Front Leg Across

"At this nudist camp," said Jessie, "Visitors weren't allowed to bring cameras. The managers had Polaroid cameras, and set aside one area where visitors could, if they chose, be photographed by one of the staff."

"Has Dad ever seen these?" asked Darla, with a look to Jessie that struck Simone as sad.

"He has, Dear," said Jessie brightly. "I convinced him after you started showing up in girlie magazines. I said he should see his daughter as she really is, as an antidote to your posed work. I know his feelings were mixed, but seeing the two of us together made it seem less, um, inappropriate."

Simone looked at the nude image of her mother, shown at essentially Simone's current age. I'm shorter, but curvier, she thought, almost unwillingly. I can cute up my face and hair...

"Then, of course," said Darla, turning a page, "despite marriage and motherhood, I was able to do openly what Mom had kept under wraps."

Simone was largely unmoved by pages cut from mags. But she was surprised by a shot with Darla, nude, among others in what seemed like a movie set.

"Wow!" said Simone. "You had that much bush?"

Darla laughed. "This one tells a little story, in a narrow slice of time. I was hired for a skin flick. It had no sex in it, so it could be shown on the fringes, in places like drive-ins. It just wasn't possible to keep up the front-leg-across thing in long scenes, even by limiting camera angles. By then, pubic hair wouldn't get you busted, but vaginas would. So we wore merkins. Pubic wigs. Mine was spirit-gummed on top of my existing bush. I looked shaggy, but didn't reveal any of those scary woman parts. Eventually, labia started showing up in magazines, and drive-in movies closed, so I never had to go through that again."

Jessie changed the subject, asking Darla, "You've explained to Simone about safe, private pleasure, haven't you?"

"Of course," said Darla, looking offended. "I left it up to her whether to maintain virginity."

"I didn't," said Simone with a smirk, getting a little rush from the talk turning this way. "I use a few products from the plastics industry that's polluting the planet."

Jessie turned towards Simone. "Would you have known about this without your Mother informing you?"

Simone hesitated, then said, "No. Sex Ed in school was all about procreation, and bad stuff like VD. Mom was the only one who talked about pleasure without pain."

Darla said to Jessie, "There's no point in trying to build me up. Simone and I may always have problems. What matters now is for her to understand that sex today has not only hazards, but opportunities."

"Very well," said Jessie. "Simone, how are you dealing with a world that has sex diseases?"

Simone felt outnumbered. She'd always liked Jessie, and tried to use her when rebelling against Darla. Seeing now a united front, Simone's first impulse was to dig in deeper. "Sex is tough right now. If I want it bad enough, I can always go dyke."

She had hoped that this would offend Jessie. But her grandmother just smiled. "If that can make you happy, Dear, that's wonderful. Is that what you really want your sex life to be?"

Damn. Simone knew her expression had given her away. She still said, "You take what you can get."

"You can still have men, Dear," said Jessie, enjoying saying this with old-lady sweetness. "And you can be very selective. Not just by insisting on condoms and cleanliness, but by choosing only healthy men, who are honest about their interest in you."

Darla pulled two sheets of paper from a side pocket of her handbag. "I'd like to show you how important it is now, to be a nude model. This is the invoice from a photo session I did in 1976. When sex among singles was becoming more common and open, and everyone thought venereal diseases could be cured." The bottom line showed that Darla had been paid $500.

"Congratulations on using your meat to make men beat theirs," said Simone.

"Whatever you think of the people involved in these magazines," said Darla, "you should accept that they know a great deal about the sexual landscape. And how the rumors of a very bad new disease could affect the choices people make about sex." She handed to Simone the other invoice. "This is from a session last month. Same time spent, same photographer, same magazine, and with me now over forty."

Simone again gave away too much, as she saw that her mother had been paid $4000.

"Men are still ashamed that they masturbate," said Darla. "But now they may decide to do it even more often, if both men and women fear this new disease. They'll also want more and different visuals. Every attractive woman will be in high demand for nude modeling."

Jessie said, "The question for you, Simone, is not whether you can do this. But how you feel about it. Would you like to let people see your body?"

Simone couldn't fight off the memory from two nights ago at Club Wreckage. She had seen two women dive off the stage, to get carried around in the mosh pit. Both of them got groped hard, and complained, and fights broke out. Simone was righteously pissed off, and also hyped from the energy in the club, and her own hormones. She clambered up onto the stage, and quickly stripped. This got everyone's attention, but Simone held her ground. Fully nude, and fully lit by stagehands who aimed at her the follow-spots that had been pointed at the band, she popped her pussy at the swarm of yammering dudes, flipped birds with both hands, and yelled, "You want this, losers? Go fuck yourselves! Ain't no woman gonna put up with your shit!"

This dubious impulse produced the best possible outcome. The gropes and fights ended as everyone charged towards Simone, allowing the other two women to get free. The guys, many of them drunk or drugged, collided with each other as they tried to get to the stage. Simone, still shod, kicked away a grasping hand, which led to even more collisions. Suddenly aware of what she was doing, she grabbed up her clothes, charged through the band, and made her way out a back door. In the alley, she fingered her cleft and clit, and in a matter of seconds had a knee-buckling orgasm.

Now, in the sedate living room, the memory had her heart rate quickening.

"Yeah," said Simone, "I could do it. Even if it's a bunch of sexist pigs looking."

"Most of those sex-aware people, who run the enterprise of nude modeling, are sexist pigs," said Darla, with no extra emphasis. "A woman starting out in modeling, or stripping, is the most vulnerable. Even if she has a bonded lover, or some other male protection, she's still likely to get ripped off or placed in unsafe surroundings. Mom and I, however, know the business well, and can help you avoid real danger."

Simone raised an eyebrow at Jessie. "How do you know the business, Gram?"

Jessie looked towards the kitchen for a moment, then again at her descendants. "I thought I heard something from where the men are having it out. But no, we can keep up the girl talk.

"So. For a while, Walt also took home movies of me, and those joined the still pictures that we made available. This gave us a much closer look at postal inspection enforcement, and the enlargement of this pursuit from individuals to businesses. Many of the businesses also became involved in magazines, and in hiring models out for bachelor parties, and such. As Darla started modeling, I helped her out."

Darla smiled. "There were still problems, but not as many as there might have been. Men working in the shade often leave traces that could get them into more trouble. If they think you know those traces, they become fair and courteous."

Remembering the feel of spotlights on her naked flesh, Simone said, "I guess this is worth a try."

***

November-December 2001

Simone watched the young woman's face closely. With closed eyes and parted lips, the face went from smooth to strained, lines at cruel angles, teeth exposed. Then her chin lifted, and she sent a deep moan towards the ceiling.

Eight seconds later, Simone said, "Cut."

The young woman relaxed, and exhaled. She looked over the man's shoulder and asked Simone, "A keeper?"

"One of the four should be," said Simone, rising from the canvas chair. "That one may have been the best. Enough for today. Back at nine tomorrow."

The crewpeople turned off the lights and began securing gear in place. The nude man rolled from the bed and headed for the bathroom.

Simone got out her flip phone and checked for texts. With relief, she saw this from Teresa:

//BAR & FRIDGE STOCKED. 3 BODS READY 4 U 2 WARM//

Twenty minutes later, Simone entered her suite at the weekly-rate hotel and exhaled deeply as she was welcomed, with affectionate hugs and kisses that soon progressed to passion.

"Thank you so much," she said as six hands efficiently disrobed her. "Sometimes I'm okay watching naked people simulate sex. Lately it's been getting to me."

"Simulate?" asked Howie. "They don't fuck at all? Seems like a wasted opportunity."

"It's best not to complicate softcore," said Simone, taking out slight resentment at talking shop by gripping Howie's prick a bit roughly. "As it is, we end up editing two versions. One with groins visible, but separate, the other without. The hottest stuff is what looks like doggystyle, his abs up against her butt, seen from in front, with her boobs swaying. But no genitals in sight."

"Shut up," Teresa said, and kissed Simone deeply.

While that happened, Howie's hands rolled her breasts around, and Dennis's fingers found moisture in her cleft. Almost swooning, Simone got her mouth free to say, "Indecent exposure first."

She led the way to the glass door to the balcony, and slid it aside. Evening chill was on the wind, as they stepped out to face empty scrubland that Vegas developers hadn't yet colonized. Simone didn't make her guests stay there long, only a few seconds to bring her the joy of freed skin, a pleasure she shared with her mother and grandmother. Then she led the way back inside, to one of the king beds.

For a while, the groping was random and diverse. Then Simone made a point of spreading Teresa's legs and bringing lips to her pussy, getting a rush from the rise and swell of her friend's clit. Simone's desire for women was usually in the background, until opportunity roared in on a gust of vaginal musk. Now the feel of Simone's fingers spanning Teresa's breast had both women panting.

Trunk held aloft by her parted knees, Simone felt Dennis's fingers hyping her crotch while also edging her, deploying skill he had developed with her for twenty years. As for Howie, he was still fondling her tits, and she jerked him without looking, just to maintain the group vibe.

After Teresa came, thighs squishing Simone's ears, the revelry advanced. Dennis lay on his back, and Simone gave his rod a helical yank and tip suck at his preferred level of roughness. Then, feeling the need to have her womanhood filled, more intensely than she had all day, Simone mounted the only cock she had ever allowed to quicken her ovum.

Simone's thighs flexed and spine extended, as if to create more room for her welcome guest. "A-a-a-a-ahhh," she vocalized, accepting the push of his stretch, then squeezing her walls to confine him, in a sweet battle that they would both win. Fullness, heat, her fluid almost gushing, his glans harpooning her ring muscles.

"Still fucking after all these years," said Howie, sounding envious. "In the third millennium, that's what fidelity really means."

Simone's look to him was fully joyful, the opposite of the dangerous snarl she had shown so many times in her career as a softcore performer. "Shouldn't you be fucking your wife? Or is that too tame for you now?"

"Yeah," said Teresa, "now he only begs me twice a day."

The other couple arranged themselves as the first had. This allowed the cowgirls to kiss, and mash together their boobs, to the further delectation of the tumescent men beneath them.

All four would stay overnight, so the first ejaculations were allowed to occur when they did the most good for all concerned. For Simone, it was when Dennis hauled down her torso and clamped it to his chest, and they kissed rough, teeth knocking, and her orgasm seemed to tickle the roots of her pixie-length hair.

Then for all four, wheezes gave way to laughs, and fondles to grabass. Simone marveled that she lived in a country and a century in which it was possible to have this fun simply by arranging for her lovers to have keys to this suite, which was paid for by her employer.

They lazed through the refractory period by noshing on re-microwaved Mexican carry-out, and allowing Simone to work up gradually to venting.

"Thanks for responding to the distress call," she told them. "I really needed a mental health orgy. And a chance to mumble about things in general.

"It seems," she went on, "that every medium that ventures into sexual content, has to go through the same development phases. First, the women go topless. Then, they show their buns. Then, they can touch certain parts of their bodies. Then pubes can be seen, and then what's behind the pubes. Along the way, men start getting naked, and the men and women can touch in certain ways, sometimes with the lights dimmed.

"Softcore erotica on cable TV is still in the front-leg-across stage. The audience is much hipper now, so everyone knows what's being hidden. From other media, even the timid know what genitals look like. But the act of hiding, in this medium of motion and sound, stokes the viewer more. My performances with front leg across, and limited lighting, were clearly intended to tease and frustrate the viewer, because my character was denying him something.

"The signals are mixed. Horror movies show young people being sexually active, and getting punished for that. This satisfies the sexually inactive audience. My channel wants most of the scripts to be hot and heavy, but with consequences. Secret affairs being found out. Passion turning destructive. Maybe one out of five flicks, I can have the characters think first, and bang because they both like the idea, without anyone getting hurt."

"Like us?" asked Teresa.

"If only," said Simone. "If I wanted to show a happy foursome, it'd have to be a zany comedy."

"Why don't you pitch that?" asked Dennis, an earnest look on his chiseled face.

Simone took a breath before replying. "Last week, two local cable systems and a small hotel chain dropped the channel, replacing us with a news channel nobody ever heard of. Recent events may be working against anything I might pitch.

"Al-Qaeda claims we're The Great Satan, never mind how many Muslims they murdered by crashing into the Twin Towers. Now our own haters want us to fight fire with fire, while still calling themselves Christians. A major casualty in this is free thought. Another is pleasure. Women learning to enjoy their bodies, and have fun with sex? Too frivolous for this dead-serious era. Women should just do what they're told, accept that we're now in a Holy War, and keep quiet about their own preferences. Go breed lots of kids, so they can grow up to be suicide bombers."

Dennis made a valiant effort to lighten the mood. "I definitely want you stay gainfully employed, but in general, anti-sex campaigns can backfire. A certain convenience store chain insisted that skin mags be sealed in plastic bags, to keep them from being paged through, right there in public. The publishers saw this as an opportunity, and took their photo sessions to explicit, openly displayed fucking. Magazine sales have boomed, and the models willing to participate now have careers in porno on home video."

"Thanks, Sweetie," said Simone with a smile. "That gets me back in the mood, and it looks like you can perform again. Please give Teresa the benefit of your bounceback. Howie, want some sloppy seconds?"

Howie looked skeptical. "Is Dennis really that good at flipping your mood."

"Of course he is," Simone purred. "Because he knows that sometimes I have to say something out loud, to get it out of my system. Also, I think there's going to be another medium for sex to roar through. But it may be irrelevant for a scary softcore star who's past forty."

They connected and braided again, with Simone taking Howie in doggystyle, which matched his protuberance well with her receptacle. He kept her on a pleasant buzz, and she got extra rushes from watching Dennis plow Teresa.

"Yeah, cheat, you bastard!" Simone crowed. "You'll both get AIDS, and die!"

"Frequent, testing," Teresa huffed from flat on her back, "is part, of the routine, now, for us, cheaters."

Then she bucked and grunted through a long orgasm.

After that, Teresa resumed the conversational thread. "Like birth control. And condoms, with new crushes."

"For those of us who can afford it," Howie put in, while still putting in.

Dennis's departure from Teresa showed that he remained erect. He knelt before Simone's gasping mouth to complete her spit-roasting. Howie teased a thumb around her anus, giving her a hint of what triple penetration might feel like. She had always been intrigued by that. She had never wanted it actually to happen to her, and still didn't.

Looking blissed, Teresa leaned against the headboard and kibitzed. "Forty? So what? Nice tits, cut abs, and a posture like you're in charge of these pricks. You're scary because you're still hot."

Devoted to her fellating of Dennis, Simone flipped her the bird, but with a twinkle in her eye.

Slack-jawed, Dennis managed to say, "Forty-plus, is a new, venture, in skin mags."

"It's a Baby Boom thing," Howie added, "like blue jeans and comic books."

As the men gushed into Simone, each was able to reach and squeeze a tit. Simone released herself to the orgasm from which she was holding back, a skill she could achieve now and then. It wasn't a huge climax, but she was totally happy, even while feeling filled with goo.

Loving gropes in the shower. Drinks in the jacuzzi. Despite the presence of two beds, they mingled their flesh in one, and even slept.

They had to skip wake-up sex, with Simone due on set. Simone made a point of checking in with Dennis.

"Merrill already knows some bits and pieces about her maternal line, but it's my obligation to give her a full presentation. I'll do that when the shoot's over and I can get home."

Dennis scowled. "You expect her to go into the business?" He was every bit as involved now in raising Merrill as he had been when he and Simone had agreed to have a child together, without connecting their lives more deeply than through frequent sex.

"If she doesn't want to, fine by me. She's doing well in college. I'm carrying out the implied task from my mother and grandmother, to our legal-age daughter. I'll be quite blunt about all the scrambling I've done to make a living from open female sexuality."

***

The skips and grains from the original film showed on the DVD, a carryover Simone was already familiar with from the scan lines on VHS originals. "Thank you, Jessie and Walt," she said, "for proving that sex could be fun within a marriage in the 1960s."

Merrill knew, intellectually, that what she saw on the television were her great-grandparents making love, but it was so alien that she felt no personal connection to it. A flickering, squarish, black-and-white image, with no sound, barely counted as a window into the past. Yet she observed, "It's not like most porn, is it? Nearly all of the picture is Jessie. That must be Walt lying on the floor under her, but you can only see his gut." Then she added, "And now his hand, grabbing her breast."

"And through their pubes, you can clearly see his prick as she pistons on it," said Simone, glancing at her daughter. Thanks to Simone's status in the business, free copies of home video porn arrived at the house constantly, and Merrill was old enough to peruse it. "As you said, not like most porn. What is it like?"