Serenity’s voice squeaked with excitement. “What do you think? How’s it going?”

Joan gave her friend a coded smile. “It’s going, it’s going well. Everybody’s very . . . relaxed. What do you think?”

“Oh, yes.” Serenity nodded in slow-motion for emphasis, and gave back a grin in the same code. “Oh yes, definitely.”

Joan and her roommate Serenity were in the kitchen together. Neither one was hungry. They were gleefully plotting together to get laid as a team, which was a situation that had risen out of the grown-up world’s failure to bear out the excitement of Joan’s years at the university.

They got new beers (the beers were their cover story for their parley in the kitchen) and rejoined the two men in the living room. They were having a conversation in low tones, but when the women came in the conversation stopped in mid sentence.

“What are you guys talking about?” asked Joan.

College had been a great liberation for Joan Slayt. Suddenly the people around her were libidinous! The first day in the dorms, the way the girls talked about the boys, who lived above them and below them and teemed in the stairwells, was desirous. The girls talked like the boys were something they wanted.

Joan had felt these same stirrings in high school. She had recognized them when she was fourteen. But subconsciously she understood that if she behaved the way her instincts dictated, and coiled her pale thin limbs around those boys, she would be socially destroyed on a charge of sluttiness.

So she stayed chaste and watched the herd of girls around her for the signal that she thought must one day come, telling her that it was now okay to fuck. She frankly didn’t understand why the other girls didn’t, but she kept that to herself.

“We weren’t talking about anything,” Jay said. The girls paused at one end of the room, holding beer bottles, their hips canted. The boys sat at the other end, failing to look innocent. There was a space and a silence into which all four of them poured their energy.

The signal never came. She decided to quit wasting time waiting for it and lost her virginity the summer before her senior year, to the first boy who seemed willing to take it, after a decent period of courtship. The boy was a bad lover. But bad as the sex was, she sensed great potential in it, and having waited so long to get started she just wanted to do it again. In a fit of wild release she shaved her pubic hair the day after her deflowering. Then she went and found that boy again, but her baldness scared him and estranged him, and they only did it twice more before he went somewhere else.

So the dorms and all their discretely closed doors excited her.

In her room she had had the top bunk. One night she came home late, and saw that her roommate was asleep in the bottom bunk, her arms wrapped around a small dark-haired boy who slept on his back with his mouth slightly open. When Joan was awakened the next morning at nine by the swaying of the beds and the cries that the lovers below tried to stifle for her sake, she had smiled and stretched her limbs dreamily and thought that now, after all the preparatory years of her childhood and adolescence, she had arrived at last at life.

When she got out of college, things were different. Things were much more uptight in the adult world – except at night. Except in the clubs. One could dress any way one wanted, behave any way one wanted, do anything one wanted. Immunity to all blame was gained by pretending you never acted any other way than the way you acted at the office. And in the sunlit world, who could call you a liar?

Serenity broke the silence by saying, “So then what happened?”

“Oh, yeah!” Mike snapped his fingers. “My assistant manager!”

The girls glided into sitting positions, and Mike resumed an anecdote about work.

So she worked during the day in order to live at night. It was the freedom she fed on, the rush, the high; it was that sensation of ascending she wanted. She wanted to stretch and strengthen the psychic membrane she thought of as her self.

And the door to that could be opened with a snapping eye-contact. Or a conversation, or a wolf-howl out the window of a passing car, low-slung and glistening with reflected light and bass shaking the windows. That was often enough to set her tingling with pleasure, and smiling a smile that her friends quickly learned to recognize. They would tease her about it, to hide their jealousy that Joan was such friends with her sexuality while they hated their own.

Serenity, with her head in Jay’s lap, waved her arms in the air. “I had a district manager once who used to send people home and then do their jobs. Okay! I used to say. You clean out the fry machine if that’s what you really want!”

But Joan noticed a disappointing trend about being an “adult”. The sex was cold and solitary. The men she went to bed with always ran away right afterward, and they always thought they were distinguished studs with cool hands for doing it.

In college it had been an exhilarating lark, full of the warmth of friendship. Now it was something you did to a person, not with them. And the feeling she found herself experiencing more and more while she was fucking these boys was a melancholy transience. And if the boy was lousy at it she felt jaded. And as often as not what she got afterwards was a vague irritability at their smugness, as if making it stand up and then vanishing like an enemy spy was a wonderful accomplishment they deserved a trophy for. As if she’d wanted to be fused to their hips (she had her own destiny planned).

It was a lot like masturbation, she mused, only the bed was more crowded. The problem was that these guys had such small imaginations. She wanted passion and playfulness; she wanted to be on a new level; she wanted to lose herself and find herself. They wanted to come in silence and then leave, like having a pizza delivered.

Stroking Michael’s chest, Joan said, “I love this shirt! Is this . . . what is this?”

“Chamois.” He put his hand over hers. “You like it?”

“Yes,” Joan purred. “Very strokeable.”

Still, the world of night was where she lived. The sunlit world was far too sterile for any kind of life. That she met a kindred spirit in the sunlit world came as a great surprise to her, and at first she didn’t know what to say.

She met Serenity like this:

She, Joan, was having a picture framed. The man who worked behind the counter at the framing store was a few years older than her, and had a body like an electric shock. Joan had already sent him back twice for different frames, just for the pleasure of looking at his ass. She decided on a silvered aluminum frame but couldn’t resist sending the clerk back one more time.

Joan let out her breath when he was out of view. She looked around idly and was startled to find an unknown woman smiling at her.

“Nice, huh?” The woman asked. About Joan’s age, she wore a disk of bisected bone the size of a quarter on a cord around her neck.

“Yeah!” Joan replied before she could realize that she was talking about her frank appraisal of the clerk’s butt with a stranger.

“He’s wearing a ring,” the stranger said mournfully.

Ring? Ring? What ring? Joan’s own voice echoed in her head as the clerk returned. So what if he’s wearing a ring? She was so flustered she didn’t even look at his hands.

It wasn’t until Joan had left the framing place and turned the key in her ignition that she realized what the stranger had meant.

“Duuuhhhh!” she exclaimed out loud, and bonked her forehead on the padded steering wheel. “A wedding ring! Important detail, Joan!”

The stranger kept resurfacing in her mind over the next few days. The way she had so naturally shared Joan’s view of the clerk tickled her; the gracefulness of her sensuality tugged at her; and the whole incident nagged at her. There was something wrong about it.

Singing in the shower two mornings later, it suddenly came to her what hadn’t been right. The exceptional elegance of the stranger’s frank sensuality stood out in Joan’s memory, of course – and it had kept Joan from seeing that it was also out of place. No one ever acted that way under fluorescent lights.

Joan envied her that. Joan wanted to be that – an eclipse. A piece of night in the middle of the day.

Joan assumed that she’d never see the intriguing stranger again, but now that Joan knew her face she kept turning up. They found each other in the same line for the same movie. They ran into each other in front of the ladies’ room mirror in a warehouse that had become a dance club with the addition of a bar and laser lights. Joan learned that the stranger’s name was Serenity; they became acquaintances, they became friends, and when Serenity’s lease ran out and she was looking for a cheaper place to live, they became roommates. Their personalities were well adapted to each other.

Even they were surprised to what degree.
Their first experiment was Wallace Chansk, a medium-sized young man with rosy cheeks and vibrant blond hair. Serenity met Wally at a party thrown by a woman Seri worked with; Wally was a friend of the party-thrower’s ex-boyfriend, who still spoke to the party-thrower and had been invited. Wally seemed very sensitive and multi-faceted to Serenity. She was impressed.

“He’s cute!” Joan summed up after Serenity had rambled energetically about Wally for ten minutes, right after Joan had met Wally for the first time.

Serenity sang out a laugh. “He’s cute! I’m going to a movie with him on Friday.”

“Let me know if you fuck him,” Joan asked.

“You’ll probably see it if I do. Right here on this coffee table. Rrrr-rrrrr!”

That Saturday night, Joan lay on her bed reading a book by Danielle Steel. She was listening to her very old cassette of Like a Virgin on her Walkman. She heard a noise through the music; she ignored it, as either the neighbors or a hallucination. But then she heard another noise, and her heart raced. Serenity was out and she wasn’t expected.

Joan crept into the living room and found Wally and Serenity beaming at each other in the kitchen and holding hands.

“Hi, guys,” she greeted them. Wally let go of Serenity’s hand, and his smile faded a level.

“Hi, Joan,” Serenity said. Her smile was unreduced. “You want a coke?”

“Um . . . ”, Joan made several judgments rapidly in her head. Normally she would have retreated or even gone out, what with her roommate having brought the boy home. But Serenity certainly didn’t look like she wanted Joan to leave. And she had said that thing about Joan watching her do it with Wally.

“Sure, I’ll take a coke,” Joan told her roommate.

Wally, Joan and Serenity all retired to the living room. Soon they began talking about movies. Wally had recently rented Gone in Sixty Seconds. The love scene between Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie became the focus of their conversation.

“Who wouldn’t want to kiss Angelina Jolie in a Ferrari?” Wally asked rhetorically.

“Or would you rather kiss Elizabeth Shue, like in Leaving Las Vegas?” Joan asked playfully.
“That’s a tough one,” Wally conceded, theatrically searching the ceiling for the answer. He put his chin on his fist to think.

Serenity was looking straight at Joan when she said this to Wally, and she was smiling like she had eaten a shipment of canaries. “Who do you think would be the better kisser here, Joan or me?”
“I would never take sides in something like that!” Wally said. He exaggerated putting up his hands defensively.
“Maybe all you need is some direct experience to make your decision,” Serenity suggested. Joan, her heart in her mouth, watched every detail.

Wally’s eyes were locked on Serenity’s. He looked like he was trying to speak. Serenity leaned forward and kissed him.

“Now you’ve got to kiss Joanie,” Serenity said, taking her mouth wetly from his.

Wally swallowed. He turned and looked at Joan with his face full of nervousness. He doesn’t know if I want him to kiss me. His stomach is filling up with butterflies while he watches the ultimate male fantasy as it starts to happen to him all of a sudden, without his planning it.

She tried to put him at ease. “You won’t really be able to tell who’s better without making the experiment,” she told him. She had a flash of regret for those boys in high school that she had forgone because of the social pressure. She could have done this with them. It was so easy.

Her head swam as her lips came together with Wally’s. His parted only a little. She extended her tongue but his wasn’t there to meet it.

“I’m sorry,” Wally said, in a tone that spoke of pummeling failure.

What? Joan was still trying to grok that the kiss was over already. Then there was the noise of flexing upholstery and Wally was getting off the couch.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, and he sounded angry. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got, uh, to, this thing to . . . look, I’ll call you, alright? I’ll call you.”

“Alright,” Serenity said, her brow furrowed in confusion.

And Wally left. Joan and Serenity sat looking at each other, and looking round the living room they were now alone in.

“Huh.” Serenity said.

“That’s not the way it works in the movies,” was Joan’s remark.

“What is this?” Jay asked, flicking at the object of his curiosity with one finger.

“It’s my necklace,” Serenity said a little sleepily, her head comfortably in his lap.

“No shit,” Jay guffawed. “But I mean, is it just a necklace or does it have a meaning?”

“It’s a cunt.”

Jay: “What?” Everybody else laughed out loud.

“It’s a cunt!” Serenity yelled victoriously. She held the little disc of bone, with the tiny trough down the middle, out for them to see. All four of them laughed. Jay laughed because he hoped that laughing would insulate him from being the butt of the joke. But it wasn’t that kind of joke. It wasn’t intended to produce casualties.

Joan could tell that Serenity was drunker than she usually got. Joan’s own heart was racing, and she didn’t think her ability to speak would serve her very well if she tried to open her mouth. Actually, the problem would be thinking about what she was saying. If she thought about it she would almost certainly stammer.

She just couldn’t figure out how to steer things in the right direction. They were so close . . . She turned to face Michael. He faced her as well. She was still smiling because of her recent laughter and because she was desperately trying to think of something to say, to maintain their momentum. Michael was smiling at her, waiting for her to speak. Finally he started chortling at the look on her face.

“What? What is it?” he asked.

Serenity had a core of male homosexual friends. There were three or four of them, and she went out with them sometimes to places like the Rainbow Club. One Sunday morning she met Joan at the breakfast table and they made pancakes.

“Oh, oh, let me tell you this,” Serenity grabbed Joan’s arm. “At the Rainbow last night there were these two guys at a table in one of those little niches, you know, with the walls and the ferns up top?”
“Uh huh.”

“They macked on each other all night long. This one had long black hair and a black leather jacket, and he sat with his legs around the other one, you know?” She made a gesture to indicate straddling.

“Right there in the club?”

“Sure, they didn’t care! They were way too into each other. But guess what?” Serenity had a secret to tell, obviously, and it made Joan curious. What could have happened between two unknown queers that Seri would think Joan would want to know?
“When the guy with the black hair went to the bathroom – it turned out his friend that he’d been straddling was Wally.”
Wally’s visit to their house had been fourteen days ago, and Joan had to ask Serenity to clarify before her memory seized on the incident.

“You don’t mean it,” Joan gasped.

“I do mean it. I went up to him and said hello. He said to say hi to you. So hi from Wally.”

“I guess we helped him figure out something about himself, didn’t we?”

“I think we did,” Serenity agreed. “Syrup?”

That was the extent of their conversation on the subject, then and any other time. They said to each other, “That didn’t go right,” or, “that didn’t go as planned.” They never directly said to each other, “Okay, by “go right” we mean that x and y and z happen, and a and b are avoided.” Joan did not turn to Serenity and say, “W know what happened when he walked out the door, but what would have happened if he had stayed?”

A small voice called down one hallway in Joan’s mind that it was so well understood between them that there was no need to talk about it directly. She believed that voice in the moments when she doubted, and then she made an effort to forget that those doubts had ever arisen.

In actuality it was the last of their shame that kept them from talking about it. Each had a secret fear that if they went ahead and said what they meant, the other would stop and say, “Pervert!” Or one or the other of them would lose their nerve, or some other misstep would serve as the sun that would evaporate their fantasy.

But now that Joan had a complete understanding of what they were about, she could set to doing it a lot more deliberately. Hopeful flailing was off the schedule. Deliberate reaching was the new agenda.

And she deliberately reached for Roc Tiachelli.

Serenity dove in to rescue Joan with Michael, because they’d just gotten stuck in escalating giggles and Michael repeating himself. “What? What is it?”

“Oo, Angel is on. You ever watch Angel?” Serenity asked Michael, with the remote in her hand. Joan admired Serenity’s hands. They were a hard-working tan and strong, because Serenity liked to bicycle.
“No, I never have. Maybe, like, part of one episode,” Jay said.

“I used to watch it but I liked a competing timeslot better,” Michael told them.

Serenity turned on the TV.

Joan had just been about to shout, “Oh, let’s all just do it! Can’t we just do it!?” But Serenity had taken off the pressure, and she didn’t pop. She took a moment to think about that as the television faded up from black to Angel, and she decided that on balance she was grateful. It probably wouldn’t have been quite the nudge the situation needed.

The television was in the middle of one wall of the living room. Joan’s couch was along one of the perpendicular walls, where it had gone when Serenity moved in. The couch Serenity had brought with her was opposite of Joan’s. Serenity put herself into her habitual position for watching TV, lying lengthwise on the couch with her head propped up. Jay lay down beside her. Joan and Michael mirrored them on the other couch.

Joan experienced a vivid tactile hallucination that she was floating a few inches above the cushions while she tried to make herself narrow and watch the television. She was drifting toward the ceiling.

In spite of his name, Rocchio Tiachelli wasn’t very Italian. He was a little bit Italian; his grandfather, also named Rocchio Tiachelli, and his wife had immigrated to the U.S. from Italy just before World War II. Poor and in the Bronx, the wife had died of bronchitis and Roc’s grandpa decided to move all the way to Baltimore, where he’d heard there were jobs. He found a job and an Irish girl named Megan Callahan, who became Roc’s grandmother. When Roc had been born, his grandfather had been very ill, on death’s doorstep, and so Roc’s father gave him the name Rocchio.

Roc made like he was shy about his name, but Joan liked it. “Roc Tiachelli.” It was like the name of a porn star. Sexy.

It was only the third time she met him that she got to talking to him and decided to take him home. It was after the Wally incident, and Joan thought Roc was the perfect choice to bring home to Serenity, a confident, articulate one-quarter Italian stallion with thick, wavy brown hair who would know just what to do with the opportunity she was going to present to him.

“My roommate’s out of town,” Joan told him as she flicked on the living room lamp that splashed light on the ceiling, and so indirectly everywhere else. “But you should meet her sometime. She’s cool.”

“I did meet her, one time at the club, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, you did . . . I forgot.”

“She looks nice,” Roc said.

Bingo, Joan smiled secretly.

She hadn’t actually planned on doing it with Roc that night, but it happened. Her plan to tease him a little and have him come back another time, when Serenity was there, seemed to get rather far and wee in the sound of his voice and the wine coolers she drank. Oh well, she thought, looking at the ceiling through half-shut eyes as he expertly kissed her neck. Stupid plan, anyway. Now he’ll be sure to come back.

Time later, and she realized in her sleep that Roc had fallen asleep next to her, and there he was still lying, the missing ingredient to her and Serenity’s situation, warming the bed next to . . .

Wait a goddamned minute. The bed wasn’t warm enough.

She shot up out of her cozy fetal position, whipped her head around and found her suspicions confirmed. Roc was gone. Adios. Amscrayed. Not there anymore.

No phone number, no note, no communication or link of any kind. Out the window like an enemy spy. Vanished.

Joan concluded that Roc was a gutless twit. If he’d just had the nerve to hang in there a few days he would have gotten quite a surprise from Joan and her roommate. She was furious all morning. In spite of his confidence and that well-polished story about how he got his name, he was still a little boy with a stunted imagination, who slipped out in the middle of the night.

Split. Gone. Evaporated. Gone extinct, if he had the littlest bit of courtesy.

Later on she talked to her friend Kerry, who had introduced her to Roc. Joan had had the impression that Kerry and Roc were friends from way back in the day, but it turned out that Kerry had known Roc for about five days when she’d introduced him to Joan.

“You only knew Rocchio Tiachelli for five days before you introduced him to me?”

“Who?”

“Roc.”

“I met him that weekend.”

Joan was very depressed.

“Are you depressed about something?” Serenity asked, cocking her head to one side, like a curious bird.
Joan took a second to think of an answer. “Do you think I look depressed?”

“You look depressed. You’re barefoot in your sweatpants eating ice cream in front of the TV at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon.”

Joan looked at the sad sight inside the ice cream carton. The ice cream was nearly gone. A brown film of melt-off was left, cut with thin white lines where the spoon had scraped it. Joan thought of pap smears, and shuddered.

“I’m not depressed.”

An idea was prowling around her cerebellum in sleek circles; the idea that it must be her with the problem. Apparently, there weren’t any men out there who saw what sex could be, who sensed the . . . animal, or the space, or maybe the structure or maybe the matrix where a structure could be created, that waited just past the hump of inanity they mistook for the edge of the world!

These guys weren’t virgins, they weren’t monks. They had relationships with other women, and if these guys hadn’t learned anything from those other women it must mean that the other women didn’t know any better, either.

This left Joan in one very small place, all alone. I mean, which is the simpler explanation? She asked herself. That everyone else in the world is some kind of mental midget, or that I’m fucked in the head?

It was at that moment that the house became unbearably small to her, full of all the same ancient barren things. She wasn’t going to suffer there. She jumped into a pair of jeans and an old sweater, grabbed her keys off the kitchen table – her sword and her shield – and out the door she went.

All roads led to the mall district. Joanie pulled into Barnes and Noble on a whim, and went browsing through the printed media. With a sense of karma, she found herself in front of the Relationships and Sexuality sections.

She saw books with titles like Clitoral Kiss: A Guide to Oral Sex for Men and Women. The Ultimate Illustrated Guide to Sex. The Ultimate Illustrated Guide to Sex II. Better Sex in 30 Days.

The tension fell out of her shoulders as she looked at all the pale and pastel colored books with their mutedly erotic cover illustrations. Her back stopped aching, and a weight was lifted off her mind. Look at all these books that said in print exactly – no, more exactly – what she had thought all along. She wasn’t fucked in the head. How could she have ever forgotten The Kama Sutra, that millennia-old manifesto on sexual ecstasy, available here in a Large Type Edition?

There were others like her out there. Here was the knowledge of the best of them, available to anyone with an odd number of dollars and ninety-five cents. There was hope.

She started taking books down and leafing through them.
“What book is that?”

Joan turned her head to the voice and saw a man about her age, tall, weathered-looking with a day’s beard. She could see his collar bones underneath his T-shirt, which read “Pissing off the entire planet, one person at a time.”

She glanced at the spine of the book she held. “It says, How to Make Love to a Woman.” He’s going to think I’m a lesbian, she thought.

“If I could say so, if it’s for your boyfriend this one is much better.” He reached right in front of her and she swayed backwards to keep his arm far enough away to focus on. “I’ve read them both – I mean, I didn’t read all of that one – but this one is a lot better.” He yanked a big hardback off the shelf. “That one’s full of, I don’t know, misty crap. This one’s much more informative.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Joan said. He’s going to think I’m a lesbian! She took the heavy book from him.

Awkwardness attacked him. Joan saw it in the way his fingers abruptly flew off the book as soon as she had a hold of it. He shuffled backwards a step.

Joan tried to speak warmly before uncertainty could choke off the encounter. She liked his straightforwardness. It tickled her that he had that fearlessness. “Can you recommend any more of these?” she asked.

“Not really. About the best I could tell you is don’t read my high school health book. That was a list of wild distortions and scare tactics.”

This man would turn out to be Michael. The decision for the two of them to leave the Relationships and Sexuality Section together was reached sweetly; Michael had spoken confidently on a range of subjects and then suddenly backed off, withdrawing his expressive hands, saying, “I’m talking too much. I’m sorry. You’re trying to look at books, aren’t you? You want to get rid of me.”
“No, it’s okay. Go on,” she urged, and she took the lead traveling over to the music section, where he had just been and on which he was holding forth.

They ranged across Barnes and Noble together that day. They were going to sit down in the café but Michael glanced at the display cases and said, “Nothing looks good here. Not for four dollars a slice.”

They had seen the store, they’d rejected the café . . . Joan’s feet drifted towards the front doors while her mind buzzed with plans and strategies, trying to apply the lessons of Roc to this encounter (she had to stop thinking that each new man was different; usually they weren’t). Michael walked with her, talking all the time.

Her instincts told her not to make the move. But now they were in the parking lot. He was still talking, winding down his topic of the musical arc of Pearl Jam, and they were getting farther and farther apart, as their cars in different rows drew them away from each other. Six feet . . . eight feet . . .

“Look,” he said, and his shoulders climbed up under his ears and stayed there in a frozen shrug, “do you have a card or something? Email address? So maybe I could get a hold of you and we could hang out again?”

“Yes I do, as a matter of fact.” She felt a rush of adultness make her heart beat faster because she really did have a card in her purse. She looked inside her bag and there they were. The store had them made up for each counter-girl free of charge, and hers had lain dormant in her purse for months until this moment, when they fulfilled their destiny.

“Joan Slayt, Customer Service Representative” the cards said. She wrote her home number on the back of one with a blue pen.

This was how Joan met Michael, and how their friendship began. They met once for drinks, and they got along swimmingly again. She taught him how to play darts that night. The next day, she called him up after debating with herself whether or not calling him that soon after their second meeting would come off as too eager.

Oh, what the hell, she decided, and went to the pay phone in the mall concourse outside of where she worked. I am eager. And he’s so open and unshy that he couldn’t find it too strange.

She invited him over for the afternoon, because she worked a morning shift that day. Subconsciously, she wanted Michael to meet Serenity, and see if she approved of him. And if he approved of her.

But when Joan got home from the store, Serenity already had a guest there. He was Jay Van Houten, and Joan was surprised to meet him because he was Serenity’s first man-expedition since Wally. What was she going to do with Jay and Michael there, both?

“Jay plays drums for My Mom’s Car,” Serenity introduced him to Joan. “They play at the Zorro Club twice a week. You know the Zorro?”

“Yeah, I’ve been there,” said Joan. She fired a smile at Jay and went on talking to Serenity. “A friend of mine named Michael is supposed to come over in about an hour, at three o’clock.”
Serenity looked at the clock. “Honey, that’s half an hour.”
Shit, Joan thought.

But when Michael showed up, and was led into the living room to meet Serenity and her guest, Joan found out that the boys knew each other already – Mike had actually written some lyrics for My Mom’s Car. He was one of their most regular fans.

So they all got to be great good friends very quickly, and playful sexuality floated in the air. A few weeks hanging out together, and their foursome evolved into this get together that was happening this hour in Joan and Seri’s living room.

Jay announced, “Man, I’d love to go out at night and slay some vampires. I’d mount little jars of ash on my wall.”

Serenity gave a keen giggle. “Hush, baby,” she said to him gently. She kissed him on the mouth.
“What?” Jay asked her. Then he kissed her back. “What? Little jars of vampire ash would be co-oo-ool . . .” Joan heard another tingling rasp of tongue on flesh. Jay and Serenity’s tongues were blue and shiny in the light of the TV.

Joan’s heart was beating so fast her nerve gave, and she had to look back at the television. She gave a little giggle out, because she couldn’t suppress it. A vampire with a bald head and a black overcoat was stalking down some kind of tunnel on the screen.

Joan heard an exhalation like a sigh. Then there was the sound of someone moving on the other couch. Dare she look? Dare she?

“Look what’s going on there,” Michael said to her under his breath. With her head almost on his chest the sound was more like a hum than words, and they kicked a switch in her head. She had to look! This was the time! This was it, now! Seize it! The transient moment!

She looked across Michael’s chest. Michael was looking too. They saw Seri’s back with Jay’s hand on the small of it. Seri’s curly hair fell down around her shoulders; her body was pressing itself against his with the rhythm of a beating heart. They could see a half centimeter of Seri’s leopard-print panties, and Jay’s fingers were slipping slowly between those panties and her jeans.

Joan’s breath was getting heavier and more humid as she watched them. Michael made a little moan, and she realized it was because she was panting in his ear. She kissed his ear and licked the skin of his neck behind it. He moaned louder; with sweat coming out on his forehead, he turned and put his mouth on hers.

Joan immediately put her hand up his shirt and rubbed his chest. He wrapped one arm around the back of her head and stroked her throat with the hand. Soon they were making out passionately, with Michael kissing her throat where his fingers had passed, and Joan’s hand roaming in circles over his chest and stomach, and pushing down into his pants. She arched her back and groaned. Her sex ached and tingled, but the feeling she was experiencing now was so good she wasn’t sure she wanted to move on.

But that soon changed, because she heard the sound of a bra hitting the floor. Joan pushed Michael into a sitting position and pulled his shirt over his head. She looked across the room and saw Serenity’s small, neat nipples for the first time. They were reddish brown. Serenity was pulling Jay’s khakis and boxer shorts down with one motion. His erection, pink with a fat head, waved in the air.

Michael peeled her jeans off. She had one foot on the floor and one on the couch. She saw that Serenity was pulling Jay’s cock with her fist while they French kissed each other like kisses were mother’s milk. Origami trick of the book of Genesis.

Watching them, then watching herself – it was the freest feeling she’d ever had. Death was not in the room as she thrust her pelvis against Michael’s face. Joan saw that Seri had already straddled Jay and the disk of bone she wore around her neck bounced against her chest with the motion of her body. Joan felt Michael’s shaft at her hole and mounted her own ladder to the stars.

Copyright Nuvein Magazine: Online Edition © 1997-2002 All Rights Reserved.