Agony/Ecstasy: Original Stories of Agonizing Pleasure/Exquisite Pain

by Litte, Jane

A fairly companionable moment passed before Nathan spoke again. “You’re my best friend and I didn’t know this about you.”

  “Really? Your best friend? Wow.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  I thought about it. Now, of course, I thought of a dozen ways I might have told him. Now that I knew he would have accepted it. “I was afraid you’d freak out, I guess.”

  “I’m not freaked out,” he said, and I waited for the “but” I could hear in the works. “But I have a lot of questions about how it all works.”

  I squeezed his fingers in mine, wondering at how comfortable that felt. How right and essential.

  “Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”

  After earning two graduate degrees, practicing law awhile, and working for the public school system for more than ten years, Delphine Dryden ditched it all to start writing full time. She has published numerous contemporary erotic romances, an erotic steampunk romance, and quite a few erotic short stories; she’s currently hard at work on a mainstream steampunk romance series.

  In addition to novel writing, Del blogs regularly about writing, BDSM/kink, and topics of general geekery at http://1800domhelp.blogspot.com and http://geekandkink.com.

  Del and her family are all Texas natives, and reside in unapologetic suburban bliss near Houston.

  STITCH AND BITCH

  A.L. SIMONDS

  Luisa was going to fall.

  A split second before her skateboard caught a crack in the pavement and her balance shifted too far back, she saw it coming. The world tilted, the ground rose to meet her.

  She smacked down on her side, hip and shoulder catching the worst of it, and slid a few inches down the asphalt ramp. The impact flashed across her vision and shook her nerves. She could have sworn she heard bells tolling.

  She had to lie there, just for a couple seconds, in order to remember how to breathe.

  When she struggled up—first onto her palms, then her knees, then to her feet—she rolled her shoulders and shook away the worst of the pain.

  “Ow, dude,” she said. “Ow.”

  As the pain cleared, she realized that she did hear church bells, over on the university campus, tolling six o’clock.

  She had taken care to ask Charlie to watch the time for her, but, typical Charlie, he’d wandered away down to the hot dog truck and forgotten about her.

  She’d been so absorbed doing a line—a sequence of tricks—that the seasons could have turned, barbarians invaded, and she wouldn’t have noticed.

  Now it was already six and there was no way she would not be late.

  Cursing, she jumped to her feet, shaking off the reverberating pain of her fall, grabbed her bag from under the bleachers, and kicked off on her board.

  She passed Charlie as she came out of the skate park and hit the sidewalk. He waved cheerfully at her and she had to swallow the urge to stop and give him a piece of her mind.

  She’d just be later if she did that.

  So she pushed faster, sailing off the curb into the street. Cars were hard to contend with when she was on her board, but they were big and easy to navigate around, unlike pedestrians, who were both slow and unpredictable. As she careened down quiet side streets, the low evening sun warmed her side and cheeks. She zigzagged through the lengthening shadows, breathing through the lingering ache of her fall, then turned a hard right onto Ossington Avenue.

  She didn’t have time to stop and change her shirt, let alone shower.

  She caught a draft and zoomed forward.

  “JUST like clockwork,” Toni, her boss, said when Priya arrived at the shop. “You’re a marvel, you know that?”

  Priya grinned as she stowed her knapsack under the counter. “All in the planning.”

  Toni shook her head. “You take planning to a whole new level.”

  Priya allotted herself fifteen minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to walk from her seminar on campus to the yarn store, a window that was fairly generous, but not overly so. It was good to have the time to let the seminar sift and settle into her mind before she had to switch gears.

  She was usually at least five minutes early. Today was no different.

  “Quiet today,” Toni said from the back, where she was eating a takeout dinner.

  Priya looked around the store, all the vibrant colors and cozy furniture. “I’m sure it’ll pick up.”

  Toni slurped up some sesame noodles. “And then we won’t be able to get rid of them.”

  Tonight was Stitch and Bitch. A regular crowd always dropped in for gossip, advice, and crafting time away from families, jobs, and other responsibilities.

  As the regulars arrived, Priya manned the counter to sell last-minute needles and splurge skeins of yarn. When she was not needed there, she tidied the shelves, returning stray balls to their rightful places, reorganizing laceweight and sockweight skeins, straightening and neatening the disarray from an ordinary business day.

  “You don’t pay her enough,” one of the regular ladies told Toni when she emerged to join the group around the big table in the center of the shop. “Look at her work!”

  Priya ducked her head and focused on finding the one ball of blue sock yarn missing its label. Toni did not actually pay her at all; Priya kept the books and helped out three nights a week in exchange for wholesale prices on yarn and the bachelor apartment over the shop.

  She had been lucky to get that deal. When her fellowship at the university fell through, she had been forced to find a few part-time jobs just to cover tuition. A place to live had started to seem like an unattainable luxury. Although her apartment was little more than a creaky half-converted attic with questionable plumbing, she wasn’t about to complain.

  Finally, when Toni had nagged her enough and there truly was no more yarn to tidy or needles to inventory, Priya joined the group at the table. She pulled out her latest project, oatmeal-colored yarn flecked with green and blue, which she had unraveled from an unwanted sweater. She had spent an entire weekend pulling the sweater apart, skeining up the yarn, then washing it and hanging it, weighted down with soup cans, to dry.

  “Still doing the recycling?” Gillian asked. She was a relative newcomer to the group, and liked to wield her husband’s corporate Amex card to buy the finest silk and cashmere weights. “Aren’t you worried about”—her nose wrinkled slightly—“pests?”

  Priya shook out the sock she was knitting up from the yarn and extracted the fifth needle from the center of the ball. “I didn’t get the sweater out of the garbage or anything.”

  “Just from a piece of garbage!” Toni put in, and rubbed Priya’s arm consolingly.

  “My ex,” Priya explained to Gillian, who was looking both puzzled and nauseated. “That’s all she means. The yarn came from a sweater I made my ex.”

  Gillian tossed back her impeccably bobbed hair. “Well, wherever it came from, I don’t see why you bother.”

  “I like it,” Priya said, and pressed her lips together. She could have said more—recycling the yarn was therapy for her. Reclaiming what she had given to Amy, cleaning it up and making it into something new, all of that helped her not only move on, but to mark her movement, measure it as she grew further away.

  After her breakup with Amy, she had instituted a long-term plan for herself: She gave up her ambition to become a theater director, she went back to school for a degree in elementary education, and she promised herself that any new relationship, if there ever were one, would be in harmony with her new goals. Simple, careful, and thoughtful were going to be her guiding lights.

  Besides all of that, recycling the yarn was frugal. If she hadn’t had knitting in her hands, she didn’t know what she might do.

  Gillian had turned her attention to someone else now, an older woman named Catherine, who was struggling with making a cable. Priya sighed in relief, happy to have a chance to work a few rounds on her sock.

  The sock would be knee-high, with a plain foot and leg in a trellis lace pattern. She loved t
he way knee socks looked on a woman’s legs, at once rustic and sexy. The wool and lace interplayed delicately, the wool robust and reassuring, the lace subtle and coquettish, revealing small patches of skin like light dappling and splashing through the leaves of a tree on a bright summer afternoon. The combinations and contrasts were what captured her fancy: smooth skin and slightly scratchy wool, nudity and covering, the curve of a calf and strong line of a shin, maybe a nice leather high-heeled shoe over the snug sock.

  As if her thoughts had made it happen, just then the bell on the shop door rang and Luisa crashed inside, a riot of color and wind and noise, skateboard in hand, corkscrew curls flowing around her face like a lion’s mane. Her face was flushed, her smile wide and bright as she greeted everyone with high fives and quick hugs, pecks on the cheek, and squeezes of the hand.

  Luisa had a way of entering a room as if she were donning it. The space shifted and molded itself around her, arranged itself so that she was always at the center. Priya knew that she was well liked here and did her best to be friendly and polite. But Luisa’s warmth was of a different order. It was furnace-hot and pure, genuine and impossible to extinguish.

  “How’s it hanging, Gill?” Luisa asked as she dug in her ratty messenger bag for her yarn and other materials. “Having any luck with that crepe recipe?”

  Even sour-Gillian smiled when Luisa collapsed into the chair next to her and knocked her elbow into Gillian’s side. Gillian smoothed back her hair and sighed. “I’m working on it, but . . .”

  “I took the worst digger just now,” Luisa announced, tossing down a lumpy ball of yarn and her crochet hook. “Fell on my ass like some kind of newbie.”

  The ladies around the table tut-tutted in sympathy and asked for details, shared the names of their chiropractors, and offered advice about warm baths versus cold, compresses versus ibuprofen.

  Priya set down her sock. “You probably want to wash up, right? Come with me.”

  Luisa tilted her head briefly, grinning at her, then scraped back her chair and bounded toward the little staff washroom behind the counter.

  The washroom was barely wide enough for a sink and the commode. Somehow, Priya and Luisa squeezed into it.

  Priya turned on the faucet. “You came right from the skate park?”

  Luisa bit her lip and held up her shirt so Priya could press soapy, wet paper towels to her abraded hip and ribs.

  “Pobrecita,” Priya murmured. The first time she’d spoken Spanish, Luisa had staggered back and pretended to faint, as if Desi people didn’t live all over the Antilles, including Trinidad, where Priya’s parents were born.

  There was no broken skin to speak of, just darkening bruises and the imprint of gravel overlaying the friction burn from Luisa’s slide. Priya ran the water colder and swabbed it off again.

  Luisa was looking down at her, lower lip gone white in her teeth, curls crowding her face.

  “What?” Priya asked when she was finished.

  Luisa smiled, slow and shy, and leaned back against the wall, foot up on the toilet lid. “Nothing.”

  “Liar.”

  Luisa tipped up her chin and reached for Priya, managing to graze her shoulder. Her shirt was still raked up to her armpits. The fabric was twisted across her breasts; one cup of her bra was held to the elastic band with a safety pin.

  Priya plucked at the pin and cupped her palm around Luisa’s breast. She leaned in and rubbed her face in Luisa’s hair. “Stinky, stinky.”

  Luisa breathed in sharply. “Nah,” she said, her hand going around Priya’s waist. “Just . . . alive.”

  Priya snorted with laughter and kissed Luisa quickly before pulling away. “We should get back out there.”

  “Don’t wanna.” Luisa curled two fingers into Priya’s belt loops. “Do I have to?”

  Priya kissed the tip of her chin, then bit down lightly. “Yes, you do. Be good.”

  “Fine,” Luisa grumbled, and tugged down her shirt. “But you owe me.”

  Rolling her eyes, Priya slapped her lightly on the leg.

  LUISA’S version of being good, however, was more than slightly naughty. Although she kept up several conversations for the rest of the evening, her eyes rarely left Priya. She told jokes, shouted with laughter, and all the while, tracked Priya’s movements around the shop.

  While the group became absorbed in helping Catherine untangle the mess, Priya helped a customer who had just wandered in. They selected a nice hank of gray wool and a set of large needles. Priya showed her how to cast on and start knitting a simple scarf. She knew Luisa was watching her. The attention, subtle but persistent as it was, warmed her skin. She became more conscious of her gestures, more careful with her words, as if she were performing, privately, for an audience of one.

  When the newcomer was settled in, frowning over her needles, Priya started cashing out the register. Luisa interrupted her, waving a set of German stainless-steel needles, double-pointed, five in all, just two millimeters in gauge.

  “You don’t knit socks.” Priya slid the package back to Luisa. The set was exactly the sort she longed to use, but she had never been able to justify the price. “These are hardcore.”

  “Hardcore,” Luisa repeated. Before Priya could stop her, she had torn open the package and fanned the needles out, running her fingertip over their lethal-looking tips. She pressed the tips into the soft skin on the inside of her wrist. The points made tiny, perfect dents. “Sounds about right.”

  Priya swallowed hard.

  Luisa saw her and grinned. “Ring ’em up.”

  “They’re eighteen dollars.”

  Shrugging, Luisa tossed her a twenty. She only ever paid—when she did buy something, which wasn’t all that often—with cash that came crumpled and damp from the depths of her pockets. Priya was not entirely certain where her money came from, or how regularly she was paid, if at all. This uncertainty was the only constant when it came to Luisa. She didn’t seem to have a permanent address; rather, she crashed with various friends and acquaintances, an ever-changing and expanding population of skateboarders, musicians, self-appointed artists, and hangers-on.

  Toni was excited that Luisa was taking up sock knitting. “It’s addictive! Like chocolate,” she declared. “Once you turn your first heel, you’ll never go back!”

  Luisa nodded amiably. “That’s what I’ve heard, yes.”

  Another woman leaned in to confide, “My husband married me for my socks.” She paused and waggled her eyebrows. “If you know what I mean.”

  Cocking her head, looking more than a little puzzled, Luisa just smiled. “That’s something to consider, huh, Priya?”

  “Sure it is,” Priya said, not looking up from the register. Her chest felt tight, her face very hot.

  The needles were still on the counter. They pointed like daggers at Priya, promising something irresistible.

  LUISA met Priya at the crochet basics class last spring. Her sister was pregnant and wanted Luisa, probably to piss off their mom, to be the godmother. So she had set herself the task of learning how to make sweaters and booties and other tiny, cute things for the impending infant. After nearly strangling in cheap plastic yarn from the dollar store, she decided to take a class so she’d actually know what she was doing.

  Priya taught the class with grace and good humor. She never lost her cool, not even when Luisa lost control of her crochet hook and sent it flying at Priya’s face.

  Afterward, pretty sure that she had felt a vibe between them, she asked Priya out for coffee.

  Priya blinked, opened her bound planner, and said after a lengthy consultation, “How about next Wednesday at ten?”

  Not only was that a long way off, it was really early in the morning, so far as Luisa was concerned. She twirled the crochet hook between her fingers and gave Priya her best flirtatious smile. “I was thinking more like right now?”

  “No.” Priya closed her planner and set it down on the table. “I have plans.”

  Luisa would come to l
earn that Priya always had plans; what’s more, eventually, Luisa found that fascinating. Here was this beautiful girl, smart as a whip, working three jobs and going to graduate school part-time, and she barely let herself ever relax. Or, Luisa suspected, sleep.

  But back then, Luisa figured she knew how to take a hint, and stepped away. “Okay, well. Maybe I’ll see you around?”

  She was nearly out the door when Priya grasped her wrist—she had very strong hands, probably because of all the knitting—and pulled her to a stop. “If you’d like, there’s Stitch and Bitch the day after tomorrow. We could meet then.”

  Luisa had no idea what Stitch and Bitch was, but she liked the name right away. After adjusting to the sight of a roomful of suburban-looking moms and grandmas, she came to like the people a lot, too. She spent so much of her life skating and hanging with dudes that it was nice, almost restful, to kick back with females and work on cutesy baby accessories.

  Her friends claimed she was going soft on them, but then they began to ask for toques and fingerless gloves.

  Maybe she was soft, but if they’d ever met Priya, they would understand. She wasn’t the type of lady you gave up on.

  WHEN the last of the crowd had trailed out the door, Toni turned off the overhead lights and started locking up. Priya got out the push broom and swept, starting just in front of the washroom and working outward into the main area of the shop floor.

  “I can do that,” she told Toni, who was putting the chairs up on the table. “You should go home. You’ve had a long day.”

  Toni rubbed the back of her neck and didn’t argue. After she had gone, Priya finished sweeping and ran the feather duster over the tallest shelves before she opened the washroom door.

  Luisa stumbled out, blinking against the dark. “Dude, what took so long?”

  Her impatience was equal parts charming and exasperating. Priya kissed her hard, like she’d been longing to do all night. Her mouth ached for it, and Luisa gurgled a little into the contact. Her hands ran restlessly up and down Priya’s back, pulling Priya closer, holding her in place as she kissed her back.