Front Leg Across

"Point-of-view, right? I've seen that a few times."

"I think there'll be a lot more of that. Just think. What does a straight guy want to see in porn? Some other guy's body blocking the view of the woman? No, he wants to see all of her, but also the fact that she's fucking. So, from this angle, the viewer can see all of her, and sustain the fantasy that the viewer is the one actually fucking her."

Merrill referred to an earlier topic in this discussion. "So, the whole thing about previous generations being mystified, or scared, of vaginas, doesn't hold up any more?"

"Not in porn and magazines. For men, and even women, the mystery is now more about what goes on inside the vagina."

On the screen, Jessie's mouth opened. Her eyes closed. Her torso jolted. Her head rolled side to side.

"You don't even need sound," Merrill observed.

Soon Jessie's drive slowed, and halted. Abruptly the image, previously from a fixed position, jerked and then closed in on their groins. Jessie's vulva lifted away, shedding drops of semen onto Walt's withering spire. Then Jessie's face entered the shot. She raised and licked her husband's prick, then said towards the camera what could clearly be lip-read as 'I love you.'

"This was their riskiest adventure, and their last," said Simone. "Even after the camera clubs faded away, Jessie and Walt maintained many of their old contacts. Walt didn't start on home movies until he knew that there'd be a developing lab available, in secret. The darkroom was no help. Because movies could be copied, Jessie wore masks for softcore stuff, stripping and walking around nude. This one, though, was what Walt and Jessie always wanted: A movie of them coupling, and having full-blast orgasms.

"When they sent this to the lab, along with some nudie reels, the lab offered to develop it all for free if the hardcore could then be distributed. Jessie and Walt refused, insisting that this was for them only. After that, they stopped sending stuff to customers. They didn't need the money, and took stills only for their own fun."

"Are they okay in the new place?"

"I think so. Walt grumbles about how small the apartment is, but Jessie likes that there's maintenance, so she doesn't have to do chores that wear her out. But she's also started sending me boxes of stuff that she can't store any more. She says she wants to put together a presentation someday, something about her looking into her genealogy. She said I could show you the photo albums, and play this video for you. But the newer stuff should stay sealed, as long as she's still alive.

"Meanwhile, Darla and Mark are happy as clams, traveling the world. I personally didn't need to know that sildenafil is working great for them, and you didn't either, but I'm committed to full disclosure. End of presentation, and you may get on with your life."

"I definitely will," said Merrill. "I intend to get my degree in social work."

Simone was ready for her daughter to elaborate on the needs of under-represented communities. To Simone's relief, Merrill merely extended the recliner from the sitting position, and stretched her arms.

"I applaud that," said Simone, ejecting the DVD from the player atop the television, "and accept that your dancing is a hobby."

Merrill frowned. "I need side income."

"I agree. And that'll still be true if you get a job in social work."

"Some of us aren't materialistic," Merrill muttered.

Simone was glad that Darla was not present to hear Merrill throw that in her face. She also bit back a lecture about what a single woman and her co-parent had to do to provide for their child, including the material stuff. Like this paid-off house, Simone didn't say aloud.

Dennis's DNA had given Merrill wavy brown hair and facial features somewhat more angular than Simone's, but Merrill was as close to the bullseye of conventional attractiveness as the rest of the maternal line. That prompted Simone to say something that was mostly thinking out loud. "Eerie, isn't it? I'm the third in a row to breed early, and get a daughter."

Merrill looked up, puzzled. This got Simone back on track.

"You've got your grandmother's mile-long legs," she told Merrill. "You've transferred your gymnastics skills to pole dancing. Your father and I can help you keep enough of what you make that you can stay part-time, and don't have to do private rooms." She smiled mock-sweetly. "So you can get all the thrills of dancing nude, without any of the dangers."

Merrill looked away, saying nothing.

"There's nothing wrong with it," said Simone. "For all I know, any woman who's encouraged to grow up without body shame and sex terror might enjoy being nude."

"What about your post-9/11 world?" Merrill snapped. "In that world, I'd be a hated slut."

"That world won't last. Sex for pleasure has come back from everything else that seemed to be killing it. Lately, when I'm in Vegas to helm something for the channel, I've set aside time for the tech expos that always seem to be going on there. The dot-com crash could have erased any other industry. For the internet, it was just a hiccup. What I've learned at these confabs is convincing me. Merrill, in a few years the internet will be everywhere, and there'll be sex all over it."

"Geeks in basements," muttered Merrill, fingering her iPod.

Simone almost burst out laughing. "What you're shuffling there is one of the leading edges." She didn't add, My early-adopting but not-materialistic daughter!

Merrill sneered at her. "This is just sound. What'll it take for video, a truckload of batteries?"

Simone leaned her way, getting amped. "Everything in all the equipment is getting more efficient, doing more with less energy." She pointed at the television. "See that big heavy box, with the cathode ray tube? Digital flatscreens are already more efficient, and eventually they'll be cheaper. Every new satellite has slicker tech and higher capacity, for the bandwidth that's increasing here. Before long, some internet will be on phones!"

"Who did you have to fuck to get that story?"

"Show a little respect for you mother! First, I didn't fuck anybody. I gave some private dances in guys' sleeping rooms, no touching. Second, you should know I won't fall for any man's blue-sky promises, even when they're full of technobabble. I made them show me the meat and potatoes of what they do: Technical abstracts, test results, proposals on industry standards. I prepared for this by using what is now on the internet, search engines. That helped me ask the right questions. This will happen, Honey."

"And it'll still be rich, white, and male."

"It'll be your job to change that. You and your age group. Even the guys--and, yes, they're all guys--at the expos are already fretting about the 'digital divide,' how it will make the poor poorer. So there'll be big infrastructure projects to give everyone some kind of access. Along with mobile phone service that isn't universally hated. There's your work for the under-represented."

Merrill fought against excitement. "If it's all the same to you, I'll pass on the Kool-Aid."

"That's your choice," said Simone, smugly aware of how her daughter truly felt. "You know where to find me. I look forward to cheering at your graduation."

***

Three nights later, Merrill wrapped up her dance at a club that seemed to operate decently. Nude save for heels, patterned stockings, and a garter stuffed with currency, she shimmied slowly, arms circling above her head, trunk rolling, with neither leg blocking the view of her sweat-gleaming cleft, seeming to approach the audience from her high mons veneris.

Fifty men yelled, ten of them pushing to get more money to her garter.

Merrill was at the brink of cumming.

Club rules, and local laws, barred her from even a finger flick while on the stage.

She strolled for as long as she could stand it, getting even more in the garter. The nude pleasure had lofted her early on, and the dance steps and pole spins fed steady excitement to her whole body.

Finally she sashayed past the curtain, dashed to the bathroom, and finished herself off.

Still breathing hard, she got to the dressing room while a manager seemed to be making a pitch to any dancer who'd listen. He held out a featureless black expanse of cloth.

"This is the next act we want," he declared. "Dress up like an Arab bitch, then strip and surrender to the American flag."

Merrill pushed through the women surrounding him. She got right in his face, breasts brushing his lapels, and said, "I quit."

She didn't dance anywhere for three weeks, during which time she aced her semester finals.

Then she asked her parents to meet with her.

To the surprise of them both, Merrill said, "If you can show me how to advance sex without hate, I'm listening."

***

June-July 2022

On all fours on the cushioned mat, Merrill slowly rolled her trunk and torso. Cleve easily kept his lips and tongue on the dental dam covering her anus. There was plenty of sensation, at the level Merrill wanted. Slow, relaxed, deeply pleasing.

"My mother has plans," she murmured. "Be very afraid."

Cleve's chuckle added some vibrations to his oral work. "You know any details?"

"It involves us being near her place." Then she paused, as heat bathed her chest. In response, Cleve got a hand between her legs and pressed the heel of the palm up across her clitoris.

Merrill moaned. Slowly.

She then said, barely audibly, "So nice."

Cleve waited, still tonguing. He also used his other hand to stroke his cock, improving its readiness. It had recovered fully from its earlier exertions.

In a more conversational tone, Merrill said, "This must have something to do with Jessie and Darla, if it has to be near where they are. And 'us' includes Ursula. So all five women."

"A party?" Cleve guessed.

"There might be one, but not the main event. I suspect this will be, in all caps, A Simone Guerlain Production, of some kind."

Cleve recoiled. "Porn?"

Merrill smiled, turning to face him. "I doubt it. My guess is, a blunt discussion of open sexuality, as each of us lived it." She rose up to take him by the shoulders, so they could embrace, knee-standing, skins freshened by the breeze from the terrace.

She took over the stroking of his prick, and reached back to peel away the dental dam. "You okay keeping this up? I hate to stop when the buzz is so good."

"When isn't it good?" The grin flashed his teeth against the mottled brown of his complexion.

"It can vary," she said, smiling through a bashful moment. "It's how I'm blessed by my body. And yours."

She pulled him down onto her, spanning her dancer legs wide and then wrapping them around his hips. She was damp, but the most recent ecstasy had left her vagina slack. "You'll need to wake up my walls," she said. She had greatly enjoyed him doing that earlier.

"I'm accustomed to going slow," he said, easing his shaft between her labia, slow indeed, into increasing warmth and, at full insertion, a slight tightening. He raised his torso and set his hands on the mat to either side of her armpits.

"Oh yeah," said Merrill, lidded eyes peering at him. Then she lifted her head and licked his right nipple.

He whimpered, yet still drew back his penis halfway, and again drove it in deep.

Her right hand brushed his left nipple, tweaked it, pinched it, gently stroked it. Yips escaped him, at an octave higher than his speaking voice.

Merrill's vagina was no longer slack. It was again the sexual pride of a dancer's anatomy, what Cleve sometimes described as channel locks, never entirely joking. On those rare occasions when she welcomed a new lover, Merrill always relished his reaction to what she did to a penis that had entered her so confidently. She never ruined his orgasm or hers, but made it clear that he'd better respond well to the challenge. There were times when she said, "If I really like it, I might keep it."

Her comprehensive vetting of potential sex partners ensured that the new man never disappointed her.

Cleve had never put on the airs of a black stud. Merrill found him much better than that, an eager and determined lover who could withstand her flexing and deliver pleasure, even when she exploited his nipple sensitivity. It galled her slightly that, despite her youthful desire to help the under-represented, she had fallen for a prosperous techie. Yet in nearly two decades of conventional (if sometimes open) marriage, neither had come close to anything like regret. She was content for her empathy to support her social work, while her love and desire went to her husband.

As Merrill moved her mouth to Cleve's other nipple, and she grabbed the dampened one, she felt her heart pounding in her throat. Slow and relaxed had left the building, which was already open to the outdoors. The rhythm of their wham-bam expressed in her heels pounding his buttocks.

Exactly when she came, she wasn't sure. It seemed to involve spasms from her upper spine to her thighs, a brief squirt, and some vocalizing that left her throat raw. By the time the spots vanished from her field of view, and all extremities had reported in, she felt one last vaginal pulse, the end of Cleve's release.

The bulk now pressing down on her moved slightly as it spoke. "Is the buzz still good?"

She laughed, and her heels drove a quick tattoo on his butt. "It's over, poor fellah! I think your cougar is finally satisfied. You may now go save the world, mentoring the next generation of coding nerds."

Of course, it wasn't that simple. They hugged and kissed as they lay there, then hugged and kissed as they stood up. She squeezed a love handle, with no need for the dancer to say anything about him spending much of his life seated at a keyboard. Then he teased her by fingering and licking her nipples, which could have ecstatic moments of their own. After that, he sauntered off, knowing that he'd left her with the tiniest hint of a new buzz.

"You bastard," she called after him, lovingly. Then she stretched herself back to normal functionality, and turned to step onto the terrace.

Nude woman the fourth, as happy as the first three, she thought, closing her eyes as the breeze caressed her. No reason to think I haven't raised the fifth.

***

Merrill hadn't gotten around to presenting to Ursula what Simone now called The Epic of the Maternal Line. Ursula knew plenty about her great-great-, great-, and grandmothers from their many times spent together, even as Jessie lived gently into her second century. Once Ursula reached eighteen, Merrill had also answered her daughter's questions on the nitty-gritty.

Now, however, with Simone about to launch something that would probably delve into The Epic, Merrill made a point of sitting Ursula down to listen, to the extent that the daughter was willing, to the ways in which the women had pushed various envelopes in the course of exploring and enjoying their womanhood.

Merrill was wrapping it up with one of her own experiences, raising her voice when necessary, to cover the noise of an online game Cleve played in his mancave.

"Even when cable TV in the U.S. got raunchier," said Merrill, showing some video to illustrate, "it was nearly all scripted, done on a movie set, with an implied fourth wall. What was different in Europe, and to some extent Japan, was the development of nude shows with in-person audiences. Things tricked up like game shows, but built around stripteases. Colpo Grosso in Italy ran for years, and was franchised or copied elsewhere, like in Germany. It was obviously for men to get their rocks off, and piled even more body-shaming on women who didn't look like these hot young strippers. The shows were sharply criticized by women's groups and churches, but even when one show shuffled off, another would start up. This may have been the real reason for the growth of the European Union, so more countries could find the naughty stuff on TV.

"The strip at the end of each Colpo Grosso went full nude, crotch displayed, but because it was at the end, a local system could delete it, to limit the strips to bare breasts and opaque thongs. Cronicals Marcionas in Spain, which was more of a variety show, was under different constraints. The strippers could go nude, but--stop me if you've heard this one--get there only once they had the front leg across. The studio audience could probably see plenty more, but not the TV audience.

"I was working to save the world, both by stitching together the digital divide--with Dad's help--and by keeping alive the notion that a woman could decide how to live her life and enjoy it. For a couple weeks, while Dad was your only present parent, I was stripping in Europe. I got booked on a TV show that was based on the Holland-Belgium border, and may have found ways to skirt some rules for a while. I couldn't do on television my whole strip club act, which included some intimate fingering. For this show, boobs and butts could be shown, and nude men and women could perform together, with some teasing contact. But both kinds of down-there were off limits. I front-legged the finish, and so did the guys. Now, I have really great legs, and back then my boobs were nice and bouncy, so I'm sure viewers had plenty to stroke to. But they were deprived of my big, bold camel toe, which I had just started shaving completely."

Ursula focused on beading her braids. She said, "That's really binary."

Merrill's eyes aimed at the ceiling. She had nothing in her life experience to make her daughter believe that her mother wasn't prehistoric. "Yes, there were, and are, under-represented communities whom I probably did not inspire to self-pleasuring. I do what I can."

Ursula met her eyes. "I know what Gran and the others did is important. I think it's good that I'm not hung up on sex, so thanks for that. But for me, enjoying being nude and having access to pleasure isn't as important as being biracial. That will have me in borderline paranoia my whole life."

Ursula said this with a calm that made Merrill shiver.

"You don't have to be involved in Gran's project," said Merrill, knowing that this didn't make anything better.

Ursula smiled. "Maybe I will. The whole maternal line thing is kinda cool. And I hope some of it will be nasty. In an uplifting, in-your-face way."

Merrill nodded bleakly. "You know your grandmother very well."

***

Kal was making good money, coding game add-ons as a free-lancer, and able to afford a small solo apartment. A few texts could set up a visit from Ursula.

"Just mouth-to-front today, okay?" said Kal as the two settled onto floor cushions. "Day to day, I have to go along with whatever the body chemistry dictates."

"It's cool," said Ursula, although she had prepped with psyllium. "Can I play with you?"

"Sure," they said, smiling. Kal was five years older, but was as hyped about Ursula's otherness as she was about theirs.

Each slowly stripped the partner. Ursula fondled and licked every partial revelation of the form Kal consciously styled after Ziggy Stardust, pale skin coating lean, sharply defined muscles. Kal's fingers trembled at each advanced touch of Ursula's cafe-au-lait curves.

Ursula kept Kal's crotch covered until she got the telltale she wanted most. When Kal's licking of Ursula's lush breasts accelerated, Ursula saw the spandex over Kal's groin push outward slightly. "Oh yeah! My trans man is here!"

"You're terrible," said Kal, rocking back with a laugh. This allowed Ursula to haul away Kal's undies, and see in detail the oversized clit swelling red.

They started by sixty-nining. As young as she was, Ursula had enough experience with cis partners to know how special it was to suck Kal. Her mouth had full coverage of something about the size of a thumb, and gave it wild pleasure. Even while grunting, Kal resolutely licked Ursula's less prominent genitalia.