by Alex Algren
“I missed you, too, but I kept myself surprisingly busy, especially in the evening,” I said.
“Oh, how?” he asked, with just a hint of jealousy.
“I’ve been exploring the concept of ensō.”
“Really? You’ve been practicing calligraphy?” He sounded pleased. “I’d love to see your work when I get home.”
It was all I could do not to giggle. Only when we hung up did it occur to me he might be offended by my sensual interpretation of his spiritual practice. But Adam did have a sense of humor and he definitely appreciated sex. So I made sure to do extra practice sessions, just to make sure I was in tip-top shape for our reunion.
Forty-three hours later, a thinner, sexier, glowingly enlightened Adam walked through security and grabbed me in a great big circle of a bear hug. Fortunately, our apartment was only twenty minutes from the airport, or we might have had to stop at a motel on the way.
When we got home, Adam grabbed my hand and immediately headed for the bedroom. I shook free and strolled into the living room instead.
“I want to show you my calligraphy first,” I said, giving him a mischievous sidelong glance. I gestured for him to take a seat on the sofa.
“Oh, sure, great idea,” he said, not quite hiding his disappointment. But as he started to sit down, I grabbed him by the belt buckle.
“Take down your pants and underwear first,” I said firmly.
He raised his eyebrows, but obeyed. He was already hard, of course, and at the sight of his real “calligraphy pen,” my pussy contracted so sharply I flinched in surprise. Keeping my breath steady, I knelt between his legs and took his cock in my mouth.
“Oh, god,” he groaned, arching up.
If he was that easy to impress with a simple kiss, my next trick was going to blow his mind. I decided it would be fitting to start the art show with a preview of coming attractions. Accordingly, I puckered my lips and began to squeeze his shaft with the same rhythmic, gripping motions I used for my internal exercises. Indeed, I was mirroring the same movements down below—clench, release, clench, release.
I’d never heard Adam make such noises: surprise, pleasure and distress all mixed together.
“Please, Maddy, stop,” he begged. “You’re going to make me come. I don’t want to come yet.”
“Like it?”
“Yeah. I don’t get the calligraphy connection, but that’s okay,” he breathed.
“Perhaps it lies beyond conscious awareness,” I said, rising and leisurely unbuttoning my shirt. I stripped for him slowly, baring my breasts first and fingering my own nipples as I did each night when I masturbated. His gaze on my nude body was so smolderingly hot, I was afraid he’d raise blisters on my skin.
After a few teasing swivels of my hips, I straddled him on the sofa and immediately took him inside, purposely keeping my muscles loose and relaxed. This was a challenge, because his real cock was so hard and long and thick, I’d swear I could feel the length of him tickling my throat.
“Want to see my ensō now?”
Adam let out a hoarse little laugh. “Uh, no offense, but can it wait till later?”
“It doesn’t have to wait. You see, I learned a lot about the magic circle while you were gone. How it represents so many things at once. Not just the void, but strength, elegance, the Universe, enlightenment.”
I gave him my best elevator squeeze, one, two, three, hold.
His eyes almost popped out of his head.
I squeezed again.
His head arched back and he let out a low, helpless, “Fuuuck.”
I began to move, grinding my clit against his coarse hair on the downstroke, massaging his swollen shaft with my muscles as I rose.
Adam was beyond words now. His whimpers of protest let me know he was close to shooting his load. But I was close, too. The resistance of a thick, hard rod inside me definitely increased the effort—and the pleasure. I started in on the butterfly squeezes, a preview of climax in itself.
Adam grunted as if someone had punched the air out of him, and his hips bucked up into me. Before the vacation, it would have been way too soon for me, but now I closed my eyes and gave one last squeeze of his brush, the final stroke at last. My orgasm exploded deep in my belly, the spasms unbearably sweet and sharp, as Adam and I rode together to the finish.
“Like it?” I asked again as we rested afterward, our foreheads pressed together.
“A lot. I’d ask for details, but somehow I think another demonstration of your art might be more enlightening.”
As he pulled me close for a kiss, I flashed on that moment at the Claremont spa when I started this journey, not quite sure where it would end. But now I knew.
When the circle is complete, you start again.
BUTTERFLY’S KISS
Thomas S. Roche
If you take a left off of Figueroa and then a right, right, left, down to the corner of a street without a name, and pull past the sign that says PARK-A-LOT, you’ll see it: the entrance to the right side street leading to the wrong back alley. Pay the attendant, give him an extra twenty, and you might still have a stereo when you come back. If you’re one of those cats with an AM radio, you just saved a Jackson, but go ahead and leave your doors open if you like your windows.
You’re wearing something you shouldn’t be, so I hope you’ve at least brought a raincoat or a cover-up, or things are going to get interesting before their time.
Down the side street, which I won’t tell you the name of, you’ll spot a few sleepers at the edge of the alley, maybe. There’s a Dumpster at the far end stenciled with Bob the SubGenius, tagged with yellow Kanji, and drunkenly sprayed over it all is FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FU, which is the point at which the boozer ran out of Dumpster and presumably lost interest.
Over the open doorway, red curtain shrouding the inside, there’s a sign but no words, just a stylized spider, Latrodectus hasselti if you give a flying fuck, red hourglass on a black body. Under that there’s a cat in a derby, always a derby, impeccable, his mug impassive underneath, eyes watching as you approach. His name is Regentine, or more commonly Reg, but don’t call him that unless he introduces himself, which he’s not going to unless you’re Trent Reznor or the Marquis de Sade.
Walk up to Reg and say your name, either first and last or scene name. He’ll give you a look like he just scraped you off his shoe. He’ll fish in the pocket of his waistcoat, pull out a reporter’s notebook.
He’ll find your name, because you won’t be there if you’re not on the list.
He’ll check your ID, maybe pat you down, take your double saw, jerk his thumb at the red curtain. At that point you’ll either come to your senses and go home, watch made-for-Skinemax softcore and relax with your thoughts, or you’ll hit the darkness like a lush hitting bottom. If you’ve gotten this far, like I did, you’re going to hit bottom anyway, and the only question is if you’re going to get up again. So walk, my friend, and let me tell you what happens, if you’re me and this is last night, Walpurgisnacht, the day the music died.
When I last brushed by Reggie twenty shekels lighter, not sixteen hours and a thousand years ago, it was a dark warm night in April and my digital watch was striking twenty-three. I nervously unclasped it, stuffed it in my raincoat next to my camera phone—not allowed. The velvet brushed my face as I slipped through; it smelled of cigarettes and cheap perfume.
I walked through the alcove, shadow black but lit in overwrought UV where the club cards were stacked and the Plexiglas showed the blue-white face of the girl who accepts the chit you received last time you attended, maybe looks at you funny for whatever reason like she did at me, then hands you a piece of paper to sign. You hand the waiver back with your Grant, or two Jacks and a Hammy, or whatever, and she picks out a stamp: spider or butterfly.
I stuffed my paw through the little hobbit hole and she spanked it with that wet stamp, hard, maybe harder than usual, fixing me through the glass with a supreme look of self-satisfaction. I drew back
my fist and looked at it, glowing faintly phosphorescent in the UV: eight legs, big ass, and plenty of fang.
Next stop was the coat check—another wicked girl looking disgusted. I shrugged off my raincoat and she looked me up and down, her disgust fading to a neutral sort of acceptance. I was one of the crew, maybe, at least with my rubber hot pants and tank. She handed me a claim check and drew an ankh on it. I glanced back as I left; she was eyeing my knee-high boots with the lust of the fashion victim.
I brushed through a second curtain, this one black leather, heavy like one of those lead aprons you wear getting X-rays at the dentist. The scent beyond was the first that hit me, just like always, but each time it’s a little different and each time it’s intoxicating. If you’ve got a predator’s sense of smell, which I often fancy I do, you can detect the night’s cocktail just by drawing a deep breath. Tonight, people were drinking a lot of Johnny Walker Black Label and fucking a lot of ass. The beat from the twelve-foot speakers hit my breastbone like a hammer.
The crowd was tight, pushed up against the dance floor, watching selected bodies grinding together. People were dressed like I was, rubbered, or leathered, or PVCed, second skins in evidence on both genders but the balance running about seventy-five percent women, which is the finest gift Ulysses S. Grant could give me.
I squirmed my way through the crowd, spent twenty minutes waiting to order a Maker’s from the tranny bartender, who pointedly ignored me a couple of times before finally begrudgingly serving me. I ordered two because I knew I’d want a second one and fuck this shit. She wanted to see two hand stamps. I ordered one neat, gave her a twenty, slammed it before she could bring me back my change, and told her to keep it and bring me another on the rocks. She did with a scowl. I backed my ass away from the bar and wriggled my way across the edge of the dance floor, looking for the spiral stairs.
The place was a warehouse, then a loft, then a club; the spiral stairs are a cheap industrial-looking sheet-metal hack job probably put in by the latest owner. They squeaked as I climbed them. I panted a little and sipped my drink at the midpoint, then climbed the rest of the way.
Top of the stairs, there’s a girl named Kane with a derby like Reg’s, but Kane’s is paired with an immaculate white jumpsuit, a cane and one false eyelash pointed straight to hell.
I showed her my stamp; she frowned and shook her head. I read her expression: she knew me, knew the tarantula, didn’t think we were a good match. Kane’s a nice girl, despite, or because of, the whole loving-to-beat-people thing. She narrowed her eyes, told me, “Be careful, fucker,” without saying a word, the slightest hint of crow’s feet telling it to me since there’s no way soft words could pass on the landing and Kane’s way too dignified to shout.
I squeezed past her into the leather curtain and her nipples brushed mine. Then I was in past the leather and her hand was on my shoulder, briefly, and I was gone, into the black where the music sounds distant, blocked off by heavy insulation and the half-inch thick curtain.
High in the corners, some spacey New Age shit was playing, competing with the beat from outside. Forty, perhaps fifty people were crammed into the well-equipped space, eight or twelve gawky spectators, four couples crammed into corners going at it—male male, male female, female female, male female, I think—and half a dozen women relaxing and getting foot massages, back rubs, kisses on their rubber-clad behinds.
The rest were playing, if you can call it that. A female plugged and ring-gagged on a St. Andrew’s drooled down her front while a six-foot tranny whipped her. A guy bent over on a sawhorse was getting fucked by a machine. A woman in a gas mask was bound and spread on top of a horizontal cage, getting a violet wand to her exposed genitals. There was a guy in the cage, fucking himself onto a bar-mounted dildo. And up on the low stage, where emo bands play at Chagrin on fourth Tuesdays, an impeccable female body was suctioned tight into a howling vacuum bed, every contour of her naked body bleeding through the latex, growing more visible with every drop of sweat.
The vac bed is a fun little device or a nasty slice of hell, depending on your perspective, which for me can change at any moment. A sturdy frame of PVC pipes, it’s wrapped overall with an airtight envelope of heavy-duty latex. A victim—usually a submissive, for reasons I’ll detail momentarily—crawls inside and the pipes, which are attached to a vacuum, suck the air out until the rubbery skin molds so close it all but crushes you. It feels like you’re being buried alive. The slightest movement becomes an ordeal and is often impossible, depending on the strength of the suction.
While some vac beds are covered with black latex, or latex thick enough to hide the contours of the body within, this one was an almost perfect white, and thin enough to be seen through. The girl inside was slim and savage, spread and squealing, the sounds muffled as she fought against the crushing weight of the latex.
In a vac bed, you breathe through a tube, and this one was trying to squirm but unable to because the latex held her so tight, like a python digesting something still ever so slightly alive. The intricate outlines of her shaved pudenda were of infinite fascination to me, as were the gradually more visible outlines of the blue-black Sanskrit characters tattooed above her sex, growing discernible as a thin film of sweat made the white latex translucent, then gradually transparent. The former, the folds of her pussy, I did not at first recognize, but the Sanskrit’s a dead giveaway. It was the labial piercings that threw me, or the lack thereof; she’d taken them out, I imagine, so as not to damage the latex. Three on each side, now nothing.
I dusted my second bourbon, sucked, cracked ice, chewed. The Domme operating the vac bed was six feet in heels, poured into a rugby-striped number short enough to show her latex panties and low enough to show that she didn’t bother with the matching bra. Her boots left a trio of inches between their rubber tops and her dress. Her hair was cropped short, a bottle-blonde contrast to the electric blue stripe on her black dress. She held the wired remote, a simple attenuator dial on an ergonomic grip. She twisted the dial and the bed howled louder. I watched the girl on the bed fighting it, trapped, suctioned into the rubber. I remember that: the fighting. I remember it like it was yesterday.
She moaned through the breathing tube, almost drowning out the music and the sound of the vacuum. Then she humped her body against the pressure of the vac bed, not making much purchase, asking and not receiving.
“Another drink?” asked the girl in the pinstripe latex dress, and I said, “Knob Creek,” and bent down and gave her the first bill out of my boot, a twenty. Then I was back to watching, as she moaned and fought. The Domme switched off the suction and left a huge gap of silence unfilled by New Age from above and Psytrance from outside. My ears rang.
The girl’s body became slowly less visible as the tension in the rubber began to relax. The Domme gave her a moment, ran her latex-gloved hands all over the entombed victim’s upper thighs, then into her, pressing as far as the rubber sheath would let her.
The woman moaned. The Domme slapped her. The latex glove came off and her fingernails came out, drawing great gentle circles around the captive’s breasts; she shivered at the sensation. The nipples had little gaps of air around them. The Domme took care of that with a twist of the dial, and moans mingled with the howl of the bed as the latex envelope evacuated. Going full bore now, the machine crushed her again, and the victim writhed violently.
My bourbon came back with twelve dollars, which I left on the tray. I gulped, not quite feeling the two Maker’s, thinking I should leave; there’s death trapped in that Pandora’s vac bed, and motherfuck if someone isn’t about to let it out.
The crowd shied away from the captive’s audible moans, muffled from the breathing tube but growing louder until they actually drowned out the scream of the machine. The spectators formed a half-circle that, contrary to the typical wisdom of crowds, gradually inched back as the action throughout the rest of the room slowed and stopped, as manacles came undone and whips ceased their movement, as foot massag
ers lost interest and turned to gawk at the screaming latex statue.
I edged closer. Slick in its latex cocoon, the girl’s body now showed impeccably, every contour, every curve, every place I had put my tongue and my hand, every part of her I had tasted, every part of her I loved. Her name was Aiden and I should have fucking left ten minutes ago, but the third bourbon was gone and that wasn’t going to happen.
The dial twisted down, up, down, up, down, making Aiden screech and seethe and pump her hips. I was now the only spectator within the Domme’s space bubble, which is rude at any party—and at this one, it was asking for trouble.
“You,” she said, pointing, without looking at me.
I stared, dumbly.
The Domme’s eyes turned to me, and Christ, did she look pissed. I gestured, “Me?” and she stomped her foot.
The beat from outside the curtain went pounding into my breastbone, bam-bam, bam-bam, in unplanned syncopation to fucking Zamfir Master of the Pan Flute or Yanni or whatever it was pouring treacly out of the speakers. I think it was the Blade Runner soundtrack or some Year of Living Dangerously shit. I shook my head.
“I don’t think I should,” I told her.
She killed the vacuum; Aiden moaned behind her breathing tube as the air hissed back in. The Domme’s eyes were steel. “Did I ask, Tarantula?”
I thought, be careful what you wish for, which is not a new thought for me and seems to be coming with increasing frequency nowadays.
I put my dead soldier on a passing tray, looked at the tarantula as if to tell myself it was really there. I climbed onto the stage.
From somewhere, the Domme produced a dildo with a flat base. She set it up and said, “Put it into her.”
“Look,” I said stupidly. “I sort of know this girl. It’s my first night. I know her. It’s my first night.”
