“Marty . . .” she breathed, “roll over.”
He wasn’t sure of this maneuver at first, but once he was on his back, and she sitting on him, he caught her rhythm easily. He began to climb again: dizzy with the height.
The pain at her neck persisted, but she thrust it out of focus. She bent forward, her face six inches above Marty’s, and let saliva fall from her mouth into his, a thread of bubbles that -he received with an open grin, pushing up into her as deep as he could go and holding himself there.
Suddenly, something moved in her. Not Marty. Something or somebody else, fluttering in her system. Her concentration faltered; her heart too. She lost focus on where she was and what she was. Another set of eyes seemed to look through hers: momentarily she shared their owner’s vision. She saw sex as depravity, a raw and bestial exchange.
“No,” she said, trying to cancel the nausea that had suddenly risen in her.
Marty opened his eyes to slits, taking her “no” as a command to postpone the finish.
“I’m trying, babe . . .” he said, grinning. “Just don’t move.”
She couldn’t grasp what he meant at first: he was a thousand miles from her, lying below in a foul sweat, wounding her against her wishes. “OK?” he breathed, holding on until it almost hurt. He seemed to swell in her. The sensation drove the double vision out of her head. The other viewer shrank away behind her eyes, revolted by the fullness and the fleshiness of this act; by its reality. Did the intruding mind feel Marty too, she half-thought, its cortex plumbed by a cock-head that was swelling to cream even now?
“God . . .” she said.
With the other eyes in retreat, the joy came back.
“Can’t stop, babe,” Marty said.
“Go on,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
Flecks of her sweat hit him as she moved on top of him.
“Go on. Yes!” she said again. It was an exclamation of pure delight, and it took him past the point of return. He tried to stave off eruption for a few more trembling seconds. The weight of her hips on him, the heat of her channel, the brightness of her breasts, filled his head.
And then somebody spoke; a low, guttural voice.
“Stop it.”
Marty’s eyes fluttered open, glancing to left and right. There was nobody else in the room. His head had invented the sound. He canceled the illusion and looked back at Carys.
“Go on,” she said. “Please go on.” She was dancing on him. The bones of her hips caught the light; the sweat on them ran and ran, glowing.
“Yes . . . Yes . . .” he answered, the voice forgotten.
She looked down at him as imminence infested his face, and through the intricacies of her own flaring sensations she felt the second mind again. It was a worm in her budding head, pushing forward, its sickness ready to stain her vision. She fought it.
“Go away,” she told it, under her breath, “go away.”
But it wanted to defeat her; to defeat them both. What had seemed like curiosity before was malice now. It wanted to spoil everything.
“I love you,” she told Marty, defying the presence in her. “I love you, I love you-”
The invader spasmed, furious with her, and more furious still that she didn’t concede to its spoiling. Marty was rigid, on the threshold; blind and deaf to anything but pleasure. Then, with a groan, he began to spurt in her, and she was there too. Her sensations drove all thoughts of resistance out of her head. Somewhere far off she could hear Marty gasping
“Oh, Jesus,” he was saying, “babe . . . babe.”
-but he was in another world. They weren’t together, even at this moment. She in her ecstasy, he in his; each running a private race to completion.
A wayward spasm made Marty convulse. He opened his eyes. Carys had her hands glued over her face, fingers spread.
“You all right, babe?” he said.
When her eyes opened, he had to bite back a shout. It was, for a moment, not her who stared out between the bars. It was something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Black eyes swiveling in a gray head. Some primeval genus that viewed him-he knew this to his marrow-with hatred in its bowels.