybe hurt your feelings."

"What do we have together if we don't have honesty?" she asked him.

"But I want you to keep working for me," he told her. "I'm even going to give you a raise."

She laughed. "I'll bet that's the first time a boss has given an employee a raise because he didn't want to fuck her," she said.

"Well, I'm glad you understand," he replied. "You're a nice girl, with a lovely ass and an educated cunt, and you have a good mind. But you know, you're one of thousands, millions. Me, I'm interested in pictures. And as a model, you've shown me everything you have to show."

"And what happens to those movies you've been taking?" she asked.

"Don't worry," he told her, "they'll never be seen in Arkansas."

She now walked with habitualized rhythm down the corridor, glad to be away from the interminable drone of male voices, and wondered about Margaret, who was already in the small kitchen at the other end of the suite of offices, waiting for her. Joan sensed that the other woman was about to lift matters to a new level of relationship, and while she did not dwell on the particulars of what might be involved, she was charged with a slight expectant randiness that primed her for whatever might take place.

Copyright © 1993 by Marco Vassi