Minerva the Liar, page 11
It was idyllic, really. Before living with three men, she’d entertained the fleeting fantasy of having more than one partner at a time, but even in those imaginings, she’d never let herself conceive of a harmonious domestic situation like the one she was in. Before it happened to her, it seemed impossible.
Actually, she thought, as Max pulled the covers up over her body and tucked them practically beneath her chin, now that it was happening to her, it still seemed impossible.
“Nighty night,” Max said, before giving her a little wave and closing the bedroom door.
She closed her eyes and rolled over onto her side. It was like living in a dream, the situation she now found herself in.
She felt a lump in her throat. Why then, she wondered, was she not completely satisfied?
Why didn’t she feel happy?
What more could she possibly want?
She pondered this as sleep took her.
Dream Invasions
Minerva started suddenly and peered down at her body. Her body was wrapped in bedsheets. But they were blindingly white.
This was strange because she didn’t own white sheets. Too easily stained and difficult to get completely pristine again, even with the aid of bleach. Because of this, all the sets she put on her bed were a royal blue.
The sheets were wrong. That was her first clue that something was off. And then she noticed she wasn’t in bed.
She was sitting on the ground. The dirt ground.
As she glanced back at the white sheets, she realized she wasn’t actually wrapped up in bedsheets, as she initially thought she was. No, she was wearing a white cloth that looked an awful lot like a bedsheet. It was slung around only one shoulder, the left one.
Her right shoulder was bare.
The white cloth hung down nearly to her feet.
It dawned on her. She was wearing a toga. Of course.
Something else was wrong, too. Minerva noticed suddenly that her breasts were gone. Her chest was flat. She even had chest hair. How curious.
On either side of her were two women. One was a woman with frizzy blond hair. She wore bright lipstick and heavy eyeliner that made her eyes seem to recede into her head. Despite her newness, she smiled with keen familiarity at Minerva. The other woman Minerva was certain she had seen before. It was Rosie Drake.
Both women smiled at her with blistering heat emanating from behind their eyes. Their hands disappeared under the toga, moving, fumbling, until Minerva felt them both stroking her…
Her penis.
I have a penis? Minerva thought. Her penis responded in the affirmative, throbbing as both women paid attention to it.
This was a kind of madness, Minerva observed. She felt overwhelmed by sensation. Controlled by pleasure in a way that she hadn’t been in a very long time, if ever.
Her penis propelled her body forward as hands became mouths and mouths turned to other forms of lovemaking. They mounted her in turn. Over and over again. Rising and falling.
Afterwards, Minerva would not have been able to tell what exactly happened, in what order, and with whom. But her strange new body ached with a glowing exhaustion.
She realized guiltily she didn’t even know the blond woman’s name, only that she had spectacular curves and her eyeliner and mascara had run from exertion, making her look quite ghoulish while afterglowing.
In that moment, Minerva bristled. Of course. It was Regina. Why had she not realized who it was at first? Had the frizzy blond hair thrown her off, or had Regina’s face changed during the sexual encounter?
Everything seemed quite a bit fuzzier than normal. The sky was changing color in a disconcerting and unpredictable manner. It reminded Minerva of the way light moves in time lapse photography, with shadows being thrown haphazardly across the landscape at breathtaking speed.
Had Regina’s identity moved as well? Or had she simply not noticed it?
Rosie smiled at Minerva as she collapsed beside her. “You’re quite a man,” she observed.
“I guess I am,” Minerva replied. “Not sure how I got so lucky.”
“To the victor go the spoils,” Rosie explained.
It wasn’t much of an explanation, but Minerva wasn’t about to go asking a bunch of questions. No need to spoil the moment by interrogating it.
And she didn’t have to. Regina dressed and left them. Rosie chatted easily about where they were, their circumstances, what would likely come next.
As Minerva listened, it became evident that she was a warrior. And both women and their sexual favors were prizes she’d won via valor.
Minerva woke from the early morning nap, drenched in sweat and deeply sexually frustrated. Rosie and Regina were off limits. She knew that, but apparently her subconscious didn’t.
It was funny, she mused, how an entire world of possibility had unfolded before her because of this strange new power. What had previously been fantastic was well within her reach, and yet, she was fixated upon what she couldn’t have.
Infuriating, really. She’d always found herself looking down on people who were like that, who seemed unable to enjoy what they had and were instead obsessed with what they didn’t.
She’d sworn she’d never be that way. When she was longing for more, she told herself that she’d be different. When her circumstances improved, she would appreciate the upward mobility, savor it. She wouldn’t be one of those people who let a taste of power corrupt them, turn them insatiable, make them less satisfied. But now here she was, doing the same thing herself, what she promised herself she’d never do.
It was a humbling position to be in. The attendant depression that followed sadly made her long even more for what she couldn’t have, clutching for something new to cope.
“Someone has a crush,” Darren teased her after she reported back to him on her evening with Regina and Rosie and what had transpired.
“Stop it,” she said.
This didn’t deter Darren. If anything, he took requests to cease a behavior as a challenge, typically assumed she was kidding.
“Minerva and Rosie up in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”
“Darren,” Minerva said. “Just don’t.”
“What?” he said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. And I don’t blame you, really. There’s something…different about her. Something that reminds me of you. It makes sense to me that you’d be attracted to her.”
“Well, she doesn’t like me back, so it doesn’t matter,” Minerva said.
“Can’t win em all,” Darren said.
“I know.”
“Look on the bright side,” Darren said. “At least you’re not alone. You’ve got plenty of company.” After a beat, he added, “Including present company.”
“I know,” Minerva said.
“You know,” Darren said, leaning in and speaking the words directly onto the nape of her neck. “You know. Is there anything you don’t know?” He brushed her earlobe with his lips before he pulled away.
Minerva considered this. “Apparently how to deal with rejection,” she said.
Darren laughed.
Darren had a point. She did have plenty of company between Darren, Max, and Chad – even if Chad did leave a lot to be desired. He’d turned into a good housekeeper in the last few months, but little else had changed.
He still had a way of saying things that hurt her feelings. She rarely bothered making love with him anymore, since he was so much more selfish in bed than Max or Darren.
She had begun to wonder what she’d ever seen in him.
I don’t know if I saw much in him, she thought, or if I didn’t see that there was anything else more suitable out there.
Darren and Max had changed all of that.
She continued to run into Rosie at Skinner Makes and become bitterly disappointed with herself every time she felt her stomach drop in response. This was ridiculous. Why was she so hung up on Rosie? She had plenty of other companionship, financial freedom, and a new creative outlet in pottery.
Perhaps, Minerva thought, there’s still something missing. But that doesn’t mean it’s only something Rosie can give me.
She continued to attend Darren’s Beautiful Liars meetings, making a concerted effort to make new friends there. She also pushed herself to talk to strangers around Skinner Makes, as awkward as it was.
Most of the members were men. And it was not hard to become close to them. Most of them were introverted and uneasy around her, which told her they weren’t used to a lot of female attention, but with a little persistence – and the aid of crossed fingers – she found it quite easy to break down their walls.
Just as before, she found herself going a bit far with it, and before she knew it, she’d bedded about half of the makers that frequented Skinner Makes. She was honest about her situation – that she was already seeing Darren, Max, and Chad – that in fact all three men were squeezed into her apartment, taking turns sleeping on the couch and the living room floor – and in spite of this, each new man seemed to want to not only be her lover but also move in with her.
“But there’s nowhere for you to sleep!” Minerva said.
One enterprising conquest named Tom had the solution. “I’ll build you a house.” He procured a plot of land and got to work.
And so it began, the largest group project Skinner Makes had ever attempted: A new home for Minerva and her many boyfriends.
Tom was a construction engineer who was used to designing large-scale projects, so a single-family home was well within his purview. He drew up the plans quickly and doled out assignments to her other boyfriends. Minerva watched in wonder as her boyfriends organized themselves and cooperated to accomplish the task.
Twenty days later, her new home was finished, standing on land she didn’t have to pay for. No more apartment life for her. There was a beautiful master bedroom for her of course – and anyone else she wanted to join her for the night – and plenty of other space for her boyfriends to sleep. Tom had the foresight to construct the other bedrooms in a barracks style that made it easy to fit many bunkbeds into the space.
“It should easily accommodate us now,” Tom had said, “and there’s room for more.” He indicated the possible need for further future expansions had also guided his selection of the lot.
Her lovers took care of moving everything into the house – they hauled in Minerva’s possessions and all their own without troubling her. This might just be the hottest fantasy of all, she noted, realizing she’d moved to a house of her own and had managed to avoid packing, lifting, or unpacking while doing so. She was a bit troubled, however, to note when she moved through the house that Max had been telling the truth, as much as it conflicted with her memory – there was no espresso machine. He hadn’t moved one in with him anyway.
Still, Minerva regarded the new home in awe. This wasn’t simply a house; it had the makings of a compound. One that had materialized rather seamlessly, manifested simply through her desires. Curious, really, as until recently the universe didn’t seem to care at all about what she wanted. Is this how Cinderella felt when her pumpkin turned into a coach? She wondered.
And yet… the dreams persisted. Nearly every night, she would find herself transforming physically into the same form, losing her breasts and gaining a penis, and carousing with Regina and Rosie at the same time.
She wasn’t always a warrior claiming them as trophies, wearing the gladiatorial costume of a frat boy. The setting changed countless times. There were different costumes. The action took place in a variety of different locations.
In one dream, Minerva took them both on a beach at sunset while a group of curious tourists stood by and watched, their mouths frozen open in shock, snapping pictures of the three lovers with cameras that hung around their necks. Upon waking, Minerva found herself wondering where someone would get a roll of film like that developed exactly and found herself laughing at the thought.
In another dream, she screwed Regina and Rosie while hanging off the side of a building, attached to a precarious snarl of climbing ropes. As she climaxed, her tether came loose, and she plummeted many stories down. Thankfully, she woke up before she hit the ground and felt the impact.
Not everything changed, however, from dream to dream. It was always Regina and Rosie, and Minerva always found her body transformed in the exact same way.
Every time she awoke, she found herself wanting more.
It seemed obscene to be this sexually frustrated given the circumstances. Her sex life was an embarrassment of riches. She wasn’t going through a drought by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, she’d been naughtier than she’d been in a long time.
She walked around practically every day feeling like she had a dirty secret, one that made her entire body glow. Before the past few months, she’d never had sex with more than one person in a single day. Now that was old news. It wasn’t at all uncommon for her to be intimate with three or four of her boyfriends in a single day. For the most part, this was one on one, and they stole their opportunities when they could, but sometimes a few of them would cooperate, and she’d find herself enmeshed in a cage of hands, mouths, legs, and cruces.
Even one on one, however, it was all a blur. One man in the shower, another at night to go to sleep, and yet another encounter in the morning.
Was it truly random? Were they simply seizing opportunity? Or were they coordinating the order somehow among themselves?
It seemed almost random but not quite. Plus, she noted, so far there had been no arguments over her. Not as far as she knew anyway. If they were fighting over her, they kept those conversations far away from her, where she couldn’t hear them. And as far as she could tell, none of her boyfriends seemed to be in relationships with one another, or anyone else outside of the house.
True, it would have been possible for them to sneak off and see a lover when she was preoccupied – which was most of the time lately – but she didn’t feel like that was happening. They seemed strangely devoted to her.
“Max Meteo, reporting in from your personal man harem,” Max said, as Minerva ate breakfast together with him one morning. It was just the two of them, Minerva’s idea, because she had started to miss him. If whatever system they were using to divide intimate time with her were under her control, she would have given Max two or three shares in the schedule. But it wasn’t, so this was the best she could do, finding stolen moments when they could be together unexpectedly.
It meant cutting into her precious alone time, but to her thinking, it was more than worth it. Where a lot of other people took energy for Minerva to be around, Max had a way of refilling her energy whenever she spent time with him. He relaxed her, and she hadn’t been able to find that with anyone else.
“Man harem?” Minerva said, bristling.
Max smirked. “You have to have a sense of humor about these things. Anyway, it must be pretty great having your own man harem.”
“Actually, it’s not,” Minerva said.
“Oh?”
“Well, it has its moments,” Minerva said.
Max smiled. “I can think of a few myself.” His eyebrows punctuated the thought.
“It doesn’t seem quite right though, Max,” Minerva said.
“What do you mean?’
“Here I am, I have everything I’d ever want. I’m financially stable. I live in a beautiful house. I have a… gaggle of boyfriends.” Minerva frowned. “You know, it’s hard to talk about any of this without making my life sound ridiculous.”
“That’s why I go with ‘man harem,’” Max said. “Just go for it. Lean into the ridiculousness.”
“It doesn’t feel real,” Minerva said.
“It doesn’t?”
Minerva shook her head. “It feels… conditional. Provisional.”
“You mean, you’re worried that we’re going to up and leave you?” Max said.
“No,” Minerva said. “I mean… I’m worried it’s not actually happening. That I’ll wake up one morning and it will have never happened. It doesn’t feel real. It feels like a fantasy… and not a well-thought out one either. It feels like something you think about when you’re trying to get off. A fantasy you keep adding details to, embellishing it more and more, trying to get that shock out of yourself, that one rush of chaos that brings you over the edge. Sometimes if you’re not careful enough, you’ll think of something distracting that’ll bring you away from the edge. Something confusing or gross. And before you know it, the entire fantasy is gone, and you’re just a sad sweaty naked person who can’t get off.”
“That’s a very interesting theory,” Max said. “The solipsism angle.”
“Solipsism?”
“The philosophical idea that the self is the only thing that exists, that your mind is the only real thing in this world, and that the rest of us are just figments of your imagination. However sexy any given figment might be.” Max smiled. “Just to be clear, I will happily accept a trophy that says World’s Sexiest Figment on it. Store that idea away for the holidays.”
“Noted,” Minerva said, laughing.
“But there’s just one hiccup in your theory,” Max said.
“What’s that?”
“I know my own mind. I have my own reality,” Max said. “So I know you’re full of it. And for all I know, you’re a figment of my imagination.”
“True,” Minerva said, “but it would be pretty easy for the figments of my imagination to just say that.”
“This is why I hate solipsism,” Max said. “It turns into an impasse. No one knows anything, and no one can ever know anything. I’d say the whole thing’s an armed standoff or a hostage situation, but that’s giving it too much credit and too much entertainment value. Solipsism is a yawn fest.”
