A Is for Amour

by Alison Tyler

Suddenly, I felt George’s hand between my legs, between Jane and me. He was lifting her up, using his hand as a wedge. Then I felt the heavy heat, the weight of his sex as it moved into me, moving in and out. I opened wider, wanting him even deeper, but then he pulled out of me and started pumping into Jane. I watched as he slid in and out of her juicy slit. It excited me even more so that when he stopped diddling Jane and penetrated me again I was in ecstasy. Back and forth he went, bringing the three of us moaning and yelling into the biggest orgasm I could remember.

  We lay together in a happy sweaty heap.

  “Now’s the time for the champagne,” Jane said.

  If this was sharing the love, I’d do it anytime.

  MICHAEL HEMMINGSON

  TOYS

  AFTER WORK, I went to Rosina’s apartment. Her front door was unlocked, like she had told me it would be. I could hear her in her bedroom, typing away at her computer. She was sitting at her desk in shorts and a halter, hair pulled up in a messy tail.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She spun around in her chair. “You!”

  “Expecting someone else?” I sat on the bed.

  “Only you. Only you would be here.”

  “What are you writing?”

  “What does it look like?”

  I saw a poem on the screen. “What’s the subject?”

  “Flying. If I had wings,” she said, “I could fly. I could fly here—I could fly there. I’d be rich! Everyone in the world marveling at how I can fly.”

  “I can fly.” I lay back on the bed.

  Rosina got on top of me. She tickled me and said, “Can you now?”

  “Stop!”

  “No.”

  She stopped.

  “I’m a superhero,” I told her. “But this is a secret. Well, now you know the secret. When I’m a superhero, I can fly. I’m a superhero—with no name.”

  “Show me,” she said. She kissed my nose. “I want to see you fly.”

  “Can’t,” I said. “Not in costume. Right now, I’m a regular person.”

  “But when you’re a superhero—?”

  “I can fly.”

  “Well,” Rosina said, “not all of them can.”

  “Superman does.”

  “Batman doesn’t.”

  “He doesn’t have superpowers. He’s a vigilante.”

  “Batman is sexy,” she said, and rolled off me, looking at the ceiling. “I’ve seen those movies. I’m not talking about the goofy Batman on TV. I mean the movies, armor-plated nipples and everything!”

  “All superheroes are sexy,” I said, bored.

  “Does Spiderman fly?”

  “No. He swings around the city with his fake webs.”

  “Who’s that guy who runs really fast?”

  “The Flash.”

  She said, “I’d like to be like that, run around all in red, running faster than—faster than I don’t know what.”

  I moved to kiss her, to say, “You’re Wonder Woman.”

  She got up. “No. I’m too short, if you have not noticed. So,” she bent down and grabbed my legs, “when you’re a superhero, do you wear one of those tight, sexy spandex outfits?”

  “You bet.”

  “And battle evil foes?” Her hands were running up my legs.

  “I keep the world safe and clean,” I told her.

  “Sexy hero,” she said, unzipping my pants. She took my cock out, and started sucking on it. She sucked long and slow; I relaxed and allowed myself to enjoy this. I came, but she didn’t swallow. She let it go out of her mouth and down my cock. She looked at it. She moved up onto the bed and put her head on my chest. “So where are we going with all this?”

  “This?”

  “This,” she said, touching my stomach, “and this,” touching my wet cock, covered in saliva and semen.

  “This.” I touched her back, her ass.

  She turned and kissed my neck, nuzzled it with her face. “You smell good.”

  “You smell pretty good yourself.”

  “You always smell like sex,” Rosina said. “Is this a good or bad thing?”

  “Everything between us is a good thing,” I said.

  “Everything just seems to be too good. We’ll end in tragedy,” she said.

  “Tears?”

  “Violence?”

  “Pain?”

  “Maybe blood,” she said. She sat up. “Put your hands here,” she said, indicating her neck. She took my hands, and put them around her neck. “There, there. Now choke me.”

  “Why?”

  “I want you to.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Keep your hands there and squeeze.”

  “Like this?”

  “Harder.”

  “I’ll hurt you.”

  “Just do it, you bastard.”

  I squeezed her neck. “You like this?”

  “You know what I like?” She broke free from me. She plopped down on her hands and knees, body on top of me. She said, “What I really like is for men to fuck me from behind, my ass high in the air, and reach over, here, here”—taking my hand—“reach over like so and choke me like so as they fuck me from behind like so.”

  “Is this romantic talk?”

  “Depends on your upbringing,” Rosina said.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I like the silence.”

  She put her head on my chest. “Is this getting serious?”

  We stopped talking, and started kissing, which led to fucking. I fucked her the way she wanted, my cock in her pussy from behind, and I reached over and choked her. It wasn’t an easy thing to do; I thought it’d be easier if she were on her back, I’d have better access to her neck. “Choke me harder,” she pleaded, and I did, and her body shook as she came, my hand still at her neck. “Oh boy,” she said.

  I began to enter Rosina’s world of pain: her delight.

  I was touching, caressing her breasts. I pinched her nipples, which were hard; I pinched lightly.

  “Pinch them harder,” she said.

  I did.

  “Harder,” she said.

  I was afraid I’d hurt her.

  “I want the pain,” she said. “It makes me horny.”

  She gave an example. She got up, found a pair of clothespins in a cabinet in the kitchen, and placed a clothespin on each nipple. With the clamping down on each nipple, she took in a deep, hissing breath.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “You like that,” I said.

  “Yes yes,” she said. “Take them off.”

  I did, quickly.

  “Put them back on.”

  I did, and this time I took delight in watching the pins squeeze into her flesh.

  “Ahh, fuck,” she said.

  I took one off.

  “Now use your fingers.”

  I took the nipple in question between two fingers.

  “Squeeze,” she said.

  I squeezed.

  I started to become quite good at choking her while we fucked, whether she was on her belly or on her knees. Repetition makes you better. I also started to enjoy this activity. I was never quite sure if it was mental or physical for Rosina, but as long as it got her off and made her happy, it made me happy.

  We started biting one another, soft at first, then harder, sometimes until we drew blood from each other’s punctured flesh, fragile as anything in the universe. The biting was not just into the body, but into the soul.

  “I have something,” Rosina said, standing naked before me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Something I want you to use on me,” she said.

  She went to her closet, and produced a cat-o’-nine-tails. I’d seen such a flogging device in magazines, in movies.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “I’ve had it awhile,” Rosina said. “I want you to use it on me,” she said.

  It was black and ominous. She handed it to me. She lay on her stomach, on the bed. “Use it on my back,” she told me. �
�Use it on my ass, my legs.”

  I did so, lightly, uncertain.

  “It’s okay to start off soft,” she said, “but increase your strength. Gradually. I want you to get to a point where you could almost make me bleed.”

  I did this. I hit her with the cat-o’-nine-tails just as she said: her back, her ass, her legs. She seemed to like it best on her ass. I started to get into it. I started hitting her harder, enjoying the smack of leather against flesh. Harder. She began to cry out with each blow. Tears in her eyes. She wanted more. Welts were beginning to form on her ass, the backs of her legs. I concentrated on her back, ’til welts formed there.

  “Okay,” she said. “Stop.”

  I stopped. I, too, was almost out of breath.

  “Now get on me,” she said. “Fuck me, I can’t stand it, fuck me!”

  I entered her from behind, I reached over to choke her. We fucked for a bit, then she turned around and put her legs on my shoulders.

  “Slap me,” she said.

  I raised a hand.

  “Slap me.”

  Fucking her, I slapped her, hard, across the face.

  She just looked at me, some blood on her lip. “Not that hard,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching down and licking the blood away.

  “Slap me again,” she said.

  I did, but not as hard.

  Rosina bought toys several days a week, usually at thrift stores, sometimes at the toy store. She loved her children’s toys.

  But she had adult toys hidden under her bed, and it wasn’t until we’d been seeing each other for a month that she brought them all out, and wanted to share them with me.

  Anal beads, large double-headed black dildos, a dog collar, other assorted rubber penetrating devices. While Rosina liked the beads or my fingers in her ass, she didn’t care for anal sex all that much. She wasn’t into ass-licking, piss, or even swallowing my come. She liked pain, she liked to whack her clit off, she liked me to choke her. It was easy to get into what she enjoyed, as I got into any woman’s pleasure, however alien it was to me. I adapted well.

  The image I have of her—this image will always stay with me—is of Rosina surrounded by her toys, a milieu of toys: the toys she liked to buy and play with, fill the empty spaces of the apartment with.

  This is what I knew about her—or this could’ve been mere assumption—and the image of her that sticks like hot glue to the fingertips of my reverie is Rosina as I saw her one night, when I went to her apartment and she had bought a bag full of magnetic letters, the colored alphabet letters I seem to recall having played with when I was a very small person. “Look! Look!” she said with glee, like a small person, and she said, “Help me with them,” an invitation to play. She tore open the plastic bag the colored letters were contained in; they scattered across the floor of her kitchen like stupid human dreams forever lost in a car crash. She went to her knees, told me to come to her: play, help, fight. She started putting the letters on the white refrigerator, where she had a color print of a happy smiley-face woman with large eyes and the caption HOME HONEY, I’M HIGH and two postcards, one of a brunette holding a gun and shooting, another of a man with a gun, an image from the movie Reservoir Dogs. There was a mixture of delight and anxiety on her face; she looked at me and said, “Won’t you help me?” I got to my knees, picked up several letters, started putting them on the fridge with her. The kitchen was hot (like the rest of the apartment) and I felt very sad. She must’ve seen something on my face because she said, “You think this is silly, you don’t like doing this.”

  “No,” I said, “there’s nothing silly about this,” and so we were like two children frantically picking up the alphabet from her floor—letters that I thought would any moment now get up and dance—sticking them to the door of the fridge. Merriment, yes, a small one’s joy on her small triangular face; and when I looked at the kitchen table that held a lot of other toys, used and new, I felt sad again; I knew there was something missing. Something was missing from her past (something was missing from mine) and something was missing between us, yet another space to be filled, a vacuous interior needing intestines.

  “You buy so many toys,” I said. I sat down at the table and played with a dinosaur.

  Rosina looked at her letters, arranged them in a way she liked better. “Yes, I do,” she said.

  She sat in my lap like she always did, arms around my neck and looking down at me with her dark eyes, dark circles under her eyes—my face pressed against her breasts, the smell of her now on me, that smell that was not perfume but some men’s cologne I’d never heard of that mixed well with her skin and gave her the smell I knew I’d forever associate with her, an invasion of my psyche: my memory of Rosina.

  She kissed me on the lips, she kissed me on the forehead. “Just think,” she said, “I keep collecting more and more toys, we’ll never have to buy toys for our children.”

  One night at her apartment I felt, for the first time, like I did not belong there. I was feeling weak. All day I had had this sensation of horror, but all I wanted was to be with her, to hold her, to have her hold me, to play with her toys, to talk, to have her warm body against mine, to make love, to do anything, anything but be away from her; whip her, slap her, beat her, choke her. Her apartment was dark, candles were lit all around, flamenco guitar music on the CD player. She was in the bathroom, hair pinned up, applying makeup in a way she never had before, looking at herself in the mirror; and when I went into the bathroom, her eyes on me, from the reflection, were eyes of rancor. She seemed angry, like she didn’t want me there; she seemed evil in the candlelight. I tried to kiss her and she pushed me away. Once, she told me she did a lot of symbolic things, some abstruse and some subtle, and I would have to get used to it. “Like this band on my wedding finger,” she said, “is to remind me who and what I’m really married to: myself, I’m married to myself; and this necklace, these earrings in the shape of hearts, to remind me to always follow my heart.”

  “Why are you here with me?” she had asked after we made love the night before. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  I grabbed her necklace and said, “I’m just following my heart.”

  In the candlelit apartment she told me she was having second thoughts; she wasn’t sure if she wanted a partner, someone to tell her to come to bed at four a.m. while she was working on a poem; someone to tell her to eat; someone to even talk to, to be present for, to remind herself of herself. “I’m used to being a hermit,” she said. “I like being a hermit.” I told her I would go but she grabbed me and said no and we held each other and I smelled her and I was all the more confused.

  I saw her touching herself, making herself come, the way she liked to, lying on her stomach, and how hard she did this to herself, finger to clit. When I tried doing it to her, I never seemed to do it hard or fast enough. “Press, press,” she said, her body drenched in light, sweet-smelling sweat.

  As I saw her masturbating, the image was replaced again by that of her on the kitchen floor, picking up the alphabet, playing with her toys.

  Yes, it was over and I would live with this hole in my heart forever, and I’d never look at toys the same way again.

  R. GAY

  AN ORDINARY LOVE

  AH, YES. I enjoy tormenting my wife, Sasha. I do it because she lets me. Sasha lets me torment her because she enjoys it. We play little games, share mutual fetishes. She likes watching me chop onions before I fuck her over the kitchen counter so that she can taste their bite and cry without cause. I like watching her humiliate herself for me. There is a balance between us. “Andrew,” she’ll say, while we’re sitting next to each other on the train, on the way to work. There’s always urgency in her voice and I know what she’s going to say before the words fall from her mouth. I’ll turn to look at her, then look away, quietly observing the other passengers—the way the man across the aisle from us adjusts himself when he thinks no one is looking, the way the woman in the row in fron
t of us keeps jerking her head, trying to stay awake.

  While I’m watching all this, I’ll turn toward her, slide my hand across my left thigh to Sasha’s right, squeezing gently, slipping my fingers beneath the hem of her skirt. She’ll clear her throat and look out the opposite window at the passing scenery, a light pink blush spreading across her face. She’ll pretend to be somewhat disturbed. But she’ll brush her thumb across my wrist, and lean closer into me. We’ll stare at each other in these moments, and the rest of the world recedes. All I see is my wife, her legs spreading ever wider as we pass New Rochelle.

  Later, always, I smell her on my wedding ring.

  Sasha enjoys these torments because she appreciates the view from the bottom. She told me this on our third date. She was kneeling on the floor of my apartment, smiling up at me on the couch, my pants around my ankles. “I don’t care what you think of me,” she said, with a little laugh. “I like the view from down here.” And with that, she swallowed the length of my cock, continuing to laugh. I could feel the vibrations of her throat muscles. It was a curious sensation.

  Sasha carries her secrets in tight knots along her spine. When she’s lying in bed, her back facing me, I can see their outlines in the dark. Sometimes, I reach for her to trace them with my fingertips. She shrinks away, curling herself tightly. I withdraw but continue to watch. Sometimes, after we’ve shared a bottle of wine and we’re on the couch watching television, she’ll dance around her secrets, try to share a part of herself, but she never gets too far. I don’t push. I don’t want to complicate the games we play with history.

  We married after dating for only seven months. I proposed to her after a free jazz concert in Central Park. We were sitting on a bench, where she was trembling and smoking a cigarette. It was cold and windy and miserable. I put my coat around her shoulders, knowing it would smell like tobacco for weeks afterward. It was not a moment. I didn’t make promises I couldn’t keep. But after I asked and showed her the ring, she took a long drag on her cigarette and answered, “I’m going to say yes because I think you have the capacity to hurt me the way I need you to.”