Club Himeros (6 page)

“We had all the right parts.”

“Interests, sweetie.”  As she said this the back of her hand rubbed Lindy’s arm.  “Like what he’s offering isn’t anything that turns you on.”

“I guess?  Maybe?”

But that was crazy.  She and Michael had been together for six years, which was long enough to build a real relationship.  It hadn’t been about sex for a really long time.

“Okay,” Lindy said, “maybe sex was part of it, but… we’re just going through a rough patch.”

“So you’re not broken up?”

“No we
are,
but… how can we break up without there being a reason?  That doesn’t even make sense.”

“How about, you just ran out of reasons to stay together?”

Lindy sighed.  “Maybe.  I don’t know.”

Across from them, blue mask and brown mask appeared to be comparing either scars or tattoos.  This involved lifting articles of clothing, pointing, and laughing.  She wondered if these two were going to end up having sex in front of her like everyone else seemed to be interested in doing.

“This is probably the most unusual conversation I’ve ever had with a naked woman,” Lindy said.

Olive laughed.  “All right, I’ll change the subject.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you like girls?”

Lindy coughed up some of her water.  “That’s your new subject?”

“It’s a more appropriate conversation to have with a naked girl, don’t you agree?”

“I guess that’s true. 
Like
in what way?”

“You know what way, Ms. Burgundy.  Do you
like
them?  Do you like these?”  Olive cupped her own breasts and squeezed them.

“I don’t
think
I do.”

“No?  Because, I mean you’ve been looking at them for a while, don’t think I haven’t noticed.  You already said you want to touch them.  You should.”

“I don’t know if I like girls sexually.  But those kind of draw the eye.”

To be specific, they were really spectacular breasts, although Lindy was at a loss as to why these in particular were so interesting.  They were neither too particularly large nor too small, occupying some sort of Goldilocks middle ground where they seemed exactly right for the stature and physique of their owner.  Ms. Olive was a young enough woman for there to be only a little sag to them, and since she was aroused—clearly—they were a little swollen, which added a perkiness. 

Lindy, as she said, did indeed have a pair of her own, but she didn’t think anybody looked at hers the same way they looked at her friend’s.

“I don’t think I ever said I wanted to touch them.”

“But you do, don’t you?”

Yes. 
“Sort of.  But I don’t really know why.  I don’t think I’m… that way.  Once, sure.”

“So you liked girls once?”

“No, no I mean I
did
it once.  One time,” she said, adding “College” as if that was a complete explanation for same-sex digressions.  And perhaps it was.

“Oh, sure.  I’m just wondering if the sex thing you’re working through with this guy, if it’s because a guy can’t really get you off.”

Olive’s roaming hand had found Lindy’s, and then they were two girls in different states of undress sitting on a couch and holding hands.  Lindy was trying not to overthink it.

“I feel like this is something I would know,” she said.  “Like, if M… if
he
was gay, I would think
he’d
be aware of this.”

“Sexuality is a spectrum, Ms. Burgundy.”

“I don’t know if I…” Olive stuck the middle finger of Lindy’s hand in her mouth, bit and pulled, taking off the glove. “I don’t know if I agree with that.”

Her bare hand was now on Olive’s bare breast.

“But don’t I feel good?” Olive asked.

Lindy didn’t exactly know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.

A second later, Olive had gotten up onto her knees and leaned forward, and then they were kissing.  Lindy’s hands—both gloved and ungloved—were squeezing Ms. Olive’s breasts.  And her kisses tasted like peppermint.

“You can tell me to stop if you want to,” Olive said, removing one of her gloves with the flourish of an exotic dancer. Lindy still had no voice to say no with or even to ask what Olive intended to do with that hand.  Then the hand was roaming down Lindy’s body to the hem of her skirt, and up her inner thigh.

Across the room, the naked sub atop her dom was enjoying a more traditional expression of intercourse, grinding up and down in the orange-masked man’s lap.  Thinking back to when she had fingered herself on the floor aroused Lindy more than watching her now, and almost more than what Ms. Olive was doing to her, which was a thought she would have to unpack carefully later.

Blue and brown stopped talking.  They were watching Lindy and Ms. Olive, and holding hands themselves. 

Watch, but don’t stare.

“What do I do?” she asked Olive.  “I don’t know.”

Her blond friend smiled.  “You don’t have to do anything.  Here.”

Olive’s fingers slid past the meager covering the G-string underwear offered and entered Lindy.  Aroused as she already was, they were met with no resistance.

Olive’s fingers curled inside of her, and Lindy gasped when they tickled her, sliding up and tugging gently.

People can see us
, she thought.  But the idea that she was being watched made the whole thing feel better, not worse.  It was wrong, much more wrong than anything she had ever done, but that was what made it so exciting.

That, and the remarkable dexterity of Ms. Olive’s right hand.

“Okay so far?” Olive asked. 

Lindy couldn’t really speak, but she could nod.

“Good,” she smiled.

They kissed again, and then Olive began roaming down Lindy’s body.  The fingers came out, and in a second Olive was on the floor between Lindy’s legs, pushing up Lindy’s dress.  Soon their brown- and blue-masked neighbors—and everyone else in the room—would get to see a part of Lindy she was unaccustomed to showing in public.

Olive pulled down Lindy’s underwear just enough to give her tongue access.  She leaned forward.

“No,” Lindy said.  “No, stop.”

Ms. Olive hesitated where she was, not entirely clear she had heard what she thought she had. 

“Please stop,” Lindy repeated.

Olive nodded, sat up and rested her head on Lindy’s thigh.  “Are you sure?”  Her hair was hot with sweat and her eyes alight, and a part of Lindy wanted to give her everything.

“I’m sure.  I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

Ms. Olive got off her knees and climbed back onto the couch, curling up next to Lindy, whose sitting position had changed to a somewhat more horizontal one. 

Lindy pulled down her dress and crossed her legs.  Brown and blue went back to their conversation.

With them both half on their backs it felt weirdly like they were lying in bed together, half propped up on pillows as if watching television.

“I just can’t,” Lindy said.

“It’s all right.  Really.”

“Should I… I feel like I should do something for you.”

“Nah, it’s okay,” Olive said.  She sipped her water.  “Unless you want.  Actually, I’m really close.  If you want to just lie here for a minute, that would be great.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah, unless you want to do more.”

Ms. Olive pulled off her left-hand glove and ran her hand slowly down Lindy’s body again, which Lindy liked just as much as before.  Only now Olive’s right hand was in her own crotch.

Her breathing went shallow.  Lindy watched her nipples harden again, and her legs open and twitch.  Slowly, her back arched and her head tilted back, mouth open.  Olive’s left hand, caressing Lindy’s hip and waist, latched onto Lindy’s upper thigh through her dress, and squeezed.  Tighter and tighter.

Olive let out a low moan, a high squeal, and a gasp, and nearly bruised Lindy when she came.  Then she sighed and exhaled unevenly into a giggle.

“Much better, thank you,” Ms. Olive said.  “That was great.”

*   *   *

They sat there on the couch in the corner for a while, all sweat and sex and—for Lindy—confusion, before Ms. Olive decided it was time for Ms. Burgundy to move on.

“You’ve only seen a small part of the club,” she said.  “You should go out and mingle, and, you know, do what there is to do.”

“I’ve seen plenty from here,” Lindy said. 
And done enough, thanks.

The brown and blue mask couple had by then introduced themselves as Mr. Turquoise and Ms. Auburn, but otherwise had little to offer conversationally.  They continued to hold hands and had performed a few acts of light petting, but that was all.  Lindy got the sense they were working their way up to something more intimate and graphic, but planned to take their time about it.  According to Olive, the party went on all night and into the day, which could explain why it was that Elijah had never picked up anyone from their location.  It also explained why Mr. Turquoise and Ms. Auburn didn’t feel like rushing anything along.

Olive was much more voracious.  Lindy had no intention of staying until sunrise, but she got the impression Ms. Olive would be meeting people and performing sexually with them until she ran out of people and they told her it was time to leave. 

Lindy couldn’t remember ever having that kind of sex drive, and was a little envious.  She also couldn’t imagine her blond friend being someone’s wife someday.  But that was how the masks worked.  Whoever Ms. Olive was underneath it, but as long as she was at club Himeros, the mask persona was all she had to be.

Ms. Burgundy was having a lot of trouble absorbing that attitude.

“Walk around,” Olive said again.  “I know you’re shy, honey, but there’s no reason to be.”

“What else is there to see?”

“I don’t know!  And neither do you.  You won’t know until you see it, will you?”

“Will you come with me?” 

She could bring herself to walk around with Ms. Olive on her arm.  That would almost be the same thing as bravery.  But she already knew the answer was no.

“I insist you get out there and meet someone without me.  If you’re worried nobody will want to talk to you, you’re crazy.  Not with those legs on top of those heels.  And you can always pull open the front of your dress and let the girls out.  You’d be amazed how great a pair of boobs are as an ice-breaker.”

Lindy laughed.  “I guess that’s true, but I’m not half as daring as you are.”

“Maybe not yet.” 

Ms. Olive held her face and kissed her full on the lips.  “Now go out there, young lady, and mingle.”

So she left the corner and walked around, and tried to figure out how to mingle.

Michael knew how to small-talk other people.  That was what made him so good at parties.  Lindy used to try—with his coaching—to get better at it but never did get it right.  But the tricks he showed her wouldn’t work all that well at club Himeros.  He had all sorts of techniques to recall names and faces and one or two telling details that would make it possible to sound as if he knew the person in front of him better than he actually did.  In this environment—where nobody had a name or a face—he might have been as stymied as her. 

Lindy’s default approach to dialogue with strangers was to linger at the edge of other people’s conversations and wait for one of the people talking to turn and engage her.  She never wanted to interrupt.  In a regular party it didn’t really work.  Here, she expected to fare no better, unless she resorted to using Olive’s technique and just take off some of her clothing.

So she walked around and looked for ways into conversations somewhere between lingering on the edge and full-frontal nudity.  By definition everyone there was a stranger to everyone else, so there was no way she could intrude on an existing relationship or butt into something where she was the unwelcome new person, but somehow that didn’t really matter.  Everyone, it seemed, was in either mid-conversation or in the middle of something else that would have been even worse to interrupt.

There was an awful lot of
something else
going on, too.  After leaving the corner, she walked the length of the floor.  As Ms. Olive predicted, the place had filled up over time.  Lindy was not gifted with an accurate internal clock and there were no timepieces in the club, but it felt like two or three hours had gone by since her arrival, and there were a whole lot more people. 

The increase in head-count only made the irrational contrasts worse.  In one area she saw six men and women in formal evening wear discussing local politics and sustainable growth, which sounded like the most boring conversation imaginable, except that one of the men had on no pants—it turned out the men had been issued G-strings as well—and two of the women had their breasts out.  Behind their couch, two men were making out furiously. 

In another spot, a man had a woman pushed up against the wall.  Her legs were open and wrapped around his hips.  Each time he thrust forward the muscles in his butt tightened, something Lindy found captivating.  She wanted to get closer and maybe even find a way to contribute somehow, but she was hardly the only one with this notion.  There were two women already there, one on either side of the couple.  They were holding the woman’s arms, which were outstretched against the wall.  If it didn’t look and sound like she was enjoying herself enormously, Lindy might think they were helping hold her down for something involuntary.