Night Angels Ch. 2

Selma appeared lost in thought for a moment while Holly busied herself with her task. She gazed meditatively at her audience. At last she turned to the girls.

"So this is how we welcome you. This is how we decide who will first pleasure you and be pleasured in return. This is how we introduce you to the state of being available. This is how you first experience the lessening of control, which is the same thing as the opening of possibilities. Holly, the hat."

I took another sip, and then realised that I was mouthing an empty glass. I tried to collect my whirling thoughts. Claudia had plainly invited me here for this strange game, but why? Was this simply another strange tease? Did she want me to fuck her – did she want to fuck me? And if so, could she be unaware of the membership rules? Or was this some strange way of cheating the process, so that she could give me an eyes-only dance rather than be touched by another member? Was I the safe option? After all this, a private dance would feel like worse than nothing to me, like a vision of water for a man thirsty in a desert. I had had enough of watching Lucy from afar. But the thought of another one of these people in the darkness around me taking my place –taking her – was even more unbearable. I noticed the bar girl watching me inquisitively and nodded mutely at my glass.

Holly stirred her hand around in the upturned hat and withdrew a small red slip. The silent hush had settled over the crowd again. The three girls stood silently, eyes downcast again. I looked at Claudia, trying to gauge her state of mind. Selma took it from her "Thank you my dear. We begin with the third choice… which goes to number 417!" There was a commotion at a table to my right, which seemed to belong to a small group of very fashionably dressed girls and boys. "Another one, Holly, please… yes, the second choice goes to number 495." For a moment my heart skipped a beat, but then I recognised that this was not my number. "And first choice… yes, first choice, thank you Holly, goes to - ah! what a coincidence – number 459!" There was scattered applause, the lights on the stage started to dim, and the three girls filed out stage left. The background music started again, and with it the buzz of ordinary conversation.

I dug the slip out of my pocket. Number 459. I caught the bar-girl's attention and wordlessly handed it to her.

"Thank you. You just wait here," she said, and I settled down to nurse my whiskey.

Presently Holly appeared at my elbow, and asked me to accompany her. She took me past the stage, and through a mirrored and room where a couple of girls were hurriedly in the process of changing. They took no notice of us. Another door and a short corridor led us into what seemed to be an office of some kind. It was sumptuously furnished with dark hardwood furniture and plush carpets. A fire burned in a grate, and next to it, still in her black garb, stood Selma. In the middle of the carpet were the three women – no longer naked. They were now wearing the same leather harness as Holly. The straps were fastened in such a way is to bind their breasts and cover their nipples and genitals. They seemed to be waiting for me, and looked up expectantly as I came in. Two other people were already there – one of the flash young things that had sat at the table next to me, and an elderly and very grave looking Asian man. Claudia's expression was unreadable, and she gave no sign of having recognised me.

"Thank you Holly. Welcome, sir." Selma's tone was calm, unhurried, confident. "Your rooms are being prepared. Meanwhile, before you choose your girls, a few words." She turned to me and the club members. "These girls are now yours to enjoy in whatever way you please, for the next five hours. You are free to do whatever you like, bar hurt or scar them in any way, as long as they freely and voluntarily consent. I will not put up with coercion or bullying. So if a girl says no, take it as a no." She put her arm through Aster's. " Secondly, these girls are your partners in pleasure. I expect them to receive exactly as much enjoyment from your contact as you yourselves. You know what I think of boorish, selfish or inconsiderate behaviour. Except for those qualifications you can do what you like. Fuck like bunny rabbits, tie each other up, visit bookshops. It's for you to decide."

She released Aster, and walked over to me. "Except for you, sir. I am very pleased to have you here as a visitor, and I am happy that you have won first-choice tonight. But unfortunately you must remember that you are barred from any kind of sexual contact with these girls. You can choose the one you like, and you can ask her to do anything – dance for you, display herself, frig herself silly. But you are not allowed to touch her. And the same goes for you, my darlings. You are allowed to touch him through his clothes. But no other contact of any kind. No hand jobs, no blow jobs, nothing. And his hands are to stay off you. If this rule is broken, this man goes out, and will be permanently barred. And you will have a penalty to pay as well. Have you understood? "

The girls and I humbly and contritely assented, as if we were naughty kids called in front of a kind but stern headmistress.

"That's settled then." Selma smiled. She turned to me. "Sir, time to make your choice."

Six pairs of eyes fixed expectantly on me. I cleared my throat – I felt a bit self conscious – and said, "I choose Lu – Claudia."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I am."

"Come on. Take your time. Look carefully. Claudia is beautiful, but so are the others. Go on. Touch them. Go on, as long as they are clothed it's fine. Feel them. Apply your mind. Who do you like most?"

My erection felt hard and warm in my pants, but I felt strangely calm, thinking that my mind was hardly the bit of me that was involved here. The girls kept up their tantalising reserve. In front of me stood Aster. She was almost as tall as me, and her eyes were almost on a level with mine. I let my hands run along her neck, her shoulders, her breasts and belly, her sides. Her flesh was firm and warm. Her eyes were green, deep green. She was looking demurely down at the floor as if this was the most normal thing in the world. Her mouth was full and luscious. I was aware of her breathing, the smell of her skin, the way she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. I imagined her mouth against mine, her legs wrapped around my hips. I tore myself away and considered Jade. She, too, submitted willingly and silently to my touch. An exquisitely small, delicate beauty. A china girl.

Last I turned to Lucy. I let my hands run briefly through her soft, cropped hair; down her beautiful neck, across her slender sides and hips. She looked me full in the eyes with that mysterious, dark, secret gaze of hers. She gave no clue that she knew me. She was simply Claudia, a luscious and beautiful stripper girl, leather clad in a secret basement, and I an anonymous man, looking at her with admiration and longing. Who was this girl, and what were her feelings about me? I did not know. I did know, however, what it was about her that set her apart from the other girls. She was the one who saw my desire. She saw my longing, and she accepted it. I turned to Selma.

"This is the one. This is the one I want." My voice was rough and ungainly.

"I like a man who knows his mind. Claudia, are you happy to go with this man?"

Claudia gave me another brief, impenetrable glance, and said shortly, "Yes."

"Good. You go, my girl, and get ready. Rika, you take this man to the first room."

Rika turned out to be a slender, waif-like creature in a figure-hugging black dress who had been perching unseen on a desk in the background. She moved with quick, deft grace and appeared utterly bored by the proceedings. She led me back through the door I had come through, and through a confusing series of intersecting rooms and corridors. At length she stopped next to an open door. "You wait in there" she said, and left.

* * *

"In there" was what looked like a small, dimly lit and elegantly furnished bedroom. More of the rich cloths and expensive artefacts I had seen upstairs: a Persian carpet, an apparently original Klimt painting, a gigantic mirror on the wall. A mirrored ceiling! An easy chair. A bed. A wash-stand. Hi fi and video equipment (TV, VCR and tripod-mounted camera). And what looked like a massage table or a piece of gym equipment in one corner. Fully equipped.

I sat down in the arm chair, then stood up again.

I stood in the middle of the carpet, paced up and down.

I sat on the bed.

The one thing this room did not have was a heap of magazines, I thought. That you could read while you waited for the doctor to come.

Suddenly I jumped up. The door rattled, and Lucy entered. She was breathtaking. The leather harness had vanished (except for that collar), and she was dressed in a long, silver, shimmering, form-fitting pale gown that left her arms bare. She looked like a princess. I felt that dry-mouthed feeling again. Once again my heartbeat was shaking my chest. It was hard to breathe.

"Shall I dance?"

Now it was my turn to nod mutely. She touched a panel on the music system. I recognised Sade, "No ordinary love" again, and the part of my brain that still produced thoughts said, "is this our tune now?" But Lucy said nothing. She drifted over to me, silent as smoke on the air.

She had offered to dance, but this was not dancing. Not for one moment were our bodies separated. I stood silent and still, while she leaned against me, ground her body against mine, writhed, stroked and held me. She moved around me like a slinky, six-foot cat, rubbing and pressing her body against me with unrestrained urgency. She pressed her face into the hollow of my throat and nuzzled there. Her fingers tousled my hair, scratched my chest, ran across my face, grasped my buttocks. All I was conscious of was the delicious pressing of her body against mine, and my overpowering desire to touch her in turn, to hold her, to taste her skin… Her breathing was ragged. And when her eyes were not closed, her gaze was locked on mine. Her eyes were hot, smoky, passionate.

Without a word, she shoved me backwards. I almost tripped and fell, and then sat down heavily on the chair. She bent over and grabbed me by the shirt collar. She leaned forward, showing me she had no brassiere under her low-cut dress, almost allowing her breasts to spill out. Then she sat down in my lap and recommenced her insistent grinding. This was not simply a lap dance, I realised. This was fucking in clothes. She was deliberately and precisely riding my erection. If she did not stop soon, I was going to come. And so be it, I thought. If coming inside my clothes was all I was going to get from this girl tonight, I would make my peace with that.

I realised she was saying something. "What?" I murmured.

Her voice was tiny, nothing more than a whisper. "Touch me. Touch, touch, touch me!"

I let my hands wander across her flat tummy, over her chest. My fingers found the slinky, silky, shoulder straps. I slid them down her arms. She leaned forward – impatient, urgent, and let the dress fall down. Then she leaned back again, again imploring me in a whisper. At Happy Joe's I had wanted to tantalise, to tease her. Now I just wanted to taste, feel, hold. I felt the softness, the heaviness, the warmth and fullness of her breasts. I felt the pucker of her nipples. I felt the rapid beating of her heart. Somewhere I was dimly aware that this girl who I wanted, wanted me too. Incredibly, magically, I had found her, I wanted her, and she was not dancing just outside my reach. She was in my arms, in my hands. Time had stopped, and nothing existed in the world except us.

I watched her rise, the top of her dress still bundled entrancingly on her hips. She was behind me, crouching behind the chair. Her arms were around my neck, her mouth at my ear. I felt her breath, then a hot, salacious tongue. This girl had me down, she knew just how to transport me into another world. Her left hand was at my crotch, sliding up and down, teasing me, drawing me further and further… with the other I felt her frantically tug at my shirt buttons, undoing them one by one. Then my shirt was off, and her hands were tickling and caressing my bare skin, raking across my chest. The room was spinning around me.

I became aware that she had stopped.

I opened my eyes.

She was standing in front of me, entirely naked. Her hair was tousled and her face was flushed. She loved this, I realised. She wanted my hungry, longing admiring gaze. She loved the depth with which I wanted her. She felt beautiful when she saw me looking at her.

Then her arms were around me, and she was kissing my neck and shoulders, biting my nipples, sucking on them, in a transport of love and desire. I felt her tugging at my belt and unfastening my pants. Within a moment my cock sprang free, and I felt her hands stroking and tickling its sensitive surface. It felt as if I was in a dream. I tried reached out to her, tried to say something, but she put a finger to my lips. "Hush, my darling," I heard her whisper. And she bent down her lovely head to open her mouth and engulf my cock.

For a timeless while I let the liquid sensation engulf me as she alternately half swallowed my member and licked up and down the length of its shaft. I had forgotten what this intimacy felt like, the sheer luxury of another person's solicitous touch… I had forgotten what it was to make love for the sake of making love, to be driven by nothing but regard for my own and another woman's pleasure…

I roused from my torpor. Somehow – perhaps it was Selma's warning, perhaps it was the habit of years of putting a watch on all my actions – I had remained almost entirely passive during all this time. But I did not want to go on simply allowing this girl to overwhelm me with her passion, delicious as it was. I reached out and gathered her up in my arms, drew her face up to mine. The chair was large, comfortably allowing her to straddle my lap. I felt the wetness of her sex settle on my crotch. I could sense her slit was still far from wide open, but she slithered herself up and down on the shaft of my cock, her soft lips sucking at it and her pubic hairs tickling its head.

And I kept finding new places to kiss. The top of her head. The heavy, full lower curves of her breasts. Her engorged nipples. The softness above her nipples. The warm skin between her breasts. The little hollow at the base of her throat. (Her head was thrown back, and my fingers were curled in her hair) The slender column of her neck. (My hands ran down her warm, bare back). The scented little nook behind her earlobes, where her throat and jaw line met. (I felt the soft down there tickle my lips). The tender whorl of her ears. (They were cool, and felt indescribably delicate). Her eyes like little warm pools against my lips. And her mouth.

I think that was really where everything changed. If everything else had happened in the same way – if we fucked on the carpet in the tiny little room – and we had not kissed, it would still have been possible in some way to go on as before. I would have gone to the office the next week and we might still have been able to pass one another as if nothing had happened. That strange split between our night time life and our daily work would have continued. It would have been possible to believe that all this had only been something that happened between the stripper Claudia, a staff girl at a little known, expensive but probably illegal nightclub, and an anonymous, lonely man, who put his desire back in his pocket and went back to his safe, constrained existence. But it did not work out that way.

For a second she resisted. The body is wise, and knows about boundaries our minds are only half aware of. Then she opened her mouth and returned my kiss. Her mouth was like a juicy peach. Kissing her was like a long drink of water. In the years since then, we have coupled hundreds, perhaps thousands of times – with one another, and with other people – but I can still remember the exact sensation of her lips and her tongue in my mouth that night. We devoured each other. Everything slowed down. Lucy stopped her insistent grinding. Our bodies had found a new way of speaking. The kissing became gentler and gentler, until it was the merest touch: my lips grazing hers, her teeth nibbling my mouth, a lick of tongue tips.

And then we stopped. I opened my eyes. We looked at each other. I saw how soft her face was, how calm, the half smile on her lips. The game had ended. There was no more pretending. We could be free. And we had all the time in the world.

Time for me to kneel in front of her and let her open her legs for me. Time to be engulfed in the hot smell of her sweat and her excitement. Time to taste the outside of her sex, and to lick the juices that oozed there. Time for me to tease and play with her, to suck at her outer and inner lips, to slide my tongue into the outer passages of her sweet pussy. Time for me to hear her breathing deepen, to hear her start to gasp. Time for her to mount me in turn, and for us to be as lazy and easy as we liked as she slowly, slowly eased herself onto me. Time for me to slip gently, bit by bit , into the hot, wet, tight, slick curve of her delicious cunt…

We did not come together. That was only to happen much later, when we had got the measure of our passion and knew each other's bodies. That night, Lucy came almost immediately, arching her back and uttering stifled cries of pleasure. And it was a while before it was my turn, gasping and crying as I felt my sperm flood deep inside her, while she leaned over me, holding my head and staring into my eyes.

Warmth and release flooded my body. I floated away on a dark river. For a long while I did not know where I ended and where Lucy began. We were two entangled shapes in a line drawing, sensuous curves and flesh tones blending and interweaving. Her sweat cooled on my body. Her juice dried on my legs. Her breath was in my ear.

* * *

I became aware of feeling cold. The floor was hard beneath my back. We stirred, mumbled, and I slipped out of her. We sat up, and she smiled shyly at me. I ran my fingers through her hair. She touched my shoulder. We looked around.

Selma was sitting on the bed.

In another time I would have started guiltily. We would have scrabbled for our clothes and covered our bodies. But all that seemed strange and irrelevant now. Damned or not, I did not care. I returned her gaze and waited.

She got to her feet, impassive. "Get dressed, my dears. In my office."

Wordlessly we put on our clothes and followed her. I was dimly aware of faces and voices, of the traffic of the club continuing around us, but I hardly registered anything. Selma's office seemed strange. Nothing had changed. The fire burned in the grate. Rika was curled naked on the carpet in front of it, apparently sleeping, her thumb in her mouth. How long ago had it been since I had stood here, playing along in their bizarre game?

Selma perched on the edge of her large, ornate desk, dispassionately regarding Lucy and me. We looked rather bedraggled, I realised. My clothes were rumpled, and my hair in a mess. Lucy's dress was badly creased. We waited.

Selma turned to me.

"Your name? "

"John, John Gray", I said. What was it to her?

She smiled and moved towards me, extended her hand. "Mr Gray, I am pleased to meet you. And pleased to be able to congratulate you. Welcome to our club. You are our one hundred and fifth member." She shook my hand. Her grasp was firm, strong, dry.

I was too baffled to speak.

"I must say, this does not happen often. Many members have spent years as outsiders, hoping to be invited in, wondering what it will take to make the grade. Some never do. People who watch and watch, wondering when they will be asked to join the party. Some offer money, some plead to be allowed to join. And on your first night here, you showed me what I wanted to see. You knew whom you wanted. You would not be deterred. You acted on your passion… And you too, my dear girl. At your audition, I realised you were something special." She tousled Lucy's hair, motherly and proud. "You got what you wanted. I thought that something was up with that last raffle ticket. And I was right! You subverted my little auction on your first night here, my clever little slut!" She said the word as if it was a term of endearment. "Right under my nose. You took a huge risk. In fact I more than half suspect you've planned this for a long time. Was that the reason you joined this club? To get this man? "