Laura the Laugher Part One — Jeremy Edwards

The plush seat of the nightclub chair felt physically seductive to Regina. Yet even as her ass sank comfortably into luxury after a day spent running all over campus, she was acutely aware of her psychological discomfort. Why the editor of the university newspaper had sent her to interview the neo-burlesque star was a mystery. Whatever the reason for this decision, the assignment was a keen source of irritation for Regina.

She was by no means a prude. She acknowledged her own urges, and when they became distracting she did something to address them, effectively and expeditiously. But she dismissed any larger fascination with sex as easily as she dismissed other forms of frivolity.

Frivolity. Regina cringed as she remembered that she was here, not merely to interview a specialist in titillation, but to interview one whose act evidently revolved around jokes, of all things. She glanced once more at the blurb she’d printed off the Web:

Laura the Laugher is a “new burlesque” star whose specialty is erotically charged laughter. In a twist on the historical marriage of comedic and erotic elements in burlesque, Laura has created an act in which the laughter becomes the sex . . .

What the hell was that about? Regina wondered. She couldn’t fathom it, and she doubted that sitting through Laura’s act would enlighten her any further. If it weren’t for her sense of obligation to her editor—and the indisputably nice feeling of the chair against her rump—she’d be tempted to bolt and forget the whole thing.

She consoled herself with the thought that Laura the Laugher was on first tonight—so all she had to do was survive one stupid performance, conduct a bare-bones interview, and flee.

She looked around at the other members of the audience. The club was nearly full, which she had to admit was remarkable for a Thursday night. Apart from those at her own table—a good one, thanks to her press pass—almost every chair was taken, as were the majority of the barstools. And almost every face seemed to be alive with anticipation. People were dressed up, too—and not in the way Regina was dressed up, grayly professional in deference to being “on assignment.” The silly event was being treated as some kind of important night out, she realized with a touch of incredulity.

She took a sullen sip of her ginger ale, and occupied herself by mentally scoring the piped-in “light classical” music.

Soon the house fixtures dimmed; the light classical became lighter and lighter until it was inaudible; and a sort of gloaming established itself on the stage. Regina saw two male forms—crisp silhouettes in the near darkness—float in from the respective wings. The shadows stood still, faintly whimsical in their silhouetted bowler hats. Impressed by the drama, Regina forgot her disdain for a moment.

A slender spotlight, an oval the color of watermelon meat, suddenly illuminated the center of the stage, from its front edge to the hefty purple curtain at back. A gap developed in this curtain, through which walked—no, emerged—the most self-possessed woman Regina had ever seen.

Laura the Laugher.

She looked fancier in her near nudity than most women looked in ballroom gowns. The two-piece silk outfit that glimmered around her breasts and hips—it seemed too grand to be called a “bikini”—was two or three shades of watermelon deeper than the empty areas of the spotlight, falling somewhere between flamingo and vulva on the Pantone wheel. Hundreds of individual pieces of silk had been sewn together to form the garment, mimicking the texture of feathers and creating a ticklish effect for the observer.

But Regina wasn’t ticklish.

Laura, her stance at once statuesque and soft, turned to the left and to the right, taking in the still-shadowy male figures at each end of the stage. Her sensuous shoulderfuls of dark hair were paraded as she glanced each way, and the pink spotlight caught the elegant outline of her pixiesque nose.

Then she faced forward, her eyes absurdly, but beautifully, large with promise. And she laughed—a merry trill.

It was quite brief, but it rang across the room and sizzled down Regina’s spine, coming to rest at the small of her back. Laura followed it with an even briefer trill, and Regina found her buttocks shifting involuntarily. She felt embarrassed . . . yet curious. What was funny? And why did the pretty, irrelevant laughter seem to resonate with every cocktail glass and beer bottle in the nightclub—and with Regina’s bones?

A warm male voice from stage right, thick like greasepaint eyebrows, broke into her thoughts. “Did you hear the one about the bed?”

“No,” said a similar voice from stage left, perhaps half a key higher. “It hasn’t been made up yet.”

It wasn’t very amusing, but Laura pretended it was. An emphatic “a-HA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha” burst from her lips—as though the gag had surprised her, despite hours of rehearsals—and the spotlight intensified slightly. Laura’s cheeks glowed a bit brighter, and the tight skin of her tummy looked scrumptious where she pressed it with delicate fingertips.

A subdued wave of sympathetic chuckling surrounded Regina, as the audience laughed, not with the two-dimensional comedians, but with the three-dimensional goddess at center stage. The ambient laughter was heavy and sexy, like sticky limbs awakening on an August morning.

The sweet kiss of ginger ale tingled in Regina’s mouth, tasting like a pleasant disorientation.

“What’s the tallest building in town?” This time it was Stage Left Man who served the ball into play.

“The library, ’cause it has the most stories.”

Laura’s face lit up with delight: “Ha-ha-HA-ha-HA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” As before, the pink light intensified, and a shiver of glee coursed through Laura’s torso, visibly traveling from her throat to her navel.

A shiver coursed through Regina as well, and lodged between her legs.

Again, the room murmured with collective chuckling. As it tapered off, Regina thought she heard one or two stifled moans. She felt a twinge in her knickers.

“Why did the turkey cross the road?”

“Because it was the chicken’s day off.”

Laura bent her knees, then slapped them with mirth, shimmying very subtly as the laughter rippled through her. “Oooh-hee-hee-hee-hee!” she sang, each syllable a precious comment. The spotlight flashed in her cleavage like cartoon lightning, and Regina saw the Laugher’s pink-feather breasts vibrate with the dignity of minor planets. “Ooh-hee-hee,” Laura reiterated, as if summarizing. Her eyes danced; and when they refocused, they seemed to be staring right at Regina.

Regina felt as if one more “hee” would make her soak her panties.

Regina felt that maybe there was something to this, after all.

Regina waited breathlessly for the next joke.

“If two’s company, and three’s a crowd, what are four and five?”

“Nine.”

Laura’s knee-bend was a deep one this time, a display of flexibility that looked raunchy as hell in combination with the expression of uncontrollable ecstasy on her face. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee . . . ,” she shrieked—indefinitely, it seemed to Regina, who only realized that one cascade of laughter had ended because another, equally intense, had begun. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee . . .” Laura stamped her feet, folded her arms across her chest, and writhed in a sultry, slow rhythm that formed the perfect counterpoint to the frenetic sixteenth notes of her giggles. Regina felt hypnotized by the sound, and by the fascinating motion of Laura’s hips, where the corporeal echoes of the laughter appeared to be most concentrated.

The corny riddles came faster and faster, and Laura would break up at the next one just as she’d disembarked from the previous crescendo. Each burst of delight was delivered with exquisite artistry and musical precision by every muscle of her highly-trained body: she stalked and danced, tittered and howled, her entire form expressing the eclectic rapture that was her stock in trade. She paced herself like an athlete, getting maximum mileage out of each episode of excitement, rationing her energy for the long haul. When an invisible stagehand pushed a plush-seated stool through the curtain, Laura, amid a particularly strong gale of laughter, spun it around like a partner, then straddled it lewdly as she bounced through the final paroxysms of her current gust of jollity. When she stood, Regina strained her eyes to see if the velvety fabric on the stool showed signs of the wetness that she imagined was developing in the crotch of Laura’s silk.

Regina’s interview stockings seemed to crawl on her thighs, like snakeskin waiting to be slowly shed. Her pussy was a vortex of sensation, and she knew that if she were at home this would be one of those evenings when she’d thrust a hand into her panties in a businesslike fashion and fondle her clit into an explosion. And that it would be satisfying in a not-very-satisfying kind of way.

But she wasn’t at home; what she was feeling was anything but businesslike; and her clit, removed from all direct contact save the halfhearted tension of underpants, was getting the fondle of its life from a stranger on a stage. And Regina knew that she wanted to watch Laura laugh until the beautiful performer came like a hyena in heat.

By the end, Regina wasn’t even hearing the riddles, though they were no doubt articulated with perfect clarity. She had learned that it didn’t matter what the joke was—that all that mattered, in fact, was that the joke be a weak one, so as to ensure that the bumper crop of erotic laughter would be purer than any prompted by a spark of actual wit. Laura’s laughter was a freebie, an act of generosity, a reward for nothing. It crossed Regina’s mind that many a theatrical producer would have loved to have Laura in the audience—except that then the audience would have taken notice only of the Laugher, and not of the play.

For her grand finale—triggered by yet another stale punch line that Regina ignored—Laura rolled on the ground in a full-fledged frenzy of artistic giggles. Then, situating herself with her lovely tummy to the floor and her silk-sheathed ass gleaming in the spotlight, she hammered her fists to underscore peal after sturdy peal. To top this, she flipped over and spread her arms, kicking her sleek, bare legs in the air and making herself a kinetic portrait of wide-open womanhood.

As Laura’s laughter shouted itself to the ceiling and down again, her crotch became the electric center of Regina’s attention. Still remaining on her back, Laura now switched from a kicking to a pedaling motion, working her limbs like an inverted, hilarity-drenched clown on a unicycle, her feathered gusset anchoring the action of the surrounding flesh. Her wild, giddy voice carried with it every other voice in the room—including Regina’s. Together, all present comprised a living sea of euphoria, an ocean held in place by a palpable sexual tautness.

Then the Laugher jumped to her feet, a woman composed and in control. She bowed like an orchestra conductor and disappeared behind her curtain.

____________________

Watch for Part Two of this sexy tale to be posted one week from today.

Jeremy is a favorite author here on Every Night Erotica click here to read more from him.

Jeremy Edwards is the author of the erotocomedic novel Rock My Socks Off and the erotic story collection Spark My Moment (both published by Xcite Books). His libidinous short stories have been widely published online, as well as in over forty anthologies. His work was selected for The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, vols. 7, 8, and 9, and he has read at New York’s In the Flesh and Philadelphia’s Erotic Literary Salon. Jeremy’s greatest goal in life is to be sexy and witty at the same moment—ideally in lighting that flatters his profile. Find Jeremy here: http://www.jeremyedwardserotica.com.