The Venus Fix (12 page)

“Don’t move,” Noah whispered in that slow drawl. “Don’t
move. I want to undress you.” And then he unbuttoned the first button of my shirt and put his lips on my collarbone and kissed me there.

Z
aZa took her time taking off Tania’s sweater. She let her fingers linger on each button, making every moment last an achingly long time. That was what she was supposed to do. It was also what she wanted to do. No matter what, the night would not last long enough. They never did anymore. But she wouldn’t think about that. She wouldn’t think about anything, because that would make her sad. She would just take the pleasure where she could get it. That her partner in this game didn’t feel anything back wasn’t what she needed to think about now. That she was in love with a woman, that she couldn’t get enough of the woman and her skin and her mouth and her hair and her pussy, didn’t matter now. What it meant didn’t matter now. What it said about her wasn’t important. She wasn’t going to put labels on this; it was an acting job. Except ZaZa knew she wasn’t acting, she was feeling all of this emotion. She’d stopped doing it for the camera and the money a long time ago.

Tania stood, unmoving, while ZaZa pushed the sweater off her shoulders, down her arms, to her waist. She breathed in sharply when she’d exposed the other woman’s breasts. Then Tania undressed ZaZa.

Seconds later, ZaZa felt lips kissing her neck—small fluttering motions that progressed from her collarbone up, up, up to behind her ear, where a tongue reached out and licked her skin on the spot that made her twitch and squirm and emit a small moan.

The tongue slid back and forth and then moved in a tiny circle around and around and around until ZaZa couldn’t have told you where she was or who was touching her. It was pure sensation and there was nothing attached to it.

She wouldn’t have minded if Tania never moved away from that spot, but she did, and her skin felt abandoned. The spot was jealous when the tongue and the lips started moving back down her neck.

Tania moved to pull ZaZa’s pants down, and the air on her bare skin was cold. She shivered.

“Never mind,” Tania whispered, “I’ll warm you. I’ll warm you until you don’t feel anything but your own heat.” She leaned across her, silky hair brushing ZaZa’s bare stomach, and reached for the bottle of oil.

ZaZa smiled. Nothing felt as good as Tania’s hands massaging the fragrant oil into every inch of skin on her body. She closed her eyes and waited for the warmth to enter her pores.

N
oah trailed his fingers down my throat and across my chest. I closed my eyes and focused on the feeling. Or, rather, tried to focus on the feeling.

When you are a sex therapist people assume one of two things: that you are an intensely sexual person and interested in sexuality almost to the exclusion of other emotions, or that you have sexual problems of your own and are on the other side of the couch to try to convince yourself you’re fine.

But that’s not how it works for most of us. We become therapists first, and then choose to specialize in sex therapy later, because it fascinates us for a wide variety of reasons, many of which we don’t always consciously know. But for me, it was because Nina Butterfield was the most constant role model I had in my life and she was a sex therapist. So even before I understood what it meant, I wanted to do what she did.

“I am a doctor who helps heal people’s hearts,” she’d told me when I was little. And when my own daughter first asked what I did, that’s what I told her, too.

In my life, I have never been preoccupied with sex and have never thought of myself as highly sexed or a sensualist. I’ve
met women who are, I’ve treated them, and I know how we differ. Sure, I’d enjoyed sex with the man I was married to, but I’d never noticed when we went through dry spells the way he did.

But now, with Noah, I was different.

His fingers trailed down my sides and made circles on my stomach. He lingered there, in the dark, spending whole minutes sensitizing a two-inch circle of ordinary skin that I had never been aware of. His fingers moved so slowly that I became conscious of the texture of his fingertips, slightly rough and callused. The intensity of the touch was magnified a hundred times. Looking at a snowflake through a magnifying glass, you see myriad crystals creating a unique and complicated design that the naked eye is incapable of recognizing. So it was with his one finger on that spot of skin. It was not a single movement that elicited a single reaction, but a constantly changing evocation of impressions that not only affected that area but sent electric warnings shooting through me.

Noah was melting me.

It was like this each time we were together. I always started off half frozen and he had to work me into relaxation.

“There’s nothing to think about but my fingers, Morgan. Nothing but my fingers and your skin.” His voice was as mesmerizing as the movement. The pressure was building to pain. I writhed.

“What do you want?” he murmured.

“More.”

“What else do you want?”

I shook my head.

“Tell me.”

I shook it again.

He put his lips up to my ear. “Let go, Morgan. Let go. Stop thinking.” The rhythm of his words was hypnotic, and the
more he repeated them the less I heard them, the closer I got to disappearing into the feelings. “Let go, Morgan, let go.” The fingers moved into a wider circle. Around and around. I was seeing the circles as hot-blue neon lines going around and around, each crossing the other, exposing layers of nerve endings, shooting the same hot blue through my skin into an inner core, where they became lightning bolts of hotter blue and searing red, circles and then lines that traveled up my arms and down my legs, always coming back to settle deep in my womb, which sucked them in and still wanted more.

Z
aZa moaned under Tania’s fingers as she stroked her from her shoulders down her back, down her spine, down around the cheeks of her buttocks, and then, with the same warm oil, made the reverse trip back up.

Now it was her turn. ZaZa grabbed the oil, poured it into her hands and then rubbed Tania’s breasts. Around and around.

They took turns with the oil and the massage. Back and forth.

ZaZa used more oil to travel up and down the length of Tania’s legs. Tania came around ZaZa from behind and massaged her breasts again. Held them in her hands and gently and reverently drew her fingers around her nipples. At the same time, she pushed her pubis into ZaZa’s ass.

ZaZa pushed back, the pressure was building. Her breasts were on fire.

And then she pulled away and turned around. Tania sat back on her haunches, watching and waiting to see what ZaZa was going to do next, both of them instinctively careful to stay at an angle to the camera so that neither of them would obscure too much of the other.

ZaZa was thinking about how much she loved this woman. How much she wanted to keep touching her everywhere and have Tania touch her back, and how complicated it was because she’d never wanted to be with a woman before and now there was no man she wanted to be with as much.

Tania reached out and rubbed ZaZa’s hard, small clit.

ZaZa threw her head back and closed her eyes and felt her insides throb.
Rub me faster,
she wanted to scream out, but she knew—she had been doing this gig for so long it was second nature to her—she couldn’t rush it yet. There was a pace and a rhythm; she had to stay with it.

But would it really matter if she got off fast once first? Maybe they—the anonymous “they” who never had faces or names—would like more than one orgasm.

Reaching out, ZaZa put her hands on top of Tania’s, which were already playing between her thighs, and encouraged her partner to rub her harder and faster.

Then she placed her own hands between Tania’s thighs. She knew the other woman wouldn’t mind the change in the routine, and would be happy to oblige.

ZaZa put one oiled finger inside of Tania. Tania put one oiled finger inside of ZaZa. Two women mimicking each other’s movements.

W
hen I came, it was sharp and intense and hard-won. Noah had been waiting for it, holding back until he felt my body stiffen, and then he let go, moaning into my ear. The same ear he had been gently and patiently whispering into—a breeze of words that had, in the end, been the same mantra that urged me into an orgasm.

When he rolled off me he didn’t disengage completely, but left our sides touching and our legs crossed. Once he’d caught his breath, he reached out and played with my hair.

“I can’t stop,” he said. “I’m exhausted but I can’t keep my hands off you.”

“I’m flattered.” I kissed him lightly on his lips.

After I pulled away, I saw him open his mouth and then shut it, as if he had been about to say something and changed his mind. Sometimes I wished I wasn’t so damn observant. I didn’t want to be an expert at sensing and noticing and understanding other people’s emotional states when I was involved. I closed my eyes.

“I’m not going to give up on you, you know,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t know?”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. “I have no idea.” And I didn’t. His words had caught me by surprise.

“Are you as afraid of us as you seem to be?”

“You know, Detective Jordain, it’s not in the slightest bit sexy for you to lie here and psychoanalyze me.”

“
Au contraire,
my dear. It’s utterly sexy. Two of us, naked and glistening with lovemaking, and me figuring out your very complicated brain. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing.”

I laughed. He leaned over and kissed me. Not a light and teasing kiss as mine had been a minute before, but a long kiss, with his lips pressed tight against mine, letting it last and linger, taking my breath away. He knew that, too.

“You’re completely relaxed now, aren’t you?”

“Hmm.”

“Good. Just lie there now. There’s more I want to do to you.”

With his hands on me, the way he was holding me, I couldn’t have thought about anything else if I’d wanted to.

T
ania was gasping for breath and ZaZa smiled at the intensity of the orgasm she’d given her, increasing the pressure of her fingers on Tania’s clitoris. She wasn’t going to stop. As soon as her partner’s breathing slowed and her orgasm ended she was going to start on her again, and then again. She was going to amaze her. And then, later, when the camera was off, she was going to tell Tania how she really felt about her.

Focusing, listening to the other woman’s breathing, ZaZa waited to hear the intensity slow down. Damn, this was lasting a long time. She waited. Still there was no slowing down. Something was wrong.

Maybe Tania wasn’t gasping in the throes of an orgasm. Maybe she was gulping for air.

“What is it?” ZaZa whispered, not wanting to break the mood for all the men who were watching, but concerned about her friend.

When Tania slumped over and continued the rasping, ZaZa really began to worry. Clearly this was not a sexually-induced reaction, but before she could do anything, she felt the first wave of nausea overtake her. It hit her hard. Failing to hold it
back, she vomited uncontrollably, right there on her own bed. Her head suddenly ached, too. Bad. She couldn’t breathe. Christ. Everything was blurry, confusing. She tried to say something. To tell Tania she was sick, too, but she was so dizzy. She could see Tania at the end of the bed, curled up in a ball, shaking, and she wanted to reach out to her, but she couldn’t figure out how to move in that direction. Nothing was where it should be, everything was skewed.

“I’m really sick,” Tania whispered.

ZaZa couldn’t even answer. She just stared at her with eyes that felt as if they were on fire.

“You’re sick, too,” Tania said. She tried to get up but couldn’t find her balance.

ZaZa was willing her to get up. She had never felt so bad in her life. She needed some water. Some air. She needed to be able to breathe. More than water, she needed help. Tania needed help, too. ZaZa could see that.

Finally, using the back of a chair and then the edge of a table, Tania managed to make it to the desk where the computer was. Where the phone was.

ZaZa tried to talk, to tell her to tell them to hurry, but all that came out was a low and raspy moan. She couldn’t form the words, but she could still see what was happening.

She watched Tania pick up the phone. She was so sick, but she was thinking about how at that moment, Tania had broken the computer connection and ZaZa’s broadcast had gone dead in thousands of homes, hotel rooms and offices. She’d also tipped over a glass of wine that spilled onto the keyboard and shorted out the motherboard. One way or another, that Web cast was fated to go dark.

Right before ZaZa passed out, she saw Tania manage to dial 911.

Sunday
Twelve days remaining

T
he phone rang, jarring me awake. I could barely open my eyes, and I reached for my cell phone where I always left it when I was away from my daughter, on the bedside table. But before I could find it—while I was still groping in the dark— I heard Noah talking. It was his phone.

I lay there listening to the one-sided conversation, unable to fill in the gaps but making wild guesses at what was going on.

“What time?”

Pause.

“What hospital?”

Pause.

“How are they?”

Pause.

“Which one?” One last pause. “Okay. I’ll be there in a few hours. I can turn around and fly back here for Monday.”

I heard the click as he shut the phone and the thud as he put it back on his nightstand. As he lay back, his breath was rapid and his body was tense.