Her senses expanded, took in the others that surrounded them. Whispers on the periphery, a crawling sensation of being watched, appraised, admired. The menace of the unknown. Movement — were these others drawing closer?
Adam stopped, had her lower to the floor while he swung from his chair and joined her. His mouth pressed roughly to hers, and his hands rose to strip her clothes away. Moments later his hands were joined by others. Naked, blind, she was laid back on cushions that shielded her from a floor that felt old, nobody’s priority.
“Beautiful,” came someone’s voice, “even if she
She submitted to the hands that stroked, caressed, and in their numbers lost track of Adam. He was subsumed into the mass around her.
Her back arched, her mouth parted to suck a finger that slipped past her lips. Her nipples stiffened beneath circling palms. Their hands gave a hundred delights, promised a thousand more.
They opened her legs then, swung her ankles wide, and as one checked her wetness, then murmured approval, she heard the rustle of someone else moving into position. She was entered then, and gasped. It was huge, pushing deep, deeper still. What began as a groan became a wailing cry, treading that delicious threshold separating rapture from agony. She was filled near to being split, yet still wasn’t aware of a male body hovering over her. There was no press of hips against hers.
Elle reached down with her hand, felt herself caught by Adam.
“One finger,” he whispered in her ear, and she found him again. “One finger’s all you get.”
Trembling, slowly rolling her hips with the rhythm set up by the massive phallus, she extended one finger. His hand guided hers … and she touched, glided a few inches. Flesh. It was flesh, firm and hard.
“Satisfied?” he asked, and she was and she wasn’t. Nobody could be that big … could he?
It wasn’t for the mind to ponder — she let go of the thought, surrendered to the here and now, the reality of sensation. She drew a deep breath and braced herself, elbows on the floor. Took it. Took it all in. Thrust back with muscled hips and grunts through feral clenched teeth, feeling as if she were at war with this monstrous thing inside her. Riding it until it brought her low and sent her soaring, and her voice pealed from rafters gone dead with dust.
Drenched in sweat, she fell back into someone’s arms, felt her lover withdraw, receding into a blackness that was total, her sole world. They waited until she got her breath, then a hand was on her chin, urging her lips to part. She obliged, eager to surmount exhaustion, prove herself worthy. Whoever these people were, she wanted to be one of them, take what they offered, give what she had. Her lips parted, and her tongue serpentined out to explore what her eyes were denied. She touched warmth.
She smelled herself on the gigantic phallus, tasted herself a moment later. Opened wide, wider, could scarcely accommodate a few inches without her jaw cracking.
And it slowly withdrew, teasingly, before she could identify what seemed so familiar, so alien, so tantalizing. Around her, far and near, came soft murmurs of approval, appreciation, acceptance.
Adam’s hands were at the back of her head, gently undoing the knot, and when the blindfold was drawn away she blinked into the light, forgot to breathe. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this.
She found herself in the center of the old sanctuary, beneath soaring ceilings and the watchful eyes of suffering figures in the stained glass windows, some pocked with vandals’ holes. Pews and pulpit were gone, in their place a cushioned playground for these thirty-plus members who had welcomed her, even though she wasn’t at all like them.
Elle looked straight into the eyes of the young woman sitting in the V of her outstretched legs. So this was her lover? There was a thin, wanton quality to her as she reclined on her haunches, meeting Elle’s gaze with a hunger almost masculine. It was a role she played well. Elle followed the contours of her body, from the small breasts to the slim hips, to the tapering length of her left leg. There was no foot, just the smooth bony head formed by her ankle.
At the moment, quite wet.
And she had no right leg at all.
Elle whirled, met Adam’s smile. His pride. And let herself be taken into his arms. At least he had them.
Not so, many of those around her. They were all missing bits and pieces, some more than others. Feet, lower legs, or the entire limb. A few, like Adam, had neither. Others had sacrificed arms along the way. A couple, she saw, were but heads and a single arm attached to naked trunks. They were smooth and they were sculpted, every one of them, and if they looked upon her with anything, it was with longing. Not to be like her again … but to make her one of them.
“You do it to yourselves, don’t you?” she whispered to Adam. “These weren’t accidents.”
He grinned, got Freudian on her. “There are no accidents.”
“I don’t understand,” but then, in looking around at them, an entire roomful of broken statuary, she couldn’t say she didn’t like it. Whatever their reasons, this was commitment, so far beyond the Inner Circle that she could never go back there.
“You will,” Adam told her, then scooted off to new partners, as did the others. Recombinant pairs, trios, groups.
And she watched, a privileged witness.
They could do the most astonishing things.
Adam explained later, after the two of them had returned to his apartment. She was very quiet, cataloguing everything she’d experienced but finding that even in her vast erotic repertoire there was no place for this.
She drew herself together on the sofa, hands around a mug of coffee. Feeling loose inside, liquid, where muscles had stretched.
“How did it start?” she asked.
“How does anything start?” Adam said, then laughed softly to himself. “Transcendence. That’s what anyone wants out of life, isn’t it? Some way of getting past it. Or getting more out of it.” He paused, changed gears. “Ever hear of the Gnostics?”
She seesawed her hand.
“They were several splinter groups from the early Church, a couple thousand years ago. Didn’t last long, by comparison. The party line condemned them as heretics. Progressive in their day, in a lot of ways. But then they had this self-loathing kick they were on. Since the material world fell short of the spirit, it was bad, themselves included. So, automatically, anything that created them had to be bad too, so their lives were spent showing contempt for it all, until they could return to the spirit. Each branch had its ways. The ascetics denied themselves everything. The libertines, they pleasured themselves and fucked each other left and right. Overindulgence as the way to paradise … people after my own heart.” Adam winked. “And yours too,
Elle smiled weakly; felt rubbery inside and out. “I don’t think my goals were that lofty.”
“Oh mine neither, hell no,” he said, laughing. “Anyway. Even among the Gnostics there was a lunatic fringe. Most all of them had the idea that the body was a prison that kept the spirit shackled, but this fringe, they did something about it. Had a habit of cutting parts of themselves away to reduce the size of the prison.”
She began to piece it together then, amputation in an erotic context: The less body one has to dilute pleasure, the greater must be its concentration in the flesh that remains.
“And so the two of those approaches got combined, over time?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” Adam looked dumbfounded. “Who knows how anything really happens? It’s not like we trace ourselves back for centuries, nothing like that. It’s just something that someone stumbled onto awhile back, and found out … works.”
Languidly, Elle slipped from the sofa, wandered to a window, stared into the night. A sickly glow of sodium lights cast pools amid the blackened hulks of brick and steel, withered hives of isolation. How she hated it out there, its cold hard rot.
“Everything revives,” she said, “if you give it enough time.”
Their procedures were strictly of a back room variety, the amputations performed by a surgeon no longer
