The Panopticon

     

     I met Lisa at a party on the waterfront. She was tall and slender, with
long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was the sort of woman one
might call "handsome": she was attractive but not stunning, well-muscled
without being manly, yet with something of a tom-boyish look about her. We
spent most of the evening talking, and our conversation ranged over all
manner of things. She was smart and funny, and when she spoke her voice was
like silk. We drank vodka tonics like our judgement should never be too
sharp, and with each drink our bodies drifted closer together. Even when it
was time to go they showed no sign of drifting apart again, so she invited
me back to her place.     We reached her apartment, and she began to undress
me as soon as we were inside. She left the lights off, leading me through
the dark as her hands explored my body. I was naked by the time we arrived
at the door to her bedroom, my clothes having been in left a trail from the
front door to there.
     My heart leapt at the sensation of her hot breath in my ear. "Wait
here," she whispered. She flipped a switch, and a spot light turned on over
her king-sized bed. Directly behind it and on both sides were
floor-to-ceiling mirrors. In front there was what looked to be a sliding
glass door. I looked at the mirror behind the bed and instead of her and me
there was a reflection of another mirror reflecting the bed. That mirror
reflected the first mirror reflecting the bed, and so on into infinity. I
was distracted by it, and it held my attention as I heard kick off her
shoes. I heard her unzip her dress and looked back at her. She was standing
in the dark, so I could only see her silhouette as she took off her clothes
and slipped into a long robe.
     She openned the sliding door, and her reflection appeared in the mirror
behind the bed. I realized that the glass door must be a one-way mirror, so
that what was a window on this side was a mirror facing the bed. Someone had
gone to a great deal of trouble to set things up this way, and I wondered if
she had built it herself.
     Lisa climbed onto the bed, lay down so that her legs were spread in my
direction, and gestured beckoningly to me. I could see the curves of her
body underneath the sheer robe and sighed at that layer of red fabric
separating us. I stepped through the doorway and climbed onto the bed. There
was a click behind me, and I looked back to see the door closing. "It's
automatic," she said, before I had a chance to ask. With the door closed,
there was nothing but mirrors on all sides, and our bodies repeated around
us from all angles.
     I bent over and kissed her knee, and she giggled. I planted a trail of
kisses down the inside of her thigh underneath her robe. I paused at the
boundary of her pubic hair and took a deep breath. The smell of her musk was
powerful and enticing; that evidence of her desire fueled my own.
     "Go ahead," she said. I explored her with my mouth, kissing and
nibbling at the tender folds of her flesh. She moaned with appreciation.
     I began to lift my head, to move further up her body, but she pressed
both her hands down through the silk of her robe onto the top of my head.
"Finish me," she said, her voice at once pleading and demanding.
     I returned my attentions to her, flicking my tongue first along the
contour of her lips and then plunging it inside her. She moved her hands to
the sides of my head, rocking me back and forth gently with the rhythm of
her
desire. She moaned, and I felt her body tighten with anticipation. As I
continued by ministrations, her cries slowly reached a crescendo and then
descended to a cooing whimper.
     Her hands relaxed, I moved up her body. I had reached her cleavage when
she grab me, rolling us over so that she was on top. I pulled the robe from
one shoulder and began kissing her neck. I slipped my hands behind her and
tugged on the back of the robe, pulling it off.
     She ran her fingers through my hair and pulled my head back from her
neck, then stared into my eyes for one intense moment before kissing me full
on the lips. Our tongues traded places, and it was as if she tried to hollow
me out with hers. Her hands slipped down across my shoulders and onto my
chest. She crawled down my body, pausing to lick one of my nipples before
positioning her head over my erect cock. Her tongue there was as skillful as
before, and twice as eager.
     I looked up at the ceiling and saw that it was a hundred mirrors, all
at slightly different angles. I saw her beautiful blonde hair repeated a
dozen times, in each image her head bobbing up and down as she fellated me.
I did not hold out long; soon I erupted into her mouth. When I was done, she
rolled over to the end of the bed, opened the door, and spat out my stream
of hot jism. She closed the door and crawled over next to me. "I think I'll
clean that up later," she said, and I planted a kiss on her nose.
     We lay there for a while, side-by-side and contented. I looked into the
mirrors at what looked like that sated couple in the distance.
     "Why the mirrors?" I asked as I absent-mindedly fingered one of her
nipples.
     "It's silly," she said. "You wouldn't understand."
     "Try me."
     "You don't really want to know," she persisted. "You just wonder about
the one-way mirror. You wonder if there isn't an audience, if there aren't
cameras all around."
     "Are there?" I asked, surprised that she suggested the possibility. I
stopped playing with her nipple and let my hand fall back onto the bed.
     "Not all around," she said, rolling onto her side. Her eyes met mine,
and I got the sense that she was looking for something.
     "Not all around?" I repeated questioningly. "But there are some
though?"
     She let the question hang in the air for a moment before answering.
"There are a few," she finally said. "So. I suppose you're worried that I'm
making some amateur porn movie..."
     "...or hosting an adult web-site," I added, finishing her sentence.
     She laughed and said, "No. Nothing like that."
     "What then?"
     She rolled onto her back with a sigh and said, "They're for my own
personal record."
     "Another woman might just carve notches on her bed post," I replied.
     "No, not that sort of record. I want to catch myself."
     "What do you mean?" I asked, looking at her image laid out in the
mirror at the foot of the bed.
     "I want to see my orgasm, to see what it looks like. To see what I look
like."
     "You're radiant, I imagine." I said it without really believing it. The
woman copied all around me in the mirrors was cute but not stunningly
beautiful. I imagined her as attractive during sex, but more a sweaty and
athletic attraction than glamour or radiance.
     "I know I am," she said, without a hint of irony. "Everyone tells me
so."
     "Everyone?" I asked incredulously.
     "Do you know the first time I climaxed? I was sixteen and alone in my
bedroom. I masturbated with a shampoo bottle, and it was the greatest
feeling I'd ever had. As I came down from it, I heard a noise. My little
brother. He had seen everything."
     She sat up and cupped her breasts in her hands, as if hiding them from
the prying eyes of a peeping tom.     "I was so scared that he'd tell our
parents, but he just muttered 'You were beautiful' and ran off.
     "My little brother!" she repeated, raising her voice. She propped
herself up on her hands and leaned over me. "He's never said another nice
thing about me before or since, but even he had to admit it."
     It was a bit kinky, but her sudden burst of aggression combined with
the thought of being a pubescent boy and watching Lisa pleasure herself
turned me on. "He was just a boy," I said. "He was probably so jazzed with
hormones that he didn't know what he was saying."
     "No," she insisted. "My first boyfriend said the same thing. And my
second. And every other man who's ever seen me cum.
     "Do you know what that's like, knowing that you couldn't see yourself
at your best? Knowing that your greatest moment was only there for someone
else to see?"
     I shook my head, trying to think of something to say. She turned away
from me suddenly, facing the mirror on her side of the bed. She started to
talk to me again, but she was looking at her own reflection.     "I started
with one mirror, but my eyes would always close at the moment when
everything happened. I worked hard on that. With effort and practice I
managed to keep them open. Even then, my eyes would focus a long way off,
and I would only see a blur."
     "So you built this bed," I said, suddenly seeing some of her logic. I
sat up and positioned myself behind her, looking over her shoulder at her
reflection. "You hoped that with your image repeated infinitely into the
distance, your eyes could not help but focus on your beauty at the moment of
your orgasm."
     She looked up from her own body and met my eyes in the mirror. She
seemed surprised that I had caught on so quickly. "But that didn't work," I
continued. "Your eyes focussed on something else or on nothing at all. So
you added cameras, hoping to capture your image at just the right moment. To
preserve it so that you could see it at a moment when you could see
straight. But the moment passes so quickly. The camera is so imprecise. Even
that has failed..."
     "...so far," she said smiling.
     I put my arms around her, and we tumbled into the middle of the bed. We
came to rest facing each other, laughing. Stifling her laugh with a kiss, I
rolled on top, mounted her, and made her beautiful.