Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology by Carol Queen Read Free Book Online Page B

her ass into her quarry.
    He held her gaze for a moment, then reached between her legs, found her cunt slick and wet, dipped his fingers in and then brought them up and pushed them into her open mouth. She sucked on them, still watching his face.
    “Seems like you want it pretty bad,” he said.
    She nodded. This was the point in the Game at which he began to describe the things she would like to do, and she would agree to each interrogatory and add her own embellishments. But tonight the Game took a different course, a new course.
    “I think you should do it.”
    She inhaled sharply and her stomach quivered. They had done things with others before, had talked about different possibilities, but always together. This time she would be flying solo.
    “I don’t know, now I’m nervous.” “Nervous or scared?”
    “Nervous.”
    “That’s good, it means you’re expanding your comfort zone. Do you remember when I said I was going to take you to a party blindfolded and make you do things? You were really nervous then, too, but you enjoyed it, didn’t you?”
    “Yes. You were very naughty and you still won’t tell me who anyone was.”
    He laughed. “I want you to be brave again.” His hand kneaded her back from her hip to just below the shoulder blade. “But you know if I let the tiger out of the cage, there will be a price.” She nodded again.
    He pushed her face down into the bed and bent close to her ear. “You have three days to do it. But you pay the price either way.”
    ***
    Nate’s brain was scattered in small, irregular pieces over an area at least two miles in diameter.
    Each morning the sun drove him from his tent, and he rode his bike out into a lunar landscape filled with fragments of dreams he’d never had. He ate pancakes while listening to classic rock anthems, bounced on trampolines, dodged dust devils, danced like John Travolta. Once someone came out from their camp to feed him a grilled cheese sandwich; another time he was asked to joust against a man-sized inflated monkey. All day he wandered aimlessly, like a tuft of marabou some thoughtless raver had set loose on the wind. Each evening he would return under a dusky pastel sky, having left more of himself behind.
    After sunset he was back out on the playa, now an astronomical fairyland, swimming through a vast darkness coronated with lights and flames and mysteries. Each night he stayed out until the fire faded from his blood and the horizon was just an endless line of unreachable glowing beads in the dark, unknown pleasures taunting him, and then crawled home, exhausted, to the cold, dusty refuge of his tent.
    There were other women. Women with larger breasts. Tiny pixie girls with smudged faces and butterfly wings. Six-foot goddesses who wore their sexuality like a strap-on battering ram. Filthy hippie girls with bright smiles behind their matted hair. Fresh scrubbed virgin girls in khaki shorts, eyes like hungry pools.
    But he realized that what attracted him to each of these women, endlessly different as they were, was the same thing: each of them reminded him of Treasure in some way. They had her haircut, her feistiness, her bold sexuality, her freely-displayed figure, her inventive costume sense. They were unstoppable—they could do anything they wanted, the playa wasn’t dry to them, it was the world’s wettest oyster and it was all theirs.
    He wanted to talk to these dazzling, exotic creatures, but he felt as inadequate as he was giftless. His sporadic conversations were friendly but stilted and abrupt. What could he say to them that could possibly be of interest? His stories were all about fucking off in Ohio, killing time between classes, dreading the day he had to look for a job. He had no conception of a world that could contain wonders like this.
    But it did.
    He didn’t see Treasure again until the evening of the third day. She waited for him by his tent, in a fishnet bodystocking that somehow accentuated every curve of her