Belonger (An erotic novel): Part One Read online

  “A creature of the Gnomon,” Ione whispered almost reverently, channeling an apocryphal knowledge.

  “A gnome,” Emma nodded, stirred by its masculinity. She wondered how it had come to inhabit such a desolate place.

  They stared down in squinting wonderment at the jade light beaming from its eyes, destined to illuminate a vast underground territory by elaborate voyages of reradiation. The shadow of their bedboat collected above them in a blot, hovered forth oracularly as they drifted high over the gnome’s motionless body, left it regretfully behind.

  The boat was moving at some speed further down the channel when Emma saw the lower half of a woman sprawled on the muddy right bank.

  “Look!”

  “Kick us over,” Ione commanded, rising cautiously.

  With some awkward maneuvering they drew abreast of her position and debarked, newly alert for men. Ione pulled the woman by the ankles from the stream and they rolled her over, letting water drain from her lips.

  When she was empty, Manassa leaned down and kissed her, breathing her first breath. The woman woke coughing, stared about uneasily.

  “Who are you?” Ione demanded, flushing at what she had witnessed.

  “How did you get here?” Emma more gently inquired, gathering a mass of bedraggled brown hair away from a fearful countenance.

  “This? Better to then forget and however…”

  “Uh… what?” Manassa replied.

  “Left easy stiff doing who. How for been,” the woman anxiously qualified.

  “What is she talking about?” Manassa questioned.

  Emma sighed. “Nothing, probably.”

  “Gone, gone and ever for held in never!”

  The woman muttered chaotically in this fashion, and they listened for a while, interrogating her in progressively simpler terms till it was obvious they were wasting their time.

  “She can’t do better than nonsense,” Ione sniffed, standing.

  “Few can at first,” Emma mused, glancing thoughtfully to Manassa.

  “If it was when a skulk did take,” the woman moodily explained. “After who sees busy need…”

  “It’s not totally random,” Manassa observed. “She uses real words.”

  “Yeah,” Emma nodded, listening to her lilt and flow of earnest, bewildering speech. “And says’em like they mean something. But that’s a slipper for you,” she remarked, using the informal name for such women. “They all talk like that till they get familiar with their situation.”

  “Are there more around here?” Manassa stepped back to the water to peer carefully down.

  Ione nodded wearily. “Yes. Many.”

  There were shortly a six of slippers groggily shuffling about the bank, which soon doubled to a dox of their number.

  The bedboat could not accommodate so many, and their options might have narrowed uncomfortably, but more flooded vessels were discovered nearby and more women too, and after much effort and administration they eventually continued, a loud and loosely dispersed convoy fitfully regulated by the velocity of the lead craft.

  Ione decided to call a halt when a small crowd of women had accumulated. No skulk had been seen or heard as they traveled, but the unlit intervals of waterway that presented were now so extensive in places she knew whole armies of men might lurk invisibly in their midst.

  Manassa seemed unconcerned by this threat, an annoyingly unmilitant attitude that clearly desensitized the other women in turn—even Emma, whose personal history encompassed many sad humiliations at the hands of skulks. Ione wondered when and how their huge companion might learn about men for herself, allowed herself a moment’s dark anticipation at the prospect.

  The slippers they had rescued were almost helpless, manageable by just two means in such unstructured circumstances. One was playacting; an energetic pantomime that vaguely coordinated their behavior. By simply pretending everything made sense, Emma and Manassa could coerce their inclinations by force of personality alone, subtly steering the nonsense to useful ends. The noisy, arm-waving mummery this entailed seemed to delight everyone involved, compounding Ione’s irritation.

  Where these histrionics failed Manassa resorted to a dishearteningly efficient whole-body persuasion, massive legs planted at sure tangent to the desired locomotion of flesh as her exotically nude vagina flexed gregariously among their blond and brown naps, secretive-seeming by comparison.

  By these methods they had been able to get the women distributed onto boats, leaving Ione gratefully free to negotiate the route. She had taken advantage of this to search for a place to camp as fatigue was rapidly overtaking them all.

  They were now entering a high-ceilinged cavern, lit to a ruddy glow by a crimson-eyed gnome hung by a thick chain from a projection of rock above them. A restless current prowled the area, departing on many channels. Along one side of the chamber a broad cuticle of grass beckoned, ideal for their purposes, and after a brief survey of its tumbled contours Ione directed her companions to moor the boats.

  “Not exactly private…” Emma cautiously observed.

  Ione shrugged. “There are a lot of ways to escape, at least.”

  Manassa skipped dexterously onto soft turf. “That’s nice!” she sighed, stamping about happily. Emma followed her, anxious to stretch her legs.

  After a brief interval of confusion they got the women into the lake, shouting and splashing with each other. Linens, scrub brushes and various other balneal conveniences had been discovered in a locked bedboat cabinet, and now they were passing around a fragrant cake of soap, oblivious to its latent threat. Blankets and towels had been drying as they traveled, were spread invitingly about the hummocked turf of the camp now.

  When they had finished bathing Ione assigned the women to sleeping sites, watched Manassa and Emma’s increasingly efficient teamwork as they settled them in place, helping out where dignity allowed.

  “Why are we pairing them up like this?” Manassa wondered. Ione turned slightly but waited for Emma to respond.

  “Uh… well, they’ll want to get off, right?” she said with self-conscious jocularity, leading a bouncy little redhead to a taller woman looking around presumptively. “But these slippers would fuck around all night without some kind of plan, mostly just masturbating. As couples they can climax, relax and get to sleep.”

  “Why do you call them slippers?”

  Emma shrugged. “Dunno. Need some name I guess since they’re so different from us. Skulks trick’em into all kinds of mischief if they’re not looked after.”

  “So they… What is masturbating?” Manassa stared at an unassigned woman dreamily rubbing her vagina with a circular movement of two fingers.

  Ione was moved to amazement at this, turned to stare plainly at Manassa. “You’ve never touched yourself?”

  Emma rubbed her blond pubis in demonstration, gestured flirtatiously to the bigger woman’s bare labia. “It’s quite lovely to practice. But you can’t climax that way.”

  Manassa watched her, eyes narrowing in interest. “What’s climax?”

  Ione spoke with slow disbelief. “The culmination of sexual arousal. The orgasm. The peak, the payoff.”

  Manassa was clearly roused by this concept, so ardently described. “Heh. Sounds like something I should figure out…”

  Emma giggled. “I’m sure you will. But not without help…”

  “Why?”

  “Takes two people to climax,” Emma grinned. “Can’t be done alone. We’ve all tried. Endlessly”

  Manassa regarded the camp, newly interested in the couples ranged about.

  “They’re like you, mostly,” she mused. “One big, one small.”

  Ione cleared her throat. “Yes. It, uh… simplifies things.”

  Emma regarded the women, then glanced covertly to Manassa’s groin, unable to mask her lust Ione sourly discerned.

  “You’ll see it all soon enough,” the little blond pertly advised the huge woman. Manassa grinned, evidently content to wait.


  “Let’s go,” Ione nodded to her lover, bluntly terminating the exchange.

  Not long after she was alone with Emma in the farther waters of the cavern, treading slowly as they methodically soaped themselves. Manassa walked the camp in their absence, location cheerily advertised by an occasional ass-slapping inducement to order. The slippers were far from unhappy with this attention, laughing noisily enough to provide an echoing camouflage for their own activities.

  The past was slowly fraying in Ione’s consciousness, looming into congruency at a familiar sound or gesture only to veer off-balance just as suddenly, aligned to some fantastic, submerged context. She was watching Emma now, shoulders rising and falling to a barely discernible tread, the only person in the group who shared her complicated history.

  “What do you really remember from before awakening? Anything about an ambush?”

  Emma hesitantly shook her head. “I recall how we met and our time together as doyennes, and I can access all kinds of facts and names, but they don’t seem to have any order or connection. The first thing that felt real was waking up, Manassa staring down at me…”

  Ione was silent for a while.

  “Emma, I’m trying to hold things together. I really am. But I can barely distinguish the past from the present. It’s like everything already happened but got rearranged somehow.”

  “I know exactly what you mean, love. I’m scared to even think about certain things.”

  “Like what?”

  Emma’s expression went slack. “Like… like what happened when we reached the Lap. I have this epic memory of trying to get there, but the place itself seems like a mirage, filled with jumbled possibilities that always go wrong somehow.”

  Ione nodded slowly. “Can you remember men? Not skulks, but actual men?”

  “No. But I want to… Can you?”

  Ione looked away bleakly. “I don’t think the conditions in my mind are right.”

  They trod silently for a time, perfunctorily cleansing themselves.

  “What role is Manassa playing in this?” Ione moodily pondered. “She seems conspicuously ignorant about certain things.”

  “Oh?” Emma lathered her arms with distracted diligence, carefully indifferent.

  “She claims to know nothing about us, yet she was apparently cast by fate to our exact location.”

  Emma considered this fact uneasily. “But she rescued us. Doesn’t that deserve some kind of trust?”

  “Maybe. But how did she herself awaken? She can speak intelligently, but she’s not a doyenne. We would have heard of someone like her, even if she was just a slipper, Emz. Have you ever seen a snooch like that? I didn’t know it was possible to shorten, let alone entirely remove hair. How did her vagina get that way?”

  Her lover could not suppress a lecherous glint at the mention of Manassa’s genitalia and Ione scowled.

  Emma gulped, dove into a tight scoop that delivered her between Ione’s legs, thrusting hard to send her long body into a backfloat, buoyed by a fast tread.

  “I think it’s someone else’s vagina that needs attention,” she soothed, and kissed Ione chastely on the crotch, tickling up her labia to arrest with innocent engagement at its dimpled apse.

  “Is this really a good idea? We need to talk.” Ione clamped her thighs inhibitingly, but this only made it easier to engage her.

  Emma reached down to her own crotch, tugged something free and produced one of the recovered toys, a small plastic device called a splay she had deviously preserved from view as they swam. It featured a bulb-shaped vaginal insert that curved out and up to spread the labia wide, presenting the clitoris through an oval opening for convenient rubbing and licking. It could be comfortably gripped by either party and was sensually textured.

  Emma positioned it at her lover’s seam, forced it gently within. Ione squirmed at this unsolicited occupation of her body, but glanced back to the camp to verify they weren’t being watched and reluctantly closed her eyes. Emma plunged the toy back and forth, massaging her interior till she sighed, relenting to the effect.

  “I’m just gonna kiss you up a little, hmmm?” she whispered and put her lips to Ione’s pubis, swabbing delicately across the ovaled aperture of the splay to tickle the intimate projection of flesh centered there. Ione exhaled sharply, legs widening in helpless abetment of the act, seduced by the returning familiarity of the other woman’s touch. She submitted to circumstance for the first time since waking, let her lover decide things for a while.

  Emma licked with slowly blossoming heat at her clitoris, sensually washing the tiny erection with each rounding flirtation of her dexterous tongue, chastely kissed it for a term to moderate her pleasure, then licked at it again, a slow alternation of favors that in all only teased. But this canny coercion gradually built to a whole-mouthed osculation that displaced everything else from notice, and the tread of her shapely legs lofted them both, imparting a lunging lilt to her slippery oral favors.

  Emma drove the splay deeper into her vagina, rubbing the textured bulb along its sensitive upper tract, humming wantonly, lathering Ione’s twat with single-minded intent, gathering every wayward impulse to a centering desire.

  “That’s it, love,” she breathed, heaving from the effort of treading now. She plunged the splay again, forced it down hard till Ione’s clitoris was starkly distended from the oval breach.

  “Shower time!” Emma giggled, and lapped up a mouthful of water. Ione groaned as her womanhood was lovingly spritzed, compounding her increasingly fervent ambition to consummate the act.

  Emma filled her mouth again, issued another sputtering spew onto her clit with a spiral flourish, an intimate transmission that flirtatiously beckoned the conclusion. Ione heard a wandering sound emerge from her own throat, knew she would climax if Emma would kiss her there just one more time. But the little blond sensed her nearness to fulfillment, defied her by languorously fountaining her turgid tip again and again, nimbly countering the manic need for release.

  “That feels sooo good…” Ione suspired. Emma lovingly sprayed her pussy with sucked and gulped mouthfuls of warm lake water, one after another.

  “Please, love…” she begged at last.

  “You wanna come, sweetheart?” Emma teased. “Is that it?”

  “Oh yesss,” Ione implored. “Please…”

  Emma forced the splay hard against her vulva and Ione’s swollen pudendum was bullied wide by its uncompromising girth.

  “Then we’ll just kiss the pink one more time and see what happens…”

  Emma limbered her lips into action once again, licking and tickling Ione’s womanhood with slowly advancing passion till her stiffened point went abruptly slack, loosening to a submissive blot under her tongue. Emma pressed a thumb into the notch of her anus, servicing a private requirement, and Ione chopped helplessly at the lake as her dignity fled in taut little eruptions, the futility of self-control multiplying her joy to a ragged shout.

  “Oh lick it, lickitup lickituplickitup… yesssss!”

  She abandoned herself to a sublime syncopation with the other woman, rising and falling on a wake of rapturously rendered oral sex as Emma conveyed her stroke by fluttering stroke to bliss, legs churning the water about them to a roil. She worked Ione till the ecstasy was fully indulged, thumb sensuously massaging her knotted sphincter, monitoring its telltale clench and release through the time-slurred interval of orgasmic transport. When it relaxed for good she gently kissed Ione’s pubis and withdrew her lips, thoughtfully letting her lover savor the afterglow as she held them both.

  Then they were uncoupling, apart again, staring slightly away, silent in the distant ambience of the camp women.

  “Thanks,” she whispered, not sure if Emma heard.

  Manassa hollered, cracking a towel, and a slipper hastily scrabbled back to her designated partner, rubbing a chastened posterior.

  Emma pulled into an expectant backfloat, and Ione drifted closer to oblige.

  “Imagine trying this on
Manassa,” the little blond quipped, grinning exhaustedly.

  Ione stared. “How could you be thinking about her now?”

  “What?” Emma was abruptly on the defensive. “I wasn’t! I mean–

  “Oh. Of course. You want to teach her about pleasure. Quite reasonable. She is ignorant on the subject, along with everything else that might explain her past—or ours.”

  “No! It’s just that–

  “What, Emma? She’s special like us? Makes decent conversation? Flaunts a glamorous snatch? She’s a stranger,” Ione hissed. “We can’t trust her, certainly not under these circumstances. I don’t know what to make of it that you want to!”

  Emma’s crumpled demeanor finally registered the distance that had accumulated between them since waking, and when she spoke again all defiance had quit her tone.

  “We were strangers once, too.”

  The lake fell silent for a moment, restored to a solitary custom.

  “Maybe we still are, whatever the past seems to imply,” Ione shrugged, brusquely disdaining sentiment. “So we’ll take care of your treacherous urges back in the camp.” She turned on this threat, stroking off at a pace the smaller woman couldn’t match.

  Emma stared unhappily after her dwindling form, remembering…

  The skulks of the green streams were not especially cunning, but Emma had somehow failed to detect an organizing will lurking beneath their individuality, a hidden gravity of desire, and this time she knew the consequences would be severe. She trod in silent exhaustion, no longer trying to swim, lost in a labyrinth of subterranean waterways seldom visited by outsiders.

  Emma had wanted company. She was friendless, excluded by the established societies of women for reasons that were never formally acknowledged by the doyenne couples that ruled them. She had finally realized they were simply fearful she would disrupt their rigidly dualized loyalties—Emma could think and speak like them. She had no place in their governance therefore and was unhappily consigned to the company of women that possessed only a contingent form of intelligence; slippers.