Wild Cards

The concept of the Special Beach, its basic rules, and "The Joker," was developed by Petra Bee in her story "A Special Beach," which can be found in the Necrobabes Story and Poem Archive at http://www.necrobabes.org/public/messages/pubarch/petrabee/s_beach.htm.

"I knew you'd be surprised," Lois said.

I was not surprised. I was amazed. Speechless.

"Just think of it," she almost sang, pushing the brochures across the table. "You'll love it, it's all set. You don't have to do a thing."

I tapped one of the brochures and stared at my wife. "You really want to go here? The Eubenangee Resort?"

She cocked her head and gazed at me with bright blue-green eyes. "Don't you?"

"For me it's one thing. For you it's another. Are you aware that the beach at Eubenangee is a Special Beach?"

"Oh, of course I do. I don't plan to taking my suit off, Brad!" She paused and giggled. "Not the bottom of it, anyway. It's safe e--"

"It is not safe," I interrupted. "There is a Joker on that beach. There's a Joker on every Special Beach. You do know what happens if the Joker orders you to take off your suit, don't you?"

"Oh, of course I do, everybody does," she answered breezily. "But that's a big resort and a big beach. I'll bet there are hundreds of girls on that beach all the time. What's the chance of me getting picked?"

"Were you also aware," I pressed on, "that the Jokers always pick out the most attractive women on the beach to approach?"

She laughed again. "That's just a rumor, they're supposed to be random. They--"

"People," I pontificated, "never behave randomly."

"Maybe not. But if they do pick the best-looking women around, then I'm even safer."

I stared at her again, wondering--as I had wondered dozens of times before--if she was serious or if this was some kind of act. Lois was very petite, just a shade over five feet tall. Her perfectly shaped legs were proportionately long, which meant her body was tiny. Her hair was black, cut short, and her features were small except for her overlarge eyes and pouty lips. Her breasts were only a B-cup but they were high, firm, and softly rounded, and she had the smoothest, most perfect skin I'd ever touched. Like all women today, she lived in a world where only the best and brightest ever got married, and the average duration of a marriage was under two years. Lois was married, to me, and we'd been married more than eight years. Nor was ours one of the autumn-spring marriages so common today; she was twenty-seven and I was just thirty-two. Most of my male peers had been through three or four wives. Lois was my first and only.

"That," I noted as I had noted before, "is ridiculous."

She sat down at the table, her legs splayed out childishly, as was her habit. "No it isn't," she replied dismissively. "Look, Brad. This isn't for me anyway, it's for you. You've been working too hard, you're tired all the time, you need a break. You have vacation time coming and I have comp time I take. And besides, didn't you tell me you'd like to visit a Special Beach or an Impulse Park sometime?"

"Well, yes, I did, and I would, but--"

She leaned across the table and glared at me wide-eyed as if trying to hypnotize me. "You don't think I'd let you go to one of those by yourself, do you? That's more dangerous to me than the Joker, my love! Why, all those beautiful women, all that free sex--you could fall for one of those beach bunnies and I'd be history."

I laughed. "Lois, I pass by two sex clubs twice every day on my way to and from work. There are plenty of beautiful women in those clubs, and the sex isn't free but it's damn cheap. There are beautiful women on the streets and most of those are free. Have you noticed that I still come home every evening?"

She touched my hand. "A girl has to be careful these days," she intoned. "Has to look out for her own interests."

I squeezed her fingers. "You have nothing to worry about."

"Still. I've seen you watching those vids taken on those beaches, I've watched them with you." She gave me a sly grin. "I've seen the effect they have on you." Mercurially, she then became serious. "You deserve to go there, see things live and up close. My job is to see to it that you get what you deserve. Well, okay, my job is really to supervise the loan office at the bank, but that job makes me enough money to buy these tickets and reserve that room for a week, so I can do my real job, which is--"

"Stop," I said, holding up a hand. "You're confusing me and you're going to confuse yourself."

She pouted. "Okay." She looked down at the table, then back up at me. "So you'll go?"

I waved at the tickets. "Do I have a choice?"

"No."

"Then I'll go, of course."

And so, a little more than two weeks later, Lois and I were on a plane, making the long flight from Los Angeles to Queensland, Australia. We landed at Cairns and from there were taken by bus to the Eubenangee Resort, one of those places in the world where many of those who checked in never checked out again. The resort itself was almost overly opulent, from the giant stone pillars in the marble-floored lobby to the huge spacious room we were shown to. One wall of the room was glass, with a sliding door allowing access to a little balcony outside. We were on the fourth floor, and from our balcony we had a spectacular view of the sparkling blue-green Pacific Ocean and the pristine white beach bordering it. It was then late in the afternoon, and the beach was liberally sprinkled with umbrellas and cabanas of various sizes and colors. Dozens if not hundreds of people could be seen down there, splashing in the water, playing games, or just walking about. As was the case with any and all crowd scenes in the modern world, the majority of them were women.

"See?" Lois said as she stood at the rail beside me. "I'm even safer than I thought."

"Hmph," I grunted. "You'd be safer if you played in the hotel pool while I went down to the beach. The pool isn't a special zone."

"No chance of that, mister," she shot back. "Besides, nothing is ever perfectly safe. Why, I could bonk my head on the side of the pool and drown. Right?"

"I suppose."

I wasn't through arguing, but both of us were exhausted from the flight and bus ride and severely jet-lagged, so we decided not to go to the beach that afternoon, we slept for a while instead. When we arose, we had a sumptuous dinner in one of the resort's several restaurants. We then spent the remainder of the evening unpacking and preparing for our weeks' stay, and catching up on our sleep even more. The next morning, all my arguments having fallen on deaf ears, we were headed out to the beach by eleven, dressed in local style. Against my advice, Lois wore only the bottom of a minimal black thong bikini, while I was clad in an almost equally minimal Speedo. On the way we encountered a fence and an open gate. There was a sign up next to the gate, the words large and bold. It read:

WARNING: YOU ARE ENTERING A SPECIAL BEACH As a part of the Australian national effort to reduce the proportion of females in the population, this area has been designated as a SPECIAL BEACH. Please read the rules below and if you are in any way uncomfortable with them, DO NOT ENTER. This is a beach where females may be killed under certain circumstances without legal consequences for their killers.
1. Any female nude on the beach or in the water bordering the beach at any time may be freely killed by anyone, by any method. Nudity is defined as having the breasts and pubes exposed.
2. Any female topless on the beach or in the water may be killed after her permission has been requested and received. Topless is defined as having the breasts exposed but the pubes covered. A bottomless woman wearing a top is to be treated the same.
3. Females who are not nude or topless may not be molested in any way.
4. A plainclothes official known as THE JOKER may be on the beach at any time, and may at any time and for any reason order any female to disrobe. THE JOKER will show a special badge upon request. Failure to follow an order from THE JOKER to disrobe is a FELONY and anyone who does so is subject to arrest and trial, and if found guilty will receive the DEATH PENALTY from the state.
5. Please do not leave weapons lying about on the beach as someone may be unintentionally injured. Extreme caution is advised in using projectile weapons such as guns and bows.
6. Open sexual activities on the beach are permitted and encouraged. A topless female who has her bottom pulled to the side to permit sexual activities is NOT to be considered a nude female, even though her pubes may be temporarily exposed.
7. Children under age 16 are not permitted on the beach. It should be understood that any female child on the beach may be assumed to be, and may be treated as, an adult.
8. Women who are or suspect they might be pregnant should not enter the beach unless it has been determined that the fetus is not male. Pregnancy and gender test kits are available without charge at the resort.
9. Enjoy our beach.

Below that was a thin sticker noting that one should "Beware of Snippers."

"Snippers?" Lois asked, turning to me.

"Boys, mostly, who run around with scissors or whatever and try to cut the bottoms off girls who are dressed the way you are," I informed her. "You haven't heard about them?"

"No."

"Didn't think so." I rummaged around in our beach bag and came up with the bottom of another of her swimsuits, which I had packed. "If you get snipped," I explained, "anyone who sees you nude can claim the right to kill you, right then and right there. Being a snipping victim is no excuse. Your only recourse is to get your bottom on again before someone lays claim to you, and hope that no one is pointing a gun or an arrow at you at the time."

"Ah. Okay. Thanks for bringing that." She looked back at the sign again. "Didn't these snippers mothers' ever teach them that running with scissors is dangerous?"

I chuckled. "I suppose not." I then stopped and gazed at her for several seconds. "Lois, are you sure you want to do this? I mean, I have not ever known you to be much of a risk-taker, and, regardless of what you say, you know that there is a certain risk for you in going onto that beach."

She stared back at me. "What, I'm going to come all this way, spend all this money, and not go out on the beach? For a whole week? Are you nuts?"

"But--"

"Brad, there are risks for women all the time in today's world. I took a risk just marrying you, didn't I? You do after all have certain rights if you ever want to exercise them, whether we're on a Special Beach or not."

I laughed. "I haven't done that yet, have I? And just between you and me, I'm not likely to. I'm kind of fond of you."

Her expression softened. "That," she said, "is good to hear. But it doesn't matter. Every girl has grown up with risks, something can happen at any time. I'm the middle daughter of three in my family, my little sister was a lottery choice. She didn't get chosen, but still..." She stopped. "Anyway. Yes, I want to go out on the beach." She gestured toward her bare breasts, which looked very pretty in the tropical sunlight. "I'm just topless, all anyone can do is ask me permission, and I can say no."

"Unless that one is the Joker."

"Tiny chance. Let's go." She turned and stepped through the gate, entering the special zone. I sighed and followed her.

That day began as an average outing on a very nice, even spectacular, beach. We picked up an umbrella and some chairs from a beach kiosk operated by the resort and set them up, then just took it easy for a long while--punctuated by frequent excursions into the gentle waves that lapped continually at the shore and occasional walks up and down the beach. The resort provided all the amenities, including a very nice beach bar where one could order snacks and drinks even while in the ocean. The day was hot, the sun intense, the water refreshing, and everything was just utterly pleasant.

What wasn't usual was, first of all, the ratio of men to women. There were more women than men, as was normal, but the ratio was definitely much smaller than usual. The other thing that was noticeable was the completely uninhibited attitude these beachgoers showed toward sexuality--as was to be expected given rule #6 posted on the sign. During our walks we commonly saw couples and sometimes groups engaged in all forms of sexual behavior.

"Hm," she said as we returned to our umbrella after one of these walks. She was staring at the front of my swimsuit, which was sticking out noticeably. "Looks like the scenery around here is having an effect on you. Which one was it? That big-boobed blond giving a blowjob to the red-haired guy?"

"I think it's cumulative," I answered. "But no, the dark-haired girl riding the guy with the beard had a lot more effect. Maybe you didn't notice, her ass and legs looked a lot like yours."

"Oh, Brad, you always flatter me with stuff like that," she said with a giggle. Still staring at my crotch, she touched her lower lip with a fingertip. "Anyway, I think I need to do something about that."

I grinned. "I do too. When we get back to our room, you can--"

"No," she said, cutting me off. "Here. Now."

My grin turned to a frown. "Here, on the beach, out in public? Lois, we've never--"

"Oh, I know we've never. But we're here now, and obviously, that's what you do here." Before I could say another word, she grabbed the edges of my Speedo and pulled it down to my ankles. Taking advantage of the fact that I was a little off-balance, she then pushed me down in the chair under our umbrella, dropped to her knees in front of me, and took my rising erection in her mouth. I didn't protest any further. It was too pleasant, even when--or perhaps especially when--other strollers, both men and women, stopped to watch us for a minute or two. Lois ignored them, looking up at my face most of the time. She took her time, easing off a few times when she sensed I was getting close. When she finally allowed me to have my orgasm, two young men were standing nearby, watching intently. Finally taking notice of them, glancing at each one it turn, she put on a little show by letting some of the semen run back down my cock before licking it all back in and swallowing it. Then, looking rather proud of herself, she raised her head, straightened up, and put her hands on her thighs.

"You haven't asked her yet, have you, dude?" one of the men, a rather thin blond in his mid-twenties with a very fake-looking grin inquired as I dragged my Speedo back on. I was still basking in the afterglow of a very nice orgasm and did not reply immediately. "You mind if I do?" I just looked at him, confused, not really knowing what he was talking about.

Lois understood, though. "No," she said, her grin impish. "He hasn't asked me and it's okay if you do."

He turned to her. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Lois."

"Hi, Lois, I'm Billy. May I please kill you?"

I just stared in disbelief, again speechless for a moment. In retrospect I can't imagine why, I was familiar with the protocol at these beaches and I had read the sign. Lois was topless, which meant his question was perfectly legitimate.

Lois was unfazed. She pointed to a leather strap hanging from Billy's swimsuit. "Is that what you'd use?" she asked.

He lifted an end of the strap and grinned, almost idiotically. "First class leather," he said. "Makes a fine garrote."

"I'm sorry," Lois said. "You don't have the right equipment. The answer is no." Billy's face fell.

"Do I have the right equipment, Lois?" the man on the other side of her asked. She turned to him. He was a little older, dark-haired and muscular with a sort of a craggy-looking face. He patted a sheath strapped to his calf, above which the handle of a knife could be seen.

"As a matter of fact," she answered, looking at the knife, "you do."

"Well, that's good to know," he said. "Unlike some less mannerly people on this beach, though, I don't go about asking girls I don't know at all if I can kill them. The answer is, after all, pretty certain to be no. Do you mind if I join you for a few minutes?"

"Not at all," she told him. "You are?"

"Jerome," he said. As he sat down on the sand, Billy, having been humiliated and now being ignored, sighed and walked away to join a small group of men further down the beach. .

"Nice to meet you, Jerome," Lois said. "You already know my name. This is my husband, Brad."

Jerome looked startled. "Husband?" He started to get up. "Oh, damn, I'm sorry, I didn't know, of course, I--"

"Please," Lois said. "Stay, let's talk. Unless you feel you're wasting your time. Just so you know in advance, even if we do get to know each other, my answer would still be no." She gestured toward me. "I need to go back to our room tonight with him."

Jerome relaxed. "It isn't a waste of my time," he said, "just to sit here and look at you. You're a stunning woman, Lois."

She smiled richly and giggled. "Thank you very much," she said. "Won't get me to say yes, though."

"I didn't expect it to."

"Okay, good, we understand each other. Is this your first time here, Jerome?"

He hesitated just for a moment, just enough for me to notice it. "Yes, it is. I've been here three days, I'm staying until Saturday."

"Pardon me for being blunt, but have you killed any girls here, Jerome?"

He shook his head. "No, not here or anywhere else. But I'll be blunt, too. I hope to, that's why I came, I want that experience. If that upsets you, I--"

"Why should it?" she interrupted. "It's a killing beach. Most of the men here are here hoping to get the chance to kill a girl. Many, maybe not all--well, okay, certainly not all--of the women here are here to find the right man to put them to death." She paused and grinned. "Some of us are just here to watch. But there's no reason whatever for you to be embarrassed."

"You take a risk watching, Lois," Jerome pointed out, echoing my own concerns. "The Joker could come by in the next five minutes and tell you to take off that bottom."

Lois leaned toward him a little. "Tell me, Jerome," she said. "If that did happen, would you kill me?"

He glanced at me. "I'd defer to your husband," he said tactfully, "if he wanted to do it. If he didn't, then yes, I would. In part because as soon as you took that bottom off, men would be running this way from all over the beach, a lot of them assholes like Billy. One of them would kill you, that much is certain, and if you're naked you have no say-so about method. I believe I could do you more justice, and you've already said, in effect, that you'd prefer my knife to Billy's garrote. It may be arrogant on my part, but I think I could accommodate your own desires better. And," he went on, raising a hand when she started to speak, "because having the opportunity to kill a beautiful woman like you would be the high point of my life, probably forever."

She giggled again. "Oh, this one is smooth," she said to me. "If you weren't here with me, he could be dangerous." Bouncing on her knees a little, she turned back to Jerome. "Okay. How would you kill me? Cut my throat? Stab your knife into my heart?" She touched her chest between her breasts.

Jerome grinned. "You want my perfect fantasy? Okay, why not? I'd be sitting cross-legged. You'd be on my lap and my cock would be inside you. I'd kiss you and caress your face and your hair and those wonderful tits, and I'd run my knife into your belly, as gently as I could. No violence, smooth and soft. I'd do that again and again, in your belly, through your tits and maybe in your back, until you bled to death. If I could time it perfectly I'd come just as you died."

Lois touched her lips, then stroked her own belly. "That," she said, "is rather pretty. No, it's very pretty. If I were here alone and here to be killed, I'd accept that right now, I'd take off my bottom and tell you to go for it. You need to tell other girls that fantasy, Jerome. You'll find someone who'll take you up on it, I'm sure of it. Maybe several someones."

"Even several someones," he said, "would not equal you, Lois."

She giggled again. "Okay, stop that! I'm not available."

"That's sad." He rolled his eyes upward theatrically. "The best ones are always taken." He then looked back at her, grinned, and shook his head. "But I'll take your advice. Tonight, I'll try it on a few girls, see if I get any takers."

"Tonight?"

"Yeah. You guys haven't been down here after dark?"

"No, we just got here yesterday."

"Ah. Well, most of the real action around here takes place at night. The resort sets up tiki torches all over the place, and girls do take off their bottoms after dark. Unless there's a game, very few girls get killed during the daylight hours."

"A game?"

"Yeah, like beach volleyball. Sometimes girls swear an oath to take off their suits if they lose. One team has to lose, so you know what happens next."

"I see."

"That's just a chance thing, though. There are always girls playing beach volleyball, but they don't always swear oaths. If you see men mobbed around a game, though, you can bet that's what's happened." He sighed and shook his head. "Hasn't been an oath game since I've been here, though, at least not one I was aware of. I'm just telling you what others have told me."

About that time another man approached us, and I noticed there was a little enclave of men behind him, watching him. His arms folded, he looked down at Lois. "I'm the Joker," he said in a firm voice. "Lose the bottom."

Lois's eyes flew wide open in shock. I'm sure mine did too, and I started to rise from my chair, although I'm not sure even now what I intended to do. I knew quite well the Joker's decisions were irrevocable.

Jerome, however, didn't bat an eye. "Show the lady your badge," he said calmly.

The man looked around at Jerome. "Asshole," he snarled. He then turned and walked away, leaving Lois and I looking confused.

"You know that's a crime," Jerome called after him. He dug into the long slender beach bag he was carrying and pulled out a cell phone. "And I am reporting you."

"Fuck you," the man yelled back, but he also began to run.

"Yes," Jerome said into the phone. "I'm calling to report a Joker impersonator. Yes, about half a kilometer north of the main north gate. Two meters tall, thin, longish brown hair, blue trunks almost to his knees, open shirt with blue and white checks. He's running north right now on the main strand. Yes, I would. Thank you."

"How did you know?" I asked.

Jerome shrugged and nodded toward the man, who was by then quite far away. "You didn't notice, I guess, but he was with Billy, apparently a buddy of his. That happens occasionally, somebody tries that. He is in for one heavy fine when they catch him. Plus, he'll be banned from the beach."

"I really do appreciate it, man," I said. "I cannot say I would have thought of asking for the badge quickly enough."

"Me neither," Lois agreed. She cocked her head toward Jerome. "I guess I owe you my life." Then she giggled again. "Although you would have been the one to take it, I suppose, if I had gone through with it. Brad doesn't even have anything to kill anyone with other than his bare hands." She then became serious again, another of her quick mood shifts. "That was pretty selfless of you, too, Jerome. You could have been playing your fantasy, right here and right now. All you had to do was nothing."

He gave her a crooked grin. "Shit, I didn't even think about that. Damn." He then laughed. "But no, that's cheating and I would've felt badly about it later. I do want to kill a girl, yes, but only one who wants me to kill her. Besides, that would only have worked with you guys because you're newbies, you haven't talked to many people yet. The Joker doesn't just march up and say 'strip.' He starts a conversation, then tells you who he is, then makes a decision about what he's going to do. It's a bit of a drawn-out process, and he doesn't always tell the girl he's talking to to strip."

I nodded; I had seen videos of Jokers on Special Beaches, and they generally behaved as Jerome said. "Have you seen the Joker in action, Jerome?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Not yet, no. Again, I'm just telling you what others have told me."

Lois, I noticed, was looking around. She looked a little stiff, no longer relaxed. "Are you all right, honey?" I asked her.

She looked back at me. "No. I'm not. I don't feel I'm in all that much danger from the Joker, I really don't, but--I don't know, I guess that spooked me a little, I'm just not comfortable now. Can we go in for a while? Maybe come back tonight?"

"Probably a good idea," Jerome offered.

"I agree," I said. I rose from my chair, we packed up, and we took our leave of Jerome after agreeing to meet him near the lifeguard station at nine that evening. We returned the chairs and umbrella to the kiosk, then left the beach and went back to the resort.

Once we were there, though, Lois did not want to return to our room immediately, as I thought she would. Instead, she led me to a hallway where there was a string of small shops. Bypassing the swimsuit boutiques and the convenience stores, she went into a shop identified by a sign as "Koala Outfitters."

As soon as we stepped inside it was obvious what sort of gear the shop carried. It was not oriented to divers, sailors, fishermen, or hikers. Instead, the shelves were lines with an array of knives, swords, guns, bows, lances, garrotes, and a variety of other things which could be used to dispatch a human being.

"Lois, why are we here?" I asked.

She gave me a wide-eyed look. "You need to be equipped," she answered. "What if an opportunity presents itself?" Her speech started speeding up. "I mean, I was thinking, down there on the beach when that guy came up and said he was the Joker and all, what if instead of Jerome we'd been talking to some beautiful girl and he'd been the real Joker and she'd stripped down and then you wouldn't have had anything to use except your bare hands, remember, I said that?" She gasped in air. "And then, see, you wouldn't have been able to do anything except strangle the poor girl or beat her to death and I don't think you even could do that, and besides Jerome said if it had been me for real he'd defer to you but you didn't have anything to--"

"Lois, stop. If that had been the real Joker, I couldn't have killed you myself if I had a rocket launcher."

She stared at me. "You couldn't?"

"No."

An odd expression flashed across her features, there and gone so quickly it was impossible to read it accurately. "Well, I know that!" she cried gaily. "But that doesn't matter, you still need to be equipped for whatever might happen down there." She paused. "Pick out something."

"Lois, I did not come here to kill girls, just to watch."

"Oh, poo! You will not pass up an opportunity, Brad, if one falls into your lap! You'd never forgive yourself. Pick out something. I'm buying."

"Well, you could pick out something."

"No. You." I sighed, walked deeper into the store, and looked over some of the guns. "Guns are terribly loud, don't you think?" she observed. "And so--sudden, and impersonal, and--" I shrugged. Bypassing a display of garrotes and nooses, I hefted a lance with a shiny stainless-steel head. "That's so big," Lois said. "You don't want to be carrying that big old thing around." The look she was giving me was distinctly disapproving.

"Well," I said mildly at that point, "the choice is obvious, after all, you already said so, you told Jerome he was properly equipped. Right?"

She flushed a little. "Yes, I guess I did."

"And you said Jerome's fantasy was pretty."

She flushed more. "Yes, I guess I did."

"So." I moved to the knives. "Short, long, wide, skinny, single-edged, double-edged, serrated, folding, what?"

She hesitated, but then pointed to a slender bronzed blade double-edge six inches long. "Maybe something like that one."

"That's it, then." I picked up the knife and its scabbard, designed, as Jerome's was, to be worn on the calf. "Let's get it." We went to the counter, she paid for it, and we left the store. "I did not know," I said as we walked back down the hall, "that you had a thing about knives."

She stopped walking, turned to face me, and gave me a seductive look. She was still wearing her bikini bottoms, and she had thrown on a beach shirt but had not bothered to fasten it in front. She looked ridiculously charming and sexy. "There may be a few things," she said with a smile, "that you still don't know about me. Just one or two." She then turned and walked on down the hall.

A short while later, back in our room, I emerged from the shower, dried off, and walked back in to find Lois, who had showered before I did, lying across the bed on her stomach, still nude. Her arms were crossed and her head was lying on them, turned to the right, Her eyes were open and she looked as if she was deep in thought.

Wearing just my towel, I walked over and sat on the edge of the bed beside her. Gently, I ran my palm down her back, across her buttocks, and down her thighs. As always I marveled at the absolute perfection of her skin. She smiled slightly at my touch but did not move.

"Still feeling uncomfortable?" I asked.

"No," she replied. "But then, we're here in our room. Not down on the beach."

"Lois, we don't have to go back down there, we don't have to take the risk. There are regular nude beaches not far from here, we can--"

"No." She rolled over on her side. "We're here so you can experience this. We could've gone to a nude beach in Florida. It would've been a lot cheaper."

"Maybe we should've."

"No. I wanted you to have this."

I squeezed her shoulder. "I thought I was about to have a whole lot more of it than I wanted this afternoon, when that guy said he was the Joker."

I expected her to laugh or make a joke herself at that point, but she did not. "Me too," she said in all seriousness.

"You know we do not have to go back down there tonight."

She turned her head a little more. "Yes, we do. I want to. I'll be under control again by then. I have no plans to remove my panties. I still think my chances of running into the Joker are slim. I am willing to take that chance, Brad."

There was no talking her out of it, so I shifted the subject slightly. "I have to admit," I said, "I was somewhat surprised when you told Jerome his fantasy was pretty."

She did smile then. "Were you? Well, I guess that's to be expected. We've never talked much about me personally being culled."

"Not one of my favorite subjects."

"Nor mine." She shifted her position slightly, rolling over a little more. "But you know, for all women today, death is right around the corner, we're reminded of it all the time, in a hundred different ways. It makes us think about it, it makes us think about the way we'd want it to be if our number was called."

"I'm sure," I said. "But you--I have to say, Lois, I certainly would have thought you'd be more of a bullet-to-the-back-of-the-head or long-drop hanging sort of girl instead of a knife-in-the-belly type."

She nodded. "Which just goes to show you don't know me as well as you think you do. But there's something else, too."

"What's that?"

"The reverse is true, too. Men see a lot of women being killed these days, on TV and so on. If they like watching that they always have a preferred method, something they like better than anything else. Remember, I've watched a lot of executions with you, Brad. I know what you like best. A knife in the belly and a slow passionate death. Am I right?"

I nodded. "You know you are."

She smiled a little more. "And you know I love you, Brad. I like nothing better than turning you on. If I had to die, and you were there with me, I'd want to be killed in a way that would be exciting for you. And I do know you well enough to know that Jerome's fantasy would be wildly exciting for you. Am I wrong?"

There certainly was no point in denying it, so I shook my head. "No, it might easily be my own," I admitted. "But what if I wasn't around?"

She pursed her lips. "Oh. Well, in that case, a bullet in the back of the head sounds pretty good to me."

We didn't get down to the beach that night until about 9:20, but Jerome was still waiting for us. We were dressed as we had been during the day, me in my Speedo, Lois in her bikini bottom alone. Jerome immediately noticed my knife and asked to see it; I gave it to him and he said he found it more than acceptable.

"You aren't wearing a toe tag," he then said to Lois.

"A toe tag?"

"Yes. That's what everyone calls them, but they aren't really toe tags, they're ankle bracelets. If you notice, all of the women here are wearing one. They're in bins behind the warning signs at the beach entries. There are little paper slips, too, you write on them what you want done with your corpse if you're killed and who had rights to it. Then you can seal the paper in the bracelet, they're waterproof and all."

"Oh.Well, I don't need one, I don't plan on letting anyone kill me."

Jerome grinned. "There's always the Joker. The real one."

"Not worried," she said airily. "What do we do now?"

"Enjoy the beach," he told her. "You can play in the water, it's safe, there are shark fences out here, the resort doesn't want any males being eaten by sharks. What I want to do is wander up and down and see what's going on."

She made a gesture of deference. "You are more familiar with the ways and means than we are. Lead on."

He did. For maybe the next hour, we wandered aimlessly up and down the beach, looking for naked girls. We didn't find any. We did run across even more couples having sex than we had during the day. Twice we encountered camera crews who were looking for the same thing we were, and once we paused to talk with them for a few minutes; they told us that unless they got tipped off that something was about to go down, they just wandered about hoping to get lucky, and often enough, they did. Occasionally we went into the water, and occasionally we just sat on the beach, gazing out at a half-moon painting a long white streak on a calm inky ocean, and chatted idly.

"I feel," Lois said during one of these chats, after we'd been on the beach for maybe an hour, "that hanging out with us is cramping your style, Jerome."

"How so?"

She waved toward an enclave of five very young, and very pretty, girls about fifty yards away from us. "Well, you could go approach them. Try spinning that fantasy you spun for me this afternoon. You never know, one of them might go for it."

He grinned. "I told you, I don't just go up to girls I don't know and ask if I can kill them the way Billy did. Not my style. And I don't know any of those girls."

"And you won't get to know any of them by sitting here with a stodgy old married couple."

"I'm not complaining."

"You should be." She then rose, and, while Jerome and I just watched, she went over to the group of girls, crouched down beside them, and started talking to them.

"Unusual," I noted. "She is often bold, but not normally all that gregarious."

"It's not normal circumstances," he offered. Lois, after talking with the girls for several minutes, stood up and motioned to us. Both of us shrugged, picked up our beach towels, and walked over.

"Ladies, this is Brad and Jerome," Lois said as we walked up. "You'll have to introduce yourselves, I'll have to hear the names several times before I remember all of them." The girls invited us to sit down and ran off names, names that I too was going to have to hear more than once to remember; Marianne, Gina, Stevie, Lucinda, Jenny. Three of them were topless, Stevie and Jenny wore full bikinis. We learned rather quickly that they were, like Jerome, native Australians, and that they were classmates, freshmen at Griffith University in Brisbane.

Jerome and I sat down. By chance, I was closest to Jenny, a brown-haired and blue-eyed girl with a freckled face that was almost plain compared to her friends, but who had large breasts, very long legs, and a superb hourglass figure. "Would it be too forward of me to ask," I said to her, "what exactly you are all doing here? Do you plan to offer yourselves?"

She didn't answer immediately. Instead she dug in her beach bag, pulled out a pair of glasses, put them on, and peered owlishly at me through them. "That's better," she said with a brief giggle. "And the answer to your question is, not all of us." She gestured toward a pony-tailed and heavily tanned blond, a classic beach-girl type. "Gina does, she's looking for the right guy and the right moment. The rest of us are just here to support her, we all kind of talked ourselves into it. But anyway, she's our friend, we're willing to take a Jokerchance for her." She looked down at the knife strapped to my calf. "Killed any girls yet?" she asked.

"No, I just got here yesterday."

"Well, you and your friend probably aren't going to have any luck with Gina. She's looking for a man she can completely lose her head over." She then giggled again.

"I'm not really looking to kill anyone," I told her. "I was just told that I should carry this just in case."

Jenny frowned. "Well, but what about your friend there?" she asked. I had noticed that Lois had not introduced me as her husband and took it from this that she hadn't mentioned it. "She's really gorgeous, wouldn't you want to do her?"

I just smiled. "I'd miss her too much."

Jenny leaned toward me. "You shouldn't think like that," she said firmly. "There are too many women in the world for men to think like that. You should ask her permission. It's what she's here for, right? Somebody's going to do it."

"No, she's just here to watch too."

"Oh. Well, I guess maybe a lot of people are."

"Probably."

"Too many, I think. We've been here two days now. We've been watching too, and waiting for Gina to find the man she's looking for. We haven't seen a girl get killed yet. We've only seen two dead bodies, although of course they don't leave them lying around long."

I laughed. "That's two more than we've seen!" I exclaimed.

"It's a good thing there're other things to do here."

"Yes," I agreed. "It's a truly wonderful beach, terrific water--"

"That's not what I meant."

I truly didn't understand. "What did you mean, then?" I asked her.

She smiled broadly. "Come and take a short walk with me," she answered. "Up into the dunes, and I'll show you." She threw a beach towel over her arm and got up. So did I, and she led me to an area perhaps a hundred yards away where the roll of the dunes cut off our view of the ocean and our view of Lois, Jerome, and the other four girls. The reddish light from the tiki torches still illuminated the area, but faintly.

"Here," she said.

I looked around. "What? I don't see--" I was facing away from her at that point. I heard her move just slightly--and then felt my Speedo being pulled down around my ankles. Unsteadily, I turned. "What?" I said, rather stupidly, since I saw that Jenny had already spread the towel out and had removed her top. Flashing me a wide smile, she dropped to her knees, lifted my cock with her hands, and slipped it into her mouth.

In all the time we'd been together--the eight years of our marriage plus two years prior to that--Lois had not ever been with another man, even though she did have male friends. She told me that, and I had no reason whatsoever to doubt her. We had talked about it on several occasions, and she had explained to me that I was all the man she either needed or wanted, that I was the perfect lover, companion, and friend as far as she was concerned. The same was true for me, actually. Lois was beautiful, she fitted my tastes perfectly, she was wonderful just to be with. And she was an amazingly passionate, skillful, and eager lover. I could not then and cannot now imagine a woman any more perfectly suited to me.

But I am male, and simple difference is enough to be appealing. Jenny's technique in sucking my cock was altogether different from Lois's, and, bluntly, not nearly as good--but it was different. Her breasts were too large and pendulous to be my ideal--but they were different. The face that looked up at me as I hardened in her mouth was nowhere near as pretty as Lois's but it wasn't the same face.

There was no way I could tell her to stop.

She sucked me to full hardness, then laid back on the towel, spread her legs, and pulled the bottom of her bikini to the side. I dropped down between her legs and slipped my cock inside her. As we moved together, her face was transformed, she became really lovely--especially her eyes, which were enlarged by the glasses, which she never took off. We never even changed positions; she had two orgasms before I had mine, unloading my semen inside her.

"That was nice," she said as I slipped out of her.

"Yes," I agreed. "It was." We got up and used her towel to clean ourselves up a bit before putting our swimsuits back in place.

"Any time you want a repeat, I'm ready," she told me as we started walking back to the group.

I have her a quick kiss. "Nice to know," I said. We rounded the corner of the piled sand and saw them--and I saw immediately that, although they had not moved, there were only three girls sitting there. Jerome, Lois, and one of the girls had vanished. Naturally, I asked where they'd gone.

"Up in the dunes," Gina answered. She grinned. "Just like you two did."

I felt a sudden coolness in the pit of my stomach. "Which way did they go?" I asked.

"I don't think," Stevie, a slim redhead, offered, "that they need any more company." Then she shrugged. "But that's not my business." She pointed. "That way." I started off immediately. Behind me, I could hear the girls discussing whether Stevie should have told me or not.

But their voices quickly faded as I entered the dunes again. Stevie had not misled me, it wasn't long before I heard voices, male and female. At that point I moved carefully, maneuvering into a position where I could see them without them seeing me.

The coolness in my belly tightened. Marianne, another blond with a build much like Jenny's, was on her back on a beach towel. Jerome, naked, was between her legs, his cock sliding smoothly in and out of her. Lois was crouched behind him, her hands on his shoulders, watching them. Minutes passed; the couple shifted, Jerome on his back and Marianne astride his hips. Lois knelt behind his head, still touching his shoulders, but doing nothing else. Much of the time he was looking up at her face, not at Marianne. Lois looked pensive, thoughtful, serious.

Then Marianne was on her hands and knees and Jerome was behind her, taking her doggy-style. Lois again stood behind him, slightly to one side. He turned his head and their eyes locked for quite a long while. They were still looking at each other when Jerome started to come, his hips jerking as he emptied himself into Marianne. Afterwards, Marianne and Jerome cleaned themselves up with the towel, just as Jenny and I had, and they all started heading back toward the group. Jerome was walking with his arm around Marianne's waist, Lois trailing along behind them. I was closer than they and had already established a bit of a shortcut, so I was there when they arrived. As they did, they were laughing and joking among themselves as they had been when Jenny and I left. None of the other girls said anything about my having followed them into the dunes.

"I'm getting a little tired," Lois said after a few minutes. "You mind if we call if we call it a night, Brad?"

"I don't mind at all," I told her. Although the girls--still unaware that Lois was my wife--gave us some odd looks, we made plans to hook up with Jerome and them the next morning at 10:30, again near the lifeguard tower. After that, Lois put on her beach shirt and we left.

"I have a confession," I said we passed through the gate.

She didn't even glance at me. "Oh?"

"Yes. I followed you, Jerome, and Marianne into the dunes. I was watching."

"You did?"

"Yes."

"Why?" That actually stopped me for a moment. "Were you concerned that Jerome and I were having sex?" We were in the hallway headed for the elevator by then.

"Well, no, I--"

"Since you were there, you know that we did not."

I didn't say the first thing in my mind, that I had not seen everything, only the end of things. "Yes," I answered. "I do know that." We stepped into the elevator and pushed the number four button. It rose swiftly.

"Do you have any other confessions, Brad?" she asked me as we stepped into our hallway.

"You're referring to Jenny," I said as I pushed the electronic key into the lock. She didn't answer. "If you're asking me," I went on, "if I had sex with her, I guess you pretty much already know the answer is yes. I will say that I didn't know what she was up to when she invited me into the dunes." We stepped inside. "The girl practically raped me, Lois."

She laughed. Without saying anything else, she stripped off her beach shirt and her bikini bottom and went to the shower. We didn't say anything else to each other until after I'd showered. Again, she was lying on the bed naked, on her belly. Again, I came to sit beside her.

"Are you upset with me?" I asked.

She half-turned over. "Oh, no, not at all," she protested, suddenly much more animated than before. "You know that I've never seen you with another woman, Brad. I would have liked it if you'd had sex with Jenny right there, in the group, where I could watch and touch you." She shook her head. "But I do understand, that isn't the way those girls do things. When in Rome and all that."

"Watch, and touch me, the way you were watching and touching Jerome?"

Her expression became unreadable. "Yes," she answered.

"Lois," I said after a brief pause, "would you like to have sex with Jerome?"

"I have not had sex with another man since you and I became lovers, Brad."

"I know. That isn't what I asked you. I asked you if you'd like to have sex with Jerome."

She gazed at my eyes for several long seconds. "Yes," she answered finally. "I would."

The cool lump in my midsection reappeared, but I wasn't finding it unpleasant. "Then you should do that," I said.

She studied my eyes. "Are you sure?"

I did not hesitate at all. "Yes, I am. I only ask one thing."

"What's that?"

"I'd like to be there, to watch, and to touch you."

She rose off the bed quickly and threw her arms around me. She hugged me, then kissed me, and from there things just progressed.

As we went down to the beach the next morning, headed for our planned meeting with Jerome and the girls, I was expecting that a coupling between Lois and Jerome would essentially be the first order of business. That day, Lois had exchanged the black thong for a bright white string bikini thong bottom, which was even more minimal--and an easier target for snippers, which I warned her about but which warning she ignored. As always we had a spare bottom in our beach bag for any such eventuality. As we came close to the lifeguard tower, we saw Jerome and the girls, jumping up and down and urging us to hurry. We broke into a trot.

"What's going on?" I asked as we drew close.

"Oath game," Jerome said excitedly. "Over at the sports area. Let's go, it's due to start soon!"

"Beach volleyball?" I asked.

"No, but just as good. Doubles badminton."

We made our way quickly to the sports area, a region of the beach where such things as volleyball and badminton nets were set up and where the resort had provided risers to accommodate large numbers of spectators. There were probably two hundred people there when we arrived, a substantial crowd but actually smaller than I had expected. Still, we managed to find seats--or, actually, standing-places, since no one was sitting down--with a good view.

The game was already under way. In the left hand court, closest to us, were two strongly tanned blondes, both of them fairly tall and athletically built. In the other was a brunette and a blond. The brunette girl was also tall and quite strong-looking, her unruly dark mane and olive skin a sharp contrast to the other three girls. Her partner was considerably shorter, with very light pixie-cut hair and slightly thicker legs. All looked as if they might be professional or college athletes or fitness models, and all were dressed in bikini bottoms only. At the ends of the courts, two other girls were holding up placards that had evidently been supplied by the resort and which showed the score, currently 7-4 in favor of the dark girl's team. Three teams of cameramen were on hand to record the proceedings.

Near the placard girls, on each side, stood two men, waiting. We quickly learned from the other spectators that these were the would-be executioners. On the two-blond side, one of the men was armed with a pistol, the other with a knife. On the dark girl's side, one of the men was armed with a Japanese Samurai sword--a katana--and the other carried a short bow and a quiver full of arrows.

The play was at a very high level, the shuttlecock flashing back and forth at high speed and the exchanges continuing for long periods. Watching, I found that I had oddly mixed feelings about who I wanted to see win. I found the dark girl much more attractive than any of the three blondes, although her partner, who had a cute, full-lipped, and seemingly always smiling face, had her appeal as well. In a sense I wanted to see them win, but I also knew that watching them die would be much more exciting for me than seeing the more classic-looking blondes on the other side lose their lives.

As the game went on, it looked as if the dark girl's team was going to win. They gained a bigger advantage, pulling ahead 15-8, but then the blondes rallied, tied things up at 18, and surged ahead 20-18. A slightly off-balance return by the dark girl allowed one of the blondes to smash the shuttlecock down just over the net and the game was over. I had assumed that this meant we would go on to the main event, but instead, the girls, their skin shining with sweat, simply switched sides.

"Best of three match," Jerome informed me after consulting with another spectator. "The first game was played before we got here, the girls in front of us won that one, and now it's 1 to 1. This one will decide it."

After a brief pause for water, the match resumed, the dark girl leading off at serve. As in the previous game, she and her partner took a strong lead quickly, jumping out to a 10-3 advantage. At that point though, again as before, the blondes began to rally. Now, it was obvious why: the dark girl's partner, by half a foot the shortest girl on the court and not at all long-legged, was having to work too hard to keep up and as a result she was tiring faster. After having played two games in the hot sun, her fatigue was becoming obvious. Like any competitive athletes, the blondes were taking advantage, targeting her and forcing her to work even harder. Although the dark girl's team maintained the lead, the blondes began to pull closer and closer; it was 12-7, then 15-11, then 17-15. At 20-19 the dark girl's team tried desperately to score the final point but could not, the blondes tied it. It then bounced back and forth for several minutes, each side holding a one point lead at times but unable to close. Then, with the blondes leading by one, one of them managed to fire the shuttlecock at high speed toward the short blond. At frantic speed she reached it, caught it, and returned it--but it struck the top of the net, barely, and fell back into her court. The blondes screamed and threw their rackets in the air, rejoicing.

The dark girl and the short blond embraced each other, then walked to the net to congratulate the winners. The crowd grew quiet and attentive as they then walked back to the center of their own court. After a moment's pause, they almost simultaneously pushed their bikini bottoms down and stepped out of them.

They held them up like banners. "We, who are about to die, salute you!" they shouted in near unison. The two men, the designated executioners, stepped into the court. One had already unslung his bow and the other had unsheathed his katana. As they came, the short blond, her bright smile back in place after a brief absence, dropped to her knees and sat back on her heels. The swordsman came to stand beside her and said something to her we could not hear. Her body still glistening with the sweat of the final game, she nodded and lifted her chin.

The man then swung the sword expertly, and the short blonde's cleanly severed head bounced on the sand a few feet away. As the crowd roared its approval, the girl's body, spouting twin geysers of blood from the neck, stood up. Her hands came up as if they were searching for her head. The body then fell and rolled onto its back. One hand beat the sand, her legs flexed and extended several times; urine wetted the sand between her legs. Finally the corpse became still, and the jets of blood calmed to trickles.

The swordsman then checked her ankle bracelet, the "toe tag." "Alice's wish," the man cried after reading, "is public luau! Tonight, everyone is invited!" Again the crowd roared.

The dark girl, meanwhile, had just been standing, watching, as her partner died. Now she took center-stage, standing straight and tall, her face expressionless, her feet planted fairly far apart and her hands on her hips. Her designated killer stood not more than ten feet from her and drew an arrow fitted with a savage-looking three-bladed arrowhead from his quiver. He nocked it to the string, drew the bow--I noticed he did not draw it all the way--aimed it at her, and then paused.

The girl tossed her head and pushed her torso slightly forward. "Shoot me," she said, her voice firm. The man released the string immediately and the arrow flashed forward to bury itself deep in her lower belly, below her navel.

She gave a short cry, grabbed the arrow, and took a staggering step forward. Blood gushed out as she struggled to maintain her balance. Taking his time, the man drew out another arrow and nocked it on the string. After several long seconds, the dark girl managed to pull herself up straight again. She let go of the arrow and again put her hands on her hips.

"Shoot me again," she said.

The man drew the bow quickly and let the arrow fly. It struck her high in her abdomen on her right side and went in deep. She threw her head back, grimacing, and made an odd strangled noise as she grabbed at this new arrow. Again she fought to remain standing but this time she could not, and she went to her knees. Blood was running freely from around this new arrow, she was still bleeding from the first one, and blood was draining from her mouth, as well. After a few seconds, though, she let go of the arrow and let her hands fall limply by her side. Her head was hanging and she was breathing very hard.

Finally, she lifted her head. "Again," she said, spitting blood as she choked out the word.

This time the man drew the bow back further. When he released it it plunged into her right breast, just inside the nipple. A little cloud of red erupted from below her shoulder blade as the arrowhead and six inches of shaft appeared behind her, having passed all the way through her chest.

She didn't cry out and she didn't grab at the arrow. Gasping for breath, she slowly toppled over onto her side. Her mouth was open, her eyes wild. She clawed at the sand as fresh blood poured from her breast and from her back. Her legs worked back and forth repeatedly. Like the other girl, she wetted the sand with urine as she fought to breathe. The archer calmly drew another arrow from his quiver and walked over to her. He drew the bow; and held it so that the tip of the arrowhead was not more than six inches from her left side. He then released it, and it thudded in just behind her breast and went in almost to the fletching.

Her body spasmed violently, then relaxed but began quivering. She was no longer breathing. Her heart had been pierced, and what we were watching then were her death throes. I glanced over at Lois. She was watching very intently, touching her lower lip with one delicate finger, as she often did. Down on the court, the dark girl had died. Her killer read her toe tag, which gave the body to him, and he donated it to the same luau where Alice would be cooked.

Around us, in the bleachers, women were pulling men's swimsuits down or off, and erections were popping up. Jerome and I were not exempt. Lois pulled off my trunks, straddled my legs, pulled her bottom to the side, and quickly sank down on me. Marianne, meanwhile, was going down on Jerome. After she sucked him for a while, she yielded to Gina, who took his erection inside herself. Jenny watched Lois and I hungrily, but Lois, her body pressed tightly against mine and her head on my shoulder, did not seem to be interested in sharing. Next to us, Gina moved off to make room for Stevie--who had, at last, removed her top--and Jerome ended by squirting his semen into Gina's mouth. I was not far behind, unloading inside my wife while she shuddered with an orgasm of her own. Afterwards, when we felt able to walk reasonably again we went down to the surf to wash the semen, the fluids, and the sweat off ourselves.

"Well, I guess what's for dinner is all settled, eh, mate?" Jerome said as we emerged from the surf.

"You mean the luau? Oh, I don't know, man," I replied. "I've tried human meat, I--"

"We call it girlflesh down here."

"Yes, well, we do in the US, too. As I was saying, I've tried it and never have found it all that special. Lois and I pretty much never eat it, it's so very expensive..."

He clapped me on the shoulder. "But this is free!"

"We'll be there, Jerome," Lois said, patting my hand.

The excitement of the games and the frenzy of the sex afterwards had left us all a bit drained, so we obtained a large cabana and a number of blankets and lounges from the beach kiosk, set it up, and then relaxed under it. After just a few minutes on a comfortable lounge, listening to Gina talk about how she wanted an end just like Alice's, I fell asleep.

I woke later--much later, as it turned out--to find Jenny crouching beside me, toying with my hair. "Hi," she said.

I glanced over at Lois. She was still asleep on a lounge next to mine. "Hi yourself," I said, turning back to Jenny. She was again topless; she had not been during the games.

"May I ask you a question?" she said.

"Sure."

"Lois. She's... special to you?"

I sighed. "I probably should have told you, it just didn't come up. She's my wife."

Jenny glanced at her too. "Really? You're married?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Eight years."

Her eyes widened slightly. "That's a really long time these days. Did you bring her here to... to..."

I smiled. "Have her killed? No. I have no plans whatever to do that. Now or in the future. I love her, with all I have or am. We'll probably grow old together."

"Oh, that's so sweet," Jenny said. "And so rare today, most men don't keep wives long..."

"I guess I'm not most men."

"No," she said, studying my eyes. "You aren't."

I picked up her hand. "The fact that Lois is my wife," I said, "doesn't mean you and I can't play. I told her about us, last night. She's okay with it. She says she wants to be there next time, to watch."

"That's okay." She squeezed my fingers. "I think you're a very special man, Brad," she said. Then she let my hand go, stood up, picked up her bikini top and walked out of the cabana. As she vanished down the beach, I saw her putting the top back on.

"That was a little strange," I muttered aloud.

"Not really," I heard Lois say.

I turned to her. She was lying on her side, one eye open. "You're awake?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Since 'hi' and 'hi yourself.'"

'You heard everything, then."

"Yes. Jenny's got a crush on you, Brad, a serious one. Treat her gently, she's young and not very experienced."

"I think," I said, reaching out to take her hand, "that I have been. I like her, I am planning to have sex with her again, probably tonight. While you're there, watching."

"I'm going to be looking forward to that," Lois told me. "I saw her watching us after the games. I should have let her have a turn with you, I'm embarrassed I didn't."

"I wanted you then. Only you."

She smiled. "No. You wanted a woman. I was there, available. Brad, you and I have a special relationship, I do believe that. But at a moment like that, any good-looking woman would have been fine for you. I have no illusions about that."

I smiled. "Finally admitting you're good looking?"

She shrugged. "I'm not ugly. I know that. I'm not the epitome of female sensuality, like you say I am. You love me--and believe me, I'm more than happy you do--but you're biased."

"I'm not," Jerome said. Lois and both looked up; he moved across the cabana to be closer to us. "And I agree with Brad."

Lois laughed. "What are you agreeing with, Jerome?"

"Whatever he said about you being the sexiest woman around." Boldly, he laid a hand on her thigh.

"Ah. Well, I do not believe you, Jerome whose last name I still don't know, Jerome Aussie Guy. You have not yet made even one pass at me, even when we were off in the dunes with Marianne and I had my hands all over you."

"That," he said, "is because I already knew you were married to Brad, and Brad has become my best mate here. I don't piss in my best mate's pool without permission."

"Jerome," I said as Lois began laughing again, "be it hereby known that you have permission to piss in my pool any time it's okay with the pool."

Jerome looked down at Lois. "And how," he asked, "does the pool feel about this?"

She giggled, then reached up and touched his rough-looking face. "This pool," she answered, "would very much like to have you piss in it. Tonight, after the luau." She glanced at me. "But I want him there."

"Lois, it you wanted the prime minister and all the parliament there, it wouldn't matter to me. Tonight, after the luau."

"We have a date, then." She raised herself up off the lounge, threw an arm around his neck, and kissed him. "Now," she said when she broke the kiss, "go away. At least for a few minutes, go away. I want to be able to anticipate and if you stay I might want to go ahead right now and I'm not ready right now. So go away."

He saluted. "I'm gone." He got up and left the cabana.

Lois rolled back over to face me. "Sure?" she asked.

"A little late to ask that," I observed. "But it doesn't matter. I'm very sure." I reached over to touch her face. "I've never seen you with another man and I'm looking forward to it." I traced her lower lip with my fingertip.

"I like Jerome," she warned me. "I'm likely to be passionate with him. Demonstrative."

"I hope so."

"Just so you know," she told me, "I'm feeling the same way about watching you with Jenny."

I grinned. "Looks like a double-header tonight."

At about five-thirty, a truck operated by the resort rode down the beach announcing that the luau would begin at six-thirty in the firepit area, which wasn't too far from where we'd set up the cabana. Neither Jerome nor Jenny had returned yet, but, not long after we heard the announcement they both showed up, about five minutes apart.

"So," Lois asked when he walked in, "did you find any other beach girls to play with while you were away?"

"No, and I wouldn't have played if I did. I'm saving myself for later. I've just been wandering around, swimming a bit, and thinking about how I'm going to be in the arms of the most beautiful girl on the beach tonight."

"Who's the most beautiful girl on the beach?" Gina asked.

He put his arm around Lois's waist. "This one," he said. "We have a date, for after the luau." He leaned down and kissed her; she kissed him back.

Gina looked at Lois and nodded. "Yes, she pretty much is the most beautiful girl on the beach." She then frowned. "But I thought you were Brad's wife."

"She is," I said. "But I don't mind sharing."

Gina smiled. "That should be a good show," she commented. "Even if I had a man on line to behead me, I might ask him to wait until after." She turned back to Lois. "You'll like him, he's good."

"I know," Lois answered. "Remember, I've seen him in action already."

"Stop now, you're going to swell my head," Jerome told them. "And this kind of talk is already making something else swell." Both girls laughed. "Besides," he went on, "it's time to go. We don't want to be at the back of the lines, and there will be lines."

As we started out, I was walking on Lois's left side and Jerome was at her right. After we'd gone a short distance, he put his arm around her waist again. I gradually dropped back, letting them have this moment to themselves. I watched them as they walked, chatted, and sometimes laughed, and I realized I rarely saw Lois from this viewpoint, from behind and distant enough that I could essentially see all of her at once. Her nudity was broken only by a narrow white string around her waist and another running down between her buttocks. Her back looked so very smooth, her waist looked so tiny. Her legs, seen from behind, looked extraordinarily lovely; I was especially drawn to the backs of her knees as she walked. She was, I told myself as I watched her, a truly beautiful woman, from every angle.

I wasn't given too much opportunity to appreciate the view alone, though. We hadn't gone much further before I found Gina on my right and Jenny on my left. Jenny was again topless, but she was wearing her glasses.

"She is, really, the best-looking woman around here," Jenny observed.

"We've established that already," Gina noted.

"Neither of you," I commented, "have any problems in the looks department."

"Oh, Brad, don't be silly!" Jenny protested. "I'm not even pretty. My body's okay, but I work on it a lot, too."

I started to argue, but Gina beat me too it, telling Jenny that she did not look nearly as bad as she seemed to think she did, and all I had to do was nod. "And you know," Gina went on, "that if I was in your shoes I wouldn't be here looking for a man to chop my stupid head off."

"What does that mean, Gina?" I asked.

"Jenny knows. We have a lot of the same classes. She makes As without even trying to. I struggle and work my ass off and I get Cs. We are exactly what we look like, Brad. She's really smart, she has a career to look forward to, and I'm just a dumb blond. I'm expendable, a part of the female population that should be eliminated."

"You might not find a swordsman, Gina," I said. "The guy that was there at the badminton match was the only one I've seen carrying a sword out here. You might end up going home, going back to your classes."

She shook her head vigorously, lashing the blond ponytail from side to side. "No. If it comes down to the point where we have just a day or two left, I'll take off my bottom and let some man make the choice. I'm not going home." She gave me a direct look, her eyes shining brilliant blue in the sunlight. "Could be you or Jerome, if you're still here."

"If it were me," Jenny said, "I'd only want it one way. Just one way."

"How's that?" I asked.

She looked pensive. "It's funny. Years ago I watched a vid that was taken on some Special Beach, I don't know if it was this one or not. The end of one scene showed a naked blond girl on her hands and knees and a nice-looking man behind her, fucking her doggy-style. He pulled her head far back by her hair, and he slit her throat with a big knife. He kept pulling and kept cutting, and blood was spraying out all over and you could see the cut in her throat standing wide open." She nodded, as if to herself. "That scene really stayed with me. If I was going to do it, I'd want it done that way and no other way."

"But you're not planning on it." I said.

She shook her head. "No. As we told you, we're just here to support Gina." She then giggled. "And have some good sex."

"You may have to share this one tonight," Gina said. "I have a feeling Jerome is going to be pretty well tied up with Lois." Jenny nodded.

I smiled. "There's enough of me to go around, ladies," I assured them.

We'd reached the fire pits by then, and we joined one of the serving lines, which were not at that point very long. The headless and gutted bodies of the two girls who'd died on the badminton courts were already on spits, rotating slowly over hot coals, and had been for quite a while, since they were well-browned, looking like they were close to being done. Two posts flanked the entry, and on these the heads of the two girls, their hair professionally done and makeup carefully applied, were mounted. To the side of the cooking pits were long tables covered with an array of prepared vegetables, breads, and tropical fruits. Obviously the resort did not hesitate to go all-out for one of these luaus. Several camera crews were on hand, recording the proceedings, and I did not doubt that images from these would be used by the resort as advertising.

The spits finally stopped rotating, the bodies were removed from the fire, and the resort's chefs began carving them. Soon the line began moving forward, and shortly we all had plates full of food. I specifically requested a flank steak from the dark girl, but I have no way of knowing if that's actually what I got.

"Good, eh?" Jerome asked as he cut another piece of the meat on his plate.

I shrugged. "It's very well cooked and very well seasoned," I agreed. "And, actually, quite tasty. I guess I just don't get the thrill a lot of people do from eating pieces of what used to be a young woman."

He frowned. "Well, you don't have to, do you? It's just good food. It would be pretty much the same if they'd roasted two young pigs, right?"

"Women have to die," Gina said. "Once they're dead, there's no reason not to use the bodies for food, right?"

I smiled. "Does your toe tag specify a luau too, Gina?"

She gave me an obviously fake shocked look. "You can't tell anyone what's on your toe tag!" she protested.

"Why not?"

"It's supposed to be really bad luck. Attracts the Joker."

"It might be easier for you if you did attract the Joker, Gina," Marianne said teasingly. "It'd save you all the trouble of trying to find that swordsman."

Gina sniffed and took a bite of mango. "A guy lugging around an ax and a chopping block," she observed, "would do just as well." Everyone laughed.

After we'd eaten we had tea--at Lois's insistence. Not surprisingly, Jerome seemed to be eager to get on with the evening's planned activities, but Lois was obviously intent on taking her time. He'd remained close to her throughout the dinner, and by then was sitting with his leg touching hers, frequently touching her thigh, her shoulder, or her hair.

Finally, while he was stroking her thigh, Lois put her teacup down and turned to him. Taking his face in both her hands, she kissed him, deeply and passionately, and threw one of her legs over his. His hand wandered up her body to her breast and he began teasing her nipple, which quickly grew rigid. One of her hands dropped to the front of his trunks, and he started responding instantly.

"Here? Now?" he almost gasped out when she broke the kiss.

"No. This first time, at least, I want an audience of only friends. Let's go back to the cabana." We did, at a much quicker pace that we'd set coming to the luau. All the way, Jerome had his hand on her body, and again I had the wonderful view of her from behind, now lit by moonlight and the tiki torches. Jenny and Gina flanked me closely, their hands on me, as well. As a result I had essentially a full erection by the time we reached the cabana.

Once we were inside, Jenny started tugging at my swimsuit. "No, not yet," I told her. "I will take it off now, but I don't want to do anything now. I want to watch them first. I've never seen my wife with another man and I don't want to miss anything." I took off my suit; Jerome had already removed his, and we were both already strongly erect.

Standing, Lois kissed him again and pressed herself against him, trapping his cock between their bodies. He again teased her nipples, and when she broke the kiss he gently sucked on each one of them. I sat down on one of the beach towels, cross-legged. Jenny sat down on my right, and Gina was kneeling at my left. Given the request I'd made they did not touch my cock, but they did stroke my chest and legs, and I returned the favor.

Lois then moved away from Jerome, arranged an oversized towel so that one end of it was close to my knees, and told Jerome to lie down on it. When he did, she planted both hands on the towel on either side of him, but did not drop to her knees; instead she remained on her feet, her rear end high in the air, moving like some oversized cat. She kissed him again, then moved down to kiss his throat, and on down to kiss and suck each of his nipples. Going further, she briefly slipped her tongue into his navel. Moving on down, she used her face to caress his rigid erection, something she frequently did with me. She looked up at his eyes, then at mine, and slipped his cock into her mouth. Never closing her own eyes, she sucked him for a few minutes, dividing her gaze almost equally between his face and mine.

"My god that's good," Jerome murmured.

She raised her head. "That's nice to hear," she said with a smile. She moved to his side, close to me, laid down on her side across him with her legs tightly folded, and started sucking him again. Turning her head slightly, she looked back at me. With his cock deep in her mouth, she extended one leg and pressed her foot against my knee. I responded by caressing her knee and calf, and she smiled around his cock.

Rather suddenly, she stopped and lifted her head. "Not that quick," she told him. "Switch places with me." He rose, and she laid down in his place--but further up, so that her head was in my lap. I touched her face and she smiled up at me. Jerome positioned himself between her legs, pulled her suit to the side, and started lashing her clitoris with his tongue. As he did, I caressed her face gently.

Her eyes dropped closed. Jerome kept licking her, sometimes thrusting his tongue into her vagina. He ran his hands up her body from her hips, stopping to hold and squeeze both her breasts. Lois began moaning, her hips moving slightly from side to side. She opened her eyes, then grabbed one of my hands. I squeezed her fingers. Her body arched up, her eyes went wide, and she pressed her thighs against Jerome's head as she quivered in orgasm. Jerome, grinning, raised his head.

"You can't start any better than that," she told him, a soft smile on her face. "So good... come up here and kiss me."

He came up over her, his hips between her now widely spread legs. As he kissed her, she reached down to guide his cock, and he slipped wetly inside her. Holding the kiss, he moved his hips back and forth a few times, then pushed his upper body up and looked down at her. She smiled up at him softly and, lifting her legs, folded them around his hips. He was moving gently but firmly, pushing his cock in as deeply as possible.

"I was sure you'd be good," she murmured. "But you're better than good."

"I'm motivated," he answered. He touched her face. "You are just so beautiful..."

"Mm. Glad you think so." She pushed her hips up against him, then looked up at me. Her smile brightened considerably, became playful, and I returned it in kind.

After a short while they changed positions, Jerome on his back and Lois riding him. I watched, fascinated, as she ground her hips down, taking all of his cock inside herself, leaving not even a half inch of it visible. It was wonderful to watch--the only problem was, I could not reach her to touch her. It wasn't long before she threw her head back and began trembling again. Her breasts flushed pink and she moaned loudly as she climaxed again. They then shifted again, Lois on her side with her head resting on my knee, Jerome behind her as he continued to plunge in and out of her.

"I can't last any longer," he told her.

She grabbed my hand and pushed her hips hard back against him. "Give it to me," she said, her voice almost guttural. "Give me all of it, give it to me deep." He slammed himself against her hard, gave a little cry, and exploded into her. It set her off again, trembling and moaning with her third orgasm. They remained coupled for several minutes, seemingly exhausted. When Jerome pulled out, Lois rolled over quickly, enveloped him with her arms, and kissed him again.

"That," she told him, "was just incredible."

"Yes," he replied, touching her gently and lovingly. "It was. That's the only word for it."

"No, there are a bunch of others," Gina said. "Terrific, magnificent, fantastic. I'm sure Jenny can come up with some more."

Lois turned and looked at her and Jenny. "Okay, I'm expecting a show too. Let's get to it, I have a feeling Brad's pretty much on edge by now."

"You aren't wrong about that," I said. I turned to Jenny, pulled her to me, and kissed her, While I was kissing her Gina leaned over my lap and took my almost-painful erection into her mouth. Over the space of the next few minutes I was being sucked by, going down on, or fucking one of the two of them continuously. Lois moved very close, watching intently, but made no attempt to join in. The other three girls did the same, as did Jerome. For my part I was trying to husband myself, I didn't want to end this too soon.

Then, suddenly as far as I was concerned, things turned strange. Jenny was on my lap, my cock inside her. As she moved on me, I was kissing Gina and playing with her breasts. At that point, I noticed that Jenny, who had just climaxed a few seconds earlier, was crying freely, tears flowing down her cheeks from behind her glasses.

"Jenny?" I said solicitously. "Is something wrong?"

"No," Lois said sharply. "No. Ask her, Brad."

"I just did, I asked her what--"

Gina pulled back from me. "No, not that," she exclaimed. "Ask her."

I was blank. "Ask her what?" Jenny just cried harder.

"Don't be stupid, Brad," Lois said. "Do it, do it, you need it and she needs it worse."

I realized then what she meant, and I'm sure my own eyes flew wide open. I looked back at Jenny. She was staring at me, moving slowly on me, her eyes pleading with me.

"Jenny," I said after a moment, "may I kill you?"

Her lower lip trembled. "Yes," she whispered. She rose off my cock, stripped off the bottom of her suit, then came right back down on me.

I felt like I was in a dream. But I did know that the idea of this, coupled with the stimulation I'd already had, wasn't going to let me last much longer.

"It has to be soon, Jenny," I said.

She hugged me and ground down on my cock. "I know."

"Then let's go outside." She rose off me and went out of the cabana, tossing her glasses aside carelessly as she went. I followed closely; she was naked, meaning she was fair game, and I did not want to lose my claim on her. The others followed as well. "On your hands and knees, Jenny," I commanded.

She sobbed loudly but adopted the position immediately. I knelt behind her and pushed my cock back in. She bucked back against me wildly. I couldn't wait. I wound her hair in my left hand and pulled her head back hard, and with my right I drew my knife.

"Thank you for this, Jenny," I whispered. "I'll never forget you."

"No," she whispered back. "Thank you."

I brought the knife around, laid the edge of it against her throat, and started pulling it across to my right, pressing in hard. The sharp blade cut into her soft neck easily; I heard a loud crunch as her windpipe was severed. Blood squirted out, showering the sand several feet away. She started bouncing in my grasp, her breasts swinging wildly from side to side, her legs working back and forth. She dug up handfuls of sand with her fingers, but she never tried to interfere with me. I pulled her head back even harder, opening the slit in her throat. The amount of blood flowing out of her amazed me. In a frenzy of excitement, doing something I'd often imagined but never expected to actually experience, I moved the blade back and forth in a sawing motion, cutting deeper and deeper.

She gurgled as she tried to either breath or speak; there was already an enormous amount of blood on the sand. I cut harder and was rewarded with a sudden jet of blood, much stronger than any before. Her vagina started contracting hard on my cock, I think she was having a final orgasm. I could not hold out any longer. I roared as I came into her, and as I did I jerked her head back violently and drew the knife across one last time.

Then it was over. Jenny's blood was just dripping; I let go of her hair and her upper body fell heavily, limply, and face-first, into the sand. I was still inside her and I felt warm urine washing over my cock. For several long seconds I did nothing.

"You need to check her toe-tag, mate," Jerome reminded me.

"Oh, yes. Yes. Of course." As my softening cock slipped out of her, I unhooked it, opened it, and held up the paper. "It says she wants to feed the animals at Australia Zoo."

"Just leave the body where it lies, then," Gina advised me. "The resort crews will pick it up and deliver it to the zoo." I just looked up at her blankly. I must have moved a little, because Jenny's body slowly fell onto its side in the sand. There was sand all over her face. Her eyes were still open, and sand was caked in them. Below her chin, a vicious-looking cut gaped like a spare mouth, a cut I myself had inflicted.

"No," I said in a choked voice. My own eyes were wet, and I blinked rapidly several times. "No. I can't leave her like this. Help me carry her to the water, I have to clean her up, at least."

No one argued, everyone cooperated. I took one of her legs, Jerome and Gina took her arms, and Stevie took her other leg. Lois and the others followed, Marianne carrying the toe-tag. As a few curious onlookers gathered, we walked right into the water and kept going until we were about waist deep. I washed her face carefully with my hands, clearing all the sand out of her eyes and nose, and cleaning the blood and sand away from her mouth and throat. I closed her eyes, then kissed her lips. She was cooling noticeably already.

We carried her back out of the water and laid her down carefully in the sand, well above the high-tide line. Marianne knelt down and replaced the toe-tag around her right ankle. I arranged her arms at her sides, left her legs just slightly parted, and smoothed her hair. I just knelt there, not knowing what else to do, not really wanting to leave her.

"We should go," Gina told me. She started tugging at my arm. "You've done all you can, Brad." I allowed myself to be pulled to my feet. "And you did it wonderfully..." she whispered. She started guiding me back toward the cabana.

I wasn't sure. A bright, sexy young girl, a girl I knew and liked, was lying dead on the sand and I had killed her. It wasn't the same as watching it on TV, wasn't the same as watching the two badminton players die.

"It's what she wanted," Stevie said, coming up on my other side. "That was obvious. She would've given herself to someone, and I'm sure she wanted to be yours, Brad."

"No," I argued. "She told me, directly, she was only here to support Gina. She just got swept up in the moment." I stared down at the sand. "And so did I."

"But that's not true," Stevie argued. The slender redhead used her fingers to turn my face to hers. "She told you exactly how she wanted it to go down, and you followed her script exactly. She told you about her fantasy for a reason, Brad. It's entirely possible she did not know it herself when she arrived here, but she came to this beach to die here. She wasn't going home."

"That doesn't happen!" I argued. "Girls don't come to a Special Beach to get themselves killed without knowing that's what they came for!"

"Oh yes they do," the normally quiet and retiring Lucinda, who was walking nearby, told me. I glanced over at her. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dark-skinned, she was somewhat heavier and much more voluptuous than any of her friends. Her breasts were remarkable, quite large but so firm they hardly moved when she walked. "Please believe me, I have seen it before and I know what I'm talking about. Several times, when I was in high school and this year, I've seen a girl decide to make a final trip to one of these beaches and a bunch of her friends go with her to 'support' her. I don't think I've ever, not once, seen them all come back."

"What about you, Lucinda?" I asked her. "Did you actually come here to get yourself killed too?"

She gave me a level stare. Her very dark eyes seemed incredibly deep. "To be honest with you, Brad," she replied, "I don't know." She moved closer to me. "When we left Brisbane, I was telling myself I was just going to support Gina, what we all were saying. An hour ago I would've told you that exact thing." Her eyes seemed to cloud over. "But then--watching you slit Jenny's throat--I... I wanted..." She paused and stamped her foot. "Brad, I could feel your blade in my own throat! I wanted to be her!" She glanced back to where we'd left Jenny's body. "She looks so beautiful, lying there dead," she went on. "The way you washed her face, it was so tender..." She choked back a sob.

"Looks like there's two of us now," Gina said softly.

"Maybe more," Marianne commented.

"I'm not killing anyone else tonight," I said quickly. "I've had enough. Try Jerome."

"Not me either, mate," he said. He smiled. "But there is always tomorrow..."

Lois and I didn't stay at the cabana long. I was profoundly exhausted, I said so, and we went back up to our room. All the way back, Lois did not speak to me, and when we reached the room she immediately went to the shower. She didn't speak when she came out of the shower, either. After I'd taken mine, I came out to find her as before, lying naked on the bed on her stomach, looking again as if she was deep in thought. Again, I sat on the bedside.

"Let me remind you," I said carefully, "that you insisted that I get a knife, you said I should take an opportunity if one fell into my lap and that opportunity was sitting in my lap, literally. You are also the one who first told me to ask her permission."

Lois's eyes opened wide and she almost scrambled up to a sitting position. "Oh, no, you think I'm upset with you? Oh, because I haven't been talking, of course, of course... no, no, I'm sorry, I'm not upset at all, not in the least. She wanted that and you gave her exactly what she did want, and you did it beautifully, just the right mix of tenderness and violence. No, I'm delighted you had the experience, Brad. I was hoping you would when we came here, and I knew you wouldn't push it, you'd have to have it offered."

I sighed. "You're right about that." I paused. "If you're not upset with me," I asked, "then why were you being so quiet?"

She looked away. "I was... thinking," she answered. "I was really looking forward to watching you with Jenny, I really was. I wasn't really expecting to watch you screw her and then kill her, that sort of took me by surprise."

"Again, I'll remind you--"

"No no no. You don't have to. You didn't choose it, it just happened. Stevie was right, Jenny would have given herself to someone. Really, it was all perfect, you were there, willing and able to accommodate her and have a fantastic experience at the same time."

I practically hung my head. "I don't feel it was fantastic," I said. "Not right now, anyhow. I just feel bad."

Again, there was a flash of an expression across Lois's face, again there and gone too quickly to even see it clearly. "Why?" she asked. But then she smiled. "Never mind, I know why. You're just too nice a guy, basically, you--"

"Whether that's true or not," I interrupted, "there's another reason."

"What's that?"

"Once I got into it, Lois, once I felt that blade cutting into her neck, I really, seriously, wanted to kill her. It really became primal. I jerked her head back so hard at the end I might've broken her neck. I was a savage, a beast. A monster."

Lois smiled again. "I know. I saw it. You were a beast, a wild man. Your face--I've never seen it like that before. Not even at the peak of our very best lovemaking have you ever looked that wildly passionate. It was very, very, sexy."

I stared. "Sexy?" I echoed.

"Oh, yes. Just ask Gina and the other girls. Look, Brad, women have to die, we all know that and we all accept that. A lot of us have a horror of being sold and slaughtered for meat on an impersonal assembly line. Any woman will tell you, if you have to go it's a lot better to be killed by a passionate man who's being driven wild by the act of killing you. You want him to take you, possess you totally, make you absolutely his for the remainder of your life. That's what you did for Jenny, it was your gift to her. Don't lose sight of that." She laid down. "Come to bed now," she said.

"Lois, I'm not sure I can--"

"No. To sleep, just sleep for now. And maybe dream of killing compliant and willing young college girls. All this will look different in the morning."

I did not dream of killing compliant young college girls that night. I wasn't daydreaming about it the next morning, either, as we walked down to beach to find Jerome and "our" girls. I had, then, a very strange set of conflicting emotions. I was seriously concerned that I would be asked to kill Gina, or Lucinda, or perhaps Marianne that day, and I was, on one side, absolutely dreading it. On the other hand, the idea of it caused my cock to stir most pleasurably every time I considered it. The oddest part of it was that the one I least wanted to kill was the one who'd already declared she was not going home, Gina--simply because I'd spent more time with her than with Lucinda and Marianne, and had already had sex with her. I liked her, I liked her a lot. But even so, I found myself wondering if she'd be okay with the idea of me cutting her head off with my knife, and mental images of her smooth brown neck, that bright blond ponytail lying against it and my knife cutting into it, caused me to stir even more.

In many ways, I did not want to go to the beach that day.

But we did, and we found that Jerome and the girls had set up a new cabana, an even larger one with flaps that could be dropped down and tied off, a short distance from where the old one had stood. As we came in, Gina explained that the weather called for intermittent storms and no one wanted to leave the beach if they broke, the plan was to wait them out in the cabana. Jerome and Lois embraced and kissed passionately as soon as they saw each other, but, for the moment, things didn't go any further than that.

Instead, Jerome came over to talk to me. "So, mate," he said jovially, "how're you feeling about things this day?"

I just grunted. "Confused."

"Figures. I'd offer you congrats on a lovely kill, that's what blokes do, but I'm not sure you're wanting that."

I shrugged. "I don't know. I wasn't planning to do that here. I was planning on watching."

"But you have to be glad you got the opportunity," he probed. "Aren't you?"

"I suppose. I never will forget about last night, that's for sure." I tried to change the subject then, asking him what he and the girls had been up to after we left. He told me that they hadn't stayed much longer, that everyone needed a little time to absorb what had happened, and I just nodded.

The morning was a little strange--maybe even more than a little. No one was very animated; the girls spent a lot of time talking about Jenny, sharing memories of her life, which, I found, both interested me and bothered me. Jerome was physically affectionate with both Lois and Marianne, and I was with the other three girls, even Lucinda, who seemed to have come out of her shell a little. But no one, at least as yet, was initiating sex.

"We need to stop this," Gina said abruptly. "We all need to get back to enjoying the beach, this is not accomplishing anything, we're just wasting time. We need to get out there, see what's going on today. Jenny's dead and that's the way she wanted it. None of us are going to forget her, but I don't think we can afford to spend a whole day moping around, and that's what we're all doing."

It was a simple proposition, but all of us agreed with it. With Gina in the lead, we left the cabana and began walking up the beach, just looking around, seeing if anything was going on. It was much as it had been the first day we were there, we encountered quite a few people having sex but nothing else. At that time, the day was partially overcast, there were swirling winds, and the sea was rougher than we'd yet seen it.

"Look, what's that?" Gina asked, pointing. I looked. There was something up ahead that looked strange. From that distance the object, silhouetted against the sky, looked like it might have been some sort of monument. People were stopping to gaze at it, staying for short periods, then moving on. We picked up the pace a little and approached the object.

As we drew close, it was obvious that it was not a monument. It was a post, perhaps twelve feet tall, I had no idea what its purpose might have been. Against the post was the body of a naked young girl. Rough black-iron spikes, each one perhaps twelve inches long and half an inch in diameter, had been driven through her upper arms and her thighs. There were three more driven through her abdomen, and one through each breast. Drying blood streaked her body liberally, and there was much more on the ground at the base of the post. Her head was hanging, her eyes closed. She was quite dead.

Gina and Lois approached the post. "Incredible," Gina said. "This wasn't done to her against her will. She wasn't bound. She stood here and let her killer drive these spikes through her."

"Maybe not," Lois commented. "Maybe one person held her and one drove the spikes. Once she had them through her arms she would've been helpless."

Gina threw her a quick look. "I prefer my way."

Lois, amazingly, grinned. "Actually, so do I."

"You do?" I asked.

She turned to me. "Yes. This was very painful for her, it took a while for her to die, especially if the two in her chest were done last. I'd rather think she chose it than think that someone forced it on her."

"I wish we'd gotten here in time to see it happen," Marianne said.

"I do too," Jerome agreed. "Just seeing her like this is... exciting. Seeing this being done to her, especially if she did actually just stand here and take it, would have been... damn, I don't know the word."

"You find it exciting too, Brad?" Gina asked me.

There was hardly a point in lying. "Yes, I do. Very much so. And the word would be something like incredible, again."

"I think we should go back to the cabana now," Lois said. The ice had been broken.

As it happened, our timing was quite good; just seconds after we got inside, it started to rain. The wind, which was not strong, was coming from the west, so Lucinda and I closed the flap on that side alone. I turned to see Jerome and Lois locked in a passionate embrace, kissing, his hands on her breasts. I smiled.

"You like watching them, don't you?" Gina asked me.

"Yes, I do. As far as I'm concerned she's the sexiest woman alive, and I don't get to see--" I glanced at Gina. "Sorry, I didn't mean--"

"Don't worry about it," she said. "Drop your knickers and sit with me, let's watch." I did. This time, red-haired Stevie took Jenny's place on my other side. As an additional benefit, Marianne moved in behind me and put her hands on my shoulders.

Lois, meanwhile, had pulled Jerome's trunks down and he'd stepped out of them. She embraced him again, as before. "I want your come in my mouth this time," she told him. "I want to taste you."

"My pleasure, Lois," he responded with a broad smile.

"Don't forget." She slid down his body, pausing to suck both his nipples, and ended in a crouch. Holding his thighs, she drew his cock into her mouth and began sucking him. Much of the remainder of their encounter went the same way it had the previous night. Again she spent part of her time with her head in my lap, holding my hand. She was riding him, facing me and looking at me, when he told her he was close.

She rose off him swiftly, then knelt beside him and took his cock back into her mouth. Her head bobbed up and down a few times before Jerome groaned and pushed his hips up toward her. She held still while he emptied himself into her mouth. As she had done with me the first day, she let some of the whitish semen run back out before licking it up and swallowing all of it. She then stretched her body out atop his, her legs trapping one of his, and kissed him again. Outside our cabana, the rain increased to a downpour, sheets of water pelting the sand. Lucinda was on her feet, lowering two more of the cabana's flaps to stop the rain from splashing in.

"Our turn now," Gina said with a giggle. She slid down in front of me and took my cock in her mouth. I turned to Stevie, kissed her, and began playing with her slight breasts. Marianne came around to stand beside me, her groin very close to my face. I could see Lois watching; except for the fact that I had three girls to deal with, not two, it all seemed very similar to what had taken place the previous night.

"This is just stupid," I heard Lucinda say. "Like Gina said, we're all just wasting time here." Still standing, she pushed the bottom of her bikini down and stepped out of it. Then, completely naked, she calmly walked out into the pouring rain.

I just stared, and Stevie gave a little shriek. "Go after her, Brad!" Lois cried. "Hurry!"

I scrambled to my feet. Also still naked, I stepped out of the cabana and felt the rain hammering down on me. I could see Lucinda a short distance away, walking slowly.

"Lucinda, wait!" I called. She glanced back over her shoulder at me, then broke into a run. I ran after her. Lucinda wasn't a very fast runner--or perhaps wasn't trying very hard--but I was struggling to keep up. I still had a full erection and running in that state is not easy. As I ran after her, I was thinking that the only thing that was saving her so far was the rain. There were, as I had seen, plenty of men on that beach with bows and guns, and one of them would surely have taken a shot at her already under normal conditions.

Finally, though, I overtook her. "Lucinda, stop!" I cried, grabbing her shoulder.

She shrugged my hand off. "If you want to stop me," she yelled back, "you know how!" She gestured toward the knife strapped to my calf, then turned and ran again, her dark skin glistening wetly. "Catch me if you can!" she shouted over her shoulder.

She was right, I knew that, and I also knew that rain or no, she wasn't going to get far. There weren't very many people out in the rain, but there were some. She was fair game for anyone, and her yelling was sure to attract someone soon. I drew out my knife and ran on. When I caught up with her again, I grabbed her thick black mane of hair, pulled her to a stop, and plunged my knife into her right side at her waistline.

"Ah!" she screamed. "Oh god oh god, please...!" She tried to jerk free; the blade came out as a result, and blood came welling out after it. She jerked again, leaving me holding a handful of her hair, and ran on--though much more slowly and with one hand pressed against her bleeding side. Catching up with her quickly, I spun her around. She stared at me, her eyes huge, the white visible all around the iris. I put my arm around her and pulled her body up against mine. She resisted me, pushing against my chest with her hands, but I drove the knife deep into her lower belly on her right.

She grunted loudly and put her arms around my neck. I was still strongly erect, and my hard cock was trapped between her legs, against her sex. Her hair hung wetly half over her face, she was grimacing with the pain. Her gaze moved from one of my eyes to the other. I pulled the knife up hard and then yanked it out, and I felt her warm blood squirt out against my body. She threw her head back and gasped.

Then her knees began to buckle. I helped her down onto the sand, and she sprawled on her back. Staring up at me, she spread her legs, lifting her knees. I laid down atop her and pushed my cock into her; it was no surprise that she was very wet. I started moving on her, and she pushed my upper body back up a little.

"Give it to me hard," she almost snarled. "Hard as you can." I nodded, slammed my hips against her, and I stabbed her violently in her left breast, just at the edge of her nipple, going in deep. She cried out pitifully, then gasped again as I jerked the knife out. She choked, and blood ran from her mouth, but she kept squirming under me.

"Die for me, Lucinda," I said.

She gave me a defiant look. "Make me."

I nodded again. "I will." I plunged the knife back in, going in right through her nipple this time, and moved it slightly inside her. She gave a gurgling cry as blood spouted from her mouth. Water was running around us, breaking against our bodies, rain rushing down the beach toward the ocean, and it was liberally streaked now with red. Keeping the knife buried in her chest, I pulled it to the side a little and pushed down, so hard I felt one of her ribs crack.

She relaxed then, suddenly. A second later her body bucked violently. I held her down with the knife as she bucked up against me again. Her features smoothed, and she gazed at me with an unreadable expression as her body continued to spasm, three or four more times. With a yell, I twisted the knife inside her violently and exploded into her. By the time my climax was over, her body had become still and her eyes were glazing. When the raindrops struck them, she no longer blinked the water away.

It was a while before I got up. When I did, I saw Jerome, Lois, and the others standing behind me. I started to rise.

"The toe-tag, mate," Jerome reminded me.

"Oh. Yes," I said numbly. I checked it and read it aloud. Lucinda had dedicated her corpse to a retirement home in Brisbane, to be used as food.

"Leave the body here, then," Jerome advised me. "The resort will collect it and deliver it. I'll call it in when we get back to the cabana so they get it fresh." He went to the body, pulled my knife from Lucinda's breast, and handed it to me. "Another good kill, mate," he commented. "I'm starting to feel left out here."

"Yeah," I mumbled. "I guess." I started to move in the general direction of the cabana, but suddenly Lois was there in front of me. She threw her arms around me and pulled me close.

"Don't," she murmured, pressing her head against my chest. "She made the choice, you know that, and she pretty much told us all she was going to. You did it right, my love. You heard her, she told you to give it to her hard and you did."

"Why do I feel like she only did this because we were all ignoring her? Both times we've had these little mini-orgies, she's been left out."

"That was her choice, not yours."

"Still." I looked around at the others. "I want it known," I said loudly, "that the next time, at least, we all have sex, I am not killing anyone. Understood?" Lois smiled; Gina laughed, and we all started making our way though the rain back to the cabana. We arrived wet and bedraggled, and spent a while getting ourselves back in order.

But the mood, even mine, was not solemn as it had been after Jenny's death. It was true, I told myself, that the first one was the hardest. It gets much easier after that.

"I want to ask you a question," Lois said as she dipped a small piece of bread in gravy and brought it toward her mouth.

It was about six at that time, and we were all in one of the beachfront bar and grills operated by the resort, having decided we didn't want to separate for dinner. It was a very relaxed place. Jerome and I, along with Marianne and Stevie, had all put on beach shirts, but Lois and Gina still wore only their bikini bottoms. We were all barefoot, but there were no complaints.

"Shoot," I said, stabbing a shrimp with my fork.

"I know you enjoyed watching me with Jerome," she went on. "I could see it in your eyes. I wanted to know--"

"Yes, I did," I interrupted. "It was immensely erotic, both times. I can't see you that well when we make love, I can't see your whole body at once, the way your muscles move. You are so graceful, so beautiful, it's just amazing. And even that's not all."

Her eyes sparkled. "There's more?"

"Oh, yes. You were enjoying Jerome fully, I could see that. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, I like better than seeing you enjoy yourself." Her eyes misted slightly and she reached across the table to grab my hand. "Oh, sorry, I didn't let you ask your question."

She took just a moment to compose herself. "What I wanted to ask was, suppose you hadn't been there? Suppose you hadn't been there, and Jerome and I had had sex, and--"

"You and Jerome did not 'have sex,'" I corrected. "You made love. That was obvious, and don't think for a minute that bothers me. He's proven to be a good friend--our best mate, as they say down here." I shook my head. "Sorry again. The question?"

She flushed slightly. "The question was, if that had happened when you weren't there and I told you about it later, would you have been upset?"

I considered this for a moment. "It would not have been as good," I told her. "But no, I wouldn't have been upset. As long as you gave me details."

"Details?"

"Yes. Such as, the way you were arched up on your hands and feet, your butt up in the air, sucking his cock. That image will stay with me forever. The way you wrapped your legs around him when he pushed inside you. Things like that." I put my fork down. "Why are you asking? Do you want some alone time with Jerome?"

She shook her head. "Not with Jerome, no."

I frowned. "Someone else?"

"I have no one in mind."

"Just a rhetorical question, then."

"Mmm."

I resumed eating. "Well," I said, wondering exactly what this had been all about, "you have your answer."

After we'd finished with dinner, we wandered back down to the beach. The weather had cleared, it was near sunset, a fine, warm, evening, and we pulled the towels back out from under the cabana to sit on the open beach. Lois was sitting between me and Jerome, Marianne was on Jerome's other side, Gina and Stevie were at my left. We watched the resort crews come out and light the tiki torches. We talked idly, the girls sharing memories of Lucinda just as they had shared memories of Jenny the day before, but without the pervasive sadness. Soon enough some rather overt sexual play began, Marianne almost pulling Jerome away from Lois and Gina stroking the front of my swimsuit.

Then, before the afternoon light had completely faded, we saw a girl running down the beach strand near the waterline at full speed, water splashing from her feet. Two plumes of brown hair, tied off, flapped behind her head like wings. She was tall and slim and much faster than Lucinda had been, I doubted I could have overtaken her. As she came closer, it was obvious that she was completely nude.

"Action right in front of us," Jerome observed. "Lucky us."

We all looked for the man who we were all certain would be running after her. We saw him a moment later, far behind her but also running very fast. I squinted to see what sort of weapon he might be carrying. She was in range for gunshot, and probably for an arrow.

"Javelins," Marianne said suddenly. "He's carrying javelins."

Since it did not seem likely the final act of this play would in fact be played right in front of us, we rose and began trotting down the beach, parallel to the track the girl, who had not yet reached us yet, was taking. At last, though, she was close enough that I could see her face. She was extremely pretty, she had very delicate and very young-looking features, and, in spite of the fact that she probably had taken off her bottom herself, she looked utterly terrified. I hoped she was not a victim of one of the snippers.

She had almost reached us when her pursuer, obviously highly expert at what he was doing, launched a javelin while still at a full run. It flashed through the air, missed her completely, and twanged in the sand--a good ten feet in front of her. She let out a squeal and ran on, but we could see that she was breathing very hard, obviously tiring.

The next javelin the man launched struck her in the small of her back. She screamed and, slowing to a trot and twisting around, reached for it. It wasn't in very far. She jerked it out and tossed it aside. The wound it left might not have been serious, but it had cost her far too many steps. Her pursuer had used the opportunity to close on her, and his next lance struck the back of her right knee and went in deeply.

She shrieked even louder and went down, skidding to a stop. For the best view, we had to stop and go back a few yards. The girl was struggling to get the javelin out of her leg, and she did succeed in doing so--although by then we were close enough to see that this wound was serious indeed, her knee had been essentially destroyed. Either unwilling to accept that or unaware of it, she tried to get to her feet, but her right leg would not hold her and she went back down again. Her assailant, confident now, had slowed to a walk.

She struggled to a sitting position. "No, Jake!" she cried as he came close. "No, no, don't kill me! No!"

"You're naked, Mary Ann," he said. "If I don't someone else will. You know that."

"Mary Ann," Marianne commented. "Hm."

"Mary Ann, not Marianne," Stevie whispered.

"Jake, I only took off my knicks to show Lynn I was brave enough to do it! I didn't mean it! I was going to put them back on! Please, Jake, please!"

He stood over her, a javelin poised. "You know the rules, Mary Ann. Maybe if you hadn't bolted, I could've... I don't know. But now you're very far from your panties and you can't walk anymore. It's too late. And besides, this is what I came here for, what I trained myself for." He raised a javelin.

She held out her hands defensively. "Jake, no! Please! No!"

"Sorry." Evading her hands deftly, he plunged the javelin into the center of her lower belly, just above her groin. It went all the way through her. She screamed again and grabbed it as he prepared another.

She looked up at him with a tear-streaked face. "I can't move my legs anymore, Jake," she whimpered.

"Lay back, Mary Ann," he said. "Just lay back." She sobbed, then obeyed. "Now let go of the lance and spread your arms." She did that too, and he pressed the point of the javelin he was holding against her solar plexus. Immediately she grabbed it with her hands. "No," he said, shaking his head. "Arms spread. Just accept it, Mary Ann. Let me kill you."

She sobbed bitterly, but she let go of the lance and spread her arms. The man drove the lance firmly down and in, again piercing her body through. Her head came up and she gasped in air, her eyes seemingly starting out of her head. Her rigid body quivered for a moment, then her head fell back. Blood drained quietly from her mouth. Jake looked down at her for a moment. Then, without the slightest evidence of self-consciousness, he pulled his swimsuit down and started masturbating.

"Hey, Jake!" Marianne called. "Let me help you with that!" She started trotting toward him.

He looked up. "Who're you?"

"Marianne." She giggled. "Really, just an appreciative onlooker. That was a nice kill." She dropped to her knees in front of him and took his cock into her mouth. He was obviously very excited, he did not last long at all. After he'd deposited his semen in her mouth, she rose and wiped her lips.

"Mary Ann?" he asked. "Really?"

"No, Marianne," she corrected.

"Well, I thank you, Marianne," he said. He looked her up and down. "May I kill you as well? Not right now, later."

She laughed. "No, thank you," she said. "But I might see you around the beach." She turned and walked back to join us as Jake bent down to check Mary Ann's toe tag.

"I didn't like seeing her terror at first," Jerome commented. "But the ending was nice."

Lois looked up at him. "Yes," she agreed. "It was. When she surrendered to the inevitable."

Taking our leave of Jake and Mary Ann, we walked back to our towels near the cabana. One the way, I heard Jerome ask Lois something I could not hear, but I did hear her say, "Not now, no. There's something else I want to do right now." After that he turned his attention to Marianne, which told me what he'd asked her. We sat on our towels, and Gina immediately started stroking my body, especially the front of my swimsuit.

Rather abruptly, Lois stood up. "I'm going to take a walk along the beach," she announced.

Disengaging myself from Gina, I started to get up as well. "That's fine, we'll--"

"No," she said. "No. I want to go by myself. Just a little alone time. Okay?"

I frowned. "But Lois, there's the Joker, and there may be snippers..."

She laughed. "Brad, you can't protect me from the Joker! And if you're worried about snippers I'll take the bag with the spare bottom in it. It's night, I should have time to get it on. Okay?"

"I haven't heard about any snipper activity here lately," Jerome offered. "And for whatever reason the Joker has been really quiet lately too."

"See?" Lois said. "It's perfectly safe."

"Well, all right, then," I grumbled. "Just be careful, okay?"

"I will. Don't worry." She bent down to give me a quick kiss and then she was off. I watched her disappear into the distance, then turned my attention to Gina and Stevie. Jerome was already pretty well occupied with Marianne. Time passed. I had sex with Gina, then with Stevie, and Jerome and Marianne had two separate sessions. Still Lois did not return. By eleven she'd been gone well over two hours. I was worried that she'd encountered the Joker--or that some other disaster had befallen her--and expressed those concerns, but Jerome advised me not to worry. When midnight came and she still had not returned, even Jerome began to seem a bit concerned. We were just discussing what we might do when she suddenly walked up to us.

"You've been gone a long time," I noted.

"I know," she replied. "I'm a little tired."

"So what have you been doing? You could've walked the whole beach end to end twice in all this time."

"Three times," Jerome corrected.

"I know," she said. "I stopped several times." She looked a little dreamy. "To talk to people and all."

"Oh?"

"Yes. The first one was this older man with a graying beard, maybe fifty or so, his name was Ben. He was sitting down close to the water in a chair by himself. He looked up at me as I walked by and he smiled, so I smiled back. He kept watching me, so I walked over to talk to him for a few minutes. He asked me if I was on the beach to be killed and I asked him if he was hoping to kill a girl himself down here. He just laughed and said no, he was just here to watch."

"That was it?"

"Well, no. We kept talking for a while, and he complimented me, he told me I was beautiful, told me I had great legs and fine breasts. He kept looking at them, so I told him he could touch them if he wanted to."

"Your breasts?"

"And my legs, yes."

"And did he?" I was amazed.

She smiled. "Oh, yes. He squeezed my breasts and played with my nipples, and he stroked my legs, especially my thighs, and my face. He was very gentle with me, and very considerate. I sat on his lap in the chair, he kissed and sucked my nipples, and I felt him getting hard under me."

"Damn!" I exclaimed. All the rest of our little group was listening intently.

But Lois wasn't finished. "So I got up, and I pulled his trunks down, and I leaned over him so he could go on playing with my nipples, and I started sucking his cock." She smiled. "He seemed to be really surprised."

"So am I!"

"So," she went on, ignoring my outburst, "once I got him really hard, I sat on his lap again, but this time I guided his cock up inside me. We started moving together, very gently, and we did that for quite a long time."

"You actually fucked him?"

"Oh, yes. He was so gentle, so nice to me, he caressed me all over, every part of me. I really enjoyed it. I came twice. I asked him if he'd rather come inside me or in my mouth. He said he'd really like to come in my mouth, so when he was close I got off him and went down on him again. I had to suck him for several minutes, but he did finally come. He asked to see it so I showed it to him, on my tongue, before I swallowed it."

"I can't believe what I just heard," I said, shaking my head. "This is what you were asking me about at dinner, wasn't it? You had something like this in mind?"

"I wasn't sure, then, that I'd do anything. I just wanted to know if I was free to, if something came up." She smiled. "Something did." Her smile then faded as she studied my face. "Was that what you meant by detail?"

I touched her cheek. "Yes," I answered. "Perfect."

"Did you like hearing about it? Your wife just casually fucking some strange guy?"

"Yes."

"So did I," Jerome added. "Hot."

"Did you stay with this Ben the rest of the time you were gone?" I asked her.

"No. He hugged me and kissed me--and thanked me profusely, he said I'd made his whole year, not just his day--and I walked on. After a little while I became aware that someone was following me, or at least walking fairly close behind me, and I stopped and turned around to see who it was. It turned out to be a young boy, and he acted embarrassed when I turned to face him, looking away, trying to act like he just happened to be walking the same way as I was but not having any success with it at all. I asked him point-blank if he was a snipper and if he was stalking me. He looked really startled and started protesting that he wasn't one, and he didn't seem to have anything in his hands he could use to snip my suit, although he did have a big hunting knife in a sheath strapped to his thigh." She paused and grinned. "But for the most part he was talking to my chest, not to my face."

I glanced down at her bare breasts. As familiar as I was with them, I never tired of looking at them. "I can understand that," I said with a smile. "And?"

"I asked him to walk with me, and he did, and as we walked along I found out that his name was Ellis and he was a local high school student, just eighteen years old, and that he'd been coming down here at nights for the last couple of years. I asked him if he'd ever killed any girls down here and he said no but he'd seen at least a couple of dozen kills. He said he didn't know if he'd ever make a kill here, he said for the most part he was too shy to approach topless girls and ask them and never seemed to be in the right place at the right time when one got naked. I then asked him again why he was following me, if he was trying to get up the nerve to ask me. He actually blushed and told me that I had about the prettiest legs he'd ever seen, especially from behind, and he'd just been walking along looking at them."

"The boy," I said, "has taste."

Lois smiled. "He went on to say that he'd never have even thought of asking me anything, he said there was no way he could have brought himself to even try to talk to me if I hadn't initiated the conversation, he said he thought I was just, as he put it, 'out of his league.' As far as asking me if he could kill me, he said, he knew the answer would be no and he would have been afraid of being laughed at. So I told that yes, if he'd asked if he could kill me the answer would have been no but I wouldn't have laughed at him. I told him he should not be so shy, and pointed out that we were talking then. And then I said that even though I won't give you permission to kill me, we can have sex if you want to."

"Are you serious, Lois?" I demanded.

She nodded. "Yes, of course."

"I can't imagine this kid said he didn't want to!"

She laughed. "No, he didn't say that. He was more than eager, I guess that's not a surprise, a young boy like that. Neither one of us had a towel or a blanket, so I took his hand and led down into the shallow water. I sat down in it and leaned back. He just stood there for a minute as if he didn't know what to do, and so I told him he could do whatever he wanted, touch me wherever he wanted to touch me." She paused and smiled. "He was down on his knees in a second, touching my legs--he seemed to like my knees a lot--sucking my nipples, and kissing me. His suit was really poking out hard in the front so I suggested he take it off and toss it up on the beach so it wouldn't wash away. He did. His cock was very long and thin and very hard. I held it in my hand for a minute while he was kissing me and squeezing my breasts, then put it in my mouth. He groaned really loud, like he was in pain. Brad, I don't think I sucked him for more than fifteen seconds before he groaned again and shot a huge load of semen into my mouth."

I could only stare at her. "Lois, I'm just... I don't know, just..."

"So," she said, continuing, "he then started apologizing, over and over, he seemed very embarrassed, embarrassed that he'd come so quickly and embarrassed that he'd come in my mouth. I assured him that everything was okay, and pointed out that I had swallowed his come, I told him it was perfectly okay for him to come in my mouth. He calmed down then. I hugged him and he started playing with my breasts again. He said I was the most incredible woman he'd ever met."

"He was fucking well right about that!"

"That's what I've been saying," Jerome added.

"Thank you both," she said. "Anyway, we kissed and played around in the water for a little while, and pretty soon his cock was standing straight up again. I had him lie back and I straddled him and rode him. Like I said, his cock was really long, it was way up in me. We rolled over to a missionary position and he started pumping in and out of me, going really fast and going in deep. I was about to tell him to slow down when all of a sudden he was groaning again and coming inside me, it didn't last long, and I had no chance at all to come myself. After that I just hugged him and told him he should have more confidence, and I started off down the beach. A man stopped me, a big muscular man, pretty good looking. He'd been watching me with Ellis, and he asked me if I wanted a real man for a change. Ellis was close enough to hear us, so I told him Ellis was a real man, a very good man, and I also told him I had two more real men back at my camp, and that I wasn't interested. It was true, he was being such an asshole that I wasn't."

"Lois," I asked, "how many different men have you fucked tonight?"

"Five," she answered, amazing me again. "Not counting Jerome earlier today. And I sucked off two more but didn't fuck them."

For a moment I was speechless. "And they say I'm a wild one," Gina, who, like the other girls, had been listening without comment, said.

Lois made a helpless gesture. "I've never been in a situation like this before, Brad. There are so many men here. I've never had much trouble finding a man for sex, but here I can pick and choose and you can have sex anywhere anytime. It's fun." She looked from me to Jerome. "But I have the best two right here." Her brow furrowed. "You aren't upset, are you, Brad? You said--"

"Stop," I commanded. "I am not at all upset. I am, in fact, very turned-on by hearing your stories. I'm seeing a new you, and really, a new me too. I don't want to leave this here when we go back to the States, we're going to have to add a dimension to our sex life at home. So please go on, let's hear about the rest of your adventures tonight."

She went on. Her stories were very arousing to all of us, myself and Jerome especially. She did not describe all of the men she'd coupled with, but those she did describe were not, it seemed, men I would have expected her to have found attractive. The significance of that I did not understand until later.

There was more sex in our cabana that evening, after Lois had finished telling her stories, which had gotten everyone wound up a bit. I paired up with Lois and Gina, while Jerome was being attended to by Marianne and Stevie. It was fairly late when we got back to our room, and we slept in the following morning.

I woke at about ten to find Lois, naked and on her knees on the bed, playing with my cock, which was already erect. When she saw that I was awake, she went down on me for a brief time, then straddled my body and took it inside herself.

Lois had always, for as long as I'd known her, been a passionate woman. She orgasmed easily and often and had a genuine love for all forms of sex, as the previous couple of days had certainly demonstrated. That morning, though, she was more passionate than I'd ever seen her before. Within minutes of mounting me, she was climaxing and when she did she cried, large tears falling on my chest. We shifted to the missionary position and she clutched at me, her legs folded tightly around me, pulling me with her arms, as if she could not get me close enough to her or inside her deeply enough. She climaxed again in that position, a long shuddering orgasm, and she cried again. By the time I had my own orgasm she had had at least five. She held me for a long time afterwards, then got up and went to the bathroom to clean up, saying that we were expected down on the beach, that our friends would be waiting.

I sat on the side of the bed staring at the open bathroom door, wondering exactly what was going on with her. Some of the changes, her sudden desire to have sex with other men and share it with me, I found delightful. But there were other changes, too. Lois had always been playful, casual, and that aspect of her personality now seemed subdued, she was more serious, more intense, about practically everything. As I sat thinking about it, everything suddenly came together with almost explosive force, and I could only wonder why I hadn't seen it before.

At that moment, though, I said nothing. My head was reeling, I needed at least a few minutes to pull my thoughts together. Lois came out of the bathroom, I went in, we dressed in our swimsuits and beach shirts as always, picked up our bag, and headed out. As was our routine, we stopped by one of the restaurants on the way to have a morning cup of coffee. That particular morning, I took care to make sure we sat at a table well away from the other patrons, where we could talk without being overheard.

"You're planning to do it today, aren't you?" I asked as she sipped her coffee. I tried to sound casual.

She looked up at me with a startled expression on her face. "Do what?" she asked, although there was a slight tell-tale tremulant in her voice.

"Let Jerome kill you," I said bluntly. "You didn't bring me here to give me this experience, Lois, or at least that wasn't the main reason. You came here to die here."

She looked down into her cup and sighed. Her shoulders slumped. She did not act shocked and she didn't even try to deny it. "How did you know?" she asked in a small voice.

The confirmation set off a little explosion in my gut, and I took a couple of seconds to subdue it before speaking again. "A number of little things," I answered finally. "A flash of an expression when I said I couldn't kill you myself. It was a while before I realized it was disappointment. The way you've reacted to Jerome, to his fantasy, and to the other deaths we've seen down there. Your walk last night, a last chance to have some new experiences. And--"

"No," she said, interrupting me without raising her head. "No, that wasn't what that was all about. Maybe it doesn't matter, but it's important to me that you understand. That wasn't giving me a chance for new experiences or anything else. That was me giving myself, parts of myself, to men I felt deserved it and who probably would not otherwise approach me. I refused any man who seemed attractive to me, you and Jerome are enough for me, for the rest of my life. It does not mean I did not have good sex with some of them. Some, like the older man at the beginning, were wonderful lovers. But it was for me only in the sense that I wanted to give part of myself away before... before I give all of myself away."

My heart literally ached. This precious woman, about to end her life, I wasn't sure I could stand it. "And this morning," I pressed on, "our lovemaking, very possibly our best ever. That was a good-bye, a last hurrah." I took a sip of coffee. "When were you planning on doing it?"

She continued to stare into her cup. "At sundown," she told me. "Before dinnertime."

"When were you planning on telling me about it?"

She looked up. Her eyes were again wet. "At sundown," she repeated. "I thought it would be easier for you that way." She waved her hands when I stared to speak, silencing me. "I was planning on doing it more or less like Jenny did. As if I was caught up in the moment." She shook her head. "But it's probably better if you know..."

I nodded. "Tell me this," I went on. "Have you known this all along? Did you plan this before we came to Australia?"

She shook her head again. "No. Well, I don't think so. Not consciously." She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Probably, but I didn't know it yet myself."

"When did you figure it out?" I held my breath waiting for the answer. If she told me it was when I killed Jenny I would forever have to live with a certain guilt, a feeling that if I had not done that she would not have come to this decision.

But she did not say that. "I got a hint of it that very first day, when that guy came up and claimed to be the Joker. I was so impressed with Jerome, not just in the way he handled things but, like I said then, the fact that he could have fulfilled his fantasy right then but chose not to. I was feeling very grateful to him, and it crossed my mind that the very best way I could show that gratitude was to take off my bottom and give myself to him. Of course that was just a fleeting thought, there was no chance of me actually doing that, not then. But it started me thinking about it, I'd find myself staring at his knife at times when he couldn't see me doing it, wondering how it would feel inside me. Still, I was scared, scared of the pain and scared of dying. I was thinking about it but not seriously considering it, at least that's what I was telling myself."

"What changed?" I asked.

She chewed her lower lip. "The badminton game," she answered. "When we watched those girls die on the badminton court, the one you called the dark girl especially. The way she stood there and asked for more arrows, even though she had to be in agony and she was already dying. But she was being so very courageous... you know she was some kind of trained athlete, Brad, she had a future, but there she was, standing tall and inviting that man to shoot arrows into her, letting him kill her. As we watched I was asking myself if I had that kind of courage, the courage to let Jerome play out his fantasy, to take the pain of a knife sliding slowly into me, the courage to let him kill me and face death calmly. I kept asking myself, what made me so different from that girl, that she should die and I should go on living? Did I, really, have the strength to accept a death like that, or was I too weak? Honestly, I didn't know." She paused for a second or two, then shook her head. "But afterwards... oh, Brad, that day turned out so perfect in every way... you were so excited, you and I made love in the bleachers, and later, when I was with Jerome... such wonderful lovemaking, both times, and I could see it in your face, you loved watching me with him. Then watching you with Gina and Jenny, seeing you fulfill your own fantasy with Jenny, and the way you were so tender with her afterwards... I woke up in the middle of the night, I got up and just stared out the window for a long time. I realized that we were right at the peak of our relationship, these were the best times, that things might be good for years to come but probably never quite as good as they were right now. I was still thinking about it when I came back to bed. The next morning, when I woke up, I was sure. It was time for me to end my life and I wanted to do it here. I want to give Jerome--and you--his fantasy."

I looked down at my own cup. "I wanted to grow old with you, Lois."

Her hand shot across the table and she grabbed mine. "Oh, Brad, I know, I do know," she said, her voice unsteady. "You can't kill me yourself, and you never would have requested my execution or sold me as a slave. But you must know, I didn't start thinking about this for the very first time when we arrived here in Australia, I've seen my friends and coworkers volunteer themselves or get sold by parents or boyfriends, and I've wondered more than once if I shouldn't do the same. You said it yourself, and I can't say you were wrong, I was probably unconsciously planning this from the first moment I started thinking about buying you a trip to Eubenangee as a surprise. Most couples aren't together as long as we've been, Brad. Wives get executed, one way or another. It isn't right, it makes me feel like I'm special and I'm not, I don't have sons, I don't have any children at all. It's time for me to die, and doing it here, letting Jerome kill me, is the perfect way."

I nodded. In a way, when I brought the subject up, I was hoping I could talk her out of it, hoping I could assure her of my love for her and my need for her, change her mind. As she spoke I knew, with certainty, that I could not. If I said such things to her it would only serve to make her feel more "special," something that in the modern world was reserved only for mothers of sons, something that women had been trained since kindergarten to avoid at all costs. One way or another, she was lost to me. Now that she was thinking openly in these terms, I feared that if I talked her out of dying on the Special Beach, I might well come home one day to find that she'd volunteered herself for the public executions or worse, committed suicide. Even though I did not want her to die, I readily admitted to myself that seeing her submit to Jerome's erotic fantasy was a far better option than either of those.

But I wanted to leave open any possible window. "I want you to understand," I said carefully, "that I do not want you to do this, I want to take you back to the States alive and unhurt. But I'll also say that if you feel you must do it, then yes, doing it here, letting Jerome play out his fantasy, is the best way possible as far as I'm concerned."

She let out a breath I hadn't known she was holding and squeezed my fingers very hard. "Thank you," she said, wiping her eyes, "for being so understanding. I was afraid you'd yell at me and tell me to forget about it and we'd have a really unpleasant scene, that's the reason I didn't tell you sooner." She then looked suddenly concerned. "You will be there with me, won't you? Doing it Jerome's way is for you and him, but especially for you. I don't want you to go away somewhere and--"

I stopped her. "I'll be there, Lois. I don't plan to let you out of my sight all day." She smiled and wiped her eyes again, and I gulped the last of my coffee. "Let's go," I said, standing up. "Like you said, our friends are waiting."

When we arrived on the beach, Jerome and the girls were indeed waiting for us, as usual, and as usual had gotten a head-start on us and had set up a fresh cabana. The sea was fairly calm, bright blue-green, and a few puffy clouds floated in a soft blue sky. It was sunny but not too bright, warm but not too hot, a perfect day. There were a lot of people on the beach and in the water, more than had been there the previous day or the day before. For a while, we just sat and chatted about the events of the previous day, and Gina wondered aloud how this day could possibly equal it.

"We make our own days, Gina," Marianne said with an enigmatic smile. "What we give to them, they give back. Day before yesterday we got to see an oath match, and Jenny gave herself in return. Yesterday we had the guy with the javelins and the girl nailed to the post, but we had to give up Lucinda for it."

Gina looked confused, and Stevie was frowning. "What're you talking about, Mari?" she asked. "I've never know you to be much of a mystic."

"I know. I've just been thinking about it. It seems to me we give our gifts to the sea, the sun, and the beach, and we get things back. That's just the way it works." As she spoke, there was a faraway look in her eyes and her smile seemed almost unnaturally bright. "I know what I'm talking about, I was up practically all night thinking about it, and I've got it all figured out. Look, I'll show you." With that, she stood up, peeled off the bottom of her suit and, at full speed and totally naked, ran out of the cabana and down toward the water.

For a moment we were all stunned, her action had been totally unexpected.

"She's fucking lost her mind," Stevie said.

Her voice stirred us to action, and we started to get to our feet. I understood quite clearly, even in those first seconds, that Marianne had effectively committed suicide, just as Lucinda had. There were dozens of men close by, it wouldn't be long before they noticed. I was already forming a plan to go after her in the same way I'd gone after Lucinda, but she was much faster and had much more of a head start. Jerome apparently had the same idea and had already unbuckled his own knife. We'd both barely gotten up when I heard the sharp crack of a rifle. A red patch appeared on Marianne's back between her shoulder blades, and her body shot forward with surprising speed. She literally flew through the air for a few yards, her arms and legs splayed out, came down on her face and belly in the sand, skidded forward, and did not move again. All five of us just stared open-mouthed. A man carrying a high-powered rifle came running down the beach toward the body. We watched as he checked her toe-tag, slung his rifle over one shoulder and her limp body over the other, and started off up the beach, staggering under the load. I wondered how he'd known she was naked, since, wearing thin thong bottoms, Lois and several of the girls would have looked much the same from behind at a distance. But then I noticed the large powerful scope on his rifle.

"Well, fuck," Jerome said. "That sure as hell seems like a waste. Too damn quick."

I had to agree. It had been so quick that for me, it had hardly registered even then. I looked over at Gina and Stevie, wondering if either of them might contemplate doing something similar and worrying that Marianne's action might set one or both of them off.. Jerome, meanwhile, was complaining that it hadn't even occurred to him to ask Marianne's permission, that he might have lost an opportunity--particularly since he'd been Marianne's more or less regular lover ever since we'd first met the girls.

"Okay," I said. "Okay." I turned to Lois. "We have to tell them," I said. "Otherwise things could mess up somehow."

She looked doubtful. "Brad, I--"

"Trust me," I said, and, after a slight hesitation, she nodded.

"What're you two talking about?" Jerome asked.

"You and I need to talk," I said, turning to him. "Right now."

"What's up, mate?"

"We need to plan this afternoon," I went on. "I can see that now, it can't be spontaneous and it isn't anyway." I paused, took a deep breath, then pushed on. "Sometime midafternoon, like three or so, you need to have sex with Gina or Stevie so you're not on an edge." As I used that term--not at all a particularly common one for me--I had no idea how many time it would be used that day.

Jerome laughed. "Well, mate, it's nice of you to try to plan things for us, but I think we can--"

"No, listen," I interrupted. "Then, later, just before sundown, you should start making love to Lois again." He frowned slightly and I took another deep breath. "At that time, you should ask her permission to kill her. She will, almost certainly, say yes. When she does, kill her. Kill her the way you told her you'd like to, the fantasy you told us about the first day."

Jerome's eyebrows shot up and he stared at me for a moment. He then turned to Lois. "Has he been drinking something this morning?" he asked her.

Lois stepped forward and put her hands on his chest. "No," she answered. "He hasn't. I wasn't going to tell you until later, but Brad's right, we do need to plan this. I want you to kill me, Jerome. Today. I'm saying yes, I'm giving you my permission, right now." She pushed closer, her eyes on his face. "Just the way you said you'd like to do it, slip your knife into me gently, over and over, and let my life bleed away."

Jerome turned his head to me again. "You're serious, you're both serious?" he almost croaked. "This is your wife, mate, and you love her, any fool can see that! And yet you're telling me you want me to kill her? Today, this afternoon?"

I nodded. "I am serious, Jerome. And part of the reason is exactly that, I do love her. I cannot kill her myself. But she has decided that this is what's right for her, to be put to death here, today, on this beach. She feels that submitting to your fantasy would be an ideal death for her, and I agree. I have always respected her decisions. I'll be honest, I don't want her to do this, but if she feels she has to I can't imagine a better way. I want you to kill her."

"And I want you to do it, Jerome," she added. "I want you to love me and kill me. Use me to make your fantasy come true."

He turned back to her. "My fantasy," he said seriously, "would be very painful for you, Lois. Very very painful."

She nodded. "I don't mind. I want to take the pain for you and Brad. I'll treasure it, knowing how exciting it'll be for both of you." Her eyes, her face, were soft, loving.

Jerome looked rattled. "Me knife is pretty thin," he argued, slipping into a sort of dialect we'd not heard before. "I'll have to knife you, oh, damn, I dunno, mebbe five six times mebbe..."

She smiled, slightly but freely. "If you have to knife me a hundred times," she told him, "it won't be too many, not for me." She reached down and caressed his erection through his trunks, it had risen to full hardness. "I want you to use my body any way you wish."

He looked at me again. I nodded and he turned back to Lois. "You know," he told her, his tone very serious, "I won't say no, I won't tell you I won't do it. You already know I will, you know it'll be a dream come true for me." He put his hands on her shoulders. "But I want you to know this, too. This is not cast in stone. If you change your mind, even if you just decide you want to think about it overnight, do it tomorrow instead of today, we'll call it off."

Her fingers walked across his chest. "I won't change my mind, Jerome."

"Just so's you know you're not committed." He gazed at her eyes intently for a moment, then went on. "Even after you drop your drawers, you change your mind, you tell me, we're done."

She smiled, more fully this time. "When am I committed then, Jerome?"

His jaw took on a hard set. "When the knife goes in," he answered. "No turning back then. But even then, Lois, even then, if you decide the long slow death I told you about is too painful, you tell me and I'll put the knife in your heart, I'll end it for you."

Still smiling, she stepped closer to him, pressed her breasts against his chest, and put her arms around his neck. "I won't say that either," she insisted, gazing up at him. "I'll take your slow gentle death, Jerome, I'll take it happily. All you have to do is give it to me."

They kissed then, a very long and very passionate kiss. He pushed his thigh between her legs and she squirmed against him. His hands ran all over her body. When they finally broke their embrace, Gina, who was crying freely, threw her arms around Lois and held her tightly, also for a long time. Stevie was next, and finally it was my turn.

I held her as if I never wanted to let her go.

Because I didn't.

In one way, the day seemed to pass very slowly, in another it seemed to just flash by, it was very strange the way it gave both impressions at once. We did the usual things, we talked, we swam in the ocean, and at one point we got some snacks from the beach grill. It is probably unnecessary to say that Lois was the absolute center of attention, it was a rare moment when one of the four of us wasn't touching her. Jerome made several calls from the cell phone he carried in that odd long beach bag he always had with him, we didn't know who he was calling or why until later. He looked, by turns, very sad and intensely excited. Gina at one point noted that my expressions were the same, although in my case I'm sure the sadness predominated.

There was one particular moment when those conflicting emotions collided harshly. We were talking, more or less idly--the way people talk at times when they're nervous or anxious--when it suddenly occurred to Lois that she had done nothing whatever to put her affairs in order back home. She told me she wanted her younger sister, Maureen, to have most of her jewelry, because she was less well-off than her older sister Julie.

"Except for that emerald pendant," she went on. "Give that one to Julie. You know, the one you gave me last... last Christmas... oh, Brad, we're not going to have Christmas together... oh, I so loved our Christmases together..."

"No," I agreed. "We won't. And that isn't all, Lois. You've passed your last morning, you won't ever have a night's sleep, or a full meal, again. You'll never walk with me when it's snowing again, or pick spring flowers..."

She looked like I'd hit her. "Brad..."

I was seeing an opportunity, and I wasn't going to pass it by. "Never see your parents again," I plowed on. "Or your sisters, they'll be heartbroken when they hear you're dead. So will your friends, and you have a lot of friends, Lois. We'll never walk that beautiful trail in Tennessee together again, never dance together again, never cuddle together on a cold night." I gave her a look that was absolutely intentionally cold. "And what about that old stuffed bear you had when you were a little girl? Should I just toss him in the trash?"

Her eyes grew moist. "Pookie... no... no, give him to... to..."

I was relentless. "And then there's that sculpture you bought when we went to Paris," I said. "I never cared much for it, did you know that? Pitch it out?"

"Oh, no, please, I love that piece, that was such a wonderful trip, I--" She started to cry, and that attracted the attention of Jerome, Gina, and Stevie.

"You aren't being fair to her, mate," Jerome told me after I'd explained what was going on.

"I'm just pointing out realities," I said. "I'd really like it if she changed her mind!"

He nodded. "I can understand that. Still, you're playing hardball here."

"I know."

"I do too," Lois said. She wiped her eyes. "And I know you, Brad. You won't, you won't toss Pookie in the garbage and you won't throw away that sculpture. You aren't that kind of man. You won't do things that would hurt me even after I'm dead. You respect me, and oh my god I love you so much for that..."

I closed my eyes for a moment. "Lois..."

"No. I know." She was back in control and I knew it, I'd lost. "And I know what you're trying to do, Brad." She came up on her knees in front of me, her legs somewhat spread. "You just said it, you want me to change my mind. I won't. This is what's right for me, to die here, on this beach, today. I want Jerome to kill me with his knife because I know what that'll mean to you and to him." She ran her hands down over her breasts to her belly. "But if you can tell me you won't find it exciting, if you can convince me of that, I'll call it off."

I stared at her. She was pressing her hands against her belly, which she was pushing forward a little. There were streaks of tears down her face, her eyes looked a little swollen, and her lower lip was still quivering a little. Her almost-naked body trembled slightly. She looked almost unbelievably vulnerable and sexy.

I was close to tears myself. I tried to force myself to lie to her, to tell her than the sadness of losing her would destroy the eroticism. Those words would not come out. "Lois, I can't..."

A rich smile bloomed, and she wiped away more tears. She moved toward me and put her arms around me. "I didn't think so," she whispered. "You'll take care of things afterwards, Brad, do whatever you think is right. I trust you completely."

"I couldn't have done it either," I heard Jerome say.

Lois had specifically said that she didn't want to have sex with anyone until sundown, she wanted to keep herself on edge, she was convinced that being sexually aroused would help her deal with the pain and the fear. In my own case I already knew that, I was well aware that I'd already had sex with her for the last time, at least in the sense of a full lovemaking session with a definite end. This did not mean, however, that she did not want to cuddle or be stimulated, and both Jerome and I, and to a lesser extent the two remaining college girls, were more than willing to oblige her. I took her out into the water several times, holding her while the waves washed over us, kissing her and tasting both her and the salt water. My predominant thoughts were about how much I was going to miss her--indeed, wondering how I was going to get along without her--but in spite of myself I was finding myself tremendously stimulated by thoughts of watching her being knifed to death, and I spent practically the whole day with at least a partial erection.

We talked, too, about what was to come, although perhaps less that I might have expected. There was one moment in particular, early in the afternoon; Lois and I had just been for a fairly extended swim, we'd sat out in the sun until our bodies and hair were fairly dry, and then we'd moved to the shade of the cabana. I had my legs spread and she was sitting between them, her back against my chest, her head resting on my shoulder, her eyes closed as if she were dozing. I was caressing her belly, running my hands up over her bare breasts, feeling her delicate nipples against my palms, and I could also feel my erection poking her back.

"You're thinking about it, aren't you?" she asked me without opening her eyes or moving. "Thinking about Jerome's knife going into me there? If you aren't you should be."

I had my hand on her belly near her navel at the time. "I'd be lying to you," I admitted, "if I said I wasn't."

Her eyes still closed, she smiled. "Are you looking forward to it?"

"No," I said instantly. "I'd be deliriously happy if you changed your mind. I don't want to see you dead."

She opened her eyes and looked up at me. "That isn't what I asked you," she said. "I know you don't want me dead. I won't be dead when the knife is going in."

I pressed on her belly firmly. "You know me well enough," I answered, "to know that seeing a knife go into this body will be the most powerful erotic experience of my life. I have no doubt about that at all."

Her eyes misted again. "Oh, Brad, I hope so. That's what I want, I don't want it to be tinged with regrets or second thoughts or sadness. I want you and Jerome both to enjoy it to the absolute fullest." She reached up and touched my cheek. "And afterwards, I don't want you to be depressed and sad. This is what I want, it's what I need, it's what should happen."

"You are going to suffer terribly," I reminded her.

"Perhaps. But seeing a woman in pain excites you, I know it does, I've seen it. And it excites you even more when you can see that she's taking it willingly, which is what I'll be doing. When the time comes, let that beast we talked about out."

I massaged her breast. "I doubt," I said, "that I'd be able to hold it back if I wanted to. But what about you, Lois? I sort of understand why you've made this choice, but are you actually looking forward to it yourself?"

She nodded, but her smile faded. "To be honest with you, I'm really scared," she confessed. "But I am ready for it, yes. I know there'll be a lot of pain, but there are rewards for that. Your reactions, Jerome's reactions. Hopefully, the way my own body reacts, although I can't be sure of that until we do it." She looked away for a moment. "And there's the knowledge that what I'm doing is right, it's what a woman who's lived a life like mine should do, it's what we have to do. For me, doing it this way is a lot better than being beheaded in a public execution, regardless of the pain. I was being honest with Jerome when I told him I'd treasure it, no matter how bad it is."

I started to say something else, but caught myself just before the words came out. I had been about to tell her that she was indeed special, that she was an exceptional woman in every way. I was still holding on to a ghost of a hope that she would change her mind, although I did not really believe she would. Telling her I believed her special would only serve to motivate her further to go through with it, so I remained silent.

At about three that afternoon, Gina and Stevie, having heard my advice, began seducing Jerome. They did not have to work very hard at it, it wasn't very long before Jerome was on his back, Stevie astride him and riding his cock while Gina kissed him passionately. Lois and I sat watching, my arm around her, her head lying on my chest.

"Do you think you'll come while I'm being killed, Brad?" Lois asked me. Her tone was so matter of fact it amazed me.

I answered her in the same way. "Possibly," I told her. "I can't be sure. I don't want to until it's over or very close to being over, in fact I don't feel I can afford to. Watching will be just plain torture for me if I've lost my own edge."

She nodded. "I understand that. Be careful, you shouldn't come until it's over. I'm sure Gina and Stevie will be more than happy to take care of you right after." She turned her head and looked up at me. "I only get to die once. I want it to be perfect for both of us."

I squeezed her shoulder. "I'm sure it will be, my love." Across the cabana from us, Gina and Stevie switched places. Lois, watching intently, began to squirm, working her legs back and forth slowly. I slipped my hand inside her bikini bottom and ran my fingertip over her clitoris, something I'd already done several times that day. She was moist already, and she jumped slightly when I touched her there.

"Be careful, don't make me come," she warned me, as she had warned me each time before. "I'm just like you, I don't want to be doing this when I've lost any of my edge, I want it as high as possible." She then rolled her eyes and, remarkably, giggled. "Although I'm not sure it can be any higher than it is right now!" She turned her head slightly. My erection was straining against my swim trunks. "But you," she pronounced, "are too high." She looked back at the threesome and saw that Gina had gotten off Jerome and that Stevie was now on her knees sucking his cock. "Gina?" she called. "Could you come over here for a moment, please?"

That day, any request Lois made was being honored instantly. Gina looked up, disengaged from Jerome, and came to us. "Yes?" she asked.

"Brad is too excited," Lois explained, gesturing toward me. "He's not going to be able to hold out once we start this evening, and you know that watching me being killed after he's come won't be fun for him. I'd like to suck him off right now, but if I do that I'm afraid I'll come too. I've done that at times in the past, had an orgasm just from sucking him. So, would you mind doing it for me?"

The tanned blond smiled. "Not at all," she answered. She dropped to her knees in front of me and, before I could say a word, pulled my swimsuit off. My erection bounced up. Immediately, Gina leaned over my lap and took it in her mouth.

I started to protest but realized Lois was probably right. "Always thinking of my best interests," I said to her.

"While I still can," she answered with a smile. "I won't be able to for much longer." She sat up straighter. "Because, in just a little while, I'm going to die, I'm going to be killed."

I touched her face lightly. "Killed," I repeated. "Stabbed to death. By your own choice."

Her expression did not change. "Yes."

I moved my hand down her body to her smooth flat belly and pressed in with my fingertips. "I'm sure he'll start down here," I said, and she looked down at my hand. "He's already said he wants to do it slowly, and you've already said that's okay with you." I pressed in firmly. "Are you sure you're ready for that? A hard steel blade sliding in deep, cutting you inside, your blood pouring out..."

She caught the edge of her lower lip with her teeth. "Like I told you, I'm scared," she said. "Scared of the pain, scared of dying, scared of being dead." She turned toward me and pressed her upper body against mine. "But I want to give this to you, Brad. I know you, I know how you feel about me, you would never put a knife in me, so it has to be Jerome. I want you to see his knife in me, deep in me. I want you to see me bleeding." Her eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted. She was breathing hard, her own excitement obvious.

As I gazed at her perfect body and visualized Jerome's knife going into it, and as Gina continued to stimulate my cock with her soft mouth, the beast Lois and I had spoken of began rising in me. She might have thought I was again trying to convince her to change her mind, but that wasn't the case, not then. For those few moments I had practically forgotten about how empty my life was going to be without her, all I could think of was the incredible eroticism of watching her voluntarily submit to her own death. The fact that I loved her intensely only made it more powerful. I moved my hand up to her breast and squeezed it hard enough to hurt her a little. She flinched slightly, but only her eyes showed any sign of her pain. "He'll probably want to stab you here, too," I mused. "God, these are so soft, so pretty..." Staring at them, I could almost see Jerome's knife going in, and the image made my body quiver.

Lois pulled my head a bit closer. "I hope he does," she whispered, "because I know how much you like that..." Her eyes were wider than ever, her pupils dilated. "I hope he goes in right down the center of my nipple, for you..."

Gina moved a little and I turned my head to glance down at her; she had stretched herself out and was moving her legs back and forth slowly, rhythmically, watching us, her bright blue eyes as wide as Lois's, my utterly hard erection deep in her mouth. It was a complete moment, an amazing moment. I looked back at Lois and turned slightly toward her.

"This is real," I said softly, as much to myself as to her. "It's really going to happen, today, this afternoon. You're going to let Jerome kill you."

She touched my face with her fingertips. "Yes," she breathed. "Yes, I am. I'm going to sit on his lap with his cock inside me, as far in me as it'll go. And while it's deep in me I'm going to let him stab me, again and again, until he's killed me." Her breath seemed to catch in her throat.

I made a sound like a growl, grabbed her head and pulled her lips to mine. As I kissed her, my orgasm overtook me and I sprayed my semen into Gina's mouth. She swallowed it; Lois and I sort of collapsed together and Gina did as well, lying across our legs.

Not long after that, Jerome finished, ejaculating inside Stevie. He then slept for a little while, his head in her lap. Lois, Gina, and I went back to the ocean for a while and I again held her in the waves, pressing her body against mine while Gina stayed close, touching both of us. As the afternoon slipped on by, the tension among the four of us rose palpably. Just after five-thirty, Jerome told us he need to talk to Lois privately for a moment. He took her aside and starting talking to her; I heard none of it, but I saw her nodding repeatedly, once in a while shaking her head, and saying very little herself, just listening intently to what he was saying. Afterwards he kissed her again, held her for a long moment, then let her go.

"Well," I couldn't help asking when she came back to me, "what was that all about?"

"Jerome was telling me," she answered, "exactly how he's going to go about killing me, in more detail." Her tone, her manner, was still amazingly matter-of-fact. "He asked me not to say anything, he doesn't want everyone else knowing exactly what to expect--even though we all do, in a general way. He wanted me to be able to be ready, though."

"It seemed to me as if you refused at least one or two things."

She shook her head. "No. I didn't. Any time I said no was when he asked if I minded if he did this or did that. I gave him complete freedom to do things exactly as he wants. You remember, I already told him he could use my body any way he wished. The only request I made was that he refrain from going down on me, because if he does I'll come and lose some of my edge." She watched my eyes for a moment. "Once he begins killing me, once the knife goes in," she went on, "I'll be his. For the rest of my life, in a way I've never belonged to any man before, not even you."

"I know that," I said. "And I've accepted it. I wish you could be mine in that sense, but I simply can't do it myself. When the time comes, I'll give you to him." She let out a choked sob and embraced me, holding on to me tightly.

For the next hour, we actually did little except watch the sun sink slowly toward the western horizon. After six, the daylight began to soften, and we all knew the time was very close. Lois stayed with me, continuously in contact with me as we all waited patiently for her to say it was time.

But then, just after six-thirty, a full camera crew, three cameras and two microphones, showed up at our cabana. A young man dressed in shorts, sneakers, and a Hawaiian-style shirt poked his head inside. "Jerome?" he asked. "Ah, yes, there you are. We have the right place, then." He glanced at the girls. "And on time, I see."

"What's all this?" I asked.

"Well, it's a camera crew," Jerome answered. "They're here to record Lois's death." Just outside our cabana, the cameramen were setting up their gear with practiced hands. The young man asked Jerome if we'd be inside or outside, he answered that we'd be outside, and they spread out a large soft-looking white blanket.

"What?" I demanded. "How did they know?"

"I called them," he answered, surprising me. "This one, this particular woman giving up her life--that has to be recorded and preserved." I suppose I looked concerned. "Don't worry," he went on. "They're professionals, they know how to stay out of the way. And I will make sure you get a few copies before you head back home."

Lois, smiling, clapped her hands. "I love it," she said.

Jerome looked down at her. "The crew is ready and the set is ready," he said. "Is the leading lady ready?"

"Yes," she answered. "I am." Jerome reached his hand down to her, but she waved him off. "Just one thing I want to do first," she said. She rose, then took my hand and pulled me up. "Come with us," she told Jerome as we walked toward the cameras. "Are we rolling?" she asked the man in the Hawaiian shirt, evidently the director.

He gestured, and a microphone on a boom moved toward us. "We are now," he told her.

With a self-assurance and poise that startled me, Lois struck a pose and looked at the camera. "Hello," she said, smiling charmingly. "My name is Lois, and I'm from the USA." She was obviously excited, but she seemed relaxed and upbeat. "I have decided," she went on, "to end my life on this wonderful beach, to allow myself to be killed here." Putting her arm around me, she pulled me close. "This is my husband, Brad. He did not ask this of me, this is my decision and mine alone, but he has accepted it." She turned her head toward Jerome, and he stepped forward, into the scene. "And this is Jerome, my friend and lover. He has agreed to be the one to put me to death. I hope all of you enjoy watching me die." She then hooked her thumbs in the sides of her bikini bottom and slowly pushed it down her legs, stepping out of it gracefully at the end. Completely naked, she rolled it up and tossed it out of the camera's range.

After a moment's pause, she turned to me. She did not have to prompt me, I knew my lines. I took her arm and turned to Jerome. "Jerome," I said, "my friend. This is my wife, Lois, whom I love dearly. I give her to you, to be yours completely for the rest of her life. Please take her, do what you will with her--and then kill her, in whatever manner you choose."

"Beautiful," Lois whispered.

Jerome bit his lip. "Thank you, mate," he said. He took Lois's hand, and she went to him. "This," he went on, "is the loveliest woman I've ever known." He raised her arm and pirouetted her slowly before the camera, letting it see every part of her. "She is also the sexiest and most sensual, as you will see. To have the opportunity to merely know her is a privilege, to love her is an honor. To be chosen to kill her is simply unbelievable."

"A bit much," Lois whispered. Even at this point, she giggled a little.

"All true," he said. "All completely true." He then called Gina and Stevie out of the cabana to join us and introduced them to the camera as well. Finally, he told me and the two girls to feel free to do whatever we wanted as things were proceeding.

He then folded Lois in his arms and kissed her. As usual, the kiss went on for a long time. His hands were at first on her waist, but then they strayed to her buttocks, her thighs, and then up to her breasts. She pushed forward, straddling one of his thighs and leaving a visible wet spot on his swim trunks. When they broke the kiss, she started sliding down his body as she'd done before, again kissing his nipples and thrusting her tongue into his navel. As she went to her knees, I expected her to pull down his trunks.

But she did not. Instead she focused on his calf, where the sheath was strapped. She undid the snap and drew out his knife; I realized then I had never seen it out of the sheath before. Shining stainless steel and double-edged, the blade was about five inches long but less than an inch wide and very thin in cross-section. Lois held it in her hands for a moment, studying it. She then rose to her feet.

"Take this," she said, holding the knife balanced on her upturned palms. Her eyes were wide, her expression serious. "And end my life with it."

He took it. "I will, Lois," he promised.

Smiling, she dropped back to her knees and this time she did pull his trunks down. As his erection popped up, he stepped out of them. Once they were gone, she unbuckled the sheath from his calf and laid it aside, leaving him as naked as she was.

She then turned her attention to his hard penis, first caressing it with her hands, then rubbing it against her face and licking around the head, then slowly drawing it into her mouth. Moving her head back and forth, she squeezed his buttocks with her hands. I did not even try to hold myself back, I knelt behind her and reached around her, lightly caressing her breasts, her belly, and her thighs. Gina followed suit, moving in behind Jerome and massaging his shoulders, and a moment later Stevie was doing the same to me. A natural actress, Lois looked toward the camera repeatedly, her eyes open, as she continued to suck Jerome's cock.

But, finally, she let his erection slip out of her mouth. She stood up, and he, in turn, sat down cross-legged on the blanket. He laid the knife aside as Lois came to stand over him. Slowly, her hands on her thighs, she started lowering herself, and Jerome put his hands on her knees as she bent them. Finally, the tip of his cock touched her between her legs. Without using her hands to guide him, she adjusted herself slightly, and it started slipping into her vagina. She let herself settle on down on it until it was in as far as possible, then put her hands on his shoulders and crossed her legs behind his hips. I moved up beside her so I could see clearly. She glanced at me briefly and smiled.

And then, immediately, Jerome picked up the knife. It surprised me, I can't say why, I assumed they would make love for a while before starting, but even at that moment I realized that that made no sense. Jerome was not going to be able to hold his orgasm back forever, and I was sure that I could assume that killing her after he'd lost his own edge would not be pleasant for him, either.

He put his arm around her lower back and touched her with the knife's point, an inch or so to the left of her navel and a little below it. She jumped slightly. "Last chance, Lois," he said, gazing at her face. "Last chance to tell me you've changed your mind."

She smiled softly and shook her head. "No. Kill me, Jerome." Her voice sounded calm, but her body told another story. Her chest and upper abdomen heaved with her rapid breathing, and her fingertips worked nervously at his shoulders.

He sighed, kissed her briefly, then firmly punched in the tip of the blade. "Ah!" she cried softly, her body jerking sharply. Letting out a breath I hadn't known I was holding, I moved in closer and put a hand on her upper back. I could feel her tremble. No more than half an inch of the blade was inside her at that point, and only a tiny trickle of blood was visible. Lois stared into Jerome's eyes, her nose less than an inch from his.

And he started sliding the blade on in, slowly, steadily, and gently, just as he'd promised her he would. The edges must have been razor-sharp, it barely indented her belly as it passed smoothly into her.

Some women, when they are in pain, take on facial expressions that can render a pretty face ugly. I'd seen it often enough in televised executions. That was not so for Lois. She was breathing hard and trembling; her mouth was open a little, her upper lip bent like a bow, her lower a smooth curve. Her nostrils were slightly flared, her eyes half-lidded. She wasn't even frowning, her eyebrows were tented up to the center. It gave her whole face a look of innocence, vulnerability, and pathos, and the overall effect was to make her look prettier and more appealing than ever. One of the cameras was positioned behind Jerome, and she repeatedly looked directly into the lens. She pushed toward him, working her fingers on his shoulders as the knife sank slowly and steadily into her body, angling across her abdomen from left to right. She pulled at his body with her legs, every muscle in her thighs and calves tight. Except for that first involuntary exclamation, she had not made a sound. Then, with perhaps a little more than half the blade buried, Jerome stopped pushing. I saw him nod to her, and I saw her nod back.

Still gazing into her eyes fixedly, he started turning the knife slowly, clockwise, inside her. Her eyes flew wide open. "Ah!" she cried again, louder this time. "oh, oh, mmm..." She fell silent and caught her lower lip with her teeth. She was trembling violently and her fingers were working even harder on his shoulders as he continued to twist the knife. Her legs jerked almost rhythmically, her knees bouncing, but she did not unfold them. The stream of blood from around the blade, which had continued as a trickle as he'd been sliding the blade in, increased dramatically, becoming a fast-flowing ribbon more than half an inch wide. Jerome did not stop twisting it until he'd turned it about ninety degrees.

I understood why he'd twisted it, it was such a thin light blade that he might literally have to stab her a hundred times to kill her if he didn't do something to increase the bleeding. I also knew, from the exchange of nods, that he'd told Lois he was going to do it before they ever started. How much pain it caused her I couldn't even imagine, and yet she had taken it without protest. I was so stimulated that the mere friction of my swimsuit against my erection was threatening to set me off far too soon. So, without even thinking about the cameras or the crowd of spectators that had gathered, I carefully took it off and tossed it aside.

But Jerome was hardly finished. He started pushing again, driving it in deeper, and, if anything, going even more slowly than before. I stroked her hair gently as the shiny blade continued to vanish, inch by inch, into her body. Her reactions were somewhat more muted; it was clear she was still in pain but it didn't appear to be anywhere near as bad as what she'd experienced when he was twisting it. He didn't stop pushing until the fingerguards were lying flat against her skin. He then let go of it.

She looked down at it. "Oh," she sighed. "Oh, look, it's all the way in there... you're killing me, it's really happening... oh... "

He touched her cheek lightly. "Yes, it is, Lois," he said softly. "No turning back now." She raised her head to look at his face again. There was an amazing look of innocent trust on her face. "Just take a moment now," he said, caressing her face. "Experience it, experience it with me..." He laid his hand on her belly close to the knife. "Sharp steel, deep inside you..."

She studied his eyes closely. "Yes," she murmured. "It feels so hot... hurts so bad... but it's somehow sensual, too..." She lifted her chin, then moved her hips on him--and as she did, her eyes flew open wider and she gasped.

"You don't have to do that... in a moment I'll take it out, and--"

She gave him a defiant look. "Yes, I do." She moved again. More controlled, biting her lower lip, she writhed on him for a moment. Her expression was, to me, incredible; her face was still not at all contorted, yet she was showing both pain and passion at the same time, her eyes half-lidded, her nostrils flared, her lip held firmly with her teeth.

"I need to take the knife out now, Lois," he told her when she finally stopped.

"Yes," she murmured. "I know. And then put it back in." Almost submissively, she lowered her head for a moment, then looked back up at him. "Do it," she whispered.

He nodded. Watching her eyes, he wrapped his fingers around the hilt, paused for just a moment, then, rather quickly, pulled it straight back and out. Lois gasped loudly and her eyes flew open wide again. She trembled, squeezed her eyes closed, and lowered her head as the blade reappeared, her skin clinging to it as it came. As the point popped free and the bleeding increased again, Lois shuddered and ground her teeth.

"I know that hurt you," Jerome whispered. "I know..."

She opened her eyes and moved her hands to the sides of his face. "And I told you," she replied, "that I wouldn't mind the pain. I don't." She kissed him, and, again, began moving her hips on his erection. Her legs, rigid and quivering while Jerome was pulling the knife out of her, relaxed a little. I ran my hand down her back, feeling the trembling subside.

Jerome did not wait very long before continuing, though. He touched her side with the point of the now-bloody blade, just above the flare of her hip. She pulled her head back, and, as before, he used a hard firm jab to punch the tip of the knife in and then began slipping it slowly and gently back into her. Her body tightened up again as it cut its way through skin and muscle, but, other than a few gasps and moans, she accepted this one in silence.

I had a better view of it this time. I laid my hand on her side just above the point of entry and was able to both watch and feel the blade slide in, passing through her satiny skin smoothly and evenly, and so cleanly there was almost no bleeding at all. Lois, her mouth slightly open, her eyes half-lidded and her eyebrows tented again, laid her head on Jerome's shoulder. He stopped pushing and nodded, and again, feeling his nod, she responded in kind. I knew what was coming, and I knew she did, as well.

I wasn't wrong, he started twisting the blade, as before. I saw it turn inside the clean slit he'd made in her perfect skin, opening it up. Blood, brilliant red, welled up in a large bead, then swiftly ran down over her hip.

Lois's whole body went rigid, her legs so tight her knees began to turn white. She wrapped her arms around Jerome and clutched his body to hers, grinding her breasts into his chest. "Ah, ah, oh, god," she cried softly. "Mmmm!"

"You can scream if you want," Jerome whispered as he turned it a bit further.

She raised her head. "Don't... want to scream," she answered in a choked voice. "Just do... what you need... to do. Mmph! Pain... doesn't matter." Amazingly, she retained the presence of mind to look back at the camera, even though Jerome was still twisting the knife. "Just want you to... kill me," she murmured, gazing at the lens. Her expression was incredibly beautiful, her pain obvious in her eyes.

"God, you are wonderful," he said, his voice almost as choked as hers. He had turned the blade fully ninety degrees by then, and he pushed it in deeper. Blood kept pumping out around it, flowing down her side. The white blanket the film crew had brought was already liberally stained with it. Some seconds later--it seemed like a very long time to me, but could not have actually been that long--the whole blade was inside her again. This time he did not let go of it. He held it still inside her for a moment. Then he raised his left hand, pushed her head back down head on his shoulder, and quickly pulled it out.

She let out a loud rasping gasp as it came free and her body jerked violently in his grasp. One of her legs pushed out, her heel rumpling the blanket. She raised one fist as if she was going to pound on his back, but did not. Almost immediately, though, she started to relax. He let go of her head and she sat up straight on him.

"It won't be so bad from here on," he told her. "The more blood you lose, the easier it'll be. You're past the worst of it."

She seemed to have regained much of her control. "It hasn't been that bad," she assured him. Her voice sounded somewhat weak, but she was able to squirm on his cock and pump her hips up and down on him a few times. "But you're right, I'm beginning to feel cool and lightheaded and I know what that means." She touched his face lightly. "Anyway, I've told you, you shouldn't worry about hurting me."

He didn't reply. Instead, he started pushing her upper body backwards. "Catch her, mate," he said to me. Moving around behind her, I dropped to one knee behind her and caught her under her arms as he pushed her back. She grabbed my upper arms. Her head resting against the middle of my chest, she looked up at me. Her eyes glittered in the fading sunlight.

"You can't imagine," I told her, "how beautiful you look right now." She smiled at me softly and looked as if she was about to say something. But Jerome had already propped the knife on her upper abdomen, halfway between her breastbone and her navel, the point aimed straight down, and her expression became serious--showing anticipation, and perhaps even a little trace of fear. Holding the handle with both hands, he firmly punched the point in, as before. She flinched and gave another sharp grunt, nothing more. She then continued to look up at me as Jerome started sliding the knife slowly back in. Another small trickle of blood appeared, running straight down the middle of her abdomen.

"My god that's incredible," I said, watching the blade again slip gradually and gently into her body. Her facial expression was also as before, and she gripped my arms tightly and periodically made soft little sounds of pain. Jerome continued until, again, about half the blade was buried, then stopped.

"I know," Lois said, still looking up at me. Her voice was strained, tight. I felt her fingers tighten more on my upper arms. "Go ahead, Jerome," she whispered, staring at my eyes. "Twist it." Jerome sighed, but he began turning the blade. "Ah! Oh!" she cried sharply, "Oh, god, mmph! Ah...!" Her eyes had flown wide open, and she was arching her trembling body. Groaning, letting out little cries occasionally, she turned her head from side to side as the knife continued to turn. Once again, I saw the blade pry open the clean elliptical slit in her body--but just for a moment before it was obscured by a large dome of blood, which welled up and began flowing steadily down, pooling in her navel and then running on.

"Ah, Lois, that must be hurting you terribly..." I muttered.

She stopped moving her head and focused on my eyes again. "It's agonizing," she whispered. "And it's exquisite." She bit her lip. "It is... exciting for you... isn't it?"

My cock, untouched, bounced. "Oh my god, yes," I told her. "I've never seen anything that even comes close."

Her head strained back as Jerome turned the knife further. "Oh, mmm, hurts so bad... so bad... mmmph! ...but it's all right, I don't care... I don't... ahhh!" Her body was utterly rigid, every muscle in her abdomen taut, her hands clamped tightly on my arms. I let go of her and grabbed both her breasts, squeezing them, letting her support herself by holding onto me.

Jerome had by then finished his quarter-turn and was again slowly forcing the knife in deeper. Bleeding much more than before, Lois raised her head and watched for a moment as it slipped on into her body. "Oh.... mmm..." she sighed. She took a very deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out. "Feels so soft... cutting into me, killing me... ah... so much blood..." She looked back up at me. "I'm dying, Brad..." she murmured. "Your Lois is dying..."

Still holding her breast with one hand, I touched her face with the other. "I know," I whispered back. "Dying beautifully."

She managed a trace of a smile even though the knife was by then fully buried. Jerome let go of it again, leaving it standing rigidly in her abdomen. He stroked her body tenderly. When he reached for her breasts, I moved my hands to give him access. He pinched both of her nipples gently and she sighed.

Then, without warning, he grabbed the knife and quickly pulled it up and out of her.

"Aaah!" she cried, her loudest noise yet. She gasped in air. Jerome reached for her, put his arm around her, and started pulling her back upright even before she'd recovered from the pain of the knife's removal. As blood spilled freely from this new wound, she let go of my arms and reached for him.

"I have to go faster now," he told her as she came back up toward him. "I can't last much longer." As he drew her toward himself, he planted the tip of the knife against her left breast, just under the nipple, and punched the point in. With a soft and sensual little cry she grabbed at his neck with her arms and pulled herself toward him.

"Do whatever you want," she told him. "However you want." Holding her tightly, he slipped the blade into her soft breast, going straight in and moving more quickly than before. "My body is yours," she whispered as the blade sank in deeper. "You can do anything you want to it."

He kissed her ear. The blade was fully in her chest by then, he had not stopped to twist it this time. She put her chin on his shoulder, choked, and blood ran from her mouth. Jerome pulled the knife to the side a little. Her body jerked violently as fresh blood spilled out.

He then pulled it straight out. She gasped; for a moment it seemed she couldn't breathe. Just as she sucked in air again, Jerome punched the point into the side of her chest behind her breast, between two ribs, and smoothly forced it in. Once it was in deep, he again he pulled it to the side, and a sudden heavy flow of blood ran down her side. She gasped and bounced on him as he started pulling it out, this time pulling it forward as it came so that it was cutting into her side. Several small rivers of blood streamed down over her ribs. Her eyes were again wide open but she no longer looked like she was in much pain.

"I'm cold," she complained. Her voice was very weak now. "So cold... I feel so sleepy..." She swallowed hard. "Stab me again," she whispered. "Stab me again, keep stabbing me until you've killed me..."

I knew the end was not far away. I changed positions, coming around behind Jerome so I could see her face, and cupped it with one of my hands. Blood was running steadily from her mouth, it seemed to me she'd lost an enormous amount of it already. She reached for my other hand and I clutched her fingers. She lifted her head, closed her eyes, and her mouth made a charming "O" as Jerome punched the knife back into her breast, squarely into her nipple this time, and again ran it in deep. Her fingers closed on mine with surprising strength.

"I have never," I said, gazing at her face as she straightened up again, "seen a death as beautiful as this one. Nothing even close."

She opened her eyes and looked at me. In spite of the fact that the knife was buried in her chest, she smiled. "You make me feel special," she said, gurgling the words a little. "You've always made me... feel special."

"Lois, god damn it, you are special." She took in a deep gasping breath, then let it out slowly. I wondered if she'd draw another.

She did. "Special women," she continued, "have to... die..." She frowned a little. "Hard to see you now..." She choked again and much more blood spilled over her lip. "Love..."

I started to tell her I loved her too, but at that moment Jerome groaned loudly, lifted his hips, and began shaking with orgasm. Amazingly, Lois stiffened too, her face flushing, her lips and eyelids rapidly swelling a little as she too climaxed. As he was coming, Jerome pulled the knife out of her breast and swiftly drove it back in again, under her breast this time.

Then he started to relax. As he did, Lois abruptly went limp, her hand falling away from mine, her eyes dropping closed. My vision blurred and I choked back a sob.

"She's not dead yet," I heard Jerome's voice say. "Just passed out. But she's so far gone she won't be coming back, I don't think." He turned his head to look at me. "We need to make sure, we need to finish it."

I nodded. "Yes."

"Her heart or her throat? Your choice, mate."

"Her heart," I said instantly, even though I was feeling a little confused, I hadn't expected to be asked to make any decisions.

"Hold her up," he directed. I did, holding her under her armpits. Her limp body felt oddly heavy. He tucked the point of the knife up under her breastbone, then ran it firmly up and in, driving it in very deep.

Even though he hadn't twisted it, blood exploded out. Her arms jerked, and one of her legs shot straight out. Her body quivered and her chest heaved violently twice. Her face remained peaceful, though, she did not show any sign of having regained consciousness. A small amount of urine fountained out, striking Jerome's belly, and her hands and feet moved for a moment without coordination.

Then she became still and the flow of blood slowed dramatically. She was not breathing; it was over. Jerome and I laid her out on the bloodstained blanket. He pulled his knife out of her, then checked her toe-tag.

"It says," he told me, "'For my husband, as he wishes.'"

I shook my head. "You're going to think I'm a fucking dinosaur," I said, "but I don't want to give her body to any charity for food and I don't want to eat her myself. Call it old-fashioned, but I want a funeral for her. I want the body embalmed, I'll take it back to the States."

Jerome patted my shoulder. "That's not old-fashioned, mate," he said. "That's romantic, and it's what I'd do in your shoes." He signaled to the camera crew director, who flipped out a cell phone. Just seconds later a flatbed Land-Rover appeared. Two men jumped down, placed Lois's bloody body on a stretcher and loaded it onto the truck, which left immediately. The next time I saw her, she was cleaned up, prettily dressed and made up, and in her coffin.

I had lost much of my erection by then, but still, Gina and Stevie, who'd remained very close the whole time, came up to attend me. Jerome, however, stopped them.

"Just one moment," he said, dragging on his swimsuit. "I have something to say, and it's important. I have not been entirely honest with all of you, and I want to change that, right now." He grinned. "And besides, it's time I get back to me duties."

"What are you talking about, Jerome?" Gina asked, frowning.

He dug into a small pocket in his trunks. "This," he said. He pulled out what looked like a business card and showed it to us. It was a photo-ID, metal, embossed. Jerome Ellison, it said. Clearly it was some sort of official government document or badge. I too frowned.

Then he flipped it over, and the other side showed the image of the Joker, as he might appear in any deck of playing cards.

I looked up at his face. I know I looked stunned. "You?" I demanded. "You, you're the Joker?"

He nodded. "Aye. For three years now."

"But... but... I don't understand, you could've told Lois to strip any time... killed her anytime..."

"No," he said firmly. "First of all, it's illegal, I can't tell a girl to strip and then kill her myself, that would lead to abuses. Second, it's not ethical. Third, I did not want to kill Lois, not unless she herself made the decision that that's what she wanted, all on her own. Your wife was one of the finest women I've ever known, Brad. I was hoping to love her, yes, and I can't even do that if she knows I'm the Joker, that's not legal or ethical either, what woman can refuse a man who can end her life on a whim? That, and only that, is why I misled you. In ways I'm not very happy about having killed her, the world lost something valuable today. I was telling you the truth when I said I had never killed a woman myself. I never have. I've caused the deaths of thousands by commanding them to disrobe, but your wife was the first woman I've ever killed with my own hands and she may be the last, you can't improve on perfection." As he spoke, everything made sense, the calls on the cell phone, his "inside knowledge" of the beach, the fact that the camera crew director seemed to know him. I also noticed that the crew had not left yet, but thought nothing of it. One of those crewmen brought him his long slim beach bag from the cabana, and he took it from the man.

"This is amazing," Stevie murmured. "You can't have sex with either of us now, either, can you?"

He shook his head. "No, not now that you know that I'm the Joker. Anyway, as I said, I've got to start being the Joker again, he's been out of operation on this beach a little too long. And I'm going to do that right now." He turned to Gina. "You've waited long enough," he said. "Take off your clothes, please. All of them."

The ponytailed blonde's eyes flew wide open. "But... but... I was hoping... I wanted to be beheaded, I really did, I dreamed..."

"That," Jerome said, interrupting her, "was an official order from the Joker. You cannot refuse."

Her shoulders slumped. "Yes, sir," she said meekly. She pushed down her bikini bottom, the only clothing she was wearing, and stepped out of it.

"Good," Jerome said, smiling at her affectionately. He then reached into that long beach bag and pulled out a Japanese samurai sword. "I've been lugging this thing around for two days, just for this moment," he commented. He then handed me the sword. "You know what to do."

Gina just stared for a moment, at Jerome, then at the sword, then at me. Finally, with a little shriek, she jumped at Jerome, embracing him tightly and smearing Lois's blood all over herself in the process. The director--this, apparently, was what the camera crew was waiting for--suggested that it would be better if her body--and mine--was not bloody. A young man with a cloth and pail stepped forward to clean her up, and a pretty young woman, topless, came to me. She giggled as she washed me down, taking care to clean my again-rising cock, and she kissed the tip of it playfully before she left me. While we were being cleaned up, the camera crew removed the heavily bloodstained blanket and replaced it with a new one.

Gina then came to me. She was smiling, delighted, bouncing about. Her deeply bronzed body was glistening with a thin sheen of oil her cleaner had applied, and her eyes shone brilliant blue. I wondered idly how there was still so much light, then realized the camera crew had set up lights; the sun was gone. Gina embraced me, kissed me, and lifted her left leg high. I caught it with my arm, she pushed forward, and my restored erection slipped inside her. She was amazingly wet.

"Oh," she whispered, moving on me. "Oh, god, oh, yes, you're going to do it, you're going to cut off my head... oh, Brad, there's no one I'd rather have do it..."

"Yes," I said, teasing her nipple. "I am. How do you want it, Gina? We've never talked about it. Tell me, and I'll do it as close to your fantasy as I can."

"Stand in front of me," she answered breathlessly. "I want to see your face, I want to see you swing the sword." She gave me several other instructions, some of which surprised me.

"Ready?" I asked her when she'd finished. "Ready to have your head cut off, ready to die?"

"You can't know how ready I am," she almost panted. She pulled off of me, then knelt down on the blanket, her knees far apart. She began playing with her nipple with her left hand and stroking her clitoris with her right. I pulled the sword out of its sheath, laid the sheath aside, and tested the edge with my thumb. It was razor-sharp. I stood squarely in front of her and raised the sword. Still smiling, she threw her head back, exposing her throat, and bounced her eyebrows.

And I swung it, from left to right, not very hard--as she'd requested, she said she wanted to experience it for a moment. It struck the left side of her neck and went in perhaps an inch or so. She frowned, her mouth falling open and her eyes dropping closed, as blood squirted out of the side of her neck. I waited, as she'd asked me to, until she opened her eyes and looked at me again--a matter of maybe five or ten seconds. She was rubbing her nipple and her clitoris in a frenzy. I posed for her for just an instant, the sword uplifted, then swung it from right to left, a much harder stroke. It passed cleanly through her neck, severing her head. It fell lightly, between her knees.

Blood shot up in twin streams from the stump of her neck, crossing in the air several feet above her body. Her body hardly moved. Her fingers kept working at her clitoris, as if trying to force a final orgasm, although her other hand fell limply away from her breast. As she'd asked me to, I quickly picked up her head and looked at her eyes. They were still moving about; and they focused on my face. Her lips formed a silent word, I believe it was "perfect."

Then her eyes started to glaze, the pupils expanding rapidly, the bright blue becoming a narrow ring surrounding blackness. Her body fell over rather suddenly and quietly, her legs pushing out. Urine flowed from between her legs as the bleeding from her neck dropped to a slow stream. As had become almost instinctive I checked her toe-tag and found that she'd donated her body to a place called Direct Care, an orphanage in Brisbane.

"Beautifully done, mate," Jerome said to me. "Keep the sword, maybe you'll find a time to use it again." He clapped me on the shoulder. "Take care, mate," he added.

Stevie came to me as I put Gina's head down. The little redhead wrapped her fingers around my cock, which was still almost fully erect. "Let me take care of this," she said, her tone urgent.

"Yes," I said. "But in the cabana." She nodded and we went in. I stretched out on the towels and she straddled me, riding me gently and slowly, her hands working at my chest, her eyes soft and full of understanding. Several times she came down to kiss me. Once of those times I held her tightly and ejected my semen into her, a unique orgasm that went on for a very long time. She then stretched herself out on top of me and we laid there together for quite a while. When we rose, Jerome was gone, the film crew and all their gear was gone, and Gina's body and head was gone. There weren't any bloodstains on the sand. Nothing was left but Stevie, myself, and a now-quiet night on a lovely Australian beach.

Stevie stayed with me that night, in the room Lois and I had shared. The next morning, we were awakened by a knock on the door, which turned out to be a young woman representing the resort, who needed some things to prepare Lois's body for a future funeral. Among other things, she needed clothing. I went to her closet and picked out a short green dress I knew was one of Lois's favorites and a pair of shoes. The woman asked for underwear but I refused, saying, truthfully, that Lois often did not wear any. I did give her a pair of Lois's favorite earrings--a gift from me a few Christmases back--and her wedding ring. After I'd signed the papers she offered me, she left. Stevie and I stayed in that room almost all day, we did not go out to the beach at all. I asked her her intentions and she assured me she had no plans whatsoever to take off her bottom on the beach and that she would run and hide now if she saw Jerome coming. She was, she said, determined to go back to the university, if for no other reason than to tell her other friends how beautifully the other four girls--and Lois--had died.

As Stevie was close to Lois's size, I told her to feel free to go through my wife's things and take anything she needed or wanted. In the process of doing this we found four letters, one to me, one to her parents, one marked as "family and friends in general," and one to her employer. The first three were similar, differing only in personal touches, stating her decision and laying out her reasons for it. Nothing was that much different from what we'd discussed that final day. The fourth letter, to her employer, merely informed them that she would not be returning to work and apologizing for not giving notice. I hadn't known she'd written any of these, she must've gotten up in the middle of the night to pen them.

I was not good company for Stevie in those days. Most of the time I was morose, even though the loss had not really registered as yet, I woke up each of those mornings at least half expecting to see Lois again, and at least once I cried bitterly when I realized she was gone for good. Stevie was very understanding, more so that was reasonable to expect. The little redhead took care of all my needs, sexual and otherwise. I asked her once why she bothered, and she said that, beyond having developed a real affection for me, she felt that real love was rarer in the world today than ever in the past, and that she admired--and even envied--the relationship that Lois and I had had.

She insisted that we go back to the beach the following day--my last day there--and we did, we spent the whole day and much of the night there. We witnessed two more kills and saw several dead bodies lying about, the beach was much more active than it had been when Lois and Gina were alive. We never knew if any of that was due to Jerome's activities or not, we never saw him again. Neither of the kills I saw were particularly interesting to me, although I knew that they would have been a few days previously. As Jerome had promised, the resort delivered several copies of the vids of Lois's and Gina's deaths. I did not view them, not then, but Stevie did and informed me that the quality was excellent, the cameramen had done exceptional work and the editing was award-winning. I gave her copies and she said she planned to show them to all her friends back at the university.

Finally my vacation came to an end and I left. Stevie was scheduled to leave the next day. We exchanged emails and promised to stay in touch. I flew back across the Pacific to the US and landed in a place that was, to me, far grayer and sadder than the one I'd left. After all the details had been attended to, after the funeral had been held and the letters disseminated, it became much grayer and sadder yet.

Those events took place almost three years ago. In many ways, I have not gotten over Lois. I miss her, sometimes very badly, and sometimes, still, I weep for my loss. I still love her and I always will.

On the other hand, I have viewed the video of her death at least a hundred times. Stevie was right, it's beautifully done, every detail can be seen clearly, I continue to be amazed at how well the cuts between Lois's impassioned face, Jerome's cock penetrating her, and his knife sliding into her body were done. I've shown it to probably a hundred people, as well, and it's rare for anyone not to say that it's one of the most erotic kills they've ever seen. I've masturbated to it, and sometimes I've watched it while a girlfriend is going down on me. It's the most erotic kill I've ever seen, too.

Yes, I have had girlfriends, several of them. I try to be as up-front with them as possible. I tell them that there is virtually no chance of my ever falling in love again, Lois was the love of my life and that will never change. I tell them, too, that if they become my girlfriends I won't keep them more than a year at maximum, at the end of which time I'll request their executions. Four have accepted this proposition, and three of them were executed in the public arena. The fourth, as a gift to me, sold herself into slavery to a friend who then transferred her ownership to me, so that I could kill her myself. I did so, in private, using the bronze-bladed knife Lois had bought for me in that shop at the resort. She asked for a quick death and I gave it to her. There was an inquest--irregularities were suspected--but nothing came of it, I was exonerated of any wrongdoing. I did not keep any of my girlfriends for more than nine months.

I've stayed in touch with Stevie, we email frequently, and she has visited me here in the States once. She'll graduate from college this year, with a degree in architecture. Throughout her college career, she has avoided having anything like a relationship with a boyfriend, although she has hardly been celibate and often regales me with tales of her sexual exploits. I am very fond of the little redhead, and I have invited her to come to the States and live with me, as my girlfriend, after her graduation. I have even told her that I'll marry her if she wishes, although I have been honest and told her that I am not, and cannot expect to be, in love with her.

I have also told her that if she agrees to this, I'll keep her between two and three years. At the end of that time, I'll take her back to that Special Beach in Australia--or to some other Special Beach or Impulse Park if she prefers--and kill her myself, using that same knife, reprising Lois's death as closely as I possibly can.

She says she's considering it.