She'd wandered in ahead of me. Somehow the two of us found independently, on the same evening within minutes of each other, a room. A secret room.

Overhead, the party roared, but here the noise was muffled, barely audible, leaking through heavy masonry and the massive oak trim and beams that embraced and supported the walls. Overhead the party roared, but here were only whispers in dusty cathedral silence.

Jerry had not discovered this place; I am sure. He would have sidled up and leered his charming leer and bragged about the extraordinary room in the basement of the enormous house (call it a mansion, or better, a castle) he had just bought. The previous owners, a young couple, precociously wealthy, had departed suddenly and mysteriously for Europe, reasons unknown, abandoning the property to Realtors. Jerry had snapped at a price exorbitant for anyone but Jerry.

The excitation of envy is one of Jerry's reasons for existence, and it is a measure of peculiar genius that he not only does not lose friends over the practice, but even charms with stories of bravado, seduction, and conquest.

The pursuit of women and an accompanying enchanting braggadocio are Jerry's happy weaknesses, and this room was so resonant with his style, his raison d’être, that he could not have contained a secret of this magnitude. It would have overflowed his bounds and spilled into the ears of his four dozen houseguests.

I'd leaned against the heavy oak panel adjoining the bookcase in the library while scanning the literary debris left by the previous occupants. The faint click and shift of an unlocking traveled down my arm from the panel and I jerked away in surprise -- then pushed again and the panel moved.

The music and noise of the housewarming party two rooms away almost completely disappeared as the massive door swung shut behind me, closing off a small chamber whose only apparent purpose was to contain the entrance to a dimly lit spiral staircase leading downward. Cautiously I descended. She was there at the bottom.

She turned, startled, green eyes gleaming. "Oh! Hi." Her expression was quizzical, curious, her face innocent and startlingly pretty. She gestured out into the space beyond.

"What's it for?" The question was rhetorical, I believe, because I think she already had a glimmer of the meaning of the shapes that lurked in that room. We pressed against the iron railing separating the walkway from the slightly lower level of the large chamber, and peered into the brightening gloom, eyes slowly dilating away the shadows.

I had seen her at the party and it had been painful because I felt a longing at once, knew immediately that I wanted her, a stranger, and simultaneously realized that I would not work up the courage to approach. For me, on that particular evening at that particular time, she was unapproachable. She laughed and smiled and chatted brightly with the three men who entertained her. They were a small knot of hounds and fox gathered in a corner, oblivious to everything else in the room. Finally, when Jerry revealed his interest by wandering over to enter the chase -- when he injected bold pursuit by holding her hand between both of his, by kissing it -- I knew I would never get a chance.

Now here she was.

"What is it?" I echoed her question. "I believe I know."

She giggled. "Yes. I think so too. It's a ... a sort of ..." She blushed. Without looking, I felt the blood rising to her face, my own cheeks burning in empathetic response. Here was a creature alive and lovely, excitable and exciting, who would wake up and stir anyone who stood near her and breathed in her giddy atmosphere.

"It's a sort of gymnasium, isn't it? A special gymnasium for ... they ... I mean...

"Yes?" I urged her on. "I think you've got it."

"... A sexual gymnasium!" she blurted. Gravely we looked at each other for a long moment and then burst into laughter.

"Look there, at that thing," she pointed excitedly. That's where she ... and he ... and they ... there, there, look, look!" She could not say the thing, but she poked me gently in the ribs with an elbow and we marveled silently together over the workmanship and function of the device, exquisitely padded and contoured with more than suggestive shapes, raised over the floor on a platform of smoothly sculpted wood. There was the place for her to lie slanted forward over a padded bar that raised hips well into the air; there was the place for him to kneel behind her, in close and molded contact. And there was a point in the air in the imagination, no physical bodies to flesh out the location and give it solidity. But there was a point in the air, defined by geometry and yearning, where the coupling was made, and there in that still room I heard my heart beat loudly and felt her presence beside me.

"Oh my, did they really?" she exclaimed. "Do you think there were others, too?" She walked past the end of the railing down onto the main floor and gingerly approached the platform in awe. Black high heels tip-tapped loudly across the wooden floor. "I mean, did they entertain guests?" She ran her hands down along the padded leather that supported the woman's forward body slanting down from the hips, and ran her fingers through the cupped depressions meant to contain and caress her breasts.

"Oooohh," she squealed. "There are bristles down inside for her nipples. Come. Come feel." She grasped the back of my hand and moved my fingers through the cup. I felt soft bristles at the bottom, and at that moment a little jolt. A tiny shudder went through my body, not from the contact of the bristles but because of the contact of her hand on mine and the contact of her eyes on my eyes, watching to see my reaction, feeling through me what I felt through my fingertips.

"Can you IMAGINE what that must have been like? And with other people watching." There were large, comfortable couches in front of each of the assemblies, lush, well cushioned couches convenient for couples. She twirled, laughing, the skirt of her black party dress flaring out to reveal a flash of red to match her finger nails, and she skipped to the next tableau, a large basket suspended by chain from a wooden beam of the ceiling fifteen feet overhead. The basket dangled above another raised, contoured platform, and she leaned far over the edge and gave it a slight twirl, and it wound up on the chain slowly, then unwound and wound again in the other direction while we contemplated.

"She sits in there ..." I began.

" ... And he lies below her on the pad..." She continued.

" ... And there's a hole in the bottom of the basket..." We chorused imperfectly but exuberantly and broke into laughter and giggles again.

She danced from platform to platform, pointing out this and that feature, green eyes almost glowing in the dim light, and I followed and we joked and struck sparks off each other until...

The apparatus was suspended by chains from an ornately carved and painted wooden ceiling -- very like the canopy of a bed. This wooden canopy was supported several feet above its platform by four sturdy, gilded posts.

Hanging from it were chains from which the device was suspended. It was little more than a leather harness, a webbed section of thin leather strands like a hammock with tiny spreaders at each end - a hammock woven of black leather strips suspended a few feet, the height of a man's hips, above the platform. Buckles and straps and other leather appendages were attached at various places.

My imagination put a woman's body into that webbing. A close hugging spider web of a sack supported her on her back; enclosed and enfolded her along both sides, taut flesh straining softly through wide holes of black mesh. At her head was attached a pillow, raised for a view down the length of her body, while at the other end the webbing halted at the buttocks, and above that were two separate small sections of webbing suspended by their own chains.

These supported the calves of her legs so that the knees were raised above her hips - no, pushed back so that they were almost above her waist, splayed out toward the sides. My imagination churned.

"Oh my God!" My new companion whispered, awed. She walked from one end of the platform to the other, gazing up at the apparatus like a doe hypnotized by a python. Abruptly she kicked off her heels one after the other, and I discovered red toenails to match her fingers. The edge of the platform was three feet above the floor and she sat back on it, swinging her legs around primly to bring them around under her, and stood up, smoothing the dress down around her hips. She paced slowly around the device; lips pouting in childlike amusement, blond hair swinging across her face as she bent her head this way and that. Suddenly she stopped and punched a finger at something she had found on one of the corner posts. There was a click, and lights snapped on from the wooden canopy, softly flooding the webbing, drawing the eyes as if to a stage, a center of attention and activity, making an island of illumination of this platform in the sea of darkness that permeated the rest of the room.

"Oh!" She jumped, startled, and then resumed her detailed exploration. "What was it like?" She mumbled to herself. "How could they do it?" She stepped into the fuzzy circle of warm light and pressed the webbing with her hand, testing for firmness, clucked her tongue and tried to put her knee up into it. It was high and unsteady and she nearly fell, but I had climbed up by that time and caught her. She grinned an asymmetric, endearing grin and asked slyly, "I can trust you, can't I?

Before I could formulate a clever answer, she was trying to climb up again.

"Help me; I've got to see how this thing worked." I steadied her, and she got a knee into the webbing and pulled up. I caught a flash of red panties as she brought the other leg up. I reached in from the side and held her arm as she maneuvered on hands and knees. Even so, the hammock swung and gyrated uncomfortably.

It took concentration and a fair effort before she had finally stretched full length in the contraption and turned to lie on her back. The webbing ran out just past her hips, and her legs jutted out into unsupported space, drooping toward the floor. There was a thin film of moisture at the hollow of her neck, and she panted slightly. Perfume wafted by my nose, mixed with the faint scent of perspiration.

"Whew!" She smiled up at me. "It's a lot of work just to get in this thing." She kicked her legs at the knees. "Will you hold these up, please?"

Her face was slightly flushed. The lap of the party dress draped loosely down between her legs, but not enough to conceal the smooth skin of inner thighs and a glimpse of red panties at one edge of the black dress. I strained not to be obvious. Glancing down along her left leg, for the first time I noticed a delicate gold anklet. I put an arm around and under her calves and held her legs up.

"Swing me, swing me!" She giggled.

"It would be easier if you put your legs up here," I said, pointing to the small slings suspended on their own separate chains above the end of the webbing. She kept her dress down with one hand while I helped work the legs into place. Soon she laid with knees pulled back and apart, hips tilted up slightly, cheeks supported at the very edge of the webbing at the verge of spilling out beyond. I resisted a strong temptation to fondle.

"Now swing me!" She mock pleaded, like a six-year-old girl begging Daddy to give her a push in her favorite swing in the park. Backwards and forwards she went, gently, rhythmically, swinging beneath the wooden canopy, enfolded in that black webbing, an endearing grin on an excited little girl's face.

"What's this?" She asked after a moment. She had pushed it aside unnoticed when she climbed in -- a soft leather piece with flashes of embedded gold or brass -- and it was partly under her waist as she struggled to pull it out.

After a moment of fumbling it lay across her belly. "It's a bra!" she squealed.

It was unlike any bra I had ever seen, yet it was unmistakably that. One side was attached to the hammock. The main part, of soft black leather, was clearly meant to go over the body, and the other side buckled, trapping the occupant underneath, constrained deliciously (I imagined) by the ample cups.

The distinguishing feature was that the tips of the cups were missing. The holes were rimmed with brass rings a quarter of an inch thick, two or three inches in diameter, a slot around the outside circumference into which the leather snugged tightly in exquisite craftsmanship.

"Oh my!" she exclaimed. "Oh, I'll bet it's cold." She pouted. "At least at first." She experimentally pulled it across her chest.

She looked up at me with wide, innocent eyes, and again asked, "I can trust you, can't I?" Before I could answer, she had slipped straps off her shoulders and pulled down the top of her dress. Two lovely pink nipples confronted me with a wall-eyed stare. She pushed the dress down to her waist, then lay back and pulled the leather bra across again, this time molding bare skin into it.

"Ohhh! It IS cold!" She yelped. Then, with an ecstatic smile she announced, "What a strange, wonderful feeling. Now it's warming up." The fit seemed perfect, and her nipples, jutting centered through the brass rimmed holes, hardened and erected as I watched, evoking an empathetic physiological response in me.

She squirmed and wriggled in the netting, inviting every sensation she could coax out of it, and then she noticed the arm restraints and had to try them as well. They were leather sleeves to wrap around the forearms, loosely secured by a strap at the elbow to the hammock sides to the extent that a woman could still move her arms to certain places, but not with enough latitude to allow one arm to unbuckle the other. "Oh, do me up, will you please?" She begged. "Do me."

The restraints were near the hips so that it was easiest to step between her legs to reach them. I stood and leaned forward slightly into the open end of the hammock, over her hips, and sheathed her arm in a sleeve and inserted a leather tongue through small metal loops, pulling it tightly back on itself while she watched my face intently. Simultaneously the bulge of my trousers pressed lightly against the bare skin of her inner right thigh. I finished the right arm, and the bulge now shifted and rested against the left inner thigh while she smiled up at me as I struggled nervously to fit the other tongue into its loops.

I backed away slightly, and she lay there in front of me, pelvis up thrust, and her face was flushed and her breathing rapid and shallow. "I'm beginning to see what it was like, now." She murmured. "I think ... it's ... very good. It's ... sensuous."

Her green eyes, framed by a mane of blond hair spread about her face and under her head, looked steadily into mine, the smile faded, and I returned her gaze with outward calm but inward turmoil.

"Now off with this." She said, lazily fingering the material of her dress, eyes not wandering a millimeter from mine.

It required minutes of effort -- joint, intricate effort -- as I pulled the dress down from her waist, over her hips as she levered them up, and around the curve of her buttocks to bunch it around her thighs. She lifted each leg in turn above its sling while I slipped off one side, like a Chinese puzzle and then the other.

Her smile returned. "Are you tired? You're panting."

"So are you."

The red of her panties and the musky smell of her skin dominated my senses.

"Now off with these." She said. "Yes, really!" She added to answer the question asked by my hesitation.

"I have to know. How did it feel to be trapped in here with no defenses, no way to hide? What was it like?"

We removed her legs from their slings, and I draped them over my arm at the knees while I plucked down the hem of the panties with my other hand, peeling them past the hips and along her thighs as she levered up against my arm. My hands shook slightly as I helped her place her legs again.

"Buckle them." She both pleaded and commanded, and I did, one at a time, and now she was strapped into place in ripe erotic display, constrained at the breasts, elbows, and legs with no way to remove herself, solely dependent upon me to extricate her from the apparatus. And I stood between her legs, her knees flung to the sides of my hips, pelvis tilted upward, soft center palpably beckoning, and she was the only physical entity in the room, the world, the universe, at this moment, there was no existence other than hers.

I gently touched her knee.

"Don't touch, don't touch," she frowned, and her face was tinged with crimson, a belated blush playing across it. "I mean, I want ... Oh, God, what have I..." Her sentence trailed off into dreamy wistfulness. She pushed her legs rhythmically, slowly against the slings, hips rising and falling in tiny provocative arcs, body swinging silently, and her eyes closed after a few long moments and a smile crept over her face. I realized that she was entering a world of imagination and sensation to which I had not been invited. Then...

"Your pants, please ... down." She ordered softly but with an embedded firmness.

I did, without hesitation, and now my physical state was as apparent as the center pole under a circus tent.

"Those too," she admonished in soft, beautiful innocence, and the underpants came down around my legs and the fullness in my groin had never before been so intense.

"Yes!" She said quietly, half moaning. "I CAN trust you, can't I?" She inhaled and exhaled in a deep sigh, and her eyes slowly closed again.

"Just the tip, just the tip…" She whispered, hips tilting perceptibly higher. And in a moment the tip, just the tip, touched ever so lightly the flowering pink flesh just beneath her clitoris, and a spasm shook both of us. The tip, a tiny bead of liquid at the opening, touched her lightly, the bead spreading to lubricate. The tip slid slowly upward, caught momentarily under the hood of her clitoris, then broke free to rest against the mound of Venus above. I leaned slightly, and now the length nestled along the length of the furrow, and we moaned together.

"Swing me," she rasped.

"Yes!" came my grinding whisper. I swung her ever so slightly through the pressure of our contact, at the one place that we touched…gently…to and fro…an inch back and forth. We lost contact for a moment, and then touched as I came home again, cradled lengthwise along and between her still widening lips. I felt the mild slap against lower cheeks, the beautiful fullness of the flesh pendulum swinging from its suspension beneath my groin, the delicious pain of slapping against her flesh.

She moaned. "Oh yes, oh please, oh don't stop."

I could not stop if I'd wanted. We were pulled along, victims bobbing in a spider's web, resigned joyfully to a force whose intent was to weave us together, and now, at the precipice, the point of no return. I found myself disappearing, long, straight, true into her, into the love flower a millimeter at a time, and we worked to prolong the moment, the pleasure, the closeness, and -- yes -- the obscene nakedness of our act together. Our simultaneous penetration progressed slowly, milking, the mindless rhythm, the motion of hips together and apart, as the apparatus swayed to and fro, hypnotically, compellingly, back and forth.

"It is..." She panted. "…good, yesss, and so…and so…and, yes, please, hard!"

And I was hard, so deliciously hard.

"You are big…so big…your balls, slap, slap, inside deep don't stop please, uhnn uhnn, in, in ALL the way…ohhh deep…deeper!" And it went deep, so deep that the tip was at the center of her being and I lived there at the tip at the center and prepared to spurt, to fill and fill again.

"Up!" I spoke urgently. "Your legs…yes…yes good. Look up at me, my eyes; I want to see your eyes. What I do to you, you do to me. Ummm! Squeeze me...so warm...smooth...slippery…almost…are you…almost? Ahh…yes…so close, around you…your legs around me…"

"In me deeper, hard, slap against me, harder!" She pleaded, writhing in the apparatus, in her pleasures.

"Get ready…take it all…almost…wait... almost, wait..."

"Yes…Now…yes…YESSS, ohhh NOW, all…ALL…all…all of it fill me!" She squealed in the agony of delight.

"Take it all…all of it…suck it…suck it…take it all here it is..."

Such bucking and churning! Such milking and sucking! It was a merging, a being and a becoming, a coming together of two into one. I have never in my life done more with another person. We rested a few moments, and I leaned over to kiss and lick and coax each nipple into hardness again while she stroked my back with her fingernails. Soon we were in heat again, moving to a gentle, caring tempo, the apparatus swinging gently, slapping softly, bobbing, and this time there was music in our heads (we told each other afterward) -- slow music, a waltz. We danced an intimate dance that lasted a long, long time, finally ending in an exquisite, mutual, tender climax.

"I'm Laura," She said much later when it seemed we had achieved, after much effort, our final pause. Names had been superfluous, even unwanted. Without names the coupling had been so wanton, so rampantly impersonal, a random carnal joining. The act was elevated into a heaven of pleasure, but that same wantonness, a mutually innocent sexual wickedness had caused a bonding beyond intention, a joint commitment to future liaison, a need for names.

"And I'm Michael."

"How do you do, Sir? Most pleased to meet you." She clicked her teeth playfully together once in a bright, toothy smile, and tweaked my right nipple between her fingers. "We must get better acquainted," She joked. "Do you know Jerry very well?"

"He's one of my best friends, but we've been out of touch for over a year."

The wicked grin was pleasantly incongruous on her fundamentally innocent face. "Oh dear. You shouldn't have stayed away so long. His life has changed. You see, I'm his wife."

The delicious feeling, a potpourri of emotions -- release of envy, mounting of the pleasure of the forbidden, simultaneous fear and yearning for discovery, the triumph of cuckolding an old hated and loved friend, and more, much more -- took literally minutes to envelop me. We were quiet then, watching each other's eyes for a hint of revelation, of love or betrayal.

I caressed her breasts and leaned far forward, still sheathed and erect again to the hilt in her, to share our first kiss.

"Don't worry," she finally said. "On either account. I will not tell, and in any event he would not mind. In fact, I think he would approve."

"And us?"

She laughed. "I love him. But us? I don't know, but we're off to a good start, aren't we."

She tightened around me, and we were off again into a never-ending journey.