Carnal Nights 06 No Limits

Dear Readers,

Its been a while and I really hope these next two were worth the wait! For the next two installments, I changed things up, well, I changed everything up, prose, genre, perspective, tense, etc. all things I wanted to experiment with and had yet to try. We left off with Dennis and Amy at the beginning of their road trip and pickup with Dennis continuing his story on the drive, where he takes us down another level, with Ashley telling her cautionary tale. I incorporated some new kinks, and some new themes. Instead of our traditional male sub protagonist, get read for a female sub protagonist. This chapter is a bit slow, but pay attention, it foreshadows what's to come in the next one and is meant to lay the groundwork of new themes and new characters along with a little world building for installments down the road.

As always, reading the previous installments is suggested but not necessary. Enjoy!

"Since it's going to be a little late when we get to the hotel, how about story time during the drive?" Amy inquired, she smiled wide, her eyes bulging just a bit.

"Not a bad idea, but I'm warning you now, I've only got one more chapter, so don't be surprised if I don't have time to crank out another one by tomorrow evening." He explained.

"Don't worry about it, I'll take my story tonight. Besides, we've got a busy weekend planned, and I doubt you'd have time to crank anything out, even if I did unlock you." Amy jested, punctuating the innuendo with a wink and a backhanded tap on the solid lump hiding under his pants. Dennis lazily went through the ritual of opening up the document on his phone, and as they whipped down the interstate in the amber light of the setting sun, picked up the story right where it left off last night.

'With trepidation, I sank to my knees and positioned myself between Ashley's legs. Using the most tender guiding touch, she grasped my hands and used them to fold my arms across her knees, then gently pressed my chin down onto my forearms.

"Good boy," Ashley cooed. "Now, for the cautionary tale of Christine, I guess I should start with a little bit of background..." she trailed off.

'Christine and I grew up on the same block, two houses apart in a small suburban enclave outside of Biloxi, Mississippi. Now, if you've never been there, which most people haven't, Biloxi is one of the bigger cities in Mississippi, although compared to what it's like here in the northeast, it would be considered a big township, not a city. Anyway, proximity was about the only thing Christine and I had in common, but it was enough to cause us to fall into a comfortable friendship, first from a young age, then on into adolescence.

By the time we hit high school, our differences had grown to extremes, as we each vehemently pursued our own teenage images. While Christine was the epitome of the good child, I began fashioning myself into a rebel against all that my parents held dear. At first glance, she was the Enid to my Wednesday in aesthetic and attitude, however our relationship lacked the vicious rivalry which was supplanted by a friendship bordering on kinship. Light and dark, yin and yang, our childhoods were spent bouncing between each other's homes and yards. We each served the other as playmate, confidant, and partner in crime.

As we grew older, our circles of friends grew more and more distant until we were the only overlap. It never caused much of a problem though. In such a small community, our respective cliques were more than hospitable to the occasional honorary outsider. The rift that ended up separating us began our senior year of high school, with Christine bound for a small religious college in Louisiana, while I railed against the education system with a weapon engineered around abstention. In place of school, I chose the strange counterculture of the underground rock scene, and by the end of Christine's first semester away at college, I was roaming the Southeast playing groupy to whichever band would drag me along to a new city. On our last encounter, Christine was a conventional beauty with the aesthetic of a down home southern girl next door.

She was short, probably around 5'4" with hair the color of a cornfield that just felt it's first cool autumn breeze, golden blonde with hints of soft brown that made her blue eyes glimmer like two crystal pools. Where I was mostly skin and bones, she was filled out in a way that was healthy and fresh, as if when the great creator had her on his slab, he decided he didn't need to ration his materials so tightly, that she deserved a little extra in every way that would flatter. The same policy that was applied to her body was evident in her face, high cheekbones, sharp but petite nose, yet her cheeks were full, her lips plump as if to suggest something juicy underneath the swollen flesh of a just ripe enough peach. At least, that's what she looked like when we parted ways for the last time before the fall of her first year in college.

We wouldn't see one other again until a strange coincidence forced the meeting about 7 years later. By that time, my travels had landed me in Tampa Bay, where I'd moved in with a guy that had latched onto me like a deer tick somewhere in North Carolina. At some point between there and Tampa we fell into the type of naive love, if love could be the word to describe it, that can only exist in the spotlight of hard drugs and co-dependence. Tampa wasn't so much an attempt to settle down so much as it was a crash landing. It was a place we ended up, not someplace we intentionally arrived at, someplace to get our shit together just long enough to get into the sky for another crash landing somewhere else. It was a pretty brutal relationship. Abuse went both ways, lots of cheating, that sort of thing.

My "boyfriend" if you could even call him that, did odd labor jobs and guitar lessons at a local music shop to come up with his end of the rent. I danced at a topless bar four nights a week, which should have been enough to cover my living expenses if it weren't for the growing opiate habit I was developing, so I had to work at a few different restaurants a few days a week as a server as well. It was right around the time that prescription opiates, my drug of choice, were suffering from a supply crisis created by government crackdowns and fancy pharmacy software, the rise of heroin being the inevitable conclusion. Between the skyrocketing price of pills and the awful quality heroin that Florida is known for, I was almost always scraping along on empty.

Despite the stigma associated with it, I enjoyed dancing. My innate sexuality combined with a little talent made me a pretty good living on the pole, made better by the little extras I could pick up in darkened rooms and the club parking lot after hours. To top it all off, dancing seemed to be the only thing that took my mind off the stomach cramps and cold sweats that almost always seemed to be lurking around the corner. By the end of the first year, I'd amassed a decent crowd of regulars, the manager let me pick the best shifts, and often the owner tried to cajole me into taking the revolving door of new girls under my wing. It was early or mid October, because I distinctly remember browsing Halloween themed stripper ensembles when the owner came up to me trailed by a meek looking woman quietly padding along in his shadow.

She was fairly short, wearing a loose T-shirt and jeans that obscured her figure as best they could, but failed to hide how dangerously skinny she was. Her shirt was somehow almost too big, yet dangerously too small in all the right places. Its collar was gone entirely, so it drooped down low across her cleavage and hung off of one shoulder. The faded Metallica logo on the front was cut short, just above her bellybutton. The jeans she wore looked as if they were made for someone else, the fabric swayed in odd places and seemed like the only thing holding them on was a patchwork of adhesive hidden under the threads.

When she walked, the frayed waistband would catch her boney hips just enough so they didn't fall down, as if they were floating around her waist giving her the appearance of a belly dancer with a southern flair. She had a worn and weathered olive green messenger bag draped over her shoulder and across her body. The tattered strap cut a valley between her breasts, and the two mountains rising to either side of it dwarfed the rest of her features. Clear outlines of her nipples were visible through the formless shirt displaying her sharp nipples and the ringed jewelry piercing them. Her blue eyes had an intense, yet vacant feel, and when the lights of the vanities played their tricks, only a deep unsettling bluntness was revealed. Short Blonde hair sprouted from her head as if only recently planted and allowed to germinate and the distinct yet casual lack of styling cemented my assumption that this woman was far more accustomed to baldness. Below her sunken cheeks and faint, distant smile, there was an elusive sense of familiarity that compelled me to stare.

"Hey Ash, this is Princess. She's starting tonight and could really use someone to show her the ropes." Tony, the owner of the club, explained in his broad New York accent. Part of me wanted to ignore the request, but something beyond my comprehension made me agree. It certainly wasn't the middle aged greaseball owner, but something less overt in the woman before me that seemed to call to me. I showed her to the vanity next to mine, then gave her a quick tour of the maze of hallways and rooms utilized by the staff.

She didn't speak much, never without being prompted, and it was as if she was so used to the expectation of silence that speaking out of turn caused physical pain. When she did speak, the movement of her upper lip caused the thick three quarter ring in her septum to bounce and twitch. Her gauged tongue piercing flashed between her teeth, and it was clear that it was guilty of generating the artificial lisp that barely escaped my notice. Even though I knew this woman would be pushing in on my territory as the only alternative dancer at the club, I couldn't help but show her kindness that was otherwise foreign to me. I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew her from somewhere. Most of my time on the road was a blurry haze, a fast life made artfully opaque by drug use and an ever shifting crowd, and there were often times where I'd meet a person two or three or even four times before committing their face to memory and tagging it with a name.

"So, is Princess your real name?" I asked her. "We really suggest that you choose a stage name, mine is 'Lilith' or Lilly for short, but I generally don't mind being called my real name Ashley when we aren't out front."

"N-yeah, Princess is my real name, well, sort of. It's actually Amira, legally speaking, which translates to Princess." she replied. The answer came off sounding confused, as if she was carefully watching her words or telling a secret that shouldn't be told and she thought if she sounded unsure or phrased it as a question that she couldn't be held accountable for its telling. Being that this club had some legal trouble in the past, they were big on paperwork, even for the dancers. The truth would come out when it came time for her to hand over her ID and sign off on the employment forms.

"Okay, well you look like a cute Josie to me, how's that sound?" I said, realizing that she didn't seem like she would be able to make a decision on her own. She winced ever so slightly with disapproval, so I pressed on. "Have you ever danced before?"

"Y-yeah, well, sorta. I used to dance a few times a month at an all nude private club. I just did it because my ma-err-boyfriend wanted me too." She replied.

"Right, got it." I said, letting my words drip with skepticism. Something was off about this girl, and I was becoming more and more engrossed with discovering what it was. I had her show me what she planned to wear on stage, and while her appearance and vibe gave the impression that she was inexperienced, her outfit choice said otherwise. She pulled out a ball of shimmering nylon and spandex along with a pair of black stiletto pumps. Without a word, she began to shed her clothing, letting one threadbare article at a time slip from her body and collect in a small pile at her feet.

She undressed in a way that seemed clinical, with no measures taken to preserve her modesty. The woman who I had pegged as shy and soft-spoken seemed to view her own nakedness in the company of strangers as simply another ordinary phase of existence, the change in her posture seemed to imply that she was even more comfortable, like shedding her clothing had shed some extraneous burden.

I watched quietly, unable to help but stare, my eyes gorging themselves on every inch of her naked body with both lust and horror. As if scratched onto her body with deliberate malice to mar both the beauty of the flesh along with its wearer, her tanned skin was spattered with disjointed and mismatched tattoos, yet sported not a single tan line. None of the tattoos contained a speck of color, and instead consisted of heavy black lines and shading contrasted by the emptiness of her golden skin. Where the need for color was unavoidable, pink, puckered scar tissue filled the voids.

Across her chest, from clavicle to clavicle was a script so foreign, so profane that it made my eyes hurt just to look at, yet made me unable to look away. At its center was the tip of a dagger that rose up from between her breasts, the adornments on its hilt spreading out across under her bust in geometric patterns entwined with rubies fashioned from deep, angry scars. There were more like them scattered across her body, all painful and obscene, but the one that drew my attention was on her back. I winced just looking at it, but steeled myself to take it all in. A great serpent, red eye'd and fierce wound its way down and around her outlined spine before slipping under the waistband of her thong and wrapping around her hip.

She was completely hairless in a way that even the most diligent woman with a razor would be in awe of. Not even the hint of stubble was visible, which told me that she'd had laser removal treatments or something of the sort. Thinking about it now, it really shouldn't have been too surprising, as it wasn't the only cosmetic surgery she'd had. The most apparent was her breasts, two giant gravity defying orbs protruding from her chest, each nipple pierced with a thick brass ring and connected together by a thin gold chain. Whoever had done the work was an artist, but while they looked perfect, I couldn't even imagine the setbacks she was met with when clothes shopping.

Now, by this point in my life, I wasn't a stranger to female nudity or attraction to the same sex. I'd always considered sexuality a spectrum, and since my early twenties, considered myself somewhere in the middle. So to say that my attraction to this woman was scary would be a gross understatement. It was a feral, brutal attraction, one that didn't just tickle the gossamer threads of my sexuality, but plucked at and slapped them like banjo strings. The second I saw her naked, I wanted her in a way that was possessive and undignified and as time wore on, the feelings grew stronger and harder to suppress.

We matched her getup with a black mesh cover-up off the club supplied rack, and now both in uniform, headed out to the floor for a little practice. The club wasn't set to open for several hours, so we had plenty of time and space for Princess to show what she knew and get a little practice in if she needed it.

She didn't. She took to the pole as if she were born of it. It wasn't the moves she chose or the way she carried herself, but something more subliminal about the way she danced that seemed to hypnotize the viewer, to peel off tiny flecks of the soul and draw them into her. She carried herself with an effortless grace that was alien to every impression she had made up until this point. Her body moved to the music as if it had been written solely for this purpose, the lighting seemed to adjust to her will, and when her back was turned the great serpent appeared to writhe and move of its own accord, the waxy scales flashing in the dim light, its red eyes pulsing softly to the beat.

It took just one song for my curiosity to become unbearable, and while she was owning the stage, I snuck away to the back office to check the paperwork she'd submitted. Something wasn't adding up, and I needed to get to the bottom of it.

When I got to the office, I picked her file up off the desk and began my detective work. The first line of her application gave me an answer, but not one that answered any of my questions. On the surface, she wasn't lying. Her Florida license with a Tampa address showed her name to be Amira, however, the last name was so familiar it made my skin crawl. At first, I couldn't believe it, maybe this was a relative of Christine's, or just a coincidence, but I knew deep down that it wasn't the case.

Amira was Christine, My Christine, the sweet girl I grew up with. In that moment, I experienced emotions I believed had been successfully eradicated. Tears welled in my eyes, as I tried to imagine how the girl that lived two doors down my whole life that left to study to become a teacher could return to me like this. I did my best to hide my tears and retreated to the bathroom to numb the pain. When I walked back out to the floor, my pinned pupils were dry, and dopamine saturated every cell in my body.

I waited until the end of the night to confront Christine. I wasn't quite sure whether or not she recognized me, but either way, I was a little worried that breaking the secret would cause a scene. When our shift ended around 2 and both me and Christine were back in our street clothes, I started looking for an opportunity to get her alone. I saw my shot when I realized that she didn't have a car, and was probably waiting for an Uber or a taxi. "Save your money darling, I can give you a ride home." I said, dialing up my charm as high as I could.

"Oh, are you sure?" She asked. "I uh, wouldn't want to be a bother?"

"No bother. It's your first night! It's the least I could do." I exclaimed and started walking towards my beat up piece of shit car. I wasn't sure she'd take the bait until I heard the passenger door open, and was relieved to see her climbing in next to me. "Wanna stop and grab some coffee? There's a 24/7 Dunkin just down the way a bit, they even have a drive thru."

"Uh, sure, why not? I could use a coffee." She said meekly. I threw the car in drive and pulled out of the lot. I waited a few blocks, then sprung the trap.

"Christine, what are you doing here?" I said, trying to hold back tears. She looked back at me, her eyes beginning to glow with panic. "It's me Ashley, we grew up together. Why did you lie about who you were?"

Slowly, the panic and terror in her expression melted into a soft, gentle smile that had the slightest hint of mischief, as if now that the secret was out, she could peel off the mask. I could tell without her ever uttering a word, that she not only knew, but planned this meeting. I stuck to the plan and stopped at the coffee place. It took a skill only possessed by the emotionally abused to suppress the tears long enough to squeak out our order and collect our drinks, but somehow I managed to pull it off.

A few blocks away, I pulled into the vacant lot of a grocery chain. I sat, dumbfounded, staring through the windshield at the headlights drifting up and down the street. Christine was calm, she didn't press, she didn't try to interrupt my stunned silence. She simply waited until I could compose myself, her hand lazily resting on my thigh in a gesture of comfort. When the time came, I didn't have to ask for her story, she simply told it freely and easily, pausing from time to time to philosophize or to allow me to ask questions.