The Box (The Temple of the Blind #1)

  Chapter 21

  They didn’t discuss the sex room as they approached it. Brandy had already removed her glasses and was stuffing them into her purse. She was still afraid of this room, but at the moment the only alternative to going through it was to go back to where that creature was, and even the fear room sounded like a better option than that. She grasped Albert’s cold hand and led him through the doorway.

  Albert closed his eyes and tried hard not to think of what they’d done in here. Hopefully they could cross this room as easily as they crossed the hate room just a little while ago.

  But as the dark shapes began to swim around her, Brandy began to realize that this room was different from the other two. She could not see the pornography around her, but she remembered it. That gray blob over there was a woman on her knees, performing oral sex on a man who looked like he might kill her if she stopped. One of the woman’s hands was stuffed between her thighs, touching herself. The very memory of that statue gave her a nervous knot in her stomach. Desire swam up from some dark place deep inside her. She was disgusted to realize that she wanted to put her glasses back on and look at it again.

  Nearby was another shape she remembered: A woman on her hands and knees, clawing at the stone beneath her as a man took her from behind. Her expression was agonizing ecstasy. Beyond that, she could still somehow see a woman straddling a man’s face, her fingers buried in his hair as she ground her hips against him. It seemed that she must be suffocating him, but he didn’t appear to be concerned with escaping. In fact, he appeared to be pulling her closer.

  She tried to move between the statues without looking at them, but even from the corners of her eyes, the obscene shapes teased her.

  She couldn’t escape it. Everywhere she looked, another statue reformed itself from murky shadows into vivid memories. And it was far too easy to picture herself in these women’s places, enjoying the same insatiable pleasures. She didn’t want to lose herself again to that uncontrollable lust, but she could feel the wanting. It was so hard to resist, especially when it was so easy. All she had to do was turn around and she could have him again…

  “Albert…”

  “Right here.”

  “Oh, Albert…”

  “What is it?”

  “Not working…” She stopped, her knees pressed together against the terrible wanting in her body. She bent forward, breathing rapidly. “I can still see it.” Though she was terrified, she found that she wanted. She craved it. It was like a nicotine addiction, only so much more intense.

  “No! Close your eyes!”

  “I did…” She turned toward him, letting go of his hand, and groped for that part of him that she wanted so much, the part of him that was meant for giving her pleasure. She needed that part of him.

  It was already beginning to grow erect—his memories of the room did that much by itself—but her touch was an instant stimulant. The feel of her fingers on his skin was more than he could bear. He wouldn’t be able to resist her for long, even without looking at the statues.

  Albert wanted to open his eyes. He wanted to see those statues. For the first time in his life, he understood how sex could be an addiction, how some people could fall into such a darkness of sexual wanting. Every muscle in his body was tense with yearning.

  He tried to remember the thing in the round room, tried to remind himself that it might still be behind them, slowed, but not stopped. Right now it could be charging down that tunnel after them, but it seemed to matter less and less with each stroke of Brandy’s slender fingers.

  He wanted to open his eyes so badly. He wanted to see the statues. He wanted to see Brandy. He wanted to look at her, to see her in the throes of ecstasy. He grabbed her wrist, but he didn’t have the will to actually make her stop what she was doing. God help him, he wanted to let her do it. He wanted to take her right there, and he knew he would not last much longer. If they lost control inside this room, they might never get out. They might just go on and on until their hearts gave out from exhaustion. Inside this room, there would be no regaining control.

  That was it!

  He opened his eyes, let in the world around him and snatched the flashlight from Brandy’s trembling hand. Immediately that hand dropped to her groin, to that part of her that needed so badly. He yanked her wrist from his manhood so hard that she scratched him with her nails, but he hardly noticed the pain through the pleasure. He bolted for the door, dragging her along, and did not stop until they burst from the mouth of the sex room door.

  When he was clear of the chamber, he turned and kissed Brandy hard on the mouth, savoring the feel of her lips, the taste of her tongue, attacking her with the full drive of the sex room. She moaned with want and as they dropped to the floor she kissed him again and again, begging him between each one to take her.

  They shared sweet, quick intercourse on the cold, stone floor as the erect sentinels watched with apparent delight. He ran his hands over her body, thrusting with forceful passion that began to quickly melt into a gentler, lovelier thing. Brandy’s orgasmic panting also slowed, becoming a softer, smoother sound, less a moan than a purr.

  The orgasm was intense, but it was not the same as those they’d experienced inside the sex room. No longer did only the next one matter. Now they both savored just the one and it seemed to last and last as the world around them slowed to a stop. For Albert, this was his first time. The last time was meaningless, but this…this was perfect.

  After they finished, Albert lay atop her for a moment, listening to her breathing, feeling the rise and the fall of her chest, the warmth of her skin, the hot wetness of her sex, her hair against his face. He could smell her. She was like apples and perfume. At last, he lifted his head and gazed at her, embarrassed.

  She was smiling back at him. That was a good sign.

  “I’m sorry,” he said lamely.

  She shook her head. “That was a good idea.”

  “I thought maybe if I could just make myself wait until we got out here, we’d be okay. Even if we did it, maybe once would be enough.”

  “I think if you hadn’t taken me here, I’d have gone back in.”

  Albert was still on top of her, still inside her even. God she was warm down there. “I guess I should get off of you now.”

  She smiled, but did not speak.

  Albert rose and they both gasped a little when he slipped out of her. He then knelt beside her, looking at her. She was lying with her arms and legs spread apart as though she were in the middle of making a snow angel, her breasts flattened against her chest, her soft eyes gazing back at him. She was so beautiful.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, not sure what else to say, and picked up the flashlight he’d dropped when he gave in to the lust.

  “Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault. It was that room. We can’t expect not to want each other like that.”

  Albert felt relief that she was not angry with him this time, but at the same time his heart was torn in half. She was taking it all as a result of this place, of this strange underground temple. Whatever happened down here, as terrifying or as wonderful as it may be, was all just illusions from a temple full of faceless sentinels.

  Brandy sat up and dug her glasses out of her purse. She was visibly calmer somehow, despite their near run in with the thing in the round room and the terrors they’d faced all through the night.

  Albert also felt better, but only in some ways. Now he felt like his whole world was bending into an orbit around Brandy Rudman and he was terrified of what may lie ahead for him. What they just did had merely intensified a feeling he’d been trying very hard to suppress, a feeling that admittedly began even before they set foot in the first tunnel. “I guess we should keep moving,” he said, trying not to think about the loneliness of the life he’d left behind at midnight, the same life to which he would soon be returning. Would they go back to being nothing mo
re than lab partners again? “I guess that thing didn’t follow us or we wouldn’t have gotten this far, but we don’t know that for sure.”

  Brandy nodded. She stood up and took his hand. Together they walked out of the room. It seemed fitting to them both, after what they’d just done, that the sentinels along the walls were slowly wilting, their excitement dying away.

  Ahead of them lay the first room of this strange, underground labyrinth. Beyond that awaited the tunnels that would lead them back up to the city.