Remittance Girl's Blog, page 11

Carapace

In the dead room, tastefully done out in shades of charcoal, he comes again.  A little slower this third  time. His body goes rigid and he makes a sound like his orgasm has been wrenched from him with violence. As if I’ve shoved my hand into his gut and pulled out a kidney. Moments later, all he looks is grateful.

Long before the vital parts came out, I knew he wouldn’t be the one. Something in the eyes: a softness, a terrible tenderness that confuses pleasure for power, engulfs and swallows them, and leaves them in this state of mute obedience.

The world forces them accrete this hard shell of brazen, masculine desire, but it’s so brittle and thin.  I cup the back of a neck, press my lips to the side of a face, curl my fingers around that stiffening cock, say the magic words and the carapace disintegrates. He becomes little boy at bath-time. Malleable and grateful and compliant as a shooter with the needle in his vein, anticipating the blessed, fluid heat.

It doesn’t occur to him – to most of them – that he possesses something I need. Something that could enslave me. Something that could free me from this god-awful prison of grim control.  By the time I know who he is, it’s too late. The order of how this will go has been set. I know what he wants, and what he wants is so little.

My instincts kick in with the disappointment; it becomes automatic. Not desire or eroticism, or even sex, now; just the gestures of it, the big bag of whore’s tricks I was born with. The innate knowledge of what to say, what to show, what to do with my mouth, my hands, my cunt. The evening curdles into a chore.

I’ve never found the trick to reading them before I get to this point. Nor have I learned the knack of just leaving. I give him his little dream, his watercolour fantasy. Two orgasms more than he thought he could manage. It only takes an hour and I’m not a cruel person.  I leave him dozing on the bed, remembering when he was eighteen and could go all night.

“Did you come?” he asks, in a sleepy haze as I pull on my jacket and shoulder my handbag. They all ask that, as if that was what mattered.

I once knew a man who wanted more.

Way Down There

[image error]He was a god. A disdainful, disappointed, impatient god. With his head and shoulders massive and black against the weak autumn sun.

And me, way down. Down in the dark cold of the oily water that made me retch and clung to my face. My lovely new red coat soaking it up, dragging me down like punishment for my vanity, my fingers clinging to the slimy, nameless living things that grew into the concrete side of the dock. Down where the big things live, and swim blind and eat. Down where dreadful machines tear you up without noticing, without hitching in their rotation. Where the very bad things slumber without breathing.

I could hear  the snap and lick of the water, and the scream – the high, frantic scream I launched. As if I’d opened my mouth and brought my own hell into being. It echoed up the gap between the gigantic rusty hull of the ship and the pier. A metal-piercing whistle of a cry, converging back onto me from everywhere, until my ears were ringing, until it was pressing back up my nose, and down my throat like the icy water only sharper.

“Daddy,” I screamed.  “Daddy, it’s cold.”

“Oh, you stupid little bitch.” Low and angry and so, so disappointed. “I told you not to…”

The cold was a giant snake, squeezing me smaller, and empty of air. My fingers numb, dead as jelly babies. My feet, scraping against the rock. I was trying not to ruin my beautiful, shiny black patent-leather shoes.

“Daddy, please.”

But I could tell by the way he held his arms that his hands were still in his pockets. He’d never taken them out.

I don’t remember how I got out, or who pulled me out. I don’t remember getting dry. And because I don’t remember, sometimes I think I died down there.

A Writer’s Seduction

[image error]This is an erotic story about stories, about writing, about writers and readers.

If you came to this page believing yourself safe or immune to my seduction, perhaps it is because you need to. Perhaps you are a lover who wants to be taken and ravished. Perhaps you hope to come away believing yourself the innocent victim of my depravity. You know I won’t allow that. I can’t let you leave without making sure you admit, if only to yourself, that you were a willing partner. These are just words. I put them down here. Like obscene photographs of things you’ve imagined doing, or gaudily coloured sex toys. If they make your heart beat faster, or cause you to shift in your chair. If you moisten or grow hard, it’s because your mind has wandered into the places it desired to go. You have drunk these words in, and put them to the purpose of your pleasure. You are no innocent. You came here looking for eroticism and perversion and so you found it. Your thighs might be wet, your cock might be hard, your mind fills with lewd images – at the prompt of these words perhaps – but you came and you stayed and you read, you slut.

If you have come here demanding literary fellatio, I’m a willing lover, but don’t imagine yourself completely in the driver’s seat. I will take my time with you. I will make you itchy and impatient, I will tease you and, if I’m feeling particularly cruel, I may leave you with readerly blue balls. Perhaps this is one of those stories I will make you to finish for yourself? Hmm?  Perhaps you arrived in search of a quick and impersonal fuck behind the bus shelter. I may wrap my thighs around your waist, but not for free. I’ll force you to carry the sting of that sordidness, the stench of stale urine, the wind-blown wrappers of those disposable snacks with you. I’ll infect you with nagging questions of why you were so frightened to take me to bed. I’ll show you everything you fear you’ll lose in giving yourself over to me for an hour, an evening, a night.

Words are my sex organs. Not singularly, but in the aggregate. Characters are the arms with which I draw you to me. Settings are the bed, the sheets, the meadow, the back-seat of your dad’s car, the rubbish-strewn alleyway, the warm, wet sand on a twilit beach. Plots are the acts and there is always, always conflict. I may propose the game, but you must accept before the game is on, my dear.

My poetics are my touch, my fingers, my tongue, my lips and the tips of my nipples, the crown of my cock. Soft and soothing, hard and rapacious, greedy, hypnotic, comic, fumbling, disorienting.

Here we are, then, you and I. Body to body, eye to eye. Sigh and I’ll sup on it. Linger and I’ll fill you. Don’t ever mistake my pen name for an indication of my gendered intention. I can fuck you and engulf you in a single moment, here, now, like I just have. If you pause for a moment, you’ll feel me come, in you, around you, through you. That taste of something foreign on your tongue? That’s me. I’m in your blood now.

And if I have done my job well, and been a memorable seducer, you will exit this space with the fear with which all lovers take their leave: that I have marked you in some way, that my scent is on your skin, that something small but significant has happened and you won’t be quite the same again.

Labels, Tribes and the Beauty of Singularities.

I cannot write you. I try and fail. I try, I fail and I’m a butcher.

Me

I’ve had some ongoing conversations, and I’ve offended some people recently, because I’ve refused the label ‘bisexual’. I want to take the opportunity to explain why and to acknowledge that for some people these words matter greatly, and why I’m wary of this.

The Advocate.Com has an OpEd: Aversion to the Big Bad B Word Continues, which goes on to discuss how people identify themselves and whether they have the right to identify themselves in certain ways. What I came away with from that article was that historically, once marginalized groups of people gain a power base, they usually start acting a lot like the dominant one, determining who can identify as part of the group and why.

The first time I ever encountered this was with my paternal grandmother, a Sephardic Jew whose family could trace its roots back in England to the 16th Century. There is no other way to put it – she was antisemitic. She felt that Ashkenazi Jews (newcomers, in her eyes) were inferior to her. I’ve had similar experiences when meeting Japanese who felt that Japanese of Korean origin weren’t really Japanese, and a few First Nations people who were obsessed about what percentage of the tribe’s blood you had to have running through your veins in order to identify yourself as a member. Of course, this doesn’t happen in isolation. When, during the Middle Ages, the Jews in Europe were almost universally reviled, you could probably turn up in the Jewish quarter of any city, and say ‘Hello, I’m a Jew,’ and no one was going to argue with you. Being a Jew was nothing but a risk. Who in their right mind would claim affiliation unless they had to? Similarly, I suspect a man turning up in an illegal gay club in the Victorian era was not grilled about his past sexual behaviour in order to be admitted.

I guess, in a way, it’s a positive sign, a sign of the sense of empowerment and establishment within the greater society that any group grows to be picky and choosy about who it will admit into the fold, and yet… the woman in the article who is in love with a man but still wants to be identified as in a lesbian relationship, instead of bisexual… Why isn’t the world happy to let her call herself whatever she likes. And more to the point, why does she feel such a pressing need to call herself anything at all. She’s a human, who loves a human. She has someone to love, who loves her. Isn’t that marvelous?

I am not a lesbian, or bi, or hetero. I am attracted to certain human beings, and the tackle they were born with plays no part at all in my attraction. Neither does their past sexual practices. Neither does the gender they identify with. If there is a configuration on the planet, I’ve probably been attracted to someone who had it.

Someone suggested I call myself pan-sexual, and I guess that probably comes as close as anything to describing my orientation. But it’s not accurate. It’s not the ‘pan’ I have a problem with. It’s the ‘sexual.’ I have been deeply, erotically in love with people with whom I’ve never had sex, and never will.

I bet some of you are thinking: well, then that doesn’t count! Who are you to decide for me under what circumstances I’m allowed to claim a proclivity? When I’m allowed to publicly consider a relationship an erotic one? And why the overwhelming need to chunk me, and push me into the membership of one tribe or another? I’m me. My name is Madeleine, and I reject your generalization of me.

I understand that lots of people feel safer in a group. That there is a sense of companionship and empowerment in identifying with a tribe. I don’t deny you that right. I just don’t feel the need for it myself.

I didn’t always feel that way. When I was much younger, I did at one time feel very strongly the need to identify with a group. Then, when I jumped through the hoops and got admitted, and the brief elation of feeling included passed, I realized I was amongst people who spent a good proportion of their time and energy keeping people out. That’s the day I decided that I didn’t want or need a tribe. That I would always be a loner, and that I was willing to run the risk of getting caught out alone on the savanna to stay that way.

It’s exactly the same with my kinks. I don’t feel like I’ve suddenly come home in a roomful of submissives or Sadists. My personal sexual proclivities are very complex, and  – and this is more important – highly dependent on the person I’m indulging in eroticism with. I do tend to prefer people with non-normative sexual tastes. I tend to be attracted to certain outward signs of dominance and perversion and an interest in transgression – in persons of any gender, or who identified as having none and any sexual orientation. I don’t identify myself as a submissive or a masochist. What am I if I suffer through a caning from you? What am I when I straddle your back, wrap my arm around your neck and sink my teeth into your shoulder? And no, I’m not a switch. I am me in the moment. with you in the moment. And the few people who labeled me as either of those things, and made assumptions based on them… were sorely disappointed. Let us say that erotically, with me, if you make assumptions, you’re not in a safe place.

The pain in the ass for you is that this means I am forcing you to see me in the particular, or not at all. If I refuse a label, how will you identify me? How will you reduce me to some easily filed away category? Maybe you will get to know me for who I am. Maybe you will decided it’s too complicated to bother with. I find this one of the best strategies of all for forming relationships that are lasting. Forcing people into a place where they must deal with me on a singular level.

The truth is, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t enjoy and glory in the complexity of people, the infinite variations of them, admire the beauty of all that data, and revel in meeting someone as a singularity, I probably don’t want to know you anyway.

Finally, as a writer, I was always trained to keep the hell away from generalities. That it was lazy shorthand. And I have tried, as far as my capabilities allowed to translate my love of singularity into my writing. I seldom use labels of sexual orientation unless it is important and germane to the story. I avoid using kink terms like the plague. Using them inevitably stops me from having to describe the desire, the act, the response. And for me, erotic writing is all about seeing the delicious singularity in any erotic act. One whipping is not like another. Or, if it is, it has become a tired game, and not a moment of bliss. I cannot avoid genders – our language, as some incredible philosophers have pointed out, IS gendered. But I hope that I write my characters well enough that a reader might identify with them, regardless of whether their gender or their genitals corresponded. There are times, in my imagination, I have a cock. I am any gender, any configuration, any orientation I need to be to indulge in and enjoy the story. I think there are readers like me.

Shooting Molly

[image error]Molly Moore wrote a post about photographing and being photographed nude. On twitter, she joked that she was proud to say she’d taken my cherry. Because it was the first time I’d ever photographed a willing, nude model. I’ve shot performance art that contained nudity, but that’s different; they are already offering up what they are doing as ‘spectacle’ to a determinate audience. It isn’t intimate. It’s a public act that I have documented. This was very different.

I wanted to write this post to mark the experience and to explain what I learned from it. I had assumptions, and plans, and when I was met with the reality of it – like most intense experiences – it was entirely different from what I anticipated it would be.

I always assumed shooting someone who I knew, nude, would be an erotic experience. And it was, but not at all in the way I thought it would be. It wasn’t sexual, but it was intensely sensual.

The first thing that became stunningly clear is that clothes break up the body. They interrupt the lines of the body, bleed it into the background. A naked body becomes a very solid, very present form. Sounds silly, but believe me, it’s a shock. Your subject is suddenly very, very present. An single-shaded organic shape. And so colour, shape, light, shadow, texture and line really become the first things your eye starts to work with in the composition.

So at first, I was concentrating on just that contrast – white skin against a dark tree bough. Then the flesh, smooth against the rough, patterned surface of the tree bark. Then lines and shapes: the organic lines of legs, arms, torso, profile juxtaposed against the geometrically cut gravestones, the railings, the bare earth beneath her. Where those shapes were echoed, and where they crossed, and fought against each other for balance. The dapple of light on her body, how it was coming down in shafts between the leaves, where it was illuminating her. The weight of her light body against the dark background, in balance, unbalanced. Her leg hanging, arm dangling, breast canted. Gravity there in the photograph, acting on a body. Motion delayed.

I could have played with just those things for hours. It is very compelling to deconstruct the body in this way. It feels transgressive to do it – to reduce someone you know and like to part of a composition. Molly as part of the landscape; Molly in opposition to the stone; Molly smooth against the roughness of the bark. It’s entertaining, and impressionistic. And yet, I felt strangely guilty about it. I’m sure it wouldn’t bothered have Molly. But it bothered me that I could so easily reduce her to the elements and principles of art. Something I have taught, year in and year out, for what seems like ages.

So, I decided to focus more on the context. The graveyard. A real woman’s body – that’s been lived in, and born children. I thought about Gothic Victorian novels and how liminal the female body was for them, how fragile and fleeting, how forever-imperiled by disease, and poverty, and childbirth and violence.

This graveyard was full of dead women and their epitaphs. Tender and formal, steadfastly denying the nature of decay, and the truth of bones, the moist dead meat left behind when the soul has fled. The sublimation of the natural world for some quaint, narrative ideal.

[image error]

Finally, I remembered a lecture by Judith Butler, strangely enough, about the photographs of Abu Ghraib. The act of the lens as aggressor, as an enabler, the shutter as trigger that sets the wheels of atrocity in motion, the ease and casualness digital image-making as normalizer of obscenity. And I thought about the camera as death. Not the angel of death, not the murderer in the woods, but death waiting, watching, observing a body in the slow process of dying. Not now, not tomorrow, but inevitably and the awful patience of that eye.

That was my experience of photographing Molly Moore. I really can’t say when I have learned more in two hours.

Here lies the body…

[image error]

Thank you to the lovely and bark-scratched Molly Moore (@MollysDailyKiss)

Jouissance, Hard Limits & an Ass-covering culture.

[image error]My story of yesterday generated a strange clutch of emails. I’ve written before about my ambivalent feelings on the subject of ‘safe’ BDSM, not simply because, on a very personal basis, desire and safety are almost mutually exclusive for me, but because I worry we live in a culture that constantly demands absolutes, assures us of them far too readily, and doesn’t allow people to prepare, despite their best efforts, for mishaps.

Jacques Lacan (the French psychoanalyst, whose theories I am using as methodology for my doctorate) described three types of ‘Jouissance’. The word itself has a complicated definition that changed throughout his career, from simple sexual pleasure to a much more complex drivenness towards ecstatic states that carried with them both pleasure and pain. I’m not going to go any further into the general description because there are far more eloquent descriptions out there than I could produce. But one of the best ways I’ve ever read it described is: you know that feeling just as you’re approaching orgasm, that there is something more magnificent, more mindblowing, more perfect just after it? Even though rationally, you know there isn’t? That imagined pleasure is Jouissance. So it doesn’t have to be something past an orgasm, but for example, the anticipated satisfaction you’re going to get from a really good whipping, or the imagined sense of wholeness you’re going to feel when your lover lets you fuck them with a strap-on. It’s going to differ with each person, and the possible source of that spectral pleasure is going to change for you, over time. It is an imagined or anticipated pleasure savoured in the mind, which seldom turns out to be quite as satisfying as you thought it would be. Not that it was bad, or even mediocre, but you have built it up in your mind. Keep in mind that the desire might not be for something overtly sexual, but the need for it, the yearning for it is a very driven, sexual sort of urge, a gnawing imperative. For instance, the anticipated enjoyment of the exercise of power, or of the fulfillment of an act of self-sacrifice or the driven need to create a good story. Underneath, Lacan contends, and I agree, it’s all libidinous, erotic in the broader sense. It’s about the pursuit of some kind of pleasure.

As I mentioned there are three types of Jouissance (and I and others have contended that there probably more.) But the type I’m describing is what he called Phallic Jouissance. This is an annoying name for it; it’s so easy to get bogged down with gender on this. I’m going to take a cue from Bruce Fink, a Lacanian scholar, and call it Fallible Jouissance, because that’s its more identifiable feature; the satisfaction, the enjoyment always fails to live up to its imagined perfection. It always just misses the mark, by a little bit.

Although fallible (Phallic) jouissance is chiefly identified with male desire, I’d argue that that’s bullshit. Anyone with a fertile imagination experiences it. Very few things in life match or exceed our expectations, and if they do, we often can’t enjoy anticipating them because we didn’t know they would. That’s complicated, let me offer you an example: you’ve always yearned to have a really good, hard, kinky spanking. You get it. It’s good. You may slip off his lap, you may find you didn’t enjoy the pain as much as you thought you would. You like it, but it doesn’t make you wet. Or… it’s good, it’s great in fact, but it just wasn’t quite what you imagined it to be. Now, on the other hand, say you’ve never really thought about being spanked, and your lover pulls you over his/her lap and gives you a couple. And it blows your mind. It’s fucking hot as hell and you fuck like animals afterwards.  It was brilliant, but because you didn’t know it was coming, you didn’t get the pleasure of anticipating it. Get it? Jouissance isn’t the event, object or person of your desire, it’s the yearning for it.

Okay, so the most commonly experienced form of jouissance is, hopefully – and you’ll see later why I think it is an important force in our lives, just not one you have to consciously set yourself up for – fallible jouissance. Fantasy sets us up for fallible jouissance. And usually this is okay as long as you can keep in mind that, whatever you think you yearn for, it’s not going to be exactly the way you imagine it.

I have many problems with the question: “So, what are your hard limits” in the context of sex and kink. I want to acknowledge before anyone jumps down my throat that this is a useful question. It’s a safety question. It’s a question one really should ask if you play with someone you don’t know at all. However, it has its drawbacks and I’d like to examine them.

That kind of a question immediately guarantees that the jouissance you experience will be of the fallible variety. When I enumerate my hard limits for you, you will imagine each one of them, and already, you have formed an idea of the way it’s going to go in your brain. It also draws a line of transgression – and all transgressive lines are erotically tempting to cross. If I say “I absolutely will not ever fuck you and another guy at the same time.” At that point, many people, even those for whom the whole thought of that didn’t have much allure, may become very intrigued by the idea. Being a person who is particularly intrigued by transgression, the minute you tell me your limits is the minute those are pretty much the only things I really want to do now.  Of course, I won’t do them. I respect people’s limits and I can control my actions, but I can’t control my fantasies; now my desire has jumped further, to a place you aren’t willing to go. Finally, this demand for hard limits always smacks of ass covering (see what I did there?). We live in a society that is investing ever-greater effort and labour, not into being productive or innovative or adventurous, but in covering its ass. If I don’t mention every hard limit I have, then it’s not your fault if you cross one, right? I’m sorry I forgot to tell you that getting fucked by your doberman was not one of my hard limits – my bad.

How about, okay, you can cut me, but not too deep. How deep? Two millimeters. Two millimeters where? Now I’m thinking, what the fuck? Uh… not over my carotid artery? I’m dealing with someone who is not willing to take responsibility to act responsibly. Conversely, if you have agreed to let me cut you, and – Jesus – that’s 3 mm deep at least!!! Well fuck that. It’s over, RG, you butcher!

In writing erotica, of course I’m interested in exploring characters, their limitations, their boundaries, and their transgressions. But my interest in that stems from my ambivalence to enumerating and delineating limits in my own intimate relations with the world.

Meanwhile, although I think that fallible jouissance can lead to real disappointment and dissatisfaction and to a curious version of the lived equivalent of ‘porn creep’ – a need to constantly escalate the extreme of your kink in order to get off on it -  I also think, that inability to ever hit the mark perfectly, is what powers our creative drive. So, it has its uses.

I don’t have limits with lovers. If I think I have to tell you my limits, then my limit is: you. I expect a lover to be sensitive and observant and intuitive. And I expect them to get it wrong from time to time. Because the one thing I am sure of is that, if I don’t allow them, and myself that freedom, I will never have an experience of ‘Feminine Jouissance’ with them. Because feminine jouissance is an anticipation only of the unknown, and the terror and exhilaration of the unknown. You don’t have to be a woman, but you do need to make yourself very vulnerable in order to experience it.

And I’ll blog about that form of jouissance in my next post.

 

 

 

 

The Filthy Wound

[image error]The first nick came with what Blanche thought was a sincere apology. She was amenable to accepting it because she was enjoying the view: him kneeling between her spread legs, with nothing on but a pair of underwear. It mitigated her discomfort at being so exposed and the ache where the rim of the bathtub bit into her buttocks. Her ass was, apparently, not as fat as she feared.

The careful attention he was paying to the task of shaving her pussy was also a salve to her bruised pride.

“Don’t you like my pubic hair?” she had asked, after his suggestion that she shave it off.

She was ready to be wounded in that very female way a woman can be. Over a careless remark about some minor aspect of the area between her thighs. As if that nether valley were a permanent wound forever waiting to split open and bleed at even the mildest criticism. All it took was one tiny gesture of disregard, one misinflected word.

“Some days I like it,” he said. “But not today. Haven’t you ever wondered what it feels like bare?”

Blanche pondered that, reaching back into the pre-pubescent past. She had childhood memories, of course, but none of them involved her sexual organs.

Perhaps one. An abstract tangle of images and feelings, of sliding herself instinctually but shamefully over an old piece of carved furniture, feeling the ridges and even the grain of the wood against her bare, plump cunt. As much as her rational mind told her that all children are sensual creatures, she recoiled in unforgiving disgust at the memory.

“Ow! Careful!” she snapped. She flinched at the second nick, unsure of whether the flare of her temper came from the cut or at the queasy shame of her remembered self.

“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, thumbing the welling bead of blood away, along with a smear of pinkening shaving foam and a clump of dark curls like a small, broken spider dragging its fractured legs behind it.

The tendons of her inner thighs ached for being so widely spread, and now, for the tension of fear that tightened them further. The muscles twitched and trembled.

He looked up from his labours, straight razor in one hand, towel thrown over his shoulder.  “Don’t you trust me?”

Blanche tried to relax. “Yes?” she said, with a rising tone that meant no.

Trust? Trust, with his face so close to her viscera? Not in bed, like a lover with a clever tongue and lascivious intentions, but like a judge of aesthetics, efficient and clinical and far too close. Didn’t one need a degree or a license to be there, like that?

Most women were accustomed to seeing blood in the region but this was something else. He shaved himself with a straight razor each morning; it wasn’t that he lacked experience with its use. But a vulva, she thought, was a different matter: squidgier, with fewer flat planes, more complex even than the little ridged dip between his nose and his upper lip, or the bony part of his chin. She wondered how many cunts he’d shaved and decided she didn’t want to know the answer.

Holding the flesh of her left labia taut between his thumb and index finger, he shaved away another clump of shrubbery, leaving the skin pink and velvety in its wake. Then he nicked her, again, in almost exactly the same spot, except on the opposite side. There, where the skin transforms from dry, pored epidermis into shiny, moist flesh, the absent cusp – the indistinct delineation between outside and insideness.

“Hey! Fuck! Watch it!” She launched each syllable onto a higher shelf.

“Jesus, sorry.”

“You’re not sorry!”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, pinching the cut to stop the bleeding. The gesture distorted her labia, pulled it sideways until it looked detachable – an alien appendage.

In fact, her whole denuded crotch looked unfamiliar. The pinch hurt more than the cut. She looked up from her groin to his face.

“Ow,” she breathed.

He met her gaze and smiled. “Ow,” he whispered back.

* * *

“So, what do you think?”

He released the plump lip, leaving a curiously white mark in the flesh where the pressure had constricted the blood vessels.

Blanche looked down again, doubtfully. “It stings.”

“Touch it. Feel it.”

“Of all the ways of getting me to wank in front of you, this is the lamest.”

“Have I ever had to trick you into doing that?” He nodded at her crotch. “Come on, feel it.”

She reached down, tentatively, the way one hesitates to touch an unfamiliar thing.

“Oh.”

He smiled and cocked an eyebrow. “Smooth, huh?”

Blanche didn’t answer. She was too busy marveling at how any part of her own body could feel so foreign to her, and so unaccountably perverse.

He rose on his knees, wrapped an arm around her waist, and kissed her.

* * *

It was in the midst of that kiss – once it had turned from casual affection to something more intentional and driven, once she had put aside any unwillingness to indulge in the strange delight of stroking her own denuded cunt – that she felt the first tiny pricks of pain. At first it was just a clutch of itches, but as she grew wet and her wetness spread out over the area, the itch became a maddening sting. She squirmed in his embrace, then struggled, and then pulled her hand from between their bodies in alarm.

“It stings! It fucking burns!”

He smiled against her mouth.

“I need to rinse it.  Move,” she said, trying to push him away.

But instead of acquiescing, he cupped her bare ass cheeks in his hands and pulled her against him, burying his face into the curve of her neck. She could feel the cotton of his underwear against her mound, not soft at all, but coarse and mean, and his cock, thickening by degrees beneath it.

In that one quotidian moment, he had pushed her past being a sentient human who took care of her own requirements with any semblance of dignity. The scratch of the cotton felt good; his erection was in just the right place so that, if she moved her hips strategically, she could relieve herself of the infuriating sting and grind herself to orgasm at the same time.

* * *

Just before she reached it, he stopped her and picked her up off the edge of the tub, her legs still wrapped around his hips.

“What? What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Don’t you want to fuck?”

“I do. We could have done it right there.”

“True, but this is better,” he said, and dropped her onto the unmade bed.

She looked up at him, with the veiled sullenness of someone who’s just been cheated of something. It wouldn’t be the first time. He had a nasty habit of teasing her to the point where she got aggressive and then would, either figuratively or literally, walk off whistling. But she sensed he was not in that kind of a mood today. There was a dark wet spot and faint red streaks on his underwear where she’d rubbed herself against him. He was still hard. She elbowed her way up the bed to make room for him as he peeled them off.

“Does it still sting?” He pushed her legs apart, knelt between them and cupped her cunt. The salt from his palm made nonsense of the question. Then he gave her a savage squeeze.

Her hips arched upward, of their own volition. “Motherfucker!”

“Bitch.” His hand was hot and cruel; he almost made a fist, gripping the pink flesh of her.

Caught between arousal and horror, she felt the recently clotted cuts break open, watched a tiny rivulet of blood seeped between his fingers. “I don’t want to. I’ve…I’ve changed my mind.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, taking his hand away, gabbing her by the back of the thighs and pulling her to up to him. “Don’t go all coy on me.”

“I’m bleeding. Can’t you see I’m bleeding?”

“Yeah, you are.” He brushed the back of his fingers over her cunt, smearing the blood that wept from the cuts, then pressed his thumb between the lips and trailed the flat of it over her clit. “And you still want to fuck.”

Blanche turned her head away, wondering why her eyes were filling with tears, why the blood scared her, and why, despite it or because of it, she wanted to fuck.

As he pushed into her, it wasn’t the thrust that hurt. It was the way filling her pulled the cuts apart. It wasn’t a sting any more; now it was worse. As if all the little nicks had decided to merge and become one generalized ache.

“Look,” he said. And, when she wouldn’t turn back, he bent forward, cradling her head in his hand and made her look.

Between their bodies, across the expanse of bare skin, between her raised knees, he penetrated her. Even and unhurried, he fed himself into the mess of her new cunt, marred, swollen, seeping, streaking his cock with blood each time he pulled out of her.

It didn’t stop. The more aroused she became, the more she bled and the less she cared – or part of her, anyway – because she was crying. She knew she was crying. She heard her own breath, hitching on the sobs that couldn’t quite decide if they were moans or something else.

She wanted to see his face, to get some sense of what was going through his mind, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the frightening spectacle of copulation turned into artful butchery, and her own body and his made into meat, into their constituent parts. Just blood and skin and sweat and meat.

Then she knew why it frightened her, as he repeatedly pushed the trickles of red back into her body: all the risk it carried; all the untouchability of it; all the mad commitment of covering himself in her blood; all the agonizing desire that anathema could offer.

“Oh, Christ,” she whispered.

The shock of the orgasm took her like a thief, as if it didn’t belong to her, as if she’d had her body snatched and put to a purpose she hadn’t agreed to.  Before she’d stopped twitching, he covered her with his body, dispensing with all his earlier restraint, and fucked her with all the driven ruthlessness of a man who has been somewhere wicked and wants to forget it. He stopped after one last, harsh thrust, rested his forehead on her collarbone, and came, shuddering.

It was hard to know how long they lay like that – long enough that, when he moved off her, the gore had clotted. She hissed as he pulled away from her skin. He gave an uncertain little laugh as if, perhaps, this time he’d gone too far.

It wasn’t a desire to assuage his doubts that made her roll onto her side, nestle up against him and fall asleep. It was the need of an animal for shelter after a storm, and the deep, dreamless sleep of a creature that has come to know what it’s made of.

Drink Me (6)

[image error]Down he goes. Not hard, but with the unexpected grace of a tall building demolished by experts. The drug in his bloodstream smiles, using his muscles, his lips, pulling him on like a disguise, sleek and pretty.

Sometimes, he’s nothing but pain, but not now. Now he inhales deeply, and sighs aloud, as if launching a lifeboat out onto calm seas, unrequired, as if to say, ‘See? You doubted in vain. Rescue was always at hand.’

Days like these, he’s torn between the urge to dismember himself in disgust and fuck anything that moves. For just an hour’s reprieve, a trip down memory lane to a time when everything was oiled precision. When the meat cloak enfolding him didn’t constantly remind him of the battles he’s fought in it, didn’t accuse him, daily, of its callous misuse at his hands.

I know how good the drug feels. I know that bliss, the tongues that race along the sinews, outward from the core, enveloping each muscle, each tendon, in a warmth and peace so sweet and deep it demands its rewards in gratitude’s tears.  Watching it take him, I sigh and melt in sympathy.

In that sublime embrace, fucking seems like a formality to be dispensed with among intimates. Something to be toyed with on the tip of the mind’s tongue, smiled at, and filed away for some other day, when sedation is less readily at hand, and the pain returns and distraction is required.

Cusp (5)

[image error]Vampires feed on blood. I feed on disquiet and decision, on rage and regret. On the decisive moment and the slow flowing syrup of bitter aftermath.  These days, I maintain a strict rule not to trigger it, but if it falls in my lap, lover, you cannot blame me for the pleasure I take in fortune’s little favours.

So when, in a moment of fury, you draw back your hand to hit me, I hide my smile. I savor the cusp of choice, the trembling drop that hangs on the tip of the moment, and feel the thrill of pause, of decision, slip serpentine into my veins. That perfect instant in which all free will is distilled down to its essence. Whether you succeed or fail to control yourself hardly matters, the fruit is squeezed. The bruise you leave on me is a small price to pay for the long draught of repercussion I may drink in return.

To see the pieces fall, to watch the slow pallor of doubt creep across your face. After the momentary righteousness has ebbed, shame steals into the muscles of your shoulders, into the hesitation of your glance, and colours the careful uncertainty of your apology.

There is nothing so flagrantly decadent as regret. It lies across the landscape like a spare whore, unrequired, costly and useless, an exquisite mosaic walled up in a windowless, doorless room. Only her perfume matters. Only the imagined luxury of creamy thighs that won’t be parted today. The potential for what might have been done differently but wasn’t; it’s an impossible future past.

In love, in lust, in terror or temper, the story is only fully told in the consequence.  I do, above all, love a good story.