by Troy Conway
“They caught us by surprise,” Celeste muttered. “Just when we were all about to trade lovers, and the men were going from one bed to the other, they grabbed their guns.”
“Luckily we’d turned out the lights, for kicks,” a Grecian brunette murmured, sobbing. “We thought it would be more fun that way—not knowing which of them was balling us.”
“It saved our lives, I guess,” Celeste added. “They couldn’t see too well in the darkness. They missed a lot more than they hit. We grabbed up mattresses and our weapons, and began shooting back after turning on the lights so we could see what the hell we were doing.”
“All right, come on. We have more of them to flush out.”
The mermen in their quarters would have been caught the same way by the Albanians who serviced them. My four remaining girl friends fell into step on either side of me.
The mermen’s quarters were dark.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I smelled deathtrap. I put out an arm, halting the girls.
“Take cover,” I whispered.
I stayed there alone, waiting until my Amazons were behind buildings. Then I shouted.
“You in there—answer me!”
The answer was a hail of lead from three windows. I dropped flat and began my crawl across the compound. As if we had practiced it, my four girls slid into view on their bellies, cradling their own weapons to their shoulders. They pumped lead into those windows as a covering fire until I got myself behind a building wall.
There was a woman there. Fleur.
“Where’d you come from?”
“When you ran after the Albanians, I ran to find the other girls. I g-got scared, so I turned and ran after you. But then I heard the sounds of shooting in the merman quarters. I froze, I guess.”
“You unfrozen?”
“I g-guess so.”
“Then get me some grenades and a launcher. And step on it, baby. We’ve got to cool it in there.”
She ran, military jacket flapping above her pantied behind.
“You inside there,” I bellowed at the Albanians. “The rest of your fellows are dead. You’re all alone. You’ll be dead in a little while too, unless you surrender.”
Soft curses were my answer.
Fleur ran up, staggering under the weight of an M-17 grenade launcher. I grabbed it, rammed a grenade down its maw and set the stock to my shoulder. My finger hit the trigger. There was a whoosh—and about a second later red flame blew up inside the mermen’s quarters. I could see bits of bodies flying all around inside that scarlet hell.
There was silence. I got up and moved forward with my girls all around me. We put our heads inside the window and withdrew them. There was nobody alive inside that shattered building.
“All right, girls—scatter! See if you can find anybody else around who’s alive.”
I set off toward my own quarters. All I needed was the packet containing Ernst Bachmann’s notebooks. When it made a good weight in my hand, I beat feet for the beach and the dinghy the Albanians had intended to make their escape in. It was there, surrounded by dead bodies.
I put my hands to the curved prow and pushed.
The dinghy did not move. Then two hands slammed against the prow beside my own. I looked at Flew Devot, pale and determined.
“Come on, push!” she panted. “The time I’m going to have you all to myself, dammit!”
We pushed. The dinghy slid an inch, two inches. Then the water was under its keel and the going was easier. I was tempted to tell Flew to go back to the other girls, but my common sense told me that was one order she would not obey.
Besides, I had a plan for Fleur.
When the dinghy was two feet out from shore, Fleur swung herself over the moldboard. I followed her an instant later. To my surprise she went to the sail, began running it up the mast. I moved aft to the rudder, glancing at the blonde in surprise.
“You know how to sail?”
“I was born on the coast of Brittany,” she answered.
The wind blew strong, and within minutes we were cleaving the blue waters of the Aegean toward the Greek mainland. Flew was very quiet, glancing at me from time to time.
Finally she said, “You took something from your room, didn’t you? Those notebooks.” She smiled when she saw my cautious glance. “Oh, I knew a long time ago you weren’t just a professor.”
“Okay, I took Bachmann’s notebooks. Bachmann’s dead. Nobody’s going to make men into mermen again if the Thaddeus X. Coxe Foundation can help it.”
“Good,” she nodded. “I’m glad.”
A Greek naval patrol boat picked us up twenty hours out of Thraxos. We were fed and taken to the American embassy in Athens. There I issued a statement to the Greek naval officer in command at their base, telling them that the pirate lair was a thing of the past, but that they could recover all the loot that had been stolen by sending a couple of vessels there.
A plane carried Fleur and me to Marseilles. From Marseilles, we went by helicopter to St. Tropez. I was wondering how I was going to explain Fleur to the baroness. I need not have worried. The baroness was in Paris, shop ping for fall clothes.
Walrus-moustache was still in St. Tropez, however.
He looked tanned and healthy, and, for him, was very grateful for my efforts. His hands went over the notebooks as if they were a woman.
“It’s too bad, but I’ll have to destroy them. Orders from on high,” he told me, seated in a chair on the beach where Fleur, in a black bikini bottom and a couple of pasties over her nipples, was walking into the water. I drew my eyes from her twitching buttocks to stare at him.
“You mean after all I went through you’re going to burn them? I could have done that myself, first night I was on that island.”
“I’m sure you’d have missed a lot of fun if you had,” he chuckled, and glanced at Fleur where she was diving into the blue Mediterranean. Since only le minimum strings were visible from behind, it seemed that she was stark naked.
I opened my mouth to protest. I closed it.
Maybe he had something there.
I relaxed in the hot sun, thinking about Fleur and her problem. I felt that my case was incomplete unless I did something about her hang-up. How to go about it? How best to teach her that pain need not be the trigger to fire off her passion? I settled back in the sunlight and thought.
And so, that evening, as I walked with Fleur Devot to her room in the Hotel de la Tour, I carried a few odds and ends in my pockets. She looked eatable in a black satin evening gown, out of which her bare shoulders and half of her breasts rose proudly. The cloth molded itself to the full buttocks quivering to her stride, naked under the satin. Her shapely legs were contained in silvered stockings.
We had just come from the Diabolique, and we walked in a swirl of heated flesh and prickling passion. Fleur seemed almost in a daze. I mess she had never seen anything quite like that stage show and the carrying-on of the people in the audience. I had deliberately refrained from touching her. I wanted her simmering, like a pot on a stove.
She was simmering just right. As I inserted the key in the lock of her door, she was rubbing her thighs together and making little moaning sounds. When I pushed open the door, I put a hand on her buttocks and urged her into darkness.
“Don’t on the light,” I murmured.
I closed the door and locked it. From my pocket I brought out a sleeping mask, one of those black cloth pads attached to a rubber band. I fitted it over her head. When she exclaimed in surprise, I kissed her pouting lips.
“You aren’t Fleur Devot any longer,” I told her. “You’re just a woman. Any woman. You have only two senses left to you, those of taste and touch. This is the last word you will hear from me for some time to come.”
I pushed twin earplugs into her ears and so that I could experience this same loss of identification, I slipped a mask over my eyes and placed plugs in my own ears, as well. Instantly I felt alone, abandoned in a black emptiness that was a
lmost terrifying in its completeness.
I put out a hand, as if to seek human companionship. I touched Fleur on her bare arm. I pulled her closer, bent my head and kissed up that arm to her shoulder. She was shaking; I knew that much. I could neither see nor hear her, but suddenly I could feel her hand touch my middle and move downward.
Her fingers clutched my rigid manhood.
I slid her shoulder strap down. I could not see her, I could not hear her, so I used my lips across the shoulder I had bared to search out and discover the nakedness of her flesh. I licked her flesh hungrily as I pushed the panel of her gown off her breast.
My tongue learned the shape of that rockhard breast, the pebbled contour of the rubbery nipple. I took it into my mouth, I suckled at it, I used my tongue to whip it as I might a candy. Fleur was pressing her bared breast into my face, trying to move it from side to side. It felt like a big balloon.
My hands slipped across her bare back and down to her hips. My tactile sense was sharply heightened by my isolation from sight and sound. Her back was like whipped cream to the touch. Her other shoulder strap had come down by this time, I felt her palms catch my cheeks and draw my mouth to her neglected nipple.
Just touch and taste.
I slid my open mouth down her front, away from her swollen breasts. I kissed her navel, let my tongue-tip know its contours. My mouth went across the faint bulge of her belly that moved against my face as she panted. By slipping downward, I had dragged myself from her clutching hand. She must have been angry, her hands twisted themselves in my hair and shook my head from side to side.
While she was doing that, my hands were yanking her black satin evening gown down past her hips. My hands followed the gown past her fleshy hips and along her smooth thighs to the tops of her silvered stockings. I caressed her warm flesh, feeling her thighs rubbing together and her hips swinging in a rotary motion.
Her hands were under my face, trying to convey the idea she wanted me to stand. I got to my feet and found that her own hands wanted in on the action. Fleur undid my tie, unbuttoned my shirt, freed my belt with thumbs and forefingers, and made my pants slide down. I obliged her by stepping out of my shorts.
Naked, I felt her own naked body come against mine. She used her belly, her breasts and her thighs to caress me. She slid around on me, back and forth, all soft flesh against which my manhood brushed and bumped. Fleur turned her body all around, moving it against me so I could sense its softness, its heat. When her buttocks touched my extended flesh, they became gentle, lifting and falling and arching as though she wanted to learn my shape through that one area alone.
I took advantage of her position to put my hands around her waist, to caress her belly, to slide fingertips down across her shaven privacy. The movements of her behind became more abandoned. When my fingertip sought out her twig, she mashed her buttock cheeks into me and shook.
I could not hear her panting, but I am certain she was, because my own lungs were going in and out like a bellows. I did not feel like Rod Damon any longer; I was merely Man. Fleur was only Woman. No longer Fleur Devot, no more a French starlet, but just a Female playing with a nameless Male.
I could only hope this therapeutic treatment was working. My little blonde starlet was discovering that her body reacted to gentle caresses, to a slow build-up of fondlings and kisses, to touch and taste. She did not need pain to get a glow on. In the dark silence enveloping us both, she was almost a virgin learning about sex for the first time.
I kissed her bare shoulder. I ran my tongue down her spine. My fingernails scratched lightly along her sides, all the way to her hips. My lips kissed her quivering buttocks, my tongue tasted them. Fleur stood trembling, accepting this adoration of her unclad loveliness. She was not thinking of pain now. Only of the pleasure I was showering upon her flesh.
I kissed her thighs, her knees, her calves. I devoted myself to her nakedness as if I must learn her beauty by touch of tongue and lips alone. She understood what I was trying to accomplish, I am positive. She turned her naked body this way and that, adding to its pleasure by partaking of it.
And then—she was gone.
My arms held no longer her naked hips, her buttock cheeks were no longer warn beneath my mouth. I gave a shocked cry, not realizing she could not hear me.
A hand touched my bare back, moved down blindly to my own buttocks, slid around in front to where I strained for pleasure. The hand was smooth and warm; it was my entire world at that moment. It took my flesh into a cupped hand. Another hand came to join it, discovering shape and size and hardness.
Sensing that this intimate investigation was an integral part of my plan to free her from her former slavery to pain, I tried to remain as detached as possible. I let those hands probe and stroke and weigh. My body was shaking uncontrollably, however. Despite my experience as a practicing sexologist, I was also a man.
Her mouth came to join her hands in their explorations. I gave a cry, I fell backwards at the touch of her tongue and her soft, moist lips. I lay there shaking, realizing she was as blind and deaf as I, and that she was using the only method left to her to know my body better.
Her lips closed on me, holding me.
Gently my hips thrust upward. She seemed to understand, she worked slowly and gently, all over me until she knew my form as a sculptor knows his clay. Then her head moved faster. The pleasure she gave me was excrutiatingly pleasant. I had no sight nor sound to distract my attention. I lived only at that point of my greatest excitation. The world had nothing else in it for me at the moment.
Then my hand reached out and ran down a shaking thigh. I caressed the soft flesh, I hooked her thigh and drew it closer so that her knees slid upon the carpet. I lifted her thigh, drew it over me. I could not see it, my caressing hands molded it so in my mind I sensed its quivering, its widespread stance. My hands slid on up across her haunches. My fingers fastened in her shaking buttocks.
I drew her downward and explored her womanhood with my mouth and tongue, as she was doing to me. I could not hear her, the only means I had to determine how I was affecting her was the movement of her teeth and mouth. Those teeth bit and scraped; the lips soothed and caressed.
For an eternity of ecstasy, we floated in blackness.
Fleur rippled and shook, again and again. Her body leaped and danced above my own as sensations to which she had been alien exploded through her flesh. A cathartic carnality held her in its grip. She was a different woman now. The mere brush of her rock-hard breasts across my belly told me that pleasure and not pain would be the guidepost for her conduct from now on.
My hands gripped her haunches, pushing them sideways. She rolled and I went with her, but now I was sliding about so my face was above her own. My fingers went to her mask, sliding it loose as I lifted off my own. I removed our earplugs.
“Ohhhh,” she moaned, hips lifting.
My eyes stared down into her delight-contorted face as I moved into her body. She welcomed me, arms clasped about me. Her hips slowly picked up the beat and began pounding against the floor. To cushion her softness, I gripped her with my hands, lifting her, directing her movements.
She screamed three times in two minutes.
When I slowed and withdrew, Fleur Devot was staring at the ceiling with a wild, bright light in her face. “Why didn’t someone tell me?” she whispered. “Why, Rod? I never realized. I never properly understood!”
“And maybe you never would have if I hadn’t settled on this mode of treatment. You’d have laughed at me if I suggested anything different from what’s always given you your kicks.”
Her laugh was roguish. “Maybe I would,” she admitted, lifting her arms to fold them about my neck so she could kiss me with open mouth. “Who knows the way of a maid?”
I do, I wanted to tell her. But maybe she sensed that, be cause she drew away her mouth long enough to say, “How about another lesson, Professor?”
Somehow, I got the feeling she might become my star pupil, given eno
ugh time. And I had plenty of time. I wasn’t due back at the university for another couple of weeks.
The second lesson started coming up.