by Solace Ames
“You’re getting my sheets wet,” he told her. “That’s okay. I put a towel down before, anyway. I was looking forward to this.” He wanted to lick her dry, but that would mean an electric shock to his tongue, which the manual happened to strongly warn against, so he just fucked into her with his gloved fingers and the probe, gliding rapidly back and forth through the glorious wetness.
“Nnn. No. Stop.”
He turned the dial back to the lowest setting. “Too much? I’m going to wait ten seconds, then go back to where we were.”
“Okay, Paul,” she said, in a very small voice.
“There. Now.” He twisted, tapped and observed her motions, inner and outer. It was magical to work such large changes over a body with so little effort—a perversely childish, wondering magic, like waving a hand in the air in front of an automatic door, then reveling as it opened. “Your nerves get used to the signals, after a while. I’m going to give you a few minutes here, then move you up.”
She nodded—more a vertical trembling of her head than a nod, really.
He eased her forward on the sling and tilted her so that the probe wouldn’t be forced out by any contractions. The gloves came off. The bit gag strapped on. He combed her hair out of the way of the buckle with his fingers, not wanting her to be distracted by any minor pain.
Her teeth closed around the black rubber bit. She blinked, swallowed, breathed deeply, hovering on the edge of panic.
“It’s going to make you drool,” he said, right against her ear. “Just let it fall out of your mouth. It’s a turn-on for me, so you don’t need to feel ashamed. Unless you want to be, of course.”
Another barely perceptible nod.
Strength and pride swelled in his chest, along with an enigmatic tenderness. He wasn’t sure anymore whether the feelings were for her or from her, because this—right here, this bed, this moment—was as close as he could imagine to telepathy. They were enveloped in a crazy sex-fluid hormonal electrical field, like a full-body drug, like a fucking miracle, like every chemical coursing through her blood had its reflection or reversal in his own veins.
He kissed her cheek. Soon.
Back on the floor, gloves on, he sank his fingers into her clenched-tight slit and pushed the probe higher up. Left hand paused on the dial, he wondered if he’d feel a phantom ache deep in his own flesh, when he twisted...
He twisted the dial.
She screamed. The gag only blocked some of the sound, and distorted what escaped, making it sound more complex, richer.
Oh. He didn’t feel anything physical, other than a familiar pleasant ache low in his balls. Maybe he’d been getting carried away there. Not that Adriana’s suffering wasn’t amazing on its own non-telepathic terms.
She tapped the chain. He dialed down to baseline. “Can you do that again?” he asked.
A strangled moan was his only answer. She blinked a few tears from her eyes. Precious and evanescent. What he’d wanted all along.
“If you don’t tap again, I’m going to go back. Try to stay for longer. I know it hurts. Take this time to breathe.”
He waited. She didn’t tap.
He dialed to the right again.
The bit gag choked off a screamed word that might have been no, changing it to a guttural nnnaaa. More tears fell, and he watched mesmerized as one curved sinuously down her cheek to her earlobe and then fell into the swaying mass of her hair and was lost.
“Good girl. So good,” he soothed. “Let’s see how far we can go. Let it hollow you out.”
She cried silently.
He put her through different patterns, different rhythms. She heaved when she breathed, but she breathed well.
“This is your new baseline,” he said. “I’m going up again.”
Now.
This time she keened, a pure sound from deep in her throat, from somewhere beyond language and meaning. The sweet curve of her body jerked unnaturally, like a film clip with frames dropped, tricking his eye. A horror-show possession.
Fingers spasming, she tapped.
Back to baseline.
“Again,” he said, keeping his voice very soft.
He took her further up the dial until her face was shining with tears and streaked with the saliva that ran from the corners of her twisted mouth. Her expression was devastated, agonized, sublime. He wanted to come, to use his left hand to time his pleasure with her pain, but he held back. Soon.
They hit a wall at around two-thirds of the dial where every line of her said no, every signal, no matter how she fought against herself.
He let the probe slip out of her tortured sex. Eased off the electrode pads and the bit gag. Unbuckled and lowered her to the mattress. Her thighs twitched with the aftershocks, but otherwise, she was limp and still. Then he got on his knees on top of her, over her head. “Do you want this?” he asked, stroking his cock.
She stirred slowly, weakly, as if she were underwater, boneless and drifting with the tide.
But she blinked her eyes open, and saw him, and nodded.
“Open, then,” he said.
He touched his cockhead to her wet, swollen lips and came on her tongue. The spike of ecstasy—how it began inside and surged outward, out of his pulsing shaft—left him feeling hollow, just like he wanted her to feel. But more. More and farther and fuck this was good and the sight of his seed sliding down the back of her throat, her face still covered with tears, was the most and best of everything.
The sun had gone down; the room was dark. She’ll be gone soon. He fell to the mattress next to her and buried his face in her hair.
Chapter Eight
Instead of grapes, Paul offered her a sticky-sweet triangle of baklava dusted with ground pistachios. It was just as delicious as she’d hoped, although the second bite sent sugary green crumbles trembling off the pastry and onto her lap.
She was still a bit uncoordinated.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” he called from the kitchen corner of the studio. “Or water?” His hair was damp from their mutual shower, and he’d switched the black leather harness for beige terrycloth lounge shorts. The look was striking, streamlined and wholesome, like he’d strolled in from the poolside of a 1950s movie.
“No thanks. Um, I got some pistachios on your bathrobe. Sorry.” Time for her to get dressed, anyway. She finished the last bite, got up from the bed and reached for her clothes while the sugar hit still fizzed in her blood.
“That’s all right. Those things are messy.”
“I bet you like that.” She caught him grinning and nodding. You’re supposed to flirt before, not after, she reminded herself, and then immediately resolved to forget the reminder.
“Is that something you’d ever want to do again?” he asked in that light tone that made hard questions easy to answer.
“When it was going on, at those higher levels, oh my God—” she buckled her jeans, sucked in a sharp breath and shook her head, “—I just wanted it to stop. But now, I feel like I want to see if I can get higher. I don’t know. Probably yes.”
“I’ll email you some recommendations for a starter kit.” He poured himself a glass of wine and rested his arms on the kitchen counter. “I’m kind of a sex geek, so it might get technical.”
“I’m that way about knives.”
“I had a chef client last year. He told me that at his restaurant, if someone else touched your knives, you were allowed to stab them once in any non-vital place.”
“Sounds about right,” she said, laughing, and sat down on the floor to slip on her socks.
He walked to her, loomed over her, reached down toward her.
The choice was paralyzing. She wanted to rise without him. She wanted to be back home with Jay. She wanted to touch Paul’s hand and complete the circuit, skin against
skin, resurrecting the sense memory of being held and rocked like a child for so long after the pain faded. And the comfort, for some reason, terrified her in a way that the pain never did.
She hated to be afraid. So she stopped thinking and did what her body felt was right.
He gripped her outstretched hand.
When she rose and looked in his eyes, it still felt right. She was herself, every inch herself, and he was who he was, and she’d leave him now even though she didn’t really want to, and it would only be a little sad. Come home with us, she almost asked, but that was crazy and unfair.
“I could drive you home in your car, and take a taxi back,” he said. “If you’ve never done something this intense before—”
“I understand. But I’m fine. If I feel weird, I’ll pull over. Thanks for offering, though.” She reached in her pocket, pulled out the cash and pressed it into his palm. She’d rehearsed this mentally enough times that the emotional shock was muffled, like an explosion underwater. “This was everything I—it was—thank you. Can I kiss you good-night?”
His face had gone strangely opaque, but he nodded.
She stood on her tiptoes, kissed him shyly on the cheek, turned and walked out the door. And kept walking down the stairs and out into the flashing lights and cool evening breeze. She only turned around when she was right at her car and saw him then, outlined at the second-story window, watching her.
She waved to him. I’m safe.
The ride home was easy. Fatigue began to creep over her—maybe she was gripping the wheel too tightly, spending too much mental energy on self-monitoring, hyperalert—but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle.
She dropped her defenses as she walked into her apartment. “I’m home, baby.”
“Oh. Hi.” Jay’s eyelids struggled open. The bedroom light was on, but he’d been lying there trapped in the drugged half-sleep she knew he hated. “I had the phone,” he said, waving it in no particular direction.
She hovered over him, kissed him quickly, then hurried to the bathroom. She didn’t want to let her hair dry without applying her leave-in conditioner. Maybe that was one of the reasons she’d been so quick to leave Paul’s place—so that she could accomplish this personal, private ritual.
She left the door open as she worked at her hair. “How’s your mother doing?” she called to Jay.
“Great. She made me some noodle soup and a jillion other things. I’m going to help her out at the flea market this weekend.”
The fatigue suddenly made her sway, made her reach out and steady herself against a mirror that she couldn’t see her reflection in anymore, because the colors were too bright, too sharp. She couldn’t stand being apart from Jay a second longer, so she stumbled back to him and sat on the edge of the bed while she finished combing her hair.
He rested one arm on her thigh and traced the seam of her jeans.
She couldn’t decide whether the silence was uncomfortable or not. “I had a good time,” she said softly. “I missed you, especially at the end.”
He sighed. Jay wasn’t usually at a loss for words, but this situation was so goddamn complicated, all the words had probably scurried off to hide in spider holes.
She tried anyway. “It’s more than sex. It’s not love, but it’s more than sex.”
“Do you want to do it again?” he asked. It struck her how like Paul he was in that moment, simply in the way that he asked the question, with no pressure for the choice.
The answer came to her instantly, without reflection. “Only if you have a session too. I mean, you and Paul.” She tugged at her hair, concentrating furiously, determined to finish without looking him in the eye. “I feel like there has to be a balance. I don’t mean doing anything like what we did, or even sex, he could give you just a massage—”
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Jay said, and he sounded amused and not upset at all, thank God. “There’s no way a guy that hot is going to give me just a massage. Back up there, baby.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling. She looked down at him now, and he was gorgeous, all big eyes and perfect cheekbones and grinning pearly white teeth. She couldn’t imagine just a massage either, putting the two of them together.
“As long as you’re okay—you didn’t get razor burn?” he asked. “Fuck, I hope not.” She shook her head. “As long as you’re okay with it, I can understand the whole balance issue. Let’s give it a week. And if I’m good enough to start exercise again, I’m good for sex.”
“Jump back in the pool,” she advised, nodding her head in mock seriousness.
“I’m still stuck in the shallow end right now, but can I see your new look?”
“Of course.” She got to her feet and started taking off her clothes. “Paul really liked your lingerie, by the way.”
“I should sew him a domination thong or something for Christmas.”
She laughed and threw her shirt at him.
* * *
“Don’t you dare carry that, Javi. I’ll kill you.”
Jay threw up his hands and let his mother lift the crate full of paper-nestled dolls out of the trunk of her car. “Can I get something?” he asked in Spanish. “Anything?” He knew the box didn’t weigh that much, and she could handle it easily, but he was going to look like a complete asshole trailing behind a fully loaded, five-foot-tall, seventy-year-old woman with his hands in his pockets.
She relented and let him carry their sandwich bag.
The flea market took place in a cavernous old building. A few birds flitted around the steel girders that held up the ceiling. Below, a neat grid of numbered stalls filled up the floor, the tables hung with bright cloth. The stalls that sold car audio systems blared norteño, and the smell of steaming tamales from a nearby food vendor made him inhale deeply. This was almost like being in Mexico. He was born on this side, but the other one still felt halfway like home.
They made their way to stall D-23 and met his father, who’d already set up half the booth from his wheelchair seat. He’d had a stroke when Jay was very young, and could walk only with great difficulty. His health had been good since then. Jay reminded himself of that a lot.
They set out the rest of the dolls together. American Girl and Barbie dolls went in the front, with collectibles set on stands to the back. A Tonner repainted as the Virgin of Guadalupe was their most expensive item at well into three figures. Jay’s mother had made the Virgin’s mantle out of blue raw silk and embroidered it with gold stars.
“If anyone tries to steal her, I’ll kill them,” said his mother, who’d always been fond of hyperbolic threats.
“This market isn’t that bad,” countered his father. “Not like the one we used to go to in Pico-Union, full of thieves. They sell some high-end stuff here.”
Jay pointed to the stall across the aisle. “Like that jacket over there with a Chanel name and a Gucci logo.”
His father shrugged. “Why counterfeit one brand when you can do two at the same time? It makes sense to me. All those Italian things look the same.”
They talked family matters and politics for a while, then settled in for the long day. Jay leaned back into his canvas chair, logged into his media sites and browsed. Customers began to filter in. The empty stall to their left soon had new occupants, a young married couple from Mexico City named Pilar and Arnulfo who sold transgressive T-shirts with designs like dope leaves crossed with machine guns and mangled English slogans like Fuckers Department.
Jay’s mother shook her head at their goods when they weren’t looking. “Those are ugly and bad for children to see,” she hissed under her breath at him. He twisted his mouth into a what’ll-you-do expression. Her nurturing side came out later, though, when she offered Pilar and Arnulfo some homemade coconut cookies, which they very politely accepted.
One shirt in pa
rticular caught his eyes, a takeoff of Jaws with a giant nude razor-toothed woman menacing a helpless little shark. “Have you got that in a smaller size?” Jay asked Pilar and Arnulfo.
“No,” Arnulfo said. “The smaller sizes don’t sell here. Sorry, man. I’m with you—I think walking around in a tent looks stupid.”
“Do you have any gothic dolls?” Pilar asked. She wore heavy black eyeliner and a cheap leather collar, which had Jay thinking about Paul and Adriana’s session and feeling uncomfortably warm and impatient.
He took a deep breath and focused. “Actually, I do. I’ve got some Tim Burton movie characters, a Robert Smith and a Repo: The Genetic Opera set.” Pilar’s eyes lit up. “But I only sell them online.” He handed her a home-printed business card with the locations. “Email me and I’ll give you a discount.”
They chatted for a while, Jay mostly keeping up, although some of the Mexico City slang flew right over his head. Arnulfo told him he had good Spanish, for a pocho, and Jay made a crack about his overly generous layer of hair gel.
Then the first rush of customers started, and Jay was soon busy fielding questions and gently preventing little girls from hair-pulling the more expensive dolls.
His mother left at lunchtime to go to one of Jay’s nephew’s soccer games. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” she called over her shoulder. “Text me if you sell the Virgin!”
“So is Adriana still regular?” His father asked. It took a second for Jay to figure out what the hell that meant.
When he did, he groaned. “Don’t you have enough grandkids? And that question—God, I’m not going to answer that.”
“I’m right at U.S. average male life expectancy. I don’t have time for tact.” His father shrugged somewhat apologetically. “I won’t bug you again. This week.”
Well, at least that solved one problem—the baseline sexual frustration bothering Jay all morning was gone, poof, just like that, driven away by the mortification.
