Free Universal Carnal Knowledge Pt. 39

XXXIX

Starry skies

It was an idyllic night, clear, still and moonless. The stars shone with an almost unnatural brilliance. In silence Fran and I walked into the darkness. I was desperate to speak of my new-found feelings for her but I felt unaccountably shy, like a lovestruck teenager.

Unable to find the words I needed, I slackened my pace so that I fell slightly behind and could watch Fran walking in the starlight. There was something odd about her, I realised; I had never noticed before that she walked in such a graceful way, almost sinuously, and somehow she seemed taller. It suddenly dawned on me that although she was barefoot she was walking on the balls of her feet; her heels never touched the ground.

"Starry skies," murmured Fran eventually.

"Cloudless climes," I replied, waving a hand at the sparkling and unblemished heavens.

"Cloudless climes and starry skies," she repeated. "That's Byron, isn't it?"

"It is," I confirmed. I could have added that I had the happiest memories of this particular poem. On two occasions in my student days I had trotted it out in circumstances not unlike these, walking a girl in a secluded spot on a starlit night, and it had got me laid both times. Nor, may I say, had I any bad conscience about having put Byron's wonderful lines to this use; from what I knew of him, I felt he would have approved. In fact, I am sure that was why he wrote the poem in the first place, to get inside some girl's knickers (not that girls wore knickers in his day).

I hardly needed poetic assistance to get inside Fran's knickers, of course (not that she was wearing any either), but the poem still seemed fitting. In a low soft voice I recited.

"She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies."

Fran stopped and turned to me. She sighed deeply and melted into my arms. Every young man starting out in life, I thought, should do himself a favour and learn these lines by heart. "Oh, James," she breathed, "that's so beautiful." She turned her face up toward mine. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was slightly open. I shut my own eyes and slowly lowered my head, my lips seeking hers as she raised her heels higher, reaching up for me. As our faces brushed together a frisson ran through us and I heard her small intake of breath as tenderly we brought our lips together ...

"Hey, guys, is this a private party or can anyone join?"

A precious moment shattered beyond recall, we spun round to see Connie, wearing nothing but a broad grin and holding up a large bottle of wine. "The girls told me you'd come out here and I thought you might fancy a drink," she said.

"Connie --" began Fran reproachfully.

"Oh, sorry, am I interrupting something?" asked Connie disingenuously.

I heaved a resigned sigh. Maybe it was for the best, I thought. I really ought to speak to Wendy before saying anything to Fran. "Never mind, you're here now," I said, extending a hand for the bottle. The three of us sat on the grass and chatted, passing the wine to and fro.

"James, you were fucking unbelievable today," said Connie.

"It was a remarkable performance," agreed Fran.

Connie corrected her. "It was hot," she said. "Hot, hot, hot. One after another, bang, bang, bang, thirty-one happy girls sorted just like that."

She had touched a sore point. "Thirty happy girls," I pointed out, "and one rape victim."

"But James," argued Connie, "she's fine about it. I talked to her afterwards. She said, [and here Connie made a woeful attempt at a Polish accent] 'I was silly and frightened but it was fantastic. I should have known he would never hurt me. I'm his now, for ever.' 'You and all the rest of us,' I told her."

I pondered this. "Well," I said doubtfully, "I suppose it's good she feels all right about it but it was wrong, all the same."

"James," insisted Connie, "you mustn't go on beating yourself up about this. She's OK with it. I told you she would be, remember?"

"You didn't see the look in her eyes," I said. "I don't know if I'll ever forget it. She was scared, really terrified."

"Yes," agreed Fran. "It must have been awful for her. Rape must be every girl's worst nightmare. The thought of it is bad enough; I can't imagine what the reality would be like. So, Connie, I know you mean well but I don't think you should make light of it because you can't know how she felt unless you've suffered it yourself, can you?"

"Er --" began Connie, and paused.

Alarmed, I gripped her by the arm and looked her straight in the eye. "Connie," I asked gravely, "have you been raped?"

"I'm not sure," she replied.

Fran and I exchanged perplexed looks. "How can you not be sure?" I asked.

"It's like this," explained Connie. "Back home in Ghana, I suppose I must have been eighteen, I was at college and to earn some money I worked in the evenings at this lawyer's office. Gus, his name was. Big bloke, about forty. I knew he liked me but he never tried anything until one day, we were working very late and everyone else had gone and he called me to his private office. As soon as I went in he grabbed my arm and twisted it right up behind my back and pulled me against him and kissed me full on the lips. I struggled but he was much too strong and he had my arm twisted so far I thought he was going to break it. Then he leant right over on me to force me down on the desk, still holding my arm twisted under me. With his weight on me I couldn't move and then with his other hand he reached down and unzipped his trousers."

Fran held her hand to her mouth. "Oh, Connie, how awful!"

"Go on, Connie," I said.

"He was such a big powerful guy I knew I couldn't escape and my arm was hurting so much and I knew I was going to get it whether I wanted it or not, so I thought maybe he wouldn't be so rough if I played along. So I reached up with my free hand and patted and stroked his face. He sort of smiled and released my arm a bit, but he still held me down. I didn't resist when he reached up under my skirt and pulled my knickers down and then he clambered up on the desk on top of me, among all his files and papers and this big framed photo of him and his wife and kids. He came down on me and he had me, right there in his office."

Fran took Connie's hand and squeezed it. She oozed sisterly sympathy. "That must have been so horrible. Was it -- I mean, was he the -- er, were you still a --?"

"A virgin?" Connie seemed taken aback at such a suggestion. "Jeez, Fran, you haven't been listening. I told you I was eighteen, didn't I?"

"Eighteen?" echoed Fran. "But I was twenty when I first let a boy --"

"Twenty?" interrupted Connie incredulously. "Twenty?" She shook her head in astonishment. "Fran, Fran," she said, "I've really got to like you over these last few weeks but sometimes I think you're --" she paused and waved a hand vaguely at the stars above us, "from out there somewhere. Why, by the time I was twenty I must've ..."

I called the meeting to order. This was fascinating stuff, to be taken up at some later date no doubt, but we were getting sidetracked. "Connie," I reminded her, "you were telling us about this lawyer."

"Oh, yeah. Well, like I say, he had me on the desk but Fran's wrong, it wasn't horrible at all. I thought it would be wham-bam and all over in a moment but once he realised I wasn't going to scream or fight or try to get away he took it quite slow, almost tender, like he was expecting a response from me. 'Not a chance,' I wanted to tell him, but for once I had the sense to keep my mouth shut so he carried on, taking his time, shifting angle slightly to see how it felt. Then, I just couldn't help myself -- I heard myself moan and felt my insides go tense and I thought, 'Holy shit, this guy knows what he's doing!' and before I knew it I was going for it just like he was and in the end I came like a train. And after that, we used to work late several times a week if you know what I mean, and when my course finished and I stopped working there he gave me a bonus of two weeks' wages."

"The pig!" said Fran indignantly. "I hope you threw it in his face."

Connie seemed unable to respond to this directly. Instead she turned to me for clarification. "James, Fran is kidding, isn't she? Sometimes I can't tell with these brainy types."

"I think you'll find," I said, "that she's dead serious."

"In that case," said Connie, pointing skyward once more, "she's definitely from Planet Zog. Anyway, what I'd like to know, and I've wondered about this a few times over the years, is when Gus had me that first time, was it rape? Legally, I mean."

I pondered her question. It raised nice issues about the exact nature of consent and what Gus thought was going on at the time. I was about to suggest that she should have asked him when she had the chance -- he was a lawyer after all -- when Fran cut in.

She was clearly poised in some awkward halfway house between appalled and amused. "Constance Amoah," she scolded, "that's the most disgraceful story I've ever heard! How could you go with him after he'd forced himself on you like that? How could you take money from him? Have you no morals at all?"

Connie matter-of-factly answered these questions in the order put: "He was a good fuck. I was skint. I guess not."

From the back of Fran's throat there emerged an outraged Scotch noise that defies transliteration.

Sensing the reproof, Connie refined her position. "Well, okay," she conceded. "Maybe I have got some morals. I don't steal things and I wouldn't kill anybody. But I don't see what morals have got to do with fucking."

"And what do you think," demanded Fran, "the world would be like if we all lived by your rules?"

Connie thought about it for a second. "Well," she shrugged, "everybody'd get laid a lot more, I guess."

"That would never do, would it?" I said, taking her arm and drawing her close to me. I had fully recovered from my exertions by now, and all this talk about sex had my cock swelling nicely. I was hungry for the both of them, right there on George's lawn, Connie first and then Fran. With Connie I had to hold something back, but I really let Fran have it.

I had not thought about it before, but whenever Fran showed signs of getting on her high moral horse, which in spite of all that had happened she still had a rather endearing tendency to do, I would feel this overwhelming urge to knock her off it by giving her a right royal fucking, which is certainly what she got under the stars that night. I was getting to know her well enough to be able to play with her, bringing her to the edge of orgasm without pushing her over. She had been kissing and cuddling me while I fucked Connie so she was well warmed up and she came as soon as I climbed on top and entered her, but when I had worked her up almost to another climax I slowed the rhythm and thrust less deeply and she teetered on the brink, exquisitely poised. Her breath was coming in tiny irregular pants as she gasped out, "J-J-James, p-please, I I...". Still toying with her, I speeded up ever so slightly so as to bring her tantalisingly to the very edge, but then, even as she gulped in lungfuls of air for the explosion she thought must come, I slowed things all the way down so that I was simply sliding gently in and out of her.

Her breath was coming in slow deep draughts now and she could speak once more. She was smiling but tears were running down her face. "James, you're so cruel. You're such a horrible cruel man." She raised her fists and playfully drummed me on the chest, then put her arms around my head and kissed me passionately. Unbidden by my conscious mind my thrusting began to accelerate.

I suddenly became aware that Connie was watching us excitedly, her face close to ours. "Attagirl, Fran," she whispered. "Great move. You've got him going now." Thus encouraged, Fran kissed me even deeper than before and it was only with superhuman willpower that I managed to assert control and slow my movements right down again. "That's it, James," hissed Connie. "Don't let this red-headed harpy hustle you. Show her who's boss." Fran gave a suppressed snigger at these interruptions, but held the kiss. My cock was desperate to pound away and as I struggled to restrain it I was beginning to feel the same exquisite agony of suspense I had inflicted on her. She knew it, too; maintaining the suction of the kiss and exploring ever farther with her tongue, through her nose she drew in deep lungfuls of air that forced her diaphragm down so as to press her lower body further onto my cock. She breathed out as far as she could; then in again, even deeper, setting up her own slow rhythm in competition with mine. She knew that she was winning the struggle, that little by little I was losing the control I had somehow managed to assert.

(All the time Connie was gleefully egging us on, whispering advice and encouragement first to one and then the other. "Thanks for your help," I told her sarcastically later. "Yes," agreed Fran; "whose side were you on, anyway?" "No one's side," said Connie indifferently. "I just like to see a good even fight.")

And suddenly all restraint gave way and I was bucking frenziedly up and down as I drilled my cock as far into Fran as I could only to withdraw it almost totally and ram it in again. For as long as she could she held my head so she could maintain the kiss but then she had to release me so she could gulp in air through her mouth as my pounding became even faster. An enormous smile of ecstasy alloyed with triumph spread across her face, then she shook violently and as huge wads of spunk flooded into her she climaxed with a massive cathartic cry that must have been audible well beyond the confines of George's grounds.

Afterwards the three of us lay on our backs side by side, staring up at the stars. The girls' silence had nothing to do with post-coital trance; Fran and Connie had had so much of me by now that it affected them for only a few minutes, if at all, so they could have spoken if they wanted.

But no one did. Long minutes passed, marked only by the sound of our breathing and barely audible night noises. As I gazed into the night sky an awareness swept over me of the unimaginable vastness of space and I seemed no longer to be lying on my back in a Surrey garden but to be travelling through the infinite void, lost among the stars, overwhelmed by the sense of my own tininess and insignificance.

And there was a kind of raptness about Fran's breathing that told me her state of mind was similar: that she too was in some far place, deep in awe and wonder. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a profound feeling that in some mysterious way she and I were together, not in the way that partners in a mere sexual union are together but in a sense that was purer and far more complete, as if we were exploring some transcendent realm and were poised on the brink of finding some more perfect state of oneness.

"God, I love to fuck!" announced Connie suddenly, for the second time that evening blasting a fragile moment to smithereens and bringing Fran and me back to earth with the rudest of bumps.

We were still laughing when somewhere far off a clock struck twelve.

"Happy birthday, darling," said Fran.

I was fifty.