“The roses are not nearly as beautiful as you are, Rikki. Stand up.”
She catches her reflection in the enormous picture window that has no drapes.
Alex turns her so she can watch herself in the glass. “Take your skirt off.”
She unbuttons the long straight denim skirt from the bottom, and lets it fall at her feet. She stands bare except for her shirt and sandals and the glimmer at her neck.
“Yes. Now the shirt and the shoes.”
Rikki strips off the shirt and kicks away the shoes. Only the filigree chains remain at her neck.
“Yes, baby, yes. That’s how I want you. That’s how I want us here.” He removes his clothes while she watches in the glass, and runs his hands down over her hips. “Civilization stripped away, all our pretences gone. I want you to stay like this all weekend.”
She’s lost in his touch, in the glancing reflection in the window of him standing behind her stroking her, in the aroma of roses that are strewn across the table. She can hear Joni Mitchell singing about “dancing up a river in the dark” in the background.
“Come lie across the table for me. This table was made just for us.” Alex clears a spot for her amidst the roses. “On your belly.” Her breasts press down into the hard pine.
He climbs up next to her on the table and begins to unwrap the roses. “Close your eyes and just feel, baby.” Roses run up and down her body, petals and thorns and then petals again. He caresses her everywhere, and she can only feel hands and softness and hardness and sharpness, until she cries out for him in need. He moves on top of her, hard cock pressing against her ass, entering her and fucking her hard, until nothing remains for either one of them but the fragrance of roses and love.
Hours later they are laughing and dancing around the kitchen area, trying to find enough glasses to put all the roses in. They line up the glasses down the middle of the table, finish putting the groceries away, and cuddle up together in front of the fireplace under a heavy blanket.
They tell each other stories, the silly and the serious, the important and the whimsical, until they fall asleep to the rhythm of their words.
In the morning Rikki wakes up shivering, and Alex gets up and finds her one of his big white cotton button-down shirts to wear while he cooks her breakfast. They relax in their closeness while gobbling down the scrambled eggs and toast. She tucks her bare feet up into his lap.
“This is the most breathtaking place I have ever seen, Alex. I want to set the next story I write here. Maybe I’ll write about a couple with minimal clothing and an absolute obsession for each other. And lots of roses.”
After breakfast, Alex finally takes her upstairs to show her around. There’s just one room, with a big four poster pine bed with lovely old quilts on it. It’s irresistible – they crawl under the soft quilts together and quietly make love one more time until they are momentarily satiated.
“Come with me, baby, let’s find out what it’s like to be bathed in rose petals.”
Warm water and bath oil, Alex’s hands and a thousand rose petals seem perfect to Rikki. Afterward they sit on the bed for a long time, curled together, while he brushes and dries her long hair.
She starts to put his white shirt back on but he tells her not to. “I want you like we talked about last night, Rikki, with no clothing here. We’ll keep the fire going all the time in case it gets cold. But we’re not about to have any visitors here who can see us. You look just perfect the way you are, except for one thing.”
Alex brings out a jewel box, and Rikki opens it to find another set of chains that match the ones around her neck. He kneels down in front of her to show her where it goes. He wraps the first section around her waist, and then runs the fragile chain down across her clit, teasing her and taking his time. The chain runs back up over her ass and fastens on the back of her waist.
“God, that’s just gorgeous. Thank you so much.”
She walks down the spiral staircase feeling completely open and vulnerable, shimmering in gold like an Egyptian princess.
In the afternoon it’s perfectly sunny and they lounge on the porch in the soft chairs with no clothing and their feet kicked up, drinking lemonade. They talk and observe the crystal lake in front of their cabin, and finally read each other erotic stories from some books they find tucked away on a shelf.
“Jonathan must be kind of a kinky guy up here,” Rikki says, looking at the stack of erotic books piled up next to her.
“He doesn’t get to come up here much any more. Rikki, I wish we could stay here forever.” He makes her read some of his favourite dirty passages over and over. “You look tired, let’s go back in.”
He takes her back upstairs to the big bed. “Lie down and hold still for me.”
She flops down on the bed, hearing the chains around her body clink together. Alex brings out the rope he brought in with the groceries and ties her wrists to each corner of the bed.
“You look so perfect there.” He covers her with the turquoise quilt. “I’m going to go out for a walk, and I want you to just rest here for me like this.”
“You’re going to leave me like this?”
“Yes. Do you trust me?”
“Oh, God . . . yes.”
She hears the door close, and begins to drift off. She finds herself wondering dreamily about what they’re doing.
Is this just meant to be? Is there any way to simply escape and live like this forever? Would it work if we did it all the time? What really happened to him in Paris that he’s going to try and show me? Is he safe? Am I in love with him? Do I really trust him? She finds that just thinking about him like this starts to make her nipples get hard and the wetness flow between her thighs. Being aroused and alone and bound is frightening, and she pulls at the ropes in frustration. What if he never comes back?
A few minutes later she hears the door downstairs. “Oh God, I got scared after a while, Alex. Please untie me.”
“Yes, baby, but we both know what happens in your story after this, don’t we? Do you think we can change the ending? Does being scared turn you on?”
She shivers. “Yes, oh, yes, it does.”
“We have two more days here, Rikki, I want you to stay as you are, naked and bound in some way for me the rest of the time we’re here.”
“For two days?”
“Yes. Just let me take care of you.”
He unties her briefly to let her get up, and then reties her hands behind her back. He helps her down the stairs and seats her comfortably on the bench at the table.
He feeds her dinner. “I feel like a child.”
“Yes, but I may not always be so gentle here.”
After dinner and wine, he takes her out for a walk on the patio with her arms still bound, slipping a jacket over her shoulders.
“It’s so quiet here, Alex, it’s like the end of the world.”
They experiment that night with every possible way to use the roses and their petals while making love. Rikki imagines she will smell these roses for the rest of her life. She’s beginning to lose track of where she is and why she’s here. He finally unties her for the night, and she feels lost.
Alex finds a way to help keep her comfortable and close and safe. He wraps her arms around his upper leg and reties her wrists, nestling her in between his legs to sleep. They both fall asleep with her head resting on his belly and her mouth gently on his cock. She awakens the next morning to find it’s already noon. Alex’s been up and gone out already. Rikki tries to stretch, only to find that he has quietly retied her hands above her head while she was sleeping.
He returns and brings her breakfast in bed.
“Alex, you’re spoiling me rotten.”
“I know.” He feeds her.
As the day goes on, she notices his mood changes slightly.
“Baby, I want you to feel what it’s like to be deprived of your senses, slowly but surely, until you are left with nothing but love and trust for me. I love you, Rikki. This is not jus
t a story. We’re going all the way. I know it scares you some. It scares me too. But I have to do it.”
They go outside before the sun sets, and he reaches over and plays with her chains.
“I think we’ll skip dinner tonight, and just dine on champagne. Take a good look at the beauty of the lake, baby.”
She does, and then looks to him in trust. He brings out a black scarf and blindfolds her with it. Walking back in to the big leather couch, she gets a bit dizzy at the loss of both her hand movement and her sight. He lets her sit there comfortably on the couch, stretched out, feet up. “Tell me a story, Rikki. A truth. Tell me where you think we’re going. How you feel about me.”
She can’t reach for him, or even see him. “I love you, Alex. I do.” She pauses. “But I’m afraid we’re going to consume each other and lose track of the line between what’s real and what’s not if we keep going.”
He reassures her, and they talk for a long time. She notices that the apprehension over what they’re doing often alternates between the two of them.
“One more sensation, Rikki. Are you ready?” Another scarf. He wraps this one around her mouth, stopping her cry of surprise.
“That’s beautiful, baby. You should see yourself, so helpless, so vulnerable, so trusting.”
He doesn’t touch her, just lets her spiral into the loss of movement and sight and speech. He sits down next to her and tells her his story.
“This is the kind of thing I did in Paris so long ago, but we did it all the time, and there was too much cruelty in it and not enough love. It was more like a contest to see who could go farther. To see who could be more evil. There wasn’t enough trust, not like with you. You’re soft and loving and imaginative and full of desire.”
She struggles to say something.
“Just listen to me.” Alex begins to play with the chain around her waist again. “The night you asked me about. She brought a knife out, and wanted me to use it on her body. It was the night it ended. I ended it. It went too far. I started to do what she wanted. I did. But I was afraid I would hurt her too much, and I was afraid I might like it. She knew what she liked. I wonder if she’s still alive.”
Rikki’s getting slightly nervous at this story. She leans slightly away from him the best she can.
He holds her chain tight. “Don’t ever pull away from me, baby. We’re on the edge here, but we can stay there. I want to control you, I want to own you, but I will never cause you serious harm. Will you trust me?”
She nods slowly, struggling with the gag and the blindfold, scared, wet, excited, anxious.
“You just need to stay with me tonight, just let yourself go. Let yourself go for me, baby, there is no other world, there is only us and our passion. There is nothing more intimate in the world than giving yourself over completely to another human being. I want you to feel me tonight, I want you to know I am on you for ever.”
His words are becoming hypnotic to her.
“You’ve been bound since last night, but you’ve been able to move most of the time. Let me show you what control really is.”
Alex lifts her off the couch and lays her down on the floor on her back. Spreading her legs wide, he ties each ankle to a leg of the couch. Her wrists are pulled over her head and tied across the carpeting to the armchair. She can only feel the warmth of the fireplace, and the smell of the roses that permeates the cabin. She’s almost glad she can’t speak, because there are no words for this feeling.
“Are you all right, baby? Just nod if you are.” She nods. “Now, there is one last sense I can take from you.”
Her body jerks involuntarily, with no idea what it could be.
“Before I do this, just know that you are nothing but the sensations of your body, and that you can trust me completely. I will always treat you like a precious object. And it will make us both strong.”
Alex places tiny earplugs underneath the wrapping of the blindfold, and continues to talk to her, knowing she can no longer hear him. “I love you, Rikki. Good God, look at you. And now I am without a voice also. We are reduced to exactly where we should be. This may just kill both of us eventually.”
As he begins to command her body, she gives herself over to him completely, feeling the pleasure, the ache, thc withdrawal, the new sensations. Every opening and inch of her body is being explored and entered. There are strokes and there are slaps and she can barely tell them apart. Kisses begin to feel like bites and bites feel like sex. She hears stories in her head and they are like dreams, stories being told by someone else, someone who has total control over her and knows her from the inside out.
When Alex turns her over and reties her on her belly to begin working his way up and down her back, she’s lost in the dance on the line between pain and pleasure. With no sight, no sound, no control, no power, she finally gives in to the absolute sensations of love and abandonment and her own wild hunger for passion and silently begs him for more, and then more, and then even more.
The return from the weekend had been very quiet between them. Alex calls her on Tuesday to say he needs to cancel that night, and wants to meet her for lunch the next day.
He holds her tight when she arrives at the restaurant. “Rikki, this is killing me. I wake up craving you. I think all day long of ways to hurt you and love you and own you. I forget to do important things, like pay bills. I can’t get my work done. I can’t find my way back across this bridge we’ve created.”
She just listens. “We can stop whenever we want to.”
“Rikki. Rikki. The weekend was incredible. I’m sorry. You were right, we’re going to consume each other if we keep going. And I can’t handle it.”
“You loved it. And so did I.”
He’s near tears. “But I’ve lost the line. The line between fantasy and my own darkness. I’m falling apart, Rikki. If I stay with you it may kill me. It may kill you. We can’t live in this secret dark world forever.”
She watches him calmly, trying to figure out what to say. She’s never felt stronger in her life.
“I have to stop, Rikki. God, I have to stop.”
She rises to leave and drops her second airline ticket to Italy on the table in front of him. “I understand, Alex. It will be all right. But I have a surprise for you, just in case you change your mind. July first. Take care.”
After three weeks away from him, Rikki’s amazed at how strong and happy she still feels. She tries not to think too hard about why this is. She misses him. But their power shifted somewhere, and it satisfies her deeply. There are things that she wants and needs and now she knows how to get them
Leaving for Venice, she writes him a short note on her rose stationery. She asks him only to take care of himself, to be well.
Sitting on the airplane gazing out the window, she fingers the filigree chains that she still wears tight around her neck. Shortly before take-off, Alex arrives, out of breath. He looks thinner, worried, a little older. She just smiles, reaches over, closes the windowshade, crosses her legs, lifts her white sundress up to her waist, and presents her bare pussy for his approval.
Alex watches her, surprised, enchanted. “You knew I’d be here?”
“Yes.”
His hand is strong on her thigh as they take off. “Tell me a story, baby.”
The Minyan
Lawrence Schimel
Simon felt self-conscious as he walked down East 10th Street. He wondered if everyone could tell that he was going to a sex party, which was a ridiculous thought since it was a private party being held at someone’s apartment. It wasn’t as if he was going to one of those clubs where anyone watching him enter or leave would know what he was up to.
Still, he felt like it was obvious. Which may have simply been because he was nervous. He didn’t usually go to sex parties, but one of the guys from congregation, Uri, had invited him. Simon had spent the rest of the service wondering which of the other guys Uri had invited as well. He’d found himself mentally undressing the men around hi
m, wondering what they would look like naked, how big their dicks were, if Isaac was hairy all over, thick mats of fur covering his body. He’d imagined them in all sorts of sexual poses and situations.
As if he didn’t feel that these thoughts – so improper in shul – were sacrilege enough, Simon had been embarrassed by his body’s behaviour, the fact that he’d had a hard on pressing its way outwards in his pants every time he stood. He’d felt like he was back in high school, getting a woody on the way to class and holding his schoolbooks in front of his crotch, as if everyone – especially all the other guys – didn’t know what that meant. The instinct to shut the siddur and hold it protectively in front of his crotch, to shield his erection from view, was still strong, but Simon resisted. He recited the responses from memory, his vision blurring as he nervously glanced to his left and his right, trying to see from the corners of his eyes if anyone had noticed his arousal. He was grateful for the fringe of his tallis, which hid his boner behind its white veil, although he was afraid that his hard-on was making the fringe stand out as well.
Although he was not certain who among the congregation was also invited – the way one did not know who exactly the lomed vuvnick were – Simon had skipped services two nights ago because he felt too ashamed about seeing those men there and knowing what they planned to do this evening. Or what he imagined they planned to do; Simon wasn’t quite sure what it would be like, since he didn’t often go to this sort of party. In fact, he’d never been to one like this, although he had once been to a “sauna” when he was down in Puerto Rico on vacation. He’d been fascinated to be in the presence of sex, to watch men around him sucking and fucking in public, but he’d been too nervous to let anyone touch him, let alone do anything more. Men did touch him sometimes – the rules seemed to be touch first, ask later – but Simon always shied away from the groping hands, the men who tried to sink to their knees before him. He’d fingered his own dick behind the protective curtain of his towel, too afraid to show it off in public despite the naked bodies all around him, and he came almost immediately, shooting into the terry-cloth fabric. He went back to his little cubicle room and turned the towel inside out, so that the come-stained side was not against his skin, all sticky.
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