Ω
“I’ll see you at Comicon, won’t I?”
I looked up from my computer terminal to see Maureen, one of the new temps, leaning over my desk.
“Um, no, actually,” I fumbled. “I hadn’t planned it.”
“Oh,” Maureen said. “That surprises me.”
“W-why is that?” I asked, still stammering. Modest though her vestments were, Maureen’s blouse and skirt could not cloak her fireplug physique. She had an incisive prettiness, with jet-black hair that cascaded all about her shoulders. Her glasses framed her dark eyes alluringly, and now she was adjusting them as she spoke again.
“I thought if anyone around here were going it would be you.”
“What gave you that impression?” I asked.
But I knew the answer. I wear glasses and ill-fitting clothes. One of the bros in accounts payable once told me that I look like I work at Radio Shack.
“I just figured,” Maureen said, “you might be into comics.”
“I was,” I said, “but that was when I was a kid.”
“But not anymore?”
“No,” I said.
Maureen stood up straight, relinquishing her hands from the edge of my desk.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “Every year I try to do a Comicon, but I’ve never gone alone. Do you know anyone else that would be interested in going?”
“I’m not uninterested,” I said. “I’ll go with you if you’d like.”
“Would you?” Maureen said. “That’d be sweet. I just get so self-conscious by myself.”
“If I went to a Comicon alone,” I said, “I’d be self-conscious too.”
Maureen smiled but did not laugh.
Ω
We agreed to meet in front of the convention center. When I got off the bus, I was immediately cast into a crowd comprised of two subsections of people: thirty-somethings who dressed like teenagers and cosplayers who, with a few exceptions, looked like depressive versions of their favorite licensed characters. I couldn’t find Maureen, though.
“Dimitiri!”
It was Maureen’s voice, and I wheeled around to find where it was coming from.
“Over here!”
I turned and matched the voice to the person, but all at once I couldn’t put a name to the face. I was at a loss for words. Clip-clopping toward me in black thigh-highs was an archetypal vamp, statuesque body packed into a red cat-suit. She wore a plastic breastplate, bosom moulded into twin, missile-like humps. That breastplate bore a licensed insignia, the same one that was emblazoned on her gun-belt. Her raven hair swept behind her as she approached.
With respect to the cosplayers, she was one of the exceptions to the depressive rule.
“Dimitri,” she said, throwing her arms around me. “I’m so glad you came!”
“W-who…?” I said. There was that stammer again. As I hugged her, I noticed that heads were turning to look.
Maureen pulled back. “You don’t know? Didn’t you ever play with GI Joes?”
“For a time,” I said. “When I was little. But that was a long time ago.”
“You don’t have any idea who I am?”
“It's on the tip of my tongue—”
“I’m the Baroness! From Cobra? GI Joe's archenemy?”
“Yes,” I said. “I sort of remember.”
“Come,” Maureen said. “Let’s go in.”
As we walked in, Maureen’s heels clacking like claves, a lot of pimply thirty-somethings and depressive superheroes were staring at us.
It was more of the same inside. As soon as we stepped into the lobby, fanboys swarmed Maureen. They wanted pictures of her and pictures with her. For some, she’d aim her dual handguns at the camera, tilting her expressionless face. Alternatively, she’d point one gun at the ceiling and tuck the thumb of her other hand under her bandolier. The fanboys loved all of it. Their faces brightened. They smiled so avidly. It was if they were meeting a celebrity. Lines formed, in fact, even after we’d started up and down the aisles. Maureen’s lines seemed longer than those that had formed for some of the washed-up actors stationed at the various booths.
From time to time, the swarm got too chaotic. Maureen would shoot me a glance, raising an eyebrow. I’d start off and she’d follow, telling her admirers she had to move on.
“Thanks, D,” she said. “You’re a lifesaver. You see why I can’t go to these things alone.”
On our way out, we ran into a pair of red-bearded, heavyset men who were especially giddy. They couldn’t stop praising the detail Maureen had put into the costume. While the one squared up a perfect selfie with Maureen, the other took me by the forearm.
“You’re very lucky,” he said.
“Why is that?”
“To be dating such a proficient cosplayer,” he said. “To be dating the Baroness, no less.”
My brow knitted up. “We’re not dating,” I said.
Upon hearing that, the fanboy’s body somehow managed to sag even more. He seemed disappointed, even as he snuggled up to Maureen for a picture.
“Did that guy just ask if you were my boyfriend?” Maureen asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Ha!” Maureen said, letting out a gusty laugh. “I think it’s time to leave.”
In the lobby on the way out, Maureen received applause. She took a bow. As she did so, it struck me that she actually transcended all the real-life celebrities. She had these fanboys lining up to meet a fantasy.
“Well,” I said as we stepped outside. “This has been an adventure.”
“Indeed,” Maureen said. “But we haven’t done a mission debriefing. Yours is the same bus as mine. Let’s take it. C’mon.”
The bus was just pulling up to the stop. Maureen hurried over in long, metronomic strides, and I scrambled to keep up.
There weren’t many people on the bus, but the ones who were there gave Maureen a wide-eyed once-over. We sat down at the back.
“Phew,” Maureen said. “Today was crazy. I thought the photos would never stop. But it’s always that way with the Baroness.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I do a few characters. When I started, I mostly did Psylocke. I’ve done the Baroness in black and in red. I do Catwoman sometimes. For that, I use the same suit as the classic Baroness in black, I just ditch the glasses and put on a hood with cat ears. But the Baroness is always what gets them, especially in the red. I don’t know what it is. I guess it’s the sexiness. Maybe it’s the glasses. All I know is that I have an easier time finding my way around as the Baroness. People have an easier time finding me. What do you think it is, Dimitri?”
“I couldn’t say,” I said.
“You said you played with GI Joes. Did you have a Baroness?”
“No,” I said.
Maureen murmured, turning to look out at the sidewalk hurtling by the window of the bus.
“You’d think,” she said, “that a person would tire after a day like that. But I’m strangely invigorated. That’s always the way it is at these things. It’s just what cosplay does for me. It lets me really get to explore the energy of the character. It lets feel the energy that other people channel into the character, and it lets me feed off it. For a fleeting moment here and there, it’s like I can feel what it is to be that character, even though she's fictional. It’s like an out-of-body experience. You’re outside of your conventional self. And it’s completely uplifting. It’s energizing.”
Maureen pulled in closer to me, lowering her voice. “You know,” she said, “the last guy I was with, Peter, he used to always come to these conventions with me. He’d dress up as Destro—that’s the Baroness’s boyfriend in Cobra, as you may recall. Anyway, his costume was never as good, but he could feel that energy, too. He’d feed off my energy. And when we would get home—oh, this is so perverted—we would have the wildest sex imaginable. Like, nothing else in our relationship would compare. Makeup sex, birthday sex, you name it, it all paled against Comicon sex. It was this wildly erotic thing. I think maybe that’s why so many people do cosplay in the first place. Don’t you think?”
She whispered this last part in my ear.
I nodded, waiting for the gooseflesh to subside on all my limbs. When I spoke, it was sotto voce.
“When I was a kid,” I said, “I never had the Baroness. She was never available. But I always wanted her.”
“Do you want her still?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You're in luck.” Maureen said. “You've got one Baroness left on the shelf. And this next stop, that's where the Baroness gets off.”
Ω
“Welcome to the snake-pit,” Maureen said as she turned the key and pushed open her apartment door.
We stepped into a standard-issue one-bedroom apartment, albeit a well-furnished one.
I took off my shoes but Maureen did not remove her footwear. She kissed me feverishly on the mouth. Her lips were quick, her tongue was sinuous, and her front teeth placed little periodic bites on my lower lip. Meanwhile, she unbuttoned my shirt and yanked it off. She unzipped my jeans and pulled them down.
“We’ve still got some debriefing to do,” she said, and then tugged down my boxers, placing kisses on my thighs.
Maureen backed me up into her living room and pushed me down onto her sofa. As I sank into the imitation leather, she squatted down in front of me. She stayed my bobbing erection with her mouth. She pulled back the hood of foreskin and her eyes narrowed on my glans. Her tongue flicked in and out snake-like, going tip-to-tip with my manhood. I stared up at the ceiling’s serpentine craquelure as if in prayer. And in my mind, there cycled a prayer, of sorts—don’t come, don’t come, don’t come. Whatever you do, do not come.
She took the length of me in her mouth all at once, gagging. I couldn’t help myself but watch. Here now, kneeling in front of me, was a perfect likeness of the Baroness sucking my cock. Here before me was a spot-on incarnation of the action figure, giving me an enthusiastic blowjob. My eyes rolled back in my head as I contemplated a formless, pre-sexual desire for the Baroness that had stirred inside me when I saw her figure warming the shelf when I was a child. But this Baroness before me was even better. She was the figurine made flesh. She had countless points of articulation, all of them working in tandem to proffer me pleasure.
In servicing my member, she alternated between her mouth and her gloved hand. She used all of her mouth to coat my cock in saliva. Her glove would pump furiously at the root of it, then slow up to pull my foreskin over and back, over and back at a pleasurable crawl. From time to time, she’d bury her mouth beneath my scrotum as she jerked me off, tongue-tip circling around my perineum.
She took me to the verge of ejaculation and then pulled her face from my testicles.
“Up!” she said, straightening her glasses.
I did as she asked and then she stretched her long, lissome body out on the couch in full costume. She took me by the arm and pulled me on top of her, positioning me so that I was half-kneeling over her chest, one socked foot planted in the carpet.
She squared up my cock between the mammary-shaped mounds molded up from the plastic breastplate. My cock hovered atop the mouth of the cobra. With my middle and ring fingers, I pressed down on the base of my member and pushed between those breast molds with short strokes. And each time my cock snaked through to full extension, the Baroness’s tongue lashed out to lick the very tip, occasionally catching the top of the glans with the bottom of her tongue. The plastic moldings offered a blissful resistance.
Don’t come, don’t come, don’t come, I prayed.
Maureen rose up and pushed me away. She snapped to her feet, locked her eyes on mine, and joined her hands on her gun-belt. Her thumbs girded the Cobra insignia at the center of the belt, which was right over her mound of Venus. She unclipped the belt and let it fall to the floor. She peeled off the breastplate. She pulled off her boots. All the while, she tilted her impassive face at a variety of angles, as if she were posing for a fanboy’s photo. She undid the buttons of the cat-suit proper and then turned her back to me. In just a few deft articulations, she peeled the suit down and off of her body. She turned her naked body to me.
Neither office attire nor the Baroness costume had approached doing justice to Maureen’s naked physique.
I reached for her cunt, but she sidestepped my grasp.
“No,” she said. “First with your mouth.”
She pushed me down onto my back and then swung her knees onto either side of my head. I caressed her trim thighs in anticipation as she lowered her pussy onto my face. That tiny cloven enclave hovered over my mouth for several excruciating seconds, then she lowered herself. I was smothered in cunt. Labia blotted my vision. In the blackness, I found her clit, and it seemed like a throbbing monolith against my tongue. Defensively, my tongue circled and circled and Maureen conceded a moan. She counter-circled her hips, grinding her pelvis against my chin as I sucked her esculent sex. She cranked back, hand gripping my cock and jerking me off wildly in the meantime.
Don’t come, don’t come, don’t come.
Maureen didn’t seem to have the same thought process. In a twirling paroxysm, her hips circling like a tempest, and she came. Having juddered out her orgasm, she pushed herself up, planted a pivot foot in the carpet and spun herself around. She aligned her vulva with my erection, pulled apart her labia with two fingers, and then flopped down, sheathing my erection in hot, wet cunt. She clapped her tawny, round ass-halves down onto my erection-horned midsection, hollering in triumph with each downburst. On occasion she’d pause to adjust her glasses, my glans ensnared between her labia. While she did so, I’d thrust up once or twice into her dewy pubes, just because I loved the feel. Her hips were tireless, swiveling round and beating down, pale ass clapping and rippling as it stamped by cock over and over. Maureen rode me until her hips gave way to a circling that seemed involuntarily, and then she shuddered and squalled with another orgasm.
While she murmured madly, momentarily come-drunk, I made my insurrection and took control. I lifted her off me and shunted her forward onto her hands and knees. I gripped her by her deliciously squarish hips and squared her up, stuffing my cock in her pussy and then slamming my pelvis into her ass and upper thighs. Again and again her hind met my lower abdomen in a sublime thunderclap. Maureen was braying and hissing—she seemed to alternate between these vocalizations with every thrust. With each thrust it was like I was chiseling away at a masterpiece figurine. As I hammered away, Maureen's backside raised up higher and higher into a steeper arch. I stood up into a squat, raining down thrusts, almost sitting on her ass as I delved straight down, 12-to-6, into her cunt. My cock felt anaconda-thick wedged inside her. All metaphor and costuming disappeared: I was fucking the Baroness.
The Baroness shrieked as she came again, her effusion like a humid squall that my cock kept thrusting headlong through.
The Baroness calmed herself down to a warble. I shortened my strokes, testicles pitter-pattering against her generous upper thighs. I slowed down, conscious now that I was once again on the verge. I’d been on the verge for a while, in fact, but it didn’t really matter. I felt like I could go all night. She snapped her head back in profile.
“You're going to come, aren't you?”
I nodded rapidly and murmured in the affirmative. And with that, her vulva relinquished its grip and she scrabbled off the sofa to the floor. Here, she picked up the breastplate. She laid it out on the far side of the couch, and then leaned overtop it, her nipples grazing the peaks of the plastic moldings.
“Fuck these plastic tits again!” she said. “I command you to fuck the cobra's mouth!”
“Yes, Baroness!”
The Baroness’s heavy, fleshy breasts dangled over the plastic breastplate like nosediving zeppelins. I slapped my cock down between the plastic hillocks, threading it through the diamond shape aperture created in the stacked cleavages of fake breast shapes and the Baroness’s very real tits. The Baroness spit down onto the breastplates for lubrication, but I hardly needed any more. My cock was coated with the Baroness’s secretions.
The Baroness’s breasts were so warm and inviting, my hips involuntarily thrusted my cock upward toward them. In concert, that hot breast-flesh and her humid breath were too much.
“Come on!” the Baroness hissed. “Give me your venom!”
With one final, decisive thrust, a bolt of come shot out onto her left breast, followed by another which landed in her glossy black hair, followed by another that landed on her cheek, and another which streaked her glasses. The conclusory beads that followed dappled the prim, satisfied smile that had formed on her lovely lips.
“FUCK!” I growled, and then collapsed as if hit by a sniper’s bullet.
“That,” the Baroness said, “was hot.”
“Yes, Baroness,” I said, left side of my mouth chewing at the couch cushion.
“Will you be reporting for duty at Comicon next year?”
“Yes, Baroness,” I said. “And maybe next time, you can wear the black suit, Baroness.”
Maureen burst into laughter.
Ω
But Maureen and I never went to another Comicon. She was only the Baroness a few days out of every year; the rest of the time, she was a temp. And, as per a temp, she was gone from the office within a couple months. I came back the Monday after a long weekend, only to have a co-worker bro explain that Maureen was gone and then introduce me to her replacement.
I really hadn’t gotten to know Maureen well enough to miss her, but I found myself bringing her to mind from time to time. That happened less and less through the months and then the years, but that night we spent together is still with me, springing up now and again in subtle ways.
That was the case, I think, a few Fridays back when I got into a bit of a spiral online. I was looking for Maureen on social media. When I couldn’t find her, I got to watching clips from the old GI Joe cartoon. By 3 am, I found myself on eBay, scouring the listings for figurines.
The Baroness arrived today. I paid more than I should have to get her, but she’s in mint condition, first run. I’m not going to take her out of the plastic, but that’s not for display purposes. She’s for six-year-old me, I think, and maybe for that version of me that actually showed up to a Comicon. She’ll remain unopened, I think, out of an appreciation for times I can never have back.