by Violet Blue
I feel the telltale slide of moisture in my sports panties that is most definitely not sweat. I feel the subtle kiss of my nylon running shorts on my bare legs that tempts me like an inanimate lover. I walk, forcing my elbows to fly high, my legs to stay true. And when I round the section where the announcer’s platform sits, I start to run full out though my skin is tingling in that bizarre way that says I am flirting with the line of too much, too fast, too far.
I round the bend, my sneakers smacking the track with a vengeance. He is laughing. I can hear him. “Come on, Robbie. Roberta Jean Monroe. Hustle. Make this count. This is mile five. Final lap. Slam it,” he roars, and I take off like the devil himself is nipping at my heels.
I rub that stick so hard I expect it to catch fire. I’m desperate to go anywhere in my head that is not focused on my distraught body. I need to go to any mental place that allows me to find a Zen state. To find a way to push away the ache and throb in my left knee, the stitch in my right side. Any place that makes the unstable bang of my heart in my chest less frightening or blots out the hot cold war of my skin because it is struggling to cool me despite the calm, gentle breeze of the May evening.
I am desperate and I run, proving myself to me, to him, to anyone watching. And when I have proven myself, Gus will prove what a good girl I am. That is my reward and I push my mind to find that place in my head, that place where Gus is showing me that I am his good, good girl.
Before I know it, my sneakers trip past that final white line and Gus whispers, in the now near-dark, “Walk it off, Robbie.”
I drop my beloved stick. Stagger past him for one more lap, letting my discordant body find its rhythm again.
When I come to pass him again, he is standing on the lip of the grass where the high school kids play football on Sunday; where someone has put a few spectators’ benches—I can only assume so that watchers can get an up close and personal view of folks abusing themselves for the sake of health. I laugh out loud and Gus smiles. I can barely see the flash of his grin in the navy blue night.
“If you’ll report to the long jump arena, we’ll take care of business,” he says in a faux announcer’s voice, but his words are dark and gruff and I can hear the want in them now.
He is always the most eager to get at me when I have been pushed past the point of reasonable pushing. I wonder again why I ever took up running. I wonder yet again why I ever told Gus. But I know deep down—because my stomach has curled in on itself and my cunt has double clutched around nothing but a memory—that Gus is about to remind me.
My feet are heavy but my insides feel floaty as I hurry to the sandpit for the long jump. The sand sucks at my sneakers and whispers with each step. I hear Gus’s belt buckle in the dark—first the merry jingle and then the sound of his zipper.
“Shuck the clothes. Get down on your hands and knees, Robbie,” he says, his voice a lick and a murmur in the blackness.
After kicking off my shoes and my footie socks, I drop my shorts and my panties, my running top and jog bra. The cool night air kisses me between the legs and under my arms. It runs a cold tongue of air under my breasts where I am hot and sweaty. My skin revolts with a legion of goose bumps, and when Gus reaches out in the dark to paint me with eye black—the black cream that football players use to ward off the sun—I whimper. He’ll make me as dark as the night and then he’ll fuck me. Out in the open, but invisible to see.
I once asked him why he doesn’t paint himself, and he laughed. “I’m a chameleon. If I don’t want you to see me, you won’t. Not like you, Robbie. All of you simply screams look at me!” From my long strawberry blonde curls to my big blue-green ocean water eyes, he says I must be looked at.
I drop to my knees and the sand says whump softly under me. Gus kneels to paint my face, with large swooping touches of his big gruff fingers, under my eyes, down the ridge of my nose, over my cheekbones. I feel like my eyes must be glowing—as if I’m some luminescent sea creature who creates her own lamplight at great depths. He smiles at me, his fly sagging open. I can see his erection pressed to his boxers. He knows where my head has gone.
“If you’re going to fly on that track like some bird of prey, some fast-moving underwater sea nymph, some force of nature, you should be camouflaged like one, yes?”
I nod and nearly purr as he paints the black paint along my shoulders and between my breasts, pinching my nipples so I shake. He runs a hand over my flanks, my back, my ass, smacking so my body zings with shock. Gus is not really painting me now, there is too little in that tiny pot. But he is speckling me like a jungle creature, and I tremble under his warm, calloused hands. Then he pushes his fingers deep into my pussy and I go still. I freeze, on hands and knees, heart escalated back to where it was when I was running, beating like some evil war drum that’s portent is death and blood and destruction.
“You did good,” he says, pushing one wet finger into my ass so that I bite my bottom lip. I bite too hard and I taste the coppery tang of my own blood on my tongue.
I don’t thank him. If I talk too much, he’ll add more the next time. I hang my head and am humble—the way he likes, the way I prefer.
“First you make a spectacle of yourself. Laps and sprints, long tangle of hair flying. God, your face gets so red, Rob. Like you’re going to go up in a ring of fire and smoke. Some fairy-tale witch burning on a pyre.” He’s taken himself in hand; I hear the hushed rustle of cotton and movement. His cock runs the length of my wet slit and he aligns himself to me, fingers sinking deep into the flesh of my hips. My muscles shake and quiver, already exhausted from being pushed. Now they are supporting me and he is sinking deep.
I gasp, bite my tongue, still tasting blood and the sour sweet flavor of a mouth dried and then rewet from running hard. I put my head down farther and my hair wallows in the sand.
“And now you’re all painted up. As black as night. As dark as that giant sky over us. No one can see you but you’re out here in the middle of this track. In the middle of this field.” He’s moving now, slow and sure—even, measured thrusts that make me want to scream and beg him to do me faster, deeper, harder. But I wait. “And all around us a magic ring of homes. Little family homes, grouped around this center. Warm yellow kitchen windows glowing around us like feral eyes.” His finger plunges back into my ass and he’s pushing it deep, fucking me harder. The head of his cock is nudging that secret bouquet of nerves deep in my wet, ready cunt. One of his hands still anchors me with a biting grip on my hip bone.
“Yes,” I say. These people have come to watch me run laps and sprint. I have run 5Ks and half marathons with some of them. They know me by sight, by name.
“Anyone could see. Not some heroine pounding the track with her tennis shoes. Not some runner pushing herself to achieve. But some painted, primal, fucked-up wild woman who’s getting banged in the sandpit. All dirty and raw and—”
“Yes,” I say. This is how you let go when your body and mind tell you that you have to be perfect. Good girl, pure girl, kind nice sweet girl next door girl… This is what you need. Right here. Smudged and dirty, sweaty and sandy, being fucked in a sandpit by a man who knows exactly how imperfect you want to be deep down.
“Breaking sticks and running from all the pressure.” He knocks me flat then. Full on in the sand on my belly, his one hand worming under me so he can press the hot pad of his finger to my clit while he thrusts. He bangs into me—forcing me down and forward, getting deep, invoking friction because my legs are pinned under him, not much wider than my normal stance. And Gus presses that fingertip to my clit like he’s tapping out Morse code.
dirty girl
bad girl
scared girl
my girl…
I hear that one outside my head because he says it. “My girl. My bad, dirty, struggling, running from everything, Robbie. My girl.”
And I come. Shaking under him, sand in my hair, rubbing my clit raw, him pounding into me. I inhale fine grains, sputter but keep coming, the spasm
s in my cunt as sure and true as a charley horse or a shin splint. I come and he’s pinning me, still moving until he bellows in my ear, his voice as rough as the sand, as black as the paint on my skin.
We lie there, facedown, filthy and grimy, hearts punching in our chests. Somewhere at one of the houses a radio plays loud country music. At another, a dog barks. Gus laughs softly and kisses the back of my ear. It sounds like a gunshot it’s so loud.
“Come on. Let’s get you home. Get you in the shower.” He tugs up his jeans, buckles his belt, helps me step into my damp clothes.
When he kisses me, I clutch at him—to thank him, to feel his warm skin under my fingers. Gus runs his fingers through the tangled train wreck of my hair and says, “We’ll come back. Day after tomorrow. I’m bumping you up to five and a half miles. Running, walking, sprints and whatever else I think of.”
My brain jumps into gear. Five and a half miles—that’s twenty-two laps. And at the end is…this. If I’m good. Twenty-two hard-core, balls-to-the-wall, whatever-he-says laps. I can do that.
ESPIONAGE
Rachel Kramer Bussel
You tuck your new pink and black coat, the one purchased earlier in the day just for this special evening, around your body, pull it tight like it’s cold out, except you’re indoors and the fire is roaring. You are cold, but it’s the kind of cold that can’t be heated by rubbing two sticks together or turning up the thermostat, the kind of cold that can only be vanquished once your heart catches up. Your heart is cautiously icy, watching and waiting; it isn’t safe to let it melt just yet.
Instead, you look—you could say spy, except you have an invitation, an elaborate listing of reasons this will be the party to end all parties, delivered right to your inbox. You’ve been promised bubble baths, servants, champagne, s’mores, drugs, debauchery. Those things intrigue you, sure, since you’re used to zoning out in front of the TV, quiet dinner parties, wholesome events like comedy shows and trivia nights, but you’d have shown up for gin rummy if it were held right here, in these rooms that hold a life that will never be yours, a life you’ve been given glimpses of but never truly peeked inside. Even better than any promise of party pampering, you’ve been granted access to this sacred space, this love shack you’ve up till now only imagined vividly. This is your chance to enter the inner sanctum, and you cling to it in the same way you hold your coat, and your heart—close. Still, despite the tacit permission, you feel like a spy, an Anaïs Nin emissary, as you walk through the rooms that make up their home, their urban house of love and lust and lasciviousness, a house you will never inhabit no matter how many times you fuck the master of it.
You’ve been invited here before, of course, when the lady of the manor was away; you don’t quite know where she spent the night, and it doesn’t really matter. Maybe she’s a bed hopper, too. That night the coveted marital bed was yours for the taking, for an evening of borrowed, perhaps stolen, pleasure. It was so tempting, except the man you love would only be yours on temporary loan. Plus, you like the other beds you’ve christened with him, the beds that became yours with the ease of a credit card, the swipe of a key; the beds that are almost communally owned, yet allow you to feel like they are yours for the borrowed time they’re allotted to you. You declined that chance to slip between his sheets, spending the night instead in a glamorous threesome with frosting and vodka, tonguing the one, bathing in the other, letting them take you away to something not quite an orgasm, not quite shameful enough to make you burn the way you need to, to come.
That burning, that fire that lights you up from the inside out, which turns pain into the most wicked of pleasure—he knows how to do that, the man of the house, the woman in the sheer black slip’s husband. He knows exactly how to hold the match between his fat, meaty fingers, to strike it in such a way that the blaze erupts in one part of your body and spreads instantly to the rest. He can do it with a word, a whisper, a text, a hand, an image; the truth is, he can do it even when he’s not doing anything at all. You only need conjure him in your mind and you’re enflamed, a mixed blessing of desire and curse. He’s told you he thinks about you when he puts on his belt, the one whose leather made you scream in Kentucky, whose buckle pressed against your throat in Montana, whose tip you kissed with sore, swollen lips in California. You’ve traveled so far to pretend he is yours, yet here, at ground zero, you realize just how mistaken you were; no matter how many states you undress in for him, she will always be there, wrapped around his ring finger, permanently embedded in his soul. On these trips, he tells you how he misses the scent of your vanilla perfume as you lie on those borrowed pillows; you in turn confess to miss the way he breathes deeply of your neck, like he’s getting high off of it, snorting a line of euphoria directly to his brain. That is your ground zero: the smell, taste and touch of each other’s body. Home has no place in your affair; instead it’s a base you can claim in any state you find yourselves together in.
This home, certainly, is theirs through and through. You may be a guest or a spy; either way, you are an intruder, an outsider whose evidence will be wiped away after you step back outside. You feel his eyes follow you around the room, feel his palms sweat as you tilt your head back and let the journalist whose byline you’ve read countless times tilt your head against her breast and slide her red lipstick over your lips, painting them as if she were making love to you. In a way, maybe she is, her fingers crushing your jaw, the not-quite-liquid, not-quite-solid of the waxy ruby pressing hard against your lips, hard the way he used to crush them, hard the way you like it.
She laughs an almost evil laugh that makes you wonder what else she could do with the lipstick, and you feel a frisson of static pass from her small, bony hands into your cheeks when she pinches them, inspecting her work. You wonder, of course, if he’s fucked her, even though it shouldn’t really matter. Lots of things that shouldn’t matter take up space in your mind, fragments of jealousy on permanent repeat. You pucker up just to give your lips something to do, someone to make contact with who is not him. Her tongue traces the red, teases, darts but doesn’t claim you as her wicked laugh did. You let her know, with your lips, that she could have you, but she simply pulls back and smiles, her nails digging into your upper arm. Suddenly you want to pull her bleached-blonde hair, tug hard until she can’t even make a sound, the feral domme inside of you flicking at your insides, aching to be let out for a moment. Instead you just smile widely and she slinks away to find another victim.
After, you think the lipstick will be smeared—that’s only right, isn’t it, after someone’s just fucked you with a tube from MAC?—but instead, it’s perfect. Redder than red, redder than you’d ever dare in your daily life. Fancy that. They should put that in an ad campaign. You go back to your spying-cum-ogling, your lips now signaling that you are the hussy you know yourself to be, the other woman come seeking vengeance, seeking something you will never have because it belongs to someone else.
Except that’s not really how it is at all; you don’t want what the woman in the slip has, the slip of a woman, the one whose body fits right up against his fleshy arm, whose presence you’ve felt like an erotic phantom from day one. You wouldn’t trade your life for hers if given the chance, yet you can’t help but hate her just a little and are surprised to find how quickly that hate snakes its way into your panties, ignites the chill that’s been coursing through you since you stepped inside.
You watch her from across the room, laughing softly, nuzzling up against some sweet young thing. You could be the sweet young thing, you’ve been told—or warned. She wants to kiss you, he’s let you know, a heads-up that only makes your head spin. You try to imagine what her body would feel like, what your fingers inside her would make her say, but you only get as far as her breasts in your mind. You already know what she tastes like, from that first date when he shoved his fingers into your mouth, fresh from the taxicab where he got his last feel of her until the morning. You watch her until it seems inappropriate to keep doing s
o, then look away, absorb the surroundings like you’ll be writing a report on them later. This is likely your only chance, so you might as well make the most of it.
The apartment is nothing special in its layout, location, design; it’s the decorations—the photo-booth strips, posters, mementos, bookshelves—that mark it indelibly as theirs. There’s no centerpiece, no stunning work of art everyone gathers around; none of the other guests seem to be having an epiphany as they take in their surroundings, no one else is clamoring for more champagne with quite the edge of hungry anger that consumes you. The bubbles work much like a bubble bath, simmering, soothing, smoothing over any rough edges that threaten to erupt. You’re glad you don’t wear eye makeup because already the tears are swimming up, demanding release. You blink them back and look around for something—anything—to latch on to that does not remind you of traveling on a bus with sex toys stuffed in your bag so he could steal an afternoon away from her to shove them inside you.
People are stripping down for the promised bubble baths, sneaking off to corners and closets for make-out sessions, while you forage for more champagne. You will leave if you don’t have it because you can only be here with those bubbles fizzing in your hand, snap crackle pop, like the cereal, before they provide a heat all their own to your insides. You find a bottle and clutch it to you, tuck it against your breasts, make people come to you for a fresh glass. He walks up, silently holds out his empty. You bite down, knowing that even MAC’s finest won’t withstand too many fresh, sharp bites, but not caring.
