RED 2: A Trick of Mirrors [#Wattys2017]

15. Love Potion

At ten, Marco and Marisa met Robert and Eliana at a bar for a drink before the party. If appearances counted, the garments of each of them revealed their dispositions. Marco and Marisa had opted for proper but informal, she in a halter pink dress with a flowing skirt, he in black slacks and shirt. Robert went by a burgundy polo shirt and jeans, indicating he didn't consider group sex to be a matter of ceremony. Eliana, on the other hand, sported a long black taffeta dress with a stiff structure that resembled an armor.

No one alluded to the orgy, but at eleven sharp the four descended to the last deck before the waterline, advancing to the stern where a private lounge was situated. Its double doors were guarded by a uniformed agent with shaved head and shark-like beady eyes, whose size Marisa estimated to be six by six feet. He requested their passwords and marked their attendance in a tablet. Mumbling in a walkie-talkie, he waited for a moment and opened the door enough to give way to one guest at a time.

They found themselves in an antechamber encapsulated in blood-red curtains that vibrated with the electronic beat from the contiguous room. A hostess in a long black dress handed them kits in plastic cases and satin masks rimmed with tiny crystal beads—black for the men and white for the women, with sufficient fabric to cover half of the face. She warned them to keep the masks on for avoiding expulsion, smiled and wished then a good time.

The curtain opened and shut softly behind them, confining the four to a room with a glass wall and a hot tub in the back. Laser beams ricocheted on the dance floor, which was sided to the left by a bar and a red pool, and to the right by low tables, sofas and colorful divans. About forty people circulated across the room, and more guests were arriving. It seemed the prosaic setting of any nightclub. Everyone was dressed.

Marco ordered a bottle of Prosecco and the four of them hung around the bar observing the movement on the dance floor. Marisa searched the contents of her kit. Under the expected lubricant and condoms was a white pill wrapped in cellophane. She read the label.

"Love potion. What is this?"

"Probably ecstasy," said Marco.

"Well?" She stared at the other three. "Shall we take it?"

They gobbled the pills with Prosecco and formed a circle in the middle of the dance floor while waiting for the effect. At the sound of a saxophone conjuring deliciously wicked images, Tracey Thorn sang Get Around To It with honey in her voice.

Play with me, blow off steam

I'm the new toy in your kit

Tell me your wildest dream

If you can get around to it

From time to time, one of them would cast a glance at a door in the back where a security agent kept watch. At last, won by curiosity, they gravitated to it. At that stage the hot tub hosted a couple that had already freed themselves from their clothes. The woman manipulated the erect penis of her partner under the water, her pale arm emerging and disappearing amid bluish bubbles.

The four approached the security guard who, without a word, opened the door to the neighboring room. Inside, Eastern music welcomed them in the dim perfumed with musk. Lanterns scattered in the corners radiated webs of golden light across Persian rugs with their labyrinths of vines and flowers. The lowered ceiling snaked in expanses of purple silk converging to the center and hanging like a gush of fire above a round bed with two naked couples. Nearby, an erotic chair waited for its next occupants.

Along the walls, smoky gauze curtains delimited a succession of alcoves with low beds covered in heavy spreads and pillows. The niches accommodated up to four persons and provided double curtains: one transparent for seeing and being seen; the other, dark and opaque, for privacy. Here and there, blacked-out alcoves interspersed with open ones.

The focus of Marco and Marisa, Robert and Eliana darted across the room gathering and processing details. The impressions multiplied, sounds, smells, body parts, for everything there was plural, rooting them in the inescapable intensity of the present.

A trio enters the room. A woman in a silver mini dress with a sinuous body, blue eyes and waves of blonde strands. She's escorted by two men in black, one a tall blond and the other shorter with his brown hair tied in a ponytail. The woman advances to the erotic chair. She's totally carefree. The mask preserves her identity and she can be whatever she wants: a sex goddess, a pornstar, the heroine of an erotic novel, a frustrated housewife reborn to the thrills of life. She parades before the audience and the chair is her stage. This flat chair that features a reclining surface and a convenient frontal pad for the partner. This chair theatrically red.

Lights, camera, action.

She lies down and spreads her legs. The blond man positions himself at her feet. He unbuttons her dress down to the waist and fondles her naked breasts. The brown-haired guy stands behind her. He cups her face in his hands and kisses her upside down in the mouth. Afterward he licks her ear and descends to her nipples while the other man lifts her dress and removes her white thong. The men recline the chair, and the woman has her hips projected upward. She flexes her legs to hook the heels of her sandals in the handles of the chair, offering a view of her sex behind a veil of shadows. The blond man kneels on the pad and covers her with his mouth and hands. His tongue circles and penetrates her, his fingers concentrate on the clitoris and the dark fringes of the labia. The brown-haired man unzips his pants, takes his best friend out and places it in the woman's mouth. She holds his penis with both hands, which follow her mouth moving down with a twist at the base, playing with the testicles. The penis grows, increasingly large as it pushes in and pulls out her mouth. Sticky sounds of suction. The brown-haired man grips her hair. The other partner is aroused too, he spits on his palm and lubricates his trophy to rub it up and down on her. He enters with shallow and quick thrusts and keeps entering until disappearing inside her in a long lunge. He retreats slowly and advances once more. Again, again, again. And the woman. The woman rocks her hips to his rhythm, and her moans vibrate to the music. She lets the other man slip out her mouth, a necklace of salty sweaty beads across her chest, which he sweeps onto the shell of his tongue. She rolls her eyes, upper body arched and head tossed back dancing in a circle from side to side, blonde strands sprawled like sunrays. Then the arch of her body reverses and the head jolts forward. Her face contorts behind the mask, the minute crystals glisten. Her eyes are closing. She digs her nails into the upholstery, collapsing amid spasms and acute heaving.

She screams and gasps and laughs.

Her orgasm tears the air, bristles the skin, throbs until invading the flesh. Marco and Marisa, Robert and Eliana avert their eyes. There's a round of applause and someone whistles. The four of them barely register it though, for what persists in their ears is the strident release of the woman. Inarticulate, primal, thundering in every single nerve. They stare at one another without a reaction. They aren't intimate enough to share an experience like this.

And yet here they stand.