Lily Lloyd's Blog, page 2

How To Build A D/s Rule That Doesn’t Fall Apart Three Days Later

[Hey, everybody -- posted this earlier this week on FL, inspired by a question on one of the forums.  Oh, and hi! -- Lily]

When I started exploring All Things Kink, my partner and I, in a fit of enthusiasm, made about a zillion rules. In general, they fell into three categories:

They sounded hot in theory, but in practice, they were pointless and annoyed us both.
It was difficult to figure out when they applied or who was in charge of figuring out if it was followed.
If they didn’t actually conflict with each other, they generally had little to do with each other, so they didn’t reflect any particular feeling or direction we wanted in our relationship.

So, you might ask: Are we stupid?! No, but like most people, we don’t do our best thinking with our clothes off The end result of trying to implement all these rules at once was that our confidence in each other and in our ability to build a dynamic that worked for us took a nosedive (cue many questions on Novices & Newbies and a moderate amount of handwringing blog posts from yours truly).

Rules seem simple — and often rules are intended to simplify — but when you take a closer look at them, even the simplest rule has more moving parts than you might think. When does it apply? Who’s in charge of monitoring and reporting it? What happens when it’s broken?

So, learn from my mistakes! Here’s a few tips on…

How To Build A D/s Rule That Doesn’t Fall Apart Three Days Later!

In general, I want every rule I implement to meet the three following conditions:

One, it brings the two of us closer together.


Two, it helps us build a dynamic we both want.


Three, adding the rule to our relationship enhances the well-being of both partners.

But once you think you’ve got a rule that satisfies all three of those conditions, then what? Here are some things that have really created successful rules for me:

One Rule At A Time

My experience is that a rule is more likely to succeed on those three points above if you give it some exclusive focus when the rule is brand new. Try to refrain from implementing more than one rule at once: implement a rule and give yourselves some time to get good at practicing it before adding another one.

Don’t ‘Hire’ A New Rule Without An Audition

Establish a trial period for the rule — a day, a couple of weeks. I travel a lot for work and I’m a big fan of “out of town tryouts” for a new rule; my partner and I will have a day or two with few distractions to focus on this new thing we’re trying out (and a nice big hotel bed to retire to if the rule we’re auditioning turns out to have…ahem…interesting effects!).

Figure out The ‘Overhead’ Of A Rule Up Front

If a submissive kneels in the forest, and no one is there to see it, is it really kinky? There are few things more deflating to an s-type than carrying out a rule (or not carrying it out) and realizing their D-type doesn’t know or care. And there are few things that annoy me as a D-type more than rules that build in a “gotcha” dynamic where I have to “catch” my s-type screwing up. I want my s-type to succeed at what she does! You have to figure out the reporting and monitoring for a rule — who reports, how, and when — up front for a rule to succeed (there’s a link down below that gives you lots of options for this).

Don’t Let Rules Fade Away — Take Them Out Back And Shoot Them

“Oh, we did it for awhile, but then…I don’t know what happened, but it just kind of petered out,” is not the kind of statement that inspires confidence on either side of the slash, is it? Re-evaluate rules regularly, and if they aren’t working or you’re not doing them, RETIRE THEM. Actually say, out loud and with words, that the rule is no longer in force. It’s a good time to propose a trial run for a new rule, actually.

Even simple rules turn out to have quite a few moving parts when you look closer. If you want to build a rule that works, and you’re the kind of nerd that thinks OMG DOWNLOADABLE PRINTABLE CHECKLIST SWOON!, A) you are my kinda people and B) I’ve put together a rules worksheet that will help you avoid implementing rules that don’t work and get right to creating rules together that make your relationship hotter and sexier and happier. It’s right here. Enjoy!

Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.

Wait, I Have Amazon Reviews?

For the longest time I had no Amazon reviews for my book, Discipline, and then…

 

OMG YOU GUISE!!!!

SOMEBODY SAYS I WAS ELEGANT!  #FAINTS

Traveling Through The Lands Of Our Sexuality

In real life, I find submitting to be extremely compelling and satisfying and good…for a little while, like a couple of weeks. After that, I still find it compelling, but no longer really good. I start to hate it but I’m unable to see that I hate it, and so I just do it in a way that makes things impossible for my partner, while still believing fervently that I want to be doing it. And I’m devastated when it ends.

In general, submitting turns me into an emotional wreck anyway. Even in the early parts, I fall apart at the drop of a hat and need constant and deep reassurance all the damn time. (I’m not like this in everyday life, though I’m not a supremely confident person either.) That seems to suggest that maybe it’s not the healthiest thing for me to be doing…

…So, damn, what about the fact that it’s mostly only bdsm (or at least sex with some kind of power imbalance) that turns me on? Well, whatever. I’m not trying to constrain my future self from having whatever funtimes she chooses. But right now, sexual gratification doesn’t actually feel very important to me. I masturbate and that’s enough for me.

“Why I’m Not Doing BDSM,” at Devastating, Yet Inconsequential

This is a passage from a longer entry at “Devastating, Yet Inconsequential.”  I found the entry fascinating, and really quite beautiful in the way it talks about transitions in our sexuality.   I don’t know about you,  but my sexuality is itinerant.  It hasn’t saved up for the RV yet, but it eyes the catalogs with great longing every winter.  

Biology may have something to do with this; there’s some evidence for the claim that female sexuality is more fluid than male sexuality.  In general, though, I try to avoid claims that biology or evolution disposes or indisposes one half of humanity for anything in particular because I’d have to take it with so many grains of salt that I’d end up eating the whole shaker, and, just, ugh.  Ugh.

The reason why I end up dwelling in one region of the lands of sexuality, or exploring a new one, in the end, is pretty simple: it’s love.  

Or, to be more precise, relationships.  My relationships drive my explorations: I’ve acquired a long list of new kinks from my partners.  Sexual excitement is sexually transmissible: If I find my partner hot, and they find X activity hot, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to end up finding X activity hot as well.  (Note: This works for kinks I’m neutral about: kinks where my honest reaction is, “Huh.”  If I have a genuinely negative reaction to a particular kink, I think it’s unlikely that even partners as hawt(!) as mine would win me over).

Of course, there’s also our relationship with ourselves.  My friend Aggie Sez, who writes the Solo Poly blog, by and for people who are not in and do not seek primary relationships, says “I am my own primary, thank you very much.”  I’m not sure I’d say that about myself, but, my relationship with myself is certainly significant .  I have a lot of respect for Sex For One, for example — despite the fact that our culture seems to think of masturbation as a consolation prize, and people who do it as pathetic somehow.  I don’t think masturbation is a substitute for sex; I see it as its own thing; it’s part of my relationship with myself and with my own sexuality.  Sometimes I need to be alone to concentrate so I can figure out what turns me on today, right now.   If I don’t know, I can’t share it with a partner, right?

But to get back to the topic:  I don’t think that sexuality is a fixed thing — or at least it isn’t for me.  I’ve moved and broadened and expanded and pulled back all throughout my life as a sexual being.  Will I always be kinky?  I think the answer is probably Yes.  But how I will be kinky will meander all over the place, depending on the circumstances and chance, and, of course, my choice of traveling partners.

[When I was writing this, I was thinking of Franklin Veaux's whimsical "Map of the Lands of Human Sexuality."  If you click below, you'll see the map with my "pins" in it, indicating areas I've explored.  I could probably put more in...but I need to get back to work!  -- Lily]

Find out where I’ve journeyed

on the Map of Human Sexuality!

Or get your own here!

 

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale

Pirates of the Carribean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.  The fact that these are so easy and fun to write (and read) are a testament to Laura’s world-building skills — the Marketplace world is so cleverly put together that I’d find that actions my characters took on one page made sense five pages later, as if Laura had been there first smoothing things out before I got there.

This tale also takes a page from the real-world phenomenon of modern high seas piracy.  Most people think that pirates are a thing of the past, but in fact, across the globe at least one boat a day is attacked by pirates looking to steal cargo, ransom the crew or owners, or steal the boat itself.

“Pirates” is a followup “Foster Care,” where we meet the two main characters, Bette and Kelly, for the first time.   Bette, who has become a freelance fixer for The Marketplace, rescuing human property when their owners can’t or won’t, gets a new case from trainer Chris Parker: rescue three slaves who come under attack when sailing their owner’s boat from Nassau to Buenos Aires.

There are pirates, BDSM, petroglyphs, fisting, SHARKS!, lesbian sex, and high-end coffee plantations.  Who can’t love that?!  Enjoy!

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 1

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 2

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 3

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 4

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 5

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 6

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 7

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 8

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 9

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 10

Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 10 (Conclusion)

Pirates of the Carribean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.

In Part 9, Bette manages to survive her star turn on her own personal episode of Shark Week.  In this part, Bette is reunited with Kelly and makes a promise to Rita.

I turn around in the inflatable lifeboat. My sharky suitor is still stalking me.  Maybe there’s just one, because really, when do you need more than one shark to get the job done?  The only time you need more than one shark is if it’s Shark Week and Animal planet needs to lower some numbnuts in a cage with a camera into the water.  If it’s not about ratings, one shark will do the job.

I see his fin flashing back there behind me, going back and forth.

If I was a shark I’d probably think he was flirting, poking the bottom of the raft with his nose as a way of saying, “Nice ass!” but since I’m not, I’m just trying to get away from him…and not run into any of his frat bros at Alpha Zeta Shark.

For awhile the fucking island doesn’t seem to come any closer at all no matter how much I paddle with my one fucking hand that I can only dip in the water after checking for shark, but then, gradually, I seem to be making progress, and then, it seems even faster.  I realize a current is sweeping me into the archipelago of tiny mangrove islands that shelter the bay. I can see the bottom now, through the crystal clear water.  I look back and my friend Mr. Shark is getting further and further behind. What’s the matter, baby, don’t like the shallows? Too bad, so sad, can’t stick around for a date.

Finally, I reach one of the mangrove islands.

The thing about mangrove islands is that the mangroves overgrow the entire island with knobby, bony, hard branches and the whole immovable thicket goes right down into the water.

I am so fucking far beyond caring about this that I climb right out of the boat and try to climb into onto, over the thing.  I just want to be on dry land because the only land sharks on earth are made by Cadillac and I’m down with that.

This was not a good impulse.

I catch the spear on one of the thicket of branches and fall forward.

I’m hanging from the spear hooked on the branch and I can feel blood running down my back DON’T TAKE IT THE FUCK OUT MOTHERFUCKER Christ I can’t even take my own fucking advice oh Christ

****************

I don’t know how but I’m back in the raft and the sun is beating down on me and I’m on my back and it’s too hot and then it’s dark and I’m in the mangrove again, tangled in the branches.  Everything hurts and nothing is right.  There are pirates and so I can’t move or make a sound or someone will cut off my ears but something is tickling my neck.

I look up at the stars and try to swallow.  I can’t tell if I’m facing up toward the stars or facing down, into the phosphorescent bay and its tiny twinkling creatures, but one of the stars near the horizon gets brighter and brighter and closer and closer and then I smell a familiar smell and hear a familar sound and Diana is walking across the ocean and out of the glow towards me and I can’t say anything at all because I’m just weeping and it’s been so long and everything hurts and nothing is right.

As she comes closer, I see something behind her skirts, which are as big as the sky.  No, not a thing, a person, peeking out from behind her, with dark glossy hair and big dark eyes.

It’s my mother.

NO! I shout.  NO!

************

I’m still shouting NO when I wake up in the hospital, though it takes me awhile to realize that’s what it is.

Kelly is there.

“It’s okay,” she says, “It’s okay.”

Kelly doesn’t look okay at all, I think. But then I’m out again.

***************

Next time I’m in slow motion.  It’s the drugs, I think.  But it takes me a long time to think.  I breathe in and I feel like I have to think about that too.  In.  Out.  No sudden moves, lungs.

“I don’t know if I can handle this,” Kelly says.  She’s sobbing.

“Carina mia, do you think it would be any different if you were married to a cop or a soldier?  You’d always be waiting for the knock on the door, or waiting for a moment like this.  Now it’s here and you are handling it.”

It’s Rita.

Kelly hiccups. “Okay,” she says. “But I’m crying.”

“I would think very poorly of you if you weren’t. Let me ask you something.  Would you feel different if you knew Bette would be home with you until after the baby was born?”

“Yes,” says Kelly.

“I have just one more question,” Rita asks. “I know you’re property, but your devotion to Bette is more than just devotion to service, isn’t it?  It’s devotion to her.  You love her, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Kelly says, barely able to get it out through her sobbing.

“And people say there’s no room for love in The Marketplace,” Rita says, patting Kelly on the back. “Like there’s any crack too small for love to get in.”

I hear rustling.  They both have handbags I could go away for a week in, and I hear paper and lipstick tubes falling on the floor and all that beautiful cascading feminine noise.

“Wipe your face, baby, she shouldn’t see you crying.  There’s one more thing I want to talk to you about.”

I hear rustling.  They both have handbags I could go away for a week in, and I hear paper and lipstick tubes falling on the floor and all that beautiful cascading feminine noise.

“Well, let me see what kind of deal I can make with one-woman army over here, hm? I think we can get her home until el bebe arrives. In the meantime, you need to eat and rest and you are not to give me that look or be stubborn.  I will have Benny bring you back the instant she’s awake, do you understand?”

Damn.  I gotta learn how to do that, I think. Kelly manages to sneak in at least three minutes of objections before I manage to shut her play down if it’s something she really doesn’t want to do.

I see Benny duck his shaggy blonde head to get through the door and smile at Kelly.  I immediately feel relief: there’s something about Benny’s face that just makes me know, in some way I can’t explain, that Benny is a good guy and would sooner drop a safe on his own foot than harm Kelly or let her come to harm.  Plus, he’s a funny bastard and he’ll get Kelly talking and then she’ll eat.

I fall asleep again.  Everything’s on the other side of a pane of glass.  I have to say something to Kelly and I know it’s important but I’ll deal with it later because I’m just so tired…

I hear the click of high heels on a poured cement floor.

“I know you’re awake, you know.” Rita says.

How the fuck does she do that?

I open my eyes.

“There we go,” Rita says. “You know, everyone was looking for you. I even had pirates looking for you, after promising on their mothers’ eyes to return you to me unharmed.  You know who was looking for you?”

“Who,” I croaked.

“Mateo,” Rita says.  “Mateo who hasn’t gone more than 50 feet from that hut in fifteen years.”

Rita arches an eyebrow at me.  “I turned this entire town upside down for you.  People won’t forget this for fifty years,” she says. “Also they think you might have the sight.”

“What?” I say.

“They think you can see the other world,” Rita says.  “You were talking in the boat.  I heard you talking about Diana and your mother.”

“I dreamed about them,” I said.

“So they came to you. Your people from the next world.”

“I was hallucinating, though,” I croak. “None of it was real.”

“Ay, carina mia,” Rita says, laughing ruefully. “For most people, seeing is believing.  What’s it going to take for you, a registered letter?”

I laugh but it hurts.

“Now we have something serious to talk about,” Rita says. “I am not going to try and talk you out of doing things like trying to take on pirates on your own. On a night that you promised me would be for reconnaissance only, I might add.  I am not going to try to talk you out of it because no one can talk you out of who you are.”

It’s the threat of her disappointment, I realize with shame at breaking my promise to her. Nobody would ever want to risk it.  She must be a terrifying Owner, I think.

“I’m not going to try to talk you out of anything, in fact,” Rita says, placing her fingertips on my forearm, a few inches below where the IV goes in.

“You should know this: Mr. Stanton, after seeing your condition — and your weeping, pregnant, terrified wife,” Rita emphasized that last bit, taking her fingertip and tilting my chin up to face her, really turning the knife, “Mr. Stanton was convinced to be very generous with your fee.” Rita pauses meaningfully. “Very, very generous.”

Rita pulls three checks out of an envelope. They’re big and have the heavy embossed paper of bank checks.

“Each of these is a check for one million dollars — one million dollars for each of the lives you saved.  That’s pretty generous, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Now, I said I wasn’t going to try to talk you out of something, and that’s because I’m going to tell you something. Your wife thinks you are going home to Montreal with her to stay until the baby’s born, and I am telling you this: you are going to do that. In fact, you are going to do more than that. You are going to go home to your wife and baby and you are going to sit your ass down until that baby’s first birthday, do you understand?”

**************

Of course I agreed.  What, do you think I’m stupid?

Don’t answer that question.

Kelly’s due in a month, and I’ve finally learned to speak French.

Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 9

Pirates of the Carribean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.

In Part 8, Bette makes a raid on the boat where the captives are being held.  She manages to rescue the hostages — but something goes terribly wrong.  In this part, she ends up with a starring role in her own personal episode of Shark Week.

I land in an inflatable blaze orange lifeboat, completely round, and through sheer luck I manage not to puncture it with the tip of the spear still projecting through my chest.

I can hear the Cape Ann II’s outboard motor start, and I see the tip of its mast float by the silhouette of the big mangrove island, its form black against the starry night sky.

I start to shake uncontrollably.  I’m going into shock.  I put my head down as low as I can get it in the boat and put my feet up on the gunwales, to try to keep my blood in my head.

*********

When I wake up the sun is beating down on me.  My mouth is dry. I gingerly move my head to scan the horizon. I’ve drifted out to sea. I see land — but it’s far, and between me and it I see a white, patchy shore break.

The reef.

Maybe I’m on part of the reef?  I feel something bumping my ass through the thin, flexible rubber of the raft.  But it feels smooth, not the way I’d expect a reef to feel.

I lie back and feel it again.  Slowly, I feel my way around the spear.  I can’t reach where it comes through in the back.  There’s something slick underneath me but I can’t tell if it’s blood or water or sweat.

Suddenly I feel violently nauseous.

Oh my god.

I hate barfing.  Hate, hate, hate it.  I will do anything to avoid it.  I don’t want to do it even if I know I’ll feel ten times better once I do.

The thought of barfing, though, isn’t quite as bad as the thought of trying to move so I can toss my cookies over the gunwale — instead of…

The thought of being in the inflatable raft with my own vomit heaves my stomach and gives me the urgency to lift myself up and get up and over the gunwale.

I must be bumping on the reef again, as I feel something under my knee.  I hang over the gunwale, heaving, even after there’s nothing left to come up.  I notice there’s blood in the vomit.  Shit.  Internal bleeding.

It happens so fast — something that’s all teeth comes up through the slick of blood and barf.

FUCKING SHARK!!!  I scream in panic, scrambling to the far side of the raft and then back to the middle as it threatens to capsize.

******

I stay on my knees in the raft, as close to its center as I can get, for the rest of the day. The sun is so hot, and I’m so thirsty and it’s so tempting to lie down in the raft.

Sometimes I think there’s just one,  sliding back and forth in the water.

Sometimes I think there’s more than one.

Mostly I feel so angry.  I know if I survive this I’ll be angry at myself, but right now?  I hate El Camaricaño with a seething passion. I wanna rip the guy’s balls off with my bare hands.  Sure — he doesn’t kill or disfigure women, but he doesn’t object to dropping them outside the reef where the hungry sharks feed — the same place he drops off all his other victims.  I’d kill him with my bare hands without even stopping to take the spear out of my chest first.  I think about my wife, and my baby, and how I’ll spend the last breath in my body making sure that evil bastard doesn’t steal them from me.

I start to paddle.

Carefully.

I look at the water, then, stick my hand in, paddle once, draw it out quickly.  As the sun sets the tide is helping me, drawing me toward the dozens of tiny islands sheltering the bay from the sea.

I do this again and again, checking each time for sharks before I put my good hand in the water.

*******

I know what you’re thinking.  “So, Bette, you’ve got a spear sticking through your chest.  How come you’re not dead?”

Siddown, kiddies. Im’a tell you a story about Iraq.

The big thing with insurgents in-country was burying explosive devices under the roads.

Now, last time I checked, about 6,000 of our guys have died in Iraq and Afghanistan so far.  It’s a drop in the bucket, really, to something like Vietnam, where US casualties were almost ten times that in a shorter war.

It’s a good news/bad news story, you see — and it’s ’cause of people like me — badass motherfuckers known as field medics.

I don’t know if we were getting blown up or shot at less than we did in other wars — but we weren’t dying in the field anywhere near as often.  Battlefield medicine and body armor has gotten so good that you practically gotta pulp a guy to actually kill him.  If you don’t take his head off, I can probably get him alive to a field hospital.  And if I can get him alive to a field hospital, the crew there will drop him into a gleaming vat of technology that would give the Bionic Man a robotic hard-on, and they can get him on a C-30 to Rammstein Air Base in Germany, and they ship him off to Walter Reed and pretty soon he’s back home pounding the Bud and telling big fat lies about all the pussy he got back in the day…

You get the picture.

Thing is, we don’t always send ‘em home with all their parts.  6,000 casualties, right?

18,000 amputees.

Read that again, sister. Eight. Teen. Thousand. Amputees.

There are gonna be a whole lotta wedding and graduation and anniversary pictures in the next few decades where Uncle Mike or Daddy Luis is missing an arm or a leg.

Let’s not even get into the traumatic brain injury.

Anyway, this isn’t a story about a guy missing parts: it’s about a guy with extra parts.

It doesn’t matter what road we went down or what time of day it was or what vehicle we were in.

It’s all the same: Drive, bump, boom.  

One minute I’m in the bus and the next minute I’m on my back in the sand 25 feet from the road and I can’t hear a fucking thing. I wait a minute: one of the insurgents’ favorite tricks is to blow up your shit and then blow up a second bomb while you’re rushing in to rescue the survivors.

By the time I start to hear the guys screaming I figure, if it isn’t safe to go in, then fuck it, I die and that’s the way it plays.

If there was a second IED it didn’t go off.  I imagine quality control at IED Industries was for fucking shit and workplace safety was pretty bad too, but there is such a thing as good enough to blow up government work.

I start pulling guys out, tying off this, getting other guys to drag guys out of the roadway.

Choppers start showing up.  Then I look in the bus.

Fucking driver has a piece of the bus through his chest.

Goddamn it all to hell.  I call up for the SawzAll.

Truth in advertising: It really does fucking saw it all, no shit.  I cut off the ends of the metal — honest, I have no fucking clue what part of the bus it was — to unconnect him from the vehicle.

Guess what?  Guy’s alive and has twins.  Working as a middle school science teacher, plays basketball on the weekends.

The thing about having something poking through some important body part — or even one that’s just near an important artery is this:  DON’T FUCKING TRY TO TAKE IT OUT.

I mean, that was my whole job back to the copter, trying to get the guy not to grab the fucking thing sticking through his chest and pull the fucker out, I don’t blame him, it’s goddamn unnatural, amirite?  I had to call an MP over to cuff the guy’s hands behind his back so I could get a line started.

So.  I have this thing through my chest, but I can feel that I’m not losing blood — not to the outside, anyway.  I’m probably losing some inside, but as long as I don’t try to pull this fucker out, I might live.

If the sharks don’t get me.

 

********

Go to Part 10 and read the conclusion!

The statistics about veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not invented — they are real.  As far back as 2004, articles in prestigious journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine were talking about how advances in battlefield medicine were saving more lives — but sending servicemembers home with far more serious injuries.  If you’re interested in learning more, please visit The Wounded Warrior Project, where returning service member and their allies help vets live their lives to the fullest.

Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.

 

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 8

 

Pirates of the Caribbean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.

In Part 7, Bette meets someone with information that might help her end the hostage standoff without bloodshed.  In this part, Bette prepares to confront the pirates and assess whether or not the captives are still alive.

“You promise me that tonight is only for reconnaissance,” Rita says.  “Look, but don’t touch, correct?”

“Yes.  I just want to see if the hostages are there.  No point in going in heavy if they’re…”

“If El Camaricaño killed them.”

“Right,” I say.  “Rita, I have one question I have to ask: will you be in trouble with El Camaricaño for helping me if I take the hostages alive?”

Rita shrugs eloquently and looks out over the dock behind the hotel.

“But…” I say.

“No arguing,” she replies,  making a flat, slicing gesture with her hand.

“You’re gonna tell me how you do that sometime, right?”  I say.

“Do what?”  Rita asks.

“Tell me how you project that effortless sense of command.   The kind where nobody argues with you.”

“I can’t teach you, baby.  It comes with age.  Be patient, you’ll get there.”

**********

Up in my room, I called Chris Parker back in New York.

“We think they’re alive, and we think we know where they’re being held.  Listen, I need you to get in touch with Ben Stanton and give him an update on his property.  And I also need to know if he knows someone who can convert some photos of a map into GPS coordinates.”

“Got it,” Chris says. “What will you do next?”

“We’ll wait until dark.  Then we’ll do a little recon.  I don’t want to try to board their boat if the hostages are already dead.  I have to tell you, Chris, these guys are geniuses.  They hide the boat in an archipelago of mangrove islands – all these twisty little passages.  And the water here, you won’t believe this shit, they’ve got something like water-fireflies, so when you disturb the water at night they light up.”

“What the hell are water-fireflies?” Chris asks.

“I mean, they’re not bugs.  I guess they’re single celled creatures, but they light up like a firefly in the water when the water is stirred up. “

“So with the mangrove maze, practically nobody can find them, and if they do, nobody can sneak up on them,” Chris says.

“Exactly,” I say.  “Smart motherfuckers.”

“I’ll call you within a half an hour with a report from Stanton,” Chris says. “And Bette?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

***************

Six more hours to go until sundown.  I check and recheck my equipment, slide into  my wetsuit and adjust it.   I look in the mirror and I gotta admit, I look pretty fucking badass: wetsuit, web belt with flares and a KA-Bar knife.  I look like I swam out of a Bond flick.

I know I can call Clarita up to my suite to take the edge off, but it’s not Clarita I want.

I pick up my phone and text Kelly.  “Google Hangout,” I say.

I flip the lid of my laptop up and dismiss all the browser tabs about waterproofing an AR-15.   For that matter, where is the AR-15?   Guns make Kelly nervous.  I take the rifle and put it behind the laptop, well out of the view of the webcam.

Kelly comes onscreen, live from our apartment in Montreal.

I gotta tell ya, the opportunities that technology offers the discriminating pervert are just fucking limitless, y’all.

“Wow,” Kelly says.

I grin and unzip the wetsuit down between my breasts.  “Naked,” I say.

Kelly’s no fool – she doesn’t argue with that one.  She stands up  and backs away from her laptop , pulling her snug long-sleeved tee up and over her head.    She shimmies out of her yoga pants, leaving her in nothing but a pair of inexpressibly cute polka-dotted panties.

Kelly turns to the side and slides her hands down her belly.  “I think something’s finally happening down here,” she says.

Yes, there most certainly is – it’s subtle, but I finally see a baby bump that I know isn’t all in my imagination.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so aroused and wanting to cry and laugh at the same time.  I want to dance, which is unusual for me – for a physical person, I’m pretty self-conscious when it comes to dancing.  But what the hell, the mother of my child deserves a little entertainment for carrying our baby.

I get up and start zipping the wetsuit lower.  Kelly’s facedown on our bed now, propping up her face in her hands, a huge smile on her face.

“You know, even if I were there, I don’t think it would be proper for me to tuck bills in your belt, Boss,” she says.

I click off the web belt, letting the Batman assortment fall to the floor with a clank.  “You could pay me in other ways,” I say.

One of the many things I love about Kelly is one of the things she hates about herself: she’s a furious blusher, and no matter how or how often I turn her into a trembling, gasping puddle of slut, her embarrassment at her own hungers never seems to wear off.  She turns red to the roots of her hair and covers her eyes.

“Now, now.  You don’t want to miss this, do you?”  I slowly slide my hand down into my wetsuit.  She knows where it’s going. I slip my fingers into my cleft and work myself, letting my eyes close and my head tilt back, swaying on my feet to the music outside on the dock.

When I open my eyes, Kelly is biting a knuckle and looking like a dog  who’s trying to be so, so good even though there’s a Porterhouse on a counter she can reach.

I throw myself back on the thronelike armchair by my bed and let one leg dangle over an arm.  I still don’t take off the wetsuit – sometimes less is more: she can’t see my pussy, but she can see where my hand disappears into the suit, and her rich imagination can supply all the details.

It doesn’t take long for me to approach the edge, and I come while I’m looking at her, my lips parted, groaning.

I let my head fall back onto the chair, and then loll it forward weakly on my neck.  Kelly looks at me expectantly.  “I know I shouldn’t ask, but you’re not going to let me come, are you?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  It seems rude to deprive a pregnant woman.  Kind of like not giving up your seat on the subway.”

“Oh, I agree!” says Kelly eagerly, flipping onto her back and sliding her hand down her belly. “And you have such impeccable manners, Boss!”

“Uh uh uh,” I say.  “Not that way.”

*****

“This way? Really?  Our child is going to think it’s a twin,”  Kelly says, holding the enormous dildo in her hand.

“Doctor Wallace says it’s perfectly safe,” I say.  “Where’s the lube?”

Kelly waggles the warehouse-club size bottle in front of the webcam.  “Right here, boss,” she sighs in mock resignation.

“On your knees,” I growl, entranced by her.

She kneels over the big silicone dick, lubing it up with her hand.

There’s a story behind that one.  I didn’t buy a cartoon dong the size of a baby’s arm on purpose, you know.  I have standards!

The first time (well, okay, it kind of turned into a five hour marathon which was interrupted by a run to the kitchen for sandwiches and seltzer to refuel) I rolled over and asked Kelly, “So, what do you think?”  indicating my strap-on cock.  “Because unlike most guys, I can swap mine out.”  Kelly blushed furiously and said, “It could be a little…bigger?”  meekly.   I could not stop laughing.  My prim and proper little lesbian size queen!

So I went to get a bigger cock, right?  But I ordered it off the Web from this dumb place that I picked because it had the actual dimensions of the toys written into the descriptions.

On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog – and no one knows if the sizes are either.  It arrived, and damn – that thing’s not gonna fit in my harness!

I used to just use it as a mindfuck – I’d show it to Kelly while she was tied doggy-style to the coffee table and then fuck her with my regular cock.   She’d squeal in delighted terror even though I’d thrown the elephant dong onto the couch behind me – all the action was between her ears.

Then I worked up to fisting her and figured it would be no big deal.

“That’s right, my cock-hungry little slut.  You’re not gonna tell your fellow dyke-slaves about how much you love this, are you?  They might decide to yank your gold star when they find out what a slut for cock you are.”

Kelly whimpers in a torment of erotic embarrassment that just winds her up even more.  I’m getting pretty worked up as I watch the huge dong slide past her silky labia.

“Please please please oh please,” Kelly says.

She begs so nice, I think.

“Yes,” I say.

Kelly comes so convulsively she touches the keyboard with her forehead and accidentally disconnects the Hangout.  The webcam window disappears and I can’t help but laugh.

********

I started feeling like a grownup when I was old enough to have regrets.  Looking back on that night, what I regret the most is that I didn’t see it coming.

And that means that it could happen again.

********

I should have known it was too easy.   One guard on the deck, sitting in a flimsy folding lounge chair, halfway through a pint of rum and singing at the stars.

I snuck up behind him, zip tied his wrist to the chair, and pushed him and the chair off the deck and into the water before he knew what was going on.  He was still singing when he went over the side and didn’t start yelling till he hit the water.

I  fired a burst into the air and yelled for the hostages to come out.  They didn’t know I wasn’t a pirate myself or worse, and I didn’t have time to explain it, so I just pointed the AR-15 at them and told them to jump.

There were three guys in canoes waiting below,  and I could see and hear the hostages being towed by the canoes, grabbing onto the gunwales as my guys paddled into the twisty passages between the mangrove islands, looking for ones too narrow for the pirates in the Cape Ann II to follow.

I tossed my gun into the water, since it was going to be worthless after the swim, and jumped in, thankful for the protective surface of my wetsuit when I bellyflopped it.

And I swam like hell for the next island.

But I didn’t get there.

*************

Being shot by a spear gun doesn’t hurt as much as you might think, probably because of the shock.

One minute, I’m swimming forward, and the next, I was on my back, being pulled back toward the Cape Ann II.

I look down, and to my growing horror, see a barbed spear point emerging from my chest through my wetsuit, just below my shoulder on the right.

**************

Getting shot by a spear gun doesn’t hurt as much as you might think but being hauled up into the air by a barbed spear on a cable hurts more than you can imagine.

I screamed on the deck, flopping back only to hit the long part of the spear on the decking, causing a searing HOLY FUCK pain to shoot through me.

There were a pair of rubber Wellington boots in front of me, and then I was hauled up to my feet by the collar of my wetsuit.  They didn’t bother to cuff or restrain me in any way — still connected to the spear and its braided steel cable, I wasn’t going anywhere.

His palm was as big as my whole face as he wiped his hand across it, smearing away the black grease paint.

Then I felt him tugging the zipper of my wetsuit down.

“You maricones got taken by a fucking girl,” he said.  “Fucking pussies.”

Now I could see his face.  It was El Camariocaño, the killer with a little sideline in piracy.  I have to tell you, I know there’s enough pirates-ravishing-captive-wenches porn to run from here to the Moon, but that is SO not my kink.

Lifting me off my feet by my wetsuit, now open to the waist, he pulled it open.

“How fucking weak are you idiots.”

“We’ll take care of her, jefe,” one of them said, meek and clearly terrified.

With his other broad hand he cuffed the man across the ear, sending him to his knees.

“You fucking dog,” El Camariocaño shouted. “You think  I kill women?  Cut their ears and nose off?  Get the fucking lifeboat.”

El Camariocaño’s flunkies scurried away, and he dropped me on my ass onto the deck at his feet.  He squatted down in front of me and said, “I don’t kill women.  Or disfigure them.  But staying alive is up to you.”

I heard a splash in the water, and then El Camariocaño flung me over the side of the boat as easily as if I were a rag doll.

Go to Part 9!

Bahia Fosforoscente is based on a real place — the waters off of La Parguera, Puerto Rico, where bioluminescent creatures really do swim by the billion in the bay.  Full disclosure: I am not now, nor have I ever been in the pay of the Puerto Rico Tourism & Travel Board.  But maybe I should be

Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 7

Pirates of the Caribbean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.

In Part 6, Bette pays a visit to an archeological site — and learns something about her own past.

After a wonderful meal of crisp pork sandwiches — another product of Puerto Rico’s torrid love affair with all things pig — we press on.

“We’re going to a finca de cafe,” she says. “A coffee plantation.”  We galumph over a big dip in the dirt road. “Though it’s not old, and not much of a plantation.  It’s one of these small, high end places.  An American came here and planted it in the 1980′s, to supply the world’s hipsters with Cafe de Taino,” she says.

We come over a rise and the vista opens up — rolling hills, terraced with coffee plants. Now, I love coffee, but it occurs to me that I’ve never seen a coffee bush in real life.  Maybe the free-floating reverence that came over me at the petroglyphs was still hanging around, but I felt like I should pour out a libation to the coffee gods at the root of one of the bushes, in thanks for all the alertness the bean has provided me over my lifetime.

We drive up to a long, low farmhouse with a broad porch wrapping all the way around it.

An American, perhaps in his sixties, bounds down the steps, his arms flung wide.

Whoa, silver fox alert, I think.

“Margarita, dollface, how are you!” he says, embracing Rita in an encompassing hug.  “It’s been too long!” he says, kissing Rita on the cheek.

Rita taps him on the nose with the tip of her finger.  “The road runs both ways, handsome,” she says.

“Aww, you’re right.  It’s just, we had this outbreak of …but really, before that, a problem with the distributor…well, you know.  Mother Nature.  She doesn’t take coffee breaks and never gives me a vacation.”

“You are her slave then,” Rita says, winking at him.

“Don’t you start, lady,” he says.

“Bill, you know Benny, of course,” Rita says.  Benny waves, still leaning against the Land Rover a few yards behind us.  “And this is Bette.  She’s come to help us with…a problem.”

“I’ve heard about this problem,” Bill says.

“And Bette, this is Bill Buckman, proprietor of Finca de Taino, the largest producer of native Puerto Rican coffee in the world.”

“It’s not much,” Bill says, “But what there is is amazing.”

Bill leads us through the finca, through the rows of coffee bushes tumbling down the terraced hillsides; the vast shallow pans of red dirt where beans are laid out on wide canvas tarps; the cisterns where red coffee berries, the bean still within, are allowed to ferment a bit.  Men are leaning over the cistern, pouring water from what looks like giant showerheads, agitating the slurry of water and bright red “cherries.”

Bill starts talking to the men, and I take the opportunity to lean over and ask Rita something quietly. “So…are these people Marketplace?”

“Dios mio, no.  Bill is so egalitarian it would give Abraham Lincoln a woody.  The men are part of an employee-owned fair trade coffee cooperative, not property.  And Bill is no owner.”

“Do they know about the Marketplace?”  I ask.

“No.  Bill just thinks I’m an eccentric with unusual sexual tastes.  He’s a very strange man — he won’t let me tie him up to anything, not even using little silk scarves!  Very strange.”

It is so, so hard not to laugh as Bill approaches us.

“We’re experimenting with processing the coffee the way it’s done in Ethiopia — you let the cherries ferment a bit and then take the beans out.  Gives it an interesting tang.” He rocks back and forth on his heels a little bit, his hands shoved in his pockets.

“Well,” Bill says. “come on.  Are you sure you want to do this?” he says.

“I don’t see another way,” Rita says.

“Well, all right then.”

Bill hikes up and around the steep hill behind the cistern, and we follow.  There’s a steep drop on the other side, and in a hollow next to a trickling creek is a stone hut with a tiled roof, surrounded by some wooden barrels, crates, and sawhorses.  There are tools and what look to be the castoffs of a carpentry project.

“How is he lately?” Rita asks.

“Up and down,” Bill says.  “Like always.”

“I’ll leave you here,” Bill says.  “Bette, you might want to take off your hat and glasses.”

I take them off, and shove them in the pockets of my cargo pants.

Rita and I set off down the ridge. “Rita, this guy isn’t some Unabomber type, right?  Is he likely to be armed?”

“Oh yes, he’s very well armed,” Rita says, picking her way around the roots of a massive tree.

Shit.  

“Why did I have to take off my hat and glasses?”  I ask.

“Mateo doesn’t like men.  If a man gets within fifty yards of his hut he shoots them,” Rita says. “With the hat and glasses, and your short hair, he might mistake you for a man.”

Oh.

I peer down into the ravine and I can swear I see something moving.  I start to get that surround-sound feeling.  Things are sharp and clear.  I see and hear everything, all around me.  I hop off the little ledge I’d been following Rita down, getting in front of her.

“Que macho,” Rita says.  “Want to go before a lady, huh?”

I look back up at her.

“Carino mio, he knows me.  He’s not going to shoot me.  You being in front just means it’s easier to shoot you.”  Rita says. “But let’s just get on with it.”

Another few yards of climbing down,  and we’re in the courtyard of the hut.  Rita doesn’t approach the door.  “Mateo?  It’s me, Rita, and I have brought my friend, Bette.  Do you feel well enough for a visit?”

For a minute, nothing happens.  Then there’s a stirring inside the hut, and a man ducks out through the structure’s low front door and stands under the broad, deep sunshade around the house.

“Hello, Rita,” he says.

“Hello, Mateo.  Thank you for seeing us.”

The man shrugs gruffly.  Rita comes closer to him, and waves me on, to come with her.

“Mario, this is Bette.  She has come here from Canada looking for friends of hers.  Their boat was taken off of Punta Loma.”

The man nods.

“Mateo, do you know if they’re still alive?”

“Follow me,” he says.  I notice he’s wearing a bandanna wrapped low and tight around his head.  Thick black hair stands up from within it.  He walks haltingly, listing to the left, and it looks like the process is painful for him.

He brings us around back to a small wood shelter with tools and a workbench, shaded by a slope-roofed structure with only one wall.  We circle it, and on the wall is a tattered paper map that I recognize as a nautical chart.

He shuffles closer to it and raises his arm to point.  “I can’t lift my arm that far, but if they’re alive they are here,” he says, picking up a stick and indicating a small clump of islands on the edge of the mangrove archipelago.  “They’ll be on the northwest side of the big island, in the channel between it and the smaller ones.

“Do you think they are alive, Mateo?” Rita asks.

“Yes.  They’re alive,” he says.

“How do you know?” I ask.

“He’s my twin,” he says. El Camariocano.  I know everything about him.  When he dies I will feel it; when he laughs I know it.”

Rita takes off her sunglasses, a wary expression on her face.   Mateo ignores her and looks at me. “I managed to convince him to stop before he fed me to the sharks outside the reef,” Mateo says. “But not before he broke my legs and took my ears.”

*******************

Rita hands Mateo a thick envelope of money, and some pictures that she tells me are of extended family members of his in El Batalle.

“Why did his brother do that to him?” I ask, as we drive back.

“Some people say it was about a woman, or about money, or drugs, or power,” Rita says, as I back the Land Rover out onto the dirt road. “But I think evil men do evil things because they are evil.” Rita puts her sunglasses back on.

“And Mateo’s brother?  Is evil.”

Go to Part 8!

Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 6

Pirates of the Caribbean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.

In Part 5, Bette gets her hands into something interesting .  In this part, Bette will go on an exploration that turns surprisingly personal.

The next day dawns clear and mild, which is apparently a regular thing around here.  I hear a light knock at the door, and a uniformed waiter enters, pushing a room service tray with flowers, juice, a covered dish, and oh, thank you gay Jesus, a carafe of coffee.  I sit up in bed, suddenly ravenous.  I guess I burned off last night’s sumptuous repast with Clarita, because I felt like I could eat ALL THE THINGS.

To my surprise, Rita sweeps into the room behind the waiter.  I scramble to pull the sheets up higher around me — I sleep naked!  But Rita reacts as if absolutely nothing at all is out of order and seats herself, in a way that can only be described as regal, in the thronelike armchair next to my bed, crosses her legs, and asks: “So. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes — I don’t think I moved a muscle the whole night long.”

“That’s not what I hear,” Rita says, with the tiniest hint of a smirk.

Oy! What is it with this woman?  She’s always got me off guard!  Older, wiser, and three steps ahead of me.  It’s a good thing she likes me; if I were up against her she’d see me coming from 500 yards, I think.

“You are quite a surprise.  I send up Clarita to give you a massage, and you end up giving her the full treatment.”

“Well, that’s me…I’m a giver,” I say lamely.

“That is quite some unusual massage technique that Clarita reported to me.  In great detail, I might add.  You give new meaning to deep tissue massage.”

I laughed.  “You could call it that.”

“I shall have to be careful, or Clarita will try to stow away in your suitcase when you leave.  She has quite a crush on you, my friend.  I had to send her on an errand to the next town to prevent her from serving you breakfast.”

“Not that I would mind,” I say.

“No, but a two hour breakfast simply won’t fit into today’s busy schedule, I’m afraid.  I have a few things planned for you.”

In half an hour, I’m showered, dressed, breakfasted, and out front looking snappy.  The military did wonders for speeding up my morning routine, I can tell you that much.

There’s a sand-colored Land Rover in the drive, and a  big, lanky blonde guy leans out the drivers’ side window and waves me over.  I hate to admit it, but my immediate thought was: “Oh.  The one with the really big cock.”  I mean, I don’t even own dildos that big, and that’s saying something.

I see Rita in the passenger seat and open the door to the back seat.

“Benny,” Rita says, “Let Bette drive, and you get in back.  We’ll probably use you to drive home.  And lift heavy items.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Benny says.  None of that macho bullshit about I’m the man I gotta drive, I note. Benny gets out with a big smile and unfolds himself across the back seat.  I hand my backpack to him and he puts it on the floor behind the drivers’ seat with a grin.

“I have a feeling this trip will be more fun for you if you get to drive,” Rita says.

“How do you know me so well?” I ask with a grin.

“You’re not so hard to read as you think you are, maybe,” she says, laughing and pulling down her massive Jackie O sunglasses down over her twinkling eyes.

Rita says it will take a half an hour to get there, but in reality, it takes us a half an hour to get out of town, even though El Batalle doesn’t even have a single streetlight.  Rita, I realize, is the unofficial mayor, Mama, and tribal chief around here.    I might have been unnerved by the way people on foot would walk right up to the car like it was made out of Marshmallow Fluff instead of the two-ton hunk of sheet metal and rubber that it really was, but I’d done a lot of ambulance driving in countries where goats were considered road markers during my tours in the Army.  Rita spent most of her time leaning out the window, chatting, shaking hands, in not one but two cases, kissing babies like a candidate for office.

Once we got out of town, I ask Rita, “You ever think about running for governor?”

“Ayyy, no, chica, not me. Give up my private life?  Not for all the money in the world!  Besides, the governor of Puerto Rico has very little real power, and it’s not like someone like me is going to choose less power over more. Isn’t that right, Benny?”

There was no response from the back seat. “It’s amazing,” Rita says. “That boy can sleep anywhere, anytime, on top of anything.”

“Do you think there are any Marketplace people holding high office?” I ask.

“Ah, no.  I don’t think so, really.  Too much exposure,” Rita says. “Take that one,” she says, pointing to a fork onto a dirt road.  “Although I heard that governor — you know the one in South Carolina who got caught with a mistress from Argentina?  I heard he went to an auction once, but never got anywhere.”

“I guess if he had, he wouldn’t have tried to claim that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail,” I say. Rita laughs. “In all seriousness, it might solve a lot of problems for politicians who can’t keep it in their pants.”

“In America, sure.  Other parts of the world are more sensible — people have affairs and while it’s not necessarily a good thing, it’s not the end of the world, either.”

“That would be a nice change,” I say.

“Well, it’s your kind that are leading the way,”  Rita replies.

“My kind?  You mean gay people?”

“Yes, absolutely.  You people are the future.  You’re teaching us all to get real about love and sex and family.”

“It has been a pretty big deal lately.  I love that it’s happening.  When I was a kid I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.”

“We still have a long way to go, though, here, and in places in the Global South,” Rita says, patting my knee.  “Gay people are a gift from God and should be treated as such everywhere on Earth.  How do people think we’re going to make anything beautiful without gays, or get anything to work right without lesbians?  It’s not like we can get along without you.”

I laugh.

“If I ever had children, I would wish to have a gay child.  I want a nice splashy gay wedding.”

“If it’s not rude of me to ask, Rita, why didn’t you have children?”

“Well,” Rita says, taking off her sunglasses and tapping one of the temples contemplatively against her teeth, “It’s funny.  Your kind has spent the last forty years on a quest to get married.  These days it  seems like all the gays want to get married, settle down, have a baby — just like you.  Now wait, stop here,” Rita says. “You see that little gap in the trees?  You want to turn in there, but be careful, it’s narrow and there’s a drop on the left side.”

I turn into the gap and the trees are all around us, pushing at us like the brushes in a car wash.  I pull hard right, not wanting to tumble into a ditch on the left.  Ten yards in, we come out into a grassy clearing.  In front of me, I can see a beautiful stream, tumbling out of some rocks.  There are kids playing on the rocks and in the stream, and families on the far bank having a Sunday picnic.

“This is so beautiful,” I say.

“Leave the car here and come with me,” Rita says.  “Benny has been here before, he’ll follow if he wants to.”

As we pick our way toward the stream, Rita continues.  “For me, it was a forty year quest NOT to get married, not to have children, not to be under any man’s thumb,” she says. “And it was like an obstacle course, especially early in my life — dodging this, swerving away from that, putting up with a few decades of family pressure and disappointment. But I knew that was not the life that I wanted, or the life that I was meant for.”  Rita waved me to follow her on a natural bridge across the stream, skipping across toffee-colored rocks to the far side.

Once we reached the other side, we stood on a massive boulder. “Look,” Rita says, pointing behind me.

I turn around and there’s a massive, sheer wall of light brown rock jutting out of the tropical foliage.

And it’s covered in petroglyphs: ancient carvings of beings with bows and arrows, hunting deerlike creatures. Curling labyrinths swirl across the wall, and carvings of hands, and mythical creatures I don’t recognize. I’m an atheist, and a pragmatist, but I feel a spiraling sense of awe I don’t think I’ve ever felt before.

“I wanted to take you to see your history,” Rita says. “Since it was on the way.”

“What do you mean?” I say, almost drowsily, enchanted by the sheer scope of the carvings and the depth of time they represent, unable to tear my eyes away from them for reasons I don’t understand.

Rita nudges me with her elbow.  “Look around, handsome,” she says, indicating all the families and kids enjoying the water and the beauty. I start focusing on each group.  This one.  That one.  The kids.  The grownups.

They all look exactly like…me.  That one could be my sister.  That one could be my child. It was uncanny.  After spending a lifetime never seeing a single person in whom I saw my own reflection, here were a hundred of me.

Of us.

Us.

I have an us.

“This is no accident, chiquita mia.   Aqui esta tu familia.”

“I have to bring Kelly here,” I blurt out.  I don’t feel like I have a whole lot of control of what’s coming out of my mouth at the moment.

“Claro que si,” Rita says. “She is your family; you want to introduce her to your family. Of course you want to show her yourself.” We pick our way over to the shore, where families sit on worn canvas tarps and blankets eating a midday meal. “And you have to bring  el bebe, of course — the next generation.”

“Well,” I say quietly, mindful of the young kids around me, “My child won’t exactly be related to me in the same way…genetically, I mean.”

“I don’t want to trivialize that,” Rita says.  “But no matter what, your baby will be connected to you.”  I spot Benny, working his lanky limbs across the rocks with no small difficulty, carrying a picnic basket.

“And you,” Rita says, shading her eyes to watch Benny’s precarious progress across the stream, “are connected to this.”

The Taino petroglyphs mentioned in this post are real, and you can visit them.  Here’s more about La Piedra Escrita, a massive boulder in the Rio Blanco that is covered with petroglyphs (and is a popular spot to swim and picnic).

Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.

Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 5

Pirates of the Caribbean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.

In Part 4, Bette tells us about an important person from her past and gets a surprising visitor to her suite.

I put her on the table in front of me.  It’s not like I’m a massage therapist, but that’s not the point.  The point is that it’s more relaxing for me to cover a woman with oil and rub my hands all over her than it is for me to lie on a table and have a woman do the same thing for me.

I run around the room lighting the candles she’s brought, feeling kind of gleeful about the whole thing.  I pick up the CD of New Age music she also brought.  “Fuck that,” I think.  I plug my phone, which is also an MP3 player and would probably do my dishes if I had the right app, into a speaker on the nighttable and play Aerosmith’s first album.

I turn it up and walk over to the table, rocking my head back and forth like it’s 1988 all over again and I’m a headbanger with big hair.  I do this to make her laugh, of course, which she does.  I slap my hands together in front of me and rub them.

“You ready?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, a big smile on her face.  I guess a little variety is as much of a treat for her as it is for me.  A little novelty goes a long way in making up for my inexperience as a massage therapist, anyway.

The inexperience I lack as a massage therapist, however, I can more than make up for with my extensive experience with womens’ bodies.

Even though I’m a dyke, I’m not a gold star lesbian — early on, I did have a few experiences with men.  What I learned was that erotically speaking, men seemed to me to be more alike, on a physical level, than women were.  Learn a few basic techniques and you can get 85% of guys off.  But what works on one woman is far less likely to work on the next woman; the specific pressure, pace, and rhythm that blows one woman’s mind might do nothing more than irritate the next one.

So instead of learning techniques, I learned to tune in.

Call me The Pussy Whisperer.  Okay, I might be bragging, but find me another person who can get more women off on the first try than I can, and I’ll buy them a six pack of their choice.  The thing I know, is that it’s not about technique: it’s about listening to a woman’s body, paying such fine and focused attention to her that her responses, reactions, feelings almost feel as if they’re happening to me as much as they’re happening to her.

First, a little recon: I start with the big muscles in her legs, circular, deep pressure.  That doesn’t do much for her; she’s staring at the ceiling and she looks like she’s thinking about her To-Do list.  I experiment, trying here and there, this way, that way. I have her lying face up, and when I touch her collarbone lightly with my fingertips, her eyes sink shut.

Bingo.  

Everybody’s got erogenous zones, and not just the obvious ones.  Sure, for most people, the genitals are a pretty fun place for someone else to touch.  But there are always other, less obvious places that turn someone on, transport them to a different kind of experience.  Those are much more unique to each person; for me, it’s a diamond shaped area covering the back of my neck and my upper shoulders.  Bite me or scratch me or even just kiss me there and I’m in heaven.

For Clarita, it’s the area around her neck and her collarbones, in the front.  I sweep my fingertips across them, symetrically, starting in the center and moving out toward her shoulders.  Gently, but firmly, I stroke my fingertips up the column of her neck along the sides. Her lips part, and tension drains from her face, making it softer, more open.

Just as a test, I take my right hand and place it around the front of her neck. I don’t press and I don’t squeeze. I just hold it there for a moment to see how she reacts.  She doesn’t tense up or pull away.  Then I squeeze her throat, very lightly; I’m not trying to cut off her airway.

She reacts in exactly the opposite way you’d expect: for most people, anything that even hints at cutting off their air supply will blast them out of the moment as effectively as an air raid siren.  But for a lot of submissives, that sensation of being controlled, of trusting someone that way, isn’t upsetting at all: it’s relaxing, even arousing.

I sweep my eyes down her body, noting the telltale flush across her chest and her alert, hard nipples.

Somebody likes me! I think, gleefully. I take her hands, which are lying at her sides, and bring them above her head.  I wrap each hand around one of the uprights of the table. “Don’t let go,” I say. “I don’t have cuffs, but you’re going to keep your hands  right there until I tell you to move them, aren’t you,” I say.  It’s not a question.

“There are cuffs in the bag,” she says.

I laugh. “Attagirl!  Way to prepare!”

She smiles sheepishly, and I fish the cuffs out of the canvas bag where they’d been hiding under the massage oil, candles, and new-age CDs.  I wrapped them around her wrists and then secured them to the table.

I start with my fingertips at that tender, ultrasensitive hollow at the base of her neck, and sweep them down, just two fingertips, between her (lovely!) breasts, down the midline of her abdomen, down, down, down, until I stop, just at the border of the neatly trimmed triangle of her pubic hair. I stroke one fingertip back and forth along the border between her curls and the smooth, soft skin of her belly.  Her breathing quickens and she bites her lower lip. She wants more, but I’m not giving it to her.

She opens her eyes and looks at me, pleadingly.  I raise one eyebrow in an unspoken question.

“Please,” she says.  “Please, please, please.”

“Well, if you ask like that, how could I refuse?” I ask.

I lean down and peer into the canvas bag again. Sure enough, one of those bottles isn’t massage oil: it’s lube.  This girl has some quality moves, I have to admit. Way to plan for what you want, instead of planning only for what you don’t want.  I  place the bottle of lube on the side table in case I need it later.

I step back up to the table, doing a few more light, sweeping strokes down her body, then the same up her thighs, until my hands, facedown on her thighs, are resting with my thumbs against her labia.  I gently part them.  Clarita squirms a little in pleasurable torment at the erotic embarrassment of the exposure.

“What a pretty pussy,” I say.

They’re all pretty, of course.  I’ve never met a pussy I didn’t think was beautiful.  I take one of my thumbs and run the pad from her opening straight up till I’m just under her clit.  I can feel the shaft, still hidden within the hood.  It’s hard — she’s definitely perking up.

“I wonder if it’s a naughty pussy,” I say.  “Maybe I should just give it a spanking on general principles.  Wouldn’t want it to get any ideas about who’s in charge.”

I start slapping her pussy lightly with the flat of my hand, slowly building the intensity until a squeal of pleasure escapes her lips.  I keep going until she’s panting, just balancing on that pain/pleasure tightrope, trying not to tip over.

I stop there: there’s a rosy blush all around her vulva from where I’ve been slapping her with my hand.  I reach underneath her and…shit, there’s practically a puddle.

“Tell me, my dear, are you a squirter?” I ask. I’m sure that if Clarita was free to move her hands, she’d have them covering her face in embarrassment right now.  She’s blushing furiously, but she doesn’t answer. I slap her pussy once for emphasis.  “Tell. Me.”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“My, you are a treat,” I say. “Pretty AND messy, one of my favorite combinations.”  Clarita looks as if she can’t tell whether to die of embarrassment or thank Jesus.

I take two of my fingers and penetrate her with them, curling them up to find that ruffled, ridged spot on the top wall of her cunt, just past the entryway. I curl my fingers and relax them in a pulling, pressing motion.  I can feel how swollen and thick she is; she’s definitely got something for me.

She’s so wet and ready I decide she can take more; I withdraw my hand and go for three fingers and she groans in pleasure.  Four?  Why not?  She’s panting as I start fucking her with my hand, going in up to the knuckles each time.

“You like being full, don’t you, Clarita?” I ask. She doesn’t answer and I slap her pussy lightly with my free hand.

“Yes!” she yelps. “Yes, please fill me!”

This sounds like a little more than some fun dirty talk I’ve elicited from her: it sounds like something more.  This time I thrust in and as I get to the widest point, where my knuckles are, I stop, stretching her, then push, applying gentle pressure to the ring of muscular tissue at her opening.

“Ohhhhh oh God, oh God, please, yes, more, please,” Clarita says.

“Have you ever done this before? Had someone’s whole hand inside you?” I ask.

“No — no, but I want it.  Please,” Clarita asks.

“Okay,” I say.  I withdraw my hand and reach for the bottle of lube. While I use it to coat the area around her labia and her perineum, I talk her through it.  “There are no guarantees,” I say.  “We might not be able to do it, and that’s okay — it’s not a race or a pass-fail course. Also, doing this won’t ‘stretch you out.’ You’ve got a muscle down there — just because you stretch your bicep doesn’t mean it stays that way. The only way it gets bigger is by tearing it or damaging it, and nothing we do tonight will come even close.”

I start lubing my hand.  “There’s one more thing that’s important for you to understand — I can’t push my way in.  You have to LET me in.  You’re going to have an active role in this process — you have to consciously relax your whole pelvic saddle for this to work, okay?”

Clarita nods. I put the lube bottle and a towel nearby, and take one last look at my manicure — everything is short and smooth, the way it needs to be.

I go back in.  Three fingers.  Four fingers.  I’m not fucking her this time, with rhythmic strokes; I very slowly penetrate her until my knuckles are right up against the resilient ring of muscle around her opening, and then I apply pressure.  Just a little to start; hold it, then retreat.  Again, this time a little more pressure.  I’m keeping a very close eye on her muscle tenor and her breathing; those are my flight instruments.  If her breathing speeds up rapidly or her abs get rigid and tense, I slow down.  As she relaxes, I move ahead.

I take my fingertips and trace them across her lower abdomen, from hipbone to hipbone.  “Concentrate on relaxing your whole pelvic saddle.  Let your hips fall open.  Relax everything that would be touching a saddle.  This is the opposite of Kegels — instead of consciously tensing your muscles, you’re consciously relaxing them,”  I say.  Clarita nods and closes her eyes.  She takes a deep breath and I can feel her sinking into the experience.

I press harder this time, as tuned in and plugged into her body as I will ever be — subtle shifts in her muscles, the temperature of her skin, all register on me as swiftly as if I were wired up to her nervous system myself.  I can feel my own heart beat harder.

What started out as a playful romp has turned into something much bigger, deeper, darker, wilder.

I penetrate right up to the point of resistance, apply pressure, wait, release.  I let her reactions, her body, guide me: how much, how long, when. I can tell she’s getting there, progressively relaxing her body to give me entry.

“We’re almost there, Clarita,” I say.  “You’re doing such a good job.  I know you haven’t done this before, so I want you to know that when it happens, when you let me in, there will be a point at which it gets very intense.  You may feel like you can’t handle it, but it’s important that you don’t panic. That intensity that you feel won’t keep ramping up — it will be there for a moment and then it will pass, okay?”

“Si,” she says, slipping back into her cradle tongue.

“There’s one thing — once we arrive at the point of intensity, I can’t just instantly pull back out at that point without hurting you, okay?  You can’t actually safeword on this one, not the way you might in other things.”

She takes a deep breath and exhales shakily. “Okay,” she says.

I rub her belly and lube up my hand once more.  I can feel that my little talk has tensed her up a bit, but she’s a trouper — I can feel her working to relax and open herself, and soon she’s breathing deeply and slowly, eyes closed, as relaxed and open as she can be for me.

I’m pressed right up against that resilient ring. We’ve worked our way up to a point where she can tolerate a lot of pressure, and I can feel that with just a little more pressure, she’s going to give way and let me in.  When that happens, she’ll feel a burst of intensity as the widest part of my hand passes the sensitive outer ring.

My feeling is that if you warn someone it’s coming, you may as well start all over again; a partner will always tense up, involuntarily, in response to an announcment like that.

So I don’t say that I’m going in.  I just retreat, then press in once more, building up to the pressure I’d sustained before.

Then?  I add more pressure. The ring of muscle begins to slide over my knuckles.

“No no no no no oh oh no ohhhh oh, oh, oh,” Clarita cries.

If I had pulled back at that “no, no, no” point, I very likely would have injured her. Now, the peak point has past.  Clarita’s head drops back on the table with a soft thud. My hand is completely inside her, curled tightly into a fist.

“Are you all the way in?” she asks, her voice trembling.  It might sound like a strange question, but the inner, deeper parts of the vagina aren’t all that well supplied with nerves, which is a good thing, when you think about the realities of childbirth.

“Yup, I say.  I reach across with my other hand and unsnap one of the cuffs.  “Feel for yourself.”

Clarita reaches down and when her fingertips circle my wrist where it disappears inside her, she says, “Oh.  Oh my God.  Oh my God.”

“You did so well, Clarita.  That was an amazing first effort.”

“Thank you,” she sighs. “I can’t believe how good it feels. I thought it would hurt when you were in but it just feels…I can’t even describe it.”

“Well, I think you deserve a reward,” I say. I take my other hand and begin stroking and pressing her clit in rhythmic circles.  The combination of fullness and having her clit teased pushes Clarita to the brink rapidly.  I don’t want to draw this out too long; for a first timer, I don’t want to leave my hand in for more than ten or fifteen minutes, though it might seem like an eternity to her.

I begin to move the hand I have buried inside her rhythmically, in time with what I’m doing to her clit.  She groans and arches.  The movements I’m making inside her are tiny, maybe a quarter of an inch, and very controlled — there’s nowhere to go, and no doing it quickly.  I can feel that puffy spot just above the knuckle where my thumb meets my palm.  I circle her clit more rapidly now, and her thighs tense, corded muscles straining.

“Oh — oh, ohhhh ohhhhh,” Clarita says.  She’s so close — and then I get a surprise.  A gush of warm fluid flows across my wrist.  She squirted for me!

Damn.  I feel so happy!  I imagine Kelly being there with me, just across the table, peering down at what’s going on with rapt fascination, her mouth dropping open when Clarita gushes all over the table and my arm, exchanging a look of delight and wonder with me, maybe putting Kelly’s talented tongue to work, pushing her face down onto Clarita’s cunt and keeping it there, fisting my hand into Kelly’s hair and rubbing her sweet hungry face back and forth in Clarita’s soaked pussy…

Clarita’s barely breathing now, taking rapid, shallow, gasping breaths.  Just a bit more now and….

“AH! AH! Oh! Ah! OHH Oh my God OHHHHHH! AHHHHH!”

Clarita collapses on the table as limp as a rag doll, covered in sweat, lube, and her own come. I bend over — gingerly and careful not to move my arm too much as I am still buried inside her — and give her the lightest, chastest peck on the lips.

Is it weird that I have my hand buried in her yet kissing her feels wrong?

“What a good girl,” I say, smoothing her dark hair awy from her forehead.  Clarita opens her eyes, blinking, unfocused.  “You squirted, you know,” I say.

A look of exhausted surprise crosses her face, and then she claps the hand I’d freed earlier over her eyes. “Ayyyy, no.  Tell me I didn’t.”

“Sorry,” I say.  “I cannot tell a lie.  You made a gushing, wet mess of your own come all over my arm and the table.”

Clarita groans in embarrassment, her hand clamped firmly over her eyes.  “I can’t believe it,” she says.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Nobody knows what a dirty little slut you are except me, I’m sure.”

“I’m afraid not,” she says, and laughs. The laugh makes her keenly aware that I’m still inside; in fact, I can feel her laughter around my fist.

“I think it’s time for me to come out now.”

“It’s gonna hurt, isn’t it?”

“Well, a little.  After orgasm your pain tolerance goes down.  But it won’t be as intense as going in, no.”

I place my hand on her lower abdomen.  “Relax for me, okay?”

Clarita exhales and does her best.  I slide my hand out smoothly.  She winces at the widest point, but that’s all.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she says.

“No, I’d say that wasn’t bad at all.”

Clarita smiles and places a hand on my cheek. “That didn’t suck.  Even a little bit.”

I roar with laughter.  “Why you little minx!” I say.

Go to part 6!

Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.