by Gabi Moore
“Mom, what did you do in America?” I said. She was bent over and scratching around in the cupboard under the sink, looking for stain remover.
“I already told you, sweetie, I was a rep for a pharmaceutical company,” she said. The air around her head always went that strange blue and white color whenever she said it though.
“But really? Is that what you really did?” I said, and straightened out the pile with the edge of my sneaker.
“Why’d you keep asking, baby?” she said, and stood up to look at me.
“I’m not a baby. I’m already seven years old!” I said. It wasn’t true, I was only six years and eleven months, but grown-ups seemed to bend the rules all the time, so I decided I’d do it too and tell everyone I was already seven.
“I had a dream you were actually a soldier,” I told her, and danced the detergent and the softener bottles around each other like one was Beauty and the other was Beast.
“A dream?” she said. I just said it was a dream but it wasn’t really. It was like a dream I had while I was still awake. The kids at school didn’t like when I talked about the things I saw in my dreams, so I just stopped talking about them.
“Yup. You were working for a mean king, just like in fairytales.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I think that’s what you did, and you weren’t a rep for fosootlicals.”
“It’s pharmaceuticals.”
“That’s what I said.”
She gave me that look she sometimes does, the one that makes the air around her head go out in small little purple spirals, but she was still laughing, so I knew she wasn’t really mad. Then Melissa rang the bell and came inside.
“Heeeeeeeere’s baby!” she said and danced Isabelle around the kitchen a bit. My mom smiled and went to take the baby from her, and Melissa came to give me a hug.
“How you doing kiddo?” she said and kissed my head.
“I’m almost eight years old, Melissa! I’m not a kid anymore,” I said, but she wasn’t listening.
I started to pile the darks into the washing machine. I had to really squash the last few socks in there to make it all fit.
“Melissa, you were in America with mom, weren’t you?”
“Sure was.”
“What did mom do for her job?” I said.
“That’s easy. She worked as a rep for a pharmaceutical company. Same as me.”
I frowned. I just knew they weren’t telling me the truth. I know I’m not even really eight yet, but there are some things that I do know, I swear. I don’t know how I know them, but I just do.
“That’s not true! You were a soldier too, Melissa, I saw it!”
“A soldier…?” she said to my mom. My mom shrugged and shook her head, then added some washing powder to the machine.
“Janie says she dreamt it.”
“Dreamt it? Chiquita, dreams don’t mean anything,” said Melissa.
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Ok, ask your dad. Ask him what mom did back in America.”
I sighed. I had a feeling he’d also tell me the same thing. But that was fine. I’d figure it out eventually. Miss Carla at school says I’m gifted, which means I can figure things out quickly, which means it doesn’t matter if I don’t know just yet. Who knows how many things I’ll know by the time I’m eight, which is basically just around the corner.
I bend down and started to gather up the laundry pile of whites. Something brown caught my eye.
“Oh man, mom what’s this?” I said. “Looks like you were dragged through a hedge backwards.” I held up a white dress so covered in mud it was basically a brown dress.
“Dragged through a hedge…? Baby, where do you get this stuff from?”
“Heard it from TV probably,” Melissa said and pinched my cheek. In fact, I knew they wouldn’t like it if I told them where I really heard it from, so I just kept quiet.
“But seriously, Evie, what the hell?” Melissa said and held up the muddy dress as well. It looked pretty bad.
Mom blushed.
“Oh, that. Jack pushed me in the mud,” she said. Even though I was pretty sure that Melissa couldn’t see that same squiggles around mom’s head that I could, even she could see that mom was telling a big old lie.
The door banged open and dad came in. He nodded hello to Melissa and gave mom and me a peck on the cheek but what he really wanted to do was scratch around the kitchen drawers for something.
“Dad …what did mom do in America?” I asked.
He didn’t look up from his scratching, and said, “Your mom? That’s easy, she was a beauty queen.”
“Dad! That’s so lame! She wasn’t a beauty queen.”
“She was. Prettiest woman in America, they even gave her a certificate, so you know I’m not lying…”
“Where’s the certificate then?” I said, laughing.
“The certificate? Uh… I don’t know. It’s around here somewhere,” he said. I ran up to him and grabbed his legs and he made a big game of trying to shake me off like an angry grizzly bear.
“What did she really do?”
“Ok, ok, you got me. She wasn’t a beauty queen. She was a magician. You know the ones that can get out of the handcuffs and chains and things? Like that. We met one day when she got stuck and dad had to help her out.”
Now mom and him were both giggling and, can you believe it, they started kissing again.
“Ew! Come on, gross! You guys are so lame,” I yelled, but they never listen, as usual.
Now Melissa was laughing too. Mom scooped the baby up, and her and dad went off to the other room to put the baby down. I know I should be happy that my parents can make pretty pink and yellow sparks between them, but …you know, gross.
I put the whites back in the laundry hamper and lifted myself up onto the counter so I could swing my legs. Melissa was making tea for us all. I liked Melissa. She was my aunt but not really. Which is another way of saying that I was her niece, but not really. She told me once that everyone who dies goes to a special place where they can watch to make sure that everyone who’s still alive can be safe and happy. She always says stuff like that when mom’s not around. Maybe she’s right.
“So, Janie girl, when are you going to your new school, huh?” Melissa said. My mom was busy putting the baby down. My little sister was cool. She was the only other one who was the same as me, but she couldn’t talk yet or anything, so she wasn’t much fun. I bet that when she grew up, she’d be gifted too, and then we’d both figure out even more things together, like detectives.
“Next year only. Mom says she wants me to be eight first. But I’m basically eight already.” I knew how to tell a lie and not let it show in the air around my head.
“Ah, that’s good,” she said. “That means my Chiquita can stay with me a little while longer, I’m happy.”
“I’m happy too,” I said and we smiled at one another.
“You still gonna be a doctor when you grow up,” she said.
“Nah, that’s for babies” I said. I had wanted to be a doctor when I was just five, so that didn’t really count.
“So, what are you going to do then?”
“Something cool.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna have a nice farm like your mommy and daddy and live in a pretty place and grow veggies?”
I looked at her blankly.
“Of course not. There won’t be any farms in the future.”
She gave me strange look.
“What? No farms in the future? But Chiquita, how will people grow food if there are no farms, huh?”
“I don’t know. It’ll just be different in the future.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. People won’t eat veggies anymore.”
She laughed.
“And how do you know of all this, huh?” she said.
I shrugged. The same way I knew everything else.
I just did.
-
THE END -
Come Undone
Blurb
I can spot women like her a mile away. Uptight, fearful, but holding onto their perfect lives by a thread.
The moment I saw her, I wanted to break that thread.
I want to possess her.
Strip her down.
Unravel her little world…
… and get at her hidden inner core that I’ve only had glimpses of so far.
Chapter 1 - Mark
I stared long and hard at the wood and leather instrument in front of me.
It was slowly getting there, but it wasn’t right just yet. Wood and leather was all it was. Dark wood, even darker leather, and the gleaming metal buckles of the attached straps. That’s all.
But if I looked at it just right, it stopped being just wood and leather to me. It became flesh and blood. It came alive under my gaze. It breathed. I saw soft, human shapes twisted in pleasure. Stretched limbs, clenched fists, the lower arc of a breast on a ribcage spread wide... a kind of carnal yoga.
I narrowed my eyes and thought about this thing I had made, with my own two hands.
Her hips would balance there, just so, across the main A-frame. Here she would hinge, hipbones pressing into the padded leather mound so that she effortlessly folded in the middle, a sort of sexual down-dog, ass lifted up high and exposed.
On this instrument her legs would be separated and held apart by the strong wooden legs that matched hers, and belted tightly so that no matter what happened to her, she would not be able to squirm free and would have no choice but to endure everything.
I could also see how her arms would be spread and held apart, just like her legs, out in front of her and to either side of her head, which would hang down low and limp.
This was a piece of furniture. A piece of art. A unique and marvelous object. And something to fuck on. Something beautiful, but cruel. An instrument of perfect torture. A device that would only make sense when melded with the hot limbs of the humans using it. It was a tool of restraint. And a tool of liberation.
I paced around the contraption and viewed it from another angle.
Bound in such a device, a woman could be well and truly fucked, utterly opened up to complete domination and ravaged deeper than ever, penetrated so thoroughly she’d see nearly the face of God himself…
But something was wrong.
It just didn’t look right.
Not yet.
I frowned and took the measurements for the rear legs again.
For a custom piece like this, the balance of weight on the different joints, the predictable fold of the flesh, the length of the wooden legs and the skill of getting the restraining cuffs to hit just the right part of the human leg …these things were incredibly precise. To get them just right without compromising the beauty of the lines of the device itself …well, on days like this it felt nearly impossible.
I frowned and rubbed my face, then tossed the measuring tape aside. I’d look at it with fresh eyes in the morning. I had another massive commercial order come through this morning and would need to get stuck into that soon.
Being an artisan purveyor of custom-made sex furniture may have been my life’s true calling, but it certainly didn’t pay the bills. Pumping out thirty identical faux-Balinese TV cabinets for a Thai resort did pay those bills, though, and so that’s what I did.
For now.
Until I made a bigger name for myself, or until the world developed a taste for fancy BDSM flavored erotic furniture, I would have to take on jobs like that to stay afloat.
I put on a shirt, stretched hard till I had squeezed out all the cracks in my back, then switched off the light and headed to the den. I had to remind myself, of course, of the real irony here: it really was just wood and leather, after all. Things which were painstakingly made in solitude in my workshop were sent off to be used as tools of love, by couples who were so into screwing one another they decided to blow a few grand on a fancy chair to do so.
I kicked off my shoes.
It didn’t matter. Quality was worth it for me. That’s what I told my clients, and I meant it.
If I didn’t meet a single woman in this lifetime who fit the bill, then so be it. I’m not a spontaneous fuck-on-the-uncomfortable-kitchen-table kind of guy. No, I’d rather plan carefully. Boy scout sex, if you like – be prepared. Craft that supremely perfect moment, that apex of pleasure where everything is so thoroughly in sync and choreographed that it falls away completely, leaving only bliss. Take all the measurements, set the stage, carve out a moment …and let that glorious something unfold.
Until I found that moment – and the woman to make that moment real – I wasn’t interested in cheap, hollow sex.
The pool of women who want a divine, ecstatic sexual experience but also to be fucked so hard they’d almost panic I’d tear them in half …well, it’s not a very big pool of women.
But I don’t care. That’s what I want.
Each of my custom pieces can take anywhere from two weeks to six months to create. I’m willing to wait far, far longer for the right woman.
I strolled into the kitchen, rummaged a beer from the fridge and took a cool sip. I sat at the desk and scrolled through some invoices, particularly one for a new piece of bocote wood for a restored antique cupboard. It had cost me a fortune but the owner wanted that specific oily, interlocked grain and I was happy with this supplier’s shipments so far. Just a few days before, I had sourced a magnificent piece of zebrawood for a dining room table and planned to create a parquet effect on the top with diamonds of ebony. It cost me more to make than I would ever sell it for, but the secret is that with things that beautiful, I didn’t altogether mind about the profit.
My eye caught a message on my phone.
Valerie.
Shit.
Women are a lot like wood, if you think about it as much as I’ve thought about it. Some are plain grained but tough as nails and simply melt under the saw like they were born for it. Others are all ornamental swirls and stripes, pretty right up until you try to work them, then you see how porous and prone to tearing they are, how brittle. Some are born to be worked into trinkets, others were destined for heirloom war chests big and deep enough to carry any damn thing.
Valerie was a flimsy softwood with a dark gloss to hide the dents.
If you know what you’re looking for, you can tell what kind of life a tree has lived just by looking at the knots and pattern of its grain. You can tell if it suffered drought, or got a parasitic infection or got partially burnt.
It’s the same with women.
Most of the girls who found their way into my workshop all had characteristic scars and scratches in them, one way or another. They either met me at some BDSM event and coyly invited themselves round for a “consult”, or they claimed to be commissioning a piece for their boyfriend, who would magically disappear right when the piece was finished.
Sometimes I’d get excited, though. I’d think, this is it. This is my girl. In my mind, I’d start measuring up the different lengths and angles of her personality to see if it would line up with mine. I’d start cautiously setting the stage.
But I would always be disappointed.
The women I met weren’t fearless explorers of far out sexual territories; they were most often scared little girls who couldn’t tell the difference between a Dom and an asshole, between ecstasy and disassociation.
I stretched back in my chair, slammed the laptop shut and exhaled loudly. Nevermind about any of that, though. I was an artisan, and my medium was the kinky trifecta of wood, metal and leather. My eyes fell closed and I took another swig. I knew how to build things. And I knew how to wait. I would build the perfect instrument, in the meantime. The right woman would just have to come later.
And come she would.
Chapter 2 - Kat
“Wait, wait, wait!” she said. “Just how long have you known this guy for?”
I trailed my fingers up and down the cold stem
of my wine glass.
“Uh… maybe a month? A little less? I don’t know.”
Everyone at the table erupted into surprised laughter.
“A month? And he’s already asked you to marry him? That’s gotta be some kind of record.”
I took a sip and smiled, trying to pretend that the story I was telling wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounded. But, well …it was. It was the most ridiculous thing that had happened in my entire life.
I had met Anthony at a speed dating event. We had chatted about nothing for exactly two minutes, shook hands and then I had promptly forgotten all about him. He then messaged me a week later, and we chatted and walked in the park near my house. He sent me cute texts and wished me goodnight for a week. The second time I ever met up with him, it was for an overpriced dinner date at a family steakhouse. That night, he proposed.
No, really. I didn’t believe it either.
“Look,” I said, “it’s not like it was an actual proposal.”
My three best friends from way back, seated around the patio table, all raised their eyebrows simultaneously.
I refilled my glass with white wine.
“Like, he didn’t get down on one knee and give me a ring or anything. It was more like …more like a business proposal.”
We were four middle-aged women sitting around drinking wine on a late Sunday afternoon. What else would we be talking about except men and all the millions of ways they could make life ridiculous?
Kara had been divorced, twice. Annie, once. Lily married straight out of school and had been casually resenting her husband for the last ten years. And then there was me, divorced from a cheating scumbag just two months ago and smack bang into a new marriage proposal.
I drank my wine.
“Sounds romantic,” said Lily.
I shrugged.
“I don’t know,” Kara said. “I think I kind of like it. It just cuts to the chase, you know? None of us are getting any younger here, so why beat around the bush?”
“Because maybe he’s a serial killer or something?” I said, smiling.
