The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Week 3

Sunday

28. Wendy wakes up in Sara’s bed

Wendy woke up with her arms wrapped around Sara’s body, Sara’s back faced Wendy as she cradled Sara’s breasts in her outstretched fingers. Wendy snuggled her face closer to Sara’s neck, breathing in the aroma of Sara’s wonderful clean hair, the scent of Sara’s body. Wendy kissed Sara’s earlobe, playfully nibbled it, and ran her hand under the blanket, across the curve of Sara’s body lying on her side, her hand trailing the slope of her chest, the downward sweep of her waist, the rising landscape of her hips. She swept the palm of her hand over the soft flesh of Sara’s ass and remembered last night.

Oh, god. How Sara fucked her with that dildo, making her scream into her satin pillows and claw at her satin sheets. Over and over and over again until her body trembled, perspired, and collapsed against the mattress, extinguished, exhausted, and satisfied. Wendy pulled away the strap of Sara’s nightgown and kissed her bare shoulder before quietly slipping from beneath the covers and out of bed to float almost mindlessly to the bathroom. Oh, god Sara. What are you doing to me?

Odd as it seemed to her, only now that she spent the night did Wendy fully take stock of her behavior. She stood in front of the wide mirror hanging above Sara’s huge bathroom. Mottled terrazzo with golden brown specks covered the floor, giving the bathroom a bronzed, golden hue. The countertops were of a golden sandy colored granite, with two large white basins each with a tall, bent brass spigot sat on the either side of the wide counter. A large glass shower, with two wide, round, brass shower heads on either side and room enough for half a dozen occupants, with a dropped floor stood on one side of the bathroom. To her left, through an open archway, Wendy beheld the largest walk-in closet she’d ever seen. Easily as big as her own bedroom, when she walked into it, she saw polished mahogany shelves holding shoes, purses, bags, and inevitably, as Wendy inspected further, sex toys.

Dresses, blouses, blazer and trouser outfits, hats, caps, lace, undergarments all hung from rods or were folded neatly on open shelves. Drawers had been built into the walls, but Wendy dared not open them. I’m intruding enough, she thought. But she did check the hanging clothes, some of which were risqué in the extreme, some of which looked like strange and bizarre costumes for a strange and bizarre science fiction movie.

Wendy moved to the sex toys. Lined up neatly on a shelf, they ranged from small chrome vibrators, to tidy little dildos, to fantastically large cocks which didn’t even look human, couldn’t possibly be human. She touched one of them, a mottled, black and white, flexible rubberized dildo, at least two feet long, with a head that flared out almost flat at the end. Wendy picked it up and trembled, imagining that monster inside her. What kind of person was Sara? Funny she had never bothered to ask. But then again, she had done a lot of funny things this past week.

One week. One week ago, she didn’t even speak to Sara, much less masturbate together over the phone. Or get herself gussied up for a date with her. Or spend the night impaling her groin on a pink dildo. Fucking a pink dildo. One week to use the word fuck.

Huh. When she thought about it, she couldn’t recall ever really using that word before. It’s just not something that would have crossed her mind. She knew she wouldn’t have ever done any of the other stuff. Not in a million years.

Not with a girl. I mean.

She supposed she would have eventually. She supposed that she would have done so eventually in college, tried alcohol, tried drugs, experimented with girls.

I mean, that’s just what people did, right? I mean.

What did she mean?

First. No. She’d never do drugs. Not in high school, not in college. She knew better, she knew she had to study and study hard if she wanted to get that scholarship, to go to a good school, to get out of Edge City. And that meant no drugs. No alcohol either. She hadn’t done it before, and she didn’t plan on drinking in the future. Still. I mean. One did. People did. And she was a person. So.

But lezzing out with one the most popular girls in school? Did people do that? I mean. Did they? She looked at herself in the mirror doubtfully. Her long blond hair straggled over her shoulders, matted on the side where she slept on it. Her breasts bounced loose beneath the sheer fabric of her sheer pink babydoll nightgown, which barely hung past the bottom of her ass. Her nipples no longer hard, her dark areolas showed through the thin fabric clearly. If she shrugged, you could see her mound. But you could see it anyway, because she wasn’t even wearing panties. Not even a G-string so beloved by Sara.

She saw the tears pooling in the corners of her eyes as she stared at herself. Her mascara ran, a blaze of blue smudged eyeshadow hung over both eyes, and pink lipstick was smeared over the edges of her mouth, her lips having spent a night in arduous passion with Sara. I’m only sixteen, she thought. I’m only sixteen, and I look like, god, I don’t even know the word for what I look like. Prostitute? Whore? Slut? She half-turned and, stretching her thighs and calves, raised her ass a little higher. I think I look nice, though. I mean. I think it’s a nice body. Sara seems to.

Who the hell was Sara, anyway? How had she come into.

Am I a lesbian now, Wendy wondered. I mean, it seems pretty obvious. But I don’t feel like a lesbian. I still like boys. At least I think I like boys. I’ve never even dated a boy. But they look nice. I really like being around them. Except when they’re jerks. Which is all the time. But, you know. It’s nice when they smile at you. Like when Brad smiles at me.

Oh, god, Wendy he’s already got a girlfriend.

But he asked me out for tonight. So that means.

He cheats.

He likes me.

No. Not a dyke. And except for Sara, not even bi. And she was pretty sure she could find an excuse for her behavior with Sara. Besides the fact that Sara got under her skin. She couldn’t have been more of her puppet if Sara stuck her hand up her ass and moved her mouth like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Ass. Another word she’d never use.

Hm. Sara’s hand up her ass.

Geez, Wendy. Get a grip.

Breathing deeply, and wiping away the few tears that had formed, she walked to the toilet room and squatted. How did things get this way? Why couldn’t she say no? Was she in love? Did she love Sara? If she loved Sara, that would be different. If she loved Sara, then she would be gay. For her, anyway.

Would she?

I mean, would I really be a lesbian for Sara? Is Sara even a dyke? It’s a funny time to ask now, but I mean. Really. Is this just fooling around? Or is it serious? Is this me? Is this who or what I am?

It was nice waking up to her. God, it was unbelievable. I never knew how lonely I felt. Sara just felt so. And that smell. It’s so. Right. And all the things they did last night. Whatever was happening, that Wendy was gone. That old me. I mean, you can’t just go back to being shy, modest, studious Wendy after getting fucked all night by a girl you’ve only been hanging with a week now. You can’t go back to being a little girl after that. I mean, my hymen’s just gone. And I didn’t even feel it. Not really. Weird. I thought there’d be more blood. God. How long was it? Nine inches? Ten? Twelve? Did I really fuck a foot long dildo? Geez.

She was the youngest.

My friends are all older than I am. Maddy will be 17 before next year. I won’t turn seventeen until May. Maybe it’s just time for me to grow up. Maybe that’s all this is.

She wiped her damp mound with several pieces of tissue, dropped it in the bowl, flushed, stood, tried to smooth her babydoll, felt foolish for doing so, sighed and left the toilet room.

Sara lay curled in a half-fetus, clutching the blankets under her chin, that blessed glow of a sleeping human hovering over her peaceful face. Maybe, Wendy thought, maybe I do. She gently tugged the blanket down, crept over Sara, pressed her lips against her turned cheek and lightly kissed her face until she woke up.

“Good morning, sleepy head.”

“What time is it?”

“I dunno.”

Wendy pushed Sara out of bed and stumbled after her.

“Hey,” Sara protested.

“I’ve got to get going. Church.”

“What do you need to go there for?”

“I dunno. Mom, mostly. She thinks it’s important for my upbringing.”

“What about you? What do you think?”

“I’ve never thought about it. Church. My upbringing. I’ve never even really thought about the future. I just always assumed it was there. Like a town you’ve never been to but plan on visiting one day. I’ve never been to the future. But I plan on it.”

“I try to like where I am.”

“That’s because where you are it’s wonderful. It’s amazing.”

“No. That’s not it.”

Sara paused. A quick expression crossed her face, sat there momentarily, and then fled. Wendy suddenly asked a question she’d been meaning to ever since coming to this house for the first time.

“Hey, Sara. How come I never see your mother here? Every time I come over, it’s just you. The house is always empty, and it’s a gorgeous house.”

“Oh. My mother doesn’t actually live here. She lets me stay here by myself. I guess you could call it my house. Mom stays in the big house in Evening Hills.”

Wendy wanted to respond, but thought better of it, closed her mouth, started to say something else, but changed her mind again. So. Sara lived alone. In this big house. But not The Big House. No, silly, that was in Evening Hills. You know. Where the housekeepers have housekeepers. Even you know about that, you big dummy.

“But.”

“Hm?” Sara asked.

“Why do you go to public school? Why do you even bother with Kid Lester High? You could go anywhere. You could go to any private school you want.”

Sara shrugged her shoulders, walked to her closet, came out with three pairs of shoes, a couple of dresses, and some leggings of hose.

“Meh. I grew up in private schools. I spent my entire childhood at the Henry Darger Academy for Girls. I like your high school. My high school, now, I guess. I’ve been going there since last year. I think the people there are just great. Here, try this one. It’s getting late. Do you want to shower now? Or do you want to eat breakfast first? I’m sure I have something I can pop in the microwave.”

Sara tossed a light pink dress on the bed.

“It’ll look great with this hose.”

“Um. I guess I should shower.”

Wendy stood in the middle of Sara’s bedroom, once again aware of her near nudity, once again aware of Sara’s near nudity. The sheer nightgown clung to Sara’s body, and her breasts, full and upturned where the nipples protruded beneath the thin tulle, stretched the babydoll outward in a gentle swoop that revealed more than covered the round curve and outward flare of Sara’s hips, the bald mound of Sara’s. Well. Sara’s mushed auburn hair, the smeared make-up of her face, mirrored Wendy’s own look. It gave the girl a reckless, lascivious air, a confident lack of concern. Wendy felt a knot tighten in her stomach, descend to her groin, and begin to unwind. A trickle of dew drops collected around her. Well. Her nipples hardened and jutted from her nightgown. Wendy looked away, suddenly shy and awkward again despite last night.

Sara stepped forward, briskly stood on tiptoes, caressed Wendy’s cheek with one hand, clasped her hip with the other, and lightly kissed the side of Wendy’s mouth.

“Great. I’ll be in there shortly.”

And there it was. Just these assumptions, presumptions, and statements Sara made, all the while expecting Wendy to just go along with them. And she did. She just did. She never once said no. Well, that would soon.

“Okay,” Wendy said.

29. Wendy in the shower with Sara

Wendy sighed as warm water flowed over her, burst over her head, cascaded over her shoulders, splashed around her face, and washed away last night’s grime, her makeup, her juices covering the dildo Sara made her suck after coming over and over upon it, the scent of Sara. Her mind drifted lazily over the past week, this time experiencing it neither as a frightening change nor a dizzying prospect, but simply as memory, alien almost, as if Wendy stood in aloof, indifferent review of someone else’s mind, someone else’s past. The water flowed over her, and as it did so, Wendy found herself once again taking that strange position of equilibrium, of recoil or plunge. But this time she felt no tension, no pull in either direction. She stood waiting.

As she faced the wall of the shower, enjoying the warm, almost hot pulsation of the water jets pounding against the back of her bent neck, against the base of her shoulders, and down the curve of her spine, she sighed, relaxed. Her body drooped.

I am me.

She heard the door to the shower open as Sara crept in, moved behind Wendy and began touching her, pressing her breasts against Wendy as she squeezed and cradled Wendy’s own breasts, pinching and fondling her nipples, before sliding both hands down the sides Wendy’s wet body, curving around the fleshy mounds of Wendy’s ass. Sara stroked a hand through the crack, sliding her fingers over the rosebud of Wendy’s anus. Wendy gasped. No, she thought. Not now. Not again. She should stop her. She should say something. I’m. I’m not this way. At the very least she should tighten her thighs, close them against Sara’s intrusion.

Wendy, groaning more to herself than anything else, spread her legs slightly, allowing Sara’s exploring hand further access. Sara held Wendy with her left arm, cradling and fondling a breast while slipping her hand further between Wendy’s legs, sliding between the warm lips of Wendy’s waiting gash. Sara kissed the back of Wendy’s neck, the wet skin between her shoulder blades, the top of her armpit, smelling Wendy’s glistening body in the water, the warm water falling over both of them. Lifting herself on her toes, she kissed and nibbled Wendy’s earlobe and flicked the sensitive flesh behind her ear with the tip of her tongue.

“You were wonderful last night,” Sara whispered. “You were so beautifully you.”

Wendy thrust her ass back against Sara’s hand as her fingers entered the canal of her opening pussy. Oh, god, she’s going to make me come again. She’s going to make me come over her hand again. I can’t stop coming on her hand. She’s going to make me do this forever.

Suddenly Sara spun Wendy around. Wendy crouched lower against the shower wall, leaning her shoulders against the tiles as she spread her thighs wider and jutted her groin wantonly at the lust-driven Sara, who worked another finger into Wendy, who gyrated and writhed against Sara’s hand.

“Do you like that, Wendy? Do you like it when I fuck you with my fingers?”

Wendy squealed. She did. God help her she did.

Suddenly Wendy pulled her groin back, pulled away from Sara’s hand, stood up, squeezed her thighs together, and clasped Sara’s hand with both of hers, holding them against her hot and aching mound.

“Sara,” she said. “Wait.”

“Wait for what?” Sara asked, puzzled.

“I just. I need.”

“I know what you need, Wendy,” said Sara matter-of-factly.

“It’s not that. It’s just. Please, Sara. Please. Not now.”

“If not now, when?”

“Later,” Wendy said, catching her breath.

“Promise?” Sara asked, a mischievous smile playing upon the corners of her mouth.

“I promise.”

Sara pulled her hand away.

“We probably need to get dressed anyway. For your church.”

“You’re going?”

“Of course, silly.” Sara winked at her. “It’s just that you get me so worked up.”

Wendy had noticed.

30. Wendy dressing for church

Sara tossed a pink G-string with matching sheer half-cup bra.

“I can’t wear these to church,” she protested.

“I can’t see why not. You’re going to be wearing the most adorable dress.”

Sara pulled a red bra over her own chest and slipped a red G-string over her calves and thighs.

“I’ll be the only one who knows how naughty you are underneath it all.”

Before they put on their dresses, Sara asked Wendy to apply make-up to her. Foundation, concealer, highlights, black mascara, red eyeliner, and just the hint of eyeshadow. Glossy red lipstick. The effect surprised the both of them.

Wendy noticed the tube of mascara. Not the black and gold tube she had grown accustomed to seeing, but a bright pink tube with the maker’s name embossed in black: Archie Beall.

“I thought they only did nylon products, panty hose, stockings and stuff like that,” Sara said. “They claim not be big on make-up, but they did this mascara all the same.”

Wendy shrugged internally at Sara’s mystifying language of cosmetics and clothing.

“I can’t believe how good a job you do with this, Wendy. I look just perfect. You catch on so fast, you know?”

Wendy beamed with satisfaction. She’d always been an apt pupil.

“Now let’s do you. I’m red, so you’ll be pink.”

Pink. Of course. But now Wendy began to look forward to the color. La vie en rose, she thought. Ma vie en rose. She liked having a pink bed cover, wearing pink dresses, pink undergarments, pink lipstick, pink eyeshadow. A little pink bow with little pink ribbons falling to her shoulders for her pretty blond hair. Do me in pink, she thought giddily, almost hysterically, as she ran her tongue over her glossy pink lips, cover me up in pink flour, roll me over in pink dough.

“Here, sit down on the bed while I put these on you.”

Sara nudged Wendy to the bed, placed her hands on Wendy’s shoulders, and guided her downward to a sitting position. The Sara knelt and, taking hold of Wendy’s right foot, stretched out her leg and carefully unrolled a pink, lace-trimmed hose that reached to her upper thighs. Wendy shivered as Sara ran her hands up and down Wendy’s nylon leg and adjusted the lace, floral-and-paisley-patterned band holding up the stocking. When Sara looked up Wendy’s dress, she smiled at the moisture collecting in the hair around the strip of Wendy’s panties. Then she took Wendy’s left foot, caressed it, kissed her big toe, and unrolled the other hose with soft, deliberate touches as she felt the naked skin of Wendy’s bare leg vanish beneath the nylon smoothness of her pink hosiery.

Sara sat down next to Wendy to put on her own pantyhose, a light brown, nude color. Sara took Wendy’s hand and rubbed her leg with the open palm.

“Feel how smooth that is. Nice, huh? So sexy.”

Then Sara stood up quickly, still holding Wendy’s hand, and led her to the vanity mirror.

“There.”

Sara wore a light green billowing dress that swirled as she walked, the hem hanging just above her knees. She placed four-inch black leather straps heels onto her small feet. Wendy also wore a knee-length dress, light pink with lace frills. A pair of three-inch pink heels completed her outfit. Standing behind her, Sara tied the bow to the Wendy’s hair, offset just slightly in the rear.

“You’re just the most adorable little daughter I never had,” Sara giggled, running her hands down Wendy’s sides and smoothing out her dress.

“Freak,” said Wendy, smiling.

“Do you like me in red lipstick, Wendy?” Sara abruptly asked.

“Um, sure.”

“One last thing for me.”

Sara disappeared into her bathroom, coming back redolent of cinnamon.

“You like girls in red lipstick, don’t you Wendy?” Sara asked the question frankly, openly, affirmatively. To reply no, well, that would just be stupid and wrong. Bad wrong. Of course she liked girls in red lipstick. Who didn’t?

“Of course, Sara. Red lipstick looks wonderful on girls.”

“So much more, um, assertive than pink, don’t you think?”

Now that she thought about it, she supposed Sara spoke the truth. Red really felt, looked, acted stronger than pink. Which made sense. Red was red, but pink was only almost red. Not quite red. But pink was lovely, so soft and lovely. She just loved pink.

Wendy nodded. Sara dropped the subject.

Later, in the kitchen, Sara opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a couple of glass tumblers filled with a pink shake-like concoction. Wendy remembered last night’s smoothies. They tasted so good.

“I only have these,” Sara said. “But they’ll fill you up. At least until you get home.”

Once again, Wendy sipped at the straw a few times before she hungrily sucked up the remaining smoothie, instantly feeling a delightful, euphoric glow spread through her limbs. The very tips of her fingers seemed suddenly to catch an electric heat. Goose pimples burst over the skin on her arms, and she felt the roots of her hair tremble. A charge seared her groin, and she squeezed her thighs tightly together, both fearing and welcoming the flood of her coming orgasm. And just when she thought she would buckle, just when she thought she would collapse clutching at the countertop of the island in the midst of the kitchen, the warp passed, the spasm passed, and Wendy was Wendy again.

“Gosh,” said Sara. “And I thought you liked the first one you drank.”

Holding Wendy’s arm in her arm, Sara led Wendy to her Mercedes in the garage. Sara opened the passenger door, but just before Wendy could sit down, Sara spoke up.

“I saw this in a movie once. Or maybe I read it. Lift your dress up and sit down bare assed.”

Wendy tossed Sara a quizzical look.

“Trust me. You’ll love it.”

Wendy still hesitated.

“I won’t even make you take off your panties. Don’t be so.”

Wendy breathed in, gathered herself, raised her dress past her waist and, rather gracelessly, sat down on the cold leather seat. Her lips formed an O. Sara walked around the car, opened her door, and, smiling at Wendy, showily raised her own dress up and sat down on her seat.

“It feels sexy, huh? It’s even better when you’re not wearing panties.”

Five minutes later, Wendy began to squirm in her seat. Her twat burned, on fire. She felt moisture pooling between her thighs, but it neither quenched nor abated the heat. If anything it inflamed her further. First she squeezed her thighs tightly, pressing them together in a vice grip. She bit her lip and turned her head away from Sara, planting her forehead against the window of the passenger door. She writhed her ass against the leather seat, marveling at the amount of secretion she felt against flat of her butt.

Wendy moved her hand across her thigh, inching it closer to her need.

“Wendy,” said Sara reproachfully. “That’s not very fair, is it? You made me stop.”

“But Sara, I’m so. I’m so.”

Wendy leaned against the dashboard and wriggled her ass against the passenger seat.

“My god, Wendy. Are you humping my car seat?”

“Oh, god, Sara. I can’t help it. I’m just so. I’m on fire, Sara. Oh god, I’m so.”

“So what, Wendy?”

“I’m so horny, Sara. I’m so fucking horny.”

Wendy threw herself against the back of the seat, spread her thighs wide and plunged her hand into her steaming center.

“Careful of your bow, honey,” Sara chastised in a motherly voice. “You don’t want to crush it. Here. Do I need to stop? Do I need to give you a hand? You’ll get a run in your hose.”

But Wendy already began to howl. She pounded her jackhammering hand with rapid thrusts of her hips, moaning, howling, mewling, screaming.

“It’s coming. Oh god, it’s coming.”

“How many fingers are you using?”

“Two. I’m using two.”

“Put another one in. Fuck yourself with three fingers, Wendy. Get yourself off with three fingers.”

“Oh god oh god oh god.”

Keeping her eyes on the road, Sara said softly but clearly.

“You can spray all over my car. I want you to. I want you to soak my car seat.”

Half-standing, half-crouching in Sara’s car, Wendy held one hand against the windshield while she jerked and hammered her pelvis at her hand. Suddenly she shook, her knees trembled rapidly, she raised her ass even further away from her seat and came, her fluid pouring from her pussy in flowing squirts over the leather seat, over the floorboard, all over her hand still caressing and kneading the spasming flesh of her labia, her pulsing cunt, drenching the bottom half of her pink church dress, her juices running down the nylon of her pink hose.

“My god,” Sara said. “To think there was a time I didn’t even know your name.”

31. Wendy and Sara enter church

A chill darted through the mid-September air, poked people on exposed necks, nibbled at earlobes, swept across noses and cheeks, and playfully nipped the legs and calves of those who wore shorts, or skirts, or dresses. In the parking lot of Nile Kingdom Church of the New Crock, Wendy and Sara wrapped light knitted sweaters around their shoulders and walked as briskly as the could on high heels over the asphalt. Most of the congregation had already entered the church. A few stragglers remained in the parking lot, finishing a last cigarette, or otherwise less eager for the Pouring.

Sara tutted at the obvious wet spot on Wendy’s dress. Wendy, after her orgasm, had no other alternative than to sit in the puddle of her own juices for the duration of the drive to Nile Kingdom, soaking the back and front of her adorable pink dress.

“Whatever will they think in there,” Sara asked, gesturing with her head at the squat polygonal church with its roof gradually sloping toward the center. Above the double doors rose a tall, narrow steeple ending with a white, modest cross. Despite the chill, the sun shone bright in a clear blue sky, illuminating the world with its quotidian brilliance, but either the glass doors were tinted, or the lights of the lobby were dimmed, because the girls could not see far into darkness of the church entrance. But the white cross glinted in the sunlight as a fat gray bird tumbled more than alighted from one of the outstretched arms to the ground below, just a few feet away from Wendy’s clomping heels.

“Pigeons,” Sara muttered. “They go everywhere like feathered rats.”

“Mourning dove,” Wendy replied. “I think it’s a mourning dove.”

Sara shrugged.

“How the hell did your mother find this place?” Sara asked.

“Um, I’m not sure. It’s not so bad. I like the songs.”

Wendy wrapped her sweater tight around her. Thankfully, it hung a little below her waist, so little of the wetness could be discerned. Sara slapped her playfully on the ass, then rubbed it, giving it a final squeeze before crossing the pavement to enter the church.

32. Wendy and Sara step through church door

Wendy and Sara stepped through the glass double church doors into a dim and empty narthex. Two large wooden doors to the chapel faced them, closed now. Wendy pulled Sara’s arm.

“Hurry,” she said, suddenly alarmed. “We’re late.”

“And?” shrugged Sara.

“Everyone will see us.”

“And?”

“Oh, Sara.”

Although from the outside the church presented the form of a pentagon, its interior conformed to an older, more classical style of church architecture. High whitewashed walls enclosed a more or less long nave holding two columns of pews separated by a wide aisle, with a narrower aisle running along the exterior side of each column of pews. A transept cut across the far side of the nave forming an ankh-shape with the altar and apse taking the place of the head at the very end of the chapel.

Behind the alter, almost against the far wall of the church stood a large fountain shaped like a whitewashed vase or urn, wide near the bottom, tapering somewhat at the neck before flaring out in a wide mouth into which water fell from a panel at the back of the vase, hidden from view of the congregation.

A small pulpit stood on the left side of the apse.

A small choir sat on the right side of the altar. A guitar, an amplifier, a drum set, and a microphone stand connected to a small PA system stood to the left of the pulpit, opposite the choir. The church deacons had allowed this monstrous intrusion in an attempt to placate the more strident clamors for modernity. But they remained unused. The deacons took to heart the lessons of appeasement.

High on the walls rising on the side of each column of pews, stained glass depictions of kings and queens, priests and priestesses, warriors, artisans, servants, and laborers showed prominent scenes from the Book of Wall and Papyrus. Not really windows, Wendy knew if you looked closely enough you could see a back light shining behind the gorgeously colored, wonderfully textured pictures. Besides, the walls didn’t lead to the outside, but separated the chapel from the administrative offices, Sunday school classes, and the private room of the minister, Pastor Flair. So the stained glass couldn’t be windows. But they could still be pretty.

Wendy looked for her mother Mary as she creaked open the heavy wooden door to the chapel. She saw her several rows in front of them, near the front, standing in a crowded pew, smiling and talking to a middle-aged couple, who smiled back, nodded their heads, and prepared to sit down. Mary turned around, making a point of searching for her daughter by raising a hand over her eyes and peering over the back pews. She relaxed noticeably when she saw her, tensed visibly when she saw Sara, and gestured confusedly at the lack of seating space in her pew.

Wendy waved and pointed to the back pew, the only empty pew in the chapel, besides the Back Pew Boys on the other side of the aisle, giggling, laughing, and punching each other. One of them smelled of cigarettes. Sister Temperance Hamer, entirely more audacious than Sister Rachel sitting on the same row number on left half of the chapel, looked back at the young man and glared. Yes, she glared. Then she turned her back on the nasty little creature, gave a final harrumph, settled into her seat, adjusted the floral hat on her head, crossed her arms, and lifted her chin in an open act of utter rejection of that which transpired behind her. In this she mirrored her chief antagonist, Sister Rachel.

Sara bore witness to Sister Hamer’s outraged sensibilities and followed Wendy to the back pew with a thoughtful expression on her face. Only two other people occupied the pew, an elderly couple sitting at the aisle end, so that Wendy and Sara had to excuse themselves as they walked sideways past the man and the woman, trying not to step on toes. Sara resisted the temptation to pinch Wendy’s butt in front of the couple and only smiled courteously as she passed over.

Wendy sat on the far end, but before she could sit down, Sara leaned into her ear and whispered, “You know how to sit now, Wendy. Raise up your dress. Then you can sit. Take off your sweater first.”

Wendy glanced around nervously and nodded. Sara helped Wendy out of her pink sweater as Wendy raised her dress in a quick movement and placed her naked bottom onto the hard wooden surface of the pew. Sara lay the sweater over Wendy’s lap, then, squirming out of her own sweater, she quickly raised her dress and sat down. Then she slowly covered her own lap with her red knitted sweater. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the elderly woman, a Mrs. Lucinda Beebe, looking. But Lucinda Beebe smiled to herself and looked away.

Sister Rachel heard the whispering and commotion behind her, but continued staring straight in front of her, waiting patiently for the appearance of Pastor Flair. Life and life’s experience had long taught her against the folly of the backward glance. Did not Orpheus lose her whom his heart held most precious? No, no, whatever transpired, no matter how heinous, no matter how dreadful, no matter how intriguing, the head, the face must remain forward. Let the thief see the back of her shoulders, let the murderer her neck, but she would never, never, show her face to what rose up from behind. Life, life was a matter of what loomed in front, not what lurked in the rear. Let Hamer harrumph, for all the good it did her.

And all the while the faint scent of cinnamon spread through the air over the congregation.

Sara stirred restlessly in her seat, her eyes roaming along the back of the pew in front of her. A kind of built-in rack or pocket held several hymnals, and towards the side of the rack a small stack of manilla index cards with short yellow pencils stuck out from the top of a smaller rack. Sara reached for one of the cards and read it. It turned out to be a welcome card asking for Your Name, Your Phone, Your Address, Your Email, and Your Prayer Request.

Sara yawned, grabbed a pencil and wrote “Is Sex Sex Sex” for her name. She left the other fields blank until she came to the prayer request. She considered for a moment, then wrote down, “For Wendy to see what I see in her.”

33. Pastor Flair enters

The congregation quieted to a rustling which soon disappeared. A door to the side of the area behind the altar opened, and Pastor Flair walked to the pulpit, head down, deep in ponderous thought. Of Germanic origin, whose last name derived from Flieger or Pflueger perhaps, his congregation had warmed to his earnest, but not too bright, conviction, his plain-spoken demeanor, his insistence on social tradition and righteous living. They applauded his warning against the degrading effects of the acids of modernity and cheered his admonition to maintain a continual vigilance against the entrance of pest and overgrowth into the orchards and gardens they held under their care as good stewards.

First the choir sang while the congregation remained seated. Wendy listened peacefully to the music, and Sara enjoyed casting her eyes over the tops of the flock’s heads, until she landed her gaze on Wendy’s mother, who had turned around to check on her daughter. Sara thought how similar the two looked, how both women’s blond hair seemed to fall in waves and cascades around their shoulders, how much the form of one resembled the form of the other, with this difference, of course. The gravity of years betrayed the one, however slightly, while the other basked in the weightless glory of youth. Mary rose a little taller, stood a little stouter than her daughter, and when she, Sara, had visited her home the week prior, she could not fail to note the lines of care and age that slowly crack the temporal vessel of beauty until all that remains is a fine and fleeting dust, so that not even memory can say what it was that once had been.

The offer of a makeover had not been a simple jest, but a heart-felt gesture, an offer to restore, however momentarily, what had been lost to time’s indifference.

Now the congregation rose for praise, and Wendy stood, and Sara stood also, hand on Wendy’s ass. Wendy tried to wiggle away, but Sara clutched her around the waist and held her close to her. In front of them, Sister Rachel’s head below a large broad brimmed and floral cap, a mate to Sister Hamer’s, twitched and then went rigid. Hell itself could flame behind me, she thought. Wendy held the hymnal for Sara, and tried to remain still as Sara’s hand went below the hem of her pink dress, lingering on the frilly band of Wendy’s hose and stroked the soft and trembling flesh above with her thumb. Wendy’s voice faltered as she sang.

“For the love which from our birth over and around us lies…”

Sara’s hand groped her inner thigh and rose up to encounter the curve of Wendy’s ass.

Wendy stumbled again while the congregations voice rang out.

“Sages leave your contemplation…”

Sara’s hand slithered further inside Wendy’s thigh until, rising, it encountered the warmth of Wendy’s mound. Sara traced her fingers across the moistened cloth of Wendy’s G-string, feeling the wet and warm thatch of Wendy’s pubic hair spreading out from the panties thin gusset. Wendy squeezed her thighs closed and gave Sara a pitiful look. Sara’s hand stayed.

“You promised,” she mouthed.

A finger wriggled against the drenched string clinging to Wendy’s steaming folds. Wendy tightened her thighs against Sara, but the wriggling continued. Slowly, ever so slowly, the thighs’ grip on the hand loosened, and Sara gained increased entrance to Wendy’s aching and needy center.

Wendy’s thighs parted further, and she stopped even pretending to sing.

Sister Rachel felt more than heard a bump against the back of the pew, and her resolution wavered. She heard slapping sounds and frantic whispers, and her head jerked again. One eye twitched, and her jaw trembled against her clinched mouth, but she held firm, staring in furious devotion at the graying hair of Pastor Flair and then at the choir to the side of him. Her hands gripped her hymnal tightly, and she croaked out her hymn in a dry, rasping voice.

“In all thy grace thou has brought forth the sun,

the fruit that was born forth

for the redemption of man.”

And Sara’s onslaught continued, until finally, sensing Wendy’s approaching orgasm, she stopped, withdrew her hand, and moved it to the band of Wendy’s panties. She caressed Wendy’s naked hip, stroking the palm of her hand over the top of Wendy’s ass from crack to side of hip. Then, gently and slowly, without caring if anybody noticed, guessed, or suspected, Sara began to pull down Wendy’s underwear. A panic-stricken Wendy faced Sara, shaking her head vigorously and mouthing the word “no” over and over again, but she did not resist, and she did not move away. One side of her panties already hung below her hip, at an even level with her groin, and Sara slowly pulled the band on the other side down, until finally, encountering no further resistance of flesh, the garment fell freely to the floor.

“Alas! how poor and little worth

Are all those glittering toys of earth,

Where is the strength that spurned decay,

The step that rolled so light and gay?”

Worship finally ended.

Four deacons, all men of severe countenance, one youngish, appearing to be in late 30s, two middle-aged, and the last older in that indeterminate age between 60 and 75, rose from the front pew and assembled at their respective aisle, the two holding a gold colored collection plate each strode to the outer aisle, the older gent on the girls’ side, and the youngest on the aisle of Sister Hamer and the Back Pew Boys. Each deacon went to the outside pew, delivered the plate to the awaiting flock member, raised an eye at the initial offering, nodded slightly at the additional bill, and gestured for the plate to be passed on. Needless to say, having the quickest exit came with a cost, and no one felt too great a chagrin at seeing the best seat already occupied, when time it came to sit. Let Brother Johnson and his damned family have it. They could afford it. Then the waiting deacon on the other side took the plate, stepped to the next row, and renewed the proceedings.

By the time the old deacon came to Wendy’s pew, his enthusiasm to judge what the flock gave waned. At any rate, he expected little from sinners row (who were always the last in, the first out, the cheapest seat), but he smiled politely at the cute little girl below him, dolled up nicely in pink, and smiled as her friend, evidently a tart by the paint on her face, opened her purse, reached over her friend’s lap, supported herself by placing a hand on the sweet girl’s thigh with a squeeze, and dropped a welcome card and two bills onto the plate. The old deacon grinned appreciatively at the little tart, who licked her open red lips and smiled back with a wink.

Well, I don’t get that every day. Might make hell some comfort, I suppose. I mean if I don’t make it to up yonder, the deacon thought as Sara passed the plate to Lucinda Beebe.

The collection finished, the deacons walked to the front of the chapel and deposited the filled plates somewhere out of sight, but not quite out mind, of the so recently depleted congregation.

Pastor Flair put away his hymnal below the pulpit, retrieving in its place a heavier, black, and zippered Book. Pastor Flair turned the Book over in his hand, traced his fingers slowly over the smooth leather cover of the Book, gently caressing its gold embossed lettering, and carefully, slowly, methodically unzipped the Book, exposing to the eyes of the congregation the bare, white, flimsy pages trimmed with gold.

An anticipatory hush descended upon the flock.

Sara withdrew her hand as both girls settled back on the pew, bare-assed against the oak. Sara collected the sweaters and once again wrapped their laps beneath them. Then, under the cover of the sweater, she placed a hand on Wendy’s thigh, first pulling up her pink dress to touch Wendy’s bare skin. Wendy closed her eyes. Not bothering to squeeze her thighs, she kept her legs slightly parted, neither encouraging nor discouraging Sara’s relentless ministrations. She squirmed in the moisture pooling between her thighs, trickling down to drip on the wood.

Sister Rachel’s mind eased, a little. Well, they certainly are quiet now. I can’t say as I imagine what those two were goofing around so much for. Girls that age ought to know better. Why they’re no better than those boys behind that Hamer. I told her to quit sitting over there, but she said she’d learn ’em. My foot, she’d learn ’em. They’d learn her if she didn’t watch it. Always sticking her nose in someone else’s business. Let’s see where that’d get her. Eyes front and center now. That’s the only way to go.

The congregation approved the man, Pastor Flair. That much was certain. A palpable delight shivered through the flock as they watched his preparations for the sermon. Rigorous but never malicious, he insisted on good conduct and sexual morality. But now a heaviness weighed his heart, oppressing it with a troubled misgiving which rattled his mind and vexed his spirit. Every day on the TV it seemed more and more. Not to mention this new Internet thing. Spreading all that. Besides. The home was a sacred place, and this, this, his wave indicated the larger world outside the walls of Nile Kingdom, all that, well. They’d find out.

They’d find out. His voice began to rise, his plain-spoken demeanor altered, and the congregation sensed a new word ascending. A new spirit verged towards rising from the pulpit in something close to wrath. Well, not wrath exactly. They didn’t do that at Nile Kingdom Church of the New Crock. But a good talking to. Sometimes a heavy hand was called for. Because they’d find out. His voice waxed eloquent, loud, bold, and just short of angry.

It was just so hard to be angry. What was that smell anyway, cinnamon? Ah, but the congregation loved it, loved the way Flair paced up and down, swayed back and forth, marched to and fro, a prowling lion waiting to devour. He flung balled hands to his face, beat against his chest, and jumped three times. The flock loved it. Ate it up. They’d never seen Flair move so much before. Usually such egregiousness met frowns of disapproval, but today. There was just something different about today. They needed to use that air freshener more often is what they needed. But really, ain’t Flair overdoing it a bit? They quickly stifled that thought. No, let the man have his day, go where his spirit led.

Wendy quivered as Sara stroked her wet pussy, her legs now splayed as wide she dared to in church. Sara leaned into Wendy, brushed her blond hair away from her lobe, and touched her red lips against Wendy’s ear.

“Now you touch me too, Wendy,” she breathed huskily. “I want to feel good, too.”

Wendy groaned.

Sister Rachel jerked upright. Even Sister Hamer on the other side peered over her left shoulder, but saw nothing. Why couldn’t that Lucinda Beebe ever keep still? She must be getting on close to 85 now, but she moved about like an eleven year-old tomboy for goodness sakes. What was she doing leaning forward like that? Reading the hymnals? Good lord, woman, worship’s over. And that Matthew. Don’t get her started on that Matthew.

Pastor Flair felt intoxicated. The spirit flowed through him like forked lightning through the night sky, storm clouds glowering. An uplifting exaltation thrilled through his body, words washed over his mind like a pouring rain, a downpour from on high, and he rose in fury, eloquence, and admonishment to his flock. He spoke of the need to repent, cajoled the congregation to declare their trespasses, and with a frenzied look of outraged virtue, called the back-sliding to the altar and the altar’s rail. Such a thing had never been heard before. Not at Nile Kingdom. But the pastor had faith in the flock, and the flock, responding to that faith, murmured and groaned in approval.

They rose before him, out of the chaos of his utterances, the faces of men, women, young adults, married couples, children all in a great concourse of uplifted countenances, crowded close together in the little chapel. They were attentive faces all, rapt, eager, and faithful. Their eyes bent admiringly upon their minister. They upheld him, straining their ears to miss no cadence of his voice. Flair straightened himself, stretched forth his hand with his fat fingers gracefully disposed and passed it slowly before him from side to side, in a comprehensive, stately gesture. The seated audience seemed to rise at him in a fever of understanding and righteous love.

Wendy’s hand drifted slowly over to Sara’s thigh. Sara grabbed it, raised her green dress above her waist, not caring who saw, moved the strip of her panties aside and pressed Wendy’s hand into the red, engorged and open folds of her boiling, shaven cunt. Wendy felt her heat, her wetness, her readiness to be penetrated. She tipped a tentative finger into Sara’s waiting hole. Sara jerked and thrust her pussy at Wendy’s rubbing hand, holding it tight against her wet groin, visibly lifting her ass off the wooden seat of the pew.

Sister Rachel’s chin lowered.

The congregation moved in a wave. The moment was upon them. Groans and cries arose, and a palpable ferment stirred the throng. The exhortation to sinners to declare themselves, to come to the altar, was not only on Pastor Flair’s lips. It seemed to quiver in the very air, as a sweet smelling spice in a baker’s kitchen, to hang aloft over every exclamation in the clamor of the flock. A young woman, several rows in front of Wendy and Sara, with dazed and startled eyes, rose amidst the body of the church and, hesitating, trembling with a bowed head and blushing cheeks, pressed her way out from the end of a crowded pew and down the aisle to the rail of the altar.

A triumphant ejaculation swelled to the roof as the young woman knelt there, and under its impetus others followed her example. With interspersed snatches of song and shouted encouragements the excitement reached its height only when a dozen or so people, mostly young, tightly clustered upon their knees about the rail. Above the confusion of penitent sobs and moans, the rest of the congregation, viewing kneeling as the business of youth, kept to their seats. Also the Back Pew Boys. They didn’t budge. No reason to. Who could con the almighty?

Sara fondled, kneaded, and caressed Wendy mound, plunging one finger, two fingers, three fingers into her trembling and gyrating pussy, awed by the flow of heat and secretion. Wendy thrust her hips against Sara’s hand, and Sara, delighted and breathless, fucked Wendy’s fingers in her turn as she clamped Wendy’s wrist against the inside of her squeezing thighs.

Pastor Flair’s joy knew no limit. He glanced over the faces of his flock, beheld the rapturous ecstasy, and felt his heart overflow with happiness, the righteous happiness of the redeemed. They had heard him, he thought, they had felt the truth of his warnings, and they had repented. He saw the young people rise to step forward, he saw the old and the no longer young lift their voices in approval, he looked to the back pews, and saw how even those terrible, terrible boys sat still, daring not to move. He glanced over to the Beebes and saw Lucinda bowed and Matthew’s eyes closed in devotion, his face pointing heavenward, leaning his head against the tall back of the pew. Beside them, two young girls, one blonde, one auburn, glowed in the joy of receiving the word, their faces trembled, and perspiration coated their faces, a little too made-up for his liking, sure, but he couldn’t hold that against them. Not now, not during this uplifting moment. He saw the two girls, evidently seized by the spirit, give out a great cry of longing as they suddenly bent forward, almost lurching, to bow their heads below the level of Sister Rachel’s damned hat so that he could no longer witness the fervent devotion of their prayers.

Even Sara had not expected the power of that last orgasm. She felt weak, extinguished, exhausted, and exhilarated. She knew only that her trembling knees kept her from slipping to the floor in a collapsed heap of satisfied flesh. Wendy still gripped Sara’s hand between her thighs in a vice that almost hurt. A wet pool formed around her hand, and Sara pried her arm from the grip of Wendy’s thighs. Beside her, the blonde rocked and jittered, and a strange weeping noise rose from the hollows of her bosom. Wendy wept. And Sara, to her utter astonishment, felt tears running down her own cheeks as she pointed her face to the floor, struggling to catch her breath. This is happiness, she thought. This is finally happiness.

Rachel broke.

She had not meant to. Jerking automatically at the sound of the cry behind her, she turned before she could stop herself, and stared enthralled at the two young ladies behind her with heads bowed, shaking and weeping in the spirit. Ashamed at her own thoughts of a moment before, and turning back to face the front, the severe woman in the large cap muttered to herself.

“That’ll learn you, Rachel Lynde, if nothing else does, not to judge what goes on behind your back. Those sweet little things have got more faith and sense of the word than you’ll ever have. You’ve got no business looking back there, not with your judgmental mind, and you know it. Eyes front and center now.”

34. Church service over

Lucinda Beebe jabbed Matthew awake. The two girls had by this time exited the pew from the other side. Now why didn’t they come in that way, Matthew thought, instead of traipsing all over their poor toes? He slowly stretched his stiff limbs to a standing position and watched as Lucinda seesawed towards the end of the pew. She bent over and pocketed something into her dark overcoat. Matthew caught a flash of pink fabric but couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what that fool woman was pottering about for. Good lord! Did one of those girls have an accident on the bench? Well, I never. Straightening up, Lucinda turned towards Matthew, hooked his arm in hers, and leaned her head against his shoulder as they slowly sauntered out into the daylight to Matthew’s battered pick-up.

35. Bookstore with Maddy

36. Date with Brad

Monday

37. Wendy in the morning

38. Wendy in Sara’s car

“Hey sexy,” Sara said, leaning in for a kiss on the cheek as Wendy flopped down on the passenger seat and shut the door. She took a long look at Wendy and said, “It’s your time too isn’t it? God. I feel so bloated. Are you bleeding yet?”

No one talked liked this to Wendy. She had never met anyone on such good terms with herself before, on such good terms with her own body.

“Um.”

“You taking those pills? They help don’t they? I mean they help me a lot. I used to just get absolutely the worst cramps in my back. I’m talking down for a day or two. At twelve. How the hell can a 12-year old get knocked down for a day or two like that? Then Mom brought home those pills. They worked wonders. Absolute wonders.”

“What are they?” Wendy asked, seizing the opportunity.

“Not sure. Butachloroglytricerapham or something like that. All I know is that they help with the cramps. And even the bleeding. Not the bloating though. That always sucks.”

Wendy appraised Sara for signs of bloating, noting with surprise how much Sara and she had dressed alike. Sneakers, jeans, even baggy sweatshirt, which is something Wendy never would have expected to see on her fashion-conscious friend. Blue though, a pretty pale blue sweatshirt. No moose. A big pink heart instead.

“What,” Sara asked, reading Wendy’s thoughts. “Can’t a girl be a slob?”

Wendy inspected Sara’s unmade face. Her skin seemed to glow even without makeup, clear, fresh, offsetting the natural pink of her lips. Her cheeks, round, high, and wide, gave Sara a cat-like look, and her hazel eyes glimmered even more deeply without eyeshadow or eyeliner. Sara didn’t need makeup, Wendy thought, makeup only added to her beauty without a corresponding diminishment in its absence.

“I can,” Wendy replied. “I didn’t think you could.”

“I can be lots of things,” Sara retorted as she shifted her Mercedes into a higher gear. “So, are you going to tell me all about it? Or do I have to pry it out of you?”

“There’s not much to say, really,” Wendy lied.

“Spill.”

So Wendy spilled.

“He did what?” Sara asked, sounding shocked, even outraged. “He took pictures? Of you? With his come all over your face? And you let him?”

“I couldn’t help it, Sara. I just felt so, so, so blissed out. So, god it sounds corny, but complete. Like I did something I needed to do, and have been needing to do almost my whole life without knowing it.”

“Your whole life you needed to let some guy fuck you in the back of his Jeep?”

Wendy deliberated for a few moments.

“Yeah. I guess you could say that. But you have it wrong, Sara. I was doing the fucking. And I felt like it was something I’ve been needing to do for, like, forever.”

An intersection was coming up, a yellow light changing to red, and Sara clutched, downshifted to neutral, foot on brake. She stared straight at the flowing traffic crossing in front of her.

“Wendy Love, you might just be the most amazing person I’m likely to meet in this life.”

Wendy shrugged.

“Besides, I kind of liked him taking pictures of me like that. Like a trophy.”

Sara spluttered.

The light turned green, but Sara didn’t say a word as she shifted from first to second to third, finally landing on fourth. Wendy stared out the window.

“Sara,” asked Wendy. “Is it supposed to burn so much when they come inside you?”

39. The Go-Between descends

The TR-3B, commonly called the black triangle, is a tactical reconnaissance, triangle-shaped, nuclear-powered aerospace platform with an indefinite loiter time developed by the Aurora Program. The TR-3B uses a polymer coating that counteracts and absorbs radar, being able to change reflectiveness, radar absorptiveness, and color. In conjunction with the Electronic Counter Measures, the black triangle can look like a small aircraft, a flying cylinder, or trick radar into detecting a variety of aircraft, no aircraft, or several aircraft all at once.

A circular, plasma-filled accelerator ring called the Magnetic Field Disrupter creates a super-conductive, mercury-based plasma resulting in gravity disruption, reducing the effects of gravity and corresponding G-forces by 89 percent, making the vehicle extremely light and capable of astonishing feats of high-performance. The magnetic field disrupter is the thing that fucks with your head whenever you see one up close, producing that uncanny feeling of otherworldliness during a close encounter.

Able to reach speeds of Mach 9, three multi-modal, multi-vectored thrusters mounted at each bottom corner of the triangular platform propel the vehicle, making the airship fast, maneuverable, and fantastically fun to fly. Almost undoubtably the pinnacle of human, well, humanish flight, it really is something to see. And by now, most of us have. As the Go-Between drifted idly past it in his multi-phasic, sub-spatial, and trans-dimensional bubble thing, he quickly scanned the black vehicle, mildly impressed.

Oh look, he thought, somebody gave them a Big Wheel. Then the bubble blinked from existence and reappeared just outside the limits of Edge City, softly descending as three slender metallic legs materialized, extended, and held the bubble several feet off the ground. The Go-Between ran a few last-minute checks, grabbed his Handheld Device, opened the portal with a raise of his eyebrow (completely unnecessary, the portal—and everything else on the ship—remained in constant contact with the Go-Between’s neurology), and descended a set of sleek stairs, each step of the stair materializing with each step down of the Go-Between.

“Those Roadmen better not keep me waiting,” he muttered to himself.

In the meantime he drew himself up and paced up and down in front of his spacecraft, hugging himself with both arms, trying to keep warm. An impossible task on such a hard rock so far from its cold star. Still, he thought, looking around him, quite lovely, really. Nice rock formations, such gentle, subtle, and delicate shades of green and brown rolling along a cracked landscape of canyon, piled rock, and sparse brown scrub. And that blue. He’d never really seen such a transparent shade of blue, bright and pale at the same time, like a jeweled membrane stretched over the globe, mottled and dotted with flakes of white. With an entirely insignificant yellow lamp rounding the horizon in the southeast, setting the whole thing off. He could get used to that, he thought.

No time though. He knew that. Not really their fault, even though it was. A statistical certainty that these nincompoops would toss their existence away in the next great filter event, which, all things being equal, looked to be just around the corner. Nothing against them, though. It’s just how things worked for the lower orders. The universe was full of ’em, dimwitted, half-retarded species that did themselves in before they got a chance to make something of themselves. Of the thousands and thousands of pre-intelligent species in this universal quadrant alone, a mere handful survived a great filter event. Species that somehow managed to combine wisdom, compassion, love of knowledge, culture, tolerance, good behavior and bureaucratic know-how into sustainable way of life, of continual, progressive technological and psycho-technological discovery. A tall order, but his had done it.

And of those few species, those very few species surviving and even thriving past a great filter event, only a tiny fraction ascended to join the Guild. His had not ascended. No harm, no foul. A lot of work, that ascending. In the meantime, he could enjoy a nice little corporeal reality running errands for the big shots upstairs. ’Cause they didn’t like to get their psychic hands dirty with this kind of shit. Acting as a kind of intermediary between the Guild and species like this retarded monkey thing hopping around this little shithole of a backwater planet on the ass end of a backwater galaxy in a boondocks quadrant of the universe.

A Go-Between, if you will.

Course, sometimes a few particularly bad apples squeaked through a filter. It wasn’t a perfect system after all, if it could even be called a system. Really bad types that somehow evolved to be only partially less retarded than their ancestors. When that happened the Pain Rabble scooped them up. Harmless, really, the Pain Rabble, if you weren’t a lower order. There’d been rumors of Pain Rabble craft circling this planet for years, for decades even, which explained the little black toy he had seen earlier. But why the Pain Rabble would be interested in this lot was beyond his guess. They were too stupid to be much use to anybody. No monkey species ever made it through a great filter.

Where the hell were those Roadmen?

40. Super Glides, Corollas, and horned-rimmed glasses

Harley-Davidson Super Glide and Softail motorcycles closely resemble the TR-3B in being nothing like that aircraft. Loud, fat, slow, capable of traveling only on well-paved streets, roads, and highways, Harley-Davidson burst onto the Vespuccian imagination after the rise of the intersovereignty highway system, bringing with it tales of horror, rape, plunder, and murder at the hands of rogue bike gangs traveling in hordes across the vast landscape of the United Sovereignties. As the decades passed, the bikes got more expensive, the bike gangs got fatter, transforming themselves into stockbrokers, lawyers, engineers, software developers, and other riffraff as they roared down the highways of life, graying, potbellied, and eminently bored.

Some of these bikers found a gig, others roamed the countryside aimlessly.

When the leader of the pack saw the white ’82 Corolla sputtering, coughing, and crepitating along a ranch road running off I-40, he motioned with a hand and head gesture, and the pack gunned their engines to sweep over the beleaguered liftback in waves of roaring Vespuccian steel. The two occupants of the tiny car, both men in their 30s with dark, short-cropped hair around the neck and ears, bespectacled in dark, horn-rimmed frames, white short-sleeved button-ups with buttoned collars, and sweat rolling down their pale faces, eyed the bikers nervously, both Adam’s apples jerking up down in a dry swallow at the same time.

The bike gang slowly overtook the frail car, each rider glancing at the white, dusty vehicle on the left with a look of contempt and utter disdain. As the last rider drifted past the Corolla, he lifted the bottom of his leather and denim jacket with one hand, showing a large, black, semi-automatic pistol which the passenger of the Corolla (but not the driver) recognized as a Beretta 92 FS. The helmetless rider turned to the driver, grinned, and flashed a peace sign, accelerating in his lumbering fashion to catch his group, already far ahead of the white car. Then the noise faded, the line of Harley-Davidson disappeared down the stretch of sun-bleached asphalt, and the Corolla continued for several thousand feet before turning off the paved ranch road onto an unpaved and unmarked side road. A billowing cloud of dust and pebble ballooned upward in its wake.

The Go-Between saw the cloud of dust and stamped his foot.

“Finally,” he mumbled.

The dust cloud neared until the Corolla, no longer recognizably white, emerged, pulled up next to the silver bubble, came to a halt, and stopped running as the driver turned the key of the ignition and removed it. The two men in thick-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses opened the car doors, stretched their legs, and climbed out the vehicle, towering over it as they looked around at the landscape, then at the silver bubble, and then at the Go-Between standing some ten feet away. The Go-Between nodded and stepped forward, all seven feet of him.

The Go-Between knew these monkeys, easily impressed with size, equating size with power and power with, well, actually that’s as far as the Go-Between ever got. He never figured out what the hell power gave these apes, and frankly, he didn’t care. As long as they did what they were told, as long as they did what the Guild wanted. And what the Guild wanted was near, obtainable, and almost vital. Important, anyway. Kind of wanted, really. Meh, would be nice to have, but you know. Not if it meant getting involved. But. Really it would be super if you could get someone down there, one of those what do you call them, Roadmen, to capture the damned thing. We would do it ourselves, you know. We could. Super easy. Barely an. No. No. Might call attention to ourselves. From whom? Now that’s our problem isn’t it? You just get those Roadmen of yours to do what they do, and we’ll remember you when it comes time to remember. Might help your kind with your, um, ascendancy issues.

Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, thin. He figured that’s what would impress these idiots, and so far it did. A seven-foot Wonko to ensure compliance, delegate responsibilities, and communicate orders. He loomed over the two Roadmen and greeted them in their language.

“Blook hundrar digba thot.”

“Huh?”

The Go-Between sensed the confusion, realized his error, adjusted the Handheld Device, and continued.

“Greetings, Terrans. Nice weather you have here.”

The passenger spoke up.

“Um. Thank you?”

The Go-Between nodded. Then he handed over the Handheld Device to the driver.

“All your instructions are in there. Everything clear now?”

The driver punched the screen of the device, expecting the screen to light up, but nothing happened. The driver held up the Handheld Device, a flat, wallet-sized device.

“Uh. How do you use this? I mean, it’s like a phone, ain’t it?”

The Go-Between sighed. It was so easy to forget how stupid they were.

“Here. Give it to me. I’ll pair it with your brain.”

The Go-Between held the driver’s head with one hand and pressed the device to side of the cranium until the device glowed and whirred. Then he turned to the passenger, who backed away, grabbed the man’s head with a large and powerful hand, pulled it irresistibly forward and pressed the device to the side of his cranium.

“There, now it’s paired to both of you. You can both use it. Just tap whatever it is you want on the screen, and the device will let you know.”

“What does it do?” asked the passenger curiously.

“What does it do? It’s a Handheld Device. It does everything.”

“But. I don’t understand. Can’t you just tell us?”

Speech? Verbal communication? The congealment of lightspeed electrochemical neurologically-processed content into sonic-level, half-understood grunts and linguistically-shrouded bellows? How retarded were these people?

“Fine. The Guild wants me to tell you to capture the thing. When you capture it, let me know, and I’ll handle it from there.”

“What thing?” asked the driver.

“What’s the Guild?” asked the passenger.

“Hello,” said the Go-Between, rapping the passenger on the forehead with his knuckles. He had seen it done once in a, what did they call it here, a movie, that’s right a movie. The gesture had elicited a humorous emotional response from the audience, and the Go-Between assumed repeating such a gesture would produce a feeling of joy and happiness in the monkey.

“You’re the Roadman. I’m the Go-Between. You worry about me and let me worry about the Guild. You just find that thing. And bring it to me.”

“But what thing?” the driver persisted.

The Go-Between pointed at the Handheld Device with his thumb.

“It’s in there. Gotta go now. Bye-bye.”

The Go-Between mounted the stairs to his craft, each step vanishing behind him as he ascended. He entered the portal, which opened as he approached, and stepped inside. Three seconds later the bubble lifted several meters, retracted the metallic legs, and disappeared.

“How long have we been doing this?” asked the passenger.

The driver looked around at the empty landscape and shrugged.

“For too long,” he said with an exhausted sigh. “For far too long.”

The passenger turned to walk to the Corolla, striking his thigh with the flat of his hand in frustration.

“And we still don’t know nothin’. We still don’t know a blessed thing.”

“Well,” agreed the driver, squeezing behind the steering wheel, “we know we gotta get that thing.”

41. Sara and Wendy in parking lot

42. Mary at work

Adamatic Paper Supply hosted its headquarters in the Edge City Corporate Park, a sprawling business campus filled with flat buildings, round buildings, tall buildings, triangular buildings, rectangular buildings, and one oddly shaped building reminiscent of an hourglass. The Adamatic Paper Supply Company boasted the nation’s largest network of paper products, paper product manufacturing, paper shippers and paper distribution, paper import, and paper export. Every conceivable use which paper could be put to was advanced, developed, created, advertised, implemented, and reconceived.

Adamatic Paper Supply boasted factories, distributions centers, warehouses, and even gift stores in practically every sovereignty of the United Sovereignties of Vespuccia. Quite simply, APS occupied position number three internationally when it came to the paper business, producing and selling everything from banknote paper to toilet tissue. It housed its headquarters in a low but expansive polygonal building, three stories, showing an exterior of glass, steel, and concrete façade.

For almost fifteen years, Mary Love called Adamatic Paper Supply her second home. In truth, it was her first home. Her second home waited for her on West Pigeon Street.

Mary Love stretched her arms above her head, yawned, rotated her head, and rubbed the back of her neck. I could definitely use a massage soon, she thought, as she finished the last business of the day. A few spreadsheets remained opened while she continued last-minute updating. Two weeks ago word swept over the department, the accounting department, that Adamite Paper would soon begin the downsizing. No department or team could expect to be safe. Except the top. However much changes needed to be made, Adamatic Paper Supply anticipated no change at the top.

Mary had mentally prepared herself for news which had not yet come. Now, as she updated the last three remaining spreadsheets, she looked over her cubicle and wondered whether a change might do her good. Ah, but she had made it her home. Had worked for the company for more than a decade, putting in more or less long hours, sharing responsibility for Wendy’s upbringing with William, who had always been more than happy to pick up any slack left by Mary’s business obligations.

Just a typical cubicle, really. A potted plant, a geranium, two, no three pictures of Wendy, Mary, and William, together, smiling blissfully into the camera. A wall calendar hanging on the blue fabric partition, just to the side of her tan filing cabinet, opposite her PC. Of puppies, the month of September showing a basketful of Dalmatians tumbling over on carpet. Her computer and monitor, on the side perpendicular to the cubicle opening. Slippers. A comfy blanket for when the men insisted on too much air conditioning. A compromise had been reached, but still. A rogue faction now and then persisted to keep the thermostat down.

Wendy popped into her mind, unsettling her once again. Mary exhaled. If only she had someone to talk to about her. To share concerns with. She’d attempted it once, discussing her daughter, with Evelyn, Maddy’s mother, but dropped the subject almost immediately. Something about Evelyn always left Mary cold, taciturn, disquieted. A shame, really. She’d love to be able to confide in Maddy’s mother, to have her as someone she trusted, someone who sympathized and understood Mary’s feelings.

She input the last figures on the final spreadsheet, closed the program window, and prepared to shut down the computer when she noticed new email in her private email inbox, which she kept open on her browser. The sender was Maddy Springer’s mother. Evelyn. They had added each other to their contact list, and sometimes Evelyn liked to send cute cat pictures or dress ideas. I wonder what she sent me this time, thought Mary, seeing the attached JPEG. The subject line said, YOU NEED TO SEE THIS! Probably a cat napping with pit bull. She clicked the attached file without reading the message.

It took her several seconds to fully realize what she was looking at.

When she did, she choked down bile rising to the back of her throat. Covering her mouth, she gasped in shock and worry. Who took the photo? That Brad, of course. When? Last night. Mary recognized the makeup Wendy wore, smeared now across her face. The mascara, the eyeliner, the lipstick, so pink and glossy with Brad’s, god, she hated to even think it much less say it, his seed dripping down her mouth and chin. It looked so. Unable to pull her eyes away, Mary fixated on the photo covering the screen of her monitor.

Brad had taken the photo a little above Wendy, so that her daughter stared into the camera lens with wide, dilated, happy eyes, smiling with a mouthful of, ugh, semen, at Brad. A stream of his seed had landed across both sides of her face, trickling down her the corners of her eyes, but she didn’t close them. Kept them wide open for Brad. She looked, well she looked like a well-used whore in garish makeup. Well, she couldn’t keep looking at this. That young lady would have a lot of explaining to do. No. Not lady. No lady would look like that. Mary felt a sense of fury, of anger, rising from heart. An anger mixed with anxiety and confusion.

How did Evelyn get this photo? Who else had seen it? But the relief did nothing to assuage her anxiety, anger, and alarm.

Mary suddenly realized with a caved-in heart that if Maddy’s mother had seen the picture, a good many other people must also have done so.

Unless.

Unless Wendy had sent it to Maddy, and Evelyn had only intercepted it, seen it on Maddy’s phone, maybe. She hurriedly read the message Evelyn had sent with the attachment, hoping for the best possible outcome to a bad, bad affair. Two sentences in, and she knew her world had crumbled. The entire fucking school, Wendy! The entire fucking school has seen you looking like this! And for the first time since William had passed, Mary felt glad of it. Relieved. At least he’d never have to see this. My god. It would have broken him. She turned off her PC, gathered her things, and stepped outside her cubicle.

As Mary walked down the dimly lighted corridors of her office building, she had a moment of unexpected realization.

“She looked happy. Happier than I’ve seen her in a long, long time.”

It brought a strange sense of relief which perhaps only another mother could fully understand. She exited the glass doors in front of the building. Her rage, her anger dissipated, transforming into another emotion she had grown more accustomed to. Guilt.

She had not been a good mother. She knew that. Bill provided all the emotional support, the encouragement, the love even. At least the signs of love. Mary, pregnant with Wendy not much older than Wendy now, resented her child in her first few years. She resented getting pregnant in the first place. Although Bill turned out to be a capable, affectionate, and stable husband and father, she wanted something more. She couldn’t say what, exactly. So she assumed the something more meant career, job, independence. And independence was not something you could have with an infant, or a toddler, or a child, or even a preteen to early teenager.

Then Bill collapsed one day on the side of a highway while inspecting powerlines, and suddenly the universe thrust Mary into that position she feared most. Single motherhood. Wendy, thirteen, fourteen years old, responded as best she could. If she hurt on the inside, nothing of the pain showed outwardly. Mary didn’t want to pry, fearing perhaps an onslaught of emotion she felt unprepared to encounter. So she went to work, stayed late, talked to a few friends on the phones, tried dating very casually a couple of times, hated it, and came home to a quiet, studious daughter, who apparently never liked to wear makeup, attractive clothing, or showed much interest in dating.

Was her daughter gay? Was she a lesbian? She’d wonder briefly, but she saw no indication of attraction to her own sex either, so Mary let the matter drop. Wendy’s just Wendy. When the time comes, she’ll show interest in boys. Until then, no harm in avoiding the conversation. No sense in making the girl talk about something she so obviously wanted not to talk about.

Besides, Wendy needed to study. She just needed to get that scholarship. She hated to imagine Wendy following her footsteps. Early pregnancy, early marriage, not an unwanted family exactly, but one not wanted at the time, not planned, not fully thought out, structured, arranged. Set. Wendy had a future, and Mary steadfastly determined to see Wendy through to that future. College, graduate school, maybe law, maybe medicine, perhaps a little something in academia. Wouldn’t that be nice? My daughter the professor. Politics. That was a thought. President Wendy Love. Senator Wendy Love. Justice Wendy Love. All that ringed very nicely in the mother’s ears. But she had to get that scholarship first, and that meant no photos of her with some guy’s, some boy’s, um, sperm on her face. No future lay in that direction.

I could have been a surgeon, Mary thought as she pulled from her stopped position at the intersection of West Pigeon and Acadia Boulevard. I have steady hands. I had the grades, too. At one time. But her own folks worked in a food processing factory back east, in one of those sovereignties bordering Big Water River, not poor, not really poor, but not wealthy, not enough to send her to school without a scholarship. And she lost any chance of a scholarship back in her senior year, four months pregnant and absolutely disinterested in going to class. So a GED had to cut it. Along with two years at the community college.

William, to his credit, stuck with her. His put his mind’s labor into technical training, and after receiving some kind of certification line laying and repair, found a steady position with the local power company, which service much of the northern half of the sovereignty. Later, after Mary earned her Associates, she found a position as administrative assistant at Adamatic Paper Supply, part time due to Wendy. Later, after being offered a promotion to Office Manager and a raise, Mary found suitable daycare.

Other mothers in her office oohed and aahed over every picture or every word, gesture, or action committed by their toddler offspring, an effusiveness that always left Mary cold, detached. She wondered what lacked in her not to feel the gushing warmth toward her own daughter, then she went back to her office duties. Before many years had passed, upper management transferred her to manage the office in the Accounting Department. By that time, Wendy went to school, relieving somewhat of her burden as a terrible mother. School could handle her.

Mary spent the next few years in night school or taking weekend or online classes, obtaining her BS in Accounting, which granted her another change of position, another raise, and more obligation, she felt this on her part, to the company. So yes, a bad mother, an unemotional, cold and distant mother. But one who kept her daughter clothed, fed, housed, and educated.

It wasn’t exactly true that Wendy needed a scholarship. But she needed one if she planned on going to the best universities, the Ivy League on the East, the West Coast schools. That university up north. And Mary fully intended that she did. Plan on going. Mary would force the issue if need be. Only those who’ve struggled in youth against, well, not exactly poverty, you couldn’t call it poverty, but. Only those would know the horrible waste of time, energy and spirit it takes just to stay even with the better off. Of course, you couldn’t get pregnant at seventeen. That would definitely throw a wrinkle in with the wrench.

Should she have aborted Wendy?

God, she had considered it. Thought about it, planned it, and almost executed the plan. Something held her back. Bill? Maybe. He argued strenuously to keep her. Morality? Doubtful. Nobody’s business but hers, and she didn’t think it a bad thing. Then what? Curiosity. What is it? What’s it, who’s it, who’s she, going to be? What will she turn into? What will happen to her? Fear, loathing, expectation, hope, all these emotions conspired and twisted in her mind, dancing a bizarre dance of reason and passion. At night these questions, these considerations, these wonderings seemed to come out of nowhere, out of the very silence of the dark, until they filled her almost with a desperate eagerness to give birth, to witness the event of Wendy arriving into the world.

And then one day, finally, she did.

God, Mary wanted to feel something.

Oh, love existed in her. She knew that. She felt it. Somewhere beneath all her detachment, all her distance, all her cool observation, she felt it, sometimes stirring to a real but quickly fading emotion. Having thrown herself into a routine of obligation, duty, work, she admired how Bill fastened about the toddler, spoiled her, doted on her, kept as much of his weekends as he could open for her. Eventually, as time passed, as Mary grew accustomed to the presence of Wendy, she too began to admire her, to even think highly of her. She recognized a plain and modest beauty, an independence mind, and a way of finding, well, a kind of amusement in her immediate surroundings, a self-reliance which began to worry the mother as the child grew older. Wendy did not easily make friends.

Besides the girl Madison, Mary couldn’t recall the names or faces of more than a handful of girls Wendy’s age. As third grade slipped into fourth grade, as fourth grade passed into fifth grade, Mary’s anxiety grew. She suggested sleepovers, parties, picnics, anything to bring in a greater number of companions for her daughter, but Wendy resisted, preferring her own company and the company of her favorite books. So Mary, not wanting to meet the resistance head-on, backed away. Wendy was Wendy after all. She knew what she wanted. And she seemed happy.

Now, as Mary’s blue Buick pulled into the driveway of the Love residence, she wondered if she had backed down too easily. Wendy should have had more friends. Mary should have forced that issue. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been so taken with that Sara. Because Mary harbored no doubt concerning the bad influence that young creature wielded on her daughter. Sara this, Sara that. For two weeks, Wendy talked of little else. And Mary couldn’t help but notice the change. That lipstick, that makeup. The way she dressed for school. The perfume she wore.

Oh, she looked nice, Wendy did. To be honest, Mary smiled at the change. Approved of it, in fact. With the misgiving Sara herself prompted in Mary’s heart. That girl raised a red flag if anyone did. But finally, finally, Wendy seemed to have discovered her body, her adolescent body just on the cusp of full womanhood. Slightly shorter than her mother, Wendy’s hips curved with the same round swell, narrowing upward until rising with the convex of her full breasts, the width of the chest. Almost a woman, now, but ah, yes, she’d heard those sounds. How could you not? That soft moaning, that shrill, sharp cry of ecstasy. Mary breathed a sigh of relief that she had Steve. She’d need her own, um, venting after hearing all that.

Mary parked the car, removed her keys, gathered her purse, and climbed out of her car. Steve. Another point of guilt. She’d promised not to bring him into the house, she’d promised not to let him spend the night, and now look at them. A frequent visitor, she shared her bed with him last night, he’d woken up in Mary’s house that morning. Wendy’s house. Met her in the hall on his way out. Not something a girl would want to experience, half-dressed bumping against a stranger early in the morning on the way to the bathroom. William, Bill, Wendy’s father gone now two years, departed, and now another man in the house. No wonder she’d started acting out.

Still. Those photos hurt her chances, slim enough as they were.

She’d be hearing from the school tomorrow, no doubt about that.

Mary slipped off her heels the moment she crossed the threshold of the door from the garage to the kitchen, the hard surface of the tile cool against the bottom of her hosed feet. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Steve over every night just to rub them? Maybe she should give him a call. After her talk with Wendy.

“Wendy?” She called out. No answer. Setting her baggy purse on the counter of the island, Mary walked to the bottom of the staircase.

“Wendy?” Still no answer. That girl.

Mary tripped up the stairs, turned right, walked down the carpeted hallway the short distance to Wendy’s bedroom. She knocked on the door. Mary listened to the bed creak, to the patter of feet on the carpet. The door opened to a disheveled, red-eyed Wendy.

“What?” she asked sharply.

“We need to talk.”

“Right now? Mom, I just don’t feel like it. I have a head—“

“Tough,” replied Mary, stepping through the cracked door.

“Then you?”

Mary nodded bitterly.

“I’ve seen it.”

“Oh, mom, what am I going to do? Everybody in school saw that picture. It’s horrible. I look like. I look so.”

Mary nodded in agreement.

“You certainly do.”

“I just can’t go back to school.”

“You’re going back to school. You’re just going to have to take it on the chin.”

“Mom!”

“I mean. Oh what do you expect? Do you have any idea how embarrassed I am for you? How angry and worried about you I am? What were you thinking?”

Now Wendy stepped back and faced her mother. Raising her lowered head, she looked at Mary with a mixture of defiance, anger, and hurt.

“I wasn’t thinking anything, Mother. I was doing.”

Mary returned her daughter’s fixed gaze until Wendy blinked and turned her head to the side. Mary’s look drifted over Wendy, noticing how her daughter must have showered. Her hair hung bedraggled and clumpy, and she wore pajamas although the light of early evening seeped through the window. Wendy had left off her bra after her shower, and the loose cotton of her pajama top clung to the curving slopes of her breasts, tiny nubs showing where her soft nipples poked the fabric. Mary felt her anger soften as she saw how her daughter must have been crying just before she came home from work. Red, watery eyes betrayed Wendy’s suffering, and Mary stepped forward to hug, to hold, to comfort her daughter.

“I suppose you could stay home a couple of days. This might blow over quickly. At least you could take a break from this mess.”

Wendy’s body relaxed, and she smiled gratefully at her mother.

“I mean, it’s not you ever skip school or anything. You’ve never even taken a sick day, have you?”

Wendy shook her head.

“No.”

Just then Wendy’s Hipkick vibrated on the top of the vanity.

Mary tossed Wendy a quizzical look.

“Whose phone is that?”

“Um, mine,” Wendy replied evasively.

“How did you get that?”

“Um. Sara. She wanted me to have it. I didn’t ask for it.”

“You let that girl give you a phone like that? How much does it cost?”

“I didn’t want to. I tried to refuse. But. You know.”

Wendy lifted the phone, held it, and furled her brows at her message.

“What is it? Give it her right now, young lady.”

“Mom. No. It’s my phone. I don’t have to show you anything.”

“Hand it over now.”

But Wendy held the phone behind her back.

“I said no.”

Mary stood to her full height and gave Wendy a final warning.

“Now. Or I’ll take it from you.”

“You do, and I’ll.”

“You’ll what, Wendy? What will you do?”

“Fine,” Wendy spat. “Take the damned thing.”

Wendy threw the phone on the floor near Mary’s stockinged feet.

Sighing, Mary bent over to retrieve the phone. Regaining her stature, she saw the text message Wendy had opened.

“Check your email you dirty whore. I can’t believe what a hot fucking cum bucket you are! God you drive me crazy you sexy girl.”

Sara sent the text.

Mary trembled with rage and confusion.

“You simply cannot see that girl again,” Mary told Wendy. “She’s off limits from now on.”

Wendy kept quiet, fighting down a rising rage of her own.

“What email?” Mary asked. “Show me.”

“No fucking way.”

The hand shot out before Mary could pull it back, crossing the short space between the two women in a wide, sweeping arc with irresistible force, her arm carrying the open palm of her hand like the end of a whip before landing sharply and brutally against the side of Wendy’s face.

Wendy staggered back, rubbing her reddening cheek. She glared at her mother.

“I hate you so fucking much.”

The she calmly walked around her mother and out the opened door.

Mary collapsed on Wendy’s bed, shocked and horrified at her violence. She leaned over and fell into a fetal position, sobbing on her side, tears streaming from her eyes, down her cheek, and onto the pink, fluffy case of Wendy’s pillow. Eventually she calmed down, dried her tears, and noticed the monitor of Wendy’s PC on the nightstand. Looking around, she found the keyboard tucked under the bed. Pushing a few keys randomly, the PC slowly woke from its sleep mode.

Mary opened Navigator to the VOL home page. Mary and Wendy had set up a VOL account years ago, and Mary hoped Wendy still used it. With any luck, Wendy would be logged in, and Mary wouldn’t have to force the issue with her daughter. I’ve done enough damage there, she thought. Mary’s luck held. VOL opened to Wendy’s home page. Mary clicked the mailbox icon and searched for a message from Sara. She found it.

The email itself contained a continuation of the theme introduced by the phone text, and Mary tried to ignore it as best she could, her horrified eyes skimming over the words slut, cum guzzler, cock whore, wet pussy, hot cum, pink cunt. Sexy. Hot. Lust. She saw two attachments. When she clicked the first attachment, she sighed with relief at seeing Wendy’s glazed face with Brad’s come streaming over it. Bad, but I’ve already seen it. She closed the file and opened the second attachment.

Mary gasped loudly, uttering a short, sharp, “Oh!”

The flash of Brad’s camera showed the same smiling Wendy, now leaning against the door of the back seat of Brad’s Jeep, holding her legs up and spread out, her womanhood on display, her daughter’s pussy, her daughter’s hot pussy, for all the world to see, Brad’s hot come leaking from the folds of Wendy’s pink cunt surrounded by her matted, golden pubic mound.

She didn’t even make him use a condom. My daughter. What on earth had happened to my daughter?

Not knowing why she did it, not really caring, or even thinking about it, Mary forwarded the email with attachments to her own email account. She can’t keep going like this, she thought. That girl Sara’s got to go. Then she deleted the email in Wendy’s account, closed the browser, and shut down the computer. Taking the Hipkick with her, crossing the room to pull the charger from its outlet, she saw the cordless phone and unhooked the line from its hookup on the wall. Cradling both phones in her arms, she stormed out of Wendy’s bedroom and searched for her daughter. She found her curled on the sofa, surfing cable channels, aiming the remote at the TV screen with a restless and impatient fury.

“Wendy,” Mary said quietly, dumping the pile of phones onto the carpet.

“You don’t get to talk to me.”

Mary sat down on the end of the sofa, reached to caress Wendy’s calf, but Wendy jerked her leg back.

“I’m so sorry, sweetie. I’m so very sorry.”

Wendy bored holes in the TV screen.

“You’ve never done that before.”

“You’ve never talked to me like that before. It happened so fast. I couldn’t think.”

“You hit me, Mom. You hit me hard.”

“I’m so sorry, honey.”

“I’m not. Now I know who you are.”

Mary watched Wendy wade through a blur of yelping, dancing commercials.

“You like to hit people.”

The remote rested on a sitcom of young people sitting on a sofa in a living room, presumably of a shared apartment, then rising to sit on a sofa in coffee shop, before going to sit at a booth in a New York diner. Afterwards, they went to a cinema to sit in a row of seats, before finally going home to sit once again on the sofa in the living room, talking of all the places they had sat in.

“It’s that Sara, honey. She’s changed you. You’ve changed. Surely you can see how much of a bad influence she is.”

“She doesn’t hit me.”

“I can’t keep apologizing, Wendy. And I’m not asking you to see things my way. I’m telling you. Sara is not welcome here. You can’t go over to see her. I can’t stop you from seeing her at school, but I can make sure you don’t see her outside of school. You’re grounded, Wendy. You’re grounded for the rest of the year. You’ve lost all phone privileges. I’d take away your computer, but you need that for school, but it stays down here. In the study, where I can check on you.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing with your life, but I can promise you this. I won’t let you screw it up. You can do so much, Wendy. You have so much potential. I can just feel it in you. You can become anything, Wendy. You’re so young, right now, you can put your mind to it and become anything you want to be. You have so many chances in front of you. So much opportunity. And that Sara can ruin everything for you. Don’t let her blow it for you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Sara. You don’t know how supportive she’s been of me.”

“You don’t understand, Wendy, because you’re so young. People like Sara. People from Sara’s background. People that rich. They’re not like you and me. They’re different. They play through life in a way we can’t, and sometimes they don’t care who gets hurt, because they know they can’t. It doesn’t make them good or bad, but you’ve got to watch out for them. And I know Sara’s rich if she drives that Mercedes and buys you the latest cell phones. I know I’m not a good mother, I know I’m not as warm and loving and affectionate as your father was. But I do want what’s best for you. I do care about you.”

Wendy shot up and said with an exasperated contempt, “Oh god, Mom. You can’t even say it, can you? You can’t even say it, because you don’t know if it’d be true, do you? You’re so full of it. You know that, right?”

“Full of what, honey? You know I care about you.”

Wendy stared plaintively at her mother.

“But do you love me?”

43. Moby at the drain

Moby banged on the drain in the big stall of the restroom next to his custodial maintenance closet on the second floor. The rubber mallet made a dull thud when it struck the metal covering, but the metal rang briefly, sending a clatter echoing down the drain. Moby scooted the canisters of bug powder, his cudgel-like black metal flashlight, and his cattle prod to one side, and bent his head to the floor, turning his ear to the drain. Nothing at first except the sound of his own breath reverberating against the tube of the drain. Then he heard it, softly, faintly, unmistakably. The sound of something large passing through the drain system, a wet, slurping, dragging sound, as if a large snake (or several large snakes), slithered through the sewage pipes below.

“That’s just wrong,” Moby muttered to himself. “I can feel it in my bones.”

Moby had first sensed something uncanny moving below the school some two or three weeks ago. At first he thought he just imagined it, or not imagined exactly, not something he conjured, but something that conjured itself despite his intent. Just the usual background noise in his head, just another noise among the yammering voices, the whispers, the whistles, the cacophony and clash of chords, the laughter. He’d learned to turn them all off years ago. No, not off, down. Not down, not down exactly. He bore the background sound like a roommate the noise of his flat mate’s stereo.

The drugs helped.

He’d consumed practically every drug known to science and pseudoscience. Recreational, therapeutic, psychiatric, anti-psychotic, bipolar, and homeopathic. Honestly, it was all recreational to Moby, who’d witness his trips, highs, mood suppressants with a kind a detached amusement. Ah, he’d say to the suddenly opened portal of swirling star faces and laughing moons, you again. Well. I’ve got some Old Style in the fridge. He’d gesture with a nod and backward toss of his head. Get it yourselves. You know where the glasses are.

He’d checked the fridge later. If any of the beer went missing, he’d know he’d had real visitors. If not. Well. Let the voices and visions on the other side dance their little dance. They needed him, not the other way around.

But when those noises in the drain kept getting louder, kept getting closer, well, sir. And when the toilets started clogging and sinks started overflowing. Well, then. He tried to pin down when it all started. Those two fillies now. Making all that ruckus in the restroom. His restroom. Damned students knew not to go in there. But not those two. That’s when that thing down there got restless, started stirring about, making noises, rattling the drains, slurping blob-like under the school. But he never saw it.

That’s the thing.

Moby never actually saw it.

Though once or twice he thought he could smell it. A weird bubblegum odor, somehow mixed with cinnamon. Made his thoughts wander, is what it did. Fogged his noggin. And he needed his noggin defogged. Fog-free and clear. Moby shook his head and pressed his ear close to the drain until it touch the metal grate. A bubblegum odor rose from the drain in the floor, spreading throughout the restroom. Moby’s nose twitched. Then something wet licked at his cheek, and he jerked back with a shock of disgusted awe. A pink, wet, fleshy tentacle pushed against the grate, lifting it. The grate fell to the tiled floor with a clang as the pink tip of the tentacle inched slithering across the rim of the drain.

Moby stood up, aghast and outraged. Not in his restroom. Not on his watch.

The tentacle had just reached the tip of Moby’s black, steel-toed work shoe. The custodial maintenance technician lunged for this cattle prod, raised it aloft and jabbed at the creature in the middle of its thick, fleshy, and smooth tentacle. He leaned over the creature’s boneless extremity and pushed the button on the handle. The tentacle instantly retracted as a pink cloud of gas or fine powder shot from the drain, blasting Moby directly in the face. The custodian jabbed the cattle prod as far as he could down the hole, shaking and rattling it against the side of the drain.

“You damned pink varmint. I see you now, you pink bastard.” Moby turned away from the hole. “Bug powder,” he muttered, wiping the pink substance off his face with the tails of his blue custodial shirt. “Bug powder will teach that son of a bitch.”

Dropping the stock prod, Moby reached for his flashlight and cast a beam of light down the dark hole of the drain, but he could see nothing beyond the curvature of the pipe, some two feet below the grate. He dragged a canister of bug powder, a non-descript, dark olive canister with a long, fabric-coated hose ending in a long conical nozzle toward the drain. Moby stuck the nozzle down the pipe, directing a long, steady blast of the bug powder. The fine yellow powder clung to the side of the pipe and hung in the air above the drain like a small radioactive cloud.

He scooted the grate over the drain hole with the tip of his shoe.

“He-he-he,” Moby chuckled. “Fuck with me varmint, and I’ll fuck right back.”

44. Pastor Flair goes through the offerings

That Monday morning Pastor Flair’s mood flattened to a low point the following day. He had spent the rest of that Sunday, yesterday, jubilant, almost ecstatic, remembering and re-remembering his triumphant call to redemption. How the congregation responded! But as the day passed, as routine took over, the daily routine of life at home, among the wife, the two kids, he felt his jubilant mood subside, to flow out of him like the slow deflation of a balloon. He turned the key to the door of the church, walked into the dark foyer, the narthex, turned left and walked down the narrow corridor to his office, also on the left side of the hall.

Renee had left the offering trays on a small table standing against the back wall of Flair’s office. Good. Counting money always cheered him up. But he handled the welcome cards first. Church business, the money wasn’t going anywhere, no sense in acting greedy. Besides, he expected only two or three welcome cards per week, sometimes, often, none at all, and this Sunday’s offering saw only the one yellow index card. He hummed and smiled as he picked it up, wondering who the person was, and whether they, the church, could expect to receive much in the way of, well, donation. Of funds. His smile quickly turned to a frown as he read the contents of the welcome card.

Well, he thought. Youngsters. But that’s exactly what he spoke against yesterday. And they had listened, he had seen their prayers, their ardent worship. And anyway, after all. Teenage joke. Poor taste, yes. Bad, really. Absolutely. But that little prayer request at the end. So sweet. So thoughtful. Yes. He could do that. He could pray for Wendy to see in her what that sweet little friend of hers saw. He dismissed the other garbage, the trash, written above. He’d seen worse. The world was full of it. Besides, Wendy Love. He knew her mother. Talked to the daughter. Good, plain people. Hardly the ones to go galivanting or cavorting after sin. But he’d keep an eye. Oh, yes. He’d keep an eye.

Pastor Flair turned his attention to the wads of loose change and bills, his mood expanding to almost buoyancy.

45. Victoria Gothe, Assistant Vice Principal

Victoria Gothe, one of two assistant vice principals steering the operations of Kid Lester High School, saw Moby stretching yellow tape in an X across the door of the girl’s restroom on the second floor. She sighed. Why couldn’t he ever seem to get that facility functioning? She frowned in distaste at the sight of the man. Shirt untucked, when he turned to face her, she saw a face lined with yellow dust and some kind of pink glitter. She noticed the same pink glitter on his shirt tail. Really, he should keep that tucked in.

At over six feet, Hilda Gothe presented a formidable physique to staff and student alike. Stout, heavy set, wide of hip and shoulder, broad of bosom, but not actually fat, Ms. Gothe piled her raven-black hair forward and up in a beehive whose fashion went out of date several decades previously. Ms. Gothe chose dark clothes to wear, navy or black, billowing slacks or long black flowing skirts with loose, dark blouses. When weather turned colder, she wore dark jackets, blazers, or sweaters over her blouses. Ms. Gothe peered at the world behind a pair of large glasses with large, rounded, squared black frames.

Ms. Gothe towered over Moby. She wondered why they school had hired such a man as he. Several loose screws obviously rattled around in that bald head of his, and if you watched him long enough, you could see his head twitch in a sudden burst of facial expressions ranging from annoyance to laughter. That couldn’t be good. But these spasms were brief and seldom, usually out of view of prying eyes. She looked behind her, down the hallway, then in front of her, then at the floor. Absolutely spotless. He kept the floors shined, the restrooms gleaming, the rooms neat and orderly. And he stayed away from students. That fact couldn’t be overpriced. No one needed that headache.

The world around her, having found disfavor in her eyes, awaited her vituperative and vitriolic approach with a bemused aggravation. Moby counted himself no exception. He opened his mouth to defend himself against whatever it was that Goat wanted to bitch about next.

“I was just—“

Assistant Vice Principal Gothe cut him off.

“V’you seen that Love girl? She’s wanted in the office.”

“Love girl?”

“Wendy Love. Blond hair, little taller than you. She’s gotten herself in trouble. A shame, really. Wouldn’t have expected it of her. Didn’t seem the type.” Gothe sighed again. “Oh, well. Just goes to show you can never tell.”

“Nope,” Moby said with finality. “Ain’t seen her.”

“Well. If you do. You might want to let her know the office is looking for her.”

Moby nodded with no intention of getting involved in school politics. The vice principal turned around and walked away. Moby watched Gothe’s big ass trundle down the hall, swaying and shaking with that female seductiveness of large bottoms.

46. A gathering of Roadmen

Low rings of hills surrounded Edge City on two sides, like geographic parentheses. The hill on the west side dropped off suddenly, forming a sheer cliff rising high above the border of Edge City. The sky yawned in its blue immensity over both rings of hills and the low, flat city nestled between them. A few thin cirrus clouds, lingering indecisively, stretched over the blue field, and the sun, nearing the end of its slow decline towards the west, poured out its last rays which glinted and reflected on the windshield of a white Corolla, parked a few yards from the edge of the west cliff.

The Roadman stood on the edge of the cliff, in the midst of a few stray scrub oak, desert willow, and mountain juniper, peering at the city below him with an odd-looking optical apparatus, which might have been a binocular but wasn’t. As the Roadman looked through his device, information flashed momentarily over the lens, information which the brain immediately received as a digital neurophotonic impulse. The effect caused the Roadman to become dizzy, and periodically the man had to lower the device, wipe his eyes, shake his head and try to collect his bearings.

The man lowered the device again and tapped a button on the side. A myriad of pink hotspots showed against the map of the city displayed in an extra-mental projection hovering vertically about three or four feet from the Roadman’s face.

“My god,” he said. “That thing’s been everywhere.”

Just then another white Corolla drove up and parked beside the first. Two Roadmen, the driver and passenger who had met with the Go-Between earlier that day, trotted up to the Roadman at the edge. The Roadman with the optic device turned to greet them.

“Well?” he asked.

“We’ve been using —” said the driver, his voice emerged from his throat in a kind of drone, articulating his speech in a halting, deliberate manner.

“The Handheld Device,” the passenger continued, speaking in the same manner as the driver. “The experience has been quite—“

“Interesting,” the driver picked up. “Exhilarating—“

“Up—“

“Lifting. Climactic. Informa—“

“Tive. We have just one question,” said the passenger.

“Who the hell is,” said the driver.

“Jack Randall?”

The first Roadman shook his head.

“Never heard of him. Look,” he said, pointing at the extra-mental map projection. “All those pink spots mark where it has been.”

“Ah,” said the passenger.

“That thing,” agreed the driver.

“But not where it’s at. That’s the problem.” The first Roadman sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and walked back to his car. “Well, how ’bout a drink at Dos Antonios? Frank and Rascal said they’d be there.”

A favorite and frequent hangout for Roadmen, Dos Antonios offered a chance to gather, talk shop, and drink Bud on tap away from the prying eyes and ears of The Group. Named after famed local barbers Anthony Gram and Tony Labrio, Dos Antonios combined poor service with poor fare and did so at a fairly low price, one suitable for the budget of a Roadman. Tucked away in the corner of a shabby retail strip facing the frontage of I-40 behind a dispirited growth of listless agave and apathetic yucca, Dos Antonios usually boasted no more than a bare handful of old and beaten automobiles in the parking slots in front of its business.

Tonight, however, the small parking lot held about a half a dozen Toyotas of various years, all Corollas, all white. Except for a blue Corolla parked in the rear corner of the parking lot. Although a large, plate glass window lined the front of Dos Antonios, a large, dark green blind covered the window from the inside. Walking into Dos Antonios was a like walking into a dark room after a bright day in the sun. The Roadmen waited several long moments for their eyes to adjust to the darkness, but after a while they saw Frank and Rascal booth, across the bar, against the far wall. Frank gestured something at Rascal, animate and excited, but Rascal just crossed his arms and shook his head, the only man in the crew who refused the requisite short cropped hair of the Roadmen. As the three Roadmen neared they caught a whiff of the conversation.

“I tell you, it’s coming. It’s coming closer. I don’t know what,” Frank was saying, “but I can feel it.” He struck his chest and beat on his legs. “Here. In my heart and bones.”

“That’s your heart attack coming. You’re primed for one and you know it.” Rascal quipped. Frank, heavy-set, a heavy drinker and an even heavier smoker, failed to find the humor.

“Maybe,” Frank sighed. “But that’s not it.”

“What’s not it?” the Roadman with the projection map asked.

“Aw, Frank here says something’s coming, but he won’t say what, and anyway, he’s just making a big deal out of someone ain’t nobody can do anything about.”

“I can’t say what,” Frank protested, sliding over to make room for the driver, while the passenger sat next to Rascal. The third Roadman scooted a chair from a nearby four-top up to the side of the booth.

“I tell you what,” the Roadman said.

The others waited, but the Roadman didn’t seemed inclined to finish that thought.

“Frank,” the driver began.

“What do you think—“

“is on its—“

“way?”

Frank shifted in his booth.

“I just feel it. I have no idea what. Something from,” Frank paused and looked up. “Outside.”

“Well, hell, Frank,” Rascal scoffed. “We already got that. That’s why we’re here.”

“Do we know that?” asked the Roadman. “Do we know that’s why we’re here?”

“What do you mean?” Rascal asked, while the driver and passenger cast a quizzical glance.

“I mean,” the Roadman said, “what do we know about these Go-Betweens? What do we really know about what these Go-Betweens want and who they represent? I’ve heard some talk about something called The Guild recently, and that’s a first. So it makes me ask. Who’s calling the shots? And what do they really want?”

“Does it matter?” Rascal asked. “I mean, does it really matter to us? What can we do about it anyway? You’ve seen what they got. You’ve seen what they can do. Look, buddy.” Rascal paused to lift a large glass full of yellow beer to his mouth. Tilting the glass, he swallowed several large gulps, set the beer down, and looked unsteadily at his interlocutor, who by a curious coincidence entirely unknown to Rascal, was called Buddy.

“Look, buddy. I used to work down at that paper place. In the warehouse, driving the forklift, loading and unloading truck after truck, moving one stack of pallets across the warehouse to make room for another stack of pallets. I didn’t ask what I loaded, I didn’t ask what I was unloading, or ask about why I moved one pile of crap from one corner to another. I just did it. And you got to just do it too. Cause whoever this Guild thing is, it’s bigger than any boss I ever had. When and if they ever get around to telling me to jump, I won’t even ask how high. I’ll just jump and wait for the next order. I recommend you do the same.”

“Is this—“

“wisdom or cowar—“

“dice,” asked the driver and passenger, or DP as they were beginning to be known.

“I don’t know,” answered Rascal, “but anybody who can glue your heads together with an overhyped cell phone gets my attention.”

News travels fast in the world of the Roadmen, and word of the pairing had made it to Dos Antonios before the driver and passenger themselves.

“We saw him today,” said DP, “the Go-Between.”

“We know,” Rascal replied.

“We have instructions. We have to find it. The thing. The thing that got away. It’s here. It’s. On the move. It’s. Restless.”

“What thing?” asked Frank.

“We’re not sure,” said Buddy, “but we’ve been keeping track of its movements. It’s been everywhere, according to the map projection.”

The Roadmen cleared an area on the table, and DP projected the map onto the surface. Pink spots stained the deep brown varnish of the tabletop, scarred with indentations from knives, pens, and years of use. Multiple pink spots spread throughout every corner of the city.

“We don’t know what it is. We don’t know where it lives. We don’t know where it comes from. And we don’t know it can move so much without our noticing it. We—“

“I think I can answer that.”

The Roadmen at the table looked up at the stranger who just then approached.

The stranger, a man, wore a black unmarked baseball style cap with the bill pulled down low over his eyes. A rumpled light brown jean jacket hung over his shoulders loosely, over a loose white shirt, tucked into unbelted khaki trousers. A week’s unshaven beard lined the hollows of his gaunt cheeks and haggard face. A real boozer, thought the Roadmen as they looked at him. They weren’t far wrong.

“What you’re looking for, they didn’t tell you, am I right?”

“Who’s they,” asked DP.

The stranger eyed the duo sitting on separate sides of the booth in turns.

“You don’t even know that?” asked the stranger incredulously.

“We know the Go-Between,” replied Frank smugly.

“Oh fudge,” sighed the stranger. “You don’t know a blessed thing, do you?”

The passenger half of DP fixed the stranger with a curious stare, defensively intrigued.

“First of all, the Go-Between has other fish to fry. Second, you live on a back planet nobody gives a rat’s ass about. Third, if anybody pays any attention to you at all, it’s because something got lost here that shouldn’t have been lost. Fourth, there are rules. And the rules can never be broken. That’s basically about it.”

“Rules? What rules? Nobody told us about any rules.”

“Really? The Go-Between didn’t mention it?”

“No. No, he didn’t. He didn’t tell us a bles- a damned thing.”

“No interaction,” said the stranger. “No interaction with a back planet whatsoever. That’s the big rule.”

“But that rule gets broken all the time!”

“Not by the big chiefs. And they don’t care much what the, uh, the other ones do.”

“What other ones?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“But who the hell are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t.”

The Roadmen at the table waited expectantly, eyes fixed, and jaws open.

“Oh, yeah. That. I’m Jack. Jack Randall. I’m a Journeyman Recorder. The Journeyman Recorder, you might say. For these parts at any rate.”

The Roadmen at the table continued to wait expectantly, eyes slightly dazed now, darting in confusion, mouths muttering.

“You really don’t know a blessed thing, do you?

“No,” the Roadmen agreed. “Not a thing.”

47. Wendy in her room

Wendy had to start her computer to eject the Cock-Hungry Coeds DVD from her computer. She pulled the jewel case from beneath her mattress, her eyes grazing the cover. She opened the case, slipped in the DVD, and lay the case beside her on the bed. Then she opened her browser and checked her email. She rarely used her email. She saw no reason to. Again she wondered why she played the oddball, the odd girl out. She just didn’t seem to be interested in the same things her peers were. No social media. No Faceblab, no Jiffygram, no Peeper. No Internet, really, except for researching for homework assignments. She looked for the email Sara had sent and saw that her mother had trashed it. Restoring the email, she opened the pictures and gasped at the images.

“Oh. My. God.”

If anybody saw that second pic, she’d never hear the end of it. But someone already had. Brad. Sara. Her mother. Leaning against Brad’s door, she held her legs open, spreading them wide to reveal her pussy, a stream of Brad’s come leaking in trickles from her matted lips. Did she look good? The coeds in the movie looked so hot. Did she look that hot? I mean, she’d need a real photographer of course, but did she even have the body? She inspected herself critically. Too much flab around her belly, her ass looked huge on the seat of Brad’s Jeep. And even without all that come on it, her face would look, well, ridiculous.

She read Sara’s message.

“OMG, Wendy you’re so fucking hot like this. I can’t believe what a total whore you look like, wearing some guy’s come all over you like a hot slut. What a cum guzzler you are, a real cock whore, aren’t you? Just look at your wet pussy, your pink cunt with all that hot cum! So sexy and hot. You drive me crazy with lust.”

Well, she did look hot she supposed. She’d have to agree with Sara there. She saved the pics to a folder labeled Homework, logged out of her email account, and shut down the computer. She unplugged it, removed the cables, and set the computer with her monitor and keyboard outside her bedroom door. Then she picked up the DVD, dragged her magazine from below her mattress, and stuck them into a small plastic bag.

What was she doing?

That Sara, for one thing. I mean, come on. How much was she supposed to take? Wendy stood in the middle of her bedroom, turning around aimlessly. I mean. Just come on. And every time Wendy decided enough was enough, there was Sara to quickly change her mind. I mean. What the hell. I even kissed her this afternoon. No prompting or urging on Sara’s part. Just turned around while getting out of her car and planted a big wet one right on her lips. What the heck was that? And then these pictures!

Her mother was right. She needed to get Sara out of her life. At least for a while. She needed to take some time, take a rest, a break, and see what, if anything, had changed about her, Wendy. She walked over to her bed and squatted. I mean, she thought as she dragged the pink double-headed dildo out from beneath her mattress, just look at this thing. She remembered how she had fucked herself with it, just yesterday, at Sara’s command, sucking one end while plunging the other into her. Vagina. That’s what you call it, Wendy. Not the p-word, and certainly not the c-word. It’s your vagina. And you don’t show it off to just anyone with a camera, just a passerby who remarks on a casual interest to see it. You don’t let grown women finger you in a public bathroom no matter how good it feels. You don’t gob makeup on your face like a two-dollar whore.

I’m not a virgin, she thought, sitting on her bed, rolling the dildo in her two hands. Not anymore. Whatever’s happening to me, I’m not that Wendy anymore. I’ve changed that much at least. I’m the school slut, now. Wendy giggled to herself. Did she really just give herself up to Brad like that? My god, she even wore those horrible panties. What kind of underwear has a hole right in the crotch? Just like those jeans she wore last week, ass cheeks hanging out behind her. My god.

But. Two weeks, ago. One week ago, she wasn’t like that. Two weeks ago, just a little over one week ago, she could still pass as modest, plain, chaste. Well, she couldn’t be chaste now, but could she recover her modesty? Could she recover a little of her chastity? I mean. It’s just been an experiment, right? Sara introduced her to sex, and Wendy, overwhelmed, just fell head over heels into it, just tumbled right into Sara’s abundant sexual appetite, awakening perhaps her own hunger, but still. And then I just kissed her, right on the mouth.

And as for that Brad. Neil had hit home with that. Was she going to just let anybody have her? Have sex with any man who showed an interest? My god. What the heck has happened to me? Those photos. The whole school had seen her face covered in Brad’s. Discharge. No. She couldn’t go back. She wouldn’t go back, and her mother had no say in the matter. At sixteen she could quit. At least she thought she could. She’d have to look that up. Tomorrow. Cause she definitely planned on staying home tomorrow.

Honestly though, shouldn’t losing your virginity mean something? How come she didn’t feel anything? How come it didn’t seem like any big deal? Was she really just a slut? I thought it was supposed to be special, and really, it kind of, well. I liked doing him, I really did. Oh god, that body. The way she rolled with him, the way she guided him with her clasping legs, calves and thighs wrapping around his powerful back, his hips, god. What a body. And the way he just oozed into me. That look on his face. Yeah. I could get used to that.

But not now. Not after those pics. God, Wendy, what are you thinking? You’re supposed to hate him, remember?

She jumped up from her bed, ran to her vanity, threw open the drawer holding her cosmetics, her lipsticks, gifted to her by Sara and tossed them on the floor. She ran downstairs, ransacked the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink and pulled out a white plastic garbage bag. Then she fled back to her room, feet pounding up the stairs. She threw the cosmetics into the bag and then threw the smaller bag holding her pornography into the larger bag. Seeing the pink dildo, she threw that into the garbage too, tying the top in a wide, bulky knot. She stomped down the hall, down the stairs, and across the floor towards the garage. She opened the lid of the empty garbage can and tossed the sack inside it. Trash had already been picked up that morning, so she’d have to wait until next Monday to be free, to be completely and truly free of Sara. But she felt better, relieved, having taken that first, short step on the path to renormalization. Wendy was coming back. A little bounced around, a little worse for the wear perhaps, but she’d be back.

Her mother was right, after all. Sara was a bad influence.

But she never hurt you, Wendy told herself as she climbed the stairs to her room. She never hit you. All she gave you were kisses you never wanted.

48. Mary comforts Wendy

Later that night, Mary tapped lightly on Wendy’s door. Wendy didn’t answer, so Mary gently pushed the door open, just ajar, a crack to peek in. Wendy lay curled up on her bed, clutching at her pillow, and shaking, almost convulsively. Mary shoved the door open and rushed to her daughter’s side. She held her arms out to hold Wendy’s face, but Wendy had covered it with her arms and hands, sobbing.

“Just go away, Mom. Just leave me alone. I’m so miserable.”

“Honey.”

“Oh, god, Mom. What have I done?”

“Honey.”

“I’m so embarrassed, Mom. I’m so embarrassed. Everybody saw that picture, Mom. Everybody. And everybody laughed. At me. They just pointed, called me names, and laughed.”

“Honey.”

“Why did Brad do it, Mom? Why did Brad do something so mean? I was so nice to him.”

“Honey.”

“I’m just a slut and whore now, Mom. That’s what everybody at school calls me now. A slut and a whore.”

“Honey, listen to me. Please.”

Wendy sat up, lifted the bottom of her pajama top to dry her eyes, and pulled her legs in to cross them, folding her hands in her lap to look at Mary, for all the world like the six-year old girl who once used to listen enthralled to her mother’s stories about spreadsheets and unclaimed assets.

“You’re not a slut, honey. You just got caught up in something you weren’t prepared for. You got overwhelmed.”

Mary took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“Look, I’ve been a crap mother. I’m so sorry. I just. And after your father. I just assumed. You seemed so content with your life. You never really asked questions, and I never once asked you. I should have told you about this a long time ago. I should have talked to you about boys. About the birds, the bees. But I didn’t, and now you got stung. My god, I should have talked to you about birth control, about condoms, about making boys wear condoms. But you just seemed so. Disinterested. I thought I had time. And I did. I did have time. But I wasted it, and now you’re paying the price. God. To think I let someone like that little hussy teach you about sex.”

Wendy’s mouth curved in a slight smile at her mother.

“Mom, it’s okay. I used birth control. I used pills.”

“You did?” a surprised Mary asked. “How? I mean, where? Where did you get birth control pills? I’m so sorry. I should have done this for you already.”

“It’s no big deal, Mom. I got them from the school. From the school nurse.”

“Hmm,” Mary paused, reflecting. “I guess that’s all right. When did you get them? How long have you been taking them?”

“Um. A couple of weeks now.”

“A couple of week? You’ve been having sex for a couple of weeks now?”

“Mom! No. It’s just that. It’s just that I didn’t know when, so I took them anyway. In advance.” Wendy amazed herself with how quickly the lies tripped off her tongue. It was so easy.

Mary remained quiet. Wendy piped in with a question of her own.

“Am I still grounded?”

“Yes, Wendy. You’re still grounded. I need to keep an eye on you. I need to get you back in my life. And I need to get back into yours.”

Mary paused.

“And Wendy?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Maybe you were a little too nice to Brad.”

Tuesday

49. Wendy at home and the effect of pink pills

Mary left for work before Wendy woke up, leaving the teenager an empty house and a full day ahead of her. Going to the bathroom she saw a little splotch of blood on her pad. Not much, but she knew her heavy flow would come soon. Tomorrow. Maybe the day after.

Her cramps started again shortly after gulping down a bowl of cereal and toast. Going to her room to get Sara’s pink pills, she wondered if she should take them.

After all, she thought, I have no idea what they are. And I don’t think I should be trusting Sara anymore. Not after yesterday. Not after all the trouble knowing her has caused.

But the pangs clinched her back and thighs, a terrible gripping above her groin, and she almost bent double in a sudden agony. Sweat pearled on her forehead, rolled down her temples, and she shook, trembling as if with fever. Whatever was in those pills had to be better than this, she thought. She staggered to her vanity and retrieved the package of pills from her drawer, tore out two pills and swallowed them dry. Within minutes her pangs subsided, and she felt refreshed, revigorated. Renewed.

An hour later, while lying on the sofa looking for something to watch on cable, Wendy felt an immense pressure building inside her, just above her groin. She sat up. Then she felt the leaking. Looking down, she saw the red mark expanding in an ever-increasing area over her groin, seeping through the denim of her jeans. Shooting up, she hurried to the guest bathroom, shoved down her pants, her underwear, once plain white but now stained a deep crimson. She squatted on the toilet. She reached for her pad, but it fell into the water of the toilet bowl, splashing cold water against the bottom of her thighs. Moments later she heard a flood of fluid striking the water of the toilet as the sudden pressure which had built up inside her dissipated.

Horrified she looked down to see a toilet bowl filled with blood mixed with water. Her thighs were covered in blood, her pubic hair matted with the thick substance.

“What the,” she muttered. “This can’t be good.”

Alarmed, she jolted to call her mother, but hesitated.

“I’ve caused too much trouble already,” she said aloud. “And anywhere it looks like the bleeding has stopped. If it comes back, I’ll definitely call her.”

So, gathering her soiled her clothes, she put them into the washing machine, added detergent, and set the temperature to hot. Then she walked upstairs and showered, after which she threw on a pair of white panties over her pad, a pair of loose pink gym shorts, and a short T-shirt, cut high enough to expose her navel and midriff. Seeing the two books she bought at the bookstore the day before yesterday, just picked up Helen Vendler’s Jillin’, frowned, and selected the other book instead. The Secret History of Edge City by Jack Randall.

This ought to be good, she thought as she curled up on her bed, holding the paperback in one hand as she leaned against her pillows, piled and fluffed against the bedroom wall. Just what I need to take my mind off things.

50. The Secret History of Edge City

Wendy opened the book to the table of contents. The first chapter dealt with a missing person name Betty Blake and the Hightower Rock Meteorite. Interesting, she thought. Never heard of her. Her eyes focused on the page.

“Not much is known about the Hightower Rock Meteorite. Officially, it never happened. The meteorite itself is missing, researchers have found no significant residue, no evidence. And yet, a handful of witnesses insist something happened, that something fell to earth that fateful night in September of 1958. Witnesses such as the late Jerry Hollingshead, former owner and operator of the famous Edge City Drive-In, claim without the slightest doubt that something landed outside Edge City near Hightower Rock.

“ “The ‘Queen of Outer Space’ was playing, I remember it clearly, how could you forget Zsa Zsa? I was walking around outside, doing my rounds, making sure the kids weren’t getting out of hand, and just generally keeping the place tiptop and shipshape. Suddenly the night sky toward the east lit up, like a fireworks show, only there weren’t no fireworks. I looked up, and just when Talleah appeared in the corridor to take the food tray to the captive earth men, a bright fireball streaked over the screen, almost touching it right above Zsa Zsa’s lovely face. The fireball sped west and landed, I just know it, somewhere out there in the canyon. There weren’t no explosion though, and I never heard nothing but the sonic boom of the passing, what are they calling it, meteorite.”

“Another witness recalls seeing Nero Craft’s Ford coupe spin out of the drive-in, throwing up dust and gravel in its wake. That same witness swears he saw Betty Blake in the front seat. Other witnesses recall seeing Miss Blake with Nero that night, the last time anyone would remember seeing her. As for Nero Craft, well, that’s part of the story…”

51. Nero Craft and the Hightower Rock Meteorite

When the sky burst into illumination in the east, Nero pulled his tongue from Betty Blake’s gaping red lips, shiny with lipstick and saliva trailing from the corners of her petite mouth. The lipstick she wore made them look somehow fuller than they actually were, but Nero didn’t complain. At 28, he didn’t exactly feel himself lucky to be with a high school junior, after all, he was Nero Craft, but he knew options remained limited with the younger crowd, shy as they were. Not to mention protective fathers guarding against unwanted masculine, um, courtship. But Betty, good old Betty, had managed to sneak out under pretext. And so Nero felt, he could admit it, grateful. Or at least conscious of the fact that he should be grateful. He couldn’t really tell what he felt. Desire. He wanted Betty. And he wanted her in that car, at that moment.

Then that damned Jerry tapped on the door window, and the sky in the east lit up like a giant firefly, full of living light, a pink brilliance on the eastern horizon, joining the light made by a bright, full, silvery moon. Nero’s jaw dropped, fascinated. Betty leaned forward, pulling the sides of her open blouse together.

“My god,” she gasped. “Did the commies drop the bomb?”

“No, baby. I don’t think so. Look! It’s coming closer! I think it’s a shooting star.”

Neither Betty nor Nero had to wait long. The shooting star hurtled overhead, just above the screen, shrieking as it passed west. A loud boom followed as superheated air collapsed behind the atmospheric intruder, a flash of pink light streaking above the startled audience. Then Nero turned the ignition, threw his coupe in reverse, and peeled out of the drive-in, sending up a cloud of gravel raining down on cursing and disrupted passers-by. They shook their hands and yelled, but the hotrod Ford was already gone.

Edge City lay several miles behind them, but Nero sped forward, heading west, staring up and ahead at the night sky. The meteorite, the shooting star, should have been long gone, smashed into a thousand pieces as it collided against the hard crust of the earth, but to Nero’s amazement, the object slowed, seeming to hover not far above the Ford, moving as it moved, maybe a mile, maybe half a mile ahead of the car. Betty stuck her head out the open window and pointed with astonishment.

“Get your head back in the car,” Nero shouted, “do you want it to get knocked off?”

“But it’s just floating there! That’s no meteor!”

“I don’t know what it is, but I never saw anything like it.”

The Ford soon careened down the winding roads hugging the sides of Reno Arroyo Canyon, the strange glowing sphere bobbing and hovering just above them. The road swooped down, curving, and the pink light darted forward, coming to a floating standstill midway up Hightower Rock on the other side of the canyon. Then the radiant object dropped, as if let go by whatever held it aloft, and plummeted into the ground beyond the sight of the two occupants in the Ford coupe.

“Dammit!” Nero shouted, “there’s no way across the canyon from here. I’ll have to turn around to get to Heywood Bridge.”

Caught in a narrow pass between a high cut in the road on his left side and a sheer drop off on the right, Nero stepped on the accelerator to burst around the corner ahead, in search of a turnaround. The corner, sharper than he expected in the limited light of his car lamps, veered at a nearly right angle towards the left. The tires of the Ford squealed as Nero wrenched the wheel to make the tight curve. The rear of the Ford jack tailed behind him, sliding right until the rear wheels hung of the sharp drop-off, shaking loose gravel and broken asphalt tumbling towards the canyon floor far below.

The car paused for agonizing moment, hanging on the edge of the road cliff. Betty pleaded helplessly with wide, fear-struck eyes, but Nero could do nothing. Her mouth moved in a silent prayer. Then the back of the car teetered, Nero shoved the driver door open and jumped out as the Ford slid backward and followed the broken asphalt and gravel to the floor of the canyon, rolling over and over on its side, crushing the top of the coupe and breaking the metal body. Nero’s body tumbled after it for a short distance before striking a small, scrub-covered ledge jutting from side of the canyon wall. The Ford’s fall came to a gradual halt in a sickening sound of broken glass, bent metal, and the shrill screaming of Betty Blake, suddenly cut off.

52. Mary gets a phone call

Mary was pouring through documents, files, and spreadsheets when she heard a persistent vibration coming out of her purse. Confused, almost mystified, she fumbled through her large bag to find the cause. Then she saw the Hipkick, the phone Sara had given Wendy. Mary put it on her desktop and ignored it. The vibrating stopped. Less than 30 seconds later it started again. Mary continued to ignore it until finally, losing patience, and realizing she had to talk to the precocious teenager, Mary answered the fifth call.

“Hello, Sara.”

“Finally, girl. Where are you? Why didn’t you come to school? Nobody’s going to mess you today, I promise.”

“Young lady,” Mary responded. “This is Wendy’s mother. I’ve taken the phone away from her and told her she is not to have anything further to do with you. She’s taken a well-deserved day off, if you must know.”

“Wendy’s mother?”

“That’s correct.”

“Oh how wonderful! I’ve been so looking forward to talking with you. Wendy’s been keeping you a secret, she has, between you and me.”

“Well. I don’t know what you think we have to talk about. And please understand I mean it about my daughter keeping away from you. I don’t much care for the way you, um, texted her yesterday. She’s completely broken up about what happened, as well she should be. She didn’t need you to send her pictures and messages rubbing it in.”

“Rubbing it in. Oh, Wendy’s mom, you’ve got it all wrong. I think I—“

“Good-bye, Sara.”

With that Mary ended the phone call and closed the phone. Two seconds later, the phone alerted an incoming text. Exhaling with exasperation, Mary picked up the phone to look at the message.

“Please let’s talk, Mrs. Love. I’m so sorry to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m sure if we discuss this in person, you will at least be able to see it from my side.”

Persistent little thing, Mary had to admit. She did kind of feel a twinge of guilt. After all, Sara was Wendy’s age. Just another kid in need of adult guidance. Obviously Sara’s mother hadn’t been paying attention. Mary felt that twinge again. I guess I haven’t been paying attention either. Might as well hear her out.

“Perhaps,” she texted back.

“See you at lunch?”

Mary sighed.

“Okay.”

“I’ll bring lunch.”

Now, that was thoughtful, Mary mused.

At twelve Mary collected her purse, stood up, and walked outside to the waiting lobby of Adamatic Paper Supply. A small fountain burbled in the center of the lobby, and a row of curved benches lined the glass walls of the entrance. A wide set of stairs let to the second floor of the building. A row of elevator doors line the wall on beyond the stairs, and the lobby itself formed a wide curve that led on the opposite side to a suite of corporate offices hiding behind a locked door. Two security guards in blue uniforms stood in front of the front doors, ready to open for any guest who could provide a suitable reason for entry.

Looking out the window, Mary saw Sara approaching the guards. She caught her breath, surprised by Sara’s elegance, grace, and, well, beauty. Sara had the kind of face that attracted attention, feline, with high and wide cheek bones set above fleshy cheeks that tapered to a round point below her full lips, accentuated now with deep red lipstick. As she neared the guards, Mary marveled at the way she pulled off her makeup, contoured and highlighted to a startling execution, red lipstick with a blue shimmering eyeshadow, dark eyeliner, almost black, and dark mascara. The total effect should have been of one, well, sluttishness, the face of a tramp in heat. On the contrary, Mary found herself approving of the look.

And her clothes matched her well. A dark blazer over a burgundy pullover highlighting large but not oversized breasts. A dark, thigh-length skirt bloomed around the sweep of her hips, hips that swayed like the clapper of a bell. No wonder Wendy regarded her new friend so highly. Though several inches shorter than her daughter, Sara presented an imposing, almost daunting figure, as she strode towards the guards, holding the straps of purse against the swing of her hips with her left elbow while carrying two drinks in clear plastic tumblers. Mary assumed they were some kind of strawberry shake or smoothie by the pink color of the drinks. Mary understood immediately that Sara conducted herself with far more poise and grace than most woman twice her age. It didn’t seem natural, but Mary couldn’t deny the maturity of the girl, almost a woman, really. Nor the appeal.

Sara passed through the guards with barely a pause. Entering the door that both guards held open, she scanned the lobby in both directions, saw Mary standing to greet and smiled warmly. Mary Love wore a gray skirt that swooped to mid-thigh, encasing her wide, full hips, rounder and slightly heavier than Wendy’s, and showing off her fleshy legs, not quite plump. Mary’s full bosom pushed against a white blouse, the top two buttons unfastened, the top curves of her breasts. Her blond hair fell in waves just past her shoulders in a long blond shag that framed her face in golden cascades.

Mary boasted the same high cheeks and tall forehead, the same full lips, but her face sat heavier somehow, older, yes, but more solid too, even in youth, Mary must have been somewhat harder looking than Wendy, who showed a soft, expressive face to the world, gentle, understanding, although reserved, and a little cool. As Sara studied the face of the mother, she saw how her chin, wider and more pronounced than Wendy’s, protruded forward, where the daughter’s receded a little, forming a large gentle button.

Wendy’s mother shifted her legs on low-heeled open toed pink shoes.

Almost rushing to greet Wendy’s mother, Sara set down the two drinks on the bench and held out both hands, taking Mary’s in her own and leaned forward, standing on her toes, to brush her cheek against Mary’s, quickly kissing her in a gesture that caught the older woman completely off guard. Wendy’s mother breathed in the air of Sara’s perfume. She couldn’t identify it. Probably something the young people wore. It smelled nice, a kind of spicy, cinnamon aroma.

“Oh, gosh, Mrs. Love,” Sara effused. “I can’t tell you how happy you made me. You just wouldn’t believe how glad I am to be able to talk with you. Just girl to girl. You know?”

Mary sat down on the bench, brushing the seat of her skirt as she sat and brushing the tops of her thighs. She turned to face Sara, also in the motion of sitting, pointing her knees at the mature teenager. Sara sat down so close, that when she turned to face Mary their knees touched, but Sara didn’t move away. Mary hesitated, uncomfortable with the sudden contact, but she kept her left knee in place, brushing against Sara’s knee, unwilling to concede or yield to Sara. She folded her hands in her lap.

“Sara,” Mary started to say.

“Please, Mrs. Love, let me apologize first. I know what you must think about me after having seen that picture. And reading that message.”

“It was terrible, Sara. I couldn’t believe it!”

“I’m so sorry. I know. But it wasn’t meant that way.”

“Not meant that way! You called her a slut and a whore. And worse!”

Sara sighed and, turning, reached behind her for one of the drinks. Both Sara’s knees touched Mary’s as she twisted around. Then Sara twisted back to face Mary, holding one of the pink tumblers in front of her with a playful smile spread across her charming face.

“Here, take this. It’s simply delicious. Just delicious. They go great with these.” Sara reached into her purse and pulled out a couple of elongated rectangle packages wrapped in pink cellophane. She carefully opened one of them with long, red polished nails and held it out to Mary.

“I got this from the same place. Not too far from here, one of those food trucks. They specialize in smoothies, but I’ve already had these, and they’re wonderful. They really fill you up, too. Just big wafers, really. But wow.”

Mary looked at the pink fluffy wafer doubtfully, but her belly rumbled. Besides, it would be impolite not to accept Sara’s kind gesture. She tried the smoothie with a short sip on the straw. Tasting it, she looked up at Sara and grinned.

“It’s really good, isn’t it. Not too sweet and not too tart.”

After a couple tiny, hesitant sips more Mary greedily slurped down the remaining smoothie.

“Like daughter, like mother,” Sara laughed happily.

“What’s that?” asked Mary, pulling her mouth away from the striped, pink straw.

“Oh, Wendy just loves these smoothies. I don’t think she can get enough of them. You should eat the wafer now. It tastes so much better with the smoothie.”

Mary bit off a fairly large chunk of the wafer sticking from its pink, open wrapper. This time she didn’t hesitate.

“Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed. “Where on earth did you get this? I’ve never tasted anything so, so.”

“Heavenly.”

Sara peered at Mary thoughtfully, almost critically. Pursing her lips, she asked Wendy’s mother a question.

“Do you mind if I try something, Mrs. Love? I mean, if I could make a suggestion? I think you would look so much better with lipstick. I have just the color for you. Would you mind? If I put some on you? Please?”

To tell the truth, the idea startled Mary, even repelled her to some extent. To allow Sara, an adolescent, mature yes but still a teenager, to apply lipstick to her nude lips, in the lobby of her workplace no less, would be to grant her primacy in their relationship, whatever that turned out to be, as short-lived as she expected it to last. She would lose the upper hand attained by age and parental role. Perhaps irrevocably.

Oh, but it was such a small request, and she looked so adorable sitting there, holding out a black and gold tube of lipstick, just like a little girl wanting to play dress-up with her mother! I mean, what harm could it do, just this once?

“After all,” Sara continued in a low voice, almost seductively, Mary thought, “we should always try to look our best, even at home. And wearing makeup helps us look beautiful and alluring. You never know who’s checking you out.”

And she did look good, Sara did. Stunning, in all honesty. And the way she smelled. God it was lovely. Clean, simple, spicy. Cinnamon.

Mary nodded in agreement, eagerly and wordlessly.

“Even at home,” Sara said, finishing her thought. “Here, lean forward. I’ll put it on for you.”

Neither Sara nor Mary paid the slightest attention to a few passers-by who cast a curious glance at the heavily made-up teenager applying a thick coat of glossy pink lipstick to the older woman’s face. When she finished, Sara nudged Mary back gently to review her handiwork. She nodded once in approval and winked.

“So much better. You look hot, in fact.”

God, Mary loved the provocative way Sara talked, delighting in sharing the harmless flirtation, Wendy’s mother pouted her lips in an exaggerated kiss, provoking squeals of delight from Wendy’s friend. Sara clapped her hands and giggled.

Mary finished the rest of her little meal quietly, careful not to mess her new lipstick. The spice in the lipstick burned a little, and a warmth spread through Mary’s limbs. After she took and swallowed the last bite, Sara cleared her throat.

“Mrs. Love. Wendy’s mom. About what I texted Wendy. I know it sounds bad, but think about it from Wendy’s perspective.”

“I am!”

“Are you, Mrs. Love? Are you really?”

Mary hesitated, started to defend herself, then she paused. Long enough for Sara to finish her thought.

“She’d spent the entire day being called that by the rest of the school. They tried to shame her, Mrs. Love. Shame your daughter. Calling her all kinds of horrible names. Sperm face. Cock whore. Cum junkie. Just abusive, really. So I sent her that picture, using the same words they used, but this time with pride. Defiance. I wanted her to embrace it. I wanted her to feel sexy, happy, proud. Not miserable and ashamed. I mean, you want her to be proud and happy, don’t you? You want her to feel good about being sexy don’t you? You don’t want her to feel ashamed of being a woman, do you?”

No. By no means. Never.

Sara leaned forward conspiratorially and took Mary’s hands into her own.

“Between you and me, I think she looked good. Don’t you?”

Mary shook her head.

“No. No, I don’t think she looked good. I think she looked—“

“Happy?”

Mary oscillated among possible responses. Finally she nodded in agreement.

“Hm. Yes. Happy. Happier than I’ve seen her in a long, long time,” Mary said, astonished to be admitting something so personal to the teenage girl facing her, pressing her knee against hers. “But that’s no reason to.”

“But happy is good, isn’t it,” Sara argued. “I mean it’s better to be happy than miserable isn’t it? And Wendy hasn’t been happy for a long time, she’s been miserable for a long, long time, just like you said just now.”

Mary wasn’t sure she put it quite like that, but she found herself struggling to disagree.

“Well, I wouldn’t say miserable.”

“But she hasn’t been happy, and now she is. Or she was when that picture was taken. She looked happy then, and that’s good, isn’t it? Even though, between you and me, her face was just slathered with Brad’s.”

Mary coughed.

“She just looked so happy. So happy. And that’s good, isn’t it? To be happy?”

“Well, I mean. Yes, of course it is.”

“She looked good. Because it made her happy.”

Mary hesitated again, confused by the meaning or intent of Sara’s words, her line of reasoning. But she looked so cute and adorable sitting there, in front of her, Mary Love, Wendy’s mother, knees touching, holding onto her hands still clasped in Mary’s lap. How long had then been holding hands, Mary wondered. Had Sara even let go of them? Looked so earnest and sincere, her auburn hair pulled back in a long braid, her hazel eyes focused on hers with an almost pleading look, wearing an expression that begged for understanding. And Mary so much wanted to understand her, to understand the darling little creature facing her, knees touching hers, holding each other’s hands. The little darling’s soft, warm hands stroked and caressed hers ever so lightly with the tips of her thumbs and fingers, just stroking in an almost petting, soothing way.

A warmth rising to heat flowed through Mary, a glowing feeling diffusing from her lap to her bosom, an inexplicable happiness to be communicating with someone who so much understood her, who got her. A sudden acknowledgment passed through Mary’s mind. She’s only a teenager, but she’s so wise. So compassionate, perceptive, and sympathetic.

“And what made her happy was, well, all that jizz on her face.”

Mary gasped but did not reject the declaration.

“Just slathered all over her face. It made her happy. She looked so good like that, didn’t she?

“Um, yes. I guess.”

“Well, there’s no doubt in my mind, Wendy’s mother. She looked good. So good.”

“She did look good,” nodded Mary, wanting so much to agree with Sara, to win her approval. At the very least not to appear to be rigid, stupid, or narrow-minded.

“With all that come on her face.”

“Yes,” Mary nodded in a whisper.

“Good because she looked so sexy,” Sara continued, stroking Mary’s finger softly with her own.

“Oh, god, Sara, what are you saying?”

“Your daughter, Wendy’s mom. Didn’t she look so sexy covered in Brad’s jizz? I mean, if it were someone else’s daughter, not yours of course. If you saw a picture of Maddy like that, for example, Wendy’s little friend with come streaking down her lips and chin, wouldn’t that be so sexy for you?”

Mary remained motionless, quiet, perfectly still. A tension held her frame taut, tight like a stretch rubber band, ready to break, snap, or contract.

“I mean, if Wendy, if your own daughter looked so good with Brad’s hot come on her, just think how much sexier Maddy would look. You wouldn’t have to feel bad, then, would you? You could want it as much as you could stand without feeling any guilt whatsoever, because she would look so sexy, wouldn’t she, Mary? Her face glazed like a donut, hair dripping with come. God, you’d give almost anything to have a photo of Maddy like that, wouldn’t you? So sexy. So hot.”

Mary found herself nodding, her lips, her mind numb with confusion and desire. The image of sexy little Maddy, her face glazed and dripping with hot come, strands of semen trickling from the bangs of her page boy hair, rose suddenly in Mary’s steaming mind.

“Oh god yes. So hot,” Mary murmured in agreement.

A strange lust seemed to overtake her, an animal heat almost, and when she looked down, she noticed her hips squirming on the bench, her hands holding Sara’s tightly against her thighs, close to her lap. Horrified and aghast, she released Sara’s hands with a jerk and scooted backward, breaking the contact with Sara’s knees that had been maintained throughout the conversation.

“What? No, I mean. What? What are you saying, Sara?”

“Well, you don’t have that picture of Maddy. Yet. But you do have Wendy’s.”

Sara brushed the cap of the mother’s knees, caressing it with light, solacing touches.

“I. I. I don’t know what you mean, Sara,” Mary whispered in a dry voice, twitching her knee away from Sara’s touch.

“Not yet,” Sara said soothingly. “Not yet, of course. But you will.”

Then the girl leaned forward, kissing Mary directly on the cheek near her pink mouth, pressing her soft, red lips against the older woman’s face, so close to Mary shining pink lips. Then she pulled back, flashed a sweet smile at Mary and stood up.

“Oh gosh, Mary, Mrs. Love. I’ve just taken up so much of your time already. I’m so glad you’ve accepted my apology. I’m so glad you want me to be friends with your daughter. Wendy is just so. So. Wonderful. I’m so glad you want us to be together. As close friends should be.”

53. Betty Blake and the Living Pink

The meteorite, the UFO, the craft, whatever name one called it, tumbled after striking the ground, then came to a standstill near the edge of the far cliff, losing whatever power drove it. The hard landing caused a slight, almost unnoticeable fissure to spread near the middle of the round, spherical object. Covered in a hard, black, rough surface, the object looked almost like a very large, dark golf ball but with far more irregular indentures in the surface. The object, the craft, the meteorite, vibrated after landing, emitting a low hum just shy of being inaudible. The vibration grew more pronounced until the object trembled and shuddered, moving to the point of almost rolling. Then it did roll. Slowly, almost imperceptibly it moved towards the edge of the cliff, trembling, vibrating with humming that increased to a loud volume now.

Slowly it began to levitate, rising one meter, two meters, three meters off the ground. It rose to a height of around five meters. Suddenly the hum rose in pitch to a sharp shriek or whistle, almost the sound of a ready tea kettle. It shook and trembled in the air, then plummeted, missing the edge of the cliff and shooting straight down to the canyon below, perhaps fifty, seventy-five feet below. It cracked against the rock side of the canyon and rolled obliquely downstream, following the natural slope of the canyon floor. It stopped rolling after striking a small boulder, cracking the spherical object at the fissure, by now a very large and open crack, and flinging something soft-looking, like wet flesh, a shapeless globule, from its interior. The globule landed in the water at the bank of the river. It oozed deeper into the water until fully submerged, where it drifted downstream with the flow of the stream.

The sphere split into two almost equal hollow halves, lined with a strange pink residue. It glowed, radiating a soft pink illumination in the immediate area of the craft. The light of the full moon, now high in the sky, showed the wreckage of Nero Craft’s Ford coupe resting against the far side of the boulder. The passenger door hung open, and the body of Betty Blake, bloody and torn, hung partially out, her head and torso lay bleeding on the ground, her legs and feet remaining in the interior of the automobile. Far behind the wreckage, a hole gaped in the canyon side, the opening of a grotto in the canyon.

The humming of the round craft stopped when the object cracked against the small boulder. Besides the quiet burble of the canyon stream, a silence fell over the area. Then a low groan coming from Betty Blake broke the silence. Her body quivered, and she tumbled completely from the automobile, sliding and skidding down the slope of the canyon until brushing against one half of the split craft, her bleeding head landing in a small pool of the thick, goo of the pink substance.

The goo clung to bloody clumps of Betty’s hair and seeped over the young woman neck and face until encasing Betty’s whole head in thin membrane of the pink substance. Slowly the pink membrane spread. More of the pink substance spilled over the edge of the broken craft and joined the membrane gradually swallowing the body in a pink radiant layer. The fabric, the clothes, on the body dissolved on contact with the pink substance, leaving Betty completely nude, covered only in that pink sheen. Time passed.

Suddenly Betty’s prone body shuddered, and the woman gasped. She sat up in single movement. The she stood, an hourglass feminine form, the form of a young woman, utterly nude, standing in the pink glow of the broken craft and the light of the moon. Clutching at the side of the craft, she leaned forward, hooked one leg over the edge and fell into the hollow of the hemisphere. Any pink residue remaining on the ground slowly moved toward the ship, sliding across the ground in droplets and small pools, creeping upward on the surface of the strange craft. Time passed.

The other half the craft began to vibrate and hum. The pink glow intensified. Suddenly, with a swift and loud swoosh, that half of the craft rose from the ground and fell with a loud, sharp clack, opening to opening, against the other half the object, where the body of Betty Blake lay concealed. Pink substance oozed from the interior to seal the crack between the two halves, like an epoxy glue. A tiny amount of the pink substance, less than a handful, fell on the ground. Then the craft, now round again and whole, rolled upward against the slope of the canyon, humming towards the opening of the grotto or fissure in the canyon side. It disappeared inside the fissure. Deep inside the fissure something shook and convulsed, and the grotto collapsed on itself, sealing the opening, shutting it behind a wall of tumbled and fallen rock.

54. Nero Craft on the ledge

Nero Craft staggered towards consciousness, every part of his body ached, especially his right shoulder. He tried to prop himself up, but his right arm gave way, and he collapsed back to the ground. Lying on his back, staring at the night sky, he saw the moon on its western decline and realized he’d been unconscious for quite some time. Hours, in fact. He tried to raise his hand to look at his watch and winced as a sharp, piercing pain burned through him. Struggling over on his left, he managed to raise himself slowly and inspected his right arm. Limp, but with no visible sign of breakage, he suspected a dislocated shoulder.

He unfastened the middle buttons of his shirt with his left hand, and then taking the same hand propped his limp arm into the opening, glancing at his watch as he did so. The dial remained concealed in the pale moonlight. Then he zipped his jacket as far up as he could to tighten the makeshift sling. It hurt like hell, but his arm hung fairly tight against his body, limiting movement. Standing on the ledge he peered down below him and stared at his wrecked Ford, hideously damaged in the moonlight. Unsurprisingly, he saw no sign of Betty. Looking at the slope to the left of the ledge, he saw a kind of foot path, descending more smoothly and gently along the side of the cliff. Hikers no doubt liked to come here. Or fishers, hunters, and other great outdoor-loving fools. Well. Could he make it?

He felt he had no choice. Betty, if she still lived, needed his help. He could also go up. The same path descending ascended in the same fashion, gradually on a slow incline along the cliff’s side. Though no hero, it seemed somehow cowardly to go up. He needed to at least see how Betty faired. He found a thick, twisted, and knobby branch fallen from one of the scrub oaks, large enough to serve as a stave to support his climb down the canyon. Taking a deep breath and steeling his nerves, he clambered slowly over the side of the ledge, dangled his feet, and shoved himself off the outcrop the few feet to the path below. Pain throbbed through his shoulder as the landing jolted his body. He stuck his stick forward and began hiking down, glad for the coolness of the weather which reduced the likelihood of rattlesnake.

Going down the slope, even that gentle descent, caused immense pain to Nero, awkwardly shuffling forward on his makeshift stave, trying hard not to stumble, not to fall. He limped downward, and with every step, his shoulder jolted, bumped, shooting a searing pain through the rest of his body. Clumps of scrub brush, stumpy clusters of mesquite, coyote and seep willow, sheaves of dried gramma lined the canyon side, casting faint, wavering shadows, dark figures in the pale gloom of moonlight. Here and there small boulders lay directly in his path, boulders which he had to careful navigate around. And always to his right lay the body of his broken Ford. The path he walked would take him some distance downstream from the car, so he’d have to turn right once he reached the end of the descent, near the edge of the canyon stream, a small tributary of Rosaroja River.

Finally he reached the bottom and limped towards his vehicle.

The battered car was empty, and searching the area with a sweep of his eyes in the light of the full moon, he saw no sign of Betty Blake. He stumbled around his car, hurtled and leaning against a large boulder, and saw only broken glass and the metallic pieces of the Ford which had broken off in the fall from the top of the canyon. He found nothing at beyond the passenger door.

“Betty!” He called out, but heard only a gust of wind blowing through the canyon. “Betty, baby, where are you?”

He took a few steps toward the shallow brook and noticed a weird pink reflection of the moon near his foot. He stopped to look down. A small puddle of pink goo, a weird pink oil, had formed a few feet, not more than two or three yards from the automobile. Holding on to his thick stick, Nero bent forward to inspect the puddle. Then he stood up and touched the puddle with the end of his stick. Immediately the whole puddle seemed to stretch, an elongation which grasped and covered the end of his stick like a rubber ferrule. Lifting the stick to get a better look, Nero Craft fell backward as the pink goo stretched in an instant from the end of his stick to his mouth, squeezing forcefully between his lips like a sickening tongue. The pink goo kept extending, transferring its mass from the tip of the makeshift stave to the terrified man’s mouth until all of the pink substance had entered Nero.

By this time Nero flailed helplessly on the ground as a shooting, burning, wrenching pain overcame him. The pink substance slid irresistibly down Nero’s throat, choking him, oozing down his esophagus until reaching his stomach. Doubling forward in pain, Nero cried out once, flung himself backward, stiff and straight as a board, and lost consciousness. And even though he lay as one asleep in a deep canyon, surrounded by the wild, in the midst of predator and stinging beast, nothing disturbed him. And if Nero Craft slept, he did so without dreaming, his soul or his mind wandering alone in the endless halls beyond time and outside of space.

55. Wendy in her bedroom, reading

Wendy yawned and put her book down on her bed, open and spine up to the horror of bibliophiles the world over. Though deeply engrossed in the reading, a sudden restlessness washed over Wendy. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She scratched her knee and along her inner thigh, then rubbed the itch with her palm, moving her hand slowly back and forth from her knee to her inner thigh, gradually going farther inward until she was touching the hem of her gym shorts. She closed her eyes at the warmth growing in her groin.

Stop it, Wendy. Get a hold of yourself.

She jerked her hand away from her thighs and stood up quickly, idly looking around her room. The blue and white cover of Jillin’, sitting on the small desk next to her vanity dresser, popped into her line of sight. The girl on the cover, an illustration of a teenager with dark hair wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, belt unfastened, one hand hidden behind a partially unbuttoned fly, winked at the reader with a knowing impishness. Wendy tossed her head and picked up the book, thoughtfully taking it back to her bed, curling her legs beneath her as she read. Every once in a while she licked her lips slowly, or pressed her lips together to moisten them. They had begun to feel dry, parched. And somehow bare.

56. Mary after lunch

Mary twitched and shifted in her chair, rolling it back and forth on its casters, restlessly glancing at the spreadsheets and documents on her monitor. Sara had left her almost reeling in confusion and longing after kissing her on the cheek, walking casually away with a pronounced sway of her ass, Mary’s eyes following the sultry movement of Sara’s strong thighs under her dark skirt. The end of Sara’s braided tail swung like a clock’s pendulum above the swell of her tush. Mary almost giggled at using that word. I bet it’s adorable, she thought, her tush. But Sara did not look back, and finally Mary Love had turned away, shocked to find herself so openly gawking at the young girl who had left her visibly shaken and in need.

Her lips felt full and warm, and the heat of Sara’s lips on her cheek almost burned as she walked into the elevator, fighting a strong urge to rub it out. No, she thought. Let me keep it there. It feel kind of. Nice. As the doors to the elevator started to close, an arm reached, quite foolishly. The doors rattled open, and Janet Brooks, who worked in the same department as Mary, entered the elevator cabin. She saw the red lips on Mary’s cheek and smiled jovially.

“Well, Mary. I didn’t think you swung that way.”

“What?” asked Mary.

“Your face, girl, you’ve got red lipstick right by your mouth. Someone kissed you, and it doesn’t look to have been a man. That’s a lovely pink, by the way. It really suits you.”

“Oh that,” Mary replied, laughing, hurriedly wiping at her cheek. “My daughter had to see me at lunch. She’s been really into lipstick lately.”

Janet gave Mary a doubtful look and shrugged.

“Kids, eh?” Janet said.

Now she sat behind her monitor, trying to make sense of the numbers, headings, inventories, assets, and shipping costs. The data in the cells kept swirling around the screen, while documents in email attachments declared open rebellion on both sense and sensibility. The center between her thighs burned into her raging mind, calling for urgent attention, and every time she closed her eyes she beheld the image of Maddy’s face, covered in semen like her daughter’s, tantalizingly vivid. Instead of deflating Mary’s swelling need, it enflamed it, sending her into a desperate furor, as two sides waged war, one to gain control of herself and her rising heat, the other to release, and to release with thoughtless abandon. The image of Maddy’s glazed face dripping with hot come tortured her with desire, lust, the urgent need to come and come hard.

“This is crazy,” she half muttered to herself. “I don’t even like.”

But who would do it, she thought, who would blow a wad like that on her daughter’s friend’s face, Wendy’s friend’s face, Wendy’s little friend Maddy? A man would do it. What man? Steve? Would Steve blow a load across Maddy’s innocent face if Mary asked him to? God, that would be so hot. But how could she get Maddy to do it? How could she get Maddy in bed with her and Steve?

Mary flinched, suddenly aghast at the direction her thoughts, her fantasy had taken. My god, Mary. Get a hold of yourself. She literally shook her head to clear her thoughts, concentrated on the spreadsheet in front of her, trying to forget the steaming moisture in her cunt gathering like the winds of a tropical storm. She spread her thighs on her chair, stretching the hem of her skirt. Maddy’s face lunged across the screen of her monitor, dripping with Steve’s come. Mary’s hips thrust against the seat of her chair, gyrating in a back and forth, side to side motion. The wheels on her chair squeaked, resounding in her cubicle, awakening her from her sexual torridity. Her chest heaved. She quickly stood up, grabbed the Hipkick, and fled to the unisex restroom, single occupancy, and turned the exhaust fan on.

She shoved her skirt down, stepped out of it, hesitated, then pulled her panties all the way down and off. She stood in front of the mirror, dressed only in her blouse. She reached under the hem of her shirt and felt her wet, scalding and wet, pussy. Her hips quivered and buckled as she stroked the valley between her fleshy lips. She moved her hand up and across the trimmed triangle of her blond bush, then back down in a slow and agonizing accumulation of hot desire.

She closed her eyes and saw Maddy’s face, intoxicated with the lust of hot come shooting across her brow, on her rosy cheeks, and into her open, longing mouth. Mary stumbled to the toilet, sat down and fumbled with her phone.

“You don’t have a picture of Maddy,” she heard a voice say. “So Wendy will have to do.”

Oh god oh god oh god, Mary. Don’t do this.

She flipped open the phone and searched for the photo of Wendy, stroking her flowing snatch as she opened the file to see Wendy’s smiling, come-drenched face. Mary furiously rubbed her groin. Saliva dripped from her open mouth as she peered at Wendy’s face, focused intently on the semen covering her daughter’s smile, dripping along her lips.

There’s another photo, Mary. Another of her hot, open cunt filled with that boy’s come.

Oh god, no. You’re her mother. Don’t look.

She found the other photo and opened it, plying her pussy with one, with two, with three fingers as she stared in a sexual frenzy at her daughter’s naked pussy, her blond pubic hair matted with come, spread wide as Wendy held her legs up and apart by the knees. God, look at that pussy, she thought. Look at the come just seep from her, leaking down her ass like that. Mary saw the nipples of Wendy’s breast exposed through the sheer, open pink blouse, sticking long and hard from the curves of her beautiful globes. Mary gaze trailed down Wendy’s abdomen, across her belly button, and returned to the boiling heat of her daughter’s exposed pussy. Her daughter’s cunt. Mary’s rock hard clit trembled, shuddered and pulsed as she rubbed it with the back of her thumb, her fingers deep in her hot, leaking hole. Then the orgasm came, shaking her ass in a steady tattoo of lust against the white seat of the toilet.

Oh god oh god oh god. I’m coming. I’m coming to my daughter’s pussy.

Mary groaned. Shoving her mouth against her shoulder, she stifled a scream as her body shook with wave after wave of orgasm. Wendy. Oh Wendy. I’m so sorry.

Mary Love gradually recovered, raising her head from her shoulder. She rubbed the pink marks left in the shoulder of her white blouse by the lipstick Sara had put on her. She slowly rose, walked to her rumpled skirt and underwear, and carefully pulled both up her legs. She stared at herself in the mirror. With a handful of tissues she pulled from a box sitting on next to the faucet she wiped the tears pooling in the corners of her blue eyes.

What kind of monster am I, she thought. She dabbed at the corner of her mouth, ready to wipe off the pink lipstick with the wad of tissue she held in her hand. Her hand lingered at the corner before falling to her side, the tissue unused.

My god. What have I done?

57. Wendy after masturbation

Wendy pulled her legs to her and sat up. With the frenzy over, she wondered at her behavior, staring at the Vendler book. She thought she meant to put all this stuff behind her. She had meant to, right? I mean, she had to get it together. Look at her, skipping school, cutting classes for the first time in her life. All because. All because that picture. All because of what that Sara started. God. Life was so much before. Before Sara came into her life. I mean, she had a real shot at, well, something. Making something of herself. Getting a scholarship. Getting out of town, maybe even going to the coast. East or West, it didn’t matter.

Good at French, she could become an interpreter. A journalist, a correspondent. Something. She wasn’t sure what, but I mean. C’mon. She couldn’t skip class to masturbate all day long. She couldn’t get a scholarship with pictures of her face oozing with Brad’s come floating around school. God. Did she really have to smile like that?

With more intent and less haste, she purposefully placed the Vendler book and the lipstick in the garbage bag, walked downstairs to the garage, once more lifted the lid to the garbage can, and tossed the bag in. I just don’t need this crap, she thought. I really don’t. I don’t even really know Sara. And the other day I was ready to marry her practically. Spend the rest of my life with her. Just because. Oh god. How did that happen?

Well. No more. Let other people experiment. Let other girls try things out. I mean, I already did, didn’t I? I mean, I did my part, right? I can just put it all away now, wrap it up nice and neat as something done once and never again, and just get on with this. My life. Whatever it turns out to be. Do I not even have an idea? I mean, I can be anybody, right?

Wendy found herself back in her room, The Secret History of Edge City on turned upside down, its label and cover greeting her renewed interest in escaping her own thoughts. Picking up the book, she followed her reading where she had stopped.

58. Nero Craft gets rescued

“Rescue workers found Mr. Craft two days later, alerted by a couple of kids who had been looking for arrowheads and other indigenous artifacts in the canyon. At first the workers feared Nero had died from unseen injuries, for despite all efforts, the young man remained unconscious. However, his pulse came faint but unmistakable. Later, in the hospital, doctors and specialists conferred in outside his private room, confused and astonished at the man’s deep coma. In the meantime, police, rescuers, and volunteers searched the canyon for the whereabouts of Miss Betty Blake, using bloodhounds to try to capture even the faintest scent of her track, but hounds just yapped and sniffed the area around the wrecked Ford coupe. Authorities waited restlessly, eagerly, and suspiciously for the awakening of Nero Craft from his coma.”

When Nero Craft opened his eyes from darkness of his coma into the bright light of the hospital room, he had only one thing on his mind: where had all the pink gone? The strange pink illumination of his, of his, of his, he stretched to find the word, had he been dreaming, had he been, what, wandering bodiless in a gulf, a void, an abyss, a hollow hall, an endlessly wide corridor, had he been hallucinating, had he been, what, if not dreaming, dreaming of a gulf, a void, an abyss, a hollow hall, and endlessly wide corridor of glimmering, pulsating pink, a pulsing, palpitating pink accompanied by a low continual hum, a humming, a drone, a buzz. A buzzing as of many bees endlessly droning in a colossal hive, a hive beyond measurement. And the pain! Oh god, the pain.

Oh, but how could it be pain? So unbearable, so intolerable, so needed. It rose against him, engulfed him, swallowed him into its endless depths and left him quaking, shivering, in need of more. But it hurt, yes? That pain? Was it pain? His mind recoiled at the memory. If not pain, what? Pleasure? Oh god, yes, that’s what it was. An intolerable euphoria, psychic and physical, touching his mind more than his flesh, but encompassing both, his flesh altered. His flesh changed. His flesh molded and refashioned by the articulation of something he could not understand, make understood, or even glimpse beyond the shadows at the furthest reaches of his comprehension, dancing along the edge of some great mystery wrapping around him like multiple, multiple onionskins. And he the center and not the center. Then his mind touched it, and he went out. Into a world illuminated by pink.

The pink faded in the word of white light. Of white incandescence burning above him. Then a female figure leaned over him, and he recoiled again, shrinking backward, suddenly very, very afraid. But the woman smiled, and said in a soft, gentle voice, “It’s okay now. You’re awake. That’s good. Very good.”

Then the woman touched his forehead.

“The doctors will want to see you soon.”

Time passed, the questions continued without pause seemingly. What happened? Where was Betty? What happened to the meteorite? Did it land? Did you see it land? What did you see? Was it a meteorite or something else? What do we mean by something else? Well, now, it’s us asking questions isn’t it? Something else means exactly what you think it means. Something else. Something not a meteorite. Oh, it was a meteorite? Did you see it land? What happened to your car? What happened to the young lady? Where is Betty Blake? What did you do to Miss Blake? What kind of meteorite did you say it was again? Where did you say it landed? What do you mean you think it was something else? Oh, you didn’t say that, did you? We did. We said that. And we mean it too. Because it was something else, wasn’t it? No? You think it was a meteorite? Did you see where it landed? Did it behave oddly?

And on, and on, and on, the questions came at him, one right after another, driving him to distraction, but he stammered the same answers over and over again, knowing somehow not to say anything beyond he had an accident, no he didn’t see it land. No, he didn’t know what happened to Betty. No. No. No. Finally the questions stopped, and the inquisitors, apparently satisfied, withdrew, giving each other knowing looks accompanied by nods, closed their little black notebooks and left the hospital room marching in step in their black suits and black trilbies.

Nero fell back asleep. A normal sleep with normal dreams. Except in this dream he looked in the mirror in the hospital room and saw Betty Blake staring at him from the other side, entirely pink. Then she moved away from the mirror, showing her whole body, nude, and noticeably pregnant.

The sheriff’s visit went much the same way as his questioning by the men in black hats. But the sheriff acted concerned about Nero’s conditioned, expressed sympathy for his accident, and genuinely seemed to want to believe that Nero knew nothing of Betty’s disappearance. After all, Nero had been in a coma for more than a week, had been in a coma when discovered, and no sign of Betty had been detected since then. If Nero had had something to do with Betty’s vanishing, then it would have had to have been in the moments directly after the car’s plunge into the canyon. And nothing, absolutely nothing, tied Nero to her absence. Except his own admission that she had been in the car when it fell.

“The car hung over the ledge. Betty just looked at me. I told her to jump. She just froze. I opened my door and leapt out, hoping she’d follow. But I didn’t see her jump. I didn’t see anything after I hit the rock ledge. Afterwards, I limped down. But I didn’t see anything. She was already gone. I must have been out for about two hours. Maybe longer. The moon was higher. I couldn’t read my watch.”

The story never changed, never deviated. Nero admitted he left Betty in the car. He admitted that she was in the car when it fell. He admitted to jumping out and saving himself. Not something any man with self-respect would admit, but he did. Still, Sheriff Boykin felt more than suspected, and suspected more than thought, that the young man, this Nero fellow, was hiding something. Leaving something out of the story. Well, he’d just have to keep an eye out for him. Just have to keep watch on his comings and goings. In the meantime, there was that girl to look for. And the trail was going cold. Had already gotten cold, in fact. The trail was frozen. But her folks were hot. Steaming mad at him, at the police, at Nero. They wanted answers, and they wanted those answers yesterday.

But they weren’t going to get any. Not today. Not tomorrow. Probably not ever. Sheriff Boykin did not relish having to have that conversation.

But he said his goodbyes to Nero, and Nero went back to sleep. Later that day, his uncle came to get him. Nero’s own folks were dead. Polio, some five years ago. Took the mother anyway. Alcohol and a .45 took the father about a year later. Nero had already left the house by that time. Found a job at a mechanic’s shop. Later, his uncle offered to let him stay in a shack behind his house.

“It ain’t much, but it’s cheap. And I kind of like the idea of you sticking near. Don’t know why. Don’t like the hand my brother dealt you, I reckon. Anyway, your decision. Offer’s open for as long as you need it to be.”

Just a little room and kitchen. A place to bathe. Maybe somewhere to take a girl who didn’t mind the emptiness of it. Uncle never said anything about that. Never much said anything about anything. Now, the next day, as Nero lay on his cot, staring at the ceiling, and trying to calm the pink storm in his head, a voice seemed to call out to him. Faintly, softly, as from far away, or from somewhere buried deep beneath the surface of the earth. Or the surface of reality.

“Nero.”

Nero didn’t answer.

“Nero.”

Nero still didn’t answer.

“Nero.”

Finally Nero answered.

“Here am I.”

“Come find me. I need you. Please. Come find me.”

Nero squinted his eyes, furling his brows in the dim light of the cabin. Although the sun soared high in the afternoon sky, the cabin remained dark. One small window in the front, covered by the awning of a porch that extended the width of the cabin, allowed only enough light to keep the shack in a perpetual gloom.

“Where are you?”

“Nero.”

“I’m here.”

“Come find me.”

Nero sat up. He reached under his cot for his boots, yanked them on, tied them and walked across the gravel and dirt of the so-called back yard to his uncle’s house, his boots crunching on the small pebbles, and alerting the mongrel bitch on its chain. The mongrel growled.

“Hush, dog.”

The mongrel growled in a diminished complaint. Nero walked over and scratched it below its ears.

“Tomorrow, girl. Busy tonight.”

The mongrel whined and dropped her head.

Uncle sat in front of the television, in a rambling armchair, a glass of iced tea in his hand, an unfiltered Pall Mall in his mouth.

“Yeah, boy?”

“Keys to your truck?”

Uncle nodded to the row of small hooks attached to a short piece of two by four nailed to the wall be the door.

“You need me to come with?”

“You got the time?”

Uncle nodded.

“I got the time.”

Nero shook his head.

“It’s just that. I don’t know where I’m going.”

“I’ve been not knowing that for thirteen years, kid.”

Uncle pulled on his blue jean jacket, a favorite of his. “C’mon. We can both not know together. You drive.”

Nero didn’t say anything about the voice in his head. The woman’s voice, whom he recognized now as Betty’s voice, calling to him from somewhere outside of experience.

59. Mary weeps

Mary sat in her cubicle, silently weeping.

She closed all the files on her computer, typed a short email to her supervisor saying she felt sick, a true statement, and needed to go home. A lie. She had no intention of going home. How could she possibly go home and face Wendy after what she had done? Was there even a word for that kind of betrayal, not to mention depravity? How did that even happen? She had never, never, felt that kind of, that kind of sexual heat before. That kind of driving need. A need to come, come hard, and in the most, well, there wasn’t a word for it. The most feminine way possible. As a woman in need, a woman in heat for her own self. It had passed. For the moment, at any rate.

She could still feel it. Lurking on the edges of her sanity, of her decorum, of her safe and sober consciousness. A laughing, giddy, deliriously hot presence who only wanted to come. And come. And come. She had to stop thinking this way or she’d do it again. Maybe she wouldn’t even go to the restroom this time. Just spread her thighs open right there, facing the opening of her cubicle, letting any passerby see her fingering her wet hole as she panted in heat, tongue hanging dog-like from her mouth, one hand rubbing her tits under her blouse. My god. How hot would that be.

Mary snatched her purse and fled her cubicle, her department, her floor, and her building, practically running to get to her car. She didn’t drive far before the feelings returned. She tried to maintain attention on the road, on the traffic signals, on other cars passing her, or stopping in front of her, but her ass squirmed in the driver seat and she parted her thighs as she tilted her groin at the car seat, humping her pelvis into the fabric in short bursts. She leaned against the steering wheel and groaned.

Oh my god, what the hell is wrong with me?

The thought of Maddy returned to her mind, god, that would be so hot. But how could she do it? How could she get Maddy over? She was sure she could talk Steve into it, letting Maddy give the man head, letting them both give Steve head, each one, Maddy and Mary, taking turns swallowing Steve’s cock. But how could she pull it off? How in the hell could Mary talk Maddy into it? She barely knew the girl for god’s sake. The realization hammered her with brutal force. It’s fucking illegal, Mary. You’re talking about putting Steve in jail if anyone finds out. It’s just a fantasy, Mary. You can’t take it seriously. Just go with the flow, just let the idea come. Let it come, like you want to come. So badly, don’t you, Mary? You just want to come right now, don’t you?

She imagined Maddy kneeling at the side of Mary’s bed. Mary gripped the steering wheel, knuckles whitening as an image of Steve standing over a kneeling the teenage girl, shooting load after load of creamy, white come over her daughter’s friend’s beaming face. Mary saw herself slipping off the bed to slide over to Maddy, holding her close as she kissed and licked the come off the pretty girl’s face. Mary shuddered at the image, and pressed her thighs tightly together.

She forced herself to sit still, breathlessly forcing herself to wait out the charge of superheated sexuality coursing through her groin, vibrating up her spine, and electrifying her brain in an insistent pulse of lust and desire. Wave after wave of heat washed over her body, but she couldn’t close her eyes, couldn’t stop, couldn’t gain release by just touching herself once, just once, between her engorged lips, the swollen labia of her wet center. Her groin twitched against the bottom of the car seat. She saw a turn off down a narrow road, on the right, and swung into it without slowing. The street led to a quiet neighborhood with a few parked cars on each side of the street.

Holding onto the steering wheel with her left hand, she dipped her right hand between her legs, slipping her fingers beneath the narrow gusset of her wet panties. Squealing loudly, she plunged two fingers into her wet and scalding channel, pumping her fingers in and out, in and out, before slipping them out to rub her clit, repeating this action over and over until she felt the flood of her orgasm build to an unstoppable tsunami. She pulled over to the side of the road to finish, shaking and crying behind the steering wheel as she jerked against her right hand in spasms of relief and pleasure.

Relieved, she flung her head against the back of the seat, almost collapsing at the sudden discharge of pent-up fervor. She brushed her hair back over her head, wiped her face with both hands, and put the car in drive before she pulled back into the street.

Mary resisted the thought as soon as it popped into her head, but it flashed momentarily all the same. If Maddy can’t do it, what about Wendy?

Mary spent the rest of the afternoon crying, pounding the dashboard, driving around aimlessly, fighting an increasing sexual pressure. She stopped at a coffee shop, ran to the restroom, pulled her skirt and underwear down and rubbed a quick one out, amazed to be so quickly turned on afterward. She stared at her face in the mirror, at her blood-shot, teary eyes, her red checks, the pink glossy lipstick on her mouth. Her blond hair tumbled around her shoulders, disheveled, unkempt, wild. She resisted a sudden urge to wipe her lipstick off. After all, she told herself, even in this state it looked so adorable on her.

She stumbled to the counter, knees trembling. The girl behind the cash register smiled at her. A young girl, of college age, maybe nineteen. She wore her brown hair pulled back under a black cap, forming a ponytail through the gap in the back where the cap could be adjusted. The girl’s face, though unadorned by makeup, radiated that freshness and glow of youth, her little round lips sitting in a little round face like a pouting kiss, the upper lip fuller than the lower, and both soon trailing to a tight thin line at the corners. The girl’s breasts swelled beneath the black, short sleeve polo uniform shirt, the buttons of the V collar fully undone, showing the partial slopes on both sides, flesh which drew Mary’s eyes inward, hoping to see more.

Mary’s heart skipped.

“See anything you like?”

Mary turned beet red.

“I’m sorry?”

“Those buns,” the girl winked. “I saw you staring at those buns. They look good, don’t they? We just made them today.”

Mary read the name on the cashier’s name tag. Renee.

“Well,” Mary’s voiced trailed off in indecision.

“How about a drink first, and then you can decide on what to eat.”

Mary nodded her head in happy agreement, glad to escape the uncomfortable innuendos. Ordering a non-fat latte she peered at the frosted buns sitting under a clear plastic cover, then raised her head to ask a question, but the cashier had turned her back to prepare Mary’s coffee drink. Mary followed the tail of Renee’s hair as it swung side to side, then her eyes drifted downward, resting on the round curves of the cashier’s ass as it jiggled in the activity of pouring coffee and steaming milk. The seam of the black slacks of the girl’s uniform ran in a tight line through the joint of the two half-moons, wonderfully forming a heart shape, turned upside down. The girl had a thick waist and thick legs, but not fat, not really. A little heavy-set, maybe, thought Mary, with a building pressure of desire, a mounting upsurge of longing.

Mary slowly licked her parted lips with the tip of her tongue, the fog of lust almost completely blanking her mind from protest, restraint, or common sense.

Mary pressed her thighs together, stifling a groan, and shoved her pelvis into the side of the counter. The only customer in the coffee shop, she ventured to slide a hand over the side of her skirt, rubbing the outside of her thigh, longing to move it inward, as another wave of desire flowed through her being. She glanced at the other staff worker, a young man with three day’s growth of beard, sweeping a corner of the shop, partially hidden by the counter as it bent at a right angle to separate the workstation from the customer dining area.

Renee turned around with Mary’s latte. Her mouth dropped open when she saw Wendy’s mother standing in front of her, practically humping the counter, wearing a look of utter abandonment, eyes closed and mouth open between flushed cheeks, a string of saliva dripping from the corner of her pink mouth.

“Oh my.”

Renee held out her hands and pulled Mary’s right hand to her. Mary raised her left hand from her thigh and gave it to Renee, who took both and squeezed them gently, running her thumbs over the tops of Mary’s hands.

“You poor little dear,” Renee said softly. “You need it so bad, don’t you?”

Mary bit her bottom lip and bowed her head slightly, nodding.

“So bad. And I need to take a potty break. Do you need to take a potty break with me?”

Renee walked around the back of the workstation, grabbed Mary’s arm and pulled her with her to the restroom.

“Jeff, cover me.”

Jeff raised his head, looked around, and shrugged.

“What for? No one’s here.”

Renee rolled her eyes at Mary, who giggled and leaned into the young cashier, wrapping an arm around her soft, fleshy waist. Renee’s hand trailed down the slope of Mary’s hip, coming to a rest on the outer curve of Mary’s ass. Mary shivered and undulated her hip to the rhythm of the palm of Renee’s wandering hand. Every nerve, every sense, every cell in Mary’s body tingled, registering new stimulations, new feelings, new emotions. A flood of lust and sexual longing filled Mary’s brain, clouding her mind in a fog as the chemicals in the pink smoothie reached their culmination.

Renee pulled and Mary followed. She barely slammed the door behind her, locking it, before Renee gripped the waist of her skirt, unfastened her top button, and shoved it with her panties to the floor. Bending as she pushed Mary’s clothes downward, Renee face came level with Mary’s enflamed pussy. Renee breathed in the pungent odor arising from the older woman’s snatch. Pushing her face forward and closing her arms around Mary’s hips, Renee covered the triangle of blond pubic hair growing above the opening of Mary’s groin. Renee kissed downward, breathing in Mary’s scent and tasting Mary’s warmth, her tart, wet warmth, as she kissed and licked down to the hardening tip of Wendy’s mother’s clit.

Mary gasped.

“Please,” she panted.

“Do you need it baby?” the cashier asked. “How badly do you need me? Tell your little girl how much you need this.”

“Oh god, honey. Please, please kiss me there. I need it so badly. I need you so badly, girl.”

The mind of Mary whirled and spun. She had never been with a woman before, never even kissed another girl, not even in play, not even just goofing around. She had never felt the remotest attraction to another woman before. Not really. In her cloudy state she couldn’t really remember what she had been like. A swirl of emotions stormed through her. Was she gay now? Was she a lesbian now? Did it even matter? Was this just getting off? Would she ever see Renee again? What if the girl wanted to date her? Oh god, could she really date another woman, a girl almost as young as her daughter? What would Maddy think?

Maddy. What did Maddy have to do with this?

Aware that none of her thoughts made any sense, Mary clung to the top of Renee’s head, knocking her cap off, as the young brunette continued stroking Mary’s clit with the tip of her tongue, sometimes flicking it maddeningly, sometimes covering the whole of her vulva with the entirety of her mouth. Suddenly Mary stiffened, she clutched and pulled two handfuls of brown hair and thrust her pussy at Renee’s open mouth, spasming in an almost painful orgasm of pure carnality. Mary shuddered into Renee, who covered Mary’s flowing pussy with her mouth, her mouth taking in as much of Mary’s tangy and sticky secretions as it could, juices overflowing her lips and trickling down her chin, glistening.

Renee stood up and kissed Mary fully on the mouth. Too dazed with lust to care, too driven by her need to wonder at her first kiss with another woman, Mary opened her mouth, taking in the flavor of her own pussy, tasting her own secretions, allowing Renee’s tongue to enter, touching her tongue tip with her own tongue tip in a dance of fervent longing, loud smacking sounds filled the small restroom, and Mary uttered plaintive cries of pleasure. Renee ran her fingers along the sides of Mary’s face, and Mary in her turn reached for the young cashier, feeling along the sides of her torso, exploring the swell of her waist.

Breaking the kiss long enough to stand back, Renee pulled off her black shirt, revealing her twin globes encased in white lace. Then she unbuttoned her slacks and pulled them down, slipping out of them in a smooth, fluid motion. A mound of unshaved pussy met Mary’s gaze. She reached for a stunned Mary.

“I’ve never.”

“Shh, baby. I’ll take care of everything.”

Renee reengaged Mary in a passionate kiss, tongue writhing against tongue, lip pressed against lip, mouth hot against mouth, wet and aching. Renee reached around Mary to unfasten her bra, and Mary, following Renee’s lead, felt the smooth back of the young woman, delighting in the soft naked flesh as she unhooked the back of Renee white lace. Renee trailed her hand to reach between Mary’s thighs. Once more Mary’s overheated groin lurched and spasmed as Renee’s soft fingers stroked and caressed Mary’s charged labia.

Renee slowly and gently kissed along the side of Mary’s mouth, across her cheek, and nibbled at her earlobe, kissing it, brushing it with her soft small lips as she whispered, “Feel me. Use your hand and feel me. See how wet I am. See how hot you make me.”

Oh god, oh god, oh god. I’m really going to do it.

Mary’s hand drifted slowly to Renee’s parted thighs. Using the flat of her palm, she caressed the girl’s inner thigh, reveling in the soft texture, the smooth skin, the gentle curve of the female flesh, a strange feeling mixed with familiarity. Because Renee didn’t shave. A pleasure Mary had never known coursed through her, charging through the swollen labia of her soaked pussy and shooting up her spine. The woman felt Renee’s pubic hair, a thatch of unshaved fur from ass to high and wide above her mound. She touched Renee’s folds, stroking her middle finger through the wet crevice between her lips, sliding her fingers through the cashier’s pussy, through the cashier’s soft and steaming cunt, through the engorged lips of Renee’s red fire.

“Kiss my tits as you fuck me with your hand.”

Mary whined, pressing her thighs against Renee’s ministering hand. She leaned her head forward, bent down, and, hesitating only briefly, kissed the area around Renee’s dark pink areole, nipple hardening to firmness as Wendy’s mother kissed the yielding flesh, caressing with soft brushes of her pink lips the area around the hardening peak. Finally, unable to bear the restraint any further, Mary covered the nipple with her open mouth, kissing and swallowing the hard tit, flicking it with her tongue, and kissing and swallowing it again, and again, and again, until the older woman became a surging need of breast, fondled pussy, and aching cunt.

Renee continued kissing Mary, the top of her head, her shoulders, finally her neck, biting and sucking on Mary’s soft neck with longing kiss after longing kiss. Suddenly her pussy trembled and quaked, her fluid poured from the depths below her lips, her fleshy folds, covered in pubic hair, matted now with her secretions, hot and flowing, and still Mary stroked her clit or drove her fingers, one finger, two fingers, three fingers into the cashier’s vagina. Mary moaned into Renee’s breasts as the girls shuddered her pelvis at Mary’s hand. Renee groaned and whined into Mary’s neck, one hand running up and down the woman’s back and ass, another driving into her pussy. Then both women stiffened and, covering their shrieks with the flesh of their partner, came in a paroxysm of mutual feminine orgasm.

Each woman held onto the other, clinging to each other as the shudders and violent shaking subsided to a light tremor that rattled through them from time to time. Releasing Renee’s hold, she laughed a sudden outburst of pure joy and joviality. Grasping at anything to say, Mary felt along the young woman’s Botticellian body, stroking her trembling limbs, the sides of her torso, her waist and hips, along the outward sides of the thighs and up to her arms again. Not even her arm pits, she noticed.

“You don’t shave,” Mary said with a happy smile.

Renee swayed a hip and held her head with one hand, striking a pose.

“No I don’t. You like?”

“Oh god, yes,” gushed Mary, almost giddy. “I like it very much. Very much indeed.”

“Good,” said Renee, getting dressed and passing her hair through her cap. “Because you still owe me a pussy licking.”

Mary gaped at the cashier.

“I’ll be here to 6 o’clock everyday this week. After that my schedule will probably change. But it’s set for this week.”

Mary pulled up her panties and skirt, clasping the buttons of her fly.

“Come here girl,” Renee said, “I need one more kiss. You drive me crazy, you know that?”

She looked like a kid beaming up at her, a black baseball cap on her head.

Mary leaned in for another kiss.

A broom handle pounded on the restroom door.

“Customers,” Jeff shouted.

Ten minutes later, after exchanging numbers and more kisses with Renee, Mary sat behind her steering wheel in bewilderment, trying to calm the palpitations of her heart.

“Is this love,” she asked herself, turning the ignition. “Is this how love begins?”

She adjusted the rearview mirror to look at herself. Her pink lipstick had almost completely rubbed off, showing only a few pink smears around the edges of her lips. But that’s not what caught Mary’s attention.

“Oh. My. God.”

Renee’s kissing had left dark bruises, hickeys, all along Mary’s neck. A sudden pride of being, well, owned, possessed, surged through Mary. Of being Renee’s girl.

“Good thing I’m the mom,” she laughed to herself. “Or Wendy would ground me for a month.”

That feeling of euphoria quickly faded as Mary pulled into her driveway, the garage door opening as she slowed to roll in. She remembered Sara’s visit at lunch, masturbating at work to images of Maddy and pictures of Wendy, of fucking herself with her hand on the side of the road. The coffee shop. And now her hickeys which she’d have to hide from Wendy and from Steve. How in the world could she hide them from Steve?

“Oh my stars. What have I done?”

60. Wendy gets a visit

Wendy had gone downstairs to microwave something, anything, throwing a frozen pepperoni pizza stick into the oven to cook for two or three minutes. She poured a glass of orange juice and looked at the time of the black and white Felix, swinging eyes and tail unceasingly, announcing 4:10. School’s been out for almost twenty minutes. I wonder how it went. Just then her doorbell rang. Putting her glass down, Wendy walked to the door and peeped through the hole. Trina Zschwinzscher’s distorted face peered back at her. Wendy opened the door.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” Trina replied.

“Um,” Wendy hinted.

“Hey, I brought you these,” Trina answered. “Your homework. Maddy opened your locker for me. I would have myself but I don’t have your combo. I went to all your classes to see if you had any homework.”

“You went to all my classes?”

“Well, Maddy helped. She told me your schedule.”

Trina held out a brown paper bag, a grocery bag, to Wendy. Wendy took it, looked inside and saw a couple of textbooks, a notebook, and some pens rolling around in the bottom.

“I just didn’t want you to fall behind. I didn’t know how long you were going to be, um, sick.”

Wendy looked at the girl standing in her front steps. Sporting a bob today with purple highlights streaking a mostly pink hair, Trina flashed a shy smile at Wendy before looking away. Wendy sighed at Trina’s oversized orange pullover showing a pink cartoon elephant chasing yellow butterflies which she wore over blue and yellow floral patterned pants. The pants fit her tightly, following the curve of her calves and thighs, before getting lost under Trina’s baggy sweatshirt. Pink and white checkered sneakers completed the ensemble.

Wendy couldn’t answer for the color, but she had to admit the bob haircut accentuated the girl’s face, bringing out her long sharp nose, slightly hooked, prominent cheeks, and smiling mouth with full, heart-shaped lips, adorned with purple lipstick, naturally. Wendy returned Trina’s smile, trying to capture her wide round eyes, glimmering and brown. But Trina kept looking away. Suddenly a horn honked loudly, and Wendy just then took notice of the blue and white pickup, dented and rusting, idling in her driveway, facing the street. The showoff driver must have backed in.

Trina jumped.

“I really gotta go now, but it was so nice to see you, Wendy. Are you coming to school tomorrow? If not, I’ll bring your homework tomorrow, too.”

Trina’s sweatshirt lifted as the girl climbed into the passenger seat, showing Wendy a glimpse of her round bottom with clear, peach-shaped lines sketching the curves beneath blue and yellow flowers. Then the door closed, the pickup rumbled out the driveway and down West Pigeon Street in clang of shifting gears and grinding clutch. Wendy turned into her house, dropping her homework by the sofa, before going to the kitchen for her pizza stick. As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, she wondered about whatever happened to Betty Blake.

61. Uncle and Nero at the grotto

“This the place?” asked Uncle as Nero pulled over to the side of the road. A turnaround and lookout had been paved where the canyon veered, allowing space between the canyon’s edge and the highway.

“No. About two miles up yonder. But we can park here. And get down. That trail I used is a little steep. I’m surprised I didn’t get myself killed going down. In the state I was in.”

Nero was right about getting down. Narrow steps had been cut into the side of the canyon, running lengthwise in a slow decline. Every six feet or so a post had been hammered into the ground, over the top of which a sturdy rope ran, providing a handhold for hikers. Uncle massaged his stiff legs with his heavy hands. He groaned at the thought of going down, knowing that any descent, no matter how easy, must entail an inversely difficult going up.

“In for a penny,” Uncle muttered, following his nephew down the incline.

The path led along the jagged flow of the stream, first cutting this way, now veering the other, but about twenty-five minutes of hiking along the water’s side, Nero caught sight of the small boulder where his Ford so recently had landed. As they neared the spot, they could see great scars in the side of the canyon, where cables on heavy winches had pulled the wrecked hull of his coupe back up the canyon, scraping deep holes and gaps into the rock, uprooting the sparse vegetation.

Broken glass alone remained to tell the tale of last week’s accident. No, the week before last. How long had he been out? And yesterday was, what Monday? So the Saturday before last. Betty’s been gone a week, but now she’s calling to him in his mind. He hadn’t let his uncle know that part. No reason to add crazy to the mix of doubt, suspicion, and concern. Uncle looked at a dark stain near the boulder, amid the broken glass, a stain that might have been blood.

“And the cops just don’t know anything? I mean, about what might have happened to that Betty girl?”

“If they do, they’re not saying. Not to me, anyway. I think they think I had something to do with it. I mean, more than just crashing the car.”

“And?”

Uncle cast Nero that look, eyebrow arched, eyes narrowed.

“Well what do you think?” Nero retorted, hiding his shame of jumping while letting Betty fall. He didn’t even try to do anything. What could he have done? Die with her? Was she dead?

“I don’t know what to think, Nero. So I don’t think anything.”

“Aw, forget it. She ain’t here. I don’t know what I expected to find.”

Nero kicked a rock towards the side of the canyon. He looked up and noticed a pile of collapsed rock and small boulders at the foot of the canyon, almost straight ahead behind the boulder where his Ford crashed. The rubble sat back from the canyon wall, as if inset in the middle of two great upturned slabs of rock. He pointed it out to his uncle.

“What’s that?”

“Rubble?”

“No, I mean, what happened there? It looks kind of odd, doesn’t it? All that rubble in one spot? And the way it’s inside like that, like it’s blocking the entrance to a hole or something.”

“I don’t see nothing. Just rock is all. Which ain’t too unusual. Considering this whole canyon is rock.”

“No, something’s wrong with all that. I’m going to take a closer look.”

Uncle watched Nero stumble his way up towards the fallen rock. He started to mumble to himself after about five minutes of watching the kid do nothing but stand in front of a bunch of rocks, shoulders drooped. Then Uncle squinted his eyes, trying to make sure they didn’t lie. Was it his imagination, or did he really see his nephew wave a hand in front of face at the precise moment the rock gave way to reveal an opened chamber, a tunnel into the canyon side? Well, didn’t that just beat everything. Meantime his back screamed at him something awful, and that boulder looked to be as good a spot to sit a spell as any. Let the boy do his thing. Whatever that turned out to be. Kid’s in enough trouble without his interference.

The boulder, flat enough at the top to lie back on, had a low spot on the canyon side, low enough for Uncle to scramble up and lean back on. The sun wasn’t so bad, already it had begun its western decline, casting a fading light on another day on earth.

62. Wendy knocks on Mary’s door

That night, Wendy knocked on the door to her mother’s room. Mary had avoided Wendy all evening, not even going down for supper. Which worried Wendy. Her mother always made supper, always insisted on having dinner together, especially since.

“It’s just you and me now, Wendy. And we can’t let each other slip away.”

Too late, Wendy thought to herself whenever this maudlin mood struck Mary.

Now Mary hid behind a locked door, refusing to answer Wendy, refusing to come out.

“Mom?” asked Wendy anxiously.

Her mother’s voice finally drifted through the closed door, low and distant. Wendy had to strain to hear it.

“I’m okay, honey. I just feel a little under the weather. I’ll be okay. I promise. Just let me be.”

Wendy shrugged and went back to her room to finish her homework. It really was thoughtful of Trina to bring it to her.

About an hour later, Steve rang the doorbell.

When Wendy answered the door, Steve brushed past her in a hurry, “Hey, kid,” said, “Your mom called me. She sounded upset, so I’m just going to run in and poke my head, okay?”

Not waiting for an answer from the teenager, Steve swept around Wendy and jogged up the stairs. Wendy stood at the bottom of the steps, scowling. Then she stuck out her right hand and flashed a quick middle finger to the unwelcome man who had so recently and so suddenly become a fixture in her life.

Who the hell does he think he is, she thought to herself bitterly and angrily. This is my house.

Steve knocked on the door, tried the handle, then reached up, found the wire key on the top ledge of the door frame, unlocked the door, and entered Mary’s darkened room. In the dim light he saw Mary curled on the bed, holding herself. He stepped softly towards the side of the bed, sat down, reached to turn on the light.

“No,” she said, “leave it off. I like it dark. I have a headache.”

Steve reached over to rub Mary’s shoulder.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No.”

“Mary, what’s wrong?”

Mary hesitated and refused to answer, but Steve persisted in a soft voice, urging without remonstrance. Finally Mary sat up.

“Fine,” she said, “but you can’t say anything. You can’t let her know that I showed you.”

“Showed me what?”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” A feeling of getting suddenly caught up in a conspiracy surged momentarily through Steve. He loved conspiracies.

Mary opened her laptop, quickly found what she was looking for, and turned the screen towards Steve.

Steve grabbed the laptop.

“Oh gosh. How do you have this?”

“This picture went all over her school. Everybody in her school has seen it.”

“Well, I mean,” Steve’s voice stammered to a halt. There really didn’t seem much for him to say.

He closed the picture, saw the other attachment and opened that before Mary had a chance to stop him.

“My goodness,” Steve said. “She really went the distance. She looks nice.”

Mary slapped his leg, suddenly happy and outraged.

“Stop that,” she said brightly. “I knew I shouldn’t have shown it to you!”

“I’m glad you did,” Steve replied. “But how did you get these? Who sent them to you?”

“Um. Well, that’s the thing. I sent did. I sent them to me. Wendy’s friend Sara emailed them to her, I saw them, forwarded them to me, and trashed hers.”

“Why did you send them to you?”

Mary didn’t answer.

“I think I have an idea,” Steve suggested. “Get undressed.”

“Steve.”

“Just do it.”

Mary started to unbutton her blouse, but Steve had already yanked her by her feet. She fell back and laughed as Steve grabbed her waist, unbuttoned her skirt, unzipped the fly and pulled her clothing off her.

Mary’s mind sped, hurtling forward through a cloud of conflicting thoughts and questions. Was she cheating on Renee now? Or had she cheated on Steve with Renee? Should she stop Steve now, or should she have stopped Renee earlier? Was she straight? Was she bisexual? Was she a lesbian? Shouldn’t she kick and protest and shout, no Steve, I’m just not into you anymore, I’m just not into men anymore? Oh but she was.

She was.

She loved the way Steve hammered her with his cock. What was it? Seven inches, eight inches? And god, it was so thick!

About to shuffle out of her blouse, Steve stopped her and said, “No. Keep it on like that, let me see your tits, though.”

Then Steve reached towards Mary’s breasts and pulled her bra cups above them, exposed them to Steve’s view.

“That should do it,” he said. He pulled down his pants and briefs, stepped out of them and stood at the side of the bed, his half-aroused dick protruding towards Mary.

“Put your mouth around me, baby. Get me hard. I’m going to come all over you.”

Mary was on fire. The heat that had kindled earlier returned, a sudden burning need for sex, for cock, for cunt, it just didn’t matter. Not to her. Not then and there. What in the world is happening to me, she thought. Then her lips wrapped around Steve’s cock as she engulfed his member, and her might went blank to rational thought

“That’s it, baby,” urged Steve, “that’s the way to make me feel good.”

Steve had taught her to suck cock.

In the short time they had been together, Steve urged her to try new things, to go out of her comfort zone, to explore her sexuality to the fullest. Mostly she had done so. Except for anal. No way was that happening. Not with him, not ever. Now, as she moved her lips and mouth up and down the length and width of Steve’s dick, she accepted the truth and wisdom of his council. Today with Renee. Now tonight with Steve.

Steve reached a full hardness. Prodding Mary’s head, he pulled her in her reluctance of his cock and pushed her back on the bed, pulling her legs around him so that his hips stood directly in front of Mary’s gaping wet pussy, right at the edge of Mary’s bed. He moved the open laptop towards her face.

“Look at it,” he said. “Look at her legs spread wide like that. Spread your legs wide like that. You want to be just like her, don’t you? You want to get fucked just like your daughter, don’t you? You want me to shoot my load right over your face.”

Steve held the tip of his cock at the hot wet hole of Mary’s pussy. Her lubrication seemed to flow around the bulbous tip as he touched her wet lips, inching forward.

“I will, you know. But you have to ask. You have to ask for it.”

Oh goddam you, Steve.

“Please, Steve. I want it.”

“Say, ‘Fuck me, Steve. Fuck me like Wendy.’”

Oh, goddam you, Steve.

“Fuck me, Steve. Fuck me like Wendy.”

Mary panted, heaved, squirmed. Short squeals and sighs burst from her open mouth as she stared at the image of her daughter on the laptop. She bent her legs, wrapped them around her lover to press him to fuck her faster, harder, to bring him fully into her pussy, to guide him fully into her being. Feeling himself on the verge an orgasm, Steve pulled out of Mary suddenly.

“Mary, look at me.”

Mary turned her as Steve climbed over her, holding his dick over her face as he spasmed and came, shooting several ropes of come over her facing before pulling back and standing up to shoot a few last ropes over her exposed and gaping fuck hole. Steve bent down, rummaged through the pockets of his trousers, brought out his cell phone and held it up.

“Pull your legs to your chest and hold them out wide. Smile at the camera, just like Wendy. Just like your daughter.”

Steve took photo after photo of Mary in the same pose her daughter had made that weekend for Brad.

Sitting at the side of the bed, he showed the pics to Mary, who looked over his shoulder, hanging an arm around him, caressing his shoulder while bringing her come-covered face close to his cheeks.

“You should pick one out and send it to Wendy,” he said. “It’s only fair. You’ve seen her, Mary. Heck, we all have. Imagine how embarrassed she feels. Try to put yourself in her place.”

“But I’m her mother,” Mary protested weakly.

“All the more reason. Let her know she’s not alone. Let her know she has you.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll send them to you later when you make up your mind. Just let me know. Or I can just send them to you now.”

“No, don’t,” Mary replied quickly. “Let me think about it. Let me think about it for a few days, please. This is all so. So weird.”

Wednesday

63. Wendy reading

The next afternoon saw Wendy on the couch downstairs, curled up under a blanket, almost completely enthralled by the Jack Randall book.

“The rise of Nero Craft’s fortunes seemed to have begun shortly after the disappearance of Betty Blake. In point of fact, however, the young Mr. Craft’s life resumed its habit. Interviews with his supervisor and fellow workers all suggest a competent, if complacent, mechanic. He missed shifts, shirked what labor he could, and basically continued performing as he had always performed. A screw-up, but not enough of one to get him fired. Not particularly gifted or driven. Not particularly concerned with the future.

“A year later, all that had changed.”

64. Nero Craft and the Living Pink

When Nero approached the pile of rubble, he felt more than knew that he had been led to the right place. Whatever pulled him, whatever urged or prompted him to return to the canyon, drew him here, to this wall, this cliff, to reach this, well, what was it? From all appearances, it looked like it might have been the entrance to a cave, but with all the fallen rock and debris, you really couldn’t say. But then he heard it. A low hum, almost inaudible, more of a vibration than a sound, coming from behind the rock.

Then his own body responded.

A tremor shook him, vibrating through his bones, seeming to come from every fiber of his body, a thrill vibrated him, and he felt the ground shaking below him. He shut his eyes and saw pink. His arms raised, and without seeing, keeping his eyes closed, he floated forward, his booted feet inches off the ground. He braced himself for an impact that never came as he followed the pink light into the side of the canyon. He tried to open his eyes, but something kept them closed, shut despite his will to open them. Then slowly he began to see.

A pink tunnel, with glimmering pink sides with darker, almost red lines like veins running in a crooked, jagged fashion horizontally along the walls of the tunnel, spiderwebbing. Nero followed the dark pink veins down the tunnel, eyes closed, no longer needing eyes to see, nor feet to walk, nor hands to touch, moving with movement towards whatever lay ahead. But he knew without knowing. The probe. Not a meteorite, not a natural object at all, but artificially and cunningly crafted. And with the probe, he also knew, waited Betty Blake, waiting for him.

And then he saw it, the object from a week ago, more than a week ago, not black, after all, but dark red, a deep velvet red, so dark, so dark. Less than five feet in diameter. A pink line encircled the rough surface of the sphere, and as he approached the humming grew louder, the vibration shook through Nero, shook the walls of the canyon, and the craft trembled and shuddered. The pink circle glowed brighter, grew wider, and Nero saw one half of the object, the probe, rise from the other, lifting open on one side, like a round clam shell, revealing an interior of a bright and radiant pink beyond the conception of human imagination. A pink beyond pink.

And in that pink Nero beheld a figure arise, slowly, from the depths of the lower half, the figure of a human, a pink and glowing figure, oddly transparent and not transparent, the figure of a woman, of curving hip and chest, nude. The figure of Betty Blake. The figure of Betty Blake stretched a hand towards Nero, beckoning, and Nero drew closer, closer, until standing beside the woman, just outside the object. Nero flinched as the woman stepped outside the craft and wrapped Nero in an embrace.

“Shh,” the figure whispered, “It’s me. Betty. And not me. I’ve been.”

“Betty?” Nero asked.

“And you, too. You’ve been. It’s inside you, but not like me. I’m. It’s me. And I’m it. I’ve been growing. It’s been growing. It’s. It’s alive somehow. I’m alive somehow.”

“Betty?” Nero asked again.

“It’s wrong. It’s in the wrong place. It’s not meant. It needs to go. There’s a place. A waterfall. But it’s out of power, I’m out of power. I can’t get there. It can’t. We can’t get there. You have to take us. You are us. Also. A little. We are inside you.”

“How?”

“We trust you.”

The figure of Betty Blake stepped backward, fell into the lower half of the craft, and collapsed, curling into a fetal position. The top half of the craft fell, enclosing Betty in her pink womb, the pink seam of the sphere resealing. At last Nero opened his eyes, finding himself alone in the darkness of the canyon grotto, faintly illuminated by the pink and red glow of the craft. Looking behind him, he saw a light coming from around the bend of the grotto’s tunnel. Assuming the light to be coming from the entrance, he stepped forward, but jerked as if tethered. He couldn’t leave without the probe. But how could he move it?

Giving it a shot, he stepped behind the probe, leaned into the sphere and pushed, his hands on either side of the small globe, using his back and shoulders for strength. The globe jolted but did not roll. Nero heaved again, and this time the sphere moved, turning over and rolling like a rubber ball as Nero pushed, now barely making an effort, lightly rolling the sphere over the rocky floor of the grotto.

65. Uncle wakes up from his nap

Uncle woke up with a start, hearing the voice of his nephew calling.

“Uncle!” Nero shouted. “Wake up! I found it.”

Uncle looked up to see Nero rolling a big black rock towards him.

“Found what? What the heck is that thing?”

“What I saw last week. What Betty and I saw last week. It’s been in that cave yonder.”

“Whatcha gonna do with the thing?”

“I dunno. Take it home, I reckon. Crack it open in the backyard, I suppose.”

“You got any idea how to get that thing up the canyon?”

“Ain’t very heavy. Not heavy at all. I reckon I can roll it up.”

“You’re welcome to try. Don’t expect my help. I’ll be lucky to get myself back up there on my own two legs.”

“Aw, Uncle, you ain’t crippled.”

“Age cripples all, Nero.”

“You ain’t old.”

“I feel old.”

It took a while. Light as the craft was, it still proved unwieldy and cumbersome trying to roll it over the roughly hewn stone steps of the hiker path. Eventually Nero managed to get it to the top of the canyon, the setting sun awash in a glow of oranges and reds. Nero sighed a thanks of relief at seeing the lone highway, devoid of traffic and curious onlookers. He half-expected to see the sheriff’s car sitting beside his uncle’s truck, but the truck remained alone.

“You reckon you can lift that by yourself?” asked Uncle.

“Might could stand a hand,” Nero replied.

“Might could offer one,” said Uncle. “You’ve done most of the work.”

Nero rolled the small globe to the back of the truck as Uncle unlatched the tailgate. Standing on either side, they crouched near the bottom, shifting their hands as far underneath the craft as they could and heaved. Uncle shot Nero a shocked looked at the light weight of the object. Couldn’t have been much more than fifty pounds.

“I know,” Nero replied to Uncle’s wordless exclamation.

Uncle closed the door, took the keys from Nero, and said, “I’ll drive.”

66. Mary at another lunch with Sara

Mary hesitated as the Hipkick vibrated, alerting her to another call from Sara. She had spent all night trying to figure things out, trying to come to terms with her behavior. But only two things stood out in her mind after a night of fitful sleep, tormented masturbation, and steamy dreams: one, she had orgasmed to her daughter’s naked body, several times that night, guiltily, reproaching herself with each caress. And two, she owed Renee a pussy licking. My god. Renee.

As hard as it was for her to believe, she couldn’t get the girl out of her mind. The way her hair smelled like coffee, the salty flesh of her breasts, her tits, as Mary kissed and licked them, the way her hot pussy quivered in its hairy thatch as Mary jilled her. The soft fur of her thighs, strong and powerful and soft, like a man’s and unlike. The curve of her round ass as Mary squeezed and caressed it, falling into endless kisses of tongue and wet lip.

Mary had thought of her body all night long, short, shorter than Mary anyway, a little stocky, not exactly pudgy, but not exactly not pudgy, Mary had delighted in the smoothness of her skin, the soft and yielding flesh. The promise of her pussy. Mary had assumed that whatever had happened yesterday would recede, be a strange and distant memory, or at least a rapidly fading one, but no. If anything Mary’s heat increased the more she thought of Renee, her body, her flavor, her smell becoming more and more vivid and each new recollection of the experience. The way her round brown eyes sat above her button nose, the pout of her sensual mouth in its round and almost boyish face, especially in that adorable black cap. Oh god. The way her ass bounced in the tightness of her pants when she made my latte.

God, I can’t stop thinking about her, Mary said to herself.

And now this. She glanced at the Hipkick vibrating on her desk.

How can I possibly deal with Sara at this time? Why do I have to? How did Sara become someone I have to interact with? I mean, why feel anything at all? She’s just a friend of Wendy’s.

Still, she hesitated to answer. But the phone vibrated again, and Mary reached to answer it.

“Mary speaking,”

“Oh gosh, Mrs. Love, it’s me, Sara. I’m so glad you answered!”

Then again, the child was always so thoughtful and kind, always so happy when anybody paid her attention. Kind of endearing really.

“Hello, Sara.” Mary tried to keep her voice in an expressionless monotone.

“Well, the thing is, Wendy’s mom, I was wondering. I was just wondering if maybe, if, you know, if you don’t have anywhere else to go, if maybe you’d like to have lunch with me again today? I have an extra hour free today after lunch. I was thinking maybe, you know, we could get together? Grab a bite to eat away from your work?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Sara. I’m awfully busy today. So many files to go through.”

“Please, Mrs. Love. I just. I just think. I just think it’s something we’d both like to do. I get the feeling it’s something you’d like to do, Mary.”

Well. To be honest, Mary saw no harm in it.

“Well, okay.”

“Great,” Sara said. “I know just the place. I’ll pick you up.”

Mary didn’t know why she couldn’t just drive herself and meet the girl there. But something about being picked up excited her. It felt nice to have someone treat her like. Like a date, she thought suddenly. Like I’m Sara’s lunch date. Mary supposed she was.

Mary retrieved a compact mirror from her purse and checked her face, glad to have put so much makeup on that morning. In attempting to hide the marks on her neck with foundation, Mary decided to go the whole way, applying the makeup to her face, along blush and red lipstick. She used a neutral, flesh toned eyeshadow to darken her eyes, adding just enough shimmer to bring out her eyes, dark eyeliner and mascara. Then she bound a light scarf, little more than a silk handkerchief, around her neck to completely hide the hickeys Renee had given her.

She attracted many stares as she entered the building that morning. But the makeup also hid her lack of sleep the night before.

At noon Mary walked out the front doors of her building in a gray blazer with matching gray pencil skirt rising just above her knees. After Sara had arranged their date, Mary slipped off the tennis shoes she wore while in the cubicle, replacing them with black three-inch heels she wore for the morning. She saw Sara’s Mercedes waiting for her in the U-shaped drive of Adamatic Paper. Sara stood outside the driver’s door, dressed in torn jeans, sneakers, and a pink long-sleeved pullover, under which her full breasts bounced freely, apparently unencumbered by a bra. Then Mary noticed her hard nipples poking through the fabric, confirming the absence of an under garment.

She felt conspicuously overdressed.

I should’ve kept my tennis shoes on.

Sara smiled, ran up to hug Mary. Mary leaned forward to breathe in the scent of Sara’s hair, loose now, unbraided, falling in auburn waves behind her neck. The aroma of cinnamon rose from Sara’s body, and Mary found herself pressing the teenager close, enjoying the soft contours of her body pressed against her own, running her hands up and down Sara’s shoulder blades and trailing down her spine.

Sara sighed and released herself from the embrace to lead Mary Love around the back of her car to the passenger door, opening it for Wendy’s mother.

“Gosh, Mrs. Love, you really look nice.”

“Please, Sara. Call me Mary.”

Sara winked at Mary, closed the door and walked around the front of the car. Mary gasped when she saw how great rips and tears had been made in the back of Sara’s jeans, showing almost the entirety of the young woman’s bottom, the full curve of her ass cheeks above her thighs, and much of each half moon. Did she go to school that way? Did they allow girls to dress like that? Did Wendy dress like that? Mary shuddered at the thought of Wendy going to school, her ass hanging out for every guy to ogle.

Not just guys, she thought. Look at you.

Two clear plastic tumblers stood upright in the cup holders in the middle below the dashboard. Mary recognized the smoothies from yesterday. Her mouth watered at seeing them, and a light, butterfly feeling passed quickly through her.

“I know how much you like yours yesterday,” laughed Sara. “So I brought some more for us today. Go ahead. I know you want some.”

Mary lifted her tumbler eagerly. She really did. She really did want some.

Sara grinned happily watching how quickly Mary consumed the smoothie, drinking the full tumbler in a long, steady sucking of the straw. Mary finally looked up with glazed eyes, dark pupils dilated in their light blue irises. Was it the blush, or were Mary’s cheeks flushed, warm with desire?

“Before we go, Mary. Let me do this.”

Taking a moist tissue from her purse, Sara gently wiped the red lipstick from Mary’s mouth, following up with a careful dapping of a dry tissue. Mary inhaled deeply when she saw Sara take out the black and gold tube of pink lipstick.

“Here,” Sara whispered. “Lean forward. You’re going to look so much hotter with pink lips. The red lipstick’s for me, silly.”

Mary leaned forward in a daze, parting her lips and pursing them in turn as Sara ran layer after layer of the glossy pink lipstick to the older woman’s mouth.

“There, that’s better. Now you look hot. My little hot angel, isn’t that right, Mary? So hot and sexy. You like being sexy, don’t you?”

Mary nodded slowly, too dazed to be confused, too unthinking to wonder what Sara said, just taking it in and accepting it as truth. Because it had to be true. Just had to.

Sara pulled away from the building.

Mary squirmed in her seat, her pussy on fire, a heat raging in her groin. She felt her nipples hardening, stiffening in the cage of her bra, trapped and bound by her blouse, her blazer, her bra. After a few miles Sara said, not taking her eyes off the road,

“You look so nice, Mary. So sharply dressed. I love the way your legs look in hose. The way your hips fill your skirt. But don’t you think you need to take it off, Mary. Don’t you think you need to take off your skirt? I can’t see what you’re hiding with that skirt on. I can’t see your panties with your skirt on.”

Mary drank in every word, accepting every word Sara spoke as something arising from her own brain, her own mind, her own need. She slumped back into her seat, unbuttoned fly on the side of her skirt, slowly unzipping it. With a last breath, Wendy’s mother pulled her skirt down and off, kicking it off with her heeled feet.

Sara pulled into an empty parking lot, partially blocked on one side by a tall wooden fence, parking between the fence and a large dumpster area enclosed by a brick wall.

“Face me,” Sara said commandingly. “I want to see you play with yourself, Mary. I’m going to take pictures of you touching your pussy, rubbing your pussy. Won’t that be so hot? It’s just driving you crazy, isn’t it? God you want to fuck yourself in front of my camera, don’t you? Just fuck yourself and fuck yourself. So hot. So sexy.”

No. No, she can’t do that. I don’t want that. I don’t want to fuck myself. Not for Sara. Not for her camera. I don’t want to touch myself. I’m so hot. God, I’m so hot. I need this.

“You’re so hot, aren’t you Mary? Tell me about what you did yesterday. Tell me about how it made you feel to think about Maddy’s hot face, to think all day long about Maddy’s hot little face covered in come.”

The image of Maddy’s hot little face flashed through Mary’s racing mind, her thoughts in a turmoil of lust and longing. She tried to remember the guilt she felt afterward, the guilt she felt as she rubbed herself all night long, looking at Wendy’s gooey face, then Wendy’s gooey pussy, her legs spread for the camera, smiling at Brad. Smiling at anybody looking at the photo. Smiling at her mother. Opening her legs for Mary. And Mary came. Came all night long to Wendy’s naked body.

“You didn’t just think about Maddy, though, did you? Because you don’t have a picture of Maddy. But you needed to come so bad, didn’t you? And you just had to have someone’s picture to look at while you jacked yourself silly. Go ahead and tell me, Mary. Go ahead and tell me who you masturbated to, whose picture you looked at as you frigged yourself at work.”

“I, I,” Mary stammered.

“Go ahead and rub yourself while you tell me, Mary. Go ahead and rub your pussy.”

Mary’s hand drifted between her thighs to rub the outside of her wet groin, feeling over her hard clit with the flat of her hand and fingers, feeling how soaked her panties were getting.

“Pull your panties away, Mary. I want to see your hot cunt.”

Mary groaned and pulled her panties to one side, revealing her engorged lips to the hungry and avid eyes of the unrestrained and insatiable teenager.

“Whose face did you come to, Mary? Whose picture made you orgasm?”

“Oh, god, Sara. You know. You know who I came to.”

“Tell me, Mary. Tell me whose face makes you hot. So hot you have to get off to it.”

Mary rubbed her pussy harder and harder, faster and faster.

“Wendy,” she whispered. “I masturbate to Wendy.”

“What makes you so hot about Wendy?”

“All that come,” Mary panted, stroking herself faster and faster. “All that come on her face makes so fucking horny. It gets me so hot.”

“You like to see men shoot their loads on her face?”

“Oh god yes.”

“You’d like to see it some more?”

“Oh god yes.”

“But who, Mary, who could do it? Who could shoot his load all over your daughter’s face?”

Mary groaned with humiliated exaltation.

“Steve could. The guy I’m seeing. He could do it.”

“The guy you’re seeing? Are you seeing a guy, Mary?”

Mary nodded, eyes closed.

“Is it serious?”

Mary shrugged, then shook her head.

“But you let him spend the night with you?”

Mary nodded again.

“You let him fuck you at night when Wendy’s home? You fuck him all night long while Wendy’s home listening?”

She wasn’t sure about it being all night long. She didn’t know if Wendy heard.

“But she could hear. She could hear you, and that means she did hear you. Hear your bed banging against the wall, hear your moans as your boyfriend rammed his cock into you, right? She had to listen to all that, has to listen to all that because you want her to hear it, right? You want Wendy to listen to you fuck. You get off to your daughter hearing you have sex. It makes you so hot. Hot like you are now. God, Mary. Your pussy’s so wet, you’re leaking all over my car seat.”

Mary squealed, shaking her pelvis at her hand, at Sara watching her. At Sara telling how much she wanted her daughter to listen to her fuck. God it’s so hot, so hot knowing Wendy’s listening to them fuck through the walls.

“You bring Steve home so Wendy can hear him fuck you.”

Mary bit her lip, nodding and trembling.

“Wendy’s just a teenage girl. She’s only sixteen years old, and you brought a man into the home so she could hear you have sex.”

Despite all her lust, all her longing, all the tempest of the sudden onslaught of yearning, of horniness, of the torment of sexual need, Mary rebelled, guilt rising to defend her.

“No, I didn’t think about.”

“A girl on the cusp of womanhood, thinking about sex for the very first time, and you bring Steve home for her.”

“What? No.”

Mary slowed her hand, but still rubbed her fingers against her swollen and heated lips.

“That makes you a bad mother, doesn’t it?”

Mary shook her head.

“You fuck yourself looking at photo of her, made against her will, made without her knowledge or consent, a picture of her with come all over her face, and then you fuck yourself silly looking at the photo of Wendy’s pussy leaking Brad’s come all over the back seat. Spreading her legs wide open for all the world to see.”

Mary shook her head, but her hand picked up speed. She hooked her right foot behind Sara’s seat, spreading her legs wider for Sara’s eager eyes.

“Then you tell me how much you want Steve to blow his load all over her face, while you watch, desperate to lick the come off your daughter’s mouth. So hot to see your Wendy drenched in Steve’s come. It makes you so hot. It makes your pussy so wet. God your cunt is so nasty and hot.”

Mary nodded. Yes. Yes. God she was so hot.

“So hot for Steve to fuck your daughter.”

Mary twitched, groaned, and writhed on Sara’s leather seat, so close to release, so close to exploding.

“I’m going to come, Sara. I’m going to come listening to you talk to me like that.”

“No you’re not, Mary. You can’t come yet. You want to, but you can’t.”

Mary groaned in frustration.

“You can’t come because you haven’t told me what a bad mother you are.”

“I’m not a bad mother.”

“Yes you are, Mary. Only a bad mother would force her boyfriend to fuck her daughter.”

“Oh, god.”

“To come all over her.”

“Oh, god. No.” Mary ground her pussy into her hand.

“Do you want to come?”

“Oh god, please. Please let me come.”

“Then say you’re a bad mother.”

“I’m not a bad mother.”

Sara opened the picture of Wendy spreading her legs on the back seat of Brad’s Jeep. She handed the phone to Mary.

“Look at that picture, Mary. Fuck yourself harder and harder while you look at Wendy’s leaking cunt.”

Mary held the phone close, eyes fixed on the image of Wendy’s pussy, rubbing her blazing cunt, plunging two fingers into her wet hole, and lifting them out to massage her clit in hard, heavy kneading.

“Please let me come.”

“Say you’re a bad mother.”

“Oh, god. I’m a bad mother.”

“Go ahead and come now, Mary.”

Mary shuddered, tightened her thighs against her hand, and shrieked in ecstasy.

“I’m a bad mother, I’m a bad mother, I’m a bad mother,” she moaned over and over, blubbering and sobbing.

“Maybe,” Sara answered. “But bad mothers don’t have to feel guilt.”

After several minutes of quiet sobbing, Mary sat up and started to put on her skirt.

“Don’t bother, Mary,” Sara said. “You’re missing the rest of the day. I’m taking you to my place. You’ve got me so turned on I’m going to have a stroke. I hope you like pussy. I really do, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time between my legs, girl. Right now, you should get in the back seat.”

Mary climbed out of the front seat and scrambled into the back, while Sara shuffled out of her torn jeans. Then she stepped out of the driver’s seat and walked to the back, not caring if anyone saw, but knowing no one would. An abandoned industrial center, far from prying eyes, and patrolled by her mother’s company security. Who knew better than to bother anyone in the Mercedes.

Mary’s heart beat in hammer blows striking the inside of her chest, pounding against the ribcage, as she sat, half-naked, waiting for Sara, eager to see the young woman in the blossom of youth, to see her groin, her hips, her shapely legs, to feel her skin, to touch her bareness, her tight body. My god, she thought. I really am. I must be. I’m so. Hot. I’m so turned on. My orgasm did nothing to calm me.

Sara climbed into the back seat. Scooting near Mary, she pulled her pink shirt over her head, swirled her auburn hair around her shoulder, and gestured at Mary to come nearer. Wendy’s mother gaped at Sara’s exposed breasts, her large areoles displaying the round points of her hard dark nipples. Mary longed to hold them in her hands, to suckle at Sara’s breast, to lean upon her lap, and half-cuddle, half-ravish her daughter’s new friend.

Mary scooted closer and shivered as Sara slowly began to unbutton her blouse, starting at the top and working her way down. Winking at Mary, Sara slid a hand under the side of Mary’s blouse, cupping Mary’s heavy breast in one hand over the fabric of the bra. Sara leaned into Mary’s ear.

“Touch me, Mary. Touch my body. Feel how hot my body is for you.”

Trembling, Mary reached a hand to cup Sara’s breast, delighting in the smooth skin, the warmth, the yielding flesh of Sara’s glands. Baiting her breath, she explored the sides of her breasts, the flesh underneath, the top, the narrow flatness of the cleavage before rising again in another hill of longing and promise.

Sara shivered at Mary’s touch.

“That feels so nice, Mary. Your hands are so lovely, so soft, so gentle. You don’t paw at my tits or smash them like soft dough, you feel them, you slide your loving fingers over them, gently and softly, like gentle lovers, quietly riding the wave of desire. Your mouth is beautiful, Mary, your eyes are lanterns, blue lamps on a low hill, Mrs. Love, and I’m going to kiss you now, Mary. I’m going to kiss the pink lips of your shining mouth.”

Sara leaned forward as Mary wrapped her arms around her, making small, soft circles in Sara’s back with the flat of her palms, then trailing her spine with the tips of her fingers, pressing against the girl’s exposed breasts with her own chest, covered in a bra, the parted blouse exposing the bare places of her body. Sara caressed Mary’s abdomen with the palm of her hand, rubbing circles around Mary’s navel and moving upward to cup a large, heavy breast, flicking the covered nipple of Mary Love’s tit. Then Sara brought her red lips to Mary’s pink mouth, brushing and teasing Mary’s lips with light, transient kisses, barely kisses, soft and light touches of the lip, until Mary flung her open mouth at Sara, seeking to devour, to taste, to take in. To devour. Tongue plunged against tongue, and Mary felt dizzy and proud, standing on the edge of a precipice she knew to be no precipice, but a dive into the deepest and warmest ocean where she could never drown but swim endlessly beneath the waves, beneath the clear blue waves, breathing the fluid air like a predatory fish.

Singing like a mermaid she groaned against Sara’s mouth, and Sara, recognizing the heat and fury of the beast she held, cooed and solaced, broke the kiss and held the woman, breathing and gasping, and whispered into the heaving woman’s ear, “Easy girl. I’ve got you.”

Sara withdrew her hand from Mary’s breast and sent it sliding down to brush the wetness of Mary’s fiery center, still wet and warm from her climax. Sara hooked her finger over Mary’s hardening clit, stroking it as she slipped her fingers between the slippery folds of Mary’s tumid labia, quivering and enflamed, soaked with her vagina lubrication. Sara returned her mouth to Mary’s mouth, her tongue entering Mary in a prolonged exploration, feeling and teasing Mary’s tongue, which returned the teasing, unrestrained, happy, joyful, and relieved.

A flood of emotions surged through Mary, too many to count, too many to care about, driving her headlong into the dizzy gulf below. Suddenly she felt the coming onslaught of a powerful orgasm, rising from her depths like a slouching monster, ready to consume. Mary thrust her cunt over Sara’s hand, over her finger, reaching down with both hands, she held Sara’s hand in a vice grip, tight against her scalding pussy as she squeezed her thighs together and came. She closed her eyes against the pleasure, the release, and held Sara tightly in her hands, gripping her with the iron of her thighs, unwilling to let the girl go.

Finally she breathed out, parted her thighs, and opened her eyes to the admiring smile and shining green eyes of Sara Craft.

“Feel better?” the girl grinned.

Mary shuddered, smiled, and nodded her head quickly, eagerly, then looked down, suddenly and unexpectedly bashful.

Sara raised her chin with a finger and kissed her lightly upon the mouth.

“Do you want to make me happy?”

“Oh god, yes, Sara. I want to make you happy more than anything. You’ve done so much for me.” Mary had no idea how much see sounded like her daughter, then, to Sara’s ears, her voice gushing childlike in a guileless gratitude. Then Mary lurched forward in a sudden hug, an embrace of thanks, of affection, of something Mary couldn’t label. Mary looked away bashfully again as she released her hold on Sara.

Then Sara leaned back, spread her legs, one over the passenger seat, and one over the back seat, along the edge of the back window. She ran a hand over her bare and shaven mound, glistening with the dew and honey of anticipation.

“Taste me, Mary. Kiss my pussy and taste me.”

67. Moby downstairs, on the hunt

Moby stomped down the halls of Kid Lester High School, pushing and clanging a dark olive-colored canister of bug powder on a green PVC cart in front of him. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of that pink varmint since Monday, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t come back. So he spent the next two days shoving the door of the boys room open with his cart, spraying the yellow bug powder down the floor drains, and beating against the inside of the drain with his mallet or mop handle. Didn’t matter which one. Sometimes he used the mallet, sometimes he used the mop. Mm. When it came to the girls room, he knock first with the mop handle.

“Bug powder,” he’d say. “Need to check your drains.”

If he was lucky, the restrooms would be empty. Then he could go right on in and finish the job. More often than not, though, he’d have to wait outside the door, next to his cart, while those damned female things drifted and floated out the door, tittering, chirping, and giggling in that mysterious language of girls on the threshold of womanhood. Moby didn’t understand a word of it, and he didn’t need to. It sounded pretty. When it didn’t grate his nerves.

He knocked on the door of the last restroom.

“Bug powder,” he shouted. “I need to check your drains.”

Hearing no laughter, no twittering, no chirping, and no giggling, he braced himself for an inevitable shriek of outrage and thrust his cart, shoving aside the heavy wooden door. Empty. His shoulders relaxed. He stood over the drain, rattled it with his mop handle.

“Varmint?” he yelled down the pipe. “Hey, you varmint, you down there yet?”

Hearing no reply, he heaved the canister of bug powder off the cart and walked it to the drain.

“Last chance,” Moby muttered. “Get out now while the getting’s good.”

Moby lifted the drain grate and plunged the end of the hose with it long conical nozzle down the opening.

“You asked for it, eh?”

Moby let loose a torrent of yellow powder, laughing triumphantly.

Having completed his round, he shoved the cart into his downstairs closet, dodged a couple of nosy teachers, and made his way outside Kid Lester, to the dumpsters behind a brick enclosure, barred by a heavy gate, painted blue and gold in the school colors. He could catch a smoke break, a little help.

He rolled a fairly thick reefer, doing so in the morning before going to school, two for the day. Usually he’d only finish one of them, smoking half of one an hour or so before lunch, and the other half an hour or so before going home. Every once in a while he’d have to chase off some punk wanting a hit.

“Get lost, kid,” he’d say. “This my prescription.”

“But they don’t give prescriptions for that here,” countered the usual protest.

“It’s my prescription, kid. I wrote it myself. Now scram.”

He lit the joint with a tarnished brass lighter, and pulled a long drag, holding the inhalation for several long seconds before releasing the smoke with a loud sigh. The size of his head ballooned, his fingers swelled to fantastical size, and his feet lifted a few inches off the ground. A cricket crawled across the cement near the rusting bottom of the green dumpsters, paint peeled and worn off from years of use and abuse. Moby listened to the loud scrape of the insect’s six feet crawling over the concrete. A buzz whirred through his head, and he tilted it at the muffled voices behind the barrier, trying to hear something important. Sometimes that happened. You just couldn’t tell. Someone was yammering something right now, though. He cocked his ear.

Ah. Those bastards.

“What’s that,” he said or thought, never able really to tell. He waited for the reply.

“Yeah, I saw it. When? Day before yesterday. That’d be Monday. You know what a day is, right? Well, then, count two of them and go back.”

He paused.

“No, I haven’t seen it since, and don’t want to.”

Moby tilted his head angrily away from the barrier.

“No I won’t contact you if I see it again. No, you can’t contact me either. I don’t like you. I don’t like talking to you. Now get out of here you, you got no business in my head.”

Moby looked up. Two men in short-cropped hair wearing horn-rimmed glasses were standing in the opened gate of the dumpster enclosure, staring at Moby in confusion.

“You talking to—“

“— us?” the Roadmen asked.

68. Wendy in the bathroom

Wendy got up from the couch to go to the bathroom. When she pulled down her pink gym shorts, the same pair as yesterday so sue me she thought, she expected to see a dirty pad, or at least a spot of blood. But the pad remained white, and Wendy realized with relief mixed with fear, that she had felt no cramps that morning. Nor any throughout the day. Those pills must have really done the trick, she thought, remembering that sudden heavy flow yesterday. I’d better take them again today, though.

Just to make sure, she said as she trotted upstairs to her room, grabbed two more pills, filled a Dixie cup of water in her bathroom upstairs, juggled the pills in her hand, lifting them to her mouth when she saw her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her hair was pulled in a loose bun piled on the upper back of her head, her eyes looked haggard, with dark bags sagging under them, her cheeks seemed hollow, sunken, and her lips were pale. She hadn’t showered since yesterday. She looked bad, as if ill or newly recovered from a long illness.

She didn’t look sixteen or youthful. She looked worn, pale.

She looked at the pills in her hand. Sara had given them to her. Something else of Sara’s. Three days ago she wouldn’t have even questioned it, but now, something in her resisted any thought of Sara, refused any connection with that person. I need to dump her, and dump her fast, she said. Anything to do with her has to go.

She tossed the pills into the toilet, following those with the rest of the package, carefully ripping open each receptacle to pop a pink pill into the water of the toilet bowl.

She wouldn’t be needing those anymore.

She wouldn’t be needing anything Sara had given her.

She licked her dry and parched lips, leaning forward to inspect them.

They looked fine, just normal, everyday lips. A little pale, a little thin and deflated but normal.

Her mood lifted as she left the bathroom. The sudden buoyancy of freedom.

I feel pretty good as it is. All things considered.

She still worried about the photos, but the worry, the anxiety, the humiliation nestled in the back of her mind, where she didn’t have to dwell on it. Yesterday had done much to restore her spirits, to bring her back to that better place, the place she recognized as the home of her mind, herself, her own thoughts. Reading did that. Reading did that to her.

Yesterday, staying home from school, gave Wendy a sense of freedom, of adventure, of spontaneity spurred on by the Vendler book, by the Randall account of the Hightower Rock Meteorite. Today, however, lowered like a gray cloud over that feeling of liberation. Restless, she paced the living room, hopped to the kitchen, threw open the door to the refrigerator, staring blankly at the contents for several long minutes, slammed the door, paced the living room, plopped on the sofa, turned on the TV, jumped up, ran to the kitchen, and threw open the door to the refrigerator to stare blankly at the contents for several long minutes.

Not quite bored, Wendy endured that gray desperation of having to fill a time which habit and authority had already slated, outlined, and defined for her. Not missing French, she nonetheless missed the determined quanta of French, the cordoned-off space of time where Wendy the person could be Wendy the student. Not that she put it that way. God, I’m bored, she thought. At least I had something to do in school.

So she did what all teenage girls do. She snooped.

And snooping meant her mother’s room.

Her mother’s room occupied the rear of their house on the second floor, running along the entirety of the west side. Crossing the mezzanine at the top of the stairs, Wendy turned left, and with the fearfulness of getting caught in the act of committing some vague transgression, turned the polished brass knob to Mary’s bedroom. Sunlight came only indirectly into the dark, dimly lighted room through two tall and narrow windows lining the south side of the room, covered by layers of long white lace over billowing panels of gauze-like sheer. A long dresser with a long wide mirror stood against the east wall, while Mary’s queen size bed jutted perpendicular to the wall opposite.

A door to north of the bedroom, on the right side as Wendy entered, led to the master bathroom, and beyond that a fairly spacious walk-in closet. Not as large as Sara’s though, thought Wendy. All the furniture in Mary’s bedroom matched, stained a light brown, almost blond, in mid-century Vespuccian style, the headboard containing built-in shelves, the dresser and bed low, long, and sleek. On each side of the bed stood matching night tables, low and squat, mid-century étagères, stained dark blond or light brown, each with a short, polished brass lamp on the top shelf of the table. Mary prized her bedroom furniture, handed down from her own mother who had insisted on their future value.

The bedroom smelled of her mother’s perfume, vaguely vanilla with the scent of sandalwood. A warm, pretty aroma filled Wendy with a longing for childhood, a sudden desire to jump in her mother’s arms to show her a new doll bought that day for her by her father. What day, Wendy asked herself as she turned the lamps on, each one in turn, trying to find a memory for the sudden image. Gosh. She must have been young then, her mother and father towered over her giant-like, huge and almighty. The brass lamps suffused the room in soft, warm glow.

Wendy pulled open the doors of her mother’s dresser, one by one, rummaging through hose, underwear, some plain white or tan-colored panties, some more risqué panties made of silk or satin lace, plain and lacy brasiers, some full cups, some demi, socks, pajama tops and pajama bottoms, small, rectangular boxes filled with odd gimcracks, shells from a day at the beach, costume jewelry, plastic rings and necklaces plated in fake silver and fake red plastic rubies, bought from a gumball machine long ago and kept by the mother or father in testimony of a past joy and happiness, an unretrievable history. An envelope filled with photographs of a day spent at a fun park somewhere up North, with Wendy about ten or eleven, delighted and laughing, the husband’s arm cast affectionately around the wife’s shoulder.

Her surprise at finding the box of condoms was exceeded only by her discovery of her mother’s large, flesh-colored dildo, eight inches and descriptively life-like, replete with rubber-like testicles. Wendy held it loosely in her hands, amazed at finding something so sexual about her mother, something at once so intimate and intrusive. She ran her hands over it, by now familiar with the texture, familiar with the shape, familiar with the touch of rubbery phallus. She had one in her own room. Well, I mean. In the garbage now, she realized. But a dick nonetheless, so much like the dick she had used on herself. So much like the dick Brad had pumped into her. Just three days ago.

God, they were nice to feel. Strange, elusive, but somehow right. She held the dildo close to her face, then rubbed her cheek with its length, remembering how she had taken the entirety of Brad’s cock into her mouth, and into her innermost being, how she had coaxed and guided him with her legs. Wendy touched the tip, the bulbous tip of the artificial cock against her nose, trying to smell something beyond the faint, lingering plastic smell. Did she imagine it or did she really detect a broad, pungent odor, the barest trace of vaginal secretion? But the phallus seemed clean. She placed the tip against her lips, smiling at her image in the mirror.

Stifling a giggle, she swayed her hip to the left, and pulled up the bottom of her gym shorts, revealing her panties under the pink cloth of her shorts. Was this sexy? Was this a sexy pose? She placed her lips over the dildo’s tip, half-swallowing the cock head. She made a sucking face and winked at the girl in the mirror. Or is this stupid? The dildo having been in her mother, having been used to fuck her mother, having fucked her mother’s pussy, at night, while Wendy slept or did homework, perturbed the girl. Between a loathsome mixture of embarrassment, shame, disgust, and arousal, Wendy pulled the dildo from her mouth.

Gross.

Then she slid the tip of the dildo over her lips, along the rise and fall of her mouth, lips that felt dry, parched, and barren. The lips of one dying in the desert, dry and flaking in the heat of the burning sun. Gross, maybe. But somehow. Oh god. Somehow wonderful. But her dry lips felt parched, scorched. If she did what she planned on doing, if she really was going to do it, wouldn’t it be better in pink? Shouldn’t she dress for the occasion, wear makeup, and really get into it? If she did, though, that would be that. She wouldn’t even think about throwing that shit away. Not again. She needed to make up her mind.

She stood indecisively in front of the mirror, holding the tip of the dildo in her mouth, wondering if she looked stupid, sexy, or both.

I look at myself too much in the mirror, she thought, removing the phallus. She imagined her face, horribly scarred and disfigured by fire, perhaps a car crash, or a terrorist attack, a gas leak, or a maniac with acid. Would I still be Wendy? Am I Wendy now? Who is Wendy, and who named me me? What if she lost a leg or an arm? Succumbed to sclerosis, secretly lurking in her body, waiting to manifest on her 18th birthday? What if she had red hair and green eyes, brown hair and brown eyes? Could a Wendy have brown hair? Could a Wendy Love have freckles or contract leprosy, like the heroine of The Memoirs of Robin Lustrous?

She sat on the foot of her mother’s bed, still gazing into the mirror without looking, suddenly dizzy and afraid, almost terrified. She closed her eyes to the vision of a thousand Wendys, a million Wendys, whirling typhoon-like around a calm eye of nothingness. Each mouth open, calling out in a far away voice, demanding a claim to exist. But she alone existed, and they did not. And from the gaping mouths, or from some other source she could not see, a dim, faint, barely perceptible din arouse, a multitude of dries leaves rustling in a sudden gust, rising to a low murmur, a droning buzz on the edges of perception, that sometimes faded and sometimes rose, quickened or slowed.

Wendy stopped her ears with both hands and flashed open her eyes. Immediately the faces and the droning ceased, and Wendy saw Wendy, herself and alone.

69. Mary in backseat, hovering over Sara’s pussy

Mary lurched forward and hovered over Sara’s exposed vulva, wet and enticing, her the pink lips of her mouth parted and trembling. Any lingering doubt fled in another gushing wave of euphoric desire, intense longing, and the searing heat of lust. This is it, she thought. Sliding on the side of her bare hip to position herself, she moved her right hand over the top of Sara’s knee, feeling a woman’s, a girl’s really, leg in a sexual manner for the second time in as many days. She ran the palm of her hand over the yielding flesh, marveling at the smoothness of Sara’ skin, so like and unlike Renee’s.

Sara was smaller, trimmer, fitter than the girl from the coffee shop. The muscles of her legs, though tighter, harder, than Renee’s still felt radically different from Steve’s. Smaller and more enticing. So, so good, so lovely. So feminine. Mary patted Sara’s left leg with her left hand, as she held both legs apart, moving her right hand inward, towards the inside of Sara’s thigh, moving slowly, slowly towards the warm and wet center. The fleshy outer lips of Sara’s pussy darkened and swelled as Mary’s hand drew closer, touching the smooth skin of the girl in loving, delighted strokes, sometimes with the tips of her fingers, sometimes with the palm of her hand, sometimes in straight caresses, now in circular motions. Sara sighed, and her legs trembled at Mary’s delicate touch.

“Well,” Sara said.

“Oh, god, honey. I just want to take my time, I could stay here for hours just looking at you, girl,” Mary said, almost chanting in a far away voice as she stared transfixed by Sara’s glistening and swelling lips, bare, exposed, ready.

“I can’t,” whispered Sara, as she raised her two hands, gripped the sides and back of Mary’s head, and pulled her inward, inward, inward.

When Mary’s lips made contact with Sara’s pussy, her mind seemed to explode. At first hesitant, she held her open lips against the intricate and moist swirls, then gradually moved up and down, parting her lips further and protruding an uncertain tongue. She tasted Sara’s honey and moaned, breathing in and into Sara’s heated musk. Moving her mouth from side to side, she first edge the smooth fatty flesh, the puffy side of Sara’s quivering lips, before lapping hungrily and greedily along the puffy labia with full length and flat of her tongue, bringing it over to the center to lick Sara’s pussy directly, eagerly trying to plunge her tongue directly into Sara’s vagina, the channel of her love.

“Lick higher,” Sara encouraged, “lick my clit, flick it with her tongue. Then hold your mouth against me, against my whole pussy.”

Slowly, step by step Sara instructed and encouraged Mary, until Sara’s undulating hips hammered and pumped into Mary’s open mouth. Sara ground her pussy into Mary’s mouth, holding her head against her spasming cunt and smashing the sides of her face with the vice of her thighs. Sara came in a relief of flooding pressure, her sticky fluids covering Mary’s mouth like syrup.

“You’re coming home with me,” Sara said, getting up quickly to open the car door. She got behind the wheel and adjusted her rearview mirror. She saw Mary start to get out.

“No, stay there in the middle of the seat. Spread your legs. I want to see you rubbing your hot pussy all the way home.”

“But I have to get back to work,” Mary frantically looked at her small rectangular watch on its thin black leather band. “Lunch hour been over for—“

“You can call in while you rub yourself, Mary. You’re not going back to work today.”

“I’m not?” Mary asked, confused.

“No, you’re not.”

Sara winked at Mary’s frightened face in the mirror.

“We’ll have so much more fun than you can have at work, Mary. Besides, it’s only a job.”

“But.”

“We’ll get to that later. Now go ahead and play with yourself for me. When you get ready to come, call your work.”

Mary closed her eyes, moved her right hand to her groin.

“Spread those legs wider, all the way, and pull your blouse away. I want to see your tits, Mary.”

Mary shivered at the thought of being so exposed in the back seat of Sara’s car. A muted voice, a far-away voice, a voice somewhere deep within Mary’s mind protested, but Mary, consumed with lust, desire, the taste of Sara’s pussy on her smeared mouth, Sara’s juices shining on the smeared makeup of her cheeks, ignored it. God she was hot, god she need release, and Sara was just so. So incredible and direct. Sara knew exactly what she needed. Mary pulled the sides of her blouse apart.

“Get rid of that bra. No more bras for you, Mary. Ever. You won’t need them.”

The older woman leaned forward, reached her hands behind her back and unhooked her bra, shuffling out of it. She leaned back against the seat. Her blouse fell open, and she spread her legs, stretching her feet to each side of the car. Then she plunged her right hand over her pussy, spreading her lips wide as she fingered herself with her middle finger, slipping it in and out of her wet hole and up and down the hood of her hard clitoris.

“That’s it, baby,” Sara said. “Keep doing that all the way home.”

Sara started the car, put it in gear, and drove off.

70. Pain Rabble craft

The black triangle floated lazily and lightly in the morning sky above, miles above Terra Infirma, a black butterfly above the Sovereignty of Nuevo Metziticli, a speck on the upper layers of the stratosphere. The pilot stared out the viewport, marveling at the world below, how tiny it looked, how fragile and vulnerable, how open and accessible to any kind of aerial assault, as he opened his thermos and poured a nice small cup of black of coffee.

“Want some?” he asked to his co-pilot.

“Nah, makes me a nervous wreck,” replied the co-pilot.

“Suit yourself.”

Suddenly the craft was jolted by a wave of disturbed air. Hot coffee splashed on the pilot’s flight suit, but the pilot ignored it to look out the viewport. Three circular, saucer-shaped craft darted past the black triangle, swung rapidly around it, one whizzed over the top canopy while another swung below, circling the craft, while the third maintained a direct line of sight with the pilot of the TR-3B. The three craft danced around the black triangle, as if mocking it, daring it to make a move. The TR-3B remained perfectly still, a butterfly caught in a game of wasps. Suddenly the three craft zoomed away at speeds which defied measurement.

“Should we give chase?” asked the co-pilot.

“No point,” the pilot said. “They’re already gone.”

He looked at the pool of coffee splashed on his lap.

“Dammit,” he said. “I hate those bastards.”

The three saucer shapes reappeared, seemingly out of nowhere because they moved so fast, over the parking lot behind Lynn’s Transmission and Fertilizer. Hovering only long enough to extend thin legs from their hulls, the saucers landed, propped low to the ground, each on a short tripod. Landing stairs dropped from the center of each saucer, lowering to the edge of each craft, past the rim. Tall, strange looking beings emerged from the saucers, descending the stairs. Difficult to discern clearly, any onlooker would have stood momentarily paralyzed before breaking into a sweating panic as far from the creatures as possible.

They might have been reptilian, or insect-like, or vampiric, or ghoulish. You couldn’t really say for sure. You could only tell that they exuded a foul air, the air of something best left in the dark, best left under the rock from which they had crawled. They carried terrible looking things, sharp looking things, pointy, stabby looking things, things best avoided. Clad in sinister black, they appeared altogether, well, evil—for lack of a better word. Again, something best avoided.

Each craft held three such beings. Each trio gathered around their own craft. One creature from each trio held a tightly packed blue bundle which it open and cast over the top of the craft. The blue bundle unwound, bursting open the moment the crew member tossed it, still holding on to one edge of what now proved to be a kind of blue tarp. The two other crew members tied the tarp down to the foot of each leg. When each crew finished covering their craft, they gathered in a group in front of the squad of concealed saucers.

“Should we keep a guard on watch?” one of them asked.

“No,” said their leader. “Not necessary. No one looks under a blue tarp. Not on this planet. Come. Let us go.”

The nine beings marched purposefully toward the steel rear door of Lynn’s Transmission and Fertilizer, which had been closed and vacant for several years now. But as the property was owned and taxes maintained, no one asked any questions. At any rate, the townsfolk told themselves, what Lynn did in and with his own damned business was nobody’s business but his. Had they known what condition Lynn had been kept in those past several years, they might have changed their opinion on that.

The leader of the nine reached into a pocket at his hip, pulled out a ring of keys attached to a flexible steel chain hooked by a leather loop to his belt, selected one and unlocked the heavy deadbolt locking the solid door.

“I love these things,” he said, turning behind him. “Planet’s got potential, I tell you. Just look at this chain.”

The leader held the chain of keys up, caressing the hard steel links with a clawed hand. Then he felt the loop of the chain hooked to his belt with admiration, closing his eyes as he ran his clawed finger over the leather’s texture.

“Real animal skin, too. Flayed from a real body. These monkeys will go far.”

The eight beings behind him murmured and nodded appreciatively. Then they entered the transmission and fertilizer shop, stepping through the narrow door one by one, dipping their heads as they did so.

The transmission shop had been gutted, the windows covered and barred, all shelves removed, until only a wide, dimly lighted, empty space remained. Or almost empty. A long steel table stood in the center of the room, racks, shackles, hooks, chains, sharp instruments, and other metallic objects of unknown purpose lined the walls. Fluorescent lamps hung from the ceiling in three rows, but only a dim, flickering, and useless light fell from them.

An interesting object lay on the table, covered and protected by a glass-like, transparent rectangular box, which completely enclosed the thing on the table. Tubes and wires ran along the sides and edges of the table and into the glass-like cover through holes and openings set at regular intervals near the bottom of the sides of the cover. Two wide tubes, white and corrugated, hung under the table, from the bottom of the tabletop to a drain in the floor. One tube hooked into the bottom of the table near the end of one side of the table, the short end of the table, and another tube hung down from the somewhere near the center of the table.

The nine beings clustered around the object on the table, peering intently through the top of the transparent cover. In front of each of the nine beings hung a kind of metal circlet, a kind of wire crown, resembling for all the world a tambourine without the drum skin, from a hook attached to the table edge. A wire ran from each crown into one of the holes in the transparent cover.

“Is it?”

One of the beings looked at a monitor at the side of the table and tapped a few keys on the below the monitor.

“Yes. Of course.”

“So peaceful.”

“So sweet.”

“So tasty.”

“Stop that,” said the leader, almost harshly. “You know the buzzers say we can’t eat them. We can’t do that anymore.”

“Who’s to stop us?” asked one of them. “They won’t know. They can’t be everywhere.”

“No. But they can be everywhen. And that’s almost as bad. They’ll find out. You don’t want them to find out. Trust me.”

The other eight bowed their heads. They all remembered the Stasis. Or, rather, didn’t remember it. Which was the whole point. But they knew to a certainty that it had been bad. Very bad.

No. We can’t eat them, they agreed. But we can hear them. We can share with them.

Yes, yes. We can share. Let’s share.

I want to share so bad.

The eight beings shimmied and oscillated from side to side, seeming to squirm as they stood, flowing from head to foot in smooth undulations.

So bad.

We want to share.

“Let’s share,” the leader said, bowing his head to the common will. “But then we have work to do.”

Then each of the nine raised the circlet in front of him and placed it on his head. Immediately they stood immobile, as if suddenly paralyzed, stiff, and erect.

71. Mary at Sara’s house

Mary entered Sara’s house with trepidation, a sudden feeling of reluctance overcoming her, now that she had orgasmed, several times, on the way home, staring into Sara’s eyes in the rearview mirror as she groaned, shrieked and whimpered. The first orgasm came as she called her supervisor, letting her know that she would be taking the rest of the day off.

“Again?” her supervisor had asked, peeved and worried. “This is the second time this week.”

“Um. I, I, I’m okay. I just have to, oh god, I have an errand to run. It can’t wait.”

Mary quickly ended the phone call as her climax surged through her.

Afterward, Sara talked her through three more orgasms, each other more unrestrained, uninhibited than the last, until Mary found herself shaking and gyrating on Sara’s backseat, her hand a piston in her pussy as Sara urged her own.

“Because you’re just a filthy whore, aren’t you, Mary? Just a filthy dyke slut who needs to get off looking thinking about straight girls having sex with men. God, you just need to see that semen shooting all over their sweating naked bodies, don’t you Mary, streams of hot come shooting across their faces, their tits, pouring out on their pussies, their quivering hot pussies, Mary, just waiting for you to lick it all off.”

Mary whimpered.

“Just a hot lesbian slut fucking herself in the car for me. Cause you like people to watch, don’t you, Mary? You love it when women, girls, watch you fuck yourself, watch you come and come and come, don’t you?”

Oh god she did. She loved it so much.

“You want Maddy to watch you, don’t you? Oh god, you want Maddy to watch you come.”

Maddy.

“But Maddy’s never around is she? How can she be? She’s Wendy’s friend, and you’d have to fuck yourself in Wendy’s bedroom whenever she comes over. That would so hard, wouldn’t it? So hard to masturbate in front of Maddy when Wendy’s there. How could you get Maddy alone?”

Mary groaned. It was hard to do that. It was impossible. She couldn’t think of a way to get Maddy alone.

“You’d have to do it in front of Wendy.”

What?

“You’d have to fuck yourself in front of Wendy at the same time.”

Oh god.

“Wendy would have to be staring at your cunt while you fucked it with your fingers, she’d have to be sitting next to Maddy on her bed while you sat on the floor, legs up and spread out, showing little Maddy your steaming pussy, plunging your fingers into your wet hole.”

“Maddy and Wendy sitting on the bed in their little nighties, watching you masturbate, Maddy’s leg cast over Wendy’s, both of their legs spread out, showing you their little white panties while you fuck yourself staring at the wet spots in their underwear. Would you like that, Mary? Would like to see Wendy and Maddy on the bed, Maddy’s hand slowly trailing over Wendy’s belly to go between her legs as she slips her finger underneath your daughter’s wet panties? God, I bet you would. I bet you’d like that a lot.”

She would. She’d like that a lot.

“Does Wendy take Maddy’s panties off, Mary? Will Wendy take off her friend’s panties?”

Mary nodded.

“What’s that? I didn’t hear you. Tell me what Wendy does.”

Mary’s voice cracked.

“She takes off Maddy’s panties. Wendy takes off her panties.”

Sara smiled.

“Good, Mary. That’s very good. But what should Wendy do with her own underwear? Should she just leave them on, and leave Maddy the only one showing you her pussy, or should she show solidarity with Maddy and take her panties off?”

“Sara. Please.”

“Keep rubbing your pussy, Mary. We’re almost done. Should Wendy take her panties off too?”

Mary’s voice croaked out a dry whisper.

“Yes.”

“God, Mary, you’re such a slut, a total mom whore. Just getting off to Maddy’s pussy, staring at her young pussy while you fuck yourself. But you don’t stop there, do you, Mary? You don’t stop at looking at just Maddy’s pussy, do you?”

“Please, Sara.”

“Because there’s another pussy in the room. Whose pussy is it, Mary? Whose pussy are you looking at as you finger you steaming wet pussy? So hot now, the girls on the bed can smell you.”

“Please, Sara.”

“Whose?” Sara repeated the question in a tone that demanded a response, breaking Mary.

“Wendy’s. I’m fucking myself looking at Wendy’s pussy.”

Sara smiled into the mirror.

“Because you’re what kind of mother?”

“Because I’m bad, Sara. I’m a bad mother.”

When she calmed down from that orgasm, Mary withdrew into herself. Suddenly self-conscious, wondering what she was doing in the back seat of some teenage girl’s car, blouse undone, without her skirt or panties, she pressed her legs together tightly and slid to the passenger side of the seat, as far away from Sara as possible. She slowly and thoughtfully buttoned her shirt.

Sara glanced at her in the mirror but didn’t say anything.

Then Sara’s Mercedes pulled into the long driveway to her house, and Mary looked up at the large glass house in wondering curiosity.

Mary suddenly felt a tinge of worry, of outright fear, actually.

“What about your own mother, Sara? Is anyone else home? What if she comes in while I’m, while I’m here?”

“While we’re having sex you mean, Mary?” Sara laughed. “Don’t worry about her catching us have sex. She doesn’t live here. It’s just me.”

“Just you?” Mary said, shocked.

“Yes, silly. Just me.”

Mary hesitated.

“I’m not sure, Sara. Maybe we should. Maybe I should.”

Sara pulled into the garage, stopped the car, and walked around the back, in her bare feet, and still nude from her waist down. Sara opened the passenger door, and Mary came face to face once again with Sara’s bare pussy. Sara reached down, rubbed herself with her fingers, pumping two fingers into her hole. She had been playing with herself the entire drive home, and she was so wet. So wet. She took her hand out of her pussy and, holding her hand out towards Mary, plunged her fingers into the woman’s mouth. Mary resisted a second, then opened her lips to let Sara’s sticky fingers in.

“That’s right, baby. Suck on my pussy juice. God you love pussy, don’t you Mary? You can’t get enough of it. You can never get enough of it.”

Mary made soft mewing sounds as she closed her eyes and sucked on Sara’s fingers.

“Look at me, Mary.”

Mary opened her glazed blue eyes, looking for Sara’s instruction.

“We’re going to have sex, Mary. In my house. All night long. You’re going to spend the night me, Mary. I’m going to fuck every single one of your holes. Every one of your hot holes. And you’re going to love it, Mary. You’re going to love it so much.”

Mary whimpered, and Sara smiled at her gently, kindly. A small tear trickled from the corner of Mary’s right eye. Sara reached down and wiped it across the mother’s cheek.

“You’re going to be such a dyke whore after this week.”

Sara took Mary’s hand and led her through the garage to the house. They walked up a short flight of stairs. Sara placed Mary in front of her, holding her waist with one hand and gently palming the round cheeks of Mary’s ass as it swayed above her. She ran her fingers through the top of the crack of Mary’s ass, felt around the rosebud of her anus before sliding further down to plunge a fingertip into the woman’s leaking fuck hole.

Mary stopped and pushed her ass towards Sara.

“Keep going, sugar,” Sara whispered, pumping her fingers in and out of the soaking cunt. With the same hand she stuck the tip of her thumb into Mary’s asshole. “We’ve got the whole night in front of us. For me to fuck that beautiful ass of yours.” Sara gently shoved Mary’s shoulder forward with her left hand, cupping her breast over her blouse as she slipped her hand down to clasp her waist. Her right hand stayed in Mary’s pussy and butthole.

Mary shuddered and kept walking up the stairs.

The stairs led to a short, wide hall, almost a coat room or foyer. The kitchen opened up through two doorless entries, separated by a wall. Mary walked through the entrance, slowly, trembling, enjoying every moment of Sara’s hand up her soaking vagina and ass Sara’s thumb had inched its way into the mother’s asshole, and by the time they had reached the kitchen, it had fully submerged into the wonderful warmth of Mary’s ass.

“Okay. Just stand there, darling. I think it’s time we had some refreshments.”

Sara removed her fingers and thumb from Mary’s ass and pussy. She ran her right hand up Mary’s side and across her cheek.

“Open your mouth,” she ordered.

Mary opened her mouth, and Sara stuck her thumb in it.

“Suck on your ass, Mary. Clean my dirty thumb.”

Mary slumped against Sara, who propped her up while Mary squirmed, tasting her own ass while sucking greedily on Sara’s thumb.

“That’s it, girl. Clean my thumb with your mouth. God, you’re such a dirty whore.”

Finally Sara removed her thumb, spun Mary around, leaned up, and kissed Mary full on the mouth, passionately exploring her mouth with her tongue, tasting Mary, tasting Mary’s ass, tasting Mary’s desire. Mary shook as she grabbed the young girl with both arms, embracing her madly in a tight, lust-fueled hug. Sara pulled away at least, marveling at the woman’s face above her own, smeared with vaginal fluids, pink lipstick smudge across her mouth, across the edges of her lips like a demented clown. Her black mascara and eyeliner a blurry mess from Sara grinding her cunt against the whole of Mary’s face, using her sweating thighs for leverage.

Sara held a hand against Mary’s breast as Wendy’s mother continued to hold her. She slipped her hand under Mary’s blouse and cupped her breast, pinching and pulling her nipple to make it hard. Mary closed her eyes at the sensations this young woman, the adolescent, unrelentingly produced in her, stimulating her without letting up. She pressed her thighs together.

“God, Sara, you—“

“Do you like that, baby girl? Do you like it when I make your tits all hard?”

“Oh, god, Sara.”

“Just you stay there while I get us something to drink. You want a vitamin? I’ll get you a vitamin.”

Sara’s hand lingered on Mary’s tit. Then the girl sighed, pinched it a last time, and turned to go to the refrigerator, which stood in a built-in recess between the two entries to the kitchen.

She came back with two drinks, two pink smoothies in pint-sized bottles. The bottles sported no label, but the pink liquid in the clear glass bottles seemed to glimmer and sparkle as Sara handed one to Mary. Mary took hers, twisted the flat cap off, and put the bottle to her lips. She did feel a little thirst. A little hungry, too. Her mouth had watered at the first sight of the pink smoothie, and a tiny thrill of excitement ran through her.

Mary upturned the bottle for a long swig of the smoothie, sucking almost a third of the bottle before pulling it back from her mouth. She saw Sara staring at her and giggled.

“I just like these so much,” she said, her eyes twinkling and glazing over.

“I see that,” smiled Sara, taking a small sip from her bottle. “Here,” she added. “Put this pill in your mouth and swallow it with your next gulp of smoothie.”

Sara held two elongated gel capsules, about the size of a multi-vitamin, pink on half of the capsule and red on the other. She put one in her mouth, leaving the other for Mary.

“What is it?” Mary asked, somewhat suspiciously.

“It’s good for you, sweetie. Don’t be shy. Put it in your mouth.”

Mary gingerly took the capsule from Sara’s open palm and popped it into her mouth without further hesitation. After all, if Sara took these.

“Drink up,” Sara said, lifting her bottle.

“Drink up,” Mary repeated, not knowing exactly why.

Ten minutes later, Mary sprawled on the sofa in the large entertainment room upstairs, completely naked, her back against a cushion on the arm of the sofa, her legs spread out, her left leg hooked over the sofa back, her right leg out and bent at the knee, her barefoot flat on the plush carpet. Between her legs, Sara nuzzled, mouthed, kissed, and licked Mary’s incredibly wet and enflamed flower. Mary’s hips rose and fell and shimmered side to side to Sara’s relentless mouth, lip, and tongue.

By now, the effects of the pink smoothies, loaded with stimulants, aphrodisiacs, and chemicals designed to collapse inhibition, had begun to overwhelm Mary’s mind, already turned on beyond anything she had ever experienced in her life. Combined with capsule, loaded with chemicals designed by The Diana Group Research Division to increase blood flow to the vulva, to hyper-stimulate the erogenous zones of the body. Mary’s nipples poked erect like bullets, hard and long, from her aching breasts, her clit trembled rock hard and red, and still Sara kept licking, licking, licking, driving Mary to the edge of a paroxysmic orgasm.

Sara hands kneaded the sweating flesh of Mary’s tits, flicking, cupping, and pinching her hard bullets, sometimes playfully, sometimes almost mercilessly painful, pulling them harshly from her breasts, stretching the skin until Mary cried out in delighted pain, before letting them go and caressing them lovingly, softly.

Sara released her mouth from Mary’s drenched and steaming hole. Her mobile phone lay next to her on the sofa. Sara picked it up and held it out to Mary.

“Call your daughter, baby. Tell her won’t be coming home tonight. Tell her you won’t be coming home until tomorrow night.”

Mary took the phone, holding it loosely, indecisively.

“What will I tell her?”

“You’ll think of something. Just call her. Call Wendy.”

Mary dialed her home number. After several rings, the other end of the line picked up.

“Hello, Wendy, honey? How are you doing, baby? It’s me, sweetie.”

Sara’s mouth returned to her work on the mother’s hot snatch.

Mary voice quaked and croaked as she continued speaking to her daughter.

“Wendy darling, listen. I’m not, oh god, I’m not going be able to come home tonight. A friend called and—“

Mary brought her thighs together in a tight vice, but Sara pushed them apart, lifted her mouth off Mary’s pussy, and said, in a loud enough voice to alarm Mary, “Keep your legs wide, baby. Spread your legs wide for me, that’s a good girl.”

Sara turned to the pussy, then paused and looked up again to wink at Mary.

“I want you to come nice and good for Wendy. Don’t hold back, okay, honey?”

Sara covered Mary’s vulva from the mons pubis to almost the entirety of her vaginal opening with her mouth, her red lipstick smearing red marks along the bare, puffy sides of the mother’s cunt. She sucked and licked at the hot pussy in her mouth, and Mary thrust her pelvis further and further into the mouth of the girl between her legs.

Mary felt her rising orgasm, delayed for a moment’s pause, surge back, flooding over her in powerful waves.

“It’s just that, oh Wendy, Wendy, it’s just that, I’m not going to be, oh god, Wendy, a friend had an emergency. She’s just crushed, Wendy. Her boyfriend broke up with her. I need to, I need to, stay with her tonight. Oh god. I won’t be coming, coming home baby. Tonight. Oh god, I’m coming.”

“Tell her how hard you’re coming, sugar.”

“Oh god, Wendy, I’m coming, I’m coming so fucking hard, I’m so fucking wet, Wendy. Sara’s sucking on my cunt, and she’s making me come so fucking hard.”

“Because you’re a dyke whore, Mary,” Sara added.

“Because I’m a dyke whore, Wendy. Oh god, you’re mother’s a dyke whore.”

Mary exploded.

72. Wendy finds picture of herself on laptop

Wendy dropped her mother’s dildo onto the bed, and flung herself back against the plush, quilted duvet, and scooted herself up to the orderly pile of cushions and pillows heaped against the headboard. She struggled up against the three layers of cushions, pulling back the bedcovers and rearranging the pillows. Reaching under one of the pillows, her hand encountered something flat, cold, and plastic. Moving the pillow aside and pulling out the object, she saw her mother’s laptop. Curious, she flipped the lid open and tapped the Enter key.

The screen came alive to the picture of Wendy leaning against the passenger door of Brad’s back seat, her face a mess of semen and her legs wide open for the camera on Brad’s phone.

“What the fuck, Mom,” Wendy cried aloud. “Why the fuck is this open on your computer?”

Wendy stared at the picture, thinking her face looked flat and chubby. She never liked to see herself in a photo, and now here she was. But why had her mother left it open like that? She knelt on the bed staring at her image on the computer screen. Why on earth would her mother have this open? Then it dawned on her. How deeply ashamed her mother must have been, how embarrassed for her daughter. She must have opened the picture, seen her only daughter splayed out like a whore, and closed the laptop, unable to bear looking at. No wonder she stuck it under the pillow.

But why did she have it in the first place?

She closed the photo, saw the forwarded message in her mother’s inbox. So she forwarded it from Wendy’s inbox. She forwarded both pictures! Wendy felt humiliated, shocked, and violated. How dare she! How dare she! I’ve never gone through her stuff. I’d never snoop through her email. Which gave her an idea. Now was the chance.

Wendy poked through the rest of her mother’s email, most of it junk. She saw a lot of cat photos sent to her from Maddy’s mother, and a couple from Steve. Noticing an attachment in one of the emails, she opened that one, clicked the file. Her eyes shot wide open at a close-up photo of someone’s dick, apparently Steve’s, at full length, long and wide, with his hand gripping his cock near the base, just in front of his testicles.

“No way,” she said. “He sends her dick pics?”

She studied the penis in the photo, curious, sitting on the side of her hip, her legs stretched towards the foot of the bed, bare thigh and calf on top of bare thigh and calf. She had already seen Brad’s cock, the dicks of the men in the magazine, and the cocks of Cock-Hungry Coeds, but she liked to look at them, even if they looked kind of funny. A warm feeling tingled and spread in the pit of her stomach, just above her groin, and her pulse quickened. She wished she had paid more attention to Brad’s cock while sucking on it. She remembered the feeling now, it came back to her in a sudden upwelling of something like pride and something like desire and something like. Something like. Care?

She had cuddled Brad’s balls, running her fingers through the stiff hair on his testicles, cupping and lightly squeezing them in her hand. Not too hard, Sara had said, and she remembered to treat them kindly. All those jokes she had heard about the boys in school wracking their balls. She didn’t want that. Not for Brad. She wanted to stroke him, to feel him, to dote on him. To show him how much she, what, cared for him. Care.

Not love. No, she’d known that from the start. She didn’t love Brad. She never imagined that she could love Brad. But she wanted, and had wanted for a long time, a long time without knowing it, or being able to admit it, to show him how nice Wendy could treat him.

Why?

Oh god. So I wouldn’t be overlooked.

I’m always overlooked.

Brad has never noticed me, never talked to me, not really, never really looked at me. I mean, why would he?

I’m just plain. I’m not in sports, I’m not in band, I don’t do anything. I’m not in glee club, I don’t even play chess like the other dorks. I’m not even on the debate team. She had been asked to consider joining, but Wendy, horrified at the idea of speaking in a group, quickly shook her head and smile a polite but firm no.

Then all those boys started looking at me when I wore Sara’s makeup the week last week. Even Brad struck a conversation with me. Even Brad asked me out. Me. Going out with the star quarterback. It had felt like a dream, an old movie from the last century, one of those her mother used to watch. And god, I was just so horny that night. I don’t know how things got so fast, so far. I’m kind of getting horny now, she realized, her eyes fixed on the thick cock leering at her from the screen of her mother’s laptop.

The weight of her body had caused the dildo to roll down to her hips, reaching with her left hand, she grasped the dildo and rolled over on her back, raised her legs to her chest, lifted her ass, and slid her gym shorts and panties down her legs, kicking both items of clothing off with a kick of her foot and a twist of her ankle. She scooted close to the big fluffy pillows, enjoying the feeling of her mother’s bedcovers against her bare thighs and on the cheeks of her bare bottom. Spreading her legs wide apart, she checked her image in the mirror of her mother’s dresser, smiled, and looked at the long thick cock showing on her mother’s computer screen.

She held the dildo against the lips of her pussy, already wet with anticipation, already wet with desire. God, it didn’t take her long at all anymore, did it. Before touching herself the week before last, she had never noticed her pussy, not really. I mean, it was there. I mean, her panties were sometimes dirty, she knew about discharges. She did read. Her doctor did talk to her. She wasn’t entirely oblivious. Just not curious. Not until last week. The week before. Not until Sara.

Wendy inched the tip of the dildo into her, biting her lip and suppressing a light moan. She tilted her hips, tilted her pelvis upward towards the intruding phallus, angling her pussy at the penetrating object. She stared at Steve’s dick jutting at her from the screen, imagining it in her, imagining her fucking Steve like she had fucked Brad. He was a creep, Steve. Lurking around, trying to catch a glimpse of her tits, her ass, a bare leg. Trying to catch her walking out of the shower, dressed only in a towel covering her tits down to just below the cheeks of her ass. Her cleavage exposed to Steve’s greedy eyes. A creep.

But his dick was huge, Wendy admitted, almost as big as this dildo. She had a third of it in her now, moving it in and out slowly, enjoying the pleasure of having a cock inside her pussy now, no longer empty now, but stuffed. Her pace picked up, her hips rolled and bucked, her breath came shorter and shorter, louder. Brad had fucked her good, had come inside her, had shot his hot load right up into her hot pussy. She giggled. Her hot cunt. God, sometimes that word just felt right. Her hot, nasty cunt.

Would she let Steve blow a load inside her? How would his cock feel inside her, fucking her like he had fucked her mother so many times now. She heard it, she could hear them. Not just once or twice, but several times, two, three, sometimes four times a week. Sometimes two or three times a night. It must have felt great, the way her mother moaned and groaned. Sometimes a high-pitched squeal. Yes, Sara. Sometimes she listened. How could she not?

She’d open her door, but never walk down the hall, afraid of the creaking floor. But she could hear them from her doorway. The headboard banging against the wall, Steve grunting like the pig he was. Mom squealing, rutting like a beast in the forest, groaning into the night. Wendy’s fist gripped the base of the dildo as she rammed four inches, five inches, six inches into her, fucking herself with her mother’s sex toy, the bed below her shaking, the headboard striking the wall as Wendy tried to impale her pussy onto the manmade rod.

Oh my god, was that? She peered at the screen closely, astonished and wound up beyond belief, noticing a small droplet of pre-cum on the tip of Steve’s dick. She’d missed it fucking herself, but now it stood out, glistening. Wendy licked her lips and moaned, wishing she had it her mouth now, remember the way Brad shimmered and shook when he came in mouth.

And she had spat it up! She had spat it all up! She didn’t even try to swallow, or lick it off poor Brad’s cock, his amazing cock. She’d lick Steve’s. She swallow all of Steve’s come, if only he’d shove that hot rod into her mouth. She’d show him she could suck cock with the best of them. Sara taught her how. And Sara knew everything.

But right now Steve was fucking her, fucking her hard and fucking her fast. Wendy trembled and shook, tossed like a ragdoll from the power of his thrusts. God he was fucking her. Wendy thrust her pussy harder and harder at the dildo she pumped into her, rolling, writhing, gyrating and undulating her hips at the huge phallus. She was groaning now, between breaths, groaning at the approach of her orgasm, squealing with each new thrust of her mother’s dildo. Suddenly she clawed at the bedcovers, the soft fabric of her mother’s elegant duvet, and came and came in. The ocean of her orgasm rolled over her, and she drowned.

A phone ring roused her. The cordless phone on the night table beside the bed. Wendy slowly moved her body over to the phone and, answering it, woke fully at the human voice. It was her mother.

“Wendy darling, listen. I’m not, oh god, I’m not going be able to come home tonight. A friend called and—“

Mary continued talking, but Wendy had already hung up.

Bitch, she thought.

After taking time to soak up the last, lingering effects of her climax, she pulled the laptop to her, went to her mother’s inbox, forwarded her pictures back to her own email, and deleted her photos from her mother’s device. Going into the trash, she permanently deleted them.

You’re not going to hold those over me.

73. Later that afternoon Sara wears a strap-on

Later that afternoon, as evening approached, Mary had been plied with another pink smoothie and two more capsules. Sexually stimulated beyond anything she had ever known in her life, her mind dulled to rational thought as her limbic system took over mental functions, Mary orgasmed over and over as Sara first fucked her with her hands and mouth, then with a set of increasingly large dildos, until finally screwing Wendy’s mother in both holes with an enormous strap-on dildo, fucking her doggie-style on the plush carpet of the entertainment room, reducing Mary to a sweating, quivering mess, and still Sara did not let up.

“Oh gosh, Mary,” she’d say. “I just loving fucking your hot ass, I just love sticking my cock in your tight ass. Shake it for me, baby. Push that ass against my hard cock.”

Mary, who until that afternoon had never had anything in her ass, shuddered, shrieked, wept, howled, and pushed her ass as far back against Sara’s plastic phallus as she could. Sara had been gentle to start with, generously lubing along the length, smearing both lubrication for the dildo and the fluids flowing from Mary’s pussy between the cheeks of her ass, covering the outside of Mary’s hole and pumping a lubricated finger into her asshole. Sara encouraged Mary sweetly and tenderly, gently and slowly prodding the tip of her cock into the anal ring of Wendy’s mother, tipping it past her rosebud, then pulling it out, the tipping it just a little further in. At Sara’s urging, Mary reached a hand to her groin, rubbing her pussy, stroking the hard clit of her pussy along the length of her middle finger, stroking in long lines and circular motions.

“That’s it, baby, rub that beautiful pussy. Get your gorgeous cunt all wet and hot for me. Feel the tip of my cock on your ass. It feels good, doesn’t it baby? God you love this, don’t you, Mary? You just love it when I fuck your beautiful ass. You just want me to do this all night long, don’t you, you little dyke. You little dyke slut.”

Mary nodded as the artificial cock sank deeper in her hole.

Soft groans, sighs, cries, plaintive cries of longing and lust filled the room, coming from speakers set into the ceiling. Videos of naked women fucking each other, touching each other, lesbians kissing each other loudly, sloppily, the sounds of the kissing echoing through the room, showed on the large flat screen covering the wall. From time to time images of Wendy’s come-covered face flashed across the screen, along with the photo of her splayed legs, mixed with the videos in a collage of sapphic lust and longing, of lesbian release, and female heat.

Mary faced the screen as Sara pumped her from behind, her cock a piston in Mary’s ass. Sara gripped the sides of Mary’s smooth ass, sometimes in hard grips producing groans from the woman below and in front of her, sometimes smoothly caressing the soft curves and flesh with the palms of her hands, delighting, as Sara always delighted, in the soft, lush feel of a woman’s body.

“That’s it, baby. Look at all those beautiful women. God, women turn you on so much, don’t they Mary? You can’t get enough of them. You can’t get enough of looking at women, of touching them, of wanting them to touch you, to feel you, to caress you, to kiss you. Over and over and over again. Just to fuck you, really. Isn’t that right, honey? Oh god, you just want sex with women, don’t you sweet Mary? My sweet, sweet Mary.”

The red and pink capsules Mary took reduced her to a shivering mess of suggestibility, readily accepting anything Sara told her, greedily accepting as truth every word uttered by Sara. Because it was true. Everything Sara said was true. Beneath the sighing murmurs, the sudden squeals and shrieks of climaxing women, women in the throes of lesbian orgasm, Mary heard or thought she heard a kind of music.

Not music. Not really. But something very like music. A steady beat, a constant rhythm of tones, almost inaudible, pulsed against her ears, sometimes rising, sometimes falling below hearing.

In truth, what Mary heard was neither music nor not music, neither subliminal nor not subliminal. Using a technique invented decades ago by The Diana Group, refined by years of development under the tutelage first of Nero Craft, then of his daughter Serena, The Diana Group learned how to embed non-linear, non-verbal, and non-textual content into sonic forms, crystallizing a meaningful but non-specified content into packages delivered by the twelve notes of the Western musical scale, with variations in each note to produce subtle and unrecognizable variations in the neurological structure of the recipient.

Knowing how music could tame the savage beast, The Diana Group used music, the form of music, to reshape the human mind. See the article “Using Non-Verbal Information as Scalar Tonal Quanta in Discrete Units of Layered Sonality in Neuro-Realignment Conduction” in the New Holland Journal of Extraordinary Techno-psychology, Volume 10, Issue 4 for more information concerning The Diana Group’s research in this area.

The lipstick increased sexual desire, a desire for sensual experience, a desire to kiss and be kissed, specifically, it increased attraction to human females, the mouths and lips of human females. Women, in other words. It burned through the recipient, and created a steady glow of longing. The pink smoothies contained concentrated doses of the same substance as the lipstick. Taken internally, they had a quicker and more pronounced effect, increasing the libido beyond the ability to resist. Sex with a woman became imperative, desire for the female body all-consuming. The capsules were another story.

The red and pink capsules were designed by The Diana Group to dull or inhibit the rational part of the human psyche while building up sexual tension and suggestibility to the spoken word. Though containing little of the pink active ingredient of both the lipstick and smoothie drinks, they nonetheless produced a pronounced receptivity to sapphic implication as well as an openness to any general suggestion. When combined with the effects of the sonalistic conduction, Mary was fucked, literally and figuratively. With each new orgasm, Mary could almost feel her mind change as new ideas, new longings, new needs were created inside it.

She watched the women on screen, her glazed eyes affixed to the nude images of beautiful and lustrous women, caress and pet each other, feeling their breasts, their round asses, holding each other’s faces, smiling into each other’s eyes in mute wonder and shocked ecstasy as they came, over and over again, hands gliding over their wet, sweaty, glistening smooth bodies, each feminine curve exploding a new idea in Mary’s mind. Lesbian, her mind told her. Hot women, women are hot, she seemed to think to herself, ideas forming inside her, each new idea a new realization springing from her own being.

Dyke whore. Lust, lesbian lust. The sighs of women kissing each other, sloppy kisses as soft lip smacked against soft lip, filled the room. Mary panted alongside the sighs, backing her ass against Sara’s cock, mewing and whining to the images of women pleasuring women, leaving red lipstick marks on their bodies as they kissed and caressed each other, plunging their lovely, delicate fingers into the lovely, delicate holes of their lovers and partners. Dyke slut.

Wendy’s image flashed in and out of the videos, mesmerizing the mother.

Mary came again, and with her climax, Sara pulled her dildo from Mary’s ass, grabbed a handful of hair from the back of Mary’s head and pulled harshly, swinging the older woman around to face the remorseless teenager. She stuck the dildo in Mary’s face, a little soiled from Mary’s anus.

“Clean it, baby girl. Clean your ass off my cock. God, you want to suck this cock, don’t you? You want to suck this cock like the dirty lesbian whore you are.”

Mary nodded hungrily.

Sara plunged the cock into Mary’s ravenous and open mouth, her pink lips wrapped around the penis, sucking and working the dildo clean, grimacing and groaning as she sucked her ass off the cock, almost choking in disgust, but continuing to swallow and suck the cock, starving to satisfy the aching need building within her.

When Sara thought Mary had finished, she nudged her backward with her foot, raising her right leg and pushing the woman’s shoulder till she fell back. Sara laughed.

“You need a little break yet, baby? Do you need to take a little break?”

But Mary didn’t answer. Her head tilted to one side, her cheek pressed into the carpet, while she rubbed her red and swollen pussy frantically, desperate for another orgasm. She turned over on her side and humped her fist with her hand.

“You just stay there then. Keep rubbing yourself. Just keep coming. Over and over. I need to get the girls ready when they get here to see you.”

Girls? What girls, wondered Mary, excited beyond measure at the thought of girls coming to see her.

74. Wendy gets two visitors

It struck Wendy as odd, the amount of doing and undoing with which she had busied herself the last few days. She had never taken her computer downstairs. Her mother hadn’t even mentioned it again after their conversation downstairs on Monday. Now it was Wednesday afternoon, her computer still stood in a pile outside her door. Her mother wasn’t coming home tonight. Still angry, she hadn’t bothered to listen to her reason, but just hung up.

Fine, she thought. Don’t come home.

But that meant she couldn’t really be grounded, didn’t it? I mean, she couldn’t be grounded if the person who guarded the grounding just decided to skip out. Not that Wendy wanted to go anywhere. But that also meant she couldn’t really be grounded from her computer. Or her phone. Which meant she could hook everything back up. Set everything back up before. Before Sara. Which meant she could put her computer back to where it belonged. On the vanity dresser. No. Not the vanity. She’d need it. It’s time to grow up, she thought. It’s time to start paying attention to my appearance. But she could set her computer up on that little table, where she’d stacked her books. Where it should have been in the first place. It was a little small, but it would work.

She spent the next half hour setting her room up. After having been so productive, or so she felt, she plopped back on her bed, settling down to listen to music, adjusting the headphones to her MP4 player, when she heard the doorbell ring. Sitting up, Wendy checked her appearance. Not really dressed for visitors, still wearing the T-shirt and pink shorts she’d masturbated in, she felt a little exposed. Still.

She peeped through the peephole, and once again saw Trina’s distorted face peering up at her. Wendy smiled, happy to see a familiar face, if only momentarily. Feeling lonely all day, she opened the front door in a happy welcome, surprising Trina with its buoyant enthusiam.

“Trina! You’re back!” Wendy practically shouted.

“Hey, Wendy,” Trina grinned, “I’m back. I brought your homework again.” Trina held up a plastic bag. “Probably not what you really want to see right now.”

“Are you kidding, I’m getting bored to death just sitting around.”

“Are you coming back, then? I mean, are you coming back to school?”

“Hm. I haven’t really decided. I just don’t know. God, it was so embarrassing.” Wendy peaked out the door. No pickup truck in the driveway or in front of the house. “Hey,” she asked, “where’s your ride?”

“My dad, you mean? He dropped me off, said he’d be back later. Had somewhere to go. You don’t mind do you? I mean, if I have to stay here for a couple of hours?”

“Oh gosh, Trina. Of course I don’t mind. C’mon in.”

Wendy held open the door widely, and Trina sidestepped around her into the hallway.

75. Wendy shows Trina a picture

Wendy led Trina to the living room. They both plopped down on the couch, on separate ends. Sitting on the side of her hip, Wendy curled her bare legs to the side and leaned against the sofa’s arm. Trina sat upright in her seat, back stiff and straight, as if afraid to relax. Her first time in Wendy’s home, she eyed each object and piece of furniture with a fearful apprehension, as if just looking might break or damage all the lovely things she saw, each so orderly and neat in its place. Tall, wide wooden shelves holding books, jade figurines, porcelain vases and statuettes, photographs in silver frames, brass and silver candlesticks or scented candles in glass containers lined two walls, while fresh flowers arranged artfully in a blue and white Italian glass vase stood on the polished coffee table, beside a thick wide book on van der Rohe and other minimalists.

A large flat screen television stood on a wide, low table with wide, shallow drawers against the back wall of the living room. A low table stood on either side of the television, on top of each holding a lamp and a small pile of magazines. Trina fought back an urge to get up and inspect every item, especially the photographs. She turned her head and glanced at Wendy, her eyes trailing from the curl of Wendy’s bare toes, to the curves of her bare calves and thighs. She quickly looked up, but Wendy had turned away, searching for a remote on the top of the table at her end of the sofa.

“How are you, Wendy? I’m. I’m. Sorry about everything.”

“Oh, Trina. You know. It’s just so.”

Wendy paused.

“Did you see it?”

Trina bit her lip, then nodded slowly.

“I did.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

Trina didn’t answer.

Wendy teared up, and her voice broke as she groaned loudly.

“I knew it. It’s just horrible. I’ll never be able to show my face again.”

Trina burst out emotionally.

“No, Wendy, it’s not. It’s not bad at all. I liked it.”

Wendy threw a shocked glance at Trina.

“What?”

“I mean, I don’t think Brad should have sent it out. Brad definitely shouldn’t have sent it out, but. I mean.”

“What?” Wendy asked again, but this time more softly, less outraged, her voice expressing curiosity.

“I mean. You looked good. Happy. You looked like a big rock had been taken off your shoulders. A huge weight. I’m sorry. That sounds stupid, I know.”

Wendy thought about what Trina had just said. Did that make sense? Had she felt that way Sunday night, like a weight had been taken off her shoulders? She looked happy. That sounded like something Sara would say. It sounded strange coming from Trina. But when she thought about it, she realized she didn’t really know Trina, didn’t really talk to her. Just kind of put up with her. She clang to Maddy anyway. A tinge of jealousy flared up sometimes, but that’s all she really felt about the girl. But now she came to visit, not once but twice, bringing her homework so she wouldn’t fall behind.

Wendy should feel grateful. She supposed she did. And that feeling of joy on having company remained, a glow at the reminder that her she didn’t live in this world alone.

“No,” Wendy said. “I think you’re right.” She paused. “That wasn’t the only picture, you know.”

“He took more, Wendy?”

Wendy nodded her head quickly, impishly.

“Hm hm.”

Wendy fell quiet for several seconds.

“Do you want to see?”

Trina’s face turned red.

“I’m sorry, Trina. I didn’t think. That’s a stupid idea, isn’t it?”

“No,” Trina apologized. “I mean, if you want to show me. But only if you want to show me.”

“I don’t mind,” replied Wendy. “I want to show you.”

Another pause.

“It’s kind of gross. Are you sure?”

Trina just turned a darker shade of red.

“Okay, but it’s upstairs. On my computer. C’mon!”

Trina followed Wendy up the stairs in a daze of dread and confusion. For months she had been fighting back a desperate longing for Maddy’s friend, always falling quiet, stammering, and shy in her company. Forever deflecting and deferring to Maddy, who enjoyed pushing Wendy, nudging her and prodding her with, well, not abuse. Not that. But somehow always with an upper hand, always somehow taking a superior air with the blonde. And Wendy let her. Wendy didn’t even notice, Trina understood, and that more than anything endeared her to her. God, Trina thought. How beautiful.

And now I’m in her house.

And now I’m walking up her stairs.

And now I’m walking to her room, her bedroom, to look at pictures of her, pictures that might be more than what she’d already seen.

But Trina really hadn’t looked. She peaked, felt bad for her friend, and immediately deleted the photo. But not before her smile, Wendy’s smile, burned a hole in her brain with its image of pure and utter joy.

Trina stifled an exclamation when she entered Wendy’s bedroom. All that pink. She hadn’t expected it. Not from Wendy. Wendy seemed to cool and aloof for pink. But she didn’t know Wendy at all, did she? And lately, with all that makeup she’d been wearing. All that pink lipstick. But not today, Trina noticed. Just plain Wendy. Plain and pretty Wendy.

Wendy woke her computer, opened her email, found the photos.

Just before she opened them, she turned to Trina and asked, “You sure? I mean, it might embarrass you.”

“I won’t be embarrassed if you won’t be embarrassed.”

“Okay.”

Wendy opened the photo and maximized the picture to full screen, turning her monitor to Trina.

“Oh. My. God. Wendy. I just.”

“Do you hate me?”

“No. Of course not. Why would I hate you?”

“Maddy hates me now.”

Trina sat down on the bed. She wanted to hold Wendy, to embrace her, to soothe her fears.

“She doesn’t hate you, Wendy. She’s just being Maddy. She’s angry because she doesn’t know what to feel. By being mad at you, she gets to protect herself. She sometimes talks to me, you know. That Jeremy broke up with her last year because she wouldn’t have sex. She was just a sophomore. She didn’t want to have sex that young. But now you have, and she hasn’t. Now you have a reputation. What will that mean for her, do you think? I mean, if she keeps hanging out with you? Will that mean she’s easy, too?”

“I’m not easy!”

God. Trina was giving her an earful. She’d never heard Trina talk so much.

“I didn’t mean it that way! I meant, will everybody think she’s easy like you.”

“I’m not easy!”

“I meant think she’s easy like they think you’re easy.”

Wendy fell quiet.

“What does it matter what they think?” she asked.

“It matters to you. You won’t go back because of what they think.”

Trina fell quiet next, but she screamed at herself internally. Why can’t you shut up? Why can’t you be quiet? Why do you always have to speak to people like you’re smarter and better than everyone else? Just be quiet. Just be quiet. Just be quiet.

“What about you, Trina? Have you?”

Wendy’s question broke through Trina’s internal upbraiding. The surrealism of the moment hit Trina hard as she regarded Wendy sitting next to her on the bed, on Wendy’s bed, on her bed, beside a large monitor showing Wendy displayed lewdly, gloriously lewd and full-screen, with male come dripping from her exposed vulva and blond, heavily made-up, smiling face.

“Have I what?”

“Have you ever, you know, done it?”

“You mean? With a boy?”

“Of course with a boy,” laughed Wendy humorously, gently ribbing her friend. “Oh my gosh, did you mean, are you, I mean, have you?”

“No! Never. Not with either. I’m. I’m still.”

Trina shifted her gaze to the image of Wendy, focusing on the area between her widely spread legs, eyes unable and unwilling to look away.

“Earth to Trina, eyes up here, girl.”

Trina looked up embarrassed, red, almost frightened.

“I’m sorry, Wendy. It’s just that.”

Wendy started to respond, but at that moment a loud honk blared from the driveway below.

“Gotta go now,” Trina shouted, leaping up and running out the room. “I’ll try to bring you your homework tomorrow, but Dad, he’s getting kind of put out.”

Wendy tried to have the last word, but Trina was already out the door and down the stairs. She turned to her monitor, suddenly realizing the weight of what she had exposed, revealed. What on earth was I thinking? God. I’m really a mess, she thought. She closed the photo, clicked out of her email, and then shut down her PC. Better leave it off for a while, she thought, walking downstairs to flop back down on the sofa.

She had inserted At Play in Fields of Reeds earlier, just before Trina showed up. She grabbed the remote, turned the TV on, and played the DVD.

76. Steve swings by to check on Wendy

On the television screen, Linda and James were standing in the middle of their burned-out home, picking up and discarding burnt and carbonized objects, wiping away tears, looking grim at the destroyed remains of their once happy home when Wendy’s doorbell rang again. She stopped the movie and walked to the front door, smoothing her pink gym short and tugging on the hem of her T-shirt. A vain struggle which led to either exposure of her midriff or an increased display of her cleavage as the V-neck plunged lower. Letting the matter drop, she opened the door without looking through the peep hole.

Great. That asshole Steve was here.

“Hey, sport, how’s everything going? Your mother called and asked me to swing by. I guess she’s not going to be coming home tonight?”

“Um. Yeah. No. She called earlier. Something about a friend.”

“Have you eaten? I make a mean casserole.”

Steve reached over Wendy, holding the door open, but not moving to go around her.

“Come on, Wendy. Give me a chance. I’m not that big of an asshole.”

Linda’s and James’ house burns down, destroying all their family’s goods and memories.

Steve flashed a wide smile at Wendy. Not much taller than Wendy herself, maybe not even taller than her mother, he looked up at her from the lower step of the porch. Steve possessed one of those tightly framed, muscularly taut bodies capable of unleashing ferocious amounts of strength. His long brown hair trailed over his ears, almost touching the collar of his denim jacket. He wore his hair brushed backward from his forehead. Boyish youth still clung to his thirty-one years, and his round, flat face peered at the world through soft, light brown eyes. His lush hair showed no sign of thinning. The lips of Steve’s mouth parted in a smile hovering above a wide chin ending with a flat and narrow point. His top lip much thinner than his bottom lip, Steve’s resting face showed the world a much more serious-looking, austere man than he felt inside.

Steve shrugged his shoulders and lowered his chin while raising his eyebrows with a questioning, beseeching expression.

Wendy relented. I mean, he’s already spent the night here. Several times. And I am getting hungry.

Wendy stepped aside and let Steve in.

She considered changing into a less revealing outfit, but felt, how did Trina put it, put out at the idea of having to cover up in her own home. I’ll just go back to my movie. He knows where everything is. She turned her ass to Steve, swinging it side to side in its pink enclosure, the loose pile of her blond bun bobbing up and down on the back of her head as she sauntered to her spot on the couch in the living room.

Steve busied himself in Wendy’s and Mary’s kitchen. If he thought it odd to be in such a situation, he didn’t dwell on it. He liked to cook anyway. And that girl, that Wendy, she needed looking after. Sure, that picture looked good, she looked good, but c’mon. Who lets somebody take a picture of them like that? Her own mother, for one thing. Well. And of course, certain thoughts just naturally cross your mind. They shouldn’t, but they do all the same.

Soon, however, he had gathered all the ingredients for his famous shepherd’s pie with Brussel sprouts. He found olive oil, onion, parsley, rosemary, thyme, flour, tomato paste, and unopened beef broth in a cardboard box in the pantry, along with garlic powder and large russet potatoes. Butter and parmesan cheese, of course, could be found in the refrigerator. Looking in the freezer, he located a frozen package of ground beef. You can thaw that in the microwave, he thought. Or in a large bowl of hottish water.

Wendy cocked an eyebrow at all the ruckus coming from the kitchen. What in the world is he doing in there, she muttered to himself. She snuggled into her cushions, wrapping a floral-patterned throw around her legs and pulling it close to her neck. She wondered what Steve would do if he came in the living room during one of the sex scenes in the movie. Now that there was a chance someone else could watch it with her, she grew alarmed at the number and length of all the nudity shots. Ostensibly a drama about a family recovering from a house fire, the movie related, sometimes in graphic detail, the loves and losses of the Henderson family, James, Linda, Becky and her little sister, Rosanne. Becky loved Peter, her high school romance, while Peter’s sister Lilly secretly pined for Rosanne. James and Linda, married for twenty years, re-ignited a dying passion after the house fire that destroyed all their possessions.

The sex between Becky and Peter blazed on the screen, the story focused on their high school romance, but midway through the film, the growing love between Lilly and Rosanne rising to a crescendo of passionate kissing and topless petting, both girls exploring each other’s bodies in a slowly building heat of desire. Wendy’s hand strayed under the throw to her inner thighs, parting her legs gradually as the film progressed. Her eyes focused on the kissing between Lilly and Rosanne, and she forgot about Steve as sighs and mews and the wet smacking of lip upon lip filled the living room. Wendy slipped her fingers through the leg of her gym shorts, reaching the moist center of her groin under her damp panties. Her cheeks flushed red, and her breathing grew shallow.

“Whoa!” Steve exclaimed as he waltzed into the room. “Dinner’s ready.”

Wendy jerked her hand away, hoping Steve hadn’t caught her. He had.

The dinner actually passed pleasantly. Talkative but not overbearing or stupid, Steve asked questions about school, about Wendy’s friends, about what she wanted to do with her life, but not in a challenging way. Just questions he fired off because he was genuinely interested. What did Wendy want to do? When she hemmed and hesitated, he just nodded his head and said, “You’re young. You have plenty of time to figure all that out.”

He was funny too.

Wendy soon found herself relaxing and laughing at his silly jokes, his play on words, the faces he made. Cute. Stupid, but cute. A good cook, too. No wonder her mother put up with him. Was it love, though? Did her mother love Steve? I mean, he was her boyfriend, wasn’t he, so I supposed she did love him. Did Steve love her? Did they love each other? Oh my god, was Steve going to move in? We’re they getting married?

Still deep in thought, Steve cleaned up the table around her, clanged the dishes loudly in the sink, and suggested going back to the living room.

“Listen, Wendy. I’d like to talk to you some more. I’d like to get to know you a little better. I mean, if you’re willing.”

Steve pulled a bottle of wine from the built-in wine rack in the pantry, a Malbec. Finding an opener, he tore the metallic seal, pulled the cork, and poured himself a glass. Wendy braved a resounding and automatic refusal.

“Can I have one, Steve?”

Steve stopped pouring his wine. He put the bottle down. He looked deep inside himself and thought to himself, “Get out. Get out now. Run.” Then another thought immediately responded, “Stay. This is what you want. This is what you always wanted. You need to talk to her. The girl needs someone to talk to. Go ahead and pour a drink. It’ll loosen her up. It’ll get her to talk.”

Steve turned around, took another wine glass from the cabinet and poured Wendy a drink.

“Don’t tell you mother.”

“Oh, she lets me have a glass all the time.”

“I doubt that,” Steve replied. “I doubt that very much.”

Wendy raised her glass and drank a large sip. She followed it with another. Soon a warm glow diffused through her body. She felt relaxed, happy, and glad to have company. Steve suggested going to the sofa to talk. He had some things on his mind.

Wendy’s ass flirted with Steve’s eyes, swinging from side to side in its hypnotic sway.

She knows what she has, he thought. How could she not?

They both sat down, slightly facing each other, a few feet apart, near the middle of the plush sofa. Wendy placed coasters on the coffee table. They both set their glasses down at the same time.

“The thing is,” Steve said.

“Yes, Steve?” Wendy’s tone took on a mature edge, a slightly mocking tone.

Steve didn’t bit.

“The thing is, I’ve seen your photograph Wendy.”

I’m going to put down my glass, thought Wendy. No, I’m going to throw my glass in his face. I’m going to throw my glass in his face, run upstairs, lock my door, and never, ever, come out of my room again.

Wendy stayed perfectly still, her fingers trembled around the stem of her wine glass.

“It’s okay. I’m not trying to upset you. It’s just that. It’s just that I want you to know that you can get through all that. You can get through all that at school. You just have to defend yourself. You can’t just hide away. You’ve got to go back to school, Wendy. There’s no one here to home school you. You’re better than a G.E.D.”

“What business is it of yours, anyway? I mean, just because you’re my mom’s boyfriend doesn’t give you the right to tell me what I need to do. Or look at disgusting pictures of me.”

“They’re not disgusting. You’re not disgusting.” Steve pulled out his cell phone. “Look.”

He scooted over to Wendy, who scooted closer to him. Steve held the cell phone out, open the pictures on his phone to the two pictures of Wendy.

“Oh my god. You’ve seen both of them? But I’m naked in that one Steve. You’ve got a picture of me naked on your phone.”

Wendy’s voice rose in an outraged panic.

“Yes,” he said calmly. “I just had to have them after your mother showed them to me.”

“She what?”

“She was upset, Wendy. She didn’t know what to do. She had to show me. So that I could understand.”

It all seems so reasonable, thought Wendy as she finished her glass.

“Want another?” Steve asked, looking at her empty glass.

“Why not?” Wendy shrugged. “Yes. Definitely.”

When Steve came back with two full glasses, Wendy was looking at her photo in the phone. Wendy took the proferred glass, swallowed a long mouthful, and giggled.

“I’ve seen your picture, too, Steve. It’s huge.”

“Picture? Picture of what?”

“Your cock, silly. I’ve seen a picture of your cock. The one you sent mom. It’s huge. I—”

“Oh, that. That was a couple of weeks ago.”

“I masturbated to it.”

Steve choked.

He scooted closer to Wendy until their knees were touching.

“Want to see something else?” he asked in a sly voice.

“Okay,” Wendy said playfully.

Steve took the phone from Wendy’s hand, flipped through some files and found the picture he’d taken of Mary.

“Look. What do you think of that?”

Wendy’s jaw dropped.

Her mother’s face shone with Steve’s come, and she held her legs spread wide and bent in reproduction of Wendy’s pose, her trimmed pussy exposed to her daughter’s hungry eyes. Her mouth felt dry. Wendy licked her lips. She placed a hand on Steve’s leg, mid-thigh.

“You mean.”

“I couldn’t stop her. She was like an animal.”

Steve face inched closer to Wendy’s face, almost brushing it as they stared at the picture between them. Wendy breathed in the smell of Steve’s aftershave, enjoying the male scent, the proximity of, of. Of doing it again. She could, she thought. She could have sex with Steve. She could have sex with her mother’s boyfriend.

Steve turned to say something to Wendy, and the girl, sensing it, immediately turned her face to his. Their mouths were so close. Their lips were almost touching. Wendy tilted her head slightly, leaning in just the barest fraction of an inch, and Steve, god help him, went for it, maddened to have the girl sitting next to him in thin gym shorts and a cutoff T-shirt.

The ferocious kiss took both by surprise.

Finally breaking away, Steve looked at Wendy.

“Are you sure?”

Wendy nodded as she pulled her T-shirt over her head, her full breasts open to Steve’s view. Leaning in to kiss her, Steve lay her back against the sofa, kissing her breasts one by one, kissing and nibbling the soft areas around her nipples, slowly and patiently working his rough hands around the fleshy mounds, as he took one tit and then another into his mouth, lightly tonguing each nipple before sucking it and pulling it away from the soft globe. He kissed the flat and bony valley between her breasts, slowly kissing down the sternum to the belly, arriving at her adorable and shallow navel, her button below which lay paradise.

She had not showered that day, and Steve could smell the scent rising from her, delighting in the salt of her skin, the taste of her magnificent body, the stink rising from below her shorts as he nosed a path towards the warmth between her thighs. He kissed the top of her shorts and moved back up her body, slowly and deliberately, returning to her lips, her mouth, the sides of her face, nuzzling his rough skin against her cheeks, nibbling at and kissing the unpierced lobes of her ears. Kissing and whispering all around her ear, he brushed the hair above the top of the lobe with his mouth, then moved towards her lips again, endlessly pouring that curious mix of masculine brutality and gentleness upon Wendy’s trembling body, now beginning to surge with desire and need.

Again and again he moved towards her groin, now damp and hot, flushed and swollen. Again and again he moved away, kissing her belly, the soft flesh of her belly, the swell of her breasts, the hard nipples of her tits, pulling them playfully with his lips and the lightest touch of his teeth away from her body. Wendy became a surging, shaking, writhing body of need, thrusting her pelvis again and again at Steve’s body, until finally, finally Steve reached the hem of her pink gym shorts. Quivering, Wendy held her legs up, bent at the knees and spread for Steve’s access. She raised her ass off the sofa cushion.

“Are you ready, Wendy?” Steve asked.

“Oh, god, yes, Steve. Please.”

“Please what, baby?”

“Please. You know. Do me.”

Steve pulled Wendy’s soft gym shorts off her legs, sliding her wet white panties off along with them. He shuffled out of his jeans and boxers. Holding the tip of his hard and throbbing cock at the soaked steaming entrance of Wendy’s pussy, he looked up and asked again.

“Really?”

“Please, Steve. Just do it. Fuck me. I need you inside me.”

Wendy thrust her pussy at Steve, and Steve plunged his cock into Wendy’s hot, wet, swollen hole.