Alison's Wonderland (21 page)

I shrugged off the feeling that I’d been under some spell. It was just some guy who wanted to get his leg over and saw the opportunity for mutual pleasure. And who could blame him? Not me, and I was glad of it. As I retraced my way along the path, I wondered how long I had been gone. What if I had missed the bus? I walked faster, and then broke into a run. When I got to the parking area, I was relieved to see my bus was still there, and no one else was around. I hadn’t been away as long as I thought.

The driver didn’t seem to be on board, but when I got to the entrance the door swished open. I climbed the steps. As I did, a shiver went down my spine. There was someone else on the bus. I stared down the aisle at him.

The man from the forest was right there, sitting in the center seat at the end of the aisle, right at the very back of the bus. He had his legs cheekily sprawled, and he was beckoning to me. The quintessential bad boy at the back of the bus. Had my third wish come true, or had he been on the bus all along? My cheeks warmed when I realized that he might well have been on the bus. I hadn’t taken much notice, and
yet…I was pretty sure I’d never seen him before. Besides, he was a local.

I remembered the way I’d acted after he’d asked me what I wanted. I fought off the embarrassment, wanting to be cool. What had I thought? That he was a granter of wishes, or—more likely—a figment of my imagination? He’d known which tour I was on. If he was the driver, that would explain why. Even so, I wasn’t able to keep the silly grin off my face as I closed on him. “Are you the driver?”

“Maybe,” he replied somewhat quizzically. “For the next leg of the journey, at the very least.” Humor twinkled in his eyes. He reached out and grabbed my hand, pulling me over to sit on his lap. With one hand under my skirt, he ran his hand over my bare pussy, reminding me of what he’d done.

“Cheeky,” I breathed, secretly thrilled.

His warm smile went right through me. “When we get to Cork,” he said, “would you like to get together and make some more magic?”

Joyous laughter bubbled up inside me. I could feel his cock through his jeans, right there against my hip. I could also hear the door of the bus swishing open again, and the noise of happy tourists approaching.

I didn’t care whether he was the bus driver, or the devil himself. What I did care about was that I didn’t want the moment to escape. I didn’t want this to end. “Yes, let’s make more magic tonight,” I said, and bent to seal the wish with a kiss.

This is ridiculous,
I thought, pacing around the room that I’d now been confined to for almost a month.

I’m a grown woman; I ought to be able to go in and out as I pleased. At least for a breath of fresh air. Who knew that the boring aisles of a drugstore would hold so much appeal after being deprived of them for weeks? I missed the click of my heels on the sidewalk, the dash of pedestrians all around me, the way in a moment a pair of eyes could seize mine and I’d feel the sexual heat right down to my toes. New York is a voyeur’s paradise, and being alone in a room with only a mirror was wearing real thin. Deal or no deal, I was going stir-crazy, which perhaps was the point of the experiment I’d signed up to be part of six weeks ago without really thinking through the consequences. I’d just gotten laid off, and was combing the papers for a job,
any
job. I answered ads, plenty of them, but they yielded nothing but impersonal form rejections, if anything at all.

Finally, desperate, I’d started answering ads for studies, offering myself up as a human guinea pig, for everything from market research to scientific experiments. The first few gigs
I’d landed were easy: taste test several vodkas and say which was the strongest. Look at ads for sports cars and proclaim which one I’d be most likely to buy. Read copy for laundry detergent and determine which was the most friendly to young, single women like me.

And I’d gotten paid cash.

Perhaps the ease had made me greedy, or selfish or a little too full of myself. I thought I knew the tricks, knew the right words to say to make the employers think I was an obedient subject. But it’s one thing to sit in a room and answer questions for a few hours, quite another to agree to be locked up in solitary confinement for two months for a study on sex drives. I was given room and board—if you can call it “given” when you pretty much sign your life away—in order for them to study my response when forced to go from nonstop cock to my own means.

These particular scientists were trying to develop a pill to cure women who were “too horny,” though
oversexed
was the word they chose.

“Do you have sexual intercourse more than five times per week?”

“Do you think about sex more than ten times a day?”

“Have you
never
gone longer than two weeks without sex since becoming sexually active?”

Yes, yes,
and
Thank God, yes,
I’d answered. I don’t really think I’m abnormal. I’m a woman with a libido, and I exercise it as often as the fancy strikes me. I’ve had boyfriends, sure, but at the moment I was single, which shouldn’t mean I had to rely on a battery-operated friend, right?

Instead, I made do with a rotating cast of overnight guests, the type who can be found in bars around the world—all of them looking for one thing: a woman just like me. The kind who want it fast and quick, who don’t want to go through the wooing process. I’d had a steady diet of cock for years, some
times even two in one night. Sometimes a woman would join us for a circle of triple the pleasure.

But desperate times call for desperate measures, and the hosts of this study were offering twenty thousand dollars if I could go the full two months. The catch was that, like on a game show, if I messed up, I would leave empty-handed. These people weren’t messing around, either. They had my room monitored so that I couldn’t flee. I was given menus where I could check off whatever I wanted, up to a hundred dollars a day worth of room service. I had cable, and they’d bring me all the books and magazines I desired. I had some stimulation, but not the kind that matters. In preparation, I’d even fucked my way through my local bar in the little over two weeks I had before the experiment started, figuring that the memories would keep me going, but they hadn’t. I felt lost, even though I could tell you which celebrity marriages were breaking up and all about the latest crimes and political happenings. None of that information is worth anything without someone to share it with. I would rather my mind been blank and my pussy been filled—that’s just the kind of girl I am. I was feeling like Rapunzel, from the old fairy tale, but instead of my hair being let down, I needed my legs to be spread wide. At least, my reactions provided good fodder for those studying me and my libido.

What I lacked, though, was human contact. I couldn’t even go online; the researchers felt that interacting with my fellow humans via the Internet, or heaven forbid, looking at porn, would interfere with what they were trying to study. Which was, in my own words, how to drive a woman mad by drying up her pussy. I was into week three and my libido was definitely on the wane, although I still could use my hand. But I didn’t mind them watching me; in fact, I got a kick out of the fact that otherwise staid lab-coat wearers were now getting big bucks (at least, I hoped it was big bucks) to watch me jerk off.

But nothing compares to a real-live cock to satisfy my carnal cravings.

Contrary to popular belief, for me it’s not the size of the dick so much as the way a man uses it, what he says, how turned on he is. Hardness is only one measure of arousal, and taking in the full measure of a man, feeling him up and down, kissing him all over, hearing his breathing change from steady to staggered, is what drives me wild, what I was missing each night as I slid between the decadently high-thread-count sheets and tried to approximate what I was missing with my fingertips.

I’m sure I was offering much to the scientific community, but I was starting to feel like I was going crazy, like when I got out I wouldn’t remember how to interact with men, wouldn’t recall how to sink down onto a man’s dick and welcome him inside. Even more, I wasn’t sure I’d want to. They say your libido is a use-it-or-lose-it type of thing, and I was beginning to think that on that score, conventional wisdom was right on the money. My libido was dying, and I wasn’t sure if twenty thousand dollars was a high enough selling price.

So when the first note was slipped under my door, I grabbed it. The only human contact I’d had was from the researchers during their weekly questioning. They made sure to dress as seriously as possible, not giving off any hints of eroticism, lest they skew their results. I answered as honestly as I could, trying not to whine as I reported how my tendency to wake up and need to put my hand between my legs (I’m like a guy in that sense) had diminished considerably. I was no longer a horny-all-the-time girl, and it was doing a number on my self-esteem. They listened and nodded and took notes, but didn’t seem to truly grasp the severity of the situation.

The note was unsigned, but it made my heart sing and my
pussy…well, my pussy started to pound like it had just seen an old friend.

I took the note and rubbed it against my breasts; this was as close as I’d come to flirting, to a sexual interaction with another human being, in longer than I could remember. To some women, that would be no big deal—in fact, it might be a relief, a two-month sex vacation—but for me it was starting to feel like a slow death. The note brought me back to life, even if I couldn’t answer it. The writer went on to say that he was one of the researchers who was in the background, one of dozens who were studying my every move. This made sense; watching me so intimately had to have an effect on those doing the study. Even though they could see what I was doing, nobody had to know what the note said, but for good measure, I ripped it up and placed the scraps in different wastebaskets, keeping a few in my private box for safekeeping.

But there would be no way to “sneak out.” The researchers had made sure of that when they’d devised the study. The money was nothing to sneeze at, and I couldn’t afford to fuck things up, even for a fuck that sounded so damn juicy I had to make myself come right then and there. The next morning, there was another letter, this one even more graphic.

He was killing me. I knew what he described was impossible; someone would surely notice. I was surprised they didn’t have cameras in the hallway, but I think you have to pass some special security clearance to get to be part of the study. When the day of my next evaluation arrived, I stared at my questioners, wondering if they knew. “So, Iris, please tell us about your mental state and how it’s affecting your…desires.”

I wanted to lie, but I was also starved for conversation, so I shared some of what I was feeling. “I’m not sure I can go through with this, especially when there’s so much temptation. I don’t have a job lined up or any way to pay my bills, but this feels like being a whore, only in reverse. I’m selling myself by not having sex, and that feels wrong, like it’s going against my nature.”

“What do you feel will happen if you don’t have sex soon?” one woman asked, her pen dancing along the edge of her lips. Even an only vaguely phallic object like an ordinary pen was enough to have me imagining her sliding the pen into my pussy; once a lover had inserted a lipstick, just a small, simple tube, but he’d gotten me so turned on beforehand that I had come like a shot. I was even willing to switch teams if that’s what it took.

“I feel like I’m going to explode. This is different than a typical dry spell—not that I’ve had one of those in a long time—because it’s not that I lack the ability to get a man. That
I know for sure.” I paused and stared at each of them significantly, hoping one might cough or blush or otherwise reveal himself. Maybe he wasn’t even in the room, but I knew that everyone on the project watched these taped sessions.

“Being with a man, one who’s hard for me, who wants me, wants to do things to me and have me do things to him, when he whispers in my ear…it doesn’t just make me come. It makes me feel alive. Powerful. Like I can conquer the world. Sex is better than caffeine, better than getting high, better even than skydiving, which I’ve done. There’s nothing that rivals the feeling and right now I basically feel like I’m starving to death, slowly, like I’m shriveling up.”

They all nodded intently, their expressions unchanged, while I was starting to feel even more depressed about my situation. Would I have subjected myself to an experiment where my food intake was drastically reduced? Was I letting them assume that “oversexed” women were inferior in some way? I wanted to make a statement, but even more, I just wanted to get fucked.

That night, another note arrived. This one held more urgency, and was also tender in its way.

His words made my breath come fast and furious, my clit swelling up.

“I bet if you snuck out at three in the morning, they wouldn’t notice.” He was starting to make me angry. I had a month to go and he was asking me to sabotage my livelihood, all over a good fuck? I mean, would he really be worth sacrificing twenty thousand dollars? What about my rent? He hadn’t mentioned stepping in to pay my expenses himself, though I guess that would’ve turned me into a more traditional kind of whore.

I ripped up the note angrily and vowed not to read the next one. Except the next one came the next day, and it was a photograph. Of his dick. Unsigned and untouched, because what more did I need to know? It was so beautiful, so perfect, that I held the photo to my lips and kissed the shiny surface, then quickly shoved it into my jeans pocket. Would I be disqualified for receiving these communications? From then on, the messages came every day, sometimes twice a day. My mystery man spun elaborate fantasies about what he wanted to do with me, about where we’d fuck, who he’d show me off to, how he wanted to dress me, about taking me to get pierced, about spanking me in front of a roomful of people. I wound up telling the researchers at our next meeting.

“These—these letters have started arriving,” I said. “The writer claims to be someone involved in the project and says that he wants to fuck me. How twisted is that, right?” The researchers just let me talk and talk, and then listened as I read a few out loud. When nobody seemed to be shocked, I started to wonder if maybe there was no man after all. Was this just a trick to get me to leave and save them all some cash?

Yet that couldn’t be true. I shook my head, then ushered them out and climbed into bed. I was getting my period, thankfully, and knew that should take some of the edge off.
Except that unlike usually, when all I want is hot chocolate and Chex Mix and fluffy pillows, now I wanted sex, hot, mad, messy sex that would make me forget I even knew what a cramp was. I fell asleep early, and my dreams were vivid. There were a variety of men, different looks, shapes and sizes. One had long hair, like he was in a metal band, and he was extra talented with his tongue. Another was built short and bald, but with a giant cock. They kept coming, literally and figuratively, and when I woke up, I was so turned on I was barely aware that it was the middle of the night.