Edited by Cecilia Tan

Wicked Pleasures: Stories of Kinky Love

A Ravenous Romance™ Wicked Pleasures™ Original Publication

A Ravenous Romance™ Wicked Pleasures™ Original Publication
www.ravenousromance.com

Wicked Pleasures Anthology

Copyright © 2009 by Ravenous Romance

Ravenous Romance™
100 Cummings Center
Suite 125G
Beverly, MA 01915

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60777-078-7

This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Taste of Salt by Jean Roberta

Temporary Reversals By A. Silenus

Just Friends by Cynthia W. Gentry

Lesson Plan by Alex Picchetti

Break Me by Elle Rose

Peace de Resistance by Kris Cherita

Fair Game by Elizabeth Coldwell

Queen of Revels by Peter Tupper

Annabel’s Birthday Wish by Sage Vivant

The Invited by Ralph Greco, Jr.

“Daddy” and his Two Girls by Ralph Greco, Jr.

Backwards by Kris Cherita

Contributors

Introduction

There is a difference in my mind between “wicked” and “evil.” Evil, in my definition, is nothing good. It is villainy, crime, murder, intentional wrongness; whereas “wicked” is something more…playful. Wicked is a flirtation with the dark side, playing with emotions – like fear or submission – that we’ve been told are negative, or experimenting with pain or even excesses of pleasure we’ve been told we ought not to enjoy.

But we do enjoy them, and the characters in the stories presented here are definitely enjoying themselves.

Another way to look at it, in terms of sex and love, is that evil is nonconsensual, while wicked is consensual. This is a book about love, about the declarations of love made through some of the kinkier expressions, about the trust and love people must have for each other in order to play on the edge. Not every story is a “love story” in the traditional sense, but you will also find very few stories in here that would fit a kinky porn magazine, where it’s only “two people meet, they have kinky sex, they never see each other again.” How boring would that be, again and again? In “Wicked Pleasures,” you will find couples playing with their spouses, love blossoming between strangers, friends loving friends, and even a few surprises.

The contributors to this book come from diverse backgrounds. They are from England, Australia, Canada, and the United States. They run the gamut of the gender and preference spectrum as well as the lifestyle spectrum, from single to married to partnered-but-purposefully-unmarried, kinky, vanilla, and so on. The stories are as varied as they are, and I truly hope you enjoy the variety of wicked pleasures presented here. They share a common focus on women’s pleasure and some would even say women’s empowerment. And beyond that, whips, corsets, threesomes, bondage… the possibilities are endless.

Cecilia Tan

November 2008

The Taste of Salt
by Jean Roberta

Sarah strolled beside the restless gray Atlantic, trying to find comfort in it—or serenity or perspective or whatever a sensitive person is supposed to find in the eternal sea. Tendrils of her long black hair blew around her delicate, serious face. She remembered walking this beach as a teenager, feeling like a maiden under a spell whose supernatural lover comes to her in dreams.

A short, determined man with shaggy brown hair walked toward her with amazing speed for someone wearing loose sandals on wet sand. Earth magic, she thought. That’s what it is. He has the wisdom of the body, an understanding of all things physical. He’s at home here.

“Hey, Devon.” She hoped he hadn’t come to the beach to look for her. Much as she welcomed the sight of him, she didn’t want to be sought out.

His face looked more adult and less innocent than she remembered. “Sarah! Welcome back. You still love it, don’tcha, girl?” His sarcasm hadn’t changed.

She couldn’t look him in the eye. Heat rose from the vicinity of her heart, through her closed throat, and into her face. She knew she must have turned as red as a lobster being boiled alive. “I needed to think.”

“Huh. You were always good at that, babe. You don’t need company, do you?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said, smiling. “I want to know how you’ve been keeping.”

He gracefully reversed direction to walk beside her. The language of his body was easy, fluid, miles and years away from the bureaucratic or rebellious self-consciousness of city men. She remembered Devon had spent much of his life in rocking boats.

“Not enough to keep in touch,” he said.

Sarah flinched as she felt his anger lick her skin like a flame. He had probably heard about her from time to time from the old women who were the unofficial nerve-centers of the town, Sarah’s aunt and the ladies who ran the post office, the drugstore, and the café.

As far as she knew, Devon was still that rare creature, a decent man. He had been an honest, loyal childhood friend.

Sarah’s mother had been glad enough to find a man like that, one who could be trusted to keep his word, support his family and not take out his frustrations on them. She had married him and had accepted her lot the way a wildflower in the shade accepts whatever light and moisture it can get.

Sarah didn’t know how to give Devon the explanation he needed. “I didn’t know what to say. I got my degree and then I was looking for, you know…Things happened. I came back for my mom.”

“I heard she was in the hospital. I’m sorry, Sarah. I hope she’s better.”

“She had a stroke, and she can’t be alone now. I came to stay with her until I can bring her back to the city with me. She hasn’t really been well since my dad died.”

Devon’s eyebrows clenched, and he opened his mouth, but Sarah pressed on. “If I can’t persuade her to move to the city, I’ll arrange for someone to take care of her. I have a job to go back to.”

Devon’s gaze was long and steady. Sarah wondered if he thought the neckline of her T-shirt revealed too much cleavage, if he found her red capri pants too tight and too loud. It was summer; what did he expect her to wear? She resented being judged by men. But then, Devon had never come close to her father when it came to that.

“You wanna have a beer with me, Sarah?” The man’s invitation held a subtext, but there was something cynical in it.

“I would if we can just be friends. I’m sorry, Devon, but we’ve grown in different directions.”

His look made her feel shallow and evil, like a hit-and-run high-school vamp dragged back to the scene of the crime.

“Says you.” He reached out to hold her by the arms—not roughly as she half-expected, but as gently as he had handled the birds’ eggs he used to collect at age twelve. She felt herself small and light in his hands.

He leaned in and kissed her. On the lips.

For a moment, she had no idea what to say or do. “Leave me alone” would have sounded melodramatic, since he had already withdrawn his lips and his hands. She still tingled where he had touched her.

The magic was still there, but she didn’t want to give in to it. “Devon, I’m not—”

“D’you feel soiled, lady? Do I smell like fish?”

In fact, he smelled clean and tangy, like a combination of soap, shaving cream, men’s cologne, fresh sweat, and some indefinable personal ingredient that came to her on gusts of sea air. He was as tempting and dangerous as a merman who had tracked her down to pull her under. In his moody gray eyes, she could see depths of memory that seemed to stretch back before their own lifetimes.

“Sarah.” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Tell me you don’t want me, and I’ll let you go. Just look at me and tell me.”

Tears stung Sarah’s eyes, blurring her view of the strong-featured face in front of her. “I never wanted to hurt you, but I had to get the hell out of here, Devon.”

An image burst into Sarah’s mind like a monster from the deeps. The Reverend McDermitt, her father, using his voice and his arms to persuade his Methodist congregation to give up cheap distractions and soul-killing habits. The Reverend at home, just as righteous in a sweatshirt, urging his daughter to give up a boy who wasn’t worthy of her, one who could keep her trapped in this town all her life. She would be constantly pregnant and harassed by squalling brats; didn’t she know what Catholic husbands demanded?

Like a migrating bird, she had flown away from danger and discomfort.

Hypocrites, she had thought. Men are men, no matter which Father they worship.

Sweat dampened Devon’s once-white T-shirt, and she could see the shape of his chest muscles beneath the faded logo of a local band, The Selkies. He leaned closer and kissed her slowly, tasting her. His arms wrapped around her back, and he pulled her breasts to his hot chest. Her nipples woke up and hardened to pebbles.

He pulled his mouth away. “You still want me, Sarah.” It wasn’t a question.

“Oh yes. Dev.” No one in the city had ever held her like this.

“Come to my place for a bit. Someone must be watching out for your mother…?”

“Mrs. Clark from the church.” There was no point in lying. Everyone’s business was public knowledge in this town. “This is a bad idea, man, but okay. I am thirsty for a beer.”

He grinned almost the way he had years before. He wrapped an arm possessively around her shoulders and pulled her uphill to where his truck was parked.

As soon as she saw it, Sarah was reminded that vehicles here were for use, not show. The faded blue of an old paint job was flecked with encroaching rust, and a jumble of gear could be seen in the back.

This had been Devon’s dad’s truck, and Sarah had ridden in it before. Bouncing over a gravel road, she remembered the damp heat of a summer night, and Devon’s breath on her neck. Her nipples remembered Devon’s mouth, and her ticklish belly remembered his knowing fingers, sliding behind the waistband of the panties her mother had bought, sliding down to her secret entrance. She had been wet with expectation, and he had stroked her (Oh God, she prayed silently, then and now) just where she wanted him to. The truck was full of history, but time had moved on. Devon drove with an assurance that said it was his now. Family truck, family boat. Devon’s father would now be too old to fish the way he used to. Sober and responsible Devon had clearly taken on the family business.

“Are you married?” She had to know.

He turned to look full at her, his hands steady on the wheel. “Naw. Divorced.”

The word sat in her chest like something she couldn’t swallow. What unbearable disappointment could have caused Devon to defy his family, his priest, and his conscience to break his marriage? Maybe it had been her idea, whoever she was.

“She got the house,” he added. “I can’t afford much, so I rent the upstairs of the Wilsons’ place, now that their kids are all gone. It’s big enough for me.”

He pulled the truck to a stop behind a rambling three-story house. Before she could hop out, he came to her side to offer her his hand, then he held hers persistently on their way to the side door. It seemed he wanted to be seen.

Devon guided her up a flight of creaky back stairs with a sweaty hand on her butt. She knew the old Wilsons were probably somewhere in the house, but luckily they were nowhere in sight.

A narrower staircase led to Devon’s three-room attic, more spacious than it looked from outside. He flicked a switch, and three lamps with red light bulbs bathed the room in a ruby glow. He walked to a CD player, shuffled through a stack of CDs, and bent over the machine.

Sarah expected to hear a pop tune from their high school years, but the instrumental music that floated through the room was more suited to meditation than to dancing. It was dominated by yearning violins and nostalgic flutes. It was the unearthly soundtrack of Devon’s pad as a theme park, a geeky version of hell.

“Sarah.” The red light on his face made him look both sinister and clownish. “Are you adventurous?”

She felt thunderstruck. What kinds of kink could he possibly have discovered in a saltwater town? Net bondage? Whippings with fishing line and paddlings with driftwood?

“Hey Sarah, come here.” He held her close and gently raised her T-shirt, exposing her bra. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. I went away too, you know. I learned some things about pleasuring a woman. I learned things about myself, too.”

As if in a trance, she pulled her T-shirt over her head and threw it on a wicker chair in a corner. She was nervous, but she was too proud and curious to back down.

Devon soothed her with words. “Oh baby, you’re beautiful. You’ve ripened.” He unhooked her bra, releasing her breasts into his waiting hands. She shifted from foot to foot as he stroked her nipples and rolled them between his fingers.

“Ah, you like that.” He pinched hard, and an electric current ran from her shocked nipples to her clit. She squeaked like a tea kettle.

“You like that too,” he said. “Am I wrong?”

She blinked back the tears that threatened to fill her eyes. “Um.” She forced herself to look at his face. “You’re not wrong, Devon. I can’t help it.”

“Honey.” He brought her to his mouth and kissed her. He slipped in his tongue and withdrew it before she could respond. She felt lightheaded. “Don’t fight it. You want me to take charge, don’t you?”

“Yes. I must be crazy.”

“Sarah. You don’t have to understand it.” He unbuttoned and unzipped her pants, then pulled them down her legs with her wet panties. “Just feel it.”

She stepped out of the last of her clothing as though stepping into a looming wave that would carry her out to sea. She wanted it, despite all reason, wanted to let go and be carried away.

But she wanted to speak while she still could. “Dev, I wouldn’t have been a good wife.”

“That’s all right.” He tensed, gathered her up and hoisted her over his shoulder. He carried her to the double bed and let her fall on her back. He grinned down at her, and his look held a threat and a promise. “I wasn’t a good husband.”

He pulled her arms beyond her head and attached each of her wrists to the bedposts with the velvetlined cuffs that were part of his bedroom furniture. Looking at the distance between her bare feet and the posts at the foot of the bed, he laughed. “Spread your legs,” he told her, “and keep them there. Show me how well you can hold still.”

Sarah followed instructions and smiled up at him. The light and the music helped her to relax into her role as Devon’s willing pet, at least for now. She had played other roles, but none had felt this important.

He shed his clothes with calm haste, and left them in a pile on the floor. He crawled over her and let his thick red cock point at the triangle of curly dark hair between Sarah’s legs. “Would you like to be fucked, Sarah?” he asked as politely as though offering her a cup of strong tea on a cold winter day.

She sighed and squirmed. “Dev, it’s been so long.”

“You must like to wait. You didn’t answer my question.” He teased her nipples with pinching fingers and pressed a knee against her slit. He pushed his hard kneecap against her wetness to the hypnotic beat of the music.

“Oh! Yes, I want you inside me. Please, Devon.”

He laughed, showing very white teeth. “I will, but not yet.” He reached across her to open a drawer in a bedside table. He pulled out a large, realistic dildo in a tan color that contrasted with his own pink, freckled skin and ginger-colored hair. Sarah was moved by the sight of the real man, and then his obscene toy was being pushed into her, filling and stretching her eager cunt.

Sarah moaned with each thrust, not caring who might hear her.

In steady, rhythmical strokes, Devon kept pushing the thing deeper into her center, making her open for it.

“Girl, do you want the whole town to know what a hoor you are?” He pronounced the word the way her father had, on the rare occasions when he had used it. “I have a reputation to keep up.”

As usual, Devon’s joking was not really funny. Sarah was too distracted to think about it.

He left the object in her, filling her like a plug and tempting her to squeeze it. She felt as if the slightest movement could make her explode. “Oh, honey, I’ll come.”

“No you won’t, girl, or you’ll get a lickin’. Lie still.”

He reached into the bedside drawer and pulled out a silly pink feather duster. It was clearly not meant for sweeping away dust. He used it to tickle her neck, her breasts, her belly and thighs while she laughed and wiggled and tried not to erupt into spasms from head to foot. He lay the duster on the bedspread and lifted a small bottle of oil from the tabletop.

He rubbed the oil into her skin with long, firm strokes down her arms and circular ones on her breasts, spiraling up to her nipples. His index finger explored her sensitive navel. With both hands, he reached under her to cup her ass cheeks and massage them, jostling the thing inside her.

His cock seemed to be made of stone, and she wondered if he needed relief as badly as she did. If so, he didn’t show it.

When every inch of her skin felt slick and gleamed in the red light, he pulled another clever device from the drawer which served as his magic trunk. Since she couldn’t move her head much with her wrists secured, he waved the metal clips in front of her eyes. Sarah flinched.

“You’ll live,” he assured her. “If you really want me to stop, say ‘high tide.’”

Sarah made a hesitant sound.

“Say it after me, little angel.” He watched her as though he wanted to memorize her every expression.

“High tide.”

“Good girl.” He applied the clips to each of her nipples. She almost screamed, but bit her lips instead. She refused to chicken out.

“I know they hurt, Sarah. I won’t leave them on long, but they’re part of the plan. You’ll see.” She breathed in and out in time with the throbbing of her breasts, which sent tremors and twinges directly to her tormented inner folds.

Devon lowered himself over her until he was almost pressing against the clips. He kissed her possessively, deeply, as though he had all the time in the world. As though the rest of the world didn’t exist. “Sarah, you look so beautiful. You wouldn’t believe it.” He deliberately jiggled her breasts, and she gasped. “Are you my woman? Mine and no one else’s?”

“Yes!” She hissed a little, exhaling. “Like this.”

He understood her. “Then call me Master. Here in this room.”

He raised himself up and pulled the clips off her nipples—first one, then the other. He pushed a knee against the base of the dildo, as if by accident.

Sarah howled as the blood surged back into throbbing flesh and her inner muscles clutched at the hard thing inside her, over and over. Her knees rose and she pressed her feet into the bed, trying to hold herself as steady as possible. Gradually, her spasms decreased. Her energy seemed to return to her body. For an endless moment, she struggled to get her breathing under control.

He reached up to her wrists and freed them. The music had ended, and she could hear the sound of his breathing while he leaned over her, the sharp scent of his armpits filling her nose.

She flexed her hands and stretched her arms around his back without thinking. “Devon,” she sighed.

“No.” His voice was warm and thick with everything he wouldn’t say to her in words. “Who am I?”

“Master. That was so good.”

His soft laugh covered her like a blanket of feathers. “Now you can serve me, girl. Show me what you can do. Do you trust me?”

She guessed what he needed, and she was willing. “Yes. Um. Master.”

“I need your sweet mouth. I went to get tested, and I’m clean.”

Now that she was free to move, she wanted to touch him. She reached for his iron-hard cock and circled the base with one hand, feeling his curly hair and the balls below. He felt so innocent, so vulnerable, yet so powerful.

She remembered he was part of the natural world, no less than a bull or a stallion. Of course, and she was part of the female half of the universe, but that truth was so easy to forget in ordinary time.

They shifted positions until he sat with his back against the bed frame. She approached his regal scepter on her hands and knees, and held it with one hand so that she could lick its head. He groaned, and she took that as a compliment. She stroked his cock with her tongue, licking all down the shaft to the base and up again. She lowered her mouth onto it, and probed the tiny slit in its smooth head. She ran her teeth ever so gently against it, and licked the underside of its helmet-like ridges.

His cock seemed to have a life of its own. He pushed against the back of her mouth as she fought off the gag reflex and moved to accommodate him. His flavor was rich and mildly salty already.

“I’m—coming!” He shot his fluid into her. After a moment’s hesitation, she swallowed. Then came the next load, and the next, as though he couldn’t hold back any more. She held him in her mouth, wanting to suck him dry.

“Ahhh.” She could feel him relax after the storm. “Good girl.” His cock softened and shrank, and she let it slide out of her mouth. He pulled her up to lean back against him as he held her between his legs. She was trapped as securely as she had been by the handcuffs on the bedposts.

She was aware that her front side was coated with oil, while her back was coated with sweat. She rubbed against his chest hair, liking the feeling of man-fur against the skin over her spine and ribs. She could feel his words in his chest before their meaning registered in her mind.

“I don’t know who taught you, honey, but you give good head. I could show you some ways to do better. Just the way I like it.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that her performance could be improved. She swallowed her disappointment, reminding herself that almost any performance could be tweaked, refined, finessed. It was all in the details. She had heard that often enough.

“Arrrgh, me lass. Am I your stud?”

“Yes, Master.” She hoped this was the answer he wanted. “You’re the man of my dreams.” She wasn’t exaggerating.

“Aw, you’re a fine bitch.” He stroked her hair as though petting an actual pet. “You think it’s all natural, don’t ya? You think I’m a piece of rough trade, not like them city dudes who try to win you over with fast cars and flashy clothes?”

He seemed to be asking a question, but she wasn’t sure. “You’re a good man, Master.”

He exhaled in a laugh that was more like a snort. “I’m not playing now, baby girl. Do you think I know how to bring in a catch, day after day, ‘cause I’m the son of a fisherman? It has to be learned, honey, like everything else. I went to school too, and I read books. More restaurants in the West have salmon on the menu than in the East, did you know that? The price of cod went up and down six times since 1995. Those fishies don’t know what they’re worth, but I do. I have to watch the economy if I don’t want to go under.”

Shame seeped through her, making her feel slightly nauseous. She had kept him in her mind as a fantasy all these years, wrapping him in layers of her own desire like a clam coating a grain of sand in its own nacre, changing it into a pearl. The man she wanted him to be was not who he was. “I never thought you were stupid. I never did.” She hoped she sounded sincere.

He pulled her across his lap and ran a hand over her ass cheeks in a comforting way, but she could feel the threat in his calloused palm. Excitement ran through her like electricity.

“No, not stupid. But you never thought I was cultured, not a man who could put on a suit and take you to the opera or an artsy fundraiser. I look damn good in a suit, if you want to know.”

She believed him.

The first slap on her bottom was light, playful, barely more than a love-pat. She squirmed, but she made no move to get away from his hands. The next slap made a satisfying sound that seemed to echo off the walls. It stung.

Whap! Devon was spanking her for real now, and she squirmed under his relentless hand. He held her in place, and she was almost relieved that she couldn’t get away.

“Oh!” she squeaked. “Master, I’m sorry.” Her ass was growing hot and sore.

“For what?” he laughed. “I’m not mad atchoo. I’m givin’ it to you ’cause you need it. And I like it too.” He was imitating a soap commercial, but his focus on her unprotected behind was serious.

His hand came down on her bare skin again and again. Tears stung her eyes and streamed embarrassingly down her cheeks. She was sure he could feel the drops that flew through the air as she moved her head. “High tide” appeared in neon lights in her mind like the name of a television game show, but she wouldn’t say it.

The fire in her ass reignited the sullen ache in her empty channel. Beyond reason, she wanted to be filled again. Her inner walls were burning with an itch that needed to be scratched.

“Ready?” Devon flipped her onto her back, grinning like a devil. The cotton bedspread, formerly so soft, rasped against the sensitive skin of her bottom. She wondered briefly how she would bear to put her panties back on later.

The man held his hard cock, covered with a sheath of latex like the stocking mask on a bank robber. Before she could laugh, he plunged it deep into her, burying his living toy to the hilt. She noticed it wasn’t as thick as the fake version, but it aroused her more.

He breathed in her ear. He used his knees and elbows to keep himself anchored as he rode her with abandon. “Nothing—like—this.”

She wrapped her arms and legs around him, grateful for the traction he provided. His grunts and her moans provided a musical accompaniment to the ride they had both wanted for so long.

He sped up, and she was willing to let him finish. It was always hard for her to come just from fucking, and she formed a vague plan to sneak off to the bathroom soon afterward, to bring herself off in secret.

Without warning, he withdrew from her partway, and slid two fingers down past her soaked hair to find her clit, the little man in the boat. It was almost too slippery to grasp, and she felt his fingernails sliding over her swollen flesh.

She came with a moan that rose to a yell.

“Sarah!” He slammed into her, pumping his fluid against the barrier that protected her from it as though he wanted to leave some trace of himself deep in her core. He groaned from his guts.

They lay together in their cooling sweat for a few moments after their bodies had slowed down. She became aware that the oil on her skin had greased up his chest hair. He seemed to enjoy being covered in oil and sweat, his and hers combined in a pungent stew.

She could hear a clock ticking somewhere in the house, as though ordinary time had reasserted itself. “Devon.” She didn’t want to break the spell, but she needed to know who was important to him besides her. “Do you and your wife have kids?”

He squeezed her shoulders. “She’s not my wife. Yeah, a little girl. She’s three. Named Anne-Marie, after Mary’s grandmother. “

“Do you see her?” Sarah was afraid she was probing a wound, but she needed to know.

“Yeah. Oh yeah. We’ve got a schedule. Everything’s worked out. I always wanted kids, and I’m really glad we had her, regardless. She’s a smart little girl. She gives me something to live for, you know?”

Sarah didn’t know what to say. Getting pregnant and having a child had never been a priority for her, although she hadn’t ruled it out altogether. She was honestly glad for Devon, but the sudden intrusion into her consciousness of a three-year-old with his genes was disconcerting. Anne-Marie. It didn’t sound like a name for a young child—more like a prediction of future womanhood.

Sarah would need to think about this when she was feeling calmer. “I have an acting class for older kids, age ten to twelve. They’re very creative at that age, if it hasn’t been processed out of them.”

Devon ran a casual hand over her bottom, making her jump. “For sure. You always were. Are you a star yet?”

She laughed. “Not yet, but I’m playing the lead in Saint Joan at Trident Theater in September. You should come see it if you can get away.”

“You want me to come to the city in two months? Why, Sarah?”

It was a question she hardly dared to ask herself.

“I’ll tell you what,” he continued. “We can write letters to each other, just like in the old days. Only it’s easier now because we both have computers. You can let me know where you’re at, and I’ll do the same for you. Deal?”

“Deal,” she answered. She skimmed the room with her eyes, hardly daring to focus on the bookcase, the rocking chair, the doily-covered dresser with various bottles sitting next to a pair of cufflinks. His personal stuff. It all looked unbearably sexy, down to his dirty socks on the carpet.

She realized more commitment was called for. “I’ll send you an e-mail when I know what’s happening with my mom. Or a phone call if I’m still here. I’ll let you know. But Devon, Mister Sir, I can’t be a wife like my mother or yours. It’s not in me. I’d lose my mind.”

“I know that, baby.” He rocked her slightly, as though she were really a fretful baby. “It’s okay.” He did know, and it was. He shifted and sat up. “You want a beer now?”

Sarah laughed. “That’s what you offered me. Sure.”

As he stood up to put on some clothes, she felt more at home than she had in years.

Temporary Reversals
by A. Silenus

When Miranda made love, she seemed to appreciate instinctively that the dividing line between man and woman was not a clear one. Her long, graceful fingers probed at places that made her lover smile in surrender. He braced himself for that scarlet polish to draw a like-colored fluid as one of her nails scythed into the tenderness behind his scrotum, but all he felt was a penetrating warmth from her gyrating finger.

“You understand,” he had murmured, with eyelids half closed, during one of their early bouts of mutual exploration. “So few women do.”

“More do than you think,” she had told him, gently pressing down on his abdomen with her other hand. “But there’s the fear to overcome.”

“Fear of what?”

It was her turn to smile, her eyebrows raised in mock condescension as she spoke. “You don’t know your gender very well, do you? Fear of stepping out of one’s role. Fear of confusing the macho ego. Fear of being rejected, I guess.”

“Don’t stop,” he had replied, growing secure by this time with whatever she did to him. “That’s my fear.”

He said nothing more for what could have been several minutes or several hours or several days. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink. He was young enough that he did not connect inebriation with performance. No anxiety there. Adrenaline flowed all the smoother in the haze.

* * * *

Looking back a mere few weeks, he was amazed at how he’d changed. Acceptance had come, but not without vacillation. That first time she had invited him in for the night, it was her performance rather than his that caused him concern. As his head lolled across the pillow, he peered at the warrior’s bangles on the wrist which held him down.

“Relax and enjoy,” she had instructed. What choice did he have? Endorphins gave him wings, even as he fought the pleasure. Her Amazon will constricted his own.

Try as he did, though, he couldn’t comply with her command in its entirety. Relaxation was not easy. There was something in his nature, or perhaps in a multitude of infant and boyhood recollections, that resisted.

“You’re so rigid,” she said.

“It’s supposed to be,” he countered, trying to make light of her reproach.

She circled the shaft of his penis in her hand and stroked him into a St. Vitus Dance of grunts and contractions.

“I didn’t mean it,” she continued. “I meant the rest of you.”

He watched, or rather pretended not to watch, as her genitals docked with his own. As she moved astride him, there was a power in her haunches and a grace in her descent that calmed the struggle within him. At first he thought he saw mockery in her stare, the irises as dark and fathomless as a northern sea. Then, as she began to sway, she leaned over him. Her fingers manacled his wrists and a steady moan escaped the lips sucking the sweat seeping the length of his throat. He pushed up to meet the warm, round parts of her, the breasts that stroked his chest and the buttocks that kneaded his trapped thighs.

Afterwards, she laughed without restraint until he wondered whether he’d missed her taking a hit of something more potent than the wine on the bedside table.

“Nothing you did, or didn’t do,” she tried to reassure. “It just felt so good I needed to express.”

“You expressed all right,” he agreed, although there was still something about the experience that left him uneasy.

* * * *

Next time they were together, she directed him to shower with her. Afterward, she pushed his naked body back onto her couch and squeezed his knees to his chest until he imagined some disc or vertebra would pop and his spine would clatter to the floor like a cut strand of pearls.

Once again her tongue soothed his misgivings. He flinched as a tepid saliva dribbled along the tender channel between his buttocks. But his ankles were in her firm grasp, and gradually he succumbed. Then her tongue forced entry with a firmness that made his mind swim with sci-fi images of alien parasites.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He was a man, after all, unwavering in his heterosexuality. A man, who set his own course, who made decisions, who should have been in control of his own destiny.

“Turn over,” she instructed as she twisted him into a kneeling position. “This may be cold at first.” He recoiled as a trickle of liquid splattered on to his tailbone and rivulets ran over his anus and scrotum and dripped off his hips onto the towel she had spread over the couch. An oily fragrance gathered under him like morning mist in a hollow.

“Keep still.” Her palm slapped against his buttock, and then again on the other side. Gently she penetrated his anus with her fingers.

“Does that feel good? Then don’t fight me. Just give in.”

Give in? Well, why not? It would come to that sooner or later. She withdrew her fingers, and he was aware of her making adjustments of some kind, something at waist level. Then there was contact once more. This time it was not the soft flexibility of a finger but rather a hardness, a smoothness, dipping into the moist fissure that now felt so exposed.

It probed him, and he gasped as it pushed its way inside him. He could feel the warmth of her pelvis moving towards him in slow motion, one sigh at a time, until she was rocking against him and her hands were anchored on his waist.

In his passivity, he was bewildered. Emotions flickered in quick succession. First came embarrassment as he considered what this meant to his notion of maleness, then a vague surge of anger at the violation, then perhaps a little panic, like the panic of a lost child.

She flicked her tongue across the lobe of his ear, and then began to nibble on it. Somehow that took the tension out of his body. He was seduced by how gently she pushed into him. None of the thrusting that would have been instinctive to him in her place. Gradually he gave up resistance and let her shift his position as she desired. He went limp, until even his mind seemed to slump into inertia and his limbs felt deliciously paralyzed.

After he had come, the warmth behind him began to ebb. The air seemed chilly as her breasts and stomach lifted from his back. She eased away from his buttocks, her pelvis leaving a sticky film. And then she withdrew the hardness in a slick maneuver that had him reeling between pleasure and pain. Rolling him on to his back, she lay on top giggling.

“Like that?”

“Yeah, but—”

“No buts. Well, just yours and mine. Those are the only butts in this.”

There were a thousand things he wanted to say, but he was not given to speeches and certainly not spontaneous ones. He knew the words would come to him later, perhaps much later, and that he would torment himself with what he should have told her. Perhaps that was part of it, the expectation of a lifetime of replays flitting through his daydreams.

* * * *

Once again she surprised him, this time by what she said, or rather whispered.

“How do you feel about restraints?”

Had he heard right? As usual, she sensed his confusion.

“Restraints,” she repeated. She was staring into his eyes, and the challenge made him quiver. “You know, handcuffs and ropes.”

She began to laugh in that conspiratorial gurgle of hers that made resistance seem so much weaker than going along with whatever she wanted. “And if you’re lucky,” she added, “masks and who knows what else?”

“I never know what to expect from you,” he said, with a smirk to disguise the edge in his voice.

“That’s the way I like it,” she replied.

What she hadn’t told him was that they would not be alone. Once his wrists and ankles were secured to her bedposts, there was little he could do about it, of course. He lay on his stomach, his will subdued and his ego as vulnerable as his naked body. She placed the blindfold over his eyes, and cradled his head against her thigh while she adjusted the fit. Then there was the click of buttons as she selected an ambient soundtrack, and a stereophonic suite of whispers and giggles as unseen feet shuffled around the perimeter of the room.

“What do you think?” she asked, and he heard murmurs of approval in a variety of male and female pitches.

“This is one place where ‘don’t touch’ doesn’t apply.” She laughed as she said it. And then, as if to pacify, she kissed him on the neck, so lightly it tickled.

The yelp that followed was so sudden and unanticipated he thought for a split second it came from someone else, or that he was possessed and his voice usurped. It wasn’t so much that he was hurt, just caught off guard. The sting radiated through his flesh from the slap across his buttocks, and then a hand burnished the tense, heated muscles. The touch was gentle and assured.

“Easy, baby. Let the sensations free you.” Miranda’s voice came from near the headboard. He tried to calculate how far that was from the hand on his buttocks. Too far, he concluded, to be connected.

In his isolation, her bedroom lost its familiarity. He wondered about the voices he heard and the skin that rubbed and stroked his own. Who was Miranda sharing him with? How many and what were they like? And what would they do to him next? He thought of the drawer she had shown him, with the collection she called her “tools of the trade,” and the chest where she kept the larger items like manacles and harnesses. Sure enough, he heard the brisk clatter of a lock and the groan of hinges, and flinched as the scent of leather mingled with the perfume of unseen spectators.

“Now what shall we play with today?” he heard her ask. A round of giggles and grunts was the response.

Clearing his throat, he was about to introduce a note of caution. For there was a gathering tension in this scenario almost to the point of alarm. Being in a state of ocular deprivation in front of an audience seemed to make his skin supersensitive. He swore he could feel breath on the small of his back.

Loss of dignity was a factor. What could they be thinking of this manacled body in their midst? Furthermore, the usual cast of relatives and colleagues and people he respected entered his mind. What would they think of him? Not that they’d ever know. Would they? Suppose though, just suppose, someone here talked about it to someone else. Six degrees of separation is all there is, so they say. Word spreads.

And then the image of Miranda came to him. Dazzling in her nakedness as always. Breasts and buttocks shapely and tanned. That predatory sparkle in her eyes. He pictured her hovering over him, those manicured nails dancing the length of some implement or other.

For a moment he felt caught between bad options. Was it better to say something and sound stupid or keep quiet and feel stupid? Before he could decide, he felt a hand, unmistakably female in its warmth and delicacy, glide across his shoulder and throat. The next he knew there was a smooth globe between his teeth and a strap secured around his cheeks. He tried to speak, but there was just a rumble from his larynx.

“No need to say anything, baby,” Miranda said with a snigger echoed by the chorus around him.

He anticipated force. The sting of something thin and pliable across his back, or a cylindrical nudge of the prostate. A touch as light as a feather didn’t occur to him. At first it was almost indiscernible. Fingers brushed against the sole of one foot, as if in passing. Then against the other foot, lingering this time. They were women’s nails, of that he was sure. Long and playful, they sought out the tenderest skin in the arch of the foot. Were they Miranda’s? The uncertainty was a torment, although nothing of the magnitude of the sensation itself. Never before had he suspected such fires existed. It was as if a needle had been inserted, and ignited an inferno in another part of his body entirely. If the cuffs around his ankles and wrists hadn’t been so strong, he would surely have writhed onto the floor.

Was it then that he first heard Miranda talk of Julian? Looking back, he wondered whether the name had surfaced in the darkness of that room. There had been so much to absorb, pinned as he had been on the bed. A whispered name could easily have been forgotten, or suppressed.

When she released him from his bonds and removed the blindfold, there was no one else present. It was almost as if he’d made them up, that gathering of voyeurs and fetishists. In fact, she teased him about it as they lay together that night.

“You wish,” she’d said with a dismissive laugh. On a whim she bent over her music collection by the bedside, the bare oval of her sex taunting him. Then she smiled as he recognized a favorite golden oldie.

“Dear Mr. Fantasy,” she lip synced, and then a few measures later: “You are the one who can make us all laugh…”

But was he the one? Or rather, was he still? Up to that point he had assumed so. She’d made him feel that way. Okay, so she’d played games with him, perhaps gone a bit far tying him up in front of her friends like that. But it was still him at the center of everything. At the center of her attention, that was.

And then that name began to crop up again. She couldn’t meet him that evening because there was something Julian wanted her to do. He had only the vaguest notion of who Julian might be. Couldn’t recall ever seeing him. Not sure how he fitted into her life at all. Only conscious of something inscrutable about the way she mentioned the name in passing. As if it wasn’t important.

“What’s he want now?” he asked, trying not to sound as if he was interfering with her schedule.

“Oh, something to do with work,” she told him as they parted.

“And it can’t wait until the morning?” he wanted to say, but of course he didn’t.

Julian’s name came up again in a phone conversation she was having with one of her girlfriends. There was a titter, and then a string of curt responses of the kind that people give when their phone calls are being overheard. A cryptic “yes” and “for sure” that made his heart race and nerves quiver.

His rendezvous with Miranda became less frequent. Things she had to do, she said in a harried tone. When they were together, her evasiveness startled him. It wasn’t the Miranda he thought he knew. She had been so engaged in all they said and did. No matter how slight the sensation or mundane the comment, her pointed stares had always made it seem as if it was, in that moment, all that mattered. Now it was as if her mind, maybe her heart too, was elsewhere. Was she growing bored with him?

He was bewildered, and then in stages grew more resentful and brooding. There were the usual comparisons made on occasions like this. What did Julian have that he didn’t? Some password to her heart? Some occult touch to her G-spot that turned it into a double-G?

When they did meet, she seemed distracted and relieved to cut short their shared time. No longer did her palm sweep across his cheek and her eyes plumb his own. She busied herself with grooming, pouting as she stared into a compact mirror and filing unseen blemishes from her nails. Excuses became more frequent. He’d suggest a quiet evening together or a lunch, but there were already things she had to do. It was driving him crazy.

In spite of himself, his mind surfed images that set him on edge. It was relentless, like a TV grafted above a dental chair. He pictured her pursing her lips as Julian clutched her. He wondered how those perfect nails looked when they glided over Julian’s washboard stomach. It wasn’t even as if Julian’s name came up often. It didn’t have to.

Where once he would have fondled her without hesitation, he became conscious of propriety. Did she want an arm around her shoulder or a kiss on the cheek? If so, was it his arm and his lips she desired? He retreated from intimacy, and waited for permission to touch, feeling that same inhibition he had felt as a boy in museums. Worst of all, she seemed oblivious to these changes. Did she not realize what she was putting him through?

There was the temptation to pull her into an embrace and just tell her. But accepted wisdom suggested that wouldn’t be a good idea. It would show weakness, he decided, and he’d risk her pity or, the unthinkable, her contempt. On the other hand, it couldn’t go on like this. He couldn’t stand it.

He looked for omens in everything. What she wore or said became a crucial concern. Did that neckline plunge to catch Julian’s eye? When she said she’d had a good day, what unspoken pleasures were going through her mind? The slightest gesture, such as her hand brushing aside a curl, produced an agony of heat and palpitations. The eyeshadow with its lustrous semaphore. The spangled lip gloss made for contact and yet defying his approach. His throat would grow parched and he’d stammer or snort in an effort to calm himself. She had to know what she was doing to him, he was convinced.

When he was apart from her, which was most of the time now, he told himself he had to end it. If he was to stay sane, he must put her out of his life. But then what would life be? He thought about being without her. Not that he saw much of her anyway. But being without even the possibility of her, even a phone call – it was too much. He couldn’t do it. He’d disintegrate, self-destruct until he was fit only for a straitjacket.

In exasperation he obsessed about her body, the way it looked, and the way it felt. The way she had imposed each sensation upon him until he was mesmerized by skin smooth as feathers, the rubbery nudge of her nipples on his torso, maverick tresses tickling his neck, her scent a bewitching bouquet.

In retrospect, her knowledge of ecstasy seemed encyclopedic. She had measured his sighs on a sort of Richter scale and awakened latent appetites hitherto hidden from him. Truly she had possessed him, and—once he had accepted that—he had delighted in it.

For hours at a time, this was as far as his mind could range. Then gradually his desires became more desperate. Somehow he had to recapture what they had shared. Passion melted his doubts as he imagined them together again. This time he wouldn’t be so passive in his lovemaking. He just had to make it happen.

He saw her leaving work one evening, quite by chance really. At least, he wasn’t stalking exactly. Just happened to be in the neighborhood. Most people had already left for the day. She looked so slick and resolute in her business suit, although he did notice the top buttons on her blouse were undone, as if she’d been unwinding after a stressful meeting. Perhaps Julian was still in there, adjusting his tie or making a note to call a florist in the morning. The creep.

Back at home he sat by the phone for a few minutes and then muttered, “What the hell!”

She knew his voice of course, as soon as she answered. What caught him off guard, though, was how friendly she sounded. There was a reverb to her voice that wasn’t at all what he expected from the woman he’d watched hurrying out of the office earlier. They began with impersonal things, like the weather and TV, and then out of the blue she got more personal.

“Why don’t you come round?” she asked, not even allowing for the possibility that he had a schedule of his own.

“What, now?”

“Well, that is unless…”

“Now is fine,” he said, remembering his vow to be more assertive. He tried to sound firm and yet indifferent, a combination he felt sure he could master with practice. “I’ll be there in a while.”

He put down the phone without waiting for a reply, scared he might reveal his racing heart.

At the door to her apartment, he called out “Hi, it’s me,” and sounding offhand, she answered, “Come in.” Inside, the lights were low and she wasn’t to be seen. She’d be at the computer, he concluded, catching up on paperwork. All of a sudden, the promise slipped from his evening. As so often recently, she’d be busy. There’d be halfhearted dialogue and lukewarm coffee, and then she’d be tired and he’d have to leave, wracked by the frustration of being close, but so disconnected.

As he walked toward the small room she used as a home office, it irritated him to think about it. He felt wound up, muscles stiffened. The old visions of being naked with her flashed into his mind. But there seemed no point. He couldn’t make her want him.

She glanced around with a passing smile as he walked up behind her.

“See what I have to get through?” she said, her focus on a screen packed with data. He bit his lip as he lusted for the fingertips skipping so daintily across the keyboard. He was near enough to brush against blond curls as he pretended to look closer at the screen. Her black satin chemise displayed cleavage and gym-conditioned thighs. Why was she dressed so scantily? Was she trying to tantalize? Or was he incidental to her bedtime informality? Catching him off guard, she leaned back, her head pushing against his pelvis.

“Oh, my aching neck,” she said.

It was the moment, it dawned on him, to display the boldness of his new resolution.

“Let me rub it for you,” he said. Giving her no chance to consider his offer, he began to push his fingertips against the tension in her shoulders. Then he gripped around the sides of her neck, tempering the urge to press her down in submission as in his dreams. The chemise was slipping lower on her breasts, and she tried to straighten and turn.

“That’s better. Thank you,” she said in a businesslike tone. He refused to be rebuffed.

She stood with her back still to him, but stayed motionless when his curled fingers slid down her forearms and he pressed his pelvis gently against her buttocks.

“I’m starting to feel tired,” she said. Was that a hint, he wondered? Next she’d show him the door. If he didn’t act decisively. For a moment he stayed put, weighing her words and actions and gauging his prospects. Then his hands surged forward until he could feel her nipples through the black satin. At the same time, he began to plant a row of kisses across her collarbone. She gasped and made an attempt to wriggle free. But it wasn’t much of an attempt. Nor was there any desperation in her struggle as he shunted them both towards her bed.

For a few seconds the arsenal of restraints and implements in the room distracted him from her protests.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked with a calmness that was the antithesis of his own state. He ignored the question, and with a firm grip bent her forward on the bed.

Her arms flailed briefly, until he snapped the cuffs around her wrists. And then, tucking her knees under her stomach, he lifted the chemise away from her behind and contemplated the sheen on those smooth curves that had made him suffer so.

Miranda stayed still, her arms stretched across the bed and her torso arched.

“Well?” she murmured. “What are you waiting for?”

Just to be sure of her cooperation, he picked up a chain and ran the delicate filigree across her back so that it connected with leather cuffs he placed around her ankles and throat. He stroked her buttocks, and then gave each a light slap. He did it again, this time eliciting a muffled groan. Several more times he struck, each time with slightly more force. Then he stepped back to view the glow he had created.

Her crouch hardly stirred. Her breath rippled across a pillow in measured gasps, and she seemed to have withdrawn into a trance. From this, he drew confidence. On the spur of the moment, his attention wandered to the drawer by the bedside. It had always been Miranda who decided when and how to use its contents. Now, surely, it was his turn.

He opened the drawer and studied clamps and whips. Perhaps later, he decided, when he grew surer in his control of the situation. For the moment, he looked for something assertive and yet relatively benign. He settled on a wand shaped like a well-contoured penis.

At first he used it to caress. Lubricant dripped onto the moist ridges between her legs as the tip slid over her skin. The implement impressed him. The smooth surface felt delicate, and yet the shape was so uncompromisingly firm. A synthesis of opposites. She flinched as it burrowed between her labia and moaned when the batteries gave it life.

It was time for a more direct intrusion. His own hardness demanded it. In fact, it banished all other considerations. He withdrew the artificial device and prepared to replace it. Miranda was still motionless, as if the gap between her buttocks were an offering. He paused to enjoy the experience, one he wasn’t sure would ever return. Miranda’s rear view was as near perfect as a man could desire. He parted her buttocks with his hands in admiration. Apart from the labyrinthine folds of her vulva and the rosy crater of her anus, her skin was smooth and taut. His fingers played in the soft, moist crevice as he considered how to make the most of this opportunity.

He thought back to when their positions had been reversed, and he had been the one to kneel in submission. In his daydreams, he could still feel her breasts against his back as she eased inside him. Then, as he stood cradling the curve of her buttocks in his palms, it occurred to him that he should repay her in kind. Perhaps she’d recoil, but the chance was worth taking.

Quickly he coated his penis in slippery liquid from the bottle and prepared to test the crater. There was an incoherent murmur from Miranda as he made contact, but nothing to suggest resistance. He pushed a little, enough for the crater to expand and, it seemed to him, grip around him. Bit by bit, he worked his way inside her and, as he did so, she began to push back. To the extent the restraints around her wrists and ankles would allow, she pivoted in time with his thrusts. She became more vocal too, sighing and occasionally squealing. In her anguish her fingers curled, rings flickering like prisms, and blond locks flayed the bedclothes.

Was she fighting what he was doing to her? He couldn’t decide what the turmoil before him signified. All he knew was he couldn’t fuel it much longer. He waited for her vocalizations to build to a scream, which he took to indicate culmination. Then he reached his own point of release. A pulse shimmied through him in tandem with the spurts he felt leaving his body for hers.

For what seemed an age, he stood glued to her by sweat and semen. She was still swaying slightly and mewing. He waited for the physical effort to lapse into tranquility.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said as he drew back from her behind. ”You were driving me crazy. I hope you don’t hate me.”

“Hate you?” She looked up as she said it, motioning with her head for him to undo her wrists. “Waiting, that’s what I hate. I thought you’d never catch on.”

He was going to ask what she meant. But now that her arms and legs were free, she was pulling him on top of her.

His spine tingled in response to her fingertips, and he shivered as her lips plucked at his nipples. Already, as her thighs arced around him, he felt renewed. Her breathing was heavy again, and a drifting, helpless expression had returned to her face.

“I got jealous,” he confessed. “I got worked up about that Julian guy.”

“Who?” she asked in a daze. He drew back so he could see her face, hoping perhaps for a confession.

“That Julian from the office you kept talking about.”

She gave him one of her full frontal stares and, looking bemused, murmured, “Did I?”

Just Friends
by Cynthia W. Gentry

Back when Matt and I were trying to be lovers, he used to talk dirty to me on the phone, teasing me slowly into orgasms over the course of many long-distance phone calls. Eventually, being lovers didn’t work, especially over a distance of two thousand miles. I finally gave him an excuse to become angry with me and stop returning my phone calls. We made up after a year of silence and now I think of him as a friend. An odd one, maybe. But I think about him and all I think about is how I’d like to be enfolded into his arms.

I’m in New York on business, staying at the Doubletree. I am amazed when I walk into my room. It has a separate bedroom, with a door, and a sitting area with a long, low chaise lounge and an ottoman. I laugh when I see the bed. It’s an iron bed with patina grillwork on the frame. I laugh because one of the fantasies that Matt used to torment me with was a scenario where he would tie me to a bed and have his way with me. “That pussy’s mine,” he’d whisper over the phone, as I masturbated to orgasm after orgasm, hundreds of miles away.

Now here I am in Manhattan, alone again. I’m meeting Matt for dinner but since he and I are just friends now, this lovely bed will go to waste. Oh well. I shower off the airplane grime and change my clothes. I think about how Matt used to talk about waiting for me in a hotel room while I was at a party; how he’d describe undressing me, peeling off my black cocktail dress, sliding my black thong panties over my hips and down my legs. But now, because we are just friends, I throw on a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt. How times have changed.

Twenty minutes later, I arrive at a Mexican restaurant on the lower West Side. He’s already sitting at a table, drinking a margarita. He gives me a big grin when he sees me. He’s cut his hair, for which I’m glad. I hated the ponytail and moustache he sported for a while. But now here he is, cleanshaven with short blonde hair falling over his blue eyes. He stands up and hugs me. I’m tall, but still I have to go up on my toes. I like this. I like men being taller than me. It makes me feel, for a moment, like I’m not a large clumsy Amazon-- an image of myself that I picked up in junior high when I was two feet taller than everyone else.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I say. “The plane was delayed.”

“That’s OK, babe,” he replies. “Can I get you a margarita?”

At the word “babe,” a tingle runs through my body. He used to call me “babe” when we were more than just friends. I loved it because it let me pretend for a moment that I wasn’t a supercharged, professional, got-everything-together kind of woman. It let me feel that I was, well, a “babe.” I know, it’s politically incorrect to admit that.

“A mineral water,” I tell him, and then, when he raises an eyebrow, “I don’t drink anymore. I thought I told you.”

This is true. I drank a lot when Matt and I were more than just friends. Entire bottles of wine by myself. When I thought he had dumped me, I decided it would be romantic if I drank myself to death. Thankfully, I changed my mind and joined AA instead.

“That’s right,” he said. “You told me that. I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize.”

“Do you mind if I drink?”

“Why would I? You’re not the one with the drinking problem.”

I feel very positive and magnanimous in my sobriety. It’s what got me to re-establish contact with Matt in the first place. I heard about the possibility of him losing his job because his division was being closed down. I sent him an e-mail saying I was sorry and was thinking about him and he wrote back. We made up and now we’re friends.

And now he’s doing what friends do: asking me about my job (boring, although I should be thankful I have it); my relationship with my boyfriend, whom I love but to whom I am no longer attracted; my writing. Then I take the focus off me and ask him about his love life. I play counselor. This is what I’m good at, especially with men. Sometimes it ends up being a way for me to worm myself into their beds, but with Matt, I really want to know. He’s involved in a hopeless romance with some woman fifteen years his junior. Instead of being threatened, I laugh and tease him. I tell him what I think. I begin to get a reaction from him and switch over to flirting mode. I can feel myself doing it. Lowering my head to look up at him mischievously, I smirk, pout, and punch his arm lightly. It’s fun. I feel alive.

“How’s your sex life?” he asks me suddenly.

I find myself entranced with a piñata hanging from the ceiling. I don’t want to talk about myself anymore.

“My, this flan is good,” I say with exaggerated enthusiasm. We both laugh.

“That bad, huh?”

I relent. “No, it’s fine.” And then I blurt out, “As long as I fantasize.” It’s as though I’ve been the one drinking margaritas.

“About what?” He grins at me. I’m not going to play.

“Oh, you know. The usual.”

“No, I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Matt,” I say primly. “That’s private.”

He laughs. “OK, babe.”

Oh, so he’s going to drop it that easily? “You should know what my fantasies are, Matt. You gave them to me. Over the phone. Remember?” I’ve just crossed the line. Now let’s see how he’ll react.

He doesn’t. He sits back, smiling. For some reason, I think he’s relieved. But why? I’m not sure I want to play this game anymore.

“Let’s get a coffee somewhere,” I say. There. Back on safe ground.

Outside the restaurant, he puts his arm around my shoulders. I look up at him.

“Thanks for dinner,” I say, and lean up to give him a quick kiss. It’s a test. He passes. He didn’t try to stretch it out.

We turn back to the street and almost run straight into a young man with dark hair and cheekbones that could cut ice. He’s dressed in jeans and carries a gym bag, like he just came from working out.

“Hey, Rich,” Matt says. “What’s happening?”

I feel a twinge of adrenaline. Rich? My fantasies, the ones Matt gave me, include a Rich. I didn’t realize he actually knew one. Matt introduces me. Pleasantries are exchanged. It’s decided that Rich will join us for coffee.

Over cappuccinos, Rich surprises me. I’m shy with him at first, as I usually am with handsome men. Guys with his looks aren’t usually so funny, so smart. Matt pretends to be bored while we discuss movies. But he’s sitting close to me on the couch. I sink into it and rub up against him.

“Poor Matt, left out of the discussion,” I say. “What would you like to talk about?”

“I’m just teasing you.”

“What else is new?”

“You seem to like hanging out with guys,” Rich says.

“I get more attention that way.”

“You don’t seem like you need a lot of attention,” he says. “You seem extremely self-sufficient, actually.”

I’m pleased but instead I make a face of displeasure. “Oh Rich, I thought you’d see through my facade. I need lots of attention. Lots. I’m insatiable, in fact.”

Our coffees are finished. But none of us seem to want to separate. Then Matt makes his suggestion.

“Let’s go hang out at this giant hotel room you keep telling us about.”

I feel another shot of adrenaline, of pure fear, like I’m about to do something very bad.

“Only if you boys behave yourselves.”

“Scout’s honor,” says Rich.

I lead them in. Matt, of course, pokes his head into the bedroom and grins. I feel my face getting warm as I reach past him to pull the door shut.

“The mini-bar is that way,” I tell him. Drinks are poured-- they sip tequila. I’m suddenly very thirsty. Rich, ever the gentleman, goes to get ice. While he’s gone, Matt sits down in the chaise lounge and stretches his legs out on the ottoman.

“Come here,” he says, and suddenly I have no will of my own. I squeeze into the chair with him. He looks into my eyes. “It’s good to see you. Every time I do, you become more and more of a babe. Don’t make that face. You are.”

There’s a long pause. My mind is suddenly blank.

“Do you mind if I kiss you, for old time’s sake?” he asks. My heart begins pounding.

“No tongue.”

“Sure. No tongue.” I tilt my head up and let him. At first he keeps his lips closed. Then his tongue slips between my lips. The heady fumes of tequila fill my mouth.

“You said no tongue,” I say, but I don’t pull my head away.

“I lied,” he answers, and keeps going.

“Is this going to ruin our friendship?” I whisper.

“No. It will make it better.” I would like to believe him, but my experience with him and others tells me he’s wrong. No matter. I keep kissing him. Then I’m conscious of someone else in the room. Rich.

I pull away from Matt, embarrassed. “Sorry, Rich. Your friend grabbed me.” But Matt doesn’t let me go and Rich only smiles.

“Don’t worry about it. It looked like fun.” He pours me a glass of water, which he sets on the coffee table. He sits down on the ottoman, near our feet.

“It is fun,” Matt says. “She’s a good kisser.” He turns to me. “Rich broke up with his girlfriend recently.” If this is calculated to get my sympathies, it works.

“Oh God,” I say. “Then you don’t need to watch us kissing.” I try again to pull away, but Matt doesn’t break his grip.

“Yes, I do,” Rich says.

At times like these, there comes a moment when we make decisions. To decide whether to stay with what is familiar and tell ourselves that we are being good, or to go with the unknown. And though I don’t consciously know it, it’s at this moment that I’ve chosen the latter.

“There’s only one problem,” I hear Rich say. Matt and I are kissing deeply now. He has pulled me closer to him. I’m letting him stroke my back, my ass. At Rich’s words, we stop and look at him.

“I’m sitting here thinking how much I’d like to be kissing those beautiful lips myself.”

His words were catnip to me. I’m already wet between my legs, now I feel my cunt lips fill with warmth, soften and open. My heart thuds in my chest. Can’t they hear it? I pull away from Matt and sit at the edge of the chair. I picture myself as supremely benevolent, the Queen of Kisses, bestowing them out of charity and goodwill. I take his face between my hands and lean forward. My lips meet Rich’s and I’ve made another decision.

I start to French kiss him, but he says, “Wait. Slow down.” He puts a hand on my cheek and kisses me gently with his lips closed, and then again. With each new kiss, he begins to slip his tongue a little further between my lips. We begin kissing deeply, his tongue playing with mine. Finally, I pull away.

“There,” I say. “How was that? Do you feel more included now?”

He smiles. “Matt is right. You are a good kisser. I’d like to kiss you again.”

“Don’t stop on my account,” Matt says. We both shift our positions so that I’m sitting on the edge of the chair with my back toward him, his legs on either side of me. He puts his hands on my hips.

“One more,” I say to Rich, telling myself that that will be the end of it, but I know I’m wrong. As I kiss Rich, Matt leans forward and slides his hands under my shirt, playing with my breasts. I feel him nuzzle my neck, my ear. He unhooks my bra and gently rubs my nipples. Then he slides one hand down my stomach into my pants. I freeze.

“Is this okay, babe?” He whispers in my ear.

I stare into Rich’s eyes. They are warm and earnest.

For a split second no one moves. Then I put my lips to Rich’s again. Matt’s hand continues its explorations down my pants, under the waistband of my underwear. But because of the jeans it can’t get much farther than that. I shift my hips almost involuntarily, trying to give him access. His other hand leaves my breast and unfastens the buttons of my jeans. He slides his hand back down and discovers the wetness between my legs. I hear his intake of breath and I moan as he caresses my clit. Meanwhile, Rich continues kissing me. My mind is so full of sensations that I can’t think.

Again, I pull away from Rich and lean back into Matt, whose hand is deep inside my wetness. Rich takes off my shoes. He reaches for my jeans.

“We should stop,” I say, but have no will to make that happen. They have to decide.

“Is that what you want?” Rich asks me.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s okay, babe,” Matt says. “Let’s go into the bedroom. Let Rich give you a massage. Then you can decide.”

In the bedroom, I turn and stand before them. Matt stands behind me and pulls my t-shirt over my head. I let him ease my bra off my shoulders. Rich slides my jeans over my hips and down to the floor, kneeling as he does so. I step out of them. He hooks his fingers into the elastic band of my panties. He smiles at me as he slides them off. I’m completely exposed to both of them. I want to cover myself. He begins stroking my legs. His hands move up the back of my thighs, then around to the front, and he traces the V of my public hair with his thumb. If Matt weren’t holding me up, my knees would have given way by now. I wait for him to put his mouth where his hands are, but he rises instead.

“I’ve got some massage oil in my gym bag,” he says and leaves the room.

Matt turns me around to face him. “Nothing will happen that you don’t want to happen,” he says.

“I know.”

He pulls the comforter, blanket, and sheet back from the bed. “Lie down.” He takes off his shirt.

I stretch out on my stomach. Matt stretches out next to me and we kiss. Rich returns to the room with his bag. I turn my head and see that he has also taken off his shirt.

“I’m going to take off my pants,” he says, “so that they don’t cut into you.” He does, and I see the huge bulge under his briefs. I turn away and wonder why. To preserve his modesty? A moment later I feel him straddle me lightly and begin to stroke his hands over my body. Slippery with oil, they glide over my skin and his strong fingers knead my muscles. I sigh with pleasure. “You’re tense,” he tells me. “Relax.”

“Matt, are you bored yet?” I ask, trying to make a joke.

“Not at all,” he answers, smiling. “You have such a beautiful body. Such beautiful skin.”

By now, Rich is finished with my back. He massages my buttocks. He slips a finger between my legs and lets it stop at the opening to my cunt. I groan.

“You’re so wet,” he whispers.

I don’t want him to stop, but he keeps moving down my legs to my feet.

“I’ll go to sleep if you work on my feet,” I tell him. I’m not lying.

“We wouldn’t want that,” he says, but he massages them nonetheless. All tension melts out of my body. “Turn over,” he says, finally, and he continues to work on my feet.

Eyes closed, I hear Matt shift on the bed. He takes my wrists in one hand. I open my eyes and see that in his other hand, he is holding a long velvet scarf. He smiles and begins to slowly wrap it around my wrists.

“Let me do this,” Matt says. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I know, but…” He covers my mouth with a kiss even while he loops the other end of the velvet through the grillwork of the headboard. It holds my arms above my head, firmly, but not too tightly.

“I want to make your fantasies come true,” he says, smiling at me. I look down to see Rich’s reaction. His eyes gleam.

“Nothing is going to happen that you don’t want to happen,” he says again, reaching down into his bag to pull out more velvet ropes. He hands one to Matt. They part my legs gently and tie one ankle loosely to one bedpost and one to the other. There is enough slack so that I can bend my knees. I begin to twist. I feel too exposed.

“Matt, I don’t know about this.”

He slips his jeans off. His erection is huge. He climbs on the bed and stretches out next to me. He kisses me and plays with my nipples.

“Let yourself go,” he says. “You can’t help it.”

He is right. I know they would stop if I became frightened. My heart is pounding in my chest, indeed. But whether it is from fear or excitement, I have no idea. Matt has remembered my fantasy of being tied down. He has remembered the fantasy about Rich. But there’s something more about the fantasy that Matt gave me about Rich. How could I not have realized this sooner? Was it because I didn’t want to? I can hardly breathe.

“Matt, is Rich…is Rich a…?”

Matt laughs. Rich smiles. He has climbed onto the bed and between my legs.

“Yeah, babe. Rich’s from an escort service.”

I remember lying on the bed with the phone pressed to my ear while I masturbated furiously, as Matt described sharing me with a male prostitute. A male prostitute named Rich.

And now, I am at their mercy. Matt has made the fantasy real.

“Oh Matt, I can’t believe you did this.”

“We can stop anytime you want. This is all up to you.”

“Do you want me to go?” Rich asks, kissing my knees, the inside of my thighs, my belly.

There is a long silence. There is a voice in my head saying, Good girls don’t do this. This is beyond the pale. This will come back to haunt you.

I look at Matt. “What if this doesn’t work?”

I hear Rich laugh. “It will work,” he says.

I look at him. Suddenly, practical thoughts enter my head. I have to ask.

“Are you…Is this going to be…?

It’s as if he has read my mind. “I’m straight. I only do women. And it will all be safe sex. Don’t worry.”

They are both looking at me. Neither man has stopped touching me. Their hands are everywhere-- stroking my nipples, my ass, my legs. I look up at Matt. I can’t say the words. But he understands. He knows my answer. He smiles but then his face becomes quite serious.

“Rich will do anything I tell him to,” Matt says. “And I’m going to tell him to do a lot to you. I hope you’re ready.”

I look back at Rich, who is still rubbing his hands up and down my legs, brushing my pubic hair lightly. He smiles at me, that same smile, warm and implacable.

“Yes,” I say, my voice hardly above a whisper.

Matt continues. “First, I think I’d like Rich to lick your pussy.”

Rich obeys, but he doesn’t dive right in. No. He kisses my pussy gently, like he kissed my other lips earlier. Then I feel his tongue slip between my cunt lips and barely touch my clitoris. I moan and arch my back, straining against the rope that holds my hands.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Matt says. His fingers are playing with my nipples.

“You taste beautiful,” Rich says. He reaches down into his gym bag and pulls out a square of latex. I’ve never seen a dental dam before. I know that we must do this, yet I’m afraid that it will numb the feeling I’ve just had, the feeling of his tongue on me. But he manages to make this act erotic, spreading my cunt lips apart and stroking the latex into place. He puts his tongue back between my legs and I feel its soft, insistent pressure as strong as a finger, flicking back and forth across my clit.

“Do you like that?” Matt asks me.

“Oh God, yes.”

“Good. Rich, put a finger into her. I want to see you fill her up.”

Rich obeys. He slides the index finger of his right hand into my already sopping cunt and moves it in and out slowly.

“I think you should put another finger into her. Into her ass, though.” I moan. There is something about having a man touch my asshole that seems taboo, which only makes it even more exciting.

Rich puts his middle finger into my cunt. At first, I think he’s misunderstood Matt. But when he pulls it out, I realize that he has just been wetting it with my juices. He then slides it down to the entrance of my asshole. I think I’m going to come right then.

“Not so fast,” he says, taking his mouth from my cunt. “I think she needs something bigger in her,” he tells Matt. “A big cock.”

“Do it,” Matt says. “Get her ready for yours.”

Rich reaches into his bag again and pulls out a large, pink, life-like dildo. He puts his hands back on me, touching my ass, but he puts the dildo at the entrance of my cunt. He looks to Matt.

“Do you want it?” Matt asks me. “Do you want that big dildo in you?” I can only nod. “Of course you do.”

He nods to Rich, who very slowly slides the dildo into me. He lowers his head back to my cunt and resumes licking as he fucks me with the dildo. With each push of the dildo, he slides his finger a little deeper into my ass. Matt begins to gently suck on my nipples and I hear my own moans grow louder. As if in response, Matt covers my mouth with his lips. My arms strain against the velvet ropes.

“I’m going to come,” I say, pulling my mouth away. I can’t believe it’s happening this fast. Sometimes it takes as much as an hour before I can climax.

“That’s good,” Matt says. “I want to see you. I missed out on that before.”

Before. Yes, when we almost became lovers. A memory flashes through my mind-- of me on a different hotel bed and of Matt parting my legs. I stare at him and then I come. I throw my head back and cry out as the waves course through my body. I forget about the ropes holding my hands. As the orgasm subsides, Rich slows his licking. Then he pulls the dildo out of my cunt and his finger out of my ass. They are both grinning at me.

“We’re not done with you,” Matt says. Rich is untying my ankles from the bedpost. Almost instinctively, I close my legs. I think I see him smirk. Matt positions himself on his left side so that his cock is level with my face. Gently, he puts his hand on my cheek and turns my head. He presses the tip of his penis against my lips. I part them and take his cock into my mouth. I know that if my hands were free I could do more, but as it is, I just lick the tip and then begin sucking.

“Oh God,” he says, moaning. “I forgot how good those lips were.” I look up and see that his eyes are closed in pleasure. I want my hands free so that I can stroke his ass, his balls. Then almost reluctantly, he pulls himself out of my mouth. He flips himself so that he is lying on his right side, his face even with my hips and his cock again at my mouth. “Keep sucking it, babe,” he says, and I comply. I’m afraid that my arms are going to cramp. Then I feel his hand caress my stomach.

“Are you ready to be fucked good and hard?” he asks me.

I forget about the ropes and the numbness in my arms. “Oh, God, yes. Fuck me.”

“Not yet. I’m going to let this male hooker fuck you first. I’m going to share you with him.”

I pull away from his cock and look down. Rich has a condom wrapper in his hand. Another adrenaline rush hits me. I watch, my heart racing, as he opens the wrapper. To me, the moment when a man puts a condom on is one of the most exciting moments in sex. It means that the sex is about to happen; that I’m about to be fucked. But by this stranger?

Rich spreads my legs and puts his knees between them. He positions his cock where I can feel it at the entrance of my cunt. It’s wet from the recent orgasm and getting wetter. Rich places his hands on either side of me and braces himself above me.

“Put it in just a little,” Matt says.

Rich does, and I moan. My pelvis moves against him involuntarily but he pulls back.

“Do you like that?” Matt asks me. “Do you like being fucked by a stranger?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

“Do you want him to do it more?”

“Yes.”

Then Matt begins rubbing my clit. For a moment I think, No, it will be too sensitive. I’m surprised to feel sensations of pleasure once again.

“Put it in a little more,” Matt orders Rich and he complies. I know that Matt can see everything from his vantage point. It makes me feel even more exposed, more powerless, and at the same time, more turned on.

Rich begins to slowly fuck me. We stare into each other’s eyes. I wonder how many women he’s looked down on like this. My ego rises up inside me. I tighten my vagina around his cock. His eyes widen and his face contorts momentarily in ecstasy before he composes himself. I want to put my hands on his ass and pull him to me.

“She’s good,” he tells Matt. “I’m going to have to do her slow.”

“I want to do her mouth,” Matt answers. He moves up the bed, stroking my side with his stiff cock. Softly, he brushes my cheeks with it. Rich lifts one hand from the bed and again turns my cheek to Matt’s erection, which I take between my lips.

“Oh God, she’s sucking you really good,” Rich tells him. I’m pleased and overwhelmed by sensations as Matt begins rubbing me harder.

“You’re going to come with his cock in you,” he says.

Rich’s thrusts become more even, slow and hard, as Matt’s finger rubs faster and faster. Even though Matt’s penis fills my mouth, I’ve stopped sucking and have started moaning.

I come again, slamming my pelvis against Rich. I open my eyes in time to see the look of surprise on his face and I know that he is coming, too. Matt pulls his hand away so that Rich can collapse on top of me. We are both sweating.

He rolls off, panting hard. “That doesn’t usually happen,” he says to the ceiling.

Matt laughs. “I’d better see what all the fuss is about.” He shifts position and gets a condom. I look at him in surprise. “I said we were going to share you,” he reminds me.

I realize again that my arms are aching. “Untie me,” I say. Matt begins to reach for the rope but Rich is there first. I lower my freed arms and Rich rubs them while Matt slips his condom on.

Once suited up, he spreads my legs again. I gasp as I feel his still-hard cock slide into my wetness. Then he’s looking down on me. “You’re so wet,” he says. “You’re so, so wet.”

“I didn’t think this was ever going to happen,” I say. Indeed, I didn’t. A few years before, it was all I could think about. But Matt had been the one who wanted to wait to consummate our relationship. We’d taken it right up to the edge before he pulled back, perhaps sensing the intensity of my neediness. The further he pulled back, the faster I came at him, until I no doubt drove him away. Now-- when I least expected it, when I had completely embraced the idea of us just being friends-- it happens.

Now while Rich watches, Matt fucks me slowly, hard. “I knew this would feel good. I knew it.” He turns me over and pulls me onto my elbows and knees. I feel him enter me from behind. He grabs my ass cheeks hard and the pace of his thrusts quicken. “You have such a great ass,” I hear him say.

“I want to see you come,” I tell him. He flips me over and enters me again.

“That’s it,” he moans. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.” And then he comes, his body shuddering, his face even more contorted then Rich’s.

Later that night, I wake up. Matt sleeps beside me, breathing quietly. I hear the toilet flush. Rich enters the room and begins to collect his things. I watch him dress. He glances over at the bed and sees me.

“Hi,” he whispers.

“Hi.”

He finishes dressing and comes over to my side of the bed. He kisses me on the lips. “Bye,” he says. “Take care of yourself.”

“Do I need to…?” I can’t believe I’m about to offer to pay him.

“Nope. All taken care of.” He heads for the door.

“Wait,” I don’t know quite what I’m doing, but I get out of bed and follow him out of the bedroom to the door of the suite. He looks at me questioningly. I put my arms around his neck and kiss him deeply.

“What was that for?” he asks.

“For making one of my wildest fantasies come true.”

“Matt made it come true. Not me.”

I hear the voice in my head ask, So this was just another job to you? I mentally kick myself. Surely he’s heard that question before. And I’m sure he tells them all they were special. So I take a step back. “Thanks anyway,” I say.

“Any time.”

“Really?” I say teasingly.

He gives me a strange look. Suddenly, he drops his bag and grabs me. We begin kissing madly, almost as though we were trying to devour each other. He picks me up and I wrap my legs around his waist. He takes me back into the sitting room and together we fall onto the armchair. He fumbles with his pants, then fumbles with a condom, and then he is in me again. Our sex is even more intense this time because we have made a silent agreement to be quiet. This is no performance. He never takes his eyes from mine. Finally he comes, and lies against me.

“That was on the house,” he whispers in my ear. “That was for me.”

A tremor goes through me. “How do I know that?”

“Because. Because I want to see you again.”

Rich is gone. I crawl back into bed beside Matt, who stirs in his sleep and reaches over to me. “How are you?” he asks groggily, pulling me to him. Here is another fantasy come true: me enfolded in his arms, safe.

“I’m fine,” I say, despite the other fantasy’s unexpected turn. Can one cheat with a male prostitute on someone who is just a friend? Why do I want so badly for him to leave, to not be there when I wake up in the morning? And then the feeling subsides. “Thanks for tonight.”

“What are friends for?” Matt says, and goes back to sleep.

Lesson Plan
by Alex Picchetti

Jasminder fiddled with her pen, tapping it irritably against the test in front of her. The paper slid off the tiny foldout tabletop, and she scrambled to catch it. Her neighbor scowled at her, and she sneered back. “Who gives pop quizzes at college, anyway?” she mumbled to herself.

Professor Reiniger, of course. The bastard loved to make sure they were doing their readings, diligently keeping up with the course load. He was like that—methodical, prepared. Ready for anything, and perfectly dressed for it in his pressed shirt and khakis. That simply didn’t fit with Jas’s style, which was to cram all she could in the last few days before the exam and purge it all in booze and sex immediately afterwards. It had been the source of more than a few arguments—and their follow-up punishments, which she admitted made the shouting matches worthwhile.

Sighing obviously, she dipped her head to look at the page. Mathematical equations danced across the page, followed by the words, “show your work.” A small smirk quirked her face. She picked up her pen and began to draw, using her arm to hide her masterpiece from her bitchy seatmate.

When she finished, she examined it with smug satisfaction. Art had never been her strong suit, but it didn’t take much talent to draw a stick-figure student in a skirt, bent over a desk, being fucked by a stick-figure teacher. For good measure she added labels, then sauntered to the front with her paper, presenting it to Reiniger with a flourish and a deliberate fiendish smile.

He narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously. Could he sense her wicked mood? Or was he annoyed at her trashy attire? Then he dropped his gaze to the page in front of him. She waited, biting her lip to contain the fierce giggles that threatened to erupt.

She did not get the reaction she was hoping for. Without looking back up, he folded the test in four and calmly shredded it. She could only stare as he swept the confetti into the trash can. She suddenly became aware that three hundred sets of eyes were upon them, and that there was no sound of writing. The blood rushed to her face, and she was glad her dark skin would mask it.

“Miss Sidhu,” Reiniger said, and she jumped. In the silence, his voice was like a cannon going off. “If you would please wait in my office until the end of class.” He did not look at her, and his voice held no anger, no inflection, yet it reached all corners of the hall. The silence around them deepened. Now angry as well as embarrassed, she returned to her seat in a huff, gathering her books and flouncing off to his office.

His office was in the back annex of the mathematics building, away from the other professors. It wasn’t the best of offices, small and cramped, but the first time she had seen it she had wondered aloud whom he had bribed to get such a prime piece of real estate for fucking students. The bruises on her ass for that comment had been satisfyingly long-lasting.

She slammed the door when she arrived, but it didn’t ease her wounded pride. To make matters worse, the class would go on another hour, ending well into the evening, and so she had plenty of time to stew. She sulked, slouching deeper into the uncomfortable chair he kept for students. She played with her braid, trailing the end of it up the inside of her thigh and down again, trying to imagine his fingers instead. Finally, she heard the noise of students coming down the hall.

She smoothed out her barely-there shirt and short black skirt just as Reiniger entered, followed by a pair of blond, bland all-American boys. She recognized one as Nick, Reiniger’s pet and favorite to compare her with, but the other was an unknown. She gave him the once-over when he caught her eye, and smirked. He blushed. Cute. She made a mental note to catch him after class one night.

“Sir, I still don’t fully understand the process…” Nick was saying.

“You can come by during office hours, Nicholas,” Reiniger said firmly, and Jas sniggered. “It’s late, and right now I have an appointment.”

Nick glared at Jasminder, who casually gave him the finger. He and the blushing boy left. Jas blew a kiss after them as Reiniger closed the door gently, locking it behind them. Jas felt a thrill slide down straight to her cunt. He couldn’t be that angry if he was locking the door, could he?

“Should I be worried?” she asked as the professor sat behind his desk. He didn’t answer, shuffling through the quizzes instead. She pressed on. “I mean, he seems pretty jealous. Nick, that is. You’re not doing boys now too, are you?”

With a sharp tap, he brought the papers into alignment and set them down carefully. He crossed back to her, standing over her with his arms folded. His expression was unreadable, his blue eyes unwavering.

“I mean, maybe I should have guessed, with your fixation on my ass.” The words were tumbling out of her, unstoppable now that she’d started. Why wasn’t he saying anything? “Am I just a poor substitute for what you really want?” She theatrically touched her finger to her cheek as if seriously considering the thought. “But you like skirts so much. Unless he wears a skirt for you, too? I guess that could be hot.”

He motioned for her to be silent. Was that pity she saw in his face? She wanted to scream. Why wasn’t he getting angry with her? Normally he’d have had her on her knees immediately. This was agony.

“Why didn’t you do the test?” he asked.

“I was up late studying,” she said snidely. On her knees in his study, everything in her focused on the sensation of his cock sliding against her lips, tongue, mouth. His words garbled through her intense concentration, but the theme coming through clearly: slut. That was a lesson she would keep with her, she thought, and shifted in her seat.

He rubbed at his eyes. “What am I to do with you, Jas?” She started to feel guilty. Had she misjudged his mood? Suddenly his blond hair seemed grayer than before, his wrinkles deeper.

“You could start by fucking me,” she whined.

And there it was! The spark of anger she needed. Hope sprang up in her. “I know this hasn’t sunk in yet, but I do not do this for my gratification.” He slid a hand through her hair, then gripped a handful tightly. She winced and bit her lip to not cry out. “Nor do I do it for yours. And that seems to be the crux of the matter.”

“What is?”

He pulled her to her feet sharply, and this time she yelped. The noise was cut off as he shoved her against the wall, knocking the breath from her. Oh, this was what she had been waiting for!

He pressed against her, leaving her unable to take in a good breath. His mouth found her ear as his free hand slid up her skirt, digging two thick fingers against her panties. “This is,” he growled. “You refuse to learn. And you routinely act out. But if I try to punish you…” He brought his hand up and smeared his fingers against her cheek. She could smell her juices. “I get this instead.”

He backed off slightly and she tried to regain some composure, but he spun her around quickly and slammed her back against the wall, this time pinning her from behind. She could feel his cock pressing the rough khaki of his pants against her ass. God, she’d come if he would just rub against her a little. She tried to wiggle against him, but he grabbed her left arm and twisted it behind her, using it to hold her in place. She whimpered and struggled against him.

“So what do I do now, Jas?”

Her stomach dropped sharply. She’d never heard him use that tone before. She’d pushed him too far, now. She could feel everything spiraling out of control.

“What do I do with someone as sinful as you?” He pressed against her harder. She cried out as she felt the strain in her elbow. His damp fingers stroked her hair, and he pulled her head so that her neck was exposed. “If everything I do makes you come, that’s hardly punishment, now is it?”

“Please stop,” she whimpered.

Did he not hear her? Or was he ignoring her? He pinned her arm against the wall to allow himself to get closer, his lips trailing down her neck, burning her as he went. She struggled to get her free hand between her legs, but he jerked her hair again and she stopped. Instead, she tried to pry his fingers free, her nails digging into his knuckles. He ignored her pathetic attempts.

“What’s this?” He breathed in her ear. “Don’t you like this game any more?”

“No,” she said, but it rang hollow in her ears. She wanted this.

He pulled her free hand over her head, and used his single hand to hold both of her wrists. “This isn’t what you wanted, then?” He began to pull up her shirt, pushing her bra out of the way with ease. “You weren’t trying to infuriate me?”

“No!”

He pinched her nipple hard and she bit her arm to keep from shrieking. He pressed harder. “What was that little trick in class, then?” He twisted it roughly. “You weren’t trying to make me lose my temper? Make a fool of me in front of the class?”

“Yes, I was,” she wailed. “I’m sorry!”

He released the nipple and she gasped in relief. She could hear the smile in his voice. “See what honesty gets you?” Reiniger told her. “Of course, there’s still the underlying problem.” His fingers worked under her skirt, jerking her panties down and delivering a sharp slap to her ass. She squirmed, trying to get free. He slapped her again. “I don’t appreciate being toyed with,” he said. His fingers tightened around her wrists and she squealed.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, holding her still. One hand cupped her ass cheek, caressing it. She scrunched up her face, willing herself not to give him the satisfaction of an answer. That would serve him right. “Hm? I’m afraid I didn’t hear that.”

Her elbows and shoulders ached from struggling, and the bite mark on her arm throbbed in time with her cunt. She tried to use this pause as a reprieve, a chance to draw one deep shuddering breath into her body. If she could just get centered—

“Maybe it doesn’t hurt enough,” he said thoughtfully, and his hand slipped between her legs and pinched her labia hard around her clit.

She screamed into her orgasm, and as she struggled to get free—or was she rocking against his hand?—he released her cunt, leaving her to buck aimlessly against the air for release, the lack of pressure more painful than any of the bruises he had ever left on her. She could hear herself begging as though she were outside herself, her words tripping one over the other.

When the last spasm of her orgasm had wracked her body, he gently took her and sat her down again. She juddered against him as her cunt brushed against the rough material of the chair.

“You see, Jas,” he said, as though he hadn’t been interrupted, “what you are doing hurts me.” She made a quiet noise. “I want to see you excel. I know that you can. And yet you persist in behaving like this.”

She opened her mouth to say something and was rewarded with a calm, powerful slap to the face. That was the end of it. She could only look at him and listen now, eyes wide and mouth slack.

He stroked her hair and she trilled, pushing into his hand. “And so I am left to wonder if there is nothing that can be done. Do you want to improve, or are you just a masochistic little whore?”

Both, she wanted to tell him. She would do anything for him so long as he kept doing this.

His fingers slid around to the back of her head, pulling her forward. The other hand worked at his belt, and she fumbled to help—her jumbled brain couldn’t make sense of buttons—there it was, and she opened her mouth obediently. He rubbed his cock against her cheek, first, gently directing her head with his grip on her hair.

“You do love this, don’t you?” he mused. “Just open your mouth and keep your teeth out of the way. What Freudian complex makes you love this so much? Hm?”

The same one that makes me love you, she thought as he slid deep into her mouth. She grunted against his cock. Every nerve in her body felt connected to her lips, and as she ran the tips of her fingers against the backs of his thighs she could feel the chair beneath her soaking up her juices. The idea of the office stinking of their sex in the morning was almost enough to drive her over the edge again. She began to grind herself against the chair in time with her sucking, trying to be subtle.

It never worked, and she knew somewhere that she didn’t really want it to. He wrenched her away and she shrieked. He slapped her again, then reached down to jerk her legs forward. She was now balanced precariously on the chair, her tailbone the only thing supporting her, her neck against the poorly cushioned seat back. He knelt over her again, his wet dick dangling in front of her. This time he was not gentle, forcing himself deep into her mouth, ignoring her grunts and cries. She gripped his thighs for support, her feet scrabbling to keep her in place as his thrusts banged her neck against the chair and occasionally knocked her skull against the wall. Still her body arched against the air, her cunt pulsing, and she wished desperately that he would fuck her, do anything to ease the ache there.

“You see?” he grunted. “No matter what I do to you, you can’t be punished. Maybe I should give up.” She shook her head as best she could. “No?” She moaned. “Put your tongue to better use, then.”

She struggled to move herself into a better position, running her tongue rapidly against the underside of his cock, each vein and ridge sending cascading shocks through her body. He slowed his thrusting to better enjoy her technique, making a low noise in his throat. She shivered.

After a moment—a minute? Five? Ten? Time was irrelevant—he pushed her away gently. She rocked back, trying to remember what breathing was like, and wiped at her mouth. He slid his arms under her armpits and, like he might pick up a child, stood her up. She wobbled unsteadily on her legs, but quickly enough he bent her over his desk. Relief flooded her as she balanced herself on the solid oak. Her knees were like water, her panties still stretched between her calves. She took a few deep breaths and felt lightheaded. The room was spinning, so she shut her eyes.

“So what do I do, Jas?” Reiniger asked again. She heard a drawer open and shut. Terror and excitement combated for control, and she couldn’t say which won. “You won’t behave. What should I do, do you think?”

“Fuh.”

He flipped her skirt over her back and traced something cool and smooth along the curve of her ass. “What was that?”

She swallowed. All that spit and her mouth was dry. “Fuck me?” she tried again. God, did she really sound that desperate?

“What would be the point?” He said, tapping the paddle lightly against her. She jerked. “I don’t need to use you for you to come. And not orgasming would punish you, but that doesn’t seem to be an option.” A slightly harder tap. “Unless I stop fucking you altogether.”

“No,” she moaned.

“Then what are you going to do?” This time the paddle cracked against her, and she whimpered into her arm.

“Whatever you say?” she tried.

“Clever, but I’ve heard that one before.” He whacked her again. “Give me specifics.”

“I don’t know,” she said timidly.

The slam of the paddle against the desk sent her scrambling, the pop quizzes scattering across the office floor. She cringed away from Reiniger, but he grabbed her head and pulled her back towards him. He pushed her against the desk again, this time pressing between her legs, and bent his head close to hers. He was shaking with anger. Or was that her trembling?

“Pure laziness,” he said.

She caught a sob in her throat. “No.”

“Then what do I want from you, Jasminder? We’ve been doing this for five months now. If you can’t even tell me that,” he said, shaking her roughly, “then you have been a waste of time.”

“I’ll be good,” she wailed.

He slapped her. “Specifics!”

She gulped hard. “I’ll study!”

“That’s a start. What else?” He slapped her again.

She squealed. “I’ll behave in class!”

“You’ll behave all the time,” he said firmly.

She nodded, and Reiniger slipped his hand down her neck to her waist, pulling her onto his cock. She gasped, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face into his chest. It was all she could do to hold on for dear life.

He wasn’t rough with her now, but the sex was no less overwhelming for it. Each thrust drove a lance of sensation straight into her brain, leaving sparks behind her eyelids. Each time he squeezed her ass, she bucked. She came twice definitively before they turned into constant shudders of ecstasy through her body.

She didn’t realize she had been crying until he finally came, when she pulled away and saw the wet spots on his shirt. He pulled out of her and she shuddered, collapsing back against the desk in exhaustion.

“That was quite a reaction,” he said, looking down at his shirt. She looked at him from half-closed eyes. What could she say to that? Could she even speak?

He stroked her thigh gently and she jerked it away from him. “Too sensitive,” she said. He nodded and began to collect up the papers she had knocked to the floor.

When he had finished neatening them, he replaced them on the desk next to her. Then he slid an arm under the small of her back and the other under her neck and cradled her gently, lifting her into his lap as he sat in his chair.

She curled against him and he began to stroke her hair. She nuzzled deeper, wiping at her eyes. Everything felt euphoric, the sensation of his shirt against her cheek, his fingers trailing through her hair, even the wetness of her tears.

“Too much?” he finally said. She shook her head. She felt him release a long breath and looked up to give him a watery smile.

“You weren’t worried about me, were you?” she asked.

He gently pushed her head back against him, his other hand tracing patterns down the outside of her thigh.

“I would have used it if I needed it,” she said quietly, meaning their safe word.

“I wonder sometimes.” She snorted quietly. “I meant what I said, though,” he continued after a moment. “No more stunts like this afternoon.”

“But you like it when I make you mad,” she mumbled.

“Hm,” he agreed. He squeezed her thigh. “Just not in class.” He slapped her gently and she shivered.

“Yes, sir.” She took a deep breath. Mmm, Old Spice. Her favorite. “I feel like I’m made of Jell-O.” She shivered for emphasis.

He laughed. “Good.” He patted her back. “I expect you to keep to your half of the agreement, by the way.”

“That promise was made under duress,” she complained, but she laughed when he spanked her and gave him conciliatory kisses. She slid between his legs and rested her head against his leg. “Right now, I just want to go home and sleep.” She felt her cheek, still sticky. “And maybe shower.”

“We will,” he said. “As soon as I’ve marked these tests.”

“Can I make it up?” she asked, giving him her best hopeful, innocent look.

“Absolutely not.” Reiniger patted her. “Perhaps that’ll teach you something about responsibility.”

She pouted, closing her eyes. “I’m going to take a nap.”

And she did, listening to the scratching of his pen and indulging in being stroked by his free hand.

Break Me
by Elle Rose

He lay on her couch and stared at the ceiling. It smelled like her. Everything in the dark little apartment had her scent, her feel. It was his fault it was dark, of course. When she left in the mornings, he walked around pulling down all the shades. He didn’t want to be distracted by anything from the outside world, because it was all her. The small television, the stacks of DVDs – dozens, filling a bookcase and in piles on the floor. There were even more books. He’d tried to read them. He wanted to know everything she did. But he would end up staring at the grain in the paper, thinking about her, wondering when and where she’d been when she’d read that page.

She was in the wood furnishings which appeared nicer than they really were, in the framed posters on the wall. She was in the comfortable, slightly worn couch, and all the kitchen utensils and the vases of flowers and the toiletries in the small bathroom. He was sure he’d be able to taste her if he licked the furniture, or the floors, but when he tried he only tasted wool and wood and linoleum. He thought maybe if he could get into the bedroom he would be more successful, but she kept it padlocked after the first day when she’d come home and found him naked in her bed.

When would she be home? He looked at the clock. Hours yet. She worked. He didn’t like that she worked. It meant she was gone most of the day; it meant she went to bed long before he was starting to get sleepy, much less tired of her. He’d held jobs in the past, when necessary, but he was a criminal at heart. She had recognized him from the news. After they’d been talking nearly an hour at the dungeon club, he took off the hat, sunglasses, and fake mustache he’d been wearing. With people fucking and beating each other around them, he’d confessed everything. She hadn’t been afraid. Why hadn’t she been afraid? She’d just looked quietly at him, listened to everything he said without shock. She didn’t seem surprised he had been lying for most of the hour before, either. Had she read him that easily? There was sadness in her eyes. Where did it come from? Why did she let him stay with her? She was breaking the law. She didn’t seem like the type, but she was doing it. Why did she bother with him? Why did she trust him? When would she be home?

His gaze shifted back to the clock. Less than a minute had passed. He tried pressing his tongue to the sofa again. Nothing. He lay back and inhaled the air instead.

* * * *

She lay on the same couch, propped up on her side, and stared at him. His brown eyes, so dark they appeared almost black in some lights, devoured her.

“Why am I here?” he asked finally.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem interesting, and you said you needed somewhere to stay.”

“You know who I am. Aren’t you afraid I’m going to kill you in the night?”

“No. You won’t.” Her voice wasn’t commanding, only certain. “I have nothing to fear from you.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do.”

* * * *

She wouldn’t fuck him. She hadn’t even kissed him at first. He’d only been allowed to touch her hands. He would grab them tightly in his and squeeze them, running his thumbs frantically over the backs. He’d wanted more, and closer, and now. It had seemed like he was hard constantly. That was still true.

Eventually, she’d given him permission to kiss her. He reveled in the memory of the first time.

He was hard, so hard, he could feel her desire in the lines of her body as she pressed to him. She pushed him away.

“Enough,” she said. She walked into her bedroom and closed the door. He lay on the couch with his face in one of her pillows, inhaling, and thrust—one—two—three—four—and came, moaning.

When was she coming home? Half an hour had worn away. It seemed like much less. What had he been doing all that time? He couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t remember. Time had never had much meaning. Here, it had no meaning. It was designated only by her entrances and exits. He just wanted her, all the time.

When was she coming home?

“Hurt me,” he demanded for the twentieth time at least. “Hurt me. I want you to. Hurt me, do it. I know you can.” His sentences were staccato, sharp with need.

She looked at him for a long moment and then shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not now.” It was the first time she’d answered with anything besides a short, firm, “No.”

“But you will?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You have. I’ve seen your equipment.”

“Yes, I’ve topped people. That’s not the problem.”

“What do you want me to do? What will make you want to? I’ll do anything. What?”

“I don’t know. I think I’ll know when I’m ready or when you’re ready. I suppose it’s both.”

“But you will?”

“I might. But I’m not making you any promises.”

Keys in the lock. How long had it been? He jumped up and stared at the door as she came through. She was alone. Was she always alone or only since he’d been with her?

When she saw him, her face went blank. She shut the door behind her, locked it, and stood facing him.

“Take off your clothes,” she said and walked to her bedroom, unlocking it and then shutting the door behind her. He began stripping eagerly and finally stood naked in the middle of her living room floor, staring at the bedroom door. It opened a minute later, and she came out, having changed from her work clothes into a pair of tight jeans and a black tank top trimmed with lace. It was low cut, and he watched her breasts rise and fall as she walked up to him.

She reached out and wrapped her hand around his cock, hard since he’d heard her at the door. She stroked him firmly once, twice, and he threw back his head and moaned, pushing into her hand. The hand went away, and he looked down to see her snapping a cock ring onto him with practiced ease. He moaned.

“Tighter,” he said.

“No. It’s dangerous.”

“I don’t care.”

She frowned and he laughed at her expression. “I figured you out while you were at work,” he said. “You want someone you can do anything to. Everyone before, you were gentle, right? You held back. You don’t have to do that with me. I’m bad. I deserve it. You’re justified.”

“No, I wouldn’t even be considering going as hard as you’ve asked for if I didn’t know how badly you wanted it. That’s what I like.”

“That might be what gets you off, but that’s not what justifies it. It’s okay that you’ve tortured me for so long, right?”

“I didn’t do anything because I wasn’t ready yet. I’m still not sure I am. I don’t trust you.”

He leaned in. “That’s what makes it fun,” he said.

“Whatever you say.” She sounded annoyed now, and he grinned wider.

“You’re more afraid of you than you are of me. You’re afraid of what’s going to come out of you.”

She glared at him. “Do you want me to beat you or do you want to psychoanalyze me all night?”

He laughed again, a manic edge in his voice, bouncing on his heels. “Beat me.”

“Good. Go into my room and lie on your back on the bed.”

He did, and she followed. She chained him to the bedposts, securing his hands and feet with heavy-duty locks. His limbs were stretched a little too tight, and he moaned. She straddled his hips and ran her hands slowly up his chest. When she dragged them down again, she pushed down hard with her nails. He arched into the pain.

“Fuck,” he said.

She kissed him hard on the mouth. His wrists strained against the chains as he tried instinctually to touch her. She pulled away and reached over to her bedside table to pick up a knife. Twisting his head, he saw that the table was covered with BDSM instruments he hadn’t noticed when he’d first come in. He’d been too eager to follow her instructions, too eager for this to begin.

She ran the flat of the blade over his skin. It was cold, but quickly warming; his heart felt like it was going to break his chest open. He wondered what it would feel like if it did.

After a few long moments of teasing, she made a small cut on his chest, near his right arm. He made a noise somewhere between pleasure and frustration, and she looked at him.

“Deeper,” he said.

“If you don’t stop telling me what to do, I’m going to gag you.” Her voice was calm, even slightly amused. “And wouldn’t you miss the sound of your own voice? I wonder if you could even come without hearing it.” She kept making short, shallow cuts that kept him moaning but wishing for more, sometimes out loud.

“More. Deeper!” he cried.

She threw away the knife, rose, and began unlocking his chains. He started to panic. She couldn’t be stopping already. He shouldn’t have tried to tell her what to do. He should have just let her hurt him. She knew what she was doing. She was—

“Turn over,” she said when she had finished with the chains. “On your hands and knees.”

He breathed a sigh of relief and turned over. She chained him, and again it was too tight, and most of the weight of his upper body was on his wrists, making the chains cut into his skin. It was heaven.

His cock was just barely above the bed. When the first blow came and he jerked forward, it rubbed against her covers. “Fuck,” he moaned. “Harder.”

When she hit him a second time, it was lighter, and he made a frustrated noise.

“Harder!” he commanded.

She barely tapped his ass with the paddle, and then she waited. He said nothing.

“My, my,” she said. “You can learn. I’ll alert the media. Maybe they’ll agree to rehabilitate you someday instead of just sending you to the electric chair.” She hit him again, this time nearly as hard as the first.

“You can rehabilitate me,” he said.

“It would save the taxpayers some money,” she replied, striking him twice, much harder now. “But I’m given to understand that vigilante justice is generally frowned upon.”

She sent a volley of sharp smacks against his ass, making him cry out in pleasure and pain. He moaned when she stopped and pressed her hand to his ass, caressing the skin lightly.

“Fuck,” he groaned. “More. Please.”

“That’s an improvement as well,” she said softly. “Asking. Begging would be even better.”

She put down the paddle and picked up a stiff flogger. She didn’t bother to start gently as she brought it down on his back over and over. He writhed in his bonds. Next, it was some sort of switch on the backs of his legs. Then she slid under him like a car mechanic and affixed clamps to his nipples, nasty ones with little biting teeth. He cried out and tried to rub against her, make any sort of contact with her, but she’d slipped away again. Now she was beating him mercilessly, ass and back and legs and fuck fuck fuck would it never stop? He prayed she’d never stop, and when it all came to a head, he screamed.

She stopped.

He looked back at her. “Why did you stop?” he demanded.

“You screamed,” she said.

“So why did you stop?” he whined, feeling like he was going to cry. Oh, what the fuck was this?

“I thought you were in pain,” she replied. “And we foolishly didn’t set a safe word.”

“I don’t want one,” he said immediately. “You can beat me ’til I pass out for all I care. I wish you would.”

She looked curiously at him. “Why do you want so much pain?” she asked.

He gave the best approximation of a shrug he could in the position he was in. “I always have.”

“Do you think that’s why you do such terrible things? Because you want to be punished?”

He stared at her. “Are you going to beat me or psychoanalyze me all night?” he asked finally.

“A little of both,” she replied tartly. She put down the cat-o’-nine tails she’d been holding. “Eyes front,” she commanded, and he looked ahead.

He heard a rubbery snap, and a moment later her finger, cool and slippery with lubricant, was circling his anus. His breath caught, and when the finger pushed inside him, he groaned and tried to lean back on it. She added another finger, and he pressed his cock against the covers.

She worked her way in a little deeper and hit his prostate. He jerked forward, the wave of pleasure leaving his body limp.

“Maybe you want someone else to be responsible for your decisions,” she said thoughtfully, starting to slowly thrust her fingers in and out of him.

“God, fuck,” he moaned.

She stopped moving her fingers. “What I mean to say is, you knew you’d get caught, and then you’d be in jail so you wouldn’t really have free will anymore. That’s why you did what you did.” She shoved her fingers in and out of him hard. His cock throbbed, still constrained.

The fingers were suddenly withdrawn, and he turned to protest, only to have something much larger slammed into him. He yelled, savoring the burn. He tried to see what it was, but there was no chance of being able to twist around that far.

Some kind of toy, he thought. Who cares, as long as it hurts?

And hurt it did. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he was bleeding a little. The pain and pleasure were making him almost dizzy. He started chuckling low and attempted to collapse onto the bed, but the chains made it impossible.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

He grinned. “It’s true. You can only do like this, this rough, this mean, because I’m bad, because I deserve it.”

“I told you, I can do it because I know how badly you want it.”

“No one ever wanted it this hard?”

She paused, looking thoughtful. “No… a couple people have asked, at the club, and once privately.”

“But you wouldn’t do it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I think I was afraid I’d break them because they couldn’t take what they thought they wanted. Maybe I was a little afraid of what I might do, if given free rein.”

“That sounds closer to the truth.”

She met his eyes, seeming not to have heard his last statement. “I don’t worry about breaking you.”

“Oh, you can break me. Just not in the way you were afraid of breaking them.”

“How, then?”

He attempted another shrug and turned away. She pulled out whatever she’d shoved inside him, leaving a strange, empty feeling. It hurt, but not quite as much as it had going in and not nearly as much as he wanted. In a flash, she was beating him again—was that a whip? Whatever it was, it stung and burned and sliced into his flesh. She went hard, and within minutes he was blissed out on pain. He was laughing again—it passed and he was screaming—she didn’t let up. He went limp, accepting the pain, ready to feel it for the rest of his life.

She stopped. He was barely aware of it. His back, ass, and legs were on fire – even his sides and chest hurt a little where the whip and floggers had wrapped around him. He didn’t notice she was unchaining him until his limbs were falling onto the bed. He lay in a heap and groaned.

“Oh, fuck. I think I love you,” he sighed.

“Roll over,” she ordered from behind him.

He complied, wincing as his weight pressed fresh cuts and bruises against the cloth. Though he could tell it was soft, it felt rough against his wounds, catching at them whenever he shifted. She bound him again, handcuffing his hands over his head. She took off the cock ring and carefully rolled a condom over his erection. The contact and anticipation made him squirm. She rose once more and took off her clothes, not quickly but not making a show of it either. He watched her, watched her, watched her. If it weren’t for the pain in his body, he would have thought he was nothing but eyes to see her with.

She returned to the bed, straddled his hips, and kissed him hard. He pressed back just as hard, and when he slid his tongue into her mouth, she bit it, making him jump. She bit and sucked at his lips, then kissed them again so fiercely it was like she was trying to hurt him rather than caress him. She raised her hips, grasped his cock, and positioned herself. When he slid into her tight, slick heat—in in in fuck!—he screamed again.

She froze, raising an eyebrow at him. “I don’t remember performing any cock torture tonight,” she said. “Beyond the ring, that is.”

He grinned. “You’ve been torturing my cock since you let me stay here,” he said.

She smiled at that and leaned forward to kiss him, rocking her hips slowly. He writhed and moaned and cursed under her as she rode him, biting and sucking at his neck and chest. He cursed because it wasn’t fast enough, because his hands were cuffed and he couldn’t touch her, and because it was finally, finally, finally happening. When he was getting close, he began screaming, and this time she didn’t pause. She only reached up and unlocked his handcuffs. He could hardly feel his hands, but he ran them all over her skin. Wishing he had more time, his hands landed quickly on her hips and held them in a death grip until he came with a shudder and a loud groan, almost anticlimactic after all the yelling.

He blinked and started to laugh again, a weird sort of giggle. She lay down next to him, their skin only brushing in a few places. He stopped laughing and turned to her, staring intently into her eyes.

“You know I’m still wanted,” he said.

“I know that,” she replied.

“And you know that after this, I’m never going to leave you alone.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I figured as much,” she said.

He grabbed her hand in both of his, squeezing it urgently, still staring into her eyes. “I’ll never let anything happen to you. Ever. Police, lawyers, and people like me—they’ll never get you.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

Peace de Resistance
by Kris Cherita

Linsey winced as Brianna kneaded her back. “Jesus, girl,” said the masseuse, “you are a fucking mess. What the fuck have you been doing?”

“Just working.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” her friend asked, with a hint of a sigh. “Why did you take that job, anyway?”

“They forced money into my hand,” said Linsey. In truth, she’d been offered the position of principal of Maria Goretti College over many colleagues with seniority because of her excellent track record as a teacher. She’d accepted it in the hope of being able to improve the school as a whole, and had scored some minor victories, but only by micro-managing as much as possible. “Ow!”

“You getting any exercise?” Brianna asked.

“No.”

“Getting laid?”

“No!”

“Thought not. When was the last time?” When Linsey started doing the math, Brianna shook her head. “Not since Phil left, right?”

“No,” she admitted, with a slight twinge. While her ex-husband had had many faults, he was undeniably good in bed—a vast number of beds, unfortunately. She’d been hugely inexperienced when they’d started dating, but he’d soon changed that: He was a silver-tongued actor and dancer with the ability to arouse her to the degree that she would agree to almost anything. “I’ve been on a couple of dates, but none of them…well, you know. None of them turned me on.”

“How much of a chance did you give them?”

“What?”

“Did you try talking about anything other than your job?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Brianna was silent.

“I don’t get many opportunities to meet anyone—”

“Bullshit,” said Brianna. “There are plenty of people out there, and you still look damn hot—okay, not in that straitjacket you were wearing when you came in, but you do now. Pretty face, big tits, nice curvy butt, good legs…you just have to learn to show them off a bit. All it takes is some effort and a bit of imagination.”

“I can’t go cruising the bars, or anything like that. I have my position to think of. I’m having enough trouble at the moment with parents trying to sack one of my best teachers for saying that abstinence-only sex education isn’t enough, and we should tell the girls about alternatives, including contraception and masturbation.”

“Maybe you should take that advice yourself. Start thinking about alternatives and different sorts of positions. Do you masturbate, at least?”

“I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work for me, either. I can’t…”

“Let yourself go?”

“Something like that.”

Another sigh. “You always were a control freak. You’ve got to learn that sometimes you have to make the choice to let someone else take control instead. Always being in control fucks you up almost as bad as never being in control. Then you can decide when to take control again, because you want to or need to, not because it’s just a habit.”

Linsey didn’t reply.

“Okay,” Brianna said, after a moment’s thought. “It’s your birthday next month, right? And I owe you something for introducing you to Phil in the first place. What say I arrange a party for you, out of town so you don’t have to worry about meeting anyone with daughters at your school?”

“I don’t know…”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I worked in a brothel?”

“You what?”

“Just as a receptionist. I needed the money. Besides, I wanted to play Blanche duBois, and this seemed like a good chance to watch the working girls. Anyway, I found out some interesting stuff. For one thing, a lot of our clients were lawyers or judges. And after a while, I learned what their kinks were.”

“I’m scared to ask.”

“Judges, and a lot of lawyers who’d just won a case, wanted to be dominated, even tortured. Restoring the balance, if you like: They’d meted out punishment, and wanted to be punished for it. They’d taken away someone else’s control over their lives, and they wanted to surrender control themselves, if just for a few minutes. It sounds to me like you should try doing the same thing.”

“I’m not into S&M,” Linsey said sharply.

“I’m not so sure. Taking that job might be considered masochistic. So what are you into?”

* * * *

The limo that arrived to pick Linsey up on Friday night had tinted rear windows, so dark that she could barely see outside, and the chauffeur warned her not to wind them down. “You don’t want to spoil the surprise, do you?” he asked cheerfully. “Help yourself to something from the bar, if you like.”

“No, thanks.” She stopped trying to keep track of the corners they turned, then blinked as the TV came on. The sound was turned down, but it didn’t take her long to realize a man in a sea captain’s cap was directing four couples into an increasingly intense orgy.

The next scene began with a blond nurse in a latex uniform teaming up with another equally unlikely-looking nurse and a male doctor to remove a long dildo that had become lodged too far up another woman’s ass for her to extract unaided.

The third scene began with an Asian woman in a maid’s uniform being summoned to her blond mistress’s bathroom. the limo pulled into a garage just as the maid had begun licking her mistress’s soap-slicked slit. The sound cut out as the garage door closed behind her, and Linsey began to wonder whether she’d made a horrible mistake going along with Brianna’s plans. Despite this, she stepped out of the car when the chauffeur opened the door for her, and was escorted down a hallway into a small office. The woman sitting behind the highly polished desk looked her up and down as the chauffeur left, then nodded at a side door. “There’s a bathroom through here,” she said. “You can change in there. I don’t know what the friend who paid for your session here has told you, so I’ll just run through the basics.

“Firstly, there’s nothing here to sign. I don’t know your name, nor does anyone else here, and we don’t need to. For tonight and tomorrow, if you want to stay that long, you’re Roberta Stepford—a sex robot, a living, walking, talking fuckdoll.”

Linsey’s eyes widened in alarm, but the manager gave no sign of noticing. “How much personality you choose to display is up to you, but you must obey all legal orders you are given. The most important thing you need to know is that we do not allow anything illegal or unsafe, though you can simulate it if you wish. Your sponsor has given us a list of what you won’t allow.” She reached into a drawer and removed a sheet of pink paper, which she handed to Linsey. “The other participants have been told this, of course, and they will be removed if they break any of the rules. The next most important thing is that if you wish the games to stop, you only have to say your safe word, and you’ll be taken to a room where you can dress and recover, and someone will drive you home again. Your safe word is ‘Overtime.’ Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Linsey. Her mouth was dry and she wasn’t sure her voice was audible, but the woman merely nodded.

“However, once you use that word, everything stops. No line-item vetoes here unless someone else breaks the stated rules. If that happens, your sponsor will receive at least a partial refund, and you can then decide whether to continue, or to return another time.”

“Who are the…”

“Other participants? Some are employees here. Some are volunteers, but they have all been very carefully vetted and understand that if they break any rules, they’ll be heavily fined and permanently blackballed. Okay?”

Linsey nodded.

“Excellent. So, if you’ll go in there, please, and get into your outfit, I’ll send one of the maids in to help you with your makeup, give you your enema, and help you shave.”

* * * *

The bathroom contained a shower stall, towel rack, hand basin, toilet, folding massage table, inflated bondage chair, and a TV mounted in one corner. Linsey looked at the costume laid out on the table—a silver lamé corset that stopped just above her hips and below her nipples, and silver boots—with some alarm and more than a little amusement. She stripped, showered, and was reaching for a towel when the door opened. A pretty woman in her mid-twenties wearing black latex gloves, spit-polished slut shoes, and a maid’s outfit only slightly less revealing than Linsey’s abbreviated corset walked in and looked at her appraisingly. “Nice,” she drawled. “Okay, let’s get you ready. Lie down on the table.”

When Linsey didn’t obey immediately, the maid shook her head. “What part of ‘lie down’ didn’t you understand? Do you speak English?”

“Yes.”

“That’s ‘Yes, Mistress Abigail’ to you.”

Linsey blinked, but echoed, “Yes, Mistress Abigail.”

The maid smiled. “That’s better. Now say, ‘I will do everything my mistresses and masters tell me.’”

“I will do everything my mistresses and masters tell me.”

“You’re a big-titted robot fuckdoll. What are you?”

“I… I’m a big-titted robot fuckdoll.”

“Mistress,” the younger woman reminded her.

“I’m a big-titted robot fuckdoll, mistress.”

“Better. Okay, now get your butt up on that table. Roll over onto your side. Now, grab your cheeks and spread ’em.” Linsey obeyed, then gasped as she felt the cold, well-lubed enema nozzle being pushed up against her anus. Abigail chuckled, then reached around between her thighs and began gently rubbing her clit. “Relax,” she said, making it sound more like a suggestion than an order. “You’re a fuckdoll. Fuckdolls take bigger things than this up their nice, hot asses. And you want to be clean for your masters and mistresses, don’t you?”

“Yesssss,” came the reply, through gritted teeth.

“Mistress.”

“Missstressss.”

“That’s good.” When Abigail was satisfied the nozzle was firmly in place, she began lathering up Linsey’s honey-colored pubes, tantalizing her with the brush and her fingers. “Pretty hair,” she mused. “Seems a shame to get rid of it, but orders are orders. Right?”

“Yess, misstress…” Linsey’s senses were beginning to reel. Phil had taught her to enjoy anal sex, and it felt as though she was being flooded not just with warm water but with happy memories. That, combined with Abigail’s expert ministrations, were bringing her close to orgasm, but there was still something niggling at the edge of her consciousness, something that stopped her…

If Abigail was disappointed by Linsey’s failure to come, she didn’t show it. She simply finished trimming and shaving her pussy, then wiped it clean and leaned back to admire her handiwork. “Okay,” she said, then returned the shaving gear to the drawer under the sink.

Abigail produced a butterfly vibrator, a G-spot stimulator, and a remote control for the TV. She strapped the butterfly over Linsey’s clit, then sat in the bondage chair and began using the G-spot vibe on herself while she watched a scene of two women decorating a third with frosting until she resembled a cake—which they then proceeded to devour. The next scene showed a blond woman cheerfully taking on four men, and Linsey realized that the vibrator on her clit was sound-activated, responding both to the soundtrack of the porn movie and Abigail’s squeals of pleasure. I’m not in control any more, she thought, and moaned as she let herself be overwhelmed by the delightful sensations. She opened her eyes a moment later to find Abigail standing over her and grinning. She smiled back weakly.

“Happy, little fuckdoll?”

“Yes, mistress.”

“Good,” said Abigail, producing a collar and leash from the pocket in her apron, “’cause that was just an appetizer. Wait until you see the entree.”

* * * *

When Linsey was prepared to Abigail’s satisfaction—silver eyeshadow and nail polish, scarlet gloss on her lips and nipples, lubricated silicone anal beads in her ass—she was led down the corridor to meet her new masters and mistresses. “Remember to show proper respect,” said Abigail, before she opened the door. “Don’t speak until you’re spoken to, smile and say thank you whenever you think it’s appropriate, and don’t look anyone in the eye. It’s best if you don’t look any higher than their crotches unless you have to. Are you ready?”

“Yes, mistress Abigail.”

“What are you?”

“I’m a big-titted robot fuckdoll, mistress.”

“Good.” Abigail opened the door, and led her into a large room dominated by a huge bed and a plasma TV screen. Assorted strangely-shaped chairs and sofas were positioned along the walls, and six people—four men and two women—were standing around with drinks in their hands. “Ah,” said the shortest of the men, who was wearing a tuxedo jacket with no pants, “the new toy. Bring her here so we can take a closer look.”

Abigail shut the door behind her, and guided Linsey into the center of the crowd. “Good flesh tones,” said another man, as he reached out and cupped one of Linsey’s breasts, hefting it as though trying to guess its weight. “Feels natural, too.” Linsey’s nipple stiffened as he rubbed his thumb around it. “Very convincing. I approve.”

“They are impressive, aren’t they?” said a slender Chinese woman. She grabbed the other and squeezed it, almost hard enough to cause pain. “It’s remarkable she walks as well as she does without overbalancing.”

Another man, half-dressed like the first with his cock already rising to parallel the floor, chuckled as he walked around to look at Linsey’s back. “I doubt she spends much time standing up,” he opined, running a finger between her buttocks, then turned to Abigail. “Fully functional, I hope?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I can’t get over how well she moves,” said the short man, relinquishing her breast. “Can she do jumping jacks?”

“I’m sure she can,” said Abigail, unfastening the leash from the collar. “Well, Roberta? You heard your master.”

“Yes, mistress,” said Linsey, trying to smile. The people stepped back to watch her breasts bounce as she did a series of star jumps. After the sixth, the short man told her to stop, then went up to her, grabbed her breasts again, and sucked a nipple into his mouth. “Hmm,” he said, his voice muffled. “They even taste like the real thing. Wonderful!”

The other woman—dark-skinned and dark-haired, wearing a sari that left one beautifully shaped hard-nippled breast free—nodded approvingly. “Good work, professor,” she said to a bespectacled man wearing a white lab coat. “But is she flexible enough to touch her toes?”

The ‘professor’ raised an eyebrow, and Linsey bent over, straining to reach her toes—something she hadn’t done in years. She’d come within a few inches of succeeding when lab-coat said, “All right. Stop.”

Linsey looked up, and realized he meant her to hold that position. The short man was still sucking on her right breast, refusing to be dislodged, and was patting the other back and forth, making it sway. The Chinese woman walked behind Linsey, fondled her wet cunt, then sniffed her fingers. “Not bad,” she said grudgingly, then slapped Linsey on the ass, hard enough that she nearly toppled over. “Very good,” she said, as she spanked the other cheek. “Nice convincing wobble, and they turn a lovely shade of pink, too. You’re an artist, Professor.”

“This I have to see,” said the Indian woman, walking around to stand behind Linsey. The two women took turns in spanking her, until they were joined by the second man, and soon she was being smacked on each cheek while another hand gently rubbed her pussy. The beads in Linsey’s ass, on their flexible shaft, shifted with every smack. They weren’t as thick as Phil’s cock had been, and they felt more like a wonderfully long finger probing and caressing her, but they were yet another reminder – as if she needed one – of the overwhelmingly intense orgasms she’d had from being masterfully sodomized. The recollection, combined with the rhythm of the spanking, the tingling of her cheeks, and the wonderful feeling of so many hands and mouths on some of the most sensitive parts of her body, soon had her on the verge of coming again. Go with it, said a voice in her head.

It’s humiliating, a vanishingly small part of her brain replied.

Who the fuck cares? When was the last time something felt this good?

That was all it took. Soon, she was shaking and shrieking with the force of her orgasm, while the people fondling her propped her up and kept her from falling. She thought she could hear laughter and applause, but she wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure she cared.

When she could focus again, she saw a hard cock being waved invitingly in front of her face, and she opened her mouth wide to let it in without wondering whose it was. It had been so long since she’d sucked a dick that she’d forgotten how much she enjoyed it, how good it was to turn someone on and feel and taste the proof of it. The spanking had stopped, but there was still a hand between her thighs, and now both of her breasts were being sucked. She wasn’t sure how long it was before the cock in her mouth erupted, but she relished every second.

She felt the softening dick pop out of her mouth, and waited for it to be replaced by another: instead, she heard the Chinese woman say, “Were you told to swallow his come, fuckdoll?”

Linsey tried to think. “I wasn’t told to spit it out,” she replied numbly.

The Indian woman laughed. “She has a point, Ting. You’ve programmed her well, Professor.”

“Except that she forgot to say ‘thank you,’” said the tallest of the men, reprovingly.

“Thank you, master,” Linsey gushed. “Thank you for letting me suck your cock, and thank you for coming in my mouth, master.”

“Hmp,” Ting grunted, and removed her little black dress, showing herself to be naked underneath. “Does she eat pussy as well?”

“As well as I can, mistress.”

This time, she was sure the laughter and applause were real. “Show me,” said Ting, lying down on the bed with her legs spread. Linsey dropped to all fours and crawled towards her, slowly kissing her way along one thigh to her crotch. It had been many years since she’d gone down on another woman, but she felt confident she still remembered how to do it. As Ting began to purr, she also remembered why she’d done it, and began hoping someone would think to do it to her—if not Ting, then maybe Abigail or the Indian woman. Cunnilingus had been another thing Phil had done well… almost as skillfully and eagerly as Brianna had, back during their brief affair. Linsey found herself wishing Brianna was here, and fuzzily wondered whether offering to eat her out would be considered a suitable way to thank her for this wonderful gift.

She heard the professor muttering something about viruses and nanobots, then the sound of a condom wrapper being torn open, and a few seconds later a cock slid into her cunt. The man fucked her slowly, allowing her to concentrate on licking Ting, for which part of Linsey’s brain was weirdly grateful. She was vaguely convinced that a good fuckdoll would make sure Ting’s pleasure came before her own. She was gratified when Ting climaxed, allowing her to concentrate on the delightful sensations she was getting from the dick in her pussy and the beads in her ass—which rapidly intensified as the man fucking her picked up the pace, then grabbed the ring at the end of her anal toy and proceeded to pull it out slowly. Her sphincter expanded and contracted as the beads popped out one by one, perfectly synchronized with the peaks of her own orgasm.

She lay there for a moment, face down between Ting’s silky thighs, unaware of anything but immeasurable pleasure and the hope that her now empty ass would soon be filled by something larger, preferably a cock. Instead, the short man grabbed her and turned her over onto her back as Ting wriggled up the bed. “I’ve wanted to do this since I saw you,” the man said, squeezing a bottle of lube into his hand and applying it to his dick.

“Thank y—” Linsey began, but to her surprise, the man grabbed her breasts and pushed them together, then thrust his slippery—but unsheathed—cock between them. Linsey’s eyes widened in amazement. She’d heard of tit-fucking, had even seen it on porn movies, but had never tried it. Phil had always been more of a butt man, and her other male lovers had been too inexperienced to think of it or too shy to ask for it.

“Nice big fuckable funbags,” Shorty grunted. “Every fuckdoll should have beautiful boobs like these. Ohhhh, that feels fantastic!”

Linsey blinked. To her, it felt only mildly pleasurable, but she found she did enjoy seeing the purpling head of Shorty’s long dick appearing between her breasts just within reach of her tongue, and she began licking it as emerged.

Shorty obviously wasn’t a control freak. Unlike the slow fucking she’d just received, the tit-fuck lasted less than a minute before she saw the come start spurting out of his cock—a sight she’d never previously witnessed, and found utterly fascinating. Without waiting for orders, she opened her mouth to catch as much of his semen as she could, then licked the rest off her face. “Thank you, master,” she said, surprising herself with the sincerity of her tone.

“My pleasure,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. “You are a fantastic fuckdoll.”

“Thank you, master!” She looked around, and saw that Ting and the Indian woman were lying on the bed on either side of her, obviously enjoying the show.

“Impressive,” said the Indian woman. “How was her cunnilingus?”

“Pretty good,” said Ting, wiping a stray drop of come from Linsey’s face and licking it, “but I think she could benefit from more practice.”

“Hmm. Is she programmed for rimming, too, professor?”

“If I remember the specifications correctly,” said the man in the lab coat.

“I am, mistress,” said Linsey, as the woman unwrapped her sari and lay prone on the bed.

“Then lick my ass.”

“Yes, mistress. Thank you, mistress.” With an enthusiasm she no longer even wondered at, she parted the woman’s beautiful brown buttocks and buried her face between them, her tongue running along the crevice until it found the hot little starburst between them. As she began rimming her, she felt another pair of hands—Ting’s, she rightly suspected—part her own cheeks, and a large dollop of lube being applied to her asshole. After some precautionary and thoroughly pleasurable probing with his slippery fingers, the professor slid his latex-sheathed cock easily into her butt. She felt her sphincter contract again and close around the shaft after the acorn-shaped glans had entered, and began coming. Her tongue slipped inside the Indian woman’s anus, and soon she was tongue-fucking her in synch with the cock reaming her ass.

They’re using me, she thought. I’m just a fuckdoll, a sex machine, I don’t even know their real names and they probably don’t know mine, but fuck, it feels so fucking good!

After that, the rest of the night and the next day and the next night were something of an erotic blur. She did have a clear memory of jerking two of the men off so she could watch them come on her breasts, and then licking as much of their jizz as her tongue could reach before the other women finished the job of cleaning her up…and of Shorty returning for a second go at her tits, this time facing her feet while she licked his ass as avidly as she’d rimmed the Indian woman’s, or Ting’s, or Abigail’s… and of being blindfolded and ordered to guess whose cock was in her mouth, with the “threat” of a spanking if she guessed wrong, and of coming as the “threat” was carried out…and of being fucked and sodomized by all of the men, and by Ting with a strap-on, though she couldn’t remember in what order… but as she woke up Sunday morning, her body still glazed with come and other juices and covered with lipsticky kisses in four colors, the most important thing she remembered was how much pleasure her body, too long ignored, had given her and seven other people.

She lay there in what Abigail had called the “recovery room,” still slightly dazed, and wondered whether she should ask the chauffeur to stop at a church so she could go to confession on the way home—at a church where no one knew her, of course. She’d gotten less than halfway through listing her encounters of the weekend in her head before reaching for one of the vibrators Abigail had thoughtfully left on the nightstand.

* * * *

Linsey kept her expression neutral as she listened to the secretary of the PTA drone on reprovingly about the teacher some parents thought was being too frank about sex in biology class. The woman was only a few years her senior, and as Linsey looked across her desk at her prim, even severe, appearance, she realized she was what she might have become without Brianna’s gift.

Maybe I’m judging her too harshly, she thought. Maybe she has a girlfriend as well as a husband. Maybe she has an impressive collection of piercings and tattoos under that Dior suit. Maybe her ass isn’t really so tight that it doesn’t regularly accommodate a nice hard cock, or so hard that it doesn’t jiggle a little when it gets spanked. Maybe she likes to go to sex shop movie booths in some other town and suck cocks through a glory hole. Maybe—

“…do the girls even need to learn biology at all?” the woman asked, bringing Linsey out of her reverie. “Unless they decide to go into medicine, what use will it be to them later in life?”

Linsey stared at her for a moment and seemed to hear Brianna’s voice in her head. You can choose when to be submissive, it said, and that means you’re choosing when not to be.

“The course stays on the curriculum,” said Linsey firmly. “Biology is not some shameful little secret. There’s a reason they call it a life science. And I am not going to fire a teacher for doing her job, answering questions, and encouraging curiosity. Yes, we will tell the girls that abstinence is safest—but if they ask about alternatives, any alternatives, I expect the teachers to answer the questions as honestly as they are able and let the girls make informed decisions about their own lives. How do you put it? ‘Teach the controversy?’”

The woman turned red and stood. “I hope you’re ready to defend this position at the next meeting, when I suggest to the other parents that we pull our daughters out of this school—”

Linsey resisted the urge to make a joke about withdrawal not being a particularly effective alternative. “You’re free to do that,” she said, “but I’m not apologizing for the position I’ve taken. Is there anything else you wish to say?”

Clearly there wasn’t, as the woman stood up and stormed towards the door. Linsey looked at her ass for a moment, fantasized about having it bent over her desk ready for a thorough spanking, then reached for her cell phone. “Brianna? It’s Lin. What’re you doing this weekend?”

Fair Game
by Elizabeth Coldwell

Donovan lived for the weekend, because that was when the “hen” parties came to town. Friday and Saturday nights would see him sitting in one of the bars that lined the marina development, watching bachelorettes and bridesmaids-to-be trip across the cobblestones in their strappy high heels, dressed in the uniform marking them as girls celebrating someone’s last night of freedom. Sometimes they were angels with little gauzy wings. Sometimes they were devils with horns embedded with twinkling lights and tiny red halter tops. If he were honest, he liked it best when they went for the slutty schoolgirl look, with their hair in pigtails, too-short skirts, and shirts unbuttoned to give a flash of pushup bra. Whatever they wore, though, they might as well all have had the words “FAIR GAME” tattooed across their foreheads.

He had lost count of the number of hen night conquests he had made, and he doubted he could remember the names of more than one or two. After a while, they all merged into one. It was all so predictable: He would watch them trooping into Montgomery’s or Diamond Lil’s, where it was always happy hour and margaritas came in a two-pint jug. A couple of drinks there to loosen them up, and then he would look up from his seat at the bar to find a dozen identically dressed girls surrounding him, giggling and teasing the bride-to-be as they debated whether they were going to order Screaming Orgasms or Long Slow Comfortable Screws. It was very rare that he approached the “hen.” It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have slept with him, had he asked. He knew how often these women fancied one last no-strings fuck before they waved their freedom goodbye. If anything, they were too easy, too eager to fall for his muscular good looks and his effortless charm.

No, his target was usually the girl straggling at the back, the one not having quite as good a time as everyone else. Probe a little and he would discover she was insecure about her looks or resentful of all the attention her friend was getting, however hard she tried to deny it. These were the girls who were grateful—the overweight, the gawky, the lonely. And they never turned him down.

He made sure, too, that they had a good time. He had a solid seven inches and a long, supple tongue, and he knew how to use both. He was careful to use protection, whether they raised the subject or not. He told them they were beautiful, special, that no one had ever made him feel the way they did, and they lapped up every word. Of course, when they awoke the next morning in their hotel room with the hangover from hell and the soreness of taking a thick cock in an underused pussy, they probably had second thoughts. But by then he was gone. Done and on to the next, as the song had it.

So when the Go Girls came into the bar that night, he thought this would be another smooth, easy one-night stand like all the rest. He knew they were the Go Girls because they had the slogan written in Day-Glo pink ink on tight white T-shirts that strained across their breasts. The outfits were completed with skinny jeans and ponytails secured with strings of pink and silver tinsel. A couple of them were sucking on round pink lollipops. He felt himself getting hard just looking at them.

As well as the lettering on the front, they had their names on the back. He discounted Frances, “the future Mrs. Anderson,” straight away, and bypassed Linda, Shelley, Nicki, Gwen, and Julia—though the last two were particularly difficult to ignore, given that they were identical redheaded twins. Instead, he turned his attention to Beth. It would have been hard not to: She had streaky blond hair, huge green eyes, and the best arse of any of the girls there, shown off to perfection in those tight-fitting jeans. His eyes were also drawn to the pair of fluffy pink fake-fur handcuffs she had attached to her belt. He’d seen girls with them before—just another part of the hen night ritual. But though she was definitely there in body, her spirit seemed to be elsewhere. She was the one – he knew it instantly, and as she stood on the edge of the shrieking group, sipping at her fruit-heavy cocktail through a straw and looking bored to tears, he wandered over.

“Having a good time, Beth?” he asked, giving her his most sincere smile. He knew she was taking in his six-foot frame, his tousled dark hair and the row of sharp white teeth he revealed when he smiled, making the snap judgment which would decide whether she would get sucked into making conversation with him.

Clearly having decided he wasn’t a jerk, she returned the smile. “To be honest, no. I’m only here because Franny’s one of my oldest friends.” She kept her voice low, presumably so the future Mrs. Anderson couldn’t overhear her disloyalty. It meant Donovan had to lean in close enough to smell the spicy perfume she was wearing. “I mean, these outfits, the silly hairdos—it’s all too tacky for words.”

“You should try being a bloke,” Donovan said conspiratorially. “You either spend a weekend staggering round Prague, drunk out of your skull, or you go go-karting, for God’s sake. Now, if it’s ever my turn to tie the knot…”

“You’re not married, then?” she asked. He was surprised she hadn’t glanced down at his ring finger. In his experience, it was the next thing a woman did after taking a sneaky peek at a man’s crotch.

“Nah. It’s never seemed like the right time to get tied down.” He swallowed the last of his beer. “Can I get you a drink?” he asked. “Or would you rather go somewhere a little more quiet?”

Beth looked over at her friends. Two of the girls were up on one of the tables, singing along at the tops of their lungs to one of the songs from the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing, a perennial favorite when the hens were in the house.

“Don’t worry,” Donovan said, “I don’t think you’ll be missed for a little while.”

“So where did you have in mind that’s a little quieter?” Beth asked, as they made their way along the marina, the neon-lit frontages of the bars and the groups standing drinking on the cobbles reflected in the smooth, dark water of the harbor.

“Well, my place isn’t that far,” Donovan said. This was the moment. She could either tell him to get lost and go chasing back to her friends, or she could accept his invitation and let him take her to bed.

“Okay,” she said without a moment’s hesitation. “Lead the way.”

He heard her high heels clip-clopping behind him as he turned into the little alleyway that led to his front door. As always, he wondered whether he would have to go through the polite ritual of coffee and small talk before things got physical. But then Beth virtually pushed him up against the wall, her mouth locking on to his as he fumbled with the key, and he stopped wondering.

Her body pressed against him, the twin points of her braless nipples boring into his chest, her hand reaching down to cup his cock through his jeans, and he tried to reconcile the hungry slut making all the moves with the quiet, disinterested-looking girl he had first spotted in the wine bar.

“My bedroom,” he managed to say when she finally broke the kiss. “We’ll be more comfortable there.” And he would be in control again, he thought.

Their progress to the bedroom was slowed by more kissing, more fondling, and breaks to remove items of clothing—mostly his, he was disconcerted to realize. By the time they finally stood by his bed, he wore nothing but his black jersey boxers, which clung uncomfortably to the rapidly rising length of his cock. Beth still wore the “Go Girl” T-shirt and a pair of lacy, hot-pink boy shorts. Donovan itched to strip her of those items, though he thought idly about asking her to put the heels back on. She would look great with them wrapped around his broad back. He stretched out an arm to pull her towards him and somehow—afterwards he was never quite sure how—she gripped it and spun him around, catching hold of both wrists as she did so. He staggered and felt the backs of his legs bump up against the cold metal of the radiator. There was a sudden click and he felt the unexpected sensation of fur against his skin. He tried to step forward, alarmed at what might be happening, and came to the shocking realization that he had been secured in place.

He hadn’t seen her take those silly hen night handcuffs from her belt—lust had blinded him to much of what was happening on their ascent to the bedroom—but she had managed to use them to chain him up. This wasn’t how the evening was supposed to go—by now she should have been topless and on her knees in front of him sucking his cock, instead of standing there with a mocking smirk on her face.

“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” he said, trying not to sound as scared as he felt. “Joke’s over. You can let me go now.”

“I don’t think so,” Beth said. “Not just yet.”

“Look, what is this?” he said, struggling against the cuffs. That got him nowhere – for a cheap toy, the cuffs were surprisingly strong. “Why are you doing this?”

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said.

He racked his brains, but he had no memory of her. As far as he knew, he had never seen her before in his life. Those eyes, that arse—surely he wouldn’t have forgotten those?

“No, I didn’t think you had. Mind you, my hair was mousy brown then, and I was about a stone heavier. Oh, and I had plain contact lenses, rather than these green ones, but I think these suit me better, don’t you?”

Donovan sagged against the radiator as Beth continued. “You met me in that same bar, eighteen months ago. Shy little Elizabeth, down for her sister’s hen night. You gave me all the charm, all the chat, and I fell for it. Then you brought me back here and you fucked me on that bed. Clean sheets then, clean sheets now…You must have been confident you were going to pull tonight, eh?”

“So what’s this leading up to? I broke your heart and now you want revenge?”

“Not quite.” Beth came up to him, so close he could smell that her perfume was now mixed with a definite hint of her arousal. Looking at him restrained and helpless like this was clearly turning her on. “That was the original plan, I’ll admit—to strip you, chain you up, and let one of the neighbors know where to find you, but…you didn’t exactly break my heart. However, the way you treated me was pretty appalling, you must admit. I mean, I tried ringing the phone number you gave me when I was back home, to see if there was any chance of seeing you again, and found myself talking to a very nice woman who ran a minicab firm. Nice trick, Donovan. How many other girls have you fobbed off like that?”

Donovan started to mutter an explanation, but she silenced him by pressing the palm of her hand across his mouth.

“So really,” she continued, “you deserve everything that’s coming to you, but you need to know it’s because of you that things turned around for me. We had some pretty spectacular sex—” Donovan began to grin, preening himself over the compliment, but the sudden pressure of Beth’s fingers against his jaw stopped him “—and once I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I decided I wanted more. I stopped being mousy little Elizabeth who nobody noticed and nobody fancied, and I lost weight, cut my hair and—well, you seem to like the results if that bulge in your boxers is anything to go by. But the real reason I’m not going to humiliate you the way you deserve to be humiliated is because you may be a sneaky little shit and a user, but you’re still the best fuck I’ve ever had. And I want that big cock of yours inside me again.”

Finally she did what Donovan had been wanting her to do from the moment they had stepped into the bedroom. She peeled the T-shirt over her head and treated him to the sight of her bare, lightly tanned breasts. They would have made two delicious little handfuls, he thought, if only his hands were free to grasp hold of them.

As it was, all he could do was stare, and shift slightly as his cock began to pulse and stiffen, responding to the sight of Beth’s barely clad body. She squatted in front of him, pulling down the waistband of his boxers. Her hand encircled him, stroking him ’til he was fully, achingly hard. He felt dizzy, blood rushing from his brain to his aching groin, and when her hand was replaced by the heat of her mouth, his knees threatened to buckle and he was almost glad of the furry cuffs that held him in place.

Whatever else she had done in the eighteen months since they had last met, she had certainly learned how to suck cock. Her tongue wove intricate patterns, touching and teasing all the sweet, sensitive spots along his length. He was moaning, trying to tell her how good it felt, but somehow her clever mouth had robbed him of the power of speech, and his words sounded like nonsense even to his ears.

As he watched, she slipped a finger between her widely spread thighs, burrowing under the crotch of her shorts to bring it away shiny with her own juices. She pushed the finger between his lips, urging him to suck it. He had the briefest taste of her excitement, and then the finger was between his thighs, worming into the cleft of his arse and finding his tight little hole. When she began to ease inside him to the first knuckle, he almost lost control. How did she know it would feel so good, when he had had no idea?

No woman had ever taken charge the way Beth had. Normally, they were content to let him lead the way, to tease them and lick them and make them beg to be fucked. Now he was the one begging, wanting to be allowed to come. But she clearly had other ideas.

She stepped back, peeled off her shorts, and put her shoes back on. Donovan could see how enticingly damp her shorts were, and he wanted her to shove them in his mouth and gag him, to overpower him with the scent and flavor of her. Then she was pressing against him, clutching his cock and gently guiding it inside herself. With the heels, she was just the right height to slide all the way down on to him.

As she began to move, Donovan realized this was what it was like to be taken, to have someone use you for their pleasure, not your own. Not to be the one controlling the pace, setting the rhythm went against all his experience, but it felt good. So good that he just went limp in his bonds and let Beth do what she wanted. Her finger was on her bud, rubbing in some little pattern that was particular to her, and her eyes were distant, glazed with pleasure behind the green lenses. She looked fierce and utterly magnificent. Donovan could feel his balls tightening, his peak approaching, and when Beth gave a squeal and her muscles tightened around him like a tightly clenching fist, Donovan surrendered to the sensation and came.

* * * *

All the time Beth was dressing, picking up her handbag and her scattered clothes from the stairs and the landing, the fear gnawed at Donovan that she would leave him here after all, naked for the neighbors to find. The relief which coursed through him when she finally pulled the key from her bag and unlocked the cuffs was as sweet as the orgasm she’d milked from him minutes earlier. She gave him one last look of amusement mixed with contempt. Then she was gone.

He hadn’t bothered asking for a number, or offering his. He wasn’t going to see her again, he knew that. The player had been well and truly played.

But as he rubbed his wrists ruefully, he couldn’t help but smile. She had intended him to learn a lesson, and he had—but not, perhaps, the one she had been hoping for. He remembered what he had told Beth earlier, that the reason he was not married yet was that it had never seemed like the right time to be tied down. Tonight, however, he had finally realized that the time was more than right to be tied up…

Queen of Revels
by Peter Tupper

Eb couldn’t remember being young. She did not age, and nothing could kill her, though she could be hurt. Even decapitations were a temporary inconvenience. She had dug her way out of more than a few graves and funeral pyres. By preference, she kept moving, as she knew that human beings loved to tear down their gods as much as they loved to build them up. No matter, there was always another community within a few days’ walk. When she led her followers across the land bridge into what would one day be called North America, she had already lived at least a dozen lifetimes and borne more than thirty children.

On her return trip across the steppes, she decided to try something new. The nomadic bands she traveled among tired her now, and when she turned to the Mediterranean, she taught people how to plant seeds, to store grain, to keep animals. It didn’t always take, but she just moved on, and those who did adopt new ways quickly (by her standards) out-populated those who didn’t.

Actually, it succeeded beyond her expectations. Cities grew, and with them came calendars, writing, and more. Time changed, she noticed; instead of seasons and generations, people thought in days and months, and even smaller units. There was a pervasive sense of control, of regulation. She felt like an animal in a cage, but the cage was more interesting and comfortable than the wilderness.

So she invented something else.

* * * *

The naked bride stumbled into the torch-lit chamber, dropped to her knees on the tile floor, looked up at Eb with gratifying awe. Eb looked down at her and rustled the black wings strapped to her back, made from the feathers of a hundred ravens.

“Who comes before Ananke?” Eb intoned, using one of her many aliases.

“Livia,” said the young woman, eyes wide in the flickering light.

Eb stepped forward, her height enhanced by her boots, gifts from the barbarians to the Northeast. “What do you seek?”

“To join my husband in the worship of Dionysius,” she said breathlessly.

Eb stalked around the kneeling woman, interrogating her on the previous phases of her initiation, reinforcing the lessons learned in her initiation into the cult of Dionysius. Livia answered correctly.

“I go where I please, and leave reluctantly. All men and all women will know me, but none have ever seen me. I say nothing, but others speak for me. I am everything to the one I visit, but nothing to others,” Eb recited the riddle. “What am I?”

“Pain,” the bride inhaled, just as Eb snapped the cane across her thighs. It was the lightest of blows, but enough to make the young woman spring to her feet.

“Up,” Eb barked, driving her forward. At the opposite end of the room, another woman sat, covered in her purple veil. As Livia approached, she lowered her veil, revealing her face and hair, styled in the manner of Venus.

Livia fell to her knees again, burying her face in Venus’ lap, whimpering in anticipation.

Eb wound up and began the caning. The cane, a souvenir from her last trip to Asia, was a supple stick of rattan that could be bent nearly double. From firsthand experience and long practice, she precisely measured the blows on Livia’s proffered buttocks, staying on the narrow threshold of pain where a distinctive pleasure could be felt. The young bride would feel the loss of herself, naked and whipped like the lowest slave, but experience it as being touched by the gods. That paradox, embedded into Livia’s body, would transform her thinking, create an awareness of possibilities beyond what she had seen in her brief life.

“This is the touch of the gods, even whose punishment brings rapture,” Eb whispered in Livia’s ear, one hand firmly twisting her hair, the other squeezing the reddened buttocks just enough to elicit a moan.

Like an infant taking her first steps, the bride got to her shaky feet with Eb’s and Venus’ help. Livia shivered as Venus wrapped her veil around her, the fine silk sliding across her newly sensitive skin an exquisite thing. Venus escorted Livia, now no longer nude, into the chamber for the next step.

After mopping her sweaty brow, Eb peeped through the door to the next chamber. Now wearing the scrap of Venus’ veil and playing pair of palm-sized zils, the young bride danced wildly to the flute music played by musicians, on her way to the next phase of the ritual and her wedding night.

Satisfied by her part in the initiation, Eb removed her godly vestments and left the temple. Outside, the autumn festival was in full swing. This was her favorite time, when the world turned upside down, time changed, and everything seemed possible. Drunk on unwatered wine, she led her maenads and bacchae in wild runs through the forests, pouncing on men, sometimes beating them, sometimes ravishing them. In this time, she could be a goddess, a demon, a spirit, revealed to the world as the more than human being she was. People loved and desired her not for herself so much as the possibility of renewal she represented.

The end of the festival always saddened her, when she had to return to whatever identity she had adopted: the newly arrived wealthy widow, the mad woman who lived in the woods, the minor priestess, the common prostitute or servant or camp follower. In that time, immortality was a curse, not a blessing, one she shared with the few others like her she had met over the centuries.

* * * *

Time passed, and the world changed. An empire fell, and a religion rose, one that had even fewer places for women. Festivals became weaker, feebler remnants. The clock, then electricity ruled the world. Kings became men, then quaint symbols. Nobility granted wealth, then wealth granted nobility. Poetry was surpassed by prose, surpassed by photography, surpassed by the moving image.

After her fourth burning at the stake, Eb kept a low profile, outliving a series of husbands, moving every two decades, living off carefully tended investments, mastering one musical instrument after another, and writing biographies of obscure historical figures. Her unending life had become, well, cozy. One day, in the early years of a new millennium, she looked around at her well furnished rural home, her numerous cats, her 5,634 LP records, and wondered what had become of the woman who had been called Ishtar, Messalina, Judith, Atalanta, Ereshkigal.

I need a change, she thought, and not just another college town in another state.

She packed up and left within twenty-four hours.

* * * *

Eb moved to the nearest major city, one she had first visited when it was just a trading post at the southern tip of a island flanked by two rivers, and returned to several times over the centuries. She purchased a small apartment, a new wardrobe, new accessories, sliding into a new identity and catching up on ten years of fashion.

She examined herself in her new apartment’s mirror. Whatever made her immortal also altered her appearance to some statistical average of the people around her, convenient camouflage that made her beautiful, but not memorable. She now had dark eyes and hair and an olive complexion that suggested Latino or Mediterranean ancestry.

As she wandered the streets of Manhattan, she looked for something she couldn’t quite name, but was disappointed. What has happened to this city? she wondered as she walked through Times Square. The rich ferment of thieves and whores, prophets and preachers, people living and dying was diluted to almost nothing. Everything was too clean, too predictable. She knew that people who lacked her inhuman resistance to disease and injury might feel otherwise, but still….

Eb turned onto a side street and window-shopped. One display caught her attention. To her ancient eyes, the outfit on the mannequin dripped history: the spurred thigh-length boots suggested the mounted soldier, the wasp-waisted corset reminded her of a century of beauty and an armored cuirass, the riding crop the sport of soldiers and aristocrats, back when she drove the prettiest horse-drawn carriage on London’s Rotten Row. Even the leather collar gave a hint of clerical attire. It was centuries of the vestments of male power distilled into exquisite clothing.

Eb went inside and turned to the young woman behind the counter. For a moment, she stared in utter delight at the cashier, the way silver symbols of five different religions hung from her necklace, the way her pale skin and dark eyes and hair echoed back two centuries to when pallor was the height of style, her barbaric studded wristbands and collar. To wear the markers of the bound slave or the barbarian warrior was such courage. This girl was, for Eb, like a newly discovered species of orchid that grew from stainless steel.

“Can I help you?” the girl said.

“Yes,” said Eb. “I want…” She looked around the shop, then put down her platinum card. “I want a full outfit.”

Two hours later, the shop girl, Desiree, helped Eb into a latex bolero jacket. After fifty years of such bland, shapeless clothing, Eb delighted in her new ensemble – its heaviness, bulk and tightness reminded her of the days when one could tell someone’s status by their attire. She admired herself in the mirror, nude and armored at the same time. “What is the occasion for wearing this kind of outfit?”

“Well, not on the street, unless you want to stop traffic,” Desiree said, handing her a quarterpage handbill. Eb accepted and read it: “NYK, New York Kink, presents Black Circle, pansexual BDSM Play party.”

* * * *

Eb’s stiletto boot heels clicked as she descended the concrete steps, the way she once descended into sacred caves. She’d been to this warren of connected basements once before, during Prohibition when she listened to hot jazz and drank bathtub gin that made even her sick. Now it was transformed once again, decorated with a century of symbols, particularly photos of women in obsolete styles of female underwear that had attained some totemic status.

Sipping her drink at the bar, Eb watched in fascination. The people were in constant transformation through the alchemy of clothing and sensation. Free people became slaves or aristocrats or warriors, men became women, women became men, the old became young, humans became animals or machines. What she had started so long ago had not been crushed by arid religion and mechanistic economies. It lived here, diversified into a thousand new forms.

More than a few people made passes at the new, striking woman in silver-gray latex, but she demurred with three thousand years of social graces. She wished to understand before participating.

One man did catch her eye. He wore the trappings of the warrior, she thought. His black leather jacket and pants echoed back to the bomber pilots of the last great European conflict, when just war was still possible and the flying machine retained a touch of magic, along with a touch of the pagan and the animal. His boots suggested the warrior-peasant root of masculinity, but the high sheen of the polished black skin hinted at the aristocrat and the machine. Pinned to his silk shirt was a button that read, “Questions? Ask me.”

“I’m Mark,” he said, offering his hand. “Newcomer liaison, New York Kink.”

“Eva, thank you,” she said, one of her more frequent names. “My question is, where does one begin?”

He told her about negotiations and safe words and switching. It was as if a religion had been dismantled and given to the lay worshippers, a concept that agreed with her. Here, anything was possible, yet there were rules to control it, as important as the proper rituals and observances of the rituals she performed long ago.

When Mark’s shift as a greeter ended, he showed her to one of the X-shaped wooden crosses. She’d seen hundreds of people dead and dying on such structures, but he showed her how they could be used for pleasure, even enlightenment.

He offered her his favorite flogger, handle first, a distant descendant of the courtly manners of another time. She swished it through the air, savoring the mixed leather and rubber strands, and remembered her secret group of female flagellants right under the Pope’s nose. It was delicious.

Marveling that anything could make her impatient anymore, she said, “I want to use this on somebody.” She met his eyes. “You, for instance.”

He laughed, then pulled off his jacket and shirt. “Strictly for instructional purposes, you understand,” he joked as he turned to the cross and wrapped his arms around it.

Mark gave her careful instructions on the portions of his body that were safe to strike, as well as technique, but once she got into a rhythm, it all came back to her. The regular whack-whack-whack of rubber and leather hitting skin, her dance-like motions in time with the heavy electronica on the sound system, the darkened room where people reached beyond themselves in ecstasy, things she hadn’t felt in centuries. Even her sweat pooling within her skintight rubber was a pleasure.

Mark’s grunts and cries as he clung to the cross were a sweet song to her. “Wow…You sure you’ve never done this before?” he asked, resting his flushed face against the cross. In his eyes, she saw what burned in the eyes of the initiates she had touched—the need to rupture boundaries of the self and touch what lay beyond.

Eb just smiled and swung the flogger again. She hadn’t had this much fun since her bull dancing days in Minoan Crete.

* * * *

“It’s not like it was before, Eva,” Mark told her over coffee early the next morning.

“Oh really?” she asked, sipping her black Ethiopian, a taste she’d acquired a thousand years back.

“I came here ten years ago, and went into the scene head first. Funny, my parents were Pentecostal freaks, but a good flogging is how I get slain in the spirit. I volunteered, I wrote articles, I was on committees, I did everything. It was the community I’d always wanted. I did something kinkrelated every week.

“Now the Hellfire’s gone, the Vault’s gone. Nobody goes to parties anymore. Thanks to Giuliani, 9/11, and rent hikes and all that. We can’t even get a decent venue.

“I ought to apologize, like you’ve come into the scene just when the best part’s over. All we have to do now is look backwards.” He looked at the cuffs of his bomber jacket, the missing buttons, the black leather worn gray in places. “Look at me, I’m already an old coot talking about the good old days.”

“Take it from me.” She put her hand on his. “Nobody’s too old to feel young again.”

“Now, my family has some property in the city that might help you…”

Annabel’s Birthday Wish
by Sage Vivant

Her eyes were wide as she fought a smile. She’d never known him to be a practical joker, so maybe she really had heard him correctly.

“I’m serious. Behind every great submissive, there’s a formidable Dom just waiting to get out. I want you to be that Dom on your birthday,” Dan said. His piercing eyes underscored the gravity of his message.

“You realize tomorrow is my birthday.”

“I never forget anything about my Annabel.”

* * * *

The idea that eventually became her birthday wish started as a passing thought—the kind she’d trained herself not to entertain. So the night before her birthday, as she crawled into bed, mind buzzing with plans for Dan, she almost smiled at the preposterous notion that popped into her head. By morning, that notion had metamorphosed into a single, all-consuming plan.

She wanted to take Dan’s ass.

She wanted to do it slowly, so she could savor not only his moans and his scent, but especially her own dominance. This once-in-a-lifetime experience could not be embarked upon lightly. She needed to devote the day to the idea, become the person who, that evening, would live out a fantasy she could return to again and again in the future.

First, before costumes or props, she focused on her state of mind. She visualized Dan in the positions she most desired for him, saw herself as the one deciding what would happen next, experiencing the heady satisfaction of her needs and desires being allowed definition and space. Though it was true Dan was granting permission for her to be dominant just this one time, she still floated with the glorious opportunity to exercise the other side of her sexual nature.

Costumes, though, were important as well. She dug through her clothing drawers and found a bustier that no longer fully contained her voluptuous figure. Time for a trip to the sex shop.

At Leather and Lace, Annabel ran into Lucee, her best friend, who was also planning a special night, from the looks of her shopping basket: butt plug, anal beads, dildo harness. She kept very little from Lucee—and vice versa—but tonight’s plans were so special, she preferred to give Lucee an account of everything tomorrow, rather than talk too much about what might or might not happen today. She tried to deflect attention from herself and keep on it Lucee.

“So. Hot night?” she asked, nodding toward Lucee’s basket of intended purchases.

“With any luck,” Lucee winked. “What do you think of this?” She took a shiny latex bustier from the abbreviated clothing rack and held it to her body.

“I think you’ll look too hot to handle in that,” Annabel replied and wasn’t just handing her friend an empty compliment. Annabel really did consider Lucee tremendously sexy and sometimes got the vibe that Lucee liked the way Annabel looked, too. But they never talked about it, preferring instead the comfortable territory of men as a conversation topic.

Lucee giggled. “Okay, then. I’ll take it!”

Annabel tried to hide her disappointment—the bustier was exactly the item she had been looking for and now it was going to be Lucee’s. Oh well, she thought, maybe the store will have something else I can use.

“I should get going,” Lucee whispered. “I have a lot to do to prepare for my special night!”

“Ooooh, good luck!” Annabel said, nudging her conspiratorially. She was grateful that Lucee’s excitement distracted her from asking questions about her.

Annabel ended up having to settle for a black satin corset with red laces. It was slimming and pushed her tits up nicely, but she’d always associated corsets with more submissive women—and tonight she would not be in that mindset at all. She bought fishnets and remembered she had thigh-high boots at home. Nothing like a pair of imposing footwear to give a girl a sense of power.

* * * *

When Dan arrived, Annabel’s blood raced through her veins. Though he was the same strong presence he’d always been, her own persona felt larger, now virtually equal to his. Her swept-up hair and no-nonsense outfit raised his eyebrows.

“You look terrific,” he said. “I’m eager to serve.” He sat down in the largest chair he could find and placed an ankle over one knee.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Annabel replied, walking up to him so she could look down on him. “Because tonight, I’m going to have your ass.”

He’d been her master too long for her remark to feel entirely comfortable. But the gleam in his eye helped cut some of the tension. They both knew that although she was in charge tonight, tomorrow she’d be his slave again, so she did need to observe some implied codes of behavior even tonight if she didn’t want to face his wrath tomorrow. Testing those boundaries sent a dangerous thrill up her spine.

“Are you? And how do you propose to take me?” he asked calmly.

She held a crop in one hand. As she leaned her weight into one hip, emphasizing its womanly curve, she slapped the crop into the palm. “That remains for me to show you—all in good time. For now, you need to strip for me.”

“Right here? In the living room?”

“That’s what I said.”

She wondered whether her cheeks looked as flushed as they felt. She had no intention of looking ridiculous. She had to be taken seriously tonight.

When he was naked, his sizable cock already close to fully erect, she grinned her approval. Then she placed one high-heeled foot on the coffee table, opening her exposed pussy.

“We’ll begin by having you eat me until I say you can stop.”

“Any particular position you want me in?”

“Whatever is most comfortable. You may be there a while.”

He knelt on the floor and buried his face between her meaty thighs. Her clit met his tongue in a moment that made her gasp. She feared her balance might be compromised by the heady sensation of his mouth at her cunt, but she stayed upright and in control. When he reached upward to spread her lips with his fingers, she reprimanded him.

“No hands.” If he used his hands, she’d come too quickly, which was not part of her plan. It was important to build and maintain sexual tension tonight.

So he worked diligently on her hardening little nub, licking and sucking it while her juices spread all over his cheeks and chin. Amidst all his smacking and her moaning, she never heard the front door open. Lucee stood in the entryway for a minute or two before announcing herself.

“Hi, there,” she finally said.

Dan did not even pause in his licking, but Annabel was momentarily shocked to see her best friend watching her pussy get eaten.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Lucee said without a trace of regret in her voice. “I just came to see if you wanted this bustier. My date canceled and I don’t have any use for it.”

The moment hung in the air like an imminent thunderstorm. Lucee had already seen more than Annabel could ever explain. And maybe Lucee could be of some use tonight.

“Put it on,” Annabel instructed, saying the first thing that popped into her dominatrix head.

Lucee grinned, tilted her head, and tore off her clothes. As she stepped into the bustier, Dan’s tongue took some unexpected turns, pushing Annabel closer to the brink of orgasm than she’d intended to go. With Lucee watching, Annabel could no longer keep her reactions in check. She shouted and rubbed her spasming cunt into Dan’s face. He didn’t stop running his tongue over her beleaguered clit, but then she remembered he would only stop when she told him to, so she ordered him to return to the chair.

By this time, Lucee was wearing the bustier, looking from Dan—whom she knew as Annabel’s master—to Annabel and back again. She didn’t hide her confusion well, but she hid her arousal even less.

“I’m dying for some cock, aren’t you, Lucee?” Annabel asked her friend.

“Oh yeah.”

The women descended on Dan’s fully erect tool like hungry lions. Annabel worked his swollen tip while Lucee traded off sucking one ball then the other. Periodically, the women would meet in the middle, licking his shaft and gingerly brushing their mouths against each other. When Dan moved to stroke their heads, Annabel had to remind him of the no-hands rule.

So he was resigned to sit back and watch as these two bustier- and corset-clad women lapped away at his dick. Between sloppy kisses and wet licks, Annabel reached between Lucee’s legs and located the hot muff she’d never allowed herself to think about before. Lucee’s cream spread over Annabel’s fingers instantly, inviting her to come closer, come inside. Finger-fuck me, it seemed to plead.

Annabel flicked her tongue at Dan’s nearly purple head while she inserted one, then two fingers up inside Lucee, who responded by reaching over to squeeze Annabel’s tit. With her thumb, Annabel diddled Lucee’s clit. She was so dizzy now that her breathing came in shallow spurts and nothing other than Dan’s cock and Lucee’s twat mattered in the tiniest way.

Lucee seized the opportunity to sample her best girlfriend’s slippery labia, now that Annabel had opened the door with her own bold move. Lucee mimicked Annabel’s stroking when her hand found its way to Annabel’s snatch. Together, the girls rubbed and tickled and frigged each other, spreading sweet wetness to thighs and hands.

Annabel kept an eye on Dan’s hard-on as she circled the ridge under his knob with careful sweeps of her tongue. She had come to know the color it turned just before it shot come—she even knew how hot it felt against her cheek just prior to spewing. She promised herself to stop short of those signs as she slowly worked him toward the very state she intended to delay.

Lucee sucked his balls with her eyes closed. She let her nose tickle his pubes while she burrowed into his sac. The sight of Lucee’s enthusiasm combined with the feel of her silky, wet cunt threw Annabel’s best laid plans into mayhem. Lucee’s skillful fingering was the final straw. In her attempts to monitor Dan’s orgasms, she’d forgotten about her own and now came for the second time that night, releasing aromatic, feminine jizz into Lucee’s busy hand.

Lucee, too, had had more than she could take and launched into a stream of howls and yelps that jerked her body in uncontrollable fits. Dan watched the two women act as an orgasmic tag team, but refrained from beating himself off to join them.

The women seemed to briefly forget about him as they embraced each other immediately after their powerful orgasms. Annabel kissed her friend’s pretty mouth and Lucee undid the studied hairstyle Annabel had concocted for herself, sending Annabel’s lovely reddish brown hair cascading down to her shoulders.

“That’s better,” Dan couldn’t help but comment. He’d always preferred her hair to be loose and free.

His voice jolted Annabel back to the matter at hand. She locked gazes with him and shot him a stern warning that she augmented with words. “Do I need to remind you that you aren’t entitled to an opinion tonight unless I give it to you?”

She wanted to laugh maniacally at her own swashbuckling confidence. She felt like the dictator of a country full of silent citizens and a frightened militia. It was very, very good.

“Don’t you think that kind of impertinence demands punishment?” she asked Lucee, whose countenance displayed her total satisfaction.

“Oh, absolutely,” Lucee managed to muster. “I’d whip him if I could stand.”

Annabel wanted to laugh but caught the impulse in time to squelch it. “I have a better idea,” she said, grinning, vaguely aware that she’d never been wetter in all her life. The room smelled like cunt—hers and Lucee’s.

“Get up, Dan,” she said as she got to her feet. Lucee followed suit, albeit with some difficulty.

Dan’s cock bobbed like a billy club between his legs. He had a good build anyway, the kind women always looked at. But the addition of such a hard and obviously ready cock increased the collective temperature in the room considerably.

He stood before the women, awaiting his instructions. His pubic hair was slightly matted from where saliva and tongues had concentrated, but this fact did nothing to diminish the unquestionable beauty of his singularly hard penis. Annabel’s instincts directed her to kneel before him and suck until he was satisfied, but she ignored them, committed as she was to staying in the dominant role.

“Dan, that is some slab of meat you’ve got there,” Lucee crooned. As Annabel cleared the coffee table of all articles, she forgave her. After all, she’d never seen Dan naked before and the sight was rather unforgettable.

“Get on all fours, Dan,” Annabel said.

As he did, Annabel reached into the goodie box she’d planted under the sofa and extracted four items, a butt plug like the one she had seen Lucee buy that morning, a dildo, a harness, and some lube.

“Guess who’s going to be taking it up the ass tonight?” She purred to Lucee. “Can you help me into this thing?”

The women stood before Dan so he’d have to watch them work together to prepare his fate. Annabel inserted the dildo into the harness’s ring before Lucee helped her into the contraption. Lucee tightened the straps and ensured that it all fit snugly. Meanwhile, a semi-erect cock dangled from Annabel’s pubis. She grasped it with a menacing look in her eye, and spoke to Dan. “This is what’s going up your ass, Dan. Nice and slow. You’re gonna scream for me tonight.”

“Have you ever done this before, sweetheart?” Lucee asked her friend quietly.

“No, but I’ve had it done to me.”

“Would you like to test it on me?” Lucee asked, barely concealing the intensity of her desire.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. Use this, though.” Lucee handed her the butt plug, then dutifully lay on her back and threw her legs over her head. Dan and Annabel got a full view of her exposed pinkness.

“Stick it up my ass, Annabel,” Lucee pleaded breathlessly.

Annabel was already coating the plug with lube, stroking it like it was a cock. She then massaged a bit of the viscous fluid into Lucee’s perineal area, taking care to rim her delicately. She crouched down, leaving room for Dan to watch everything, and drove the plug slowly into Lucee’s willing hole. The plug opened her asshole gradually, and as she pushed it cautiously past one and then another set of muscles, it didn’t take long for it to disappear.

“Twist it,” Lucee begged.

Annabel complied in between ramming it into her.

“Okay, I’ll finish here. Go fuck Dan and I’ll join you in a minute,” Lucee whispered.

Lucee’s comment surprised her but then she realized what her friend had planned. Witnessing Lucee play with a butt plug up her ass and taking a dildo up his ass was going to make things extra difficult for Dan. That Lucee was one smart cookie, Annabel thought gleefully.

Annabel stood behind Dan now, pouring a generous stream of lube over his cheeks and into his crack before adding a bit to the dildo. She massaged his cheeks with the excess, enjoying the way his flesh responded to her touch. The shine from the lube gave him a porn-star look and she allowed herself to smile at that.

As she’d done with Lucee, she rimmed his shriveled opening until she felt it relax somewhat. Just for kicks, she inserted her tongue where her finger had just been, testing how deep the hole would permit her to go. She wiggled her tongue when she reached the limit and felt him twitch. He knew enough not to make a sound.

Now it was time. She’d thought all day about the sight of the dildo parting his cheeks and paving the way into his ass—and now she was responsible for bringing that vision to life. She took aim, pressed the tip of the dildo against his lubricated sphincter, and pushed as slowly as she could.

“I’m going to fill you up so slowly, you’ll want to cry out for mercy,” she heard herself saying. Centimeter by centimeter, the lifelike cock drilled into his ass.

Meanwhile, both she and Dan couldn’t help but be riveted by the now-writhing Lucee, who pumped herself like a crazed animal. She squealed and twisted, but held onto the base of the toy with supreme dedication. It was unclear whether she was in the middle of an extended orgasm or just having one hell of a good time. Either way, her single-minded pursuit of something only she knew how to define raised the tension level in the room to astronomic proportions.

After what seemed like an hour, the dildo’s base rested against Dan’s ass cheeks. Annabel moved from side to side to provide a new sensation of pressure, but when Lucee started to make louder, more atavistic sounds, she opted to thrust in a more traditional direction. She pumped faster as Lucee’s orgasm reached a frightening fever pitch.

“Please, Annabel, may I come?” came Dan’s strained voice.

Her compassion overruled her need for dominance. “Yes, Dan. Come now. Come all over the table while I ram your ass!”

Not only did he come on the table, he shot a load that splattered Lucee’s contorted body, as well. His spunk didn’t stop as Annabel continued to pump him—and she continued to pump him long after he had nothing left to shoot.

“Had enough, sweet cheeks?” she finally growled.

“Yes! Yes, please stop now!” Dan whimpered. His head was in his hands, which were on the table.

Lucee lolled on the floor with the butt plug still in her ass, laughing languidly now at the jizz in her hair and the orgasms under her belt. Annabel slapped the dildo against Dan’s upturned ass, then kissed the spot where it had hit.

“Thank you, Dan. This was so much better than birthday cake.”

They all laughed, but Annabel didn’t come out of her dominatrix role until promptly at midnight that night.

It was a birthday she’d not likely soon forget.

The Invited
by Ralph Greco, Jr.

My friends know me to be a calm, dark-eyed woman with a welcoming smile, a good body – though it wouldn’t hurt me to lose five pounds – and a relatively pleasant personality. All the men I dated until meeting Tony are still my friends—or if not, we don’t speak because of miles, not because of a bad break-up. I’m simply a “nice lady.” I speak my mind, but never to the point of beating someone over the head with my opinions. I like a good bottle of wine now and again. I have a bit of a thing for Al Pacino.

So it would probably come as a surprise (and it did to most of those aforementioned boyfriends) that I like to be spanked—love it, actually. It came as a surprise to me when my first boyfriend, Joey Anderson, and I were fooling around in his dark, dank basement on my sixteenth birthday and he managed to get me across his lap for a few “birthday swats.” I became so red-faced – and with my dark complexion, that is saying a lot – that I literally had to sprint home so as not to show Joey how excited I was.

At first I was a bit confused by that sudden rush, but somehow this simple act – what I would later learn was called an “OTK” or over-the-knee spanking – awakened a deep well of desire. I started masturbating furiously to daydreams of ass-warmings, only to graduate the year of my “real” graduation through a swath of boys I hoped in vain might be able to make my budding fantasy a firm reality.

My first years of college I jumped from relationship to relationship chasing my elusive goal: a man who could indulge me daily. Quite a few men spanked me with a variety of implements. Some ordered me to wear ever smaller skirts in public for easier access. I loved the idea of public punishment. I was taken across knee, desk, high-backed chairs, punished quickly in a bedroom while a party commenced in the common room of a dorm. Although never enough, I was lucky enough to surround myself with men who indulged my fantasies.

Now, as I mentioned, I still count among my best friends a good portion of the men I’ve dated, and a couple of my exes were even on the guest list for my wedding—so who better to seek out for a final night of revelry before tying the knot?

My husband-to-be and I decided to give one another one last weekend of freedom as a bachelor/bachelorette party. I had no idea what Tony would be up to, nor he I, but I knew my fiancé well enough to know he respected me and would never endanger his heath, or mine. I knew he assumed I’d spend the weekend with some girlfriends—and I had on Friday night—but on Saturday at five, I checked myself into the bright monolith of a Hilton on Route 10, ordered a light room service meal, then showered, dried, and waited to see who would answer my invitation.

I had picked five of the nicest, most caring, wonderful men I had dated from age twenty-one to just a year before my engagement. Some I saw frequently around town, others not for a year or more, but I knew if anyone, these guys would enjoy the invite, take it for what it was, and not make anything more out of my request to “Show and Spank.” I had no idea who would respond—none had called per my written wish—but my friend Bobbie was working the front desk downstairs, the reason I decided on this hotel. She was set up to coordinate my night with the discretion only a best friend can muster.

My plan began at seven, staggering my visitors with enough time to spank, maybe have a quick drink, then be on their way as I readied myself for the next. If one failed to show I’d get a break, if two, even more. I didn’t really want any of them running into each other. Despite the fact that I was kneeling across the bottom of the single hotel bed at seven, naked except for a pair of two-inch heels, my ass cold and quivering in the direction of the door, I really did want this evening to be as private as possible for the great guys who agreed to join me.

What was I hoping for? Was this a last attempt at some sexual excitement Anthony didn’t show me? Would this night throw me back to the “good ol’ days” and cause me to break my engagement? Certainly not. I knew what this was all about. My husband-to-be treated me well, both in and out of bed, even spanking me often. I merely wanted to enjoy a last fleeting taste of many hands on my bottom, feel the wonderful nuances of different men, all in one night, all for one last time.

I sighed into the coarse bedspread as I looked up at the digital clock on the side table. The hour was upon me, and hopefully Gregory, the man I requested first, would show.

There was a knock. I said hello as calmly as I could, and the hotel door opened to admit my old lover. He had wide blue eyes and curly brown hair.

Gregory.

“What a nice sight,” he whispered and closed the door.

“Haven’t seen this in a long time, huh?” I asked, looking over my shoulder.

If I had needed to, I would have wiggled my hips, but I knew the way I was bent, I afforded my ex-lover of six years ago a good view of my meaty backside. Greg and I never had any problem getting hot for one another. He had loved my voluptuous body, as I had loved his rather thick frame and slightly larger-then-average cock. He had been a bright young man our sophomore year in college, and now he was a successful businessman, and he looked well kept in his khaki pants, brown loafers, and vanilla-colored button-down shirt. Always the picture of decorum, Greg exuded class and charm with his low-metered speech and slightly slanted eyes. I was as attracted to him then, bent over and naked, as I had ever been…and I could see by the smile on his clean-shaven face and the bulge in his pants that the feeling was reciprocated.

“I don’t think I ever really understood to what degree you liked to be spanked,” he began, coming to sit on the bed next to me.

As the mattress sagged slightly, I became even wetter. Greg was just sitting there having a nice little chat with me, while I was bent over bare-assed!

“Well, now you know,” I offered, looking up at him.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to get you across my lap,” he said. “I mean, you lying there like that is great, but…”

“Anything you want,” I said and stood on my two-inch heels. Again another surge of wetness flooded my pussy as I faced my old lover, my trim brown “landing-strip” right in his face.

“I mean, I never gave it very much thought before,” he added, “when we used to do it. I just spanked you, however.”

“Yeah,” I sighed as a hundred memories of hot nights in Greg’s cramped apartment came rushing back to my mind.

“But when I received your letter…” He scooted forward and I bent across his strong, thin legs. “I began thinking about positions and…”

“Um,” I agreed, adjusting myself to feel his bulge against me, then…

SWAT!

Greg’s hand landed dead center on my cheeks so unexpectedly the breath shot out of me as I settled across him to ride the sting.

“I remember you liked it hard,” was his only comment as I squirmed and literally draped myself across the man.

I felt him raise his hand and—SWAT SWAT—I was smacked again.

This time he had landed a heavy blow to each cheek and I was aching between my legs as much as on my ass. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder at his expression. That would have been just too much for me at that moment.

SWAT. SWAT.

“You look as good as always,” he said as the heat seared across my buns.

SWAT. SWAT.

He hit me again, exactly like the last two.

“More then halfway,” he whispered, shifted, and then I felt Greg bend and actually kiss my ass.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked, sitting back up again.

“Um, na… no,” I sighed, squeezing my legs tight to relieve some of the building squishiness.

“I just wanted to taste that beautiful butt one last time.”

SWAT.

SWAT. SWAT.

Cheek to cheek, the hardest he had struck me yet. I held my breath, spread my thighs, my belly clenched.

“I’ve got to say, Jane,” Greg offered, shifting his weight to poke me in the side with his cock. “This was a very good idea.”

I’d say, I thought as I tried with all my might not to roll to the side into him. I felt an impending orgasm I feared I’d be too weak-willed to halt. I was getting so very close, so very quickly, to that point of no return where I would begin writhing and pressing myself into the man under me…no matter if Greg would want me to or not. I had suspected I would be turned on, especially in this oh-so-basic a position, but this quickly?

I felt Greg raise his hand again and reposition himself. Going rigid, I waited, pressing down, willing the orgasm to hold off at least for a few more seconds.

SMACK.

He hit me dead center, high, hard and even, and I jumped as Greg left his open palm on my ass and pressed down. Though I had an entire night ahead of me, I really couldn’t stop myself. It was a matter of having a quick release now, but maybe denying myself a real explosion later…? That was if there would be a later, since I had no real idea how many of my “invited” would show.

What to do?

My mind pulled one way and my pussy another. I was starting to circle my pelvis, grinding down, the heat really coming up through me now, Greg’s hand on my ass…

“Is that champagne for us?”

Fuck!

I wanted to scream. Greg leaned back, took his hand off my ass, indicating in no uncertain terms we were done.

I reluctantly rose off him, my knees shaking, my pussy hot, but my mind, at least for the moment, sliding down off that precipice of impending need. I stood to look down at his wide, thin-lipped smile. He was so goddamned matter-of-fact.

Fucker, I thought, and smiled at him

I managed to cross the carpet and poured two glasses of champagne. I had plenty of plastic ones on hand).

“Thanks,” was all I could manage as I passed him the drink. “Thanks for…coming.”

We both ignored the loaded meaning in that simple word. Greg knew how close I had been. And he knew that I knew he’d stopped short on purpose.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” he said, raised his glass in salute and downed the sparkling liquid in one gulp.

I sipped mine. I had a long night ahead of me.

“I assume there are more guys scheduled,” he said and stood.

“I…” I demurely answered, looking up at him from under my curly bangs. I sat down, suddenly aware of how naked I was…not that I was about to get dressed, though.

“‘A last night’s indulgence,’” he quoted the invite. “I’m flattered to have been invited, since knowing you, there’s got to be a couple more coming.”

And just like that, Greg kissed my lips, stood back from me, smiled, handed me his glass and turned to leave.

“See ya at the church,” he said and then left the room. Yeah, Greg was one of the guys who had been invited to the ceremony.

He knew exactly what he was doing by leaving so quickly. He wanted to tease me as well as spank me.

I had thirty minutes to wait for my next…if he showed.

* * * *

Ronald never did make it, but I had promised myself no regrets or recriminations. I had heard my slightly chubby red-haired ex was involved with a woman quite a few years his senior and I assumed Ronny couldn’t reconcile my request with his monogamy. He had always been a very honest guy with an acute cause-and-effect type of outlook. I missed him, to be sure, but held nothing but fondness in my heart for the guy.

I settled back to wait with two Everybody Loves Raymond reruns. When the time came for my third man, Gerald, I assumed my position again and there came a knock at my door not a mere minute past the hour.

The first thing I heard, even before Gerald’s heavy footfall, was the “swish” in the air behind me, followed by a tight, “Don’t turn around.I was hoping I’d find you like this when you said you’d ’be waiting,” he added.

Fear shot through me then, delicious, clutching fear as again I heard a short, quick flick in the still air of the room. God, what had he brought? Gerald always had a very good imagination, but I had not mentioned props or toys. I had had various implements used on me over the years – too few for my liking, actually – and I fetishized common items even at that late stage of my sexual awareness. (Tony’s mom had a wooden spoon in her kitchen that made my heart go into spasms if I looked at it too long.) But for Gerald to have brought something with him? Jesus Christ!

“Remember that time at George’s house, during the party?”

My mind quickly flittered back to a night some seven years before. Gerald and I had skirted off to a small bedroom at his friend’s house during a Super Bowl party and I was soundly spanked right on our host’s bed, my face inching into the coats of the other partiers. That was one of my most erotic memories, as well as one of the hardest spankings I ever endured, Gerald and I urged on by the chance of exposure.

“This is going to be ten times worse,” he added, and then I heard the cut in the air again.

This time the fucking thing landed!

It had to be a thin branch of some kind. It stung like all hell. But not only was I stinging, I was struck with a picture of Gerald, long and lanky in his usual black jeans and tight T-shirt, walking across the hotel lobby attempting to hide the long stick.

SZIP the thing said and I rolled to the bed to try and get away from the searing sensation.

Two more times the thing connected across my cheeks in the silence and I managed to look over my shoulder at the man with the steely blue eyes behind me.

“Hiya, doll,” he said and I watched as his hand rose and the wooden stick flicked through the hotel room air and bit me just below my ass, on the upper part of my thick thighs.

SZIP SZIP.

“Ah, Gerald, ah!” I screamed. Shit, we were getting loud. Would Bobbie be running down the hall any second from complaints to the hotel switchboard?

“You never said what I could hit you with,” he remarked and I just lay my face down into the cool bedspread, knowing he was reaching back again.

“Man, look at those little red marks,” he teased and again—SZIP SZIP SZIP—I was cut.

I started to cry as the heat rode up my flanks. God, could I take this? Did I want this? I lost count. Had that been eight or nine? How many more were coming?

“One last one,” Gerard said. “Let’s see if we can get you to stand.”

I did as he asked, looking at him fully then. He was regarding every inch of me from under his heavy lids, his cheeks aglow, his thin-lipped smile wide on his tight, dark face. Even then, as terrible as those searing cuts had been, I felt safe with Gerald. He wasn’t a big guy, to be sure, actually almost skinny in a way, but his confidence had always made me feel safe and warm when I was around him, safe like I felt right then. Although I knew the last slice would really hurt and although I feared feeling it, my fear was delightful since I trusted Gerald. I was so aroused in my blind safe terror—or because of it.

I put my hands to the edge of the bed and thrust my ass out.

“Last one is going to be bad,” he promised. “Worst yet. But when it’s over, it’s over.”

I braced myself and whimpered, tears rolling down my cheeks, legs shaking. God, was this wonderful, I thought as I heard the branch flick the air.

SZIP!

I fell to my knees. I was hurting to be sure, searing red pain, but the endorphins mixed with my clutching arousal and I came. Kneeling forward on my knees, feeling my hot ass for marks, a quick, gulping undulation gripped me as I crumbled there, gulping tears and coming.

“Wild,” Gerald announced, coming to my aid.

He knelt, I sat up best as I could, and he took me in his sinewy arms as we both rode out my sobs.

“That’s what you wanted,” Gerald reminded me, as I looked up at him a minute later.

Our lips met.

This was last thing I was expecting, but we kissed for a while, Gerald’s strong tongue finding an easy access through my thin lips, the pain on my ass numbing as I concentrated on rolling my tongue over his.

“Um,” I said when we finally broke apart. “Um, help me up.”

He helped me to stand, then walked me to the mirror that ran from one side of the bathroom sink to the bathtub.

“Feels a lot worse then it looks,” I said, looking over my shoulder to the sight of ten thin red lines on my tan cheeks.

I was red. I was stinging. But truth be told, my ass didn’t look bad at all. The sting of the cane, the slice it had made in the air before it connected, all this added to the idea of how lethal the thing was, but there really were no bruises on me. Crafty Gerald had hit me just enough to cause those quick searing jolts, but not enough to make a lasting impression any place else but my mind.

And even then I was thinking about the last two men I hoped would still visit me.

“Wild,” Gerald said again, kissed me on the shoulder, and walked from the bathroom.

“Really fucking wild,” he announced at the room’s door.

“Stay for a drink?” I asked.

“Honey, if I stay I’m going to want to do more then whip you,” he explained, tickling a lock of errant straight black bang from his high forehead. “That’s why I just came in and got right to it. I couldn’t give myself any extra seconds looking at your body and imagining what it would be like to be with you again.”

“I…” I tried, smiling.

“You are one hot lady, Janey,” he added. “Always were and always will be.”

Gerald smiled wide, then chuckled, took up his cane from the side of the bed, and left the room.

* * * *

For the next fifteen minutes, I vacillated between short quick sobs and laughter, all a delayed reaction to so hard a beating and the memories of Gerald, Greg, and even Ronald that flitted through my mind. This night was as much a rite of passage as anything else I knew. I was leaving one life, the single world I had so long ago physically left, and stepping into my life with my soon-to-be husband. For sure, I had been faithful during the two years I had been with Anthony and wouldn’t have wanted my life to have been any different, but with Gerald and Greg I began to remember that a great part of me was being a sexually submissive woman. It was good I was hurting, that my ass was stinging; like everyone, I needed to be reminded from time to time of my real feelings.

There was no way I’d be going into my marriage without asserting my non-assertiveness.

I was sitting on the bed when the door slowly slid open.

Carl was undoubtedly one of the best-looking men I had ever dated, and also one of the gentlest. He spoke barely above a whisper, smiled easily, and was by far one of the kindest guys I had ever known. He had also been meticulously sexual, taking time, setting candles, pouring wine, drawing scented baths, easing me to heights of such abandon that at one time, I could imagine no other lover. But as things go in life, we broke up. Carl was ten years my senior and building businesses all over the country, and I wasn’t leaving town. But I never forgot him and had managed to discover his address through a friend of a friend. He was the one man I had thought wouldn’t show given the three hundred miles that separated us, but I was tickled to no end that he had. I rushed over to the door, as if I was clothed and we were just meeting for a normal Saturday night date.

“Ah,” he said, breaking from my quick embrace. “Now, now. Let’s have a look at you.”

I turned completely around like I always had when Carl inspected me. He liked to have me model outfits he bought for me, which I always readily did.

“I guess you weren’t joking, huh?”

“No,” I admitted, slithering against him again.

I guess Gerald’s whipping had gotten the better of me. The delightful smirk on Carl’s face, his cool blue eyes, and fine-cut jaw were so enticing I ached to jump him then and there.

“You know…” he began, sitting on the bed as I followed. “I don’t remember spanking you all that much.”

This was true. Although he had swatted me a few times, soft over-the-knee spankings, and he knew well how I loved them, Carl had other ways of making me submit. Those modeling sessions I mentioned often led to us going to dinner with me wearing the skimpy outfit in public, sans underwear or bra.

“But when in Rome…” he quipped and pulled me up and over his lap. “Ten, right?” As I lay there I felt his fingers snake in between my thighs. I opened and ached as he tickled my tight wet lips.

“As wet as always,” he whispered, exploring my suffering sex. This was the first time all night I had been touched and I was aching for it.

But then I was hit.

My ass was alive, even more so after Gerald’s numbing caning. I bucked as Carl began to swat evenly and soft. He had a way of pushing down on me after every swat, as if willing me to grind against him even harder then I already was.

On his fifth swat I began to moan aloud and really grind.

“Going to come?” Carl asked and—SWAT SWAT—I was hit cheek to cheek.

“Go ahead, go ahead,” he coaxed as he hit me two more times.

I clenched down with all my might, rubbed my pubis against his strong legs, and grabbed the bedspread in my fists.

“Go, Janey, go,” he said as he hit me three last times, and on the last swat, Carl laid his hand to my hot ass and rubbed.

“Oh, oh,” I cried, tears welling up in my eyes as I pushed up and back into his hand, then lay flat on his knees.

“Yes, Janey.”

“Ohhhahoh,” I sang as I clenched, repeatedly pushing my buns up into Carl’s palm, then my steaming pussy into his knee.

“Yessssss,” he whispered. He flattened his hand even more, lifted his knee slightly.

Straightening my body across Carl’s strong lap, I clenched my stinging cheeks, let the tears come, and flexed my pelvis so I was unabashedly humping his knee.

“Fuck… Fuck… Fuuuck!” I screamed as I bucked myself into him and came… and came… and came.

Jesus, it was so fast and so hard.

“Just stay there, honey,” Carl said, after I rode my last wave.

I really didn’t have much of a choice. I was exhausted and feeling just the slightest chill. I felt him reach over me, and I heard him pour himself a glass of champagne.

“All these years and we never really change all that much, do we?” Carl began as if we were simply having a nice chat over wine and cheese. “It’s all so bizarre how our minds work, isn’t it?”

What could I say? Given the time, Carl could ruminate on all manner of things. He just had one of those minds. And I felt once again, lying across him as he lightly pontificated, like the student I had always felt like around him. And again, for the inexplicable reasons I had never explored, I grew wet between my legs again and stared to wiggle.

“Janey, you are incorrigible,” he said. I heard him sip, then reach over me again to put the glass down.

“Now, now,” he scolded. “Do we have to do this all over again?”

SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, he rained down on my ass as I bucked. These swats were considerably heavier, probably the hardest Carl had ever hit me.

“Shit!” I screamed, trying to rise off his lap.

“Janey, Janey, Janey,” he added and then I was swatted four more times, so hard that on the tenth, I cried out and rolled off him and onto the bed.

I lay still, hurting, sweaty, and aching to come again. I was on my back, open, ready for whatever he wanted to do and knowing well that I shouldn’t even be entertaining these thoughts. I couldn’t keep myself from them. But my older ex, my teacher, my spanker, just leaned toward me as if I was his child, and kissed me on the forehead.

“I wish you the best of all worlds,” Carl said, standing then. I lay flat and turned my head to smile up at him.

“Now that you have my address, you’d better keep in touch. And have a good rest of the night, little one,” he said. A tear came to my eye again then as he opened the door and I watched his high, tight buns exit the room.

* * * *

Delighted with the luck I had had and the spankings I had endured, I could have easily left then. But for some reason I really wanted to see Blaine most of all. Although the tall black man and I had talked about him spanking me, among other things, for some reason I could never quite fathom, Blaine and I had never managed past the heavy-petting stage. We had dated for a quick three months during our first year in college; a fast, furious time when I was so unsure of myself, bristling with such superheated, kinetic possibilities that I never really noticed what a great guy I had in him. Blaine and I were more buds then actual boyfriend/girlfriend and remained as close as ever after our romance—such as it was—petered out.

There was a knock. My heart skipped. I sat as quiet as I could and crossed my legs, my arm across my chest. Blaine had never seen me naked and I didn’t want to startle him.

The tall black man walked into the room, took off his glasses – glasses he hadn’t worn when we last saw one another – wiped them on his shirt, replaced them, and smiled down at me.

“Hello,” he offered, but he was so shocked he had forgotten to close the door.

“Blaine, the door,” I whispered, and he laughed and then closed it behind him.

I didn’t move as he walked slowly toward me.

“What’s it been, like a year?” he queried, still smiling. I could get lost in his deep dimples.

“Yes,” I agreed, looking up at him. “Yeah, I think. Maybe a little less.”

If I damn well wasn’t a virgin, and I wasn’t, I was feeling like one then. Just having Blaine see me naked, vulnerable to him like this, was so startling that goose bumps rose across my skin.

“That was quite a letter.” He sat on the bed. I could smell his thick cologne; his sinewy arm brushed my thigh.

“An invite,” I corrected, demurely looking up at him as I tried to keep my arms locked to my chest.

I was aching to open up, stand up, and show off. Let him see what he never got the chance to see, let him touch, taste, even smell my muskiness.

Please, I whispered in my mind, please just ask me to stand up and face you!

“An invite,” Blaine said, as if running behind the conversation a few seconds. “I’ve thought about you a lot,” he continued, and damn if I didn’t see a soft tear in his right eye. “I mean, we had some great times.”

“We did, we did,” I agreed.

Ask me to stand up, please! I yelled to myself. The last thing I needed now was Blaine getting all emotional with nostalgia. That would easily lead to me getting all emotional with nostalgia.

“Good times,” he repeated, the light in his eyes far away.

Was I losing him? Jesus, I had never expected a sentimental walk down memory lane, mainly because I didn’t want one. I figured the spankings would keep all those old feelings at bay, but truth be told, I had been crying over these very feelings only an hour before. Why would I have the exclusive rights on regret? But just as I thought I might have to embrace him, Blaine suddenly cleared his throat, looked nearly through me and added, “And now, here you are naked as all hell, and I’m gonna get the chance to spank you.”

Rivers of stilted anticipation ran over me as my ex and forever friend stood.

“Now, let me have a look at you,” he softly demanded. “The real good look I never got to have. Stand.”

I did so, nearly swooning as I stood up straight on my two-inch heels.

“Turn around and walk to the bathroom,” he said, and I did.

Not one sound from him as I did as commanded. I was hot with desire to wiggle my ass, or turn and shake my big breasts, anything to get a reaction.

“Okay, come back here,” Blaine ordered and returned. “This excites you, huh?” He eyed my rock-hard little nipples.

“More then you know,” I agreed.

“Want me to tell you how great you look?” he asked, as I came closer to him. “I guess you know that already though.” He stood and as I came up to him, he hugged me hard and his lips found my right ear. “I’ve never spanked a girl before,” he whispered.

“There’s always a f…” I started, but he broke away from me, smiled and said, “I’m going to really enjoy this.”

Blaine spun me around, turning me quickly and pressing me against the wall. He moved with such easy speed, I literally teetered on my heels as my fingers spread across the dark wallpaper and I settled myself, thrusting my ass out as far as it would go, my chest and face pressed to the wall.

“Now that’s a sight,” Blaine commented, as I ached with anticipation. “I guess I just do it,” he added more to himself then to me.

SWAT, his wide hand landed soft across my right cheek.

I moaned to the wall.

“Was that too hard?”

I merely moaned again and shook my head. I could take it much harder, I wanted it much harder—surely he could tell by the slightly raised red welts on my ass that I had taken it harder—but as it had been with this man from the minute he stepped into this room only minutes ago, I wanted Blaine to find out for himself just what he could do.

“Okay, okay,” he agreed and he connected again, this time to my left cheek. Then another.

He was metering the swats to a friendly, slightly hesitant pace and I smiled as I realized I was getting, and had had, real spankings from my men tonight, spankings that truly befit their personalities: from Gregory’s over–the-knee spanking to Gerald’s whipping to Carl’s swatting and teasing to Blaine behind me now, hesitant.

“Number four,” Blaine announced. A dead center hit, this one rocked me forward.

“Ah, Blaine,” I managed. “Um, baby.”

“That’s good, huh?” he asked and—SWAT, SWAT, SWAT—he hit me three times, fast and hard, all to my left cheek, actually pushing me forward so my big tits pressed even harder into the expensive wallpaper.

“Blaine,” I sighed and again he spanked me without speaking…two more on my aching left cheek.

But alas, only one more! Dammit, I thought, he was just hitting his stride.

“Can I…?” he started and turned to look over my shoulder at him. “Would it be okay, if…I mean…”

“The more, the better,” I said, finally realizing that he too realized he was just getting his feel for this.

“Ten was just an easy number,” I explained. “If you want to go mo—”

I found out that Blaine did want to go more, a lot more. I pressed my chest to the wall, thrust my stinging ass back to him even further then before and…

“We have a lot to catch up on,” he said and SWAT, SWAT, SWAT…

As I lay there and Blaine worked into a stride that began with six heavy six blows, cheek to cheek, I knew that I had caught up on so much this night. Old feelings, old loves, old stingings, but most of all, I had caught up to myself…in the present, a woman who loved to be spanked, would continue to be spanked and would forever cherish the men who had spanked her, and the one who would do so for my future.

“Daddy” and His Two Girls
by Ralph Greco, Jr.

“Did our ’daddy’ have a good time?” Geena asked, looking up from under her sweet brown bangs. All I could do was smile.

“I had a great time,” Ilene offered on my other arm.

I looked down as her deep white cleavage pushed up and forward while she snuggled against me. As usual, the bigger girl was wearing a shirt unbuttoned nearly as far as it could without her bosom popping out. It was all I could do to keep my attention on her face when she spoke.

“I’d say a little too great,” I said, opening the single screen door for us all.

“We were only playing, Jeff,” Geena defended as I led them inside, down the ten steps to my basement apartment.

“All that ’whu,’ ’whu,’ ’whu’ shit?” I said, imitating the girls’ sarcastic enthusiasm of only an hour ago.

“My girls” as I called them, had accompanied me to a small club tonight to see a band they considered a “bunch of old fucks in baggy leather pants” mainly because a friend of theirs was the singer for the opening band. I had enjoyed their company as I always did, my ego stretched to the limit with these two eighteen year-olds on my thirty-year old arm, “Daddy out with his two girls.” I had reveled in the stares I received as Geena and Ilene purred over me. This was a “game” we played often when we went out.

“And I warned you about the smoking,” I continued to tease.

“So what?” Ilene said, coming to stand with Geena at the bottom of my stairs, hands defiant on her wide hips.

“I’ll give you so what, young lady,” I lightly scolded the pale girl. Placing a hand to each of their bottoms, I gave each girl a quick pat, pushing them to the center of my studio apartment.

“It’s high time I punished the both of you,” I barked, looking around quickly for the voice that had issued this threat. “Now, who goes first?”

Although there had always been this tremor of sexual possibility running through our yearlong friendship, nothing much had ever happened beyond Geena and Ilene flirting through our “Daddy out with his girls” scenario. On the Saturday nights we didn’t plan to hang out I’d still, more often then not, find the pair parked in Geena’s blue Mazda, waiting as I returned from a date. If I was lucky enough to bring a girl home, Geena and Ilene would split, but if not, we would all steal into my place for latenight munchies, a DVD, and Geena and Ilene finally collapsing on my futon.

I knew the girls through a brother of a friend and really did like being with them, but I certainly couldn’t deny the sexual fantasies, and the frustration, they provided me. Maybe, just maybe, this night could be different if I could count on the drinks, the lasting effects of the girls’ flirting, and our possible mutual attraction to get me to do whatever it was I was thinking to do next.

“First, for what?” Geena asked.

“Since you asked…” I said, pulling her toward my high-backed desk chair. With my free hand, I got hold of the chair and sat down under her.

“Don’t worry,” I assured Ilene as she sat on the futon across the room. “I’ll get to you, too.”

Then I spoke to Geena again. “Well?” I asked, wondering myself what it was I was asking.

“‘Well’ what?” Geena exclaimed. Surprised or not, her usual tight smile was playing across her smooth, dark face.

“You gonna make me wait?” I asked, then added as I felt sweat start on my forehead, “Strip. Everything off.”

“Jeff!”

“That’s ‘Daddy’ to you!” I spat back. “Hop to it. Ilene’s gonna do it, too.”

I knew I had to show absolute confidence here, as if I just assumed the girls would do as I asked. Let’s face it, I wasn’t even sure what “punishment” I was threatening after they stripped…if they did strip. But I had to be cool about if I was going get anywhere.

“I…” Geena’s high cheekbones flushed, her slightly slanted eyes wide.

There was a true sexual energy in the air now, more so then ever before. I was finally calling the girls on all their teasing. I was living the role of “Daddy” and if they were to really be my “girls,” they’d both have to obey me. This game we played, the flirting, the not-so-subtle kisses and brushing up against me, the bending low, the coy glances—all of it was coming to a head, right here, right now.

“I, um…” Geena tried, actually fumbling with the snap on her low-rider jeans.

As if to boost her confidence, the lanky brunette stood and faced Ilene, giving me a wonderful full view of her high little ass. Let’s face it, with the jeans the girls wear today you see a lot of thong and low hip even when a girl isn’t bending. I knew showing me her ass wouldn’t really tax Geena all that much. But getting her to strip all the way, to take off as much as I hoped she would right then, in full view of Ilene and I, this could be a major moment.

It all seemed to happen in slow motion.

I watched Geena crisscross her arms and lift her shirt high over her head, then caught Ilene’s even bigger blue-eyed stare. Was this turning them on…even a little? Was it possible these eighteen-year-olds found me as attractive as I had always hoped they did?

The tall girl bent, I heard a zipper, and then Geena was peeling her jeans down her long legs, wiggling and stepping until she had them off her, her ass halved by a black thong. “Jeff…” Geena quietly pleaded. She turned to look coyly over her shoulder. Standing there in her bra and thong, she looked so cute looking back at me.

“This is for your own good,” I said, not truly addressing her hesitation. “You know you both deserve this. Strip all the way.”

Geena sighed, then turned to stare at Ilene again. Whatever passed between the two in those silent seconds was enough as the Filipino girl reached behind herself, unsnapped her bra, let it fall, and then bent to peel her thong out of her little cheeks, down her tan long legs.

I screamed in my head. Holy fucking shit! But I tried to keep up my steely exterior. “You both know you have been very bad little girls.”

With Geena’s sweet high buns not more then an arm’s distance from me, I tried to ease my breathing and not stare too obviously. I looked around her to Ilene, who sat still on the edge of the futon, no doubt realizing she’d be next. The girls weren’t saying a word, but they shared another look; what was passing between them in that look, I had no idea.

My next request was going to push the envelope, I knew. But if Geena complied, there would be no doubt in my mind that I had her, and hopefully Ilene as well.

“Turn around.”

Slowly Geena turned and I faced a thinly trimmed brown “landing strip” of public hair, then my eyes traveled up her body. She was by no means as big on top as Ilene, but she had nice breasts and long, tan limbs. I could have stayed staring at this seemingly shy girl all night—I truly was amazed that Geena was standing in front of me naked, her arms at her sides—but I had to get to Ilene as well.

“Go sit on the futon, honey,” I told her. And called Ilene’s name.

“Well?” I asked as the stockier girl came to stand before me.

“What if I don’t want to?” She chuckled.

“You have to obey ‘Daddy,’” I said.

“Yeah, I guess.” Ilene surrendered with a broad, thin-lipped smile.

Flicking her strawberry blond hair from shoulder to shoulder, Ilene opened her zipper, then pulled her jeans down her thick thighs. Unfolding her shirttails next, unbuttoning just those two buttons that were buttoned, she flicked off the shirt and was in her blue bra and matching boy-shorts in seconds. Again I wasn’t sure how far I could push my luck, although Ilene was facing me even then with her hands on hips.

I was still amazed at the thought that these girls wanted to strip for me. Even though I was suggesting they do so as their part of their “punishment,” I did not want to coerce either of them into anything that they didn’t want to do, that they didn’t get excited from. I knew they enjoyed the “Daddy and his girls” game when we were out in public. Their enjoyment was why it all worked for me so much and why I was sure that they wanted to strip for me. They would have told me to fuck off, or laughed it off and put a DVD in the player if they hadn’t wanted to play along.

In fact, it seemed to be Ilene who wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t chicken out. “You sure about this,…Daddy?” the big girl cooed. She looked once over her shoulder at Geena, sitting on the couch staring wild-eyed at us.

I kept silent as Ilene turned back to face me, reached behind herself, and unsnapped her bra. Her heavy D-cups spilled forward as the bra fell to the floor, then the girl was bending and peeling her shorts out from between her meaty thighs just as her friend had seconds ago. Ilene stood back up to present rosy, erect nipples, a wide smile, and a completely shaved mound.

I took a deep breath, drank her in, silently thanked God for my good fortune, and pinched myself a little too. Delighted as I was that they were both naked, I still had no idea what I was going to do. God knew, I would never live down getting them undressed, then doing nothing!

“Well?” they sang, snapping me from my reverie. Be careful what you wish for, I thought as Ilene walked back to join Geena on the futon. They were positively daring me now to go on. Punishment. Punishment… The word kept rumbling through my brain. What could I do that would really make this night memorable? Sex was too easy, if they even would allow it…and my heart could stand it. This night needed something with wit, something with control, something hot, something that could only ever come from a man my age, with my experience. Something maybe even a little bit embarrassing. Something…

I sat up straighter as the idea hit me.

“What?” they asked.

“Well,” I asked coyly, “are you two even a little bit wet?”

“Mmm,” Ilene moaned in agreement while Geena looked down.

“Well, Daddy wants to see you get even wetter,” I suggested.

I rose from my chair as best I could considering the lump in my pants, and sat down between them, Ilene on my right, Geena wiggling to my left. I’m sure they were prepared for me to slobber all over them. Feeling the heat from the flushed nubile bodies of my naked bookends, I snuck a breath and continued. “You’re going to masturbate for me.”

Silence descended as I stared from one girl to the other and back again.

“She’s shy,” Ilene offered, and Geena leaned forward to look accusingly at her best friend.

“Ilene!” the thinner girl pleaded, then turned to look at me. “Jeff, I can’t. I mean I…”

“Yes you can, girl,” Ilene spat across me.

I couldn’t help but run my eyes up and down her voluptuous body. God, was she built, firm because of her youth, and open, white and so succulent. Man, how could I not be hot for these two?

“Well, I won’t!” Geena declared and marched across the room to her clothes.

“We have to!” Ilene demanded through a quick chuckle, walking over to her best friend. “We’ve been bad and we must be punished!”

I just sat and watched them—no longer in control, if I ever had been—Ilene standing over Geena, Geena bending to gather her clothes. If this went no further, I thought, I would still have a great memory.

“Tell me you’re not as wet as I am!” Ilene demanded.

Geena dropped the bundle of clothes.

“I just…” She addressed both of us. “I never did it like this, I mean…”

“You think I have?” Ilene asked. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Together, right?” Ilene added, turning to me.

“Well…”

“You’re really loving this, aren’t you?” Geena said, relenting.

“You know it, little girl,” I said and stood, ceding the futon to them.

Here was the tricky part, I knew. In order to come, each girl would have to be relaxed enough to let her inhibitions fly. It wasn’t enough for them to be wet; I knew they had to get into the moment, not feel threatened. Could that happen with them sitting right next to one another?

Silly as it sounds, I was nervous. Let’s face it, I knew eighteen-year-old girls could be easily bored, their minds could flutter from one thing to another. I remembered how hard it was way back in my first years of college trying to keep up with girls. I was hoping the masturbation was enough of a sexy stimulus to at least engage Ilene and Geena.

But how do I start this, I wondered?

“I got to…” Geena said hesitantly, and I nearly jumped as I thought we had lost her again. But she went on. “I got to be on my knees.”

Far be it for me to suggest positions.

Geena knelt then, circling her pelvis against the futon’s front, thrusting her ass toward me, spreading her knees. Ilene sat down right next to her, her thick thighs spread, her back slightly arched, her bare open pussy in full view.

I slowly moved my chair to the center of the room, but before I could sit, Geena said, her voice muffled into the futon, “I…Jeff, I need you to…”

Her voice was quivering.

“Anything, honey,” I said. I was teetering here, wanting to be close but not too close, my cock pounding in my jeans, my head swimming.

“Touch her ass,” Ilene offered. “She likes that.”

I had no idea how Ilene was privy to this kernel of information, but I bent on one knee and began massaging her cheeks as she fed her hand up under herself.

I realized this was the first time I had really touched either of them.

I looked over at Ilene who was grinning, one hand clutching her big right tit, the other buried in her bare snatch, her fingers spreading herself.

There is a limit to how much good luck any one man should be allowed.

“Daddy’s girls were very bad tonight,” I said, caressing the hot cheeks below me. “Very, very bad,” I added, as Geena began to moan and circle her hips, and Ilene grabbed her tit harder. “And every time you are bad, this will be your punishment.”

With my cock all but aching to break out of my pants, I looked from where Geena’s long brown hair cascading between her shoulder blades to Ilene’s shaking tits, her crooked lips pursed. Ilene had her legs so wide that the smell of her pussy hit me square in the face…as I all but lunged to taste her.

“Come, my girls,” I teased as Geena’s moans increased in volume and she slapped her crotch against the futon and her buried hand.

“Jeff,” she called as Ilene opened her eyes wide, nearly sat straight up and looked over at me.

“Daddy, I…” she quivered, as she planted her even hand deeper.

“Who’s gonna come first?” I teased.

Ilene spread her hand and I saw her slip another finger into herself. Her breasts bounced as she released her hold on the one and placed that hand across her slight belly. Geena was mewing, little quick sobs escaping as she pushed hard against my hand and began to shudder.

“I wonder who?” I sang.

I let go and knelt to press my crotch against Geena’s ass. I tickled the outside of Ilene’s right thigh, too, and when I did, it was as if an electric spark ran through her. She threw her head back. “Ah, Daddy!”

I tried with all my might to concentrate on what was unfolding around me: pressing against Geena’s back, watching her hair swishing, hearing her muffled mewing, the sight of Ilene, my face mere inches from her thighs, those glorious tits bouncing as she stared back at me…

Ilene screamed, nearly sitting straight up as she pleaded with her big, blue eyes.

I smiled up at her, pushed my heavy crotch into Geena as hard as I could. “Go ahead, come for Daddy.”

“Ah… ah!” Ilene cried and began to quiver around her hand.

Whimpering , she kept her eyes on me as I watched her transform with her impending orgasm. She arched her back, her tits thrust out, finger-fucking herself until her whimpers became growls and her hips shook. But it really was her pretty nose and strong chin I watched as Ilene came.

“Fucking Jeff!” she screamed.

“Na…no. No No No!” Geena screamed in answer, pushing back against me one last time. Pushing her crotch against the front of the futon, she increased her hip thrusts until she was moving with piston-like spurts.

“Jeff…” Geena said, thrashing her hair across her back, pushing those hips, rubbing her ass against me.

What the hell, I thought and I tapped her ass with one quick swat.

The little girl screamed as she fell flat over the futon.

I swatted her quickly three more times, and as Geena shook through her own deep orgasm.

* * * *

I walked back to my chair after leaning over to kiss Geena on the head, then standing and doing the same to Ilene. Geena stayed in place, too exhausted to move, while Ilene stared at me, her legs still spread, her fingers still inside herself.

“Very good, girls,” I offered, sitting slowly, my cock all but pushing through my jeans.

“Mmm, look at Daddy!” Ilene said, and Geena turned to stare over her shoulder at me.

“Well, if we can, so can you,” the darker girl dared me. I looked at them both…and began to unzip my pants.

“Oh, Daddy,” Ilene exclaimed, not moving her body or eyes from me.

I produced my hard cock and began to stroke myself.

“You should punish us more often,” Ilene said and massaged her tits.

“Yeah,” Geena said, and began to wiggle her ass.

“Um,” I sighed as felt my arousal spike at the sight of them, Geena wiggling her ass for me, Ilene grabbing her big tits. I gulped, pumping my cock through my fist. It wouldn’t take me long, given what I had just witnessed, but I did try to hold out. Ilene at one point even lifted her heavy right tit to her mouth.

“Yes, Daddy,” Geena whispered.

“Come for us, Daddy,” Ilene agreed.

How could I deny these sweet girls of mine anything? I thought as I came in a fount.

Backwards
by Kris Cherita

Lisa was careful to arrive as soon after seven as possible, not from any fear of punishment—Greta was free to punish her according to her whim, no matter how perfectly she behaved—but out of respect for her beautiful mistress. She knew better than to be early, in case she met any of Greta’s other clients leaving, but didn’t want to waste even a minute by being late.

Greta answered the door on the second knock. She was wearing a black silk dress slit up the side almost to her hip, with a neckline that showcased her magnificent brown breasts, almost—but not quite—revealing her nipples. It was part of their pact that Lisa had to earn the right to see her mistress’s breasts in all their glory, and only as a reward for perfect obedience would she be permitted to suck on them.

“Good evening, Mistress,” said Lisa, quietly as the door opened. “May I enter?”

“If you promise to obey me, you may,” said Greta calmly. In fact, neither had ever breached their elaborate pact—Greta knew exactly what orders Lisa would obey, what punishment she would accept—and it had been several months since either of them had used a safe word.

“I promise.”

“Come in, then, and close the door. Now get those ridiculous clothes off. What do you think this is, a gymnasium?”

Lisa quickly stripped out of the bicycle pants and sweatshirt. It was another part of their ritual that she had to come in wearing something that accentuated her ass and left it accessible to Greta. Lisa was a small-breasted blonde, a little on the skinny side, but she’d been blessed with a gorgeous, appleshaped ass, to which her husband, Terry, paid scant attention. He’d never kissed it, spanked it, or even praised it, much less fucked it, as Lisa often wished he would. At most, he’d hold on to it sometimes when she was on top, his fingers never seeming to come within an inch of her asshole. She was technically still a back-door virgin, though Greta had over the past year butt-fucked her with fingers, vibrators, and an assortment of toys.

When she was naked, Lisa slowly bent over to pick up her clothes, offering her ass to Greta. Sometimes this would earn her a spanking for turning her back on her mistress, while at other times…

“Cute,” Greta drawled. “Cute butt.”

“Thank you, Mistress.” said Lisa, then added, sincerely, “Not as beautiful as yours.”

That, as expected, earned her a relatively gentle swat on the cheek. “Did I say you could speak?”

“No, Mistress.”

Another swat. “Go and put those away, have a quick shower—three minutes, no more—then go and bend over the bed and wait for me.”

* * * *

The toys were waiting on the bed—fur-lined cuffs, spreader bar, slim vibrator, inflatable butt plug, bottle of passion fruit-flavored lube, and ball gag. There was also a glass of scotch and Diet Coke. Lisa knew she could remove any item she didn’t want used, but none of these were a problem. In fact, she was mildly disappointed not to see one of Greta’s strap-ons. Whips, crops, canes, paddles, and hairbrushes didn’t appeal to her, and she didn’t want to have to explain the marks to Terry, so although she loved being spanked, it had to be skin on skin, and Greta had agreed. Lisa took a mouthful of the drink, locked the spreader into place, put the gag into her mouth, then bent over the bed and cuffed her hands to the far side. She left herself enough slack that she could remove the gag in an instant, or fumble for the spare key taped under the bed in case of an emergency.

She was ready—slightly more than ready—when she heard Greta walk in behind her.

“Good,” purred her mistress. “Now, I only have a few minutes before my guests arrive, so I’ll have to make this quick.”

Guests? Lisa started, but she didn’t remove the gag.

“Some friends of mine,” Greta amplified. “Another mistress and her slave. I was thinking of leaving the door open so they can see your pretty pink ass, but none of them will see your face.” Lisa heard her pause to see whether there would be any objection, but Lisa only continued to listen. “Of course, some of them may want to play with your ass a little, the way I do. Nothing too rough, of course; no cocks, no whips, no toys that aren’t on the bed. It should be fun, don’t you think?”

Lisa knew that all she had to do was shake her head. Instead, she nodded, telling herself she could always change her mind later.

“Good,” Greta said and sat down beside her on the bed. She picked up the vibrator, lubed it up, then put another dab of lube onto her index finger. This dab she spread around Lisa’s twitching asshole, then slowly worked her slippery finger inside up to the first joint, then the second. Lisa whimpered around the ball gag as she began coming, and Greta removed her finger and reached for the vibrator. She rubbed Lisa’s clit with her other hand while inserting the vibrator inch by inch into her lovely ass. Lisa lost count of how often she came before the vibrator stopped buzzing in her butt, and only slowly became aware of the rather tentative knocking sound coming from outside the room.

“Sorry,” said Greta. “That should be the first of them. I’m going to shut the door. If it’s who I think it is, I’m going to let him rim me for a few minutes. Don’t worry, he’ll be cuffed to the chair, so he won’t be able to touch you, and gagged so he won’t speak. Of course, how much he hears is largely up to you.” She caressed Lisa’s ass, and gave it another swat. Lisa nodded. “I’ll be right back.”

* * * *

Lisa lay there in an erotic fog for what might have been a few seconds or the better part of an hour before Greta returned. She vaguely heard the chair creak as somebody sat, and heard the click of handcuffs being locked. Greta sat beside her again and proceeded to spank her on one cheek only until Lisa suspected half her ass was rose-red, the other half milk-white. She was on the verge of coming again when Greta stopped, and left the room to answer the door again. She heard muffled breathing from the man in the chair, and then the door opened again.

“Oh, wow,” said a young woman’s voice. “Who’s your decorator?” She laughed, then snapped, “What are you staring at, slave? Haven’t you ever seen a woman’s ass before?”

“Yes, Mistress,” said another young woman, meekly.

“Well? Have you forgotten what to do?”

“No, Mistress,” said the slave girl, a little hesitantly. She knelt behind Lisa, parted her cheeks, and said timidly, “You have a beautiful ass. Please, may I lick it?”

Lisa was startled—she’d worshipped Greta’s gorgeous ass with her lips and tongue for many hours since coming to her as a client, but had never been rimmed herself. “She’s Greta’s slave,” said the first woman, before Lisa could respond. “You ask her permission.”

“Please, Mistress Greta?”

Greta stepped forward, and gently ran her finger down the crack of Lisa’s ass, watching her tight little ring open slightly in anticipation. “Is she a good ass-licker, Naomi?”

“She’s enthusiastic, and I’ve done my best to train her,” said Mistress Naomi, “but she still needs practice.”

Greta nodded. “Show us.”

The slave lowered her face, kissed Lisa’s white cheek, then her still-tingling pink cheek, then ran her tongue back and forth between the two kisses, flicking it lightly over Lisa’s hot little hole. Lisa gasped slightly, but the gag muffled the sound. The licks became shorter, homing in on her puckered portal, until her tongue was circling the star-like creases and spiraling in towards the core. It felt strange and wonderful, and she was soon only vaguely aware of the voices in the background. Her asshole tightened as she began to come, and she began squirming on the bed, trying to rub her clit on the satin sheets, and the slave girl parted her cheeks and began licking a little faster with a little more pressure until Lisa felt the orgasm hit her like a huge wave. She lay there, basking in the afterglow from her orgasm, only vaguely aware of faint applause from behind her.

* * * *

“I could do with a drink,” said Greta as Naomi tugged gently on her slave’s leash. The young woman reluctantly stood, giving Lisa’s ass one last quick kiss that left a scarlet ring of lipstick on her cheek. “I should’ve asked you to bring your maid.”

“He couldn’t have made it,” Naomi replied. “It’s his anniversary. He’s taking his wife out to dinner.”

“Pity. He looks cute in his uniform. Does she know about you?”

“Darling, she sent him to me, and she tells him how much to tip me. She’s an angel. What about your other slave, here? Can’t you unchain him for a moment?”

“I’m not sure I could trust him not to touch himself if I did—or worse still, touch something else. Maybe even try diving into that lovely ass. He’s gotten quite worked up, watching.”

Naomi shrugged. “Slave, you know where the bar is. Get me a Midori.”

“Vodka, with lots of ice,” Greta added, and Naomi sent the girl on her way with a smack on the butt.

She returned a moment later with the drinks. Greta plucked an ice cube from her glass and ran it over Lisa’s ass cheeks until the ice had melted down to a lump a little larger than a gumball, with no corners or rough edges. She rubbed this piece of ice around Lisa’s asshole, watching it twitch, then slowly pushed it through her puckered hole. Lisa’s senses reeled from the sudden cold and the strange feeling of the ice melting inside her, but she made no attempt to speak, or to spit out her gag.

“It is a lovely ass,” Naomi agreed. She smacked her slave’s butt, and the young woman knelt between Lisa’s feet, spread her cheeks reverently, and began eagerly lapping at her brown rosette, rimming her and probing her hole, licking away the cold, her tongue feeling like a warm wet washcloth scrubbing her clean. Lisa squirmed, rubbing her hard nipples against the satin, and unconsciously pushing her ass up against the slave’s face.

“Very fuckable,” said Greta. “You wouldn’t believe her fool of a husband has never even kissed it, would you?”

“What?”

“Uh-huh. Serves him right if he starves, with a wonderful dish like that lying beside him every night.”

The slave twisted her tongue into a point, and pushed a little harder with it until Lisa’s hole began to pucker invitingly. She pushed deeper, gently probing and then enthusiastically tongue-fucking her ass. Lisa continued to squirm as the ice melted away to water inside her and the girl’s tongue slowly opened her darkest, most secret place, but after several minutes, she was on the edge of coming again. She held back. A faint twinge of guilt was spoiling the pleasure: letting a strange woman, whose face she’d never even seen, give her multiple orgasms seemed perilously close to adultery. After several minutes, Naomi tugged on her slave’s leash, pulling her away. “I don’t know what you’re doing wrong,” she hissed, “but believe me, you’ll suffer for it.”

Greta stroked Lisa’s pussy and inner thighs, trying to encourage her to relax enough to come again, but Naomi came to the rescue. She lubed up the butt plug, which slid easily up Lisa’s glorious ass, then squeezed the ball to inflate it while Greta started spanking her. The twin sensations of the toy growing inside her and the sweet, sharp sting of the slaps on her cheek pushed Lisa over the edge in only a few seconds, with another mind-bending orgasm following almost immediately. When Lisa opened her eyes again and tried to focus, Greta gave her a sharp slap on her other cheek and said, “We’re going into the next room,” she said. “I’ll leave the plug in your butt, with the bulb by your knee. If you want it to be bigger, just press down on the bulb. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

* * * *

Lisa lay across the bed, feeling satisfied but not quite satiated, fantasizing about the slave girl rimming her while she rode Terry’s cock. Every so often, she inflated the butt plug just a little more. She was sure Greta hadn’t finished with her ass yet, and wanted to be ready for whatever her magnificent mistress had in mind. She lost track of time completely, and was startled when the door opened and the guests returned. Greta deflated the dildo and removed the spreader bar while a beautiful redhead, naked but for afterglow, flopped onto the bed next to Lisa. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Karen, Naomi’s slave. I hope we get to do this again some time. ’Bye.” She kissed her way back down Lisa’s back, took one long last lick down between her ass cheeks, then bounced out of the room.

Greta walked around the bed, and unlocked her handcuffs. As Lisa removed her gag, Greta stepped out of her dress and waved her beautiful big brown breasts in front of her face. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. Lisa reached for her tits, but Greta shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “I’ve found the perfect toy for that hot little ass of yours. Turn around, look behind you.”

Lisa peeked over her shoulder, then did a double-take. The man handcuffed to the chair behind her was her husband Terry, wearing only a ball-gag and a pair of Greta’s crotchless panties, from which a glistening erection protruded toward the ceiling.

“He’s been coming here for a month,” said Greta. “Naomi sent him here when she realized who he was. He didn’t have the courage to ask you if you’d like some anal action, and you didn’t have the courage to ask him.” She shook her head. “So I decided to show him. Now, will you two for fuck’s sake talk to each other in future?”

Terry mumbled something through his ball gag. “Sorry,” said Greta, and walked over to him to remove his gag and cuffs. “I ought to spank you both until you can’t sit down for a week, unless one of you has a better idea.”

“Please, Mistress,” said Terry, his mouth dry, “may I fuck my wife’s ass first? Then you can do to me whatever you want.”

Greta managed not to grin. “I think you should ask her, don’t you?”

“Please, may I fuck your beautiful ass?” he croaked. “I’m sorry I’ve neglected it so long, and I’ll try to make it up to you.”

“Please hurry,” whimpered Lisa. “I’m about to come just from looking at you.”

He staggered forwards, knelt behind her, and rubbed the head of his cock against her asshole. It opened for him instantly, and he slipped all the way inside her in one smooth motion. His cock was smaller than the butt plug had been, but to Lisa it felt as though it was filling her completely, and when he came after only seven thrusts, the new sensation of semen jetting into her ass made her come so hard that she blacked out. He collapsed on top of her, and they lay huddled there together, oblivious to everything else until Greta flopped down onto the bed beside them, holding out her breasts for them to suck. Terry and Lisa took one hard, dark nipple each and sucked eagerly while their mistress fingered her clit and pushed the vibrator into her own ass. She shrieked as she came, something her clients had never heard before, and a faint blush crept across her dark skin.

* * * *

“Okay,” Greta said, when she’d recovered her breath. “Get dressed and get out.”

Terry and Lisa looked at each other uncertainly, then back at her. “Can’t we see you again, Mistress?” asked Lisa.

Greta blinked, and propped herself up on one elbow. She’d assumed this act of charity would cost her two clients, but neither of her slaves seemed inclined to leave. “What?”

“Please?” said Terry.

Greta drew a deep breath. “You still want to be my slaves?”

“I’ll be your slave as long as you want me,” said Lisa, glancing at Terry nervously. He nodded.

“Together, or separately?”

“As you wish, Mistress.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “Come and see me next Friday. Both of you, seven o’clock.” They nodded. “Why are you still here? I told you to hit the showers! And shut the door on your way out!”

Greta watched as they walked out, arms around each other and idly fondling each other’s asses. As soon as the door was shut, she began masturbating again. One of these days, she thought, she’d have to find a slave who gave her what she wanted.

Contributors

Kris Cherita has written smut for D-Cup, Gent, and Hustler Busty Beauties under a variety of noms de porn, and thinks the best thing about writing smut is the research, even the bits you can’t claim on as tax deductions.

Elizabeth Coldwell is the editor of the UK edition of Forum magazine. Her stories have appeared in anthologies including Best SM Erotica 1 and 2; Yes, Sir; and Naughty Spanking Stories 2. She believes bad boys need to learn to play nicely.

I.G. Frederick has gotten paid for her writing for more than a quarter of a century and has specialized in erotic fiction and poetry for the last seven years. Her novels, Broken and Shattered, are currently available online and at select bookstores. She also has had numerous short stories and poems published in print and electronic anthologies and magazines. In addition to sharing her words on paper, she teaches workshops on topics from writing and marketing to ways to spice up your sex life. More information available at http://eroticawriter.net

Ralph Greco, Jr. is an internationally published author of short stories, plays, essays, button slogans, 800-number phone sex scripts, children’s songs and SEO copy. Ralph is also an ASCAP-licensed songwriter and lives in the wilds of suburban N.J., where he attempts to keep his ever-expanding ego in check.

Alex Picchetti used her psychology minor in university as an excuse to explore the many quirks of human sexuality, and hasn’t stopped exploring them since. She lives near Toronto with her three spoiled cats. This is her first publication.

Jean Roberta teaches English in a Canadian prairie university and writes fiction (erotic and otherwise), research-based articles, opinion pieces, and reviews. More than sixty of her erotic stories have been published in print anthologies, and Eternal Press (www.eternalpress.ca) has released her single-author collection of erotic stories in various genres and flavors, Obsession (2008). Other recently-published stories include Smoke, (a new look at an old demon) in Best Fantastic Erotica (Circlet Press, 2008) and The Personal Is Political (about the first lesbian Prime Minister of Canada and her legal wife in 2013) in Coming Together: With Pride (Phaze, 2008). She is also a staff reviewer for the site “Erotica Revealed” (www.eroticarevealed.com). She has a column, “Sex Is All Metaphors,” on the web site of the Erotic Readers & Writers Association (www.erotica-readers.com). Her own Web site is www.JeanRoberta.com.

A resident of Arizona, A. Silenus spent his early years in Britain. In addition to fiction, he writes features and other oddments for various print and online media. His erotic short stories have appeared in Forum magazine in the UK, at the online Ruthie’s Club, and in The MILF Anthology, published by Blue Moon Books.

Cecilia Tan is the author of several books of erotic short stories, including White Flames, Black Feathers, EdgePlays, and Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords. She is the founder of Circlet Press, Inc., and has edited erotica anthologies for Circlet, Masquerade Books, Carroll & Graf, Thunder’s Mouth Press, and Blue Moon Books. Find out more at www.ceciliatan.com.

Peter Tupper is a journalist and writer in Vancouver, BC. His erotica has been published in S/M Futures and Like a Wisp of Steam. He blogs at www.historyofbdsm.com

Sage Vivant founded the original Custom Erotica Source in 1998 and sold it to new owners in 2007. She is the author of Your Erotic Personality, and with partner M. Christian has edited five erotica anthologies, including Amazons, Garden of the Perverse, Confessions, The Best of Both Worlds; Bisexual Erotica, and Leather, Lace, and Lust. Her stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies worldwide. Visit her at www.sagevivant.com and learn how to revel in your erotic personality.