Free Elemental Pleasure by Mari Carr

would find her other partners rather than risk her falling apart.
    The thought was bittersweet. She refused to participate in a relationship where Lance and Preston were at each ot her’s throats all the time. Well, e xcept , of course, when they were fucking her. Once they’d agreed to share, they seemed to get along just fine. It had been she who’d had a problem with what was happening, a problem she’d done nothing about, said nothing abo ut, because she’d been too turn ed on to think straight.
    It was amazing the stupid things people would do for the sake of pleasure. All Carly had to do was read the news—o r the gossip blogs—to know terrible decisions were made every day for the sake of lust. Labeling it love didn’t make it any more legitimate. While she might have thought she was above that, yesterday made it clear she wasn’t.
    She sighed in regret. If things were different, if they woul d agree to treat her like an equal in the bedroom as well as outside it, Carly would be the luckiest woman on earth. She certainly couldn’t have asked for two hotter, sexier men.
    The image of Lance between her legs, his cock sliding in and out as Preston touched her made her dip her hand under the water. Pressing her knees against the sides of the tub , she opened her thighs and push ed her fingers into her sex. She was roused by the memory of it, and with a few quick strokes, she came, whispering their names in the silence of her mind.
    When her heartbeat slowed, she rose from the tub. The orgasm had done more to calm her than the candles or music. Toweling off , she vowed to put the men out of her mind. She was going back to work tomorrow. Somehow she would get in touch with the Grand Master to make her request.
    Until then, she had the memory of their hands and mouths—and a vibrator—to get her through.
    *****
    Carly slipped her headphones off, letting them dangle around her neck like a stethoscope. Like a doctor , she’d been diagnosing, but in this case, it was the most technologically advanced RPG on the market, not a person.
    Nexus Six had taken the world by storm, as players bored with games that could be beaten with walkthroughs, and whose interactive features mostly centered on character customizations, flocked to her game. No two players, and no two games, were ever the same.
    Nexus Six was in the middle of beta-testing the next version of their signature game, End Times , which would elevate it to a new level. They were taking the ever-changing world they’d created and adding multi-player features. Solo players loved the complexity of End Times , but those who loved MMORPG—massive mul tiplayer online role play games like World of Warcraft —wanted the multi-player features. It was no small feat to create a game in which multiple people could have input, while simultaneously having it react in unique ways. The story department constantly had to come up with new starting poin ts—quests, missions and events—that launched the game. They created the stories and dialogue that were fed into the program, creating the base layers, and once the game was live, it learned from other players, taking their decisions, actions, and even their dialogue—whether spoken or keyed in—and added it to the program’s memory banks.
    It meant Nexus Six had server rooms that rivaled those of Google, a massive programming team, and an even bigger troubleshooting department, who responded to reported issues and jumped in and out of games to see how the program was working.
    At the center of, and in charge of all that was Carly.
    “We’re going to need to split the input,” Charles, one of her team, said.
    “I don’t want to split it.” Carly pushed herself out of the beanbag she’d been sitting in. The testing room looked like a kid’s dream room with a massive HD projector, couches and beanbags, and small tables loaded with gaming equipment and computers. “What if we have it aggregate the player input, then