69

by Alison Tyler

  She considered, staring at the mostly empty glass in front of her. “Yes,” she said. “I would.” He was square-looking, this man who had liked her father. Tall, with square shoulders and a square jaw and a square personality to match. Her second Tom Collins arrived, accompanied by his vodka martini on the rocks. Square was okay. The Midwest was very square, but the people were kind. “Are you from the Midwest?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, smiling. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just something about you.”

  “Are you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Did he ever talk about me? My father?”

  “No,” he said, and it was the truth. “I didn’t know he had other children until I saw you at the funeral.” She absorbed that in silence. “I went through a rough patch after college,” he said. “I did something stupid—nothing illegal—only it could have derailed my life pretty badly anyway.” She was paying attention now, watching his face as he spoke. “Your father was the last person I expected understanding from. He didn’t act like the type.”

  “No,” she said. “He wasn’t.”

  “And yet,” he said. “And yet, when he found out, he didn’t fire me. He held my job for me and got me back on my feet and explained that everyone makes mistakes and it shouldn’t ruin your life.” He sipped his martini, crunching on a piece of the ice. “And he never condescended to me afterward. He treated me the same as before. Only we were friends, sort of.”

  “That’s a good story,” she said. “I kept thinking on the flight out that if this was a movie or a dream there would be something waiting here for me—a letter, or something in his will—some kind of sign. But it’s real life. So he’s just dead, and I fly home tomorrow morning.”

  Anson put his glass down. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.

  “You could take me upstairs and make love to me,” she said. She didn’t think he would. Too square.

  * * *

  A few thoughts flashed through his mind. It would be a mercy fuck; she wasn’t exactly radiating sexual energy. He could do it anyway because he liked her, from the way she talked to the set of her green eyes. And she had a nice ass. Probably what she really wanted was to be comforted and he could that, too. In light of what her father had done for him, that was better anyway. In her face he could see the absence of grief in the place where grief should be, and he understood that was the true cause of her distress. He stood up. “Your room or mine?”

  “Mine,” she said, rising. “It cost a fortune.”

  A fortune in Midwestern terms, he thought when he saw it. A nice room, though. She began to undress with a lack of seductiveness, but made up for it in determination.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. He took off her black dress and slip, and sat her on the edge of the bed to peel away her stockings. He went slowly, thinking she would change her mind. But she stood and began to remove his clothing, hanging his coat neatly over a chair, smoothing his silk tie to prevent wrinkles. The methodical movements seemed choreographed, and he had the eerie feeling that someone was watching them. But she took off her bra and he filled his hands with her breasts and he forgot about anything else.

  “Are you sure?” he said. She nodded, holding his wrists, pulling him backward to the bed. He wanted to touch her between her legs, but he distracted himself by kissing her. Her mouth was pliant; she let him do as he liked. The color came back into her cheeks, so he knew he wasn’t making love to a corpse. He kept on, running his hands all over her skin to warm her, and the simple touch was arousing, as if in the middle of an arctic landscape he had managed to build a small fire and keep it burning.

  She kissed him back. She was not chatty, but in a moment when her mouth was free she said, “Anson, where are you from? I forgot to ask.”

  “Colorado,” he said, laughing. “Does it matter?”

  She was not going to change her mind, but still, he entered her slowly and carefully and the restraint made him avid. Stranger things had happened, but rarely to him. He moved in her, thinking, we’ll stay like this, we’ll kiss some more, we’ll talk about life. And for a while it was like that. But then the delicate color in her face turned a deeper red and, breathless, she said, “I want to be on top,” and they rolled together and his restraint dissolved. Her knees gripped his sides, and she braced herself on his chest and rolled her hips and brought his hands up to pinch her nipples, and the heat gathered and gathered, breaking through her skin like light.

  She slept and woke and slept again. At one point Anson asked, “What time are you going to the airport?”

  “What time is it?” she said.

  He fumbled in the dark. “Six-thirty.”

  “Now,” she said, but seemed disinclined to move.

  “We’ll sleep more, and I’ll take you sightseeing.” He dozed, and then pinched her arm lightly. “Say if it’s okay.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. He went to sleep. The hand on her arm lay open and relaxed. She watched the morning send fingers of light around the edges of the heavy draperies. Life turned to memory, always. A man had died. He had been her father for a short time, and then he became someone else. She had spent the night of his funeral touching a person who had liked him, which was not a bad way to begin to remember.

  Floating in Blue

  By Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Adam uses ropes to tease me to a pleasure that transcends description. But we aren’t lovers, not in the sense most people mean it. Adam doesn’t have sex with women, if by “sex” you mean some configuration of body on body with orgasm as a goal.

  Sex isn’t the point of this relationship. I don’t need to know Adam’s body more intimately than I do for us to give each other pleasure.

  There are other men when I crave fucking and sucking and that whole glorious mess. But Adam is special. I bare my soul more to Adam than I do to the men I fuck. Don’t get me wrong. My friends-with-benefits are genuinely friends. But Adam’s the one I’ll talk with until 4:00 a.m.

  Besides, Adam knows rope.

  Adam may not want to sink his cock into my body, but he’s happy to exercise his artistry on me. He says the lines of a woman’s body, ornamented with rope, please him aesthetically and spiritually, that there’s a yin/yang to it that balances all the male energy in his life. He finds satisfaction from working with rope on anyone who’s really into it, and though I’m not his preferred gender, I’m definitely into rope.

  It’s mysterious to our other playmates. My guys like to tie me down before they fuck me, because it makes me hot and wet and eager for cock. But they don’t love the rope for itself. Adam says most of the men he plays with like to be tied up as a prelude to fucking or some other game, and he’s happy to oblige. But the rope’s his real fetish, as it is mine.

  Thus I find myself wearing a bra and anticipation-damp panties, standing in Adam’s loft, under the big hooks he uses for suspension. The warm room smells of hemp rope and dusty wood and, softly, underneath it all, of male bodies and lust I had no part in.

  Adam is almost done wrapping me in rope. It holds me secure, pulls me inward into my own mind. Leg to leg, arm to arm behind my back. Rope wraps my torso—to keep my soul from flying away, Adam says.

  Rope snakes between my legs to make my soul want to fly away. He’s put a knot right over my clit. Adam may not be a fan of female anatomy but he knows how to make it work against itself.

  Adam won’t touch my pussy with his hands or his tongue. If he ever wanted to, I’m not sure I’d say yes. Such direct contact would jar the delicate balance of this relationship.

  Besides, Adam’s ropes seem more intimate than Adam’s body. He’s a bit of a slut, is Adam, but he reserves the ropes for people he really cares about. We fortunate few each have our set, colors chosen “to suit our inner selves” by s
ome arcane method he won’t disclose. My ropes are hemp, dyed a deep blue. He says when I’ve been in their thrall often enough, I’ll know why he chose that color.

  Maybe today will be that day.

  I’m sheathed in rope now. Even my long hair is macraméd behind me. My thoughts slip toward a place where language is distant, and nothing matters but the sensation of hemp on skin, the throbbing between my legs, the safety of confinement. While I still have speech, Adam asks me, “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” I answer. My voice comes from the other side of the world.

  “I’m going to try something new,” he says. “A rope gag.”

  I can’t make my tongue work, so I nod eagerly.

  “It will make it hard to talk.”

  I call words back from the place they’ve fled. “Ropes do that anyway.”

  He smiles. “I know, sweetie. I love the way you trip out on the ropes. But I’d feel awful if I broke you. I’ll give you a scarf to hold. Drop it if there’s a problem.”

  “Oh, right…safe words.”

  “Yeah, those.” He kisses my forehead lightly, as if I were a child being put to bed by a loving but nervous uncle.

  The rope gag is a large, elaborate round knot, the same deep blue as the rest of the ropes, but nylon, not hemp.

  I open my mouth to say how pretty it is and Adam pops the knot in.

  Silence fills me and my mind floats away. I’m hardly aware of him securing the gag. He tucks something silky into my hand and says something my brain is too far off to process.

  He slips a blindfold over already closed eyes.

  I’m wet, but this kind of arousal doesn’t demand climax, just wave after wave of rope-induced pleasure.

  And that’s before he suspends me.

  Blindfolded, I’m not sure what magic he works to get me into position, but I end up belly down, floating in space. He’s worked my hair into the rigging, so even my head is immobilized.

  Being suspended is strenuous in an odd way. I’ve come out of a long session feeling like I’ve climbed a mountain, trembling with exhaustion and in need of a meal, Adam’s best-buddy embrace and the comfort offered by his affectionate cat.

  In this particular tie, though, I feel little strain. Some from the tugging on my hair, some on my mouth from the pressure of the gag, but I enjoy those sensations and everything else is beautifully supported. I’m flying on wings of hemp.

  Adam pushes gently on my thigh, sets me spinning.

  I’m utterly disoriented now. I could be in Adam’s apartment or the Crab Nebula.

  I love it.

  When the spin slows down, he sends me in the other direction. These gentle nudges are the only indication he’s there.

  Sometimes they seem very far apart. I know, in the distant part of my brain that knows things other than rope and darkness, that Adam wouldn’t leave the room. He’s very good at stillness, though, or maybe my mind’s just too far away to register his presence.

  Eventually I lose track of everything except the rope against my skin and the soft, drunken dizziness and forget he’s there at all. His unexpected touch on my shoulder feels like the hand of God.

  Like the hand of God, it shoots electricity through me. The knot against my clit feels huge, heated. I press my thighs even closer together, jerk in my bonds. The ropes tighten. They constrict even the small movements I can make. They tug on my imprisoned hair. They move. Only the slightest amount, but the sensation fires me. The rope is soft, but at the same time fierce, biting. I’m wet to the knees.

  “Please,” I try to say around the gag. Across a distance much vaster than could really happen in his loft, I hear Adam chuckle. It sounds like the way God would laugh, if your version of God was hot and a little evil.

  The laugh makes me squirm. The squirming sets me spinning again. The spinning and the squirming increase the pressure on my clit.

  Orgasms usually explode through my body with violence and red light behind my eyes. This one sneaks up, surrounds me and fills me as if I were drinking a blissfully cool beer on a hot day. Instead of focusing on my clit and pulsing out from there, the sensations spread out from wherever rope touches my skin.

  Behind the blindfold, I see stars on a velvety blue heaven.

  Every time I think it must be done, cool waves of pleasure break over me again, over and over until I’m lost in a deep-space sea and don’t care if I drown. My hands go weak, and the silk scarf slips from my grasp.

  Adam is at my side in an instant, taking off the gag, asking if I’m all right.

  I have to translate his words into the language of stars and rope before I even begin to make sense of them, so I’m silent longer than he likes. He fumbles with the ropes that keep me afloat.

  “No,” I croak out. “Green. Green. Just dropped it.”

  “Good girl,” he says, and tugs gently on the rope that holds my hair.

  Everything shifts back to blue and another long, slow-building orgasm detonates.

  Then another, or maybe it’s the same one, continuing.

  When it finally calms I am in a nirvana woven of hemp, one with a blue universe.

  I don’t ever want to feel the ground beneath my feet again, don’t ever want anything besides the rope and the mystic bliss of floating suspended in midair, safe in the care of someone who loves and understands me more than my lovers.

  But bliss can’t last forever. As soon as I try to grasp the moment, I become aware of small aches and pains, of being chilled despite the warm day. I try to fight the shift in consciousness, but the more I do, the more reality creeps back in.

  I don’t say anything, although I have the use of my mouth again. The starry blue still surrounds me, despite the discomfort, and I’m sure another long, exquisite orgasm is within reach. I have a rare moment of wishing Adam would pinch my nipples or touch a vibrator to my clit, anything to push me over the edge again.

  Instead he strokes down my spine, his fingers bumping along the rope and pressing it a little deeper into my skin.

  Who needs something as crude as a vibrator?

  I become a vibrator, quivering with layer upon layer of orgasm. “Blue,” I say, my voice ancient and strange to my own ears. “Now I understand. Blue everywhere.”

  “Love you,” Adam whispers, and I know he means it, though maybe not in a way most people would understand.

  I don’t remember him taking me down and untying me. Everything’s a blur between that last, soul-shifting orgasm and finding myself wrapped in Adam’s ratty bathrobe, curled on his couch under a blanket, shivering despite the heat. He’s sitting next to me, not cuddling but close enough to touch if I need a hug to bring me back to the world. His big tabby sprawls between us, purring madly.

  “You’re giving off happy vibes,” Adam says. “You went pretty far, farther than I’ve seen you go before.”

  I nod dreamily.

  “I was right about the blue, wasn’t I?”

  I nod again, not sure I can speak yet and pretty sure I don’t want to try.

  “My own ropes are purple,” he says, startling me out of my reverie. “That’s where I go when I’m one with the rope, to purple.”

  “Aren’t you a top?” My voice sounds rusty. I’m surprised it still works.

  “Mostly. It’s hard to find someone who understands the deeper possibilities of rope, who gets how it can transform you. How it can be the most erotic thing on earth yet not involve actual sex. You’re the only person I know who fits the bill and you’re a bottom. And a girl.” He sighs and reaches his hand out. For a second, I think he’s going to touch me, but instead he strokes the cat.

  “Can’t change the girl part,” I say, “but I could learn to rig.” I’m not sure where that came from. I’ve never had the desire before. But I remember the blue surrounding m
e in the embrace of Adam’s rope, and I don’t want Adam deprived of that bliss.

  “Yeah, you could. And I’d be proud to teach you.”

  I put my hand on his, on top of the blissfully vibrating cat.

  There’s nothing erotic about the touch. It brings no sudden urge to fall into each other’s arms. We’re best friends forever who share a love of rope and a bond that all the lovers we may have can’t weaken. But it feels deeper now.

  I feel us embraced by blue and purple. The air smells like hemp and the future. I breathe it deeply.

  Suite Surprise

  By Cate Robertson

  After the five courses of dinner, the endless speechifying, the round after round of nightcaps in the bar, it was finally, thank God, time for him to find his room. They’d booked him into an executive suite, no less. He hardly knew what to expect of an executive suite, in such a posh establishment as this. A fancy bathroom, probably. A complimentary bar, and no end of personal service, he supposed, more than chocolates on the pillow, champagne in the silver ice bucket—perhaps a select array of pleasant boudoir companions to choose from? He had no idea how events like these happened at places like this.

  When he opened the door, he was astonished. She was there already, all business, turning down the sheets on the far side of the huge bed, then bustling around to the near side, plumping and replacing the snowy range of pillows along the headboard, straightening the sumptuous purple bed cover—a regal color, and what was that cloth, damask or something? She would know.

  Her uniform was perfect. Just as he would have expected. Just as he had always wanted. The only problem was that he couldn’t decide which view he preferred. Decisions, decisions! Was it the black bodice buttoned to bursting across the sweet pair of melon-sized tits above the spotless apron with its ruffled edge? Or the crisp snowy bow behind, where the snug skirt cupped her firm round arse and revealed, when she reached to the middle of the bed with a little grunt, above the shaded tops of sheer black stockings, a glimpse of white thigh?