Talla's Temple Ch. 12

The scene was repeated with the man from the kitchen.

Talla looked across the room at the last remaining male occupant.

"You must be Jace," she said and drew in a breath.

He nodded as he approached her. Dark complexion. Black hair. Thin, solid arms. He seemed neither confident nor shy and only faintly eager.

"I'm Talla," she said, figuring that introductions were appropriate.

"Hi, Talla," he said.

So calm. He must have done this before. Despite her steadfast and desperate need for sexual release, she still felt her stomach trembling at the idea of having sex. It was new to her. How new was it to him?

"How old are you?" she asked as he reached her and put a hand on her hip – the bare hip. She suppressed a shiver.

"Nineteen," he said. "You?"

Nineteen. That explained it. He'd been doing this for over a year. He'd probably had a hundred different women in his bed; probably done lots of Initiations and more than one upgrade.

"Just turned eighteen," she said, forcing defiance in her voice to hide the lilt that inexperience wanted to put there.

"Eighteen?" he asked, somewhat surprised. He glanced down at her breasts. Tina's top left her well displayed.

She smiled. He might have been Served by hundreds of women, but a nineteen year old boy would never be sent a Keeper. The age difference would violate one of the most rigid rules the Temple had about sexual interaction. That meant that she had something he had never seen before, despite his experience.

She pulled the frail silk pieces of her top out of the way, uncovering her chest for him.

"I'm a bit special that way," she said, pretending as much coyness as she could.

Jace let out a light gasp and then checked over his shoulder in a slight panic.

"It's alright," she said, letting her eyes turn fierce and narrow. "They won't be coming out any time soon."

Seeing his anxiety, hers disappeared. She pushed him backwards in to a small, cushioned chair near the fire and knelt on the floor in front of him.

If she could do it in the Priming room, couldn't she do it here? She wanted him hard, right from the start and she knew how to do it.

It was easy to unlace his pants and pull his semi-erect penis out. A partial erection wouldn't do, would it?

With a look in her eye bordering on salacious, she took the whole of him in to her mouth. Jace moaned, completely disarmed now, and let his neck relax as he turned to look up at the ceiling. It took only the least bit of tongue work before he became rigid.

Talla slid her mouth clear. She was glad – oh, so very glad – that she had chosen to leave her underwear at home this night. She got up on the chair, kneeling straddle over top of him.

Here it comes, she thought. I hope you're ready.

She didn't care if it hurt, or how much. She had seen pain today, under Form's lash. She'd cringed in sympathy watching M'lis and Adria suffer. If she went a little too hard tonight with Jace - if it she went so hard that it hurt her, then so be it. If she couldn't walk properly in the morning, it would be in sympathy for her friends.

And, finally, it wouldn't be any more than she deserved.

She set herself against him, the tip of his erection just touching her lips as her body loomed over his helpless form. She could feel wetness where they touched. If there would be pain, it wouldn't be for friction.

He opened his eyes in a moment of panic.

"Reguno," he muttered.

"What?"

"Kid," he gasped. "Apprentice."

A child? Someone under eighteen lived here. That someone could, possibly, wake up and come across them. There were rules about keeping children away from sexual activities.

"Then we'll make the first one quick," she promised, and forced herself down, sliding inch after inch of him slowly up inside her.

And they meshed.

She could feel the faint mists of his uncertainty blow away in the gale of her arousal. His doubts were as nothing to the strength of her needs. She brought him to her level with astonishing speed, before even the hilt of his manhood touched her bare lips.

Yes. Yes, indeed, this was what she needed. Tina had provided ... what Tina could provide. There had been a mesh there almost as intimate as the one she'd had with Zhair'lo, and much, much stronger than the one she now had with Jace. But Tina hadn't been enough. Tina might have shored up the dam for a bit, but the dam was weak and the storm waters were coming through.

She needed a man inside her body, stretching her out, filling her up. It was such a base, primal desire that she scarcely noticed the crudity of the mesh, the lack of clarity in her reading of Jace's thoughts. It was enough that she had brushed away his uncertainty and she could use him now to fill her needs.

"Come for me," she said, looking him in the eye.

He nearly whimpered under gaze.

"If you fear discovery, come now."

It was her turn to gasp, then, as he obeyed. He let himself pass the point of no return as she rotated her body and ground him in to the chair.

Oh, how he swelled inside her!

Yes, yes, yes!

She pushed down as hard as she could. He thrust up in to her and released his seed in to her belly.

It wasn't what she'd had with Tina or with Zhair'lo. It wasn't a violent hammer pounding at her genitals or a fire burning up her spine. But it was an orgasm. It was his orgasm and it was hers at the same time - the promise of the mesh fulfilled – and it was the feeling of her body clenching itself around the intruder that was bursting inside her.

It was painful and it was ecstatic and it was everything she needed right then.

But once wouldn't be enough.

Not even close.

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"Whaddaya think?" Eletta asked eagerly.

He'd had to wait through eight other women making their announcements before Eletta, last in line, had called out his name. The first thing she did, after dragging him to his room, was tear off her top. Apparently, having made Zo'kar ejaculate on her breasts and her genitals, she had no truck with modesty in his presence.

"Um. They look ... great?" Zo'kar replied, not quite sure of the appropriate response.

She shoved him over on to his bed and leaned over him, letting the slightly reddened masses dangle in his face.

"Not just great," she said pointedly. "Double great."

"Double?"

"Double," she said as she pressed her forehead lightly against his. "Somehow you managed to pull two upgrades out of that Acolyte and put them -" she cupped one of her breasts upward "- right here."

"Wow."

"Yeah," she said, her eyes bright and eager. "You're practically a hero."

"Hero?"

That was better, by a nine thousand step march up a mountain, than failing to perform at an Initiation. Gods, how far had he come since then?

"Hero," Eletta confirmed as she pulled his pants off. She took a glance at his penis, already growing erect, and smiled. "My hero. It's gonna help me a lot, you know, getting bumped up like that."

"Bumped up?"

She unlaced her skirt and let it fall to the ground.

"I checked around," she told him as she took his penis in hand and stroked it. "I'll get a free promotion to second rank. That's a year I get to skip. A year of laundry, mopping and other crap that happens way too early in the morning."

Her breathing quickened as she ran out of things to babble at him. With one hand she stroked the length of his shaft while the other hand went underneath. Two fingers poked under his testicles, increasing his stiffness.

"You ready?" she asked.

Zo'kar nodded, unable to find a single word to speak.

"Good. Me, too."

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"There's nothing wrong with you."

"Then how do you explain the double upgrade?" Shanata replied.

Tia held back a shrug. Shrugging, she reminded herself, is a sign of intellectual cowardice. She took a breath though, and tried to soften her voice.

"Maybe you just made a mistake," she told the Acolyte earnestly.

If she expected an angry outburst, she was pleasantly surprised. All that Shanata had to offer was a frown and a desultory sigh.

"I'm sure – I'm so sure," Shanata said as she looked at the floor, "that I only put one upgrade in to that boy."

"I can feel your certainty," Tia observed patiently. "You're very unhappy with the thought of being wrong."

"Exactly. How can I trust myself the next time?"

"You're asking me how to build your confidence back up?"

Shanata looked up at her.

"There's no good reason not to trust yourself," Tia told her. "It was one mistake. You'll only get your confidence back by doing an upgrade again and getting it right."

Shanata nodded in agreement. There wasn't any arguing with the logic.

"Besides," Tia added. "You've probably found another Seal Breaker. That's no small thing."

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The virtue of making it to Keeper was the improvement in work assignments.

Maksa was done, as far she could tell, with laundry, food preparation and running idiotic errands for her august superiors.

Years ago, she had chosen Lips at her Initiation. That usually led to a medical or scientific career of some kind. But as time and education had gone on, she'd developed a different interest. She'd learned about genealogy. It wasn't a real focus in general Temple education. In fact it was rarely discussed at all. Nevertheless, she'd taken a keen interest.

Genealogy was the responsibility of Pussy, which meant she was only slightly out of place. She was at least in the right Division. That made it a possibility. When she'd put in a request – a general indication of interest - they had put her in charge of one of the Virgin's Dorms without any further explanation. That had seemed like an odd choice at the time.

Then, as the girls had come in, she'd been sent off to fetch family trees for each of them. It should have been tedious, pouring over those charts, looking for common ancestors to the sixth generation.

And tedious is exactly what it would have been for almost anyone else. Maksa, however, was fascinated. Her position gave her access to the Stacks, a library locked up under the ground floor offices of Sweetness's Hall. She began to see patterns – tendencies – among women in their choices of Discipline. Most, given the opportunity, chose what their mothers had chosen. Failing that, they took something in the same Division. If the women on the paternal side strongly favoured a particular Discipline, it could, rarely, come through.

How did any that happen, though? Didn't the race through Initiation generally determine Discipline, with the fastest going to Sweetness? How did maternity decide such things when women gave their children to the dorms before they could speak? Were the women of Within somehow faster or more effective at the Initiation in a way that they could pass on to their children?

When she had witnessed Sila and Talla meshing, she reported what she had seen up her chain of command. As long as she was working in the Virgins' dorms, that meant reporting directly to the Sorceress of Pussy. Pussy had listened calmly, asked her to provide deeper genealogies and then, in a casual sort of way, sworn her to silence on the matter.

That had been mildly disturbing. No one had ever ordered her silence before. But she was new to the yellow skirt and accepted that such confidences and responsibilities came with the rank. So she was silent.

Then she had gone to the Stacks and fetched Sila's dossier, and only Sila's.

Because, after all, she'd only been ordered to fetch Sila's.

That had made her wonder. Why hadn't they told her to fetch Talla's dossier? Wasn't that at least as important? The answer had come to her, in the middle of the night, a couple of days later.

The reason they hadn't asked for Talla's dossier was because they had already looked her up for some other reason.

That explained her purpose in the Stacks on this night. She had the authority to enter based on the fact that she was supposed to be running genealogies on any girls that came in to her dorm. And Talla had, after all, come in to her dorm. She was just doing some, ah, extended research.

That was the question, then, which preoccupied her: what was so special about Talla? Why had they looked her up before she'd even come in?

The dossier was clear. Her mother, Mih'lan, had been an Acolyte of Pussy, passing away at the age of 42. They were Sweetness on her mother's side for generations: mostly Pussy but some Lips and Within. Her father, Kain, had a mish-mash of Disciplines in his tree. The women there showed only a general predilection toward Sweetness and Form with very little Endowment. In her short experience, she knew that it took a strong and specific tendency to override the mother's effect.

And that was very, very odd.

How did Talla come to Endowment, and specifically Abundance, when there was no such thing in her ancestry? Why would she choose Endowment when she'd come in second in her Initiation?

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No one had come out to catch them having sex by the fire pit. Talla had actually felt just a bit disappointed. M'lis and Adria had been punished for so much less while she had gotten away with this particular act twice.

Jace had immediately taken her off to his bedroom, never mind the semen dripping down the inside of her thigh. His anxiety made her wonder what sort of inducements men were provided that made them want to obey the rules.

He was lying on his back now, breathing heavily and recovering from their second orgasm. She was sitting beside him cross legged, having ridden him again and just dismounted. She found she rather liked being on top. She'd have to try letting someone be on top of her some other day.

Jace turned on his side to face her as the heaving of his chest started to subside. He looked at her breasts.

"How you figure you're eighteen?" he asked.

She looked down, delighting in the attention he was paying her body.

"I've had eighteen birthdays," she replied smartly.

He reached a hand out to gently cup one of her breasts.

"Never seen 'em that big."

"I suppose you haven't", she said, pushing her chest out in to his hand, let the tip of her nipple rub against the palm of his hand whenever she inhaled.

Someday, maybe a year from now, they'd let her get her first Point upgrade. Then her nipples would stand a little more erect.

She touched what looked like a scar on his forearm.

"What happened to you?" she asked.

"Caustic burn," he said. "Lye, you know. Pretty dangerous."

She hadn't thought that soap could be dangerous. She examined that lightened patch of skin, running a finger along it while he caressed her. He still seemed stunned by the size of her breasts.

"How did you -?" he took a deep breath and then shuddered as some aftershock went through him.

He had looked as if he wanted to ask her more, but he seemed so tired suddenly. That was fine. Best he saved his energy anyway. She would let him rest for a little bit, but she was far from done with him.

I've never tried the doctor-fetish thing before, so I hope I pushed the buttons properly.