Ellen could be kind that way.

And the days took care of themselves.

By night, Elle. Just Elle. "What"s in a name?" Shakespeare had asked, and she"d decided plenty. With the lopping off of a single letter she had created an entirely different life.

She even felt different when that was what others called her, what she called herself. "Ellen" was safe and respectable, a fine name to endorse on the backs of paychecks. But "Elle" rang with mystery and resonance, conjured a slick wet alchemy of surrender and seduction.

For years now that name had been eagerly welcomed by the sort of clubs that are frequented only by those who knew where to find them; whose new members arrived only by invitation and discreet word of mouth; where no one was ejected to the streets for improper conduct, because everyone there knew precisely what everyone else had come for.

Her beauty and willingness to experiment were prized. She was almost tall, not quite. Her raven hair, when unbound, contrasted with her pale luminous skin and ripe lips in delicious nocturnal severity. She had a twenty-three-inch waist but could corset it down to eighteen. Men and women alike loved to wrap their hands around it, or nuzzle over the smooth tight curves on their way to the drenched heat between her thighs.

Tonight"s lovers were no exception, at times all six hands caressing her tiny middle, some lightly tender, others rough and groping with urgency. The club"s name was the Inner Circle and variety was everybody"s spice.

She"d spent the past couple hours as part of a foursome, one of her preferred configurations. Two men and two women-she found a perfect symmetry there, something intended by nature, along with the four winds and seasons, the cardinal points of a compa.s.s. The Inner Circle offered an orgiastic central room aglow with gauzy mood lighting, or more private quarters with plenty of cushions and sprawl, and they"d opted for the latter.

She filled her mouth with Daniel while Mitch filled her from behind; she cradled Jill, kissing her deeply, as the men traded off between the women"s legs; she and Jill tongued one another"s feverish c.l.i.ts while Daniel and Mitch were yet locked inside them; Jill straddled her mouth while holding her ankles wide ... and in Elle"s broad experience you usually needed more men, because their glands betrayed them and they wore out so much sooner. Still, they gave their all, and she drank it with her mouth, c.u.n.t, a.n.u.s. She cried out loudly, in cycles, pulled the others into her singly, as pairs, all three. She made a dinner of s.e.m.e.n, a dessert of the musky dew on Jill"s swollen and petaled cleft.

And there was always so much silence when bodies fell still, unable to give or take any more. It always felt as if the world had just ended, and they all lay naked and wet in the ashes.

"You"re ravenous," Daniel told her. Blond, well-toned, he lay in a sweaty half-curl near her side, reaching over with one finger to probe beneath the edge of the black corset. Jill and Mitch lay in their own raw exhausted tangle a few feet over. "I"d like to see you again."

"You might," she said. "I"m no stranger here."

"So I understand." Grinning, he elbowed closer, crawling like a soldier. "How long"ve you been coming here? Double entendre not intended."

"Look, you don"t have to engage me in conversation, all right? I f.u.c.ked you tonight, and I"ll probably f.u.c.k you again."

He rolled onto his back, relaxed, unfazed. "I wish I was nineteen again," he sighed. "I could come five times a night when I was nineteen. But the sad thing was, I was alone for most of it." He peeked at her, hopeful. "Are you feeling pity for me yet?"

He was so obvious, and knew it, that Elle had to laugh in spite of herself. "You late bloomers, you"re so maudlin when you start dwelling on what you"ve missed."

Daniel said he was valiantly fighting the pull of gravity, here on the downhill side of the s.e.xual bell curve. Confessed he was thirty-five-coincidence, or karma? She was closing fast on thirty-five herself, but then weren"t they all, for the first or second or tenth time.

She let him talk, and he was pleasant enough without seeming possessive. A few of the guys in these places, in spite of their laissez-faire posturing, they nailed you once and it was as though they"d staked a claim. So she let Daniel talk, but already her thoughts were drifting ahead. Tomorrow night, or the night after ... future nights at other clubs, wondering where she"d be, what she"d be doing, who she"d be doing it with.

Maybe at the Purgatorium, with the rings through her hardened nipples and chained to a leather belt while some hooded dominatrix violated her with a strap-on.

Or maybe with the Jezebel Society, where g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gs were a specialty, and where, on knees and elbows, she could be triply penetrated while ma.s.saging a c.o.c.k in each hand.

Or elsewhere, with company even more exotic, but always sure to wring more from the experience than her partners. It was a kind of challenge, something bone-deep and primal.

And she wondered if, wherever she"d be, after she was sated and lay breathing heavily, she"d once more start dreaming of the next time before the sticky fluids of that night had even dried.

Could you even completely look forward to that next time when you could so easily forecast your pose by its end? Even in private clubs like the Inner Circle, the Purgatorium, the rest, s.e.x could get as routine and predictable as some fat suburban couple"s half-hearted hump scheduled for the second Tuesday of each month. It was only a matter of degree.

And she wondered if considering these things, in a room with three other nude people whose potent s.e.xuality had just soaked the walls, meant that she was bored.

Figuring that, in the asking, she already had her answer.

A few days later Ellen came back from lunch, took one look behind the counter, and wondered if one of Jude"s facial nips and tucks had begun to unravel. The woman"s forehead appeared ready to burst veins.

"He"s ... upstairs," she said through clenched teeth.

Ellen frowned. "Who? Who is?"

"That ... that creature." Jude seemed to need the counter to remain vertical. "From the alley."

"Ohhh," she said, and frowned again, more thoughtfully. "Was everything in place when he came in?"

Jude"s eyes widened, horrified at the very notion she"d have glanced down to check. "You see, you see-it"s types like his that make me think Affirmative Action is a terrible imposition on the rest of us. No telling what he"s doing up there."

Ellen started for the stairs. "Maybe he needs help reaching a book. We don"t have elevators for the shelves, did you ever think of that?"

"You"re going up?" Jude clutched the counter, all bony white knuckles and maroon nails. "What if he has his w.i.l.l.y out again?"

Over her shoulder, Ellen smiled with rea.s.surance. "Then I"ll suggest he find a more appropriate bookmark."

This befuddled poor Jude. Upstairs, Ellen began to check the aisles, the shelves older and taller and dustier up here, home to the store"s used and vintage and rare books. She"d always accorded a greater respect to the browsers who spent their time here.

She found him in fiction, as st.u.r.dy and vital in his chair as if it were an outgrowth of him. He sat engrossed in a book, not so deeply that he didn"t notice her approach. His face lit with a self-effacing smile, and she tried not to recall how it had looked the other day, self-pleasured and unashamed. And so powerfully attuned to his body. Not one in a thousand could get past his lack of discretion, and she supposed that finding this a simple matter made her the odd one as well.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

He pointed at the second shelf from the top. "Even chimps use tools to get what they can"t reach, but ..." He spread his empty hands. "Eleventh from the left, if you wouldn"t mind."

She stretched, pulled it down, looked over the cover before handing it to him. "De Sade, Justine. Not too much call for that."

His grin was apologetic, wholly engaging, set in a weathered ruddy face. A shock of hair tumbled over his forehead. "Loaned mine out and never got it back. Home feels incomplete without it."

Ellen smiled back. Or maybe it was Elle this time. Elle in daylight, rattling at her prison. "Myself, I"m partial to 120 Days of Sodom."

He seemed merely delighted, not surprised. "I"m sure we each have our reasons." Vigorously, he patted Justine"s cover as if it were the shoulder of an old friend. "I appreciate his philosophy here. The utter lack of reward for living a virtuous life. And every one of these sick sons of b.i.t.c.hes in here states his reasons for acting like a depraved monster with such eloquence it makes you want to cry." He shrugged. "But obviously you know that."

Her grin turned mildly wicked, and she checked to make sure they were alone. "You want to know what I found most eloquent? When Justine"s captured by the bandit, and de Sade gets across the idea of a b.l.o.w.j.o.b without using one concrete anatomical reference. I loved that."

And thus it went on, impromptu critiques and appreciation of the works of a man who"d scandalized a continent, whose debauches were legend, whose name itself had enriched the vocabulary of the erotic. Time got away from them, and once she started to laugh as she imagined what by now must have been going through Jude"s mind downstairs. The poor woman frantic, calling paramedics, priests, a SWAT team. She should go quell Jude"s fears.

"I"m enjoying this," he said at last. "I really am. You know the way you can just tell, sometimes, that you can talk to someone and let a half-hour go by and you won"t even know it? I knew you"d be someone I could talk to."

"And how"s that?" She had to know. He was either far more intuitive than Jude, and most of the day-herd who muddled through downstairs, or she"d let something of night inside shine free.

"You didn"t look away on the street the other afternoon. You held your ground ... and watched." His eye contact was bold, candid.

She stood there, tongue-tip wedged between her front teeth, clothed yet her garments may as well have been sheer. Caught. She was caught. Knowing it had to come someday, but always taking for granted the person would at least have legs. Caught.

"It was the look on your face," she whispered. "I-I didn"t even think you noticed me then."

As he laughed and rolled his eyes, she found his easy candor extraordinary. And while she"d known plenty exhibitionists, she got no sense that his pleasure had derived from being watched. It had been grounded in the physical, she was sure of it.

"I get carried away sometimes. I really shouldn"t, but when it feels that good, and the mood strikes ..." He shrugged, palms up. "You know, you may think it doesn"t, but your face gives you away too. Like does know like, when it knows what to look for. I don"t think I"m completely off-base here, am I?"

A blush threatened to warm her cheeks. Embarra.s.sment? She"d not even thought it possible anymore. The challenge in her tone of voice was merely affectation: "What is it you think you see?"

He appraised. "In your eyes. It"s always in the eyes. This look when your guard slips. Something unsatisfied, maybe a little angry. Okay. I know-it"s like someone just stole the last sliver of chocolate torte right out from under your fork."

Ellen"s laugh was soft, low, throaty, half-pleasure and half-challenge. Chocolate and s.e.x. This man may have had no legs, but he most definitely had her number.

"Look," she said, "I have to be getting back to work. But I think I"m going to need your name ... and some way of getting hold of you later."

His name was Adam, and the address he gave took her to a dim neighborhood where her footsteps were solitary echoes against walls of brick and stone, where the pale faces of residents peeped out from behind barred windows. Everything malingered beneath a stubborn dusting of industrial fallout, and the last of the year"s greenery twined dead and brown around sagging wrought iron fences. Privacy would be valued here, and respected.

Adam played the proper host, skimming through his apartment and around corners as quickly as if he were on a basketball court. He mixed fine drinks, served hors d"oeuvres that hadn"t come from a deli. He showed her his books, including the freshly reinstated Justine. He let her notice for herself his collection of fetish videos, and be the one to suggest slipping a disc into the player. There was a lot in the way of nipple clamps and whimpering, later the obligatory golden shower, and they were really just marking time here, weren"t they? She might"ve yawned once. Adam shut it off before the end.

"It"s been awhile since I"ve watched this," he said. "Been awhile since it even did anything for me."

"So why sit through this much if it"s that pa.s.se to you now?"

He shrugged easily. "Humoring you?"

"Oh, that"s a laugh," she said, and she was Elle again, had become Elle without one bit of effort. Adam recognized this. Like knows like, and from here it was a very short trip to the bedroom.

Unclothed, his body was a peculiar marvel. Incomplete, but hard and sculpted, like a magnificent Greek statue that vandals had smashed in two. His genitals seemed all the more for it, large and immodest. His lower trunk flexed with new rhythms she"d never felt without the normal counterbalance of legs. As he meshed with her, braced upon two powerful arms, she could run her hands along the tapering curve of his back, cup the clenching muscles of his a.s.s. Could run her hands farther down and cup the smooth rounded stumps where his legs just ended. She couldn"t think of him as an amputee. It felt as if Adam were complete, whole, and his hips met some other plane, where his legs existed in another dimension.

For hours they rolled, locking themselves into twisted new arrangements. Positions once denied her because of one set of legs or the other getting in the way were now accessible. And Adam was tireless, his commitment to ecstasy for a long time bordering on possession, then tipping far beyond. He had a whole body"s worth of pa.s.sion compressed into half the ma.s.s. Each time he came it was with a straining convulsion of ardor, racked with groans and shudders that might"ve been endearing were they not so intensely animal. For any less experienced a woman, Elle decided, his plunge into the heart of his own pleasure would"ve been frightening.

But for herself? It was maddening, feeling for the first time ever that she had been left behind, that there was no way she could draw more from the most ravaging of f.u.c.ks than her partner. He had eclipsed her, and if at the bookstore he"d nearly prompted in her a flush of embarra.s.sment, he had now done the unthinkable: He had inspired envy.

I want whatever it is you have inside, she thought, and lay as stunned as if a new galaxy had opened before her. Lay with him in the sweat-soaked afterglow, her c.u.n.t lips puffy and throbbing. It lasted long moments, even as Adam stirred, even as he traced a hand along her face.

Even as he said, "If you stay with me, you ... you may not be seeing me this whole for much longer," and she found it a peculiar thing to say. But consider her life.

It certainly was no stranger than hearing someone confess his love.

Their relationship grew from that night, a happy co-existence of need and availability, willingness and daring. She didn"t know how long it would last, but this was the way things were done on their level. Emotions and attachment rarely figured in. It was more the delight of connecting with someone who didn"t judge, who understood that not everyone craved a permanent partner at his or her side through life. Who trusted the physical body"s immediacy more than a bamboozled heart.

It saved time. It saved money. It saved pretense.

Adam happily listened to her recount various liaisons at her nocturnal haunts, his erection like a club curving away from the base of his body. He would close his eyes, smiling as she conjured for him images that would drive the average man to frenzied fits of jealousy and despair: Elle, flogging the back of a submissive man until he rimmed her with a quivering tongue; coaxing an o.r.g.a.s.m from the sluggish genitals of an uncut transs.e.xual; bending a girlfriend over her lap and paddling her bottom cherry red while a nervous old couple watched from chairs.

Adam listened, and Adam trembled. She had read, one memorable lunch break, that artist Salvador Dali could think himself to o.r.g.a.s.m. She wondered if Adam wasn"t far away from it himself.

"Your turn," she demanded once, in an uncharacteristic sense of quid pro quo. "You"ve hardly told me a thing about yourself. I want to know all the dirty stuff you did before you met me." Then, with a grin, "Besides pulling over for quickies with yourself in the alley."

He pretended to consider sharing. "I know some people. You"re not the only one with a members-only pa.s.s."

He teased her with silence then. Adam"s smile was annoyingly aloof; smug, even. He could be so superior when he wanted, all in fun, but he knew d.a.m.n well how curious she was, that she wondered if he"d not had some esoteric training to channel s.e.xual energy, let it feed upon itself like nuclear fusion. Something to do with Indian chakras, perhaps. Tantric s.e.x magick. Teach me too, was the unspoken gist of her hunger. Teach me or I"ll strangle you.

"So what does it take to meet these people," she asked, "or am I not good enough?" Guilt-that was a fair tactic. "You"re ashamed of me, is that it? Not worth f.u.c.king in front of your friends?"

His weatherworn face creased with a heartfelt smile. "You may be ready after all." He ran a hand along her body, lingering here, there, anyplace where bones joined. "But then, Elle"-and it sounded anything but rhetorical the way he said it-"what have you got to lose?"

Adam took her to another unfamiliar neighborhood. This newest stop on the search for the bigger and better o.r.g.a.s.m was a no-man"s-land where residential met industrial and both had died of blight. The building of intent was a church whose congregation had long since moved away, broken up, lost faith ... something. They"d left behind an orphaned edifice surrounded by trees stripped bare by smokestacks that had themselves died, all of them now in a stark eternal autumn. The church sat gothicly stolid, sooty and gray.

"Privately owned now," he said, and she wheeled him up a ramp at one side of the steps. It looked to be the only thing kept in good repair.

He unlocked the door, then stopped inside the nave, and before her eyes could adjust to the dimness, dangled a black strip of blindfold. "I"m afraid I have to insist."

Elle stiffened. His demand reeked of threat-how well did she really know him? Curious women died all the time, led to h.e.l.lish ends by their hungers and strangers who betrayed misplaced trust. But back out now and she was a coward, a poseur. Adam knew that, of course, could easily exploit her sense of self.

She bent at the waist, let him fasten it around her head, and a cool cathedral night descended upon her. "If you cannibalize me," she said, "I"ll haunt you "til you die," then she bit firmly on his ear. He just laughed.

Elle rested her hand on one of the grips of his chair as he wheeled forward, let him lead her along as if blind. They pa.s.sed through swinging wood doors. She shuffled her feet, seeking clues. Further still, and in this dark nucleus of intuition the room felt vast-the sanctuary, but a sanctuary redefined. It smelled of s.e.x and sweat and ecstasies.

Her senses expanded, took in the others that surrounded them. Whispers on the periphery, a crawling sensation of being watched, appraised, admired. The menace of the unknown. Movement-were these others drawing closer?

Adam stopped, had her lower to the floor while he swung from his chair and joined her. His mouth pressed roughly to hers, and his hands rose to strip her clothes away. Moments later his hands were joined by others. Naked, blind, she was laid back on cushions that shielded her from a floor that felt old, n.o.body"s priority.

"Beautiful," came someone"s voice, "even if she is whole."

She submitted to the hands that stroked, caressed, and in their numbers lost track of Adam. He was subsumed into the ma.s.s around her.

Her back arched, her mouth parted to suck a finger that slipped past her lips. Her nipples stiffened beneath circling palms. Their hands gave a hundred delights, promised a thousand more.

They opened her legs then, swung her ankles wide, and as one checked her wetness, then murmured approval, she heard the rustle of someone else moving into position. She was entered then, and gasped. It was huge, pushing deep, deeper still. What began as a groan became a wailing cry, treading that delicious threshold separating rapture from agony. She was filled near to being split, yet still wasn"t aware of a male body hovering over her. There was no press of hips against hers.

Elle reached down with her hand, felt herself caught by Adam.

"One finger," he whispered in her ear, and she found him again. "One finger"s all you get."

Trembling, slowly rolling her hips with the rhythm set up by the ma.s.sive phallus, she extended one finger. His hand guided hers ... and she touched, glided a few inches. Flesh. It was flesh, firm and hard.

"Satisfied?" he asked, and she was and she wasn"t. n.o.body could be that big ... could he?

It wasn"t for the mind to ponder-she let go of the thought, surrendered to the here and now, the reality of sensation. She drew a deep breath and braced herself, elbows on the floor. Took it. Took it all in. Thrust back with muscled hips and grunts through feral clenched teeth, feeling as if she were at war with this monstrous thing inside her. Riding it until it brought her low and sent her soaring, and her voice pealed from rafters gone dead with dust.

Drenched in sweat, she fell back into someone"s arms, felt her lover withdraw, receding into a blackness that was total, her sole world. They waited until she got her breath, then a hand was on her chin, urging her lips to part. She obliged, eager to surmount exhaustion, prove herself worthy. Whoever these people were, she wanted to be one of them, take what they offered, give what she had. Her lips parted, and her tongue serpentined out to explore what her eyes were denied. She touched warmth.

It was at her mouth.