It had been two weeks since Rachel and I had hooked up, and my streak of missing appropriate windows to talk about stuff had firmly resumed.

Rachel had practically asked me what I wanted, and I hid behind my dice. I’d been in the zone all night, so in tune with her, pushing and pulling just hard enough to keep her fully, ecstatically in the moment. But I still couldn’t tell her that I wanted to be more than a friend, and more than a port in a storm. I couldn’t get past the terror of what it would mean if she didn’t want the same.

Tonight would normally have been game night, but with Cameron gone from our long-term campaign, we hadn’t really made a new plan yet. Every time I’d thought about asking Rachel what she wanted to do, or if we were even going to hang out, I’d frozen up over all the other places that conversation might turn once it started.

My phone buzzed while I was busy pitying myself over a solitary bowl of Cheerios.

Rachel: Can I ask a weird question?

My blood pressure spiked, and I could hear my pulse in my own ears as I answered.

Seth: Sure, what’s up?

Rachel: So, I was talking to my friend, Olivia, and she’s going through kind of a rough time. I hope you don’t mind… what you did for me kind of came up. And she was really into it. It’s like, she’s right where I was a week ago. So, feel TOTALLY free to say no, but if you’re into it, I’d love to bring her to you.

This was… none of the possibilities I’d been anticipating.

Rachel wasn’t cutting me off, or demanding answers. She was… setting me up? For a date? For a joke? For a chance to say, “No thanks, the way I feel about you and what I want to do to you is kinda non-transferrable”?

Flattering, that she thought I could handle that.

Seth: Uh, I guess so. Help her roll up a character and send me the details.

Rachel: Sure. She’s super excited.

I stared for a long time at that last message, trying to decipher how Rachel felt about it, hoping the next message to pop up under it would clarify. It didn’t. It was just a link to a character sheet and brief backstory.

Feeling like I was stumbling through a dream, I opened a blank document, and started cobbling together the pieces of a game.

#

I had snacks, and maps, and lore. I had a moody playlist of Celtic folk instrumentals. I had electric safety candles with flickery plastic flames.

I had two beautiful women sitting on my couch, across the gaming table from me, waiting for me to convene the session.

Rachel was looking exceptionally cute with a tailored blazer over her t-shirt and jeans, looking like the charming, rebellious hero of a salaciously inaccurate FBI procedural.

And Olivia… I had to admit, if my brain weren’t completely saturated with Rachel, with her smile and her scent and the addictive urge to touch her again the way I had last time, Olivia would definitely have been one of my types.

She had a classical look, and a soft, femme sense of style that contrasted intriguingly with the casual yet powerful way she carried herself, with her long limbs spread wide to fill the space around her.

I took a deep breath.

“You’re arriving in the bay of Sinnifree Isle,” I narrated. “The ship you’ve chartered is dropping anchor an inconvenient distance away from the shore. The crew is muttering behind your back about curses while they prepare a rowboat for you. They’re not even bothering to hide it from you anymore, how much they don’t want to be anywhere near this place. But every clue surrounding the recent disappearances seems to lead back here. As you two are looking out at this stark mound of rock and grass, cottages and standing stones, how about you both tell us who you are and how you’re feeling?”

Rachel clapped her hands excitedly together and started.

“Well, I’m playing Arianna Brighton again. I’m a Human, a Rogue, and a spy for my government, mostly against the forces of hell. I’m feeling pretty great. I’m on track. I’m going to find those missing men, and this is where it starts.”

Olivia ran her finger across her character sheet.

“I’m… Trippy Carnage. I’m a tife… a teef… one of those part-demon people. And… um… a Sorcerer.”

Rachel looked at her expectantly for a while, but Olivia didn’t add anything else.

Whatever more there might be of Trippy, it would have to come out through play.

“The people here look on edge,” I said. “When they notice your arrival, their expressions range from hostile to guardedly hopeful. You can see an older woman walking away from the center of the village out to the standing stones, and setting down a basket of what looks like—”

“So, there’s a tavern, right?” asked Olivia.

“Sure,” I pivoted, “no sleepy little island village like this one could get by without the warm embrace of a public house.”

“Great, let’s grab a drink.”

“Both of you?” I asked.

Rachel nodded, watching Olivia out of the corner of her eye, like she was showing her a movie with a gut-punch of a twist and wanted to be sure not to miss a second of her reaction.

As ever, I couldn’t help but feel flattered by her faith in me.

“All conversation stops when you walk into the tavern,” I described. “This is not a place where strangers are common or easily overlooked. The Minotaur woman behind the bar sets down the glass she was cleaning and asks in a gruff voice, ‘What can I do for you?’”

“Woman?” Olivia asked me, like she was expecting me to correct myself for some reason.

“Yeah,” I said. “Minotaurs can be women.”

“Sure, okay, but the gruff bartender we’re going to be pumping for information, you really want them to be…. You know what? It’s fine. A woman is fine. Good evening, ma’am, nice place you’ve got here.”

“And it’ll be a nice line forming behind you,” I answered, pitching my voice down to simulate the resonating chambers of a much larger body. “Will you be ordering, or won’t you?”

“Is there really a line?” Rachel chimed in.

“Not even a little bit,” I said.

“We’re actually looking for a place to stay,” said Olivia. “While we’re sorting out this whole missing persons thing for you guys.”

“The proprietress sighs heavily. ‘There’s a room upstairs,’ she says, ‘but I’d advise you to turn around and go back where you came from instead.’”

“Nah,” said Olivia. “We’ll take the room. Only problem is, we can’t exactly pay you in gold for it.”

“Yes, we can,” said Rachel.

“No, we can’t,” Olivia hissed back, and then unfastened the top button of her silky red blouse. She leaned forward, toward me. “But we can come to some kind of arrangement, right? Even if it means one of us might have to bunk in with… someone else?”

I sighed. “Go on, roll Persuasion.”

Olivia rolled her die. To my relief, it came up on a two. We didn’t even have to do the math.

I leaned back and crossed my arms. “Just what kind of establishment do you think I’m running here, miss?”

Olivia looked genuinely surprised. “Can’t I get, like, what’s it called… advantage?”

“You just walked into this woman’s bar in a super insular, superstitious town and asked to sleep with her without even asking her name,” I summed up. “What part of that would give you advantage?”

A snort escaped from Rachel.

“Okay, fine,” Olivia sighed. “Can you just tell me what you know about the whole mystery thing?”

“The proprietress looks completely done humoring you,” I said. “She picks her dish rag back up and says, ‘Order a drink or get out.’”

“What the fuck?”

“Here, let me talk to her,” said Rachel.

#

Rachel took the lead for a while, chatting with the NPCs, following my breadcrumbs around the town, and doing her best to corral Olivia along.

It was bizarre, almost unnatural, to watch my favorite troublemaker having to be the sensible one for once, in the face of a whole different level of trouble.

Olivia hit on everyone — the frightened old widower buying a fresh bouquet of flowers, the shy young florist with dirt under her fingernails, the drunken mayor who blusteringly tried to order them out of his town for prying into their private affairs. And when each character either turned her down or (in the mayor’s case) responded with a prohibitively off-putting yes, she ran away, regardless of what else there might yet have been to accomplish, usually breaking something on her way out.

I had to relocate clues on the fly, as Olivia made them impossible to find the way I’d originally intended, but finally, at long last, Rachel put together the essentials.

There was a mysterious power contained within the standing stones, and the mayor was using an ancient artifact to harness it and use it to disappear his rivals and perceived threats. The elders of the village believed the power to be a tortured and restless spirit, and even had a name for him.

Rachel and Olivia, or rather, Arianna and Trippy, hurried to the stone circle, racing to get there before the mayor could gather the supplies he needed to turn the power there against them.

Just as I was beginning to describe their arrival on the site, Olivia got up from her chair and clasped her hands above her head, stretching one shoulder and then the other.

“So,” she said. “How long does this part usually go on?”

“What part?” I asked.

“You know, rolling dice, sitting at a table… wearing clothes.”

“Four to six hours, plus breaks,” I answered, deadpan.

Olivia’s eyes widened.

At least I’d been able to get that much of a response out of her on purpose.

I pushed my dice tray to the side and folded my hands.

“What did you come here for?” I asked her.

She sighed and leaned over to page through her character notes.

“No, not Trippy,” I stopped her. “You, Olivia, why are you here?”

She paused and looked down to watch her weight shift between her feet. “Rachel told me… she said you could….”

“You came here to get fucked?” I cut right to it.

“I mean… kind of, yeah.”

“Is that a difficult thing for you?” I asked. “Is there a shortage of men willing to stick their dicks in you?”

Just looking at her made the next answer obvious enough.

“…Not exactly,” she acknowledged.

“So why me? You don’t know me. I’m not a model, and I promise you, my dick is no more exceptional than the rest of me. Why do you want it so bad?”

Olivia shrugged. “I just… I got the impression you know what you’re doing.”

“And you don’t?”

This got her to look at me again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, there’s a whole market full of toys designed to help you touch yourself however you want. Some of them can even thrust on their own now. I assume you know your own body and what it likes. If you just want the feeling of getting railed over the edge of a table, you can have that whenever you want.”

She got a sulky little look around the corners of her mouth. “It’s not the same.”

“So, let’s be clear, then,” I said, leaning a little closer against the table. “You don’t want me to fuck you. Not really. Sticking tabs in slots doesn’t do it for you, not on its own. You want me to play with you. You came here to have a human being look you in the eye, and say, it’s okay, you can stop tamping your soul down into that tiny, boring, acceptable box you present to the world. Give me your passion, your wildness, your weird, and I’ll hold them for you.”

Olivia’s eyes were still wide, with a bright shine overtaking them. “Yeah. Something like that.”

“Then what do you say you sit the fuck down and pick up the die?”

She sat down.

She picked up her die.

“What was I…” she sniffed and cleared her throat, “what was I supposed to roll again?”

“That depends on what you want to do,” I said.

“Right, okay. I guess I want to step into the circle.”

Rachel must have been holding her breath as she watched, she was so quiet. I resisted the urge to look at her, and gave Olivia a small smile.

“You can feel a thin membrane of magic stretched between the stones. The air pressure tightens against your eardrums as you cross to the inside. Even with the open sky above you, it’s stuffy enough in here that you can feel the push and pull of your own breathing… and something else breathing, too.”

“I say… I say… what the fuck was this ghost’s name again?”

Her voice wasn’t dismissive anymore, just annoyed with herself and the gap in her memory.

“David Thregar,” Rachel whispered.

“David?” Olivia called out, looking to the dim ceiling above us, like we were having a séance right here in this room. She moved stiffly, kept hunching and glancing at me and Rachel, like we were about to laugh and reveal this whole evening as a prank on her.

I could relate.

But she was shaking it off, like a statue coming to life, reclaiming her confident posture. It was actually pretty hot to watch.

“David, talk to me,” she said. “I mean, you can talk to me, if you want to.”

I took in a slow, wheezing gasp, and answered as David. “Am I in hell?”

“No,” said Olivia. “You’re still in Sinnifree. I think someone trapped you here.”

“But aren’t you…?”

I looked to Olivia’s forehead, where Trippy’s demon horns would be. She clapped her hands to them like she could feel the sharp points, and wished she could hide them.

“No, these are just… I’m material. I’m alive. See?”

She reached out. I took the hand that had been holding my iced coffee and reached it across the table. I just barely brushed the very tips of her fingers with my half-frozen ones, and then pulled away again. She actually shivered.

“What’s going to happen to me now?” I whispered.

“We’re here to help you leave,” said Olivia. “Is that what you want?”

I shivered a little too. “I think so. I don’t think I did anything worth sending me somewhere worse than this. But it’s hard to remember.”

“What do you remember?” she asked.

I thought for a bit. Or rather, I tried to look like I was thinking, while I actually searched Olivia’s face, the hints in Rachel’s text messages, every trace of what might have brought this stranger to my table tonight.

“I thought I had someone,” I said softly. “I thought I could see the future, for just a moment. I saw our whole life, and she said she saw it too. But she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t see me having a future at all.”

Olivia took a long breath. “I know how hard that can be.”

I blinked. “You do?”

Her hand was still on the table. I wrapped mine around it. My fingers were still cold, but she squeezed them like they were the one thing that could keep her from tumbling into the abyss.

“My last boyfriend was a musician— I mean, a bard,” said Olivia. “I saw a future too. He went on tour, um, a tour of the realm, and I was so happy for him. I stayed up late every night to talk to him. And then the talks stopped happening. Until the last one. The one where he told me I was an anchor around his neck. And that he was tired of feeling guilty about all the amazing sex he was having.”

The rest of her breath escaped in a rush after those last few words. She tried to make it sound like a laugh.

I squeezed her hand back. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s… yeah, it sucked.” She shook her head, refocused on me. “Never mind. It’s not like he killed me. I’m guessing that’s what happened to you? What else do you remember? Anything about exactly what she did? How you ended up here?”

I looked to the side, like I was chipping my way through an icy cavern of memory. Then, before speaking, I looked right at her. “Well, I remember I was a virgin sacrifice.”

Olivia blanched, then slowly broke into a grin. I could see the relief all over her body, softening her cheeks and her shoulders, as she realized that I was still leading this, slowly, in the direction she was hoping for.

“Oh.” The grin lingered, became a coy little smile. “So, if you weren’t a virgin, then the magic trapping you here wouldn’t work anymore? No one could use you to hurt people anymore?”

“I guess not. But isn’t that a little hard to change, if my body’s dead in the ground?”

Olivia leaned her cheek against her other hand. “Could you use my body?”

“Maybe.” I lightened my touch and ran my fingers along her wrist. I could feel myself warming toward her temperature. “Would you let me possess it, for a little while?”

“Yes,” said Olivia.

Rachel made a muffled squeaking sound into her own clasped hands.

“Really? Just like that?” I asked.

“Really, get in me.” Olivia laughed. I smiled with her. It did nothing to break the tension.

“You’ll have to stay with me for this.” I put my other hand around the one of hers I was holding, squeezing it tighter. “You can’t just disappear while I borrow you. There have to be two souls involved, or it’s just….”

“Masturbation,” said Olivia.

I let myself blush. It wasn’t difficult. All I had to do was stop fighting it.

“You feel a cool breeze under your skin,” I switched to my narrator voice. “A sad, sweet presence seeps into you, tinged with loneliness that lifts as it mingles with you. David’s specter remains in front of you. He’s not moving into you so much as expanding to share the space you inhabit.”

Olivia shivered lightly. Goosebumps spread across her arms.

“So,” I said, as David once again. “How do we start?”

Olivia leaned forward to touch my face, and, I think, to kiss me. I leaned away. “Your fingers can only feel a whisp of a cool surface, before passing through him,” I described. “He’s even less solid outside of you than he was before, now that he’s anchored to the solidness of you.”

Olivia looked at her hand, the one I wasn’t holding, and ran it over her own neck.

“Mmm,” I sighed, like it was the first time I’d been touched in decades. I mirrored her, touching my own neck. “That feels so good.”

She walked her fingers down a little lower, twisted them into the neck of her blouse, and looked at me questioningly.

I hooked my fingers into the neckband of my t-shirt, and tugged it over my head.

Our clasped hands separated for only a second, while we tossed the shirts to the floor, and then sprang back together.

She took a moment to rake her eyes over my chest, and I took the opportunity to do the same to her. She was surprisingly muscular under her flowing clothes. She unfastened her bra. The round softness of her breasts stood out against the harder lines of the rest of her, and part of me wanted to touch them with my own hands. But I’d cooked up this ghost scenario just for her, and I was going to stick to it.

She ran her fingers down and over her nipple, which hardened effortlessly. I mirrored that too. I walked my fingers down farther, along with her. We slipped them under our waistbands together.

I couldn’t see her below the table, so I just kept watching her face, waiting for that first little spasm of sensation. When I saw it, I took in a sharp gasp myself, and ran my fingers along the underside of my cock. The gasp was just theater at first, but I felt myself swell in response, and a surprisingly sharp stab of pleasure ran upward through me. It was like the forces of cause and effect within my body had rearranged themselves.

“Oh god, is this what it’s like?” I asked.

“This is what it’s like for me,” Olivia sighed, touching herself in a pattern I could mostly extrapolate from her breathing and the subtle motions of her elbow. “I’m sorry I can’t show you more about what it would have been like for you.”

“What do you mean?” I prompted her.

“Well, I’ve got a vagina,” said Olivia. “And I could play with it, but your body didn’t have one, so I don’t know, would that feel weird for you?”

“Do it,” I said. “Let’s use what we do have.”

Olivia shifted in her seat, angling her hips forward to give herself better access.

I watched her fiddle and fumble, and then take in a quick breath as she sank in a finger, or maybe two.

I gasped and squeezed her hand harder. It was the strangest thing; my pelvic muscles were tingling and contracting, almost as if they were wrapping around some object intruding through a space I didn’t have.

Her arm began to move more dramatically, making it easier for me to synchronize mine to it. I stroked myself, picturing the way I knew she must be penetrating herself, pausing to rub her palm against her clit with each thrust.

My anatomy was what it was, of course, but I have nothing to my name if not a strong imagination. I put my mind in her body as best I could, rearranging the messages of my own nerves into a new shape.

I don’t know for sure if my experience was anything like hers, but I swear, it was different from anything I was used to myself. My legs were weak, my stomach tied up in a whole new kind of knot, like it was bracing itself against the ripples of a nearby earthquake.

I let Olivia see every bit of that.

“I’m shaking,” I whispered to her.

“That’s normal,” said Olivia. Her hand vibrated in mine, and her legs shuddered against the cheap, faux-wood floor beneath us.

“It’s like if a fever felt good,” I said.

“Yeah, totally.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Sure,” said Olivia. “Well, never this exact thing, actually.”

“But with living people?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you ever stop thinking about it?” I asked. “Once you’ve felt something like this?”

“Some people never do,” said Olivia.

“And there’s more?” I asked.

“Oh, there are lots of ways to do it.”

“Like what?” I asked. “What were the things you said you couldn’t show me?”

“Well, you probably remember a little bit about having a penis, don’t you?” She lifted a playful eyebrow.

I smiled and scooted a little closer to the table, still openly stroking my real-life cock underneath it. “Yeah, that does ring a bell or two.”

“Well, we don’t have anything quite like it here, but….” She glanced over at Rachel.

So did I.

“I jump into the circle!” Rachel announced with absolute certainty.

I did my best to access my narrator voice, while keeping my movements matched to Olivia’s.

“What’s Arianna thinking when she steps into the incredibly thick air trapped within the standing stones? It’s thick with magic, thick with sex. You’ve been watching this whole scene unfold.”

“I think I’ve been really proud of my friend for throwing herself all the way in and getting the job done,” said Rachel. “But at the same time, there’s a big part of me that’s spent the whole time wishing it was me.”

There was an instant of silence, with Rachel’s eyes right on me, and something in my chest spasmed harder than anything lower in my body had all day.

She continued, before I had to say anything.

“So, I’m super excited when Trippy gives me a little come-on to get in on this. I run right into the middle of the circle, lie down next to her, and say, ‘Hi, I’m Arianna.’”

I suppressed a snort.

“Hi, Arianna,” I said, as David. “Are you here to help me too?”

“Oh yeah, I’m here to help you all night long,” said Rachel.

I failed to suppress the next snort.

“So, I can use your body, too?” I asked.

“Yes… but in a different way.” She smirked and began taking off her clothes.

I didn’t even try not to watch her, every move, every step, every new inch of skin exposed to the air. She stripped all the way down, not even pausing before being the first person in the room to slip her jeans and underwear all the way off.

I’d been running my thumb over Olivia’s hand since Rachel jumped in, trying to stay conscious of her, and make sure she still felt grounded in the moment. But the sight of Rachel’s naked form sent me into a full flashback, delicious and overpowering. That imagination of mine went full speed into recreating the taste of Rachel’s pussy, the feel of it around me, when we were alone together.

I don’t know how long it took for any part of me to get back into game mode. When it did, I was desperately tempted to rewrite my way back into Rachel’s arms, and preferably more than arms, on the spot.

Minutes must have passed before I managed to pull myself far enough away from that feeling to incorporate it into this story, the one I’d started, the one I’d volunteered for.

I turned to Olivia.

“Will you touch her for me?” I asked, pouring real, acidic longing into David’s voice.

Olivia slowly eased her fingers out of herself, and held them out questioningly to Rachel.

Rachel nodded eagerly, took Olivia’s wrist, and brushed her hand along her body, over her chest, down her abs, to the ready glistening of wetness on her lips.

“This’ll be a little different, I think, from what you could have done with your own body,” said Olivia. Her soft lips twitched into a smirk, and I realized that she’d already learned to play me just the same way I was playing her, seeking out those tender intersections where our characters’ feelings aligned with our own. “But we’ll just have to make do.”

Olivia knelt up on the couch, still holding my hand, and pulled Rachel’s legs toward her, one at a time, surrounding herself with them. Rachel squealed with joy and anticipation, and laced her fingers behind her head.

Olivia brought her fingers back to Rachel’s pussy, and teased them around the opening, waiting for me.

I got up from my chair and braced my free hand under the table in a tight, stationary circle, preparing to shift my movement to my hips, so that I could keep on mirroring her.

“If you had your cock here, on the same plane with her,” Olivia teased, “it might work something a little bit like this.”

She pressed two fingers deep into Rachel, following them along with a thrust of her hips.

Rachel moaned, arched her back, and dragged both her hands down her neck to play with her breasts.

At the same moment as Olivia’s thrust, I took one of my own, into my hand, and groaned with both genuine pleasure and bone-deep longing.

“She’s so warm,” I sighed, as if I could feel her through Olivia’s fingers, and not just my own memory.

“Mmhmm,” said Olivia, initiating another shared thrust, and another, slowly and deliberately. “She’s alive, and so excited to be here, aren’t you, Arianna?”

Rachel groaned in the affirmative and reached up to touch Olivia’s chest.

I didn’t have enough hands to try to recreate that sensation for myself. My sternum ached for contact, right over my heart. I leaned in lower over the table, imagining Rachel here on top of it, between me and the cold, hard wood.

“Can you feel how wet she is?” asked Olivia.

“Almost,” I whispered, honestly.

Olivia kept her thrusts slow and deep, pausing at the bottom of each stroke to grind against the back of her own hand, while pressing her palm against Rachel’s clit.

“More,” Rachel begged.

“More what?” asked Olivia.

“Everything,” Rachel gasped, breathless. “Anything. Just… more.”

I could give Rachel more.

I wanted to. I wanted jump the table and fill her up with me, replacing Olivia, or even joining her. I wanted to touch Rachel on every good nerve she had, all at once. I could do it.

But then, Olivia could have granted her request too. Olivia was choosing to go slow, to keep Rachel wanting more. Just the way I would have. And I would have been terribly proud of the reaction I got for it, too.

I had no genuine critiques to offer, as much as I wished I did.

Olivia leaned her head down and licked one of Rachel’s hard, prominent nipples.

I licked the bare table and tried to imagine feeling that sensitive little peak against my taste buds.

God, it was torture, being this close to Rachel in mid sex act and unable to touch her directly, a torture entirely of my own making.

I squeezed Olivia’s hand almost too tightly, like she was here as my emotional support for some painful ordeal, instead of the other way around.

Rachel looked up, directly at me, watching me thrust against the table, still in perfect rhythm with the hand thrusting into her.

There was so much on her face that I was sure matched my own, the pleasure, the frustration, the vaguely embarrassed awe at the vulnerable wildness of what we were doing. But as ever, there was something else, something not connected with any character. Some kind of impatience all her own that I couldn’t stand to hope I understood.

Then it was gone, buried back under the roleplay, and a huge, playful grin.

“Please,” Rachel sighed sweetly. “Please, ‘David,’ tell her to fuck me harder for you.”

“Can we?” I asked Olivia, in my most innocent ghostly voice. “Can we go harder? I can almost feel it! It’s almost like being alive!”

“Hmm,” Olivia taunted, slowing down further for a few agonizingly separate strokes. “Okay!”

She sank in hard and, instead of pausing, jumped into a pounding new pace, removing all space from between the strokes. Her hips hammered against her hand, against Rachel beneath her hand. Her thumb never left Rachel’s clit, while her fingers darted efficiently in and out.

I stumbled for a moment, trying to catch up, but soon fell into sync with the two women again, pumping my hips against the edge of the table.

“Is this what you had in mind when you brought me here?” Olivia murmured to Rachel. The softness of her voice made the distance across the table prickle.

“I just came to investigate a haunting on a remote island village,” Rachel laughed. “The rest is all you two.”

Olivia laughed too, but the sound quickly shortened and grew higher, resonating with the tensing and tightening of every muscle in her body.

She turned to look at me.

“Here’s another thing that’s… a little different… from if you were alive,” she panted. “I can keep going for her, without having to change a single thing, even if I finish first. And I’m so… temptingly… close. So, do you want to pace ourselves like she’s counting on your warm, solid, living cock to see her through? Or should we just let loose?”

I was right there with Olivia. In spite of all the jumbled feelings of the day, or maybe partly because of them, my body was lit up all over, ready to tip over at the slightest provocation.

But I didn’t want it to happen from just any random provocation. I wanted it to happen within the fantasy of fucking Rachel, or “Arianna,” if only through the tantalizing conduit of a living proxy.

“I might disappear when this is over,” I brought us back to the plot. “I want to wait for her. As long as she wants.”

“You hear that?” Olivia looked back at Rachel. “As long as you want.”

“Such a generous spirit.” Rachel smirked at me. “But I’m… not going to be able… to drag this out… oh fuck… too much longer….”

She writhed on my couch cushions and twisted her fingers in her hair, breathing harder with each passing second, each hard thrust of Olivia’s hips, and mine.

I had to admit, if these really had been my last few seconds tethered to the material plane, I could think of infinite worse ways to spend them.

Rachel’s soft moans grew louder and closer together, until she gripped the cushions and cried out. Her eyes closed reflexively, then opened with intention, finding mine and holding me in the most intimate, touchless contact.

Olivia stopped thrusting and cupped Rachel’s clit steadily with the flat of her palm, grinding herself urgently against her own knuckles.

I held myself, tight and still, waiting for the moment.

Olivia announced it with a grunt and a trembling, uncontrolled squeeze of my hand, and I took those last two, three, four thrusts that it took for me to join them both. The waves of pleasure crashed through me, powerful as any magic, and I felt the splash of fluid hit the underside of the table and drip down onto the floor.

Oh well, there was always cleanup to be done after a good game night.

For a long while, we all just stayed there, connected as we were, breathing in the dim, quiet warmth of the room.

Then Rachel shakily hoisted herself upright on the couch. She gasped as Olivia’s fingers slid out of her.

“So,” she said. “How do you feel… David?”

I caught my breath, found David’s ethereal voice again.

“I feel… not complete,” I said. “I wish I could try so many more things. And the same things, over and over again. But I think I needed the chance to know how incomplete I was. How incomplete we maybe all are, on our own. It’s better than never even getting a glimpse.”

I swirled my hands together like a magical vortex and then raised them above my head, spreading the fingers wide to all directions.

“Trippy, you can feel the tendrils of David’s spirit recede from inside you. At the same time, you both notice that the visual image of him is becoming more transparent, more intangible.”

Olivia and Rachel clasped hands in silent, bittersweet celebration.

“Finally, the last whisp of his presence shoots you a tearful smile and bursts into light. The membrane of magic that seems to have been containing this space within the circle bursts, and you can feel the night air on your skin again.”

#

Olivia was the first to leave. I’d been hopeful and terrified that she would be.

“So…” Rachel clasped her hands and rocked back and forth on the couch, glancing sideways at me, where I’d taken Olivia’s spot.

“So…” I repeated. “Did that go the way you were imagining?”

“Kind of,” she said.

“Kind of?”

“Well, I imagined a few different possibilities,” said Rachel.

“And this was one of them?”

“Close to one of them. Close but better.”

“What were the others?” I asked.

Rachel sighed, visibly debating with herself.

“I thought you might hate the idea,” she said. “I thought you might tell me that what you did for me was just for me.”

My voice shut off in my throat, as surely as if someone had thrown a switch.

“And then I thought that I might hate it,” said Rachel. “I didn’t know how I was going to feel, seeing someone else get to play with that side of you. And I’m not going to lie; I did get a little jealous.”

She laughed, like that was ridiculous of her.

“But also… it was kind of hot, too,” she said. “The jealousy even kind of made it spicier. And then getting to join in….”

She grinned and shivered.

“Anyway… I’m just so glad we’re okay. That was the most important thing, for me. If you didn’t want to play like that with anyone else… or if you wanted to offer it as a service to anyone who needs it…. Either way, I just still wanted to be….”

“You’re special, Rachel,” I blurted out.

Rachel blushed. Her shoulders rose, and she seemed to be having trouble looking at me. “You don’t have to say that.”

I fought my instincts and steered into the skid. “You’re special to me.”

Rachel’s voice got very quiet. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying that tonight wasn’t fun,” I said. “I thought I might hate it too, but I didn’t, and I’m not opposed to doing something like that again. But you could bring ten thousand guest players through my living room, and none of them would be you.”

Rachel’s hand moved before any other part of her. She squeezed my arm, then twisted quickly toward me and planted a kiss on my lips.

“To be clear, that was me,” she said. “Me. Rachel. No one else.”

I touched her cheek to hold her steady and kissed her again, a little longer.

“And that was me,” I said.

We passed the kiss back and forth a few more times, like the gentlest, quietest game of hot potato. A tingling stirred in my pelvis that I would have thought I was too tired to feel.

“Come to bed?” I asked. “If we take it slow, I think I can go again.”

Rachel kissed my neck and stood up. “As slow as you like.”

***

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