Belonger (An erotic novel): Part One (3 page)

“
Few can at first,” Emma
mused, glancing thoughtfully to Manassa.

“
If it was when a skulk did
take,” the woman moodily explained. “After who sees busy
need…”

“
It’s not totally random,”
Manassa observed. “She uses real words.”

“
Yeah,” Emma nodded,
listening to her lilt and flow of earnest, bewildering speech. “And
says’em like they mean something. But that’s a slipper for you,”
she remarked, using the informal name for such women. “They all
talk like that till they get familiar with their
situation.”

“
Are there more around
here?” Manassa stepped back to the water to peer carefully
down.

Ione nodded wearily. “Yes. Many.”

There were shortly a six of
slippers
groggily shuffling about the
bank,
which soon doubled to
a dox of their number
.

The bedboat could not
accommodate so many
,
and
their
options might have narrowed
uncomfortably,
but
more flooded vessels were discovered
nearby
and more women
too
, and
after much
effort and administration they eventually continued, a loud and
loosely dispersed convoy fitfully regulated by the velocity of the
lead craft.

Ione decided to call a halt
when a small crowd of women had accumulated.
No skulk had been seen or heard as they traveled, but the
unlit intervals of waterway that presented were now so extensive in
places she knew whole armies of men might lurk invisibly in their
midst.

Manassa seemed unconcerned by this threat, an
annoyingly unmilitant attitude that clearly desensitized the other
women in turn—even Emma, whose personal history encompassed many
sad humiliations at the hands of skulks. Ione wondered when and how
their huge companion might learn about men for herself, allowed
herself a moment’s dark anticipation at the prospect.

The slippers
they had rescued
were
almost helpless, manageable by just two means in such unstructured
circumstances. One
was playacting; an
energetic
pantomime
that vaguely coordinated their behavior. By simply pretending
everything made sense,
Emma and Manassa
could coerce their inclinations by force of personality
alone,
subtly steering the nonsense to
useful ends
. The noisy, arm-waving mummery
this entailed seemed to delight everyone involved, compounding
Ione’s irritation.

Where these histrionics
failed
Manassa
resorted to a
dishearteningly
efficient
whole-body
persuasion
, massive legs planted at sure
tangent to the desired locomotion of flesh as her exotically nude
vagina flexed gregariously among their blond and brown naps,
secretive-seeming by comparison.

By these methods they had
been able to get
the women
distributed onto boats, leaving Ione gratefully
free to
negotiate
the route. She had taken advantage of this to
search for
a place to camp
as fatigue was rapidly overtaking them all.

They were now entering a
high
-
ceilinged
cavern, lit
to a ruddy glow by a
crimson-eyed gnome hung by a thick chain from a projection of rock
above them
. A restless
current prowled the area, departing on
many
channels. Along one side of
the
chamber
a broad
cuticle of grass beckoned, ideal for their purposes, and after a
brief
survey of its tumbled contours Ione
directed
her companions to moor the
boats
.

“
Not exactly private…” Emma
cautiously observed.

Ione s
hrugged.
“
There are a l
ot of ways to
escape, at least.
”

Manassa skipped dexterously onto soft turf.
“That’s nice!” she sighed, stamping about happily. Emma followed
her, anxious to stretch her legs.

After a brief interval of
confusion they got the women
into the lake,
shouting and splashing with each other. Linens, scrub brushes and
various other balneal conveniences had been discovered in a locked
bedboat cabinet, and now they were passing around a fragrant cake
of soap, oblivious to its latent threat. Blankets and towels had
been drying as they traveled, were spread invitingly about the
hummocked turf of the camp now.

When they had finished
bathing Ione assigned the women to
sleeping
sites
, watched Manassa and Emma’s
increasingly efficient teamwork as they settled them in place,
helping out where dignity allowed.

“
Why
are we pairing them up like this
?”
Manassa wondered
.
Ione turned slightly but
waited for
Emma to respond
.

“
Uh…
well, they’ll want to get off, right?” she said with
self-conscious jocularity, leading a bouncy little redhead to a
taller woman looking around presumptively. “But these slippers
would fuck around all night without some kind of plan, mostly just
masturbating. As couples they can climax, relax and get to
sleep.”

“
Why do you call them
slippers?”

Emma shrugged. “Dunno. Need
some name I guess since they’re so different from us.
S
kulks trick’em into all kinds of mischief
if they’re not looked after.”

“
So they… What is
masturbating?” Manassa stared at an unassigned woman dreamily
rubbing her vagina with a circular movement of two
fingers.

Ione was
moved
to
amazement
at this, turned to stare
plainly at Manassa. “
You’ve never touched
yourself?”

Emma rubbed her blond pubis in demonstration,
gestured flirtatiously to the bigger woman’s bare labia. “It’s
quite lovely to practice. But you can’t climax that way.”

Manassa watched her, eyes narrowing in
interest. “What’s climax?”

Ione spoke with slow disbelief. “The
culmination of sexual arousal. The orgasm. The peak, the
payoff.”

Manassa
was clearly roused by this concept, so ardently
described.
“Heh. Sounds like something I
should figure out…”

Emma giggled. “I’m sure you will. But not
without help…”

“
Why?”

“
Takes two people to
climax,” Emma grinned. “Can’t be done alone. We’ve all tried.
Endlessly”

Manassa regarded the camp, newly interested
in the couples ranged about.

“
They’re like you, mostly,”
she mused. “One big, one small.”

Ione cleared her throat. “Yes. It, uh…
simplifies things.”

Emma regarded
the
women
,
then
glanced covertly to Manassa’s groin
, unable
to mask her lust Ione sourly discerned.

“
You’ll see it all soon
enough,
” the little blond pertly advised
the huge woman. Manassa grinned, evidently content to
wait.

“
Let’s go,” Ione nodded to
her lover, bluntly terminating the exchange.

Not long after she was
alone
with
Emma
in the far
ther
waters
of
the
cavern, treading slowly as they
methodically soaped themselves. Manassa walked the camp in their
absence, location cheerily advertised by an occasional ass-slapping
inducement to order. The slippers were far from unhappy with this
attention, laughing noisily enough to provide an echoing camouflage
for their own activities.

The past was slowly fraying
in Ione’s consciousness, looming into congruency at a familiar
sound or gesture only to veer off-balance just as suddenly, aligned
to some fantastic, submerged context. She
was
watching
Emma
now
,
shoulders rising and falling to
a
barely discernible tread, the only person in the
group who shared her complicated history
.

“
What do you really remember
from before awakening? Anything about an ambush?”

Emma hesitantly shook her head. “I recall how
we met and our time together as doyennes, and I can access all
kinds of facts and names, but they don’t seem to have any order or
connection. The first thing that felt real was waking up, Manassa
staring down at me…”

Ione was silent for a while.

“
Emma, I’m trying to hold
things together. I really am. But I can barely distinguish the past
from the present. It’s like everything already happened but got
rearranged somehow.”

“
I know exactly what you
mean, love. I’m scared to even think about certain
things.”

“
Like what?”

Emma’s expression went slack. “Like… like
what happened when we reached the Lap. I have this epic memory of
trying to get there, but the place itself seems like a mirage,
filled with jumbled possibilities that always go wrong
somehow.”

Ione nodded slowly. “Can you remember men?
Not skulks, but actual men?”

“
No. But I want to… Can
you?”

Ione looked away bleakly. “I don’t think the
conditions in my mind are right.”

They trod silently for a time, perfunctorily
cleansing themselves.

“
What role is Manassa
playing in this?” Ione moodily pondered. “She seems conspicuously
ignorant about certain things
.
”

“
Oh?” Emma
lathered her arms with distracted diligence,
carefully indifferent.

“
She
claims
to know nothing about us,
yet
she was apparently cast by fate to our
exact location
.
”

Emma considered this fact
uneasily.
“But s
he
rescued
us.
Doesn’t that
deserve
some kind of
trust
?”

“
Maybe. But how did she
herself awaken? She can speak intelligently, but she’s not a
doyenne. We would have heard of someone like her, even if she was
just a slipper, Emz. H
ave you ever seen a
snooch like that?
I didn’t know it was
possible to shorten, let alone entirely remove hair. How did her
vagina get that way?”

Her lover could not suppress
a
lecherous
glint
at the mention of Manassa’s
genitalia and Ione
scowled.

Emma gulped,
dove into a tight scoop that
delivered her
between Ione’s legs,
thrusting
hard
to
send
her long body
into a backfloat,
buoyed
by
a
fast
tread.

“
I think it’s someone else’s
vagina that needs attention,” she
soothed
, and kissed Ione chastely on
the crotch
, tickling up her labia to arrest
with innocent engagement at its dimpled apse.

“
Is this really a good idea?
We need to talk.” Ione clamped her thighs inhibitingly, but this
only made it easier to engage her.

Emma reached down to her own crotch, tugged
something free and produced one of the recovered toys, a small
plastic device called a splay she had deviously preserved from view
as they swam. It featured a bulb-shaped vaginal insert that curved
out and up to spread the labia wide, presenting the clitoris
through an oval opening for convenient rubbing and licking. It
could be comfortably gripped by either party and was sensually
textured.

Emma positioned it at her lover’s seam,
forced it gently within. Ione squirmed at this unsolicited
occupation of her body, but glanced back to the camp to verify they
weren’t being watched and reluctantly closed her eyes. Emma plunged
the toy back and forth, massaging her interior till she sighed,
relenting to the effect.

“
I’m just gonna kiss you up
a little, hmmm?” she whispered and put her lips to Ione’s pubis,
swabbing delicately across the ovaled aperture of the splay to
tickle the intimate projection of flesh centered there. Ione
exhaled sharply, legs widening in helpless abetment of the act,
seduced by the returning familiarity of the other woman’s touch.
She submitted to circumstance for the first time since waking, let
her lover decide things for a while.

Emma licked with slowly
blossoming heat at her clitoris,
sensually
washing the tiny erection
with
each rounding flirtation of her dexterous tongue,
chastely kissed it for a term to moderate her pleasure, then licked
at it again, a slow alternation of favors that in all
only teased
. But this
canny coercion
gradually built
to a whole-mouthed
osculation that
displaced
everything else from notice, and the tread of her
shapely legs lofted them both, imparting a lunging lilt to her
slippery oral favors.