Bound by Lust

by Shanna Germain

  I study the outline of her backside. It’s a well-rounded rump, the kind that’s just cruising for a bruising.

  Lisa leans into me. “Why, may I ask, are you so fixated on my fanny?” she demands, the spicy scent of her breath complementing the playful pitch of her voice.

  My gaze shifts to the bible sinking into my lap. I’m sure my eyes are as black as its leather binding. God, please let this be over soon.

  As if in answer to my prayers, the group leader initiates the closing communion. I like this part. It means I get to hold Lisa’s hand openly.

  Afterward, Lisa makes me socialize and help eat the donuts that someone brought, none of which have sprinkles.

  How much longer are we going to be here? I mean, come on—there’s got to be a limit on the number of impure thoughts a person can think inside a house of worship before they get excommunicated.

  “Nancy and I will clean up today,” Lisa volunteers. Jesus christ, what the hell is she doing?

  The fellowship hall clears out, until we’re left in the company of bibles and burgundy chairs and acorn-colored tables.

  “Did you enjoy that?” Lisa inquires, closing the door. A quiet click follows close behind.

  “Yes, particularly the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Who knew it had nothing to do with homosexuality?”

  “Yearning and learning? My goodness. And you thought you were lousy at multi-tasking.”

  We lock lips, bump hips.

  “Aren’t you going to thank me properly?” she pouts.

  “I just did.”

  “I’ll rephrase,” she says, daintily pinching her skirt between her thumb and index finger. “Aren’t you going to spank me properly?”

  Lisa flips a chair around, presses it up against a table. She climbs onto the cushion, her knees carving divots into the seat.

  My lips leap into a smile. I pitch her skirt up, shove the hem inside the waistband. Her panties are plain, simple, virgin-white. “Is God going to smite you?”

  “No,” Lisa assures me. “You are.”

  “So, essentially, I’ll be doing God’s work?”

  Lisa nods, propelling her bottom into my palm as she submits to me, bound by lust and trust. That’s all the encouragement I need. I rub her rump, massaging the flesh, tracing halos on her skin with my fingertips.

  I study the cheeky curves of her backside. “I have a feeling this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you,” I murmur, just before my hand whomps her posterior.

  Lisa giggles. She steeples her fingers, presses her palms together.

  “Lord, have mercy?” I venture, wondering how long it will take to get that Dixie Cups ditty, “Chapel of Love,” out of my head.

  “No, it’s so I don’t…you know. So I won’t be tempted to touch…myself.”

  It’s then that I notice the aroma. The spanking has barely started, and already I can smell her arousal. It’s a succulent scent—cranberries mingled with mandarin oranges.

  My palm strikes again. Lisa bounces up and down on her chair. “Easy there, Tigger. I can’t hit a moving target.”

  She stills.

  My hand thumps her rump.

  “My knees hurt,” she says.

  The poor, sore thing. I just assumed she would suffer in silence. “That’s what happens when you pray and play in the same position.” I swoop down like a bird of prey. “You get a—”

  “Holy fuck!”

  Did Lisa just curse? Funny, I figured the only way she would ever swear is in a court of law.

  Countless swats, strikes, and smacks later, Lisa is sufficiently smote. I peer inside her undies and study her battered, Barbie-pink backside. My palm is identical in shade. Who knew pleasure could be such a pain?

  Speaking of pain… “I’m pretty sure the bible mentions something about doing to others what you would have them do to you.”

  Lisa climbs carefully off the chair. She yanks her skirt out of the waistband, lets it drop down to her calves. “The bible also says to be patient in affliction.”

  “Fine,” I say, and for a second, I think I sound more fearful than cheerful. Yeah, right.

  Lisa licks her lips, rubbing her hands together like Snidely Whiplash.

  Yeah. Right.

  “Have a seat,” she says solicitously, gesturing to the chair.

  My legs shudder. Lisa always did make me weak in the knees. I clamber onto the cushion.

  “Nancy, dear?” She smiles at me, like an angel of mercy. “You haven’t got a prayer.”

  THE HEART OF CHAOS

  Rachel Kramer Bussel

  On the surface, my husband Skip and I might seem unconventional. In a sense, we are, because we don’t work corporate jobs; I’m an artist, the kind who works with paint and performance, and he’s a chef, one I consider to be a food artist. Yet if one of us is more by the books, it’s Skip. Whereas I consider art my chance to jump into the heart of chaos, to surrender to the part of me that is wild and wanton and doesn’t play by the rules, he thinks of cooking as something more akin to a science, perhaps a form of math, full of rules and precision that, he says, lead to masterpieces.

  Most of the time, I agree to disagree, because when we come together, I win. What I mean by that is chaos wins; he surrenders his analytical self, unwrapping the layers of overthinking to unlock the perfect masochist. In our years together, I’ve beaten him, whipped him, gagged him, bound him, pierced him, and even branded him, once, at his behest. I consider kink to be a form of chaos too, a place where we go forward without knowing the next step, where there is no right answer, only multiple paths each leading to its own kind of bliss, like an erotic Choose Your Own Adventure where every ending is a happy one.

  I like that we don’t necessarily think the same way when we approach our work; otherwise, life would be boring. When I step into my studio, I have only the vaguest idea about what I plan to create, whereas Skip has recipes, road maps, a mental, if not a physical, image of what he wants to concoct for his customers. Recently, though, our worlds collided, and he had to step into mine, to surrender to the chaos, give up any pretense of rationality.

  “My show, my show…” was all I could mutter as I sank to the floor of my studio, ready to cry. The canvases themselves were hung, the gallery ready, the poster in the window touting the performance I’d been practicing with my model, Claude, for weeks. It was a tricky, complicated work that involved covering him in Cling Wrap, including his face, with only a mouth hole so he could breathe, then using him as my canvas, layering candle wax everywhere. In the end, I’d rip it off, and he’d put out a flame with his tongue. It this case, my chaos was carefully choreographed; I couldn’t just wing something like that, and I wanted people to make the connection among the struggle Claude had to endure, the sense of immobility and surrender, and the art on the walls. Sometimes I felt just as immobile as if I were bound tight all over, not in a sexual sense, but in every other way. Claude got that…but he’d also gotten a very high fever, and there was no way I would’ve let him go through with it, even if his doctor had okayed it. That left only one choice: Skip.

  “Honey, what’s wrong? What can I do?” he asked as I rocked myself back and forth on the floor, a plan forming.

  “I need you,” I said, staring right into his startlingly clear blue eyes, ones that look like that ripest of blueberries. “Claude had to cancel for tonight. He’s sick. I need you to take his place.”

  My husband is one of the palest people I’ve ever met, but I saw his face go even whiter. “I’ll do anything for you, Molly, but not that. I couldn’t. It’d be humiliating.”

  I stood up and walked toward him. “That’s exactly the point,” I said as I reached for his cock beneath his jeans. “Well, not the only point, but one of them. It’s about surrendering to the unknown, letting go. You’re telling me you don’t want to be tied up, unable to move at all, barely able to breathe?” I’d taken his dick out and started stroking its hard, smooth length.

  “What I feel r
ight here in the privacy of your studio is one thing. You know public play is a limit for me, baby.” His voice took on a whine as I ran my thumb around the wet tip.

  “I’d normally never ask you to disrespect your limit, but this is an emergency. I’m not going to order you to do it, because you’re your own person, but I’d be extremely grateful if you’d do this for me this one time. And I also have a feeling you just might like it, if you let yourself go with it.”

  I stop myself from saying more, even though my natural inclination is always to say more, to go past the point of reason, to fill the empty space with words, as if they will somehow magically create actions. But here words are not my master, and neither, really, is Skip. I must wait and let him think and decide if it’s worth it and know that if he declines, I will be okay. I cannot let my opening’s entire promise rest on my husband’s shoulders.

  He looks up at me and says, “Okay, I’ll do it, but you know how much this is a sacrifice for me. I’m nervous.”

  Skip never tells me he’s nervous; even when I hear him drawing in breath after breath when I spank or whip him, it’s not nerves he’s displaying. Those breaths are giving him extra stamina, and he gains strength through submission. But for him that is what we do at home, in private; those are our sacred, beautiful, kinky rituals, ones that are all the more special because they are not for public consumption. He likes that he’s known for being unconventional with his work, but when it comes to sex, that just doesn’t come up. Someone might say his latest culinary masterpiece is “orgasmic,” but they don’t mean it literally. I’ve even seen him blush when someone made that connection too strongly; he doesn’t see food the way I do, the mouth connecting to parts much lower.

  I know him and love him too much to have asked him to do this if I had any other options, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it might be good for us, to take all the extremes we play with at home and bring them into the world. Of course, it’s not going to be a scene in the traditional sense; we can’t go quite as far, and it’s not about us, really, but our audience. Still, even though I’d never fuck Claude and betray my marriage, I must admit there was a part of me that was looking forward to degrading him, to watching him squirm and struggle, to pushing him beyond his usual limits. That is where I get off on the process; just as I want people to walk away from my art feeling differently than they did walking into a gallery, I want kink to change me and Skip, or whoever I might play with. We are pretty faithful to one another, but once in a while, maybe once a year, we might find ourselves intrigued by someone else and go off and have a romp.

  “Okay, well, I have to be there at 6:00 to set up; you can get there at 7:30, and the performance is at 8:00. You’ve heard me going over the details with Claude so you know what it’s going to entail. Mummification, hot wax, and a candle. You can practice that part on your own if you want.” I say the words in such a businesslike way, so the opposite of what I feel about them. My heart pounds as I look at my husband’s face, watch him try to stay calm, even though I can practically feel his nerves leaping across the few feet that separate us.

  “Molly…I don’t want this to come between us. This is your work, and I respect that, but we are more than that, right?”

  I move closer and pull him in for a hug. “We are always more than that, baby. Always. I love that you’re doing this for me, but I’d love you whether you did it or not. Now please pamper yourself today; no chores, do whatever you feel like for the next few hours.”

  I have to get away from him, so I don’t start to feel sorry for him. I lay out my outfit for tonight and gather all the things I’ll need; the supplies for the scene are already at the gallery. The owner, Daniel, calls me a few times with last-minute questions, and before I know it there is a crowd lined up outside, and we are getting everything ready. I want these strangers to walk in and see my husband, naked, covered in clear Cling Wrap. I want them to sense what he is feeling, sense what he is offering me, and by extension, them. I want them to go to the heart of chaos with me, live.

  Skip’s eyes are big as I start to wind the sheer wrap around his ankles, tight enough so he can’t move. It’s when I get to his cock that I have to smile; despite what I know are true nerves, he’s hard, his impressive cock so erect I know that anyone who sees it will be jealous—the men of his size, the women (and I’m sure some of the men) of me. “I love you,” I whisper in his ear before I cover it with the wrap. In that moment, it’s doubly true, triply. I can’t focus on the sappy feelings threatening to overtake me because I have a job to do, but seeing him like that, I’m not only excited about what’s about to happen, I’m touched. I know that even if it turns him on like nothing else, if it weren’t me asking, Skip would never have agreed to this.

  I finish securing the wrap and then use a nail to poke a hole in his mouth, inserting a plastic tube so he can breathe. He can move his body a little by rocking back and forth, and that is his signal if things get to be too much. I’ve also trained two staffers to watch him closely; at the first sign of anything wrong, we cut him out. Most of this crowd, as avant-garde as they may think they are, have never seen anything like this, I’m sure. The red velvet ropes around my husband have just been secured when the crowd starts streaming in.

  In what feels like no time, we are at capacity. Cameras are going off nonstop, and I can hear the word husband being whispered along with giggles, gasps, and plenty of profanity. People simply don’t know what to make of this. Daniel gets up to introduce me, and I smile, my eyes looking all over, hoping we pull this off without a hitch. I’d practiced with Claude so many times but had only told Skip about those sessions, where he’d winced when I’d described pouring hot wax onto Claude’s cock. Yes, it was protected by the Cling Wrap, but not entirely.

  I knew that the added drama of our last-minute substitution would have the art world abuzz, but right now, I don’t care about that. I’ve worked so hard to make this the perfect night that I don’t want anything to mar it. “And now we will have a five-minute live presentation,” I hear booming over a loudspeaker, and then the lights are dimmed, the music starts, and I begin “painting” my human canvas, my husband, with wax. I smile at him, genuinely, as I drip purple all along his chest, arms, and back. When the first candle is nearing its end, I blow it out, toss it on the floor, and am handed a white one. I go into the zone, where it isn’t about me and Skip, or even me and the audience, but me and the candles, the canvas, using the colors to work together. I have to move quickly, and the urgency spurs me on.

  The room is as silent as a packed gallery can be as I coat my husband from head to toe with hot wax. I can hear him breathing through the tube and see his dick straining against its trappings. I can’t take the time to get turned on, but I do smile when I get to the last candle and manually smear it all along his chest, taking a moment to pinch his nipples as I do. I’m handed safety scissors, and I cut him free. The lights come up, and then the trickiest part happens. I’m given a long black candle, and Skip kneels before me. I try my best not to tremble as I upend it. One drop of wax falls on his lower lip, and then I’m staring, riveted, as I place the lit candle in his mouth, where he expertly “swallows” it, extinguishing the flame. The room explodes into applause and Skip stands there stiffly until I tap his arm and tell him he can go change.

  The rest of the night flies by, and all the pieces but two wind up with red dots next to them. Skip sticks around, even though I know he’d rather be home, and even though he shrinks from the attention, standing just behind me or in a corner most of the night, I know we’ve reached some crucial point in our relationship, some space where the chaos of playing in public has permeated our private world.

  Finally, the last guest leaves, and he lifts me up in his arms. “I can’t believe we did that,” he says, and I grab him for a kiss, letting my hand wander down to his ass.

  “I can’t believe you let me,” I say.

  “I’d do anything for you,” he tells me, his
voice shaking with passion.

  Just then I know exactly what I want to give him. “You can have me. I mean, do whatever you want to me.” Yes, usually I top him, but we’ve been together for a long time, and sometimes we mix things up. I like to think the rarity of my subbing to him makes it all the more special, but the truth is, we are complex creatures and follow our moods. Suddenly, I want to show him, viscerally, with my body, how much what he’s done meant to me.

  “Whatever I want?” he asks, his voice taking on a suspicious hint of mischief.

  “Well, within our rules.”

  “Do you have any more candles?” He knows I ordered several times more than I needed, just in case something went awry, as well as for practice.

  “Yes.”

  “Then take off your clothes and get on the tarp.”

  “Here? Now?” I ask.

  “Why wait?” The grin he gives me is pure evil. “Don’t tell me it’s okay for all the people who work here to have seen me totally nude but not okay for you.”

  I can’t argue with him, and besides, this isn’t about anyone but the two of us. “Give me five minutes,” I say.

  “You’re on,” he smirks. I tell Daniel what I want to do, and he agrees to leave me in charge.

  “You were amazing tonight, Molly. You’re a star.” I hug him, but just then, the art world, even in the middle of this gallery, seems far away. The only place I want to be is right here, ready to accept whatever my husband gives me.

  As I undress, I’m a little nervous, almost shy. I’ve known Skip for more than a decade and been married to him for six years, but suddenly it’s like I’m submitting to him for the first time. In a way, maybe I am, because we’ve both gone to new places tonight, sharing parts of ourselves we might not have ever seen were it not for a quirk of fate.