XXIX.
The morning following a peaceful sleep is a good time to think. Sitting with a mug of hot coffee, Jenn consciously chose to remain alone for a while. The urgent messages from Lisa could wait; now was the perfect time to re-evaluate her life, her direction, her performance. And it was an especially interesting collage when viewed objectively. How many people had she – Jenn Anderson, former monogamist and one-man girl – actually had sex with? The number was astounding – and all within a year. Was it all just substitute love for missing Matt? Or, she thought for not the first time, had she become a nymphomaniac? She knew that it wasn't nearly as simple as either of those alternatives. While not actually in love with any of her multitude of lovers, Jenn knew she was hopelessly in lust – helplessly in heat for any and all of them. Was being obsessed with carnal pleasures, single-mindedly seeking out self-gratification, were those the hallmarks of nymphomania? She thought it was more like extreme, fanatical hedonism. It wasn't like she was trying to prove anything. She had just pulled out all the stops, and now she was riding a runaway; she couldn't complain. She was still having the time of her life. Did any of it make sense? Maybe not, but as they used to say, 'If it feels good, do it!'
She thought about her chosen role – how well she played the part for Lisa; her performance at
Celebration
; how versatile she was – as evidenced by yesterday's more egalitarian affair. She thought about the road that had brought her here. The cliché usually refers to that trip as the descent into sexual-servitude – slavery. For Jenn it was much less a descent than a transition. It was a lateral move between universes, diversion not corruption. It became just the next place to go; the next life to lead – or be led; the next stage to fret upon. Sipping her coffee, the picture started to become clear, or if not clear, then at least discernible. There were no details yet, for how could there be? It was like religion – explaining the incomprehensible with something equally incomprehensible. There was simply a thrill in humiliation that Jenn didn't understand. She enjoyed it; she accepted it; but she couldn't explain it. As simple as it was, it was complex beyond her grasp. "I'm not God," she often thought by way of rationalization, "I can't understand every little thing." Initially the humiliation was just fun; she enjoyed the thrill because it was fun. Even when it went beyond mere humiliation, even when it became degradation, she still enjoyed it in some perverse way. She enjoyed the flush of mortification. She enjoyed the feeling of the raw wind against her dignity, stripped bare. The deeper she got into the world of submission, the more complicated her responses seemed.
But sitting alone with her coffee, mulling the ideas around in her head as her drink got cold, she thought that maybe she could see a suggestion of order and reason. No, nothing was clear, yet she could make out shapes. And in those shapes she thought she could maybe understand how Matt's submission was of an entirely different character to her own. As much as she was in transition, Matt was apparently in descent – a descent into his own welcome hell. Jenn's disposition to slavery was so very different from Matt's. His was all tied up in his omnipresent guilt, which had become more evident since the death of the girls, but had been latent long before then. Jenn knew that hers was all to do with thrill, the illicit thrill of activities that were, to most right-thinking people, intolerable. To Jenn, tolerating the intolerable generated a thrill to which she was becoming addicted. She craved sex – craved satisfaction. She was a slave to her obsession, and in her carnality, she no longer had any recognizable morals. Right or wrong had lost its definition; her sense of discrimination was paralyzed. Satisfaction was everything.
Yet, in finally seeing that, even admitting it, she pondered, still holding the cold coffee mug, had anything changed?
Jenn's life continued much the same way: visits to
Celebration
, evenings at Lisa's, invitations to orgies, attendance at private functions. Every few weeks Jenn would connect with Matt. They would spend the occasional night together at the condo with only each other for company. Their sexual contact was perfunctory; their energies spent rather on talk. Sometimes they would talk of philosophy, sometimes they would recount experiences, yet, sometimes they would still search for the 'old magic'.
On one of those nights, Jenn had Matt tie her spread-eagle to the bed and tease her to climax after climax – her climaxes became increasingly intense – increasingly enervating. While she was almost completely exhausted, he hadn't actually come yet. When she swooned in a post-climatic trance, he slipped off the bed and rummaged quietly in the bedside drawers for a moment. Jenn pretended not to notice as he inserted a large butt-plug into his own rear before climbing back onto the bed. Matt rammed his pecker, infused with life again, into Jenn's slit again and again. Eventually he threw his head back and moaned at the arrival of the hard-won orgasm. His climax nudged Jenn to yet another.
On a different night – a different chase, looking for the same magic, though – Jenn tied Matt face down on the bed. After kissing and caressing his entire body, she carefully lubricated and inserted a huge double-ended dildo. Like a thick black flagpole, it rose majestically from his ass. Gingerly, Jenn straddled his buttocks and lowered herself onto the awesome tool. As she began to ride it, bouncing at first carefully then, as her pulse increased and her control dissipated, wildly, she felt the onset of her first peak. Sinking her weight onto the pole, into Matt's rectum, she heard him gasp as her spend dripped down the shaft. She rolled from crest to crest in a sea of sensation. Matt didn't climax until she had attached nipple-clamps, and leaving the dildo in, reached beneath to give him a hand job. It didn't achieve the intensity either of them were now used to, nor did it even remotely resemble the 'old magic', but, on those odd evenings, it satisfied them nostalgically if not otherwise.
Occasionally Matt arrived back at the condo to find Jenn and Lisa locked in some erotic tableau. He simply waited in another room, reading or padding about to kill time, until they were finished, whether it took minutes or hours. And he would exchange pleasantries with Lisa as she left, as if they had just finished a chat over coffee. Although she knew not to expect anything else, it still amazed Jenn that he was so accepting of the situation; that he had just caught his wife having kinky sex with another woman in their marital bed did not seem to concern him in the least. Jenn had never interrupted Matt with anyone else at the condo; she, in fact, was correct in her belief that he almost never took anyone there. Yet, they still basked in their time alone together. Often they would abstain from sex altogether, although their touching, hand holding, hugging and kissing would be almost without pause.
Jenn got dreamy and warm at times like that. She felt an almost indescribable love for Matt. Perhaps, Jenn thought, her love was as simple and as complex as the fact that, basically, she didn't like to sleep alone. "No," she argued with herself. "There's definitely more to it than that." She felt secure in his familiar warmth; his familiar smells; the familiar texture of his skin; the familiarity of his breathing patterns, with which she sometimes felt herself – themselves – become at one – lying in bed in spoon position, breathing as one; their hearts beating as one; their beings merging into an asexual oneness that was the manifestation of their love. There was security in those things, and in security there was peace, and, perhaps, in peace resided love.
One morning, as they drifted slowly into the wakedness, Jenn began to describe those feelings to Matt. "Don't you think it rather odd," she asked rhetorically, "that our love can continue to flourish while our mutual sex seems so stunted?" But, having finally said it out loud made something go cold inside her, as if having verbalized the thought finally sealed it; made their sexuality irretrievable. She shivered and pulled Matt's body closer, just to warm her chilled soul with his heat. For a long while they lay still, saying nothing.
"I don't know; though I've often had the same thought," Matt admitted. "Shit, I don't understand it either – but I sorta know what you mean."
And yet they didn't completely give up hope; but as they both moved deeper into their respective submissions, more and more they found that they were
too
alike. Like similar poles of magnets – like static charges, they were well aware of one another's attraction; they just couldn't come together. Try as they might, they could make magic only increasingly rarely.
Lying together in the calmness of another morning, some weeks later, Matt had gently raised Jenn's hand to his lips. He had a hazy recollection of Jenn – another Jenn, in another time – arousing him tremendously by lasciviously suckling – actually, felating his fingers. Slowly he began to caress each finger, sucking it in like a small semi-hard cock. The heat of his lips nudged Jenn towards wakedness, towards arousal. She could feel, through her fingertips, the sexual tension building. She remembered having performed the same ritual on Lisa. Tiny, tiny spasms began shimmering through her. He treated each finger separately, then changed hands and did it all over again. Slowly, slowly Jenn felt the stirrings of what might build to climax; an ignition of sorts, it was like the proverbial Boy Scout rubbing two sticks together. Still it glowed and grew. Matt could feel it too. Heat and tension rising from a body in stimulation; and in sowing her excitement, he felt a kindling of sexual energy within himself. He continued, moving down to her toes, trailing his lips back up her body, stopping briefly at her nipples, her ear lobes, before returning to her fingers again. It seemed like hours before the slow train of release finally cannonballed Jenn out of her complacency.
As they lay in panting, sweaty afterglow, Matt muttered dreamily, "That was great!"
"Yeah," Jenn concurred. She marveled at the intensity of the non-copulatory, almost non-sexual love they had just made. He hadn't even got hard, yet it was great – great to be loved, great to be with Matt.
The morning of her fingers notwithstanding, Jenn felt less and less sexual desire for Matt. Although she still loved him, he failed to stir any degree of lust in her. And it often appeared that sexual indifference was mutual. It had become obvious to them both that the sexual aspect of their relationship had long since withered and died. In retrospect, Jenn wondered if it had been doomed from the start, its roots neither strong enough nor deep enough to actually satisfy them both. It just them took all of those years to realize it. But by then, their love had blossomed in other, more transcendental, ways.
They continued, nonetheless, to experiment from time to time, for old time's sake, alone at home, in a sort of half-amused attempt to light a simultaneous sexual fire between them. Sometimes it almost worked.
