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It started when Margo sat in the chair in the corner of Alice’s room with her arms lying atop the chair’s like it was a throne, leaned back, spread her knees apart just an inch, and smirked.
Technically it had started downstairs a half hour before. Like it always started: Alice trying to lubricate an uncomfortable evening with alcohol and someone sidling up to her. Margo. She started her buddy-buddy routine that always put Alice on high alert as her body flooded with adrenaline. Here was a pretty, confident girl being nice to her—supposedly. There had to be an ulterior motive, a trap being laid.
Then Margo leaned forward and pressed her mouth to Alice’s.
Oh. There was the angle.
It didn’t eradicate Alice’s suspicions. Some primal, animal fear, dating back to the antediluvian muck of middle school, said this was merely an unusual level of commitment to the bit, to setting up the punchline. Truth or dare? Ghostly, girlish giggles echoed in Alice’s amygdala. Either way she knew she would lose. Call truth and she got laughs poorly muffled behind hands as she was asked if she’d ever been kissed. The losses branch out. Say no and be revealed as a loser. Say yes and the freakishness of the idea induced shrieks of delighted horror. Call dare and end up on the roof of Jessica K’s house, no one believing she’d jump, and then suddenly being no longer on the roof but on the ground among a circle of screaming girls, leg broken, and instead of gaining respect for her nerve she’d freaked everyone out so much they avoided eye contact forever after.
Alice always took the dare.
She seized Margo by the hand and dragged her upstairs to her bedroom. The other girl’s brows, arched ironically, leapt to her hairline. Her mouth, smirking, fell open in surprise. Like always, she wanted to shock Alice, make her uncomfortable, watch her run away. Like sometimes, Alice got up the guts to enjoy viciously denying that desire.
She was uncomfortable, kissing Margo once they were upstairs. But she’d been uncomfortable downstairs, trying to make small talk, trying to dodge all the conversational landmines she was so prone to trigger, making people laugh nervously or start to edge a way or glare angrily and mutter under their breath. Maybe more uncomfortable.
Which is how so many such attempts at human interaction ended with Alice taking her clothes off, or, honestly, leaving them on—but nobody was talking.
It wasn’t that she thought Margo was faking her enthusiasm or the interest that has now clarified itself. Alice isn’t an idiot: she knows people find her physically attractive. Now that that interest had distinguished itself from the more thorny, opaque hungers of girls sharing confidences in bedrooms it was easy enough to trust in. But it was not totally disentangled from that soft, uniquely terrifying play for intimacy. There was a fall coming from somewhere. The trap would spring.
Maybe more exactly, it started somewhere in the middle. Margo kissed her and Alice shuddered and bit Margo’s lip hard. Margo drew back and Alice’s face heated and her stomach churned with panic and shame as she watched her lick a bright drop of blood off her lip. She always did this at some point, an urge to —bite—that baffled and frustrated her and that sometimes was enough to scare men off. Sometimes. Other times they went, yoww. They said, oh, you’re a wild one. Those were inevitably disappointed, as that one glimpse of the feel of skin giving beneath her teeth was enough to make her shut down.
She expected Margo to laugh in her face. March out and scream about it to the whole school. That wasn’t new, but it felt worse here somehow.
Some part of her expected that to be the end of it. None of Alice’s previous experience provided a template. She usually fucked awkward nerds at parties or non-nerds that got some thrill about fucking the stacked four-eyed broad—yes she’d once heard herself referred to that way one evening and then on another fucked the guy who had so referred to her—and in so doing getting the frisson of mating with such an alien species, or at least imagining that there was such a transgression there and thus affirming something about themselves.
All of which was to say—Alice didn’t know how it went with girls.
How it went: Margo turned Alice around by the hips. Margo bent her over her dresser and flipped her skirt above her hips. She put her hand to Alice’s pussy. She said, “Jesus, you really need someone to make you relax, huh?”
That was all on script.
Then Alice happened to meet Margo’s eyes in the mirror and it was like Margo hooked her gaze and Alice found herself unable to look away like there was a fish hook through her reflected pupil. Margo grinned and pushed her fingers against Alice’s cunt, over her underwear.
It wasn’t like Margo’s fingers were magic. There was no shared mystical feminine magic that made no pussy a mystery to a person already in possession of one. True, she didn’t jam her fingers in there, and she wasn’t so hesitant and nervous that it was nearly as uncomfortable a touch as the brute force. That much was an improvement. She was confident, her thumb rolling in an oiled slide over Alice’s clit.
It didn’t do much right away. It never did. It took Alice forever to come and most men got bored, and Alice got bored, and it was easier to fake it when it seemed it mattered to their egos if she came. Which certainly wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t that she cared if they called her frigid, or whatever. It was just—a hassle.
But Margo activated the depths of Alice’s stubborn will, her mulish resistance. Like any of those guys she thought she was God’s gift to women, but with her, Alice’s dignity found itself standing firm. Which was, in its own way, humiliating.
Alice bit down hard on her own lip, glaring at Margo’s own in the mirror, plump with an impish satisfaction. The breath escaping it was hot against her neck. Margo rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. She didn’t vary her movements, didn’t see if Alice was more amenable to light strokes or a spiteful flick. She didn’t slide her hand under the fabric or make direct contact with skin. She simply pushed on Alice, inexorably, with an atypical lack of flair, until Alice’s breathing began to pick up and the cotton beneath her fingers was swollen and permeable with damp. Her legs trembled to touches filled with the gross savage delight of pressing on a bruise or picking at a scab, skin hot and throbbing, the slick rush of a protective covering ripped away, open to the air, seeping.
She came resentfully. Hard, as in it literally felt difficult to do so, like she was being worked past some limit, and hard, as in tears sprang to her eyes and her teeth cut into her tongue hard enough to draw her own blood in a failed attempt to hold back a harsh cry that made her buck and twist against Margo’s hand so forcefully that her other hand, surprisingly strong, had to hold Alice still by the hip. Her clit was sore, overtaxed with exertion. That’s when it started, in the middle of the middle, when their sightlines were entangled like fishing wire and she started to come because Margo wanted to make her come and the tension was so taut she couldn’t unsnare herself. She was going to make Margo pay. She was going to win.
When Margo stepped away she snapped that quivering, jerking line as if it were nothing. Alice panted. Pushed down her skirt and turned around shakily to glare at her in the flesh. She considered simply walking out of the room. Pretending it had never happened. That would irritate Margo. Never mind it was Alice’s room. Get off and stalk out, leaving Margo frustrated and untouched and forced to come downstairs after her. Margo sauntered across the room, running a finger mockingly along the edge of a bookshelf as she passed. She sat in the chair in the corner of Alice’s room with her arms lying atop the chair’s like it was a throne, leaned back, spread her knees apart just an inch, and smirked.
It was a dare. Alice had learned too well and too long ago that not all challenges would be laid out verbally to miss it.
She knelt between Margo’s knees. That was the thing. To not take it was to lose. To bitch out. To take it was also to lose, to submit to a will that compelled you. To not take it was to win, to preserve dignity, to not lower yourself. To take it was to win: to keep the door open, to have some grounds to have your own further challenges accepted.
Truth: Margo wheedling Alice to her bedroom, unearthing a bottle of white from a drawer. The pop of her lips parting from the bottle after taking the first swig echoing in the room as she passed it to Alice who drank while sinking down into the treacherous softness of the mattress, desperate for anything to help dampen the waves of anxiety coursing through her. Coaxed into fumbling, flustered non-admission about her family in response to Margo’s search for information, because Alice was briefly an exotic, alluring commodity. I want to be your friend, I guess. Every nerve flooded with a panic that propelled her out the door.
She couldn’t deal with that. But she could kneel, the wood hard and uncomfortable against her knees. Margo’s dress was a deep-sea green sparking with sequins, a glittering sheath of muscle like a mermaid’s tail. Alice shoved it up above her hips. She wasn’t wearing underwear.
Margo let her legs sprawl apart lazily, expansively. She put a hand in Alice’s hair and pulled her forward by it, commanding her to walk forward on her knees until she more firmly encircled Alice.
“Come on, honey,” she said. “Do you know what to do?” Her voice was sweet, cajoling, indulgent.
“Yes,” Alice snapped, pathetically. Of course it was obvious that Alice had no idea. Of course she expected Alice to be shy, overwhelmed, so grateful for her magnanimity. But Alice wasn’t afraid of not knowing. She hadn’t known how to circumvent McNaughton’s Unstealable until she had. She hadn’t known what had happened to her brother until she fucking figured it out.
It was merely a matter of figuring it out. The only thing to fear was being denied the opportunity to learn. Here it was, laid out to her eyes, her fingers, her mouth. The senses were the first tools of scientific inquiry, a high school biology teacher had said.
Observation: Margo’s cunt. She sees the brown outer lips closed primly over the purple-red of her inner folds, the seam parting shyly, the slightest glistening crack like a geode in a cave wall and feels the faintest prickle of hair on the bare, goosebumped flesh.
Question: how to make Margo come, how to make her cry out and buck and twist against Alice’s mouth. Sight, touch, taste: Alice licks out and thinks of that same teacher holding out a pebble in one hand and in the other, indistinguishable, a piece of bone, as he told them the best way to distinguish bone from inorganic material is through taste. In demonstration he’d licked the pebble—see, your tongue doesn’t stick—and then the bone—see, mmph, your tongue will stick slightly—to laughs and exaggerated sounds of revulsion from the class. The two bits of grayish material had passed from hand-to-hand, most of the other students too squeamish to do anything but observe with eyes and fingers, which were useless here: both things are gray, small, smooth and cool in the hand, and Alice hadn’t been able to help herself. She wanted to know, to know how to know. Her tongue darted out to taste, her tongue clinging to the surface of the bone for a moment longer than the stone while the boy across the lab table said ughhh and everyone else continued to laugh. The flesh that met hers was salty, like the stone, and her tongue clung to it, like bone, so she only retracted it for a moment, halfway back into the cavern of her mouth before it reached out again curiously to the cleft of Margo, her nose inhaling the scent of her, tidal and earthy and mineral and animal all at once.
Hypothesis: the repeated application of Alice’s tongue to Margo's genitals will make her come. Not exactly groundbreaking but the excitement of discovery is there as Alice commenced testing, as she parted Margo’s labia with her fingers and looked, the awareness of looking always engendered by the rapid blink of her shitty eyes trying to take in visual data causing her to push her glasses higher up her nose with her right hand while the fore and middle fingers of her left hand formed a V-shape to keep Margo’s clitoris bared to her sight—Margo gasped above her and tugged hard with the hand still in Alice’s hair even in the pause before Alice’s tongue followed her gaze to lick out at that nexus of nerve.
Analyze the data: light touches made her sigh and her hips shift restlessly. Adjust conditions: more forceful pressure made the muscles in her thighs twitch. Firm circles made her bigger, wetter. Alice’s fingers joined in, following the deep inward churn of curiosity, wanting to discover what it was like, more evidence of the effect she was having.
She sheathed her finger in Margo’s cunt and noted how it felt around her, frustrated that the only words that came to mind were inexact and also cliched, tight, hot, wet, but satisfied when the continued pressure of her tongue on Margo’s clit combined with the thrust of her finger caused it to tighten up around her, for every effect her senses were taking in to increase. She was tighter, hotter, wetter, and Alice had done that, she’d made that happen. As Margo came she was trying to quantify. Tighter how? By how much? How to measure it, how it went from being like another skin encasing her perfectly, moving with it, rippling around it in waves, to clenching tight like a vise? What to make of the fact it then loosened, more than before, so it wasn’t like that conforming skin at all but too loose, too open, Alice’s finger not snug and enveloped but lonely, so the only thing to do was to insert a second digit beside it so that the aftershocks of Margo’s orgasm contracting her inner walls ground the knuckles of Alice’s fingers together, bound them, encircled them, and that’s interesting, that rhythm, if she made her come again would she open even more, would she become perfect for three of Alice’s fingers—
Alice jerked back, dazed like she was emerging from a spell. She removed her fingers from Margo’s body and looked up at her face. Her breath fluttered rapidly in her throat. Her mouth was open and her eyes were dark, and Alice hadn’t seen. Had she bitten her lip, had her eyes been open or closed? Alice had been too absorbed in trying to track the minute movements of her intimate body for her ears to catch what sounds she’d made. She needed superhuman perception to take it all in. She needed a double, a double of pure brain, pure observation, to stand on the outside and watch and record.
She got to her feet abruptly and stood before Margo on shaky legs.
“That was fun, kitten,” Margo said, settling deeper into the chair, making herself at home.
“I—” Alice turned awkwardly toward the door, cleared her throat. “Sorry, I—”
She walked out of her own damn room. She failed in the face of that challenge.
“Alice!” Margo called after her, laughing incredulously.
And yet the next weekend Alice found herself on her back and naked in Margo’s bed. Margo stood at the end, stroking the cock standing up from the deep red leather that banded her thighs and joined together where her hand encircled the base. She smiled down at Alice, very pleased with herself, the same smile that had followed Alice around campus, sprung out of her from behind doors and around the curve of a hallway, taunting her.
She watched Margo’s face carefully as she pressed the head of the dildo to Alice’s cunt. Her breathing was fast and a tiny noise escaped her lips as it breached Alice with one firm roll of her hips. Her gaze flickered up from observing this to catch Alice’s own, to determine the effect. Alice thought she might be disappointed in what she found. Alice bit at her own lip not in ecstasy but in a reflection of the wrinkle of her forehead as she tried to think, to actually process what it felt like to be penetrated.
Margo had laid out her collection of dicks like an old woman proudly displaying her prize cabbages on market day. “The tools of the trade,” she’d whispered. Alice had rolled her eyes and Margo’s had glittered wickedly as she said, “Go ahead and pick which one you’d like.”
A dare. A continuation of the one contained in her smiles, her, “That was fun, we should do it again sometime.” It worked on Alice because it prodded at the same mocking jeer within herself, the voice that said, you stupid little bitch, what are you afraid of?
Because she was afraid.
She only had to remember that frenzy she’d experienced under that icy moon in Antarctica, the scratches and bites left on her and that she knew that she’d left on Quentin with very human nails and teeth and carried home with them to flinch in fear. She’d ignored him, avoided him, sniped at him, kept him off, and into that stalemate, into the suspicion of her own cowardice came Margo and her shame at it had flared up bright.
It was unacceptable to not know. To be afraid of knowing. At the trials she’d confessed to Quentin the fear of her own magic and capabilities that lurked within herself. Events broke harshly into that new truth and there was nothing in her ordered days of classes and dry textbooks to stir it up again.
But there was Margo. Margo with her tools she wanted to wield to make Alice react in certain ways, to see the effect she could have.
Alice wanted to see that too. Most of her clothes on, a stranger in a darkened spare bedroom at a stranger’s house, a pile of strangers’ coats piled on the bed beside them. Alice had learned nothing from this. She’d floated above and seen nothing worth observing.
Margo had made Alice choose which would be used on her. She’d picked at random, guided only by the intimidation that spiked in her gut at glimpsing the bigger specimens on offer.
“Good choice,” Margo said. “Big dicks are overrated. You can do a lot with this little guy if you know what you’re doing. And believe me, I do.”
Absurdly, Alice was offended. She could take any size dick if she wanted to, and anyway, the little guy in question didn’t look that small to her, once his massive brethren had been cleared away.
It felt big enough as it slid into her easily, even with the generous helping of lube Margo had slathered it with. Not huge, no, but—present. It didn’t feel good, exactly, which is what Alice always found with penetrative sex. She was too aware of the strangeness that was someone else inside her, the sense of intrusion too overwhelming to allow for anything else, and too distinct for easy comparison to anything else.
When Margo was fully inside Alice, their hips flush together, she stilled. Alice pulsed around that presence that was absence, the presence of something else where an absence is filled by something foreign to herself. She emitted a soft noise of frustration at the lack of movement. She needed to move, for that outside to rub and slide against her inside—
Alice opened her eyes to see that Margo had closed hers. There was a look of ecstasy on her face.
“It’s not like you can feel it,” Alice said in bewilderment, voicing her first annoyed thought at seeing how transported Margo looked. “Or. Wait. Can you? Is there a spell that—”
“Hah,” Margo responded, sounding short of breath. “Good question. One that many before you have asked. Short answer: no. Long answer: kind of?”
“What does that mean?”
Margo laughed in surprise and started to fuck into Alice gently, with languorous circles of her hips, withdrawing a little further each time and then flowing back in. “Really? Now? Can’t we—”
“I mean, surely there’s a way to rework Gregson’s Formula so it can hook up to the, um, instead of—”
“OK, OK. Hook up the sensory perceptions of the clit to a external object using Kindle’s Loop? Yeah, well, that’s one of the many ways it's troubled and baffled the kind of guy who gets magical research funding.”
“But surely, female magicians—”
Alice’s hips started shifting to meet Margo’s thrusts, seeking, restless. Her eyes closed again as against the black curtain of her lids she tried to work out the problem. Physical magic, obviously, and also healing magic because the problem had to do so intimately with the human body…
Above her Margo gasped. “Fuck, why is it so hot when you do your little professor face, Jesus—”
“—would have some insight—” Surely. Alice had never thought of it before this moment but there was a heat blossoming in her pelvis that expanded what she could think of and now she wondered what would it be to have a cock, to have the sparks that her fingers sent up her spine—she’d begun touching her clit, instinctively matching her movement to Margo’s—be generated by a field so much larger, more diffuse, for one lazy entitled grab of the palm to provide pleasure, that’s what she imagined it was like… “—and the desire—”
“Alright, we’re really doing this,” Margo muttered before pulling out of Alice. Her eyes flew open so she could glare at Margo, undercut by the whimper that escaped her throat. “I just need a break. Giving the strap is hard enough work without giving a feminist magic history lesson. It’s cool, you seem really hot for this nerd talk, keep touching your clit—that’s it, good girl.”
A flush of red fury washed down from her forehead to her chest, but she did as she commanded, glowering at Margo, who sat back on her haunches, gleaming with the sweat of her exertion, the little silver hoops in her nipples that Alice had felt faint at seeing for the first time seeming to refract double the light her sweat reflected from the lamp behind her, her cock gleaming from Alice’s insides bobbing around and it was—ludicrous, laughable—”Go on,” Alice gritted out.
“Well, you’ll be significantly less horny for this part. Dykes and trans dudes wanting to fuck with a fully functional dick does not get the same kind of insitutional support as prosthesis for war vets that could make the McAllister’s the big bucks. Shocker. Of course, DIY is a proud tradition, but there’s a reason you kind of need a team of research and a billion dollars for this shit. It’s complicated as hell. And risky. And anyway the sort of feminist magical groups doing research were more focused on retractable vagina dentanta as rape prevention, even leaving aside the second wavers who thought it was politically retrograde to want to know what it was like to experience phallocentric eroticism based in sexist domination of women at all—”
“You said the short answer was kind of.”
“Yeah, there is a spell that gives some sensation—it doesn’t feel anything like a dick though. Just like if your finger was bigger.”
Alice remembered the revelation of Margo around her fingers. Just. “And you aren’t using that now? Isn’t it better than nothing?”
Margo laughed. “There’s a little thing called imagination, Alice.” She gripped the dildo again and fed it into Alice with aching slowness and total control.
“What does that mean?” Alice sounded peevish, both with confusion and with the frustration of—wanting Margo to…to…
“There’s more to life than magic. Dicks aren’t the be all, end all. I can almost feel it, sometimes.” Margo’s eyes fluttered shut and then sleepily parted, admitting a slit of pupil that indulgently flitted from where she was finally fucking Alice slow and steady, to the clit swelling under Alice’s fingers, to Alice’s tits, still pink with affront, like she really could feel it through the silicone, and it was so incredible that she could barely keep her eyes open. She gave a hiccuping sigh and brought her hand up to tug lightly, languorously at the ring in her nipple.
“What—what do you think it feels like?” Alice asked, hoarse.
“Mm, I bet you feel so good,” and Margo gasped and Alice gasped. Not it, her. How did Margo imagine she felt? “Nice and tight around me. Hot. Wet.” Alice experienced the same sense of disappointment at the inadequacy of these cliches, the same agitated search for the exact right word, the true word behind those stale ones. For the tingling that radiated out from her clit. The fiery cradle of her hips. The sense of tightness in her groin, the urge to explode, to expand, for a release—“I can feel it in my clit, every time it throbs. Every time you—there, tighten up, because I’m fucking you so good. Not because the strap is providing pressure on it, I mean like it’s literally fucking pulsing, inside you, like you’re all around me, sometimes I’ll have my fist in someone’s pussy or ass and it is like it’s my clit in there, because my clit is being fucking led around my my hand, it’s jumping and jerking and freaking out about how much it wants to be inside someone, how good the way their body sucks me in feels, how good it feels when, god, fuck, fuck, they’re co-coming on my hand, my strap, fuck, fuck you’re coming, that’s it, gorgeous, that’s it, good girl.”
She was watching Margo’s face this time. Her eyes opened to stare slack-jawed at Alice, to rub at her tits, closed, the exultation of earlier gone, replaced by a look of intense concentration as her words picked up speed with her inward focus on the images conjured up by her own words, her face wrinkled by how totally absorbed she was in explaining what she felt. Alice wondered again what her own face looked like, but from the loud cries Margo was forcing from her she could imagine, and was glad Margo seemed too overcome to take much notice.
Margo kept up the game—it was a mutual game, Alice believed, although she didn’t know how Margo framed it. The dare was usually ventured in Margo’s bedroom. Two thin silver rods, with small balls on either end, twinkled in Margo’s cupped palm. “So I thought of a way you could actually enjoy those lumps of meat attached to your chest.”
This was what she got for a moment of post-coital weakness. The other day Margo had been petting at her breasts and some look of discomfort must have passed across Alice’s face because the stroking stopped and she asked if Alice didn’t like to be touched there.
“It’s fine,” Alice said tersely, angry at herself for tensing up. Stop being such a freak. Margo tucked the hand under her head and laid there breathing softly. Alice told herself she should leave. “It’s just—I don’t get much out of it, you know? I don’t really feel much when they’re touched, and they make my back hurt, and bras are insanely expensive, and everyone else gets to enjoy them but me, because they’re just—these lumps of meat attached to my chest.”
“I have to admit to really enjoying your tits, Alice. Sorry about that. I’ll try to tone it down.”
That was all, and she had—touched them less, avoided going into florid reveries about how they were a gift from Heaven Alice insisted upon wasting. Even though she was pretty sure Margo didn’t really get it, if the tops she wore and the way she preened when she caught Alice glancing at and then quickly away from the dark peaks of her nipples visible through her thin pajama top when they ran into each other in the cottage kitchen one night were anything to go by. But Alice found herself missing Margo’s frank, cheerful appreciation. It was different from the guys who started wolf-whistling at her walking down the street in middle school. Or the painful squeezing and grasping her random hookups mauled her with. It was. Fine. The way Margo’s eyes had a hot glaze on them when Alice took off her bra. It made Alice feel less unbalanced for a moment, to know the effect she could have on Margo.
Now Margo said she wanted to pierce Alice’s nipples.
Absolutely fucking not, she barely stopped herself from saying.
“Why?” she hissed. She couldn’t help looking at Margo’s piercings, obvious through the red lace of her bra.
“They can heighten sensation. In general that’s a possibility, but also with these specifically it’s a guarantee.”
“Of course it’s not about you liking how they’d look,” Alice responded snidely.
Margo shrugged, grinned. “I mean, that’s a bonus. It just seems sad for you not to get anything from something that brings such joy to others. They’re fun. See for yourself.” She lifted her breast out of the flimsy support of the cup that cradled it. Margo’s small breast with appealing swell and the metal piercing the stiffened peak of her nipple. Alice’s mouth was dry, her face hot. She’d never touched them. Margo hadn’t asked, or commanded, this or anything else. That surprised Alice, now that she thought about it.
Her skin was hot, the metal cool, and Margo moaned, as Alice gave the ring the gentlest of pulls.
“Wait,” Alice said, stopping with the piercings pulled toward her, held taut. Margo whined. “You said these specifically. Are they spelled? Did you use Berson’s adaptation of—”
“Yes, and I’ll tell you all about it later when I need you nice and wet. Focus. Are you in?”
Alice released her. Margo panted. If Margo could enchant a bit of metal to sharpen sensation—Alice could easily imagine several ways to do this, but wondered which had been most effective here—that would be helpful information for her project.
So Alice laid on her back, Margo kneeling above her. It wasn’t an exchange. Margo would have told her the spell she’d used if she’d said no, and anyway, it wasn’t like she couldn’t figure it out for herself. It was just better, somehow, if Margo shared this thing she’d done, that she’d researched or maybe just heard about once.
She could say no. She knew she could say no. Once, hating to ask for anything, she’d requested that they keep this between just the two of them. A look Alice couldn’t read passed across Margo’s face, but she’d merely replied, “Sure thing.” But the game is that if Alice says no she loses. Nothing would happen from Margo’s side, she was now pretty sure. But she will lose something. So she can’t say no.
Margo had laid out her equipment on a towel beside Alice’s head. She caught glimpses in her peripheral real vision. Weird pincers, the piercings, cotton swabs.
Alice licked her lips. “Wait. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah, Youtube is so helpful. Kidding! One summer in college I shacked up with this piercer and she put me to work. And I have my fair share of sticking needles in people for fun. Consensually,” she said in response to Alice’s expression. “OK, ready? You sure you don’t want to do the numbing spell?”
She shook her head. It hurt when Margo picked up the pincer-like instrument and used it to pull Alice’s nipple to its full height, to expose as much of it as possible. The expression on her face caused Alice to let out a wobbly by breath. Exact and methodical, examining Alice not with hunger but with the cool eyes of a surgeon.
The needle sliding in hurt in a way that mocked the previous hurt. Hot tears came to Alice’s eyes and slipped down her cheeks. A hot drop of blood oozed onto her breast, and Margo gently blotted it away. Then it was over and there was a crackling white roar in Alice’s head, a tide washing it away.
“Alice. Alice.” She got the impression that Margo had been saying her name for some time. “You did so good.” More tears, even though it didn’t exactly hurt anymore, although Alice knew it must be throbbing. “Are you ready for the next one? Just give me a nod.”
When it was done Alice came back to herself to watch as Margo took a little tub of ointment from the towel and swiped her thumb through it before dabbing it to the aching new hole in Alice’s flesh. She couldn’t seem to stop the tears as Margo touched her so very gently. “No long healing time, courtesy of some ointment from Faye. I can’t get you off by telling you all about what’s in it, you’ll have to hit up the infirmary for that.”
Alice cautiously touched the metal attached to her. It didn’t hurt, didn’t bleed. “Oh,” she said faintly.
“Pretty sweet, huh? Usually you have to wait weeks for them to heal. Weeks before you can enjoy any of the benefits. But that’s not gonna be a problem for us.”
The smirk was back, the gentle distance gone. Margo raised her hand, moving her hands in a short tut.
Alice’s back arched off the bed. She cried out as she writhed. The piercings, without Margo touching them, jumped and twitched. Alice clenched her legs together and said, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Margo watched her with the glee of a child observing the bugs they’d plucked the wings from.
The twitching stopped. Alice trembled on the bed, and every palpitation forced another bit of wetness out into her immediately soaked underwear.
“OK, strip,” Margo said cheerfully. She obeyed, dazed and clumsy, and sat on the edge of the bed nude while she watched Margo turn and walk to her closet and retrieve a black, glossy shopping bag, shimmery gold tissue paper frothing from the top—she set it beside Alice and stood before her, arms crossed like a teacher watching Alice sweat over calculus problems, and with a jerk of her chin she indicated that Alice should open the bag.
Alice expected it to contain something to stick up one orifice or another, a chain for the nipples for Margo to lead her around by—something along those lines. But when she’d pushed through the tissue what she found was a full body lace contraption in black, with thigh garters.
“What does this do?” Alice asked dubiously. “Is it enchanted to suck me off or something?”
“Nope! Just normal lingerie. It’s a crime, those little skirts you wear and that tragic underwear underneath.”
Her face burned at the same prick to her pride that had put her so on edge the first time she and Margo had really talked. That pilgrim tent. But when Margo told her to go put it on—suddenly, she’d embraced telling Alice what to do—she marched to the bathroom and did so. Of course, Margo wanted her to wear this, expecting that because she had the body she did she should wear shit like this. Alice could feel her teeth grinding together with the force of her pique.
Upon emerging from the bathroom, Margo was calmly filing her nails on the bed. Her eyes flickered up and took Alice in from head to heel with no greater reaction than a small feline smile curling one corner of her mouth. “Now get dressed.” Another nod at the outfit—skirt, sweater—draped over the back of a chair.
“What?” Alice squeaked. “You—we—”
“Chop, chop.”
Alice’s nipples throbbed with arousal. She’d assumed Margo would drink her fill of the vision she’d made of Alice, then bend her over and enjoy it to the fullest, and now she wanted her to put on clothes?
When she was dressed she stood before Margo, who rose to her feet and readjusted the shoulders of the sweater, smoothed a fold of the skirt into place.
“There,” she said with a hint of heat finally coming into her eyes. “It’ll be our little secret. I’m the only one who knows what you’re carrying around under your clothes.” She flicked one of the piercings and Alice bent towards her, breathless, as Margo twirled away from her to open the door. “Come on. Party time.”
This was how Alice ended up having a fascinating conversation about Westerman with Julia that she could hardly pay attention to as she watched Margo hold court with Eliot and tried not to be obvious about it, sealing her lips tight against the embarrassing noises that threatened to slip out every time the piercings brushed against lace.
Then when the party was in full swing, it began. The tiniest twitch of the metal.
“See, that’s what’s so interesting—”
“Oh!” Alice yelped.
“Alice, are you OK?” Julia asked, concerned.
“Fine.” Alice said stiffly. “Excuse me.”
She was about to turn on her heel and head for the stairs, alone, to go up to her room and—jerk off—because, when her gaze was drawn helplessly to Margo she saw her occupied, laughing brightly in a circle of admirers. Then, and maybe the lingerie was enchanted in some way, Margo turned her head and with laserlike focus met Alice’s eyes over her shoulder. Smouldering, triumphant. Just as quickly she had turned back to the girl next to her and said something that made her companion laugh.
Alice turned back to Julia who, fuck, was casting a speculative look between Alice and Margo. “Sorry,” Alice said in a voice she was pleased to find firm. “Go on?”
Twitch, twitch. Alice bit the inside of her lip so hard she tasted blood.
A half-hour later Alice and Julia had been joined by a group of knowledge students and a spirited debate on Westerman not requiring much attention from Alice had started up. Which was good. Her face was bathed in sweat and the crotch of Margo’s purchase was soaked. Her nipples, which she hoped were hidden under the thick sweater but was too scared to look down and confirm this was the case, throbbed in an infernal beat with her clit. She’d locked her knees to remain upright and stop herself from humping the couch and it was impacting what little blood flow remained after those pulsing points had their fill. The knowledge kids, usually unable to perceive much about other human beings when engrossed in such an exciting conversation about theory, are actually shooting her wary glances, and Margo hadn’t glanced her way once.
Julia touched her arm and Alice jumped. “Excuse me,” she choked out, finally beyond endurance, and began weaving her way across the room in Margo’s directiom, flinching every time her body brushed against someone else’s, also beyond caring that Julia was watching and capable of putting things together.
“Margo,” she said when she’d reached her side. The guy she was speaking with looked startled at the way she’d shoved herself between them. Margo gave one of her bright, false laughs, throwing her head back so her hair cascaded down her spine. “Margo!’
The people around them fell quiet. The music impossibly loud as it swelled to fill the void. She was going to kill her.
“Excuse me,” Mago lisped, pressing her cup into the hand of the random beefcake of the evening. “Hold onto this for me, will you?” she said sweetly. Then she seized Alice by the wrist and marched her to the ground floor bathroom.
There was a long line. Margo skipped it to a chorus of heys and what the fucks.
“Sorry,” Margo said when the current occupant blearily stumbled out, weaving in place and blinking, stupefied by the clamor that greeted her until Margo gave her a gentle shove on the back and she tottered away. “That sweet white powder calls!”
“Margo!” Alice hissed, but then the door closed and Margo shoved her against it and kissed her deeply with a little moan.
When they parted Margo laughed. “You didn’t want anyone to know about this. So we’re doing drugs in here, capiche?”
Then Alice was moaning. “Please, please—”
“God,” Margo said. No longer distant or haughty, running her hands over Alice’s torso almost reverently, scraping the lace agonizingly against her flesh. “No one knows. No one has any fucking idea. Just for me. Just for me.”
She touched Alice’s breasts and Alice almost sobbed. She put her hand between Alice’s legs and her grin was leonine as she brought the wetness she collected there to her mouth and sucked it off her fingers. “It hurts so bad, you need it so bad. You’ve been good, it’s okay baby—”
Alice grabbed her by the wrist, hard enough that Margo yelped, and brought her face close to Margo’s so they were nearly nose-to-nose. "If you don’t—if you—I will fuck you up. I will make you regret you were ever born.”
Margo giggled, delighted.
From some secret location her sluggish brain can’t determine, Margo withdrew a small vibrator and without any ceremony shoved it into Alice’s cunt. Alice was so wet it nearly slid right back out of her; she clenched her legs tight to hold it in her, absurd, humiliating moans falling from her lips as that movement made it present and full within her, as the shoved aside scrap of underwear is sucked into her cleft, providing some friction she could rock her clit against.
Then Margo was wiping her hand on Alice’s skirt and reaching behind Alice to open the door, leaving Alice to scramble to flip her skirt down before the hallway of irate party-goers caught an eyeful. The next girl in line shoved past Alice and slammed the door behind her and Alice was forced to stumble after Margo, who sauntered away with a condescending crook of her finger at Alice, to indicate Alice should follow. Alice was about to—so she could strangle her—when the toy began to buzz.
She tripped. Her entire body went rigid as she tried to be subtle about the fact her eyes were rolling back into her skull in the middle of a crowded party. She was so, so close.
As suddenly as it had started, it stopped. That was worse. Margo turned around and arched a brow at her. “You coming?”
Alice’s face was beet red, and her skin crawled with shame. That old sense that everyone knew something was defective with her, that they could sense it. Usually it was an insubstantial feeling of existing wrongly with no tangible reason Alice could identify for why she’d been marked out. Now it was all too identifiable. If anyone caught on to Alice’s secret this time, it would mean that they had discovered she was being fucked in public, unbeknownst to most everyone around her. Still, she followed.
Somehow the fear that everyone suspected some ghastly flaw in her coexisted with a persistent feeling of invisibility. As she walked through the party behind Margo dozens of eyes skipped right over her because they had no fucking idea. And although everyone’s gaze lingered on Margo’s as she passed, as always, they’d get no clue from her. She moved confidently through the crowd, kissing this girl’s cheeks, shrieking a greeting to someone like she hadn’t seen them in forty years, letting that guy spin her around. She didn’t look back but it was like there was a cord between them. It was like Margo’s back vibrated with an awareness that Alice was being pulled in her wake.
Margo rejoined her previous group. Eliot gave her a smacking kiss on the cheek. His glance passed over Alice as easily as the others and she felt certain that Margo hadn’t even told him. Just for me.
She had never been more furious in her life. She kept rubbing her thighs together, her cunt aching and slick. It would take just one more buzz of the toy in her for her to come, she knew it. Her eyes bored into the side of Margo’s obnoxious head like she could will her to do it, however it was she did it. She’d tutted before, in the bedroom, probably just to show off, but Alice hadn’t seen anything from her so far. Had she hooked the damn things she’d threaded through Alice’s flesh up to her consciousness somehow? Could she make Alice do whatever it literally came into her head to do. Had she made Alice lose her mind, as she must have to be standing here behind her, painfully aroused and trying to resist throwing herself on the floor to beg? No, surely not. Then with not even a twirl of his finger—not showing off for once, just desperate for a drink, she thought angrily—Eliot floated a glass in his direction. Right. Telekinetic best friend.
Twitch, twitch.
The vibrator remained still, driving Alice further insane with its presence and uselessness, as she squeezed around it rhythmically, desperately, her clit screaming for attention. But the nipple rings had started up their tiny movements again, and it was like her clit was fucking moving with them. I can feel it in my clit, every time it throbs. I mean like it’s literally fucking pulsing. Yes, yes, it was just like that. Every time they throbbed. Alice’s clit was being fucking led around by Margo’s will, by every minute, torturous twist in the metal she’d put in Alice’s flesh. Slowly, Margo turned her head. Like the force of Alice’s wish she’d turn around had actually commanded it, like in putting her bewitched charms in Alice she had created some mutual vibrating wire between through which Alice could send her own signals back. Her eyes were incredibly dark. Her lips parted softly. She was looking right at Alice, everything falling away around them, as Alice’s clit jumped and jerked and freaked out about how much it wanted to be touched, how much it wanted Margo to touch it, please, please, how good it felt when Margo played with it or teased it or kissed it, how well her body sucked Margo right in, how good it felt when, god, fuck, fuck, Alice came on her hand, her strap, fuck, fuck she was coming, please, she thought, call me gorgeous, call me your good girl—
Of course, Alice had to flee again. Right before dawn, after tossing and turning with fevered dreams, the sound of the party going into the small hours, she crept downstairs, ravenous. She was confronted by Margo sitting on the couch with a pearly light only barely distinguishing her from the mass of shadow behind her.
Margo rose silently from the couch and walked toward Alice where she stood frozen at the bottom of the stair like a woman in a horror movie, finally confronted by the menacing form of the house’s ghost. The porch light cast some illumination into the foyer. When Margo emerged from the spectral gloom she reconstituted herself as flesh.
The smirk looked a little strained with exhaustion. Her makeup was smudged. “Have fun last night, ki—”
She wasn’t allowed to finish the goading question. Alice surged forward and kissed her.
It’s intent was brutal, all of Alice’s frustration and terror poured into it. But when their lips meet, it’s—not that. Alice pressed into her with a little whimper. Startled by herself, almost shy. She could feel a more fierce blush warming her cheeks than anything she’d experienced at the party.
Margo, very gently, put her hands in Alice’s hair. Smoothed it back as Alice gripped Margo’s dress at the sides, wanting to pull it up, turn this furious and incendiary again. But the kiss slowed down and down and down, until they were just breathing into each other’s mouths, their lips occasionally brushing together wetly and merely taking an impossibly long moment to separate.
When Margo pulled back her eyes were wide and a little wild. Without saying anything, this time it was she that turned away into the room that was no longer dark, the light on the porch having winked out with the pink of dawn throwing its radiance in through all the windows, light enough see her raise a shaking hand to the lips that had just been touching Alice’s before she clenched it into a fist at her side and walked stiffly out the door into the morning.