Chapter 23: The Retreat Begins
Two days had passed in muted quiet. The bridge sat dormant in their nerves, a sealed pipe, and Chris had slept better than he had in years. He'd almost convinced himself it was over. Then Blackwood called, voice crisp down the line, and told them to pack light and bring nothing they minded ruining.
The shop was closed when they arrived, blinds drawn, the door unlocked. Blackwood waited among her jars in a waxed canvas coat, holding a brass key the size of a hand. She didn't say good evening.
"The radiant phase passed. You're dim. That means you can travel." She walked to the back wall, past the tottering bookshelf, past the concealed door to the slime alcove, and stopped at a second door Chris had never noticed, tucked in the shadow of a standing mirror. It was oak, older than the building, banded in tarnished silver. "The weekend retreat I promised. Consider it partial payment for what I put you through."
"Where does it go?" Lily asked, eyeing the key.
"Where the sweets come from." Blackwood turned the key. The lock didn't click so much as sigh, and the door swung open onto not a room but a wall of green light and wet heat. "Mind the step."
They stepped through.
The air hit them like a towel soaked in warm water. Jungle. Real jungle, dense and dripping, canopy closing overhead in layers of jade and emerald, some of it glowing. Fungus lit the roots like scattered lanterns. Somewhere out of sight, water churned, and the smell that rode the steam was honeyed, floral, faintly narcotic. Pollen drifted through the shafts of light in slow, golden constellations.
"You said the source was a department," Chris said, watching a moth the size of his palm drink from a glowing bloom.
"The source was stolen from a place like this, a long time ago, and duplicated badly." Blackwood led them down a root-laced path, her boots finding purchase with practiced ease. "What grows here doesn't forgive carelessness. Stay on the path. Don't eat anything I don't hand you."
The path opened into the clearing.
The spring sat at its heart, ringed by gnarled roots as thick as Bea's waist, and it glowed. Not reflected light. The water itself burned a soft, luminous turquoise, bubbles rising through it like slow champagne, and where the steam curled off its surface the pollen gathered in visible ribbons. Stone shelves edged the near bank, smoothed by centuries, warm underfoot.
Bea made a sound low in her throat, half laugh, half hunger. "This is where the candy comes from."
"The original formulations came from learning what this water does," Blackwood said. She began unbuttoning her coat without ceremony. "You've ingested echoes of it. Today you'll have the real thing, diluted, supervised. Pastilles first. Then the spring."
Bea was already pulling her dress over her head. She'd worn nothing under it. Her tattoos stood out dark against skin going pink in the heat, her enhanced nipples already tight, and Chris felt the dormant bridge give a low, single knock against his ribs, like something rolling over in sleep. Lily's eyes went to him at the same instant, sharing the knock.
"It wakes up when we do," Lily said quietly.
"It will," Blackwood confirmed, stepping out of her trousers. "Which is the point. Controlled arousal, controlled signal. A rehearsal." She folded her glasses onto a root and stood there, small and unashamed, silver-haired and freckled everywhere. From a satchel she drew a stone flask and three flat pastilles, the color of sun-warmed amber. "Dissolve these on the tongue. Not chew. Let them take their time."
She handed them out. Bea went first, as always, pressing hers under her tongue and closing her eyes. Lily followed. Chris let his sit against the roof of his mouth, sweet and resinous, tasting of the pollen in the air.
Then Blackwood uncorked the flask and poured its contents into a wide shell that sat ready on the stone shelf. Warm golden oil, thick as melted honey, smelling of the spring itself. She filled her palm.
"Into the water. Wading depth. We oil each other before we soak, or the water's effects come on too sharp." She waded in to her thighs, sighed at the heat, and turned. "Beatrice. You're first."
Bea stepped in, hissing pleasantly as the luminous water climbed her calves. Blackwood's oiled hands spread across her back, and Bea's shoulders dropped an inch.
Chris and Lily shed the last of their clothes side by side. His twin cocks hung heavy and half-full already, and Lily noticed, and the bridge knocked again, harder, carrying a doubled pulse: her interest in the sight and his interest in her interest. He felt her nipples harden through his own chest. It was dizzying even at this low volume.
Lily cupped oil from the shell and poured it down his spine. It ran warm, trailing heat to the base of his back, pooling in the small of him. Her hands followed, spreading it in slow circles over his ass, down his hamstrings, matter-of-fact and yet each touch arrived tripled. Her palms on his skin. His own skin receiving. The echo of both, faint and pearlescent, somewhere behind his sternum.
"Your turn," he said, voice rough, and filled his own hands.
He started at her shoulders, working the oil in, and she tipped her head back against his forearm. He poured a line between her breasts and watched it divide around the swell of each and run down over the soft curve of her belly. When he slicked her breasts the bridge hummed properly for the first time in two days, a low chord, and Lily's breath caught.
"There it is," Bea said from across the spring, grinning, Blackwood's hands still working the small of her back. "I can feel both of you waking up. It's like standing next to an oven."
"Depth of field," Blackwood murmured. "That's what you're learning. At full volume everything flattens. At low volume you can pick a single thread." She nodded at Lily. "Keep going, Chris. But slower. Let her feel where your hands end and the echo begins."
He slowed. He spread the oil down Lily's stomach with his fingertips only, barely touching, and the tripled sensation became a strange, bright delicacy: his touch, her skin receiving it, and the ghost of both, soft as breath. Lily shivered hard and grabbed his wrist.
"Fuck," she whispered. "Do that again."
He did. The oil had reached her thighs, and when his fingers slid between them, just gliding through the slick warmth without pressing in, her knees dipped and the chord in the bridge swelled to fill the clearing. Bea gasped across the water. The pollen ribbons drifted through the steam, and a drop of condensation fell from a glowing root and rang on the surface like a struck bell.
"Enough," Blackwood said, but her voice had thickened. "Sit. The shelves. Oil the parts that go under and let the water do the rest."
They settled on the submerged stone, water to their waists, turquoise light climbing their bodies and turning them all into versions of the same luminous creature. Bea reached for Chris and drew him close, kissed him with oil-slick lips, and the bridge opened fully for the first time in days, gentle, wide, threefold.
"Two nights here," Bea murmured against his mouth. "No door, no hunter, no static. Just us and the professor and this water." Her hand slid beneath the surface and closed around both his cocks at once, and the chord rang out so hard Lily moaned from three feet away.
Blackwood watched them, her own hand idle on her thigh, and something like grief and appetite fought behind her eyes. "The water will deepen everything within the hour," she said. "The pastilles will take effect first. When they do, you'll want to start slow."
Lily was already uncorking the flask again, pouring oil into her palm, her eyes on Chris's chest, on Bea's mouth, on the glowing water lapping at all of them. "Why would we want to start slow?"
Blackwood smiled, and in the turquoise light it looked like a warning. "Because in this spring, slow is the only thing that will keep you sane. And because what's in that water when it deepens," she nodded toward the far bank, where the roots grew thickest and the glow burned brightest, "has been waiting a very long time for company."
"Company," Bea repeated, glancing at the far bank where the glow pulsed slow and deep, like a heartbeat in the roots. "What kind of company?"
"The kind you don't want to meet at full speed." Blackwood settled back against a root, water lapping her breasts. "Slow. I mean it."
But Lily wasn't listening anymore. The pastille had begun to melt through, and the bridge told Chris what it was doing to her before her body showed it: a spreading warmth in her mouth, then her throat, then lower, a sweet resinous heat pooling in her belly like the oil still slicking his hands. Her pupils had blown wide. The turquoise light caught the oil sheening her shoulders and made her look carved out of something luminous.
"I want you," she said. Not to the water. Not to the clearing. To him. Her voice had dropped to something raw. "Right now. Before it deepens. Before whatever that thing is gets curious."
Chris opened his mouth, and the bridge opened with it, and what came through wasn't words. It was her want, entire, pressed flat against the inside of his skull: the memory of his twin cocks splitting her open on the rug, the ache she'd carried for two dormant days, the way she'd touched herself in the shower that morning thinking about him and felt almost nothing because her hand wasn't his.
"Lily," he started.
She didn't let him finish. She crossed the water in two strides and climbed into his lap, knees bracketing his hips on the submerged shelf, and the heat of her hovered over his cocks, which had gone from half-full to aching in the space of a breath. The spring water ran between their bodies, warm and faintly electric, and where it touched the head of his shaft the sensation rang up through the bridge like a plucked string.
"Feel that?" she breathed against his mouth. "The water knows what we're doing."
He gripped her hips, oil and spring-slick, and pulled her down an inch so the underside of his left cock dragged through her folds. She was soaked, and not from the spring. Her clit was swollen hard under the head of him, and every brush of it tripled: his touch on her, her heat on him, the pearlescent echo underneath, triple-layered until his vision swam.
"Chris." Bea's voice came from close now; she'd waded over, and she knelt on the shelf beside them, watching Lily's face. "Take it slow. The professor said."
"The professor said slow," Lily gasped, rolling her hips so his crown notched against her entrance. "I've been slow for two days. I've been so fucking slow I could scream." She pushed down.
The head slipped in and they both shattered a little. Her cunt was velvet heat gripping him, and the spring water churned around the join, and through the bridge Chris felt himself being stretched from the inside, the burn and the fill and the relief of it all at once, doubled, tripled, a feedback loop that made his hips jerk upward without his permission. Lily sobbed out a breath and sank another inch.
"Fuck. Fuck, there it is." She braced her hands on his shoulders, oil slipping, and rode the first few inches in small, grinding circles. "Both of you. I want both this time. All the way."
Bea's hand appeared on Lily's lower back, steadying her. "Breathe. Let it open you up." Her forked tongue flicked out, tasting the air, tasting the steam. "God, I can feel her through you, Chris. She's clenching around you already and you're not even halfway."
He wasn't halfway. Lily took him by degrees, her body yielding with a hot, searing slowness, the water's warmth making her muscles slack and hungry at once. When the second cock-head pressed against her stretched rim she shuddered the full length of her spine.
"That one," she whispered. "That's the one that unmakes me."
He held still and let her take it. The double penetration of her body, his twin shafts wedged together in her gripping channel, was a pressure he felt from both sides, and through the bridge he felt it as she felt it, the obscene fullness, the way her cunt fluttered and gave and clenched down again, greedy for more. When she finally bottomed out, seated flush against him, water sloshing over the shelf, they sat fused and gasping, and the chord in the bridge swelled so loud Bea moaned from a foot away, untouched.
"Look at that," Blackwood murmured from across the spring. Her silvery device had appeared in her hand, forgotten, then remembered. She set it face-down on a root. "Not tonight. Tonight you're just people."
Lily started to move. Small rolls first, then longer strokes, lifting until only the crowns held, sinking back down until her ass met his thighs and the water clapped around them. Every descent drove the air out of her in a broken syllable. Chris caught her breasts in his hands, oil-slick, the nipples rigid against his palms, and her reaction to his grip came back through the bridge into his chest as a bright, tingling ache.
"Harder," she begged. "Use me. I need it rough enough to feel tomorrow."
He gave it to her. He planted his feet on the stone and drove up into her as she dropped, meeting her, the impact jarring through her body and his and Bea's, who had slid close enough that Lily's shoulder pressed her breast. The sound filled the clearing, wet and rhythmic, layered under the spring's bubbling and the strange far-off pulse of light from the thick roots.
"Touch her," Bea said hoarsely, and reached between Lily's thighs herself, fingers finding the slick, stretched join, circling Lily's clit where it ground against the base of him. The triple feedback detonated. Lily's whole body locked, her cunt seizing around his cocks in a rapid, milking spasm, and Chris roared, the sensation of his own orgasm building smashing into hers building into Bea's circling fingers until there was no telling whose pleasure was whose.
"Don't come yet," Lily gasped, nails digging into his chest. "I want it with the water. I want everything at once."
Bea laughed, low and wrecked. "Greedy girl."
"You love it." Lily turned her head and kissed Bea, filthy and open-mouthed, her tongue working against Bea's forked one an inch from Chris's face, and he watched his wife and the woman fused to him devour each other while his cocks throbbed buried to the root in the first one.
The spring deepened around them. Chris felt it before he saw it, a subtle shift in the water's pull, the warmth climbing a degree, the turquoise glow at the far bank brightening, quickening. The pollen ribbons drifted lower, thickening over the surface, and the sweet smell concentrated until each breath was a mouthful of honey.
"The pastille's peaking," Blackwood said quietly. She had moved closer, wading, her hand resting flat on the water's surface. "This is where slow stops being possible."
"Then stop telling us to be slow," Lily said, and slammed her hips down.
Chris grabbed her ass with both hands and fucked up into her in earnest, hard, deep, relentless, the water splashing turquoise light over all three of them. Bea kept her fingers on Lily's clit and her mouth at her ear, whispering things Chris couldn't hear and didn't need to, because the bridge carried them anyway, and Lily's orgasm started at the base of her spine and rolled forward like the spring itself tipping over its edge.
She came with a scream that scattered birds from the canopy, her whole body clamping down, and Chris went with her, the release tearing up through him and out, hot pulses flooding her depths while Bea shuddered through her own quiet crest and the bridge whited out into shared, tripled light.
And beneath the surface, under the churn of the glowing water, something at the far bank pulsed once, slow and interested, and began to move.