Second Show

Sometimes, all Venus wanted was to be looked at.

Wait – let’s be clear here. She always wanted to be looked at. But occasionally, not too often, that was all she wanted. At those moments, her normal tastes in worship – stroking, licking, thrusting, obeying – fell away, and the rapt attention of a few dozen human eyeballs was all the tribute she required.

In the old days, of course, such a thing would never have occurred to her. She’d started life, way back in prehistory, as Goddess of both Love and War. To humans then, those two weren’t very different. Making love and making war in the ancient world were as mutual and as interdependent as conjoined twins.

How long ago that had been, Venus had forgotten. What she remembered was springing forth with her blonde hair and her perfect skin, and also with a spear and a predilection for inspiring men to kill each other. It had been a lot of work, being a goddess in those days.

She’d been happy to lose her war responsibilities after the Greeks fell. Rome recognized her true calling. The Romans gave her a new name that she liked better than her Greek one, and separated her from all her extraneous, more bloodthirsty responsibilities. She’d become, simply, Love Embodied, and gone happily about the world– or the Ancient part of it, anyway– dispensing her gifts, which were also her greatest pleasures.

And, some millennia later, she was still dispensing. She’d found her perfect venue, the only place in the modern world where her particular talents were still celebrated unabashedly, where the gifts she offered were still craved, where her beauty was still recognized as an end unto itself. Her entrance into a casino always caused an uproar, simply because she looked so good. No one knew she was a goddess, but in this place, with its singular morality, any woman who looked like her was treated as divine.

Of course, really, there were no other women who looked like Venus. She was, by definition, one of a kind.

So lust was what she lived for, but sometimes the acts of lust got in the way. Especially in these latter years, when clumsy human hands had to be involved. The touch she liked best, in any case, and the body she liked best to touch, were her own.

All she needed was an audience. Admiring eyes alone could give her a climax that would explode like the original Big Bang, erupting through her to whirl into stars and worlds and the whole cosmos. Venus, she thought, mother of galaxies. She liked that image.

Just now, she’d found a suitable venue for display and begun slowly exposed herself to the passersby. She didn’t just appear without warning, shocking them into screaming and running. She revealed herself, little by little. She was right in front of them, but they only saw her in glimpses at first, out of the corners of their eyes. Then she smiled at one. It turned out to be a little boy, years away from finding pleasure in women, but he recognized her anyway. Venus was universal, impossible not to know. She was written into his DNA. He gaped back at her, then pointed, goggling at his mother half in joy and half in uncertainty, unready for the wholeness of the goddess. She smiled once more and winked at him and retreated from his sight, and left the seed that would grow in his dreams for the rest of his life.

A moment later she chose another to share herself with, and she let him see her for longer, and then she exposed herself to a few more all at once. Before many minutes had passed, she’d revealed herself utterly. Immediately, a crowd gathered, as one always did when she allowed herself to be looked at. Humans couldn’t help themselves, Venus was everything they liked looking at. They– and she– were made that way.

“Holy cow,” one man breathed, just arrived in Vegas.

“Sh!” his girlfriend shushed him, jerking his forearm, retaining just enough awareness, herself, to insist on propriety. “Don’t stare!” They both fell silent then, and looked.

Everybody stared. People still passed, but they slowed, and more and more of them stopped. Venus leaned back and laughed in her low and subtle way, shimmying the sound through the air and caressing their ears, their cheeks, just as their eyes caressed her hair, her breasts, her thighs and ankles and stomach and wrists...

She could feel the pressure building, somewhere so deep down, it felt like it was in the ground below her. Her onlookers stoked the fires, built up the steam of the rush waiting, roiling, preparing to burst from her soon. She dropped her head back till her hair– bouncy, greedy for movement– brushed her elbows where she leaned on them, and she heard sounds of appreciation for her nipples, pointed to the sky, her chin, her soft, downy crotch.

“Very nice, Venus,” she heard.

She snapped her head around. Her cotton candy hair flew around her head and set off a few sparks in its depths, the discharge from all that built-up energy.

“You,” she said, low and angry as any soap opera diva facing her most hated rival.

“Me,” he responded conversationally. He stood at the back of the crowd, smiling and perusing her worshipers. The people still stared, still breathed, but were still. Not caught and immobile, like the victims of Vesuvius frozen for all eternity, but paused, on the verge of the next moment, like a raindrop trembling on a windowpane. They did not react as Venus pulled herself up, felt the boiling heat subside and a new warmth, made of anger and long-fermented resentment, took its place without pause.

“What are you doing here? This is–”

He smiled broader. “Very nice. They’re certainly enjoying you.” He gazed around and fastened on one young man, barely adult, who stared at her with his jaw hanging open.

“Stay away. They’re mine,” she hissed.

“Are they?” He blinked but didn’t look her way. He gazed at the crowd as if they were lobsters in a tank at the front of a seafood restaurant, a herd of wildebeest with the weak ones beginning to straggle.

By his side there stood a woman, who also looked at the crowd rather than Venus.

“Found a follower?” Venus spat.

He glanced at his companion. He laughed. “Oh no. But I will. I like Las Vegas.” A glint bounced off his teeth. Venus glared, speechless.

“Enjoy your little display,” he said as he turned away. He took the woman’s arm in his and started to lead her off again. “And I like your stage,” he added over his shoulder. “I always said you were a whore at heart.”

He was gone. The raindrop swelled and slipped, and the crowd rustled. Venus, forgetting them, stared after him and then down at the object she was lying on.

It was a vehicle, a nicely sized platform at the perfect eye-height for the worshipers she’d gathered. And this one was painted bright, shiny gold, which struck her as appropriate for an impromptu altar. But as she leaned over, she saw that there were words painted in clamoring colors all along its side.

Totally! Nude!! Showgirls!!!, they read.

Venus made an indeterminate, jagged, growling sound as she looked up again after Zem.

“Excuse me, Miss?” another voice interrupted her scowling– which still worked magic on the crowd, making all the men shift back and forth and all the women lick their lips. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to be, if you’re doing some sort of personal appearance for the club,” the speaker was taking his time, gazing at every inch of her, lying there, “but you can’t do it out here in the open without any clothes on.”

He was dressed in blue and black, leather and weapons. He bristled. Venus got distracted from looking for her nemesis and glared at him, instead.

“Sorry,” he shook his head, his eyes fastened on her thighs shining creamily and sweatily against the gold roof, “But I’m going to have write you a ticket.”

“Oh–” she growled, and grabbed his lapel.

“Miss?”

His voice cut off suddenly. And all the crowd around the limo blinked, wondering for a fraction of a second what had happened to the lovely girl they’d stared at, and the cop who’d been remonstrating with her. Both of them were gone, and then... the memory of them was gone, too.
Venus took the cop out of sight with her and forcibly forgot Zem and his words, along with any thoughts of what would come next or what she should do. The blue and black clothes ripped away easily, and the leather belts and harnesses became playthings in her experienced hands.

“Uh...” he faltered once more. She didn’t have to tell him to be quiet. Humans, especially human males, never could think of much to say to her once she got her fingers on their skin.



“What was going on back there?” the gypsy asked.

“Nothing,” Zem answered her. “Just an old friend.” He laughed, inexplicably.

“Really? That whole crowd–” she was frowning. There had been dozens of people, all glued to a single object, but she hadn’t been able to discern exactly what...

“Don’t worry about it. Ah– how about here?” He waved negligently at a four-star place called Pan’s, complete with carved grape arbors and miniature satyrs arching over the door. It lay to one side of the Olympus Hotel, part of its newest extension. “I’m staying here. I could have you up for a nightcap after dessert.”

“I’ll bet you’d like that.” She considered the restaurant. “Oh good,” she said. “The most expensive plate in Vegas, I hear. Are you sure you can afford this?” she added flippantly.

“Surely you wouldn’t settle for less,” he flirted.

She laughed, an echo of his gunshot guffaw from their reading. “I’d settle for a TV dinner. But I have the feeling you demand white table cloths and twenty waiters.”

He was eyeing the passersby, waiting for her. Not particularly interested in what she had to say, she thought. “Good service is what makes life worth living,” he commented.

“Is it. I don’t know. And we probably can’t get in here, anyway. I hear there’s a six week waiting list.”

“They’ll make room,” he said as he swept her inside.

NEXT UP: THERE'S GOT TO BE A MORNING AFTER (Monday 8/17)