Chapter 41- Lemons

Lupe couldn't find a comfortable position to lie in that night, no matter how she twisted and turned. It was fairly quiet in Elpis Close at night – no drunks or late-night factory production or despondent weeping – just the steady low humming of the ventilation systems and the ever-present gentle throbbing of pumps. Lupe would have welcomed a loud and obnoxious external distraction from her thoughts, however.

Helena's monstrous body and jarringly normal face were etched into her mind's eye now that there was nothing else to focus on. The bizarrely-communicated images and ideas that Helena had shown her were overlaid over the horror. Fish. An ad for the Mermaid Lounge. Lupe herself. Escape. What does she want? How can I help her?

Lupe rolled onto her back and sighed. Cellular degeneration. Is that what's going to happen to me? Is that what she's trying to tell me? I'll become a fish? Can she see the future? As unpleasant as life was in Rapture she much preferred to experience it as a human and not a fish.

Richard's even breathing told Lupe that he was sleeping just fine despite the story she had told him. He hadn't seen it though, he hadn't been in that room with her. That's why he could sleep. If it had been something someone had told her it wouldn't weigh upon her so either. After all, she read about all manner of terrible things, real and imagined, and they had never kept her up before.

He had told her to never hesitate asking him for something, and she was going to take him up on that offer. She needed a monster to chase away her waking nightmares – but a gentle monster that would treat her gently. She wasn't in the mood for their usual slap and tickle and belt and pinch. That was all lovely, but needed an old-fashioned tender encounter at the moment. But she didn't feel right prodding Richard awake with only a vague notion of comfort. Richard craved a starting point for sexual activity – it was not required per se, but when given a path for their play he enjoyed himself much better.

The effort of scraping up a new and fun scenario for him was already distracting her from her woes. Three days ago she had acted as if she had gotten stuck in the bed frame – which was such a silly thing she had to suppress laughter while calling out for 'help' – and he had loved it. Lupe often consulted the handbooks and guides she sold to generate ideas. She was also going to have to look into getting props and had started to consider how she would sell those as well.

Something gentle tonight though. That was a new track for her to explore. She thought back to the physical relations she had before Richard, all the way back to Javier. She smiled to herself at the memory. Neither of them had known what to do. It wasn't so bad though. An idea hit her and she knew how she would direct Richard.

Lupe leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "Richard?" Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Sweetheart?"

"Mmm," he groaned as he was pulled out of sleep. "What's…what is…Lupe?" Richard inelegantly mumbled with all the coherency of someone roused against their will. The smooth yellow radiance of his eyes shone in the dusky gloom of their bedroom.

She instantly felt better. His glow no longer alarmed her – indeed, it had the opposite effect. "I'm feeling awfully low and I could use some cheering up."

Richard sat up. "I…yeah, of course…I'd be too."

"I can't sleep," she continued. "I need some attention, I think, and some love."

"Aaahhh," he exhaled and she felt his hands on her nightgown. "What, urm, what…" he was still clearly a little sleep drunk. "You got the best ideas. Give me one of your dynamite ideas."

"Do you remember your first time having sex?" Lupe coyly asked.

"Erm, yes, it pretty much was my downfall," Richard dryly replied.

"Oh," she sadly mumbled. Yes, Rollie had mentioned something to that effect. She felt guilty for not remembering and failing to take that into consideration.

"What are you getting at?" Richard sounded more awake now and his eyes literally glowed with interest.

He had graciously given her an opportunity to steer the conversation back into fertile fields. "Well, my first time was pretty boring, to tell you the truth," she began, hopefully steering them down an erotic path. "There was this boy in my neighborhood, Javier, and I'd know him for years and years. Nice enough, I guess, but I never had any romantic inclination toward him. A little on the dumb side, I like smart fellows."

"Hmm," Richard grunted, pleased with the inferred compliment. "What'd he look like?"

"Black hair, very short, sort of prickly, and brown eyes," she honestly had to struggle to remember. Had she not lost her virginity to him she would have completely forgotten him, he was a quite unremarkable person. "Tall. On the heavier side, but pretty strong, he had a job working at a warehouse. Why do you want to know? Are you imagining me having sex with another man?" Lupe teased him.

"Maybe," he answered back in an equally coquettish voice. "Keep going and I'll tell you if it's worth it."

"Alright," she answered, happy that her strategy was so warmly received. "Javier joined up and a few days before he had to go to training he told me that he didn't want to go as a boy, and if I understood what he meant. And I said no, I didn't understand what he meant, and then he said he thought I was pretty and nice and that he'd like to take me to a hotel and know what sex was. And I thought, well, he joined up, he's doing his part, I should do mine. I was also curious as to what sex was like. I didn't know much about it, only what girls whisper to each other in high school. I heard that if I put a lemon inside me I wouldn't get pregnant – "

Richard laughed. "A lemon! Like a whole one?"

"I don't know, that's all I heard. In any event, I wasn't going to get a whole lemon up there as a virgin, I'm fairly certain I couldn't do it now anyway, at least not a regular-sized one. Javier and I both still lived with our parents, so he rented a room – he was a gentleman about this, he really was – and we met there. I asked him what he was planning on doing, and he said he didn't know, but I could take off my dress, that'd be a good start. And I did." Lupe stopped for effect, letting Richard imagine that if he wanted to.

After a few moments, she continued. "Javier said I was very pretty and he thanked me for agreeing to this, and said to come and sit with him on the bed. And I said sure, but I need to juice these lemons first."

Richard burst into laughter. "You brought lemons with you?"

"Yes, like a half-dozen," she confirmed with a giggle. "Enough to make a couple of pies at any rate. And a knife and a juicer and a cup and turkey baster, all in a train case."

Richard's laughter did not abate at this. Once he got it all out, he caught his breath and asked "Why didn't you just juice them at home and bring the juice with you?"

"And what would I tell my mother if she caught me?"

Richard apparently found this much more funny than erotic. "So you juiced up multiple lemons naked while Javier watched?"

"Yes. He was confused and I said it was after we did the act. I put the juicer on the window sill and, gee golly, I juiced the ever-loving daylights out of those lemons. Could have made enough lemonade for an entire platoon. So when I was done I washed my hands and when I came back Javier had taken his pants off. He still had his shirt on though, I thought that was odd."

"That was the odd thing?" Richard joked.

Lupe ignored his comment. "I laid down on my back, that seemed natural, and he got on top of me. We kissed a little, but since I wasn't romantically interested it was not very interesting to me. He then touched my breasts, and he liked doing that, he was squeezing and pinching, and I liked that too, much more than the kissing. He had to poke at my kitty with his fingers for a while. It felt strange at first, but after a while it felt good. Javier put his cock in me, and went in and out oh…about five times. When he reached his pleasure he said "ooooaaaghkkk" like a bird. I didn't have my pleasure, but it was nice I suppose."

"What about the lemons?"

Lupe tittered at the memory. "That's exactly what Javier said. I got up and I sucked all the juice up into the turkey baster and slipped it up my kitty and gave it a squeeze. Well, I tell you what, I wasn't expecting all that lemon juice to come right back out. I don't know what I was expecting. So all this lemon juice comes gushing out of me, and I freeze, there's blood and lemon juice running down my legs. Javier gets up and gets me a towel and dries me off and askes 'Is this what women have to do after sex?' and I said 'maybe'."

"Oh that's rich," Richard sounded very amused. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh."

"I wouldn't have told you if I didn't think it was funny," she answered.

"Did you ever have it off with him after that?"

Lupe shook her head, then realized that the room was dark and thus she'd have to verbalize her negative. "No. He came back from the war though, and I saw him a few times after that around the neighborhood. The first time I saw him back he bought me a soda at the café and I asked him if what we had done helped and he said, yes, it did, that during training he felt confident. I was happy with his answer. I had done my patriotic part."

Richard sighed wistfully. "If I had known it was that easy to get a girl to sleep with me I could have skipped a lot of misery."

"That's what I'm getting to," Lupe coyly announced. "Let's do our first times right, no lemons or…" she didn't know how to parse Richard's disaster in a lighthearted way. "Or wars."

"Oh, alright," Richard said slowly, clearly intrigued. "What's the rules?"

"Rules?" Lupe hadn't been anticipating that.

"Yes, otherwise how will it be 'first-time'?" Richard was evidently expecting her to have this mapped out much more clearly than she had. She thought it was just going to be a funny story about lemons and then some gentle screwing.

Lupe switched on the bedside lamp. "What um, what sort of rules?"

"Well, first off, are you you or are you someone else?" Richard's eyes had faded back to a normal human state, but he still looked captivated.

Lupe raised her eyebrow. "Is there someone you have in mind?"

"Promise you won't make fun?" There was a touch of vulnerability on his face at this request.

"Cross my heart and hope to die," Lupe affirmed. As soon as the words were out of her mouth she belatedly realized it might be something awful. Please don't be awful.

Richard shyly exhaled. "Rollie had a girlfriend in his last year of school, Margaret, oh, she was a head-turner. I thought about her many nights as a lonely fifteen-year old. She never once looked at me for more than a second, but I often thought that maybe she'd come over one night and Rollie would be gone and she would look for me instead…" Richard trailed off.

"I can be her," Lupe quickly replied, not pointing out the obvious point that Rollie most likely screwed her six ways from Sunday before Richard even set eyes upon her. "Do you need more rules?"

Richard pressed his lips together in thought. "No talking," he finally said after a few moments. "Because you're sneaking into my room as you couldn't find Rollie. Keep quiet."

Lupe nodded. "How about I get dressed and come into the room, would you like that?"

He vigorously nodded. "Yes, I believe I would like that. Thank you."

Lupe got out of bed and opened her wardrobe, which took up around thirty percent of the space in the small bedroom. "Anything in particular?"

"Something that would have been in style about ten years ago. She did her hair like Rita Hayworth in Gilda," he dictated, eager for his surprise midnight treat. "You've seen Gilda, right?"

Lupe had seen the film and she duly rolled her eyes. "My darling, you are the light and love of my life, but you're out of your danged mind if you think I'm going to start doing my hair at this late hour." She took out a light-green shirtwaist dress with little pearl buttons.

"Don't forget a slip," Richard reminded her.

Lupe pulled on a particularly lacy chemise. She had dozens of the damned things, she couldn't stop pilfering them from her shop. After pulling on the dress Lupe brushed and fluffed out her hair in a hasty facsimile of the titular Gilda. "Shall I knock on the door?"

Richard shook his head. "No, just come in and get into bed with me. With your clothes on."

"You've thought a lot about this, huh?"

He shrugged. "More like I remember what I wanted." He leaned back in bed. "What did you want?"

"Oh, it changed all the time, I didn't have anything solid. An outlaw cowboy or a rum runner, something exciting like that, something you'd see in a serial. Nothing in particular, though." Lupe opened the door to the hallway. "We can do that another day, if you'd like."

"I would like."

She smiled to herself and stepped out into the hallway. Her plan was working, she hadn't thought about the horrors of the day, her mind was instead focused on what Richard wanted to do with this creature she had created. How long should I wait? He liked to keep her waiting under these circumstances. Give him a taste of his own medicine.

After a suitable amount of time passed – no more than three minutes as Lupe was already starting to warm up as well – she slowly opened the door. She shyly peeked inside and saw Richard sitting up in bed, pretending to read a book. When the door opened he flicked his eyes upwards, but didn't lift his head.

Alright, I'm sneaking into my boyfriend's brother's room to have sex with him…for some reason, Lupe worked through while Richard covertly stared at her. What's my move? Lupe put her finger to her lips in a gesture of shushing, then winked at him.

Richard closed the book and put it on his lap, but said nothing.

Perhaps I am trying to see if his cock is bigger, Lupe tried to muster up some motivation for her character. I need big cock. She smiled at the thought and sat on the end of the bed. She leaned forward and pulled back the blanket that was covering Richard. He was still wearing his pajama bottoms.

She faux-curiously prodded at the hard cock hiding under the thin cotton fabric. After ascertaining that yes, his cock was hard and yes, it was a satisfactory size, she gave him a questioning look and licked her lips. Richard slipped his pajama bottoms down just enough to free his cock.

Lupe swirled her tongue around the spongy but firm head. Uh-oh, he's just a virgin, better take it easy! She sat up and guided his hands to her legs. Richard slid his hands up her skirt, but stopped short of her slit. He removed his hands from her legs and gently – much more gentle than he usually was in the bedroom – drew her down onto the bed.

Richard straddled her around the waist and unbuttoned the front of her dress, revealing her lacy slip. He shimmed her breasts out of their pretty cage and squeezed and fondled them with not at all fabricated interest. This Richard hadn't apparently developed his sadistic side yet, so his caresses were soft and almost entirely pinch free.

Once he had gotten his fill of that Richard kissed her very softly, then got off of her stomach and pulled her dress up, and then after a few moments of admiring it, her chemise as well was pulled up to her waist, exposing her to him completely. Richard parted her legs with a tender tug, then traced his finger around her lower lips.

Lupe was aflutter with anticipation. This reversal of their usual repertoire was warming her up like a hot cup of chocolate on a cold winter's day. She moaned and pulled his finger away and put it to her lips to silence her moans. She could taste her own juices on his finger. Richard climbed on top of her and effortlessly slipped into her.

She embraced him fiercely. The only sound was their gasping breaths and the squeaking of the mattress springs. Having Richard so deeply inside of her without all of the bells and whistles they usually employed was satisfying in a way that transcended a purely physical need. Lupe had her thighs clamped around his midsection.

Richard was no longer keeping to the script in the sense that he hadn't spilled his seed yet, as one would expect from a first-timer. And, also unexpected from a first-timer, he began to massage her most sensitive little bud. He laid his hand over her mouth as she had her pleasure on his cock. He then clenched her hips tightly and silently shot his shimmering semen into her.

He rolled off of her and onto his side of the bed and wordlessly turned the lamp off. Lupe stood up out of bed and took off her clothing and hung it back in the closet. She snuggled up against Richard and, with her body aglow with sensual satisfaction and ADAM, she quickly drifted off to sleep.