Penthouse Suite

The service elevator dinged and groaned to a halt at the end of its journey to the top floor of the hotel; I checked one more time to make sure there were clean towels in the lower bin, and then held the door as my cousin wheeled the cart forward into the dark, depressing back hall.

The Hotel Topaze had been the height of fashionable luxury in the 1930s, when it first opened on the highly-trafficked downtown boulevard, but changing city demographics, the installation of a freeway several blocks away cutting off important arterial flows, and the slow disappearance of nightlife from the urban core as long-term renters fled to the suburbs and the bohemian young people who replaced them preferred to party in their own gentrified neighborhoods rather than making the trek downtown had left the Topaze with a dismal, shabby atmosphere wherever guests were not expected to be. The rooms themselves were extremely well-appointed, modern, and clean (that was what my cousin and I were paid to do), and the hallways and guest elevators were spotless, silent and efficient; but the money the hospitality conglomerate that bought the Topaze back in the 90s spent on upgrades and refurbishments somehow never made it back to the staff areas or facilities.

I knocked on the door to the south penthouse suite and called out, as ever, "housekeeping," pausing dutifully for the required three-second count before entering. I was surprised when a voice answered back.

"Come in, come in."

I inserted the latchkey pin that let us into every room whether the keycard was working or not and cautiously swung open the door, glancing at Felisberta not to push in the cart yet before I determined how difficult the guest was going to be.

The south penthouse suite was laid out exactly like the north penthouse suite across the corridor: a vestibule with coat hooks and shoe racks, a side table with bowls for keys, cards, and anything else guests might want to have handy on exiting, and doors to the guest bath, the kitchenette, and the linen closet. Through the arch beyond was the sitting room, with its desk, its chairs, its coffee table, and its large television strategically mounted between two massive floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. The kitchenette opened onto a dining nook on one side, while on the other another door led to the bedroom and master bath. It was through the open door of the bedroom that something pink and white in blue hailed me.

"Don't mind me," the voice called out again. "I always write best in the middle of the day. Just go on as you always would, pretend I'm not even here."

"Yes, ma'am," I called back with a stiff little bow in her general direction, and looked back to nod Felisberta in. Aside from a flutter of blue fabric, I saw nothing else of the guest, and went to work with my cousin methodically tidying, replacing, wiping down, disinfecting, vacuuming, and discarding every article, toiletry, surface, fabric, floor and bit of refuse in the guest bath, kitchenette and sitting room. We plumped up the throw pillows and arranged them correctly on the sofa, we replaced yesterday's three newspapers with today's, we scraped oil and dried juices off the dishware, thoroughly washed, dried, and put it all away, and even replaced the batteries in the television remote, since it was on schedule. All of this was performed in the same meticulous silence we always worked in; after two years of working the same shift and another fourteen of having worked together both back home and in the States we had a practically psychic connection, with no need to speak a word.

But we glanced uneasily at each other when it came time to enter the bedroom. I approached, and knocked softly on the open door.

"Is it okay we come in?" I asked. My English was usually better than that, but nervousness born of bitter experience with violently unpredictable penthouse residents made me sound once more like I had been in the country for a year instead of seven.

"Yes, yes, yes," came the same voice, forceful but tranquil. "I'm almost done with the chapter, and then I'll leave you to it."

I grimaced at Felisberta, and nodded our way into the room. The guest was sitting at the desk overlooking the eastern view of the city. Sunlight twinkling on the lake, the fountain in the park spraying up and being wafted away by the wind, the endless beetle-like scurrying of chrome, glass and glossy paints on the expressway. Her shape, silhouetted against that brightness, was sturdy and large: very tall, by our standards. Felisberta was four eleven and I had been the tallest in the family at five three. Her hair fell in a golden red cloud around her broad shoulders, and she wore a diaphanous blue dressing gown. But her face was to the window, and she did not turn around as we came in, continuing to type in quick, sudden bursts at a laptop which must have been hard to see against the brightness of the morning outside.

Felisberta and I went to strip the bed and replace the sheets. I noticed that her eyes kept straying to the guest nervously, and shook my head at her.

"It will be all right," I said quietly in our native language. "Just keep your head down and do the work."

The figure at the desk suddenly turned around.

"That's not Spanish," she said.

Felisberta stared at her in dismay and then froze entirely, a look of total stupefaction on her brown face, because the guest's robe had fallen open to one side and one large white breast was hanging out.

I bowed nervously in my sturdy gray hotel maid's uniform.

"No, ma'am."

Her green eyes narrowed as she studied me. "Quechua? Guarani? Or wait, no. One of the Mayan languages. Kaqchikel."

I must have visibly been surprised at the astuteness of her guess, because she nodded to herself, "Guatemalan."

"Kaqchikel, yes, ma'am. From Guatemala."

I tried to frown discreetly at Felisberta to stop staring with her mouth open, but that only attracted the guest's eyes to her. She laughed, and stood up.

She towered over us, five foot nine at least, and the breadth of her shoulders was matched by a similar breadth of hip. She pulled the robe open from the other side, loosing the already naked bosom's mate, and said to Felisberta,

"Take as long and as good a look as you want to, my girl. I suppose you get few enough sensuous pleasures as it is." Felisberta continued gaping, like a deer dazzled in the headlights, and I started for her, prepared to shake her back to her senses.

"No, no," said the guest, stilling me with a gesture. "Let her stare. It's quite flattering." I blushed, and tried to apologize for my backward cousin. She looked at me keenly.

"Cousin? You came to this country together?"

I nodded. "Seven years ago."

"Your English is very good."

"I've been going to night college," I said, knowing that wasn't the right term, but I couldn't find it in the moment. "I am studying urban planning." Her eyebrows raised.

"You want to return to Guatemala and improve your hometown?"

I shook my head. "I want to work internationally. Help create green, walkable infrastructure everywhere."

She stared at me, her breath suddenly catching.

"What is your name?" she said, and her voice sounded different now, a little less forceful and much less tranquil.

I bowed my head slightly. "Concepción Tecú. My cousin is Felisberta Cojul."

At her name, Felisberta looked at me, startled, seeming to break out of the spell that the guest's breasts had had over her.

"Cepción," she whispered to me in Kaqchikel. "Her buds are becoming stone."

I had not looked at the guest's breasts, either looking down submissively or briefly at her white face, green eyes and curved pink mouth. But I glanced now, and saw hard little pink buds of nipples centered in broad, spreading areolas. I had the impression that her visible nipple had been soft when first she turned around.

"What is she saying?" the guest asked, trying to appear amused, but I saw that she was covering some other emotion. Anger was, as always, the one I feared, and I responded as though it were.

"You must be cold," I answered, trying to turn and draw Felisberta with me. "We have interrupted you. So sorry." I reached for the bedspread.

"I've never been warmer." In a motion, she untied and shrugged off the dressing gown, and stood in glorious nakedness framed against the eastern sky.

Unexpectedly, she moved between us, throwing herself onto the bed and turning so that she landed on her back, and pushed herself up so that her back was against the pillows.

"My name," she said, as we stared at her, speechless, "is Diana McCollister. I don't expect that to mean much to you."

"You wrote my textbook," I said. She inclined her head.

"I have had the privilege of contributing to certain academic publishers. I am an urbanist like you, Concepción. And do you know why?"

I tried to remember the details of the introduction, which had filled me with so much fervor when I read it months ago, despite my professor's warning that Diana McCollister was considered something of an eccentric in the field.

"Because humanity is its best self when it is allowed to be on terms of intimacy with itself," I quoted at last. Her chin lifted proudly.

"Intimacy," she echoed, and spread her arms as though inviting us to embrace her. Felisberta started nervously, then looked at me with a shamed expression. I remained still, giving them both an incredulous look.

"Come," said Diana, her voice thick with emotion. "Let me give you some refreshment, some nourishment, some comfort, some delight."

Those were the chapter headings in her book, the four principles of her vision of human-centered cities. Refreshment: libraries, parks, space for the arts both highbrow like bookstores and concerts and lowbrow like record stores and comics shops. Nourishment: plentiful and varied dining options, groceries within easy reach of transit, local markets not choked out by multinational conglomerates. Comfort: available medical care, retirement and caregiving options for the aged, schooling and caretaking for the young, housing for all grades of income, transit options throughout all urban zones, safe and protected avenues for sex work. And delight: All of the above, but going above the strictly utilitarian. Not just shops, but malls and arcades. Not just parks, but fairgrounds. Not just restaurants, but picnics. Not just bars, but dinner theaters and nightclubs. And not just strip clubs, but sumptuous red-light districts.

It had never occurred to me that the Diana McCollister who wrote so movingly of the need for decriminalized sex work was not merely advocating for the lonely men and persecuted women who needed it but because her own sexual appetites were ravenous.

She put one hand under a massive powder-white breast, tipped in coral and pointed it at Felisberta.

"You want to suck, my girl, I know you do," she said. Felisberta was staring as though transfixed once more. I felt helpless to intervene, and no longer sure I wanted to: whatever was going to happen now would happen, and it seemed unlikely, at least, that Diana would report us to hotel management for being disrespectful or taking too long cleaning her suite, which had been my secondary fear since I'd heard her voice from the entrance. (The first fear, that she would accuse us of stealing, had died, perhaps naïvely, once she had been able to name my native language.)

Felisberta took a hesitant step forward, and then looked at me, her face seized with indecision. Hardly even knowing I did it, I nodded. I could feel a warmth flooding over my body at the sight of the gorgeous woman splayed on the bed before us, and I held my breath to see what would happen.

Felisberta approached, trembling, and lowered her face to the offered breast. Diana smiled richly, gazing at her through lowered lashes.

"Chúpalo," she breathed. "Suck it in. You have a pretty mouth for sucking."

A sudden twinge in my loins made me gasp, and her eyes flew to me. She put her other hand under her other breast and moved it gently in my direction.

"The offer is open to all," she said. I felt myself moving forward without ever having made a decision to do so.

Both of our brown lips circled around her nipples at once, and she leaned her head back against the piled pillows and sighed her pleasure at the sensation.

"Yesss," she hissed through closed teeth and open lips. "Oh God, I needed this. You angels, That's right, Concepción, flick it with your tongue. Oh, Felisberta, the way you suck it is driving me wild."

I took her breast in my hands and lifted it to my face like I was drinking from a holy chalice; meanwhile, I saw Felisberta wriggle in happiness at the sounds of pleasure emanating from Diana, even while she didn't dare to touch her with anything but her mouth.

I felt Diana's hand take mine and guide it down her body. Our eyes met, and she raised her eyebrows questioningly. I released her nipple, licked my lips, and nodded. She placed my hand over the furred mons that I had deliberately avoided looking at since she shrugged off the dressing gown. I could feel warmth emanating from it, and a soft wetness that made me want to squeeze and feel it seep between my fingers.

"You and your cousin," said Diana breathlessly, "have made me this hot and wet. Did you know you were stunningly beautiful?"

I shook my head, quite truthfully. With our earth-brown skin, flat black hair, and meek demeanor, we had rarely attracted welcome attention. There had been a boy, once, in my village... but he had married the daughter of a landowner, shortly before we went north. And nobody had ever courted Felisberta, who I had long suspected of being much more fascinated by women than men, but far too bashful to do anything about it. Once Diana had opened the floodgates, however -- I wondered if I would have to watch her around other female guests now.

Diana brushed a hair out of my face with her thumb and cradled my cheek in her hand.

"You are stunningly beautiful," she said softly, and curled her fingers over my hand on her pubis, pressing my fingers down into her moist, warm folds.

Both Felisberta and I were still in our stiff, drab maid uniforms, and as I tentatively began to stroke Diana, working the very tip of my middle finger between two of the most prominent folds, she reached up with both hands, circling around my head, and found the zipper at the nape of the dress, buried in my long thick hair. The uniform was of a cheap manufacture, and the zipper got stuck almost instantly.

From the other breast, Felisberta raised her eyes and saw what she was doing, and that it would be awkward for her, laying down as she was; in a flash, my cousin had bounded behind me and began jerking down on the zipper in a shivering rush.

"You greedy child," I teased her in a whisper. "You want us all naked now."

"It's for her," she protested, but then as the stuck zipper finally came loose, she added, "but it does feel silly to be wearing clothes."

"I've never been fingered to the sound of a pre-Columbian indigenous language before," observed Diana dreamily. "It's a profound experience I feel lucky to be having."

My finger was exploring her slippery innards now, and I slid it back and forth, marveling at the ease that her secretions gave to the motion, without any roughness or friction. Felisberta slipped the uniform down my shoulders, and I slipped my other arm free, but a tug at the shoulder reminded me I would have to remove my hand from Diana's core if I wanted to take it off entirely.

Reluctantly I slipped the finger out of her and slipped my arm out of the sleeve; Diana caught my hand, and held it up so that the light glistened on my wet finger; a drop of liquid ran down my hand and into the juncture where her hand circled my wrist.

"Give Felisberta a taste," said Diana. I looked at her, knowing that the color was rising in my face.

"Feli," I said in Kaqchikel, without taking my eyes off Diana's. "Taste her." I leaned my arm back toward her, who had gotten as far as slipping my uniform down around my hips.

I felt my cousin's lips engulf my finger and suck the juices from it eagerly. I felt myself grow weak in the knees from the thought that it meant Felisberta was tasting me, just as much as she was tasting Diana, who smiled at me.

"It is delight for both of you," she observed.

I nodded. "Take off my bra," I told Felisberta. She released my finger from her mouth and unhooked the clasp on the back. I shrugged the straps from my shoulder and let the cups fall from my little brown breasts, watching Diana closely as they came into view.

Her eyes lit up with glee, and she clapped happily.

"Oh they're precious!" she said. "May I?" She was already sitting up to draw me closer to her.

I nodded. Her mouth closed around one nipple, and I felt myself breathing hard from the sensations that were flooding into me. As she pulled me into a sitting position on her lap, Felisberta pulled the dress from me, and my panties with them. Except for my stockings, I was now as naked as Diana, who greedily sucked on first one and then the other of my breasts, murmuring,

"Is there anything more holy than to suckle at the breasts of a woman who has no milk to give? The crude utilitarianism of the wet-nurse is as nothing to the sacred sensuousness of a breast offered for its own sake, with nothing to give beyond the joy of the act, and the hungry mouth which must be fed can only be a dreary necessity, compared to the loving mouth which doubles its own share of pleasure as both giver and recipient."

"Is that from one of your essays?" I managed to ask shakily, feeling uncountable feelings swarming through my lower torso in response to the sensations being awakened in my nipples.

"It will be," she said. "You and your cousin are very inspiring."

I felt Felisberta embrace me from behind, her own thin body stripped of the housekeeping uniform.

"I want to taste her again," she said shyly in my ear. I felt a wild surge of confidence, and said something I would never have dared to say twenty minutes earlier.

"Drink from the source then." And I pressed my hands to Diana's shoulders to return her to her prone position, and slipped my legs off her to the side, though still keeping her mouth latched to my bosom. Her lower half lay exposed before Felisberta, who stared at me.

"Is it okay if she licks you?" I said to Diana in English.

"Oh God, please," was all she said in between suckles at my breast. I looked at Felisberta, and nodded.

Watching my cousin approach the pink, inflamed to red, folds between those milky white thighs did feel, as Diana might have said, like approaching something holy. Her face worked through trepidation, astonishment at her good fortune, self-pity at her own ignorance, and finally a deep-seated desire that would finally be satiated. Her tongue met Diana's lips before anything else did, and having licked experimentally and received nothing but an encouraging groan from Diana's throat and a responsive quiver from her hips, her second venture was bolder, using her lips to suckle at the folds and capture even more fluid.

"Sit on my face," said Diana peremptorily. I looked at her in surprise, and saw such a look of agonizing need in her face that I scrambled to obey.

Gingerly, I straddled my legs across her head, hovering above her for fear of resting my weight on her, but she wrapped her hands on my buttocks and drew me down hard onto her mouth.

I can no longer report what Felisberta did to Diana's loins, since my back was to her now. I believe she did her best. But I was far too occupied with the feelings that swarmed through me from where my body met Diana's mouth to pay any attention to my cousin.

That mouth was doing things to me I didn't know mouths could do. She was making noises like a hungry dog at a food bowl, but there was none of the pain that I had always subliminally associated with the metaphor of "eating out," only successive waves of pleasure, cresting higher and higher as she focused more and more on the central point at the apex of my cleft. I felt as though my body could no longer contain the immensity of the feelings that were within me, of the new me that had been awakened within me, that I would have to explode or die.