Content Note:
Incest
The Avenue, being only a few thousand miles from Cox Island, is a place I visited often while at college. My first date with Freya was to an opera there, and in my final year, following the severing of our love, I attended many concerts there - but never without a hateful misery. What joy could there be in music when my heart was broken.
No joy, but music is so often beauty from desolation. Music can take a broken heart and shatter it anew, and in doing so can heal it too. I was no concert performer, but the hours I spent pouring passion and grief into the piano that year helped me to continue.
Since then, I had declined my father's half-hearted invitations to join him and Eliza when they travelled there in search of culture and high society. For years, the Avenue was where Freya and I had been in love, and to go there would only reopen that wound.
But everything had changed. Freya had come back into my life. Perhaps there could be no mending the hurt I had caused her, but it had seemed to me, at The Beach, that her coldness towards me, the much deserved anger, had given way. To what, I could not say, but the idea of joining my father and sister in their new home on the Avenue no longer seemed quite so daunting.
I could not, anyway, live forever as Rosa's guest in her house on Kell Island, just as I could not live forever as Mara's guest on Ux. Like it or not, my home was still with my father and sister, and sooner rather than later I would need to face that reality. Or find some occupation that would gain me independence from the dwindling Elliott fortune.
What would it be like to work for a living? What would I do? What could I do, for that matter? Could I serve coffee and cake all day in a posh café? Or be one of those young women who sell themselves for the pleasure of others? Could I be charming for a stranger, talk music over cocktails and poetry over dinner, and afterwards scream with pretended pleasure as I fucked professionally?
I'd always lacked the courage for that. It had been my fear of the great unknown, as much as my love for Rosa and my respect for her advice, that had persuaded me to accept chastity and deny Freya. Not a day had passed since that I did not regret that act of cowardice.
There could be no halfway ground. My father would not approve, just as he had not approved of Freya. Either I was his daughter and thus an Elliott, a product of privilege and above such trivialities as employment, or I was nothing to him.
For the first time in my life, a life without the Elliott safety net did not seem impossible. I was not, however, quite ready to dare it.
Outside of the cultural heart, the Avenue is arranged in concentric rings of houses. Each ring of houses has a distinct character, some a blaze of colour from carefully maintained gardens, some tightly terraced with avenues and parks all around.
The outermost ring is the wealthiest by far, grand houses within even grander gardens, belonging to families whose stratospheric wealth spans multiple star systems, and who visit O-Stred whenever the whim takes them.
The innermost ring, carefully concealed from view by tall trees, is a dense sprawl of small apartments and a huge variety of shops selling the basics of life to those with no fortune to subsist on. The café waitresses and sex workers and all those in between. There life is bustling and energetic, in contrast to the sparse and sedate atmosphere of the outer circles.
The industry of the Avenue is catering to the wealthy. From the finest blends of tea and the most artistically decorated cakes, to the most deviant sexual perversions. A murmur of praise from the right lips can raise an unknown to celebrity.
One such was Mistress Clay, a practitioner of the ancient art of kinbaku, who I encountered on the steps of my new home. She had in the way she dressed and carried herself an air of precision, and an aura of confidence that I found a little intimidating as she watched me walk from the taxi to the house.
I was saved from my indecision about how to address her by the front door opening abruptly. "Mistress!" Eliza said with a happy cry, followed by frown of equally abrupt disappointment. "Ana," she added reluctantly, and opened the door for us both to enter. "Father!" she shouted up the marble-effect stairs. "Ana's here."
With that she lost all interest in me, practically dragging Mistress Clay into a large side room, and closing the door firmly. "Welcome, Ana," I muttered. "It's lovely to see you again. How are you? How is poor Lucy?"
Poor Lucy was out of hospital, and by all accounts physically well. "The accident has affected her," Mara told me. "The surgeons had to fit an exo-spine. It looks like a giant zip down her back. I actually think it's sexy, but you can hardly blame her for being sensitive about it."
"She's a lot more withdrawn now," Helen added. "I still get flashes of the old Lucy, but she's not letting me in like she used to."
The last I'd heard, Lucy had packed a bag and left home, leaving a note about going to Cox Island to confront Freya once and for all.
"Ah, Ana," my father called downstairs. "Come on up. We've saved a small room for you."
"Home, sweet, home," I muttered, and dragged my suitcase up to my new, small room.
*
As homes go, it was nothing compared to Kell House with its island-spanning estate, but it was sufficient in size. My father and sister each had luxurious chambers, my sister's on the ground floor, my father's at the very top. His room had windows looking out towards the mansions of the ultrarich, and windows overlooking the avenues and parks that separated us from the next circle of houses.
I visited him there the morning after my arrival, and found him half-dressed, idly stroking his huge, rigid cock as he stared out the windows in contemplation. A maid stood ready to help him dress, but clearly her duties did not include helping my father achieve climax.
"Ah, Ana, excellent," he said. "I wonder if you wouldn't mind...?"
The adoration of my father's cock was a task I was usually happy to leave to Eliza, but for once I didn't mind helping out a little. Pulling up a seat beside him, I wrapped a hand as well as I could about the hard shaft, and caressed its extraordinary length with a slow, steady rhythm.
"How do you like the house?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, "Without question it is in the best part of the Avenue. I would not like to live in a mansion and feel obliged to entertain daily. I do enjoy the occasional party, but they are entirely too much trouble to host."
I chose to say nothing. My father would convince himself to believe whatever he needed to. I stroked his proud cock, feeling the veins beneath my fingertips, and watched how his precum glistened in the morning light as it oozed out into a long strand. "Pass me a glass, please," I said to the maid, and she did so with a wary eye on the weapon I held.
"And the little patch of grass we have is ideally suited to an evening soirée. I am not one to delight in the endless care and cultivation of an ornamental garden. What use is a garden anyway when we have such a pleasant space for walking in front of our house. Look there." He pointed down out through the window. "There is even a pond with ducks."
Indeed, I had already seen them from my own bedroom window. I didn't dare look away from his cock, though. I could tell he was close by the way he was moving his hips, thrusting through my hand with ever greater urgency.
"But it is the society here that has proved we were right to move here from Kell. Emerald Grey lives not half a mile from us." As if there was some erotic magic in the name itself, his cock stiffened suddenly, and I quickly lifted the glass to the tip of his cock.
Emerald Grey. I knew the name, of course. My mother's cousin, and a second cousin of my father too, on the Elliott side. Since my mother's death, I had often heard my father lament that Emerald was married. "Our genes in combination," he would cry, "would surely produce an heir for Kell Island."
His cock jerked powerfully and I struggled to hold it still as cum burst forth, thick, creamy jets splashing into the glass. The maid watched with fascination from a safe distance, and blushed brightly when she realised I'd seen her do so.
"She's divorced now!" my father exulted, seemingly oblivious to what I was doing, his imagination half a mile away, his cock in Emerald's cunt, his cum filling her womb and producing the next Elliott heir.
I waited until his erection subsided, then stood and made my way out again. "Here," I said, handing the glass to the maid. She took it uncertainly, staring at the contents with naked curiosity. "For my sister," I added, and her fading blush brightened anew.
*
At Kell we had a staff of twelve maids and gardeners, all of whom were available for sex. At the Avenue, we had two maids and a cook, and sex workers had to be ordered in. Mistress Clay was one such, a regular visitor with her ropes which she would wind in intricate designs about my sister's flesh. Eliza seemed to have finally found a kink that satisfied her more than our father's cock.
Not that she neglected him entirely, but Father's obsession with Emerald Grey had instilled a youthful vigour in him. He stalked the events she might chance to go to, and thus Eliza and I were dragged frequently to this play or that concert, and it was at an open-air opera (some modern composition that I was unfamiliar with) that we came at last face-to-face with Emerald herself.
I could see in her a resemblance to my mother, her cousin, especially in the dark curls of her hair, and about her blue eyes, and I wondered whether Father ever really missed the woman who had given him three daughters. Perhaps, for him, she had only been the possible solution to a genetic problem, and now he had found a superior solution to that same problem.
Emerald was not a great beauty, but something of the Elliott inheritance could be observed in the lines and symmetry of her features, and the Grey inheritance was in the health and longevity the Grey genes conferred. She was a little younger than my mother would have been, and no one who saw her could doubt she was fertile. No one who looked into her eyes could doubt that this was a woman who would enjoy inflicting pain.
"Dear cousin!" my father enthused. "Emerald! What joy to meet you at last!"
"Walter," she said. "How lovely!" In her eyes I saw cold calculation and a flicker of amusement. Were it not for the possibility that a union with my father could produce an heir to Kell Island, I don't doubt that she would have dismissed my father immediately from her attention. Or perhaps she would have toyed with him for a month or two, until bored. "You must come and visit," she said. "Tomorrow evening, perhaps?"
