Emma Ch. 14

Emma was hardly ever at home these days. Where she was Charlotte didn't really know. She believed that Emma was still seeing that teacher, Dorothy, and one of Emma's colleagues had told her that it was now common knowledge that she was having a relationship with her boss.

Charlotte felt totally excluded from Emma's life. It seemed that the only times Emma ever came back to the flat was when Charlotte was out - perhaps spending the night at Josephine's or still at work. Whatever it was, though, Charlotte knew she wasn't part of it, and she was sure that Emma wasn't even paying her enough attention to be bothered to intentionally avoid her. Nevertheless, Charlotte was a faithful lover and nothing that Emma could or couldn't do would shake her love for her flatmate.

Perhaps, she hoped, when Harriett returns from her jaunts abroad, Emma might be home more often. But even that hope - compromised as it was by her feelings that she'd again be excluded from their lovemaking - didn't seem very likely judging from Harriett's last letter from Baghdad where she was making a sex film with a Kurd with whom she claimed to have fallen passionately in love. It seemed that Harriett had more or less forgotten about returning home. Every assignment she had seemed to lead to another assignment in yet another exotic location. Charlotte felt incredible envy at her good luck in visiting and working in places she'd only vaguely heard of, and then in the most bizarre of places : Damascus, Samarkand, Shanghai, Puerto Rico, the list was endless. Charlotte hadn't realised that the sex industry was so widespread, but then these were modern days and the sex industry was the world's single largest industry (or so she read once).

However, Charlotte wasn't actually lonely. In fact, her position as the last of her flatmates to stay in actual residence was not at all a lonely one. Her relationship with Josephine was building towards an intimacy and passion that outstripped anything she'd had with Emma. However much she pretended that her love for Emma was unassailable, the evidence of her heart as she greeted Josephine when she came back from work was that Emma had become pretty much the secondary passion. It was difficult to be sure what Josephine's feelings towards her actually were, though she was sure that she had no other lover. However, as Josephine made a living from making love with people, it was not for sex that she'd need a relationship.

Josephine was always much more enthusiastic about taking work in stage performances rather than in film or television, despite the fact she earned more from a short slot in an advertisement or a short role in a film than from a month's run with a production in the theatre. However, she was in a play at the moment where she played a princess in a harem in a production of Sindbad The Sailor. This production seemed to spend far more time between the harem sheets than anywhere else, and even though Josephine's role was fairly minor she still had to have sex with Sindbad, a portly actor with a stuck-on goatee beard, and two of the other harem girls.

"The advantage of a stage performance," Josephine asserted while the two girls were resting after their lovemaking, "is that you make love to the same people every night. No surprises, you see. The disadvantage, however, is making love to the same boring people night after night. No surprises at all."

"Don't you get tired of it?" wondered Charlotte.

"Not tired exactly," Josephine considered. "A bit sore perhaps. But not tired so much. And anyway if you know what your partner's going to do, you can concentrate on your lines. Make sure you come at the right time."

"What are the girls like?" wondered Charlotte who felt a sudden spasm of jealousy. She'd seen Josephine on stage, and it seemed to her that her lover had particularly enjoyed the scene in which the black and blonde girls were having sex with her. She felt a particular pang when one of the girls inserted a long steel phallus into her vagina while the other put her tongue into her anus. Why did Josephine have to be such a convincing actor?

"Not as good as you, darling," responded Josephine, who as always knew precisely what was the right thing to say.

Despite Emma being such an infrequent visitor, Charlotte kept her vagina shaved as a kind of reminder to herself, if nobody else, of the love she felt towards her. It was a ceremony every morning, to perch by the bidet filled with hot water and to carefully scrape off the bristles of pubic hair. It was not, however, a ceremony that Charlotte needed to do herself. Susan had left her boyfriend and had more or less moved into the flat as a permanent guest. Susan didn't shave her own vagina any more - she'd been somehow more upset by Emma's treatment of her than Charlotte could have imagined and was quite happy to lose this memory of the incident. However, she made clearer than ever her passionate love for Charlotte. A passion she said that eclipsed any previous passion in her life.

This passion rather embarrassed Charlotte, who, although she was quite fond of Susan, couldn't say that she actually had passionate feelings for her. Well, not feelings that compared to those she held for Josephine or Emma. This didn't trouble Susan, however, who went to the trouble of moving her own bed into Charlotte's bedroom so that there was plenty of space for her as well whenever Josephine was staying the night. Charlotte's love for Josephine didn't prevent her leaving her boyfriend, as she claimed it was hypocritical to stay with someone who was not your first love. She even went to the extent of having her shoulder tattooed with Charlotte's name surrounded by a festoon of oriental flowers - the only tattoo on her body. This was so that when she was being filmed making love, the viewers would know the name of the only person she truly loved.

Charlotte and Susan did, in fact, make love together. Part of Susan's love for Charlotte was apparently because she had at last found a lover to whom she could make love without being watched by others. "You make me feel more whole!" she would say to Charlotte in her frequent outbursts of praise and adoration. "With you I am a whole person!"

Charlotte couldn't deny that Susan's love for her was not undesirable. Indeed, Susan's passion for her made it easier for her to keep at bay the jealousy she felt towards Emma's mysterious sex life and Josephine's thespian one. She knew that Susan was also enjoying a sex life away from her. She was quite in demand in films which required oriental women. Charlotte had even seen Susan in some of these films on video. Susan would frequently watch them to review her technique and make notes of in a small school notebook she kept for the purpose. Charlotte occasionally watched Susan and Josephine make love together - something she allowed because far more frequently she would be making love to Josephine with Susan watching.

Susan had a very understanding relationship with Charlotte. She knew that Josephine occupied a primary role in Charlotte's life - and showed no embarrassment about this. When Josephine visited, which was four nights out of seven, Susan stayed quite out of the way, occasionally watching but more often seeming totally uninterested. Even at night, with the three of them under the same sheets, Susan would stay to one side as Josephine and Charlotte made tender love together. In fact, she admitted to getting a warm fulfilment out of seeing the woman she loved getting so much pleasure out of sex - even if it wasn't with her.

Susan still saw her boyfriend, saying that it wasn't possible just to abandon someone who she'd lived with for so long. Indeed, she once invited him round one evening. He was an oriental himself - shorter than Charlotte and much shorter than Josephine, but still taller and less slight than Susan. It wasn't very long after the meal, that Susan and he started fucking on the living room floor. Charlotte who didn't see this kind of thing nearly as frequently as Josephine felt immobilised by the sight of it. On the one hand, the sight of this erect penis in Susan's mouth and then in her vagina rather repulsed her. On the other, it brought back warm feelings of the men she'd made love with when she was still a Sapphic virgin.

After Susan had decided that she'd had enough of making love to him, she invited the other girls to join in. "Best to be polite!" said Josephine with a smile, kissing Charlotte full on the mouth and allowing her tongue to glide over Charlotte's teeth. She then went down on the ground with Susan's boyfriend, while Susan herself came over to Charlotte and put her arm round Charlotte's naked waist and gently stroked her pubic hair.

It was inevitable that when Josephine had finished that Charlotte felt that, yes, she'd like to have sex with a man again. She felt a bit nervous, but Susan's boyfriend, who was an sex film actor like Susan, knew how to comfort her, and soon she was again enjoying full penetrative sex. She occasionally looked up at her friends and could see Susan and Josephine, with their arms around each other watching her with supportive smiles, and this added passion to her activity. She wasn't really making love to a man, she thought. It's my friends whom I'm making love with, she said to herself as the penis thrust deep inside her and brought her to a crescendo of gasps. She enjoyed the deep thrust that she'd almost forgotten after all these months of Sapphic love. She may be a lesbian, Charlotte reflected, but that didn't mean she couldn't enjoy herself with men.