A/N: Thanks so much for the initial responses to this thing. As always, comments are more than appreciated! Twistiness lies ahead now, as does a fair dose of, well, intimate content. (Though it be tender, I feel obligated to issue a warning: this is new territory for me.) As always, also, thanks for tagging along. Enjoy.

#####

#####

Susan said, calmly, the muzzle of the thirty-eight pressed to the soft underside of her chin: "No, Robert. If you shoot me, I'll be dead."

She was absolutely still save for what he perceived as the slightest elongation of her throat. A subconscious distancing of her jaw from the cold touch of the revolver.

"Are you certain of that?" he asked.

She didn't respond. She took a deep breath and eased away. He let her go, though he tracked her motion with the gun. She sat back on the edge of her own chair with the barrel of the thirty-eight now leveled at her forehead. "I'm former military, Robert. I was an officer in the RAF. You know that. If you're going to shoot me, I deserve to see it coming."

Fischer hesitated, his mind as much as his hand bound by shame, uncertainty, fear. He put the muzzle of the thirty-eight to his own right temple. A familiar touch, that. Cool, as hard and light, in its way, as ice. "And if I shoot myself?"

"You'll die, too. You won't wake up. I promise you that."

No threat in her tone. No anger, no fear. Her expression was neutral, her eyes sad and gentle.

Fischer lowered the gun. "I'm afraid to fall asleep," he said. He felt the weight of the revolver like a palpable chunk of death in his hand. He felt himself start to cry, the feeling as well as the crying itself methodical, almost mechanical. He hunched forward in his chair, folding into himself, shaking. "I've been— I'm afraid to dream."

Susan stood. She reached toward, if not for, the gun, her motion less cautious than simply fluid and slow. Fischer handed it to her. He asked, as he watched her remove and pocket the cylinder:

"Are you going to call the police now?"

She stepped from between their chairs, went to set the revolver, a precise, distinct click of metal against heavy wood, on the room's reading table. "Do you think I should?"

He didn't reply. A long silence in the light-pocketed darkness. Susan came back to the window, but she didn't re-seat herself. She stood by Fischer's chair; with the fingertips of her right hand, she brushed his still-damp hair away from his forehead.

Fischer didn't look up at her. His voice was library-low, practically a murmur: "So stupid. It's so stupid. The one thing that's seemed absolutely real to me since— since—"

"Since Sydney?"

"Yes." He spoke half to her midriff, half to the wing of his chair. "Do you remember— At the gallery: do you remember?" At the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, Fischer having ingested a bit too much liquid courage at the prospect, both before and after, of providing the opening address for the museum's new Berryman Wing, they'd spent possibly a third of their three-quarters of an hour together in the real world. "I was drunk; I was being a complete ass—"

"I kissed you. You responded in kind."

"That— that was real for me. Was it—"

"— real for me, too?"

"Like I said—" Fischer looked away, cleared his throat. "Stupid."

Susan said nothing. In reply, instead, she took his face in her hands, leaned down, and kissed his lips. Tentatively at first, yet firmly. She angled closer to him, and Fischer groaned softly, drawing her closer still, his hands on her lower back, her hips, and kissed her deeply back.

She embraced him while he was still seated, held him in a close mutual nuzzling to her belly and breasts. She drew him to his feet, then; they re-kissed, re-embraced, their hands reaching mutually for, and fondling, buttocks. He pressed himself against her. She rubbed herself in turn against him, opened herself to the hardness rising at his groin. Fischer's breathing grew rough. His heart seemed to be pounding right at the base of his throat. Susan caressed his cheek, smiled for him as she took his hand. "Come on."

#####

Her bedroom was next to the library. Just one door down. Desk, chair, dozing laptop. Books, hardback, paperback, on shelves, in low stacks on the floor. A wall-mounted washbasin and mirror in the far corner, perpendicular to the high window. Photographs, framed, on the walls, some sepia-old, some black and white, some in vibrant color. People, landscapes, animals. Smiles from two women who might have been Susan younger and older: her sister, possibly, their mother. And, in short order, Fischer's suit jacket and shirt and her sweater, off. A trembling radiated from his heart out to his hands as he undressed her. Her amethyst necklace she kept on. Her unhooked bra freed firm and modest, yet shapely, breasts. He caressed them, tentatively at first, a cupping of his palms against her soft warm flesh, a gentle squeezing, as she knelt on the low wide bed and unbuttoned and unzipped his trousers and fondled him through his boxer-briefs, as Fischer, breathless, sucked her tongue. The first time, really, that he'd kissed a woman so desperately, so deeply. The girls of the elite service that had been available to him in Sydney had neither openly encouraged, nor had they seemed to expect, such attentions. The effect, for him, now, was both weakening and electrifying. He was shaking as he laid Susan back on the bed's blue comforter, pulled away her boots and socks, her jeans and panties. He finished undressing himself and stood for a moment clearly in her view. She seemed to like what she saw. She smiled, her eyes possessive and bright, eager with lust. Then she drew him down to her and spread wide her slender thighs, and he mounted her.

#####

It was clumsy, a bit too quick, maybe, but absolutely and profoundly satisfying. She came as he came, inside her, moaning and groaning, both of them, respectively, as spasms shook their loins; wrapped in her arms and legs, he lay against her, gasping, his penis still buried deep inside her.

Still beneath him, she reached for a tissue from a box on the bedside table; she caught the trickle of his semen as he pulled out. Then she again drew him close and wrapped him in her arms, and Fischer lay with his softening cock resting in the crease of her hip and was held.

#####

The rain turned to sleet. It pelted and hissed at the windowpanes. Fischer, from a cozy distance, as it were, examined the contrasts: the lingering cold, the blue-black darkness, the embodiment of unreality, outside; the comfort and warmth here, with her. A nestling of blankets and sheets, the comforter drawn back, once their initial passion cooled.

She kissed him, having yet to speak; Fischer kissed her back. Her taste and scent, the glorious fact of her total nudity, brought him nearly instantaneously again to arousal. She smiled for him, nuzzled his throat, and took his shaft in hand (he was modest lengthwise, but satisfyingly thick, or so the girls of the service had, in unflinching honesty, been bluntly kind enough to let him know), and Fischer eased back onto her and slid once more into her slick warm depths.

#####

This time, they took their time.

"I missed this," Susan said, a little dreamily, as Fischer, supporting himself easily on straight arms, his thighs and hers widespread, slowly pumped her.

"Been a while...?"

"Yeah." She ran her hands down his back, squeezed his buttocks. "I love the feeling, being filled like this."

Fischer smiled. "Do I fill you...?"

Susan nodded. "You're exactly right. You feel so real, Robert."

She drew him down, kissed him tenderly; Fischer's eyes filled with tears. He ducked his head to nuzzle her throat so that she wouldn't see him crying.

#####

She climaxed once, whimpering; he coaxed her to another orgasm, took her right to the brink, then left her lingering just long enough to make her final release absolutely apocalyptic. She muffled a scream against his shoulder, raked his skin with her teeth. Her fingers clenched his buttocks. He could have come right then, but he wanted to enjoy her climax; he waited. She was able, then, to watch him, to see him, when ejaculation finally overcame him: he groaned, pushed tightly against her: his seed spilled into her in long, hot, uncontrollable spasms.

#####

This time, he caught the outflow himself, the pearly excess, with a tissue from the box on the nightstand. His eyes now fully adjusted to the sparse light passing through the sleet-spattered window, he lingered for a moment, looking down openly at her, at her breasts and belly, at her pussy, too, her dark mound and her vagina glistening with their mingled juices, and suddenly he realized—

"Oh, my God. I didn't use a condom."

She looked at the shock on his face and laughed. "It's okay, darling. We're okay; I've got it covered."

She drew him down for a kiss. Then Fischer, feeling adventurous, a little devilish, curious as well (this being yet another behavior the girls of his escort service hadn't seemed to expect or, for that matter, encourage), began to kiss his way down her torso. Susan relaxed beneath his touch; when he tongued her navel, she tangled her fingers gently in his hair, met his eyes when he looked up.

"Have you ever gone down on a woman before?" she asked, softly.

"No."

She caressed his cheek. "Pretend you're eating an ice cream."

Her tone went straight to his cock. His breath caught as he hardened again. She seemed to read it as hesitation; her expression, though, was playful yet knowing. "You have eaten ice cream before, haven't you?"

He tried, through a sheepish smile, to sound casual. "Once or twice."

He eased farther toward the foot of the bed, angling for easier access to her; Susan spread her legs for him. Fischer hooked his arms under her thighs and ran his tongue slowly over her clitoris.

The scent, the tastes— hers, his, too— musky, tangy, tart and sweet— shot through him like electricity. His penis went fully, unabashedly erect. He buried his face in Susan's pussy and began to lick her in earnest, and she pushed herself eagerly against his mouth, moaning in surprise and delight.

#####

He lost track of her orgasms. Eventually, he was very much in need of his own. He slid up, kneeling, pulled her legs against his chest, pushed his cock into her willing wet depths, and ejaculated no more than three thrusts later, arching uncontrollably back, buried in her to his aching, spasming testes. Light burst behind his eyes; he heard a cry and couldn't tell if the sound came from her or from him. It was as if he were completely inside her and she were inside him, too, one inside the other, all one.

#####

He relaxed his grip on her legs, and Susan wrapped her thighs around his waist. She lay watching him, panting; she looked as stunned as Fischer felt. He had yet to soften. In his post-orgasmic weakness, he was almost afraid to move. He could feel his trembling pass from his torso and loins through his erection, the eager jut of his flesh still buried deep inside her.

She shifted slightly, the muscles of her vagina squeezing his cock, and Fischer realized, disbelievingly, almost deliriously, that he was, if anything, getting harder.

"Here," Susan said. "My turn."

She rolled him onto his back, straddled his loins, and lowered herself back onto his seemingly indefatigable erection. She set a slow, deep pace, and Fischer treated himself to the sight of his glistening shaft sliding in and out of her. Susan smiled down at him.

"Hey," she said, "there's more to life than that."

She took his hands, placed them on her breasts, and Fischer, in wonderment, squeezed and caressed. Her breath caught as he circled her erect nipples with the balls of his thumbs; she closed her eyes, her head going back, and undulated against him.

#####

Orgasm, ejaculation. Moans, cries. Another slow trickling of semen from her vagina, this time back down the shaft of his penis into his own dark pubic hair.

#####

He drew her close, wrapped her in his arms, while she was still astride him, her hair feathering his face and shoulders like a silk-soft curtain as they kissed, breathing in together, out together, her belly pressed to his, her breasts radiating warmth against his chest.

Question and fact, then: "Shower," she said, drawing away, dismounting. She sat beside him, tousled, animal-casual, her expression tender but wryly critical. "Sleeping isn't the only thing you haven't been doing for the past few days, is it?" She swung her coltish long legs off the bed, stood. For a moment, the implication, like his body odor itself, deftly eluded Fischer's hormone-intoxicated brain. Reluctant to leave the comfort of the sheets, his muscles heavy with the sweet exhaustion of sex, he lay simply looking up at her.

"You're perfect," he murmured in reply.

"Not quite." She smiled down at him, held out her hand. "Come on, lazybones."

#####

Once he was on his feet, his mind refocused. Physical details equaled reality: the chilly air on his chest and back, the sand-like roughness of the worn carpet beneath the heels and balls of his feet. He saw no door that might lead to a bathroom; he looked at Susan with an inquiring frown—

"Sorry," she said. "This was a B&B before we acquired it. Afraid we're not entirely en suite."

She opened the door leading to the hall. Fischer hesitated, looking out—

Susan chuckled. "Do you want a robe? Chris is on assignment, and Nick is downstairs."

Of course he should be prepared to walk nude down a hallway in a strange building.

"I, umm—"

Susan sighed, took his jaw in her hands, leaned up the inch or so it took to bring her face level with his, and kissed him slowly.

"Oh, that helps," Fischer panted, when his mouth was once more solely his.

Susan looked down at the source of his complaint, smiled mischievously. "Are you always on such a hair trigger?"

"Only one way to find out." He brushed the hair away from the left side of her neck, indulged in a slow, thorough nibbling of the exposed skin. "Intensive research."

She breathed out, slowly, pleasurably, angling her throat to facilitate his ministrations. "Through which we create a solid body of empirical data—?"

"Mm hm."

"In the shower, Mr. Fischer."

#####

The bathroom was the size of the closet, midway along the hall, from which Susan took rough white washcloths and motley purple towels; the shower was no more than the size of the refrigerator in Fischer's flat back home. Elbows and knees, angling. Soft laughter on both their parts as Fischer surrendered again to the urge in his loins.

"Pardon me, Miss Gaumont," he murmured, looking into her eyes at the moment of sliding-slick-slow penetration. "There doesn't seem to be anywhere else to put the damned thing.'

"Quite all right, Mr. Fischer," she replied, as Fischer lifted her right thigh to half-embrace his hip. She relaxed with a soft gasp into his first thrust. "Quite, quite all right."

#####

In the warm spray, post-coitus, they held one another, washed one another, kissed tenderly, caressed. Fischer embraced her from behind, and Susan, squeezing his forearms to her midriff, let him drift to a near-doze with his face nestled against her neck. On their way back to her room, she stopped again at the closet, pulled fresh folded sheets from a high shelf. Dried, in clean linens and in each other's arms, they slept.

#####

#####

His heart beat slowly and steadily through her palm; Susan Gaumont lay quietly with her right hand resting on his chest and listened to Robert Fischer's breathing. He was beside her under the sheet and soft worn blanket of her bed, flat on his back, deeply asleep. He wasn't snoring; he wasn't laboring. No roughness to his respiration. She raised herself up far enough to see his angelically handsome, if wildly unshaven, face: smooth, synchronous motion beneath the eyelids, the barest, breeze-like fluttering of beautifully long light-brown lashes. She found herself smiling at those lashes; she found herself smiling, too, at the fact that he was experiencing a REM state free of distress. She leaned in close, kissed his forehead, his lips, and sat cautiously up. She turned the bedside lamp on for him, knowing how disorienting it could be to wake up in a strange room, especially when you weren't feeling quite yourself; she left a note, too, simple and direct (Be back soon. Ask Nick for something to eat; get more sleep. Love, S); she dressed, took the revolver from the table in the library, and went downstairs. Nick was sprawled on a stuffed chair in the work room with a TV show playing on one of the computer monitors. He had the sound turned up just a bit too high. Onscreen, a fresh-faced girl with dark hair and a true epicure's curves smiled as she slivered pork. Susan handed him the revolver and the cylinder.

Nick raised his eyebrows at the gun. "I was just about to come up and see if you needed help. Where are you off to?"

"If I told you, I might not be able to catch him there."

"I see." Nick examined the cylinder before tucking it away in the kangaroo pocket of his hoody. "I'll assume our guest is asleep. What do you want me to do if he wakes up?"

"Try to keep him here. Give him something to eat."

A casual wave of the thirty-eight. "But don't give him this, right?"

"He's not dangerous, Nick." She leaned down, planted a kiss on the crown of his head. "I'll be back soon."

#####

Subconsciously, Fischer had adopted a habit of those inured to dream-tech. Susan employed it now. With the sole difference being she wasn't distraught and exhausted and hence was sensible enough to take along a good umbrella, she chose to walk to her destination.

She might have walked but partway and trusted the remainder of the journey to one of the team's two cars, a bruised black Cooper S she and Nick and Chris kept parked in a garage off Holborn, had she not acquired a minder so shortly after leaving the house.

Her follower was a big looselimbed bastard in a black coat, shaggy-haired, tall but not broad, who broke away like a nightfall of glacial ice from a group of twenty-somethings huddled to the light of burning fag-ends beyond the ropes and bouncers at the door of a club two blocks from the museum. Susan wasn't afraid; she had, in fact, noticed him because, beyond the purpose of her trip, she was feeling relaxed. Nerves closed rather than heightened her senses; right now, she was comfortably, intently aware of her surroundings.

From Bloomsbury to Soho, he never tried to close the distance between them. That's how she knew for certain he was minding her, following her, and not intent on robbery, rape, or other mischief. Not that she was afraid in any event: walking, she ran through a dozen scenarios in her head in which she neutralized him, crippled him, killed him, whether he was armed or not, and knew herself capable of enacting each one of those scenarios with or without the assistance of the seven-inch lockblade fighting knife clipped into the handle of her umbrella. But he kept between them a clean twenty meters of distance, even when she paused to look at the dresses in a shop window, then ducked into a doorway on the pretense of answering her phone. He began to hang back a bit farther beyond Greek Street; by the time Susan reached Wardour Street, he'd as much as vanished, lost to the rain and the spotty crowds and neon. And by then she was pretty much at her destination.

The Dreamtime, like its dozens of roachlike cousins, had existed, re-formed, reconfigured, as needed, in operation, before and since World War II. Bombing couldn't destroy such places; nor could burning. The clubs fought invisible turf wars, behind-doors so to say, tussling over passageways, storage space, cellars and sub-basements, a shifting maze of warrens that made for quick escapes and quicker concealments while confounding both the bounds of morality and those who would try to enforce London's zoning laws. In the Dreamtime's plate-glass front window, against blackout curtains since faded to the color of cheap merlot, neon tubing spelled out the promise of COCKTAILS and LIVE ENTERTAINMENT. Both claims, Susan knew, were at best only half true.

She walked past the club's two hawkers, two seedy boys like smack-addled bookends, shoulders hunched against the rain, their hands jammed in the pockets of identical tawdry leather coats, before they could try on her either muttered catcalls or a standard pitch regarding cheap cover, cheaper drinks, no minimum, and passed between them through the club's open door into a half-lit passage carpeted, to the sides as well as underfoot, in gritty black. At the door leading into the club proper stood a troll of a man, six feet tall or better, an even mix of gristle and granite, steel-gray fuzz like metal shavings on his jowls and the crown of his head. He held out a cinderblock paw at the end of an arm, encased in the sleeve of a black leather jacket, as thick as a trans-Atlantic telecom cable; before he could name the club's going rate, Susan pressed a fifty-pound note into his hand. He raised his eyebrows, pocketed the bill, and let her pass.

Inside, she moved quickly through the outer realm of the damned, the cheap seats of Hell, the stink of must and watered booze and sweat, the circular tables at which huddled tourists looking trapped or shamed or both, the scattering of regulars, mostly middle-aged men nursing drinks in smudged glasses while they watched, slyly, shyly, openly, glassily, three girls swaying, not quite in time with the wooden thump of the club's low-end sound system, bony hips and flaccid exposed breasts on each of three tiny raised stages. To the right of the bar, she passed without pausing through a bar-handled door marked ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE.

Through the door, in the club's front storeroom, amid steel-frame shelves holding crates of liquor, bundles of paper napkins, boxes of crisps and peanuts, four men sat around a folding table playing cards. For a second after Susan entered they froze, a mug-shot moment of surprise immobile save for the drift of cigarette smoke. Then the one nearest the door, a fellow with cropped red hair and a featherweight's slight but dangerously wiry frame, rose and placed himself between Susan and what stood beyond the table and the shelving, that being another door at the far side of the room.

"Loo's outside to the left, love," he said.

He had eyes the color of dried bone marrow. Susan looked down at him— even in the low-heeled boots she was wearing, she had at least four centimeters on him— and said: "I want to see Eames."

Surprise negated a bit of the cockiness in his expression. "And who might you be?"

Susan replied, without a trace of irony: "His mother."

Snorts and laughter from the table. The wiry man smiled, displaying teeth thoroughly unexposed to the concept of flossing. "That's a new one, anyway. You'd've made his sixth sister this week." He chuckled. "Come on, Mum."

#####

Beyond the door at the other side of the room lay a deeper level of Hell. Susan expected as much: the farther one got from the street, from open air and the outside world, in a place such as this, the deeper grew one's appreciation for the first volume of the Divine Comedy. But what she saw now caught her nonetheless by surprise. Not a hive of bookmakers, not the packaging of drugs, not a maze of peepshows and glory holes.

No, this was a con new to the West End.

Maybe a dozen of them there were: boys and girls in their very late teens, early twenties. Each asleep on a sofa, a velvet settee, all of the furniture looking to have been nicked either from an antique shop or from the forgotten prop room of one of the area's many ancient theatres. Each tubed intravenously via limp and languid wrist to one of three PASIV machines. Pretty young things, rich, privileged, bored, in search of new thrills.

Susan shuddered in passing. You'd be better off on Ecstasy, she thought.

#####

Yet another door at the far side of the dream-room, that much farther away from the street and, as such, the real world. Through it lay a casino, private and tiny. At a baccarat table, half facing the door, half facing the dealer, a wraithlike man in a ghost-white shirt and black button-down vest, sat a compact man in his early thirties. A handsome early thirties, Susan supposed, though she'd always seen more in terms of ancient decadence in his face. With his clean jawline and cropped dark hair, the look of a mad young Roman emperor, perhaps. A Cockney Nero, with those too-full lips. A Cheapside Caligula, with a cruel yet playful slant to his lapis-blue eyes.

"Eames—" said Susan's escort; he finished, once the man at the baccarat table had turned, fully, to face them, once his profligate-handsome face had not quite registered surprise at the sight of her: "— your mum's here to see you."

#####

#####