* * * *
All the time Beth was dressing, picking up her handbag and her scattered clothes from the stairs and the landing, the fear gnawed at Donovan that she would leave him here after all, naked for the neighbors to find. The relief which coursed through him when she finally pulled the key from her bag and unlocked the cuffs was as sweet as the orgasm she’d milked from him minutes earlier. She gave him one last look of amusement mixed with contempt. Then she was gone.
He hadn’t bothered asking for a number, or offering his. He wasn’t going to see her again, he knew that. The player had been well and truly played.
But as he rubbed his wrists ruefully, he couldn’t help but smile. She had intended him to learn a lesson, and he had—but not, perhaps, the one she had been hoping for. He remembered what he had told Beth earlier, that the reason he was not married yet was that it had never seemed like the right time to be tied down. Tonight, however, he had finally realized that the time was more than right to be tied up…
Queen of Revels
by Peter Tupper
Eb couldn’t remember being young. She did not age, and nothing could kill her, though she could be hurt. Even decapitations were a temporary inconvenience. She had dug her way out of more than a few graves and funeral pyres. By preference, she kept moving, as she knew that human beings loved to tear down their gods as much as they loved to build them up. No matter, there was always another community within a few days’ walk. When she led her followers across the land bridge into what would one day be called North America, she had already lived at least a dozen lifetimes and borne more than thirty children.
On her return trip across the steppes, she decided to try something new. The nomadic bands she traveled among tired her now, and when she turned to the Mediterranean, she taught people how to plant seeds, to store grain, to keep animals. It didn’t always take, but she just moved on, and those who did adopt new ways quickly (by her standards) out-populated those who didn’t.
Actually, it succeeded beyond her expectations. Cities grew, and with them came calendars, writing, and more. Time changed, she noticed; instead of seasons and generations, people thought in days and months, and even smaller units. There was a pervasive sense of control, of regulation. She felt like an animal in a cage, but the cage was more interesting and comfortable than the wilderness.
So she invented something else.
* * * *
The naked bride stumbled into the torch-lit chamber, dropped to her knees on the tile floor, looked up at Eb with gratifying awe. Eb looked down at her and rustled the black wings strapped to her back, made from the feathers of a hundred ravens.
“Who comes before Ananke?” Eb intoned, using one of her many aliases.
“Livia,” said the young woman, eyes wide in the flickering light.
Eb stepped forward, her height enhanced by her boots, gifts from the barbarians to the Northeast. “What do you seek?”
“To join my husband in the worship of Dionysius,” she said breathlessly.
Eb stalked around the kneeling woman, interrogating her on the previous phases of her initiation, reinforcing the lessons learned in her initiation into the cult of Dionysius. Livia answered correctly.
“I go where I please, and leave reluctantly. All men and all women will know me, but none have ever seen me. I say nothing, but others speak for me. I am everything to the one I visit, but nothing to others,” Eb recited the riddle. “What am I?”
“Pain,” the bride inhaled, just as Eb snapped the cane across her thighs. It was the lightest of blows, but enough to make the young woman spring to her feet.
“Up,” Eb barked, driving her forward. At the opposite end of the room, another woman sat, covered in her purple veil. As Livia approached, she lowered her veil, revealing her face and hair, styled in the manner of Venus.
Livia fell to her knees again, burying her face in Venus’ lap, whimpering in anticipation.
Eb wound up and began the caning. The cane, a souvenir from her last trip to Asia, was a supple stick of rattan that could be bent nearly double. From firsthand experience and long practice, she precisely measured the blows on Livia’s proffered buttocks, staying on the narrow threshold of pain where a distinctive pleasure could be felt. The young bride would feel the loss of herself, naked and whipped like the lowest slave, but experience it as being touched by the gods. That paradox, embedded into Livia’s body, would transform her thinking, create an awareness of possibilities beyond what she had seen in her brief life.
“This is the touch of the gods, even whose punishment brings rapture,” Eb whispered in Livia’s ear, one hand firmly twisting her hair, the other squeezing the reddened buttocks just enough to elicit a moan.
Like an infant taking her first steps, the bride got to her shaky feet with Eb’s and Venus’ help. Livia shivered as Venus wrapped her veil around her, the fine silk sliding across her newly sensitive skin an exquisite thing. Venus escorted Livia, now no longer nude, into the chamber for the next step.
After mopping her sweaty brow, Eb peeped through the door to the next chamber. Now wearing the scrap of Venus’ veil and playing pair of palm-sized zils, the young bride danced wildly to the flute music played by musicians, on her way to the next phase of the ritual and her wedding night.
Satisfied by her part in the initiation, Eb removed her godly vestments and left the temple. Outside, the autumn festival was in full swing. This was her favorite time, when the world turned upside down, time changed, and everything seemed possible. Drunk on unwatered wine, she led her maenads and bacchae in wild runs through the forests, pouncing on men, sometimes beating them, sometimes ravishing them. In this time, she could be a goddess, a demon, a spirit, revealed to the world as the more than human being she was. People loved and desired her not for herself so much as the possibility of renewal she represented.
The end of the festival always saddened her, when she had to return to whatever identity she had adopted: the newly arrived wealthy widow, the mad woman who lived in the woods, the minor priestess, the common prostitute or servant or camp follower. In that time, immortality was a curse, not a blessing, one she shared with the few others like her she had met over the centuries.
* * * *
Time passed, and the world changed. An empire fell, and a religion rose, one that had even fewer places for women. Festivals became weaker, feebler remnants. The clock, then electricity ruled the world. Kings became men, then quaint symbols. Nobility granted wealth, then wealth granted nobility. Poetry was surpassed by prose, surpassed by photography, surpassed by the moving image.
After her fourth burning at the stake, Eb kept a low profile, outliving a series of husbands, moving every two decades, living off carefully tended investments, mastering one musical instrument after another, and writing biographies of obscure historical figures. Her unending life had become, well, cozy. One day, in the early years of a new millennium, she looked around at her well furnished rural home, her numerous cats, her 5,634 LP records, and wondered what had become of the woman who had been called Ishtar, Messalina, Judith, Atalanta, Ereshkigal.
I need a change, she thought, and not just another college town in another state.
She packed up and left within twenty-four hours.
* * * *
Eb moved to the nearest major city, one she had first visited when it was just a trading post at the southern tip of a island flanked by two rivers, and returned to several times over the centuries. She purchased a small apartment, a new wardrobe, new accessories, sliding into a new identity and catching up on ten years of fashion.
She examined herself in her new apartment’s mirror. Whatever made her immortal also altered her appearance to some statistical average of the people around her, convenient camouflage that made her beautiful, but not memorable. She now had dark eyes and hair and an olive complexion that suggested Latino or Mediterranean ancestry.
As she wandered the streets of Manhattan, she looked for something she couldn�
��t quite name, but was disappointed. What has happened to this city? she wondered as she walked through Times Square. The rich ferment of thieves and whores, prophets and preachers, people living and dying was diluted to almost nothing. Everything was too clean, too predictable. She knew that people who lacked her inhuman resistance to disease and injury might feel otherwise, but still….
Eb turned onto a side street and window-shopped. One display caught her attention. To her ancient eyes, the outfit on the mannequin dripped history: the spurred thigh-length boots suggested the mounted soldier, the wasp-waisted corset reminded her of a century of beauty and an armored cuirass, the riding crop the sport of soldiers and aristocrats, back when she drove the prettiest horse-drawn carriage on London’s Rotten Row. Even the leather collar gave a hint of clerical attire. It was centuries of the vestments of male power distilled into exquisite clothing.
Eb went inside and turned to the young woman behind the counter. For a moment, she stared in utter delight at the cashier, the way silver symbols of five different religions hung from her necklace, the way her pale skin and dark eyes and hair echoed back two centuries to when pallor was the height of style, her barbaric studded wristbands and collar. To wear the markers of the bound slave or the barbarian warrior was such courage. This girl was, for Eb, like a newly discovered species of orchid that grew from stainless steel.
“Can I help you?” the girl said.
“Yes,” said Eb. “I want…” She looked around the shop, then put down her platinum card. “I want a full outfit.”
Two hours later, the shop girl, Desiree, helped Eb into a latex bolero jacket. After fifty years of such bland, shapeless clothing, Eb delighted in her new ensemble – its heaviness, bulk and tightness reminded her of the days when one could tell someone’s status by their attire. She admired herself in the mirror, nude and armored at the same time. “What is the occasion for wearing this kind of outfit?”
“Well, not on the street, unless you want to stop traffic,” Desiree said, handing her a quarterpage handbill. Eb accepted and read it: “NYK, New York Kink, presents Black Circle, pansexual BDSM Play party.”
* * * *
Eb’s stiletto boot heels clicked as she descended the concrete steps, the way she once descended into sacred caves. She’d been to this warren of connected basements once before, during Prohibition when she listened to hot jazz and drank bathtub gin that made even her sick. Now it was transformed once again, decorated with a century of symbols, particularly photos of women in obsolete styles of female underwear that had attained some totemic status.
Sipping her drink at the bar, Eb watched in fascination. The people were in constant transformation through the alchemy of clothing and sensation. Free people became slaves or aristocrats or warriors, men became women, women became men, the old became young, humans became animals or machines. What she had started so long ago had not been crushed by arid religion and mechanistic economies. It lived here, diversified into a thousand new forms.
More than a few people made passes at the new, striking woman in silver-gray latex, but she demurred with three thousand years of social graces. She wished to understand before participating.
One man did catch her eye. He wore the trappings of the warrior, she thought. His black leather jacket and pants echoed back to the bomber pilots of the last great European conflict, when just war was still possible and the flying machine retained a touch of magic, along with a touch of the pagan and the animal. His boots suggested the warrior-peasant root of masculinity, but the high sheen of the polished black skin hinted at the aristocrat and the machine. Pinned to his silk shirt was a button that read, “Questions? Ask me.”
“I’m Mark,” he said, offering his hand. “Newcomer liaison, New York Kink.”
“Eva, thank you,” she said, one of her more frequent names. “My question is, where does one begin?”
He told her about negotiations and safe words and switching. It was as if a religion had been dismantled and given to the lay worshippers, a concept that agreed with her. Here, anything was possible, yet there were rules to control it, as important as the proper rituals and observances of the rituals she performed long ago.
When Mark’s shift as a greeter ended, he showed her to one of the X-shaped wooden crosses. She’d seen hundreds of people dead and dying on such structures, but he showed her how they could be used for pleasure, even enlightenment.
He offered her his favorite flogger, handle first, a distant descendant of the courtly manners of another time. She swished it through the air, savoring the mixed leather and rubber strands, and remembered her secret group of female flagellants right under the Pope’s nose. It was delicious.
Marveling that anything could make her impatient anymore, she said, “I want to use this on somebody.” She met his eyes. “You, for instance.”
He laughed, then pulled off his jacket and shirt. “Strictly for instructional purposes, you understand,” he joked as he turned to the cross and wrapped his arms around it.
Mark gave her careful instructions on the portions of his body that were safe to strike, as well as technique, but once she got into a rhythm, it all came back to her. The regular whack-whack-whack of rubber and leather hitting skin, her dance-like motions in time with the heavy electronica on the sound system, the darkened room where people reached beyond themselves in ecstasy, things she hadn’t felt in centuries. Even her sweat pooling within her skintight rubber was a pleasure.
Mark’s grunts and cries as he clung to the cross were a sweet song to her. “Wow…You sure you’ve never done this before?” he asked, resting his flushed face against the cross. In his eyes, she saw what burned in the eyes of the initiates she had touched—the need to rupture boundaries of the self and touch what lay beyond.
Eb just smiled and swung the flogger again. She hadn’t had this much fun since her bull dancing days in Minoan Crete.
* * * *
“It’s not like it was before, Eva,” Mark told her over coffee early the next morning.
“Oh really?” she asked, sipping her black Ethiopian, a taste she’d acquired a thousand years back.
“I came here ten years ago, and went into the scene head first. Funny, my parents were Pentecostal freaks, but a good flogging is how I get slain in the spirit. I volunteered, I wrote articles, I was on committees, I did everything. It was the community I’d always wanted. I did something kinkrelated every week.
“Now the Hellfire’s gone, the Vault’s gone. Nobody goes to parties anymore. Thanks to Giuliani, 9/11, and rent hikes and all that. We can’t even get a decent venue.
“I ought to apologize, like you’ve come into the scene just when the best part’s over. All we have to do now is look backwards.” He looked at the cuffs of his bomber jacket, the missing buttons, the black leather worn gray in places. “Look at me, I’m already an old coot talking about the good old days.”
“Take it from me.” She put her hand on his. “Nobody’s too old to feel young again.”
“Now, my family has some property in the city that might help you…”
Annabel’s Birthday Wish
by Sage Vivant
Her eyes were wide as she fought a smile. She’d never known him to be a practical joker, so maybe she really had heard him correctly.
“I’m serious. Behind every great submissive, there’s a formidable Dom just waiting to get out. I want you to be that Dom on your birthday,” Dan said. His piercing eyes underscored the gravity of his message.
“You realize tomorrow is my birthday.”
“I never forget anything about my Annabel.”
* * * *
The idea that eventually became her birthday wish started as a passing thought—the kind she’d trained herself not to entertain. So the night before her birthday, as she crawled into bed, mind buzzing with plans for Dan, she almost smiled at the preposterous notion that popped into her head. By morning, that notion had metamorphosed into a single, all-consuming plan.
She wanted to do it slowly, so she could savor not only his moans and his scent, but especially her own dominance. This once-in-a-lifetime experience could not be embarked upon lightly. She needed to devote the day to the idea, become the person who, that evening, would live out a fantasy she could return to again and again in the future.
First, before costumes or props, she focused on her state of mind. She visualized Dan in the positions she most desired for him, saw herself as the one deciding what would happen next, experiencing the heady satisfaction of her needs and desires being allowed definition and space. Though it was true Dan was granting permission for her to be dominant just this one time, she still floated with the glorious opportunity to exercise the other side of her sexual nature.
Costumes, though, were important as well. She dug through her clothing drawers and found a bustier that no longer fully contained her voluptuous figure. Time for a trip to the sex shop.
At Leather and Lace, Annabel ran into Lucee, her best friend, who was also planning a special night, from the looks of her shopping basket: butt plug, anal beads, dildo harness. She kept very little from Lucee—and vice versa—but tonight’s plans were so special, she preferred to give Lucee an account of everything tomorrow, rather than talk too much about what might or might not happen today. She tried to deflect attention from herself and keep on it Lucee.
Wicked Pleasures: Stories of Kinky Love Page 10