by Litte, Jane
He was grinning at me as I pulled off my breathmask and slicker, clearly pleased, proud of what he had. I wondered how many people he showed it to like this. Unusual setup for a free-drifter, I was thinking . . . unusual focus on the visual, when all we really need for that are our little black consoles. I arched an eyebrow and he must have seen the question on my face.
“I have a job,” he said. “I run code for one of the investment firms downtown. I designed the GUI for their entire system and I do updates for it. But that’s just to pay the bills.”
I nodded. But I was looking around for his console, and he must have seen that too, because he moved past me, reached down to a shelf by his workstation, and fished it out. I looked at it and felt the familiar hungry ache of the consummate junkie, that deep-down need to be out of the meat and drifting.
“In my spare time,” he said, “I work with this.”
I looked at him like he was maybe a little stupid. “I know,” I said, and he shook his head and laughed.
“No, not like that. I mean, I work with it. It’s been around for how long now? And the military uses it, and some of the bigger firms. But the rest of us, the plebes, we’re just fucking around with it. We use it for maybe a tiny percentage of what it can really do.” He carried it over to a low table in front of the futon and set it down, untangling the leads and jacks. I watched him as he unfolded a little black netbook and brought up a program, tapped something on the keyboard, and turned to me.
“Come here.”
He hadn’t ever talked to me like that before. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I don’t much like being told what to do—it’s part of why college didn’t work all that well, part of why I never managed to hold down a job for any length of time—but the way he said it . . . it was low, soft, coaxing as much as it was commanding. I felt my body carrying me forward. Rebellious meat. But not rebelling, not now—at least, not against him.
I sat down next to him on the futon and he turned to me. He reached up and pushed my hair aside from the jacks, gentle in a way that made me want to cringe back from him. It wasn’t that I was scared or that it hurt, but no one had touched me like that in . . . Fuck, years maybe.
He seemed to be examining me, leaning close to look at the tiny metal holes in my temples, and I smelled him again, the scent of solder. I was opening my mouth to say something else, to inhale him—and he touched the jacks.
No one touches the jacks. The doctor touched them when he installed them, and I touch them to wire myself into the console, and besides that, no one does. I’ve heard of tech fetishists who like to touch, but to me it’s a means to an end, like the rest of the meat, so when he touched me like that, circling each jack with delicate fingers, I didn’t know how to process it. I jerked, some indefinable sensation shooting down my spine to lodge itself like shrapnel in my cunt, hot and liquid. He smiled at me and pulled his hand back.
“See? You respond so well. You’re ideal.”
“Kim.” I was trying to get my breath back. I wanted to fuck. I wanted to shove him over and claw his cock into me. I hadn’t wanted it like this in . . . about as long as it had been since someone touched me with that kind of delicacy. “What the fuck?”
“The jacks are hardwired into your nervous system,” he said, leaning over the netbook again. “They have to be, to give you the kind of input you need to drift.”
“I know that, Kimber, Jesus.”
“So they’re designed for input and output, both concurrently. But the input is passive. It’s just feeding you information you can process. So I started thinking, you have hard-line access to the entire nervous system through those things. You can feed in data . . . but you can also go in and fuck with it. Change the wiring.”
“Kim . . .” Now I was nervous. What this sounded like . . . It sounded like a one-way ticket to total neuroburnout. “Look, I don’t think . . .”
“You can trust me,” he said again, and he looked at me with those eyes that always had a way of making me give in. “It works, and it’s safe . . . and you have to fucking feel it. It’s not like anything else.”
He knew how to hook me. Tell me something is new, tell me it’ll blow my fucking mind, and I won’t be able to say no. Free-drifting, you live out there on the edges of things, right in the liminal; you make a home there. Then you don’t want anything else. You always chase the new shit.
What the fuck. I said yes.
He grinned at me, reached down for the leads, leaned up close again, and kissed me. It was hard, no delicacy now, and his teeth bit down on my bottom lip. I gasped, jerked, but it wasn’t exactly pain, because just at that moment he touched one of the jacks, and what I felt . . . Was I coming? I’m still not sure. It was sharp, like a whip-crack in my spine, and I cried out, heat and stickiness bursting between my legs.
And he jacked me.
I must have blacked out. When I opened my eyes he was there, leaning over the netbook again. I looked around, confused, reached up to feel the leads snaking their way to my skull.
I wasn’t drifting. I wasn’t out there in the data-sea. I took a breath. “Kim, what’s going on?”
“I’m not giving you any AV input,” he said. “You are getting input, though. It’s just a different kind.” He reached over to his side and picked up something that I couldn’t see, got up suddenly, and moved around behind me. He leaned down, touched my face, took one of my wrists in his hand.
“Just making this a little more interesting,” he said, finding my second wrist. And then I saw a flash of red. A scarf, and then it was around my wrists, tying them back behind my head, against the back of the futon. I tugged; I felt a pull against one of the frame’s crossbars. I stared up at him. He laughed and touched my face again, gently.
“You can tell me to stop anytime,” he said. “If you really don’t like it. And I swear, I will.”
At first there was nothing. I watched him go back to the netbook again, and I squirmed a little, experimentally, but as he tapped on the keyboard I caught myself starting to doubt this whole “input” thing, starting to wonder if this was all just some kind of kinky prank.
Then he hit a key and my fucking brain started buzzing.
It was a low hum at first, but it ramped up until it was a purring between my temples. My vision doubled; I shook my head, trying to clear it, and then he was crouching over me. I licked my lips, tried to gather myself enough to speak, and he touched me again, light, running the tips of his fingers up the insides of my bent arms. It was like the raking of little needles over my skin. I jerked and he laughed.
“Kim, tell me what the fuck—” His fingers moved back down, quick, and he pinched my nipple through my shirt. No gentle teasing, just one hard pinch. It should have made me yell, and it just about did—but it didn’t hurt. It was like someone pressing a slick finger down on my clit, flicking it so fucking perfectly, all pleasure. I dropped my head back and whimpered.
“I rewired your peripheral nervous system,” he murmured, lips against my ear as his fingers kept twisting, pulling my skin out of shape. “Pain is some of the most intense shit you can feel, right? Pleasure is harder, more subtle . . . So I figure, if I switch which makes you feel what . . .” He gave my nipple one more hard twist and released me. I let out a whine of disappointment, but it cut off when his hand smacked hard against the side of my face.
Tears flooded my eyes. He’d avoided the jacks, but I could feel my cheek burning . . . and it was hard to describe what else. It was all the pain I would feel from a slap like that, but flipped. Sweetened. It was lingering, a warm honey-glow spreading down my neck, all through me. I gasped, twisted a little, but I wasn’t trying to get away.
“You like that?” He flicked his tongue against my ear, and it was like he’d dug his fingernail into the lobe. I tried to get words out—what I would have said, then, I have no idea—and they didn’t come. Should it have been scary, what he’d done to me? Maybe. I hadn’t known exactly what was coming. But I hadn’t
really asked. Because I’d wanted something new, I’d wanted to be surprised . . . and here we were, and I wanted . . . Fuck, I wanted him to hurt me.
I turned my head and I kissed him, and it felt like burning, like the rasp of sandpaper over my lips without the friction, like standing too close to a fire. And even the pain wasn’t pain like I was used to. It was pain with a sweet edge, pain with a memory of a time when it hadn’t been pain at all. I kissed him hard, stroking my tongue along the top of his, and when he bit me again I arched up against him and made a loose, hot sound.
I hadn’t enjoyed being meat like this in a while. I hadn’t loved my own skin, what it could give me.
Kim pulled away from me suddenly, and I looked up at him and he looked down. His expression was hard to read, but under that hot metal scent I could smell sex; I could smell the memory of the pre-come at the head of his dick, the way his sweat always smelled when we were done, collapsed together in a tangle of human hardware.
I lifted my hips in an unspoken request, and he yanked my pants down. He didn’t bother with my boots, barely bothered with unbuttoning my fly, and his nails raked against me all the way, so hard I wondered if he was drawing blood . . . and fuck, it felt so good. My cunt was wet, getting wetter, my thighs sticky and the air cooling them when he slapped them apart, slapped them red and angry, and every time his hand hit me it was like the most amazing, most perfect set of fingers in me. He slapped his way up my legs, and when he got to my cunt, gave it one sharp smack and shoved his fingers in, I came so hard I screamed. I came so hard I hurt, and that part was good, too.
My arms were stiff, but I didn’t care. I was tired, stretched out, and strained and pushed to a place I’d never been before, but I didn’t want to leave. I lifted my hips again and I grinned at him, and he grinned back, hands already working at his fly.
“Thought you’d like it,” he said, pushing his pants down his hips, his dick bobbing free and glistening in the low light, the netbook’s screen, the neon through the windows. He reached down to the table and somehow he got the condom on without ever taking his eyes off me. And that look . . . it was like that sweet slap to the face. I’d forgotten what it was like, being wanted like that. In the flesh. The flesh part of the wanting.
It hurt when he thrust into me, until he did it again, harder. I keened and kicked my heels against the small of his back, and the whole futon rattled as he slammed into me, one hand gripping my tit under my shirt, fingers digging into my flesh. Now something stranger was happening: now it was getting blurry, the pain and the pleasure harder to differentiate, like a photo negative bleeding its lines. His hands were all over me, squeezing, scratching; he closed his hand on my neck so hard at one point, I knew there would be bruises. He bit down on the skin where my neck met my shoulder. He could have done a lot more—could have ripped at me, torn me, done real damage . . . and I know I would have loved it.
“Harder,” I gasped, and he laughed and fucked me harder, the muscles in his arms trembling as his hips pistoned. He was lunging into me, so hard I thought maybe I was bruising down there too, but the harder he did it the better it felt, and I bit down on my own lip and just about saw sparks, tasted a light bloody tang, the scarf rubbing my wrists raw. I wanted to touch my clit—but it wouldn’t have worked the same way, I somehow knew. I bared my teeth, hissed at him like an angry snake.
“Pinch me,”
“What?” He lifted his head, sweat rolling down his face, his eyes wide and glazed. I bucked against him, meat on meat.
“Fucking pinch me. My nipple, you asshole. Pinch it hard.”
He pinched both. Twisted, nails in my flesh. It was hard and sharp and so, so sweet, just like I needed, and it was a lightning bolt straight down into my cunt, every synapse firing and firing. I arched my back and screamed again, gushing around him, and he swallowed the scream down with his teeth raking against my lips, sucking at my tongue. We were free-drifting, lost in the sea that was my own fucked-up nerves, a mess of data that he had turned into the best kind of chaos. I floated, and it blew my fucking mind.
LATER, when he had untied me and pulled off the leads, and we were lying there just like old times, I noticed that it felt good when he touched me. So it was reversible, then, and at some point, after he had left me lying there in a daze, he reversed what he’d done. I expected to feel relieved, and then he made me come the normal way, his fingers slick with his spit and my juices . . . but it wasn’t the same. And he knew it.
So he blew my mind, and he showed me something new. He delivered. But I didn’t expect him to deliver on what he actually gave me. I’ve spent years trying to get out of the meat, but he used the console, the instrument of my goddamn coded liberation, and he slammed me right back into it, the whole slippery mess. And he made me like it again. Made me see it new.
I still free-drift. And I like that, too. And I see him in there, and he knows just how to touch me. But sometimes, when the data-sea gets stagnant and the chaos all starts to look the same, I come see him, and he touches me in a whole different way.
There are more sites now that can handle what the console does. The world is catching up to us. The lag time is running out. But that’s okay, I think. Because when what I have stops getting it done, I’ll still have Kimber, and he won’t let the meat get old on me anytime soon.
Sunny Moraine is a carbon-based humanoid creature of average height. To date, she has published numerous pieces of fiction of varying lengths in various places, including Shimmer, Icarus, and Strange Horizons. When she was younger, she would dress up as her family’s pastor, but now she writes stories about ghosts and space and ghosts in space, as well as stories that would make her pastor blush horribly (you’ve come a long way, baby). She lives with her husband in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where she writes sociological analyses of violent events and dreams of mountains and Mars. Online she can be found at sunny moraine.com, among other places.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Jane Litte is a blogger, a reader, and now a collector of stories. Agony/ Ecstasy is a collection of very steamy stories that explore the twin concepts of pain and pleasure. These stories represent fresh new voices in erotica and erotic romance, exploring the interiors of the bedroom and the mind.
Readers can learn more about Jane and her love of books at Dear Author, a website devoted to discovering good books, or they can send her an e-mail at [email protected]. Follow her on twitter,@jane_l, to let her know what you thought of the selection of shorts. She is always looking for feedback and recommendations for other readers.
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
“Transfixed” copyright © 2011 by Anne Calhoun.
“The Sybil” by Jean Johnson copyright © 2011 by G. Jean Johnson.
“Caged” copyright © 2011 by J.K. Coi.
“Each Step Sublime” copyright © 2011 by Bettie Sharpe.
“Safeword” by Delphine Dryden copyright © 2011 by Kimberley Wendt.
“Stitch and Bitch” copyright © 2011 by A.L. Simonds.
“Bachelorette Party” copyright © 2011 by Jessica Clare.
“Wicked Wedding Night” by Margaret Rowe copyright © 2011 by Maggie Robinson.
“Shameless” copyright © 2011 by Edie Harris.
“Taken” copyright © 2011 by Rebecca Lange.
“Wetwire” copyright © 2011 by Sunny Moraine.
ECSTASY
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2011 by Dear Author Media Network, LLC.
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Cover photo by Shutterstock 313904765 (male) and 50494849 / Olga Ekaterincheva (female).
Text design by Kristin del Rosario.