They took a siesta in the early evening just as the sun was beginning to go down and it was dark in the adobe.  So much music had made her lethargic.   In the diminishing light inside the house, she let her playing cease.  Even the bizarre conversations, that seemed moved by the shifting desert shapes, rested for a while.  Jose didn’t ask anything from her while they lay side by side on the bed, so her mind was tripping away with thoughts, letting them move her from place to place. 

       “Open your legs wide,” Jose finally said.  Rolling over next to her, he stroked her naked belly. 

       “You’re not tired anymore?” she asked.

       “I’m wide awake,” he answered with his fingers tiptoeing to her crotch.

       She’d opened her legs wide, letting him tease her.

       “You want lots of cock here?” he asked.

       “Yours is fine,” she answered.

       “But you want others?  Perhaps your spirits were telling you that?”

       “Why would I want others, when being with you is totally enough?”

       “Is it?”

       “It is,” she insisted.

       “I don’t think you know yourself enough to know.  My friends can come and take you if you like.  Then you can see how it feels to be used.”

       “Is that what I want?” she wondered aloud.

       “I can’t answer that.  Only your heart can.”

       He’d reached for a bottle at the bedside, and opening it, poured a liquid on her navel, staring down to watch the little pool of it gather there.  The oil was smooth like the petals of a flower; and it tickled the tiny hairs on her belly.

       “But why would I want anyone but one man to make love to me?” she answered him.

       His hand moved against the hairs, gently, as if it was just his breath disturbing them.

       “Does it matter why?” he asked.  “It’s a riddle perhaps, but I wouldn’t dwell on the reasons behind the truth; truth simply is.  Remember, your lust is your most basic truth.  Don’t argue with it, Elena.”

       “So if I desire the men, you’ll give them to me?”

       “It would pleasure me to do so.”

       “It sounds obscene, like something from a porno movie.”

       “Does it?  Like walking the streets, and giving head to a stranger, and doing table dances in a topless bar?  That kind of obscene?”

       “Yes.”

       “It feels cheap, perhaps?”

       “Yes.”

       “Like nothing worthwhile could come from it?”

       “Yes.”

       “Then don’t do it because you’ll just screw up the experience,” he told her.  “Something worthwhile always comes from good sex.”

       He kissed her mouth, pressing his lips to hers so it almost hurt, then he pulled away.  He’d been coating her skin with oil the whole time, so now she shimmered in the light from the candles Jose lit all around the bed.

       “Will this feel cheap too?” he asked, taking the candle holder from the table and holding it over her.

       She cringed.

       “Close your eyes,” he said.

       It was torture waiting for the wax to drip on her belly and then her thighs.  But when it did, she didn’t suffer, the jolt was a pleasant spark to her skin.  One such jolt and she wanted more of the dripping wax searing the oil and her skin.  A thousand fires exploding, a thousand sharp prickly hurting sensations were making her hips gyrate into the covers beneath her.  The anticipation was killing her, when and where the next explosion would appear.  She orgasmed from the idea of it, and from the movement of her body, and the way her pubis rocked against Jose’s loving hand when he held it.  She was certain that she was being dangerously depraved.

       “I think I’m ready for something really cheap,” she told him boldly when he walked away from her, out of the adobe into the night.

       He turned back and nodded, then looked out to a starrier night than the one before.  There were little tails on the bursts of light twinkling in the sky, as if each burst was a message dripping to the earth’s consciousness, just as the hot wax had dripped its seductive charges on to her skin.

***

They came to her in the evening of the next day, three men with Jose.  When they arrived at the adobe at dusk, she’d been eating grapes feeling the cool liquid of the fruit squirt in her mouth delicately. 

       “You want them all?” Jose asked her, even if it didn’t seem as if he was really asking a question.  She had the feeling that this was already decided.

       Elena stared at the men for sometime, their gentle, anxious faces, and Jose’s.  All dark eyes, and ruddy red Indian skin, and hair that shined.  Two were naked to the waist, their chests hairless and shimmering with sweat.  One had long hair, untied, that draped his shoulders and fell to his chest nearly waist long.  Her eyes drifted to their crotches where inside their white linen pants she could detect no rising organs lusting for her.  She approved of their slim hips, the swagger like Jose’s, and rounded rears she wished were unclothed so she could inspect them.

       Her gaze moved from their crotches to their faces where she witnessed their desire.  It was nothing lewd like the desire of men in bars or on street corners who leered at women.  Theirs was pure animal instinct, drive, intent, determination, almost as if it were a duty to copulate with her. 

       Rising from her chair, she smiled at them, and let the white dress that covered her fall to the ground.  Even in the dim light they could recognize what she wanted, seeing the seduction in her eyes inviting them to follow her into the adobe.

       She might have walked past them without a single touch, but Jose, standing there too, stopped her.  The men joined him fondling her, so many hands groveling with her private places, kissing her everywhere, one man at her feet with a mouth to her groin, the man with the long hair in front of her with his hands cupping her breasts. 

       They parted her ass and fingered her there, her labia, her mouth—raised her arms above her head so that they could tickle her skin with their lips as they kissed her. 

       “She wants no peace tonight, friends.  Ravage her,” Jose instructed them.

       Pulling away from their hands, Elena moved to the bed,  the sexual hunger having stripped her of any remaining propriety. Lying down on Jose’s bed, she spread her legs open, drawing her knees up, knowing how she wanted to feel the penetration deep, to the hilt, to the heart, to every place inside that had not yet been stirred. 

       One man, stripped of his pants, mounted her.  His erection a vivid sight, boldly hard, a thick shaft soaring high with a small head, cleanly circumcised.  He kept his weight above her while he thrust.  As she desired, the penetration was brisk, his penis buried to the end of her cavern, and Elena greeted the intrusion with her pelvis replying generously.

       When the first man pulled away, there was another replacing him.  In the silence of the late hour they moved one man to the next in a round of exchanging lovers.  The harder they pounded her, the more widely she opened to them, for a long while thinking she wouldn’t stop this: they would have to stop it themselves from fatigue.  All four men took pleasure between her thighs, she wasn’t counting climaxes, theirs or her own. 

       There was a moment, when it felt like there was just one man, not many, their aromas, their masculine touch, the tickle of their skin against her skin, their great penetrating force clamoring for her hole and its riches.  She was a goddess, born in those hours at their mercy, giving into the dream where this idea was born.

       At other moments though, the four men were distinct.  One was savage, like an animal demanding; another moved on her with an easy sensuality that made her feel as if she was fucking herself; in the third she read excitement in his eyes, and the spirited passion that burst from him was like a thrilling carnival ride; the last, the fourth made love to her, her heart suddenly soaring just to see his eyes, every fragment of herself succumbing to his tenderness.  Relishing them, not passing judgments on any one, the orgy made her lecherous inclinations clear.  Even if it wasn’t reasonable, she knew that what Jose had said was true about her. 

       Mauling her until she was numb from the perpetual assault, she wondered first how long they’d used her.  Later she wondered which one had been Jose, though it seemed he might have been all of them, animal, lust, thrill and heart.  But he wouldn’t tell her when she asked him.

       “You fucked like a whore,” he said.

       “And you think I should be ashamed of myself?”

       “That would be pointless.”

       “Why am I like this?” she asked.

       He shrugged, with no answer.

       “You think I’ve always been this way?” she wondered.

       “Where it counts?  Yes,” he answered her.

***

        In the morning the men were gone, except for Jose.

       “I’m worn out,” she told him, while they drank coffee on the patio, and looked to the mountains, which, because of the late hour, were bathed in sunlight, few shadows remaining.

       “Then you should rest,” Jose said.

       “I keep thinking of things, though.  Things I should write down.”

       “Don’t get anxious about it,” he said.  “What needs to be put to paper will be.”

       “You take things with such an easy grace.  You’re so tranquil.”

       “And you never feel that way,” he surmised.

       “No.  There’s this constant roar.”

       “Is that so bad?  Is peace always a state of nothingness, or can it simply be acceptance of who you are, the roar and all?”

            “That would make it easier for me,” Elena answered.  “I think I’ll play,” she said, and she took off to find the guitar.