When I stop at the foot of our bed and turn to look at her, she is less smug than she was before. “You have not come close,” she says.
“To what?”
“You’ll know when you get there.” She sits cross-legged, waiting for my next move. We are, I think, very large chess pieces. I cup her chin with my hand, pulling her mouth open. I slide two fingers deep, to the warm soft at the back of her throat. She tilts her head back, her hands holding my ass as I begin to slide my cock in and out of her mouth with slow, deliberate thrusts. Every now and again, she closes her mouth slightly, letting her teeth graze against my shaft. I slide my fingers through her dark hair, closing them into tight fists. Sasha brings one of her hands to my cunt. I grunt, try to twist away, but she is steady and unforgiving, sliding her fingers into me as I slide myself into her. I thrust harder, faster. She makes muffled coughing sounds. After I come, I stagger. Sasha wipes her lips with one thumb. She swallows. She waits for my next move. I’m not sure, but I think I hear her say, “Check.”
Sasha hates having her pussy licked. Nothing gets her angrier than when I tie her down and lie between her thighs, lavishing my tongue across her swollen pussy lips and hard nub of a clit. She won’t speak to me for days afterward, but she also never uses her safeword to stop me. When pressed, she says that it bores her and lacks purpose. But she comes when I put my mouth on her, and it’s the only time she makes any real sounds—high-pitched moans that she utters at a staccato pace. I pull her onto the bed and slide my hands up her inner thighs. The muscles flex. I press my forehead against the mound of her pussy, breathing heavily. She smacks my forehead, but I push her arms away, sliding my tongue inside her cunt before drawing it up toward her clit. Sasha digs her heels into my back, just beneath my shoulder blades, far harder than necessary. When I look up, I see her head turned to the side, tears of anger threatening to spill over the crests of her eyelids. Sasha hates losing control.
“Do I have you where you want me to have you?”
“Fuck you,” Sasha says. It is a wonder she can get words out through teeth clenched so tightly. I thrust two fingers inside of her, deep and hard. She winces. I slide my fingers out, then drag them up her body, between her breasts, leaving a damp trail. I straddle her waist, squeezing her breasts together. There will be bruises here. I reach over to the night table and fumble for a pair of handcuffs. Defiantly, Sasha throws her arms above her head. I clasp the cuffs around each wrist. Sasha shrugs. I slide off the bed and tell her I’ll be back. I wait in the hallway just outside our bedroom. I can hear frustration in her breathing. She mutters unkind things about me.
I go to the den and turn on the television, loud, letting her hear it. Twenty minutes later, I hear footsteps. “Now we have a problem,” I say. She stands in the doorway, her hands cuffed in front of her. She looks lonely, abandoned. She is beautiful. I stand and quickly close the distance between us. Clasping her throat with one hand, I force her against the wall. I slap her face, once, then reach down between her legs, where she is wet. I turn her around and kick her legs apart. One of her cheeks is pressed against the wall, and her eyes are tightly shut. I rub my hand across her ass, pulling my fingers along the cleft before smacking that ass once, twice. She makes no sound. I smack her again, hard enough that the palm of my hand tingles. She stands on the tips of her toes, offering herself to me. I spank her until my arm is heavy and the muscles in my shoulder burn. We are both sweating. She is raw. Strands of her hair are plastered against her face. When I scratch her reddened ass, it leaves white streaks.
This time, when I slide my fingers inside her pussy, she moans loudly. “That’s fucking right,” I tell her. I call her my bitch and tell her I want to hear just how much she wants this. She raises her arms over her head, her cuffed fists resting against the wall. To every question I ask, she gives me the answer I want to hear. I twist her nipples with the fingers of one hand and stroke her clit in tight, fast circles with the fingers of the other. Her head rocks from side to side. I want to overwhelm her with stimulation. We are loud and vulgar. Our damp bodies come together and fall apart with sharp sucking sounds. She is liquid heat around me, and I want to reach into the marrow of her with my lips, my fingers. In moments like these, her rough edges fade. Her arrogance retreats. Her body feels incredibly small and fragile. She is truly mine. I sink my teeth into her left shoulder, biting through the sweat and skin, then circling my tongue over the indentations. I kiss the back of her neck and slow the rhythm of my hips.
Suddenly, I want to be gentle with her. As if she can sense what I’m thinking, Sasha says, “Don’t,” her voice hoarse, almost trapped. The tension in her body begins to slacken. When she comes, I can feel her pussy pulsing around my fingers. Her body heaves with sobs, and slowly, she falls to the floor. I look down at her, smiling. She is clearly tired, but she knows what to do. Her face shines; her lips are slightly parted. She lowers her mouth to my boots. She affords me the proper gratitude. She moves her lips upward as she pulls my pants around my ankles. She takes the most sensitive part of me into her mouth until I can hardly stand. And when I am spent, I am the one leaning against the wall. She lies at my feet, bent and slightly broken, her arms wrapped around my legs. I touch the top of her head. Before long, I will help her up, carry her to bed, hoping I have inched closer to that place she might never let me reach.
Gospodar
by Garth Greenwell
It would have made me laugh in English, I think, the word he used for himself and that he insisted I use for him—not that he had had to insist, of course, I would call him whatever he wanted. It was the word for master or lord, but in his language it had a resonance it would have lacked in my own, partaking equally of the everyday (Gospodine, my students say in greeting, mister or sir) and of the scented chant of the cathedral. He was naked when he opened the door, backlit in the entrance of his apartment, or naked except for a series of leather straps that crossed his chest, serving no particular function; and this too might have made me laugh, were there not something in his manner that forbade it. He didn’t greet me or invite me in, but turned without a word and walked to the center of what I took to be the apartment’s main room. I didn’t follow him, I waited at the edge of the light until he turned again and faced me, and then he did speak, telling me to undress in the hallway. Take off everything, he said, take off everything and then come in.
I was surprised by this, which was a risk for him as for me, for him more than for me, since he was surrounded by neighbors, any of whom might open their doors. He lived on a middle floor of one of the huge Soviet-style apartment blocks that stand everywhere in Sofia like fortresses or keeps, ugly and imperious, though this is a false impression they give, they’re so poorly built as already to be crumbling away. I obeyed him, I took off my shoes and then my coat and began to undo the long line of buttons on my shirt, my hands fumbling in the dark and in my excitement, too. I pulled down my pants, awkward in my haste, wanting him and also wanting to end my exposure, though it was part of my excitement. It was for this excitement I had come, something to draw me out of the grief I still felt for R.; he had left months before, long enough for grief to have passed but it hadn’t passed, and I found myself resorting again to habits I thought I had escaped, though that’s the wrong word for it, escaped, given the eagerness with which I returned to them.
I made a bundle of my clothes, balling my pants and shirt and underthings in my coat, and I held this in one hand and my shoes in the other and stood, still not entering, my skin bristling both from cold and from that profounder exposure I felt. Ne ne, kuchko, he said, using for the first time the word that would be his only name for me. It’s our word, bitch, an exact equivalent, but he spoke it almost tenderly, as if in fondness; no, he said, fold your clothes nicely before you come in, be a good girl. At this last, something rose up in me, as at a step too far in humiliation. Most men would feel this, I think, especially men like me, who are taught that it’s the worst thing, to seem like a woman; w
hen I was a boy, my father responded to any sign of it with a viciousness out of all proportion, as though he might keep me from what I would become, a faggot, as he said, which remained his word for me when for all his efforts I found myself as I am. Something rose up in me at what he said, this man who still barred my way, and then it lay back down, and I folded my clothes neatly and stepped inside, closing the door behind me.
It was a comfortless room. There was an armoire of some sort, a table, a plush chair, all from an earlier era. These spaces are passed from generation to generation; people can spend their whole lives amid the same objects and their evidence of other lives, as almost never happens in my own country, or never anymore. And yet it was impossible to imagine friends or family gathering there. I stood for a moment just in front of the door, and then the man told me to kneel. I could feel him looking at me in the clinical light, inspecting or evaluating me, and when he spoke it was as if with distaste. Mnogo si debel, he said, you’re very fat, and I looked down at myself, at my thighs and the flesh folded over them, the flesh I have hated my entire life, and though I remained silent, I thought Not so very fat. It was part of our contract, that he could say such things and I would endure them. I wasn’t as fat as he was, anyway: he was larger in person than in the photos he had sent, as you come to expect, larger and older, too; he was as old as my father, or almost, anyway nearer to him than to me. But he stood there as though free of both vanity and shame, with an indifference that seemed absolute and, in my experience of such things, unique. Even very beautiful men are eager to be admired, wherever you touch them they harden their muscles, turning their best angles to the light; but he seemed to feel no concern at all for my response to him, and it was then that I felt the first stirrings of unease.
He neither spoke nor gestured, and the longer he appraised me, the more I feared that having come all this way I would be told to leave. It wasn’t the lost time I would resent, but the waste of the anticipation that had mounted in me over the several days I had chatted with him online, an anticipation that wasn’t exactly desire, as it wasn’t desire that I felt now, though I was hard, though I had been hard even as I climbed the stairs, even in the taxi that had brought me there. He was an unhandsome man, though in the way of some older men he seemed solid in his corpulence, thick through the chest and arms. His face was blunt-featured, generic somehow; it was clear that he had never been attractive, or rather that his primary attraction had always been the bearing he had either been born with or cultivated, the pose of uncaring that seemed to draw all value into itself, that seemed entirely self-sufficient. He would never be called a faggot, I thought, whatever the nature of his desires.
Then, to my relief, Ela tuka he said, come here, having decided to keep me, at least for a while. When I began to rise he snapped Dolu, stay down, and I moved across the space on all fours, the carpet featureless and gray and coarse. When I reached him, he took my hair in his hand and lifted me up onto my knees, not roughly, maybe just as a means of communication more efficient than speech. I had told him I wasn’t Bulgarian in one of our online chats, warning him that when we met there might be things I wouldn’t understand, but he had asked none of the usual questions, he seemed not to care why I had come to his country, where so few come and fewer still stay long enough to learn the language, which is spoken nowhere else, which even here, as the country shrinks, is spoken by fewer people each day; it’s not difficult to imagine it disappearing altogether, the language and the country both. We’ll understand each other, he had said, don’t worry, and maybe it was just to ensure this understanding that he had taken me in hand, firmly but not painfully guiding me to my knees.
He let go of my hair then, freeing his hand to move down the side of my face, almost stroking it before he cupped it in his palm. It was a tender gesture, and his voice was tender too as he said Kuchko, addressing me as if solicitously and tilting my head so that we gazed at each other face-to-face; his fingers flexed against my cheek, almost in a caress. I leaned my head into him, resting it on his palm as he spoke again in that tone of tenderness or solicitude, Tell me, Kuchko, tell me what you want. And I did tell him, at first slowly and with the usual words, reciting the script that both does and does not express my desires; and then I spoke more quickly and more searchingly, drawn forward by the tone of his voice, what seemed like tenderness although it was not tenderness, until I found myself suddenly in some recess or depth where I had never been. There were things I could say in his language, because I spoke it poorly, without self-consciousness or shame, as if there were something in me unreachable in my own language, something I could reach only with that blunter instrument by which I, too, was made a blunter instrument, and I found myself at last at the end of my strange litany saying again and again I want to be nothing, I want to be nothing. Good, the man said, good, speaking with the same tenderness and smiling a little as he cupped my face in his palm and bent forward, bringing his own face to mine, as if to kiss me, I thought, which surprised me though I would have welcomed it. “Good,” he said a third time, his hand letting go of my cheek and taking hold of my hair again, forcing my neck farther back, and then suddenly and with great force he spat into my face.
He pulled me forward, still holding my hair, and pressed my face hard into his crotch, hard enough that it must have been as uncomfortable for him as for me; any pleasure we took would be an accident, or a consequence of some other aim. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t feel pleasure; I had never stopped being hard, and when he said to me Breathe me in, smell me, I did so eagerly, taking great gasps. I had felt it before, too, when he spat on me it was like a spark along the track of my spine, who knows why we take pleasure in such things, it’s best not to look into it too closely. He was feeling it, too, I could feel his cock thicken against my cheek, then lengthen and lift; there had been no change in it during my long recitation, that catalog of desires I had named, but now at our first real touch he grew hard. He kept one hand at the back of my head, gripping my hair and holding me in place, though there was no need, as surely he knew; but with the other he was reaching for something, as I could tell from the shifts in his balance and weight, and when he pulled me away from him, he slipped it quickly over my head. It was a chain, I realized as I felt it cold against my neck, or rather the kind of leash you use with difficult dogs, and immediately he pulled it tight, letting me feel the pinch of it. This didn’t excite me, it was part of the pageantry I was indifferent to, but I didn’t object; I assented, though he hadn’t sought my permission or consent. And then he took another chain, this one shorter and finer, with little toothed clamps at each end, which (using both his hands, letting the leash fall free, since after all I wasn’t an animal, I didn’t need to be bound) he attached to my chest. It was the first real pain he had caused me, it made me suck in my breath, but it wasn’t too much pain, and not unexciting; a thrill ran through me at this, too, and at what it promised.
Dobre, he said when he had finished, good, though he was speaking of his own work now and not of me. He took up the larger chain again and pulled it tight, twisting his wrist to gather up the slack, which he wrapped around his curled fingers until they were nearly flush against my neck. He was putting me on a short leash, I thought, though I was thinking more of his cock, which I was eager for now, perhaps because of the pain at my chest, which was more than pain, which was excitement too, as was the tightness of the chain around my neck, in which I felt the strength of his arm keeping me from what I wanted. Whatever chemical change desire is had taken hold and I was lit up with it, so that after all I did strain against the leash, he had been right to make it so short. It was a kind of disobedience but a kind he would like, and even as he tightened his grip on the chain I heard him laugh or almost laugh, a slow, satisfied chuckle. It was a sound of approval, and I glowed with it. She wants something, he said, still chuckling, and he lifted his foot to my crotch, feeling my erection as I knelt before him, she likes it, and then he used his foot to pull my cock do
wn, letting it go so that it snapped back up, making me flinch. Then his foot moved lower and he placed his toes beneath my balls, which he fondled roughly, flexing his ankle until there was not quite pain but an intimation of pain. He was dulling my pleasure, I thought, not removing it entirely but taking off its edge.
But he didn’t take off its edge, not really, and when there was a slackening in the leash I lunged forward, like the dog he called me. There wasn’t anything special about his cock, it was solid and sizeable and thick, but none of these to a remarkable degree, and he had shaved himself there as all men here do, which I hate, the bareness of it is obscene somehow, I can’t accustom myself to it. But I was eager, and as I took him in my mouth I felt the gratitude I nearly always feel in such moments, not so much to him as to whatever arrangement of things had allowed me what as a child I thought I would always be denied. It was large enough that I didn’t try to take all of it at once; eager as I was, there are certain preparations required, the relaxation and lubrication of passages, a general warming up. But immediately his hand was on my head again, forcing me down, and when it was clear that the passage was blocked, he used both of his hands to hold me, at once pulling me to him and jerking his hips forward in short, savage thrusts, saying Dai gurloto, give me your throat, an odd construction I had never heard before. This was painful, and not only for me, it must have hurt him, too. But I did give my throat, I found an angle that gave him access, and soon enough I relaxed and there was a rush of saliva and he could move however he wanted, as he did for a while, maybe there was pleasure for him after all. As there was for me, the intense pleasure I’ve never been able to account for, that can’t be accounted for mechanically; the pleasure of service, I’ve sometimes thought, or more darkly the pleasure of being used, the exhilaration of being made an object that had been lacking in sex with R., though that had had its own pleasures, pleasures I longed for but that had in no way compensated for the lack of this. I want to be nothing, I had said to him, and it was a way of being nothing, or next to nothing, a convenience, a tool.
Kink Page 13