by Alison Tyler
Jenny showed up the way she always showed up. She came slithering under the doorjamb, appearing in a puff of smoke. Fire-breathers have all sorts of tricks like that. When I returned from a run, Jenny was there on my sofa, curled up in the corner as if she’d been there all along, as if she’d never left. Except we hadn’t lived here together. She’d had to look long and hard to find me.
“Lola,” she said as I unlocked the door, startling me enough so that I dropped the keys. While bending to retrieve them, I tried to make sense of the situation. Jenny had left me for a girl in her entourage. She’d literally run away with her to join the circus. I’d had dreams of her burning up, of her getting too drunk to do her trick correctly and incinerating herself until all that remained were ashes. But she looked solid and whole on my sofa, her skin still that translucent shell, nearly iridescent, her lips parted into a smile, her green eyes wide and filled with hope.
Stray kitten, ma’am, won’t you take me in?
“You can’t stay,” I said.
“Nice fucking greeting.” Those big green eyes went dark. Her voice held razor blades and whiskey. That’s what Jenny hid right beneath the surface: Metal shards and Kentucky bourbon. She could take you to a faraway place, a dreamscape you’d never been to, build the pleasure until your eyes rolled up and your heart tried to escape from your chest. And then somehow, when you awoke from the bliss, she’d have burned through your credit rating, cremated all your closest relationships and left even the clothes in your closet soot-stained, singed and smelling of smoke.
“My husband will be home soon,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. “You have to leave.”
“No drink for the road? No kiss for old time’s sake? No fuck with your hands over your head and your eyes shut tight?” I could remember being fucked by Jenny. I could remember the ways she could make me come, her small hand curled into a fist and working inside me. Pleasure, always tainted with a little bit of pain. That’s what you get when you fuck a dragon.
“You can’t,” I started, “you have to…” but she was up, moving quickly toward me, her hands around my waist, her lips on my lips. I remained frozen. Her heat would not melt me. Not anymore. I had Rick. I had my sanity. I had money in the bank. All sorts of things I’d had none of with Jenny. But her hand was insinuating down the front of my sweats and her fingers were searching out my clit in that rough, gaudy way they always did. Dime-store trick, carny whore.
I pushed hard. She fell back on the sofa. “You’ve changed,” she snarled, top lip raised.
“I got married,” I told her. I didn’t care if she could put her fingers up inside me and make me come like nobody else ever had. I didn’t care if Rick and I hadn’t gotten to the true kink yet. We were still young. We’d get there.
“Let me meet your man. I’ll leave after. I swear. I just need to know that you’re truly happy.”
“I’m truly happy.”
“I saw your work. You only paint like that when something’s wrong in your world.”
“You’d know,” I said softly. “You put me in that state so many times. But it’s different now. Rick makes me happy. And I paint better.”
“You sound like a fucking Hallmark card.”
“I sound like a normal person.”
She laughed, but she stood. I was relieved. She wasn’t going to hang around. “There’s no such thing as normal,” she said, and I saw her fan her fingers out, magically showing me five crisp twenties. I knew she’d taken them from my underwear drawer. It’s where I always kept a bit of extra. Pot in the coffee can. Cash with the knickers. In case you ever need a quick favor and I’m not there to let you in.
“See ya, Lola,” she said as she left. I didn’t move until the door clicked shut. Then I went to my bed and masturbated like a fiend.
“I smell smoke,” Rick announced when he came home. “Did you light up without me, babe?”
I was still tangled in the white cotton sheets. Since I paint all day, I love surrounding myself in pure whiteness when I dream. Only imaginary colors stain my sheets. “You could say that,” I said. “Jenny stopped by.”
I hadn’t told him everything there was to know about my ex, but I’d spilled as much as I dared. He’d been consumed by her portrait, wanting to own the very last dirty detail of how we’d behaved together. Emotionally, physically, sexually. I knew he was turned on by what I’d told him, but I still hadn’t come entirely clean about our bondage-drenched nights. What if he balked? What if he turned away? I loved him, and I didn’t want to scare him. So I’d told him most, but not everything there was to know.
“Did you fuck her?”
“Come on, Rick. I’d never cheat on you. You know that.”
“But would you fuck her?”
That was a different question. Canvases Rick had never seen flickered through my mind. I had never told him about the time she cuffed me to the shower rod and used her leather belt on me. Never told him about the time she splayed me on the kitchen floor and licked my pussy for hours without letting me come, a candle in her hand, drip-dripping wax all over my body whenever I got too close to climax.
“She’s dangerous,” I said. “You heard what she’s like.”
“For me?”
I stared at him. What was he asking?
“I mean, if I was there, if I were watching, you wouldn’t be cheating. It would be three of us together. I don’t care how I participate. I could play with you, or I could sit in a chair across the room and never even move. You could even tie me down.”
He was on the mattress. He had my right hand in his. He brought my fingertips to his lips.
“You touched yourself and thought of her,” he said.
“I thought of you,” I lied.
He started kissing me. My neck. My breasts. He pushed the sheets away and went for the split between my legs. “I can’t do for you what she did.”
“Thank fucking god,” I said, tilting my hips.
“No, I mean, I can’t be a girl.”
“Ditto to what I just said,” I murmured. “I don’t want a girl.” I was moving on the mattress, reaching for his cock.
“Lola.” He threw me back on the bed and held me there. I looked into his eyes. We had not done this yet. We had fucked like animals fuck. He had taken me against the wall. He had driven his cock hard into my ass, a drizzle of lube making the ride sublime. But we had done no power play. Not the kind where you might need a safeword. The term bondage hadn’t even rippled between us. Until now. “You stay,” he said. He had his fingertips pressed against my clit. He alternated between licking that hard bud and rubbing his thumb directly across the top. Giving me too much pressure, too much pleasure, all at once.
“Let me watch,” he whispered, and he let his thumb side into my pussy.
“I don’t even know where she went.” But as I said the words, I knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth. Sure she’d disappeared, as she always did, leaving only a vapor trail behind. But the look on her face as she’d walked out of the house told me that she’d be back.
I was wrong.
Jenny didn’t come to our house. She went after Rick, all by himself.
Rick’s a used car salesman. Before you make up your mind what that means, you have to know him. In his real life, in the garage, he is the type of brilliant mechanic who can take apart the most complicated engine and put the pieces back together. I believe he could do this blindfolded. He operates on touch and sense. He loves cars, the smooth clean lines, the purr of a good motor, the way I love the smell of my paints, the feel of my favorite brushes in my hands.
Rick spent years under cars, getting paid for doing what he loves. And then he was wooed away by the owner of a car dealership—a high-end retro vintage spot where Rick’s good looks and the cars’ sleek styles come together in happy harmony. Rick makes you want to drive off the lot in a cherry ’55 Chevy, and he makes you almost believe that when you do, the whole world will tip on its axis and you will slide back in time to when the
car was new and the world was simpler.
How’d Jenny find him? She has her ways. Thank god, Rick had seen her picture. He recognized her right off, even with all her clothes on. He told me later how she appeared behind him, coming up quick and quiet. She’s like that. That whole morning fog on cat’s feet, suddenly all around you in a haze of silver. He turned, and she was there, acting as if she had never seen anything prettier than the car on the showroom floor—and yet wanting, he said, wanting him to tell her that the car did not compare with her own fire-brand of beauty.
She chose a car with flames. Of course she did. Scarlet flames licking up from the grille. She wanted a test drive, but she didn’t have ID, wouldn’t cough up her name. He passed, and she tried harder. I remember Jenny when she used to turn up the heat so the flames licked you from every angle.
What was she thinking? That she’d get Rick in the car, drive him off to the Hollywood Hills and fuck him? And then what? She wasn’t into any long haul. Would she come back and gloat to me, or simply move on down the road with another bite mark out of her belt?
Doesn’t matter. Rick didn’t fall. But he came home that night and told me everything, from the way her red patent leather shoes buckled at the ankles to the way her seamed stockings were perfectly in place.
I sat on the edge of the bed and I looked in his eyes.
“She’s going to come here next,” I told him. “I know her. She got a whiff of you, a scent of me and she’ll be trying her best to get between us.”
“She wants you back?”
I shook my head. “She’s not wired like that. But if she can’t have me, then she wants me to be as miserably unhappy as she is every day of her life.”
“I want to see her fuck you,” Rick said.
“Even if it means burning up what we’ve got?”
“It won’t,” he promised. “I swear.”
When she showed up again, it was nothing like I expected. Never is. She was there all in white on the doorstep, bottle of champagne in one hand, scarlet blooms in the other. I smelled rat even above the roses.
“Just a late wedding gift,” she said, “since I didn’t get an invite.”
“You left no forwarding address.”
Rick came up behind me and waited for the introductions. I let Jenny in, reluctantly, and she strode forward as if I’d given her the passkey to my soul.
“Lovely place you have here,” she said, sneering at the fact that our pad was clean. There were no piles of ashes anywhere to be seen. Dinner was makeshift, unplanned, awkward. Champagne gave way to whiskey, which gave way to Rick kissing me in front of Jenny and then looking at her straight in the eye. “Do you think you do better than I do?”
“I know it for a fact.”
“Show me.”
I started to understand this wasn’t about Rick getting off on seeing two girls together. He wanted to know what hold Jenny had over me, what she could do that he could not.
Jenny gripped my hair in her hand and pulled me back for a kiss. I grimaced, but I did not flinch. She bit my bottom lip hard, hard enough to leave marks, to draw blood, and then she slapped my face, so that I put a hand up to the sting and stared at her. “You like that?”
I nodded. I couldn’t help myself. I refused to look at Rick.
She tightened her fist in my hair and then she led me like that to the bedroom. Rick followed.
“Do you have cuffs?”
Rick shook his head, while I motioned to my bottom drawer. Rick looked surprised as Jenny lifted the sterling handcuffs from amidst the tangle of my stockings. “You sure you have the key?” I pointed to my jewelry box. Jenny had my wrists over my head in seconds, had my clothes cut off me and my body smack in the center of the bed.
“Roll over,” she said. “Show me your ass.”
I obeyed, on autopilot. Rick had said he wanted this. Be careful what you wish for.
“See how wet she is?” Jenny asked him. “Part her legs and touch for yourself.”
Rick’s fingers felt my wet, slicked-up pussy lips.
“Now, watch this,” Jenny said. I saw her undo his belt buckle and pull the leather free. I saw the look on Rick’s face as she snapped the leather in the air and then landed the first stripe on my ass. “She’s tough,” Jenny said. “She can take more than you think she can. And she likes it rough.”
Jenny striped me with the belt. This was my penance for moving on, my punishment for being happy now that she was gone. I accepted every stinging stripe, every fiery blow. What was Rick thinking? I couldn’t waste a second on that. But Jenny could. She grabbed his hand again and thrust it into my pussy. “See? She’s so fucking wet, isn’t she? Taste her.”
She pushed on him, and Rick climbed between the V of my legs and pressed his face to the split of my body. His tongue against my clit had me crooning under my breath. I didn’t care if Jenny saw this. I didn’t care about anything except pain and pleasure—melting together—filling me up.
“Move back,” she said, and she started to stripe me again, that belt like fire on my skin. “I like to make her earn the climax. I like to make her cry out, beg for release.”
She knew exactly how much I could take, and only when my ass felt hot and throbbing, swollen from the punishment, did she drop the belt next to me on the mattress.
“You do it like this,” she said, and she shoved me over and sealed her face to my pussy, sucking on my clit as if she’d never stop. My hands were cuffed. I couldn’t push her away, but Rick could have, and he didn’t. He sat next to her and watched—learned everything he could in a few short minutes. When I came, I saw angels, I swear, wings beating in front of me. I saw fire, white-hot plumes of smoke, and then I saw Jenny’s face, that sneer, grinning down at me.
“You like it,” she said. “You’ll always like it like that, won’t you, slut?”
Then she kissed Rick—my taste clearly on her lips—and patted him on the cheek.
“You keep her satisfied, won’t you, stud? The way she needs. The way she craves. I won’t bother you anymore, if you promise me that.”
He nodded, but he seemed too shocked to speak. Jenny was up then, in motion, fumbling around in my jewelry drawer, reaching for the key. “I ought to leave you like that,” she said with wet steel in her voice, but she tossed the key to Rick. Her hand darted into my dresser drawer, and I knew she was palming the few twenties that remained.
“Don’t make me come back,” she said, smiling at us as she left the room. I heard her heels, heard the front door close.
Rick looked at me. I didn’t know what he’d say, what he’d do. He moved forward, as if he was going to unlock the cuffs, and then he set the key down on the edge of the mattress where I could see it and reached for the belt once more. I felt my stomach tighten as he rolled me over onto my stomach.
“So that’s how you like it?” he asked, his voice harsh.
I nodded.
“Why didn’t you say?”
“I thought we’d get there.…”
“We’re there,” he said, and he snapped the belt, making it sing just like Jenny had. “Oh, baby, we’re there now.”
And we were—we are—in that place where pain and pleasure meet, where they war to top each other. Rick takes care of me in all the dirty ways I so desperately crave. He makes sure I go to sleep with my ass hot from his palm or his belt. He collars me, cuffs me, works me the way I need. So I have Jenny to thank for that, I guess. My dragon girlfriend, my lover from hell.
But I’ll tell you one thing. I never did sell the painting. I took it out to the backyard the next morning. Rick doused the edges with gasoline. Together we watched the canvas burn.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
VIDA BAILEY (heatsuffused.blogspot.com) lives in Ireland, where she infrequently writes erotica. You can find her work in Love at First Sting, edited by Alison Tyler, Steamlust by Kristina Wright and Bound by Lust by Shanna Germain.
By day, JAX BAYNARD is a financial investment advisor. By night
, she makes her own (and her clients’) fantasies come true. This part-time dominatrix’s short fiction has appeared online, in several literary journals and in Pleasure Bound, Kiss My Ass and Torn.
HEIDI CHAMPA (heidichampa.blogspot.com) has been published in numerous anthologies including Best Women’s Erotica 2010, Playing With Fire, Frenzy and Ultimate Curves. She has also steamed up the pages of Bust Magazine. If you prefer your erotica in electronic form, she can be found at Clean Sheets, Ravenous Romance, Oysters and Chocolate and The Erotic Woman.
Called a “legendary erotica heavy-hitter” (by the über-legendary Violet Blue), ANDREA DALE (cyvarwydd. com) hopes none of the “golfing” members of her family read her story. Her work has appeared in about 100 anthologies from Harlequin Spice, Avon Red and Cleis Press, and is available online at Soul’s Road Press.
KIKI DELOVELY (kikidelovely.wordpress.com) is a queer femme writer/performer whose work has appeared in various publications, including Best Lesbian Erotica 2011 and 2012, Salacious Magazine, Take Me There: Transgender and Genderqueer Erotica and Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica. Kiki’s passions include magical realism, the Oxford comma and taking on research for her writing.
MADELINE ELAYNE is a bisexual polyamorous leather switch, but if that’s too much of a mouthful, she happily suggests the shortened but still entirely accurate “slut.” Her biggest bondage fetish is incorporating long hair into precarious rope bondage scenarios, or just lovely and convenient leashes. Mmm…rope.
LUCY FELTHOUSE (lucyfelthouse.co.uk) studied creative writing at university. She has had stories published by Cleis Press, Noble Romance, Ravenous Romance, Resplendence Publishing, Sweetmeats Press, Xcite Books, Constable and Robinson, Decadent Publishing, Ellora’s Cave, Evernight Publishing and House of Erotica.