"You'd be surprised," said Claudine. "Some girls are made that way; they can't take anything thick, but they seem to be able to absorb any length of anything that's thin enough."
The dildo was a long, thumb-thick affair, nowhere near as fearsome as even the short, squat prick with which Louise had begun her experience of artificial fornication. Certainly it was not in a class with the great tool, thick as a forearm and almost as long, with which Claudine had finished off the experience.
"And also," Claudine continued, "there's the anus, you know!"
"The anus?" echoed Louise in wonderment. Then realizing what Claudine meant, she added weakly: "Oh, I see."
"That, too, you'll probably experience one day," said Claudine. "If, that is, you haven't done it yet."
"No," admitted Louise. "No, darling, I haven't. Hector's tried it but, I don't know. He just never managed it. Either I winced too much with pain or he'd find it impossible to plunge it through that restricting ring business. I don't know, I seem to be awfully tight there. But I've often wanted to know what it's like."
"Then you probably will, one day. You don't just start on a penis, you know. You begin on within, narrow tube like one of these or even an ordinary laboratory test tube will do, if you haven't a dildo like that one. You oil it well and insert it, and there you are. Some girls even use a finger for a start."
"A finger? Oh, I see. Oh, Claudine, there is still so much I have to learn!"
"There's so much we all have to learn, my sweet."
"But how do I learn it? How would I ever have known what you've taught me up to now if, that is, if I'd never let you?"
"Oh, one does, my darling, one does. Trouble with most people is that they just won't. They don't keep an open mind about sex. They rebel inside themselves. They set themselves limits, saying: 'This much I'll do. That far, I won't go.' And how can people like that learn?"
"I was like that, Claudine. But then you camp along. Oh, how can I ever thank you enough?"
"Me? Nonsense! Don't even try. Look at it another way and you'll see that you've been as good for me as I've ever been for you. Hector was one thing entirely, of course. But Hector and Andrew, what are they, after all? Men. Males. I agree that they're often quite necessary in their funny, limited way. They're almost irreplaceable. But only almost."
"You take these dildos, for example, these rubber cock affairs. If we never saw another man again and we had these, why, hell, what would we be missing? You know something? There are halls for each of these things. And you can fill those knackers with something like warmed-up glycerine, so that you can actually, at the moment of coming, ejaculate great squirts of hot fluid up into your insides. It's exactly the feeling you get when a man lets go inside you. Remind me to show you some time."
"Really? Oh, Claudine, where can I get myself a set like yours?"
"Dildos?"
"Mmmm-m-mm. Hector's away so often. And hell, with all my big talk about infidelity, do you know, I hate having to resort to it. But what can I do? He needn't think I don't know it, but Hector wasn't at all happy with my asking whether he'd mind about Andrew and me. And I don't think even Andrew likes it; somehow, I just get that feeling."
"Funny," mused Claudine. "I was thinking just that – just what you've said – that time we had dinner here. But that just proves what I'm trying to say: that men are adequate only within their limits. After that, what've you got? What man, for example, can give with his one silly prick the variety that all these pricks can give?"
"From these, you get all the pleasure you can get from an actual cock, and none of the inadequacies like the child-prevention-precautions and so on. And the failure to come at precisely that simultaneous instant. Or, worse sin, that constant strife to make sure you come together. With these dildos you get none of that. You and I could copulate with these for months to come, and we'd never need a man, either of us."
Louise was thoughtful. Then she spoke. "This, then, is lesbianism?"
"This, then, is lesbianism," said Claudine levelly. "Just this. What could be more idyllic, anyway, than two women together in utter, complete harmony, with never a misunderstanding between them. Never any bickering. And with all the sex in the world available by sliding a drawer out of that box. But there I go, and I'm the girl who adores all men and who lives for them, for their strength and clumsiness in feeling me, caressing me, undressing me, straddling me, fucking me, boring away in all their tactless insanity to dominate us. God, how I love men, how I love it all!"
"And I, too," echoed Louise, fervently. "But now – all this? Hell, I'm so confused I can't think straight any more."
"Of course you are, darling," said Claudine. "Don't even try to understand it all in one night. It must be all so strange to you. Just think about it, the rest will come in good time."
"Besides, I'm tired."
"Then come to bed."
"Here? With you?"
"Why not? You can't possibly drive back to Nice at four in the morning. Besides…"
"Oh, Claudine, I couldn't! Not if it's more sex. I've had enough, I swear I have!"
"You'll see," smiled Claudine.
She got up, naked and lovely. Her splendid body glowed in the soft, diffused light. As she moved Louise saw, and shuddered, at the several places where the welts of her recent whipping still stood up, blue and angry, over her otherwise flawless skin. Claudine gathered up the rubber phalluses, replacing them in their appointed beds in the tray that she slid back into the casket.
Closing the casket, she opened a catch on its side and another drawer slid out. In it, on a bed of blue satin, lay what looked like two penises. A second look, however, showed that they were not two pricks, but one.
Gently, reverently, Claudine took the strange object up, and Louise saw that the two cocks were connected at their thickened bases. There, the rubber had been built up onto a smooth bulge from which each jutted out to its full eight or nine inches. The flesh color of the thing was perfect. Not the tiniest detail had been left out. The undersurface was the perfect simulation of a man's penis, even including the pipe through which piss flowed and semen spurted. Louise handled the exotic thing and gazed at the blued veins crisscrossing the heft of each penis. The heads jutted up firm and solid from the softened sponge-rubber that formed the retracted foreskins. Each of the two penises was perfectly formed.
"What in the name of God is this?" whispered Louise.
"That," said Claudine softly, "is the rarest thing of all, the perfect lesbian tool. That is a Double Dildo. Personally I think it's the finest of its type that's ever been made. Look. For all these things, I paid about the same amount as for just this one alone. Look, I'll show you how it works. You don't need straps or anything. Hand it to me!" Claudine took it and lay back upon the bed, splaying her thighs so that her cunt, a dark slit down the length of its valley of hair, was exposed to its maximum.
"You use it like this," she said. She held the instrument, a good eighteen inches in overall length, with the point of one of the penises an inch away from her vaginal entrance.
With the fingers of her other hand, she parted the labia majora of her cunt, exposing the reddened, mucous-wet surfaces that lay inside. The twitching of her clitoris was mesmeric in its effect, drawing Louise's gaze like a magnet. In-out, in-out went that clitoris, mute yet eloquent in its underlying randiness.
"Then you stick it in, so."
Into the vaginal orifice, gleaming dark and inviting, went the tip of the double penis and, sliding it into the ravine of her vagina, Claudine pressed the strange prick down and up inside her. Slowly, very slowly, the cunt swallowed its piston. It was utterly fascinating to Louise, who bent over bewitched, her face barely twelve inches from the other woman's sex-scented orifice.