The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

Diving Into Oceans of Air by Renée M. Charles

Just as I sliced open the packing tape which sealed the large, flat box of Gunter Blum posters I’d special-ordered directly from the photographer’s native Germany, I heard a metallic whump! from the old-fashioned horizontal flap inset in my shops front door. (The slot was occasionally useful for my infrequent snail-mail, like my Empaths Unlimited newsletter). The whump! was followed by the muffled whuff! of something thick being wedged tightly into the narrow opening. After ripping open the top of the greyish box and confirming that they’d sent the right set of art-quality blow-ups (that almost take-off of Lewis Hines Steamfitter with the beautifully lean and slick-haired model posed against a grittily rendered piece of machinery, the hair on her pubis wiry and fierce against her taut thighs), I hurried over to the door. A tightly wound roll of sticky dots sealed paper jutted through the tight labial opening like a crude dildo.

The Blum posters could wait. The Empaths Unlimited newsletter only came out once a month, snail-mail thanks to it being too massive for an e-mailing. I’d been a long time between mind-seductions. Not that I didn’t get my fill of illicitly-obtained fuck-fantasies gleaned from the fuzzy little brains of my customers, the men and women who either boldly or timidly entered my establishment, to fulfil whatever moist fancies their minds and bodies craved. But after a while, their craven wants grew tiresome and even easily anticipated – the stately, perfectly coiffed matrons who selected the largest, thickest dildos to use on their college-age lovers, both male and female; the I’m buying this for my collection types who were already yearning to shoot a steaming wad at the model in the sexcapades CD ROM they’d just shoved into their initial-adorned briefcase; or the eyes-cast-at-the-floor meek ones who tried to rip the edible panties they’d just bought off their own bodies once they got them home and wiggled into them in their lonely, steamy bathrooms.

I could picture and feel each one of their memories, their wildest (or tamest) conceits, as they drifted about my store like windborne dandelion seeds, aimlessly letting their eyes drift over items they had no intention of using, would never want to own, lest I discern their true desires should they hone in too quickly on the object of their longing. Perhaps I should have written warning: telepath/empathic on duty! under the heading under the existing lettering on my store’s front window. But as it was, I thought that homme-donna was already a bit artsy-classy, surely enough to keep away the truly vile and the hopelessly tacky away from my establishment.

Glancing quickly at the clock above my counter, I noticed that it was close enough to closing time for me to turn around the OPEN/CLOSED – PLEASE COME AGAIN sign resting at the bottom of my discreetly mauve-curtained window and turn my full, pussy-throbbing attention to my torn-open newsletter. Once I’d seated myself in plain view of the Richard Avedon framed, non-glare-glassed posters opposite my counter-stool (several actresses and models whose names I only vaguely recalled caught in nude, but dignified glory), I flipped through the “Women Seeking Men”, “Men Seeking Women”, “Men Seeking Men” sections. Each bore that alphabetical string of abbreviations along the bottoms of the pages: M = Male, F = Female, E = Empathic, T = Telepathic, PC = PreCognitive, G = Gay, Bi = Bisexual, FT = Fetishist, N/D = No Drugs, N/S = Nonsmoking, and so on. The list purposely omitted the more typical Singles Paper designations, B = Black, W = White and H = Hispanic because that particular point was a moot one when it came to espers like me, and the other readers of this newsletter. I finally chose Women Seeking Women.

Three pages’ worth in this issue, both sides of each sheet. But I’d scanned the first page and a half of listings (“BiFT seeks open-minded/open-hearted G/BiFT/E for discreet but intense shared visions of-”), and come across nothing but the same-old, same-old, variations of “Let’s blend feelings and fantasies” with no inherent bite, no suggestion of something fresh in their advertisements – let alone the one or two word “MindBytes” which followed each listing. Those teasers, when concentrated upon by the reader, gave off a faint, residual echo of that person’s thought-waves, their fingerprint-like unique signal which could be momentarily savoured like a whiff of encapsulated perfume molecules trapped between the folded strip of paper in a magazine insert.

By the time I was halfway through this month’s crop of psipotentials my mind was gummy with after-images of romance novel-cover tepid embraces under the ubiquitous full moon and wisps of cloud, and cloyingly cuddly mental snuggles under postcard perfect sunny skies. Weren’t there any hot-minded lesbian or bi empaths left any more?

The offerings in last month’s issue had been little better. I’d received a long-long-distance virtual finger fuck from a woman in England who was expert in transmitting her bodily sensations to me via a phone line (her voice was even sexier than her mind), and the telepath over in Queens whod been too timid to phone me was marvellous at pseudo-cunnilingus while we both literally pictured ourselves in a Grecian temple, but neither woman was seeking anything more than a one-mind stand, as it were. Once the last of the orgasm died down, I felt their minds gently but firmly close to me, leaving me sated but hardly satisfied.

Things were getting so bad for me, I’d recently been trying to tune in on the thoughts of some of my customers after they’d left my shop, discreetly bagged purchases in hand, but tracking them amid a clamouring, seething ocean of mental voices and bodily sensations was often much too difficult – aside from one store-to-apartment track on a rainy, not too bustling evening, when I’d seen/felt an outwardly confident-looking young executive type receive a deliciously thorough whipping/humiliation from her surprisingly femme-looking Mistress, my efforts at connecting with Unawares were close to futile.

The best Mindfuck occurred between two espers, period. Which is why the Unlimited was created. The only trouble was, most of the truly hot and gifted espers already had partners, and didn’t need to advertise for a mind-mate.

I morosely flipped through the remaining listings, letting my gaze wander over to that opened cache of Blum posters (what was in that model’s mind, I wondered). I was sorely temped to run my own advertisement: “GFE/T wants to know – are there any hot G/Bi/E/T/PCs out there? With imagination and libidos to match?… until my eyes drifted back down to the tight columns of newsprint, and saw:

TIRED OF MIND-F – KS THAT LACK IMAGINATION? Try me. I’m G/T/E, N/D, N/S and a water F/T; seeking G/Bi-? to swim the steaming waters of my mind. Shed those clothes along with your hangups/inhibitions! Think: *OCEANOFAIR

If the Unlimited’s listings weren’t so blasted PC (and I’m not thinking PreCog here), she could’ve come out and said “Mind-Fucks” in print, but knowing that she was thinking it, and not wallowing in pseudo-Romanticism only, was a most bracing revelation.

Squirming in place on the already-smoldering vinyl cushion of my stool, I closed my eyes. I let my mind go placid, numb, figuratively limp, then clearly imagined the huge, cerulean word OCEANOFAIR across the forced-clear backdrop of my mind’s eye.

So suddenly I felt almost literally cold, actually drenched, my body was diving into a horizon-to-horizon ocean of wave-lapped slightly frigid waters. Once I was submerged, I wiggled forward with almost no effort, toward a waiting, legs-scissoring figure, whose dark hair was clipped professional-swimmer short. Only a gently waving thatch of sea-grass-shifting hair was on the top of her head, and a matching close-trimmed wedge of sharply angular pubic hair covered the rising mound of Venus. The straps of her diving gear crisscrossed between her small, nipples-jutting breasts, and the clear diving mask over her nose and eyes revealed a light dusting of pale freckles over her nostrils and lower bridge, and a pair of orbs whose dark-brownness was intensified by the light-diffused blue-green waters around her.

With each kick of her flippers-encased feet, she moved closer to me… me, who wore no diving gear at all and who just then realized that I didn’t need it. My own legs and lower body now sported overlapping, glistening scales, which culminated in a fin-leg tipped with delicately feathery fins which undulated and writhed in the rippling waters which surrounded me.

Glancing down at my own breasts, I saw that they were coyly cupped with purple-and-white mottled shells, strapped with thin ropes of sea-kelp. My hair – now suddenly long, waist-touchingly long, was floating about me like a nimbus of green-tinged gold. As she moved nearer, her left hand reached out to caress what would’ve been my own mound of Venus, but now, as I glanced down at it, was a small, tight vertical-lipped orifice resting parallel to my former hip and pelvis area. As her fingertips, cool yet subtly ridged along the fingerpads, made contact with my rippling, scaled flesh, I quivered. The touch of her skin on my own transformed fish-skin was exquisitely sensual, like being finger fucked with a leather-gloved digit.

As the first pulsing wave of pre-orgasm rippled through me, moving in ever-smaller concentric rings toward the narrow base of my tail, my body began arcing backwards in the cushioning waters, until I completed a full circle in that ocean. She maintained contact with my transformed mermaid’s cunt, keeping that one pressing, gently probing finger in contact with me as she matched my gyrations in that soothing liquidity, now using one of my breasts to better hang onto my whirling body.

Remembering that I, too, was free to touch her, I mashed my hands – now greenish-tipped, with pearlescent nails – over her taut breasts, feeling the tender, puckering nipples dig into my palms. As her ribcage heaved toward me, pressing her manna tighter into my kneading hands, she shoved her finger all the way into that hermetic glory-hole, until the tip brushed against what had to be my deeply buried clit.

As we cart wheeled in aquatic free-fall, the depthless blue of the waters now frothy with bubbles, I heard her clear, chimelike thought-question: Your name… what is it?

Not missing a rotation in those buoyant waters, I thought back, Sima Rozyczka… that’s Scottish for “listener” and Polish for “rose”.

No sooner had the thought burst from my mind than she and I were out of the water, out under the low-hanging brassy sun, resting on a beach covered not with sand, but with millions upon billions of tightly curled, dried white rose petals. Their scent was an overpowering contrast to the salty brine of the sea, whose waves lapped at our now bare feet and outstretched legs. Both of us were nude, our shining skin covered with dewy beads of some exotic scented oil. I was once more shorter-haired, the artfully braided and beaded coils only reaching down to my shoulders, and a glance at my pelvis revealed my usual thatch of golden-brown curls. Beside me, her sheared-short black thatch was dried to a lacy covering over her swelling labia and high-rising upper mound. But both our breasts were tipped by raisin-shrivelled nipples, the darker brown flesh around them dimpled and pulled taut above the smoother pale mounds below.

As she lay on her side next to me in that shifting shore of petals, she fluttered her thickly-lashed dark eyes and thought: Mine is Claudia Muirfinn… the latter is also Scottish. For “dwells near the beautiful sea”. My sea is beautiful, is it not?

An encircling expanse of calm azure waters surrounded our isle of convoluted, deeply curled petals, the sunlight shining off the surface like a wide-flung scattering of golden coins.

Very beautiful, I thought back: then, as I rolled on my back, letting the sun press down on my waiting body, I asked: And Claudia stands for…?

I felt a swath of shadow cool my midsection when she stood up abruptly before padding out to the edge of the sea with long, loping strides. Turning her head sideways toward me, so that I could see one dark winking eye, she flashed back: Something you’ll find out all too soon… I’ll swim back to you soon. What is your MindByte?

She was already diving into the waters as I concentrated: Listener! As her left arm rose up above the waters, followed by the strong kick of her legs and feet, I almost slid off the counter stool, and broke my almost-fall by slamming both hands hard against the inside edge of the counter.

That had been the most intense MindByte sample I’d ever experienced. Usually the newletter’s customers only expended a minimum of intense imagination when leaving their MindByte, just enough for a brief taste of their mind. But Claudia Muirfinn’s Byte was more like a feast, a gushing forth of long-stifled images and experiences, concentrated in – I glanced up at the clock, and was astonished by what I read there – a mere three minutes of actual thinking time.

But, as I massaged my sore palms after getting to my feet, I realized that Claudia’s MindByte was merely that. Her ad had clearly stated that she was an Empath, too, yet I hadnt felt one thing she was experiencing during the Byte.

For Claudia, “soon” meant a mere hour later, when I was back in my west-side apartment, soaking in a tub filled with a sprinkling of fragrant herbs and a few drops of lavender oil. As I went to gently massage a huge sea-sponge between my slightly parted-at-the-knees legs, I instead felt her fingers wrapping around mine. We lolled in a circular tub whose surfaces were composed not of porcelain, but of close-set slightly domed individual small tiles, in a mosaic of ombre blues, violets, indigoes and deepest black, a swirl of grout-divided colour that extended up onto the deep ledge which also surrounded the tub, extending out three feet or more. Beyond the tub and the ledge was a room mirrored in black-veined smoked mirrors and dividing panels of oiled ebony wood. Only one of the wooden panels was knobbed, a smooth black-enamelled irregularity in all that linear shining perfection.

The waters which lapped and splashed around us were lit from a frosted greenish bulb set into a fixture located at least twelve feet above us in the domed ceiling. The bathwater itself felt sensuously silky, almost oily; its warmth brought the scent of sea salt and some bright, green odour to mind, something living, something tangy to the nostrils, yet sweet, too, as if concealing a flowering centre.

The inside of the tub gently sloped, so that we could recline side by side without slipping to the bottom. My hair – now pinned up to the top of my head, only ringlets hanging down to my wet shoulders on each side of my face – rested slightly damp on my head, as if Claudia had imagined me being in the tub so long that the surrounding moisture would wick into my tresses. Claudia’s hair, while still short, still sleekly wet, had been coaxed into one coy, tight curl along the left side of her forehead. Letting my hands glide down along her lithe, limber body, I rubbed my fingers over her Mound of Venus, the short hair down there now silky smooth and soft over her fleshy cleft. As I eased one finger into her slick, tight quim, she reached over and began fingering my nipples under the water, massaging each of them in a counter-clockwise motion, while she thought: This is better than your tub, isn’t it? Would you like to body-feel it? Actually… see it?

So this is real?

A mental pause, as the fingers spread out over my breasts to tenderly cup them, then: Doesn’t it feel real? Doesn’t it sound real? She bent one of her legs at the knee, so that it broke surface with a liquid splash. Working my fingers deeper into her, gently rubbing her clit with my middle finger, I returned: Yes, and yes, but… I feel the tub, I feel your flesh, but… how do I feel within you? You’re an empath, so -

The hands on my breasts stiffened, then slid down off them, to the slightly convex roll of my belly, then down, down, to my waiting watery-drift of loose curls, and the slightly gaping ache between them. I had to lean back hard against those tiny, knoblike tiles. First she fingered me, then, after shifting around so that she was facing me, ducked her head under the surface and began tonguing me under the rippling waters until my pelvis began thrusting upward in short, hard pulses. I started to reach my arms outward, hugging the surrounding curve of the tub, while she thought: Just relax, feel it… never mind about me. Just let it flow -

And as the shivering jerks of the orgasm made my leg muscles writhe under the damp flesh, I felt her tongue narrow and burrow deep within me like a bee tunneling into a half-opened rose. When the tip of her nose brushed against my clit, I lifted my pelvis free of the water, feeling the air touch it warmly, yet with a strange completeness. When I opened my eyes and took in my own familiar bathroom, in all its familiar pink-and-whiteness, it was like being exposed to a flashing bulb, for my eyes had grown so familiar to that soothing blue-violet blackness.

But as I slid deep into my bath, letting the water rise up to my chin, my lower lip, I heard Claudia’s parting thought, slightly distant and muffled, as if shouted underwater, but nonetheless clear:

I’ll tell you the meaning of my name when you visit me…

I moved to an upright position with a noisy splash, asking: Visit… as in see-see you? In… person?

This was something almost unheard of in esper circles. The whole purpose of the newsletter, of all the esper singles newsletters all over the world, was to facilitate meaningful mental relationships. Not the petty body-dates which were based solely on looks and other uninspired, mundane aspects of our bodily trappings. Phone calls were only used as a tool to better solidify an esper transfer. For most of us, making voice contact intensified the images, made the emphatic bonds all the more tactile and real.

Since Claudia’s bond was already so strong (if lacking in my being able to read her physical responses, something I’d chalked up to some sort of shyness on her part), I already thought we had something special, something even a phone line couldn’t really improve upon. But her answer was unmistakable, if faint:

Of course… how else do people visit? Phones are for wussies. Dive in, the water’s fine here.

Before I lost all contact with her, I leaned forward in the tub, my forehead almost touching the spout, and shouted:

How do I find you??

Her reply was as faint as the distant drip-drip of a faucet left barely turned on in a far away room:

I’m in the book, Sima…

Although she wasn’t in the Manhattan directory, there were plenty of view-phone books for surrounding cities in my shop. The next morning (after a night spent wallowing in moist, blue-tinged dreams) I shoved aside the still unpacked box of Blum posters and looked under my counter, through every view-phone book on the shelf, until I finally found the name Muirfinn, C. A., in the Lake Placid directory. Hers was the only address listed for that particular street (Blue Fin Drive, appropriately enough), so I suspected that hers was either one of those spreading country-style estates, or a private cul-de-sac.

The Blum posters – and my meagre-visioned customers – would have to wait a few days… until I’d rented an old-style gas-powered car (thanks to her place being too far away for an electric car’s reserves) and personally checked out C.A. Muirfinn.

And, as if to acknowledge the Tightness of my decision, Claudia whispered in my mind: You were right the first time… it is an estate. Right near the lake, in fact, before closing off the contact, leaving only a subtle whiff of briny sweetness in my nostrils…

It was a long drive up to Lake Placid, and another five miles beyond the city to Blue Fin Drive, which was within less than one hundred yards of the twin islet-dotted lake itself. As I made the turn onto her winding, sinuous driveway, which led in lazy loops and twists toward a massive, deep blue-sided, grey-roofed deluxe ranch-style mansion, I couldn’t help but notice that the driveway looked incredibly new, as if few cars used it. There was a two-car garage near the house, but the gravel before it looked virtually pristine, as if this was the bottom of a fish tank, and not someones private driveway.

When I exited the car in front of the garage door closest to the house, I noticed that there was no actual landing before her front door, just a slightly sloping-concrete walkway which slanted subtly upwards, plus a metal hand-rail next to it, decorated with stylized verdigris-coated brass dolphins. The house seemed to grow larger as I walked up that slight incline; it had to be over one hundred and twenty feet long, and almost half that wide, not counting the garage. That the place was only one-storey didn’t detract from its sheer size: in many ways, it reminded me of an ocean of air, capped by a pale, glittering island of silvery sand.

While Claudia had remained strangely silent, even when I’d tried to use her MindByte while trying to figure out how to gas up the unfamiliar car I’d rented at the automated garage a few miles back, during my trip up here, she did choose to speak to me just as I was about to place my finger on her door-bell:

You came… you actually did come to see me.

There was an unexpected pause in her mind-voice, followed by something akin to awe in those silvery tones. Before touching the bell, I thought back: But didn’t you invite me? Tell me to look you up?

Her answer was as soft as the plash of raindrops on new grass:

Of course, of course… but I didn’t think that you wanted to so badly.

Pressing my forefinger against the bell, I was about to think her a retort when I felt a twinge of queasiness ripple through me, the first empathic touch I’d felt from her. Not a physical sensation, but a deep feeling of – what? Could it actually be fear, of me?

Bold Claudia fearing more reticent Sima? On the second ring, the door swung open on its own, revealing a cathedral-like expanse of blue-green-violet lit hallway carpeted in what had to be a soothing low-pile sandy broadloom, its surface delicately pebbled in the diffuse light. No furniture adorned that long hall, but the walls were dotted with wall-mounted fishing nets from which hung sand dollars, flat shells, and rigid starfish and dried sea horses… and as I entered that passageway, and lightly touched the various remainders of the ocean, I felt the deepness of Claudia’s affections for each object, and knew/felt that she’d gathered them all herself.

The hallway stretched out for about fifteen feet before it opened onto an extraordinary room – that same sandy-nubby flat carpeting ringed the outer parameters of the huge room (fifty by fifty, or twice that much?) whose centre was dominated by an amorphous blue-green-black tiled pool whose waters gave the room a faint but not unpleasant chlorine smell. This scent was almost masked by the hanging rattan baskets of pungent dried herbs and flowers which dangled from various hook-suspended chains all around the pool area. The area around the pool was brightly tiled, with hand-painted sea creatures fired upon their surfaces. The overhead lights cast bright, rippling ribbons of light upon the pale aquamarine waters: almost blinding in their intensity, they made me partially shield my eyes against the glare, so that I missed Claudia’s initial entrance on the opposite side of the room. But when that queasiness gave way to a sense of heart-lopping panic, I looked across those waters and saw -

– the woman of my mind-fucks, only she was wearing this oddly strapped and buckled and reinforced-from-without blackish-blue bodysuit, which covered her entire body, fingers and all. For a second, I was reminded of some of Gunter Blum’s more personal-looking shots from the mid- I990s, the studies of that bald-pussied woman trussed up in those leather and vinyl corsets and lace-up bustiers, her legs encased in semi-opaque black stockings, but Claudia’s outfit didn’t look so much erotic as… functional. Like every strap and supporting rod had a very specific purpose.

When she took a step toward me, I recalled another image, also from the last century – that film about the robot-man with no hands, only flicking, twitching scissors, the man whose body was his strange leather suit. Each movement she made was twitching, seemingly isolated from the next, and her legs didn’t so much as scissor but jerk forward, forward, as if the strings guiding her were welded by a palsied hand. Her arms didn’t quite move in synch with her legs, but randomly pulsed out, to the sides, and back again, as if yet another set of hands were guiding those strings…

But when I saw her pinched, deeply concentrated expression, I realized just who those guiding hands belonged to… or rather, to what. I’d heard of suits like hers, read about the late-twentieth-century limbs-only prototypes which plugged directly into the limbs themselves. But I’d never before seen a full-body walking suit in action.

As Claudia reached the outer edge of the carpeting on the other side of the pool and paused to make the transition between the nubby surface and the slicker tile (I saw something move on her “booted” feet, and suspected that some sort of grippers were now positioned on her soles), I actually spoke to her… aloud:

“How did it happen to you? Was it… a diving accident?”

Stopping, but only as if she’d planned to, she awkwardly brushed at the sides of her tight-shorn head, and replied, using her own voice (which was quite similar to her mind-one), “Yes… I was at a diving contest… the board had a flaw in it. It broke and I fell straight… down, hit the edge of the pool. All this around you is part of their insurance settlement, and most of the lawsuit. Paid for this suit, too. Luckily, I still could breathe, after being weaned off the respirator. Had good muscle tone, so the suit was my best option… but, it isn’t everything -”

As in, it couldn’t give her back physical sensation, couldn’t feel for her… not in the way another empath could. Making my way closer to the edge of the pool so that I was stepping on the colourful marine-inspired tiles, I asked, “Was that why you… so I could be your skin, your…”

“ ‘Pussy’? Not actually… I can mind-fuck with the best of them, even before this happened… but, theres something else -

Unable to speak what she so deeply felt, Claudia felt it to me:

The fast-moving rush of flat water coming close, closer to my forward-pointed fingers, then the enveloping, sensual closeness of the water churning over and around me, seeping into my private parts, rushing across my close-cropped head, like being buried in the juiciest quim, flowing with musky oils.

Despite the exactness of all the sensations she felt toward me, I realized by their fuzziness in duration that I was actually feeling only a memory of sensation, not her current state of being.

As realization crept over me, I thought to her: You… you can’t get into that pool any more, can you? Not while wearing that suit -

And when it’s off of me, I’m helpless. Can’t get in or out of the pool alone. My attendants, they come by twice a day, to wash me, but… they’re mundanes. Not even gay or bi. To them, I’m just a limp body studded with receptor plugs. I can’t even get into water, not all the way. The plugs by my neck are water-sensitive. Have to be sealed shut just to wash my hair. Can’t even… can’t even dip my feet into the pool. But I like to see it -

Coming closer to her, to the pool, I began to unbutton my blouse, then dropped it onto the decorated tiles at my feet, while slipping off my clogs one foot at a time. Freeing up all my senses, leaving myself as wide open as mentally/physically possible, I stepped lightly across the cool tiles, my feet splapping with each forward, clothes-shedding motion, until I was standing slightly shivering and naked at the edge of the pool, directly across its shimmering surface from Claudia. She’d been watching my every move, feeling each sensation, and her eyes were half-closed in something far greater than ecstasy – something almost serene in its blissful intensity.

When I slid feet-first into that warm pool, feeling my skin goosebump lightly as it entered that swirling moistness, Claudia slowly, laboriously, got down to her knees, then stretched out alongside the pool, to better watch me swim across toward her. With each stroke, I was myself and Claudia, so that the waters around me were now an ocean kissed by a ruby setting sun, then the waters of the lake beyond the house itself, then a bubbling jacuzzi filled with champagne froth…

Each of her water-memories were so vivid, so detailed, I realized how hard it had been for her to give up her beloved seas in favour of an almost independent, if totally arid, life. When I reached the opposite side of the pool and was close enough to Claudia to reach out and touch her smooth cheeks, her firm chin, I whispered, “You promised to tell me what your name meant. I was rewarded with a burble of only slightly ironic laughter, as she said, It actually means lame of all the crazy things… one of my nurses told me, in the hospital. Showed me the name in a book, just to prove it. Isn’t that delicious? As if my mother was a PC instead of a mere empathic…

Her laughter was a brittle thing that echoed off the waters and distant walls around us, until I clambered out of the pool and sat down spread-legged and dripping beside her, and asked, “Do the fingers… work? If you’ll do me, I’ll share it with you… I love the feel of leather on my pussy,” while pulling up the top of my mound with my fingers, so that my slit was a taut, vertical smile before her. And when those band-reinforced leatherette fingertips caressed my labia, my clit, both of our eyelids became suffused with blood, as we peered at each other through the capri-shells of our lowered lashes, and everything in the room grew crimson-bright…

And when she creakily bent down her head (the neck encased up to the bottom of her hairline in a collar-like device) to tongue me, I stretched out with one hand lazily dipping into the pool, the other caressing cool, slick tiles, so as to give her the most sensation possible, until I was so blown away by my climax that my entire universe was that wiggling, supple tongue poking deep in my most sensitive fissures and folds…

Later, much later that evening, I watched as her attendant undressed and bathed her in that same blue-green-black tiled room she’d shown to me during the mind-fuck… only she’d left off the special plastic contour chair upon which she had to sit while being bathed from that sloping tub. She’d merely told the woman doing the bathing that I was a visiting friend from her college days, to which the woman (older, coarser, and totally disinterested) merely grunted.

Claudia had told me to watch very carefully, which hadn’t been necessary. Rather than being saddened, or repulsed by the sight of her pale, pluglike studded limbs and torso, I was fascinated by the soft texture of her skin under the greenish light, which made her resemble an exotic sea creature cast up on a shining marble shore. As the woman mindlessly moved the soapy washcloth over and around Claudia’s inert, statuelike limbs, I tried to tune into what she was feeling, but there was simply nothingness. No cold, no wet, no… anything. Not from the face down. Just memories of touch, and the eagerness to feel through me…

Before the woman had a chance to dress her, Claudia asked, “Could my friend help you?” Another noncommittal grunt, then she began showing me where each male end of the inner suit fitted into Claudia’s artificial “female” parts, until we’d suited her from foot to neck in the metal and plastic armoured suit, and she was able to place an arm around my waist as the woman trundled out of the little sea-coloured room, leaving us alone.

Without a need for words, I slipped off my clothes again, and slid into those still soapy waters, and began massaging my body with that same cloth, while Claudia shared each swipe and caress of my terrycloth covered fingers. Once she’d felt what had been happening to her for too many physically unconscious years, I drained the tub, then refilled it with clear, pure water, in anticipation of a mind-fuck like no other I’d ever experienced.

Once Claudia entered my mind, it was like there were two of her in the room with me: an inert insect-like being who sat rigidly on a corner chair, almost out of our sight, and the live, pliant Claudia who sloshed in the tub with me and fingered and tongued me until I was gasping too much to see or hear…

Only when the orgasm died down did I wrap my mental/physical arms around her/the surrounding waters and whisper: Now that I know what to do for you, do we really need her around?

Not after the end of the month… I only hire them by the month, just in case… But Sima, tell me, do you really need that shop of yours? The job of… personal attendant pays quite well -

Resting my head against her watery shoulder, I thought it over, then said: Have you ever seen the photographs of a German called Gunter Blum? I have a feeling they’d go well with your decor…