Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  In the real world it didn’t work that way. In the real world she was furious and disgusted, and utterly untransformed. She said I could take my disgusting desires, my disgusting penis and my disgusting sperm and I could leave her life for good. She said I could also take her now sullied red cabretta gloves since she would never touch them again; which I duly did.

  It was the inevitable end of a relationship that had always been far from perfect, despite containing certain elements of absolute perfection.

  I tried not to mope. I threw myself into my work, grateful that I still had that. I did my best to get over it. Nevertheless there were many times, in the middle of long, feverish, lonely nights when I found myself brooding about Vanessa and what might have been. At times like that, I gazed at the red cabretta gloves, touched them, sniffed them, and sometimes – almost against my will, it seemed – my hand would slip inside the right glove. It was a snug fit at first, but cabretta is wonderfully yielding. Before long, I would find myself masturbating, bringing myself to a wet, messy climax, and if I got some sperm on the glove, well that was all part of the experience. It wasn’t the same as having Vanessa do the job for me, of course, but you know, there were certain ways in which it seemed much better.

  MEAN STREAK

  Christine Pountney

  Christine Pountney is a Toronto-based writer, teacher, and Core Energetics practitioner, whose work has been published to great critical acclaim in Canada and the UK. Her first novel, Last Chance Texaco, was long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2000. Pountney has since published two more novels, The Best Way You Know How and Sweet Jesus – which Irvine Welsh and Barbara Gowdy both chose as one of their ‘Best Books of 2012’.

  They’d been married without children for eight years and she loved him with a love that was fierce and true, but he had a mean streak and she sometimes wondered if she loved him more or less because of it – and often suspected more. He sat on the board of directors at the Royal Opera House in London and they frequently attended black-tie events. She was tall and Egyptian and carried herself with a regal grace, though with a flare in her manner of dress that sometimes offended his strict sensibility. He would have liked her to dress more conservatively, but enjoyed the attention she received because of it, especially from other women, whom he often caught eyeing her with an envious admiration bordering on lust.

  This evening, when she came down the stairs like a princess from the Raj, dressed in a red and gold silk gown, he shook his head and said, “What in Christ’s name are you wearing?”

  He said this to crush her, but only succeeded in crushing her a little. She was well schooled in deflecting his comments and accepted them as a prelude to praise. As cruel as he could be, he could be just as repentant.

  He placed a velvet shawl around her shoulders and, lifting her hair, kissed her on the back of the neck. Then they walked out to the car that was waiting for them in the street.

  Just before they entered the ballroom at the hotel where the reception was to take place, he took hold of her with such an urgency that it belied any indifference he could pretend, and whispered, “You’re so fucken gorgeous. You make me horny. I’m gonna go crazy if I can’t fuck you soon.”

  She lowered her face and, peering up at him from under her dark brow, said haughtily, “You’ve always taken me when it suited you. I don’t see what the difference is now. Nobody’s stopping you.”

  This kind of taunting infuriated him and she liked to infuriate him just before they entered a room full of people. She could see the redness of his neck flare up against his white tuxedo collar and felt an erotic supremacy over him. She liked to mock him. It provoked the right reaction from him, an angry retaliation that she enjoyed.

  Sometimes as they moved around the room, mingling with the other guests, he would squeeze her arm painfully. The pain was such that it gave her a sultry, breathless, heavy-lidded look that men found stimulating in an animal way. As if she was in a perpetual state of sexual arousal, she had the look of a big cat, seemingly languid and insolent before the kill.

  After they’ve been there a little while, they run into a couple they’ve met only once previously and don’t expect to see much of in the future.

  “Well, if it isn’t Jim and Jacky Fluckerty,” the man says sarcastically.

  “It’s Flaherty, actually,” Jacky corrects him.

  “Of course it is,” the man says.

  There’s a pause between the four adults, then Jim says, “It’s a pleasure to see you again,” and nods at the man’s beautiful wife, glancing down at her breasts.

  “Seems the pleasure’s all yours,” her husband says.

  “Pardon me?” Jim asks.

  “I can see you’re gagging for it,” he says.

  “Come on, honey,” Jacky says and pulls her husband away.

  “What a pathetic bunch of people,” the man says looking around the room and finishes off his whiskey. Then he pulls his wife towards him and says, “I want to fuck you now. I’m gonna ram you hard with my cock. Is that what you want?”

  The woman nods and, holding herself with unwavering dignity, follows her husband to a side exit leading to a concrete stairwell. They walk down two flights of stairs and he pushes her back against the wall.

  “My God,” he says, dropping to his knees and wrapping his arms around her waist and pressing his head against her stomach, “you’re so fucken beautiful. What would I do without you?”

  “Don’t bore me,” she says, yanking his head back by the hair. “Try behaving like a man, for a change.”

  At that, the man stands up and slaps his wife on the side of the head. He’s learnt where to hit her so that he leaves no mark. She turns away from him and winces, raising her arms to defend herself. He hits her again and says, “You’re such a whore.”

  “No, babe,” she says. “I only ever do what you tell me to.”

  “And have I ever told you to suck another man’s cock?”

  “No, babe.”

  “So whose cock do you suck?”

  “Yours, babe.”

  “And whose cock fucks this pussy?” the man asks, grabbing her crotch.

  “Just yours, babe. Only yours.”

  “That’s right,” he says. “Now turn around and bend over. I’m gonna drill you from behind.”

  The man’s beautiful wife bends forward, pushing her ass towards him. He lifts the hem of her dress and drapes it over her head so that he can’t see her face. He puts one hand on her lower back and wrapping his other fist around her underwear, rips them off.

  Then he drags his well-manicured fingernails up the outside of his wife’s thighs and over her hips, scraping into her flesh, drawing blood. She tries to straighten up, but he holds her down, the pain like a white spear through her brain, the abraded flesh already rising in four red furrows along her legs.

  The man spits on his hand and gets ready to ram his cock into her. “I’m gonna ram you now, baby.”

  “Okay, babe,” she whispers. “You ram me.”

  “I’m gonna bang you so hard.”

  “Make it hard, babe.”

  But just as she feels the hard soft hot tip of her husband’s cock at her pussy, there is a noise on the stairs, a woman’s laughter and then silence. The man turns and sees a young couple, hotel employees, the man a waiter probably, his girlfriend a chambermaid, heading out for the night.

  “Sorry,” the young woman says, brushing past and scurrying down the stairs. The young man takes longer and, as he’s passing, the man, still holding his wife draped in red silk and bent at the waist, takes hold of his arm and says, “Listen son, I need your help here.”

  The young man glances down at his girlfriend. She jerks her head as if to say, Let’s go, but he pauses, and in that split second of reluctance, the man knows that he’s got him.

  “It’s something else, isn’t it?” he says, standing up and tucking his cock back into his trousers. “My wife’s got a beautiful pussy, don’t you think?”

/>   The young man doesn’t look at it.

  “Look at it,” the husband says. “It’s the most beautiful, muscular pussy you’ll ever see in your life. Do you want to touch it?”

  The young man swallows and looks down at his girlfriend. She opens her hands and says, “This is sick, James. You don’t want to get involved in this.”

  “Look at her legs,” she hisses, under her breath. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  When he doesn’t comply, she makes a disgusted noise at the back of her throat and runs down the stairs.

  “Your girlfriend’s a bit squeamish,” the older man says and James looks back at him.

  Again the man nods towards his wife’s exposed vagina. “Go on, cop yourself a feel. Chance of a lifetime, boy.”

  James runs his hands through his hair and licks his lips and glances down the stairwell in the direction his girlfriend went, then he looks at the woman’s beautiful ass and her long legs in their expensive stockings. As if pulled by gravity, he lifts a hand and moves it slowly towards the woman’s pretty wet pink cunt. He touches it lightly with a finger and the woman moans, arching her back. He looks at the husband who nods again, and pushes a finger in. The slippery hot skin of her pussy makes his cock grow hard.

  “Try another finger,” the man says, and so he does, each finger eliciting a stronger reaction of pleasure from the man’s half-concealed wife.

  James becomes so entranced by the woman’s fleshy cunt that he doesn’t notice the husband position himself behind him, until he feels a hand on his elbow. The man’s voice is right at his ear.

  “Put all your fingers in, boy.”

  Obediently, James makes a beak of his fingers and eases his whole hand into the woman’s body. When he is in to his knuckles and feeling the tightness of her flesh, the husband tightens his grip on James’s elbow and eases his hand in further.

  James can feel his fingers pushing against the soft inner walls of the woman’s body. His hand is completely inside her now and the man is right behind him. He’s got his left arm around James’s chest, holding him there, and with the other he starts ramming James’s hand into his wife’s body. She lets out a moan, a painful noise, and James’s instinct is to pull his hand out but the man won’t let him. The man pushes his hand in, up to the wrist, and James curls his fingers into a fist, afraid of poking something vital inside her, of catching something with a fingernail.

  With every rough punch of his fist, the woman cries out now. She starts flailing her arms, pushing against the wall. Her husband leans forward, putting all his weight into it, and James can’t help but transfer this weight to the woman until, eventually, she collapses, her head in the corner where the wall meets the floor. James uses his free hand to brace himself, kneeling over her, her husband kneeling behind. It is at this point that James realizes his arm is in half way to the elbow.

  “Stop,” he says, breathlessly. “Stop it, you’re hurting her.”

  “I’m not hurting her,” the husband says. “You are.”

  “Please stop,” James says. “I’m begging you.”

  The man’s wife is quieter now, but still breathing heavily, whimpering in pain.

  “Please,” James implores the wife now. “Please tell him to stop.” There are tears on his cheeks, falling onto the woman’s back.

  “Okay,” the woman says eventually, from underneath her red silk veil. “That’s enough. The boy’s right. It’s time to let him go.”

  The man gets off the boy and stands up.

  The boy withdraws his hand, wet and glistening like a newborn calf, and cradles it, relieved to be in possession of it again.

  “Get out of here,” the husband says and the boy takes a quick look at him, then tears down the stairs.

  “Come here, sweetheart,” the man says, taking his wife in his arms, rearranging her dress, then stroking her face. “You okay, baby?”

  The woman nods.

  “I didn’t hurt you too much?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I love you, babe,” she says.

  “I love you too, baby. I love you so much. What would I do without you?”

  “Well, you’d have to get used to squeamish girls, for one,” his wife says and they both laugh.

  He pulls his wife to her feet and they head back towards the party in a sated silence that is so commonly mistaken for love.

  THE CAT THAT GOT THE CREAM

  Christine Pountney

  Christine Pountney is a Toronto-based writer, teacher, and Core Energetics practitioner, whose work has been published to great critical acclaim in Canada and the UK. Her first novel, Last Chance Texaco, was long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2000. Pountney has since published two more novels, The Best Way You Know How and Sweet Jesus – which Irvine Welsh and Barbara Gowdy both chose as one of their ‘Best Books of 2012’.

  It’s not like I don’t get paid for this shit. But I knew Latif Eljadidi as a friend. He was known as The Sheik, though he probably wasn’t even Arab. I think he was from Libya. He ran the local convenience store and had always been nice to me. He knew me way back in the days when I was just a street waif, when I was still a junkie and nothing more than a bad-ass streetwalker, lady of the night, doggone hooker. Now he knows I only go out when I get called. That I make upwards of $1,000 an evening. That I only have to fuck one client at a time, and at a leisurely pace. I say this because anybody who knows a thing or two about what goes on in my neighbourhood knows that making one end meet another as a bad-ass junkie hooker, you’ve got to be turning a helluva lotta tricks. And that can wear you out. Not to mention the heart and soul.

  I guess the thing I did with Latif was a nostalgia kick for me. Something perverse to remind me that I still had a long way to go to a healthy lifestyle. But let’s get back to Latif.

  Sometime pretty soon after Latif immigrated to this fair land of ours with his family, some 28 years ago, so soon that his mom was too busy hanging hijabs in her brand-new walk-in closet to notice that he was gone, Latif wandered away from the house. He was only nine years old. As the sun began to set over Liberty, our ice-cream lady of the harbour, all sorts of pagan, nightmarish creatures began to appear. Ghosts, goblins, witches, cowboys, super heroes, robots. Latif didn’t know what the hell was happening. He became terrified. He started to cry. He got chased down a dark alleyway by a sinister group of boys in rubber President Nixon masks. He peed his pants. They punched him in the eye. They laughed at him. Welcome to America.

  Ever since that childhood experience, Latif vowed to set some kind of annual sabotage, a trap for unsuspecting trick-or-treating brats. And even though things turned out pretty well for Latif – he never married, but he did become the successful owner of a rather successful business – there was something about Halloween that still rankled his Eastern sensibility, still brought out a vindictive streak. Children begging for candy, imagine that. He found the whole idea of Halloween offensive.

  So this is where I come in.

  For the last six years, Latif has hired me for the night and the drill has always been the same. He would pay me handsomely and I would arrive, equally handsome, in a one-piece black lycra catsuit and heels. A cat mask and whiskers, two pointy cat ears and a long, rather stiff, black velvet tail. He would greet me with a kiss on the cheek and once inside, he would pull the blind on the door, the only window in his shop. He would then produce four leather restraining straps and a saddle blanket, which he would lay across the counter beside the cash register. He would then ask me to bend over it and rest my belly on the counter with my arms hanging down on the other side. Arched just like one of those black cats in the Halloween ads that are always standing on the witch’s broom as she flies in silhouette across an orange moon.

  With my legs straight and slightly parted, and my stomach on the counter, I could just about touch the floor with my palms. In this position, Latif would begin to fasten me. He didn’t talk much at this stage, and come to think about it, we rarely said a word to each othe
r on these nights. It’s as if we had to adopt a false formality to avoid the embarrassment. I thought it was all rather discreet.

  Latif had four hooks drilled into the floor along the bottom edge of the counter, two on either side. They were barely noticeable, and it was to these hooks that he would attach the restraining straps, fastening me securely by my ankles and wrists.

  “Beautiful,” Latif would sometimes whisper at this point, standing behind me with his hands on my hips. He flicked my tail one way and then the other as if playing a private game. He leaned forward and put his head on my back. He got up and walked around the counter and took a small pair of nail scissors out of the money drawer of the register to my left. Walking around the counter again and standing between my legs, Latif cut a hole in the lycra of my catsuit. From a sudden cool sensation, I could tell that the elasticized material had peeled back of its own accord as if eager to reveal what it had, up ’til now, been concealing.

  Sometimes, at this point, Latif would take me from behind. Just a dozen or so quick thrusts, maybe less, but always forceful, as if he was denying himself some greater pleasure that he wanted, but wouldn’t allow himself to take. There was a hint of violence in the power of his thrusts, but it never lasted long. If he did fuck me then, he did so expediently. And as surreptitiously as he began, he would desist, tucking his cock back into his pants and setting about his business.

  Latif took a carton of milk from the fridge, which he put in the microwave for a minute to warm up. He placed a saucer on the floor in front of me and filled it with milk. He held it to my lips and watched me lap at the milk like a big, black, arched-back cat, while he stroked my head. Then he got some olive oil from the shelf, filled a cup with oil, cut the top off the carton and crouching in front of me, slowly pulled the warm milk into the throat of a turkey-baster. Then he dipped the mouth of the turkey-baster in the oil and, standing up, bent over me and gently inserted it into my ass. He squeezed the rubber pump and filled my rectum with warm milk.