Skin Folk (28 page)

He’d gone silent, embarrassment shutting his open countenance closed; too shy to describe the sensation he was seeking. Issy
sighed in irritation. What was the big deal? Fuck, cunt, cock, come: simple words to say. “In that few minutes, you’d find
out what it feels like to have a poonani, right?”

A snatch. He looked shy and aroused at the same time. “Yeah, and you’d, well, you know.”

He liked it when she talked “dirty.” But just try to get him to repay the favour. Try to get him to buzzingly whisper hot-syrup
words against the sensitive pinna of her ear until she shivered with the sensation of his mouth on her skin, and the things
he was saying, the nerve impulses he was firing, spilled from his warm lips at her earhole and oozed down her spine, cupped
the bowl of her belly, filled her crotch with heat. That only ever happened in her imagination.

Cleve ran one finger down her body, tracing the faint line of hair from navel past the smiling crease below her tummy to pussy
fur. Issy spread her knees a little, willing him to explore further. His fingertip tunneled through her pubic hair, tapped
at her clit, making nerves sing.
Ah, ah.
She rocked against his thigh. What would it be like to have the feeling of entering someone’s clasping flesh? “Okay,” she
said. “Let’s try it.”

She picked up Cleve’s stim. So diaphanous you could barely see it, but supple as skin and thrice as responsive. Cocked up
onto one elbow, Cleve watched her with a slight smile on his face. Issy loved the chubby chocolate-brown beauty of him, his
fatcat grin.

Chortling, she wriggled into the suit, careful to ease it over the bandage on her heel. The company boasted that you couldn’t
tell the difference between the microthin layer of the wetsuits and bare skin. Bullshit. Like taking a shower with your clothes
on. The suits made you feel more, but it was a one-way sensation. They dampened the sense of touch. It was like being trapped
inside your own skin, able to sense your response to stimuli but not to feel when you had connected with the outside world.

Over the week of use, Cleve’s suit had shaped itself to his body. The hips were tight on Issy, the flat chest part pressed
her breasts against her rib cage. The shoulders were too broad, the middle too baggy. It sagged at knees, elbows, and toes.
She giggled again.

“Never mind the peripherals,” Cleve said, lumbering to his feet. “No time.” He picked up her suit. “Just leave them hanging.”

Just as well. Issy hated the way that the roll-on headpiece trapped her hair against her neck, covered her ears, slid sensory
tendrils into her earholes. It amplified the sounds when her body touched Cleve’s. It grossed her out. What would Cleve want
to do next to jazz the skins up?

As the suit hyped the pleasure zones on her skin surface, Issy could feel herself getting wet, the mixture of arousal and
vague distaste a wetsuit gave her. The marketing lie was that the suits were “consensual aids to full body aura alignment,”
not sex toys. Yeah, right. Psychobabble. She was being diddled by an oversized condom possessed of fuzzy logic. She pulled
it up to her neck. The stim started to writhe, conforming itself to her shape. Galvanic peristalsis, they called its ability
to move. Yuck.

“Quick,” Cleve muttered. He was jamming his lubed cock at a tube in the suit, the innie part of it that would normally have
slid itself into her vagina, the part that had been smooth the first time she’d taken it out of its case, but was now shaped
the way she was shaped inside. Cleve pushed and pushed until the everted pocket slid over his cock. He lay back on the bed,
his erection a jutting rudeness. “Oh. Wow. That’s different. Is so it feels for you?”

Oh, sweet. Issy quickly followed Cleve’s lead, spreading her knees to push the outie part of his wetsuit inside her. It was
easy. She was slippery, every inch of her skin stimmed with desire. She palmed some lube from the bottle into the suit’s pouched
vagina. They had to hurry. She straddled him, slid onto his cock, making the tube of one wetsuit slither smoothly into the
tunnel of the other. Cleve closed his eyes, blew a small breath through pursed lips.

So, so hot. “God, it’s good,” Issy muttered. Like being fucked, only she had an organ to push back with. Cleve just panted
heavily, silently. As always. But what a rush! She swore she could feel Cleve’s tight hot cunt closing around her dick. She
grabbed his shoulders for traction. The massy, padded flesh of them filled her hands; steel encased in velvet.

The ganger looked down at its ghostly hands. Curled them into fists. Lightning sparked between the translucent fingers as
they closed. It reached a crackling hand towards Cleve’s shuddering body on the bathroom floor.

“Hey!” Issy yelled at it. She could hear the quaver in her own voice. The ganger turned its head towards the sound. The suits’
sense-memory gave it some analog of hearing.

She tried to lift her head, banged it against the underside of the toilet. “Ow.” The ganger’s head elongated widthways, as
though someone were pulling on its ears. Her muscles were too weakened from the aftershocks. Issy put her head back down.
Now what? Think fast, Iss. “Y…you like um, um…chocolate fudge?” she asked the thing. Now, why was she still going on about
the fucking candy?

The ganger straightened. Took a floating step away from Cleve, closer to Issy. Cleve was safe for the moment. Coloured auras
crackled in the ganger with each step. Issy laid her cheek against cool porcelain, stammered, “Well, I was making some last
night, some fudge, yeah, only it didn’t set, sometimes that happens, y’know? Too much humidity in the air, or something.”
The ganger seemed to wilt a little, floppy as the unhardened fudge. Was it fading? Issy’s pulse leapt in hope. But then the
thing plumped up again, drew closer to where she lay helpless on the floor. Rainbow lightning did a lava lamp dance in its
incorporeal body. Issy whimpered.

Cleve writhed under her. His lips formed quiet words. His own nubbin nipples hardened. Pleasure transformed his face. Issy
loved seeing him this way. She rode and rode his body, “Yes, ah, sweet, God, sweet,” groaning her way to the stim-charged
orgasm that would fire all her pleasure synapses, give her some sugar, make her speak in tongues.

Suddenly Cleve pushed her shoulder. “Stop! Jesus, get off! Off!”

Startled, Issy shoved herself off him. Achy suction at her crotch as they disconnected. “What’s wrong?”

Cleve sat up, panting hard. He clutched at his dick. He was shaking. Shuddering, he stripped off the wetsuit, flung it to
the foot of the bed. To her utter amazement, he was sobbing. She’d never seen Cleve cry.

“Jeez. Can’t have been that bad. Come.” She opened her thick, strong arms to him. He curled as much of his big body as he
could into her embrace, hid his face from her. She rocked him, puzzled. “Cleve?”

After a while, he mumbled, “It was nice, you know, so different, then it started to feel like, I dunno, like my dick had been
peeled
and it was inside out, and you, Jesus, you were fucking my inside-out dick.”

Issy said nothing, held him tighter. The hyped rasp of Cleve’s body against her stimmed skin was as much a turn-on as a comfort.
She rocked him, rocked him. She couldn’t think what to say, so she just hummed a children’s song:
We’re stirring cocoa beneath a tree / sikola o la vani / one, two, three, vanilla / chocolate and vanilla.

Just before he fell asleep, Cleve said, “God, I don’t want to ever feel anything like that again. I had breasts, Issy. They
swung when I moved.”

The wetsuit Issy was wearing soon molded itself into an innie, and the hermaphroditic feeling disappeared. She kind of missed
it. And all the time she was swaying Cleve to sleep she couldn’t help thinking: For a few seconds, she’d felt something of
what he felt when they had sex. For a few seconds, she’d felt the things he’d never dared to tell her in words. Issy slid
a hand between herself and Cleve, insinuating it into the warm space between her stomach and thigh till she could work her
fingers between her legs. She could feel her own wetness sliding under the microthin fibre. She pressed her clit, gently,
ah, gently, tilting her hips toward her hand. Cleve stirred, scratched his nose, flopped his hand to the bed, snoring.

And he’d felt what she was always trying to describe to him, the sensations that always defied speech. He’d felt what this
was like. The thought made her cunt clench. She panted out, briefly, once. She was so slick. Willing her body still, she started
the rubbing motion that she knew would bring her off.

Nowadays any words between her and Cleve seemed to fall into dead air between them, each not reaching the other. But this
had reached him, gotten her inside him; this, this, this and the image of fucking Cleve pushed her over the edge and the pulseburst
of her orgasm pumped again, again, again as her moans trickled through her lips and she fought not to thrash, not to wake
the slumbering mountain that was Cleve.

Oh. “Yeah, man,” Issy breathed. Cleve had missed the best part. She eased him off her, got his head onto a pillow. Sated,
sex-heavy, and drowsy, she peeled off the wetsuit—smiled at the pouches it had moulded from her calabash breasts and behind—and
kicked it onto the floor beside the bed. She lay down, rolled towards Cleve, hugged his body to her. “Mm,” she murmured. Cleve
muttered sleepily and snuggled into the curves of her body. Issy wriggled to the sweet spot where the lobes of his buttocks
fit against her pubes. She wrapped her arm around the bole of his chest, kissed the back of his neck where his hair curled
tightest. She felt herself beginning to sink into a feather-down sleep.

“I mean the boiled sugar kind of fudge,” Issy told the ganger. It hovered over her, her own personal aurora. She had to keep
talking, draw out the verbiage, distract the thing. “Not that gluey shit they sell at the Ex and stuff. We were supposed to
have a date, but Cleve was late coming home and I was pissed at him and horny and I wanted a taste of sweetness in my mouth.
And hot too, maybe. I saw a recipe once where you put a few flakes of red pepper into the syrup. Intensified the taste, they
said. I wonder. Dunno what I was thinking, boiling fudge in this heat.” Lightning-quick, the ganger tapped her mouth. The
electric shock crashed her teeth together. She saw stars. “Huh, huh,” she heard her body protesting as air puffed out of its
contracting lungs.

Issy uncurled into one last, languorous stretch before sleep. Her foot connected in the dark with a warm, rubbery mass that
writhed at her touch, then started to slither up her leg.

“Oh God! Shit! Cleve!” Issy kicked convulsively at the thing clambering up her thigh. She clutched Cleve’s shoulder.

He sprang awake, tapped the wall to activate the light. “What, Issy? What’s wrong?”

It was the still-charged wetsuit that Cleve had thrown to the foot of the bed, now an outie. “Christ, Cleve!” Idiot.

The suit had only been reacting to the electricity generated by Issy’s body. It was just trying to do its job. “S’all right,”
Cleve comforted her. “It can’t hurt you.”

Shuddering, Issy peeled the wetsuit from her leg and dropped it to the ground. Deprived of her warmth, it squirmed its way
over to her suit. Innie and outie writhed rudely around each other; empty sacks of skin. Jesus, with the peripherals still
attached, the damned things looked like they had floppy heads.

Cleve smiled sleepily. “Is like lizard tails, y’know, when they drop off and wiggle?”

Issy thought she’d gag. “Get them out of my sight, Cleve. Discharge them and put them away.”

“Tomorrow,” he murmured.

They were supposed to be stored in separate cases, outie and innie, but Cleve just scooped them up and tossed them together,
wriggling, into the closet.

“Gah,” Issy choked.

Cleve looked at her face and said, “Come on, Iss; have a heart; think of them lying side by side in their little boxes, separated
from each other.”

He was trying to joke about it.

“No,” Issy said. “We get to do that instead. Wrap ourselves in fake flesh that’s supposed to make us feel more. Ninety-six
degrees in the shade, and we’re wearing rubber body bags.”

His face lost its teasing smile. Just the effect she’d wanted, but it didn’t feel so good now. And it wasn’t true, really.
The wetsuit material did some weird shit so that it didn’t trap heat in. And they were sexy, once you got used to them. No
sillier than strap-ons or cuffs padded with fake fur. Issy grimaced an apology at Cleve. He screwed up his face and looked
away. God, if he would only speak up for himself sometimes! Issy turned her back to him and found her wadded-up panties in
the bedclothes. She wrestled them on and lay back down, facing the wall. The light went off. Cleve climbed back into bed.
Their bodies didn’t touch.

The sun cranked Issy’s eyes open. Its August heat washed over her like slops from a bucket. Her sheet was twisted around her,
warm, damp and funky. Her mouth was sour and she could smell her own stink. “Oh God, I want it to be winter,” she groaned.