by Alison Tyler
She knows what’s next. She knows because it is what she wants so dearly, so much that she brought me to her. I know she’s afraid. Her fear marbles the desire that gives me substance. It wars inside her, but her parted legs don’t close.
My ghostly inhalation of her scent tickles her ears. Slow exhalation of air currents alert the skin of her belly and lower. When my mouth touches her again, she shrieks and arches, and grabs at me, finding purchase this time as I greedily devour her cunt. Every lick and suck solidifies her desire into blazing need, imparting substance to me so that I may answer her.
By the time I rise off her, nipping her clit with my teeth, she is moaning, legs brazenly splayed, slick and weeping with want. I move over her with weight and purpose, black in the black. She wants me. She welcomes me. I come to her.
His
By Charlotte Stein
When the belt snaps, I know exactly what to do. I know the way most people know how to breathe and eat and think. It’s a jerking instinct, like someone yanking on a leash around my neck.
Sometimes literally.
But not this time. This time I’ve been just good enough or just bad enough to warrant a small sizzle, and nothing else.
Well, nothing else apart from everything about the whole messy experience, from the sound of my own breathing, thin and high, to the snap of her pulling the belt taut between her two tiny hands.
She’s small, you see, my girl. Very small—you’d never know it to look at her. She has a neat heart-shaped face and little doll’s legs. She talks in a chirrup of a voice and never demands anything in the way she does right here, right here in our secret heart.
Here, she is the Overlord. She has death rays. Her voice stills and centers, and she says, “Thomas, Thomas. You’ve been bad, haven’t you?”
I always know I have. I roll around in that I have like something gross and greedy, getting it all over myself until I’m a mess, I’m a mess. Even though I never am in real life. At work I’m in charge of hundreds of people, and when strangers see me in my tailored suits and my high-beam shoes, they think a certain thing: that I’m rich and powerful and in command of my own destiny. Either that or they feel sure I’m a total asshole. A Captain of Industry, secure in himself enough to do others down.
And I suppose I’m all of those things, it’s true. I’m just not all of those things here, in this place we’ve made in a room no one ever goes into. Julie always says to visitors and friends, Oh, that’s just the guest room. We haven’t gotten around to renovating it yet.
But we have. Its walls are swamped in red, and its floors are polished and immaculate, and there is furniture in there—though only one piece. One piece of perfect furniture, leather-covered and as black as the rest of the room is red.
And when we play this game I spread myself over it like it’s my true lover, even though it isn’t, it isn’t. It’s just a stand-in, something to keep me still and focused and when it hurts so good, something to hold on to, tightly. Before today I’ve dug my fingers in so hard I’ve almost ripped it—almost, but not quite.
She designed it too well for it to ever rip. Paid for the best, as she always does. Ensured it was perfect in every way, so that when I finally bent over it, naked, she could feel secure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t slip or damage it or myself.
No, no. She’s responsible for that. Any damage, I mean.
She stands behind me now, with the belt in her hands and her eyes probably all over my naked backside, and she says the words that thrill me every time: “Are you ready, Thomas?”
I am. It’s never really damage, after all. She’s too careful, too precise. Oh God, I think I hear the belt whistle through the air right before it lands on my overly tensed flesh.
Of course, I flinch. I always do. She always tells me to relax, relax, it will hurt less, but I can’t. Or maybe I don’t want to. Either way the pain sears through me like a bolt of electricity, fat and hot. I clench again and it makes it worse, until I have to mold my lips together against the sound that threatens to come out of me.
If I make a sound, I get another stripe for my trouble. And every time I swear I won’t, even though every time I know I will. I’ll cry and beg and sob, because she always knows how to take me to the very brink of the line, without ever quite going over.
God, who am I kidding? I’m almost over it now. She slaps the leather against my bare ass and my body goes molten, every nerve alight in that good, good way. It feels like they’re singing, and the tune is one I know deep down inside me.
She drags it out of me, that song. Cracks the belt again until I want to kneel down, I need to kneel down, oh please let me kneel down; I don’t think my legs can hold me. No, no, no I want to say, but it’s too late for that, and even if it wasn’t, the evidence of how much I really want it is between my legs. My cock feels like something alive—like something that needs to crawl all over me and devour every last lick of sense I have.
But that’s good, too. I want my sense to go. I want everything to go, apart from the white-hot burn and the thrum-thrum-thrum through my cock. Sometimes it feels as though there’s a thread connecting each stripe she makes, to my swollen prick. A painful, evil thread, but a thread nonetheless, and every time she thwacks the belt down my prick jerks and leaks in a way that would be embarrassing.
It would be embarrassing, if I understood embarrassment in the way I probably should, while naked over a bench with my ass in the air. But I don’t, because to me it all feels like a new and raw kind of bliss.
I’m cut open, and the insides of me are on the outside, and that’s okay, that’s okay. Hit me again, so I can be okay.
She does, and I love her. I cry out this time—I can’t stop it. But I want her to know, somewhere inside her, that I don’t cry out because it hurts so bad. I cry out because a tense spill of pleasure flows downward through my belly and along the length of my cock and back down again, to the tight aching center of my balls.
It makes my thighs even weaker, briefly, and I wonder if this is going to be one of those times—one of those times when I come purely because of the sensation of being spanked or belted or whatever it is she’s doing. Sometimes I do—it triggers something inside me, and I come and come and make a mess of the floor.
And then she has to punish me again, naturally, for being such a dirty boy.
But not yet, oh, not yet, I have to wait for that part because she says to me,
“Are you ready to come, Thomas? If you like, you can put your hand on yourself and tug on your big cock until you spurt.”
And I know what that means. It’s a test of my resolve and my will, in the exact same way that I’ll tell my staff that they can, if they want to. Oh yes they can. But really we both know that if they do I’ll make them sorry.
So I answer, in a wavering voice that is not my own. “No.” Then firmer, firmer. “No, definitely not.”
She makes a little amused sound, then, and my love for her deepens. She sees past the facade, every time. I think she’s seen past it right from the start, because I can’t imagine why a woman like her would want the suit, the slick hair, the high-beam shoes otherwise. I just can’t imagine.
“Oh, I see. Definitely not, is it? How splendid. How controlled of you. And here I was thinking you’re nothing but a horny bastard who comes at the first sign of a spanking. Good Lord—what would your employees think of you now?”
I try not to wince but fail. I also fail to stop the swell of arousal that goes through me, when she says horny and come and hell, even employees. I picture them around me, briefly, all in their suits that I insist on, all with the same disgusted looks on their faces. Some of them turn away. Some of them flush with an unintended excitement to see me brought so low.
“I’ll tell you what they’d think,” she says, and she lands another stripe across my ass. I can
smell her perfume now, because she’s working hard and that always makes that crisp scent stronger. “That you’re a whore, that’s what they’d think. A little whore who likes it rough, and who doesn’t like to be the one in charge at all. In fact, you don’t like to be the one in charge so much, that you’re about to go off right now, aren’t you?”
I say no, but I’m lying. My body is trembling without my permission, and when I clutch at the leather tighter it somehow makes the whole thing worse. The feel of it, puckering beneath my fingertips. The sight of my knuckles turning white, and of my almost-reflection in the polished floors. I bet I’m red-faced and sweaty looking, and sometimes, God, sometimes I don’t know how she can bear me. I don’t know.
I’m definitely going to come. Any second now, any second—all she has to do is…
Yes, yes. That’s it. She runs a sudden gentle hand over my burning flesh, and oh, that’s it. I moan too loudly and probably too long, while every sensation that’s ever been in my body spills out of the end of my swelling cock in hot, wet spurts.
I’ve failed. I know I have, but somehow it doesn’t matter. In here, I get to relax over the bench, and she puts another cooling hand on my back, and she doesn’t say anything bad anymore. Instead she says something like are you okay or it’s okay, and I know it is. I’m too boneless with pleasure to know anything but.
But that’s okay, too. I know it is, because it’s at moments like this that I understand our relationship completely, and what it is, and what it’s not. I understand every part of her, as though we’re not two people at all. We’re one, and I’m inside her, and she’s inside me, and even if every other person in the entire world sees me and doesn’t know who I really am, it’s all right.
Because she does. She does.
Talk to the Hand
By Allison Wonderland
I may not be able to hear, but I’m a damn good listener.
That’s what Becky tells me. I’m telling you she’s wrong. She has no idea how easy it is to tune people out when you’re Deaf.
I am Deaf with a capital D, which makes me the star of my very own silent movie. And who doesn’t want to be a movie star?
There are other advantages, too. I never get tongue-tied. I never put my foot in my mouth. (The Deaf community is very literal—we’re not big on subtlety or ambiguity—but I’m up to speed on my idioms and double entendres.)
This is the benefit of being bilingual; I know English and American Sign Language. ASL has a unique sentence structure. We like to rearrange words and repeat pronouns over and over, and if I were to interpret each sign orally, I would sound like a complete idiot. In other words, deaf and dumb.
You know what’s dumb? Pity. People think I’m missing out on everything, but from what I’ve heard, there are lots of unpleasant sounds in the world: thunder, belching, really annoying laughs. Becky could have the most annoying laugh in the world, and it would never get on my nerves.
Becky.
I should get back to Becky, shouldn’t I?
When I said it’s easy to tune people out when you’re Deaf, I wasn’t talking about her. I meant it’s difficult to concentrate on a conversation when I have to read lips. Lip-reading is exhausting. If I do it for too long, my vision gets blurry and my head hurts. Besides, nobody’s lips are reading material, not even the Material Girl’s.
Actually, that’s how Becky and I met, through Madonna. We were seated next to each other at her concert, in the section designated for people with disabilities. Becky says we should dis abilities because they’re too subjective. Becky is awesome. But not Deaf. Not even Hard-of-Hearing. While we waited for the show to start, Becky confessed that she wanted to watch the interpreter because she thought sign language looked pretty.
Pretty. With her hair an animated shade of red, like Jessica Rabbit’s, and the rollercoaster curves to match, the word fit Becky like a lace glove.
I learned that she was studying ASL and wanted to become an interpreter. Her signs were accurate, moderate in speed—she was at the intermediate level then—and she seemed confident, committed to learning the language. I showed her signs for words she didn’t know: mousetrap, radioactive, lactose intolerant, lesbian.
I made her fingerspell “lesbian” three times before showing her the sign, which looks like a finger gun pressed against the chin. Then Becky grinned, pointed to herself, made the sign, and pointed to herself again: I’m a lesbian, she revealed, as casually as when she’d told me her name.
Madonna says express yourself and Becky did just that. Was she attracted to me? Did she sense I was attracted to her? She must have; I was staring at her as intently as I do when I’m lip-reading, and she wasn’t even speaking. I decided to follow Madonna’s example.
As a reward for my honesty, Becky gave me her number. Guess I made the right call. In fact, I know I did, because we’ve been together almost two years. Becky is the first Hearing person I’ve dated who doesn’t feel guilty about being able to hear. She never gets embarrassed when I say things like I won’t hear of it or I’m putting on my listening ears. She just laughs, and I pretend she has the most annoying laugh in the world because it’s the only thing I wish I could hear.
Well, not the only thing. It might be nice to hear the sound of Becky’s kisses as her lips connect with my mouth, the sound of Becky’s moans as my tongue connects with her clit, the sound of Becky’s handcuffs as the metal connects with the lock.
Did I mention Becky is a little kinky? It’s one of the many things we have in common. I suspected our deviance was mutual early in the relationship, while scrolling through her iPod one day. I saw artists named T-Pain and Alice in Chains, and songs called “Control,” “Hurts So Good,” and “Just Obey.” The last one turned out to be a Christian song, which I found out when I looked up the lyrics, but this discovery only strengthened my desire to submit to a higher power.
I considered telling Becky, but I didn’t want her to think I was taking her musical preferences too seriously. I also wasn’t sure how to explain that if she tied my wrists together, leaving me unable to communicate in the only way I feel comfortable, that would be part of the pleasure. Yes, it would be scary, but scary in that way that’s not scary at all, like listening to a ghost story or watching a horror movie: you know it’s make-believe, but it’s fun to pretend that it’s real.
I was good at pretending. When Becky and I started having sex, we kept it tame, and I feigned satisfaction—though, thankfully, not orgasm. Occasionally, we’d swat each other’s behinds, but the spankings were more flirty than dirty and my limbs were always too liberated for my liking. I wanted to be out of control.
Six months ago, I got what I wanted. Becky and I were having a serious discussion about our relationship. She proposed the idea of us living together and wanted to know if I felt ready to make the big move.
You have to ask? I asked.
Becky smacked my thigh. Yes.
Yes is my answer, too. I know you love me, and I know you would never hurt me.
Becky’s eyes narrowed into buttonholes. Yes, I would! She crossed her arms. I wouldn’t hurt a fly, but I would definitely hurt you.
Excuse me?
Becky shook her head in disbelief. I’ll spell it out for you: B-D-S-M.
I wanted to slap her. I should have. She would have enjoyed it. I had a hundred questions, most importantly, when and where? Instead, I asked, How did you know?
Becky regarded me like I was a few letters short of the alphabet. Of course she knew. She’s as smart as a whip. And very handy with one, too. In fact, the next day…
Did you hear me? Becky drops her hands and picks up a Manila envelope. She waves it in my face. You used to be such a good listener.
Sorry. I take the envelope and unfasten the flap. Inside are the results of Becky’s interpreter certification exam, endorsing he
r as Advanced, the second highest level of skill.
Becky yanks me into an embrace, plants a big wet kiss on my lips, and begins to bounce around the room. I am wowed, proud, aroused. There’s something so erotic about a Pollyanna personality combined with a Playboy Bunny sexuality.
I sign I love you, pressing my middle and ring fingers into my palm. Becky signs the same. There’s a soft spot in my heart and a damp spot in my panties. We need to celebrate.
Becky bounces toward the bedroom. Of course. Everyone knows that copulation and celebration go hand in hand.
In the bedroom, we start out simply, hugging and touching and sharing frantic, romantic kisses.
But when our clothing comes off, the shackles come out. Today it’s a jump rope. Becky’s eyes fade to black, and she ropes me into submission, capturing my wrists inside the woven cloth. She presses the hard handles into my palms and I fold my fingers around the wood, something to squeeze when the pleasure starts.
Becky pats the mattress and I climb on. Don’t get comfortable, she warns, and brings me to my knees, legs gaping, heels grinding against my buttocks. A firm believer in the slogan No Pain, No Gain, Becky wastes no time getting to the bottom of things, flicking her hand until the flat of it connects with my backside. But the first slap is mild, and the pain wears off too quickly.
I pout. Becky nibbles my ear. It’s nice to know they’re good for something. She laps at the lobe and sinks her teeth into it. I pinch my tongue between my grinning lips and squeeze the handles of the jump rope.
Becky whacks me again, this time using more force. My backside burns, yearns for more, and a sleek leak starts to dribble between my thighs.
The solid smack that follows makes my flesh ache and shake on impact, and I wonder how loud a sound it made when it landed. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the tight tug on my wrists and the pleasant pain in my bottom.
Becky moves closer, one hand is raised above my rear and the other is dashing toward my cunt. She jams her hand between my thighs as she strikes my backside. The collision of sensations makes my body convulse. Hips thrusting, skin combusting, I feel the pleasure crest, sense the rush, the flush of orgasm. The pleasure blasts through me, winding around every bone and vessel and muscle.
