by Various
Of course, I have no idea if he’ll be there or not. But the hour-long car journey filled my head with non-sensible thoughts, and few of them were about what would happen if he catches me. They were only concerned with him and his lack of reality.
So I creep through the woods as dusk sets in, following the ominous smell of something burning, and feel like Little Red Riding Hood. Halfway through the tilting and more-gnarled-than-they-had-seemed-before trees, I curse myself for not bringing a basket of goodies.
How do you keep off the wolf with nothing to bargain with?
Or maybe I do have a chip to bargain with, and it’s something far dirtier than I’m thinking of. He’s going to ask me for my maidenhood by the light of the first full moon. He’s going to drink my virgin’s blood at the winter solstice. He’s going to sacrifice me to Fenrir, the wolf god.
And all of these thoughts keep me walking, terrifyingly, rather than stopping me. Not even the thought of my actual lack of virginity can stop me creeping towards the smell of smoke and burning flesh by the light of the rising moon.
I’m on the verge of being sure that I am lost when I get to a clearing in the woods. To what is, in fact, a caravan. His caravan, looking so squat and hunched that it could almost be the sort of thing that’s in all my bloody Other obsessed thoughts. The gnarled cottage in the heart of the forest, with the dark stranger waiting inside.
There is a little fire trailing smoke before this tiny home, and over the fire there is a crude grill with a haunch of something cooking on it. Less on the nose things hang about the place, like a T-shirt or two on a half-heartedly strung washing line. A line of his tattered boots by the steps that lead to the cracked open door. Lettering on the caravan, almost washed away: Ace.
But I am still all darkness on the inside. That bloodied darkness that lies in the hearts of all women. Or, at least, all women like me. Grimm fairy-tale addled, subtext searching, always waiting for the dark Other to come and –
I doubt any of this is helping my need to claw back to reality.
I walk up to his door and almost chicken out at the last second, but then, after a long moment of him not springing out at me, I regain my courage. I put my hand to the barely there door handle. It’s one of those spring-loaded snapping sorts of things, somewhat rusted over and reluctant to move.
Luckily, the door is open anyway. All I have to do is ease it all the way and mind the creaking and groaning of the hinges.
And then I take one step up. And another until I am inside.
Inside, it doesn’t smell like cooking meat, or must, or anything else I expect. It’s as dark as it had seemed from the outside, however, and I can barely see my way. The door closes to that three-quarter mark again, too, so that the darkness is made even thicker.
I try to refrain from putting my hands out in front of me, but end up doing it anyway.
And yet, when it comes to me that there are things to touch, somehow I don’t want to do it. I can see a little sink, and on either side there are shelves filled with all sorts of things that my eyes can’t make out. My hands don’t want to make them out either, and, instead, they flutter over the impressions of things made in the black. A jar of this, a tin can of that. A sudden burst of the blue glinting colour on something made of glass.
Tiny slivers of light spread through the chinks in possible-curtains and reveal swirling patterns of dust and tender shapes in the gloom, but little else. There are just the impressions of things: the humps of a couple of worn chairs surrounding a table; the soft spread of an old shirt over something. And at the end of the short and narrow passage through his home, a bunk in which he obviously sleeps.
Obviously, because he is sleeping in it.
I jump a little suddenly to see him there. I think I jump more because I wasn’t aware when I first came in that he was in here. That I didn’t even feel or sense his presence in some way knocks at me, and forces me to be startled. Despite the fact that I’ve never been the sort of person to know when someone’s creeping up on me.
I manage to recapture my breath and stop clutching at myself, and then I look on him just lying there, stretched out as much as the narrow confines will allow, lost in sleep. Though the fact that he is lost and oblivious doesn’t make him look any less intimidating. The dark hair on his face seems to bleed into the shadows, and the heavy roundness of his shoulders intrudes on the small space.
I think he is naked beneath that rough-looking blanket. His chest is certainly naked. I can see all the rough coarse hair spread over his pale skin, an image that thrills me if only because I’ve never been privy to it before. He has never shown me himself unclothed, and this little glimpse is like prying into his secret diary.
At last, I know something more about him!
The new knowledge bolsters my probably insane confidence, and I inch towards his supine form. I know I shouldn’t. I know he’s probably about to leap up and devour me. But what can I say? I want him to.
I want to touch him. I want to so much that I get as close to him as I did to all of his glass jars and tin cans – fingers ghosting oh-so-close – but then his eyes open and all of my nerve dissolves.
I think part of my stomach dissolves with it. Something definitely drops. I think about running immediately, but his pale, pale eyes catch me and hold me in place. They glint and gleam and tell me gotcha, while I try to think of what on earth possessed me.
He’s real, all right. He’s as real as I am, my strange, rough Woodsman.
I think I expect him to say something then. At the very least I’m sure he will accuse me of something, grow angry, grasp my wrist. But instead he only lays his eyes on me, and remains unmoving and quiet.
It’s too much just the same. I run.
I almost go back to the city thinking about his eyes pressing into me. God knows what they were pressing me to do, but I don’t think I want anything to do with it.
Only they can’t have been really pressing me to do something as he never seems to expect me to do anything at all. He just does things to me instead. I should be glad. I shouldn’t be frightened.
Though it’s entirely possible that I should change my mind on the latter when I wake up in the morning and my wrists are strapped to the bedpost.
Even worse, my first thoughts are not about my own personal safety. I struggle a little, and test the leather belt that’s tangled around my wrists, but no urgency wells up in me. I know what I’m being punished for.
And, of course, I also know that if I pull hard, I could get free quite easily.
Though I don’t let this thought spoil the punishment of me, the wicked girl who invaded his space. I trespassed in the dark stranger’s lair and need to be taught a lesson.
Good girls get head. Bad girls get strapped to the bed.
Oh, how I wish he’d speak and tell me something like that! Instead, he just fills the doorway, glimmers beneath the dark hair on his face, and waits, and waits. I can’t imagine what he’s waiting for, but then that’s part of his allure. I can’t imagine anything about him. Nothing he does makes any sense – unless it’s all rewritten into a terrible fairy-tale in which I’ve done the one thing I promised the beast I wouldn’t.
I promised I’d never trespass and never try to touch him, and I’ve broken all of one and half of the other. Now I have to pay the price: to live with him forever, as his love slave. Forever getting my pussy licked and my body caressed until he gives in one day and fucks and fucks and fucks me.
I don’t think I could write a better fairy-tale if I lived to be a thousand.
‘Please,’ I say, and squirm against my bonds. ‘Please.’
Begging him is like paring myself down to the quick, but there’s no real pain in doing so.
I’m not sure why. It could be something to do with the fact that he never speaks, and never shows anything but that glinting edge of lust in his eyes, and all of this cuts the tether from around the neck of my imagination. My imagination is free to see him in any w
ay it sees fit.
He could be anything, or anyone, or filled with any thoughts at all, and I want to guess all of them and make him give in to me.
‘Please,’ I say, and then try out all the other things that might possibly persuade him. Is he the kind of man who gets off on the helpless victim? He must be, he must be.
‘Please don’t hurt me. Don’t touch my soft, wet little pussy. Don’t, don’t!’
But his expression doesn’t change to see me beg like that. The glint in his eyes doesn’t sharpen to anything stronger, and he doesn’t come any closer. I have to make him come closer.
I twist restlessly on the bed, kicking up the duvet and making my breasts jiggle. I spread my legs, letting it look involuntary, but completely aware of the view he must get. I’m one step away from resisting now, and into doing something more … grasping.
His gaze flicks to the ripe wet split that I reveal to him and, when said gaze crawls back up my body, it’s definitely heavier with lust. He takes a slow step towards me and his hand passes over the hilly duvet.
Oh so very close to my leg.
So I take another step away from resistant.
‘What do you want to do?’ I ask. ‘Do you want to touch me?’
My voice sounds silvery and seductive, even to my ears.
‘All I wanted was to touch you.’
He glimmers at that. He gleams. Oh, I’ve got him now. Another step is needed.
‘Touch my pussy – see how wet I am for you? Make me wetter, make me hotter, I’ll do anything you want.’
Another step.
‘Don’t you want me to suck your cock? Don’t you want me to bite you, and fuck you, and rub my juicy cunt all over your body? Oh, I want that. Set me free and I’ll do it.’
I feel as though there are magic words I have to say. There’s a riddle I have to solve. If I get it exactly right, he will grant me the pleasure I so crave. He’ll give me not only his mouth on my pussy, but his cock, his body, himself.
I arch up on the bed, the tips of my tits standing out proud and swollen, my sex spread, and demand what I want from him.
‘Kiss me,’ I say, and somehow I know it will be the right thing before the words are even out of my mouth.
His eyes flash over to hungry, and something that could be a smile shifts beneath all that hair.
Then he spreads his body over mine and covers my mouth with his.
He kisses my lips as hungrily as he did my pussy, pushing me until my jaw aches and urging his tongue against mine. I am crushed and devoured and triumphant all at the same time, and my feelings jumble up together and mix with the slight pain of the leather cutting into my pulling wrists. I am overloaded by it all.
I think it’s the overload that makes me wrench my head to one side and fuck my hips up at his body.
‘Just do me,’ I tell him. ‘Just take me. Just turn me inside out.’
And then I shove at him again, and this time when he lifts a little I manage to get my legs completely open and around him. Once I’m there in this most-longed-for position, I squeeze my thighs tight against him. I bite into his flesh with them.
And then I watch through heavily hooded eyes as his lips part in an obvious moan. It’s soundless, but it’s no less a moan for it. So I moan back at him, and rub my nipples against the rough hair on his chest, and urge my molten pussy over whatever it’s pressing into.
I’m sure I briefly feel the long slide of his cock through my creamy slit, but then he gets himself up on poled arms, and my legs lose my grip on him, and it’s gone. My clit jerks and aches at the loss, but he is in command.
Even if he isn’t in command.
He’s obviously trying to resist himself in some way, but I’m sure I know how to crack that riddle now that he’s here and over me. There are so many things that I can reach with the parts of me that are free, and I take full advantage.
I run my tongue over the fur at his jaw, and then down, down, as far as I can reach. I nuzzle my face against his and manage to get to his ear lobe, which I capture between my lips and suck on. His cock deserves to know what it’s missing after all.
It has the intended effect too. His breathing grows harsh, and he insinuates the side of his face against my searching, probing tongue. I feel his cock bob and pat my belly, still somewhat wet from the glide between my pussy lips.
‘Give in,’ I purr, and rub myself against him. ‘Don’t you want to feel this slick pussy around your cock?’
I pull on the straps, almost at the point where I’m just going to break out. There may well be many parts that I can reach tied up, but there’s nothing like free hands and the ability to roam around with your mouth to really make a man fuck you.
Even if the riddle would then label me a cheater and disqualify me. If I break free, I lose him forever and have to wander for a thousand years in the desert. Being tied like this is part of the deal; I have to persuade him with just the wiles he gives me.
And I’m not sure if that’s a better fairy-tale than the one I guessed at before, or an achingly worse one. I try to think of what persuaded him to lie down on top of me, but the logic of this thing seems fuzzy and unapproachable.
‘Come all over me,’ I say. ‘Spurt your come on my tits and let me lick it off your still jerking cock. Fuck my tight slippery pussy until I moan and clench around your big stiff rod.’
All the dirtiest stuff I can think of spills out of me, and some of it definitely has an effect. Occasionally he’ll shiver, and sigh, and flick his tongue over my lips or my throat. I tell him to blindfold and gag me, and keep me as his slave, and fuck my ass and my mouth and my pussy until I am sticky and slick with his come. I tell him that I’ll stroke my clit for him, and fuck myself with whatever comes to hand, and ride his face until I cream.
But none of those suggestions push him any further.
I try to be practical and tell him about the condoms in the drawer next to the bed, and say that we can take it slow or fast and that we don’t have to, if he really doesn’t feel like it. I try sweet and innocent, and ask him to deflower me. My virgin quim aches for him, and I have all these feelings warming my insides, and won’t he please have mercy?
But he has no mercy. He gets me to the point where I wouldn’t even mind if he’d just go down on me again. Anything will do. How could I have been bothered that oral sex was all he seemed to want to do?
I’m not bothered now. All I’m concerned by is the tender swollen place between my legs, my tingling tight nipples and the hovering edge of orgasm always too far away. Sometimes I’m sure that just his hot breath brushing over the slopes of my breasts is about to be enough, but it never is.
Nothing is enough, and I choke it out into the side of his throat.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘Please make love to me.’
I had no idea he’d be corny enough to take that as the answer to the riddle. But I suppose even dark hairy strangers need love too.
When he kisses me again, and presses his body down on mine, I liquidise. However, before I can get my legs around him again and really cross my ankles and never let him go, he leaves me. I almost crack and cry out to feel nothing but air painting over my body, before I realise what he’s doing.
I’m glad I mentioned the condoms now.
And, oh then, then, he stretches out on top of me again, and in the same motion smoothes his cock into my hungry, aching pussy. I jerk at the sensation and my body warms all over; even better is the simmering relief of his fingers working between us to press down on my swollen clit.
I pant out his name – the only one I know – as I burst into a huge climax, and he gives me that glimmering look, near enough to smiling for me a second time. He does it again once he’s wrung me out on my back; he turns me over and fucks me with my ass in the air until I gasp that name and see him over my shoulder, darkly watching me.
Each time I say it he seems more satisfied, as though I am drilling the word into him and that is who he will forever be: my Wood
sman. In return he writes the name he knows is mine across my bare chest with one trailing tender finger, and that becomes forever me.
We make love until it gets dark, and the moon shines in through the partly opened curtains. After, my body still hums from the things we have done, but it’s a relaxing sort of feeling. It’s a relief to just lie here and doze and breathe him in, and think over everything that I’ve done that previously didn’t seem like me.
I suppose it might not have been him either.
I wonder as I lie there why he tied me up at all. But then I suppose, if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have dared break the spell and talk to him the way I did, and beg him, and ask him to beg me. I would have run away as I did when he caught me in the caravan, and then where would we be?
Somewhere far away from here, and not so magical.
Charlotte Stein has contributed stories to the Black Lace collections Lust at First Bite and Seduction. Her first single-author collection, The Things That Make Me Give In, is published in October 2009.
Glamour
Carrie Williams
MARTA THINKS JACOB must be someone very important indeed to be staying – living, one might say, given the length of time he’s been here – in this largest and most prestigious of suites at the Pimlico Grand, with its splendid Thames views. Marta’s never seen Jacob, but sometimes she thinks she almost knows him. Every day she’s in here, bringing back his freshly laundered clothes and hanging them in his wardrobe, changing his bed linen. Hoovering and polishing and tidying. Sometimes she goes so far as to imagine she’s his wife, getting everything shipshape for his return. Only she’s not there at the end of the day when he gets home. By then she’s long gone, back to Elephant & Castle where, from her high-rise bedsit, she watches the planes float down over the city, loaded with busy people whose lives are so much more interesting than hers, flying in from impossibly exotic places to which she has never been, and will in all likelihood never go.
Jacob has been here since Marta got the job of chambermaid, which came about when her cousin, a housekeeper at a sister hotel, put in a good word for her. Not that there’s any shortage of hotel jobs in London – quite the contrary. But Marta had no experience, no references. She was fresh out of college in Poland, with a classical music degree she was at a loss as to how to make a living from. Violinists are ten a penny over there. So here she is, cleaning rooms for a living, albeit rather wonderful rooms complete with marble bathrooms and monsoon showers, and planning, on her days off – which are rare – to busk in the Underground.