head, her smile full of warmth and promise and without the faintest hint of smugness. 'You said I'd pay for it.' Her brows asked for endorsement; he nodded. 'And as it happens, I will love paying for it,' she said, tossing the hat into a corner. 'Get over on that bed, mister; your first payment's going to be a massage.'
By the time she got his boots off, he was already functional. When she pulled his synthosuede briefs down, he met her with a salute of sorts. 'No you don't. Mister Coulter,' she said, even though she was brushing it with her hair as she continued, 'it's your shoulders that I massage first. Just stay there on your back, buckaroo.'
Of course he had taken a room with mirrors on the closet, and she caught him watching as she kneaded the muscles across his shoulders; and the sight of herself astride him, his erection fully vertical and only a hand's span behind her buttocks as she rubbed the bronzed shoulders, made her gasp with desire.
Now their glances locked in the mirror and held as she moved back, still massaging, pretending to ignore the probe between her thighs, and even when he slid into her she did not abandon her attention to his upper torso.
His arms had been flung wide, but as she began to utter soft moans to pace him, he reached up and separated the bra, titillating her breasts with feather touches. She wanted to look directly at him but remained fascinated by the sight of herself, somehow not herself, ravishing a man in ways both familiar and strange; plunging on him, turning to favor one nipple or the other for his attention, controlling and dominating him through raw sex. And with his wholehearted assent.
When she felt the warm climactic flood spread through her body, she urged him to accompany her; felt him thrust more slowly but more deeply, too, and when they began to cry out, the name each of them called was not the name the other had given. And this was somehow an added ecstasy.
She collapsed on him eventually, and now it was he who gave the massage, progressing to her buttocks, clasping her, rolling her over. She lay with lips parted, her face partially masked by masses of honey hair with those strange auburn highlights he had never seen before, an addition to his joy.
He never withdrew but came to his knees, his blunt nails running gently down her legs until he gripped her feet, now holding her legs up, using those lascivious heels as handles. 'A very, very gifted amateur,' he teased as she reached down to tickle him.
'I watched a holoporn cassette,' she said in bogus innocence. 'Can you really come again?'
'I faked it,' he said, burying himself in her. 'You're not through paying yet, Margarita.'
'You bastard,' she said, more blessing than curse. Then she reached up and grasped her feet in glorious abandon. 'Fake it again. Mister Coulter.'
'Never trust an oilman,' he began, and ended, 'from Mon — a — hans,' and this time there was no question of fakery.
They lay together for a long while, exchanging kisses, caressing one another as though afterplay were foreplay. Presently she disengaged, showered, and dressed while he showered. Then, before emerging into the sunset for dinner and dancing, they enjoyed a second engagement featuring broad variations on oral and manual themes.
Sometime before midnight, after touring half the ringcity, they sat through a short double feature 'living presence' holoshow, the first feature a broad farce, the second rated X, and Y, and Z, and just as comic in its own way. Later, they found that they could not copy every position they had seen — but it was not for lack of trying.
On Sunday they went to church together. Neither of them found anything odd in that. In parting, they agreed to repeat their liaison 'sometime soon,' but they were cheerfully vague about details.
Chapter Twenty
Sandy's journal, Sun. 24 Sept. '06
I am going to sleep for a solid week. Poor Ted, those brown contact lenses had him teary-eyed until I convinced him that his hair-dye deception was enough! I could convince myself that all this was entirely a stratagem toward marriage. But no lies in these pages. Liked it so much it scares me — but only because the illusion of sex without love was an illusion, and one that we discarded during the night. Perhaps if he did not give up male domination so easily, I would like the illusion less. And will he still like it, after sober reflection?
We did not talk as we usually do — but why should we? Often, words between lovers are slaves of the poor, a few doing the work of many, doing it tiresomely, over and over. This may be a blessing, since it sometimes bids us hush. It is only then that we can hear the silence filled with the sibilance of unspoken yesses.
Mutual oral sex may be the most profound communion of all, if for no better reason than that our tongues are silently occupied!
God, I miss him already…
Chapter Twenty-One
On Saturday, Felix Sorel arrived in Oregon Territory with papers claiming he was one Ernst Matthias. Within the hour, he and a second man were seated in a monorail lozenge as it slid up broad green valleys toward a tumble of mountains on the horizon. Sprawled like an apron across the lap of one of those mountains lay their destination, the southernmost township under Canadian protection: Ashland.
Sorel studied maps and promotional pamphlets, noting that many of the prewar roads shown on the maps were 'no longer maintained,' to quote the map legends. Now and then Sorel stared at some local landmark, identifying it on the map. Long ago. he had learned to use every means to brief himself on an unfamiliar region — especially one where his pelt had a price on it. By the time they reached Ashland, Sorel had a bare-bones working knowledge of the town and the arterials that fed it.
The second man, Harley Slaughter, carried forged ID as well. The lank, yellow-haired Slaughter talked little and, as he stepped from the lozenge into sunshine, watched the crowds a lot in his heavy-lidded way. From the first. Slaughter was uneasy among the tourist throngs who made Ashland seem a major city in miniature. If he felt any premonition, he kept quiet about it.
Harley Slaughter enjoyed perfect health but had hollow cheeks and gaunt limbs suggestive of a man recovering from serious illness. His expression said he was half-asleep, if you missed the way he scanned his surroundings for trouble. He had the trick of noticing everything without the faintest show of recognition, and he carried another trick up his sleeve — literally. Strapped to the underside of his right wrist was the barrel of a coldgas weapon, its pressure cartridge snugged into his armpit, its trigger mechanism a flesh-colored tongue of plastic hidden by a long shirt-sleeve. By flexing his wrist sharply outward. Slaughter could fire the weapon through his sleeve without the wasted time and effort of a fast draw. Though its range was limited, the weapon was quiet and flashless.
A product of North African genius, the coldgas mechanism was semiautomatic, firing porous metal balls of medium caliber. Each ball was coated with a plastic film that peeled away when penetrating a target, and then the ball tended to disintegrate. The pores of the ball contained formic acid, the same stuff that fire ants used to such effect, except that a hundred ants did not carry as much formic acid as a single ball from Slaughter's weapon. Harley Slaughter did not depend on muzzle velocity or impact effects; anyone who took the slightest flesh wound from him became hors de combat from sheer agony, tearing at his own flesh, sometimes dying from toxic shock. Slaughter's was not a very nice weapon, but Harley Slaughter was not known for nicing.
Marianne Placidas found the men at the monorail platform and did not remark on their roundabout route (Chihuahua to Portland by laserboost, before the long glide through Eugene to Ashland by electric monorail). She was too nervous for small talk and guided them to her rented diesel-electric Chevy without preamble.
'I assume,' said Sorel once they were inside the Chevy, 'that you are not as unarmed as you seem to be.'
