OUTLAWS
I ached for fulfillment in an age where robots diddled me with more expertise than I did myself. Day in and day out, in and out, I poked and prodded, rubbed and rodded with every possible attachment, gizmo, and hybrid vegetable I could find. Like Icarus, I hooked myself up to my mechanical wings and tried to fly. I spent thousands of globals, charged to my credit account, for the latest technology—get off in style, get off with the turn of a dial, waterproof, shockproof, new and improved, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back—but no matter how many orifices I filled, and filled to bursting, I couldn’t satisfy that one elusive hole that yearned the most. It had opened up inside me, yawning wide and slavering with a hunger I didn’t understand. It ate at me from the inside out like a greedy ulcer, hidden deep in my psyche where even a Hyper-Dildo™ couldn’t reach.
Then, he came out of nowhere and inserted himself into my pursuit of happiness.
It happened in the Women’s Spa on Level 30; I was relaxing in a Jacuzzi. The warm water enfolded my naked body and rocked me. Eyes closed, I let my mind drift and tried to suck an ocean of healing into that chasm in my soul.
“I want to fuck you,” he announced, close, too close, too male. I blinked open my eyes and focused on him. He had gotten into the tub, unnoticed—brown, curly hair, brown eyes—trusting eyes— masculine mouth, sculpted neck, broad shoulders, smooth chest, flat stomach, dark pubis, erection. Erection. His penis looked angry, purple-faced in the rippling underwater, and pointed an unfamiliar accusation at me.
I had seen pictures of cocks before, flaccid examples in college textbooks: disease samplings, warped constructions, and symptoms of sexual deviance. Curious, I had studied the fleshy acorns with their oozing sores and, through the course of my education, had developed a natural aversion to the male sex organ. I had never seen one up close and personal, certainly hadn’t expected to see one in the Women’s Spa. This penis, the one swimming beneath the surface of the water, stared at me with its one eye, voluptuous and healthy.
Long ago, centuries ago, women had let men put cocks inside them. Though I knew the history, I had somehow, until that moment, missed the connection between erection, arousal, and the fat dildos with which I pleasured myself. My pussy took notice.
Tearing my eyes from the engorged member, I glanced around for other spa patrons, but they had all left. I was alone with a fucker. A crazy fucker, no doubt, who might touch me, or worse, get me arrested for conspiracy to touch and be touched. I glared at him. He was early twenties and handsome, not like the elderly sex offenders pictured on the evening news or the ones caricatured in the psychology textbooks.
The man spoke again, his tone gentle. “You believe them when they say you mustn’t.”
“Are you insane?”
“No. I feel you—your need. It’s like mine. I’ve been waiting for you. I want to fuck you. Please.” His voice had a soft depth, not the least bit threatening, sincere. He took my hand so gently I didn’t think to react, and he pulled it down into the water, down to his erection. The shock, oh the shock, the cock electric and blue burning. Flesh to flesh, skin to skin, forbidden touching.
I yanked my hand back. Fighting the thick water, I fled from him and climbed out of the tub in a rush of splash and drip.
His gaze pursued me across the tiled room and into the dryer tunnel. I felt it as acutely as if he were still touching me with his hands. Just inside the dryer tunnel, I stepped onto the conveyor belt. It slowed my flight, moving me along at its leisurely pace.
When I glanced back to see his streaming, wet-shiny body rising up out of the Jacuzzi, my inner walls clenched.
Blast after blast of warm air assaulted me. The drying winds tugged at my hair, invaded my space. From below, they thrust up between my legs and groped at my cunt. From above, they pushed down on me and tweaked my nipples.
The nerve of him! I considered reporting him; it would have served him right. What he’d done was criminal. Men did not belong in the women’s baths, and they should never show their bodies.
I wanted solitude. At my locker, I punched numbers into the keypad and removed my belongings. My robe provided a soft shell of protection against the erections of the world, but offered no comfort to my disturbed mind and crotch. I hurried to the exit, murmuring apologies to the strangers I skirted.
I had never appreciated the privacy of the complex’s transport system as much as I did that afternoon. The car moved like a solitary corpuscle through the building’s veins. I huddled, ruffled, in a corner of the ascending Bubble and clutched my robe around myself. I watched the red-on-black display count off the levels, 32, 33, 34, 35 . ..
Softly, I chanted to myself, “59, 59, 59, 59,” anxious for the shelter of my suite. The correct digits appeared, and the Bubble slid sideways, 59A, 59B, 59C, 59D, 59E . .. through the horizontal shaft to my apartment. The doors opened directly onto my living room. After I’d stepped across the threshold, the doors closed with a vacuum suck. I relaxed. I was safe again, at least physically.
In my mind, I heard, “I want to fuck you,” in that masculine, natural voice. “I want to fuck you . . . fuck you . . . fuck you.” My pussy throbbed.
Men lived in their quarter, and we women lived in ours. Thus, the government kept us separated and safe from the venereal bacteria that had killed hundreds of thousands. Marriage and love had become outdated concepts. We made babies in the clinic, not in the bedroom.
And we never saw them without clothes—except in school-books.
He’d been naked, his skin clear and shining with water, his cock an eager . . .
“No,” I denied aloud and went about my business. Nothing, however, distracted me enough. He haunted me with his lewd and unacceptable, not to mention illegal, request.
I tried to console myself on the Stroke-57. I straddled it and sat down on the positioning nub. The small probe slid easily into my moist cavity. I spread my nether lips around the mechanical mouth, fingers parting my pussy. I brushed my clit; electricity ran up my spine and seized my heart. I gasped.
The machine sensed me and began its foreplay. As the stroke bed came to life, I leaned forward onto the angled bench, rested my cheek on the soft pillow, and closed my eyes. I wrapped my arms around it and held on.
He’d been muscular, his hand enormous when it had wrapped around my wrist.
The vibrations shook my tits.
Warm. His touch—and his eyes. He’d had tears in them. And his lips had parted with wanting . . . me.
The mouth undulated between my labia and licked with jellied pressure across my clit.
Hot. His cock had radiated heat through its skin, healthy skin stretched over the hard proof of his arousal.
He wanted to fuck me.
The probe thickened to my preset proportions. It pistoned, increasing its depth and speed.
When I came, it was upon his cock that my pussy clenched, and I threw my head back and lifted my breasts up, offering them to his gaze and . . .
The Stroke-57 clunked to a halt and was still between my legs. The probe receded.
I told my best friend Mikeila about the man in the spa.
“He did what?” she cried in horror. “What did you do?”
“I walked away.”
“Good.” Mikeila shook her head. “Stupid fucker. I can’t believe the nerve. He’s lucky his ass isn’t in jail right now.”
“His cock was hard.”
Mikeila grimaced in disgust. “You poor thing.” She folded her hands in sympathy. “Did you tell the attendant?”
I shook my head and lied, “He didn’t touch me.” Then, to justify the guilty secret, I added, “I don’t even know who he was.”
“The world’s going to shit,” Mikeila grumbled. “Fuckers everywhere. I was watching this show on the vid last night. They were interviewing sex offenders—people convicted of everything from holding hands to . . . fucking. They want a revival of the old days. Can you imagine? They’ve forgotten . . . the crimes of passion, the teenage mothers, the population explosion, rapes, suicides, disease, incest, crack babies, and fanatics who bred their own followers. I mean, come on! Let’s get some perspective, people. With today’s technology, they don’t need to be sticking their . . .”
My mind wandered, as it often did when Mikeila was on a roll, drifting back to how that cock had felt against my hand, hard wood wrapped in the richest silk. I remembered its heat and how it had twitched, like a living thing. The word “delicious” came to mind.
“No, no, no,” I murmured, denying, denying, denying.
Mikeila asked, “What do you mean ‘no’?”
“Sorry. I just . . . Can we talk about something else? It was so . . .”
“Crude?”
“Yeah.”
“Primitive?”
“Yeah.” I lowered my eyes. “If I see him again, I’ll report him.”
Days later, he found me at the Millennium Café. A book suddenly appeared on the table beside my espresso, held in a strong, masculine hand.
“Read it,” he whispered. “It’ll get you wet.”
I glanced at the book. You, the title read simply. By Anonymous.
He turned and walked toward the exit. His black jumpsuit gave him a neat, tight look, rippling tension. He stopped in the doorway and shifted sideways to let someone pass. The rotation slid his crotch across my view. The leg of his pants had a bulge, a thickness that shared the confining space with his thigh. Because I knew what was in there, I felt intimate with him.
Lifting my gaze, I caught his attention on me. Heat put flames to my cheeks. In those dark eyes, I saw amusement, but he wasn’t laughing at me. He was enjoying me.
A waiter approached, and I covered the book with my hand.
“Can I get you anything else?” the server asked.
“No. Thank you.”
When I looked back toward the door, he was gone.
Once in the privacy of my suite, I tried to decide how to dispose of the book. I could have tossed it in the incinerator or flushed it page-by-page down the toilet. I could have buried it among the food scraps in the communal composter. I could have wiped it clean of my fingerprints and left it lying where the police would find it.
I did none of those things. Instead, I picked it up and opened it to the first page.
Just a peek, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t what I imagined. Maybe . . .
I want to fuck you, the handwritten inscription said. He had signed it, Émile.
I tossed the book down and paced. Émile. He had a name. He had a face. He had a—glorious—cock, and he wanted to fuck me with it. I chewed a fingernail until it bled.
I didn’t read the book. Nor did I throw it away. It hid like a criminal in the back of my closet, behind the box of old photos and the forgotten shoes. I watched for him, in crowds, at the spa, in the café. I came to assume he had given up on me or been arrested.
Then, one day, he approached me in the open-air plaza.
I was seated on a concrete bench beneath an imported gingko tree. I had come for the sunshine. He had come for me. He loomed, casting the shadow of his body over me. The sun’s jeweled light put a halo around his head and obscured his features.
He greeted me with, “Mark Twain once said, ‘Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.’”
“Who?” I squinted up at him.
“Mark Twain. Samuel Clemens? One of the greatest literary minds of the early twentieth century. They’ve banned his works, of course.” He sat down beside me.
I couldn’t have been more aware of his nearness. My heartbeat accelerated, my energy expanding to vibrate beyond the confines of my skin.
Émile spoke with quiet assurance. “They’ve imprisoned us in our own bodies.”
“We’ve evolved,” I replied, rote.
When he laughed, it drew an unbidden smile to my lips. “That’s what the Darwinists say to control us. They pet us with words that soothe our egos and make us believe we’ve risen above our animal lessers to become more angelic, more godlike. In our near-divinity, we’re conceived in test tubes.” He grinned crookedly. “Only the best genes allowed, mind you, handpicked by our leaders.”
His grin faded, and he returned to seriousness. “We become addicted to their dogma because it tells us we’re special. They teach us that our physical and emotional urges are evil and marry us to masturbation. So we lock ourselves in our one-person homes and play with ourselves in solitude. We are the priests and nuns of Holy Loneliness.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In the meantime, the legislators are fucking their secretaries.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He smiled. “Don’t you see? Separating us from one another, all of us, makes us meek. If we can’t touch one another, we’ll never rise up against injustice.” His fingers brushed my hand, and I instinctively pulled it away. “See what I mean?” he said. “Why can’t I touch you?”
“Because . . .” I tried to justify my government’s laws, my reaction, myself, “. . . the temptation to do more . . .” My voice faltered. His eyes had the softness of copper and the strength of walnut. I cleared my throat and continued. “It’ll put us back in the Dark Ages; we’ll have war, social disturbance, disease . . .”
He interrupted. “Sex, lust, exploration, creativity, art, poetry, closeness, sharing. Love.”
“No.”
“Yes.” Émile looked me square in the eyes. We breathed a sigh together. Finally, he stood. “Read the book.”
“I threw it away.”
“Read the book.” He gently touched my forehead. Anyone who’d seen the gesture would have assumed it was an accident, he did it so carefully. I knew better. My virgin skin tingled where he’d left his mark.
I went home and read the book.
The language in it had the flavor of antiquity which allowed me, at first, to distance myself from its content. He’d been right, though: it made me wet. I could only read a chapter at a time, sometimes less, before I had to ease my distracting clit with an orgasm. I had never read anything like it. Contemporary erotica involved men or women with a machine—never two people together.
I approached the story from an analytical viewpoint, despite my regular masturbation breaks. I examined its social and interpersonal implications. I pondered the health issues and moral factors. I judged the characters, because I didn’t want to understand them. The title, You, implied something that tickled the back of my brain. The hole inside me, the one I couldn’t fill, ached. Eventually, I forgot to think and began to feel. The characters, Russell and Leslie, established a hot residence in my soul. I knew their bodies as well as I knew my own. I knew their hearts. They fucked inside me. They licked each other, they sucked each other, and I learned a new verb for their sensual communion: they made love.
By the time I finished the book, I had lived a vicarious life that felt alien to what I knew and had believed. The touching described in the book cracked my foundation and made the entire structure of my world unstable.
Émile had underlined a passage at the end. It read, That is the view from where I am. From what I am. I do not know where you are, or what you have become beyond our last time together. But if these truths are your truth, as they are mine—but only then—then come, my love, and let us love.
I cried.
Once introduced to my bloodstream, this new venereal virus spread, changing how I viewed the world. A storm churned within me, a tumult I couldn’t fathom. My machines began to disgust me. Their parts no longer fit me; their patented functions no longer fulfilled me. I took to masturbating on my own, more satisfied with the flesh-on-flesh of my fingers than the mechanical lick of a self-lubricating, multispeed, variable-pressure tongue.
I was angry that my worldview had irrevocably changed. I broke dials and threw dildos against the wall, shattering plastic, bouncing rubber, and denting metal, none of which eased the torrent. I walked numerous emotional paths and left much debris in my wake. Anger, denial, disgust, self-loathing, fear, depression, confusion, intellectualization, guilt, loneliness . . . and, finally, acceptance.
I made the book my bed companion. In my fantasies, Émile became Russell and I was Leslie. Together, we spent a lifetime unlocking secret portals of passion—and enjoyed together all the enduring pleasures of love and lust . ..
Then, one day, my intercom buzzed. I threw on my blue silk robe and pushed a button on the console. “Who is it?”
“I’m here,” he said simply.
I took so long to respond that, by the time I did, I was afraid he’d gone. My hand shook as I punched in the code that would allow him entrance to my sanctum.
The Bubble doors opened, and he stepped inside. Behind him, the vacuum suck of the closing doors sealed us in together.
His presence imbalanced me, and I began to tremble. He said nothing aloud, but his brown, hungry eyes spoke volumes. I came alive, my soul electric, my nerves on fire.
Carefully, like a trainer with an untamed animal, he came toward me. His hands reached for the belt of my robe and pulled it free.
The robe opened to reveal my nakedness. I couldn’t look at him, but I could hear his breathing and smell his spicy warmth. My heart fluttered like a trapped bird. My breath betrayed me. It expressed my fear and my thrill. It quickened with my body.
He exhaled audibly.
At the edge of my vision, I saw his hands approaching my shoulders, and I tensed—instinct, anticipation. The touch came gently, unilaterally warm and caressing, pushing the draped silk away. My robe fell down my arms to the floor; his hands followed it all the way to my fingertips. I was naked to him.
Slowly, he knelt before me and wrapped his arms around my hips. He pressed his cheek to my belly and hugged me, a sensation I hadn’t had since childhood. I swallowed, panted; tears welled in my eyes. His lips burned against my belly. He kissed downward to the curls of my mound, rubbing his face in them, and then his tongue penetrated the slit there.
It touched my clit.
I looked down, surprised and ready to shove him away. My hands rose and fingers twitched, but I didn’t touch him.
He flicked his tongue against the tender nub, overcoming fear with pleasure. I let out a soft sob and closed my eyes. My soul reeled.
He moaned a deeper harmony.
That moment, more than any other, marked a change in me. The intimacy brought my world into sharp focus. My past turned black and white while my present sparked with all the colors of the rainbow. I was alive, and the universe welcomed me. I widened my stance at his guidance. His tongue lapped in the swollen grasp of my labia, stroking across the nucleus of my sex. With delirious, pulsing thrusts, he stabbed the slick organ between my nether-lips and purloined my clit, claiming it as his own. Moisture gathered and ran down my quivering thighs.
I touched him then. Tentatively. I laid my shaking hands on his head. Whisper-soft, his hair flowed through my fingers. My thumb brushed an ear, skin to skin, touch sensation building connections between us. The irreverence of it, my wicked, personal rebellion, thrilled me in ways I had never expected. A sense of revolution rose up inside me, felt good and right, and condensed all the questions, so many questions all boiled down into one simple truth: Why not?
My orgasm showered me with sparks. I fell, from grace, to earth.
Émile caught me. He had awakened my soul with his book and with his tongue. He carried me to the bed and laid me down upon it. He didn’t say a word—for which I was grateful. No congratulations and no preaching about my prior sin of ignorance. He knew that he had converted me, knew beyond all doubt; the time had passed for words and come for action.
He undressed. I watched his clothes fall away, obsessed with the blush on his neck and the butter-mint flesh of his nipples. The incline of his stomach drew my eyes downward, narrow waist and stream of hair, both naturally pointing south. He removed his pants and reacquainted my eyes with his erection. This time, no light-refracting water distorted the image. The thick wand pointed at me, but I felt no accusation, only a yearning that I shared. He stood over me, me the priestess laid out on the dais of my past, he the slave of my choices, at my mercy. He wrapped his hand around his veined shaft and stroked himself once, for me, so I could see how tame it was, then he laid it across my trembling lips. It smelled of burning wood and morning rain, of gingko and man.
I tentatively rubbed my lips against skin unbelievably soft and forgot to worry that I didn’t know what to do or that I shouldn’t, or that I wouldn’t. I wallowed in sensuality and welcomed the way he held his cock’s globed head against my lips.
I touched my tongue to it, exploring.
He gave no pressure, made no demand. His gaze never left my face, his own expression one of wonder and . . . lust.
I opened my mouth and suckled the rosy plum, as Leslie had done, and to my delight, Emile—just like Russell—whimpered. I felt greed birth inside me; I wanted to please. The sounds he made, the susurrations of pleasure, fed my heat, making me hunger for more. I would have given up the world for just one more of his earthy moans.
He withdrew, and I watched him slide a primitive sheath over his cock. The thought that I had hurt him or offended him clutched my heart, but he murmured a quiet comfort and came to lie on top of me. He pushed my legs apart and settled between them. His weight, so reassuring and physical, pressed me into the mattress. Emile, my Emile, as I had come to think of him, brought his face near mine, letting me smell my own juices on him.
I felt an overwhelming need to fall into him and tumble through his veins, to touch his every hidden corner and become a permanent part of him. Heat, so sexual and real, transmitted lust between our bodies. From chest to thigh, he fit himself to me; I marveled at the perfection of it. His shaft slid through the velvet-wet lips of my vulva.
With slow pressure, he breached me. His cock cut a torrid trail straight through my wilderness. It pushed aside my clinging walls and forced its way deep. Only one word could describe it: “Alive.” That solid pillar of flesh lived.
Émile rubbed his lips across my chin and licked at my mouth. I tasted him and tasted myself.
His cock jerked inside me, and my own muscles responded with a squeeze that made him gasp. His hips pulsed in slow, short strokes.
From some primal source, I responded to the evolving choreography, following and leading, creating an ecstatic dance greater than either of us could have managed alone. I couldn’t take my eyes off his face, entranced by the expressions of lust and elation moving across features already grown dear, seen through the fog of my own passion.
The machines hadn’t taken pleasure in me. They hadn’t murmured my name. They didn’t shiver when I scratched at them or falter in their rhythm when I touched the right nerve. They lacked heat, meaning, and life.
My body expanded toward release, tension building along my spine and stealing my breath. Emile’s lust and mine mixed, heat rising into the promise of ecstasy. I remembered how Russell and Leslie had loved each other, but even their cherished words hadn’t prepared me for the strength of this or the feeling of completion. It filled my hole. He filled my hole.
I came again with a rush that rolled me. It turned me head over heels and threatened to drown me in its bubbling wave. I held my breath as long as I could, then gasped for air, sucking in the mist of our passion. I cried out for Emile, and he joined me. His cock pulsed and bucked inside my cunt.
I thought the convulsions would never end; I hoped. Slowly, however, the aftershocks dissipated, and Émile fell heavy upon me. We vibrated. Sweat glued our bodies together. He held me in his strong arms, the thunder of his heartbeat against my breast. Our kisses grew tender and adoring, thankful, and we exalted each other with caresses. For me, the world had acquired dimensions I’d never even known I’d missed. How could I have known?
Society frowned on us, judged us, and threatened punishment for our transgressions against its human-fabricated, human-fallible laws.
It couldn’t comprehend that Émile and I pursued truth in each other’s arms.
I learned to pity the fat old men who manipulated legislation for their own greedy purposes, who kept people apart with closed minds and locked hearts, who denied the endless possibilities of love. Even more, I pitied those innocents molded from birth by prejudice instilled generations earlier, those birds pinioned by false teachings and inherited beliefs.
Outlaws, my Émile and I fled through the underground. We moved to a wilderness colony of fuckers like ourselves. We built our home and called it Ibiza, beyond the horizon in a place where we were free to hold hands in public, to sleep in each other’s arms, to kiss good morning, and to make love. Two by two, others joined us, left the cities and came in search of human fulfillment, of diversity and understanding. We, the people; we, the fuckers . . .