crystal of her namesake – a precious stone that must be worn one day; another chastity chain for some unsuspecting suitor whose hand in marriage unwittingly handed him over to the lineage, tutelage and control of her father and his tyrannical reign.
It returned into her life each and every day, interrupting her experiences with glum reminders.
Crystal would feel pity for this seducer, who knew not what awaited him, if she was not so enticed by his bewitching display of sexual prowess to think much of anything at all. He pleasured each of the other women in line and each of them he approached in different ways, revealing many different areas of sensitivity and adulation throughout the female body that Crystal had never known before. One woman he moved to climax by tasting her ears, licking the lobes and kissing the holes, the soft sounds of his lips against the gorgeous fleshly shell that decorated a most sensual hearing sensation. Crystal, whose senses had awoken to a greater experience than any of these people who stood in the room with her now, was positively overtaken by the auditory and sensory stimulations of the man and his seduction, and when she found herself clutching the bedsheets underneath her she began to wonder if this was not some sort of insidious plan hatched by the seducer to win her favor. Surely he knew of her sensitivities. Surely he planned to exploit them for his own ends.
Her lineage was no secret, of course; although none of these men had the royal blood to have before experienced a woman like her. They had surely read many stories, and dreamed through many nights of imagining about the ways a wife of her caliber would experience the ecstasies of their manhoods.
In many ways, Crystal wondered if this man was not just as naïve as her. Truly she would have felt pity for him and she would have been suspicious of him if not for the beauty of the sensations which came floating to her on the soft kisses and smooches and licking and tasting – the tongues and the rubbing, and the soft moaning and cooing from the women he brought to the floor with his magical hands and daring intimations. He did not know the foray he was entering into to be presenting himself before a woman of Crystal's lineage. He could not understand the scope of owning a jewel so precious that fe w men on the planet possessed.
Another women he brought to climax by simply massaging her hands and feet, moving with soft and circular rhythms across the hide of the palm, rotating the fingers and pressing them together with a tactile softness that looked superb for its simplicity, and erotic for the suggestion alone.
Indeed he was an artist. The seduction that this man was trained in came from an art form of insinuating sexuality in place of actually committing any penetration, and the reason it was mostly the art of women is because seduction was the way that younger girls won their favor without having to fear the chance of pregnancy or marriage by bedding the wrong man with too stubborn a seed. Seduction could make a man feel as though he had experienced a night of sex even when the girl had done nothing but massage his back and legs, and this man, this strange and foreign man, had discovered this nuance and was performing it before her now with such flagrancy that he was practically showing off.
Crystal did not mind, of course.
She had lost her sensitivities to her own arrogance when she was a much younger girl, lost in a kingdom that had been built in honor of a single family, swept away by ceremonies and expectations of her single blood rite that would awaken her second puberty, and crystalize this woman named after the jewel into the most desirable wife and political piece in all the kingdoms. Selfishness seemed a part of things, and if that should be the case then sex was its suitable arena, where two people made one and that oneness rang throughout the heavens with a centeredness that bucked body into body. The beast with two
Marguerite Henry, Bonnie Shields