I was headed home after one of these night drives, when inspiration struck. It was just before dawn, late September, the fire season winding down. I was driving along an old service road that followed some river I couldn’t name. Rounding a bend, I saw a rickety wooden warehouse perched precariously on the bank. Three stories high, sign weathered to unread-ability, roof half-caved in.
The leaves on the beech trees that surrounded it were already crisped and brown. That would go up like a torch, I thought, if it caught a spark. Even the casual notion sent a bolt of heat to my crotch.
I slowed the car, stopped, gazed at the clearly abandoned building. Why not, I thought. Why the hell not?
I planned carefully. Bought the gasoline two days ahead of time from a self-serve on the interstate twenty miles from my home town. Borrowed a late-model Chevy sedan from the lot, dark gray, completely unmemorable.
It was a Thursday night. I made myself sit in front of the TV during the ten o’clock news, just like I always did. I was so wound up, though, they might have bombed the White House and I wouldn’t have noticed. Finally, it was over. I turned out all the lights in the apartment, as usual, slipped out the back door and down the stairs to the yard, and rolled the car out onto the street. I didn’t turn on the headlamps until I was halfway down the block.
My cock was so swollen that it hurt to work the gas and the brakes. But it was a good kind of pain. A taste of things to come.
By the time I made my way back to the warehouse on the river, it was past midnight. The evening was incredibly still and dark, no breeze and no moon. I began to get nervous, despite myself. My hands were shaking as I circled the building, splashing the gasoline onto the battered planks of the wall. Where there were gaps between the boards, I tried to slosh some of it inside. The vapors made me a bit woozy. The world wavered as though I had drunk too much beer.
Finally it was done. I went back to the car and got the fuses I had made of twisted newspaper. I stuck the fuses into the cracks between the boards, then went around and lit them all, with those big wooden kitchen matches. Each snap of a match echoed loudly in the quiet of the night. Each flash of electric blue mellowed to a steady gold. The sulfur smell prickled in my nostrils, and my dick throbbed in anticipation.
These days, I can’t even strike a match without getting hard.
It was better than I could have imagined. Pure joy. After years of borrowing other people’s fires, I had my own. There were no sirens, no spectators, no official types keeping an awkward eye on me. Just me and the night and the dancing, piercing flames. I lay down in the scrubby grass with my fly wide open and watched greedily as the blaze devoured the feast I had laid before it.
By the time the building had become a charred pile of debris, I was gorged and sated. I called in sick that morning.
After that, second-hand conflagrations couldn’t satisfy me. I have to have my own. I try to space them out, keep at least six to eight weeks between them. It’s tough, but I don’t want anyone to get suspicious.
The first few weeks after a session, I have plenty of memories to keep me going. I can close my eyes and recall every detail, the intricate shapes of the flames, the taste of smoke in my lungs, the searing, intimate caress of the heat on my privates.
I remember the sequence in which the barn or the shed or the deserted fishing cabin collapsed. Sometimes the whole structure explodes, or caves in on itself. Other times, one wall will totter and fall gently, leaving the others standing as though buoyed up by the hot gases, until at last they simply melt away, crumbling to glowing ash. It is always fascinating, thrilling, enough to push me over the edge.
Sometimes, I imagine that I’m inside, during those final moments when the fire declares victory. I lie on my back, feeling the sparks rain down on my naked flesh, struggling to breathe as the fire sucks up all the oxygen. I know that it sounds a bit twisted, but I come the hardest when I think about the fire consuming me, taking me into itself.
Anyway, after a while, the memories aren’t enough. I start to dream of fire. I wake up soaked with sweat, with a hard-on that I can work for hours without finding any real relief. I begin to get irritable, less polite, less persuasive. My work begins to suffer.
That’s when I know it’s time. It takes me a few days to prepare, and then finally, I have what I need.
Last night, though – well, last night things didn’t quite go as planned.
I picked out the place last week, a huge, ramshackle barn on a foreclosed farm sixty miles north of my territory. (I’ve found that reading the auction notices sometimes points me in the direction of promising targets.)
I arrived a bit before midnight in my borrowed Ford pickup. Lately I like to spread a blanket in the bed of a truck and watch the show from there. Meanwhile, the usual places I find my targets, a truck’s going to be less noticed than a car, especially one that’s a bit rusty and dented like this one.
As usual, I dowsed the place with gas and lit the fuses. The fire caught like the place was made of cardboard. Sheets of flame rippled across the face of the building, waves of light so intense they hurt my eyes.
I stripped and lay down on my blanket, my dick straining toward the fire like the proverbial moth drawn to a candle. My organ was hot to the touch, fever rising inside me to match the flames around me. I fancied that it would blister my fingers as I stroked it, and smiled at the thought.
The screams ripped through my fire-induced bliss. Shrill cries, piercing the peaceful summer night, over and over. “Help! Help!” A female voice. Panicked. In pain.
My mind was still drugged with the fire’s aphrodisiac. It took me long seconds to understand.
By the time I realized what was happening, the screams had stopped.
Naked, barefoot, I stumbled out of the truck and ran toward the inferno I had created. The heat beat me back when I was still six feet away. Beyond that invisible, impenetrable barrier was a brilliant wall of flame, stretching from one edge of the building to another.
The flames hissed and roared, but I could still hear the woman’s cries echoing in my mind. I was helpless, though. Darkness settled on me, guilt and horror so intense that my erection withered even in the face of my magnificent creation. I was responsible. I was a murderer. This was the final result of the obsession I had pretended was so harmless.
Then my luck returned. As if sensing the waning of my desire, the flames seemed to sink back into themselves. The heat lessened slightly. Then the lintel above the barn door collapsed, temporarily smothering the flames that had consumed it and creating a gap in the blazing facade. I seized the moment, took a huge gulp of air into my lungs, and dashed into the burning building.
In contrast to the brightness outside, the interior was murky with smoke. Now and then, the fire flashed angry red through the haze, but in general, it was surprisingly dark. I wouldn’t have been able to see, anyway; my smoke-irritated eyes were brimming with tears. Fortunately, I tripped over something soft and motionless about ten feet from the door.
I squatted down and lifted the body to my shoulder, then backed out the way I had entered. Before I managed to exit, the back wall of the place lit up, piercing the gloom. A blast of heat struck me full in the chest. I scrambled out onto the grass, half-carrying, half-dragging my human burden.
Only when I was back at the truck did I breathe again, a long shuddering breath that felt cold as December. My muscles quivered from my exertion. I began to be aware of raw pain, on my chest, my hands, the soles of my feet. At the same time, I noticed almost absently, my cock was hard again, aching with that different kind of pain that I craved so much.
I smelled singed hair and burned flesh. Damn, what about the woman?
She lay crumpled in the truck where I had dumped her. Motionless. Was she dead? I held my seared palm over her nostrils and felt a stirring of air. Thank God. I relaxed a bit more, looked her over more carefully.
The few rags she wore were charred black, but I could tell that they had not bee
n all that clean or intact even before the fire. Her feet were caged in scuffed men’s work boots, which probably had saved them from being burned. She had wiry black hair, shot with gray, that looked as though it hadn’t seen a comb in weeks. Her face was smudged with soot from the fire, but her fingernails were equally grimy.
A homeless woman, then. A hobo. (Did they call women hobos?) Who no doubt had decided that my barn was a fine place to spend the night. Damn, damn, damn.
How badly was she hurt? I could see several stripes of crimson on her arms and thighs, the outer skin completely burned away to show the spongy level underneath. Third degree, I remembered from Boy Scouts. Aside from the soot, her face seemed OK. Gingerly, I tried to push aside the shreds of blackened cloth that covered her torso. They crumbled to black ash at my touch.
There were more burns on her belly and breasts, but they were second rather than third degree. Blistering already. I should get her to a hospital as quickly as possible, I thought. Or I should get my clothes on and get the hell out of here.
I didn’t move, though. I just watched her, watched her wounded flesh rise and fall with her shallow breath. I felt very strange. The lust was bubbling in my veins again, though the flames in the barn had begun to subside. I had bathed in the fire tonight, I realized, just as I had always dreamed. The raw patches on my flesh were the marks of the fire’s kiss.
The woman moaned and shifted uneasily. Her eyes still closed, she licked her cracked lips. On impulse, I leaned over her and brushed my own against hers. My partner. My victim.
Her eyes flew open. They were a deep velvety brown. The whites were a startling contrast to her soot-blackened skin. She focused immediately on my face.
“Who . . .? What . . .?” She tried to sit up, and screamed as the pain hit her.
“Shh,” I told her. “Lie still. There’s been an accident, a fire. I’ll take you to the hospital . . .”
“No!” her voice was surprisingly forceful. She pushed herself up to half-sitting, despite the obvious agony she was experiencing. “No way. Folks like me die in hospitals.”
“But you’re badly burned. You need medical help.”
“No thanks. I can take care of myself.” She cocked her head to the side and looked at me carefully. “Who are you, anyway? Did you save me?”
A hot wave of shame washed over me. Saved her? Nearly condemned her to death was more like it. “I heard you screaming. I managed to pull you out.”
“You saved my life,” she said flatly. It was no longer a question, and I wasn’t going to argue. “I owe you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, sir, I do, and I always pay my debts. But I ain’t got much to pay you with right now.” She looked ruefully at the few shreds of fabric that still clung to her limbs.
Then she looked me over, noticed immediately that my cock was huge, purple and oozing. She was sharp, no question about it. She gave me a crooked little grin.
“Well,” she said, “there is that.” She lay back down in the truck bed, raised her knees, and spread her thighs. “Come’ere, lover boy.”
“No, I couldn’t, I don’t want ...” I began. Then I realized that I did want it. I wanted her, wanted to sink my cock as deep as it could go into her fire-scarred body.
Last time I had a woman was Christmas, when I fucked Jen, Manny’s receptionist, after the company party. She’s cute, just slutty enough to be fun. All in all, though, it was disappointing. I couldn’t even come without imagining that we were lying together inside a burning building.
Now, though, I wanted this nameless, broken woman as I had never wanted a woman before. I let my eyes slide over her breasts, ample, middle-aged breasts with nipples the size of grapes. I wanted to suck those nipples, then move over to tongue the blistering flesh around them. The legacy of the flames.
Her thighs were ripe, too. She was pretty well-fed for someone who lived on the road. Her black and silver pussy hair was as wild and tangled as the locks on her head. It was untouched by the fire, but I’ll bet it reeked of smoke. I wanted to bury my face there, and just breath, the smoke and musk mixed.
Mostly though, I wanted to ram my cock into her and fuck her until I lost consciousness. I knew she’d be hot, my woman who had lived through the fire. Her blood would be molten, her cunt would be boiling. I knew it would hurt, hurt us both, my seared chest slamming against her blistered belly, but she wouldn’t notice and neither would I. We’d be too high, lost in the fire, flaming with the purity of lust that burns away the body and leaves only the bare, white-hot soul. Never, never have I wanted anything so much.
She wriggled her hips at me, raised and lowered her bum provocatively. My cock convulsed, and I nearly sprayed my jism all over her. “Come on! What are you waiting for?”
I turned away.
Something stopped me, I’m not sure what. Maybe it was the echo of that darkness that swept over me, reminding me that I was almost her murderer. Maybe it was fear, fear that the pleasure would not, after all, be worth the pain.
Or perhaps it’s just that I was getting another lesson on the difference between fantasy and reality.
She wouldn’t let me take her to the hospital. I dropped her at a motel near the interstate, left enough cash for her to hang around there and recover for a week or so.
Meanwhile, I came home and slept for twelve hours, as though I was in a coma. No dreams. No beating off, either. What would be the point?
I don’t know what will happen next. Maybe I’ll kiss this job goodbye and move to another state. Some place with a new supply of abandoned buildings.
I have an uncomfortable feeling, though, that at this point, abandoned buildings won’t do the trick.
Guilt
Tsaurah Litzky
I don’t want to tell my friends I am having an affair with a priest. It’s not that I’m ashamed; no way: it’s more that my adventures between the sheets with Father Sal move me so deeply; I don’t want to talk about them.
I don’t want to sit with Ursula and Carri at Southside Lounge drinking Margaritas and talk affectionately about him. I don’t want to tell them about the faded blue boxer shorts decorated with little Snoopys that he wears, nor do I want to tell my friends how much his hairy barrel chest turns me on.
I don’t want to chat about his mighty eminence, so thick when it is erect and wanting me that it fills my palm. I especially don’t want to get all girly-girl with my dear gal pals and giggle with them about the fact that the Father’s favorite position is indeed missionary. Nor do I wish to share with them the fact that due to the particularly fortunate geometry of our bodies, I can swing my legs up, up so that my toes can tickle the back of his neck while he is nailing me. Then, by just lifting my head a little bit, I can grab one of his nipples in my mouth and suck it so it gets as hard as the blessed cock that is reaming me. I suck at his nipple almost as hungrily as my ravenous twinkie is sucking Father Sal’s cock deep into my heart of hearts. Most of all, I don’t want to tell my friends that I think I am falling in love with him.
He visits me on Thursday evenings because that is the night when he is free of responsibilities for his parish. The day before his visits I can’t get him out of mind, I anticipate how I will welcome him with a big juicy kiss and a nice glass of scotch, and my pussy gets so wet that the crotch of my panties is soaked.
I wonder how much falling in love with a priest will complicate my already complicated life. I can’t imagine bringing him to the annual Passover Seder my eighty-nine year old aunt holds in her house out in Valley Stream, Long Island, but then I don’t even have to bring him. Ours can be a secret love. People can be secret lovers for a long time. Last year, Carri’s father died, only three months later her mother married his best friend, Herbert. It turns out the mother and Herbert had been secret lovers for forty-five years. Lately, I have started to imagine Father Sal and I growing old together in our secret way. He will keep a pair of slippers at my house; I will always have a tube of Ben Gay around becau
se even now he complains that his back sometimes aches after he fucks me. However, last night something happened that has made me worry about our future together. He and I may be developing a serious problem.
Sal always brings me roses, roses in different colors. Last night they were pink, the color of romance. He has also started to bring an article from the newspapers for us to discuss because, he says, he wants our time together to be about more than just the bed. Last night he brought over an article about social security reform. I poured him a hearty scotch and for me white wine. Then I sat on his lap while we discussed the threats to the social security system. I couldn’t resist putting my hand down between his legs to rest on his big elephant balls. I stoked them with adoring fingers. Very soon, his manly nature rose up and started smacking against my wrist like a wooden ruler. If this was punishment for me being a bad girl, I could take it and I wanted more.
Just as I was talking about the dangers of privatization, and comparing our system to retirement programs in Europe, my dear Sal suddenly picked me up out of my chair. Then he threw me over his shoulder like I was a sack of Bibles, carried me into the bedroom and dumped me on the bed.
He was so impatient; he did not even bother to undress me. There must have been something about the pension system in Holland that really turned him on. He just pulled up my skirt. I wasn’t wearing panties, when he is around I like to offer not even the flimsiest impediment to him entering me. Then he unzipped his trousers and pulled out his proud piece. He sheathed it with the condom he always carried in his shirt pocket in anticipation of our raunchy romps. A second later he pulled me onto my hands and knees and took me like doggy style. With each deep lunge, his hot balls spanked my ass cheeks making me even more excited, so excited I wanted to privatize him for myself forever. He collapsed on top of me, his mouth sucking my neck, his scepter ramming into me, his sizable belly slapping my back like a silken cushion. Finally his powerful rod shot a steaming jet of pure heaven into me sending us both to kingdom come.
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