Chapter 3: Living With Lascivious Livia

The next three months of my life are busy ones. Livia trains me in stage magic — not to nearly her degree of skill, but enough that I can participate competently in the show. She’s a harsh and demanding teacher — things in the Scandal Show have to be perfect for her to be satisfied, and she focuses obsessively on getting all the little details right. I didn’t expect how rigorous the training would be, but I take to it well. My life prior to this had grown indulgent and lackadaisical; I had become stagnant. Men need structure to grow. I thus find my new boss’s rigor and professional demands refreshing.

Having a centerfold as a teacher probably provides some motivation, too — especially one I officially have permission to flirt with. (I mean, I totally would anyway, but still... ) It’s not long before I’m a genuine magician’s assistant — the sexy kind, of course. That’s pretty cool. Like a lot of pickup artists, I have an interest in self-improvement, so expanding my horizons is always a positive thing for me. It’s a really optimistic time — I no longer feel my life is stalled; something new is happening.

I also learn the skills of a grip and gaffer — for those not in on the Hollywood lingo, grips are people who move things around on a film set, and gaffers are movie-specific electricians responsible for wiring on set. Livia actually hires a film veteran to teach me for two weeks. Both hats come very quickly to me — I’ve got a history in trades, and unlike many glamour-focused men I’m not at all averse to a little manual labor. I’m proud, honestly, to be the show’s heavy lifter — it makes me feel both masculine and productive. Livia ogling me covetously whenever I work up a sweat is a nice side-perk — I work shirtless whenever believable, and not just for the reasons of comfort in the Australian heat that I share with her.

Once the show acquires support staff, I will end up as the key grip for the show, training said staff in how to set up a location for filming. Casual blue-collar hires often don’t take Livia as seriously — they try to flirt with her and ignore her instructions, so having a dominant male organizer is good for the show. The leadership aspect is more novel to me than the labor aspect — but I’m charismatic and a natural leader. Or so I’m told, at least. The leadership’s in the future, though — for now, it’s just the three of us.

I live with Livia and Mimi in the Beast, getting my own room — nothing as opulent as Livia’s, and really a fairly cramped space. I do, however, get an enthusiastic approval from Livia to use her crib for hookups any time I want — provided I don’t mind her taping the results. Kinky!

We agree that anything she tapes would be for her private collection — I have no problem with the idea of there being a sex tape of me circulating; it can only serve to improve my profile. But most of the ladies I pull would not be up for that. I’m sleazy enough to make secret tapes of an encounter, but not enough to let them get out and hurt a partner’s reputation. Livia even offers to show me choice selections from said private collection if I get her something hot enough. That’s tempting, but I blow it off for now.

I don’t progress with seducing Livia much in this time. I could — I probably could bang her by the end of the first month — but we are both people that appreciate the chase, and we’re going to be in close quarters for the foreseeable future, so I don’t want to use up the sexual tension too quickly. I know I need to wait for the perfect setup to actually ‘capture’ her the way she seems to want.

So, you’re probably wondering about Life with Lascivious Livia™. It’s not actually as over-the-top as you might expect — she’s a character, for sure, but she can also be down-to-earth. You all, O Impressionable Readers, have only seen her larger-than-life stage persona. It’s not entirely fake, but it also doesn’t give a good picture of her day-to-day existence.

First, Livia wasn’t kidding about the prop thing. I quickly learn she’s some kind of perfectionistic, perverted polymath. She’s incredibly driven, systematic and meticulous for a woman whose basic motive is weird kinky indulgence. We always imagine libertines to be laid-back slacker types, but Livia demolishes that archetype. She’s a technical thinker at heart — the type of nerd that, even if charismatic, has a rough time in casual social interaction. She’s the perfect mark for the ‘magic formula’ angle on pickup artistry — the sort of person that wishes sex appeal was procedural rather than interpersonal.

It’s obvious to me after spending some time with her that she’s a deadly serious workaholic devoted to running a very silly, sexy show. For me — at this point, at least — this is all a lark; a novel experience with lots of opportunities to meet hotties and get laid. It’s also Livia’s odd, perverted dream, though, and I resolve not to be insensitive to how much this seems to mean to her.

At least she’s not neurotic. The stereotype about stand-up comics is supposed to be that they’re all some combination of neurotic, angsty and misanthropic in their personal lives, right? You know, the tears behind the laughter and all. I wouldn’t say that about Livia. She’s a bit OCD and has her melancholic periods, but overall really is sunny, impish and wildly oversexed.

The other thing I learn about her is how deeply Livia wants. She was being completely candid with me in our first long conversation. Her libido rivals my own. It burns inside of her like a whirling dynamo, powering her stage charisma and drive to make her peculiar show-concept not just a success but perfect.

I’m so used to girls being sexually naïve — caterpillars that have to be carefully cultivated into the chrysalis of exploring their own sexuality and discovering the depth and peculiarity of their own carnal needs. Livia’s self-assured, goal-oriented sexuality is refreshing to me even if its intensity can seem faintly threatening at times. I’ve never met a woman as methodical or process-oriented in fulfilling her intimate desires as Livia is.

What she wants isn’t just cock, or pussy, or exceptionally attractive partners. Fetishes are games and novelties to me — ways to spice up sex and keep it interesting. To Livia, they’re basic needs. She hungers for very complex, fetishistic scenarios of trickery and teasing that all tie back on some level to the primal scene she described to me of the magician stealing the girl’s bra.

I’ve always been about experiencing each new conquest as a distinct individual, a person with her own foibles and quirks inside the bedroom and out. Livia’s less concerned with her partners as people than she is with the fetish archetypes they can be cast into. Like a lot of more serious fetishists, Livia also struggles with intense frustration. When she gets near her perfect moment and it goes off in a different direction or the victim isn’t wearing the right thing or doesn’t respond the right way, she perceives it as a veritable tragedy and grows embittered and melancholy. She recovers, though — she dresses down for a while and locks herself in the prop labs and focuses obsessively on crafting things, and after a few days she’s back to her cheerful old self again.

Funding is an issue for us. I can’t imagine what the Great Beast had cost to purchase, but even its upkeep is substantial. I know that profits from the NFL half-time have gone into the Beast, and apparently much of Mimi’s life savings as well; she’s “all in” with Livia’s dreams to a degree that honestly makes me a bit uncomfortable at this point.

There are also apparently some some “wealthy private investors” whose involvement may have been secured through Livia’s sexual wiles. It is mysterious, and vaguely sinister, to me. I get a four grand speakers’ fee for my SexCon panels, and Livia gets ten for the four shows she did there culminating in the Taurus Escalation. SexCon apparently fined her two grand for the smoke bombs and vanishing act at the end. I put the SexCon money into the Spectacular, since Livia was apparently responsible for me getting the gig to begin with.

I have substantial residuals from my books — they were both bestsellers for a few weeks the year each was published — but they have also been depleted in my decline by a moderate and lackadaisical lifestyle. And I have a small stipend from my family to never cause them trouble. So I work for three months without actually getting paid — not a big deal to me in my position; my expenses have never in my life been this low — but I don’t drop any personal funds into the kitty. Yet.

One night in the middle of January, I awake with a start to feel very tiny, very sharp legs digging into my abs. I tear off the covers — and experience a moment of surreal terror, being uncertain if I am asleep or awake, faced with a visual image so dissonant I’m paralyzed for a few seconds as my mind struggles to process it.

A... thing stares up at me. It’s about six inches long, chitinous and has something like a vertical crab’s pincer where any creature put together in a sane way would have a head. Initially, I think it is some kind of plastic child’s toy — it’s only when I look carefully, and realize it is very much organic, and alive, that the true terror begins. An insect, or a crustacean, or perhaps an alien parasite looking to burrow its way into my body and eat my spinal cord. It stands on my naked torso, arching its carapace insolently at me.

The fact that it is dyed hot pink and metallic purple, and its carapace is patterned with ornate psychedelic swirls, does nothing to conceal its Gigeresque anatomy or the sheer surreal horror of its inexplicable presence. In fact, I think it may be heightening both.

I raise a clenched fist up in growing panic to crush the abhorrent creature — and then I remember the scene from Dr. No with the tarantula, and why Bond didn’t just crush it. So I stand very still and study the creature. Eventually I can see the brush-marks where its shell has been painted in such colorful patterns. This isn’t some otherworldly predator; it’s someone’s eccentric pet. Given the color scheme, it only takes me a moment to figure out the most probable owner.

I pick up a manila folder from my bedside table, hoping to get it off my torso and on to the cardboard. I blow on it slightly, hoping to nudge it forward. With shocking speed, the twin sections of its carapace split apart and it spreads its wings. They make a ferocious sound like a jackhammer, and the creature leaps into the air — it must have cleared a good four meters in the blink of an eye.

I scream like a girl. (I’m not suave all the time, you know — just most of the time.)

When I manage to force my panic back down, I shout for the party I am pretty sure is responsible. “Mimi! MIMI! Get your ass to my room NOW!”

I hear a muffled shout back. “Ass coming pronto, Marcie!”

A minute passes. This ... neon aberration perches on top of a green-lidded, retro-style banker’s lamp with an ornate and vaguely Gothic bronze frame on top of my dresser in the cramped room, and I end up engaged in a kind of staredown with my unexpected, surreal nemesis, Sergio Leone style.

A minute later, Mimi opens the door. She’s wearing a frilly pink babydoll, and it’s faintly translucent. I can almost see her nipples. Yes, I notice that. I might only be suave most of the time, but let’s be honest here — I’m a horndog 24/365.

“Mimi ... is that yours?”

“Ooh! Marc, meet Keith Rand Buchanan. Keith, this is Marcelo Ambrose Knight, our staff pickup artist. He’s hyper-awesome, and a real sweetie. You two should be friends!”

“Flattery stops working when my heart rate clears one forty, Mimi!”

“Sorry. He must have got out of his case. I had to put him in isolation. He and David Byers Tannen are both alphas, you see, and they fight, and it messes up the dye-work on their horns so I had to separate them last Tuesday. The new wing of the Grand Manor must not have been sealed properly...”

“Mimi ... what is it?”

“Keith Rand Buchanan.”

“Mimi!”

The creature apparently gets startled when I shout. It hops down from the lid of the lamp — and kicks the two-pound desk lamp over defiantly. Yikes!

“Umm ... Keith is a Hercules beetle, Marcelo. I keep them as pets.”

“The, uh, the lamp...”

“They can lift eight hundred times their own body weight.”

“Right. Of course they can. Silly me.”

“Also, I, um ... make have made use of certain legally ambiguous hormone-steroid cocktails to breed them for size...”

“Why is it ... er, why is he pink?”

“I dye and style them. Don’t worry, it’s a safe organic dye that doesn’t cause keratin irritation, and I’m very careful about the wings and —”

“I don’t care, Mimi. Can you get him out of my room?”

“Sure.”

So Mimi goes over and makes cooing noises at the eldritch atrocity in pink. I would be irritated, but she needs to bend over to do so, and as she does, she ... dangles. So I bring out my inner voyeur and let it gently massage my heart-rate back to a healthier level. Eventually, Mimi entices the beetle into the palm of her hand, and we walk to a normally-locked closet. Above tightly-packed dresses, sexy costumes and other clothes there’s a shelf, and on that shelf is an ornate, miniature Antebellum mansion. I actually noticed that earlier, a few times — it’s very finely-crafted, with a lot of detail work — but I never noticed that it was inhabited.

Now, I see another beetle — this one dyed in shades of metallic blue — peek out at me from one of the windows. It ... is wearing a little, beetle-sized black felt top hat. The absurd image burns itself into my mind. Tally ho, motherfucker! I’m a beetle, I can lift 800 times my body weight, and I’m wearing a hat like the Monopoly guy because my owner is a bimbo with too much time on her hands!

I can already tell life with the Sexy Scandal Spectacular will be many things, but predictable is not going to be one of them.

In early February we drive the Beast down to Surfer’s Paradise, an Australian surfer town and tourist mecca vaguely similar to Fort Lauderdale in the US. You have to love Queensland weather — hot days top twenty degrees in February, with colder ones around fifteen. One of the city’s iconic attractions is its bikini-clad meter maids — ladies who patrol the streets paying up the parking meters of cars about to incur a ticket. It’s a scheme by the local tourism board that has blown up and attracted a lot of media interest and tourist revenue.

Many of them are amateur models eager for exposure. I can say from personal experience many of them are gorgeous, with their bronze-tanned skin, trim athletic bodies and gold lamé bikinis. They wear big cowboy hats and sashes with the words “meter maid” on them, making them look like contestants in a cowgirl beauty pageant. A few of them hate the work or are just puritanical, but many of them are party girls and libertines. Queensland is one of the most conservative regions of Australia, and Livia believes that a lot of bi and gay girls here deny their own sexuality. She and Mimi hope to “educate” some of them in a rather intimate manner.

Interspersed with my magic training, I’m apparently going to get some field experience — we’re going to run a racket on the meter maids. We invent an amateur gameshow that we call “You Bet Your Bikini”, which is exactly what it sounds like. The maids aren’t supposed to get naked on the job, obviously. But we have a clever scheme.

Mimi hacks the tourism board employment database and the local college’s enrollment lists. Many maids are just paying their way through college, and plan to leave Surfer’s Paradise once they graduate. So we compile a long list of names and pictures of meter maids that will have “nothing to lose” in five months, and correlate it against mentions on scene BBSes to find the party girls and wild types.

Then we use our access to the shift rosters to park a rented van — not our huge Neoplan, obviously — where the girls we want would pay for it. It helps that our party girl marks hang together in cliques, so we can grab a bunch at once. Running pickup on them is ridiculously easy. They want exposure, and we offer them two hundred each (plus any prizes they might win) with a clause on the model release forms saying the footage wouldn’t be released in the next six months or damages will be paid. I’m in a black Speedo with Ray-Bans and my Triskelion and Livia’s in a tight, pink spandex one-piece. I think our marks want me as much as they want exposure.

We film six episodes with three or four girls each. That’s over forty exposed nipples, folks! It’s a simple trivia quiz show, with the girls against each other; in the later three episodes we reconfigured the format to fit what the girls seem to want most — I am a contestant and they can compete to try and strip me, as I can them. God, my new life kicks ass. Livia takes a maniacal, almost supervillain-esque glee at using me as bait to separate cute girls from their clothing. Her energy is just infectious.

The show is built from the ground up to become a promo reel — to be released for free to promote one of the big shows we intended to be an Escalation — and for late-night public access broadcast, censored, with an infomercial to buy the real tapes. We coach many of the girls to be more coy and demure than they might otherwise be about losing their tops, giving the resulting footage far more sexual tension and transgressive thrills, and Livia affirms her chosen epithet by providing some deliciously lascivious one-liners as the tight lamé bikinis pop off.

And yes, there are some glorious hookups. I bring a busty meter maid back to Livia’s crib and have the pleasure of being her first introduction to anal sex. I hear from Mimi that the fresh-faced young Chinese girl Livia brings back to her hookup den proves to be depressingly straight, but does agree to some erotic hypnosis and apparently leaves with an entirely consensual post-hypnotic suggestion to have a body-wracking power orgasm whenever a guy she considers cute smacks her ass.

I actually track her down to test out this rumor, trailing her from a distance until a cocky surfer smacks her and she collapses writhing as he runs off. I help her up chivalrously, and brazenly ask the deep-breathing nymphet if she feels she ought to be spanked for such a lewd public display.

She agrees, and the results are quite pleasurable for said young lady, and quite appealing for me to watch. I walk away with a big grin on my face, a new phone number to call and a damp spot on my slacks where she ground against me as the pleasure overcame her. Hypnotism fascinates me at this point, and its apparent power makes Livia seem even more captivating.

There’s one episode of YBYB that stands out above all others, however. Its star is a cute half-Maori optometry student I lure in named Whina. (Early editions of our tapes list it as ‘Fina’ — sorry about that, sweetie! Sincerely! We only ever hear it verbally, we all end up a bit distracted given what goes down when she signs the final model release, and she never initially corrects it. We do get it fixed much later in the remasters, at least.)

She’s about my height, with dark black eyes, luxuriantly smooth golden skin that contrasts amazingly with gold lamé, all-natural C-cups and short, curly black hair. She’s very demure and shy, but also deeply horny — her Aura is radiant. She giggles nervously a lot and seems very eager to please everyone around her — especially me, even if she can’t keep her eyes off my body whenever I’m near her.

It’s the thin, long, devilish sideways smile she constantly flashes that makes her so intriguing to me. It says to me, I want to do wicked things I’ve never done before, but I’m just too shy. I need someone to talk me into it, guide me through it. Would you do that for me? Yes, baby — I sure would. She’s like a naughty moon to Livia’s naughty sun: demure, passive and meek where Livia is bombastic, lecherous and brassy, yet still conveying a deeply-embedded horniness and sexual need.

She doesn’t talk a lot, but her blissful smiles speak volumes about the private, nasty images running through her mind as we film. She proves to be incredibly susceptible to my Eyefucking — and really seems to love it. I can tell her private imagination is running away with the subtly lewd hints I seed into her subconscious with my gaze and body language, and I wish I was privy to the details of what she’s visualizing.

She isn’t the first to lose her bikini top — and sadly for Livia, shows no interest in her friends getting naked. When she finally blows a question, she hesitates, almost panting, before untying her gold top to reveal her perfect caramel teardrops and plump black nipples. She’s sweating, squirming and giggling — clearly embarrassed to be topless, but also incredibly aroused. I think she’s both a strong exhibitionist and a strong submissive.

After losing her top, she competes fiercely to get me naked. She really has no chance, though, when I can annihilate all conscious thought in her mind with a simple gaze. She constantly covers her chest with her hands defensively, which only makes it all the more alluring to me and Livia — though we do talk her into doing some jumping jacks to please the more mainstream audience. Livia even cheers her on. “Bounce, baby, bounce!”

Her chest can’t help but obey. Her modesty is strong, but her desire to please people — and, honestly, to obey me — is stronger. She can’t resist it. I think she enjoys that feeling of helplessness, honestly. Livia clearly loves her predicament as well, vibrating in place with excitement.

Well, predictably, she ends up botching a question with her bottoms on the line. She’s simultaneously mortified and aroused by that, and toys with the strings nervously. She’s a magnificent natural tease without even trying to be. She pulls the string bow on her bottoms undone and lets them hang there, staring at me desperately, covering her dangling boobies with one arm. Black bush peeks enticingly over the line as her gold bottoms slide slowly down and hit the floor. Her fellow contestants giggle at her expense.

She looks directly at me. “Do you like my body, Mister Knight?”

Yes, I sure do. But Livia is right beside me and almost giddy, and I can’t resist the temptation to impress her a bit. “Yes, Whina, you’re just gorgeous. Mimi, get a long slow pan up her body, would you? But first ... Whina, can you stand a bit more naturally?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re covering your chest again and you’ve got you legs clamped so tightly together. Could you run your hands through your hair and get your feet in a bit of a wider stance?”

She knows exactly what I mean. I use my eyes and give her a little lewd incentive to show us more. She raises her hands to her head and gives me and the camera a nervous smile, giggling awkwardly. Her nipples are so hard right now. She’s sweating slightly, and it makes her golden complexion positively radiant. Her legs start to slide apart, and we get a much more explicit look at the black bush and golden lips between them.

The camera gradually climbs up her body. I’d like it to catch her with an especially aroused and erotic look on her face when it reaches there, however. I stare at her and thrust my body forward subtly. Yeah, baby — imagine it sliding in, just like that! Wouldn’t that feel so good for you right now? I know it would feel pretty good for me...

Making Whina squirm is so very much fun, and I can see she enjoys it as much as I do. Unfortunately — or rather, fortunately — I push things a bit too far. Whina’s gaze is locked on mine, living out a somatic-tactile fantasy with me, when her eyes go wide and she gasps loudly. Her hands snap down to cover her chest once more. Mimi wisely focuses out, back into a full body shot. And then, well ... she just can’t control herself. Whina falls on her cute little butt, legs splayed, and pops off like a vigorously-shaken bottle of champagne.

Yes. I not only made a girl come with just my eyes, I made her squirt. I mean, until now I wasn’t even sure that was a real thing outside pornos! Her whole body trembles as she hoses down the pavement with the byproducts of her overly fertile imagination. I swear to God, I did not know she was such an epic squirter until she involuntarily demonstrated it right there in the middle of our tacky amateur game show on a public beach. Oops! That little accident and its furiously blushing aftermath makes for one of the best “woah!” moments we have on film to date.

As soon as Livia is alone with me, she abandons her poise and signature coy sophistication — trading it in for high-pitched girlish giddiness. She’s literally jumping up and down. “Bloody hell! That was fuckin’ ace! You made that bint squirt just by starin’ at ‘er! Even I have to get ‘em to sit through an induction first! How the bleedin’ Christ did you do that?! I mean, I mean, I know — I read your books — but still! Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick, that was sick! I wish I could do it! I’d go totally spare with it too, you know. Just wall-to-wall drenched bloomers everywhere you look!

“I’d see some random totty with a nice rack walking by on the streets, and pull down my sunglasses to stare at her all aloof and cool-like, and BAM! The little chickadee’s on her hands and knees, helpless and moaning, desperate for it! And that’s not even considering how much fun I’d have at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, or even the Oscars. And, oh boy, would it have made my high school years more bearable! The reputations of all those priggish girls that sneered at me for bein’ some kind of pervert would get a right good seeing-to! A really, ah, abrupt, public, noisy and moist seeing-to, if ye know what I’m sayin’!”

I’m imagining the ending of Zapped here, just with squirting orgasms in place of telekinetic stripping. “My dear, you should never be allowed near power,” I tell Livia in a droll but playful tone.

“Well, I already have lots of power, so pffht!” she quips back, sticking her tongue out at me. I’ve got a feeling this new chapter of my life is going to be ... interesting, in the old Chinese sense. And probably also a wee bit deranged.

I could point out that Whina is a unique case — she apparently just discovered through practical experience how into exhibitionism and teasing she can get — and I can’t do this to other girls. I don’t, though. I’ll explain it later. Given how I’ve slid into revering Livia recently, it’s deeply satisfying to me to be able to elicit some awe from her for once. She’s, like ... I dunno, my role model or something. She has all the same pervy interests I do, but instead of treating them as a disgraceful slacker period that’s going to end Any Day Now™, she’s got this huge ambitious vision to actually make use of them as a career.

With the model release forms, we have no legal need to negotiate with Whina to release the orgasm footage, but there’s still a moral concern. She ran away, mortified, after the incident. She also apologized profusely, despite both of us assuring her that she was the star of the show — I guess it comes with that ‘pleaser’ personality type. We track her down the next day, though, once she’s had time to calm down.

She does finally agree to sign off on the footage in exchange for both a decent chunk of change and the unspoken agreement that I will give her a bonus for her on-screen humiliation in the form of an extensive, off-screen deep dicking. Her idea, not mine, even if she only ever suggested it in the most elusive of terms. Sadly, she isn’t interested in playing with Livia, or any other girls. I’m happy to say I hold up my end of the bargain with attentive interest and great sensual skill. I hold up her end too, actually, albeit in a rather more literal way. Whina has a very nice end — firm, brown and fit.

Unfortunately, I can’t cover what goes down in private in too much detail. It’s always the sweetest, most submissive girls that settle on the most jealous and possessive boyfriends and husbands, isn’t it? I suppose, to them, that possessiveness must be really attractive. Thus, in the interests of discretion, I will simply say that each of us have two showers during the evening we spend together and leave the rest to your imagination, O Dirty-Minded Reader.

Whina is not our last adventure in Surfer’s Paradise, even if she’s hard to top. Livia and I plan to double-team another promising mark who Livia is sure has a “bendable” sexual orientation, but she sadly ditches us before the planned date. I probably could nail Livia that very night, she’s so worked up, but in retrospect I’m glad I show restraint — our first real sex is still several chapters ahead, but it is clever, hot and well worth waiting for.

I also hear that Livia and Mimi are introducing a very petite, shy brunette with a bob-cut to lesbianism in the form of a spontaneous threesome. The three of them have a date to drive down to a kinky lesbian club in Brisbane for a night out. (I’m not invited, obviously.) Their mark will end up bailing after a finger-orgasm, leaving Livia in a hellacious, bitter mood — but that’s not what’s most memorable to me right now. It’s Mimi’s prep for their triple date. She’s been a bit stressed, working hard on editing the YBYB tapes. I remember this, because it’s the first time I see Mimi “change”. The duo saunters into the Beast’s kitchenette and ask me how they look, decked out in their best fancy clubwear.