Duchess J., part I

This story comes in many parts...here's an arbitrary chunk of my/our excellent interaction with a beguiling woman.

The duchess waltzed into my life during the party mentioned in my last post. She lives far away. Post-party, the Prince pinged her on Facebook--she pinged back--not wanting to miss out, I pinged her too--she pinged back--I wrote her a longer response--she wrote me an even longer response, and one to Prince B too--the Prince and I started sharing her responses to each of us with each other--we made it more efficient and began a lively three-way email discourse, writing each other pages-long emails about love and life and jealousy and the geometry of three-pronged relationships. And, thanks to the Duchess, about food.

After the party, we didn't see her outside of the virtual world until Burning Man, where we eagerly anticipated meeting up. (for any readers not familiar with Burning Man: it's a big, I don't know, technohippie art festival in Black Rock Desert, NV. Once a year, fifty thousand people (largely upper-middle-class liberal white people, but I hear the diversity is growing (racial and geographic diversity, not so much economic or political diversity)), from all over the world (but mostly the western half of the US and also NY) go there for a week and build a temporary crazy city in the middle of a fuck-ton of white desert dust. They call the earth there playa and they call the city Black Rock City. That's prob'ly all you need to know for the purposes of this blog. It's better than I'm making it sound.) The first day in the desert we pedaled over to the Duchess's camp in Prince B's two-person pedal-car built for the occasion, and there was a big dust storm and we were in the right general vicinity but couldn't see more than a few feet in front of us. So we parked the pedal car and walked toward the first structure we could make out in the dust, and lo and behold! It was the Duchess's camp, a group of 20 or 30 people, many of whom we know.

So we saw her again. We cuddled up in the dust storm with her and DOL, also part of her camp, and talked and stroked each other's arms, waiting for the dust to lift enough to find our way back to camp, where I was scheduled to cook that night. Seeing her was shocking, a little bit--our correspondence had so colored my image of her that seeing her in the flesh--shorter than I remembered her? But then most of the time I had seen her, that first night, was more horizontal than vertical--made of skin instead of pixels--such a stranger still, despite all the intimacies we had poured out electronically, that it was a bit like meeting a new person. But a new person one feels one knows, a new person who comes with that feeling of recognition that you get when meeting a very good friend for the first time. The storm blew on around us. We talked through our dust masks and goggles and listened to each other and turned slowly white from the light-colored dirt in the air on our skin, in our hair, extricating ourselves only when it was past time to return home.

Later that night we went back to their camp to excursion with Duchess J and our other friends SweetD and Rawr, a couple we had met at the same party we first encountered the Duchess. We explored Black Rock City, returned. I was a tired Princess but the notion of staying over in SweetD and Rawr's tent with the Duchess was bandied about and seemed rather irresistably attractive.

I swore I would sleep. I collapsed on the mattress inside the tent. The other four, less tired, sat around my curled-up body and began stroking me, and immediately it was clear that my sleepiness wouldn't last. But I let them go on touching me, and watched as they started to kiss each other, letting my sleepiness give way to my arousal. Only when I couldn't stand it any longer, when the delightful burn in my pussy and flutter in my tummy reached a pitch that I couldn't ignore for one more second, did I allow my hands to slide up along their intertwined bodies. The kisses descended to me, to my lips and face and shoulders and thighs, and I rose to meet them. The subsequent fivesome was heavenly, and again, the details blurred by the passage of time--has it already been a month and a half? Indeed. Next time I'll be writing about this sort of thing while it's still fresh. Moments I remember--the two beautiful women, the Duchess and Rawr, side by side on their backs, underneath me, one of my knees in between each set of their thighs, just looking at their beautiful softness and leaning forward to kiss two incredible sets of nipples, feeling them grow firm between my lips. My nipples brushing theirs. Two gorgeous men running their hands over my naked body, behind me, while the ladies kissed each other below me, the softnesses of their bodies pressing against each other and me.

At one point in the night, Prince B and Duchess J got somehow separated to the other side of the tent. He was sitting up and she was in his lap, his cock in her mouth. SweetD was sitting on his heels and I was leaning against him, restrained by his arms, while Rawr parted the lips of my vagina, tickled my clit with her tongue, made me rock back over and over again against SweetD's warm hardness straining into my back. I was missing the Prince at that moment, feeling echoes of the jealousy I had felt at the party where we met, and I looked over and locked eyes with him. Watching his arousal grow enhanced mine, I felt our connection surging back, and suddenly the incredible eroticism of my current position overwhelmed me. My Prince & I were together, surrounded and attended to by sexual beings; we were their masters in one moment, in another moment their slaves, following each other's orgasms with eager & devouring eyes. Ohmigoodness. And shortly thereafter, we were ready for sleep again.

The queen-size mattress was too small for five. We lined up, the boys on the ends, I in the very middle, and despite my genuine bone-deep exhaustion, I could not drift off. Duchess J was between me and the Prince, and in my sleep-deprived state the earlier moment of jealousy returned to me, grew. Following our rule for immediate sharing, despite the fact that I knew he had drifted off to sleep, I leaned over the Duchess and tried to whisper in his ear, returning them both to alertness.

"Hey, love--sorry to bother you, I know you're sleeping, but can I talk to you for a moment?"

He struggled to open his eyes. "Of course."

"Earlier--when you & the Duchess were together on the other side of the tent--I was feeling some jealousy. I just wanted to tell you that."

He looked at me, sleep fogging his face, confused and frozen. The Duchess was contrite. "I'm sorry," she whispered, squeezing my shoulder. But it wasn't her acknowledgment I needed at that moment. The Prince said nothing. I realized that he was too sleepy, really, to process what I had said, that we were discussing something publicly that we had only really talked about in private before, we were surrounded by people who had given us a pretty fantastic night and needed to sleep, and that this wasn't going to get very far.

"It's okay," I told him. "I just wanted to let you know." I settled back in amongst the incredibly hot people I was there to spend the night with. Everybody shifted until we were all arranged just so, pressed up against each other, and I was too warm and uncomfortable and even more distracted, knowing the timing was awful but feeling rejected by my prince's blank stare instead of reassured by the warmth I had expected from him. So I leaned over again.

"Hey," I whispered again. He woke, sort of. "Hey, I just wanted to make sure that you heard what I said earlier." (He'd been mishearing me/not hearing me all day, and we had concluded earlier that he'd gotten something in his ear or something.) He looked at me. "Yeah," he said. I waited. Nothing. "I just--could you just tell me that it's okay for me to feel that way?" "Yes--yes, of course!" "Oh. Okay."

I settled back in again. But that was too much. It wasn't at all the reassurance I needed, and the lack of that, combined with my extreme sleep-deprivation, was turning what had been a pretty minor twinge of jealousy into full-blown hurt. I was frustrated with not being able to sleep, knowing that the desert sun made sleeping in impossible, and feeling shut out, and suddenly not at all a part of the pile of beautiful bodies I was inhabiting. Besides all that, I had to pee. I struggled up and out of the tent, trying not to cry. SweetD said, "hey--are you coming back?"

I hadn't been sure, but I told him that yes, I would, I was just going to the portapotties, which I did, and then cried outside for a minute before I headed for the tent again (it gets cold in the desert at night!) I hoped to get to sleep on the edge of the people pile when I returned, but my shifting had roused everybody, and the Prince had gone to the bathroom as well by the time I returned. We settled in again, me on the edge, but of course when the prince arrived he took the outer spot again, and I was hemmed in and sleepless and upset and not sure at all what to do about it. The tears returned, and I let them fall silently. But I did consciously let some of them fall on Prince B's neck.

Diversion: have any other cryers out there done this? I know I have more than once. You're upset--you don't want to harp on it--but the people you're with may not know you're upset. And the tears are there, and you don't want to sob loudly, but maybe if you're curled up in bed with someone you let the sobs shake you--just a tiny bit. And maybe you let a few tears touch your partner's skin. Just to let them know. Is that manipulative? Passive-aggressive? Or is it just a wordless form of communication? Take your pick. Sometimes the tears work when the words don't, for making the understanding happen. The dishonesty comes in, I suppose, if you're pretending to try to hide the tears, when actually you want them seen. I can't claim never to have been two-faced about that. I'll try to be more up-front in the future.

Anyway. Prince B noticed I was crying, woke up for real, and asked if I would talk to him outside, which I gratefully consented to. (I suppose I could have asked him for that myself. My courage had failed me, maybe, or I wanted somehow to be able to deal with it without leaving the nest of bodies--I mean it honestly hadn't occurred to me to ask for a private conference. The troubles of sleep-deprived minds, maybe. Or maybe I just *am* passive-aggressive. Damn.)

Anyway, so we talked shivering outside, naked under our coats, holding each other for warmth. It turns out that Prince B had heard me the first time, had been a bit deer-in-the-headlights because of the public scenario, and too close to sleep to respond properly, not realizing how much I needed it. The second time I spoke to him, when I asked if he had heard me--he actually hadn't heard that, and was confused about why I was looking at him so expectantly, and still mostly asleep--anyway. I cried on him about how I had felt shut out, and he felt terrible and apologized, and gave me all the reassurance I needed, and it felt better, and then we decided that if we were going to get any sleep at all we should bike back to our own camp, which we did after saying goodbye and collecting (most of) our clothes. Blessed sleep, renewed connection.

There's more to this story, but I'll continue it in the next post. This incident was a good experience for the Prince & I--the first time either of us had hurt the other's feelings, and we proved ourselves capable of sorting it out well. Events in the coming days got more difficult before they got wonderful. The rest of this story coming soon.