Stripped Down

by Tristan Taormino

  I shook my head.

  There was a pause. I didn’t know what it was about her, but she seemed so different from the other girls I’d met before. There was a charming quirkiness in her voice.

  “Is your mother friends with my grandmother?” I asked.

  “Best of buds. Peas in a pod. Bridge partners for life.”

  Lucy sat on the bed and crossed her legs.

  “Did you like the deviled eggs?” she asked.

  I hesitated.

  “Be truthful. Everyone raves about Judy’s eggs, but what did you think?”

  “I didn’t like them. There was too much sugar.”

  “I agree, but it’s her recipe.”

  Moving around the room, she paused by the dresser and lifted a costume pink-pearl choker from a bowl and examined the clasp.

  “Oh, my god, these are vintage early sixties. Look at the clasp.”

  Holding it up to her neck, she looked at herself in the cloudy mirror over the dresser.

  “Most of the stuff up here is from the late fifties and early sixties,” I said. “My grandmother says it was the best time her life.”

  Lucy put down the choker and opened the closet door. I’d always thought it was a strange closet. It connected two bedrooms, the poles running lengthwise over the empty space. My grandmother had filled it with her old clothes. Becky and I used to sneak through the closet from the other side to surprise our mom in the morning.

  “Look at these clothes!” she exclaimed.

  She pulled out a dress and examined it.

  “This is a pink sheath dress with the matching pink jacket. Look at the rhinestone closure. We just studied this era at my school.”

  Digging deeper into the closet, she found an elegant ivory suit. Suddenly, she was changing into it. I averted my gaze, feeling a little flushed at the sight of her cleavage. She had a nice body, even nicer than Marissa’s. Her breasts were full, her rib cage narrow, and her stomach flat. She wore a plain white slip that looked incredibly sexy next to her creamy skin.

  The suit fit her perfectly. My grandmother would have had a stroke if she’d known someone was wearing it.

  “Go ahead. Try something on,” she said. “You’d look wonderful.”

  “Nothing would fit me. I’m too tall,” I said.

  Lucy smoothed the suit around her hips.

  “Who would have guessed your grandmother was once my size?” she said.

  I watched her undo her blonde hair and finger-comb it as it cascaded to her shoulders.

  Without warning, Lucy pushed aside the hanging clothes, darted through the closet, and opened the opposite door. Not wanting to go through there, I joined her by way of the hallway.

  In the other bedroom, there was still the old sewing machine against the wall, the children’s rocker with a needlepoint pillow, and the full-size bed with the blue bedspread. This was the room where Becky and I had always slept as kids.

  “I don’t like this room,” I confessed. “I’ve had bad dreams in here.”

  “Why’s that?” Lucy asked.

  “Becky and I used to think the attic was haunted. She used to keep her teddy bear in the rocker so nothing could come out and sit in it.”

  Walking over to the attic door, she opened it and stepped inside the dark room. I cringed, remembering my childhood monsters, but there was only silence. Curious, I followed her. Lucy pulled on the light string. I startled, but there were only some cardboard boxes and a dress dummy.

  “Honestly, I don’t think we should be in here,” I said. “And if she finds out you’re wearing her dress, she will blow her top.”

  “Okay,” said Lucy.

  To my amazement, she started to unbutton the suit. I didn’t mean for her take it off right here—I’d meant she should go back in the other bedroom and change back into her own clothes.

  Looking me in the eyes, she inched off the jacket and lowered the skirt. Once it was off, she put the suit on the dummy.

  Now she was just standing there in her slip, looking incredibly sexy. I could see the rise of her breasts as she inhaled and then let her breath out.

  She crossed the floor and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips lingered against mine. There was a tentative, gentle movement. Seconds seemed to stretch out. I started feeling that whole naughty, butterfly thing in my stomach, the feeling I used to get when I kissed girls in the back of movie theaters.

  Gently, she held my bottom lip between her lips. She knew how to kiss a girl, I realized. All sorts of emotions started raging through me, things I thought I’d buried with the memory of Marissa. I couldn’t believe I was feeling this with someone I barely knew. I broke the kiss.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  Lucy looked a little dazed. She bit her lower lip.

  “I’ve had a crush on you for ages,” she said, “ever since I saw your pictures in your grandmother’s photo albums. Then I heard those stories about Becky finding you with your girlfriend. You broke up with her, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  She cupped my face in her hands and kissed me again. This time her tongue touched mine. There was a sizzle. My knees went weak. She pulled away. I leaned toward her. I didn’t want her to stop.

  Kissing me on my second favorite place behind my ear, she brushed her lips against my skin. I felt as if I was melting into her arms. She started to unbutton my sweater, the little pearl buttons letting go of the blue wool. I let her. My cleavage was exposed. She pressed her hot mouth to my skin, pushing my sweater off my shoulders with her hands.

  She pulled me down onto the floor. The wood creaked. Lying on my back, I watched her lie beside me, and then her fingers were tracing the skin of my stomach while I gazed into her eyes. Sliding her fingers down between my legs, she gripped me through the fabric of my skirt. I gasped as she wiggled her middle finger around on what she wanted. A moan escaped me. Grabbing the hem of my skirt, she flipped it up and slid her hand under my panties. I couldn’t believe I was so wet.

  Staring up at the rafters, I felt her fingering the soft folds between my legs, working her way toward my inner crease. It felt so weird; lying here exposed only a few feet away from the bed that I had slept in as a child. Conflicting thoughts started jumping around in my brain.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this in here,” I said.

  She didn’t listen to me. She pushed aside my panties and entered me. There was no in and out movement like Marissa would have used. Lucy was looking for something else, her finger wavering inside me with a come here motion, sending my body into waves of pleasure. I started writhing on the floor as she touched the rough, spongy spot inside me.

  I giggled. I couldn’t help it. What she was doing felt so good. All the tension was leaving my body. My limbs felt light as feathers, my pelvis was a radiating sun of bliss. I was being transported to a place I hadn’t even known existed. I’d thought Marissa had taken me to new heights of pleasure, but she hadn’t even been close compared to this.

  There was a definite building of pressure inside me. I started to hold my breath. My body squirmed. My hands tried to hang on to the floor. My toes curled in my shoes. My body felt flushed. Another wave of pleasure hit me. Blood raced to my head. Colors danced in my eyes. For a second, I was blissfully unaware of my surroundings. Nothing existed but my orgasm.

  Then suddenly the room rushed back in. I heard the floor creak. Twisting myself away from Lucy, I craned my neck to see who else was in the room. To my horror, it was Becky. The look on her face said everything. She turned on her heel and fled.

  “Oh no,” I said. “She’s going to tell our grandmother.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lucy said.

  “How can it not matter? I haven’t even been here half an hour and I’m already fooling around with a woman upstairs.”

  “What do you think she and Judy have been getting up to?” she asked.

  My mouth opened in shock. Her words were sinking in. I remembered the smile my grandmother had given
the woman in the kitchen. That had to have been Judy.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “A couple of months.”

  I frowned. I had thought my grandmother loved my grandfather. I had never imagined her with anyone else.

  “It was time for her to move on,” Lucy said.

  I looked toward the door, imaging the scene downstairs as Becky told my grandmother what I was doing up here, and my grandmother responded.

  “What about us?” Lucy asked.

  I looked into her eyes, which were filled with expectation. Was it time for me to move on, too?

  “Your fingers are still inside me,” I said.

  ONLY A WOMAN’S TOUCH

  Debra Hyde

  Isabel knows what I need and she sees that I get it. If I grow cranky and irritable, she’ll harangue me to get my uptight butch ass to the gym. “Sweat that grumpiness away,” she’ll tell me. If I’m blasé and bored, I’ll hear, “Leslie, you’re an absolute bitch. Call your mother.” And she’ll pour on the guilt if I don’t follow through. “Your mama might be Cocoa Beach old, but she ain’t Puerto Rico poor like mine. And yours shops, too. You don’t know how lucky you are, to have a rich-ass mama who shops.” Yeah, Isabel’s one hell of a nag, but I’m as lucky to have her ride my ass as I am to have a mother whose fawning is actually therapeutic.

  Sometimes, though, I get into this certain funk, one that doesn’t respond to any of the usual remedies, one that’s worse than witch, bitch, and PMS combined. It’s hell on earth and it requires its very own salvation.

  I think it happens when I get stressed out too quickly. I get mouthy and my every observation bites with cruel sarcasm. I have absolutely no sense of how hurtful I’ve grown. Worst of all, I get so knotted with tension that I go stone cold and won’t let Isabel kiss or caress it away. My big, mean mouth is one thing, but shrugging Isabel’s touch from my body is quite another, one that she flatly refuses to accept. That’s when she puts her foot down and tells me I need a dose of Aunt Sissie’s miracle cure.

  Of course, I’m anything but receptive to the idea when I’m in monster mode, so Isabel sets the appointment and pushes me out the door, telling me not to show my face again “until you’re ready to be civil to me.” Can’t say I blame her. It’s her way of booting my bad ass out the door without having to toss my clothes from the bedroom window. Isabel knows best.

  So does Aunt Sissie.

  Aunt Sissie. I don’t know her real name, but she insists that everyone has a Sis somewhere in his or her family. Historically, a Sis was that eldest daughter in a large family who raised the youngest siblings as her busy working-class parents tried to make ends meet. The sibling equivalent of Mom, whatever her given name might have been before she took up the babies, Sis she became forever after, providing childcare duties when later generations needed help in a pinch. Once a Sis, always a Sis.

  How Isabel found my Aunt Sissie, I don’t know, but somehow my glitzed-up girl met the diva of domestic discipline, and the first time I mouthed off, I found myself rump-end up over Aunt Sissie’s knee, courtesy of my dear girlfriend.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into her,” she told Aunt Sissie that first time, “but I damn well hope you can whack it out of her.”

  Isabel whisked away in a dramatic huff and left me to discover release at the broad end of a wooden paddle that day. Oh, it wasn’t the release but it was a release, one capable of obliterating stress and ridding me of even the most mundane nuisances.

  It was also, to my surprise, a surrender I never knew I was capable of. That the hand of a woman could hurt so good and that she could so completely ignore my butch exterior and render the inner me mush, I never knew was possible. I discovered many things in my sessions with Aunt Sissie, but ultimately I learned that sometimes only a woman’s touch would do. Sometimes, only that woman’s touch would do.

  So I visit Aunt Sissie’s parlor roughly every three months. On a sparse wooden chair, I sit ramrod straight in my boxers and sleeveless tee, shoulders back, in a posture so proper it’s antiquated. My clothes are neatly folded and set aside nearby, shoes perched on top. Only in Aunt Sissie’s parlor would I take care to be so fastidious.

  There I sit, waiting for her to make her entrance, and when it happens her approach is always extraordinary. The click of her heels against the wood floors sounds sure and confident, and her June Cleaver dress rustles crisply as she moves. When she comes within sight, her lipstick is immaculate and stern. Her hair is perfectly coiffed, every short strand in its place, its platinum hue complimented by a strand of delicate pearls around her neck. Her white kid gloves complete her matronly ensemble. She is breathtaking and I can’t help but think that Eddie Haskell wouldn’t have dared to brown-nose this lady of the house.

  Some things, like my precise presentation and her vintage domestic appearance, never change from visit to visit. She stands by the fireplace, her hand upon the mantelpiece. She gazes at a vintage English cane that hangs above it, the trophy of another era. She has yet to look at me and, denied this, I find her overwhelming.

  “I understand you’ve been a rude, insensitive ass.”

  I have only one way to answer her: with an honest, embarrassed, “Yes ma’am.” In her presence, it’s all the confession I can muster.

  “I understand you need correction.” Finally, she looks at me. Her eyes are so steely that they render me impotent. Meekly, I lower my gaze to the floor.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She sighs. It’s an unhappy sound, a weary, disappointed “here we go again” sound. The only other person in my life to ever sigh like that had long ago fulfilled her maternal duty and now prefers cheerful shopping to familial fighting. But Aunt Sissie’s sigh affects me now as my mother’s did then. I cannot bear to hear it and it always fills me with immediate regret.

  Aunt Sissie sits down opposite me, enveloped in one of her grand upholstered chairs. Her posture is far more refined than mine, expertly natural to my poor imitation. I feel dumb in her presence.

  She smooths flat the skirt of her dress and, awkward though I am in posture, I’m schooled enough to know what to do when she finally pats her lap. I rise, approach her, and place myself there. Her thighs are firm beneath me and her dress smells of starch so fresh and liberally applied that it strikes me as a terrifying and unforgiving scent. It makes me quiver.

  She caresses my rump, fair fingers against my cotton boxers. I’m struck just then by what’s lacking: a collar around my neck, leather accoutrement and accents, verbal insults on her part and self-abasing pleadings on mine. None of this is present; we are not mistress and slave. Punisher and the punished, certainly. Guardian and ward, perhaps. Even parent and child. Within the safety net of our adult realities, we are archetypes in action.

  She pulls my underwear down, revealing my rounded ass. Lightly, she rakes her gloved fingernails over it and I gasp as a chill shoots up my spine. I can’t help it but right then, my cunt threatens to grow wet. It throbs in appreciation and her first slap only drives it further into admiration.

  Which amazes me, always. I never thought that I could respond to a spanking, that I could be a butch bottom, but when Aunt Sissie applied her hand to my ass, my dreams of being a stone-cold butch were dashed forever. What would my hard-body buddies at the gym say to that?

  Stinging blows make for fleeting thoughts, though, and Aunt Sissie’s busy hand works the sting of the slap into my skin in no time. Where others might work slowly and sensually, she works silently and businesslike, applying her hand to my flesh as if I’m little more than a chore that needs doing or a matter that needs rectifying. Perhaps, I tell myself, that’s why my mother gave up disciplining me: it had become too much work, just as two decades of cooking dinner had. Why I think of my mother just now, I don’t know, but the strangest realizations run through my mind when I’m under Aunt Sissie’s hand.

  Though the vigor of her hand is strong, it imparts more benign sensations than pain. It’s the preliminary
, not the pinnacle, and it feels good, so good that I can’t help responding to it. But as soon as Aunt Sissie sees my bliss, she stops.

  “Get off of me,” she demands. “I don’t want one of your puddles marring my dress.”

  I blush red hot as I rise from my station, embarrassed by her awareness of my arousal. I hold my underwear by the waistband to hide my wet culprit of a cleft while rubbing my ass. It is a sincere, childlike gesture, for I want neither to offend her nor to lose the burning sensation in my backside.

  My chastisement, I know, has only just begun and I wonder how she’ll proceed from this, the turning point where we move away from the ritualized, toward one of her many variations on this theme.

  Aunt Sissie points to her desk.

  “Bend over it and present yourself.”

  Her desk is below my waist, but I lower my torso to it as best I can and stick my backside out for her approval.

  Aunt Sissie, however, isn’t happy with my effort. She pushes me forward until my legs are right up against the desk—and my cunt’s pressed hard against the edge. But it isn’t until she pulls my underwear back over my rump and the first smack of the paddle hits that I sense just how difficult this chastisement might become.

  The paddle tears into me; it lacks its usual dull thud. Its strikes bite deep and its impact lasts longer. She’s using the studded side. Then, an additional element comes into play: the blows drive my cunt into the edge of the desk and its unyielding hardwood scrapes against my most hidden and vulnerable spot.

  The woman, I decide, is without mercy.

  Again with the stray thoughts. I should recount how the paddle creates pain that does not abate between blows. Or how I moan and cry out when an already tenderized spot takes a second blistering hit. Or how minutes feel like hours when your auntie’s arm has the strength and endurance of a titan. I should tell you how, magically, every blow somehow drives the stress and moodiness from me, body and soul, how I’m left expended, empty, purged of all that’s annoying to others. But all I can think of is how deliciously raw my cunt feels, crashing again and again into the abrading edge of the desk.