Janine was panting by the time she got back to her room. She felt so lightheaded after the sun, the rum, and especially all the stimulation around her. It was disconcerting. She had thought that she was so liberal and her politics were libertarian but Iznoma Hedonia was libertine. The atmosphere of intense but casual sex at the resort aroused her but the intensity was too much. It overwhelmed her. Just being around it was disorienting because of the tension she felt. She wanted it for herself but felt that she had to keep away from it. It was her duty as a journalist.
She had to keep her distance from all this. She was a professional, for goodness' sake! Her standards of reporting were too high to let herself get sucked into all this sensual permissiveness! She had to be objective! She had to resist! Her story had to show that ... what? It was then that she realized that she really had no idea what she was going to write and how to tell the story. She was observing something that was affecting her, awakening desire, but she had to resist....and why was that? In order to observe because the angle of her story was ... what? It was to tear the lid off this privileged playground for the over-sexed and tell her readers the truth,....which was? She was here to do an investigation to reveal....what, motivation -- of who? She had already started writing the story in her mind and was focused on the history of Iznoma Hedonia -- not so much what she got from Deidre on their walk but the real story of how a strip club owner was able to get her sugar daddy, the country's biggest pornographer, to finance acquisition of this anything-goes resort....in other words, by going on this visit could she really tell her readers anything more about the how and the when? But now that she was here, she realized, with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, that her readers wouldn't care beyond the amusement of a few interesting details.
The real story....she was just starting to believe was why. Not why people wanted to have sex with beautiful partners in a paradise setting but why....why what?
She was still hot as well as overheated and the stress was giving her a headache. She thought perhaps a shower would calm her down. She started the water running and when she took off her loincloth it was still damp with her secretions and tossed it on the bed. She had never dripped so much in her life without having actual sex. The cool water did feel good on her skin and seemed to cool down her pussy. She felt a little, but not much, better when she stepped out of the stall and toweled off. For no particular reason, since it was comfortably warm in the room, she wrapped the damp towel around her shoulders as if shielding her nakedness, although her lower body was uncovered. She knew that unsatisfied feeling she felt was horniness. She fingered her crotch before she sat down to see how wet she still was. Damn! she thought, she was still dripping and her lips still felt puffy.
She decided to lie down for a while and lay nude on the bedspread. She did not feel the slightest sleepy even though she felt tired and her mind was racing with thoughts of sex temptation, and her duty as a journalist to be detached from what she was reporting. She got up after a few minutes, very unsatisfied.
Maybe there was something on television to distract her. Janine looked past the coffee table, with its big bowl of condoms and decorator wooden box filled with packets of personal lubricant, to the television set across the room. She picked up the remote and tried some channels. She should have known better. There was one weak channel from Miami, a signal from Jamaica with a lot of interference, and the local broadcast channel, which was playing amateur soccer. Everything else was closed-circuit and porn. There were channels running loops and channels running full-length dirty movies, of every description and persuasion that was legal under international law. She saw anal, which she never much cared for, long and hot oral, which she had always loved, threesomes, orgies, kinky stuff with dungeons, large insertions, very large insertions, Japanese girls getting tied up in ropes, gay men, women, Brazilian girls with dicks, multiethnic and multiracial couplings, underwater sex, and obscene acts with peeled avocadoes. She was never going to get away from titillation this way. After making the rounds of channels with the remote, she settled on a station that seemed to specialize in dreamy, romantic seduction and mutual oral pleasure. She watched for a few minutes as the woman on the screen -- who looked a lot like her, was pleasured by another woman while a man sucked on her nipples and then came wetly in a wave of passion....
Suddenly, the headache was gone, like that magic moment at the end of a hangover when it all disappears. She realized exactly what she had to do! She had been resisting the obvious. After all, she was not just a writer telling a story about sexual real estate and hedonism. She was a writer for Against Moss, the magazine of her generation! The magazine that made "gonzo" journalism an art form! That made it fashionable and even respectable for the reporter to put themselves in the story and to write about their reactions instead of maintaining professional objectivity. That wrote about being "terrified and disdainful" (in the words of her hero at Against Moss, Fisher Simpson, the locally famous would-be self-regarded protege of the great but inattentive Hunter Thompson, who started it all with "fear and loathing" at that other magazine, the competition) rather than the facts -- really, any facts.
This was 1985, after all! She was a modern journalist! This was the new wave of journalism! If she really wanted to connect with her readers, she needed to feel Iznoma Hedonia deeply and personally, take in the entire experience, and report what she felt....that is what would make not a good story, but a great story!
With a new sense of purpose, she took out her pad and started writing the opening of a story about a woman who tells her readers about abandoning inhibitions in the search for sensual knowledge, for....
There was a knock on the door of her room. Shit! thought Janine. Just when she was making progress. "Coming!" she yelled. She hit "Mute" on the remote button to silence the television. She quickly looked behind the bathroom door for a bathrobe and found a thin cotton gown hanging there, but then she remembered that she was at a resort where everyone went nude. Why bother? But she didn't still feel right answering the door in the nude so she grabbed a towel. There was another knock. Holding the towel in front of her, modest from force of habit rather than conviction, she opened to the door.
There, standing in front of her, was the most gorgeous man she had ever imagined. He was not too tall but almost a head taller than Janine, brown-skinned, with deep, limpid brown eyes and black wavy hair, matched by a sexy moustache and goatee, with broad shoulders. He was dressed in a more formal version of the resort uniform, like a tailored suit in brown and blue, and held a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other, with a towel draped close to his wrist and a fresh loincloth draped close to his elbow.
"Good afternoon." His voice was like honey and he smiled broadly and invitingly but not lasciviously. "I am Carlos. I here to welcome you and to repeat La Dama Deidre's invitation to dine tonight at the restaurant downstairs, La Diva. May I come in?" His voice was softly accented with Spanish.
Janine was flustered -- she had never let a strange man into her hotel room before. "I don't think so. Why?"
"Well, I will put your flowers into a vase," (he pronounced it "vahz") "and give you champagne and while I am here I will prepare your room. Before I became the maitre d' I worked in housekeeping, so I can also turn down your bed and replace your loincloth." Janine knew perfectly well that resorts, even the most expensive, do not usually do bed turn-downs at 2:00 in the afternoon or deliver a clean garment unrequested and in person every day. Nevertheless, something in her mind whispered that she was not in danger and that she should not resist. This could be opportunity knocking. "Of course", she said and stepped back. Carlos stepped in. She had just willingly allowed a penis to enter the room.
