Bottoms Up

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  The man pulled himself off the couch and looked like he was going to say another word and then some.

  “I’ll call the cops,” Oscar said. “They’ve got nothing better to do. Get out of here.”

  The man took a few steps away from Oscar, walking around him the long way to get to Holly again. Oscar thought he was going to have to interfere until he saw money changing hands, his to hers. Holly didn’t count it and didn’t say anything, but had a purse handy to put it in.

  Neither of them said anything until the man had left, and in the meantime Oscar lit a cigarette. He only smoked when he was in the city. Holly reached for one of her own, and he lit it for her, nodding at the ashtray after snapping his lighter shut.

  “You shouldn’t smoke so many cigarettes.”

  “It’s not so many. I only smoke them one at a time.”

  “So,” Oscar said. “How did you get in?”

  She looked away from him, the first time she’d acted self-conscious. It made her seem younger. “I took your spare key when I was here with my parents. That time.”

  He nodded. It hung in the kitchen on a little nail, nothing to identify it, but no pains to hide it either. “And you’re not in school?”

  “Of course I’m in school,” she said. “But not at night.”

  “But—ah, I suppose bringing a man to your dormitory is out of the question.”

  “No. But bringing this one was.”

  “And does he not have a home of his own?”

  “I imagine he does.”

  He tapped ash in the ashtray. “I should call your parents. I might. I always liked your mother.”

  “She doesn’t like you. She thinks you bought this apartment to keep a woman.”

  “I did. It didn’t work.”

  “She also sniffed at the fact that it isn’t faced with Hummelstown brownstone. She grew up in Harrisburg.”

  “Still. I don’t know that I should hold that against her enough to hold this from her.”

  Holly sighed and collapsed on the couch. It wasn’t the childish collapse that attends an imminent tantrum. It looked like frustration, her hair touching her knees when she bent over, her hands in fists. She had small, delicate hands, and it bothered him to see them in fists. The couch was going to smell of her perfume, and the sheets probably already did.

  “If you’re going to meet with the young man often,” he said, “you should have gotten your own place.”

  “I had one, but—well.”

  “Well?”

  “It belonged to a man who liked me. He doesn’t like me very much anymore. I guess you don’t like me anymore either.”

  “Not enough to buy you an apartment, I don’t.”

  “Har har.”

  “Why don’t I like you, Holly?”

  She nodded at her purse, sitting on the floor with its strap twisted by chance into a shape that reminded him of a clef.

  “There are other ways to earn a living,” Oscar said. “Particularly when your family is well off.”

  “Not so well off,” she said. “And now you really can’t call my parents, because they’d kill me if they knew I told you that.” Kill her. This generation with its dramatics, its posturing.

  “The mill?” he asked. “And your mother’s riding in a new car.”

  “Don’t ask me where it comes from,” Holly said. “I only know there isn’t much more of it. Mother doesn’t even want me to finish school. I’m to marry and marry well. Women in my family don’t work.”

  “I have a feeling some of them work very hard.”

  “Har har.”

  Oscar sighed into his hand. “I need a shower. I need to sober up, and I’ve been grimy since the train. You need to stay put until I get out. All right?”

  “You’re not worried about me being in your home unattended?”

  “It’s better than the attendance you had when I got here.”

  She made a face at that, and he turned away from it and showered longer than it took to get clean. The shower was one of the things he liked more at the apartment than the house. The bathroom fixtures were brass, the water pressure a little higher than at home. He toweled off and redressed, changing his shirt despite the hour.

  Holly was sitting on his bed when he exited the bathroom, as he had supposed she might be. Her purse was on the bedside table, and she had taken a hairbrush and compact from it and left a Sen-Sen wrapper next to them. She was undressed again and didn’t keep her back to him now. Her panties were simple and black but he would bet they had cost someone more than a college student had to spend. Her hair was less disheveled than it’d been when he’d gone under the water, and though it was long enough that she could have let it cover her breasts, she had tossed it behind her back instead and let him see them, high and large on her frame. She had good breasts, and it wasn’t the first time he’d noticed. He wondered if she knew that, if women knew when you were looking and what you wanted to see. She sat facing him, with her legs tucked under her so that she sat on her heels with her back nearly straight, which displayed her thighs well.

  “Holly,” he said. He didn’t finish buttoning his shirt, but walked to the bar by the bedroom door. It wasn’t much of a bar, just a high cherrywood table with a rack for glasses, an ice bucket currently empty, and the liquor. He had put it there instead of in the living room when he’d hoped to have a woman living here, as a cheeky suggestion of where they’d be spending their evenings. He’d left it there when she’d turned him down. “Do you want a drink?”

  “I’m not a—what you think I am, I’m not that.”

  “You pick an odd way to let me know. Is that a yes or no? I’m going to have a drink. You won’t be drinking alone, and I prefer not to either, at this hour.”

  “Okay, then. Since you want to. I thought you needed to sober up.”

  “I sobered up.” He took two fresh glasses from the underside rack. “Gin or whiskey?”

  “Whiskey.”

  He liked that, and poured them each a glass of rye with Abbott’s bitters soaking a sugar cube. “There isn’t any ice. We’re roughing it. I could add water if you like.” He handed her the glass, and stayed near. When she looked up at him he got the feeling that she wanted to see where his eyes would roam, so he let them travel over her until he saw goose bumps on her arms.

  “There’s a word for what you think I am,” she said, “and it’s filling the room right now.”

  “There are several. I don’t expect you know them all yet.”

  “But I’m not, you see. That one thing, I don’t do that. I have, but not—not when I’m paid.” His eyes came back to hers, eventually. “When I’m earning, my panties never come off.”

  “When you’re earning,” he said, and clinked his glass against hers, made a toast out of it. “You sound like a man, the way you talk. Even if you don’t know all those words yet.”

  “There are things men will pay for, without that. Let me show you. If I show you, you’ll understand, and it won’t seem so bad.”

  “And you’ll know I can’t tell your parents then.”

  “You can watch me. I can touch myself while you watch. Men like that.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You can kiss me. Hold me. You can tell me what to say. You can even bite me.” She pushed one of her breasts up so he could see an old bruise, not from tonight, on the underside. “Or I can touch you. I can use my hands. Men like that. Men like me.”

  “Don’t tell me what men like. I’ve been one longer than you’ve known any.”

  “I can use my mouth.”

  “This,” he said, “this is somehow better than the other?”

  “I don’t like to except with men I know,” Holly said. “I don’t offer it and I say no if I’m asked. But tonight I would.”

  “Because you know me.”

  “I would then. I’d know what you like.”

  “You’d know one thing, Holly. One crescent of the moon.”

  “A crescen
t’s enough to sail by.”

  Oscar finished his drink before the sugar had had time to dissolve. It was grainy on his tongue, spicy from the bitters. He licked his lips. “Turn around.”

  She did, and he studied the lines of her bare back. He couldn’t claim to know girls her age anymore, to understand them, but guessed that she was a few pounds heavier than she wanted to be. He ran his fingers through her hair, and she shivered when his fingertips touched the back of her neck, before gently pushing her from her kneeling position until she was on all fours. A few pounds heavier than she wanted to be, but in actuality just right. Maybe he wasn’t giving her enough credit. Maybe she knew that.

  “I’ll stop when you ask me to stop,” he told her, and ran his palm along her bare back before smoothing out her panties. She flinched when he touched the fabric but relaxed when she realized he wasn’t going to try to take them off.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “Do you want me to touch myself?”

  “I want you to ask me to stop when you want me to stop,” he said, and smacked her ass hard.

  “Oh!” she said, and lurched forward.

  “Stay where I put you,” he said. “Keep your balance. Do I need to stop?”

  “No,” she said, and her voice was different now. That was satisfying. He hadn’t realized he was a little angry with her—or rather, hadn’t separated out his anger with Rebecca from his anger and confusion at Holly. That “no” and the change in her voice crystallized it, parted the waters.

  Oscar spanked her again. Her ass was firm and substantial, the kind of ass you like touching. She wasn’t a frail girl. She leaned forward again with the impact, and with that of the next blow, and then she managed to brace herself and stay in place, without quite going so far as to push herself back to meet his hand. He let up at that point, continuing to spank her but not nearly so hard. He rested his left hand on the back of her head and gradually worked his fingers through her hair until he could feel her small reactive movements and the way they caused her hair to be tugged in his grip a split second after every spank.

  “Do I need to stop?” he asked, and she just shook her head. He kept his hand moving, kept spanking her while gradually working the force of the blows back up to the level of that initial smack. His hand roamed from cheek to cheek to her upper thighs and back, and though her skin was becoming red, she began to enjoy it more.

  He picked up the hairbrush from next to her purse, and tightened his fingers in Holly’s hair. When he brought the silver back of the brush down on her ass, she squirmed in his grip and moaned. He could feel her soft hair rubbing between his fingers.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh.”

  He didn’t want to give her time to recover from the hairbrush, and kept it up, kept it coming down, a flush spreading across her skin. She shivered after each blow, and he ran the back of his hand, wrapped in her hair, against the back of her neck. She lowered herself on the bed, leaning on her elbows instead of her hands, rubbing her breasts against the sheets, her ass pushed up into the air as he brought the back of the brush down on it. He was about to ask her again if he needed to stop when he saw that it wasn’t overstimulation making her crumple like that: she was freeing up a hand. Without asking, without making a show of it, she pushed her hand between her thighs, inside her panties, and groaned. Her other arm moved up until her face was buried in the crook of her elbow, and he could hear her stifled, jagged breathing and half-formed syllables, just as clearly as he could hear her fingers moving wetly inside herself.

  “Good,” he murmured. He hit her harder and faster, as if challenging her to keep her concentration. She cried out but didn’t stop, and when she moved her arm to take a breath, he could see she’d been biting her lip. “Harder,” he said, both warning and ordering. His hand came down rapidly, clutching the brush and punishing her with it. Her hand moved stiffly as she moved her hips against it, not away from him but toward herself. Her grunts and exclamations had become a songlike groan now, modulated by both his hand and hers, as though they’d collaborated in playing her like an instrument.

  Soon enough, Holly said, “Stop,” falling upon her hand, rocking against it, and curling up on her side on the bed, shivering. Oscar put the brush back down, flexing his fingers, and watched her as she jerked with satisfaction. Finally she looked up at him, and her eyes were as changed now as her voice had been before. He ran the back of his hand along her cheek.

  “I know you now,” she said, “a little.”

  “Yes,” he said. He dipped his finger in her unfinished drink and painted her lower lip with whiskey. “Enough to sail by.”

  He was still standing alongside the bed and she was still on it. She pulled herself across the mattress, as if unable or unwilling to leave it, and unbuttoned his pants without asking or needing to be asked. He wondered how differently she felt now, how differently her mouth felt engulfing him, than if he’d let her do it when she first brought it up. He was sure it was different, but he’d never be able to compare. That window had closed and they’d moved past it to the other side. She made her little noises as she took him in her mouth with more hunger than expertise, and finished him off while he finished her drink.

  LONNIE’S LICKS

  Tenille Brown

  It was what they called addictive personality. Lonnie diagnosed me with it himself, him being a psych major and all. For instance, I always ordered the same takeout, and I was finicky about the type of movie I wanted to watch, and I had a favorite candy bar and a favorite sandwich, and I had a preferred side of the bed.

  I might have passed his judgment off as simply the perception of a shallow onlooker, except Lonnie was a friend, sort of. Well, maybe not as much of a friend as this tall, beautiful man who lived across the street and occasionally came over to fuck me.

  “Addictive,” Lonnie said. “You start something and you stick to it. You don’t care to try something new.”

  If this were true, I suppose one could say I had become addicted to his dick. And it was only his dick. His kisses were nice and he knew what to do with his hands, but he knew as well as I did that I put up with those other things just to get to the prize, that glorious, mahogany dick of his.

  I blamed it all on him, told him he should have never shown it to me. If he had wanted us to remain friends, if he had wanted me to show interest in any other part of him, he should have never disrobed with his curtain wide open, knowing I was directly across the street and that I did my writing in front of my window, and I tended to look directly in front of me when I was deep in thought.

  So, I confronted him about it; told him how he and his penis had distracted me so much I couldn’t write another word for the rest of the day and how, when I was supposed to be thinking about irony and symbolism, I was thinking about his package and how it might feel inside of me.

  Being the good and gracious neighbor that he was, Lonnie had apologized.

  I, of course, had accepted, but I was sure to let him know that there was the unsettled matter of him flashing me and costing me a full day’s work.

  So, Lonnie agreed to a bargain.

  The agreement was that we would fuck once, just get all that sexual tension out of the way and get on with our lives so that we could carry on like civilized people and be sensible neighbors, waving from across the street and borrowing cups of sugar and such.

  And silly me, I figured he would be a mediocre fuck at best—most beautiful people were. I had run across enough of them in my twenty-three years, and I had learned to expect to be disappointed.

  But I wasn’t disappointed with Lonnie. I wasn’t disappointed at all.

  In fact, I was in love, head over heels in love with his dick. It was gorgeous, solid and smooth. It was the perfect length and girth. He knew how to move. He knew when to give and when to take and he always came last, always.

  Lonnie’s dick made me forget he had hands or lips or even a face. He was the only man who could make me come using his dick alone, no
fingers, no tongue, no dildo.

  Of course, that type of pleasure always came at a price.

  His dick was terribly distracting.

  It made me wish he had fucked me badly. It made me wish he had been awful so that our relationship would become awkward and one of us would have to move. Then I wouldn’t think about it so much. It wouldn’t take up so much of my time and energy.

  But instead, I searched for reasons to fuck him. Reasons like…I hadn’t burned enough calories that day and it was too late to go to the gym…or I had this scratch in this really weird place, and if he could let me borrow his dick for just a minute I was sure I could take care of it.

  Instead, I was calling him over to look at a sink that wasn’t broken, or to taste my spaghetti with the special kielbasa sauce, or to read over a sample chapter, a sexy chapter, one that would have him all bothered and hot around the collar.

  But, in true Lonnie fashion, he was soon on to me.

  He mentioned it one morning after he had licked his way down my tummy, and I had viciously flipped him over and mounted him.

  Instead of giving in, he said, “You know what you’re doing, don’t you, Stacey?”

  “What do you mean, Lonnie?” I asked.

  He said, “You’re forming a habit.”

  I shrugged and said nonchalantly, “Well, everybody has ’em.”

  Lonnie nodded. “True. Then you should know what it is I’m doing, right?”

  I leaned in, winked, played with the sleeve of his shirt because I knew what it was he wasn’t doing. Then I said, “No, tell me, what?”

  “I’m enabling you.”

  I crossed my arms. “Damn, Lonnie, it’s your dick, for fuck sake. It’s not like it’s crack or anything.”

  And Lonnie propped himself up on his elbows, cocked his head, and looked straight at me. “Isn’t it?”

  And I couldn’t argue, so I just gave in. I said, “Well, fine, Dr. Lonnie. What do you think we should do about it?”