“I’m going to use the women’s room,” she continued, getting up off him. There were two doors near where a woman was pouring champagne on her breasts and letting her boyfriend lick it off, and Anna went through the one with the picture of a naked woman on it.
Mark waited until the bathroom door shut, then looked back at Priestess. She was still there, smiling at him. He got up and walked over to her.
“Hi,” was all he could say.
“Mark,” she replied. “I’m so happy to see you again. I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”
“Me, too. A lot.”
She ran her hand idly along her torso again. “You want me, don’t you?” Mark couldn’t answer that. He looked away, toward the door of the women’s room. Priestess took his hand. Her skin was warm and smooth. “Come with me, Mark,” she said, pulling him into the dark doorway.
Mark couldn’t resist the fire her touch sparked in him. He followed her into a hallway, and the door closed gently behind him. It was dark, but he could still see her. A thick metal door stood in the distance. Everything else was black.
Priestess leaned back against the wall and pulled Mark close. “Will you let me kiss you?” she asked.
Her breath was sweet and cool against his face, and she smelled like flowers. Their bodies were so close together Mark thought he could feel electricity arcing between them.
“I’ve been waiting so long for someone like you, longer than you can possibly imagine,” she said. “I knew it from the moment we met. When our hands touched in the hallway outside your apartment, when I heard your voice on the phone, I knew we had to be together.” Her eyes bored into his. “I could feel you fantasizing about me.”
“I did,” Mark said.
“I liked it. So much passion. I can’t stand the idea of you thinking about anyone else so passionately. You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before, Mark. You have so much energy. Raw. Uncontrollable.”
“No one understands that about me,” Mark said, falling into her eyes. “No one but you. I need constant…”
“Variety,” Priestess finished. “An endless diversity of partners and positions.”
“Yes.”
“You’re always looking for something new to keep you excited. I’m the same way; it’s why I came here from Greece all those years ago. I can give you an eternity of satisfaction, Mark, and all you have to do is love me.”
Mark leaned closer until all he could see was the smooth porcelain skin of her face. Priestess grabbed the back of his head, pulling him in.
It was like no kiss Mark had ever felt before. It started on his lips, then travelled to his tongue, his whole mouth, down his neck and through his entire body, as if his soul was merging with something divine, something godlike, through the meeting of their lips.
Anna, he thought suddenly. What about Anna?
The one thing Anna had always adamantly refused him was a threesome. She said she didn’t want to share him with anyone, and five years ago tonight he had sworn to forsake anyone else.
He could feel Priestess moving against him; could feel the soft flutter of her dress as it fell off her warm body and landed at their feet. She pulled him closer to her, their naked flesh crushing against each other.
Geoff warned him there was a price to pay, that he would lose Anna forever if he cheated on her. Was Priestess worth the price? To be with her meant never holding Anna again when she was sad, never hearing Anna’s comforting voice after a bad day, never feeling Anna’s hand in his hair on a lazy Sunday morning in bed. Could he live with that?
Priestess looked up into his eyes.
“You’re thinking about her,” she said.
“It’s our anniversary.”
“I’m a jealous woman, Mark. I can give you everything you want, but your heart must belong to me.”
“She’s my wife.”
Priestess shook her head. “No,” she said. “There’s only me.” The bathroom was completely mirrored from floor to ceiling, and Anna found it disorienting as she washed her hands in the marble sink.
The door opened behind her, and Anna glanced into a mirror, expecting to see another woman come in. Instead, she saw the short, tuxedoed butler enter the bathroom, locking the door behind him.
She spun around, trying to cover herself with her arms.
“What are you doing in here?” she demanded.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached into his tuxedo jacket and pulled out a seven-inch, serrated knife.
Anna screamed as he leapt at her, and caught his arms in her hands. The knife hovered inches from her body. The butler had a surprising amount of strength in his small frame and, as Anna’s arms started slowly bending, the knife moved closer to her bare skin.
He sank the blade into Anna’s chest, all the way up to the hilt.
The little butler opened one of the mirrored panels in the wall, and stuffed her body into the space behind it.
“There’s only me,” Priestess repeated, pulling Mark toward her and kissing him again.
Mark knew she was right. No other woman could give him everything he wanted, everything he needed; not Anna, not Arianna, not the model on the beach. He belonged with Priestess. He belonged to Priestess.
“Come see,” she said, taking his hand and leading him toward the thick metal door.
The enormous room beyond it was black, too. An unearthly green light filtering through the darkness.
A wretched orgy filled the center of the room. Mark was certain the desiccated, spent things writhing like snakes on the floor had once been human. The ravages of time and endless exertion had turned them into dry, withered, furiously copulating mummies.
Their jerking movements told Mark they had no control over their actions.
Their wasted shapes told him they would have died long ago if someone – something – wasn’t keeping them alive, keeping them fucking.
Their dead eyes told him to run.
But Mark’s legs wouldn’t respond. He couldn’t move at all.
The door slammed shut behind him, and Priestess took his hand, bringing him forward to join the fray.
Cactus Ass by Cheyenne Blue
Susan often joked about cacti. Made innuendo-filled quips about the pricks; big pricks, little pricks. But she had never had a close encounter of the personal kind with one. She was a city girl; she lived in Denver, a western city to be sure, but a city that boasted as many espresso bars and alternative newspapers as it had cowboys and bucking broncs. And the only cactus she knew intimately was the one that grew in a terracotta pot on her kitchen windowsill, resplendent with prints of howling coyotes wearing bandanas.
Geordie Mick was from England, and he was the son of a school friend of her mother’s. Which didn’t mean much to Susan, except that she was duty-bound to entertain him. He was in America for two weeks, and had an impressive list of things he wanted to see and do. Most of them were garnered from the movies, and an outsider’s view of contemporary American life. He also didn’t comprehend distances too well, and Susan had to point out that a day trip to climb the Hollywood sign was not very practical from Denver.
So they moved on to numbers 23 and 24 on his list, which were a lot simpler. A visit to a real western town and a mountain hike in the Rockies. Susan had no idea what constituted a “real western town”, but she consulted the tourist information and they came up with a suitable candidate that had the advantage of being in the mountains. Best of all, from Geordie Mick’s point of view, it boasted several bars in its historic downtown district.
They set out on Sunday, but by the time they had found the “real western town” and Geordie Mick had tried several of the authentic and historic cowboy bars it was far too late to consider climbing any mountain. The altitude was affecting Geordie Mick as well, so they settled for a stroll close to the river near town.