by D. L. King
You find your voice. “I always want to talk about art, Irene.” She’s very close, and you know she’s waiting to kiss you, though you’re not sure why.
Irene curves an arm around to rest her hand on your ass. “So do I. Though I admit I had something else in mind when I asked you to come home with me.”
You look deep into her brown eyes. “You know, Irene, if I were reading about this in a romance novel, I’d be pretty skeptical right now.”
Her fingers curl over your ass. “And why is that?”
“Handsome older butch top picks up bored femme at a party and then turns out to be a wealthy art collector? Come on, Irene. Next thing I know, you’re going to be taking me upstairs to show me a red velvet bedroom and your custom-built private dungeon.”
Irene’s expression flips rapidly through shocked to delighted. “I don’t do red velvet,” she says between peals of laughter, “And I only bought the place a month ago, so I haven’t had time to get a contractor for the private dungeon yet.”
“Uh-huh. And you’re sweeping me off to New York in your private plane when?”
She laughs so hard that she has to let go of your ass to wipe tears from her eyes. “No private plane, I’m sorry to say. But I can at least offer you business class.”
You smile as you close the inches between you, reaching up to put your arms around her neck. “Deal,” you say as you kiss her. Her laughter bubbles through the kiss for a moment before turning into a low growl as her hands find your ass and your hair again.
She kisses you long and hard enough to make sure she has your attention. When she stops, you open your eyes to find hers, warm and hungry. She holds you there for a few heartbeats, hand tight in your hair.
“Red, yellow, and green?” Irene’s hand slides over the curve of your ass.
“I thought it was blue, black, and white,” you murmur, flicking your gaze over to the Rothko and then back to her eyes.
She laughs again. “Is this the part where the hardened butch top finds out that the sweet blonde femme is actually a smart-assed brat?”
“A little from column A, a little from column B,” you say, leaning closer so that you can grind your hips against hers, your scalp turning fiery again as she twists your hair.
“Saucy little bitch,” Irene says, sounding happy about it. “Wait here.”
She disappears down a short hallway, leaving you in the living room. You want to walk over to the Rothko and touch it. It’s an impulse you have in art museums and galleries: if you could just put your fingers on the paintings and sculptures, you’d be able to feel them even more deeply than you already do. Perhaps your arm would sink into Rothko’s radiant blue. You are sure it would feel like plunging into warm salt water.
Irene returns carrying a wooden dining chair. A black bag is slung over her shoulder. She’s taken off her leather vest and boots and untucked the black dress shirt. As she sets the chair about six feet away from the Rothko canvas and drops the bag near it, you smile. It’s romantic, somehow, that she’s seen how the painting makes you feel. She fiddles with the chair’s placement, stepping behind it to look at the painting and then twitching it over an inch and brushing off its black leather seat. It’s a beautiful scene: Irene in her loose black shirt and jeans fussing over the chair’s sleek modern lines in front of Rothko’s floating rectangles. She catches you watching and smiles.
“All right, Trixie,” she says, stopping as she crosses the living room to flip a switch that bathes the painting in warm light. “Let’s try again: I assume you know how to safeword.” She reaches for your hand, turning it over to run her thumb over your palm.
“Sure. I’ll call red if I need to.” Irene’s deep breath isn’t quite a sigh of annoyance, but it pleases you anyway.
“Thank you. I don’t intend to go too deep or get too exotic tonight, but is there anything I should know now about your play limits?” Her thumb keeps stroking your palm.
“I need to not have to explain any visible marks at work. I don’t play with excrement, and I don’t like being gagged.” You like how carefully she’s watching you.
“No problem on any of those. Sex?” Her thumb’s strokes grow longer, moving from your palm to the inside of your wrist.
“I’d like that,” you say, watching her brown eyes grow even warmer. “Safely, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Irene’s fingers encircle your wrist and her other hand moves around your waist.
“I like your style, Irene,” you say, leaning forward so that your breasts brush against her shirt.
“And I like yours, Trixie.” She kisses you, slow movements of tongue and lips drawing you deeper into her arms. She brushes her lips over your cheek before she says: “Over to the chair, please.”
You walk over to the chair, heels clicking on hardwood floor until they’re muffled by the living room’s dark-gray area rug, its pile so thick that you have trouble balancing as your heels sink into it. The chair’s back is cool under your hand as you reach to steady yourself.
“Stand behind it, please,” Irene says from across the room. You put both hands on the chair’s back as you face the painting. Closer, its colors take on more intensity. There are subtle threads of black and red in the blue rectangle, and you can see now that the background is a rich yellow-tan, the color of dried grass.
She’s silent as she walks across the room to stand behind you. “Just stand, Trixie. Stand and look at the painting,” she says, voice near your ear.
You stand in front of the painting. The blue rectangle hovers over the black bar, over the white rectangle, over the polished wood floor. Irene finds your dress’s zipper. The painting disappears for a moment as she lifts the black silk over your head.
“Lovely,” she says, fingertips brushing down your back, over your black bra’s strap, over the black lace of your panties, and down to the edges of your garters and stockings. The black bar in between the painting’s two rectangles is off center. The more you look at it, the more it seems to float over the blue and white rectangles, as if it’s on a separate screen overlaying them. You wonder if the blue and white touch under the black bar.
You feel Irene’s breath on the back of your knee as she kneels behind you. She lifts one foot, then the other out of your heels. The rug settles under your feet. You realize you were wrong about the painting’s background: it’s not the color of dried grass at all. The more you look, the more it becomes a ripe wheat field in sun slanting under a thunderhead.
Irene unhooks your bra. Her fingertips ease the bra straps off your shoulders. You think about Rothko’s slanting sun on that wheat field. Irene’s touch becomes that light. You shiver.
Irene’s beautiful house is very quiet. The blue rectangle starts to quiver as you look at it. It’s not a balloon tugging on its string, not quite, nor a jellyfish, nor a cloud. Her knife’s small click as it opens breaks your breath for a second.
Her knife touches the back of your neck, just where white-blonde curls tickle if you turn your head quickly. You stand very still. The white rectangle wants to break free. It’s bestial. As the knife’s point drags down the knobs of your spine, you watch the white rectangle twist and try to stretch. It stays pinned down by the black bar.
She doesn’t speak. The knife finds the edge of your panties, blade’s point just inside the elastic, tracing around your ass’s upper curve. There are cracks in the white rectangle’s fur. You start to see threads of a deep red trying to trickle through.
Irene reaches around to rest her hand above your cunt’s swell; her palm cups over your pubic bone. Her shirt’s heavy silk presses against your back. When the knife reaches from where she let it rest against your hip, its point pricks for an instant as it digs under your garter’s tie. The ribbon parts. You can’t stop a tiny moan from catching in your throat.
“Shh,” she says against your ear. “Just look at the painting, my lovely.”
The knife swims to her other hand. More garter ribbons slice open. The blue r
ectangle, you realize, wants to let you in while the white rectangle wants to run away. Both ache under the black bar’s weight. You’re sad for them, sick with desire for the blue. Tears begin to press against the back of your eyes. Her knife rips through the garter belt’s lace. It falls.
She tugs your hips so that you have to bend, forearms now on the chair’s back. The knife’s point roams over your panties. It makes a small scratching sound as it moves over the lace. You think you can hear the white rectangle scrabbling in response.
You ache toward the blue; it aches toward you as Irene grabs the lace gathered against your cunt and pulls it away just enough to slide the knife under it. Your panties’ shredding is loud enough to make you and the blue rectangle flinch away from each other. You almost let go of the chair to reach for it, but Irene’s gloved hand moving over your cunt stops you. She finds your clit. Tears press harder in your eyes as she strokes you, her fingers beckoning the blue to come close again.
When you start to quake, she stops. “Not yet, my lovely. Just stay with the painting for a little while longer.” You feel slippery inside as you try to hold on to any single emotion, desire fraying into sadness and a longing that spills into the golden field tethering the blue rectangle.
She lets the knife cut your panties free. It licks along your ass, drawing lines only Irene can see. It scratches down the curve of your asscheeks, first one side, then the other. The white rectangle roars, showing its red crackle, as you feel blood well hot on your skin. You want to look back at Irene, to see if she’s watching the scratches as they call to the white rectangle. But you are sure if you move, something will go out of true that can never again be pulled back into shape.
Irene is still for several long minutes. You start to wonder if you could walk forward and rip the black bar off the canvas. When she moves, you feel her fingers against your ass, moving over your hole, spreading you open. The blue rectangle shivers as she works lube into your asshole.
You can’t see what she presses against your ass. She works it slowly into you, a roundness that asks you to open up, and then open up a little more. You don’t realize you’ve started crying until a tear blurs the painting. The blue is howling now as the white rectangle lashes and paces. Irene reaches up to pet the back of your head, making shhhing sounds as she pushes the roundness farther in, filling and opening you in the same instant.
“A little farther apart, please,” she says, tapping your thigh. You shift to open your legs wider. You hear her snap on a different pair of gloves. She reaches between your legs to spread your cunt open with one hand.
When the tip of her knife touches your clit, it takes every bit of willpower you have not to jump or shiver. You feel the blue rectangle pulse toward you as you struggle to keep your breath steady and your body perfectly still. Irene makes a small sound of pleasure as she traces your inner labia with the sharp knife. Your tears patter onto the chair’s leather seat.
Irene pushes your cunt open with her fingers. The sensation of being held open while feeling the pressure of the toy in your ass makes you feel like a rubber band wound too tight. You want her to fuck you, to let you come so that the feeling of being held taut, of fighting not to tremble, not to come, will stop. You want release, the wish for it pacing and lashing and storming as it builds to match the strain of the blue and white rectangles against Rothko’s black bar. You’re all captured, all prisoners.
The knife slips into your cunt slowly. You bite the inside of your lip, hard. If you move, she will slice you open. The blue rectangle keens in sympathy. You don’t move.
“So lovely.” Irene’s voice is next to your ear; her body is warm against your ass. You don’t know if she’s talking about the painting or the knife in your cunt. She holds it there as you hear her jeans’ fly unbuttoning. A moment later, the knife moves out of your cunt. You let yourself shiver then, violent tremors that aren’t quite an orgasm and aren’t quite panic, but which leave you feeling like you’re falling. The chair is blissfully solid under your arms.
Irene’s cock presses against your cunt’s lips. “Let go, Trixie,” she says softly as she thrusts into you, cock filling your cunt as her motion pushes the toy deeper into your ass.
You scream then. The blue rectangle funnels down your open throat, filling you completely.
CBT
Pascal Scott
I’ve never wanted a cock. Aesthetics are important to me and, in my view, a cock is ugly. The Ancient Greeks saw it differently. They gave Western culture the ideal of the athletic body—male, of course—and the notion that banging a youth is the apex of eroticism. Me, I would have been with Sappho, hanging with the ladies of Lesbos on that lovely isle, happily separated from the cock-and-ball population.
The first time I strapped on a dildo I felt embarrassed. It was protruding out of an old-fashioned leather harness, and I had inadvertently tightened the straps until they had cut off the circulation in my thighs. I felt uncomfortable and more than a little humiliated. This had been my girlfriend’s idea, not mine; I was just being a good butch. But then, when I looked up from the strange new appendage in my crotch and saw the look in her eyes—pure lust—I thought, oh. Well then.
Sometimes I’m a slow learner.
I meet Alexa at a workshop titled “Orgasm Denial,” sponsored by Altamont Femdoms. Now a femdom, in case you are one of those lesbians still licking the vanilla ice cream cone, is what we in the Leatherland of BDSM call a female dominant. If you stopped right now and had a wet dream about what a femdom would look like, you’d pretty much be picturing Alexa.
It’s late winter on the evening of the workshop; Alexa is the presenter. For the occasion she has slipped her sinewy body into thigh-hugging, black vinyl pants; a blood-red blouse with flowing sleeves that make her look a little like an erotic pirate; and high-heeled, laced-up, black leather boots. The colors I see are black and red and cream. The black is her hair: short and straight with severely cut bangs that reach her brows. The cream is her skin, blushed by nature at the cheeks and neck. And the red is her lips, glossed with some come-kiss-me shade of whatever it is femdoms are using these days to seduce innocents.
Notice I don’t say “innocents like me.” My days of innocence are long gone. I’ve been playing with the fire of D/s since my twenties, many decades ago now. I once received a private message from a femme on KINK—the Facebook for kinky folk—complimenting my profile picture for its “mature butch swagger.” Mature, I thought. Nice way of saying it. Checking out Alexa from my folding chair in the third row back, I’m guessing I am twice her age.
We have seated ourselves in the bourgie living room of a mountaintop home outside the city limits. The home belongs to the group’s organizer, a red-haired sadist named Mistress Kate. There are about twenty of us in attendance, mostly femdoms and a few submissive men like the bald-headed husband of our hostess. I am the only lesbian of the bunch of mostly middle-aged, self-styled “heteroflexibles.” The way I feel about all the labels out there these days—bisexual, pansexual, genderqueer— is what the kids used to say, whatever. I miss the days when straight knew it was straight, and a lesbian was a lesbian was a lesbian. But that marks me as a dinodyke so I usually keep my opinion to myself, covered by a nonchalant “cool” in response to whatever I hear.
Alexa glances up from the stack of white index cards in her hand, and our eyes meet. Her eyes are the color of dark chocolate, luscious, with long black eyelashes. One trouble with dark eyes: they’re hard to read. Blue eyes like mine reveal everything, all the little lashes of pain that life whips at you that can turn blue eyes into cracked marbles if you’re not careful.
There’s an immediate connection. The cards are transferred to her left hand as her right arm comes up and out, extended toward me in greeting as she strides over.
“Hi,” she says. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Alexa.”
I stand and shake her hand. It’s soft but gives a firm handshake.
“Pascal,” I say.
/>
“Pascal?” she repeats.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s French.”
“Charming,” she says.
Indeed. I miss most of what she says next because I’ve been pulled in by her charms, which are considerable.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I hear when I can concentrate again.
“Me, too,” I say.
It’s time. I sit down as Mistress Kate welcomes the group and gives the introduction. We learn that Alexa is a pro-domme and a frequent presenter at kinky conferences like DomCon and The National Leather Association Conference. Alexa stands beside Mistress Kate, surveying the room. Her gaze stops when it reaches me. She smiles. Mistress Kate finishes. Alexa clears her lovely throat. It begins.
Two hours later I have learned more than I ever thought imaginable about the art of orgasm denial. Good student that I am, I have taken notes in my pocket-sized notepad, which I will review later. I consider myself a competent practitioner of B/D but I am the first to admit that I am a novice to S/M. For some reason I don’t yet understand, my play partners have always been averse to receiving pain. That is until recently, when I happened into a relationship with an attractive masochist. It is with the deliberate intention of improving my nascent sadistic skill set that I have sought out workshops like Alexa’s. Orgasm denial seems to me like the most sadistic practice ever devised.
But why? you may be asking. Why would you ever want to deny a woman her orgasm?
Let me put it like this. Suppose I’m a mystery writer and I’m writing a story about a murder. I know who did it but you don’t. Yet. It’s my little secret that I’ll share with you when I’m ready. When I’m ready, not when you’re ready. You I want to leave hanging in suspense. I’ll do this by teasing you with clues.
There was a dildo found by the body. It was slick with lube and smelled like a woman’s juices.
Then I’ll check in with you. Did that make you wet? Does that make you want it? It does? But no, baby, not yet. I’m in charge here, not you. You don’t come until I say you can come.