by Tara Burns
“Damn,” he keeps saying, “I came so hard! I think I hit the headboard! I heard it hit the headboard! I've never come that hard before!”
No, you did not hit the headboard four feet away, idiot. But I don't say that. I say, “you've really never come that hard before?”
“I don't think so.”
“That's because we were being honest about who you are deep down. That's always what'll get you off the best.”
He leaves and I stretch all my muscles and touch myself everywhere, which is what I do when I'm not sure. Is emotional abuse okay when they ask for it? When they pay you for it? When it's true? When it's needed? If I think they need it what does that make me?
I leave his cum in my hair all day. It makes a little stiff spot that nobody notices.
Tantra
He said my ad touched his heart because he went to Alaska once and saw bald eagles and I remind him of how free and wild they were. I wondered what ad Maggie or the driver might have posted for me, because he was the second guy to mention bald eagles in ten minutes. It turned out she'd posted an ad saying I was "Alaskian" in the title - one of the hazards of working for or with other people is being represented as illiterate all the time.
While I'm looking at the ad I check my email and there's the bald eagle guy:
i just called back to get your address, but perhaps I am being a dufus because you would rather not give it to me until Sunday. If not e-mail me, if true I will get it when I confirm on Sunday.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart and all the fishes in the sea.
I also send you the gift of a poem of mine that will tell you something about me.
______________________________
Beauty Smiles at Me by Chance
Beauty smiles at me by chance
And not intention.
The smile is not for me
But is contained within and for herself.
My moment in her path
Is accidental.
As she passes by on my walk
This chilly autumn morning,
The sweet smell of a her perfume
Rolls over me like the wake
Of a power boat on a crystalline lake,
Swamping all who dare venture into the water.
I turn without volition, seeking the source
Of this divine sublimation.
Particles bound each-to-each,
The elixir of her scent
Draws me backwards
On a gossamer of galvanic attraction.
The moment has moved on,
While we remain constant.
Each on our opposing course.
For her, no hint of having shared my moment,
For me, a sacred inscription
On the waxen tablet of my mind.
I responded with directions and a compliment, and this led him to believe that I'm related to an ancient sex magic, that I must be a Daughter of Ishtar:
Dear One,
I will also need a room number, but and I can be a bit of a pudding head to you need to remember to tell me on Sunday when I call. I am beginning to suspect that you are a rare person and a daughter of Ishtar.
To do justice to you and me may take longer than one hour. What would 90 minutes of two hours come to assuming you still have an opening at 4:00
I wrote back calling him pudding head and telling him the prices, and he upsold himself:
I will call you Sunday early afternoon to confirm.
I no longer have a cell phone and will call from a pay phone when I arrive.
If you want to offer what you have said and knowing that I want to both give and receive pleasure, I think we will need two hours together.
I will bring the warm oil for tantric massage and cold cherry nectar from Turkey. We will have time to move slowly in our lovemaking gradually stoking the furnaces of desire in both of us. We will always be safe and respectful. Perhaps if we are lucky and diligent we will smelt virgin hot metal from the ore within our bodies. Perhaps we can each attain the bliss of climax several times, but whatever will be will be. I know that I aspire to your multiple orgasms if you will permit that.
I want you to be the river that runs through me.
Pudding Head
On Sunday I hear him rustling flowers on the other side of the door before he knocks. He called earlier and asked for the room number. I told him to wait until he got here, Mac needed to vacate the room when he called. Oh, he said, he was bringing flowers for her too, he'd love to just say hi for a second. Of course no one knows that we also have a driver, aka collective member, who needs to vacate the room as well. I told him to still call but Mac would be happy to meet him.
Now Mac is looking around asking what that noise is, and I'm trying not to giggle at the door. After a couple minutes, he knocks and I open the door on the first knock. He looks like my college statistics professor, but older. My college stats professor was a sweet fatherly man who actually told me one time that I should be a writer! He also told me he had a feeling I should do something else and all this weird stripper stuff was just a diversion. Also if I ever needed a place to stay he talked to his wife already and I was welcome at his place. I didn't say "thanks, but I have six dogs, three cats, four chickens, and own my own home." Those were things he already knew but maybe chose to overlook.
Anyways, this dude looks like him mostly because he is mostly bald and wearing a bow-tie. My college stats professor wore a different bow-tie every day of the year and if you caught him wearing the same one twice you got an automatic A. This guy, Pudding, is taller though, and more nervous. He comes in with a big gym bag and empties it of whipped cream and fancy oils and cherry nectar and oversized towels (because he thinks we'll get a little wet). He gives Mac and I roses, and we ooh and aah about how lucky I am before she leaves. I kiss him, because he is nervously puttering around instead of paying attention. He gasps and almost falls into me.
"It's been forty years since anyone kissed me," he says. His wife, it turns out, does not want to be touched. Sometimes it makes her cry, and other times it just makes her go blank. She doesn't say no, he says, but it would still be like rape. She doesn't even like to be touched by her children. It didn't bother him until recently, when he lost 160lbs and his kundalini began to rise again. This is what he says. He's brought a selection to read from the epic of Gilgamesh, before we get started. I hate that part of the Gilgamesh, but I pretend I don't know it and I say we have to get naked first. He's nervous. "I lost a lot of weight," he warns me, "I look like a sharpei." He takes his clothes off and I tell him he's perfect in this moment.
So I lie in front of him on the bed and he reads to me about the Daughter of Ishtar taming the wild one and explains that whores are responsible for civilization. What a mood killer. I hate civilization. I don't argue, though, and I guess this might be maturity. I just sit up and do a heart meditation, one of the only tantric things I know, with him, and then lead him to the hot tub where I float him in front of me and massage and stroke.
"Careful," he says, "I'm an old man, I can only cum once."
I take that to mean that he would cum too easily and I should back off. Reasonable assumption, right? Wrong. I really need to fuck more old dudes to learn about their penii.
He curls into me and clings, like a baby, and I pet his bald head and shoulders. This is one of my favorite parts. But then, like a baby who hadn't been fed in forty years, he starts to grasp and pull and need very much. I have the magical ability to redirect this sort of thing, so I lead him to the bed, and he spreads out one of his giant towels.
"You're beautiful," he says, "like the women that men used to paint."
"Thank you," I say.
"No, really, you are..." I'm supposed to lap the praise from his hands like a needy little puppy who hates herself the way women in patriarchy are supposed to.
"I know! And I was just born this way! Aren't I the luckiest woman in the world?" That shuts him up for a second, but then h
e explains to me that women in pictures now are objects. They look into the camera and pose for it. But back in the day women were painted as self reflective, gazing off into the distance lost in their own thoughts, and they were beautiful for being their own person and holding the artist separate.
Then he rubs me all over with oil. He goes quickly, eager to get to that pot of gold between my legs, and then he stares, and stares. How beautiful, he whispers. Yes, I say, and I give him a little anatomy lesson, a guide to cunt loving. He lies down next to me and starts to play with my clit, and I kiss him, and he says he's always dreamed of this. Always. Once he was with a prostitute in Mexico, but when they got back to his hotel room she got sick, and he carried her home to her old mother and young baby, and she tried to give his money back but he wouldn't take it.
He has been reading on the internet about how to play with pudendas, and he has lots of questions, and also much information that he delivers in a lecture-ish format. Did you know, he tells me, that your clit is like a little penis? I don't tell him that just the day before I pulled the foreskin just ever so slightly to the side on a foot fetishists cock and told my coworker that that was exactly what my clit looks like.
"I've never made a woman come before," he says when I come. "Well, I think my wife might have come. Once. Fifty years ago. But I wasn't sure."
In the end it turns out that his cock does not go off prematurely. In fact, he's taken so much viagra that he can't feel it at all. I should have been working on it the whole time instead of waiting for the last half hour. Woops. Audra runs up to get a new shirt and we get dressed. He doesn't want to leave, and in the end, as so often happens, we talk about his wife's trauma. She doesn't talk about it, but something happened to her a long time ago. He has been looking for women on craigslist to have sex with, but most of them aren't educated or spiritually evolved enough to appreciate a man like him. He tried taking his wife to marriage counseling, but she cried the whole time, from start to finish of every session. He's had coffee, dinner, with a few craigslist women. One of them is considering him now. She's a legal researcher for a women's advocacy agency.
Before he leaves he tells me how amazing and perfect I am again, and how nothing so wonderful has ever happened to him before. His ego, he says, has been consumed by my black hole of desire.
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SEX FAIRY
For these people, I'm making an exception to my rule about not doing outcalls. They live in a fancy neighborhood far out of the city. Not fancy enough to overlook the ocean, but fancy enough for spaced out cookie cutter mansions.
June emailed me a couple months ago, a long email that went on and on like water explaining how after 10 years of marriage, she and her wonderful husband had begun exploring sexually and she'd always wanted to be with a woman, but she wasn't sure how she'd react, and would it be okay if she smoked pot because she gets really nervous? Also, her husband is kind of fat but he's a very good man and takes such good care of her and her son, and she loves him. They'd been watching porn, smoking pot, reading books, and gaining communication skills, and now they wanted to try an encounter with another woman. But it had to be real! They couldn't be with someone who would fake it! And they must smoke pot or they will be nervous! I was supposed to meet them last month, but then June started bleeding early.
At first her emails were sweet. I was excited to be part of their sexual education and exploration. I'd been thinking about posting a casual encounter ad for a couple before I got their email, which made the prospect of a paying couple even better. Get paid to explore your fantasies! My life is the best!
Over time, her emails started to wear on. She asked questions upon questions, and had to describe the details of every sex documentary she had ever seen, like a phone sex customer who tries to get off by emailing about what they want instead of calling.
Now, after all these emails, I'm finally pulling into their driveway. Henry is waiting outside for me, waving. Of course. Inside, there's an envelope with my name on it right on the bench where you sit to take your shoes off. I shove it in my pocket and hang my coat in the closet. The closet is full of coats. If I had a closet that size, it would be an eighth of the space in my cabin, I think, and an eighth of my possessions would be coats. Their golden retriever is in a crate, whining and writhing with excitement.
“Oh, you don't have to crate her for me,” I say, and Henry lets her out. She wags her whole body up to me and sits to be petted, which is hard because she can barely restrain herself from leaping for joy at a new person. I kneel to let her kiss my face and wiggle around, and then I join June on the couch. June is cute. Cute like apple pie with long, permed hair, a dutifully toned body, and cheerful smile. She says she's nervous.
We drink wine and they smoke and they ask what they are supposed to do. Should they go away so I can count the money?
“Oh, I was just going to trust you,” I say. “But I can use your restroom and check it?” I have this philosophy that it turns guys off when I count the money, so I don't. I smile at them and tuck it into a drawer as if I trust them completely and am too classy to double check. Really, it's not that I trust them, but that I take a longer view. If they short me, I can just not see them again, but if I offend them, I probably can't undo it, and I potentially lose $500 per month per guy. So I go to Henry and June's bathroom and I count the money. Five crisp hundred dollar bills and two fifties. I text my friend, who's back at the hotel room, that they are cool and we are still drinking wine and talking about sex.
When I come out of the bathroom, I'm naked, and I curl up closer to June. She is so nervous, and I don't want to scare her, but I do feel a sort of responsibility to get things going. She tells me again that sometimes Henry's dick goes soft and we should just ignore it, it's just a thing that happens, we definitely shouldn't call attention to it. Then Henry says again that they want me to understand there are no goals for the evening. Nobody has to cum, and if we don't do anything it's okay. Then she tells me again that it's really the marijuana that's opened her up to her sexuality, explaining, “but sometimes it makes me paranoid.” I want to laugh so much, but I don't. I tell her she has nothing to be paranoid about and she's 10 times hotter than me on the dominant culture's scale. Then he tells me again that there are no goals and she tells me again that we should just ignore it if his dick goes soft.
Maybe I need to be more creative with questions, to keep Henry and June from repeating themselves all night. So I ask and they tell me that Friday nights are their thing, the one night a week they have to themselves when they lie in bed and watch the porn channel and do things that nobody who really knows them would ever imagine. They are thinking about getting matching tattoos that say, “Living For Friday.”
Finally, I suggest that we climb in their bed and snuggle, watch the porn channel, and see what happens. They agree. Progress! She strips down to her underwear, and he keeps his shirt and boxers on. Soon June and I are kissing, and she is the best kisser, soft and sucking and nibbling without being invasive. She says I'm the best kisser too. We rearrange ourselves for the male gaze and kiss some more, and I run my hands up and down her back and the sides of her breasts and she asks if she can kiss my breasts. Fuck yes.
She sucks a nipple into her mouth, and I groan and grind against her knee. It is one part real and one part demonstration. Soon we are kissing and groping each other above the waist and grinding against each other's legs.
“Honey,” she says, “come over here and watch.”
Soon June goes down on me, he kisses my breasts, and I'm in heaven. Then I go down on her and she lies back against him and he plays with her breasts and she screams and pants ever so responsively. Every once in a while she gets what they call “too much in he
r head,” and they have a little routine they do, laugh about it, and then start again. All of this is facilitated by huge amounts of marijuana, which seems to wear off every few minutes so they start getting nervous and have to hit the bowl again...