Socialist Love

And Leo stopped rubbing. Johannes let out an abrupt, impatient murmur. Why had he stopped? He ran a finger over Johannes's body, down his thigh, slowly, taking his time, seeming to revel in Johannes's impatience. "I want you to decide," he told Eleanor, "exactly where and when Johannes gets his release."

Eleanor laughed. "You are cruel!" As if in agreement, Johannes gave a deflated groan. "Bringing this poor man so close and then denying him the pleasure."

"I know I am." Leo grinned. "But he likes it. I know he does. He keeps coming back for more, at least. Isn't that right?"

"Yes," Johannes grinned.

"And the point of the exercise, after all, Eleanor, is your enjoyment. Tell us what you would enjoy, and we will oblige it." Leo's eyes shone with mirth, and he rested his hand on Johannes's thigh. Johannes rolled over onto his side, looking up at Eleanor expectantly.

Eleanor was quite touched by the sentiment: the power it afforded her, the freedom. How would she like for Johannes to have his release? What would she desire most from him? The possibilities were dizzying. "I think," she pronounced at last, "I think I would like to feel you both inside me at once."

Leo's smile broadened. "Now that's a request I'm happy to oblige!"

Johannes stroked the velvet edge of Eleanor's skirt with his finger. Leo reached across the bed and pulled her toward him, so that she lay across Johannes's body. Johannes began to undo the buttons of her dress. Leo untied the ribbon in her hair and ran his hands through it. Together, the men rid Eleanor of her clothes, casting aside velvet and crinoline, unlacing her corset and tearing off her undergarments. They ran their hands over her naked body, feeling every inch of it.

"Touch me like we touched Johannes," she requested.

"With pleasure!" They began to grasp her body, pinching and stroking, scratching and tickling. Eleanor closed her eyes and took in the sensations. She wanted to feel each one individually, to experience the full range of feeling offered to her. She moaned as they stroked, gasped as they pinched, and sighed as they scratched. She felt their fingers tighten around her nipples, twisting them just as she and Leo had done to Johannes earlier. It drew a sharp, rousing pain out of her, pleasurable and agonizing all at once. Someone's hand pulled at her hair. A pair of fingers grazed her genitals. A hand slapped her thigh, then another slapped her breast. A mouth kissed her neck, tickling her with its beard.

Someone lifted one of her legs up and placed it behind his neck. Eleanor opened her eyes to see that it was Leo. He held her legs apart, exposing her genitals. He spread her labia with his fingers and looked down at the topography of her nether regions, which were fragrant and moist with arousal. He dipped a finger in them and brought it to his mouth to taste. Then he wet his finger again and brought it to Eleanor's mouth. She opened her mouth obligingly and stuck out her tongue to taste the salty residue of her arousal.

"Keep it open," Leo told her. With a quick flick of his eyes, he communicated wordlessly to Johannes what he wanted him to do. Johannes took the cue. He straddled Eleanor and slid his erect penis, slowly, deliberately into her mouth. He looked down at Eleanor as he did so, and she gazed back at him, locked in eye contact. His warm, fleshy girth filled her mouth. He pressed inward, coaxing his way inside her, pressing on the back of her throat.

"Relax," Leo's voice reached her ears, gentle but firm. Obligingly, she relaxed her throat. She welcomed Johannes inside her, all of him. She consumed him greedily. She clasped and unclasped her hands as he slid in and out of her, filling her to bursting point.

She felt a pair of sturdy fingers penetrate her--first two, then three, then four. They stretched her with steady persistence. Eleanor emitted a muffled moan, which was stifled by Johannes's penis. She tensed and shook; a dark and powerful energy throbbed in her core. Something else entered her, something long and smooth and erect--Leo's penis. He thrust it into her, and she gasped with the intensity of the sensation. Yes--yes! Filled and filled, that's what she was, inside and out.

Leo was deep inside her now, and he thrust his hips in and out with steady fervor. Johannes continued moving her head along the length of the staff. Gasping and choking and moaning between pumps, Eleanor began to lose hold of herself. Where did her body end and her companions' bodies begin, she wondered? She felt Leo's thrusts accelerate and heard him grunt with pleasure. His grunts harmonized with Johannes's moans and Eleanor's sighs. Was it their pleasure that echoed on her lips, or her own?

Johannes eased his member deep into her throat while, at the same time, Leo thrust himself down her most intimate aperture. She felt as if she were consuming them, both of them--digesting them, metabolizing them. No longer Eleanor Marx Aveling, then, nor Eleanor Marx, nor even simply Eleanor. All that she was--all her relations, genealogies, identifiers--dissolved into the ecstasy of the now. The thrust, the choke, the moan; sweat, flesh, semen.

Yes, she thought to herself, yes! She shuddered from her core to her fingertips. An orgasm rent through her, and she gave into it. Then, as soon as the swell had passed, another one, then another, in quick succession. There was no time to think, nor time to recover, not with a body perforated through and through by these men, not when each inhale was a gasp and each exhale a climax. Leo's hands steadied her through the rapids of ecstasy, one hand clasped tightly around her leg, the other around her waist, guiding her body to move along with his.

Eleanor felt that Johannes was near his release; his staff swelled in her mouth, and his body shook. With a great gasp of effort, Johannes ejaculated onto her chest. Leo, too, was working himself up to orgasm. His grip on her waist tightened as if he needed an anchor to hold onto. "Yes," he grunted to himself, "thank you, Eleanor! Thank you!" Faster and faster he pounded. Just as Eleanor began to feel she could no longer take it anymore, he pulled out and spilled his seed all over her stomach.

There was a finality about Leo's orgasm--it was a dizzying coda, but one that signified quite definitively that the evening's ecstasy had come to a close.

Eleanor lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. She breathed in and out. It took several moments for the capacity for words and movements to return to her. A blissful calm seemed to have spread across her limbs. She lay there, drenched, recumbent, shuddering with the aftershock of the experience.

Leo put his arms around Johannes and planted a deep, full kiss on his lips. Johannes left the bed and returned with a damp cloth, which he ran wordlessly over Eleanor's body, cleaning it. Leo ran a hand through Eleanor's hair.

"Thank you," Eleanor said presently. "Both of you."

Leo laughed his broad, gregarious laugh, and Johannes offered her a winning smile. "Our pleasure," Leo said. "Quite literally." He lay down on one side of Eleanor, and Johannes lay down on her other side. "And I would hope it was to your pleasure as well, my dear," he added.

"Yes, indeed!" Eleanor agreed. She reached out a hand and ran a finger over Johannes's chest, feeling the hills and valleys of his sturdy musculature. "Free love," she mused. "I felt it..." She pursed her lips, trying to articulate what it was that she had felt. Even with all her skills as a writer, all the languages she knew, she found that she could not quite encapsulate in words everything that had just happened to her. "For just a moment..." she said, "for one shining moment, I did feel free. Free from all obligation, all convention..."

"It's an addictive feeling, isn't it?" Leo said.

"Yes," Eleanor said. "I could see myself getting addicted to it."

"Here's what I think," Leo told her. "I think that moment that you're talking about, that moment of letting go of yourself, of giving into the pleasure. I think you didn't just feel free. In that moment, I think you were free."

Eleanor pondered this. It was an intriguing thought: that ordinary men like Leo and Johannes, and ordinary women like her, could make their own freedom, simply by living with each other differently. "You think so?"

"I do. I think that is where revolution starts. Right here. When we stop thinking that we own each other."

Eleanor leaned to her left and planted a kiss on Leo's forehead; then she leaned to her right and kissed Johannes. Her mind flitted back to the images of Edward that had plagued her all day. They seemed more distant now, blurry and out of focus. Was the joy that coursed through her veins simply the pleasure of revenge, she wondered? Getting even with Edward for the carelessness with which he disposed of his love? No, she decided, it was something more. That tingling that reverberated through her body, that pleasurable itch, was not about Edward at all. It was a hankering toward new possibilities--revolutionary ways of living, outrageous ways of being a woman, that seemed more tangible than they ever had before.

***

Author's Note: this story is based on the life and writings of Eleanor Marx Aveling, who was an influential revolutionary thinker and activist. The quotes from her essay, "The Woman Question," are real, and the details about her rocky relationship with Edward Aveling are historical. The characters of Leo and Johannes, and my story about Eleanor's encounter with them, are fictional.