“What kind of help did you have in mind?”
I wasn’t embarrassed, though I was surprised that my secret had somehow been revealed. I truly hoped the company was discreet enough to leave the word spanking off their packaging. “Well, I just … it was pretty heavy, and maybe you need some help assembling … whatever’s inside.” He turned his mouth to the rim of his beer bottle and sucked hard, avoiding my eyes.
“Do you have some special expertise in assembling … machinery?” I asked, making sure he noticed my eyes drop from his face to his crotch.
“Not special, exactly, but I’m handy,” he said after another long sip from the bottle.
“Handy. Hmm … well, maybe you can be of service,” I said, draining my own bottle, then walking over to the box. I slipped my Swiss army knife out of my pocket and neatly sliced through the box. He stood and walked over to me and I felt that familiar electricity crackle between us, the kind where all you have to be is one person in a room with another and suddenly, no matter their age or sex or anything else, your body reacts in a way that means you want to fuck this person as soon as possible. I would’ve groaned, but I was too intent on getting my machine set up.
He didn’t speak then, just put his hands on the box and slid it away so the spanking machine was revealed, although it didn’t quite look like the BDSM fantasy sex toy of my dreams so much as it really did appear to be an exercise bench. When all the parts were on my living room floor, I just stared at it. It really was going to be up to me to take the reins, to top from below, because the machine wasn’t going to start itself!
“Do you need any help … ma’am?” he asked tentatively. Even though he wasn’t my type – too short, and not take-charge enough to light my subby soul on fire – I paused for a moment as I wondered whether I did, in fact, want his help; want him to watch me bend over, orchestrate my own submission to a machine made for just such a purpose. Ultimately, I declined, putting a tip in his hand and giving him what I hoped was a mysterious smile. I like to think that he had an inkling what my machine was all about, and went home and jerked off to the image of me getting my bottom smacked again and again.
But I had more important things to worry about. This behemoth in my modest living room was, effectively, my new lover. I had to name him – and yes, it had to be a him. I stroked my hands over the metal, then the spanking implement, the one that would presumably hit me hard enough to make me see stars, the good kind, that would smack every bit of doubt or confusion or depression out of me and leave me simply tingling. I settled on “Hulk”, a beefy, macho name, one that no real man would ever possess. I planned to have a long relationship with Hulk and I worried that if I named him, say, Jerry, I’d someday meet a man with the same name and my fantasies would get muddled.
So I put Madonna on the stereo, opened a bottle of wine, spread out the instructions and started assembling. The process didn’t take long, but I was nervous about making everything right. There’s nothing worse than being primed for a spanking and then not getting it. After an hour of screwing pieces into place, I had to admit that Hulk looked exactly like he had on the website and in the brochure. I got naked, dropping my clothes on the floor, simply because I could. I changed the CD so that “Hanky sPanky” was playing. Then I settled myself upon Hulk, my bare pussy meeting the leather of the cushion as my breasts mashed against the upper part of the seat.
I kissed Hulk for good measure, then secured my arms into the slots for them, a simulacrum of bondage since I could, of course, escape. Then, holding the remote control in my hand, I pressed it, and down came the mechanical arm to smack my right cheek. “Yes,” I hissed to myself, as the familiar feel of being spanked echoed through my body. It didn’t matter that the only human involved in the process was me. I love submission, yes, but I also love the pure physical joy of getting spanked good and hard, and I had started out not at the lowest level, but one of the middle settings.
I squirmed excitedly as Hulk’s next blow landed. I shut my eyes and cleared my mind as best I could. The smacks continued at a steady clip, and soon I was lost in the same sweet spanking sensations I’d been craving. It didn’t matter that they weren’t coming from a human hand; in a way, it was even better, because unless I’m with someone truly wicked, in the back of my mind there’s often that niggling concern that they’re getting bored or their hand is stinging or they’ll be expecting something from me. All the Hulk expected was my bare bottom. I kissed the seat and spread my legs, relishing the wetness as I turned the dial to get the machine to spank me harder.
It really kicked into gear and I whimpered, the pain shooting through my lower half. I held on tight, lifting my ass slightly to make the whacks come even faster. While of course the machine could never rival a human in disciplinary tactics, it seemed to make up for it with the stern, even whacks it doled out. Yes, I had the ultimate power to stop it, but I didn’t want to. It was like the machine was testing me, and I was testing the machine; who would win? I wanted to hold out as long as possible, at least, until I couldn’t anymore.
As I let myself go to the highest level of spanking, where the whacks came so fast and furious it was like one continuous smack, I started to go to another place, as if I were looking down on myself. I wasn’t sobbing or whining or begging; I became one with the machine. I plunged my fingers into my pussy with one hand, shifting around so my entire broad bottom could get its spanking fix. When I came, my fingers were drenched, and when I finally got it together to press stop, the world seemed quiet, like it had stopped entirely in the time it took me to get spanked. I cleaned off the machine, then examined my butt; indeed, its normally pale skin was marked by pink lines and an overall reddish tone. Even better, all that misplaced sexual energy that had been churning through me, looking for a proper kinky outlet, had found it. I felt at peace, truly satisfied, even though I hoped to someday be able to share my machine with a lover.
I plan to write to the company that makes my spanking machine praising them, and suggesting some additions for future models. I hope that with advances in technology, new versions will be able to speak to the user and tell her what a naughty girl she’s been, along with reading her body temperature and movements and sensing when she needs a stronger spanking, even if she’s not quite ready to request it. For now, though, I have a daily date with my spanking machine. I usually use it in the morning, when others are going to the gym to use other, slightly more masochistic machines. I walk out of my building with a grin that has everything to do with my blushing bottom and being able to afford the best spankings money can buy.
Raw
Adam Berlin
I craved raw fish. And like an addict, from the first time I ate perfect sushi, carefully cut, colorfully presented, dark soy sauce, green wasabi and white rice highlighting the delicate pink and pale and red fish flesh, I was smitten. It was like love. All of my money went to eating sushi. I worked and I went out to eat. I worked to go out to eat. I ate sushi until I was full and then I rested and ate more sushi until I was beyond full. Unlike other foods, the craving was back the next day and, as I plodded through my nine-to-five, I dreamed of sushi, all kinds of sushi. Plain sushi and sushi rolls, simple rolls wrapped in seaweed and inside-out rolls rolled in sesame or roe, maki tuna and yellowtail and salmon and eel and combination rolls, exotic, innovative rolls. And the more sushi I ate, the better the sushi needed to be. A ten-dollar hand of blackjack becomes dull with time and so the player bets twenty-five dollars and then a hundred dollars a hand and when he wins, he bets more, thousands of dollars just to keep the high going. A gambler who bets six figures a hand is called a whale. Fish and addiction. The addiction of fish.
The first time I fell in love was at Nobu. I was there with a first date who had a reservation, made a month before. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend and to exact revenge she went to Nobu without him. I’d met her at a bar the night before, and she’d invited me out. I’d always liked food. The New York City social life is de
fined by food, meals out at name restaurants the measure of cool. So we went to Nobu after drinking at a nearby bar, and to keep our buzz going, to keep concentration from cutting into the high, we’d asked the waitress to order for us. This was no diner waitress pushing the daily leftover special. At Nobu everything was fresh and so the waitress had suggested this cut and that cut of fish and, drunk, we’d taken all of her suggestions.
After the miso soup that tasted of faraway seas, after the creamy-spicy shrimp tempura, one of the best dishes I’d ever eaten, after the delicately glazed cod, the sushi appeared. When I hadn’t been staring into my date’s eyes, which I already knew were good enough to stare at drunk but not sober, I’d been watching the sushi chefs work. Our table was close enough to distinguish the different widths of the knife blades. There were two wiry men, who cut the raw fish in fast, crisp gestures, and one man, tall for a Japanese man, with the thickness of an athlete grown-up. The muscles under his white chef’s suit looked menacingly solid and his face was strong and impenetrable, a block of a face that enforced the inscrutable stereotype. He cut the sushi like it was a show, but a show for himself, his gestures economical. After each cut he’d wipe his knife with a hint of flourish, and when he placed the flat plates of sushi on the counter for the waitstaff to pick up, he would nod, once, for himself. I was drunk so I thought I could hear the sound he wasn’t speaking, the internal sound he made each time he nodded his head. Haiii. Like a karate movie, fist through a board.
The platter was set on our table. It was a piece of art. The different colored rolls were beautifully arranged, each with a mosaic inside, flecks of green and orange highlighting the more subtle fish colors, the fanned tail of a shrimp emerging from the center of a large roll as if beckoning us to eat. And we ate. The hot wasabi and salty soy sobered me and my sushi-drunk was better than any alcohol high. I ate beyond full. I couldn’t get enough of the raw fish. If I’d been fucking instead of eating, and I would not have traded those Nobu rolls for anything, not anything, my cock would have been ripped raw. When we left the restaurant, me walking chivalrously behind my date who’d insisted on paying since, she desperately said, I’d made her forget her ex completely, I made eye-contact with the thick sushi chef. He nodded once for me and I nodded once for him.
I had no type. I had fucked them all, every age and race and ethnicity, from every continent, and not because I was playing Around the World. It just happened that way. I think most thirty-seven-year-olds, if they were still single and enjoyed the single life that was New York City, would have been around the world several times. But when I saw her, walking out of Sushi Samba just before I was walking in, I stopped. Nothing made me stop when sushi was the destination, but she did. My sushi could wait an extra minute even if I had spent the day in my cubicle dreaming of Brazilian fusion rolls. She was beautiful, but there are many beautiful women in New York City. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, not at all. Her eyes were a little too close together and her nose was a little wide and her body, while thin and fit, did not have the long, lean minx-quality that was as close to a type as I came. But her mouth was perfect. Her lips were the color of the best cut of tuna, rich and red and moist-looking and, seeing her lips, I couldn’t help but think about what her other lips looked like. I pictured her. I pictured myself in her. My cock inside two perfectly cut, sushi-colored lips. I had to stop. And I had to talk. I wasn’t even drunk, but I was drunk with wanting her and so, standing there on the crowded side of Seventh Avenue, I forced myself to block out the noise and block out my need for fusion rolls served with three flavors of dipping sauce, and I looked in her eyes instead of her mouth.
“You,” I said, simple and clean, one-word raw.
She didn’t say anything. But her eyes were clear and she didn’t move her eyes.
“Even if you’re full, even if you’re stuffed, come back inside with me and let me buy you one more roll,” I said.
Her lips parted in a smile. Her teeth were white, white as rice, highlighting the healthy pinkness of her un-lipsticked lips. She knew her lips were beautiful, that they needed no enhancement. But she didn’t know, I didn’t think, that her lips looked good enough to eat.
“I’m with a friend,” she said. “He’s just using the bathroom.”
“A friend?”
“Yes.” Her voice was playful. Maybe she’d been drinking sake and the whole world looked fun. “A friend.”
“A friend, or a boring date you just realized is only worthy of being a friend?”
“Well done,” she said.
I took my business card and put it in her hand. “Call me,” I said. “You have to call me. We’ll go out for sushi. We’ll go out for the best sushi we can find.”
“I love sushi,” she said and her smile was up-to-something. Her eyes were alive.
“I love it too.”
“Well then,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Call me. I think your friend is coming out of the restaurant right now so hide my card and call me tomorrow and we’ll eat sushi together tomorrow night.”
I was right. It was her friend. He came over to her and took her arm, tentatively, and she let him, but I wasn’t really watching him. I was watching her and, like magic, my card disappeared into her hand.
I went into Sushi Samba, sat alone at the sushi bar, ordered a full plate of spicy tuna and yellowtail and fusion rolls. I watched the sushi chefs work. It was a performance the way they rolled, cut, separated, displayed the sushi on colorful plates. I took my chopsticks from their paper holder, moved one stick against the other, wood on wood, like making a fire.
I picked her up at her door. I was never this chivalrous, good-looking enough to simply hold a door once in a while without ever having to pay for a cab, but she was not just another woman. Her mouth, when she came out of her midtown office building, was as I remembered. Her lips were almost more perfect. The perfect thickness, the perfect color. The perfect texture, I guessed. I had already kissed her in my head, had already bitten down on her lower lip, had already tasted the salt of her blood, like the salt of the sea. I forced my lips away from her mouth and gave her a polite kiss on her cheek, but let my lips stay there for a moment so she’d know I more than liked her. I’d made reservations at Haru on the Upper West Side. Nobu had been booked solid and I didn’t want to spend hours drinking cocktails at a nearby bar until a table at Nobu Next Door could be secured. Bond Street was booked. Blue Ribbon Sushi was booked. I wasn’t the only one who lusted sushi.
Haru was not great, but it was good, and some nights it was very good, and that’s where we went. On the taxi ride up, we made small talk, ran through abbreviated versions of our biographies. She knew it was just talk and I knew it was just talk so after a while we stopped talking background and just talked, punching and counter-punching like we’d known each other for a long time. The cab pulled in front of Haru and I reached for my wallet. While I handed the driver the bill, I looked at her lips.
Haru was crowded, but I had a reservation and they gave us a nice corner table in the back where we could sit next to each other and have a view of the other diners and of the sushi chefs rolling and cutting.
“I love sushi,” I said.
“I love sushi too,” she said.
“Why?”
She looked at me and smiled. It was an impossible question.
You can look up love in the dictionary and the definition is meaningless. Sushi’s definition would be even further from the truth, a simple noun defined as simple raw fish, but the woman in front of me knew it was more, knew the word didn’t come close to what sushi was, and I could see her thinking, really thinking about the why, and then I could see her forming her answer. I admired how she thought before she spoke and I watched her mouth move, just slightly, as she went from one thought to the next to the revision of the thought into words before she spoke.
“Sushi is pure. It tastes pure, tastes like it should go into your body, and it looks pure. Th
ey’re perfect cuts of fish, as if they could be stacked one on top of the other. When I eat a lot of sushi I picture it in my stomach, the pieces stacked one on top of the other. And then I picture my body taking the pieces into it, one perfect piece at a time, the fish flesh making my blood red and my flesh pink and my skin smooth and my heart strong and alive. That’s why I love it. It’s pure. It’s the perfect food.”
“When it’s perfect, it’s as perfect as anything in the world,” I said.
The sushi came. The raw flesh glistened so wetly it could have been alive. I had read of such sushi. A master chef would take a fish from a tank, cut off a strip of flesh, throw the fish back in the water and the fish would swim, while the chef prepared the sushi.
We ate quietly. There was no need to dilute the experience with talk and she seemed to know this. Her lips were as perfect as sushi and I pictured the pieces of fish stacking up in my stomach and then another picture came to me. Her lips. Not her lip lips, but the lips hidden by the tablecloth that shielded her lap. I pictured a piece of those lips stacked in my stomach and I felt a rush go through me, more intense than the greatest craving. I put my chopsticks down and looked at her and I nodded my head, like the thick-muscled sushi chef at Nobu.
“I want to take you to Nobu one day.”
“There are sushi places better than Nobu,” she said.
“I know. But Nobu was my first and I want to take you there.”
“Why did you stop me last night?”
“I had to.”
“You didn’t have to. How did you know I wasn’t dating a jealous man who would hurt you if he saw you giving me your card.”
I lifted my arm, made a muscle, asked her to feel it.
“So you would have hurt him.”
“I don’t fight,” I said.
She moved her hand over my forearm. “That’s the muscle of a hoodlum,” she said.
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