Strange Desires

by Joe Simpson Walker

  ‘Right. Mouth open.’

  Lace in one hand, Karla’s panties in the other, she jumped to her feet, a little unsteady on the foot with the loosened boot. She folded the panties, and lifted them to Karla’s mouth.

  Karla’s lips opened wide; but then she spoke. ‘Why do you want to take people’s pictures?’

  Adrienne paused.

  ‘I’d never seen my lover’s eyes at the moment of coming,’ she said. ‘That was what began it. And I told you, I’m fascinated by eyes. I love your eyes.’

  With her last words she thrust the folded panties into Karla’s mouth. She used the long bootlace to tie the gag in position, cinching it at the back of her head, then at the front inside her mouth, at the back again; finally knotting it tightly at the side of Karla’s face, against her cheek.

  Gagged and bound, Karla could only watch her kneel down again, kneel in front of her, in between her opened legs. She watched Adrienne bury her head deep between her bare thighs, forcing it in tight; she couldn’t see, but could only feel, as Adrienne’s mouth met her sex, horizontal lips kissing vertical.

  Gradually, like a storm in the distance, little thrills began to shudder from somewhere down low in her immobilised body. With a subtle artistry that could only have come from long practice, Adrienne’s tongue penetrated her: not slavering over her genitalia, but stroking them, tickling them, teasing them; fixing on one spot, massaging it for long minutes, building with patience and care to a pitch of excitement that reached the very brink of ecstasy; then stopping short, cheating her of release so abruptly as to render the pleasure a torment.

  Karla came out of a kind of dream and found that she was writhing in her bonds, groaning through her gag, and that it was all to no avail: she was tied so expertly as to make her struggles futile. The chair had shifted, that was all, and Adrienne had moved on her knees with it; there was no escape from the tongue, no escape from the sliver of flesh with the power to drive you mad. Oh, oh! She was starting again! Torturing her worse than ever! Karla’s head threw back and forth and rocked from side to side; she wrenched ferociously at the belt that held her wrists, and its refusal to budge was fuel to the flame of her body’s frenzy. Intermittently she saw what was in front of her eyes, the row of portraits on the walls: the faces, the hair, the gags, the eyes: and then, all of a sudden, she met one pair of eyes, the eyes of some girl she knew absolutely nothing about, not even her first name, and she looked into them with complete and utter understanding... At that moment a sound exploded from her throat, hit the gag, and burst right through. Every echo of the huge, empty room was wakened by her shriek of orgasm.

  ‘What do you make of this, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess it’s by someone who’s really into eyes.’

  It was just after lunchtime and the Sidewalk Gallery was very quiet. The speakers were a young man and his girlfriend, both of them long-haired, pierced, and dressed with a kind of careful disorder. Students, probably, thought Karla. Neither of them had noticed her enter the installation room.

  Adrienne had given her a call. ‘You’re hung. Go and look.’

  Surrounded by matt black board, much larger than life-size, her eyes looked out. They were blue, but one had a curious splash of green. She and Adrienne had had a private session in the photographic studio, using the same chair. Coils of unbreakable cable and big rolls of extra-heavy duty adhesive tape had lain ready to hand. Every five seconds, the automatic camera had clicked, then whirred as it wound the film onward...

  The student girl spoke again. ‘What’s it called, anyway?’

  Her boyfriend looked to see. ‘THE EYES, Nos. 1-20.’

  ‘Who’s it by?’

  ‘Adrienne Woodward. Never heard of her.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said the student girl. ‘But she must be really into eyes.’

  Karla smiled.

  The Victim, The Window And The Intruder

  The intruder had ransacked Deborah’s study. He’d thrown down her books from the shelf; emptied the drawers of her desk; up-ended her box of computer discs and scattered its valuable contents across the desk top, with a gesture of ignorant anger. Finally he gave her working chair a kick that sent it flying, to land with a crash on its side several feet away. Then he turned and looked again at his victim.

  Deborah lay on her side on the floor, just under the study window. She was a woman in her late thirties, dressed in a thin, sleeveless, short-skirted summer dress, and at that moment she was bound hand and foot. The bonds were tightly tied and consisted of a single piece of hard blue nylon rope. No more than eighteen inches of its length was strung taut between wrists and ankles, and so her knees were pulled back, forced to remain in a bending position as she lay. The intruder looked down at her without speaking; and had Deborah wanted to speak to him, a folded cloth and another piece of the blue rope held her silent.

  Then he moved. He grabbed up her computer, a portable laptop model; its power and printer leads held it back, and as he attempted to drag it free several smaller items were sent falling from the desk to the floor. He jerked the connections out of the machine and left the study, pulling the door shut behind him.

  Deborah was alone; and now that she was alone, her heart beat faster.

  She didn’t hear the intruder leave the house, but in her mind’s eye she saw him, going out by the front door, starting on his way down the quiet residential road. He wouldn’t hurry; and as he receded gradually into the distance, her mental point of view rose into the air, like a crane shot taken by a movie camera. If anyone saw him go, there was nothing in his departure to attract attention. He’d probably left the laptop in the hall; and even if the neighbours did still sometimes find it gossip-worthy that a young man and a mature woman were living together, by now they’d become used to it. No one would come, no one would find her; not until Jim came back home to complete her fantasy.

  Jim was an actor by profession, and took the part of the intruder as seriously as any other role. Of course they didn’t always play the scene in exactly the same way. Sometimes he was a humane, reluctant captor: restraining both her wrists with one hand, clapping the other over her mouth, he’d murmur don’t struggle, please don’t, I’ve got to tie you up, please don’t make me hurt you more than I need to. Other times he’d take her in silence, with a force that was scarier than the harshest words could have been. The tightness of his grip, his genuinely overwhelming physical strength caused Deborah’s heart to pound in her breast and sent cold thrills lashing across the inside of her stomach. Resistance was impossible. Always she was trussed up, gagged, and left: not molested or interfered with, merely immobilised, silenced, put out of the way. That was her fantasy.

  Alone, she was quite unable to bring anyone to her aid. Sometimes when Jim gagged her it was just for show, a white scarf tied over her mouth or a single strip of tape that only held her lips till she chose to open them, but today’s gag was fully effective. It was a double gag: the cloth folded and tied between her jaws, knotted at the back of her head; and over that the blue rope ran first under the knot of the cloth, then criss-crossed in her mouth, then ran back around her head and tied above the cloth knot. The rope reinforced the cloth, holding it more tightly and firmly in place, and made it almost impossible for Deborah to work her mouth free. She couldn’t scream. And if she’d been able to, there was nobody to hear. She couldn’t have stood, but if she’d struggled up on to her knees she could have got her head under the window’s net curtains and pressed her face to the glass. But if she had, all there was to be seen was a small and very secluded back garden, cut off from view on all sides by tall thick hedges, deeply still in the silence of a weekday afternoon. Who would there be to see her, a face at the bottom of the frame with dishevelled hair and a gagged mouth?

  At that thought, a wave of the most exquisite self-pity flooded Deborah’s mind and body; the wave broke, and wh
at had been pure masochistic emotion turned suddenly into itching, maddening physical excitement. She wanted to be pawed, poked, squeezed, rubbed, used in every way. Oh, fuck, fuck, FUCK, Jim might be gone three-quarters of an hour yet! But the urge made her inventive. She writhed her torso rapidly back and forth against the carpet; the skirt of her dress crumpled and rode up, all the way to her waist. Beneath it she wasn’t wearing anything. She bent herself double and pulled up her knees, tighter than the rope between her wrists and ankles compelled. With care she manoeuvred that part of the rope, now slackened and tractable, into place between her bare buttocks. She began to let her legs out again and the rope grew tense; bent at the waist, lying on her side, she pulled her wrists back and kicked her feet forward and rubbed the hard blue nylon up and down in the crack of her arse. Harder, faster, harder, faster, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh... no good, it didn’t work. She unbent, and let the rope drop back into its former position.

  She was pouring with sweat. Her breath came in long groans, the noise suppressed by the gag. Her knees were aching with cramp. The carpet beneath her felt as if it were turning into flagstones. To get what relief she could, she turned over, from her left side on to her back.

  She let her head fall back to rest on the carpet. Above her loomed the shape of the window casement, an opaque white oblong: at that time of the afternoon the daylight fell directly into the study, but the net curtains were thick and heavy. Even when the sun shone, they diffused its beams enough to turn shadows into vague grey blurs, and today the sky was overcast. It was a close day; a day for sweating, Deborah thought, even if you weren’t writhing and struggling. Jim had left a window open for her, the little one at the top of the casement; just an inch or two, enough to let a breeze in. Not that there was any breeze blowing; the nets hung absolutely still.

  Bound together at the small of her back, Deborah’s wrists were taking the full weight of her body, and had begun to ache under it. With a muffled grunt, she turned again, on to her right side. Close to her face, the skirting board and the lower edge of the wallpaper occupied her whole field of vision.

  Her mind filled with thoughts of Jim. What did he do while he was out and she was left tied?

  She never asked. All she stipulated was that when he arrived home he shouldn’t smell of drink. He never did; Jim knew how to take direction. He unlocked the front door, he called out, ‘only me, Deb’; he might go from one room to another before ‘finding’ her. . ‘My god! Debbie...!’ And then he was kneeling beside her, lifting her in his arms, pulling away the gag; she’d gasp for breath, find herself incapable of words and inevitably, but always with a sense of surprise, she’d burst into a flood of completely genuine tears. Jim would hold her tight, rock her like a baby, comfort her with the security of his powerful arms. He was really a beautiful guy in every way.

  She sighed through the gag, but her right side was beginning to get that flagstones feeling. Shifting, rolling, throwing her left shoulder back and her right forward, she turned over, a full hundred and eighty degrees.

  Turning over came as a relief, but also came with a surprise. Something seemed to have changed, and for a moment she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. Then she knew; the light in the room was different. After lying for some minutes with her face turned to the wall, it should have seemed suddenly brighter. But it didn’t. It was as if a shadow had fallen across the window. As if the sun had gone behind a cloud. Only it hadn’t been out...

  In the corner of her eye, she saw something move. Above her. In the window.

  She turned her head. In the little window at the top of the casement, the one that Jim had left slightly open, she saw fingertips.

  They weren’t trying to get the little top window any farther open. No: they were feeding a length of wire through the narrow space. It was a steel wire, slim but springy, with its end curled back to make a hook.

  Slowly and carefully, the wire slid down, underneath the net curtain, until it reached the handle of the big side window. It hooked neatly around the handle and lifted it, unfastening the catch; and under a skilful pull from outside, the side window opened. With hardly a sound it swung back, the nets were pushed aside as the intruder - the real intruder - began to climb in.

  Directly below the casement, Deborah had been invisible from outside. For a few moments, he still didn’t notice her. He was a boy of eighteen, maybe, skinny and underfed-looking and scruffily dressed. Crouching on the window sill, halfway in, he stared into the room, puzzled by the signs of its having been already turned over. Then he glanced down, and discovered Deborah helpless at his feet.

  She saw his face. She saw bad skin and a red, wet, rubbery mouth, thick lips parted in astonishment; above it, animal’s eyes, staring, stupid, but predatory. He was mindless and unclean, and he’d already violated their home; and Deborah lay before him, utterly at his mercy. OH, GOD! JIM! JIM! JIM! JIM!

  But in her mind’s eye she saw the road outside from somewhere up above the rooftops, and Jim wasn’t even a dot on the horizon.

  White Rubber And Gas

  Caroline lay still. Below her, the trolley’s wheels turned almost without a sound. Above, the strip lights slid smoothly past, glowing whiter than the ceiling and walls, though the corridor was utterly clean. Dr Beck marched alongside, not in her usual neat shoes, but in the loose-fitting short white boots that were part of the uniform in an operating theatre. She leaned into Caroline’s view.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Caroline said bravely.

  It wasn’t exactly the truth. All day she’d had nothing to eat or drink, and her bowels had just been washed out with an enema. Dressed in only a thin white hospital gown, lying flat on the trolley, she felt naked and vulnerable; totally in the hands of the people around her. And very soon now she’d be put to sleep, sent into a black void of unconsciousness. Not that her surgery was to be a matter of life and death. In fact, it was purely cosmetic: she was having breast implants.

  For one last time, the thought flitted across her mind, why am I doing this? I’ve got a good fit body. Why can’t I be satisfied with nature? But it was soon answered. She needed the implants for her career. She was young, blonde and pretty, with long legs and a slim waist; she had a bright, bubbly personality, willing to give anything a try, always ready to be a good sport. She had everything a girl needed to make it as a model, a soap-opera actress, a singer, or all of those things combined. But her chest was flat. And in showbiz, breasts - not just normal-sized breasts, but big ones, the kind that call to mind the words ‘melons’, ‘knockers’ or ‘bazoomas’ - were an unbeatable asset. Time and again, in auditions and at agencies, she’d seen male eyes glide past her, only to become fixed on some girl whose T-shirt bulged and who all too often would land the job. Oh well: if you can’t beat them, what else is there to do but join them? So there she was, a patient in the Moulton Clinic, under the care of Dr Philippa Beck.

  The op was private of course, and expensive. But Caroline felt that in coming to the Moulton she’d chosen well. The clinic was a small place out of town, which from the outside looked more like a country hotel than a hospital. She had her own room and bathroom, both as comfortable as anywhere she’d ever stayed, and had only to ask for anything she might want. And she’d had Dr Beck’s constant attention.

  Caroline had found Dr Beck a little intimidating at first. In a physical sense, the doctor was striking. Caroline was five feet ten, but Dr Beck was taller than her by some three inches: longer-legged and no less slim or physically fit, although her age was thirty-five at the least. Her hair was brunette and she wore it in a bob just past collar length; her face was clear and unlined, with a strong but shapely jaw, full lips, and penetrating dark brown eyes. Lastly she had a magnificent bosom; a doctor’s white coat wasn’t the tightest or most revealing of garments, but there was no mistaking their size and firmness.

  Her personality w
as forceful, but only when it suited her. The evening before, she’d been in Caroline’s room when the mobile chimed from her pocket. Taking the call, she listened in silence for perhaps a minute, then barked out: ‘Crap!’ Another interval of silence, then she barked again: ‘CRAP! Get your finger out! I’ll be down there in half an hour.’ Caroline was slightly shocked, but Dr Beck rang off and gave her a conspiratorial smile. ‘Excuse me, dear. I have to keep up my reputation as a queen bitch.’ Towards her team of staff she was commanding, but always good-humoured; she seemed proud of them. They were all excellent at their jobs - and, Caroline thought, all fabulously pretty. She’d never been in a hospital with so many sexy nurses.

  The spotless white ceiling rolled on upwards past her eyes. They were incredibly careful about cleanliness here. Since her arrival, Caroline had seen nobody whose clothing didn’t guard them against some kind of contamination; who wasn’t sheathed or shielded to some extent. And always, they were covered by the same material: white rubber.

  The nurses wore face masks at all times. They were like the hospital masks you usually saw in that they covered just the lower half of the face, from nose to chin, but they were made of rubber, and did not tie on with string but were strapped and buckled at the back of the head and neck. They must have been much more effective at holding back germs than paper would be, but Caroline wondered that the wearers didn’t feel restricted in them. Sometimes you could hardly make out what a nurse was saying. Tight against the skin, the rubber seemed to cling to the mouth and acted almost like a gag. They also wore more elaborate face masks at times. Caroline had seen the nurses in what appeared to be industrial respirators, masked to the bridge of the nose, with filters projecting from the jawline; and one nurse completely hooded, in a helmet of thick white rubber with a gas mask for a face, and nothing to be seen of her face but two beautiful eyes, looking out from behind a glass visor. In addition, everyone wore skin-tight rubber gloves at all times. Even Dr Beck’s hands were always gloved. She’d given Caroline two or three examinations, at length. Even the lightest gloves hinder the fingers, but Dr Beck wrote notes and made rough sketches with a swift, sure touch. In between she ran her hands across Caroline’s bare breasts, and in doing that her movements were slow and measured, lingering in places. Sometimes her face would slip into an expression of deep thought, while her fingers and palms stayed resting on Caroline, warm inside the creamy white rubber.