by Emma Becker
I’m like an amateur movie. I can’t watch; I’m still blushing. I can’t look at my own face without wincing. Have I ever known what I look like when I come? How do those delicate contractions in the pit of my stomach reflect in an onlooker’s eyes? I’m sure I pleasure myself as much as anyone else, if not more, in every imaginable or possible position, standing, sitting, lying down, with my hands, my thighs, the showerhead, all the ordinary objects of everyday life my unquenchable vice summons up for assistance. But never in front of any of the thousand mirrors spread across my house. And now that I have met the man, whenever I touch myself I feel as if I’m being watched. Just three days ago I surprised myself by checking my own room (within the walls of the family home) for hidden cameras. And tonight the red reflections of the super-cheap galaxy painted across the ceiling in this room are like a gang of informers reporting my activities back to the Île Saint-Louis castle, more precisely, the mythological study where he hides my accumulating letters, between volumes by Mandiargues and Baudelaire. Improbable, I know. But I’m on my guard.
It would be so much better if Monsieur were actually here. At least I’d know why I was shivering. There would be something tangible to fear or lust for, no longer these twisted fantasies that I wouldn’t reveal to him even under torture.
Can you hear me? With your animal intuition, can you feel that somewhere in Paris, as you fall asleep against your wife, I’m spreading my thighs all the way open until it’s painful and I’m thinking of you, standing by the door there gazing at me? And because I’m a paradox, closing my eyes to my reflection in the mirror doesn’t stop me imagining you ordering me to spread my legs wide, still wider, even more. A touch red-faced, I improvise a scenario in the style of the Marquis de Sade, a tale full of orders and insults, and – would I ever have the courage to tell you in real life or confess its details to my girlfriends? – the moment that captivates me most, binding all the other scenes together, is the one where I hear you say, your voice calm but peremptory, unwilling to accept any refusal: ‘I can see your pussy, Ellie, but I can’t see your arse. Pull your legs up.’
And I watch myself in the mirror following orders. (Imagining you imagining all this, troubled by it as you read a book, numbs my fingers and I find it difficult to write.)
As if your almost invisible presence wasn’t enough, you appear out of nowhere and come to me, kneeling by my head, your nails digging into my calves preventing any further movement. Bewildered, I watch as my stomach divides, just a few centimetres away from my nose, and above it how my cunt and arse cheeks painfully conjugate with the spreading of my thighs.
‘Look,’ you order me.
In the mirror, all my holes are quivering; the stray hairs surrounding them appear to be drenched with sweat. But the worst thing is the way your eyes follow mine across the surface of the mirror, how your gaze travels over my hips, my breasts squashed against my knees, and focuses on the geometric centre of my shimmering, unveiled machinery now purring like a well-oiled engine. The violence of your will and the smells surrounding me suffocate me. You take a firm hold of my hand, set it against my clit, like my piano professor crushing my fingers beneath his to force me to learn difficult scales. There you are, holding me captive like a puppet, with all my wires tangled, leaning towards me. I hear the sound of your zip moving downwards, like the sharp echo of a circuit-breaker or a guillotine blade racing towards its target.
‘Touch yourself. You’re open. You can see every damn thing. I want to see you wank.’
I barely have time to open my mouth in protest when you brusquely interrupt me: ‘No, Ellie, no. No bargaining. I don’t even want to hear you breathe. Touch yourself, you fucking bitch.’
I have no sense of ridicule when I’m in the throes of lust. Right now, whatever I do next, I’ll look like a whore. Eyes closed, my lips sliding along the material of your trousers, I rub myself gently.
(Presently, if there is any rightful order in the world, your intuition should be waking you: I bite the flesh of my thighs as I slip my fingers inside.)
You stroke my hair. Very good, darling. Make yourself come. On another planet, such curt orders would feel like a slap, leaving me breathless and – oh, dear God, maybe I’d enjoy being slapped. Maybe in this parallel world, where I can say or do anything and still emerge fresh as a flower, I’d want you to spit on me, inside my mouth, yes, after licking my lips, then slapping my cheeks. Because it would feel good. For no particular reason. Just to take me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Am I some sort of monster? Would it be so awful and decadent to ask you for yet more?
‘Put your fingers up your arse.’
The filthier your sentences are, the more I squirm within your grasp. I reach the point where I no longer need your commands to explode: to hear you mention fingers up my arse brings me to the brink, all those mysterious compartments in the pit of my stomach contracting suddenly. One of your hands briefly abandons my thigh and rises all the way up to my cheek, pinching it hard between your forefinger and thumb.
‘What is it you really want, Ellie Becker? You want me to hurt you? Do as I say. Put your fingers up your arse.’
(I obey, still licking the blue scars left by my teeth across my thighs.)
‘One more.’
‘I can’t!’
‘Of course you can. You have no idea how much you can take. One more.’
You give a single glance at the mirror that is impassively reflecting the whole dreadful scene, your words so full of menace. My arsehole spasmodically squeezes my fingers and the flesh inside me shudders, gripping me with the energy of despair.
‘One more.’
I half open my bitch-in-heat eyes, look through my parted knees. I no longer have three but four fingers inside, your hand painfully crushing my clit, and I’m dying for more.
‘Open yourself wide. I want to be able to glide all the way to the depths of your arse, like sliding through butter. I will not tolerate the slightest sound of protest when I bugger you. Further, Ellie.’
All I can now hear are the gurgling, suffocating sounds struggling in the back of my throat, muted squeaks. If I close my eyes, I find myself back again in a world so like ours, a hail of smacks landing on my arse cheeks and your saliva forcing its way down my throat.
‘Show me, now.’
You pull on my shoulder, emphasizing your last word, and however much I bite my lips and try to look sorry for myself or hide behind my fringe, any outside observer, unaware of how the whole scene began, would come to the conclusion that I’m just a whore. And my parents. Jesus Christ, my poor father. How will I ever be able to look him in the face again, explain I was forced to do it, that their daughter is more than just this filthy bitch split all the way up to her belly button, rubbing her cheek against the cock of a family friend, her cunt dripping like a river, her thighs all red, shamelessly begging for it?
‘But it’s what you wanted, Ellie,’ you whisper (because, naturally, in this particular world our brains communicate instantly). ‘That’s why it all began.
‘From the very first text message you sent me while touching your clit in your little-girl room, I knew you yearned for this, to be bent over, my nose digging deep inside your bitch cunt, watching it melt like butter in the sun. Your messages betrayed the fact that you’re a cheap whore, whose only need is to be shown the sheer infamy of her holes. And the more I hurt you, stretch your limits, the more you’ll beg me to continue. There is no longer any need for you to say anything. I watch your holes open and close like the gills of a fish out of water. You need it. You crave it. I must say, come to think of it, wouldn’t it be an atrocious sort of spectacle for your parents to witness, or are you actually thinking of that too?’
‘Why should I ever think of such a thing?’
‘I could pinch your nipples and make you come right now, just as you are, on all fours like a dog, or maybe I could bugger you, get you screaming, eh? I can already hear the sounds, the dry slap of my stomach against your
arse cheeks, one thrust followed by another, all the way in, deep . . .’
The voice I am imagining is a deep bass, slow and deliberate, its tone a blend of desire and determination. My mouth remains wide open and silent.
You continue: ‘You could be open wider, but I want to fuck your arse the way it is now. Feel myself plunge deep inside your stomach.’
There is no transition in my mind between the words emerging from your mouth and the moment you breach my arse. Maybe you’d asked me to spread the spit you’d dribbled over my open arse with my fingers.
A second later, you’re deep inside me and the only thing I can see, even though my eyes are closed, is your cock violently thrusting deep into me, then withdrawing slowly, pale with slime, a lazy but steady rhythm. Any movement I make brings me closer to an orgasm.
‘Look at yourself. I want you to recall every single image tonight, back in your own bed. As soon as you close your eyes.’
‘Aah, you’re about to make me come . . .’
Well, that’s what I was planning to say, but your fingers are inside my mouth and the bass note of your voice glides across me: ‘Shut up. I don’t want to hear a sound, understood?’
I keep on looking at you despairingly, greedily chewing anything you place between my lips and your orders change: ‘Come.’
If only you could imagine the shrill impact of such a simple word in the depths of my twisted brain. I think of it so much I forget everything else.
‘I said, come now.’
‘But . . .’
‘Shut up. Touch yourself. Like that. Faster.’
Your fingers bruising my lips in a semblance of anger.
‘Faster. I’m allowing you a further ten seconds to come, OK? After that, I’ll cease fucking you and I’ll get very angry. Nine . . .’
I’m wanking as fast as I can, my hand and wrist cramping. A strangely pleasurable sensation. Like the odd spasms I used to have at school when a teacher would announce the end of a test. All the desks surrounding me emptying, the barrage of whispers fading, the schoolmaster gathering the papers, and I’m still busy with mine, a few words away from the ending, and I would feel my fingers going numb with an unwelcome but rapturous feeling coursing through me, preventing me from writing anything legible. Tracing the final letters, I would be forced to bite my lips to restrain the tears. My back wet with sweat. The same sort of twisted feeling I used to experience when I was only five months old and tightened my buttocks when swimming; I could have allowed myself to sink to the bottom of the pool to fully enjoy the tingling, but kept thrashing around like a frog, overcome with pleasure. In both instances, I wasn’t touching myself, didn’t know how to then, but now that I was twenty and, dear God, the effect of these deep-seated contractions as I’m ordered to do so. Just imagine if at five years old in Sainte-Maxime you had known how to rub that small nub of flesh between your legs. It would have been miraculous. Just imagine the uproar, a hand buried beneath the desk in class B36.
I feel sorry you’re a man and unable to experience such an exquisite feeling that it makes you want to scratch, bite, suck until the blood flows.
‘Eight . . . Do I have to describe how you look, with your arse in the air and your gaping cunt? Do you want me to tell you what I see so that you can imagine it too, Ellie? Maybe you want me to fuck you harder.’
The more I think of it, the more the cramp spreads, intensifies, blood rushes to my face. I keep repeating the seductive accompaniment of your countdown (‘Seven . . . six . . . five . . .’), I must come, fuck, I MUST come, bloody hell, menaced, under orders, threatened with danger or acute pain; only you know what sort of terrible things you might conjure to punish me further. The new obscenities you could throw in my direction. A torrent of words, filthy bitch whore tramp, can’t you feel me tearing up your pussy can’t you see watch watch watch? The moment is approaching, I end up folded back on myself like a religious icon, consumed by shame, streaked with spit, and an endless stream of your cum criss-crosses my face from mouth to forehead, dripping all the way down to my tits (and if it covered the whole of my body, it would be absolutely perfect).
‘Two . . .’
‘Almost, almost!’
Yes, it’s rising inside me, nerves twisting around each other, releasing their invisible but devastating conflagration around the mast of your cock inside my arsehole. I’m just centimetres away. (Is it really a question of centimetres? Shouldn’t it be another, much more complicated, form of measurement, a bar, an ampere, or some obscure scale in the quantum vocabulary? How do you calculate the strength of an implosion?). I’m just a hair’s breadth away from the finish line and still you keep on muttering at me: ‘One . . . Come, you stupid little bitch, come now . . .’
I bite my shoulder and it always hurts when I sleep on my side.
The following day, Monsieur pushed the small door open. In the darkness his eyes miraculously created light as he took in every detail of the room, a smile spreading across his lips. I was waiting for him, crouched open-legged on the bed, drinking in the joy of his reaction. Then, familiar gestures: Monsieur taking his coat off, placing it on a chair, followed by a few seconds of unbearable tension, sensing how every muscle in his body hardened as he readied himself to throw himself against me, over me, into me. My favourite moment: when Monsieur was no longer a man but a hurricane through which I could just about recognize arms, legs, the perfect hardness of a cock, the sly fragrance of masculinity, lips full of expectation, his silver-grey hair.
A quarter of an hour or three centuries later, his voice whispering: ‘Touch yourself.’
Me, ever obtuse: ‘Aah . . . stop looking at me.’
Once I had begun this indefinable and unreal relationship with Monsieur, meals with my uncle Philippe became fascinating and full of fear. I recall a particular evening when they came to dinner, on some anniversary: Monsieur occupied all my attention. Under the table in the salon I was answering his texts, trying to conceal the lubricity of my smile. Only Alice, facing me across the table, knew who was causing my BlackBerry to vibrate, and was throwing me dirty looks I preferred to ignore. It was one of those informal meals where the conversations merged into an indistinct hubbub, and I was half involved, answering questions politely, the sort of meaningless chat my family had engaged in since time immemorial. What about university? When would the strike end? How were the mocks being assessed? And how is your boyfriend getting on? Occasionally, it was the turn of my two sisters to face the random interrogation, Alice confirming for the nth time where her new art school was located and how she was revising for her baccalaureate exam, and our eyes would meet across the table and I would recognize in hers the impatience I was experiencing to leave the table and go to my room to smoke a joint or two. She appeared to be even more bored than I was – she didn’t have a lover who had spent fifteen years working alongside our uncle. How could I ever describe to her the delight I was experiencing that no one at the table knew of the words Monsieur had whispered in my ear or the way his hard cock had lodged deep inside my stomach. What a whore I had become, how much I enjoyed it.
‘By the way, weren’t you planning to show me your fat?’ Philippe’s memory always came to life at the most inopportune moments. ‘I think a bit of suction around the thighs would do the trick.’
I stood up, still unsteady from my glass of red wine. ‘I’ve lost eight kilos, but it just won’t go away.’
‘No, not worth operating on,’ he answered. ‘I, for one, wouldn’t risk it. It would be criminal.’
‘But it’s a bloody cushion! Wouldn’t Dr S operate on me?’
Alice knew I was buzzing inside and glanced at me fiercely.
‘None of my colleagues would ever agree to do it. Tell me, Ellie, why don’t you take up jogging instead?’
‘You surgeons are a hopeless bunch. Why should I run when you’ve got all these new techniques available to you? Or starve myself?’
Philippe burst out laughing, as if he knew I was kidding.
I pretended to change the subject. My sister wasn’t fooled when I jokingly said: ‘Did you know I have S on Facebook?’
‘Really? What does he have to say?’
‘Not much. I basically added him because Mum told me he was fond of Calaferte.’
He frowned. ‘Who’s Calaferte?’
‘A writer,’ I responded.
Like many family members, my uncle kept as far as possible from my interest in erotic literature. My mother, sighing, added: ‘He writes about sex, of course.’
‘You say that because you’ve never actually read La Mécanique des femmes,’ I pointed out, annoyed.
My mother’s disparagement of Calaferte had thrown me into the arms of Monsieur. She had never opened any of his books, but she knew they were erotic and felt, foolishly, that she could express an opinion about him. She raised her eyes upwards.
‘What do you mean? I’m the one who bought the book!’ She turned to her brother. ‘It’s the one where he describes a woman peeing over the pages.’
Inevitably most of the people around the table were laughing nervously, displaying their stupidity. This was one of the things I had not dared express to Monsieur, for fear he would guess from my tone how I sometimes found my family contemptible. There were moments when I truly hated them, wondering why we were so different when it came to certain subjects. Irritation rising, I almost shouted: ‘That’s enough, Mum! You might have bought the book, but you evidently haven’t read it. At no stage does Calaferte describe a woman peeing. I know because I’ve read it at least ten times. And even if he had done, it’s possible to write well of such things.’
‘You’re quite right,’ my aunt said, patting my arm. In an attempt to defuse the situation, she changed the subject. ‘Philippe, what was his name again, the photographer who liked to take pics of young girls weeing in fields? We saw his exhibition.’