Mary-Jane Avatar Pt. 03

MARY-JANE

Mutant John's ground floor flat is part of a 50s-era construction that includes five others built to last by the council in the days when councils did things like that. It has a tiny conservatory that opens onto a small, paved garden, one end of which is occupied by a lean-to wooden greenhouse of indeterminate heritage that backs onto the garden wall. The tomato plants nearest the flat don't quite mask the marijuana plants behind.

I sit beside Mutant John on a faded blue leather sofa that smells like it once lived in a pub. He has his arm tight around my shoulder as I nestle against him.

In front of us on a wicker table lies a rectangular glass heat-resistant plate, and on that lie five spliffs, each of a subtly different design: one is small and thick, one long and thin, one made of liquorish paper rather than white, one looks deceptively standard, and one is huge. Next to the spliffs sits a heavy glass tumbler and a bottle of Jack Daniels. A can of Coke, pebbled with condensation from the tabletop fridge on a tumble-dryer to Mutant John's right, sits by the bourbon. He points at the display.

"All of that," he says, "is going into you. That, and other things."

I nod.

Mutant John has everything within easy reach. In front of the fridge, for example, is the cup of tea on its saucer. Mutant John picks up his teacup and sips, then replaces the cup with a little clink. I take one of the bottles of poppers from my bag and place it next to the bourbon. The other I slip into my bra.

"Very good," Mutant John says.

One-handed, he opens the fridge again. There is a freezer compartment in the top, which contains an open bag of ice. Mutant John grabs a handful of the bullet-shaped chunks and drops them into the tumbler. He unwraps his arm from my shoulder to pour the bourbon over the ice, which clicks as the different temperatures meet. Then he opens the can with pop and a hiss, pouring over the generous measure of booze. He hands it to me and I drink it down in four big swallows. The cold fizzes in my nose, the sweetness rushes through my senses like fast-burning energy and the dense, woody taste of the bourbon cruises below like the true power of a spell. Mutant John makes no comment, and pours another drink. This one I take my time with as he strokes my hair with one hand, then reaches under my skirt and fondles me.

His touch on my sex is gentle at first -- a fingertip touch as if tracing its contours. As it responds he explores further, and again I become conscious of how big and powerful his hands are, particularly compared to the delicate sensitivity of the place he is stroking.

I feel his gaze on my face as I stare out of the window, and take another sip of bourbon and coke, as if Mutant John and I are two friends sitting there, one of whom has his hand up the other's skirt. Mutant John's breath deepens, as does mine.

I know he wants to kiss me again, but restrains himself. I spread my legs and he grips me tighter. I gasp as he takes all of me in his hand, which makes a kneading motion as it tightens. I twitch against the sofa, but keep my face still even as my eyes widen in faux innocence and my lips part. His other hand grips the back of my neck, the big hard fingers sinking into soft flesh as he turns my face to his and puts his mouth over mine. I give up all pretence of resistance as the booze speeds my heart and helps me relax into unbridled desire. I bypass needless tension until I am a sex object lost in its own deliciousness, whose use by another is the highest, most powerful erotic fulfilment.

When I kissed Mutant John before Christmas, he tasted of smoke and wickedness, the December night around us rich with the scent of woodland and danger. Now he tastes of tea. It is no less beguiling, but different, as if his menace has disguised itself, becoming decorous and polite, while retaining its inherent danger. Before, he was so overwhelming I did not care how obvious it was. Now, I do not know.

Shiver of fear chase shivers of pleasure and shivers of delectable pain as he grips tighter, then tighter still. There is something wonderful about the weight of a big man when he is having sex with you. He feels like a physical realisation of the forces erupting in us both, amplifying them through sheer trembling mass.

Also, this is one of those encounters where the usual rules of entropy do not apply. I know I will be able to carry on doing this all day, with no wandering of the mind after fifteen minutes, no secret fretting about having left a window open, or wondering what's on telly. No, I am fully in the moment, partly because of the heady realisation of an encounter we have planned for months, partly because I have a day and a night of freedom from everything, but mainly because Mutant John and I have chemistry, and it is beginning to combust.

When he withdraws, I whimper, as if some essential part of me has pulled away.

"Now then, Kelly," he says, as he removes his hand from my sex and smells his fingers. "You know I'm not finished with you yet, or for a long time, if ever."

If ever. Mmmm...

He leans over, picks up the squat spliff and places the end with a little carboard tube keeping it open between my lips. Producing a gunmetal Zippo from a denim breast pocket, he... I'm not sure how he does it but by flicking his fingers together he flips the lid off and gets the hefty ignition mechanism going so the squat, petrol-scented flame whoofs up -- all with one hand. I know better than to gush at this expertise, even though I secretly want to. Instead, I lean my head forward slightly until the paper twist at the end of the joint is in the flame. It crackles, and then births a red ember. I inhale.

When smoking like this, I always prefer to start with booze. It sets me up properly, because I am not a habitual smoker, and the predations on my hard-working lungs feel more acceptable, as if they are lubed. I don't breathe in too deeply, or hold my breath, because I will be the one smoking all the joints on display, and the one drinking all the Jack Daniels, and I don't want to get wasted too early.

"This is the one we had... that night," Mutant John says.

I smoke more, and keep it down this time, nodding as I do. Pleasure in drugs is as much to do with context, company, and environment as they are to do with the substance itself. When I first met Mutant John, he was a predator, out to get me. For a while in the woods, my terror was genuine, and my delight at that predicament did not distract from very real instincts to fight or flee (I tried both, fortunately without success).

Now I with the same man, but I have seen him at his most vulnerable, and although I am overstating my involvement in any medical intervention, I fancy that I helped nurse him back to health. We are in his snug, rather adorable home. His enormous Harley Davidson is, I know, parked not before some fearsome Hell's Angel dive frequented by gun-toting hirsute monsters, but in a council-built brick garage out the front next to his currently boxed-up drum kit. He has told me that the garage next to his houses a tuk-tuk that sells books, and the one on the other side is owned by an elderly lady who stores copies of the Sun. She buys them in bulk so no one else can get a copy, which is her stand against the endless fascist assault on our society by the vicious bigots of the Murdoch press.

The truth, then, is sometimes less easy to parse than the myth, but that doesn't make it any less interesting. Mutant John passes me the tumbler of fizzing headfuck, which he has topped up. I drink deeply and inhale again. Now I feel it begin to work through me properly, I keep the smoke down. I have ridiculously large lungs, so a hit for me is worth two of anyone else's. I blow the smoke from the corner of my mouth, so it doesn't go in Mutant John's face.

"Do you miss smoking?" I ask him.

He shakes his head.

"I thought I would," he said. "I was panicking about it, when I was in hospital, this terrific journey I'd been on, and all the knowledge I had. Then I realised the journey was over. Rather than being sad, I felt free. More free than I'd ever been on the grass, which I always felt set me free. Perhaps at one point it did, but not anymore. I guess it took that shock in the woods to make me understand. Then I realised that I didn't have to do it all myself."

"You realised you could do it via other people," I say, my voice sounding slightly far away, even to me.

"I could do it for other people," he says.

"Sounds a bit like me and my writing," I say. "Although it's different in that I do all the things I write about." I inhale again, and as I speak the magical smoke gusts out of me. "I always think about where the reader is -- what they'll like, what I like. I feel it take shape inside me: the kind of narrative where the two can meet -- the rhythms of it, and the truth. And I'll come to a part that I feel is an expression of something worthy, and hot, and I think Oh, they're gonna love this! And that's why I do it, for the delight of reaching that orgasmic point, and the knowledge that someone else I don't even know, who might even be reading it after I'm dead, will read that and find the same joy."

"And come."

"Well, obviously."

"Will you write about me?" Mutant John says.

"Yep."

He nods.

"Will you write about today?"

"Hell yes."

He looks pleased.

"Are all your stories about you?" he says.

"They're more about the people I meet. But I will always be the point of view character. I think of it like this: have the sex, write the sex, and put myself at the heart of the story. I call it gonzo erotica."

Mutant John's face lights up with delight and he claps his hands.

"Gonzo erotica!" he cries. "Like a sexy trans Hunter S Thompson!"

"Better hair than Doctor Thompson," I say.

Mutant John grips my head, the little curtains of my bob pressed between his large, warm palms and my cheeks. He leans forward and runs his nose along my centre parting as if hoovering up a line of coke.

"How right you are," he says. "Stand up, Kelly."

I do so. I don't stagger, but it takes longer than I expect to get to my feet, as if I have come adrift from the floor. Mutant John turns me so I face away from him, then toes the table out of the way. I still hold the squat joint, which is half finished. Mutant John leans behind me and puts the tumbler on the leather sofa's armrest, so it's within reach if I want it.

"I made you a mix tape," he says.

I smoke some more, and the room grows in depth and stature, as if I am perceiving hitherto unknown frequencies.

"That, Mutant John, is the most romantic thing anyone has done for a long time."

I await the whisper of vinyl from paper sleeve, or the plastic click of a cassette box opening. Instead, music comes from everywhere at once, as if the room's new wavelengths have suddenly become audible. I can't see speakers, or an old hi-fi tower, or even a speaker with an iPod on it. Perhaps, in this regard, Mutant John has fully embraced the twenty-first century.

The music, an unfamiliar psychedelia that hints at beauteous but mournful journeys among distant stars, has a crispness and full-spectrum audibility you only get with digital, and these layers of sound help my altering perception find its way through my wary flesh. My next drag is deeper, and longer, and I hear new aspects in the music, which is more complex than I thought. I am very conscious of my arse pointing towards his face. I want him to bite into it.

Mutant John's big hands whisper up my skirt.

I tend to stand with my legs together, not through any forced femme stance, but because I feel more comfortable that way. Mutant John doesn't push them apart. Instead, he leans forward so he can reach my front more easily. The fingertips of his other hand trace my outer thighs, and I feel the tension between the gentleness of his touch, the female reality of my short PVC skirt, and the androgyny of the sleek muscles in my long legs. He kisses the backs of my knees and I gasp. He licks them and strokes the ticklish area above and either side of my kneecap, sinking in his fingers until I tremble, then running his tongue up the back of my thigh, where the seam of a stocking would be if I were wearing any.

I feel calm, yet charged with potential, as if the music and the smoke are causing microscopic solar panels to grow in my skin. The sunshine beaming into the little conservatory powers me directly, and my solar freckles spread to the rhythm of the music and to Mutant John's stroking touch.

Mutant John's hand grazes my sex again. Someone cries out, and I realise it's me. He takes me between thumb and forefinger, squeezing gently and then hard, his grip pulsing in time with the music. His other hand flicks me underneath, then he seizes that too. I've never particularly liked that part of me, and Mutant John intuits this, applying rougher treatment until it's like torture made distant by the distraction of drugs and my almost contemptuous disregard. I feel my body twitch in response to the pleasure and the pain, and so I take another deep drag, and the assault on my genitals becomes a series of spread signals like a language I need to understand at some point. I reach for the glass, but it's empty so I bend over to pick up the bottle.

Mutant John pushes my skirt up.

I hesitate, then unscrew the top of the bottle of bourbon and pour it neat down my throat. When I bend over to replace the bottle, Mutant John spreads me and slips his tongue in.

For a moment I stand there, unmoving, the bottle in my hand, its base a few centimetres from the dimpled glass surface of the heat-resistant tray. I forget what action I was about to take, even with all the clues before me. It takes an effort to walk back in my mind, and then a few seconds more to lower the bottle the rest of the way, to ensure I don't use too much force and shatter the bottle, the tray, or both.

This distraction is understandable. Mutant John's tongue is deep in me from behind, and his hands grip and torture me from the front. I stare through the glass door of the conservatory. The view is limited -- a pot with a large-leafed plant I don't recognise, a design painted on the wall that is too weathered to make out. It is either a relic, or something new that is slowly taking shape. I realise I have not blinked. I keep my legs straight, and bend from the waist.

I remember the joint, and smoke more. Ash tumbles from the end to land on the linoleum floor. Other people are obsessed with ashtrays when they smoke, but not Mutant John, although I don't see any burn marks anywhere.

In goes his tongue, then out again. He gives my sex another slap, then concentrates on my back-pussy. My genitals tingle from the assault. I shiver at the residual feel of the pressure on them, and the violence. The gliding feel of his tongue, so much less brutal than cock, but also less filling, makes my hips twitch. He grips them, and I smoke the rest of the joint in a few inhalations, then let it go out. There's nowhere to put the stub. I'm unwilling to drop it rudely on the floor or distract Mutant John by asking where I should put it. In the end I just eat the thing. It becomes a smear of ashy taste on my tongue, and then it's gone, leaving a scratchy feel in my throat and the sense of a funny shape in my chest somewhere.

I must get Mutant John's tongue further into me. Spotting the Blue Boys on the tray, I snatch up the 25ml bottle. It still has the wrapper on, but fortunately my back-up front-door key is in my jacket pocket. I use the jagged edge to get the almost-solid plastic covering off, press down the lid twist and release. I take a big poppers hit, deeper than any of those I took with the spliff, and the ever-strange, ever-welcome and ever-terrifying release floods through me. All my muscles relax in a wholly different way, my pussy opens wider, and Mutant John gets his tongue even further in.

I shout at the joy of it!

Grass makes me mellow, but poppers make me sexually crazed, as if they open a door to my true self, which is a demented nymphomaniac whose greatest desire is to be fucked to death and then fucked some more. By everyone.

For a while I coast on the glory of these sensations and the realities they represent: the man with his tongue in me, the residual ecstatic jangling in my sex, and the rush of three highs that channel themselves through the complex ranges of my erotic self. I take another hit of poppers, and then a new sensation enters my pussy.

Cold.

"Ooo!" I cry, both indignant and delighted.

Mutant John grunts, I hear something click against his teeth, and then a weird, icy burning sensation presses against the wet heat of my rose. I gasp, squeak and twitch. Mutant John seizes my sex again, yanking it brutally so I try to get away. But the only way is onto his mouth, and then --

The ice block is inside me.

It slides in easily, naturally slippery as its surface melts. Mutant John's attentions to my pussy help as well, and instinctively I stand up straight and tighten, pushing the ice bullet further inside. It feels shockingly alien, like the first time I was fucked from behind, yet also weirdly right. The shape, the context, the fact that it's a hot day and people like ice inside them, don't they?

I stand there, instinct working my arse muscles as I try to make sense of what is happening to me. The cold unit inside me spreads its chill power through my underneath. It is worrying, this extreme of temperature in a part of the body that is usually unthinkingly hot. Another outcome is that the whole area is suddenly a lot more sensitive. Mutant John gets up, and I feel him tower over me. He moves to one side, there's a rustle, and then a fast-hard slap to one buttock and then the other. He waits, perhaps thinking I will run but I do not. He moves fast, or perhaps the drugs have slowed me, but when he slaps Big Clit I don't see it coming. Before I can scream he has spanked my bottom again, the cold inside making it super-sensitive and appreciative. He digs the Blue Boys out of my pocket, undoes the lid and holds the open top under my nose. Gripping the back of my head, he keeps me there until I've inhaled a lot. Then, as the effect charges through me, he caps them and drops them back in my pocket. He smacks my bottom, harder this time, and I tense my front thinking he will slap me there as well, but instead my bottom is beaten again, even harder. Then he slaps my front.

I want him to hold me, but instead he slowly unzips his fly and with effort gets out his erect cock. He tugs down my skirt, puts his hands on my shoulders and pushes me to my knees. I go to speak, not knowing what I'm about to say, and I never find out because his cock is in my mouth.

He sighs, and puts his hands on top of my head. I like the feel of that as much as I enjoy the presence of his large uncircumcised cock in my mouth, and the fact that my whole underneath is a riot of conflicting sensations -- sweaty-hot and ice-cold, trembling pleasure and smarting pain. My mind, blessedly loose from its usual moorings, processes these delectable realities in an enlightened manner unburdened by tedious binary rules. I don't, for instance, feel the need to immediately work the shaft that is almost down my throat. I take my time, and suck what I already have in my mouth, absent-mindedly keeping my teeth out of the way --

"Chew it," he says.

I shudder with delight. Everyone wants to chew, but it's so fucking painful for the recipient that it's viewed as very bad form. Not so Mutant John. Perhaps that is why he is a Mutant, although I suspect I will never learn the truth behind his name.

Slowly, I sink my teeth into the fragrant, rubbery muscle.

...To be continued