Capturing Goddesses

NOTE: I'm flagging F/F sexual content for full transparency, but it's light and the gaze remains male throughout.

Author's Note: Yes, I know that "Melissa" and "Deborah" weren't high on the list of baby girl names in 2000 - but I couldn't resist, as they both originally meant the same thing. "Melissa" is "bumblebee" in Greek, and "Deborah" is "bumblebee" in Hebrew. When I learned that, I had to set up a situation like this one... Also, if you've read "Master of the House", you might notice that Deborah is described a lot like Kim in that story - this is not an accident.

Always interested in feedback.

2024 - A couple of weeks ago

Deborah Sanders was sitting down to a late dinner, still wearing the blouse and skirt she'd worn to work. She was an attractive young woman, with long hair neither medium brown nor red but kind of both, and a pretty face dominated by a strong nose. Deborah wasn't tall, and was youthfully slender, but had an impressive bustline that she had to keep tightly reined in with a supporting bra in order to maintain professional standards at work. But she still got stared at more than she'd like.

The door chime sounded, and Deborah's roommate, Melissa Costas, pranced across the living room to answer it. In contrast to the short, dark, curvy Deborah, Melissa was tall, sandy blonde, and slender. This evening she was dressed to impress in a wine-red dress that fell surprisingly low for a date - all the way to her lithe knees, nearly meeting her high black boots. The dress was still sexy, though, as the velvety fabric clung tightly to every youthful curve.

Melissa opened the door to reveal her date. He was fairly new - this was only their second or third time going out, as far as Deborah knew. And though he wasn't necessarily bad-looking, he wasn't Deborah's type. Hair longer than fashionable, and taken up at the back in what was more a samurai queue than a man-bun, and he obviously compensated for a nondescript face with a workout-toned body. On a second look, he appeared even older than Deborah had first thought - judicious hair coloring couldn't entirely hide his grey. Nor moisturizer his crow's feet. He was clearly too old for the Millennial Melissa, but she didn't seem bothered as she leaned in to greet her man with a kiss.

As Melissa and her beau left the apartment, Deborah reflected that her own night was unlikely to lead to the same kind of romance. She was going to go to the movies with a friend of a co-worker, and from experience was expecting yet another bland STEM graduate with no real game.

Followed by another night alone.

Dammit. She was unusually horny this evening, too.

Sighing, Deborah drained the rest of her tall glass of water and refilled it from the communal pitcher in the refrigerator before glumly returning her attention to her Caesar salad.

1998

In the kitchen of the apartment they shared, Jack Torrance and Gina Campagnaro were sitting down to dinner after coming home from the UC Irvine campus where both were grad students. Jack was a biochemist, and he constantly felt that he was lucky to be with Gina, who not only was beautiful, but was already a rising star in the small world of literary anthropology.

Jack had made a fresh salad, while Gina, who had no interest in cooking, had brought home a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket deli. Gina didn't have much interest in anything outside her studies, Jack reflected. Sometimes he wondered how much interest she really had in him.

The couple communicated, after a fashion. At least, Jack tried some gambits about his day and current events, but Gina only responded with monosyllables until he asked her about how her research was going. That was the only time that Gina blossomed.

Gina was making slow but steady progress in proving her graduate thesis. Her research was about a strange connection between cultures from around the world who have strangely similar mythology despite never contacting each other. Gina was establishing conclusively that the tribal cultures had no cultural or linguistic connections - they can't have been communicating.

Gina wasn't that interested in the mythological stories themselves. She was more an anthropologist than a literature critic.

But the stories were all that was interesting to Jack, who had always had a life outside of biochemistry. The story about a young trickster who seduces the goddess of love by fondling her breasts, so different in poetic form across cultures, so similar in details. The tales of gods who sow their wild oats, mortal women becoming unbearably horny upon just seeing them, and then becoming suggestible and obedient - even submissive at the feet of the gods - when aroused.

Gina's stories were uncannily similar whether they came from Madagascar, Patagonia, Hispaniola, Sardinia, or Hokkaido. But she had found no linguistic connection, no trade relationships, no explanation at all. Gina didn't need an explanation to defend her thesis, though, so she spared little thought for the matter.

Jack couldn't help it, though. Every time Gina had related one of these stories to him, Jack had always wondered if they were a metaphor. If they were just-so stories explaining why the women in the tribes were easily seduced and sexually submissive.

On his own, on a lark, Jack was doing some extracurricular reading to see if there were any environmental connections between the areas. Jack was attending a prestigious school with an excellent library, after all. But even in the capacious stacks at UC Irvine, Jack found nothing obvious.

No correlations genetically between the populations. Weather patterns, volcanoes, ocean currents - nothing obvious. The cultures had nothing in common other than that they were all coastal tribes in areas where farming was marginal so they depended on fishing for survival. But there was nothing unique there, there were cultures like that all over the world.

Jack had stopped telling Gina about his extracurricular reading. She didn't care.

2024 - Earlier this week

Deborah couldn't sleep. Her long, dark hair was damp with sweat, and her sheets and pillowcase were clammy. She was desperately horny. She'd been getting spontaneously aroused all week, nipples getting hard on their own, vagina getting moist just sitting at her desk at work.

Deborah had been resorting to fingering herself in order to fall asleep for a few days now. Tonight would be even worse as she could hear her roommate Melissa through the walls of their shared apartment.

Melissa had brought her new boyfriend home and Deborah's besotted roommate was still at the "can't keep her hands off him" phase. The older man was playing it cool - although Deborah felt that Melissa was out of the guy's league, he seemed to be taking her attention as no more than his due.

Melissa and her date had barely exchanged a couple of hasty greetings with Deborah before the infatuated young woman practically dragged her man to her bedroom.

Right now the guy was really giving Melissa the business. For minutes at a time, the apartment was quiet other than the quiet squeaking of bedsprings and barely audible feminine moans, just at the edge of Deborah's hearing. Then, just when Deborah felt she could start to relax she was startled alert by squeals of "OH GOD! JACK!" and wordless ecstatic whimpers.

Deborah couldn't believe that she was about to masturbate while listening to her roommate's sex noises, but she found herself slipping out of her blue-and-white bra without really planning to. She was so incredibly horny. Her vagina was already damp and her nipples were stiffening.

As the squeaking started up again in earnest, Deborah brought her hands to her large, soft, round breasts and cupped them, squeezing them together. Her small nipples were already hard and she ran one fingertip around and around one large, chocolate-dark areola. Almost unconsciously, the other hand was already slipping under the waistband of her panties, which matched the discarded bra. Except for the moist spot the size of a coin on the gusset.

"Aaaaah! Jack! Right there!" came a squeal from Melissa's room. Deborah closed her eyes and pinched her nipple, lifting and stretching the little bud, causing pleasure to shoot down her spine. Deborah's curvy body began to undulate in time with her strokes along her own slick pussy lips.

"Oh! Oh! Jack! Uh! Oh! Uh!" Melissa grunted softly in time with the squeaking, right at the edge of Deborah's hearing. Deborah twined the ends of her long, dark hair around the fingers of her free hand as she continued to writhe, the hand in her panties working its magic on her slippery slit.

"Oh! Take me, Jack! Ohhh, harder!" Melissa's cries were an octave higher now. Deborah took her hand out of her panties, squeezed her jiggling breast, and took two fingers into her mouth to suck on them. She could taste her juices on her fingers, and it wasn't a bad taste.

A thought entered Deborah's mind, unbidden - how would Jack's cock taste? What about when he came in her mouth? How would that taste?

Writhing with lust, Deborah grabbed the waistband of her striped panties and began peeling them down her slender hips. Rolling to either side, she slipped them over each supple buttock in turn. Lifting her feet into the air, Deborah slid the moist panties off over them and tossed them absently onto the floor.

Melissa's voice came through the walls to Deborah again, "Oh God, Jack! So big!"

Opening her own legs wide, Deborah began stroking her glistening slit with two probing fingers, parting her vulva with her other hand. Then, looking down her body between her softly jiggling breasts, Deborah continued to work her pussy with one hand while bringing the other back up to tease and squeeze a sensitive nipple. Deborah could feel her breath coming faster now as she pleasured herself.

Even as Deborah squirmed with delight, she heard the bedsprings in Melissa's room get louder and her roommate chant "Please, Jack! Fuck me harder!" In response, Deborah began to finger her boiling pussy more vigorously, making sure to stay close to her throbbing clitoris.

Deborah heard echoes of soft cries of feminine pleasure and realized they were coming from herself as well as from Melissa's bedroom. She arched her back in undulating waves as her fingers continued to work their magic on her surging clittie. Deborah was moaning and sighing constantly now as she began to peak.

Deborah's sounds were suddenly drowned out by a shriek from Melissa - "Oh! Jack! Come inside me! Make me yours!" Which was immediately followed by a deep, bullish masculine growl from Jack. And the bedsprings suddenly went silent.

Filled with an obsessive need to join the rutting couple in orgasm, Deborah impaled herself deeply on two fingers and raised her hips to thrust her pussy harder against her hand. In just a few more seconds of roughly driving her invading fingers deep into herself, curling them to seek her g-spot, Deborah had worked herself to a trembling climax.

Deborah squealed as a wracking orgasm rippled completely through her curvy form.

As the quivering and shaking of her body began to slow and her breathing began to return to normal, Deborah stretched her hands above her head and wriggled with contentment.

It had been a wonderful climax, and maybe Deborah could sleep now. But somehow it just wasn't enough - she wasn't quite satisfied. Where had all this sex drive come from?

Deborah was suddenly jealous of her roommate. It certainly seemed that Melissa's libido was being satisfied by her new lover, Jack. Deborah needed to feel that too.

Sweaty and flushed, Deborah reached a trembling hand for the hydroflask on her bedstand and took a long, refreshing drink of cool, clear water.

2001

Although he was only wearing a t-shirt and shorts under a chef's apron, Jack Torrance was sweating. The last rays of a late-summer sunset streamed in the kitchen window, and the hot air was still. But the air was being made even hotter by the half-dozen steaming pots - open, closed, pressure-cookers, all varieties.

Jack's bachelor pad was an enigma. The furnishings were spartan, decoration minimal - but the kitchen was anything but. Some parts of the kitchen - the refrigerator, freezer, and cooktop - were cutting-edge, in contrast to the ancient original equipment like the sink, dishwasher, and microwave. The frying pan lying forlornly in the sink had seen better days, but every deep pot, whether iron, stainless, ceramic, or copper, was professional-grade, along with a handful of very expensive pressure cookers.

Although Jack had painstakingly studied and practiced a number of cooking techniques, he wasn't a chef. And he had very specific culinary instances. All for a single purpose.

When following up on his ex-girlfriend Gina's linguistic research, Jack had made a discovery.

By overlaying multiple maps, Jack realized that the tribes his ex-girlfriend Gina had studied all are located in areas where there are unusually closely related species of octopus.

Jack knew that very few tribes at that level of technology depend on octopus for food, as it is hard to harvest and cook - not a good investment of a gathering culture's time. But these particular tribes were surviving so marginally they have no alternative. And they can't afford to leave any edible part of the octopus, so they all cook the meat by boiling them for an unusually long time, in order to break down even the suckers to where they can be digested.

Jack had had an inspiration - what if there's something let out by the cooking process that is unique to these tribes? Something that even other tribes that consumed the same or similar octopus species never encountered?

So Jack had begun pursuing it as a hobby. A combination of nutritional anthropology and home economics. Trying to simulate as closely as possible what unique variation these tribes might have tried in the cooking process that had the side effect of adding unique chemicals to everyone's diet.

Fortunately, Jack didn't mind the taste of octopus. His failed experiments could be repurposed as lunch.

2005

The laboratory was lit only by the green readouts and red lights of the equipment, and a single lamp at one desk. Jack Torrance sat at the desk, starting his second workday. After wrapping up his day job, Jack habitually worked late into the evening, in order to use the equipment for his own purposes.

For a couple of years now, Jack had spent most of his spare beer money having fresh octopus flown in from as close as possible to the tribes his ex-girlfriend had studied. Then he butchered and cooked them in all permutations of technique, time, and temperature, carefully recording the exact parameters of each attempt. Afterward, as now, he used his company's equipment - instruments he could never afford on his own - to analyze the results.

One failed experiment after another. But Jack wasn't discouraged. Every experiment was more data. Another box checked off.

But Jack had time. He'd only just started, after all.

2024 - Earlier this year

Older and wiser, Jack Torrance sat in the same familiar lab, at the same desk that he had held down for two decades. But tonight, Jack felt something he had never felt before.

It had been a rerun of Iron Chef America the year before that had given Jack the final breakthrough. A pre-modern tribe would nned a long, slow braise to make full use of the octopus. Watching Morimoto, Jack had a new realization - something he, not being a professional chef, had missed entirely. For the tentacles to cook evenly with the uneven heat provided by wood embers, tribespeople would need to tie the tentacles into a bundle, and they would likely have to use cord woven from tree bark. The tannins in the bark would be a catalyst!

With that realization, Jack's had shelved his previous results and started again - focusing on the most encouraging former failures - with a new outlook. Almost instantly, his cooking experiments had started to show more promising results.

Jack had spent a few months honing his technique and tweaking the variables of time and ingredients. The addition of bark to the mix made a massive difference to the whole cooking process. And made a difference to the result - Jack no longer ate the failed experiments without loads of wasabi. You'd have to be living on the edge of starvation to eat this stuff comfortably every day.

But tonight, it was all clear. The equipment finally concurred. Jack had done it.

After long years of trying - and the variation he had so recently found - Jack had isolated a couple of substances quite surprisingly similar to synthetic versions of female hormones, with a key difference. The chemical receptors in Jack's synthetics were subtly different from the natural versions manufactured inside womens' bodies. They would act differently, the geometry implying that one hormone-like substance would concentrate in the brain, and the other in mucous membranes and erogenous zones.

Jack had, in beakers on his desk, a subtle but powerful female aphrodisiac, and a chemical that would bypass a woman's mental defenses, making her extremely suggestible when she was sexually aroused.

Jack now knew exactly how men of ancient times could capture goddesses.

2024 - A couple of hours ago

Though the late-morning sun was pouring in through the kitchen windows, Deborah was cranky. She'd had sex dreams all night, many of them featuring the couple sleeping together in Melissa's room. Deborah had always considered her sex drive to be healthy, but right now it was something else.

Even now Deborah was thinking about it more than she was thinking about the brunch she was putting together on the counter. Her outfit didn't help. She had thrown on a pink button-up jersey top and shorts but no underwear.

In addition to the muffins and fruit, Deborah had the communal water pitcher on the counter. Sighing, she took a long drink of water from a tall glass.

Quietly, Melissa stepped out of her room - which she had shared with Jack the night before - wearing a t-shirt with "Just Stab Me Now" in gothic text across her bustline. And nothing else. The man-sized shirt came only down to Melissa's upper thighs, barely covering her likely bare pussy - which she had also shared with Jack the night before.

The smiling Melissa looked like the definition of a woman whose man had satisfied her.

Not without a touch of yearning for what Melissa seemed to have found, Deborah turned back to the juicer and reached for a banana. So Deborah was completely surprised when Melissa sidled up behind her and without preamble reached around to delicately cup Deborah's large breasts.

Deborah was shocked by the suddenness, but she didn't remove Melissa's cunning hands. Melissa's fingers were gentle and knowing, not rough or possessive like her boyfriends usually were. And the touch felt surprisingly good.

Deborah reacted with a startled gasp. But her nipples betrayed her, springing to life under Melissa's clever fingers. "Mmm," Melissa breathed into Deborah's ear. "Jack told me you'd be just about ready."

Deborah looked back over her shoulder to meet Melissa's knowing eyes. "You... I... You can't..." Deborah started hesitantly.

"Ssh, honey," Melissa cooed. "I've always thought your breasts were beautiful. Jack likes them even more than mine. And they're so responsive right now, aren't they? I can feel your pretty little nipples getting hard. You must be just sooooo horny." And Melissa gently stroked those stiffening nipples, drawing a sigh from Deborah.

"Stop," Deborah murmured. But she didn't try to move away and in fact felt herself pressing her breasts into Melissa's caresses.

"You don't want me to stop," Melissa murmured. "A woman's breasts are the key to her soul, and you are enjoying this too much." With that, Melissa continued to skillfully cup and caress Deborah's sensitive mounds, making sure to pay special attention to brush across Deborah's beestung nipples.