Triptych, An Erotic Adventure Read online

  His greeting startled her. He leaned forward with his free hand, his left hand, and the misspelled words appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  Why dont u take yor shirt off sexxy.

  Susanna recoiled from the computer as if stung, remembering the webcam. The little dot in the top centre of the laptop. A device she had never used, assuming that she would have to do something, maybe go into settings, even to turn the thing on. She reached behind her and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, the scarf she had been wearing when she arrived home. She flung it over the computer, capturing the webcam in its folds as she might capture a Christmas beetle to stop it tangling in her hair.

  Behind the drape of the red scarf she could see the man working on his fully erect penis. She put her hand to her chest, noticed the wild beat of her heart and tried to calm it with deep regular breaths.

  There were new words on the bottom of the screen. She could see a few of them and it was the words that lured her to lift the edge of the scarf. If she left it draped over the top part of the computer she would be free to watch and not be seen. There was some comfort in this. She adjusted the fabric and concentrated on the words.

  Have you gone drling Come back you were soooo hot

  She thought about it. She reached out for the keyboard, shy Susanna who could never be drawn into a conversation. She found her fingers trembling a little on the keys.

  I am still here. I am watching.

  your camera drpped out. His one-handed jumbled conversation. turn yr caera back on u so hot

  And Susanna, calmer now: I will watch but you can’t see me.

  ok. do u like what you c

  I can’t see the bottom of your hand, I can’t see all of you

  Tell me wht u can c hottie. say those drty words

  I can see your cock. A little blush, a little wave of adrenaline racing along her veins. I can see the head of your cock and the shaft and some of your hand. I can see your nipples, you have dark nipples. I can see your hairy chest but the camera stops short of your neck. I can’t see your balls.

  u want to c my balls?

  I am curious. I have only seen one man’s balls

  tell me what his balls r like

  She typed quickly and with a growing confidence. She felt the rise of her own pleasure. It was like that first time, the quick insistence of her lust rearing suddenly, obliterating her shyness as it warmed her loins.

  Smooth. Almost hairless, tight, and with a little dark line running down the length of them. When he came they tightened in my mouth. I liked that. That physical expression of his love. The way his balls tightened and his hand on his cock quickened and then the sight of it, the thick semen spraying up onto his stomach.

  She was certain she had conjured it. His orgasm coincided perfectly with her words. She watched as the pre-come leaked down over his fingers and suddenly it was more than that, ejaculate spurting higher than she expected, splattering up onto his chest, spraying pearly drops onto his tight black nipples. The little aftershocks, the dying spurts leaking down the length of his still-hard shaft. She watched, shifting in her chair, uncomfortable in her state of arousal.

  The screen dipped to black, the connection gone. Her love’s namesake disappeared forever. Then, before she had time to reach out and close the computer, the words, those fateful words flaring up onto the screen.

  Another partner is waiting for you. Would you like to play?

  Her clitoris hummed, her own juices had begun to leak out from between the lips that were already swollen with excitement. The words flashed in a rhythm that she could easily settle into.

  Would you like to play? Would you like to play?

  Susanna checked that her scarf was still securely fixed over her webcam. She reached out to the keyboard and tapped lightly with her index finger. Yes.

  Yes. She did want to play.

  The combinations were endless. Their conversation was mostly the same, Female? Turn your webcam on. How old are you? Please turn your webcam on. Are you touching yourself?

  Susanna did indeed touch herself, and she always answered yes.

  It is difficult to type with one hand. Susanna soon realised that the mistakes of her first headless man were common ones, letters misplaced or repeated, no capitals or punctuation, vowels dropped, a sentence broken down to its most simple form.

  She preferred to give the conversation the benefit of both her hands, pausing between sentences to slip her fingers under her skirt. Mostly she remained clothed. Occasionally she loosened a button or two to comply with the more realistic requests of her blind lovers: oh I wish you would squeeze your breast for me. I want you to pinch your nipple.

  She did not, of course, accede to every ham-fisted demand: are you fingering your arse? stick your fist in your cunt. Often they didn’t request anything at all, happy enough to read her account of what she might be doing, or might do with them.

  She found her repertoire for sex too easily devoured by the hours she spent at the screen, and learned to become inventive, to amuse herself as much as the headless torsos endlessly stroking themselves before her. She invented scenarios that had never occurred with her first and only lover.

  She described a kitchen not unlike her own, high stools similar to the one she perched on, the laptop open on the kitchen bench. She bent herself over the stool in this particular fantasy, drew for herself a picture of her own buttocks raised high, the lips there parted and gleaming with a dewy moisture. She had the idea that he—this headless torso of one man or another—might slide his penis up against the moisture of the lips, taking his pleasure from this external friction. She had once, she told a faceless stranger, had her lover use the space between her generous breasts to find his joy. She squeezed them tight around his cock and encouraged him to aim at her chin. He coated her cheeks when he came, a drop of semen lodging in the corner of her eye. This was the only reason that they never used this position again, she said, bringing the focus back to the game at hand. Bent over the kitchen stool with the moisture from her cunt providing a slippery kind of pleasure, she had found that spilled seed could shoot up and out over the buttocks. And if he were to gently rub this into her skin then she might enjoy a slippery pleasure of her own.

  His name was Aaron Fitzgerald, although of course that may just have been the name he used in this private part of his life. He was nothing particularly special to look at, average build, not fat but not slim either, a little hair on his chest and lining his nipples, but not a pelted beast like some of the men she had ‘known’. He had a foreskin, which perhaps fixed his age as under thirty, although she could not be sure of this. It was something she had read somewhere and the idea that all young men had foreskins had stuck with her. It was certainly true that most of the older men on the internet, grey-furred bears, or men with wrinkles on their chests, had penises without any foreskin at all. The physical patterns had begun to emerge for her. Older men were without foreskins, younger men came too quickly, often before her scenarios had had time to settle into a natural rhythm.

  Most of the men responded to her delicate inventions with coarse words like cunt and cock and slut and whore. They liked their sex talk simple and direct: she was happy to play within these rules as long as they were prepared to indulge her when she lucked onto an arousing new idea. Most of them were happy to let her take the lead as long as she kept the talk within the boundaries of sex and didn’t stray into long descriptions of midnight parks or the creaking gothic corridors of abandoned houses.

  Her time with Aaron began just like any other, a faceless torso gently stroking an erect penis. It started as it always must.

  Are you male or female?

  Female.

  Really? Truthfully.

  Truly, I promise.

  There is no truth in places such as these.

  A deviation from the general script; by now they would almost always be talking about her breasts at the very least, and had usually made it to her vagina.

>   I am being truthful and I will prove it. If I were a man, would I admit that I have my period as we speak? Would I tell you that the very act of pleasure will be tempered by a dull ache in my belly, and enhanced by the freshly inserted tampon that will act like a little dildo during the act itself? I can assure you there will be no spillage.

  I have no aversion to spillage. The headless torso held his penis in his hand but ceased to stroke it. The organ was large; politely firm but not boyishly over-eager. I assume you are not averse to some amount of spillage on my part during our brief but, I trust, sweet conversation?

  His one-handed typing was superb. He was the only torso she had met who used punctuation despite the impediment of simultaneous masturbation.

  I would be disappointed if there were no spillage at all. I might take that as a personal slight.

  Oh I don’t think there is any chance of that. Even from these preliminaries I can tell that we will come to a mutually satisfactory conclusion.

  Aaron kept up the accurate typing with his left hand while treating her to a slow, stimulating display of his excitement with his right. Susanna launched into a favourite scene, imagining that she would lead the way with the story and the characters, only to find Aaron equally skilled in wordplay and narrative drive.

  She began in the back of a taxi cab and Aaron quickly delivered them to an art deco hotel. To her surprise he began to describe the building. The windows were illuminated in a russet glow by the large orbs of red suspended within. He described the flock wallpaper, gold but with a raised butterscotch velour that stroked her shoulder as they travelled down the corridor.

  If anything, his descriptions made her hungrier for the main event. He slowed the pace of their encounter with theatrical flourishes and by the time they closed the door of the hotel room Susanna was desperate to tear the clothes from his already unclothed chest and touch the undeniably hard, twitching penis that was now the complete focus of her attention.

  When the moment of completion finally arrived she found her hand moving of its own accord off the keyboard and onto her mouth, her head snapped back on her neck, the throat exposed, her nipples tugging urgently at the cotton of her shirt. If she had had her webcam unveiled he would have seen the whites of her eyes as she gazed towards her ecstasy— it seemed to reside somewhere near the light bulb hanging above her head.

  Unlike most of her men, Aaron waited for her to compose herself. He adjusted the webcam so that his penis was respectfully out of shot and instead gave her a courteous view of his chest; it was unsullied by emissions, which he had caught discreetly in a tissue at the climactic moment of their tryst.

  Are you there?

  Totally.

  You were gone so long I missed you, my dear.

  Oh I was here, just occupied in other ways.

  Satisfactorily, I hope.

  To say the least. And then she said what she had never said to any of the other faceless men. It seems a shame to end such a good thing when it has only just begun.

  Well, Susanna (she always used her own first name; the surname she used, Nabokov, was not her own), it doesn’t have to be goodbye, you know. We could easily exchange Skype addresses and reconvene at our leisure.

  Susanna paused. She pushed her stool away from the computer and stepped back. At this distance she could see the image on the screen for what it was. A youngish man, of average build, no distinguishing features. No head, and now not even a penis to identify him.

  It is just a shame. We have only seen one aspect of each other and people are such complex creatures. You could be my Lo. Plain Lo in the morning, Lola in slacks, Dolly at school and Delores on the dotted line.

  She recognised the quote.

  Very impressive, Aaron Fitzgerald.

  Not too impressive because that is the only bit from Lolita I remember and even then I don’t think it is quite right.

  Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

  There you have it. Susanna, Susie, Suse.

  But what can I do with Aaron?

  I don’t know, said Aaron and because she could not see his face she had no idea if he was smiling. But if you give me your Skype address perhaps we’ll find out.

  They met most nights after Susanna finished work. Aaron was never her only appointment of an evening, but on many nights she had him open in one window while she watched a stranger stroke himself at the same time. Mostly they met on a chat field, a little window of words with no visuals at all. He liked to know who she was talking with, the name they used, the conversations they responded to. Scare him he might say, take him out into the woods in your car. Aaron had an eye for the macabre. Sometimes it was Aaron’s words and not Susanna’s that she fed to the hungry stranger and there was an odd excitement in this kind of exchange. It was as if she were watching Aaron make love to the stranger.

  Blindfolded as he was, and vulnerable, Aaron would pretend to be Susanna, tying the stranger up on some deserted shore, stroking the delicate skin on the inside of his thighs to distract him from the encroaching tide, entering him only when the water had engulfed them, his defences eroded by the warmth of Aaron’s mouth on his penis, his body overloaded by the sensation of the spume and the seaweed wrapped around his chest.

  I like to penetrate a man, Aaron-Susanna would say to him. I like to feel him opening to me, the tiniest bit at first, just a finger. Can you take a finger?

  Yes.

  You can show me if you like. I’d like to watch it. I have a strap-on dildo with me and if you show me you can take a finger, yes, like that, show me on your camera, we will ease my dildo in just a little at a time.

  In this way she became Aaron, Aaron became Susanna, together they prised their partner open and Susanna would describe to Aaron what she saw.

  He’s angling the webcam down. More lube for his left hand and his finger. Just his right index finger. He’s doing it now. He’s spreading his legs wide. Right up to the first knuckle. He’s doing it. He’s doing it while I watch.

  Susanna became more bold with Aaron encouraging her towards wilder and wilder requests. Sometimes she stepped away from the laptop, her heart racing, her eyes wide. She barely recognised herself at all. This strange alliance with Aaron had changed everything. Alone, Susanna was good with words. Together with Aaron she was frightening.

  Hello, Susanna? My flower? Are you there my Susie-su, my Susie, my Su?

  Got to go. Bye now.

  And with a quick tap of her finger she was released from their devil’s pact. The man on the video chat would click over to some other anonymous soul, less threat, more cliché, and eventually work himself up to a disappointing spend.

  On the nights when Aaron took Susanna right up to her line, or even across it, she retreated from her internet playground and immersed herself in other things.

  She busied herself making elaborate desserts, crème brûlée in a ramekin for one, beignets, profiteroles, éclairs. She put on music to fill the space where their frenzied conversation had been silenced. She picked up the scarf she had been attempting to knit for months and managed to add a few more rows of dropped stitches and wavering tension.

  She was constantly distracted by the laptop, sitting innocently on the bench, and when eventually she gave in and reached for it he was always there. Waiting.

  Missed you, he would say, and she suspected he said it with irony. She was certainly not the only person he was chatting with. Sometimes he even described to her the person on the video link.

  A man. I have no problem with a man. His cock is bigger than my own. He shaves his chest.

  Or once: I should tell her not to put her face on camera, anyone could be recording this. She looks no more than 18. Imagine if she is underage. Would I be more or less excited if she turned out to be 15? Her vulva is very fresh and pink. She shaves. At least I hope she shaves, wouldn’t it be awful if she were just too young for pubic hair? It makes me soft just thinking it. Her breasts are tiny little things but he
r nipples are so large and so very hard. And that isn’t lube. I can see it isn’t lube. She is pretty (so young but not too young after all) but I wish she would hide her face. She seems so vulnerable. Should I tell her what a predator I am? Should I warn her to be cautious? Ah good. She has figured it out for herself. Goodbye my sweet, brief tryst. Hello, hairy cock and balls. He’s telling me what he would do to me if I were a girl. I am concerned for that girl. I wish she had stayed longer, I would have had a talk to her about it. I should have. I got caught up in the excitement of such an exquisitely formed vagina. Okay, hairy cock and balls has come. Next. Tedious. You certain you don’t want to turn your camera on?

  She was tempted. Sometimes when his cleverness made her laugh or when together they took some poor torso out into the woods and unleashed their brutal fantasies upon him, at these times she would almost suggest a visually enhanced date. She imagined that she would take her clothes off at his insistence and touch herself, as he had been touching himself when they first met. Then she thought it would be tame, somehow—bland, simply to find her pleasure alongside him after all the dark paths they had tripped down together. She never followed up that particular whim.

  Turn your camera on, he told her.

  And she said, Not quite yet.

  Things progressed in this way for so long it seemed they had become like an old married couple. Often they abandoned the talk of sex to discuss world events, environmental disasters, politics. These conversations would be interrupted from time to time: Hang on, what have we here? Is that? I think this person is a hermaphrodite. I have never seen a hermaphrodite in the flesh.

  Goodness, no. What can you see? Describe him—or is she a her?

  Sometimes Susanna forgot that this was a twilight landscape in which they met; that it was not one thing or the other, not real and yet not completely fantasy. Sometimes she caught herself divulging little moments from her day and wondering if she had given up too much information. What if he became obsessed with her? But was she not a little obsessed with him? Didn’t she dream of him, his ordinary body that had become extraordinary, the polite but sensual movement of his hand on his cock?