“You’re going to take my picture, Ma’am,” I said in a soft voice. Not a woman’s voice. But close, somehow. Close.
“And that’s going to make you come,” she told me.
I could feel her next to me. Could feel the third eye of the camera focused on me. When she bent to inspect my body, her long hair tickled the head of my shaft. Her breath made me shiver, the heat of it and the fact that her mouth was so damn close to my cock. The flash of the camera sent a shudder I could feel in the base of my spine.
Each time she took a picture, she rewarded me with a different sensation. FLASH: her mouth on my balls, cupping them both. FLASH: her tongue tracing the crack of my ass. FLASH: her insistent fingers probing me.
We went through a whole roll of film this way. With me turning, unable to touch her. Bound and blindfolded. Each time the flash of the camera broke through my darkness, I grew closer to orgasm. Each time she took a step away from me, I felt myself wanting to reach for her, to grab her.
To fuck her.
Being bound, being forced to submit to her will, wasn’t what I’d expected. It was better. For the first time, I started to really understand why I have spent my life fantasizing about scenes like this. Giving up the power to someone else was enlightening. Trapped in the dark, I could honestly see the light.
“Last shot,” she said, her lips against my ear. “Last shot.”
She bent on the floor to take the picture. She slid between my legs and shot upward. My balls constricted. Her fingertips grazed them. I came as the camera clicked, and I finally understood, in a…
FLASH.
IT’S COLD OUTSIDE
Stephen Elliott
I was on tour with a collective made up of current and former sex workers. There were twelve of us and we were crossing the country in two vans. We started in Washington, where the winter was mild, and slid down the coast of California and then into the brown scrub of Arizona and New Mexico, where the sky was big and blue and stretched over the mountains like a tarp.
Our shows were always packed. One of the women lipsynced “Breaking the Law” with her vagina and another, a burlesque dancer and one of the kindest people I’d ever met, did a number to Dolly Parton’s “Proud to Be an American” where she pulled a roll of fake dollar bills out of her ass. Byron was with me. He’s a prostitute and he lives not far from where I live in San Diego, away from the old city where the bay wraps around the water like a croissant, and he would paint his face and tell stories about turning tricks in various hotels and how he felt like a healer. I kept getting sick and Byron had all these vitamins and herbal potions he would give me and usually I would get better. Other times he gave me pills from a baggy filled with pharmaceuticals. He convinced me that the most important part of healing was faith. In Oklahoma, we took mushrooms soaked in chocolate and sat in a field for six hours, surrounded by razor grass six feet high, feeling like air rushing across a stream.
At one of the college panels in Kansas, Byron told the students he didn’t use condoms when he was giving blow jobs and he enjoyed swallowing his customers’ come.
In Colonial Williamsburg, they brought a tub of water into the student center and a preacher baptized students waiting in line for the show, pushing their heads under the water, shaking a bible at the fluorescent lighting.
During the performances, I read a story about my year as a stripper in Chicago. I was so inexperienced compared to everyone else; I felt like a loser. There were twelve of us and we shared three hotel rooms. One of the women, a former prostitute who had formed an organization to legalize sex work in Brazil, made a point of telling everyone that she wouldn’t share a bed with me under any circumstances. She said it when I wasn’t around but one of the dancers told me about it. She said I made her uncomfortable.
There was a blizzard in Philadelphia and I walked around the Liberty Bell while snow fell in sheets across the former capital. The snows got heavier as we traveled north again. In Boston, five hundred people waited outside with their hands and ears freezing to see us perform in an abandoned theater at two in the morning.
By Maine, there was feet of the stuff and trees naked as phone poles. I’d lived in California too long and didn’t know what to do about the weather. Also, when we were in Texas three weeks earlier, Byron had fallen on me and dislocated my knee doing karaoke, which sounds dumb but it’s true. I went to a sports doctor near the Texas capitol, which is made from local red granite and filled with statues celebrating the Civil War and is the only state house larger than the national Capitol. The doctor told me I would never heal but eventually my knee would stop hurting and I would run and jump exactly the same as I had before.
The weather was pounding, like clouds throwing snowballs. Andre lived half an hour away from the college in a small town and he came to see the show with his girlfriend, Serena. Andre left the West Coast two years ago. We used to play poker together and now he was living out here, in the northeast. He looked rugged and good, like a man who enjoyed chopping wood. He’d actually moved out here to be a writer, which is what I was or what I had been for a while, but I was at a point in my life where I didn’t understand why anyone would want to do that. I had a much easier time understanding swallowing another man’s come for a hundred dollars.
Andre had a beard and big curly hair that was all red and black. I remembered him as gray, salt and pepper, but now he was chicory. Serena had moved up from Boston where she had worked for years as a psychoanalyst. She was tall and white as milk. They had both given up on big cities.
“We like it here,” Andre assured me. He was teaching a course at the university. Serena worked in the coffee shop near their home. She didn’t want to be a psychoanalyst anymore. When I asked about her choices, Andre gave me a look.
The coffee shop where she worked was on a steep rise and the windows looked out on the tops of pine trees and oaks.
After the show, the three of us went for a drink.
“I’m glad to be away from those people,” I confessed. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the people on the tour. I did, quite a bit. But we were in vans together six hours a day and the vans were crowded.
“Don’t worry,” Andre said. “At our place you’ll have your own room.”
I hadn’t had my own room in a long time.
They had the kind of apartment you can only have in out of the way places, unless you have a lot of money. There were at least three bedrooms and hardwood floors throughout. The whole thing cost what I paid for one third of my crappy apartment back home. I wanted to stay.
They gave me a room off the kitchen with a queen-sized futon and a double radiator as well as a big stack of New York magazines.
“Keep the door closed,” Serena said. “Unless you want to be woken up by the cat.”
I laid out and paged through the magazines and played with myself for a little while. I thought about a black woman in Vancouver I’d been corresponding with. She said she hated it when men were into her just because she was black. I was trying to keep from her my own fetish for dark women, which made me feel vaguely racist, but I thought she must know.
I was sleeping when Serena came in.
“Shhh,” she said. “Don’t wake Andre. He’d kill you.”
I didn’t think Andre would kill me. Andre was a “feeler,” the type to get depressed. All internal.
Serena forced a sock into my mouth anyway and circled around the back of my head with duct tape. I’m not sure why people so often assume they can do anything they want to me. In my early twenties, I lived in a large condominium in Chicago with a rich man who would lie on top and force himself inside of me. He was much bigger than me and he’d wrap his large arms around my chest. I was hairless, young and thin. It must have looked like he was riding a dolphin. He would come in about three minutes, then go back to whatever else he was doing. After a year, he started complaining that I didn’t care about him. Then he kicked me out, which was the beginning of a whole string of disasters I won’t
go into here.
Serena tied my hands together with a long piece of clothes-line. She went around my wrists and then between my hands all the way up my forearms. Then she tied my ankles together and placed a pillow behind my calves, then ran some thin rope from my ankle ties to my wrists. My knee hurt; I could feel where it had left the socket in Austin, ligaments stretched like rubber bands, but it wasn’t too bad. I supposed I’d be limping later but I was fine with that. If she hadn’t filled my mouth I would have probably told her I loved her. That’s how I felt. I don’t think I had ever been in love before.
Serena sat on the bed with me. The radiator was blasting at seventy degrees but Serena was still wearing black leggings and a loose shirt. She pulled on a latex glove and I turned on my side and tried to wrap myself around her. She grabbed a handful of Vaseline and wiggled her hand in my ass and stuck her thumb in my asshole. It felt wonderful. She got a finger inside me, then another. I wished my legs weren’t tied together. I wanted to be open for her so she could get her whole fist inside of me. I thought about Andre sleeping in the other room. I liked Andre. I doubted we would still be friends after this. Then I thought about the black woman in Vancouver. I wished Serena was black.
Eventually Serena took her hand out of me and then began to torture me. First she pulled out a bag of pins and started tracing them across my body, not so deep, but enough to draw blood. She cut long lines up and down my chest to my thighs. Then she began to pierce me, pushing several pins through my nipples, then my balls. I tried not to moan.
“If you make any noise you will be so sorry,” she said. It was weird the way she said it, like she was making a joke. She didn’t really mean it, we were just playing some little game. She lit a cigarette and dotted it across my chest where she’d already cut me. I was afraid of infection. Then she brought the cigarette close to my face.
“I’d tell you to relax,” she said, “but I don’t really want you to.” She pushed the cigarette into my face, which is why I have this little scar close to my eye.
She left me like that. I tried not to move too much because it increased my discomfort. The sun came out, the winter light slanting through the pane. I heard Andre in the kitchen just outside the door. “I’m going to get out of here,” he said. “Let’s not wake him up yet.” That was probably my moment to scream, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. One part of me knew the worst was over. The other wasn’t sure.
An hour later, maybe two, Serena came back into the room. I had been tied up for hours and I’d been crying, soaking the bed. She wasn’t wearing leggings anymore. She just wore a little black skirt. Her legs were the kind of white that has never gotten any sun. They weren’t curvy, but they were fit.
“You were so good,” she told me. I wanted to smile but the sock was still in my mouth and my jaw hurt and I was dizzy with dehydration. “We’re almost done, okay?”
I nodded my head.
“I’m going to take this gag off you, but I don’t want you to say anything yet. Can you handle that?” I nodded again and she peeled the duct tape off and I didn’t scream and then she pulled the sock out of my mouth and held my head and gave me water from a glass. It was the kind of glass that comes in sets of twelve at Target. Everything seemed so ordinary. After I drank the whole glass I started to cry again. I cried a lot and she didn’t make any move to comfort me but she didn’t try to get me to stop either. I thought she would gag me again or slap me but she didn’t.
When I stopped crying she undid the line connecting my ankles to my wrists. She slowly pulled my legs straight and rolled me from my side onto my back. She pulled the pins out, then washed me with peroxide, water, and a sponge. She paid a lot of attention between my legs, holding the sponge against the tip of my penis, pressing on my balls.
“I’d like you to eat me out. Could you do that?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t sure she wanted a verbal answer.
“Ask me.”
“Can I eat you out, please?” I said, and she lifted her skirt and sat on my face. I was enveloped in her, her pubic hair brushing my lips, ass pressing on my cheeks. I pushed my tongue as far into her as it would go. She tasted sour and thick. I tried to do a good job because I didn’t want her to get off of me. I went down on her for a long time and she ran her nails gently across my wounds.
Later we showered together and when Andre came home I was okay, though my leg was stiff and I was walking with a limp. I had aggravated my injury.
The three of us went to dinner in the town. We ate at a local brewing company, fried chicken and amber beer. I was wearing Serena’s panties. What was that? A good-bye present? A nice touch? I felt vulnerable. I didn’t want to leave Serena and Andre and go back to those vans and another shared hotel room, the TV flickering late into the night, pills to get to sleep, pills to wake up, and more pills for the pain.
“Serena’s an artist,” Andre said. “She’s really great.”
“Yeah?” I asked, but Serena just smiled. She was humble around Andre, who has always been insecure and was maybe more so now, out in the middle of the forest, halfway through his forties. She seemed to want to make him happy. I’d never had that urge, to make someone else happy, but I was ready to change. I would have to.
“Check this out,” Andre said. “Serena did this.”
“I’m sure he’s not interested,” Serena said.
Andre handed me a business card. It had his information on one side and hers on the other. It was green and blue with something in the middle that resembled a rocket. I still had a show to do that night. The vans were arriving in front of the wide columns framing the university. Children walked past with sacks full of books. Nobody had noticed me missing yet.
AN INVITATION TO THE DANCE
Sylvane Alistair
Keith’s hand trembled slightly as he pulled the folded letter out of its envelope. He unfolded the piece of paper and scanned the message written upon it.
Dear Mr. Keith Trenton,
I have received your request to be considered for submissive training. You have ingratiated yourself already by sending your query to me in handwritten form. Anyone who has researched me will know I prefer handwritten correspondence to email or even typed letters. Discipline and control are very important to me, and are required to write a respectful and thoughtful letter such as the one you sent me. Your instructions are as follows. Answer the questions below in another letter and send it to me when complete. If I feel you are worthy, I will contact you with further directions.
Sincerely,
Mistress Joanna
He read the questions and felt a moment of panic. Was it a test? Were there right and wrong answers to these questions? He wanted to serve the city’s most respected mistress more than anything he’d ever wanted, he couldn’t blow it now. Joanna was known to be extremely selective with the men she chose to train.
Serving a powerful woman was Keith’s fondest dream, but he’d never found one who lived up to his expectations. As a successful and wealthy man, he had no shortage of women interested in him, but he didn’t want a wife, or even a girlfriend. He was a larger-than-life person and needed a larger-than-life partner. Regular sex was ordinary and mundane to Keith; he wanted higher highs than the missionary position could ever give him.
He wanted a Mistress, a goddess at whose feet he could worship, a superior woman who could claim him and compel him to serve her. He knew Joanna was such a woman, yet he had sudden doubts that he could please her.
Don’t lose your nerve now, he chided himself. You’ve already scored points, just answer her questions and see what happens.
As he read the questions, he found his cock getting hard. He held the paper to his nose, longing for a scent of her. A trace of perfume, a hint of leather, anything at all? Looking at the letter again, he was struck with the ridiculous impulse to lick the ink off the paper. It was stupid, he knew, but he was beginning to go crazy with need and anything to bring her closer would do.
<
br /> Pull yourself together, jackass, he thought. Answer her damn questions. With tremendous effort, he took a new sheet of paper from his desk drawer and began to write, trying to ignore the soreness between his legs.
That night, the second letter to her finished and mailed, Keith couldn’t stop the questions from dancing in his head.
What leads you to believe you are capable of serving a woman such as myself?
What experience have you had in serving a woman such as myself?
What have been your most favorite ways to serve? Your least favorite?
Of what are you afraid in a sexual sense? (These can be things you have actually experienced, or only imagined.)
He had answered the questions truthfully, realizing that trying to figure out what “right” and “wrong” answers might be would be an exercise in futility. The last thing he wanted to do was anger her and lose his chance to train with her, so he figured truth was best.
As he lay naked in bed on satin sheets with the air-conditioning a comforting background hum, Keith thought of her.
Mistress Joanna. The name alone gave him a hard-on. He thought of the photographs he had seen of her, even the brief glimpses he’d had of her at public events.
She was tall, as tall as him, five foot ten at least, slim, with shocking red hair hanging down to the small of her back. He imagined sticking his face into that hair and inhaling deeply. Unable to resist any longer, he grabbed his cock and started jerking it roughly. He imagined the skin of her neck, imagined touching it and finding it soft and pale with perhaps a blush of pink.
And her breasts—oh God, her breasts—so round and full and always peeking out from the corsets and bustiers she wore, each more than a handful in size. He imagined putting his mouth to one, licking and teasing the nipple until it was firm and pointed, then transferring his attentions to the other. He jerked himself harder as he wondered what color her nipples were—red, pink, tan, brown, a rainbow of delectable candy for his lips and tongue.
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