The Tetrised Luggage

The ground is all little atoms of lights in vast voids. Traveling at five hundred miles an hour, you would think they would shoot past as if we were on the ground. But they don't. You just see more of them up here, sliding past like the minute hand on a clock. I can feel the spark between him and me. It doesn't pass anymore than the towns do, but seems to gather in the space between us, in the sticky skin touching on the armrest.

My tray table is open, a book open on top of it. The first paragraph is something about seventeenth century slang. I've read it three times, but find that my eyes only slip over the words. I'm thinking about him, what I'd say if he said something.

A note folded in thirds lands on the book. "What are you wearing under those clothes?"

Our flight was delayed. We sat in a bar of a town we'd never been to, and now still wouldn't be able to say we had. The conversation turned quickly, and we ignored our blushes, becoming each other's anthropology projects and confessors.

"It's been forever. My last girlfriend held out on me and I've just been too depressed to get back in there."

"How long?" I asked him.

"Two years."

He laughed and so did I, but it was forced. I was supposed to buck him up, tell him it's only a matter of time, that he was good-looking enough. Should be fighting them off.

"How many times do you jerk off a day?"

"Three. I'll blow a hole through my next condom, I know it."

I smile at the note, begin to look for a pen, but just as I lean forward, one drops into the fold of the book. I write, "The usual. Skin, tits and naughty triangle. You?"

"What about you?" he continued, stirring his drink. Every seat in the bar was filled, the spaces between them with tall, black suitcases all Tetrised together.

"It's um...," it had been a year, "a few months, I guess."

He looked me over, a quick size-up in a slow blink, his straw folded over the lip of his glass. He held his breath for just a second and inhaled before looking away.

"I'm thinking about you," the note reads. "It shows."

My blush is overwhelming and beams from my forehead to my neck, pure boil. No matter what I write back, he knows. He takes the note back before I can respond, writes more and replaces it on my book. "Can I touch you?"

The whine of the plane measures a few seconds, the towns replacing one another underneath us. I can hear myself breathe, feel the air nozzle above my face flit my bangs against my face. I pick up the pen and begin to write. I only get to the Y before his knuckles are brushing the inside of my knee. I don't flinch, but inside, my body jolts. Heat pours up my skin, mixing with the blush on my face.

Our thighs are touching and I can feel him inch forward in his seat. I lean forward to check the seats opposite. One empty, two asleep. His lips flip and pinch my earlobe. My heart thuds against my breastbone. I want to feel him, the reason he had to inch forward in his seat. I check again across the aisle and move his hand up. I hear him now, a bang of an exhale. And my body, sensing the force of someone's else's hand, blacks out the periphery and hooks itself onto him.

I shut the lights off over us and look for a moment out of the window. The moon, in the shape of a spinach pie, is blinding and quiet. Our lights flash back at it, like the wing is frantically waving hello. His fingers press into me. I reach across and lay my palm on his abdomen. He reaches up and lowers his tray, then raises the armrest between us. I follow down under the plastic board and find him, a frustrated, caged erection in a tight pair of jeans. I pick apart the button between my ring finger and pinkie and unzip him against the flat of my hand, the zipper teeth pointed into my skin. He jolts and scoots up more.

My body falls into its tense concentration, his hand going above my skirt before it falls again under the material. Its fingers slip and lose themselves in me. I think I must be imagining that he's there. But he must be. I'm shaking.

My hand wraps around his cock and straightens him out so that it rests against the bottom of his tray. He's breathing quickly through his nose, alternately shallow and deep. I look at his face for a moment and find him open-mouthed, watching my chest pump. His fingers snake against me, twist and flutter. My toes bend in my socks, crush into the legs of the seat in front of me.

We work each other for a few minutes, our bodies flying along with the plane, the force of gravity against our weights changing here and there, the blood confused and shifting. My neck bends and grinds into my seatback. My mouth opens and I force back everything but a single gasping inhale. Time stops for a while, unmeasured by towns or clocks or the hiss of the airplane.

His arm pulls around my neck and when he comes, he only says, "I miss you," and pumps shots against the bottom of the tray. In my ecstasy, the continuing high of the orgasm, I know immediately what he means.

"I miss you too."

We sleep, a man and a woman alone in the crowded plane, our heads bent into each other, our hands across our empty laps.

Tell

There's a fat spider in the corner of the ceiling, a highway robber between the vent and the yellow light. I'm afraid of spiders, terrified of watching them move, the way they seem to glide without legs, zooming then creeping. Between dicks I've watched this thing, at least two inches long, and begged it to keep still. I can't climb up on the toilet seat to kill it, even if I could pull together those kind of guts. I can't put my face over the stalls. I'd get the crap beaten out of me, if I wasn't arrested. I hold this guy, a shorter one, but veiny, trimmed, the young ones are, in my thick glove, hand hidden inside, and hold him steady in my mouth, forever bargaining with the spider. I'm so distracted that I don't notice him coming, miss the sounds and the trembling ankles. I'm ready to ask for one more from the spider, but it could be hours. My fingers stroke, but the spider has made me go dry. I wait for the man to leave, then total silence, then head for my car in the lot.

"I just can't watch that stuff," Debra said. "It's just... blech." She chased two shaved pieces of red cabbage in her salad to a different part of the plastic bowl. All over the room, women in sensible sweaters and huge hair pointed at each other with their forks or finger foods, movement on top of the cropped beige carpet and the beige wallpaper, flat in the fluorescent. Men sat back in their chairs, knees apart, like fathers at PTA meetings.

Casey blinked at me, then turned to Debra. "What, two men kissing? Big deal," she said. "I'm a fag hag," she said proudly, but blushed, and rearranged herself in the chair.

"I read somewhere that fag hags are all lesbians," Debra said. Casey didn't look at her, but put her sandwich down and left her mouth open in case she came up with the gumption to respond. They were waiting for me to say something. I peeled my orange and stacked the strips on top of each other, even little triangles rocking back and forth.

My eyes close and I'm back on my knees in the men's bathroom, one cock or the other slipping through my lips. The man comes again and again, losing everything to his dream. My legs are bent against the floor on the futon couch, the shades closed, the pads of my fingers kneading me.

"What's your name?" the guy asks. I can see his hands buttoning his jeans. I dodge in case he looks. "Dude, what's your name?"

My back arches on the futon and my eyes go crossed and blank. Waaa uh. Uh. UH.

George grips my hand and takes a deep sip of his bottled water. It's a hazy night, people's sweat seeming to cause the halos on the streetlights. Sticky men pass us and size George up. He ignores them. I wonder if I've ever sucked any of these guys off or if George is right, I've only sucked straight men with a fantasy. "Hhhhuuuuhhh!" George says, as if he's just noticed the First Lady making out with a girl. "We've gotta go to Deliveries in Rear tonight!"

"No!" I say, and I mean it.

"Yes! Come on." He takes me tightly by the hand and pulls me up the sidewalk. His hands are smallish, not painfully large to hold like my other ex-boyfriends' or thin and poky like my older sister's. They fit.

The bouncer exhales pointedly when I hand him my ID, shakes the flashlight over it and hands it back to me quickly. He looks deep into the club as if he has a secret tell for the entire staff, like a baseball coach, a noserub and neck twitch indicating "fucking girl in here."

I was sick of swimming and decided to jump from one end of the pool to the other just to keep moving. My toes touched the bottom on the deep end, my face well under and I leapt up and forward, emerging into the cold air, and crunched down again. A boy wouldn't get out of my way and I was forced to tread for awhile. I didn't know him, and the way he smiled at me made me nervous.

"What?" I said.

"You're a boy," he said.

"I'm not! I'm a girl!" I said and swum around him.

I jumped again a few more times, splashing gloriously from the water with each one. The boy was there again. I looked for friends, neighbors, but remembered I'd come alone.

"Don't lie. You're a boy."

"I'm a girl!"

I dove and jumped a few more times, a little too fast. Water bubbled in my loose terrycloth suit and pulled it down too much. He ruined my thing, this boy. He was there again. I tried to swim around him, but he blocked me.

"You're a boy!" he said.

George takes me straight to the back of the club, his one eye lazy from drinking. "You order," he says, and socks a twenty in my hand.

I can't look around. The bar is dark but for sharp beams of light that you only see if you're looking straight at them. I see blurs of men in small groups, the special shine of skin. Others cruise, watching the groups with their backs against load-bearing poles. I want to be a spider, to watch them as anything but a woman, but I'm conspicuous here as Queen Victoria. I decide that going to the bar will keep my eyes busy.

"I'm a girl! God!" I said to the boy. He smiled at me as if I were falling for some sort of bait. "What do you want?" I asked.

The bartender is slim and short with a faux-hawk. He clashes with the leather-men.

"What will this lesbian be ordering this evening?" he asks, repulsed.

"This girl wants two Ketel and cranberries."

"Does the lesbian want a twist?"

The boy almost lost himself in victory. "Prove to me you're a girl," he said.

"No! Go away!" I looked at the lifeguard, but he was busy watching older girls directly under him. They were talking to him and he smiled, holding the whistle in his mouth absentmindedly.

"The girl doesn't, no."

"Good!" the bartender says, and slaps the drinks down on the service mat so that much of the liquid splashes out. He looks at me up and down and rolls his eyes. "That'll be sixteen-fifty for the lesbian."

I would have waved my arms for the lifeguard, but I didn't want to raise them. This boy was waiting to touch me. "Hey!" I yelled instead. "Heeeeey!" He blew his whistle, amazingly. The voiceover came on the loudspeaker.

"Adult swim," it said. "Ten minute rest period."

"Here's twenty dollars for the asshole."

"Thanks, lesbian."

"Anytime, asshole."

I swam as fast as I could to the edge of the pool, pulled myself out, and ran for the girls' locker room.

George had been sitting beside me, but saw none of this. I examine the glasses for cloudy floaties, but find none. I give one to him.

George and I went to separate colleges after graduation and didn't see each other until Thanksgiving. He picked me up in his car but didn't kiss me.

"I've held out for you," I said.

"I know," he said.

"So you're gay?" I said.

"Yeah," he said.

"And I'm an idiot," I said.

"If there were a girl...," he said.

"That you would have sex with it would be me, right?" I said.

"But you're a girl," he said.

"Do you love me?" I said.

"Of course," he said.

"Screw me anyway," I said.

"No," he said.

"Then you can go," I said.

The music, if the rumpy-bumpy beat could be called that, goes loud and then off. George hands me his empty and I put it behind me on the bar.

"It's time," says a voiceover, "for adult swim. You've got ten minutes."

The bare lightbulbs go out and George shoves me forward into what must be the crowd. I try to turn around but find the bare chests of men, their fingers in my hair, a dick in jeans at my ass. Before the one can reach around, I drop too hard to my knees and bury my head in his bulge. He pulls locks of my hair between his fingers and unzips. The music grows louder.

George let me kiss him in the car. The two of our faces were wet with tears. I slid my hand up his thighs and found his cock. It was limp, but I'd gotten it going before. Keep your eyes closed, I whispered. I'm a boy. This is my first time with another boy. He lifted his hips so I could lower his jeans. I'm careful to keep my voicebox out of my speech. I'm scared, but I want to touch you.

The man's cock is thin and long. It goes hard right away and I suck to the music. I can feel him trembling and go faster. His fingers pull through my hair tighter and tighter. My pussy swells, needs this. Three minutes pass, four, five. "Yes," he says, "that's a good boy."

I'd been ready for almost a year, ready to lose my virginity to George, would close my eyes in movies and will him to fuck me later. I'd imagined him staring me in the eyes, blinking slowly as he pumped, declaring his love before he came. He lay inert in the car seat as I straddled him, one of my legs forward into the backseat the other twisted and shaking in the well. I'll let you fuck me, I whisper. I'm so scared, but I'll let you do it. I held his cock between my fingers, found the wet spot that I'd tested with hot dogs and Barbie dolls, and put him inside me. It didn't hurt. I thought it would hurt.

Another set of hands moves up and down my shoulders. The man in my mouth's knees shiver. The hands dip down and pull at my ass in my jeans. I want them to slide under me. I want them to press into me. A little bit of friction is all I need. They roll up my hips for a moment, then cross to the front.

It wasn't what I thought it would be, but I grasped the back of George's seat and concentrated. I've got a huge erection, but I don't want you to touch it. I just want to give you this. He was sweating, his shoulders tense and his stomach cranking with his breaths. You feel so good inside me.

The man in my mouth is coming. He holds my head in place and dives into my throat. The taste is there, the swim of salt and lemon and savory. I forget about the arms around me until I notice that one is at my breast and the other is feeling the front of my neck.

George's mouth opened and he grunted just a little, an mmmm-guh, then quickly got a pained look on his face.

"Am I done?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"I love you," I said.

"I love you too," he said.

"You don't have to speak to me again," I said.

His eyes opened and he looked at me, considering it.

He's checking for an Adam's apple. The hands are thin and the arms are too. I stand up quickly, but he's got me in a hold.

"It's little bitch cunts like you that fuck us all up," he says in my ear.

"Get the fuck away from me!"

The voice of a girl on the floor gets the lights turned on. A bouncer heads toward us from the back. The man lets me go and heads for the exit. I push him. He turns around and grabs my face, runs me back to the bar. I punch him. I've never thrown a punch before and don't even know if I've made contact. I punch again and keep on punching. His face. His chest. He looks furious with me and dodges some of them, trying to catch my arms. My knuckles are bloody and sore. My cheeks sting. He pushes his fingertips into them. The bouncer is a few feet away. I twist my face out of the guy's hands and head for the exit. My cel phone begins to ring. People look at me and someone behind me. Must be the bouncer.

The air is fresh now and I climb into a cab. The phone call was George. The stings were tears in wounds.

The cab takes me to my car and I drive for two hours to the edge of the suburbs. A different forest preserve. Another hour passes before I have my first visitor. He approaches slowly. I watch and close my eyes. His hand touches my cheek through the hole instead. I stare at the hair on his knuckles.

"You got a little beat up there," he says. "What's your name?"

The Views

The buildings, though they didn't seem to be tall enough, blinked for very low and confused-flying aircraft. She'd meant to do it in the car, waiting for the sun to go down, showing herself off to drivers in taller vehicles. He liked her to do that. He wanted men to want her, projected himself into their shoes, out at a restaurant with a peek at her pussy across the room, wanderers in a public park finding them fucking against a tree. It would make his night to be one of them, a lucky stumbler-upon in the middle of a dreary day, suddenly struck by sex, a favor of a glance or a stare. He'd lifted her skirt in the car, but she didn't care for it in the daylight, and forced her book down to her panties.

And now he slept, the television and the sheets of a hotel room like Mickey Finns to him. She looked out onto this miniature city, the one skyscraper, put up by some local enterprise to justify a skyline, and squinted the curtains shut across it. A butter knife, the handle pleasingly round and bent at the tip, the cheap hotel hand and body lotion, enough for her. She took a long look back at him, his face slack and neck bent against the pillows, and sat on the edge of the bed. The lotion popped a few air bubbles, but produced a liquidy cream full of too much alcohol. She maneuvered it to her clit on careful fingers, losing some of it on the outer lips, but enough to start. It was cold. The alcohol evaporated and took her heat with it, but then it seemed to burn, and she held herself open. She glanced at him again and leaned back, flat on the bed, pulling the butter knife from under her shoulderblade. She swiped across her clit a few times with it, cold too like the lotion, and plunged the handle inside of her, the bent part pointing up, the blade dull enough to grip tightly when it came to that.

The pads of her fingers slipped and flickered. Her back began to tense. Sugar entered her veins and she breathed faster and deeper, though she was just as quiet. The world around her lost importance and she fell away, her body walking her on all fours through its jungle.

The sound of nylon cord zipping through a pulley startled her, followed by the scrape of small metal wheels in a track. She swore inside and dropped her hands to her sides out of habit, one taking the lotion under her back. The butter knife fell to the carpet. His lips were above hers, but they would not touch. He held her hands down to the bed.

"Sorry to interrupt," he said, and his lips pulled the way they sometimes did, the half smile that showed just the tips of his teeth and rounded his eyes, "but I'm curious."

She'd been two-thirds of the way there and buzzed under it. She wanted to beg him to let her finish, but she kept silent. Please, she thought anyway, don't drag this out, finish it or go away. He knew this, of course, and breathed on her neck for a moment before continuing. Her hairs raised everywhere.

"What were you thinking about?" he said.

She said nothing. He continued to hold her still.

"How many men?" he asked.

Nothing.

"How many women?"

His mouth didn't touch her, but scaled and dropped along her body.

"Were you in diapers?"

She was meant to scoff and deny, but she managed a frown of disbelief instead.

"You were in diapers!"

"What? No!"

"Now we're getting somewhere." He kissed the inside of her thigh. She had to stop herself from slapping them shut. She froze and waited, but he stopped. "Tell me more. Tell me about the baseball team and the locker room."

"Please just touch me."

"Not until you tell me."

"I was on a table...."

He kissed her ear, "In a meat packing plant?"

"No," she said. She tried to push her thighs together for the friction, but he clamped them open with his own.

"Go on," he said, and licked the very tip of her nipple. "Was I there at the table?"

"Yes."

He moved into the space between her thighs. His cock made contact with her through her sleeping shorts.

"And what was I doing?"

"You were watching."

He thrust against her hard. It wasn't enough.

She continued. "I'd been plugged," she said. He ran his fingers along her skin, skirting her pussy. "Oh, please touch me."

"Plugged?"

"Food," she said. His head cocked. "Cucumbers, carrots, sauces. Don't make me tell you anymore."

"Go on." His fingers held her open and he pressed into her clit. He straddled her thigh and humped it slowly.

"A man was eating it off of me."

He began to stroke her and she clenched frozen again. Her whole body throbbed. He moved slowly, though, teasing her.

"And I was watching."

"The man, mmm, the man fucked me with the cucumber as he bit things off of my skin. He... he.... Oh God."

"He what?"

Her eyes had been closed but she was curious. She glanced at him and found him stroking himself with his other hand.

"He was getting me off with two baby carrots."

He laughed.

"Shut up!"

"Come on," he said, and turned her legs to the window. "I just wanted to know what you think about. This is what I think about."

The whole city lay before her and she closed her eyes again, despite herself, thinking of the baby carrots and the man.

His breaths got shorter, darker. He shivered and fell into her shoulders, stroking her. She felt his come cool slowly on her breasts. Her knees rose up and with a howl, new pleasure scooped out of her, he slowly made her come, shaking the bed, her whoops bending down to the streets.

"There," he said, and kissed her. She crawled up under the covers and listened the return of the metal wheels and the nylon through the pulleys.

On the Chair

The smell of you, the citrus salt of your body as I come to focus, and know that now I can, now I can touch you, and I make sense. The sharp blue of your eyes as they blur, still blue in the blur, hints now instead of jabs, blurring because you're too close to see. Don't need to see you when you're this close, I guess. Just bodies and savory now. The heat of you in the magnet, over the barrier, into the wet. And there I need every part of you to flatten out and surround me, untouched parts bitter and indignant. Pull your hips closer, your arms tighter, your shins bent into my thighs.

The feel of the string in your sweatpants, the worm loosened and the soft cotton lowered over your ass. You say you want to wear dresses more, that being around these girls makes you feel like a lesbian, sitting on a chair with your legs apart, knots in your hair untangled in your fingers, but then I wouldn't have this loose softness to contrast your skin, and find your skin better, and feel it make contact with that on my thighs. It's soft before it's sticky, a glue between us, natural as the one in my mind.

I enter you awkward and bent, a pop of straightening inside. There. Your hands on my shoulders. There. Home. What do we do when we're not doing this? What's out there that's so fucking important? I don't even want to move, don't want to arch, don't want to feel myself leave you ever again.

You've put a picture of us on your radiator, to mingle with your oldest friends and your dead relatives. I balked when I saw it, ready to comment on it, but it's true that you've put my old friends and dead relatives in your shadow. My shoulders fell and I got a shot of that drug in my diaphragm. I can see it now, pressed into this chair by the weight of you. It opens like origami in my chest.

I didn't notice that you've started to move on me, your teeth in my shoulder, slippery and sharp. Sex jumps in me like a dog invited for a walk. In and you groan tight around me, out and you take it away. Fuck me. My neck bends back over the back of the chair, and I inhale quick, oxygen to red the blood. It pumps around me, curling my toes and shuddering the back of my shins against the crosspieces between the chair legs. The ball rolls uphill, spiky and suction-cupped. Fuck me.

My hands hold you to me by the backs of the neck and hips. I'm drawing my drug out of you, the wine of sex and mourning. It's meeting, its parts jigsawing together between us and the ball jumps the ramp, suicides off the other side of the hill. My eyes fill with stars and air and we meet, our bodies flattened and surrounding each other. No parts of us left untouched.

The Lily Pin and the Train to Denver

Mrs. Kingston must have been the tallest woman that Mrs. Bee had ever seen. Mrs. Bee never thought about her own height. She had come to a halt at fourteen, when Miss Everly, standing with her heels firmly on the tiles, pronounced no deviation from the previous year. Her mark was carved just a little deeper, and left there, at a mysterious fraction somewhat between 5' and 5' 1". Mrs. Kingston, Mrs. Bee estimated, was at least as tall as Mrs. Bee's husband, but the final judgment would have to come when she could compare them.

"I'm six foot one inch tall," Mrs. Kingston declared, squaring her shoulders against any possible rumor. Mrs. Bee was meant to be affronted by this accusation of curiosity, but she found very quickly that she didn't have it in her.

"Ah," she found herself saying, nodding a little, as her mother might if told a terrible secret. "I'm happy that you eased my mind so quickly. I don't often notice the height of others." Mrs. Kingston smiled after a flirtation with incredulousness, and asked Mrs. Bee if she would join her for coffee in the lounge car.

"How long have you been married?" Mrs. Bee asked, arranging one heel behind the other and accidentally kicking the front one out. Mrs. Kingston, with the opposite problem, rotated her knees outside of the table.

"Two years," Mrs. Kingston said, and took a sip of her coffee. She'd burnt the roof of her mouth each time she had one. She hid this particular scorching behind a small grimace that Mrs. Bee interpreted as marriage criticism.

"Any children?" Mrs. Bee asked, more out of habit than interest.

"No," Mrs. Kingston answered quickly, and bounced her spoon on the edge of the saucer until it settled, hooked onto the lip.

"No luck?" said Mrs. Bee. The word "luck" rose and fell in one syllable, a statement or question, depending on what Mrs. Kingston wanted. Mrs. Bee was good at conversation, often found herself the repository of many secrets and asked the right questions in just the right ways to receive them. She'd lost interest in people's secrets recently, found them all banal and depressing, but her conversation went that way regardless. It was the only way that she knew to talk.

"Not quite," said Mrs. Kingston.

The tee sound at the end of Mrs. Kingston's "quite" hung in the air, moved on the momentum of the rest of the train. Mrs. Bee waited for it to disappear, then saw the two days ahead of her, her husband in one euphemistically named car or another, the landscape, some of interest, most not, chugging past, and Mrs. Bee herself, stirring another cup of coffee, wondering when it would be appropriate to request a brandy instead. She decided, and made her approach.

"How do you mean?" she asked, and looked at Mrs. Kingston's face for the first time. Mrs. Kingston, she found, was a handsome woman, not pretty, but distinguished, high in the cheekbone if dark in the eye. She had a curious, but intriguing, hairpin, in the shape of a lily that seemed to draw a line to her jaw. Mrs. Kingston settled her knees again, this time at a distance from the table so that they might stop banging into it.

"Now, Mrs. Kingston," Mrs. Bee continued, her face now quite young, leaning over the brown of the coffee, "I live in Wisconsin. I live in a large home looking over Lake Michigan. It's airy in the summer, cozy in the winter, and I've more than enough company in my circle of friends to keep me there until death."

Mrs. Kingston smiled and took another sip of the cup of brimstone.

"This is my first and last trip to the west. I'm only on this train for my sister-in-law's wedding and I won't do it again. You live in...."

"Portland."

"And I swear now to never run into you there. You may talk to me now, or never tell anyone anything."

Mrs. Kingston massaged the freshly irritated burn at the roof of her mouth with the flattened edge of her tongue. She looked at Mrs. Bee, her small, thin hands, the choker at her neck. Mrs. Bee's body was much like her own on a smaller scale, as if she were looking at a funhouse mirror. She wanted to tell her this, but didn't.

"I hate coffee," Mrs. Kingston said, and placed the coffee to the right of its saucer. She stared at it again and moved it again, all the way to the window, where pollen from the fresh daisy in the vase would surely fall in it.

"What time is it?" Mrs. Bee asked.

"Time for two brandies," Mrs. Kingston said.

"Excellent girl," said Mrs. Bee.

The brandies came, cornfields and crossings flew past, the daisy shook pollen into Mrs. Kingston's coffee cup and the two women's feet were on the floor, leaning into one another over their snifters. Within twenty miles, Mrs. Bee and Mrs. Kingston were aware of the other's bedroom troubles, Mr. Kingston's lack of experience, Mr. Bee's fast dwindling interest. They made several statements of indignation, resignation and pointed misinformation before they made a pact.

In the name of science and the propagation of the species, the two women had each one an assignment. They stood up, gave each other a kiss on the cheek, a warm one, and set off to change for supper.

Mrs. Bee, on Mrs. Kingston's orders, placed an ordinary fountain pen in her purse, taking care that the cap was screwed on tightly. Under her corset and above her stockings, she went bare for the first time since she was a newborn. Fear gathered in her chest, felling dust bunnies and pulverizing gallstones. She could always back out, but she thought for a moment of how she would feel if Mrs. Kingston did the same, and made a new determination to face her risk.

Mrs. Kingston, on Mrs. Bee's orders, changed her clothes with a large handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. She blamed the brandy for the warmth in the base of her body, a poorly placed piece of track for her wayward knees. Saliva soaked the cloth, as Mrs. Bee had said it would, and her jaw got tired, as Mrs. Bee said it would, but she smiled at herself in the mirror, thought that the blush in her cheeks became her. Mrs. Kingston, like Mrs. Bee, had sworn off underpants for the next three days, as good as a blood oath between them.

The Bees and the Kingstons took supper at different times, Mr. Kingston's man, a friend of his father's man and as green as Mr. Kingston himself, slow to make the reservations. Mrs. Kingston supped early and was glad of it, feeling that she'd lose her nerve if she had to wait long. Mr. Kingston made his best stab at conversation, found himself pouring forth, his wife smiling and blushing at everything he said. He'd never seen her like this, so pretty and attentive, so fascinated with his drudgeries. He fell more in love with her instantly, hoped that he could find the courage to ask her to be with him that night. When they stood, her height, only an inch above his, mattered not at all to him for the first time. He squeezed her hand and took their dessert back to the room, two éclairs and two glasses with a small decanter of port.

The Bees supped lightly, Mrs. Bee suggesting that it was the heavy meals that were keeping her husband up at night. He reacted as she'd hoped, humored her, found her in the mood for attention, and gave it to her dutifully. She could feel the loose material, soft, if you went with the grain, across her mound. It pulled at the hair there and brushed it, lovingly, caressed it straight and let it bounce into curls again. She felt quite exposed there, no sensible covering, the air and all free of obstacles to her intimacy. Her toe snapped off of the floor again at the weight of her crossed ankle and it went to her husband's ankle. She left it there until he blushed, snapping an escargots fork to the linen. She did not relent, as her upbringing, fully in control of her muscles most days, would oblige her to. She rubbed his ankle in the thin sole of her dress slippers until he grew accustomed to it, then hooked his heel, looking for all the world as if she were engrossed in her sorbet, the predessert for cleansing the pallet, and pulled his foot to the inside of her thighs.

In the room, Mr. Kingston's face and neck were red from the port and the way Mrs. Kingston looked in her dress. He imagined her in the corset and wondered that they'd been married three years and he'd never seen it. He mused that he might have the bravery to stumble upon her once, at her vanity in the morning or disrobing at night. He smiled, noting that he'd had the decanter in hand for at least a minute without attempting a pour when Mrs. Kingston's hand curled around his fingers, replaced the stopper inside of it, set it down and knelt before him.

The train changed tracks, a steady rhythm to distract him before his trousers were unbuttoned at the fly and the waist and dropped, a thud here at the final selection of tracks, a whistle, his underclothes dismantled, the train speeding up, the touch of his wife's lips, here in the light, a warm, soft sensation, there in his cock, and the friction of tight silk. His cock stole all of the blood from his body. He watched her, both eyebrows raised, watched his wife engulf him. Then he swallowed, face slack, and gripped the washbasin at his back. The train gently swayed, but he rumbled, and spilt his seed into his wife's throat. He winced that she must be repulsed, but a final sucking kiss on the end of his cock contradicted him. Mrs. Kingston stood up and poured the port with a shaking hand.

As the train switched tracks, Mr. Bee took his ankle back and scowled, half meaning it, at his wife. She let some sorbet drip on the side of her mouth from the spoon and licked it in.

"Mrs. Bee," said Mr. Bee, "are you having some trouble with your liquids tonight?"

"I've an idea of how to manage them, Mr. Bee, but you shall have to lend me a bit of license to do so."

Mr. Bee's head cocked a bit and he opened his mouth to speak for a moment. "You sluttish woman," he mouthed, his after-dinner coffee cup blocking intrusive eyes.

Mrs. Bee looked shocked for a moment, and stirred her sorbet until the frozen parts had melted with the solids.

Mr. Bee mocked leading his wife down the hallway after dinner, his hand on the back of her arm, but she'd gone in another direction from their berth, swinging through car after car until she'd found one locked. At this, she pulled her fountain pen out. Mrs. Kingston had taken note that all of the "locks" on the train were opened by the porters using the backside of fountain pens, and had made this part of her dare. She pushed the fountain pen into the lock and slid the door open, the first luggage car. Mr. Bee waited for the door to shut behind him, tested it for fastness, and lifted his wife's skirts above her waist.

"You are a sluttish little bitch, aren't you, Mrs. Bee?"

He searched the room, a lit match before him, until he found a spare coal shovel, flat and black from soot. He returned to his wife, bent her over a large crate, handed her the box of matches and told her to keep one lit until he was finished. Mrs. Bee lit one. She received a slap on the bottom for her troubles. There were three more, each of more stinging intensity, until the flame came down to her fingers. Her husband waited and blew it out. She lit another. It distracted her from the pain. There was another spank.

"You are a filthy, sluttish woman."

Another spank.

"Your backside is black and filthy now, like you."

Another spank. The second match burned down to her fingers, but her husband did not blow it out. It burned her instead.

"Light another."

She dropped the second, watching the dull red as it fell to the floor, and lit another. Mr. Bee pulled her arm behind her back so her hand, the match in the air, lay over her waist, illuminating her small, smooth body, all filthy like an ill-behaved child. He unbuttoned his trousers, bent his knees, though her legs dangled above the floor, and screwed her, fucked her. He watched this match too go out at her fingertips and watched the red coal fall on her skin. She trembled and clenched his cock inside her. He pumped his seed inside of her, clenched so hard as he was, as the coal on the match went out on her skin, and smelled the smoke.

The women met for luncheon the next day, as they had planned, and shared their stories, watching the satisfying shock and blush rise in the other's face. Though they felt sure that much of what they said couldn't be heard by others above the clacks and clicks of the wheels on the tracks and the crashing of plates, Mrs. Kingston asked a porter for a pencil and stationery so that they might pass it in notes.

"It tasted awfully strange," wrote Mrs. Kingston. "I thought it would be sweet, but there was an odd taste, some bitter chemical."

Mrs. Bee nodded and shrugged. She wrote, "Yes, that's what Mr. Bee tastes of too, but I don't find it off-putting, really."

Mrs. Kingston read this and shrugged as well. She wrote, "What did Mr. Bee call you?"

Mrs. Bee wrote it down and passed it on. Mrs. Kingston hid a laugh behind her hand and clasped Mrs. Bee's hand. The two of them sat and laughed for a few moments, and Mrs. Bee's hand curled up to enclose the other. "I'm glad we've met," she said.

"I'm very pleased myself. I don't normally talk to strange women on trains."

"I'm not strange anymore, am I, Mrs. Kingston?" said Mrs. Bee, warmly.

"No," said Mrs. Kingston, "you're a...." Mrs. Kingston folded the paper and pointed at what Mr. Bee had called her the previous evening.

The two women finished their luncheon, Mrs. Kingston asking that it be put on Mr. Kingston's bill, and they walked arm in arm through the train, silently, and comfortably so, until Mrs. Bee mentioned that this was their last day on the train. Mr. Bee and herself would be alighting in Denver. Mrs. Kingston drew Mrs. Bee's arm in tighter and kissed her on the cheek, then briefly on the mouth. The two women stood for a moment and contemplated this, then Mrs. Bee drew Mrs. Kingston down along the hallway a car more.

"This is our compartment," Mrs. Bee said, and opened the door, "though I daresay Mr. Bee won't be back from his card game for quite some time. Would you care to come in?"

Mrs. Kingston didn't answer, but leaned into Mrs. Bee's mouth again. She kissed swiftly and deeply, catching Mrs. Bee in a wave of heat, before she could find her senses and open her door. Upon its closure, with the two women inside, Mrs. Bee pulled her bunk down and placed Mrs. Kingston at its edge. She sat. Mrs. Bee leaned and Kissed Mrs. Kingston for a few more minutes, affection and sadness within it, and broke it off to speak.

"You have reminded me of spontaneity and fearlessness. I have one more lesson, this one for you to pass to your husband. Lift your skirts for me?"

Mrs. Bee and Mrs. Kingston marveled at her legs revealing themselves, the flesh of them, the curves and the organic intimacy. Mrs. Bee parted Mrs. Kingston's legs, dropped her hand between them and found the place, the secret one.

Mrs. Bee had found this place when her mother's maidservant, under orders to punish her for the slight of showing for supper ten minutes late, had bent her over her knee. She cried as the maidservant paddled her with the back of a mirror and her mother, satisfied with listening to the sounds of the slaps, left the room. The maid pulled her skirts up higher, her underpants down lower, for the girl was seventeen at the time, and rubbed the younger Mrs. Bee with her thumb in the secret place, all the while paddling away at her backside. Mrs. Bee was married and moved out within six months, but she never forgot the secret place, nor the kind maidservant, who would never have spanked her without orders to do so.

Mrs. Bee put her thumb on Mrs. Kingston's secret place and kissed her gently. She found it warm and then wet, and soon enough found Mrs. Kingston's breathing heavy, her mouth distracted. "There," Mrs. Bee said, and pushed some fingers inside as she rubbed. "There now." Mrs. Kingston's face came to rapture, then exhaustion, her body in convulsions before she grew still.

"Teach that to your husband," said Mrs. Bee, "and I will remember you."

Mrs. Kingston took a few moments, unable to form words for crying, laughter and shock. Instead, she stood, removed the jeweled hairpin, the one in the shape of a lily, and put it in the hair of her funhouse mirror self, exactly as it was on her.

"Let your husband find you when her returns tonight, doing what you just did to me," Mrs. Kingston said.

"Mr. Kingston should take you from behind tonight," Mrs. Bee said.

The two women regarded each other, nodded and parted.

....

Does it make any sense, the way that some words boil inside of you, and you want more than anything to say them? You eat your breakfast with a smile on your face and you answer an email and you go see a movie and they’re there, those fucking words are there and they just hover at the back of your throat, under your uvula, in that place where that wad of phlegm sits first thing in the morning before you cough it out. M mmmm mmm. There they are under the mound of thickened spit, and you want to cough them out too, like an itch to be scratched or a piece of dust on the side of your nose that you can just make out in your field of vision. Get rid of it, you think, it’s abnormal.

They’re like mosquito bites, really, because when you say them, you feel better right away, sure, but then a few seconds go by and you need to say them worse than before. You can keep on scratching that mosquito bite all day long, you know, those really awful ones you get on your toes, and they’ll only get worse. They’ll only get way itchier and you’ll scratch and scratch, that wide-eyed look on your face that makes you look like some crazy janitor type, ranting about secret chemical dumps in the clouds, and you can’t be very attractive then. She’s gotta look at you and see you putting those damn words out there faster and faster, rocking in your chair and swirling a finger through a lock of your own hair and think, “This guy’s gone to Mars for a picnic!” and you have, for all the good it’s doing for you. You see, you can scratch an itch away by turning it into pain, drawing blood and ripping the skin off, but there’s nothing you can do with those damn words.

I mean, does it make any sense? Did our monkey ancestors press their tongues to the roofs of their mouths and find that they absolutely must go up to one of their baboonettes and screech out just those three screeches? No. It makes no sense at all. It makes sense that we can’t help but say “Look up! Fucking coconut dropping on your head!” or “Big tiger just over that hedge!” but there’s no emergency with those three words. There’s no immediate warning to howl out or dangerous argument to be contradicted. In the big scheme of things, the basic one with the food and water and shelter bit, those words don’t help anyone at all, so why are they so intense? Why do they paralyze you, make you blubbery and soft, unable to aim so much as your own piss into a toilet? They’re a mental illness, is what they are.

She lays in bed in front of me, her skin spotless and soft, curved against the mattress in the lamplight. I’m sure she’s asleep until she turns her palm back to me, her fingers thin and long. Just when I feel like I’m looking at a picture of her, she turns interactive and I take her hand and lay behind her. She cups it, girl-skin and comfort, coming home. She rubs the scar on my palm with her thumb for a while, as if asking me a question. I don’t answer. She takes my hand to her pussy, presses my middle finger into the wet and the red heat. My mouth goes to her ear because that’s where it’s got to go and I hold it open, tongue against my lower front teeth, and I fight.

Like Me

There was a time when you were my roommate, when the door across the hall was warm with your mystery, and the bang of a hanger on the doorknob would make me sit up straight, arrange my clothes, bury my big toe under the little ones so you couldn’t see that it was curved wrong. You’d walk into the living room, rubbing your eyes, your blonde hair always straight up from the pillow, and you’d light a cigarette and regard me through the blur of morning. As it was, we’d usually been out just a few hours before.

When you sat like that in a pair of loose boxers, always blue striped, I’d try not to let you see me look, would pretend to stare at your cigarette as you leaned forward. Always down the left leg, all the way to the break where your groin muscle dipped in between the front and the back of the thigh. I wondered sometimes if you saw me looking.

I saw it in action that one time, do you remember? Of course you do. That time I came in and found you at your computer when I said I’d be out and forgot my I.D. I didn’t make a sound, but watched you for a long time, watched the bend in your neck, the pull inward of your shoulders. I was there long enough to feel a part of it, as if it were suddenly natural enough for me to drop my own pants, kick them to my room and come back, fingers deep inside of my wet pussy, and if you noticed, I felt you’d do nothing but smile. I didn’t tell you how long I watched. I don’t know how long I watched. I remember backing down the hallway until I hit that creaky patch and heard a rumble in your room.

I’d dream at night that you would come to my bed, the old twin I used to have that made the bedroom seem so small. It squeaked when I moved, bounced enough to throw me off if you jumped on it, and I’d lay there and wait for you, bracing the edge in my fingers I was so sure it would happen. I believed you’d come to me, tears in your eyes, telling me that you’d noticed that I was the one, that I could never accept it, you know, but that you had to tell me anyway. I’d wrap your arm around me and you’d kiss my neck and I’d feel that wet on my neck from your eyes. And it was the kiss. It was all about that kiss you’d give me. In my bouncy bed, waiting for you, I’d lift a thigh and find myself streaming, wet enough to lubricate the entrance of a magnum of Champagne. I didn’t even think of sex until the end, before that, it was only a kiss.

We never dated anyone, you or me. We never talked to anyone. We’d screen calls like an SS officer and with as much respect. One night, drunk and driving home from the clubs, you were chatty, and told me how much you wanted to find someone just like me. I sat there, just like me, and kept my hands at 10:00 and 2:00 on the steering wheel.

Twilight in the Morning

The sky is purple, bringing out the green and blue in the trees. I’m talking to my downstairs neighbor’s dog, Percival, who sounds like my first boyfriend. “Judy,” Percival says, leaning dangerously over the hibachi in the gondola, “you don’t understand me.” His voice is intensely like Peter’s. Percival becomes Peter. Peter leans in as if to kiss, but he doesn’t. He leans back and talks to a woman who wasn’t there before. She kicks at the heels of the gondolier and yells, “I don’t speak Urdu! I don’t speak Urdu!” I get up to grab at a passing barge pole and get off of this boat, but the boat is going too quickly, at least forty miles an hour now.

“Aren’t you scared?” Peter asks, right into my ear. An intense feeling comes over me. I can smell him, salty sour and burning sex in my nostrils. I’m frozen now. I feel his beard at my thighs, his nose buried deep in my crevice. “Judy,” he says, “aren’t you scared?” But he can’t be saying that, because my legs have been pushed apart, his tongue sliding along at my clit. Another wave of the smell and electric pleasure falls into me like an interior blanket. I’m ready for him to talk again, but I don’t hear him. I try to move, to test it, but I can’t.

I’m pulled out of the dream like air bubbling through water. When I arrive, grey and still on the bed, the pleasure doesn’t go away. I open my eyes slowly, the tear of the first blink of morning, and bend my head just enough to see the top of a man’s head below. I close my eyes and stay inside.

Two men in hospital scrubs to the waist hold my legs open and watch. A third, bent over the edge of the bed, straps my pussy lips open in long, elastic belts. I’m exposed to him. Still in sleep paralysis, I can easily imagine the men holding my arms down as well. They look me in the face, but with curiosity instead of sympathy, then watch, panting, as the man in the middle begins to lick.

My ankles are lashed down too, my breasts crisscrossed with similar elastic bands, only the nipples out, pointed up at the ceiling, helpless. One of the men in scrubs licks his thumb and twists the pad along one of the nipples, testing it for hardness. My neck bends back, the licks at my pussy getting stronger, harder, wetter. Another man in scrubs appears and pulls his green pants down below his waist. He looks at the other men, who inhale with anticipation. The man turns my head and begins to jerk off over my lips.

The bed quivers as my husband rearranges himself, but I don’t pull myself into reality. I resolve it in a twist of the gurney. The other two men in scrubs have scorching erections, but they can’t touch them, their hands occupied in holding me down. They begin to hump the gurney, slowly, their hands grasping tighter, painfully, onto my arms and thighs. My clit is battered some more, rubbed and slapped and dug into. The forth man, the latecomer, begins to moan just audibly. He gasps. He’s going to come. I need to see it, to feel it, to taste it. The one between my thighs feels me shake before I do and finds a tight structure, a steady, rising tempo. I can’t move to slow it. I can’t hide or twist away or close my legs. The man above my mouth yells out and the other two, the green scrubs so tight on their hips, gasp with him. He shoots all over my mouth, above it, inside it, across my cheek and some in my nose. The smell fills me again.

I lose control, lose sight, lose the men in my head, fall under the spell of a twisting tongue at me, and my back arches, my mouth open, and I wake myself up with the sound of my own cranked growling, something leftover from my dream, as the barge poles are whipping past and Peter asking, “Aren’t you scared?”

Tangible

Lori,

Just this. I’d like you to read it, but it’s mostly for me.

I would drive at night, thinking of your breasts, wondering if you’d be up , if either one of us got sleep anymore. I would drive at night, slowly slipping down your alley. If the lamp above your stove was on, your husband would be up, if the light above your television, and only the light above your television, were on, I’d know it was you, and I’d wait, the motor on my car swelling in idle, until the top of your head appeared, and it would turn to look down on me, and I would pray that tonight you would come down. You did. You came down your back stairs, a silhouette of joy, backlit by your security light in your pathetic back yard. I knew it was safe then to dream of you, that I could think about you without wondering whether it was alright to think. As your hair began to take shape on your shoulders, and my eyes could focus, as they would only when I let them. You never entered the car here, but went to the front of your house, and I would drive around to meet you at the end of your block. You didn’t know these neighbors, probably think you were a teenager sneaking out anyway. You’d climb into the car in whatever you were wearing in the house, mostly a t-shirt with no bra and a pair of loose shorts. Your legs would move easily in them, would betray the shape I was so surprised to see every time I saw them, the swinging curve of your ass in them too, so much smaller than the shorts.

We could talk when we wanted to. Your husband was never much for surveillance. We had chats and emails and sometimes even the phone to communicate with. The phone calls were chaste, the only flirtation in smoke signals and innuendo. The emails were deeper, because we only emailed just before masturbation. The chats, during and shortly after if the other party was still working on it, were one-handed, all-small letters and no punctuation.

do you feel me inside you
yes
fuck me
yes
im in you so hard
i know harder
yes
god
your cunt
your cock
fuck me

It was always a surprise to see you, to know I hadn’t imagined you, that you weren’t just an electronic ghost, but you were beautiful and flawed and graceful and you had a mole, a real one, at the inside of your inner thigh. It was hard to make eye contact with you. You always seemed to avoid it. Your breasts, well I called them breasts for you, your tits were always rolling at turns in stoplights under your shirt. I’d take the corners hard to watch them. We parked down my alley and went to my neighbor’s back yard, a beautiful and hidden one, with acres of not much, all covered in insects and low-branched trees. We lay down on their bench, which read “God brought the sun so that we can recognize good.” It was always dark on that bench, but I saw nothing but good when you lay across the bench, your shorts billowing at one ankle, my job now to slowly lift the shirt.

Your tits were small and fit perfectly in my palms. I obsessively worked at them until they locked in, the nipple in the crevice of my heart line, my fingertips over the skin. That was happiness there, your tits locked into my heart lines on the bench. If you were an object to me, it was only through idolizing you. We didn’t have time to ruin it. I couldn’t believe at the time that I could drive through your alley to get this, that a simple gesture like that in the world could find such results. Tangible ones, if I ever really believed it was happening.

Your knees would lift sometimes when you were ready, but I’d let them cradle me for a while before I unzipped. You were so soft against the bench, but solid. You let me kiss you for a while before I entered you. I felt bad giving you no foreplay all the time, but you never seemed to want it. You never seemed to come either. What this was for you wasn’t quite what it was for me, but I just let myself think that you found something in me, whatever it was that you needed somehow. Maybe all you wanted was the weight of a body pressing into you. When you closed your eyes, I never asked what you were thinking.

And so I would move inside of you, wet anyway and pushing back, and imagine that you were in love with me, or needed me, or whatever I could placate myself with while my body turned slowly to hunger and satiation. The endless story of our lives, we need, we get, we need, we get, we need to need, and we find a new thing to need, and we try hard until we get. Sometimes I needed to look at your face and pushed your hair back over your forehead to look at you. Sometimes I needed to watch your neck until I saw your blood jump in it. Sometimes I just needed to look at your tits as they bounced under me.

I don’t think you needed me, and it’s shameful that it’s only occurred to me now. That basic need you created in me, a need to come and getting it, was, to me simple enough. As I unloaded inside you, pumped into you, it was enough for me. That you’ve decided not to stand up as I drive by, though it is only the light over the television on, means that whatever need you’ve got, you’ve created it over something else. I won’t drive by anymore, and it’s okay. I think all the bruising will heal after I press send.

Hal

Selfish

My cell phone rings. It’s Christopher.

“Would you meet me in my office, please?”

The office is exactly two doors away. I swing out of bed and go to the hallway. The door to the office is closed. I’m compelled to knock.

“Enter,” he says.

The doorknob twists and it occurs to me that I’ve never turned it. Never had this door closed before. Christopher is at his desk, facing the other way.

“Yes?” I ask, trying to quell a laugh.

“What did you do with your vacation day yesterday?”

“I relaxed.”

“I can see that,” he says.

“Well, I suppose I should have done the dishes or something, but I just wanted to take a day and do nothing.”

“Why don’t you come over here?” he asks, getting out of his chair. I’m about to take it, but he kicks it to the side. “Bend over the desk, please,” he says, with a less polite hand on the back of my neck. I’m confused, but do it anyway. He reaches around my front, unties my sweatpants and drops them. He reaches around me, takes the mouse and double clicks on what I now notice is a folder full of .mov files. The silver window pops up and begins to play. It’s me in the bedroom, legs spread, fingers inside.

A teenager voice appears in my twenty-five-year-old throat. “You’ve got a camera in there?”

My ass is spanked, open handed and hard. In the video, the cat jumps on the bed, but I don’t notice her. I’m about to come, my head throwing back, my breasts cresting. The cat sits in the window and stares at me. Here, my ass is spanked again.

“Yes, I’ve got a camera in there. For good reason, it seems. This is what you do all day while I’m off” [spank] “earning money for us?”

There is no answer, so I don’t give one. He spanks me again, and I’m trembling. The pain, from its three centers, begins to join into one stinging, itching sore. In the video, I’m done, my chest heaving, my hand on my thigh, the cat looking out the window. He clicks that one shut and then picks another one. At first, he seems to look randomly, but then finds a specific file, one that seems to bother him the most. Double click and it’s me again, at this desk, my feet spread on either end of it. On the screen is a video. It’s too bright to make out, but I know what it was.

“All day long,” he says. He opens his lower left hand drawer, pulls out a paddle. I see this out of the corner of my eye, but try to turn anyway, to see one of these cameras. He doesn’t let me, takes my head and points it forward. “Yes, you have to look,” he grumbles. The exposure of my ass has become palpable to me. It suddenly feels cold, vulnerable. I didn’t know about the paddle. I dread it. “Look at yourself, you selfish little girl. This was about when I was working through lunch. I’m bent over my desk….” The paddle comes down. My knees bend, my face twists, my pussy, shockingly, swells. It’s the video, I tell myself, and feel the polished wood make gentle contact back where it hit, resting there. “And you’re straddling the one at home. Selfish!” he yells, and the paddle comes down again. “Selfish,” [smack], “selfish,” [smack] “selfish!” My eyes are tearing up. He leaves this video going and opens another, drags it to another corner of the screen. It’s me again, in the bathroom this time. Over the toilet, a bottle of baby oil to my right, a rabbit vibe in the other. My toes curl over the doorknob. I’m spanked again, again, again. My pussy is somehow lit, straining, dripping. He kicks my legs apart, opens yet another video. Me in bed again, a different part of the day, the sun higher across the comforter. The cat is at the foot, resting on my toes as if nothing is happening.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” he asks.

“I…” [spank] “ouch.”

“That’s right, you greedy, selfish bitch.” [spank] “No consideration for me. No thought of my cock.” [spank} “Stupidly going to work while you diddle away all day.” In the video, my eyes stare vapidly at the ceiling. I can’t imagine what I was thinking about. Probably Christopher’s cock, actually. That I didn’t look forward and find a camera is a mystery. [spank] My ass is a giant, burning sting now, the desire in my pussy put into vivid contrast. I would do anything to have him in me right now.

Three movies open now. I’m coming in the one at the desk, my back bent over the chair, my legs trembling. It’s a strange picture. You never see a woman come in porn. I’ve never, actually, seen this before, my knees shut, my whole body rolling in the air. He distracts me with another spank and suddenly I’m impaled on him, his cock reaching for my liver.

“You do the work,” he says. I grasp the sides of the desk and begin to move, to service him. He spanks and I go tighter on him, trying to strangle him in my muscles. The desk video freezes, out of information. In the bathroom, my mouth hangs open, my foot slipping and catching on the door. I’m suddenly intensely envious of myself in these videos. My clit is screaming for contact with anything at all right now. I’m sweating from the effort, grinding Christopher, fucking him at this impossible angle. In the bed video, I’m screaming out “God, God, God, that’s it!” The cat is kicked off the bed with an indignant yelp. “Selfish bitch,” Christopher simply states. I can see his point now. There is rise deep in his nose, a gruff, sinister groan. He’s coming, and I slow on him until he freezes my hips in his hands. He pulls out and spanks me again.

“Close the videos, put something I like on your body and meet me downstairs. You’ve got a long day ahead of you.”

He leaves me bent over the desk. I know I shouldn’t, but I put my hands between my legs and slip the handle of the paddle inside. It’s still warm from his fist. A few hard swipes on my clit and I come, squirming over the desk, falling to my knees. My ankles hit my ass and I can feel the red hot in the cheeks. After a few moments, I pull myself up, control q the videos away, and go to my bedroom dresser to find something to wear.

Eponymous

We lounge on your couch, grape-eating style, our legs intertwined, your cock lazy and curled on your stomach, one of your balls hanging between your thighs, the other stuck against your left thigh. Your stomach is hairy, soft, reddish brown. It’s flat, the result of years of agonizing denial and a certain Siddhartha masochism. Mine isn’t. It’s round and pudgy, jovial, the result of years of lazing around on couches. Doctors could cut me open and count the rings, “Ah,” they’d say to each other, “that was 2002, the year she found out she liked mayonnaise.” “It was a good year,” the other would say. You poke me in the stomach with your big toe and look me in the eye. I smile.

“Why aren’t there any good words for female masturbation?” you ask, as if it’s been my responsibility all along to create one.

“The only good one I ever heard was ‘petting the old man in the rowboat,’ but we need something shorter.”

“Yes. Flicking?” you suggest.

“Hmm. That’s good. Nub rubbing?”

“Nah.” Your toe slides up my stomach and absently toys with my nipple. It’s turning me on, but I don’t betray it. “Tender tapping?”

“Tapping?”

“Well, I don’t really ‘jerk’ either.”

My nipple is hard now, could tickle the bottom of your feet if you’d let it. My mouth has been opening slowly. I close it.

“Flicking’s good,” I say, because I can’t think with you doing that.

“How often do you flick, then?” you ask, releasing my nipple. You drop your foot between my side and the couch, supporting my back with it. Your toenails scratch an itch.

“It varies. About three times a week on average, but I’ve been known to let it drop to once a week.”

“My God, how do you live like that?” you ask, a twitch in your cock. I pretend not to notice.

“But I have many weeks where I must at least once a day, and some days are completely lost in self-ravaging.”

“Flicking, darling.”

“Flicking. Mostly it varies on time and opportunity. You?”

“Twice a day.”

“Standard.”

“Is it, do you think?”

“Uh-huh. But this morning…. Have you today?”

“Saving it up,” you say, casually. I smile though. You risk a glance and see it. The compliment hit. “You?”

“Saving it up.”

“Why?”

“It’s better if I haven’t in a while.”

“I’m saving because I want to coat that pretty face of yours, though.”

“Aw, that’s sweet.”

“Hopeless romantic, that’s me,” you joke, but the twitch has become something of a half-erection. “How do you do it?” you ask. We’re going down that road now.

I blush. I buy time. “Do what?”

“Flick,” you say, simply, the K sound emphasized and precise.

“I open the lips, check for wetness….”

“Show me.”

I knew this was coming, but I’m still blushing madly. This conversation is a lot like being tied down. I stare at you, all faux-shock, but you continue to calmly watch, all seriousness and scientific curiosity. My hand slides down and I throw a leg, as elegantly as I can, over the back of your couch. Your eyes drop. My finger goes in, separates the lips so you can see, so I’m exposed to you. I dip a finger, wet, and work back up. And there, less of a flick and more like a rub, I begin.

I’m watching your cock, the arc it makes over your lower abdomen as it raises, unfurls, solidifies. It’s a perfect fit for my mouth and I think about that as I rub myself, what that tastes like, what it feels like to flatten your veins under my lips, making you lose yourself finally, making you unleash, grasping my shoulder as you explode. It works well, my hand coated now. My eyes open again and you’re breathing deeply, an open look in your face and your cock hovering over your lower body, finding no friction in the air. Your hands, however, lay calmly on your chest and between the couch and its cushions. I’m going in then. You can’t expect me to stay here.

I draw my legs back, lean forward, roll onto my knees, and handless, pull your cock into my mouth with a hooked tongue. The rounded tip, the nose of a rocket, all swollen and spongy in the skin. Farther, my lips sliding over the tip, like making my way over the points of an arrow, headed for the shaft, and the skin here is softer, looser. It’s been years since I’ve had an uncut one in my mouth. I play with it for awhile, move the skin around with the tip of my tongue, then try to hold the slack with it, moving back and forth along the skin with my lips. My fingers slip easily over my clit, the angle allowing a free flow of slick wetness to my fingers. Now, farther down on your cock, the lips scouting before they pull you in, my tongue welcoming you, warming you, teasing you and tasting you. And my fingers find a new high, and my back arches for a moment. I snap them off of me for a moment, grab your balls instead, cradle them, pull them a little in their tight suede bag. Then, my fingers still a little wet, now receiving a bit of the saliva that drips from my mouth, I go behind your balls, massage you there firmly.

You jump a little as I find a rhythm, matching the swing of my fingers to the one in my neck. I want to ask you what you want, but my mouth is full.

“Go back to yourself,” you say. “Get flicking, girl.”

So I let your cock down slowly, push off your knees and sit back, my legs splaying even less elegantly than before. And there, the fingers of my left hand spread my lips in a V shape, my clit left out there, a helpless little thing to be battered, hard like a cherry and soaking in its own brandy. The other hand reaches and batters it, pushes harder into the side, and I can feel it throb, my mind singularizing on this spot, clit, clit, clit. You’ve started to stroke yourself, and your lips pull. Your eyes close for a moment and you have a half swoon. So do I. You sit up, crawl to me on your knees, and whimper. Come squirts before you’re ready, swipes my breasts, my stomach, my clit. I rub it in there and lose you and the world for a moment, crash inside, lose thought and self. There is you and there is peace and there is joy and then, then, then, there is breath again.

“You know,” you say, falling back to your side of the couch, “when I was watching you….”

“Yeah?”

“I think ‘petting the old man in the rowboat’ might be better.”

I roll some of your come in my index finger and flick it in your face.

The Missing Sex Scene: Superman

Clark sits on the roof of The Daily Planet, watching the slow rotation of the world. Metropolis is all lights and the squeaking of brakes. He loves it here, but decides to do it anyway. He holds his breath for a few moments, thinks of Lois, her bright eyes. She teased him today, his winter boots, large and furry. She said he ought to shave his legs, farmboy. The weather doesn’t bother him, but she does. He bought the boots for the tease. He exhales smoothly and evenly, starting with the clouds. Atoms stick to atoms in them and they begin to come down, alarming frozen ice shards. He can do snowflakes, convincing ones even if they’re simple, but he doesn’t have the time. The ice shards make little flock flock noises as they hit his face and overcoat. He knows that the shock of his body breaks them at the crystalline level. He wonders if they would hurt a normal man and eases them back a little bit. That’s the problem with imperviousness. Tweaking is impossible.

He blows, still in the same breath, across new windcurrents, rearranging them, creating distortion in the upper atmosphere that drift down through the higher air pressure. He finishes with a few small puffs aimed at power lines miles in the distance. He focuses in on them and watches them fall. Large parts of the city go dark except for a few headlights and cigarettes. Each pop makes him feel bad, but it’s nights like this that keep the spirit of the city up. People need a challenge to come together, he thinks, then laughs at his pun.

The Daily Planet goes dark, and more importantly, Lois’s apartment goes dark. He made sure of that, snapped the little power line right on her street. If he’s going to do this, he will not mess up. He’s a perfectionist when it comes to Lois. Because Lois is perfection. It’s time to rush down to her now, turn over a few chairs in a bumbling way. Call out her name, as if he needs her help, is afraid of the dark. There is no dark for him. He’s embarrassed watching people struggle in it, their eyes open and arms out. He wants to help them, but he can’t.

“I love you, Lois,” he says in a voice that’s booming, but so low-pitched that only he can hear it, and heads down to save her.



“It’s alright, Lois, no monkey business. I’ll sleep on the couch,” Clark says just before he closes the door. She watches him lock it before she sighs and accepts the night ahead of her.

“Did you just say ‘monkey business’?” she asks, but shakes his response off before he can give it to her. A housefly hovers over her head. He’s mortified and takes it out with a quick zap of the eyes. It lands on her head, legs in the air. He sends a quick puff to throw it off of her. “Drafty in here, huh?” she says. He sighs. Flies or drafts, he will always disappoint her. She goes to his framed pictures on the windowsill. When she looks at his visage, he sends warm waves to her pussy from behind. He’s never done this before, not on purpose. His X-ray vision shows some subtle effects. So far, so good. “You know what, Clark?” she says, a little cautiously, “You were a good looking kid. Is that your house?”

“Yes,” Clark says. He warms his body temperature as he walks to her, radiates near her. He’s not doing it on purpose. He asked Jimmy one day if this happened to him when he was in love and Jimmy stared at him for a moment. Clark panicked, thought he’d just given something away, but Jimmy just admitted that he’d never been in love with a girl before.

Lois looks a little awkward, searching for a way into normal conversation, Clark at her side. He reaches around her, positively molten now, and points at the photo of the house. “Yes,” he says. “That’s the tree that my father planted as a boy, that’s him there, and this is the back door, and this is the window to my bedroom.” It was a bad way to end it, the mention of the bedroom. Clumsy. But he couldn’t find anything else in the picture to comment on. He has lots of powers, but smell isn’t one of them. His sense of smell is simply normal. For the first time in his life, he regrets it. He doesn’t think he’s ever been this close to Lois before in calm air and would love to smell every part of her. He smells only her hair and that Lois perfume.

The space between them is palpable, more liquid than gas. Clark can see her breasts rise and fall slowly in his peripheral vision. He stands quietly and radiates, happier than he’s ever been. The rest of it would be nice, but he doesn’t need it anymore. He turns his head and says it again, if anything, louder than he did before, “I love you, Lois!”

“That was weird,” she says. “Did you just feel that?”

“Can I get you anything?” he asks, pushing up his glasses. Standing this close, she can see they’re non-prescription and he shouldn’t have drawn attention to them, but he did anyway. Habit.

She turns to him and looks for a moment right at him. He thinks his jig is up until he realizes she’s only looking at his eyes.

“No, thank you. It’s late.” She breaks apart from him. “I’m going to bed.” As she walks away, he gets a good look at her pussy. It’s dripping. He considers running to her, picking her up, sweeping her into the sky, surrounding her in the warmth of his cape, watching the ice shards melt on her skin as he makes love to her. His feet remain where they are and he listens to the crush of the ice on his windows.



He lies on the couch and watches her try to sleep through the wall. She turns and flips and pulls at his shirt. He’s been popping her with warmth, as subtle as rain in the summer. In the end, he’d be content to do this all night, to watch her squirm, make her lose her inhibitions and make herself come. He’s lying in a fetal position on the couch, the ache in his pajama pants begging for relief. “Make love to me,” he says in the deep voice, not terribly loudly. “Make love to me, Lois.”

Lois opens her legs and slips her fingers into the side of her panties. Clark gasps. She punches the mattress.

“Fuck it,” she says, and Clark is shocked at the word. His mouth is still open when she gets out of bed, goes to him on the couch, spreads his legs and lies down between them.

“Is this okay, Clark?” Her voice is broken as if she’s been crying, but it always gets this way when she’s under any kind of stress. “I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do. I don’t… know… what’s coming… over me.”

“Lois,” he says in a controlled voice that sounds too much like his alter ego, “I….” He kisses her and she begins to move over him, to slide on him, to let her fingers go to all his places. He shivers like a scared schoolgirl and he wonders if some of this Clark persona has started to metastasize onto his real personality. He picks her up from what should be an impossible leverage and carries her reverently back to the bedroom, the side of her bottom bumping his penis, and lays her down, his hands sliding up her sides as lets her down, finally ending in her hair. He opens her legs and lets his cheeks brush across the inside of her thighs as he descends. He pushes forward, the smell of her at last, and wraps the loose crotch of her panties in one superhuman finger.

She can’t know, he reminds himself. Why can’t she know? She just can’t, he reminds himself again. He leans into her glistening want, splits her between the finger and thumb and lets her have this, just this. That’s the least of what she deserves.

His tongue flaps so fast on her that his saliva can barely balance out the friction. He makes quick, indiscernible dips down between licks to pick up some of her oozing sweet to keep it up. She has an orgasm, releasing across the bed madly, sheets in her fists, with barely a moment to yell before he brings her to another. He works her into three before she begs him to stop, begs him to come up and fuck her. She said that word again. He accepts it. She can’t quite be all there right now.

He climbs her, dropping his pajamas as he goes, her face still open and panting. He keeps his face away to be polite, but she leans forward and kisses him anyway, a feral Lois, new and shocking. “Fuck me,” she says again, taking his penis to her between two fingers, pushing him forward with her legs around his torso.

She can’t know, he reminds himself. Why can’t she know? She just can’t, he reminds himself again. He struggles, counting, as he makes love to her, as she sheathes him inside of her. He tweaks it until he thinks he has a normal pace, though he can’t say for sure. He keeps it to the same rhythm that Mr. White exhibited when he mimed making love to a temp. It’s good this way anyway, he tells himself. He can pay attention to every part of her, can nuzzle her neck and tenderly cup her breasts. She’s sweating and he can taste it. He loves her, knows that he’s practically setting fire to her with his body temperature but can’t help it. He opens his eyes for a moment and burns a cigarette-sized hole in the pillow next to her face. Darn.

“What’s burning?” she asks, but soon forgets it.

She sighs, stops him, makes some adjustment, feels his penis in her fingers and bends her knees back to her chest. She guides his penis down as he stares at her, unsure of what she’s doing. “Lois?” he says.

She pushes his penis into her behind. “Lo-“ he starts again, then feels the tight around him. He swallows and waits disbelievingly as she slowly falls onto him, wincing. A wall inside of her relaxes. He gets in further. He is overcome by the tight, the intense pressure of her. Another wall falls and she relaxes. “Go,” she says.

He begins to make love to her behind, his mind melted, his body outside of his control. He starts to go as fast as he can, which is to say, faster that any normal man can. Her eyes squint and she has another orgasm. He’s sure that he’s hurt her, but she’s not hurt, she screams his name out. “Clark!” she yells.

“Lois, I love you,” he says in a normal voice, the sense in him vanished somewhere in the air.

“I love you too, Superman,” she says.

He has no time to react, pulls out before he gets her, orgasms with Superman force, blowing a hole in her pillow and consequently the wall. Feathers are flying when he opens his eyes. One lands on her lips. She puffs it away and smiles at him. “I love you too, Superman,” she says and laughs. That Kryptonite laugh of hers.

September

I drove terribly slowly, less than ten miles per hour, watching the blocks of American flags punctuated intermittently by quiet retail streets. Our radio was on, but it was quiet too. Nothing was loud anymore. Even the whine and whoosh of airplanes passing had disappeared. People stayed inside and watched the news. That’s all anyone did. It was the only thing that felt right anymore.

When I stopped the car, the bubbles would catch up to us if the wind was right. If the wind was very right, the bubbles would blow anyway, even though we were stopped. I would cheer them on silently, watch the little bulge appear in the thick part of the wand and think “Go! Go! Go!” Most of the time, it would retreat, snap back to flat inaudibly. I would move again when the superfluous traffic lights would turn, letting a stream of bubbles loose behind me, and dip again for more, watching them fly in the rearview, scared and curious in their new home.

Gina’s eyes were closed and her hand was down her pants. Though the weather was quickly turning cold, she insisted on leaving the heat off. She said it was better this way. I think she meant that it was easier to stay wet without the blower on her, but I felt at the time that going without heat was part of our sacrifice, that being comfortable and having an orgasm was too much. Gina’s hand was on my thigh. I unzipped and pulled myself out for when she would be ready. I dipped the bubble wand and let some of the bubble-goo drip onto the tip of my cock. Just the smell of the bubble-goo gave me a hard-on those days.

Gina rolled her window down a little, feeling that removing any of the barrier between her joy and the void-sadness of the houses couldn’t hurt. I scanned the skies. I think we all did. We just looked up all the time back then. I’d seen some F-15s, but nothing else, the previous week. I didn’t think about it anymore, didn’t really know what it was that I was looking for.

Both of us were scared. We were scared of another attack just like anyone else was, but we were also scared of what everyone was going to do with all their anger, all their obsession and blind adrenaline. People were afraid to go to the mall, go into subways, say the wrong thing. Arabs were being screamed at on the streets. Indians were also being screamed at for looking like them. Zoos were empty. Museums were empty. People were calling the police over abandoned guacamole. Throngs of tourists on Michigan Avenue had left, no longer blocking the sidewalks. No one was shopping either, for that matter. Gina and I did what we used to do when we were sad. We blew bubbles and fucked. We decided it was time to take it outside.

Gina turned the bottle in my hand and let more of the bubble-goo drip onto my cock. It was time. I waited for her to finish, stretching my neck, waiting for the soft warmth of her fingers. When they arrived, always a welcome shock, I calmed myself and dipped the wand in the bottle again, controlling the pressure on the gas pedal. It was time for me to feel good, and my thoughts switched to the joy of being alive over the fear of death.

She lowered her sweatpants so I could see her, opened her knees wide. I risked one glance. Her fingers moved tighter on my cock, a lull, then a few quick swipes near the tip, then a lull again when she felt my back get tight. The bubbles were harder to control. Too often, I held my arm out and lost it all in one great pop. I brought the wand back to the bottle and was ready for another go when Gina let go of me and gently touched my hand, stopping me. She took the wand, dipped it herself and ringed the tip of my cock with it. I tried to just touch the brake, but found myself slamming us to a stop. She gently rubbed just the tip in the layer of soapy goo. It was like rubbing the base tickle of sex itself. Then she dropped the wand back into the bottle itself, my hand twisting on the steering wheel, and return to her normal duties on my cock, her hand like silk on me after the wand.

We were in the Arab part of town now, strangely just north of the Jewish one, and the houses and apartment blocks had just as many, if not more, American flags. The wind was light tonight, so the flags stirred slightly and swayed arrhythmically according to weight, the spooky humanity of material hanging in nature. I was as careful as I could be with the bubbles, my foot fighting its resistance at the pedal. Gina too began to go arrhythmic, was losing her footing on my cock and I began to concentrate, trying to get us both to come at the same time. I glanced at her hand in her pussy, the fingers sweetly pulling out love and felt it, the beginning of it, just behind my balls. I parked us on a residential street, right in the middle, and kissed her cheek. My foot pressed hard on the brake, but I pushed us in park anyway. Her head bent back suddenly, my hand now clutching her neck, and the two of us whimpered slightly, smiles on our faces, a dose of happy into the atmosphere.

The Party-Part Two Bend Over

We enter the room slowly, taking it in, my hand on the back of Marianne’s pants. The suede feels good against my fingers and falls heavily on her curves. We’re in a miniature mansion that is the penthouse at The Chicago Hilton and Towers. The rooms have high ceilings, long, cream drapery and vertically detailed edging. The chandeliers are crystal and they draw more light down onto the floor in reflections and dots. Thick and padded oriental rugs comfort our footsteps. The room reminds us that we are rich and important, that not everyone can be here. You can see it from Lake Shore Drive, a little White House, lit to the heavens. Inside, tonight at least, is a large group of people waiting to have their clothes taken off. I plan for us to be the first.

I lead Marianne to a centerish portion of the room with a little bit of space and reach around to her belt. She is, I see in a gilt mirror far off, too stunned to fight and simply waits, breathing. The belt is undone and the suede drops. I pull it in my fist at her knees, twisting the slack so that she can’t move. I push her down by the back and watch the rise of her ass, the twin curves into the depression at her pussy, the four-leafed clover in pink underlined by her thighs, an arrow pointed to the floor.

I’ve seen it many times, but never has it been seen by this many people, never has it been exposed to quite this much air, this much admiration, this much casual voyeurism. I’d been wanting to show everyone what I went home to for years and see her again as I did when we first met, when I moved into this pussy to stay, when I had yet to find its motives and its folded delights. “Here!” I wanted to yell. “Have a look at mine!” I waited a while, watched this new familiar thing, holding a distance so others could see, though I wouldn’t look at them, wanted them to be comfortable looking. And then, my zipper between thumb and forefinger, pulled down slowly, and my cock pulled out, because the pussy is mine and waits patiently only for me.

Marianne didn’t want to go to this. She worried that people she knew would be here, though we live in L.A.. She’s uncomfortable about her age, feels that she’s got to be close to invisible now. I can tell her that she’s beautiful all day long, but it’s throwing darts at a submarine. She won’t have it. I hope she can turn her face and see the men staring at her, wanting her, wanting to be me.

I enter her slowly, conscious of those watching, that they can see the veins and the ridges disappear into her, watching it myself, down the white shirt and beyond the belt. Mine. All of it. I hold her by her hips and thrust into her, almost pulling out each time so they could once again see the full length descend inside of her. I even pull back to the tip, let it have a feel on the lips of her pussy before another dip. It’s slow. I’m meant to take my time.

For two weeks, I wouldn’t let Marianne come. That’s how I got her here. If she was in the bath, I’d barge in unpredictably for Q-Tips or hand lotion or floss. If she got up in the middle of the night, I’d get up with her, make her a toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwich with milk. If I needed to run an errand, I found a reason that she had to come with me. Sex did not happen. She could not tolerate less than an orgasm a week. I’d wound her into a reel and put a weight on it that got bigger every day. She agreed to the party today, nodded as if it was her idea in the first place.

There is a crowd forming around us at a polite distance. When Marianne’s purse drops from her shoulder, a polite man steps forward to stand it up for her. He looks at me and holds his hands out. I nod. His hand lands gently on the back of her neck, strokes it, down around her shoulders and below to her breast. His face becomes more serious. I feel Marianne’s pussy tighten. He lets her go with an affectionate squeeze and walks away. I take some of Marianne ‘s pussy juice on my thumb and rub at her asshole. She shivers, pulses in my swipes. I let it drop in. She yells out immediately, her knees losing their lock. She vises my cock in intermittent grasps. My eyes tear up to the chandeliers and the carved ceiling, little dots like my wife’s nipples as I empty myself into her. Her. Mine.

The Razor, the Tape and the Man

For the first time, I bring you a true story. Not me, though. A kind gentleman, capable of a deluge of flattery and really fucking great ideas sent me this plotline. He's here, though there's not much to see. He says this happened to him. Glad it did.

The razor has no bite to it, but a simple, numbing danger. Jay is handling her completely impersonally, her back against the tiled blue and grey of the shower. He flattens her thighs as he opens them against his palm, only to press the other one away. Her neck is bent against the wall and she’s panting, panting already and they haven’t anywhere near begun yet. She can’t move for fear of being cut and though he has not cut her, will not cut her, she feels the slight wavering in her trust all the same. Her hands are in fists behind her back. He’s not thinking about any of this. He frowns at his duty and handles methodically, half-hypnotized by the tiny detail in it. She doesn’t say a word to interrupt him.

He stops at the last fold before her ass, gives a final check, pressing her pussy lips to examine them, one at a time, then lets them go. He stands, bends the shower water over to himself to straighten his matted hair, stretches his arms and leaves her in the shower. “Clean yourself up now,” he says. She takes the showerhead back to her direction and pours the water over her face until she can regain her control.

When she’s done, nodded at her resolve, had a good grin and exited the bathroom in a towel, she pats, barefoot, to the bedroom and lays down. She covers herself in the blankets and waits there until it’s warm enough to take off the towel. Jay comes in, dressed in a tight t-shirt and low-cut jeans that drop the pockets below his ass. He looks gorgeous as a gay man, but she doesn’t tell him so, doesn’t want to remind him. She’ll find this easier if all of the transition is in her mind, rather than spoken. He moves the towel and pulls the sheet back to reveal her. She looks down too. She has smallish breasts, but they’re still breasts, and the lack of the pouf of pubic hair leaves no doubt that she has no penis. She’s never been what anyone would term “curvy.” She has broad shoulders and barely a dip at the sides. While she looks at this, a new sound appears, one of the rip of surgical tape.

Rrrip.

“Your name will still be Aiden.”

He holds her left breast up and straight and lays the tape across it, just to left of the nipple.

Rrrip.

“It’s a man’s name too. That part’s easy.”

More on the other side of the nipple.

Rrrip. Rrrip. Two more strips on either side.

“Sit up and jump around a bit.”

She does and he nods.

“Good enough,” he says.

Rrrip. The other breast.

“But you’re a ‘he’ from now on.”

Rrrip.

“You’ve got a dick and a hairy ass and everyone’s assumed that you want a girl your whole life.”

Rrrip. Rrrip.

“Sit up and bounce again.”

She does. He examines them for symmetry.

“Lie back. Pull your legs as far apart as you can.”

Rrrip.

“But you don’t,” Jay continues. “You’ve got a secret. You’ve sat through too many sporting events now and you’re done. You want what you want.”

Rrrip.

“Cock, that’s what you want. And tonight, you know you’re getting it.”

The strips are now laid sideways across her pussy, thigh to thigh. He has to pinch the lips together so her clit is untouched. Rrrip. Rrrip. There is something small and smooth now. He pushes it inside her. Rrrip. It’s locked in.

“Plugged,” he says, patting it to make sure it’s flush. “No more pussy.”

A few more strips of tape are pulled and placed for good measure and he stands back to examine his work. “Okay, get dressed,” he says.

She stands and gets the clothes that she hung up on the closet door, a loose flannel shirt and a pair of jeans. She puts them on the bed. One last thing. She’d thought of using socks, the old standby, but decided instead on an oil-filled balloon. She places it across the front of her pelvis and tapes it too in several places. They’re men’s jeans and she only pulls them up to mid-hip. They fall convincingly on the balloon. She stares at the bulge as she would any other she’s ever seen. The shirt is pulled over her head. She combs her short hair flat against her scalp with a bend above the forehead. No makeup, no deodorant, no props.

Aiden looks in the mirror and sighs. He looks hot as a man, he decides.



There’s a man at Aiden’s job who walks with a slight lilt due to a football injury in high school. It’s not unattractive. His bottom just swings a little more on his left leg. His right kicks out and completes the balance with a little flip at the toe. It’s a punishing-the-sidewalk kind of grind, a cowboy thing. Aiden practiced all week and has it down now. He walks to the bar stool, kicks a knee around it and turns himself onto it. His elbows stretch comfortably across the padded edge of the bar, his knees, also comfortably, far apart. He hasn’t said anything yet, isn’t as sure about his voice. Jay orders, the back of his arms flexing as he gets his wallet out of his pants. Aiden watches this and wonders if anyone’s watching him. He takes his cigarettes and lighter out of his wallet and lets them slide to a stop on the bar. He lights one and leaves it in his mouth for a good puff. When he takes it out, he holds it between the inner bones of his fore- and middle finger.

“When did you know you were gay?” Jay asks him, his face turning a little. Aiden wonders if he’s beginning to see him as a man.

Aiden lets out a good cough from the cigarette, hoping loose phlegm will make the slight deepness easier. He can talk, but not loud and with very little air vibrating the vocal chords. He is almost breathy, but it’s controlled.

“I always kind of knew, you know? But I was sure when I got my first kiss. There was nothing. No there there. Like making out with a very large fish.” Aiden takes another hit of the cigarette and thinks. “I just couldn’t wait for it to stop.”

“Uh-huh,” Jay says. He blinked a little when Aiden mentioned kissing a girl. He wondered if this was working on him. He squeezed the thing in his hips to confirm.

“Yeah, that was it right there,” Aiden says. “Gay.”

Jay pauses a while and takes a minor sip of his drink. The Halloweeness of the night is beginning to disappear. Both of them are sure that this is happening now.

“And you want me to fuck you?” Jay says.

“Desperate for it.”

“I can’t believe it took you this long to get fucked.”

“I’m petrified.”

“Oh.”

“I mean this changes everything.”

A large hand lands on Aiden’s shoulder and he turns to see its owner. When the hand landed, an unconscious force drove his shoulders forward in a wince, but he put them back bravely to cover it right away. And he didn’t even think about it.

“My name’s William,” says an effeminate man with a bit of dance in his step and a drunk, eager smile. He holds his hand out. Jay casually looks forward, but listens. Aiden shakes the hand straight on, with a relieved smile when he finds it’s one of those weak wristed shakes. No grab for his small bones.

“Aiden,” Aiden says.

“You’re adorable.”

“This is my partner, Jay.”

“Ohhh. Oops. Jay?”

Jay looks up at William.

“You’ve got a fine man here,” William says and pecks Aiden on the cheek before walking away. Aiden and Jay exchange looks for a moment and Aiden decides to own it.

“Drunk,” he says.

Jay is simply fascinated, lets a small smile edge his lips. He takes Aiden by the shoulders and mashes him in a fighting kiss. Aiden feels that he is a man, kisses hard and rough, biting Jay’s lips and pushing his shoulders. And Jay fights back, holding Aiden by the collar, unnecessary roughness and hooking tongue.

“You ready, rookie?” Jay asks.

“Yes.”

“You ready for your first big cock?”

“Yes.”

“Pay for the drinks.”

Aiden reaches for his wallet in the back of his jeans, perfectly scared and shaking. The same trust faltering as it did in the shower. He’s never loved Jay so much, never wanted to please him so much, to be brave and perfect. He feels what can only be described as a disembodied-limb hard on in his jeans.

On the street, they suddenly realize that they can’t kiss, can’t hold hands. They take their need to touch and filter it into guy-games, kicking the back of each other’s knees out at stoplights, hip-checking each other off the sidewalk, punching the other’s shoulder at a car with one headlight. Aiden punches hard, his thumb out of the fist to save it. Instincts he never knew he had appear. The limped cowboy walk is natural now. He doesn’t think of it. And when he closes his eyes, he sees Jay’s cock, full and three-dimensional huge. He wants it inside of him. He can take it.

At the apartment, fumbling for his keys, Aiden is pressed into the door and he feels Jay’s cock against his ass. Jay bites his shoulderblade hard, slides his hand around Aiden’s stomach, dry-humps him, pointy and meaning it. They are under hypnosis, the fact that it’s not real so unattractive and worthless. They are beyond letting it in.

“You want me to fuck you, boy?” Jay says.

Aiden doesn’t answer. He grinds back for a yes.

Keys are found and mounted into the keyhole. Door is flung open and Aiden, Jay attached to him, are vaulted into the apartment. Bed is reached, Aiden panting like a heart attack, Jay doing the same, mount that. Jeans are disposed of in wrinkled figure eights. Tightie whities are fumbled off. There is ass, bent, eager, frightened in the air. There is cock, its own purpose.

“I’m just going to use my fingers first,” Jay says, a bottle of silicone lube a quarter drained on one hand. “This is going to feel very strange.”

He slips a finger inside and Aiden finds that his first reaction is anger. What the hell is that? That’s not where that’s supposed to be! Another finger is put in. Aiden cringes a bit, fights it, then finds a wash of sex over him. He can do this. Confident that the third finger will be a treat, when it comes the pain is an unwelcome intruder. He pounds the pillow and waits to get used to it.

“Are you okay?” Jay asks.

“I don’t know,” Aiden says.

He leaves the fingers for a while.

“Relax your muscles. All of them. Toes to face. There you go.”

Sex again. Jay moves the fingers, fucks him with them. The disembodied limb freaks out, screams things from “Stop it, what the fuck?” to “Oh holy Jesus on high that is the most amazing shit ever.” Aiden finds himself see-sawing on his knees, encouraging it, though the burning is sickening.

“I want you so bad,” Jay says, and for a moment Aiden is a girl again, feeling sorry for him having to wait.

“One more,” she says.

Four are in and she squeals, then grunts, a man. “Okay!” he says. “I’m okay!”

Quickly, quickly, Jesus quickly, the fingers turn to placeholders and slip out to be replaced by cock. Jay is in pure squishy zip, Aiden in impalement. The two of them freeze for a moment in shock and Jay dips beyond where his fingers were for the point of it. Jay doesn’t want to ask, but does, “Are you okay?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m going to start fucking you, okay?”

“Do it.”

Aiden is full of every thought ever. Aiden is full of fuck you and no really fuck me and things are good and things are too awful to be excusable and I hate and I love and what the fuck is this other thing and don’t ever ever ever stop. Aiden would really very much like Jay to have his dick cut off and Aiden would like to keep it. Here.

“Oh for the fucking Christ what the fuck is I love you and really you just my God,” he says.

“Unggh,” Jay says. Because that is what you say.

Jay stops for a moment, though he doesn’t want to, but knows he’ll be happy he did, and turns on the vibrator in what was Aiden’s pussy. Aiden grabs the pillow and takes it between his arms.

Jay says, “Oh, fuck.”

Aiden asks, “Can you feel that?”

Jay says, “Oh fuck, of course.”

Aiden says, “Go.”

Jay fucks and Aiden comes like a goddamn nuclear bomb. He’s never known this lack of control, this unstoppable surge of orgasm, this wave of ecstasy soldiers crossing his territory. He doesn’t even notice that Jay’s a person anymore and rides him like a needle in his arm. His arms flail and his life stops to record it. That was it. That was the time.

Jay came. Aiden notices it when he senses things again. Jay is bent over him and his cheek is against his back. Full of love, Aiden reaches behind him to feel the familiar rough of his armhairs. He holds them together as he falls sideways to the sheets. She reaches between her legs and turns the vibrator off. Jay languidly opens her thighs and gently pulls the tape off to let it out. They fall asleep in each other’s arms, Jay’s forearm against the left breast in the tape.