Remittance Girl's Blog, page 25

The One – #NaPoWriMo – Day 28

The One

is an ache

ratpacked in

the cleave of the heart,

shameful secret hope

of the reality-adjusted

post-modern woman.

While we

talk of vibrators

and nice, tight asses

and how sickened we are

by sentimentality,

the spectre of the One

Hovers in

the unmentionable

dimension of desire

like a halo too heavy

to put on.

With the curious liberation

of being shot out of

a cannon backwards

I’m going to say it:

I want the one,

and I don’t care

who knows it.

 

 

Old Ghosts – #NaPoWriMo – Day 27

The past came back to haunt me

in that cliched way it sometimes does:

in the form of a note from a stranger

notifying me of the death

of someone I thought

I’d killed off long ago.

But you never can, really.

The love I had for him

is trapped in an airless

bottle of time, the note

simply uncorked it

and there it was,

bright as new pain,

the scent of his skin.

The stains of my decisions

are timeless, it seems.

 

The Right Thing

I don’t think we revisit the past. We write each journey back like a story, using the unreliable, movie-still fragments of memory. Sometimes it is a snatch of a conversation, or a detail of something insignificant, or a smell, or the way the air or the sun felt on my skin in that moment, the discomfort of a knot in the wrong place. A sensory slide-carousel of recall. Each piece so loaded, each so fragile, each so poignant that it threatens to overwhelm me, to swallow me up in the whirlpool of time.

I got an email today from the wife of an ex-lover. She started off by apologizing for her poor English skills – a very Japanese thing to do – and then informed me that her husband had committed suicide three days ago and that she’d found my contact details amongst his things and felt she should inform me.

It was only crazy serendipity that I even bothered to check that email account today. It is an old one I hardly ever check. The email could have sat there on the server for months, unopened, unread, unanswered.

I haven’t answered it yet. I think perhaps it would be better if I didn’t. I don’t know what she knows about me. If I don’t answer it, perhaps she’ll just find it easier to forget the leftover detail of me. If I answer, I will be the detritus of the deep past gouging a ragged hole into the present of her misery. Shouldn’t I afford her that: the un-nness, the non-ness of me?

I left him fourteen years ago: him and the country where I met him. I left because I thought it was the right thing to do. I left because I thought I made him lose his sense of proportion, because something about me made him careless. Because I worried he would ruin his life on account of me. Then, I left the city because I could not breathe in it knowing he was there.

He was the first man I ever let cut my skin. He smeared his cheek through the trickle of blood he’d drawn. He wore the stain of it, drying on his face when he said that I made him feel stateless, cultureless, genderless, beyond all those things we manufacture as part of our identities. But I had been nothing but the vehicle by which he chose to set himself free – for those few hours out of time.

When I arrived in Saigon, I lay in tiny, closed-in room, naked and sweltering in the hideous blackness of the heat like a junkie. I cried for whole days without stopping. I cried until I was dehydrated and there were no more tears. I sweat until my sheets were wet, until I stopped peeing. I cried so loud that my landlady shoved notes under my door, written in broken English.

“Please stop. You make us afraid.”

She left bowlfuls of fruit outside my room and I smelled them go rotten in the heat. Their sickly sweet stench carried on the breeze that came under the door with the acid green light of the fluorescent strip in the hall.

I cried and I masturbated. Once for each of the different ways I remembered he had fucked me, the ways he’d made me come. He had strangely female hands. Long delicate, precise fingers. A beautiful cock the colour of milky tea; the perfect size for sucking.

In spates of blind, vicious anger at what I had given up I gouged scratches into my cunt with blunt fingernails. Over and over, I sat up in the dark, gasping through raging panic attacks, so sure I had done the wrong thing. I packed my bags, called the airlines to book a ticket back, then changed my mind and unpacked so many times, it became a comic ritual.

It is strange that the memories of leaving him are so much stronger than my memories of being with him.

I will never know if I did the right thing. All I know is that, at the time, doing it cost me so much, I spent the next decade convincing myself that it was. We tell ourselves the most outrageous lies for sanctuary, don’t we?

Unmaking #NaPoWriMo – Day 26

As the dark sky turns to a livid bruise

you strip me with words and silences

of all my little lies, my comfortable vanities.

Always, at first, there is the little hesitation,

the cusp of night where levity teeters

like a coin tossed up into the airless void.

Your razor fingered grasp of the moment

slices dawn into bloody leaves of the past,

filmstrips of memory viscera.

Then the fall, the deep plunge into

the fearsome landscape of things

we don’t whisper to the sun.

I trust your surgeon’s tongue

to my unmaking and the sutured

spectre of a resurrection.

It’s not comfortable companionship,

my mad friend, my reluctant predator,

but it’s a worthy one.

Pretty Vaginas

This is one of those rant posts, prompted by this:

I wish I had a pretty vagina.
2013/04/25 03:34:02 via Twitter for iPhone

One assumes, therefore, that this woman thinks she has an ugly vagina.  What, you might very well ask, constitutes a ‘pretty’ or an ‘ugly’ vagina? Although I often say I don’t have anything against porn, that is a little bit of a lie. I do have something against porn when people use it as a measure by which to judge their own bodies or the way in which they have sex.

Let me be visual about this. This has been judged, by the purveyors of porn, to be a ‘pretty’ vagina:

(I've had to delete this picture from this post as it contravenes Goodreads' guidelines)

Meet the vagina that doesn’t look like any cunt I’ve ever gone down on. In fact, it looks more like a perfect piece of plastic sushi.

For reasons that have far more to do with getting a good camera angle than anything else, visual sexual culture has determined that the perfect vagina does not have inner labia that extend beyond the outer ones. They tend to like clitoral hoods for that peak-a-boo moment (I personally don’t have one), and slimish outer labia. They also prefer it if you bleach your asshole so it looks more like a pussy, because anal sex has now become vanilla, and so the orifice, which is usually surrounded by more melanin-rich skin, needs to be bleached to look like it has never passed a stool ever, in its entire life.

This perpetuation of the image of the perfect genital region is so pervasive and so many women have decided to let pornography be the arbiter of how their cunt should look, that thousands of women a year go under the knife to cut away their ‘excess’ labia.

A study done in the UK discovered that the women who underwent labiaplasty did not have bigger or smaller inner labia than women who didn’t think they needed correcting. It turns out that their labia was well within ‘normative’ parameters. They just THOUGHT their vaginas weren’t pretty enough. And, by the way, it is not men, for the most part, encouraging women to do this. I’ve never met a man in my life who judged a woman’s sexiness by the size of her inner labia.

This has to be female self-hatred at its most vile. What on earth is any woman doing judging the look of their vagina by porn standards? Why is porn considered any kind of ‘normative’ measure of anything? It’s like watching a fucking hollywood film and wishing, wistfully, it was your life. It’s FICTION for fuck’s sake! It’s processed and edited and acted by people who get paid. What the fuck is up with this?

Well, it’s brilliant for plastic surgeons. They’re making a killing.

Jesus Christ, ladies: if it gets wet, it’s sensitive and it’s functional, then it’s perfect.

What’s next? Men undergoing penile surgery because their cock has an upward curve, or points a little to the left when erect? What the fuck have we come to?

This is what I think we’ve come to: genital pleasure – what is felt internally – is very hard to market. Yes, there is an attempt to show pleasure with come shots, and more popular these days – the squirting shots -  and women’s faces caught in a moment of some purportedly felt ecstasy, but that is not the pleasure itself, only the apparent symptoms of it.

We have begun to equate pleasure with the visible symptoms of it. So much so that it no longer matters that your vagina works great, lubricates like a tap, spasms deliciously during orgasm. No one gives a shit about that. We just want it to look ‘pretty’. Because the appearance of sexuality, of pleasure, is valued higher than the pleasure itself.

I’ve watched people stop in the middle of fucking to adjust the focus of a camera that is recording their sex. Apparently enabling someone else to watch the great sex you’re having is more important than experiencing the sex yourself. We are, slowly but surely and acquiescently commodifying our bodies, our genitals and every aspect of our own pleasure so that others can consume the symptoms of it – even though we aren’t selling anything.

We are so used to experiencing everything through the transactional process of commodification – I see, I want, I buy – that even when there is nothing for sale, we still act as if there is. We have become so brainwashed into believing we must participate in the free market, we put it before our own experience of pleasure.

Don’t you wish your vagina was pretty like mine? Don’t you wish your dick was as big as mine? Don’t you wish you fucked as long as we do? Don’t you wish your girlfriend would take it up the ass as eagerly as mine does?

This is all performative. All about the spectacle.

It says ‘look, envy me!’ and ‘want what I have!’ We’re so busy making other people envious, making ‘ads’ for how fucking great we are, we have stopped valuing our own enjoyment, ourselves, each other or our private pleasures.

We’ve all successfully become marketers of ourselves. Learning how to make each other feel like we are lacking something. And, believing so deeply in the system, we are all the more vulnerable to being marketed to by others: you need a prettier pussy, bigger tits, a harder cock, a more expensive car, a slicker phone.

______

 Addendum: Although personally I don’t believe in photographing or immortalizing my own cunt in a visual way (mostly because I believe its chief job is to give me a good orgasm and secondarily to feel good to whoever gets stuck into it), Molly has a really worthy project going on over at her site. If you feel visual affirmation is your thing, then please visit “The Pussy Pride Project“.

 

 

 

Nathalie’s Tailor

It starts like a low, slow rip of paper, just audible over the hiss of shower water on the slate tiles. A slow exhalation of sharp-edged things that tears her throat on the way up, making a larger hole for the louder sound that follows. Until she’s crouched in the corner of the glass stall, ragged curtains of wet dark hair covering her face, keening knives into the steam.

It’s not grief or fear or even pain in the way most people understand it.

No one ever says it, but I know they think it. They look at Nathalie and wonder why she’s with a man like me. She’s beautiful and clever. She dresses well and has a laugh like golden syrup. She’s got a good job. They see her, and then me, and can’t fathom it.

But they don’t see her like I do. They don’t see her like this.

Sometimes – rarely – it passes on its own. But not this time. I can tell, because the misshapen cries are now punctuated by the rhythmic thud of her head as she slams it back against the thick wet glass. Thud. Keen. Thud. Keen. As if she needs to soften up her skull enough to turn herself liquid, and slip out of whatever it is that’s holding her insides in.

When I come for her, towel in hand, she screeches like a wild thing caught in a trap. Don’t be fooled by her size. When she’s like this she’s strong. I have the scars down my arms, across my chest and back as proof. The towel isn’t there to wrap her warm or comfort her. It’s to pin her arms flat to her chest, so she doesn’t claw her own breasts to a bloody mess.

They’re very beautiful breasts, shaped like lazy tears just ready to drop. White as parchment, with a faint lace of blue veins when you see them in a certain light. And scarred. A tracery of pale pink ley lines of despair. Done in a moment of madness. Done in the presence, I suspect, of better men, richer men, more handsome men who watched her change and panicked. Grasped their expensive clothes and fled.

Nathalie is trapped in her skin in the world.

In lucid moments – of which there are many – she says that the world grows too thick. That she gets stuck in its suck. That it will pull her back into its smothering, bloody womb and digest her in stages. The world is a starving mother who will devour her children rather than give birth to them. It reeks of perfume staled with time, of dead birds and the awful things that are caught between its teeth. If Nathalie could just slip her skin, she’d be free of its dreadful gravity.

With all the handsome, rich, clever men gone, I’m the only one left to make the space, to ease the seams of her skin. Once I’ve carried her to the bed and tied her arms and legs with the cords she owned before I met her, she’s calmer. She still weeps, still arches her back and pushes rich sobs out her lungs, still whimpers beneath the tangle of wet hair.

“Not long now,” I tell her.

I take out the lovely, tooled scalpel I bought at an antique shop off the Bayswater road. Its red Morocco leather case is scuffed and torn in places. Made before my grandfather was born. Inside, nestled in cream velvet pressed flat with time, the knife glints, as if new. Lovingly sharpened on the small oval whetstone the texture of silk that sits above it.

It’s like drawing on her skin. I do it where it won’t show. On her thigh, or her upper arm, on her hip, on the convex sides of her belly. I cut and she watches the blood well up through the carefully parted skin.

“Breathe, love,” I say.

And she does. As if she’s snatching it away from someone who has more of it than they deserve. Greedy and quick. The crying quiets into stuttered whimpers.

I cut the little eases into her knowledgeable skin. Each rivulet of blood takes its own eccentric path over the nearest curve, sometimes interrupted in its course by a previous seam of scar. But they’re neat little scars, the ones I’ve made.

I’m a tailor, not a butcher. I take pleasure in my work.

I make my careful cuts, and when I’m done, I cover her with my body, slide my cock into her moist, fluttering cunt, and fuck her free of the world’s pernicious grasp.

 

A Writer’s Obligations

I’ve had a marvelous and vibrant discussion on Twitter with a whole raft of writers on what it means to be a writer, and what a writer’s obligation is.  I think there are some things that all of us, who care about what we write agree on. However, this is my list of a writer’s obligations. It might differ from yours. It is, quite simply, mine.

1. It is a writer’s primary obligation to care more about the work (the story, poem, novel, etc.) than themselves.

2. It is a writer’s obligation to use their primary tool, the language they write in, to a very high standard.  This doesn’t mean that every character’s dialogue should be fluent and erudite. Quite the contrary, sometimes. It is our obligation to understand that in writing, language is not only the tool with which we tell the story, but determine how it is told, and know that characters are revealed through language. That is using language with great skill.

3. It is a writer’s obligation to understand the structure of narrative. This does not mean that every story requires a perfect 12-point story structure, but that we KNOW when we are choosing to break with traditional narrative structure, and do so purposefully and with a plan.

4. It is a writer’s obligation to understand the writer / text / reader transaction. To understand that the reader participates in the writing process by completing what we start. And I feel it is vastly better to overestimate your reader’s intelligence than to underestimate it. The first is paying them a compliment. The second is treating them like idiots.

5. It is a writer’s obligation to attempt to take their readers to new places.  There are, it is famously said, no new stories under the sun. But there are endless ways of telling, looking at and approaching old ones.  This can be as radical as presenting readers with alternate universes, or inviting them to examine the interior of an erotic relationship from a fresh perspective. But there is no excuse for plagiarism or willful unoriginality. It is my personal opinion that a great amount of what is currently being published in my genre (and others) that makes no attempt at originality. There is an unabashed trend towards pumping out formulaic stories and characters with the excuse of giving the ‘readers what they want’.

6. A writer’s obligation is to write, and tell stories well. It is not their obligation to give a reader what they want. And it is a betrayal of one’s obligation as a writer to participate in the narrowing and impoverishment of reader’s tolerances. Our job is to invite the reader into a wider world, not a smaller one.  Presently, few people feel any guilt in producing predictable tasting food which makes people sick and fat as long as they make a profit. Presently, there are many writers, agents and publishers who do virtually the same thing in a literary form.

7. A writer’s obligation is to therefore broaden both their and readers’ horizons, not lessen them. I do not accept that market forces only work in one direction – give the consumer what they want. I believe that the majority of consumers will consume what is predictable and familiar until they are made aware of other options. At present, the publishing industry has little interest in the health and longevity of a vibrant literary tradition. Their sole interest is profit.

8. A writer’s obligation is not to be financially successful. This last one is really the biggie. What I’ve just said comes, in this era, very close to blasphemy.

You will notice that I have not attempted to determine who should be the judge of the excellent use of language, the deft structure of narrative, or what constitutes telling a story well. But I would like to simply state that, at present, all those things seem to be determined, to the exclusion of all other measures, by financial success.

To look back through the canon of our literature (you may believe it valid or not, however it is the one we’ve inherited) is to notice that financial success and excellence in writing have never been synonymous in the past. Some excellent writers have been financially successful in their lifetimes, but many have not. The reason why we feel they should be synonymous today is because that measure serves the agenda of institutions who care nothing for the welfare of writers, or the experience of readers, or the long-term health of our cultural heritage.  This measure is championed by people whose sole agenda is profit for themselves. Nothing more, nothing less.

And at the moment, THAT agenda is driving all the pressures imposed upon aspiring writers of every genre. What is more, this all-encompassing measure of worth (profitability) is so universally accepted, that there is almost no resistance to it. No questioning of its validity as a measure of good writing at all.

I understand that making a fair living at writing is the dream of a lot of writers. But if your dream to write good work does not supersede your desire to be remunerated for it, then I think you are a wage earner, not a writer. I can point you to professions in which it is far easier to earn a living.

Villains in Leather: Negative Portrayals of Kink in Fiction

It has been a few weeks of strenuous debate on the net about kink and how it’s portrayed in the media. Meghan Murphy (Rabble.ca) and William Saletan (Slate), who both have a large mainstream reading audience, wrote posts exhibiting a basic lack of understanding about kink and BDSM. They each, in their way, made exaggerated and very inaccurate correlations between kink and criminality – even murder. I felt like I was back in the 50s reading articles that stereotyped all gay men as pedophiles because one gay man was caught molesting a child.

There were some very eloquent, well-argued responses. “I Am An Abuser” from Michael (Molly’s Daily Kiss), “Do Your Homework” by SexGeek, and “BDSM & The Faulty Personality Presumption” by Isabel (Diary of an Undercover Kinkster).

I’m not going to revisit any of the arguments or defenses. That’s been covered. What I’d like to address is lesser but, for me, very thorny issue of how BDSM or any kink in particular is portrayed in fiction.  Like many racial minority, feminist and  GBLT action groups, the kink community wants to be represented in a positive light in the media. And I understanding why that is. Decades of having these groups depicted as criminals, cretins, and predators, they want the inaccurate stereotyping to stop. And not just in non-fiction. They feel that positive portrayals will encourage culture-wide acceptance of who they are as people. And they’re not wrong. Films like “Philadelphia“, TV shows like “Queer as Folk“, books like Sarah Water’s “Fingersmith” have probably done more to get the normative majority to reconsider their prejudices than anyone cares to admit.

At the opening of her post, Isabel says “I was watching last week’s episode of CSI, a show I usually love, when I was wacked across the face with a similar storyline to what I’ve often seen before – BDSM portrayed in a negative light.”

This is an issue I am really, truly torn about. On one hand, I recognize the enormously beneficial aspects of positive portrayals of minority groups. On the other, I feel that there is a grave danger in any fiction writer being at purely at the service of social activism; for me, that is nothing more than  propaganda. Furthermore, I feel that a constant demand to only represent, say, kinky people, in a positive light, means that I am not seeing them as individuals with individual stories, but as posterboys/girls for the group. And that is as much a stereotype as a badly executed and inaccurate negative portrayal.

So, what’s the solution?

I believe that part of the answer is to consider the complete oevre of the creative producer (or, in the case of CSI, look at the series over time. It has produced some very intelligent and sensitive kinky characters as well. You can’t accuse them of always using kinksters as villains.)

Another partial answer can be found in the work of people like Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City Series) or Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, Affinity), or Laura Antoniu (The Marketplace Series) who almost completely contextualize their stories within their subcultures, portray them with accuracy and can then allow for both the protagonists and the antagonists to belong to the same sub-culture.

My solution – and it’s a very imperfect one, I admit – is to rely on really in-depth and complex characterization. I believe our individuality is fundamentally more significant, more important, than any membership we might have to a group. I have written gay, kinky, racial minority antagonists. But what makes them antagonists is not their sexual orientation or their racial background. It’s their individual behaviour.  Similarly, my protagonists have been kinky or gay or Asian, and their goodness is also not a product of their sexual orientation or cultural background. They’re simply a good person.

I know this does not sit well with the various social action groups. And I acknowledge and understand why they wish I were more of a Maupin or a Waters. But for me, as a writer, the story and the character come before the politics. I don’t feel it’s my job to be a social activist, but to tell stories well. I understand that other writers feel differently, and I respect their choices.

 

“What’s With The Needles?”: The Origin of Desire & The Fall

I got an email today. All it said is: “What’s with the needles?” Yup, that’s all. With a fake return address.  And since I take questions seriously, because they afford me some opportunity for reflection, I’m going answer it publicly. I gather it was actually an expression of disgust at story I recently posted called “Jouissance Précoce” but I’m going to pretend it was a real question and give it a real answer.

Behind every kink, there’s a story. I’m not sure who said that. I can’t track down the quote, but I’m a little envious that it wasn’t me. It forms the basis of why I write what I write. And if every kink has a story behind it, then the story doesn’t just explain the kink; it offers you insight to the story of the whole person.

So, first I’ll admit that the story is broadly autobiographical. I don’t often write stories about myself. And it was only after reading Barthes’ “The Pleasure of the Text” and his concept of ‘Jouissance Precoce’ (precocious ejaculation, or premature ejaculation – literally ‘undercooked’) that I decided to write it. It’s also over at my academic blog, forming part of a creative response to a piece of critical literary theory.

People begin their sexual lives much earlier than most of us are comfortable discussing in our present society, and certainly in the erotica genre, but there are ages where the chances of wires getting crossed seems to be greater. Usually in puberty or early adolescence. Sometimes, Freud would have argued, much younger. The seemingly unerotic converges with a moment of hyper-arousal and the event becomes inscribed upon the landscape of our sexualities. It might be something as innocent as a particular colour or smell. Or a song. Or the particular way someone touched you in friendship. Or something as dark as needles.

As time goes on, that node of eroticism formed by the overlapping wires accrues more and more meaning. Certainly, I wasn’t conscious of, nor did I understand the power dynamic inherent in a doctor/patient relationship. I didn’t know about Foucault’s “The Birth of the Clinic”. But instinctively, I must have read my expected role as a submissive/subordinate one. Patients are petitioners, asking for relief from an all-knowing, all-seeing physician.

Of course, I have a different view of doctors now. But in the minutes it took to live through that formative event, the instruction to lie on my side, look at the wall and stay still struck me as deeply arousing. The prick of the needle heightened it. Symbolically, it was a penetration of a sort. My first, you could say. It wasn’t particularly painful or distressing, just incredibly embarrassing. And there was the added psychological complication of tangible positive reinforcement: I desperately believed that it would instantly relieve me of my awful seasickness. And it did – or close enough. It wasn’t instant, but within the hour, I was feeling much better. I’m not a psychologist, and perhaps other more educated people might have a different reading of this. But the story is my, very subjecting telling and it comes with an admittedly highly subjective reading of the event.

In adulthood, the very few times I have allowed a lover to stick needles in me, all those early visceral reactions come back. It makes me feel deeply submissive. I sit or lie still. I get very aroused and a strong sense of impending pleasure.  Interestingly enough, unlike a lot of other people who enjoy needle-play, I don’t like to watch them go in. I don’t dislike it, but it gets me off more when I don’t see it, but just feel it.

As an adult, the act takes on more meaning, because obviously, sticking needles into someone for no medical reason is a transgressive act. I don’t need medicine, the person doing it is not a doctor. They are transgressing a social norm by doing it, and that gets me off even more. I find the ‘fall of man’  -  the conscious commission of an act of social disorder – as very hot indeed.

I have a number of other kinks, few of which I have located the origin for. This one just seemed ripe for exploring, both as a writer, and in terms of literary theory.

I’m pretty sure that many people didn’t find the story a turn on. But I don’t feel erotica is porn. My obligation is not to give you an orgasm, but to write about desire. Perhaps it will arouse you, perhaps it won’t. Then it’s just a written portrait of an event. Hopefully a skillfully written one.

So… got a kink? Any ideas on its origin?

Tourist – Part 2

In Julian’s experience, people who willfully sought their own degradation were those who could afford to do so.

Seated in the recesses of the faux suede banquette, he surveyed the establishment: a club much like all the other clubs he’d been to. They existed in every large metropolis in the Western World.

True, there were a few like it in Tokyo, a shiny new one in Shanghai, one in Jakarta, an exclusively gay one in Bangkok – but those weren’t the same. They were the symptoms of cultural colonization, where the native rich, grown fat on bribes, cream skimmed off the top of NGO funded  infrastructure projects or real estate mayhem, embraced the superficial trappings of Western decadence. Expensive, imported fetish wear and a little light spanking. Had they been true aficionados of human frailty, they could have paid for a visit to a local prison and sat in on – or even participated in – the genital torture of someone less affluent for half the price of their imported shot of Chivas. But they didn’t do that. You can’t boast about that at state dinners.

Here in the West, they’d been amusing themselves with pain for years.  They took it seriously. They had rules. And so, whenever Julian came to the West, he entertained himself watching white, middle class people from developed nations beat, whip, and sexually objectify each other in a truly civilized fashion.

The ice clinked in his glass. He sipped his gin, chewed on an errant, icy shard, and shifted his attention. Over to his left, a smallish woman beat another while her boyfriend looked on with pride on his face and a bulge in his crotch. It was obvious she had little idea of how to go about it.  At first she was hesitant, reluctant even, but she found her stride, eventually.

Last time he’d visited London, it had been all about girls kissing girls. Now, it seemed, it was about girls beating girls. The goal was ever the same: to inflame the jaded sexual appetites of their pornfed boyfriends.

They all had such good teeth.

These people, he thought. These fucking people. Julian tasted his rage. It turned the gin acrid in his mouth and effervescent in his veins.

“Are you waiting for someone?”

The speaker was a slight woman of some indeterminate mix of races.  Tattoos spilled down her bare shoulders. An eyebrow piercing glinted in the gloom like a tiny beacon of pseudo-alternative come-hitherness. Wiry and compact, small boned and small breasted. Stark tendons spoiled the lines of her long neck. Artfully unkempt, tendrils snaked and curled down from an upswept nest of dark hair.

“No,” he replied and watched with the pale blue eyes he inherited from one of his father’s whores, waiting to see how she’d respond to just the one word.

She had big, dark eyes lined with too much enthusiasm. It would make a mess of her face when she cried. But what truly caught Julian’s attention were her lips.  Out of proportion to the rest of her face, they were so plump as to be almost obscene. They could have been pumped full of filler, of course, but Julian thought not.  He wondered how many men had dreamed of seeing those lips around the base of their cocks.  And what they’d look like swollen and bruised. Split and bleeding.

“You’re not going to invite me to sit down?” she asked, amused.

He moved a little and gestured to the empty expanse of the banquette.  “Would you like to sit down?”

She set her glass, half-full of something amber, down on the table and slid onto the curved seat at a discrete distance.  She met his eyes. There was attraction there, certainly, and the tang of audacity. I, said her eyes, dare you. She didn’t know better.

He smiled and held her gaze, allowing her to find – if she had the intelligence to really look – the abyss of nothingness in his. But she blinked, nothing more that a little disconcerted, and broke the contact.

“Do you play?” she asked.

Play. Now there was a delightfully absurd euphemism. Did he ‘play’? Julian did not consider what he did playing. Nor, after he’d finished with them, did the men or women he’d done it with. But that was moot. He answered with the cultural sensitivity of a benevolent tourist.

“Occasionally. What about you?”

She gave him a seductive smile. “When I feel like it. With the right person.”

Julian ignored the prompt and reached across the table, took her slender wrist and drew it towards him. Her upturned hand uncurled, revealing a small pale palm. It was fleshier than he’d expected, with shallow, smudged grooves.  The palmists in Hong Kong would not have called it a lucky hand. The lines were too interrupted and indistinct. He stroked a thumb over its surface, as if to smooth it over, and pulled it to his lips.

She tugged a little, startled by the sudden contact, but he met her eyes again. “Sh-h,” he soothed.

Her perspiration smelled of processed alcohol. Beneath it like a ghost, lay the rankness of wilted tiger lilies and a tickle of mint.  He inhaled the mix and kissed the fleshly mound.

“I know what you want,” he said.

“Oh, you do, do you?” She was nervous now. Withdrawing her arm the minute he released her wrist.

“Yes.”

She giggled and took a swallow from her glass. “And what do you want?” The tease halfhearted .

Julian inclined his head and offered her a charming, boyish grin. “You. Bound. Gagged. On my cock.”

Her lips pursed and she had the grace to blush. “Um, okay,” she said, canting the word like a question. “But I have limits.”

He nodded. “I’m sure you do.”