This is a work of erotic fantasy, so there’s quite a lot of sex. However, there isn’t sex happening in every chapter. There are many passages that include setup, character development, and all that boring stuff which makes the sex that much more meaningful when it finally happens. I know not everyone cares about backstory or getting to know the characters, so each chapter which does have sex in it also has a heart following its title: ♥

The sex is not intended to be pornographic or paraphilic. It’s just the kind of stuff that happens between people, though sometimes in somewhat unusual situations. This includes threesomes and groups, intimacy taking place among people under the age of eighteen (with no one over eighteen present), same-sex partners, and scenes involving brother-sister incest. If you live in the kind of world where you believe those sorts of things never happen, or should never happen, you’re both (1) welcome to stop reading now; and (2) not even remotely in touch with reality in any way at all.

There is cover art for Book 2! It’s non-nude. If you’d like to see it, it’s here on imgbox.com.

Finally, Nifty has been providing some primo material for years now, and can always use a helping hand. Websites aren’t free to operate or maintain, and no one’s getting paid to do any of this. Donate what you can, as you’re able!

Enjoy!

— Harmony Brücke, fricfic at gmail.

Kaeleigh Goes All the Way

Book 2: 2024 • Part I: Pretty Good Privates

6. Views on the Rooftop

It was Kaeleigh’s idea for them to go up on the roof. At some time in the past, Luke’s little rental house had been owned or inhabited by an astronomy grad who’d hired a crew to install a telescope deck, with a roof-access hatch. Folding stairs from the hall let into the attic, and from there a well-constructed set of hickory risers led to the hatch. The deck was where they’d watched the fireworks, and added a few of their own to the show. They brought themselves, some pillows, and a bottle of wine up. Marta carried the bottle. Kaeleigh carried the glasses. Luke carried the pillows. All of them were nude.

They sat and sipped and chatted, and enjoyed the view both on and beyond the deck. From here, a fairly good swath of the city’s downtown district was visible as an array of lights toward the east, with the university campus on the other side, to the west. The glow of distant buildings added to the moonlight. Later, when it was darker, the stars were visible, Luke said. All around them was grad-student housing, so there wasn’t a lot of noise or partymaking in the neighborhood, and the lighting was restricted to low, old-fashioned globe lamps along the sidewalks, a pale glow that didn’t override the darkness. The night air was mild, carrying a hint of jasmine from someone’s yard nearby. Crickets essayed the occasional serenade. It felt a little like a movie set, intimate and artistically lit and slightly magical.

Marta breathed deeply and sighed. “What a perfectly wonderful evening. A delicious meal, a delightful interlude making love with two good friends, and a gorgeous night to top it all off. I haven’t felt this carefree in a long time. Thank you for having me, and sharing yourselves and your love.”

“It’s been our pleasure, Marta. We need to do it all again.”

“Yeah, we do for sure,” Kaeleigh murmured. “Everything’s been great. I wouldn’t mind if things like this happened pretty regularly.”

“I agree, and I believe they will. My house, next time? I cook, you bring the dessert?”

“Perfect,” said Luke.

“We’ll be there.”

“Good. I’m already looking forward to it.”

Kaeleigh considered her. She was leaning back on her hands, her legs stretched out straight in front of her, her head tilted back and her eyes closed. The mellow light cast her skin in silver and warmer, human shades, transforming her to an ephemeral denizen of myth, a slightly Rubenesque naiad pausing to bathe in moonlight. “Do you ever take time off?”

“I haven’t taken much of a break in … oh … not really, no. But I love what I do, so I don’t usually feel like I need a break. The paperwork’s never a joy, but the reason for it all…” She sighed again. “I’m living my dream, honey. I am literally, actually, living out a fantasy when I come to work every day.”

“The talent sure is pretty,” she agreed.

“Oh, being surrounded by living breathing works of art is absolutely a bonus, but it’s not just the décor.” She sipped some wine and looked at Luke and Kaeleigh, sitting cuddled on the deck, facing her. The girl was snuggled into the big, strong arms of her man. They were a gorgeous picture of a newly-wed couple, still very much in their honeymoon, a sweetly-matched pair that belonged together, radiantly in love.

“When I launched PGP, it was a pretty rough go at first. I was still doing scenes for the more conventional market to help pay bills, and I dumped every extra penny I had right back into the company. Some of it was hiring talent — even then, I was determined to pay better than anyone else, and I did — and a hell of a lot more of it was advertising. I put together some animGif loops that ran fifteen seconds, and were unusual for porn-website ads for the time, because they were clean, airy, bright, and didn’t include any split beaver at all. They looked like ads for romance stories, and really stood out compared to everyone else’s ads, which were mostly thrusting this and jiggling that. The tagline was By Women, For Women, and no one had seen that before at all. I had a couple webmasters tell me they thought their users would think it was all lesbian, which made no sense to me, because the imagery was more than half men, more than half naked, too. It was like the words crossed the wires in their tiny brains, but I had a hunch women would be capable of parsing a message nuanced enough to contain both images and text.”

“We are better at subtlety,” Kaeleigh said.

“We don’t think with our genitals as much, which helps. When your entire world outlook is down to differentiating between things you would fuck and things you wouldn’t, it tends to skew how you see everything. But the nice thing, the great thing about those ads is they weren’t pornographic. They were erotic and everyone in them was nude, but they didn’t show breasts, or the pubic zones on anyone. So I could use them on non-adult websites, and I placed them all over on women’s-themed sites. Sites about cooking or sewing or housekeeping.”

“Damn good idea,” Kaeleigh said.

“My site-visit numbers went way, way up almost immediately,” Marta nodded. “And good God, did I get memberships. They stuck around. And their subscriptions let me start really expanding, getting better cameras, a better editing setup, hiring a full-time photographer-director, a full-time editor and webmaster — she did both, and was brilliant at both — and we started expanding our settings from hotel rooms to outdoor locations, office settings, and more. And the whole time, for that first five years or so, I was driven by one thing one man said to me.

“He was the producer at one of the conventional houses, and when he found out what I was trying to do, it was like he took it as a personal attack against him. He told me I’d never get anywhere, my ideas were crazy and women weren’t interested in erotica — only he never used the word women; we were always cunts to him — and within a few months I’d come crawling back and admit I was wrong. Just like any other cunt.” She sipped her wine again. “It wasn’t a personal attack on him at all, until after he said that. From then on, though, his stupid, hateful, entitled sneer was on my mind. I made it my mission to take his ass down a peg.

“Five years later, when I was twenty-five, I bought his company out from under him, fired him, replaced him with a woman, and set her up with complete creative control. She shared half of their profits until I was repaid, after which it was her business completely. She got it done and paid off in eight months, which was sixteen months less time than the contract stipulated. They’re still going strong, too. Sappho Street. Nothing, as that former producer would have said, but cunts.”

“They do some good stuff,” Kaeleigh said.

“They do. They do indeed.”

“You bought that asshole out?” Luke said. “Why’d he let you, if he hated you so much?”

“I bought his business. He didn’t have any say in it.” Marta shrugged. “There’s a real benefit to doing it all as an LLC in sole proprietorship. His partners saw dollar signs, and didn’t give a shit about what happened to him in a hostile takeover, as long as they got their money. Karma’s a bitch. Or maybe she’s a cunt. Either way, just seeing the look on his face when I personally handed him his final check and told him to clean out his office and sanitize the desk was worth it.” She sipped again. “I burned the couch, though.”

“Nice,” Kaeleigh said.

Marta nodded. “And that really was the dream that kept me going. At first it was removing one asshole from the industry. Then it became more like … since I was established and had an ally in Sappho, it became a question of subversion, changing the game from the inside. I did the same strategy with a couple other particularly sleazy houses, buying them out and turning them over to women. And word started to spread. Women liked porn too, and they didn’t like what was happening in a lot of the industry, and they were coming to change it.

“Not the form itself. I don’t really have a problem with the crude pubescent fantasy a lot of it is. There are something on the order of two billion crude pubescents on the planet right now, all of whom need something to jerk off to. If a couple of girls are happy doing a scene with a strap-on, well, I say more power to them. But that’s the stuff for men. What I do is for women, and that’s what Sappho does, as well as Lyra’s Lyre and Beads of Joy.”

“Those are you, too?” Kaeleigh said. “Damn, I shoulda guessed. I love everything they do.”

“I helped them launch. That’s all. They’re wholly controlled by their owners, but their owners are personal friends and I know their standards and practices. It’s worked, the few times I’ve done it, for ridiculously obvious reasons to anyone in the industry. Even in a shady porn house, there’re a lot of assets, but the house itself is usually rife with financial mismanagement and unpredictable profits, since the top dog is usually skimming, or snorting a lot of it, or paying off girls he’s assaulted. So it’s financially weak, but it possesses some vestige of functional structure. There’s production hardware, there’s usually some kind of studio, and there’s often a staff that’s been around a while and don’t care much who the boss is, as long as they get paid. They’re not going to walk just because the chief prick got softened up. And if they stick around, they discover that working conditions improve in a hell of a hurry. There’s better treatment and better pay for everyone, not just the talent.

“So buying out the company represents reinstallation of brass, coupled with the acquisition of a working infrastructure. You’re not starting all over from the bottom; you’re just replacing a few key players, requiring regular mopping and laundering, tolerating no harassment, and changing the way scenes are done. And since the male-targeted porn market is saturated, margins are thin. The shareholders see an opportunity to bail on a bad asset without losing anything in the bargain, and they jump at the chance. Offering ten percent over annual profit is usually enough to clear out a lot of desks, and ten percent over profit on a stumbling, ineptly-run business that nets less than a quarter million per year is absurdly easy to do, when you’re feeding a ‘niche’ that loves you enough to gross in that amount each month as the subscription fee. Of course, that was eight or ten years ago. It’s considerably more than a quarter-million per month now. We currently have a reliable subscription base of a little over five million, all of whom pony up ten bucks each for thirty days.”

“Good God,” Luke said. He knew PGP was doing well, but grossing fifty million a month was a surprise.

“Uh-huh. We can credit about six figures of that audience to your work alone, honey. You really are a bargain. That staff trip we took to the Azores last year was pretty much down to you.”

“The Azores?” Kaeleigh said. “You took everyone to the Azores?”

“That was the vacation I told you about,” Luke said.

“I guess I thought it was just the two of you. I didn’t know it was everyone else, too. That’s awesome!”

Marta nodded. “We work hard, but we take time to play, too. It’s New Zealand this year, right in the middle of January, and I do believe you’re going to love it. Forty talent, seventy staff, damn little clothing, spang in the height of the antipodean summer.”

“And us, together,” Luke said, and kissed her ear.

“Oh my God, babe.” She looked at Marta. “Got any plans for bed buddies yet?”

“Uh,” she said. “Well, I hadn’t thought that far ahead…”

“You’re welcome to join us,” said Luke.

“You don’t mind?”

“Hell no. You and me and hubby make glee.”

“You’re both a blessing, you know that? Of course the bulk of what we take in goes into staff, talent, and facilities, not wild orgies at beach resorts in different latitudes. There are the daily operational costs such as networking and legal. There are the occasional buy-ups I do of properties, such as the forty-odd acres of woodland you see on the far side of the studio. That’ll remain untouched treescape until … well, as long as I’m around to keep it that way, anyhow. We need forests. There are also the longer-term investments, like some assets I’ve sunk into new technology projects, entrepreneurs looking to expand the possibilities for VR, who need capital to develop the hardware and software.”

“VR? You mean like Kiiroo with an Oculus?”

“It’s a good idea, but inadequate,” Marta said. “The reason the internet has so much bandwidth right now is high-res, high-def porn. Email doesn’t use anything more than a trickle, and your typical news feed only a little more than that, even with image and ad content. Social media is essentially an advertising and revenue stream with user comments added in on the side. But porn is a massive, dedicated sink of bandwidth, and was from the very beginning. People wanted superior image quality for all those split beavers and cumshots, and they paid to have the pipes to feed it to them, and in the process they completely changed the technology that delivered it all, forcing providers to improve speed and quality. Now the internet is a backbone of many multinational corporations, and it feeds a lot of vanilla entertainment to hundreds of millions of people every minute. But none of that would’ve happened without porn, pushing the limits of the technology.

“The same kind of change will happen in VR, for the same reason. Sure, people will use it to attend meetings remotely, with a live telepresence that feels like the real thing, just like they do with online teleconferencing now, using bandwidth that didn’t exist ten years ago. But the real reason, the real drive behind the improvement, will not be allowing the CEO of Coca-Cola to attend an executive board meeting from his house in the Caymans. Those applications use innovation, but they don’t drive it. That’s not where the money is. It’ll come from people wanting to have primo whacking material in the privacy of their homes.

“Kiiroo is on the right track, but not what I’m angling for. Handheld will work fine for a lot of people, but if you can put on goggles and a suit, or do something equally immersive but with less physical hardware, then subscribe to a realtime-rendered, interactive 3D sensory experience that lets you feel like you’re being fellated or fucked by the woman of your dreams, a woman you can see and touch and hear and maybe even taste or smell, that’s worth twenty bucks a pop to pretty much any man. For women, it’ll be about the same, a partner who’s brilliant at cunnilingus, passionate and attentive, and doesn’t come until you’re damn well ready for him to. The current tech isn’t there yet, and I’m keeping an eye on — and a hand in — developments along those lines.”

“That makes complete, perfect sense,” Luke said. “There’d be millions of guys logging in to do that, every day.”

“Every hour,” Kaeleigh said. “And there’s a billion girls who’d pay that to have perfect tongue from a hot guy, too. I mean, I get it for free every day, but there’s only one of you, which means everyone else needs an alternative. They’d be all over it.”

“I think so too. So I’m helping nudge things along on a few intriguing projects. That’s not a big chunk of what we make, but it’s there. And if one of them succeeds, as a silent partner, PGP will get a big payoff. For the rest … well, I don’t think I pay myself too much, because I know how all that capital accumulated and, while I call the shots, I’m not the one appearing in any of them any more. But it is nice to know I have a secure retirement in my future, and to write out a shopping list each week and not have to worry about whether I can afford all of it.”

“It is,” Luke said, and lifted his glass at her. She smiled, saluted, and they both sipped.

“Now the game-changing I do is simply being present. The whole industry is starting to pay attention, and PGP is one of the houses they’re all paying attention to. There’s still a lot of split beaver and cumshots out there, and there always will be, because there’s always a demographic to consume that sort of stuff. That’s fine. I’ve never been interested in dictating what people should or shouldn’t get off to; it’s none of my business, and there’s room in the big wide world for every kink. But pay’s getting better, in some places, and in most of them, the talent now expects to see at least a minimum level of cleanliness and decency on the set.”

“That’s what Matt was saying,” Kaeleigh said. “He said the pay was pretty bad when he did some scenes in California, but the sheets were clean. He also said no one believed him when he told them what you paid. I don’t believe how bad the pay was for him, and especially the girls. I wouldn’t do a scene for three hundred bucks.”

“That’s because you don’t see yourself as a disposable asset,” Marta said. “Which is as it should be, because you’re not. But the old Mafia habits are still entrenched, and it’s going to be a long time before they’re completely gone. Porn’s been a boys’ club for decades, stacked to the rafters with misogynists. That’s not going to change, oh, probably in my lifetime, but I think the wind is definitely coming from a different direction now, and even the sleazeballs are starting to shift with it. Grudgingly, maybe, but it’s happening.”

“I’m glad,” Luke said. “I never really liked regular porn because I know sex isn’t actually like that. I like seeing people do the same kinds of things I do, not … yeah, not pumping it all over some girl’s tits or her face. It wasn’t easy to find the stuff I did like, but yeah, Beads of Joy and X-Art are close, I like a lot of Sappho and the Lyre because it helps me have a better idea what girls do with each other, and what they really like … plus, you know, girl-on-girl is fucking beautiful … and PGP was right up my alley. When I met you and you told me who you were, I couldn’t believe my luck, especially when you offered me work.”

“You had the look and the style,” Marta said. “And you’re a great fuck. That tends to influence my decisions sometimes. I saw how you were with the other women and with me, I saw how you changed your style with each of them to match what they wanted, and I saw how important it was to you that they came, a lot. I figured you’d be the same in front of a camera. Some people work for it, kid, and some are born with it. But however they get it, I know it when I see it.”

“But you didn’t see me doing anything, and you hired me anyway,” Kaeleigh said.

“Luke married you,” Marta said. “I figured any woman who could get him to commit to that degree, even if it is an open marriage, had to be able to keep up with him in bed as much as anywhere else. I was right, of course, as I now know for certain, but I figured you’d be as capable as he is, and I knew you were a player, so having sex with others watching is something you’re already doing. It’s just the cameras that change the game a little.”

“I’m not worried about them,” Kaeleigh said. “I’m pretty sure they’re not gonna throw me off. And actually, uh, I mean, I like having sex in front of other people, and … I’d see Luke in a scene, and put myself in the girl’s place, cameras and all … I guess doing porn’s kind of a fantasy for me. But PGP-style porn, not the other kind.”

“It’s a fantasy for a lot of women,” Marta said. “We have a pretty deep waiting list for the Cafés.”

“I bet. But fantasy and porn are kind of mixed together all the time anyhow. Not like the Nadia stuff. I mean, I like that, I like the story arcs, and I like the effects and the terrible jokes, and the costumes are so beautiful. I just mean like a, well, when I met Matt he told me he did yoga too, and we were talking about how it might be cool to do a scene where I’m a yoga instructor and he’s a new student, and I’m showing him poses. And it’s nude yoga, of course, and we make love.”

“I like it,” Marta said. “Next staff meeting, bring it up when we get to new scene pitches. I know a couple of directors who’d probably jump on it.”

“Staff meetings? There’s staff meetings?”

“Once a month, yeah. We get together and talk about the upcoming scenes, work out who’s going to be in what, discuss new business, welcome new hires, decide on what the next hangout’s going to be, that kind of thing. That’s also when we have pitches, where people talk about their ideas for a scene, and we see what the response is. I could see your yoga-teacher thing being a hell of a nice one-off.”

“Awesome. But … well, what I meant was that kinda spun off from a fantasy I’ve always had.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Uh-huh. It’s … just a regular yoga class, you know, there’s guys and girls in it, and it’s, well, we’re not nude when it starts. And this guy next to me keeps looking at me and I know what he’s thinking, so we start flirting. Pretty soon we’re touching each other, like with two-person stretches or poses, and then we’re taking off our clothes a bit at a time, and pretty soon we’re having sex, right there in the middle of the yoga class, with everyone all around us and still doing their poses, like nothing’s going on, only they all know what we’re doing, they can all see us fucking, and they’re getting off on it. The guys all have hardons, and you can see the girls are wet in their leotards or yoga pants. And we finish, you know, we finish having sex, and then the class is done, and we just get up and do our warmdowns with everyone else. No one says anything to us at all, but we know they liked the show.”

“I love the hell out of that, hon,” Luke said. “God, that is so hot.”

“It really is,” said Marta. “Develop it out with Matt, write some notes, and pitch it. You’ll be in it before you know it.”

“Wow.” Kaeleigh shivered.

“Any other fantasies you want to share?” Luke said.

She giggled. “Well, when I was a little girl, I used to pretend a fireman was saving me.”

“From what?”

She shrugged. “Fires. Or other things, like a bear chased me up a tree, or quicksand, or whatever.”

“And you thanked him appropriately when it was done?”

“Dork. I was like eight years old. I wasn’t thinking like that. It was mostly about … him picking me up, you know, in his big strong arms, and carrying me away, and I’d have my arms around him and lay my head on his chest.”

“Was it bare, at least?”

She giggled again. “Not until I was a little older. Then … yeah, it started getting a little more … fireman calendar-y. And once I discovered porn, well, you know what happened. I had fantasies about group sex, and then I found out about All The Way.”

“And the rest is history,” Luke said.

“What about you, hon?”

“I live a fantasy every Sunday. And, since you’re here with me now, I live my number-one fantasy every day. I fall asleep with you, the literal girl of my dreams, and wake up next to you every morning, and every morning I can’t believe that it’s not a dream, that you really are right there next to me. I couldn’t believe it the first night we spent together. I still can’t believe it now.” Marta and Kaeleigh both went awwww. “But … well, when I was younger, before I started having sex, I was way into ancient Egyptian stuff.”

“That’s right, you were,” Kaeleigh said. “You had drawings of sphinxes and things all over your room.”

“Uh-huh. And I used to have this … fantasy, about there being some kind of ancient mystery religion, and when you got to a certain age, which just happened to be the age I was then, you could be initiated into the temple. And how they did it was everyone got together, you know, in a big stone temple, and there was hieroglyphs and burning braziers and incense and all that, and the women were in those thin Egyptian style dresses and the men just had on the skirt things. And me, the new initiate, I was naked. And the priestess leads me to the altar, and she rubs me all over with oil, and then she takes off her gown and I do the same, I just rub oil all over her body. And then she takes me up onto the altar and we have sex, right there in front of all the other people. And after I come, everyone just has a huge orgy. And after that, I’m a member of the mystery religion too, and every night we get together and there’s … like a ceremony honoring Isis, with me as the acolyte, performing holy rituals with the priestess, like the Sacred Descent to the Delta of Isis, the Kissing of the Staff of Osiris, the Union of the Ankh, things like that, and all the worshippers watch us do it, and then there’s group sex.”

“That’s a pretty remarkably developed fantasy,” Marta said, thinking to herself: Isis and Osiris were sister and brother, thinking about Kaeleigh’s recollection of the drawings in Luke’s childhood bedroom, remembering what they looked like when they made love together, making the leaps with instant intuitive certainty.

She studied the way the moonlight fell across their faces. It wasn’t easy to see, not outright; there was almost no resemblance now. But it was there, if you looked for it, mostly around their cheekbones. And she thought: This explains everything about them. The horseplay, the verbal jousting, the ease and comfort they had with each other, their willingness to have an open relationship, how similar their faces were in orgasm, their abiding and constant — permanent — love, even Luke’s comment about tonight being their first threesome. It would have to have been. They couldn’t have done it back home, where everyone knew them. And of course they weren’t threatened by other sex partners. What they were to each other was deeper, more abiding, more unbreakable than any marriage vow.

The wedding rings, the discretion they both used when talking about their relationship, the secret hidden behind their shared last names, so elegantly masked by those gold bands. It all made sense, and it all fell into place in less than a second, and it changed nothing at all about how she felt for them. It just deepened her understanding of and respect for two people she adored. They were brave. They were in love. And that was beautiful.

Luke was continuing the thread; less than a heartbeat had passed since the light broke across Marta’s mind. “I guess I put a lot of time into thinking about it. Even after I got my cherry popped, it was a pretty regular feature in my jerkoff line-up. It was one of my favorites.”

“Still is, I think,” Kaeleigh said, wriggling her butt against his erection. “But it’s pretty sexy, and I guess I can see why an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy would be into it. Hot sex with a hot woman, and no one has a problem with it.”

“Yeah, plus it played to the exhibitionist in me, I guess. The idea of her running her hands all over my naked body in front of all those people, and I’ve got a raging hardon, and everyone can see it, and I know they’re going to watch me fuck her.”

“You know, this could be a series,” Marta said.

“Oh?” said Kaeleigh. “The Adventures of Luke-ankh-ahmun and … uh…”

“…And the Priestess of Isis?”

“Priestesses, babe. Es.”

“You know me so well.”

Yes, she does, Marta thought. “No, I’m thinking more of … well, of taking a leaf from Erika Lust’s book, and doing fantasies. Just fantasies, basically one-offs, a lot like she does. The difference is we have the Nadia soundstage and essentially unlimited possibility for FX work. So instead of a hot partner swap at a B&B, you maybe have something like Lord of the Rings, where you get to fuck Legolas, or Star Wars where you’re Leia and you get to shag Luke, Skywalker I mean, and not worry about the brother-sister repercussions.” They both giggled, but not nervously; and Marta understood their relationship had been going on a while, and knew they didn’t suspect what she knew. Her face and manner hadn’t betrayed her. “Or you can fuck all seventeen Doctors Who.”

“Gonna need a bigger TARDIS,” Luke said.

“Size doesn’t matter,” said Kaeleigh.

“Hush. You know it does. The point is they can be enactments of actual fantasies our actual audience has, but in an SF or fantasy scenario. They send in a description of their number-one stroke story, and if it’s workable, if it’s hot and something we can do, we do it.”

“Oh yeah, that’d be awesome. And maybe you could let them decide who they wanted to see in it, so if one of the boys is their ideal type, they can pick him to play it with a girl that looks like them.”

“Not bad.” Marta nodded thoughtfully. “There’d be some costuming, some acting and dialogue, and sets … but most of the sets we could do as CG. Like with your fantasy, Luke, you’d be on a constructed temple altar, something that physically existed … but the walls and scenery could be CG. And the congregants wouldn’t be a problem. We have talent available to serve as extras, and we can even bulk out the crowd by adding CG models, so it looks like there are a couple hundred people watching, instead of a couple dozen.”

“But wouldn’t you know they’re fake?” Kaeleigh said. “I mean, CG people … they look pretty convincing, most of the time, but…”

“Yeah, no, the way you get around that is … in Hitchcock’s movie The Birds, there’s a scene where you see ravens begin to congregate on a jungle gym, and after a few minutes there are fifty or so birds sitting there, and it looks sinister as hell. But they didn’t have fifty live birds. Most of them were stuffed. There were a few live birds mixed in, somewhere around a dozen, but because they were alive and moving, you assumed the rest were, too. Your eye was drawn to the movement, and the scene was intercut with other action, so you never really had time to look closely at everything and realize most of the birds weren’t moving at all.”

“So you’d do something like that with the worshippers?” Luke said. “Have actual live talent in a few, what, a few key places, and everyone else is a CG model?”

“And keep cutting from the crowd back to the action on the altar?” Kaeleigh said, completing his thought. They did that with each other, Marta reflected, and it wasn’t surprising.

“Yeah. And the live people draw your eye, and the models seem more realistic, more like they’re really, actually there, because they’re mixed in with real people in the final composite shot. What we shoot is Luke devouring the pussy of some oiled-up holy girl in a room with green walls and twenty or so talent as extras. But what the audience sees is sex happening in an ancient temple, in front of two hundred people.” She studied her wine. “We could actually, really do this thing, and I think it would take off like a goddamned rocket. I mean the whole live-out-your-fantasy series. And we can make the audience involvement reciprocal. At the beginning of each scene there’d be the usual title, and we credit the person whose idea it was. Like … Vanessa and the Lumberjack from Mars, based on an idea by Vanessa W., or whomever. And if we do your scene, you get six months free access, or maybe even a year like we do with the Café girls, if it works as well as I think it will. The number of new signups we’d get, once word got out, would probably just explode.”

“Lumberjacks, huh?” Kaeleigh said.

“They’re okay,” said Luke.

“They work all night and they sleep all day,” Marta said.

“I don’t think that’s exactly how the song goes,” said Kaeleigh.

“It’s those big shoulders and deep chests. I think you and I like some of the same things in our men, honey.”

“And we like our men in us.”

“It makes it easier to keep track of them.”

“True, true. But … my yoga thing isn’t a, an SF fantasy.”

“No, but we could stage it anywhere and anywhen. There’s no reason for the yoga to be taking place in a modern locale. It could be a thousand years ago somewhere near the Ganges.”

“It … could be,” Kaeleigh said, “but that might be skating the edge of cultural appropriation.”

Marta studied her for several moments. “God damn it, I really love you, you know?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re right, and I hadn’t thought of that. Half our talent is caucasian. Casting them in a period piece like that would be pretty damn insensitive. Still, I like your idea, and I’d like to incorporate it somehow, maybe as an intro piece to the series. Get some seeds planted in our subscribers.”

“Hey, I’m totally there.”

“Speaking of yoga,” said Luke, “didn’t you have a technique you wanted to teach Marta?”

“Oh, is someone ready to be a lab rat, hon?”

Luke shrugged. “As the ladies require, I make myself available.”

Marta stood. “He is trained well.”

“It wasn’t too hard to do,” Kaeleigh said, getting up with her. “I just used incentives.”

“Carrot and stick, huh?” She collected the wineglasses and the empty bottle.

“And teaching him where to stick his carrot, yeah.” They both watched Luke bend to collect the pillows.

“Oh my,” Marta sighed.

“I know. And I get to grab onto that every day for the rest of my life.”

“Marriage does have its benefits, I imagine.”

“Eight inches of them, in fact.”

“And never a battery to replace.”

“Nope. It’s all self-recharging.”

“Sorry we’re objectifying you so much, honey,” Marta said. “You’re not just some kind of plaything to be used.”

Luke stood, grinning. His penis was quite hard, which was just fine with his spectators. “I figure it’s fair. We do it all the time to women. And the fact is, the real truth is…”

“Yeah?”

“We really like being used as a plaything. C’mon inside, and I’ll prove it.”