Another Kind of Fetish?

We've all heard of voyeurs, but Marina St. Clare's expose of the secret life of musicians over at Jeremy Edwards' blog yesterday--a response to his lovely "Warming the Bench," an Oysters and Chocolate tale of a very harmonious duet in a practice room--got me thinking about another flavor of sexual pleasure. This one doesn't have an official name, so I'll give it my own French twist. If voyeurs find pleasure in watching the sexual behavior of others, the "auditeur" finds pleasure in listening.

I can't say that listening to another couple's sensual sounds is something I seek out, rather it has been thrust upon me now and then through thin walls. At first I usually find it embarrassing, but, since in most cases I've been a captive audience, I gradually get into the rhythm. One very memorable set of encounters happened the second time I lived in Japan. My neighbor and her boyfriend were very loud on occasion, usually at two in the morning. Separated from my new husband by an ocean, I lay in my futon listening with envious annoyance. Yet eventually I realized it was language study of a rare and important kind! And, just for the record, while the Japanese couple made beautiful music together and obviously had a wonderful sex life, they were both quite homely--but an auditeur need not worry about such things. He or she is freed from the tyranny of the visual.

And of course, now that I write erotica and read it out loud whenever I have the chance, I've come to appreciate a new variation on the experience of the auditeur, which, to be catholic about it, includes phone sex, podcasts, public readings of my work and other auditory media.

Marina's comment also reminded me of a scene from my story, "John Updike Made Me Do It" from Swing!: Adventures in Swinging by Today's Top Erotica Writers, the newly released and very hot anthology edited by Jolie du Pre. I thought it might be fun to give you an auditeur's excerpt in honor of the power of sound. I'll also be posting Marina's stimulating report from the practice room here tomorrow. If you have any of your own auditory excerpts to share, let me know. We can have our own fetish festival right here!

From "John Updike Made Me Do It":

Aural Orgy

We finally got to the cabin in King’s Beach around eleven. Good old Jill was waiting up for us in the kitchen with a pot of cinnamon tea.

“Sorry about the bad luck with the weather, you guys.”

“No problem,” Nick said, giving Jill a peck on the cheek. “Maria and I had a nice long talk in the car.”

“Actually there’s another little complication tonight. I thought this place had three bedrooms, but the third queen bed is the sleeper sofa in the living room. Katharina and Jurgen took the bedroom on the other side of the house and they’ll be walking through your room to get to the bathroom.”

Nick and I exchanged glances. That could put a damper on the sex part of our holiday weekend—unless we decided to live dangerously.

“And…um,” Jill began with an apologetic smile.

“What is it now, Jilly-bean?” Nick said, in not-quite-mock annoyance. In fact, they did act a lot like brother and sister.

“So, you know how Germans are more comfortable with their bodies than Americans?”

Nick shot me a what-the-fuck grin. We were both a bit punchy from the drive.

“Just so you’re prepared, sometimes Katharina and Jurgen walk around the house in the nude.”

We held our laughter until we were snuggled together on the sofa bed, snowflakes still battering the windows.

“Beware the naked Germans,” Nick whispered as I muffled my giggles in his shoulder. His hands slipped under my nightshirt and he slowly, teasingly inched it up over my breasts.

“Hey, are you sure you want to do this? A naked German might walk in on us any minute.”

“We can pull them into bed with us. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Without waiting for my answer, Nick scooted under the blankets and eased open my thighs. He knew once he got to work with his mouth down there, I’d stop arguing.

Sure enough, the instant his tongue met my clit, jolts of familiar pleasure shot through me. I arched back on the bed, but remembered where we were just in time to swallow down a moan. However, to be honest, the thought of fucking in a semi-public place where a stranger might see us turned me on in a big way. Besides, keeping quiet seemed to increase the sensation, sounds of my pleasure trapped and throbbing in my belly. My mind was teeming with images, too, fragments from the evening all tumbled together like trail mix. Nick fucking Grace, while Heather rode his face, their sweat-slick breasts swaying as they writhed in ecstasy. I watched the lewd scene before me while Jill’s faceless German friend groped my nude body, pinching my nipple, twisting it, just as Nick was doing in real life now.

I bit the corner of the pillow to keep from crying out. Every moist click of his tongue, every creak of the cheap mattress as I rocked my ass up for more, seemed to roar in my ears like a jet engine.

They could hear everything. They all knew exactly what we were doing.

Suddenly I heard a soft knocking filtering down from Jill and Ben’s room in the loft. Tap, tap, squeak. It took a moment before I realized what it was: a headboard nudging the wall, another mattress protesting under the thrusts of joined bodies.

Ben must have been waiting up for Jill. He had to watch the German woman parade around naked all evening and he was desperate for release. Jill was now paying for her friend’s provocation as she lay beneath her husband’s big body, his dick sliding in and out of her swollen, pink pussy. Tap, tap, squeak.

My thighs began to shake. I was close. Nick pulled away and rose to his knees, guiding his cock into my very wet cunt.

He bent forward and his lips closed over mine. We began to move together in our familiar rhythm, making love as we always did. Except tonight we had company.

Tap, tap, squeak.

Now another voice joined the chorus, a low feminine moan, with a hint of Bach. Jill’s friends from Bonn were fucking, too. On top of the blankets, of course, their nude bodies fully exposed. The heady mix of sex sounds swirled through my head in an aural orgy, dancing down my spine to gather in my cunt.

We’re all fucking. Together. Friends, strangers, fucking, coming.

It was too much.

I climaxed, my teeth biting into the pillow. Nick was right behind me, his face twisted in a mute grimace of pleasure.

A few moments later the knocking above and the moans from the front room subsided. I heard six pairs of lips exhale in a collective sigh of carnal contentment.

John Updike couldn’t have planned it better.