2 comments/ 14170 views/ 2 favorites Carnaro By: MaxT 1: Neu Mitteleuropa July 2002. I saw her for the first time in the hotel lobby where we were registering for the conference -- a heavy-set, early middle-aged woman, her brown hair short and tightly-permed, wearing a blue trouser suit. The jacket was military-style with two rows of brass buttons on its front, giving her the look of a Civil War-era Union officer. She caught me staring and looked at me without expression. Instead of looking away, I met and held her gaze. There was something in her demeanour that suggested a distaste for pretence. I figured she would appreciate the lack of the same in my actions. A mutual friend introduced us that evening in the bar. After an initial awkwardness, possibly due to the scene in the lobby earlier, we got to talking. Her name was Martina and she and her husband were very significant players in the property rackets. Their names came up in the business pages occasionally -- they were part of the new class of über-developers, with interests ranging from Eastern Europe to South-East Asia. When I asked her about it, she name-dropped cities like the globe was their personal fiefdom -- Budapest, Baku, Podgorica, Pattaya. Business was good, she said, and would remain so as long as the world kept turning out people with more money than sense. Amen. It turned out that I knew her husband and she knew my ex-wife. She had met Jane at a business breakfast some years ago, while I had been at college at the same time as Mick. He had been a year behind me and I remembered him as a major irritant, a spoiled loudmouth who thought the world owed him a living. As to what she saw in him, the answer was in the girth of the stone on her ring finger. I found her pretty typical of a woman who had made her way in a male-dominated world -- sharp, no-nonsense, her self-confidence bordering on arrogance. In her line of work, a woman had to be all of that and more if she didn't want to sink without trace. A conventional woman, then. And yet, as we talked, I got the sense that there was a lot more to her. There were these weird lacunae in our conversation that intrigued me. Her accent was mid-Atlantic, an affectation that usually bugged me, but not in this case. The tone of her voice did something to me, as did certain of her ancillary features -- the angle at which her eyebrows were arched, the severe indentations at the edge of her mouth, the single roll of flesh beneath her chin. There were better looking women than Martina present that evening but none of them evinced the powerful sensuality that she did. 'I'm just back from Ljubljana,' she said. 'A holiday, I was told. You know what we did for most of the week? Networking. I needed a holiday once we were done with it all.' 'No RnR?' I said. 'Some. Some of us had more...opportunity than others, shall we say. But I'm not complaining. We made some great contacts. Exciting times ahead.' When you've been in the Finance game for as long as I have, you develop a sixth sense for when a pitch is on the way. I knew Martina was gearing up to something. She was a smart woman -- she would have done her research and discovered that my outfit had a lot of capital invested in that part of the world. It was definitely coming. As to what it would be... I was wrong. We parted a few minutes later and I didn't see her again for the remainder of the conference. But I needn't have doubted my instincts. A fortnight or so later, I received an e-mail from her requesting a meeting with regard to what she called a "significant investment opportunity." Then it got strange. "In light of the unique set of factors surrounding this venture, the representative will appreciate the need for a degree of discretion." In other words, we're up to something shady so keep this to yourself. Under normal circumstances, such an offer would have ended up in my Recycle Bin faster than you could say 'Balkan Mafia.' Normal circumstances, however, didn't include Martina, who I was keen to see again. We set up a meeting for the following week. I suggested a hotel that I thought would be convenient for us both but she insisted that I come to her house. 'I'm sorry if you think I'm being over-cautious but there are good reasons for all this cloak and dagger,' she said to me on the phone. 'Who have you told about this meeting?' 'Nobody,' I said. 'My secretary knows I have a meeting but I haven't told her who. Martina, I have to ask. Are you looking to involve me in something illegal? Because if that's the case, I'll have to pass.' 'It's not illegal,' she said after a pause, 'but there is a certain element of risk...Look, all will be revealed. We're still on, aren't we?' The breathlessness of her tone made it impossible for me to refuse. I promised her I'd be there. * 'Mark. I need to be straight with you. My running into you at the conference wasn't an accident. I needed to talk to you myself. To see if what they say about you is true.' We were sitting facing each other at the kitchen table in Mick and Martina's converted farmhouse. Martina watched my reaction to her confession with a tell-neutral demeanour. Had I heard her right? She rearranged herself on her chair. The flesh of her thorax was scorched earth after years of exposure to foreign sun, hung with a length of fat red wooden beads that reminded me of a sex toy I had once watched emerge glistening from between her cunt lips of a former girlfriend. 'And what do they say?' I sipped my coffee, enjoying the throb in my groin. 'That you're Mister High-Risk. That you thrive on hazard. And that you always make money. Let me ask you a question. Property. And spare me the sucker talk. Where are we in ten years time?' 'Shit creek,' I said. 'The whole thing is going to pop. It's only a question of when. And ten years, you know, might be a bit generous.' 'So we understand each other.' For an instant the room was frozen, unfamiliar, as if we had both emerged at the same time from the same stupor. To entertain sentiments so contrary to market wisdom, never mind speaking them aloud, was akin to heresy in the circles in which she and I moved. It was never done. Martina fanned our mutual panic by continuing, 'We're dangerously exposed. We need to diversify or we're going to lose everything.' 'But that's not going to happen,' I said. 'I've studied your set-up. There are things we can do to...' 'Mark, please. I'm not some groundling fretting about her Alicante shitbox. Look at this.' She took a picture from a folder and smoothed it out on the table. 'You see that villa? That's ours. It's in Istria. Pure sucker-bait. I could flip it. I could sell it right now if I wanted. But we both know that property is bust. The trick is getting in and out at the right time. So what's next? Buy, sell, speculate. Everything has a shelf life. Almost everything.' It started to rain heavily outside, the wind flinging droplets against the glass like handfuls of gravel. 'July,' I said. She smiled and tapped the photo with her fingernail. 'What's the first thing that comes into your head when you look at that?' she said. 'Desire,' I said. 'Exactly. The infinite stuff. And that's the future.' 'What exactly are we talking about here?' I said. 'A thing of beauty. We sell desire. No commodities, no interlocuters. The thing itself.' She handed me a mock-up of a brochure cover; jet black, and a slogan in red: CARNARO everything is permitted 'I've spent the best part of the last five years in Central Europe,' she said. 'We have property in Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria. So we have a physical presence there, right? An existing bridgehead. Add in human capital in the form of connections. I mean people who know how to do business and with the clout to get business done. Now, what have we got here? July, like you say. Thousands of people looking out of windows at the July rain and dreaming. Dreaming about this.' She picked up the picture of the villa. 'But when they dream about this, what's really going on? Desire, like you say, but desire for what? Their lives are squalid, tedious. Shitty jobs, fat, suicidal kids, flat-lined relationships. And in the midst of all this, their psychic boltholes. Romance, porno...Look at the internet statistics. Look at what people are really doing online. And that's where we come in. Everything is permitted.' 'Sex tourism?' I said. 'That's only one aspect of it,' she said. 'The possibilities are endless. We're already letting several of our properties as sets for porn shoots. We can cut out the middleman. Carnaro will produce and distribute its own product. Tailor-made fantasies at a reasonable price.' 'It's...' I didn't know what to say. What she was talking about was both crazy and repulsive. Bridgeheads, human capital...I was no stranger to that part of the world and I knew the kind of human garbage she meant. Pimps, rapists and the brutalized peasant girls they traded in, fuck-dolls for the delectation of piss and sodomy obsessed German punters. On the other hand, from the point of view of utility, it was hard to argue with the logic of what she was selling. I'd done some speculative research in the area myself and I knew she was right. The woman knew how to make a pitch. She leaned back in her chair, her face set in a pout. The hardness in my crotch was not just for her flesh. She was utterly corrupt in mind, body and soul and the prospect excited me as only an illicit pleasure can. 'High risk enough?' She touched the beads at her neck. 'You have the balls. I saw it in you from the off.' 'I'd need to know the particulars,' I said. My shirt collar felt like it was strangling me and I loosened it with a finger, to her apparent delight. Her lips were greasy with pink gloss, its sheen reminiscent of secretions, sweet and toxic, that lure insects to their death upon the petals of predatory flowers. 'How does all of this sit with Mick?' I said. 'This is a man who believes that Social Welfare is theft and that the non-productive should be sterilized,' she said. 'Trust me, Mick would never let something as inessential as ethics get in the way of making a buck.' 'And he's right,' I said. I reached across the table and placed my hand on hers. 'You're right. It's beautiful.' She didn't flinch. I watched the blood rush into her face, an itch like coke bugs breaking out upon my flesh. The stone of her wedding ring nudged my finger, goading me, daring me to take the next step. There were safer ways of initiating a business venture than fucking a prospective partner but in this case, there was no alternative. We stood up at the same time, Martina exclaiming as her hip bumped against the corner of the table. I felt the tail-end of her cry upon my lips as I pushed my mouth against hers, its sweet distress awakening something terrible in me. Her body felt tense and angular against mine, a thing from which all frailty had been banished, consistent with the inorganic taint of the hot breath I lapped up -- her taste was that of a vast breaker's yard, a mass grave of auto parts and obsolete computer hardware. I pulled her sweater over her head and unhooked the cups of her bra while she spat my name into my mouth, her hand at my crotch, jacking me off through my slacks. My free hand squeezed her face, the thumb smudging down the sticky grossness of her lower lip. Her eyes were hateful slits, the cunts of animals, as I forced her on to her knees. Though I could feel her crushed breasts sliding against me as she inched down and the lacquer that made her hair like fibre-glass beneath the fingers that guided her on her way; though I could taste the slime of her saliva coating my mouth and smell the perfume mixed with cunt that embracing her had imparted to my clothes; though I gorged myself on the sensual overload, it was nothing to compare with the buzz I got from the aesthetic suggested by the postures our bodies had assumed. My cock was out, unleashed by her, full of potential violence, like a swung black-jack about to make contact with and smash apart the bones of her face. The spaces between the latter were full of a vicious and fascinating greed, its essence concentrated in the mouth that surrounded my glans. Her tongue was fat, displaying the same whorish glibness and superficiality in intimacy as it did in speech. I took her head and pushed it down, smearing her face along the length of my shaft. The ruby-painted tips of her fingers shimmered unnaturally around the rim of my sac as she licked its grotesque flesh. I crushed her face in profile against my thigh in an embrace that was both tender and brutal, deriving as much pleasure from the bruising clash of her eye socket against the bone of my pelvis as I did from her mouth. Everything was permitted. I felt a surge of absolute mastery as I put her in position, telling her to lower her hands. The athlete I had once been was reborn in the precision of my hips, informing the rhythmic and sure motion that thrust my cock repeatedly into her mouth. Her eyes streamed black, swollen incredulously, as if she hadn't thought such a thing possible. An ever expanding web of white slop dangled from the underside of her chin and I managed to capture it just as it was on the point of falling. I took my cock from her mouth, cradling her muck upon the palm of my other hand, masturbating hard as I watched her lick it up with nauseating relish. She pulled me down to her and kissed me so that I could taste it, plunge my tongue into its thick and hateful heart. I licked the pools of salty blackness beneath her eyes and the gritty mess of disintegrated foundation and body fluids on her chin, trying in vain to get a handle on her face. All at once she was glorious and debased, proud and craven, guileless and calculating. Faced with such infinite unknowability, I felt the quickening of a portion of my lust into panic. I took her face in both hands and pulled back the flesh of her temples. What looked back at me was madness. The bitch was insane and I could feel the workings of its contagion on my senses. She stood up and wriggled out of her slacks before helping me remove my own. I heaved her on to the kitchen table in a blizzard of dislodged files and paperwork, A4 sheets spelling out fantasies of confidence and control wafting to the floor like handfuls of confetti flung in honour of our union. The table creaked as she raised her legs to offer me the best point of access, both of her hard, yellow calves crossed beside the left side of my face. I clasped both of her ankles in one hand, the other guiding my cock into the vulva she held open, both of us exhaling at the instant of first contact. I had expected Martina's cunt to be inhospitable, but what I felt myself sinking into was the inviolate meat of a teenage girl. And it was there in her eyes as well, a combination of anguish and delight that I had last seen in the eyes of a young German whore I had ordered up one night in Frankfurt during a trouble-shooting visit. Thus, I didn't think it uncanny when Martina began to sigh in a language I didn't recognize but which sounded Slavic. We were unmistakably creatures of Western Europe, she and I. Our naked flesh spoke of a state of physical and spiritual malnourishment, of incubation under conditions of bland temperateness. But in the furious blood and avidity of our genitals, in the angle at which our bodies were joined and the barbarity dripping from her mouth and mine, I witnessed our rebirth as citizens of a new Mitteleuropa; a vast, sleepless city of infinite novelty. All that remained of the otherwise effaced past were those parts deemed to have charm and thus potential. Memory was a drain upon libidinal reserves that could be expended more usefully. I moved an inch or two deeper inside her, bending forward to kiss her breasts for the first time. She gnawed at the thread of a portion of necklace she had taken into her mouth, her stomach collapsed into a chasm between the opposing ranges of her ribs and pelvis. Though I was glutted to bursting on her physicality, it was this void in the centre of her that I felt most intensely. Her flesh, from upper thighs to breasts, seemed transparent, affording me a hallucinatory glimpse of the works beneath her skin -- the meat and sinew of her thighs sweating with oxygenated blood, the stem of her clitoris ablaze with transmitted and received impressions above a dense root system of neurons, the walls of her vagina hot and elastic around the fully intruded length of my cock. I withdrew myself with deliberate langour and felt her hand upon the one I held myself with, eager to assist in my re-insertion. The kiss we shared in the process was ravenous but with none of the fury that had characterised our initial embraces. Her mouth wanted mine as thoroughly as her cunt wanted my cock, as thoroughly as I wanted every atom of oxygen and drop of saliva in her body. She drew me down against her, winding herself beneath the bulk of my torso, then slapped a hand against either of my buttocks, holding on tight as I began to fuck in earnest; her eyes were black with menace beneath mine, telling me that she was almost there and how she would kill me if I stopped. Her fingers tautened against my flesh, as did her legs, now swaddling my hips. Locked against her, I felt all of the internal violence of her coming, the stillness of the test range trembling almost imperceptibly in response to the detonation beneath its surface. She gagged on rags of breath, riding her pelvis up against mine as the initial implosion gave way to another. My lips surrounded an ear, breathing into her with the heat and roar of a fire-storm. She almost fell from the table but I managed to hold on to her, spinning our bodies around until we had swapped positions. The wood of the table was hard under my arse, still warm from the body now sitting astride me. I clasped the bones of her hips, mine arching upwards in concert with her descent. Our bodies docked in mid-air for a brief instant of weightlessness before the mass of her thrust us down, her pelvis boring into mine, forcing me to a depth and a degree of constriction I had never before encountered. She took advantage of her supremacy by grabbing my arms and pinning them to the table by the wrists. Her eyes were cruel as her hips began to ride up and down, giving me a taste of how it would be for one indentured to her; the incessant nature of her demands; the impossibility of satisfying her. The profundity of her evil and lack of empathy thrilled me more than the grip of her cunt and I felt sick with a desire to become a part of them. She released my hands and swung her upper body erect, then backwards into an arc, her head thrown back, her spine curved into a reaping hook. I placed my palms upon her breasts, succumbing to powerlessness as I felt myself beginning to come. Now it was my turn to experience the lack of substance I had earlier sensed in her. The brute fact of her physicality lorded it over the negation of my own with savage vindication. My hips attempted to jerk upwards only to be restrained by her thighs, ballast-like in contrast to the lightness of the undertaker's fingertips she used to smooth close my eyes. I became one with the come I shot into her, propelled with the same exhilarating velocity into the darkest zones of her interior, the killing floor of her uterus, the drowning pools of her atria, terror and ecstasy revealed to me as different aspects of the same essence. In the distance I could see an exponentially dilating spot of light, more punishingly luminous as it came ever closer, and though I knew that I was going to die in there, the knowledge only made me anticipate the moment of impact all the more. Blast, shock, heat, fire...I intoned the words mentally, like a liturgical response... Carnaro The promised annihilation proved to be nothing more than the opening of my eyes. Her mouth was the first thing I saw, enormous, agape, the blackness engulfing the opening of her throat familiar to me as the amniotic fluid from whose serenity I had just emerged. I felt the dying contractions of my orgasm, her evolving smile a manifestation of the endgame we had now commenced. She lay down on top of me, breathing with heat and distress against my neck, her breasts rising and falling in time with a dull pounding in the back of my skull. With the decomposition of bliss came a series of discomforts -- a cramp in my calf, her arse bone like a blunt blade along the top of my thighs, a smell like washing machine run-off that seemed to be coming from her pores. I heaved her to the side to dislodge her and slid from the table, my feet touching the floor with the uncertainty of the bed-ridden. 'Mick will be back soon.' She turned her face away from me and looked out the window. 'He wants to meet you. Can you stay a little longer? There's so much to talk about and so little time.' 'He's back.' We looked around. Mick was standing in the doorway, looking on with amusement. 'Room for one more?' he said. 2: Alpha Reptile July 2004 I leaned on the balcony rail, watching as a convertible Merc pulled up in the courtyard below. The car's metallic navy was a satisfying addition to the afternoon's palette of blues -- the Adriatic in the distance beneath the cranes of Rijeka port, the cloudless sky, the teal of my swimming trunks. I reignited a dead joint in a cascade of hot rocks, watching as the girl in the driver's seat fixed her dirty yellow ponytail in the rear-view. Even from where I stood, I could see the wan and acne-blasted poverty of her skin, a chronicle of years of undernourishment, incomplete make-up removal, tweaking. She was in her late teens or early twenties -- it was hard to tell with these girls -- retaining some of the willowiness of adolescence in the limbs beneath her white tracksuit. All of the trauma of post-war Central European history was visible in the set of her jaw -- hunger, upheaval, dearth, shabbiness, boredom, paranoia. Back home, a girl her age would still have been mired in the helpless self-absorbtion of childhood. Over here you grew up fast. There was no other choice. She walked to the popped boot and pulled out a small trolley-case before setting off across the courtyard with a gait of manic determination. I sucked out the last of the joint, flicking the roach away as she vanished into the house beneath me, the wheels of her case rattling upon the tiles of the porch. A bead of sweat fell from my nose and burst star-shaped on the terracotta next to my bare foot. Caned and still drunk from the previous night, I hadn't noticed the thermostat of the day being turned up another notch. Marine life swarmed into my field of vision as I turned and sought relief in the bedroom, only to find the heat more intense in there than outside. Darinko liked to turn off the air-con before things got going. Make the bitches sweat. I found him and Martina downstairs in the kitchen, sitting between two fans at either side of a table by the open patio doors. Mick was in the pool outside, swimming length after length. Martina looked up and smiled as I came in before returning to her conversation. They spoke in German -- Martina's Croatian, though passable, didn't stretch to Darinko's weird local dialect -- the gravity of their respective demeanours suited to the harsh syllables they uttered. I took a bottle of water from the fridge and sat up on the kitchen island, picking up a camcorder I found there. It came to life when I flipped out the viewfinder. On the screen, I watched Martina lighting a cigarette, a streaming Mick walking through the door. Darinko looked at me with impatience and muttered something. 'He says, don't press any buttons,' said Martina. 'Else you'll fuck up his shit.' I zoomed in on her face, panning down slowly to take in the diamante choker she was wearing and down again to her cleavage. She was wearing a severe pink and black striped corset, fence net stockings and black PVC knee boots. She also had on a coat of fake tan in spite of the depth of her natural colour -- real fleshtones (Darinko again) looked sickly under artificial light. I lingered a moment on the shiny black lycra stretched over her cunt before moving back up to her face, rendered unfamiliar by the quantity of make up she was wearing. She looked into the camera with solemnity, the perfection of her appearance somehow grotesque. 'The girl is here,' I said. Mick came over and used my water to wash down a blue pill. 'She's getting ready,' he said. 'It'll be another half an hour or so.' 'What's her name?' I said. 'Lenka. Lolenka. Lenkola. Who gives a fuck?' He laughed and said something in Croatian to Darinko. 'The sooner these fuckers all speak English the better,' I said. 'How so?' 'Diversity may be colourful and all but it's inefficient. It costs money.' 'You need to relax. You need a blow job.' He repeated himself in Croatian and all three of them laughed. They had the luxury of doing so. They didn't have to look at the figures that I did every day, each set more catastrophic than the last. Mick clapped me on the shoulder and started to shadow-box. He was coked out of his head, the drug merely serving to accentuate the pitiablity of his badass posturing. But the drugs had little to do with it. The years had, if anything, made him into even more of a dickhead. Even though my dislike of the man was now complicated by sexual rivalry, it didn't take away from his fundamental worthlessness as an individual. These guys. They think they're making all that money because they're so smart, oblivious to the fact that the wealth accrued is as illusory as their intelligence. Chuck the ego accelerant of aesthetics into the mix and they become completely intolerable. But I was only a facilitator, one of Capital's pimps. What the fuck did I know? I looked over at Martina, wanting to let her know that we needed to talk but she was talking to Darinko again, possessed by the same impulse as her husband, hopped up on talk of camera angles and story-boards. It was better to leave them to it. I climbed down and went into the back garden, taking a lighter and one of the pre-rolled joints from Martina and Darinko's table on my way. I collapsed into a lounger and lit up, watching an enormous dragonfly flickering over the surface of the pool. The new dope made me whimsical, transforming the specks of sun upon the water into diamonds and the space between the insect's wings into a rainbow. The fairytale vibe was apt, I decided. None of this was actually happening, and even if it had been, it didn't matter. Grow up, get a job, procreate, retire, die. Or perpetuate your adolescence indefinitely and spend the rest of your life seeing rainbows connecting the tips of dragonflies wings. I closed my eyes against the heat, remembering, on the edge of sleep, the shades I had left in the bathroom upstairs. Martina came to me at some point although it's entirely possible that this was a THC and sun-induced fantasy. She crouched down at my feet, smelling of plastic and carbonized sugar, and took the joint from my fingers. 'Tell me,' she said, holding in her toke. 'We were too late,' I said. 'It's over.' 'It hasn't even started,' she said. 'It's a long way to rock-bottom. There's not enough of us yet is all.' 'And you think there will be?' You know there will. You know they're coming. You of all people should know that they can't help themselves...' The sun had moved to the rear of a grove of orange trees on the other side of the pool when I woke up. Disoriented by sleep and by the complete stillness that prevailed, it took me a minute or so to work out where I was. My tongue was dry like sackcloth but I had no water left, having knocked the bottle over as I slept. I shivered with incipient sunstroke as I walked towards the house, a vague uneasiness liquefying my bowels. The kitchen was deserted but not long since. Recent smoke still tainted the air and the red stain of Martina's lips was still wet upon the rim of the glass from which she had been drinking. I examined a pad that Darinko had been sketching upon, the page full of doodles of curved blades piercing perfectly rendered hearts and vulvas, looking up when I heard a cry sounding from somewhere within the house. I walked into the hall and towards the front room, following a sound of gagging and battered meat that increased in volume as I got closer to the door. Stoned, heat-addled, I lingered on the threshold, watching the scene within with autistic vacancy. The room was stifling. It was white tiled, glass walled on two sides, dominated by a vast granite fireplace that was a megalomaniac parody of the bucolic simplicity it was intended to embody. The curtain slats were drawn and the only light came from two strategically positioned arc lamps, trained on a three sided tan leather sofa in the centre of the room. My view was blocked by one of two screens situated at either end of the sofa, more of Darinko's cinematographic posturing. How hard was it to point a camera at people fucking? I drifted inside, wiping away the sweat that streamed into my eyes. Stripped to the waist, Darinko was on the floor behind the screen nearest to me, manipulating his small camcorder with the restlessness of an auteur. His lens was trained upwards, recording what Martina called the God Almighty shot; penetration captured from the angle that best displayed the cock in all its outlandish and obnoxious arrogance. 'I wish it was actually as big as it looks on film,' she had once said to Mick. 'You wish it was that big.' The girl was on all fours, trapped between Mick at the rear of her and Martina at the front. She was naked except for a gypsy princess' dowry in gold adorning her neck, wrists and ankles and a pair of spike heeled sandals of the same colour, laced to her calves in trellis patterns that culminated in bows underneath the back of either of her knees. When she turned her face to the side, I saw that she was no longer the forgettable thing I had observed from the balcony earlier. She was a work of art. The purple and brown of her eyelids, her rusty cheekbones, the pink jewels of her lips...I remembered Martina, who would have selected the colours, talking about the suggestion of wounds, blood and soil, the marriage of beauty and abuse. Apart from a network of stretch marks upon her flanks and the streakiness of carelessly applied fake tan, the flesh of her body was uncanny in its perfection, more beautiful than any living thing had a right to be. She had so far resisted the lure of breast enhancement but I knew it wouldn't be long before she was defacing herself, like all of the girls did in the end. Comical tit and lip jobs, chin and ass implants, tattoos...between surgery, booze and drugs, they all managed to fuck themselves up. But it didn't matter because there was an endless supply of these girls; an infinite amount of freshness to enjoy before it all went to hell. In spite of the heat and my wasted state, I felt my cock swell with blood. Martina took the girl in a complicated headlock and turned her around to where Mick was waiting to stroke his cock into her mouth. The enthusiasm with which she set about him verged on hysteria, its blatant falseness somehow more obscene than the act itself. Mick babbled dirty movie clichés at her -- suck the fucking cock, show me how good you suck the cock -- his mean girl's affectedness leading me to speculate, and not for the first time, about what team he really played for. His narcissism notwithstanding, he possessed a combination of self-absorbtion and completely irrational misogyny that you only otherwise saw in gay men. The key relationship in what was happening in front of me was not that of Mick and either of the two women but that of him and Darinko. Both seemed to understand implicitly what the other wanted, communicating via a semaphore whose subtext was unrequited love. And though Darinko flattered himself with the term director, it was really Martina who was in charge. Nothing happened that wasn't initiated by her. When Mick lay the girl on her back, it was at Martina's prompting, just as it was her who pulled open the girl's ass cheeks to grant Mick access. 'Show me how you fuck her worthless hole,' she said, looking at me as she did so. Was she talking to Mick or to me? And did 'her' refer to herself, the girl or to womanhood in general? 'Show me how you fuck her worthless,' I thought. 'Show me how the fuck you're worthless...' I rubbed my cock through the lycra of my trunks. Martina, sucking on the cock that Mick had just taken from the girl's ass, looked at me with eyes full of approval. Darinko shouted at me as I walked into the frame but was silenced by Martina. As if I gave a fuck about the niceties of composition. Shoot the scene, cupcake... As the girl took my cock into her mouth, I caught sight of a face in Darinko's viewfinder. It took me a moment to recognize the blotch of glistening meat as my own. I looked up, saw the same expression on the faces of both Martina and Mick. Feeding time at the reptile house. Darinko's insect sac stomach undulated beneath us on the floor, as if on the verge of disgorging a new generation of parasites. He grunted in Croatian, his back leaving a coat of slime on the tiles underneath him, his camera becoming still as the bodies in its gaze attained the economical rhythm of machine production. Though the girl's mouth upon my cock was lusciously wet, as was Martina's cunt, which I frigged violently while kissing her obscenity spewing mouth and though I anticipated the prospect of fucking both women, I felt no real pleasure. I understood for the first time what an addict must feel when giving in to the vice that he knows is destroying him and yet which he nurtures with a parent's love. My head teemed, with impossible numbers imprisoned in spreadsheet cells; a vision of Martina as I had first seen her, turning her head to look at me in the hotel lobby, half of her face boiling with maggots... Mick and I swapped places but I decided that I didn't want to put myself where he had just been. Instead I fell on Martina, pushing her back on to the sofa and spreading apart her thighs. I put my fingers in her mouth as I started to fuck her. 'Choke the bitch,' said Mick. I looked back at his face of pure hate. For a man who as good as pimped out his wife, he remained a slave to the peasant covetousness that had defined his forebears. His libertine pretensions withered away when confronted with the fact that it was his smallholding I was laying claim to. I wouldn't choke the bitch but I would fuck her more thoroughly than he ever could. Martina put her hands on my face and held it steady in front of hers, gouging my cheeks with such force that one of her acrylic nails snapped. 'Good. Good fuck,' said Darinko. It was good. I thrust my cock into her with the steady, deep strokes I knew she liked, dripping sweat and saliva into her open mouth. When I lifted her up, buried to the quick in her, and sat back down with her on top of me, I saw that Mick and the girl had stopped fucking and had moved to the side. The frame belonged to Martina and I. The girl reached for a water bottle and her mobile while Mick could only look on, jerking off his redundant cock with the pathos of the dispossessed. 'Obsolescence.' I took Martina's whole ear in my mouth and hissed the word. 'You want it all,' she said. 'Everything is permitted?' 'Everything...' I came inside her, much to Darinko's disgust. Martina slid from my lap and spoke to him impatiently. 'Now what's his problem?' I said. 'He didn't get a pop-shot.' She wiped her forehead with the girl's discarded thong. 'I told him we can get one later.' She looked at the girl, who was talking on her phone in the far corner of the room, and said to Mick, 'Get her back to work soon. I'm paying her arse to get fucked, not to be sat on.' He was vanquished. All he could do was nod obediently. I picked up my trunks and walked out of the room, back through the hall and the kitchen and into the garden where I dived naked into the pool. I swam a length underwater and crawled back lazily to find Martina standing on the spot from where I had launched myself. She towered above me, her frame blocking out the setting sun as I pushed myself out of the water. 'We should talk business,' she said. 'We should.' 3: The Rapture July 2006. 'Leisure has diversified in the past two decades and will continue to do so. The imperatives of an expanding marketplace cannot be gainsaid. Consumers are continually evolving, becoming ever more sophisticated, liberated by access to hitherto unavailable sources of credit and the capacity to dream that the resulting state of financial independence bestows upon an individual. Carnaro has understood this new reality since its inception. To those who would accuse us of exploitation and pandering to the basest whims of humanity, we reply by holding up a glass in which even the most self-righteous of individuals must acknowledge the truth of what looks back at them. Not their pious fantasy of themselves but themselves as they actually are. Creatures of flesh, blood and desire.' Martina paused, taking a sip of water and resetting her glasses upon the bridge of her nose before continuing. 'Paradoxical as it may seem, we are mindful of morality, but of morality in a new, flexible incarnation, decoupled from an archaic and inutile absolutism. To suppress desire, against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized world, is to transgress against that world's most fundamental motive force. To impede the ability to consume...surely this, given the openness of our contemporary social arrangements, is the real sin?' A couple of the shareholders listening coughed nervously. Watching from a corner towards the back of the room, I rolled my eyes. She couldn't help herself. I kept telling her to skip the theological shit, that it made us sound like loons. Martina disagreed. 'Scratch any of these hard-headed old bastards and there's a drooling romantic within,' she said to me once. 'This is America. Frontier heroism, Manifest Destiny...There isn't a Yank entrepreneur alive that doesn't get a hard-on from the breath of the ineffable.' One of them approached me after Martina had finished speaking. 'I don't know what the hell she was talking about half the time but goddamn it if it don't make sense.' He was from the mid-West, the architect of countless hostile takeovers during the eighties. He'd laid the workforces of entire cities to waste and yet here he was, ecstatic as he would be on the day of the Rapture. Martina, surrounded by a throng of suitors at the base of the lectern from whence she had proclaimed, looked over at me and smiled. Did she ever get tired of being right all the time? 'She's too young to be a widow.' My friend had become grave. 'Such a tragedy.' 'The property racket,' I said. 'The stress killed him. It's a relief to be done with it.' He nodded. 'Too many marks jumping on the bandwagon. But this here...' He swept his arm around. 'We're going to make a lot of money.' 'With the help of God, sir.' * 'Look at this.' Martina handed me a folded over newspaper. The headline read: "Croatian Movie is a Surprise Summer Hit." "The first-time director has fashioned a bittersweet tale about a gay teenager's coming of age in Split during the Balkan conflict," I read. 'Doesn't say anything about his apprenticeship shooting fuck movies.' Carnaro 'Or his taste in chicken,' said Martina. I put down the paper and looked out at the luminous floor of cloud below. Further down, appearing at intervals as indeterminate flashes of grey and brown, was America. Europe as I remembered it, as a repository of shadow and unreason, was gone forever. The light reflected by the clouds shone through the plane's window, spotlighting Martina's newly botoxed forehead. I looked down at her legs, her black nylon calves panther-sleek beneath the tight hem of her skirt. The elaborate facing of her polished ivory blouse mimicked the texture of the clouds outside, the bow at the neck giving way to an arrangement of folds like the inner structure of an organelle. The first time I had unbuttoned it, I was surprised at the ease with which it had come undone. 'Two more hours,' she said. 'Shall we eat?' I nodded and she pressed the intercom. 'Gabriel, we're ready.' 'Oui madame, uno momento.' 'He needs to straighten out which Romance language he thinks he's speaking,' I said. 'You'll never guess what he wants to be.' 'A stunt cock?' 'A director. Darinko mark two. We may get to see growing up gay in Guadalajara after all.' 'Not him too.' 'I'm not sure, but at this stage I suspect all aesthetes.' She was untypically quiet over dinner, as she had been since we had left New York. 'Are you alright?' I said. 'Shareholders. They freak me out,' she said. Her smile, when she looked up at me, was too bright. 'I can't handle their zeal. Especially the Americans.' 'You want a Xanax?' 'I've had one.' I lost interest in my food and watched her eating, remembering what a hot widow she had made. The morning of the funeral, I had her put on just her veil and gloves before fucking her on the bed in which Mick had died. She seemed to take pleasure from defiling the sites that were repositories of certain memories of their life together. We had bought the hotel in Florence where she and Mick had honeymooned, for example, and thrown a week-long party before having the place bulldozed. 'You never talk about him,' I said. 'Who?' she said. 'You know.' 'You should have had the fish.' She pointed her knife at her plate. 'Mick liked fish,' I said. 'His fucking seafood fetish.' She laughed. 'I know what you're trying to do,' she said. 'It's not going to work.' 'I just think it's strange,' I said. 'He was your husband. You had a life with the man. But you never mention him now.' 'They're called "dead" for a reason,' she said. 'What fucking use to me is he now?' 'Grieving is a process, they reckon,' I said. 'Grief is a good racket,' she said. 'When they're distraught, they'll buy anything you put in front of them.' The ensuing silence was punctuated with the salacious hiss of compressed air. I shivered as we crossed into a former time zone. If we had kept flying west indefinitely, we might have travelled back to a day in July four years ago when we had first looked at each other across a hotel lobby. But the same regression, I realized, would also have brought Mick back to life. She would be with him again and I would be back where I had started, consoling myself with fantasies of flying to California aboard a private jet. I never wanted to go back. The past was hateful to me, unreal, like the scenario of a forgettable movie. Her eyes, otherwise vacant, gazed into mine in sympathy. I didn't tell her enough how beautiful they were. * They had intended retiring to the house overlooking Lake Tahoe some day. Built in the Fifties as a summer retreat for an Oakland industrialist, it had been appropriated by his dissolute youngest son, a minor player in San Francisco's late Seventies porn scene. The crowd that gathered around him, a mixture of bohemian Bay Area yuppies and sex industry parasites, had stayed around until the money ran out, some time in the mid-Eighties. He had subsequently been busted for statutory rape and violating the Mann Act and had hung himself in his cell while on remand. The house had stood empty for ten years before Mick and Martina bought it in 1995. She had taken a fascinating series of photos of the place as they had found it that first day. The remoteness of its location had kept the site free from looters and what Martina's camera had captured was a perfectly preserved record of its last days of human habitation. Here too, it seemed, everything had been permitted; in the massive sunken front lounge where an unopened bottle of tequila, maypoled in cobwebs, sat upon an old walnut bodied TV set; in the drained pool, whose walls were daubed with black handprints; in the rotted hot-tub, where snakes had made their home in the midst of a pile of discarded fuck-books, empty ether bottles and dot matrix print-outs. I had the photos published for her, a limited edition of one, in a book I had presented to her on her last birthday. She had seemed more unnerved than touched by the gesture. In restoring the place, they had remained as faithful as they could to the original design. The theme was ranch-house in accordance with the wishes of the original owner who had banal ideas about the frontier and the outdoor life. The weird touches -- a spiral staircase in gold leaf ascending to the attic, Romanesque windows of stained glass depicting scenes from the grail quest in one of the bathrooms -- were down to his second wife, an amphetamine psychotic former opera singer with a Wagner obsession. Martina had ordered exact reproductions of the windows but had managed to salvage and restore the original spiral staircase. 'A monument to Eisenhower-era insanity,' she said the first time we had climbed it together. The attic above had been converted into a scarcely used editing suite by the son -- another one with cinematic visionary delusions -- and Martina had retained it as such. That day, we had watched some rushes from a recent shoot in Jamaica -- wealthy middle-aged women, all friends of Martina, getting fucked by local teenage boys -- and she had sucked my cock to orgasm as I looked out at the lake through a bay window, the bliss of the climax tainted by a strange restlessness. As the chopper approached the helipad cut into the left flank of the forest that surrounded the house on three sides, I felt that same sensation once again but decided it was only jetlag. Martina was exhausted but insisted that she had to finish some editing. 'This is supposed to be time off,' I said. 'Just a couple of hours,' she said, shouting to make herself heard over the noise of the departing helicopter. 'The new stuff from France with Anabel is pretty special.' Bell, bell bell, repeated a bird somewhere in the forest. She took my arm as we walked towards the back of the house. 'You know we have the same birthday?' she said. 'Who?' 'Me and Anabel. And it's so funny because she reminds me so much of myself at nineteen.' 'Because you were getting fucked up the ass for a living at nineteen as well.' 'I was dreaming about it. I was dreaming about this place.' She nodded to the house ahead of us. 'It was all of a piece. When I first came here, it was like it had been waiting for me. And you. You were here as well.' 'You've lost me.' 'You know what I'm talking about.' We had reached the steps that led up to the back porch. 'We've always been here. We've walked this ground so many times, in so many different forms.' I saw her and I in the Fifties, masked and in evening dress at a New Year's Eve ball, drunk on champagne beneath the winking eye of a primitive satellite; hip, radical and luded out as the Sixties became the Seventies; loved up on Dallas X, full of scorn and pity for the decommissioned factories and earnestness of former generations at the dawn of the cybernetic Eighties. 'We're home,' said Martina. * She was taking off her make-up when I came into the bedroom, her skin waxy and shining with glycerin under the glare of the lightbulbs surrounding the mirror of her old theatrical dressing table. Her face looked vulnerable without paint, weak around the eyes that were otherwise so prominent. She let fall a blackened wipe that she had used to remove her mascara and looked at my reflection looking at hers. I had given her the robe she had on. She wore it unbelted, allowing me to see a naked breast in profile, made delicious by the opal coloured silk about it. The colour matched her eyes, emphasized the quality of her skin. She turned around to face me, her slicked back hair flattened to her head and curling up inquisitively at the nape of her neck. The parting of her robe formed an aisle along the central length of her body, one that insisted upon being ascended. Though it was supposed to be our room, I had no presence there, just as I lacked the same in every other part of the house. No matter how long I stayed there, I would never be anything more than an interloper. It was hers, all of it. The disquiet I had felt in the chopper blossomed in earnest, manifesting itself in an accelerating snowball of nausea. I looked down at my hands, disheartened by how the marks of age had begun to make them look unfamiliar. They belonged to a strange old man whose face I couldn't picture. 'You're pale,' she said. 'You should come to bed.' The word lulled me. 'I don't feel too hot,' I said, bending down to untie my shoes. 'That's to be expected,' she said. I stripped down to my boxers and lay upon the bed. In spite of my sickness, I had a painful hard-on. I felt crazed with the dissonance of being so physically aroused yet feeling such a total absence of lust. Martina wanted to fuck. I knew by the way she raised her arms to let her robe slip to the floor, the ceremonial stance of her naked body before the mirror. She had internalized the tropes of porn to such a degree that she had become pornographic, an emanation from a delirious, value-free world normally only glimpsed on the far side of an LCD. I touched my cock but the hardness still had the inorganic texture of a functional piece of hardware at the periphery of a network. Martina stretched, thrusting her head back and her breasts forward, one hand moving in a circle on her stomach. 'I'm so tired and I'm not tired? Do you ever feel that way?' The bed sighed as she placed a knee on its edge. 'I don't know how I feel.' She took my foot in her hands and began to massage it. 'You can cure a man via his feet,' she said. 'Or kill him.' 'How would you kill him?' I said. 'Find the weaknesses and work on them,' she said. 'Murder, by stealth. Death by increment. He's dead before he knows it.' She moved a hand up to my knee, her tongue in the groove between my first and second toe. 'I could be dead, then,' I said. 'You could be.' Her eyes were saurian beneath the vestigial remains of her brows above a tongue that crawled up my calf and onto my thigh in a sequence of figures of eight. The further north she moved, the more I felt of her substance; what had initially been the airiness of limbs in motion gave way to the density of the muscle and bone of her upper body. Stripped of all eroticism, I felt her movement as a shift in the balance of power, a gradual divestment of my physical autonomy. Once she had attained my thighs and climbed astride them, I was helpless. Though I could feel the heat of her breath and of her cunt, she felt cold, indifferent; at once the sterility of ecclesiastical marble and the deathless stability of an as yet unsynthesized compound from which both the civic monuments and the prostheses of the future would be made. When she swooned forward, I thought of her and I arrayed as such, our new, post-human bodies capable of fucking passionlessly for entire millennia; expressing a pure sexuality, one no longer contaminated by the dynamics of emotion and reproduction; the fucking of android deities in the ideal of a virtual paradise. Desire, the infinite stuff...It had no brain, no body. I kissed her with my dead lips, searching with increasing hopelessness for even the memory of excitement but there was nothing. Carnaval Christy and Jayde were in Rio for Carnaval. It was holiday season and they were enjoying themselves. They were both pretty blondes, cousins, aged eighteen and nineteen respectively. They were still virgins but this was more by chance than conscious design. Neither had any objection to losing her virginity in the right circumstances, but neither were they in a hurry to have sex with someone just to be able to say that they had. It would happen when it happens. Tonight they were going to the parade with Raoul and Ramon, a couple of Brazilians in their early twenties. They had sort of teamed up with Christy and Jayde, not as two couples but as a group of four, with the men showing the girls their city. They had, naturally, chanced their arm but the girls had been casual but firm. No sex. We don't know you that well. Let's just get acquainted first and see what develops. Ramon said that he has access to an apartment that overlooked the route of the parade. The girls would be able to stand at the windows and have an excellent view of everything and get some good photos without being jostled by the crowds. No compulsion. The girls could check out the place and see that they weren't being lured into a den of iniquity or be expected to watch Carnaval from a bedroom. This was said a bit tongue-in-cheek, and with a slight smile, but the girls realised that it was only sensible to check things. The apartment proved to be a single bedroom on the fourth floor of a building right in the centre of the parade route. The front room was set up as a lounge room, with a couple of armchairs and a TV, and there were two tall windows either side of a wall column from which they would have an excellent view and get some marvellous photos. The parade was scheduled to start at 9:00pm. The foursome were at the apartment around 8:30, having a light meal, chatting and keeping an eye out for the start of the parade. Very soon they heard the noise levels outside start to rise and realised that the first major Samba school was approaching. "Hey, girls." Ramon called. "Don't just stand in the window. Lean out so you can get a good view of the floats coming and going. The windows are waist high so you won't fall out, and we'll be right here to stop you getting too carried away. And don't forget your cameras. You'll want to put the straps around your neck because if you drop them you'll never see them again." Christy and Jayde know good advice when they hear it and in a matter of moments they are leaning out, taking photos and chatting. Jayde was the first to notice that a problem has arisen. Starting to move back into the room for a moment she was surprised to find that the window seemed to have slipped down, trapping her. She pushed at it trying to edge it up a bit, but it seemed stuck. She yelled to Ramon, but he didn't seem to hear her, so she called across to Christy, telling her of the problem and asking her to get one of the boys to lift the window off her. That's when Christy found out she had a similar little problem. It appeared that both window were faulty and had slipped down, firmly trapping them, though not in a painful manner. They just couldn't get loose. Christy added her voice to Jayde's, trying to let Raoul or Ramon know of the problem, but the boys seem unable to hear them. The girls looked at each other, and then Jayde shrugged. "They'll realise soon enough that something's wrong," she called to Christy. "Don't worry about it for now. Get your camera ready, because by the way the noise is rising I think the first of the Samba schools is approaching." Inside the room, Ramon and Raoul could also hear the increased volume of sound rising from the excited crowd below and relaxed, smiling in satisfaction. Any sounds the girls made from this moment on would be lost in the general roar of noise. The boys headed towards their chosen targets. Jayde was looking out, trying to catch that first magical sight of a float, when she heard a squeal from Christy. She glanced across at her and saw her staring straight ahead, eyes wide with a startled look on her face. And then she jumped and squealed herself, knowing the probable, if not exact cause, reason for Christy's reaction. Moving slightly ahead of Ramon, Raoul had approached where Christy was leaning out the window, her short skirt barely covering bottom at the best of times, and in her current position riding high, revealing a pair of lacy red panties. Raoul had then prompted the squeal and wide-eyed stare by firmly goosing Christy right where those panties covered her precious mound. At the other window, Ramon was about to elicit a similar response from Jayde by flicking her skirt up, taking her panties and proceeding to pull them down, exposing her bottom and pussy to his lascivious eyes. To make matters worse from Jayde's point of view, he didn't just lower them but slid them down slowly, making sure his knuckles brushed against her pussy, both from the front and the back as the panties came off. Jayde then felt his hand at her waist, undoing the clip of her skirt and then the zip, before letting it drop to the floor. Ramon then bent down took and removed her sandals, leaving her completely stripped from the waist down. He then stood back to let Jayde contemplate her predicament. Meanwhile, Raoul, after doing some preliminary teasing of Christy's pussy had just as efficiently divested her of her lower clothes and was now standing next to her. "Did you know," he called to her, "that it takes a Samba school fifty three minutes to complete a march, and the noise stays at that level for the entire time. That means that for the next fifty odd minutes, no-one will hear you yelling." Christy called across to Jayde, who turned seemed to jolt back to awareness of her surroundings and looked back at Christy. She could hear Christy yelling to her, but the riot of noise from below effectively destroyed any chance she had of catching what she said. She picked up the odd word here and there, though. Enough to understand that Christy was in exactly the same predicament that she was. She started to call back to Christy, but her voice broke into another squeal as Ramon, deciding he had waited long enough, placed a hand on Jayde's leg, slid it round between her legs and then lifted it to cup her love mound. Raoul had also resumed his playing, running a hand over Christy's bottom, pushing it down to where the cleft of her legs began and slipped his fingers into the narrow gap, gently prodding at the soft and sensitive flesh he found there. Christy responded by trying to clamp her legs together forbidding Raoul access, at the same time cursing Raoul and her own gullibility for getting her into this situation. Raoul didn't mind the challenge. He ran his hand down Christy's leg to her ankles, taking one in each hand and quite easily forcing her legs apart. Raoul then rose, dragging his hands up the inside of her parted legs, drawing teasingly towards the apex. Christy naturally snapped her legs together again. Raoul rubbed his hand over Christy's bottom, and then delivered a sharp spank to it. Slipped his foot against her ankle and pulled it to the side, parting her legs again and reaching for her pussy. Christy hesitated this time. If she closed her legs she'd get her bottom smacked. If she didn't she'd get her pussy groped. "The hell with him," she thought, pulling her legs tightly together again. While this was going on, Ramon had been making free with Jayde's private parts, stroking her pussy, running his fingers along her slit, slipping the occasional finger within and stroking her sensitive inner flesh. Jayde initially stood there paralysed, unsure what to do, but as the stroking and squeezing continued her temper started to rise. She gauged where she was and deliver a firm back-heel, scoring hard on his leg. Ramon promptly stopped fingering her in preference to delivering a firm spank to her exposed bottom. As far as Jayde was concerned that was neither here nor there. She kicked out again, using her other foot this time, catching Ramon by surprise and landing another blow. Raoul and Ramon stood back and looked at each other. "We have a couple of slow learners," observed Ramon. "Shall we encourage them to learn faster?" "Why not?" returned Raoul, turning back to Christy. He move to her side so that she was nicely position for his swinging right hand. His hand came round in a quick arc, landing firmly and loudly on the right cheek of her bottom. Before Christy had time to do more than yelp, the hand returned, this time leaving a nice red handprint on her left cheek. Christy gave another yelp, yielded the point and hastily moved her legs apart again, granting Raoul the access he wanted. Too late, she realised, as his hand descended again, and again. This time he wasn't just giving her an encouraging smack on the bottom, but a full spanking. Christy started to yell in earnest as the spanking continued. A similar fate had befallen Jayde, with the expected stopping of the spanking when she stopped kicking failing to eventuate. Jayde could feel her bottom being thoroughly tenderised by Ramon's strong hand, all her yelling and wriggling not availing in the slightest. Looking across and Christy she could see her jerking rhythmically and screaming, from the look on her face in both pain and fury. She didn't need to be a genius to work out that Christy was getting a spanking just as good as the one she was getting. Satisfied that the lesson had been learnt both boys reverted to other activities. With Christy's legs now conveniently spread, Raoul turned his attention to her pussy. He had deliberately not touched it during the spanking, and now intended to make up for it. He gently rubbed his hand along her slit, feeling Christy trying to draw away, but without the room to manoeuvre. He let his fingers ease apart her lips, then dart within, rubbing at her tender insides. His other hand joined the first, letting him hold her lips further apart, stretching her while his free hand dipped in and out, flicking over her clitoris, making her cringe anew. Moisture was gathering, leaking out of her vagina and he encouraged it to spread, smoothing it across her lips with his thumb, gently coating both inner and outer lips with her vaginal dew. Ramon meanwhile had decided to ignore Jayde's pussy for the time being. Standing close behind her, pressing into her bottom, he placed his hands on her waist and ran them up inside her top. Leaning harder against her he reached up to her bra, slipped his fingers under the bottom edge and pushed up. Forcing the bra up and off her breasts so that the swung freely within her top. That was his cue, to close his hands upon them squeezing and stroking, using his thumbs to roll the nipples. Little ripples of feelings were now emanating from her breasts, causing Jayde to twist slightly, but into rather than away from those groping hands. She may have still been a virgin, but that didn't mean that she hadn't had some moments, and she had enjoyed feeling a boy play with those twin globes before. The fact that this was unwanted didn't seriously detract from the emotions that were being raised by the friction against them. Raoul had also decided to turn his attention to a little breast work. He had been admiring and wanting to touch those lovely boobs that Christy flaunted ever since he had seen her. Now was the time. Emulating Ramon's action he was shortly pressed hard up against Christy's bottom, while his hand played with those two lovely peaches. Christy tried to move away from that hand playing with her breast, pressing back towards the figure standing so close behind her. Was vaguely aware that her bottom was pressing hard against them, and the suddenly snapped to attention when she realised just what that hard length she was pushing her bottom against, was. Suddenly she straining in the other direction, but with the limited movement that she had she found that all she was now doing was pressing her boobs more firmly into those waiting hands. Now she could sense little trickles of heat from her boobs gently threading down to the heat that had been steadily rising from deep inside her. Ramon had now moved back to Jaydes bottom, gently stroking where he had previously spanked, his finger leaving little curls of reaction under Jayde's skin as his fingers lightly flickered across her bottom, slipping down and capturing the prize that was moistly waiting for him. Jayde winced a little as his hand closed over her mound, cupping it, helping contain the heat within it. Ramon gently palpitated the soft flesh, leaving Jayde shocked at how those gentle squeezes seemed to continue, burrowing deeper and deeper into her. She could feel her lips being parted, then fingers were plunging deeper, following along the path that the little squeezes seem to have activated, rubbing against sensitised internal nerve, lighting the fire that could only be quenched one way. Jayde felt a sting as his fingers came to and slipped into her vagina, brushing away her hymen, barely noticing that her cherry had gone as those fingers delved ever deeper, starting that conflagration that would surely burn her out. She felt Ramon's hand drift away leaving her there, expectant, waiting for what she didn't really know, but waiting and wanting. Raoul now withdrew his hands from Christy's breasts, drawing them slowly down to her waist, across her bottom and slipping back down to her pussy, gently rubbing, encouraging the fire that had died minutely when his hands moved to her breasts to come flaring back into eager life again. Then he released her and stepped back. Christy and Jayde were in a hiatus, not sure what was happening to them. They knew physically what was going on, they were in the process of getting raped, but emotionally they in a void. Their bodies had been coaxed and plundered to a stage where they were anticipating what was to happen next while simultaneously dreading it. The quandary had them paralysed, unable to struggle, unable to resist. They just waited, watching the parade go pass without seeing, knowing that the other was at the window next to them but too lost to look. Inside the room, Raoul and Ramon had been quickly stripping. Ready now they turned back to the girls. Ramon stepped up behind Jayde, pressing his erection firmly up against her buttocks, letting her feel it, letting her anticipate what was about to happen. His hand reached between her legs, stroking her lips again, parting them, placing his cock between and pushing forward slightly, letting her lips close over him and then surging home on one swift thrust. The suddenness and completeness of that crashing entry caused Jayde to scream in shock, loud enough that a couple of people in the crowd below looked up, pausing to wave to the two girls cheering on the parade. As Ramon stood there, deeply embedded within her, Jayde slowly realised that it hadn't hurt. It was just the suddenness that had surprised her. In fact, it felt quite nice. More than nice, actually. It felt good! She liked this. Her body liked this and wanted more. She wasn't sure exactly how to get more because his cock was filling her. There was no room for more, but she had to get some somehow. Raoul had moved up behind Christy and run his cock between her legs, pressing against her lips, letting her feel his member, letting her anticipate this next step. He pressed the head against her lips, feeling her lips swell that little bit more, parting slightly of their own accord, giving room for his erection to grow. He pressed forward, seeking her vagina, feeling himself at the entrance and feeling that barrier that was a warning to boys to go no further. He pressed harder, pushing at the barrier, feeling it stretch. Christy winced as she felt his cock, knocking at her door, hoping he'd go easily, opening the door gently before coming in. She felt him pushing, testing, then withdrawing, then charging forward with a rush, sweeping the door away and rushing forward into her passage. She winced at the stab of pain. "Damn it," she thought. "Couldn't you have used a key to get in, instead of a battering ram? That hurt." Hurt? She was lying to herself and she knew it. There had been a sting, true, but that had been quickly swept away by other feelings as that battering ram of his continued on its merry way, forcing her passage wider to accommodate him, and from the feel of it a lot of accommodation would be needed. Now she realised the good turn he had actually done her by playing so long and so carefully with her pussy, preparing the way for her to lose her cherry and get fucked in a way that would bring her pleasure instead of pain. Now he was in her and she caught her breath, waiting for the rest of the experience. Jayde felt Ramon slowly pulling back and away from her cunt. "I know this bit," she thought fuzzily. "He's in me and now he starts fucking me. Well, he started this so he'd better do a damn good job of it. If he's going to rape someone it's only polite to know what you're doing." She felt Ramon sliding back in and smiled happily. She'd guessed right. She settled down, letting Ramon work on her, slowly building the sensations within her, but... She wanted more. She found she was no longer happy to just lie there while Ramon plunged in and out to his own rhythm. She found herself moving, lifting her bottom to meet his thrusts, reaching and trying to hold on to that slippery monster whenever it came rushing forward, only to lose it as Ramon pulled back, preparing for another thrust. Raoul had felt Christy tense when he had broken her cherry, but noticed that she'd quickly relaxed again as his cock surge triumphantly home into her. Her pussy was hot and wet and tight, and his cock was rampart, wanting to conquer this little fortress, tumble its walls and leave it quivering and helpless. He started to thrust into her, slowly at first, letting her adjust to the feel, feeling her start to respond, to meet his thrusts with thrust of her own, accepting him, encouraging him, wanting him. Christy rode the thrusts, feeling them filling her, taking her over, felt herself draining away. There was no Christy. There was no Raoul. There was only her pussy and that thundering cock rampaging back and forth with her, driving her before it, lifting her up and letting her down with each thrust and withdrawal. Every thrust, a little higher, every withdrawal seemed to drop her a little lower. She was on a giant emotional swing, being hurled up and down by Raoul's lusty thrusting, until suddenly something broke within her, and she felt herself swept away on a flood of relief and life. Ramon felt Jayde's pussy surging back against him, answering him thrust for thrust. He was hammering faster now, pushing her to her limits, seeing how high he could take her before he exploded within her and was lost. Thrust harder, meeting her expectations, exceeding her expectation, taking her to places she had never visited before, and finally feeling his climax rushing through him, into her, and washing her away, leaving her convulsing helplessly around his jerking cock, accepting his seed, devouring his seed, unable to resist the climax that washed through her. The two couples slowly relaxed, coming down from their mutually attained heights, relaxing, becoming aware of their surroundings. The girls felt the boys withdraw, and waited to be released from the windows. Jayde and Christy looked at each other, but found that they had nothing to say. Later, when they were safely back at their hotel, they might discuss it, but for the moment they were feeling slightly shocked and were also a little lethargic as an aftermath of their orgasms. Still trapped, getting a little impatient now, wanting to be released. Carnaval "Hey, Ramon," called Christy. "How about letting us out now." "Later, beloved, later," called Ramon. "The next Samba school is due in a few minutes. You won't want to miss what happens while it passes." "What happens when the next Salsa school comes past?" asked Christy suspiciously. "Raoul and I change partners, and do our best to entertain you again," came the answer, "and there are several more schools to go. Carnaval doesn't finish until the small hours of the morning, and it is our intention that neither will we." The girls looked at each other with horror mixed with anticipation. It looked as though they were in for a long night.