The Courts of Pleasure

This story is set in a future where lusty love is forbidden and the characters seek secret satisfactions of their passions. All characters in this novel are over eighteen years of age.

The Courts of Pleasure Ch 01

Passion flowers at The Gathering.

"How I love it," Vivienne exulted. "How many times have I stood on this spot on my birthday and looked out upon this sight?" She leaned against the wall of polished ivory colored stone and gazed fondly down the little street stretching out to the entrance of The Court in the distant laurel hedge. Gardens bloomed everywhere: lush, flowering, fruiting, abundant with beauty and sustenance, surrounding her with fragrance and color, and flowing into the yards of the cottages scattered across this hill bearing The Tower.

Vivienne let her fingers touch the wall of The Tower housing the ceremonial life of The Court and started her yearly ritual. She closed her eyes, concentrating on the feel of the stones under her fingers and began walking, tracing the path she had followed from the time she could toddle. She let the curved turgidity of the building lead her around its wall and when she opened her eyes and looked up into the sky above her, a single white cloud floated in orgasmic bliss over the gleaming roof.

"This is where I was born on the Summer Solstice. This is where I grew up, this is where I'm learning about life!" she laughed. Her gaze dropped from the cloud and out to the great gray wall of hazy buildings on the encircling horizon. The New City shimmered in the heat. It pulsed, a thing alive. Glass, concrete, steel, stone and smoke, surrounding her in every direction. And beyond the New City, hidden by its skyline, lay the miserable expanse of Shantytown.

Her gaze, as always, settled inquisitively on the bold mysterious heights of Bountiful Towers with their rumors of tantalizing rites reserved for the privileged few. Those Towers rose on the skyline of the New City like resonate phallic crescendos of this hidden tower in her embrace, their shadows stretching across the New City and touching the edge of Old Town at the center of the megalopolis. There under a canopy of precious trees the ancient houses and shops of Old-Town lay beneath the hand of time, and at its very center lay her own tiny oasis, buried and forgotten, but flourishing for the few who kept its secrets sacred.

Tonight they would gather here in their own lovely tower; celebrate its strength and renew the power that kept the love alive. The very thought excited her and she spread her arms over the curved walls, hugging herself to the surface, nestling the softness of her cheek against the sun-warmed stone, pressing her breasts against it until her nipples tingled with the warmth. Everything was so alive, she could feel the energies in the wall and she was so much a part of it all herself. Vivienne closed her eyes and pressed her lips against the stone feeling the caress return into her being.

Was it yesterday that Kyle had kissed her right here by this wall, her body flowering into the ripeness of maidenhood? That first kiss and the revelations that came with it echoed in her yet. Of course she had teased Kyle unmercifully all summer, giving him distant glimpses of her bathing naked in the pond just far enough away so that he could see how her breasts were filling out, how her bottom was rounding, and how all those other mysterious marvels were changing her from a girl to maiden, but without letting him get a really good look at her up close.

It was funny and exciting the way he was always puttering nearby with his chores, painting this, hammering on that when she was working in the gardens or watering the planters. And when he was close she was so conscious of his lean brawny brown back above his shorts, the way the blonde hair curled on his forearms over his tan.

Then there was that day when he was working on the trellis right beside her, his hands up over his head hammering, and wouldn't it be a scream to squirt him right in the middle of his beautiful brown back with the hose? He was laughing when he came to her and she was backing up against this wall, between the trellises right here, and looking up into his face. And then it wasn't funny anymore only just marvelously exciting!

Vivienne's hands reached out and touched the wall behind her on each side just as she had that day when she braced herself for the encounter and her young breasts had lifted and strained against her soaked blouse, pushing her blooming nipples into relief under the thin cloth.

And when his mouth came to hers she welcomed that first special kiss as everything she had guessed it might be. But what she didn't know was what that simultaneous caress on her breasts would be like...that feel of his hands cupping and lifting them, and that slow tender excruciatingly delicious squeeze on her nipples that sent shock waves of pleasure rippling between her legs. Astonished, she had retreated wide-eyed, her hand brushing his away, his dark brown eyes warm upon hers. He'd shook his finger teasingly in her face, "That's what happens to girls who get fresh," he said.

The memory made her smile, and all the wonderful things that happened after that made her laugh, filling her again with its lusty passionate discoveries. Here between these two tall cedars his hands had teased unmercifully at her on that day when he had reached out and pulled her in amongst the sheltering branches. They had tussled laughingly until his lips had closed over hers and she surrendered herself again to his caress only this time when his hand moved to her breast she knew what to expect and was eager for it. He stayed there, his touch on her nipple holding her helpless under the thrill while he played endlessly with her firm bud puckering hard beneath her blouse. Her other nipple was already tingling before he came to it, and she gasped with excitement when he took it in his fingers and teased it into aching tumescence.

There was nothing she could do as he began slipping her buttons with one hand while caressing her breasts with the other except marvel at the incredible sensations spreading down from her bosom to her solar plexus and into that mysteriously wondrous place below her belly.

And when her blouse was open at last he could see up close what she had been teasing him with all summer. He looked at her a long time and she could see that he loved the way her breasts were swelling and tilting up, and that her nipples weren't really too big at all but just nice and ripe and begging for attention.

He kissed her on her bare belly first and tickled her bellybutton with his tongue, and then licked the bottom of each breast, nuzzling her firming shapes with his face and kissing into her cleavage until she felt all flustered and flurried with a breathless expectation, so when he finally took her nipple in his mouth she knew that was what she wanted more than anything. He sucked softly at first working her bud with his tongue until it tingled into tumescence. And when he moved his mouth to her other nipple she saw how hard and wet the first one was, and the sensations began to grow in her loins until she didn't know what she would do if she didn't get away from him.

Except now she couldn't because his hands were behind her knees holding her, his strong thumbs stroking up under her tiny sun-skirt and turning to the insides of her thighs, and then his palms slipped around to the backs of her legs and slid up the smoothness of her thighs to her bottom, cupping the swells of her buttocks and palming them deliciously. And when his fingers hooked into the top of her panties she just let him pull them down because those marvelous sensations from her nipples were spreading all around and everywhere within her, and there was no way they would stop unless he stopped nursing those twin sources of her surrender.

But instead his finger touched her quick and knowingly in that magic place between her petals and something incredible happened. Something that it didn't take her long to revisit again and again once he had showed her how to invoke its power. But at that moment the delight was new, and electric, and uncontrollable as the spasms flowed from that mad massage of her clitoris. She shook, she floated, she drowned in the luscious sensations. The magic leaped within her and her orgasm soared under his fingers, and then he summoned another one.

Only that one was accompanied by another stunning thrill of discovery when he unzipped his fly and his organ lifted urgently to her face pressed to meet it with his hand on the back of her head. The touch of it on her lips could mean only one thing and her first kiss over its bulky head accompanied by the wild surges of his finger between her petals induced a surrender in her young mouth opening to receive that first gush of cum and after that all those that followed.

Vivienne laughed at the memories as she saw where she had plunged into the pond afterwards and just let the water hold her in its caress. She stroked her breasts again in memory of that moment. That was such a sweet climax...There had been so many after that from him, and some from others too, and many many more from her own busy hand, and all so good! She had learned so much in those years. Certainly in all the world there was no place like The Court to teach a girl the power and the beauty of the arts of love.

Snuggling her face to the warm tumescent wall of The Tower House, her arms spread to embrace its smooth curving surface she gazed up the length of this phallic shaft caressing her nipples and slowly measured its girth with her girlish strides.

She stopped then and stared through the open front entrance into the interior, her reveries arrested by the sight. Tonight the atrium, the room beyond the foyer, would be filled with light and people, music and ritual. But shadows filled the space now, shadows lanced with light pouring through the open doors. The light flowed past her and she followed its path to the wall where the illumination bloomed. There in its center a flower, a huge pink white Passion-Flower glowed from a painting glistening in its frame, the colors fresh and gleaming.

At first Vivienne was startled by this appearance, this unfamiliar materialization within her realm. She studied the painting soberly, obviously the latest acquisition in Coverly's persistent search for such delights. And what a delight this creation was. The marvelous bloom opened luxuriantly before her in a richly hued display of pinks and fleshy whites, its outer petals unfolding with a turgid sensuousness over the depths of the inner blossom, a blossom that resonated with the echoes of that flower blooming between her own thighs.

The rendering was so daring, so shockingly beautiful that Vivienne caught her breath. She felt herself drawn irresistibly to the outer white labial petals and up to the stamens hovering like fingers over the blossom's pink fragrant vaginal depths, her heart fanning the pulses in her neck into rapid beats.

Unconsciously her hand sought her throat, her fingers stroking softly over the delicate rhythms beneath her skin and she gave herself over to that sudden flushing warmth spreading unchecked within her. Her breasts lifted under her loose dress and she touched them, feeling with wonder at how her nipples had hardened again.

A luminescence touched her, secret and sensitive, rousing a thrill in her loins that left her trembling and for the moment she was held transfixed. When she could move it was to search for the painter's name. There in the right hand lower corner in a delicate swirl of frothy pigment the artist had spelled out an ambiguous, 'Moore'.

Vivienne returned to the blossom, and to the echoes of sensation still welling within her. Her tongue gently laved her upper lip as she shook her head in perplexity. "Moore? You better might say 'MORE'!" she sighed to herself.

She stepped back into the space of the atrium without turning around, held by the painting and the resonance of the emotion. That dark space within her was echoing with sensation, pulsing open, hungry with agitation, embracing an emptiness urgent for fulfilling satisfaction.

Vivienne took a deep breath. Who was this 'Moore' who had moved her in this way? Was it just the memories of her maidenly awakening with Kyle still echoing within her just now, or did this painter touch some marvelous knowledge within herself? Perhaps the artist, whoever it was, would be at the gathering tonight, perhaps then she would discover the magic that moved that brush and stirred her in this surprising way.

Vivienne's hand lifted and pulled the combs that held her hair. She shook her head and her tresses fell in a dark glossy cascade below her waist. Never had she felt so ready for a gathering, so hopeful, and full of expectation. She was a vessel afloat, a receptacle of promise. And it was in that state that she left The Tower House, descended the hill, and went to her cottage to await the arrivals and let her fingers satisfy the cravings in her personal passion-flower.

***

Aaron Coverly smiled contentedly and lifted his gaze from the book in his hands. From his chair in the library off the atrium he could see the painting. In a sense he could see it in the way Vivienne had seen it, that's why he had chosen it. But he knew he could never know it in the way she had known it, not in that private intimate way of her own space. That was hers alone, or hers to share if she chose.

A contented smile lit his face while he studied the girl, Eva's daughter, not his, her lovely presence the offspring of an ancient ritual, a rite of fertility and Eros that had taken place before his own union with her mother. But he had come to care deeply for Vi and she for him as they shared the life of the Court, and he understood very well the emotions flowering within her.

Coverly had guessed the painting would catalyze Vivienne, and her gesture in freeing her hair had proved it. How many times had he seen her make that move as she had grown from the child to the maiden? It was like letting her spirit loose. He had always loved to see that, to see her bloom in each stage of her life, and then to flower into the next. Her body petite, slim, ripe, and luscious beneath the dark drape of her hair moved freely under the little shift.

Her beauty had bloomed early and at times she still offered the beauteous innocence of early adolescence morphing at other times into womanly charms and worldliness beyond her nineteen years, her adolescence ebbing and flowing mysteriously with her moods and circumstances. Her charms were not only a reflection of her striking beauty but also of that aura of the erotic that had always infused her presence. He knew she wasn't virginal of course, but curiously she simply looked like she was.

The ancient clock in the corner chimed the hour jolting Coverly from his musings. Time to get going to the station and pick up the Murdocks.

****

"We'll never make it now," Cliff Murdock muttered, and Sarah heard the little edge of satisfaction in her husband's voice. She fixed on that edge, felt its shape, its sharpness, the way it could cut, its power to sever the connection.

"Oh, we have plenty of time," she replied evenly her gaze resting coolly on signal outside the train window. The long white arm with the red flashing blinker still stood rigidly aloft, frozen there for the rest of her life. Sarah felt her minutes dropping like heartbeats into the cinders at the bottom of the pole. They fell into the porous blackness and disappeared forever each one taking a piece of the chance with it.

She refused to look at her watch, to make such a concession to Cliff's certainty. Instead she searched for the weakness, for that vulnerability in the steel, the wire, the circuitry, the circumstances that held her prisoner here on this siding while her life ebbed into frustration.

Only in the slight compression of her lips, and in the delicate flare of her nostrils might one read the intensity of her effort for she was calm, with that calmness that comes with determination...that calmness in which one stakes everything on the last throw and simply wills the win into being. "I expect they've got it fixed now," she said firmly.

A shudder ran through the train, a shock of clutching couplings and the signal fell impotently, its glaring red eye replaced by a conciliatory green one. Sarah watched the ironwork outside the window pickup speed as her husband lifted his wrist and stroked his sleeve back from his watch. There was still time, she knew there was, she wouldn't ask, she would trust...trust that he would meet them, that he had wanted her to come, and that he would wait for her.

After-all Coverly had waited before on that day when they had first met in the restaurant displaying her paintings and she was late. He had risen to greet her as she entered the room; singling her out from the other arrivals by some sixth sense perhaps, his eyes alight with interest.

He had inventoried her of course as she came towards him. She'd felt his eyes wander over her body, fondle her breasts, touch at her waist, and take the measure of her loins before returning to her face. It had been a brief but appreciative appraisal.

He rose gallantly and extended his hand. "I'm so glad to meet you, Sarah, your work has captured me."

Did he mean it she had wondered, or was he captured by something else as had happened so often in the past when she met with clients? She knew that at first their eyes were often as much on her butt and her boobs, at least what little they could see of them, as on her layouts when she was making presentations at the agency. And it was only after she had wrenched them into considering how her design concepts implemented the marketing tactics that they began to really pay attention to what she was saying.

She was even more bothered when she showed her fine art. Her work had to stand on its own and she wanted it to, and this was most particularly the case with 'The Passion-Flower'. The painting resided with her others on the walls encircling them and she observed his gaze returning to it again and again.

The meeting with Coverly at the restaurant had been telling, after all he could have paid for 'The Passion-Flower' and simply taken it away with him if it was just the picture that he wanted. They talked and his gaze kept moving from her paintings to her eyes, while she herself, the artist, sat in the midst of her creations trying to let her work speak for itself and wondering why he had settled on 'The Passion-Flower'.

"So you're into flowers, Mr. Coverly?" she had probed.

"Oh. Yes, very much so. We have incredible gardens. You should see them. Really, I mean it."

His attention focused upon her, she felt his earnestness and an intensity that went beyond mere politeness. "Do you live in the country?" she had asked and remembered how his smile had warmed her.

"We live in a very special place not easy to find here in the midst of this city. We are going to have a gathering soon, a festival in celebration of the Summer Solstice. I think you would find yourself very much at home with us."

"You do? Why?"

"It's your painting, your work. You touch something that cannot be easily put into words, only felt, and I feel it with exceptional strength in this painting he said gesturing at 'The Passion-Flower'. Would you join us?" There was the earnestness of a plea in his invitation now.

"I usually let my work speak for itself," she had responded. "After all it is as much what the viewer brings to the painting as what the artist puts into it that resonates with the viewer".

It happened most often in her flower pieces. Their looseness opened the way for that inner voice of hers to sound, that utterly sensuous evocation of undiluted erotic pleasure. And afterwards she marveled at it, at the beauty and power resonating from her canvas. She was stirred, and awed, and exhilarated by the manifestation.