Penthouse (17 page)

“Say you want it, tell me how much you want it,” James said as we were riding up in the elevator. He had one hand on the back
of my neck, and with the other he had taken one of mine and held it cupped over that big bulge beneath his belt.

“Tell me how much you want it,” he repeated, but I wanted to make him work for it, at least a little, so I said nothing.

Still holding me by the neck, he walked me out of the elevator and down the hall. He unlocked the door one-handed and pushed
it open to reveal a room with white walls, black-leather-and-steel furniture, and a large, thick white rug. He pushed me down
on a big leather chair, and only then did he take his hand off my neck. He pulled off my shoes and my leggings and spread
my legs; his tongue was hot and rough as he licked my slit, and all the while he was holding my legs apart at the knees so
I couldn’t move. He found my clit and began to suck on it like a baby sucking on a tit, but just as I was about to come he
stopped and
stood up, leaving me wild and crazy for it. He unzipped and pulled out his cock—he had a lot to be proud of—and he stood over
me, pointing it at the moist pelt between my legs.

“How do you like my big sword?” he asked. “Say you want it.” But I bit my lip and said nothing.

He started to touch me with it, pulling it like a hot blade across my face, pushing it between my breasts, tapping it against
my belly; then he knelt between my legs and sucked my clit so hard I came twice in a minute.

“Tell me you want it, tell me you want it,” he said again, and I told him I was dying for it. Then he got up from between
my legs, his cheeks wet with my cunt juice.

“Good,” he said, “good,” as he ripped off my sweater and bra with one swift motion. My big tits fell out, and he took one
in each hand, pulling them, milking them. He led me by the nipples into the bedroom and pushed me facedown on the bed. I felt
a ripple beneath me; I was not surprised to find he had a water bed.

“Spread your ass for me,” he said, “spread it,” and I did not try to swim away. Oh no, I put my hands on my cheeks and did
what he asked. He must have liked what he saw there because he bent his head and started to rim my asshole with his tongue.
He traced a circle round and round until I was squealing, yielding, and then he grabbed me by the hair and pulled my head
back so I could watch him as he pulled on a giant love-glove. Then he pushed my head facedown again, reached around, grabbed
me tight by the nipples, and rammed into my ready asshole fast and hard just like I like it, and all the while I was coming
I was thinking how virtue is its own reward.

BY
M
ARY
M
ERCEDES

F
rom the beginning, ours is a love affair that defies sanity. Caressed by the angels. French-kissed by Beelzebub himself. We
met on the Internet. Separated by three states, we collide at 70 MHz right inside our computers. “I found you on the very
first night I signed up on CompuServe,” he tells me later. I’m a sultry, hyperkinetic gadfly in mental stilettos, slinking
and sliding through the sticky electronic interstices. My mouse slithers past the crudest of cretins and zigzags around the
most boorish of brutes. It’s all so exquisitely malleable. I simply mold the electronic clay of cyberspace with a few strokes
of my keyboard. Weary of the rigid routines and heavy obligations of my life, I look to cyberspace as an ideal pressure valve.
Soon I am a shameless renegade, with a following. A typing dervish stuck in overdrive. A cyberdiva radiating erotic cybershocks
in my wake.

“Until you, I only used this computer for my business.…”

Later:

He shows me his factory, his office, his desk, his PC, where he writes hundreds of e-mail notes to me. The words tumble out
when his blistering tongue in my ear finally rests.

“Until you…”

He bends me over his leather desk chair, lifts up my denim skirt, and fucks me from behind while his calm, neatly coiffured
wife smiles sweetly at us from the crystal-framed photographs on the credenza beside us.

Like a possessed, rutting Mephistophelian savage, he takes me. In front of his monitor. On his desk. Again on the floor littered
with spilled files and an overturned box of cold computer disks that leave square, pink impressions on my breasts and backside.

We drench the Persian carpet.

We break an antique cabriole armchair.

In between his hissing and moaning, his delirious pumping… the words never stop with this man, and I love him for it.

But this is much later. After the phone sex, the endless fabricated business layovers, and clandestine meetings in my town.
After our long escape tryst in Jamaica. Before his wife finds out.

The background to our wildfire:

I am the target of fan mail, hate mail, and lots of just plain male mail. Uninvited, genderless strangers I.S.O. [in search
of ] a cheap thrill. Wannabe adulterers who always supply their phone numbers and detailed maps to their home streets in Shelby,
Nebraska. Over-testosteroned teenagers bursting with chronic ball pain and zipper stress (in all forty-eight contiguous states
and Canada).

A journey into my e-mail box is a trek into a minefield of schizoid musing.

“More obscene propositions?” I inquire with a giggle. “Oh no, please pleeaase! Not another guy with twelve tumescent inches
of steel genitalia who wants to know (in 3-D detail) if I’m wearing panties?”

Ignoring almost all of these freaks, I rarely write back to anyone. Then Richard shows up. In the midst of a miserable February
blizzard, he finds me.

Both of us are in second marriages. Both infected with midlife madness. Impeccably well-mannered, my Ivy League paramour is
the frustrated, erudite CEO of a hightech company in the Northeast crumbling under the crunch of a downsizing defense industry.
He loves Beck’s dark beer and the passionate pursuit of intensely sensual sex and ribald laughter. So do I. He loves trashy,
provocative lingerie, and I love to model it. I adore articulate, intellectual men, and he is quietly loquacious.

Yin and yang. Perfect fusion.

Whispered, loaded words flick from our cold keyboards late into the winter nights. I beckon to him with sexy innuendos. He
flirts back with fevered devotion. The electricity between us sparks and sizzles. His constant e-mail notes glow blue on my
monitor, becoming far more than a light that I seek in the night. His words illuminate my life with sparks of the erotic and
the impossible.

How could I not invite him into my life? More than witty and charming, he is fucking radioactive, easily the most irresistible
man I have ever (not) met.

I fall asleep at the keyboard, night after night. Aching to hear his voice but not daring to admit it. I begin to wonder about
the flesh-and-blood man behind the words on the screen.

My gut says, “Listen! This man is totally honorable and guileless.”

My common sense says, “He’s married… and so are you.”

“That’s all right,” I say. “He’s just a harmless, long-distance flirtation.”

But the wicked Sibyl who always sits on my shoulder knows better. “Beware,” she says. “This man is dangerous to your health.
He’s already more than a tingling heat in your head. More than a throbbing itch in your pussy….”

She is right. I know it. But I am lost already.

I try to reason with Richard. “Do you know,” I say, “that ending this now would be so simple?”

“Yeah, but do you think either one of us could ever vanish back into the ether now?”

“It’s as simple as ignoring the other’s e-mail.…”

“Yeah,” he says, “and isn’t that exactly why we are so open with each other?”

Together, we choreograph a long-distance mental striptease. Febrile daydreams and schemes. Evocative eruptions. Richard is
always there, cooing his endearing good mornings. Flirting at lunch. Writing long and languorous heartfelt revelations at
day’s end. He shares his quiet thoughts, his laughter, his angst. I begin to know him in ways that I had never imagined knowing
any man. From the inside out.

Our hearts link together with laser-focused emotions, yet I have never heard his actual voice. I am madly in love with an
invisible man, yet I know his every lust and dream.

Smitten by a cybernetic warlock… finally, I give him permission to call me, VOX, the voice you can actually hear, and things
get even worse. What is left of my mind now becomes his.

“I have to see you,” he begs. “What harm can come of it?”

Heart-stopping pictures fly back and forth from our fax machines; then via FedEx. I sicken with anxiety and can’t even look.
“What if,” I say to myself, “he’s a peewee dud, a lecherous dog, nothing but a fraudulent dipshit?” The Sibyl, with a smirk:
“Ah, but what if he’s not?”

Richard is perfect. A cosmic cut above attractive, with dark soulful eyes, a delectable mustache, and a toothy grin that could
shame any ten-year-old. And he loves my looks.

“Oh, your long hair, your gorgeous lips, your dancer’s legs…”

After the pictures I roam about like a blinded celibate in a fog of perpetual heat. Pining. I’m always pining for him. I walk
into the furniture, dreaming of the mustache in those pictures being all over me.

“God help me, you’re over six feet tall and have dimples too.”

“Yeah,” he laughs, “I have dimples.”

He doesn’t understand that his dimples are more than ample compensation for the “thinning” hair he mentioned nervously earlier
on.

I am straddling his lap sucking on those dimples, laughing, sucking up both his dimples, inhaling his scent, devouring his
mouth, sliding my tongue into his ear, then down his neck to his nearly hairless chest. His wife’s orange tabby cat in the
picture is watching us both intently. Watching me trace the Caribbean Sea, the salty sea, with my ravenous dripping tongue
on Richard’s hard belly, watching me sliding farther down, down between his legs, going south and starving to get there, heading
toward South America, heading, the compass is pointing south, head, I want to eat him flying over St. Vincent and Trinidad,
the gulf, engorge him, heading south down to the cape, the Cape of So Roque, his cape, his cock, dear
God, his sweet delicious honeyed hard cock, and I’m starving. Huge yellow panther eyes, big black pupils open wide, staring,
taking it all in. Richard’s long pianist’s fingers finally unbuttoning my blouse, sensual fingers finally off the damned keyboard,
undressing me, peeling my bra down, stripping my breasts bare. Cat tail twitches, ears perk, Richard’s beautiful mustached
mouth opens wide, slurping, smacking, slavering, wet with lust, swallowing up my throbbing nipples. Sucking his dimples…I
run through the red light and am almost killed.

A good friend asks, “What in the hell is wrong with you? Are you pregnant?”

“Dear, you’re going through early menopause,” a relative insists. “It runs on your father’s side.”

Three times a day, my own Cyrano de Bergerac comes to me. Not on a stealthy, snorting steed but on fiber-optic cyberwings.
His office phone bills soar to six and seven hundred dollars a month. Then he begins to call from home. After his wife goes
to bed.

“What are you wearing tonight, sweetheart?”

Richard is stretched out on the sofa behind the computer in his study.

“A simple blue silk kimono,” I say, “and big, hard, carnation-pink nipples.”

We drench our clothes night after night, making feral phantom love after our unhappy mates go to bed alone (accusing us of
being reclusive, sullen, and uncommunicative).

At least once a day I force him to come again. In handkerchiefs, wastebaskets, boxes of Kleenex. In towels or empty cardboard
coffee cups. Even his pants, his hands, or right on the carpet if we’re in a hurry. I can’t stop. I try.

An impartial observer, a Freudian fly on the wall, could
easily reach all the wrong conclusions about our mental health. This is worse than any conventional addiction. We are closer
to divine madness.

He is so much man that just listening to him lower his voice two octaves is better than being licked and fucked by any dozen
other men. I talk him into increasingly longer, wilder climaxes. My voice, baby-soft or talking blue-streak dirty, galvanizes
his every erotic cell. My body changes. My nipples harden into a permanent burning state of erection, and are impossible to
hide under my clothes.

“This is so bizarre,” I fret. “How can this feel so shattering?”

“Like being blasted into outer space without a spacecraft?”

“Yet I feel more intensely focused than I’ve ever felt.”

Perhaps we are both sick. But I have already learned most of his physical hot spots and mental triggers without ever touching
him. We’re as synchronized as two finely tuned piano wires that vibrate across the miles, and together we soar higher than
either of us ever imagined possible. The horrible truth is no longer “What if the bubble bursts when we meet?” but “What if
it doesn’t?” Both of us go home each night with less and less to say to our spouses. My sleep is crippled by haunting erotic
dreams of Richard. I can’t even eat anymore. He’s a dybbuk in the night, stealing my health and then my very soul away.

Weekends are times of anguished separation. Stuck at home with our partners, we languish in silence for each other. Two days
are forever. Long holidays are bitterly punishing. Richard sneaks into his den, boots up his computer, and quickly e-mails
me: “going in to the office to call you at 6 or 7 p.m. please be there.”

He tells his wife, “I have a lot of extra work to finish up.”

She gripes. She’s caustic and angry and starts a fight. He gets into his car anyway, and drives through the rain. Back into
the city to open up the empty, silent office. Back to me.

“Darling, I can’t miss you this much. It’s insane, impossible.”

“Yes, impossible.” I sigh at how he makes me as liquid as glycerin, soft and feminine as a mink. “So damned impossible.”

“It’s worse than being seventeen again.”

“It’s better….”