It was quick. A few minutes of his body, his mouth, his tongue on mine. The smell of copper hung on his breath. His cock pinned me to the earth. I know my wetness soaked him. At last he ripped up fistfuls of wiry grass and I smelled earth as he shuddered against me. He looked into my eyes as I felt him twitch inside. The look on his face was all the proof of it I could ever want. He’d wanted me, needed me, as much as I’d needed him.
He drew away, left me with the sudden coldness of the breeze cooling sweat on my skin, and feeling exposed. But when I sat up, he pulled me back against him, kneeling there in the rucked-up grass. His breath was in my ear, soft animal sounds. His clever fingers pressed into me and I shoved sharply back against him, heard him gasp in pleased surprise as he pushed deeper. He used one hand in me, and one on my clit, getting both sticky with the two of us and not caring. I dripped onto the grass, down my legs, and onto him. The blood was lost in a greater flow, need and pleasure, and raw, animal feeling. He kissed my neck and brought me to full bloom again as I gasped into the dark.
Then he put his hand to my lips.
“Taste us,” he whispered.
I kissed his sticky fingers, smeared thinly with red and smelling also of him. I licked them, and he kissed me, sharing what we’d made. His fingers drew on my skin.
I didn’t understand how he’d done it, how he’d untied me and made me up again, not better than before, and not worse, but different. But he had. And he hadn’t taken a damn thing from me doing it. He’d given.
What he offered was either the slippery slope to Hell, or something so strange and dark and wonderful that only another sinner would be able to tell it from sin. He held out his bloody hand, and I ate the bitter fruit from his palm. While he held me, and while the moon held us, I was his.
Humiliation
J. D. Smith
A few weeks ago, after a long week of work, I made myself a drink, then another, and wondered what to do with the evening; I deserved something special. As the third drink dissolved my dating habits and seeped into my Sunday school training that something special came to me like an answer in the Magic Eight Ball. I could live out a dream long shelved with all the others, like surfing Lake Michigan or playing team handball in the Olympics. I would, at last, visit a dominatrix. To submit – and, with any luck, grovel – on short notice would take work. The yellow pages yielded nothing in the Ds between “domestic help” and “doors – aluminum.” One letter later, the escort services advertised in print-only entries uniform as brides-maids, with no specialties listed. Even the names that began with “Plus” and “Elite,” or followed chorus lines of capital As, could have referred to drywall, or restaurant supplies; the lone exception was an entry stranded from “Escrow”. Calling every agency would be looking for a needle – or stiletto heel – in a haystack. There was one more chance to make something of the evening before settling, again, for self-respect. I went to the convenience store across the street, where copies of both of my city’s dailies still occupied a rack between fuel additives and three varieties of Corn Nuts. One – paper, that is – covered world news and ran stories of more than one page. The second, a tabloid, had a bigger sports section and ran color photos under tall headlines of disasters and royal infidelities. A paper’s soul, though, is in its classifieds, and I was looking for a soul that listed “adult services” – and I don’t mean home improvement loans, or dentures. I took the tabloid and saved fifteen cents against the night’s upcoming expenses. On the elevator back to my apartment I waded through ads for phone sex and massage parlors until – there’s no other way to say this – the newspaper gave me what it knew I’d been waiting for. A visitor from another planet would have been amazed at how many women were called “Mistress”. Of course, the title merely served to display each name as the glittering crystal of brutality that it was. There were Mistresses Alexa, Brunhilde, Dominique, Frederika, Griselda, Katerina, Lola, Natasha, Nevena, Rula, Simone, and Tatiana, as well as one Mistress whose name escapes me – though it was the first word in a film subtitled “She-Wolf of the SS”. There was no Mistress Amy, Betsy, Cindy, Denise, Gail, Joanne, Luanne, Michelle, Penny, Ruth, or Theresa.
After a few busy signals and voice mail messages I reached the voice of a real, live woman of whom I wasn’t worthy – Mistress Sabina. Simply setting the appointment made me quiver, then stiffen. She finished the call by saying, “I expect you at ten. Don’t be late.” She bit off the end of the sentence and hung up – a free sample.
The taxi dropped me off at nine fifty-five, and I paid with the clammy bill I had clutched for the whole ride. At the address she had given, between a falafel palace and a shuttered travel agency, there was only a grated doorway with a buzzer.
I pressed the doorbell, and a second pulse of current unlocked the grate. This had to be the place. I walked up the stairs, wood painted flat black, and as I drew back my hand to knock, the door opened no more than two inches. A woman’s voice emerged.
“Are you the worm?”
I tried to think of an answer.
I didn’t think fast enough.
The voice rephrased its question.
“Are you the worm who made an appointment?”
That changed things.
“I guess I am,” I said.
“Very well, then. Come in.”
I nudged the door open, and there she was, all six feet of her. Mistress Sabina, to whom I would have gladly been enslaved. She looked like a latter-day Brigitte Nielsen or an even more latter-day Grace Jones, in negative, with more hair; like both, her mouth held two rows of feral teeth, white and even as the tombstones of the men she had eaten alive. She stopped my reverie to pose the eternal question.
“Cash or charge?”
I lingered over the choice – the last I would make for quite a while – and took out a card. She picked it up by one corner, like a soiled cloth, and clanked it through the charge plate, an echo of medieval chains. No sooner had I finished signing than she said, “Let’s go,” and led me into her chamber. My dream was becoming reality. I would bend to her will, and do so backwards.
She turned on a blacklight and under it glowed and glared an entire constellation of humiliation. A rack stood in one corner, and from another wall thrust poles with rings for ropes or handcuffs. A table was laid out neatly as a surgeon’s with the smaller appurtenances of her trade – harnesses, a leather mask, a dog collar. In another corner stood a pillory – a nice touch, and one I’d never heard of. Two metal folding chairs took up the center of the room. She pointed to one and said, “Sit.”
I complied instantly. More commands could follow.
I was not disappointed.
“Look at me,” she growled. “Am I someone who should degrade you?”
Trembling, I somehow got the words out.
“Of course you are.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of a rhetorical question, slave? Don’t speak unless I order you to speak.
“Now, am I someone you wish to worship, before whom you would most gladly abase and prostrate yourself?”
This was good. I nearly slipped and spoke, then thought of speaking up just to be punished. I refrained, but my left cheek twitched on its own, and sweat filmed over my whole invertebrate body.
“You would like to get down on your knees before me, wouldn’t you?”
I shifted forward in my chair, all the sooner to genuflect before a will and a body infinitely superior to my own.
I did not get far.
She barked a new command.
“Stay put, weasel. Don’t move until I tell you to move and don’t lean back. For your disobedience you must suffer.”
Sure.
I deserved such suffering, and more.
Mistress Sabina clicked a metal-tapped heel on the floor.
“You would like to lick my boots, wouldn’t you? You would like to run your tongue along every inch of my boots, from the top of the calf to the bottom of the soles, wouldn’t you? And you would do that b
ecause you know even that would be a great gift from your Mistress Sabina.”
Obedient, I held my tongue, but salivated already tasting grit and gravel. She lashed out – if only verbally.
“Don’t just sit there. Are you a man or a mollusk? Not that I need to ask. I heard your shell dragging along the floor, and I can still see your trail of slime.”
Unworthy of her, and possibly no more than a waste of perfectly good butter and garlic, I waited for my next instruction. It came.
“You may nod or shake your head if you are called upon.
“Now, answer me, you simpering swine. Do you wish to lick my boots?”
Before she could finish the question I bobbed my head up and down as if for an unseen apple, in unseen water, and pains shot up my neck – the legacy of an old birdwatching injury.
“You would like to lick my boots, wouldn’t you?”
I continued to bob and hurt. Defeat, utter defeat was mine. Until she spoke.
“Your obsequious assent annoys me. You will not get to lick my boots, or the ground beneath them.”
Perhaps greater humiliations lay in store.
“You will not be allowed to grovel before me, either.”
I could not even imagine what might come next.
“You would beg for that privilege, wouldn’t you?”
Of course. But I wasn’t being allowed to beg. Yet.
“But Mistress Sabina will not allow you to beg. You are to stay right where you are. And you will listen.
“Do you know where these boots have been?”
The answer, “On your divine feet, Mistress Sabina,” lodged in my throat, and I mouthed the air like a hooked fish.
“You have no way of knowing where these boots have been. I could have worn them in excrement-covered fields and pestilential swamps without so much as wiping my feet on a doormat. Even as we speak the footwear that you would venerate may be harboring cyclospora, mutant strains of E. coli, dysenteric amoebae, schistosomiasis, bilharzia, and who knows what other parasites even lowlier than yourself.”
She had a point and, as always, the truth hurts; I had been displaced in her contempt, and she wasn’t going to make things any easier on me.
“Did your mother teach you to do something like that? Perhaps it was an older sister who made you eat worms, or else she would tell on you for wetting the bed?”
She turned her chair around and straddled it, leaning into the backrest. O lucky chair, to be so crushed.
“Or was it a girlfriend who laughed at your pathetic man-root?”
She pressed the point – and nothing else.
“Can you tell me exactly what is wrong with you that you want to do this kind of thing? You may speak, if you can.”
A big “if.”
I kept gasping around the imaginary fishhook.
“So there’s nothing wrong with you, is there? Very well. You still have commands to obey.”
My hopes were not yet dashed.
Mistress Sabina drew herself up to her full Amazonian altitude, straight as a cane, or some other rigid tool of punishment, and then dashed my hopes.
“Stand up,” she growled. “Stand up. Get on your feet, not your knees.”
I was baffled, but complied.
“Now,” she said, “look me straight in the eye.
“Do it!”
This was wrong, all wrong, but I had my orders.
Her expression softened, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I hadn’t paid for sympathy.
“Now, repeat after me,” she said. “I do not deserve punishment or abuse.”
If domination was a church, she was leading me into heresy, but I repeated.
She proceeded.
“I do not need to be bound.”
She led me through several more assertions, then broke my will entirely, saying, “I am worthy of any woman I desire.”
Before a wave of nausea clutched my throat shut I whispered the words.
“I am worthy of any woman I desire.”
She turned her chair around, sat down and crossed her legs. Removing one black fingerless glove, she said, “Now, just get out of here. Don’t come back. Don’t call. Don’t go anywhere like this again, and go out on a date in the next week.”
I didn’t know what to say. My heart and mind were filled to overflowing, like a cup left too long under the Slurpee machine.
More sober than I had been all day, I backed out of the studio, walked down the stairs, and hailed a cab for home.
I managed to get a date by the next weekend, then other dates, and seemed worthy. I was under orders. Obeying still, I have not called her, or her colleagues. When the temptation arises I put down the telephone and imagine the sharp pain in my hand, and other places, where no whip will strike.
Lucky Numbers and Marlboros
Gwen Masters
When she woke up, he was gone.
At first she didn’t know what to do. She felt displaced, as if the room she woke up in was not the same room she had fallen asleep in, as if the bed were not her own. She walked through the house and looked for him but she knew what she would find.
He had taken it all. Oh, not her things. Not those. He had taken his clothes and his cigarettes. He had left the newspaper open to the classifieds, his toothbrush in the sink and his soap in the shower. She thought he had taken the vodka too but that afternoon she found it, sitting there on the high shelf in the pantry. How civilized of him.
“I will not fall apart,” she said to the bottle.
The bottle said not a word. She settled on the kitchen chair and her body ached when she did it. Paul had been rough with her. She had bruises on her shoulder and on her neck and even on her leg. Her belly ached where he had been. She had never ached like that or been marked like that for anyone else.
He wasn’t her first but it felt like he was. She had done things. He had taught her things she didn’t know she was capable of doing. She never dreamed she would have been able to deep-throat a man that size but she did. She gagged on his cock and that excited him. He liked it when he drove all the way into her pussy and she cried out because he was so hard to take.
“Arrogant fuck with an arrogant prick,” she said out loud.
She spent an hour, maybe more, watching the bottle and memorizing the label. She remembered the way he tasted when he kissed her the last time, before she knew he was going to walk out, when she thought everything was fine. He had tasted like vodka and grapefruit juice and Marlboros.
Last times. There were so many last times now, when she had expected only first times. That was her fault, her own arrogance. She had planned on more than just one night. She didn’t want to look back on the last time she had a man in her bed and remember it with anything less than happiness. She didn’t want him to be the last time.
She rose from the chair and pulled the bottle of vodka from the high shelf. She unscrewed the cap and took a swig. It made her grimace, made her stomach heave. But that much was done. He hadn’t been the last to drink from the bottle. She opened the fridge and pulled out the grapefruit juice. The taste made her nose tickle.
She walked to the living room and found the remote control for the television. Flipped it on. He had been watching the Spanish channel. She turned the channel to something more American: Country Music Television. She saw the cigarette butts in the glass ashtray and wished he hadn’t taken the Marlboros. She didn’t smoke, but she could learn fast.
She yanked the towel off the shower rod. It was still damp. She climbed into the shower and turned it on, let the water wash her clean. She would not cry.
She grabbed the soap he had used and threw it in the garbage can. The toothbrush, too. The pretty gown he hadn’t bothered to notice went into the washing machine. She yanked the sheets off the bed so hard that one corner ripped. She stalked to the washer and threw those in, too. When it was halfway through the cycle she realized she had forgotten to add the detergent. She started the washer again and this time added a
generous cup of Tide.
She skimmed the Classifieds. He had been looking for houses. What a fucking joke. She ripped up the paper, pulled it into shreds. She dumped it all in the trashcan and a few pieces bounced up to peek over the edge. She found the mug he drank from, sitting there beside the sink. She turned on the tap, filled it up and drank from it herself.
Paul wasn’t the last.
She picked up the phone. Pressed redial and studied the number. He had called the rental car place. She stared at the number for a long time. When had he decided to leave, exactly? Why had he flown halfway across the country to get to her? Why in the world would a man do that if he had intended to leave after one night?
She sat down on the couch and her body protested. Everything hurt. It wasn’t just the muscles in her thighs or the bite on her shoulder or the back of her throat. It was everything, from head to toe. It was the pain of the shock, settling in.
She called her friend Tom.
She wasn’t sure, even then, what she was going to do. She just knew she had to do something. She couldn’t sit there and breathe the same air with the traces of his cigarette on it. She couldn’t let herself remember all those things he said and did and wanted. She couldn’t be comfortable in her own skin as long as the memory of his hands was upon her.
Tom answered and she quickly got to the point. “I need you to come over.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Everything,” she said.
Tom came over. His face was etched with worry. He sat down beside her on the couch and the story came out a little at a time. Now the shock was wearing off and along with that disappearance came anger. A vile, simmering anger that made her head feel as though it was too small for her body. Her heart pounded in her chest and even that hurt, it made the bite marks throb a little each time her blood pumped underneath the tender skin.
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