The Devil’s Sperm is Cold Read online

  She looked at him with concern. He went instantaneously from a horrid but fascinating lecher into a tired old man with a bad heart. Mixed with his rank sensuality and his pictorial grasp of sex was his actual humanity, the fact that he was only a mortal. She felt a pang of empathy with him, and from that flowed the compassion which was to bring them together in friendship.

  She went into the kitchen to put coffee up to boil. He disappeared into his bedroom, and when he came out he was dressed in a satin dressing gown. They sat and sipped the hot brew in silence, each enjoying the relaxation of the moment. And after a while she spoke. “Does that mean we’re not going to…have sex any more tonight?”

  He laughed again, a sound that she was beginning to find heartwarming. “Not at all, young lady, we will almost certainly have sex for the next three or four hours. It’s just that when the fires burst from inside you, I’ll have to stand back from time to time and let you, as they say, do your thing. I won’t be able to meet you at the peaks of your ecstasy. But then, I will be here, quite sober, should you plunge from those peaks into valleys of despair and self-disgust.”

  She gave him a questioning, appraising glance.

  “Don’t try to figure me out yet,” he said. “Look upon me as a teacher, perhaps,” he went on, launching himself into his favorite image of himself, a kind of sexual guru to the nation, both in the books he published and in the private scenes he mounted.

  “It’s hard to switch from such wild letting go to such rational conversation,” she said. “I don’t know if I can get back into sex again.”

  He put his coffee cup down. “Come with me,” he said, and taking her by the hand led her into a small room that he had specially constructed himself. She felt like a child being led by her father into a garden of delights. The room was covered with photographs and drawings, and it contained a water bed in one corner, a leather message table in another, and row upon row of gadgets, the use of which she was unable to discern without a studied look.

  “Lie down there,” he said, pointing to the water bed. And when she did, she found herself staring into a mirror which had been cemented onto the ceiling. She had forgotten how she looked and was now rudely reminded, as her long legs kicked idly about on the undulating surface, and her cunt winked lewdly from around the edges of the garter belt. He knelt next to her.

  “Now let’s take this off,” he said, expertly unhooking her bra, allowing her breasts to fall out, thick, creamy, lush, tipped with purple nipples. His head fell toward and in a moment she felt his hot tongue laving the soft mounds, while his fingers tenderly tweaked the tender tips. A gasp escaped her lips and her thighs parted of their own accord. As though his hands had eyes of their own, his fingers found their way down her flat belly, past the humped hairy mound of Venus, and into the sticky hole beneath. Her cunt, hot and pulsing with a life of its own, sucked three of his fingers into its depths.

  “Oh God,” she sighed as his hand slid back and forth, in and out of her tingling pussy, his fingers twirling against the slimy walls.

  He let out a single surprised breath. “I’ll bet you can take my whole fist in your cunt already.”

  In response, she opened her legs wider, spreading her ass on the warm support of plastic and water. “Do it,” she murmured. “Put your fist up my cunt, Lou, shove it in all the way to the elbow.”

  She closed her eyes and let him do what he wanted with her, and even when she could sense a bright light go on, and knew that from somewhere a camera was recording her every moan, her every thrust, she didn’t care. She had wanted for her entire life to let go and put herself in the hands of a man who understood what she wanted, when she wanted to be passive. And now that she had found one who was not only expert, but kind, nothing in the world would have prevented her from draining the experience of its last drop.

  “I’ll get to your cunt,” he said in a low, firm voice, “but first I want your mouth.” And he knelt above her, his bulk hovering over her head, as she opened her lips and curled her tongue out to receive him.

  “That’s good,” he said, “that’s what I want to see. Show it to me, show me your cocksucking mouth.” And again, the phrase pressed a certain button inside her, and she began to whip her head from side to side, her lips opening and stretching as wide as they could, while her tongue danced in a frenzy of lust. She twisted her pelvis, humping her cunt into the air. He seized one of her breasts and kneaded it like dough.

  “Oh, give it to me,” she moaned. “Please, put it in my mouth.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “I’m going to put something in your mouth, and as soon as you feel it, I want you to swallow it. Do you understand? Now, reach your lips up toward me.”

  Frowning, she made sucking noises as his body descended toward her face.

  That had been almost a year earlier, and since that night, Lou had taken her to his apartment a dozen times, with each visit finding her stretching the limits of the spectrum of sexual expressiveness, until one time he invited two of his friends to visit and spent the evening working her up to greater and greater peaks of desire, and then giving her to the other men to use as they wished. “It’s easier for me this way,” he had explained. “Not so much strain on the heart when a younger man finishes what I begin.”

  Finally, he had let her know, gently, over dinner, that he did not think there would be any further meetings. He had pleaded increased business, schedules, but she put her hand on his arm.

  “You’re bored with me, Lou, isn’t that it? There’s nothing more I can show you.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t want to put it that way,” he said, “and maybe hurt your feelings.”

  “What do we have together if we don’t have honesty?” she asked him.

  “But I want you to keep working for me,” he told her. “I’m even going to give you a raise.”

  She laughed. “I’ll bet that’s the first time a boss has given an employee a raise because he didn’t want to fuck her,” she said.

  “Well, I’m glad you understand,” he replied. “You’re a nice girl, with a lovely ass and an educated cunt, and you have a good mind. But you know, you’re one of thousands, millions. Me, I’m interested in pictures. And as a model, you’ve shown me everything you have to show.”

  “And what happens to those movies you’ve been taking?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her, “they’ll never be seen in Arkansas.”

  She now walked with habitualized rhythm down the corridor, glad to be away from the interminable drone of male voices, and wondered about Margaret, who was already in the small kitchen at the other end of the suite of offices, waiting for her. Joan sensed that the other woman was about to lift matters to a new level of relationship, and while she did not dwell on the particulars of what might be involved, she was charged with a slight expectant randiness that primed her for whatever might take place.

  TWO

  “Are you nervous?” Margaret stared intently at her visitor. Joan shifted her weight, uncertain as to how to answer.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I’m perspiring, if that’s any indication.”

  “Where are you perspiring?” Margaret asked with a wry smile.

  Joan shifted her weight again. “Under my arms, along the insides of my thighs.”

  Margaret licked her lips in that way she had, falling somewhere between amusement and invitation. There was a long pause.

  “Well, why did you invite me here?” Joan asked.

  While the two of them had been making coffee that morning and agreeing that men-at-meetings were the most tedious things in creation, Margaret had asked Joan to dinner at her apartment. Not sure of what was being offered besides food, Joan had felt a tingle of anticipation that something exciting might happen, and after three hours of the conference, she was ready to take anything that offered an antidote to the deadly boredom of business.

  In her Chelsea apartment, a single huge room painted Mandarin red with all black furn
iture and furnishings, except for the bone-white curtains on the windows, Margaret had greeted her, dressed in a transparent canary-yellow dressing gown through which could be seen her legs, the vermilion gash of the panties she wore, and the white fullness of bare breasts tipped with tantalizing glimpses of brown nipples. They had had drinks and a light dinner of broiled whitefish and a tossed salad and garlic bread, followed by strong Turkish coffee and Sherman cigarettes. Now, at ease on a thick rug in front of the fireplace, they were moving into that space of encounter in which the souls of two human beings become naked before one another.

  “I asked you here to talk business,” Margaret said.

  “That’s a disappointment,” Joan said, stretching out to her full length, her tight slacks folding and creasing behind her knees and at her crotch. Margaret stared for a long moment at the bulge between Joan’s thighs, picturing the soft mound, the swamp of hair, the tangled lips beneath, the succulent aromatic hole beneath them. Joan, aware of the other’s gaze, at first went to cross her legs in a reflex movement, then checked herself, and let her thighs fall open. She had promised herself that she would go with the total flow this evening, and while she was unable to initiate anything, she could certainly cooperate with Margaret’s desires.

  “I think you have a one-dimensional understanding of business,” Margaret said. “I should have thought that after your relationship with Lou, you might have understood it differently.”

  At once, Joan was on the alert. “What do you know of my relationship with Lou?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen the movies he made of you,” Margaret told her. And before Joan could say another word, went on, “I’ve seen you with your legs spread wide, a dildo in your cunt and a dildo in your ass, squirming at his feet, begging him to fuck you in the mouth. I’ve seen the one where he gives you to his friends, and after being fucked for four hours, with every hole red and raw, still unsatisfied, you stuffed your fingers in your cunt and rubbed yourself until you were wracked with shuddering orgasms, and spent, weak, crawled up to the men and pleaded with them to fuck you again. Until they had to pick you up and throw you in a bathtub of ice-cold water to snap you out of your delirium.”

  Margaret lit a cigarette, let out a cloud of smoke, and continued, “I know all about the fire inside you, Joan, and I’m not shocked. I’m a woman too, and I have felt the same things. All women do, who are at all honest with themselves. But that’s only one face of the phenomenon. Sex is one part.”

  Half horrified, half captivated by the knowledge that Margaret had seen her in her most exposed moments, she asked, “And what’s the other part?”

  Margaret smiled. “Why, power, of course.”

  Joan shook her head, “You’re just like Lou,” she said.

  “In a sense,” Margaret told her. She ran her free hand over her breasts and down to her crotch. “Except that Lou doesn’t have this lovely body, and he doesn’t have the knowledge of what it is to be a woman, although I must admit he’s made a more thorough study of it than anyone I’ve ever met, even though his perspective is rather limited. No, the one thing we have in common is clarity. We both know exactly what we want.”

  “I knew what I wanted once,” Joan said. “More than anything, I wanted to be an actress.”

  Margaret leaned forward and put her head on Joan’s calf, the pressure of her fingers just enough to capture her attention. “I know,” Margaret said. “And that’s the business I want to talk about. The only trouble with your wanting to be an actress was the scope of the stage and role you allowed yourself. The old form of theater is dead and ridiculous. All life is a drama, all the world is a stage. Trite words, but powerful meaning. Why limit yourself to a few bare boards and a painted set and someone else’s lines, when you can be starring in your own play all the time, twenty-four hours a day?”

  Margaret’s hand had moved, as though of its own volition, up past Joan’s knee to her thigh. Margaret was lying much closer now, her face at a level with Joan’s breasts, her hand gently stroking the cloth which clung to Joan’s full thigh. Its movements were in rhythm with her speech, and as she spelled out her vision and plan, her hand made insistent and persistent forays further up Joan’s leg toward the tempting, taut triangle made by the folds of fabric around her cunt.

  “It’s time to wake up,” she went on. “This moment is the only moment we shall ever have. There is always only now, even though the content of now continually changes. The thing to ask is, ‘Who is in control? Who is writing your script? Who is deciding your role? Who is designing your set?’”

  “I think I understand you,” Joan replied, “but your words have implications I don’t really grasp.”

  “Don’t worry about the implications,” Margaret said, “they will become clear in time. But for now, I want to know whether you are ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Joan asked.

  “Ready to help me take Lou Morris’ publishing empire away from him.”

  The words rang like a gong in Joan’s mind. It was the single most enormous proposition she had ever heard which fell within the realm of her possibility, and yet lay beyond the limits of what she thought she could accomplish.

  “How can…?” she began.

  But Margaret silenced her sentence with her hand, putting her fingers over Joan’s mouth. “No details now,” she said. “You’ve already got more than enough, than you can assimilate. Just let that thought rest inside you, and in a few days, we can talk again.”

  Joan let her head fall back onto the floor. Her mind was spinning around and all she could focus on were the shadows made by the flames in the fireplace as they danced across the ceiling. Although she was making no future motion to speak, Margaret did not remove her fingers, and after a few moments, Joan could feel their heat and texture on her lips. Slowly, her mouth fell slightly open, and Margaret’s fingers slid inwards, first touching her teeth, and then, moving past, rested on her tongue.

  Joan lay passive for a second, and then began to lick Margaret’s fingers gently. The two of them barely moved, and the only sounds in the room were of the fire spitting and the two women breathing heavily. Joan had never been with a woman before, although she had thought about it often.

  “It’s going to happen,” she thought, “it’s going to happen now.” She checked her body and found herself tense with anticipation. Her thighs locked together, her belly flat and taut, her toes curled. Margaret’s hand went deeper into her mouth, until she had four fingers between Joan’s stretched lips.

  “Why don’t we get our clothes off?” said Margaret after what seemed like an eternity.

  Joan opened her eyes and found herself looking full into Margaret’s face. It had the precision beauty of an ancient Greek mask, except for the eyes, which were like snakes slithering in a pit of smoke.

  “You’re so beautiful and so frightening,” Joan whispered.

  Margaret pulled her hand back slowly and replaced it with her mouth, covering Joan’s lips with her own. Joan stiffened against the contact, for despite all her tendencies toward libertinism, she had the conventional conditioning against intimate contact with a member of her own sex. But Margaret’s lips were so soft, so knowing, so warm, that she soon melted under their insistence. Again her mouth opened, and this time, instead of rigid fingers, she was greeted with a hot sinuous tongue that instantly greeted her own with an invitation to dance. Joan responded with a gasp, her mouth surging upward, crushing her lips against Margaret’s in a grinding kiss. Her hands curved around the other woman’s neck and pulled her head down to her own. Margaret snuggled in closer, and their bodies flew together, breasts crushing breasts, thighs touching thighs. With the expertise born of experience, Margaret tilted her pelvis forward in just such a way that her cunt slipped in against Joan’s crotch, and with the contact made, she began slowly to grind her pussy between the other woman’s thighs, teasing the lips folded beneath panties and slacks, inflaming the clitoris that started to clamor for nakedness. Margaret suck
ed the breath from Joan’s lungs and then abruptly pulled back, leaving the stunned copy editor gasping.

  “No clothes,” she rasped. “I want you naked.”

  They parted reluctantly, and Margaret shrugged herself out of her dressing gown at once. She lay back and bent her legs at the hips, bringing her knees to her exposed breasts, which fell in flattened mounds on her chest, sagging to either side of her torso, the huge nipples already wrinkled and erect. She slipped her fingers in the elastic of her panties and with a single motion pulled them down her legs and over her feet, uncovering the patch of yellow hair that modestly guarded the full sensual cunt lips that now burst from between the naked thighs and buttocks. Joan’s eyes went directly to the furry mound, and Margaret saw where her glance went. She brought her hands down to her cunt and rubbed the outer lips languorously.

  “Yes, my love,” she said, “now you see my cunt. Men have gone mad to get to where you are now. And I give it to you so easily. Does that make you happy?”

  Joan couldn’t answer. Her mouth was dry and her lips felt drawn. Margaret slipped one finger between the outer lips of her pussy and stirred it around inside, then pulled it out again, now glistening wet. She moved up and brought her hand up to Joan’s face. “This is how I smell,” she said, and put her finger under Joan’s nose. “Take a deep breath,” she ordered gently.

  Joan inhaled, and the fragrance that assailed her made her heart pound. It was so like her own, and yet not her own at all. It was the smell of cunt, but not her cunt. It was another woman’s cunt, and she was at the edge of feeling and tasting that cunt herself. She grew dizzy at the realization that she was at the verge of committing what she had always referred to as “a lesbian act,” and the very words only served to inflame her further.