Tales of MU

In Which Mackenzie Dreams In Circles

Sleeping with Amaranth…

Well, let’s be specific. The first time I had sex with Amaranth wasn’t the first time I slept with her. Our first time… my first time, with anyone… had happened outdoors, in the shade of a tree on a then-deserted stretch of campus.

At least, I liked to imagine it had been deserted for the duration.

Imperial decency laws assumed human participants in a way that, at least in strict legal terms, exempted demihumans like Amaranth and semihumans like me. Even custom was pretty much in favor of not holding nymphs to mortal standards in that area, if only because their divine mother was one of the more activist extant in the world deities, and she took a dim view of her sapient children being treated poorly.

So it wasn’t like anybody would have said anything in an official capacity about our romping on the grounds if they had seen it, but just because something was allowed didn’t mean that I was comfortable with it.

I couldn’t exactly blame Amaranth, though, because however receptive she’d been, I had basically initiated. I’d been acting on instinct… a time-honored tradition in the sexual arena… and it was a long time after before I was willing and able to admit to what I’d done, but it was still all me. I hadn’t been ready to be touched, so she’d let me do the touching. I’d gone in and gone deep.

Our early sexual encounters were a mixture of that, and her giving me attention of sorts that were even harder for me to recognize as sexual, even as I’d enjoyed them: ordering me around, mingling tender touches on my backside with swats and strikes, riding the intimate edge between embarrassment and humiliation, between hot shame and degradation.

I didn’t know if it was some element of the luck of the draw in my personal basic makeup or the years or repression or denial I’d enjoyed, but my orgasm triggers were both oddly specific and shockingly easy to trip. Amaranth could bring me off with nothing but the rhythm of a spanking. Maybe more surprisingly, direct vaginal sex could do it for me almost one hundred percent of the time, as long as there was enough of the right elements in the encounter.

All of which was to say that no matter how comfortable I got with sex, it was still kind of weird and hard to pin down exactly when I was having it.

Something intimate happened most of the time that I slept with Amaranth, even on the nights when she just fell asleep on top of me… which was probably more nights than most people would expect, when they pictured the relationship between a nymph and her submissive half-demon girlfriend.

For Amaranth, closeness and tenderness without penetration or even contact with what most people would recognize most easily as sexual body parts was a bit like wearing clothing: kind of taboo. Better still, it was allowed.

There was still something seductively subversive to her about slipping beneath covers, but as long as she had another warm body there with her, she was technically still exposed. Arguably, when we were alone in the room together, she was more exposed when she slid beneath the blankets with me than if she left me to sleep by myself.

I had my doubts about how much the mother goddess Khaele would even care about things like Amaranth slipping on a pair of silky panties or a sheer negligee to facilitate someone’s fantasy, even if… or maybe especially if… it was her own, but Amaranth had a lot of her self-image tied up in obedience to such rules.

I’ve never been religious myself, but I felt like there were some rules, even divine rules, you follow for yourself. Actually, maybe that was the best reason to follow a rule, even a divine one.

Or especially a divine one.

Like I said, I’ve never been religious.

That night, Amaranth and I slid beneath the covers the way we often did, the way we came together that first time: haphazardly and acting mostly on instinct. What’s the boundary between sex and close physical contact, really, when you’re both naked?

You can sort things out through careful exploration and respectful negotiation, but when you’re both up for either, sometimes things just happen and it’s not always worth figuring out which is which.

We slid around together. My face wound up between her breasts. It wasn’t a position I could spend the night in because I still had a theoretical need to breathe… I’d never quite been bold enough to find out what would happen if I couldn’t for too long… and in the process of getting out of it, my mouth brushed her nipple.

She moaned and rolled over. Her knee pressed between my legs, not the way Glory’s thigh had done but hard… my turn to moan. We probably were less careful with each other than we might otherwise have been, given that Amaranth was functionally immortal and I was functionally invulnerable and we both had a thing for pain in the right contexts and measures.

I was a lot stronger than she was, but she was a lot bigger, and she spent most of her time on top, in multiple senses.

I could never sleep on my back very well, and she knew, so she helped me roll over and arranged herself on top of me and a bit to the side. One of her hands cupped my ass. The other was between my chest and the sinkably soft mattress.

On my own, I would have preferred a harder bed. With Amaranth’s warmth enveloping me, this was luxury.

I could tell by how quickly she settled into place that she was not seeking the release of orgasm that night. I was feeling pretty wound up myself, but while I knew Amaranth wouldn’t mind if I did something about it, I just didn’t have it in me to do so, not consciously.

So I laid there, a hot, tight, ball of frustration inside me, feeling perfectly secure and perfectly loved and teased and neglected and absolutely loving it.

You want to talk about the fuzzy boundaries of what even is sex? If your body and mind are hooked up the right way, not having sex can be one of the most intensely sexual experiences you ever have.

“Goodnight, baby,” Amaranth murmured sleepily.

“Goodnight, ma’am,” I said, and settled in.

My dreams that night were a mish-mash of images and emotions, heavy on the anxiety and desire. Trying to sort out a thread between them would have been almost impossible. There was no narrative or order, just a lot of different things. People, places…

Places like buildings on campus, residence halls, classrooms. Forests. An old wooden bridge over a creek barely deep or wide enough to need it. I was looking down at the planks of the bridge past a blue floral dress of the sort I hadn’t worn since I was in the low single digits, and never for very long. The bridge became a path became a sidewalk and I was back on campus.

Somehow the dream kept looping back there. I was on an airship flying south and then I went through a doorway and I was stepping out of a dorm building. I was walking into a lake and then out of the fountain that had used to be by the pent.

Maybe it was because the university had become my home, or at least my major frame of reference for the world. Maybe it really was just random. Maybe I wasn’t really dreaming I was anywhere, but the details just got filled in from whatever was available.

I felt lost even in the discernable moments in the dream where I recognized my surroundings and knew where I was. The lostness was a feeling, not just a state of being… much the way fear was. I felt afraid, too… not just because I was lost, but as a separate thing.

Afraid, and aroused, and frustrated, and lost.

Between the places came people. There was no background in those moments, or nothing I could hold onto. It was like I couldn’t encompass the concept of a setting and characters at the same time.

In one moment, Hazel loomed over me, impossibly large, dangling the ring on a silver chain. It spun, catching the light.

Hazel was wearing the kind of leather not-quite-armor that offered no protection without a hefty investment in magic. With the typical consistency of dream imagery, it both covered and didn’t cover her breasts. I felt really unsettled about this, both during the dream and after. I’d never found Hazel particularly attractive, never really seen her as a sexual being.

Maybe I was a little overly wandshy about the idea that my own desires would be seen as gross, but I had a hard time expressing attraction to ostensibly straight girls who didn’t first display any interest in me.

In another moment in between settings, I was having sex with Glory, between Amaranth and Steff, again. The ring was hanging over us, just out of reach. Every time I reached out for it, it was pulled up and away from me, or the rhythm of our bodies pulled me back down.

Acantha, the entrepreneurial-minded elven enchanter who had taken over a class I was in last year and taught me as much about being careful who I trusted as she did about lab safety, factored in my dreams for the first time in month.

I hated to admit it given how little I liked her as a person by the end of the semester, but her sharply-tailored suits and the way she carried herself were intensely hot. Even knowing that she had to basically rehearse everything she said to people in order to get through it… well, I could identify with that, and the fact was, she was good at it, even if it didn’t come naturally.

I wasn’t sure why she popped up that night. Maybe it was because the ring was on my mind and she had become a subconscious symbol for covetousness. Maybe it was because my sexual exploration with Glory, another elf, had recently stepped up. Glory and Acantha didn’t look particularly alike for surface elves, but, well… the predominant look among their race was one of carefully cultivated homogeneity.

Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe I’d just fallen asleep sexually frustrated and my brain was throwing out whatever it could grab a hold of in an attempt to make something happen about that.

Nicki… adorable, insecure Nicki. Naked except for a pair of white panties with a tiny bow just above the curve of her ass. Nicki had kind of a big rear. She was well-padded all around, in a cute way, but her ass stuck out in a way that I was kind of uncomfortable looking at.

Not because I didn’t like it… I did. I just didn’t know what to do with that information. My sexual instincts had served me pretty well but they didn’t have anything to say on the subject of other women’s backsides. They could be nice to rest my hands on, in a setting where that was allowed. There had to be more than that.

Don’t get me wrong. You know I wasn’t a total babe in the woods in that general area. I knew a lot of things that the people with whom I was involved liked to do with my ass, but none of it seemed like something I might do to someone else… none of it seemed me.

Nicki was bending over away from me, though, presenting her cotton-clad ass towards me. I’m not at all sure it should have been as perfectly pert as it was in the soft panties, without a tight pair of jeans squeezing and shaping it. But then, it was a dream. I had the strong sense that she wanted me to do something, but no idea what.

Then I was a babe in the woods, or at least I was in the woods, and looking at a tunnel cut through the side of a hill, the entrance and inside shored up with big blocks of irregularly-sized but angularly cut stone. It was short enough that I could see daylight on the other end, but long enough that the walls and floor in the middle were lost to darkness.

…that was something I hadn’t had to contend with for a few years now. I wasn’t sure that my younger self had actually lacked my semi-demonic night vision, wasn’t sure if the tunnel was even partly a memory or entirely a dream image.

All of this and more swirled around behind my eyes.

In proper narrative fashion, there should have been some kind of emergent theme, a voice or image that came through at the end. Something portentous, something I could wake up to, an image seared into my mind or words echoing in my memory.

That didn’t happen.

The closest thing to it was either the ring, or the abstract concept of sex in general. I slept all night but woke up the next morning, not feeling especially rested but not possessing any particular insight into the problems that were facing me, nor even faced with a fresh mystery to unravel.

The ring, for its part, stubbornly remained exactly where it had fallen.

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Characters: Amaranth, Mackenzie