“Well?” Katy prompted. She stroked my hand back and forth over her chest. Her skin was moist velvet with perspiration lubricating my caress. The ball of my thumb glanced against her breast and I was sure I felt the nipple stiffen. “Do you think that feels unattractive?” she asked.
“I don’t recall touching anything that ever felt better,” I answered honestly.
Her questioning expression turned into a mischievous grin. She lowered my hand to one breast so I was cupping her through a film of damp cotton. In the stillness of that moment I could feel her pulse through the hard bead of flesh that sat at the center of my palm. “In that case,” she whispered, “if perspiration suits me so much, why don’t you see if you can make me sweat a little more?”
It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Maybe there was something appropriate about the fact that it began at the end of the day? I don’t know. I only know that, once we’d started, our passion quickly became boundless.
Perhaps I should have noticed there was something a little kinky in her desire to excite me on the porch. The exhibitionism of what we were doing didn’t cross my mind until afterwards, when I realized that any passing neighbor could have seen us and been shocked or offended by our intimacy. But at the time it simply felt natural to do everything Katy asked. I was content to bury myself deep inside her smoldering depths and bask in the cries of her encroaching orgasm. Once again it was her beautiful voice – that musical cadence and enchanting lilt – mesmerizing me and blinding me to everything except Katy. And, from that moment on, I was oblivious to everything except the pleasure that came from being with her.
But I only began to suspect that she had unusual appetites after a month of our relationship. We’d tried a million and one variations on the traditional themes of sex, going from her porch, to the bedroom, detouring via the kitchen/diner, and the stairs on the way there. She invited me into every recess of her body, welcoming me with her mouth, sex lips and other places. She worshipped my erection with caresses from her breasts, tongue, hair and hands and we took each other to climax after climax in a splendor of shared bliss. I spent endless, happy hours watching her tease herself. And I particularly adored the way she would trill her fingers against the beautiful split of her sex – parting the dense, dark curls that covered her labia – while she charmed me back to arousal with the whispered promises of what we would do next. Each step further in our relationship seemed more like a declaration of our love, rather than another jolt down on some descent toward a perverted conclusion.
We made love in semi-public places – under the stars and sometimes under the noon sun. We played power games and water sports, screwed while we were drunk, fucked while we were high, then made love when we were grounded and stone cold sober. We confessed our wildest fantasies, then endeavored to make them reality for the pleasure of each other. And, although I’m probably wrong with saying we did everything, it’s true to say: we did everything we wanted.
Which is why I had no problems with the ropes Katy brought to the bedroom. The contrast of coarsely woven hemp against her dainty wrists was ugly, but somehow exciting. The vulnerability of her naked form, spread-eagled for me and available for the satisfaction of my every whim, was infuriatingly arousing. When I placed myself between her legs, then rode her helpless frame as she sobbed and moaned through a multiple orgasm, I could totally understand what those psychologists meant when they referred to “the good place”. At those moments, when Katy was screaming with joy and her inner muscles convulsed around me in the throes of ecstasy, I knew we were both in the good place.
But, I suppose, good places were never meant to last and ours ended two nights after Katy first suggested we bring another rope into the bedroom. The term anoxia is cold and clinical – a million miles removed from the joy of Katy’s last moments or the liberating release of her final climax – but it was bandied around a lot by my defense lawyers in court. It was usually lumped with a string of other fancy words and supported by dry accounts of the reported stimulation that comes from autoerotic asphyxiation.
The prosecution simply called me a strangler. The jurors were won over by their succinct use of words and, because I was convicted of first-degree murder with more than one of nine aggravating circumstances, I found myself a resident on death row.
Which, until last week, had been the total antithesis of the good place Katy and I had known. But, on the morning when I was ready to meet the attorney handling my final appeal, Katy decided to speak to me again. At first I thought I was dreaming – I hadn’t properly climbed out of my bunk and was enjoying the sounds of the morning calls from bluejays and chickadees – when she whispered in my ear.
“What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”
I could hear her voice as clearly as when she used to nibble on my lobe while we were locked in a post-coital embrace. It was that familiar Virginia drawl, deep set with a throaty chuckle of mischief. Death hadn’t killed her sensuous way of speaking, nor had it stifled the effect she had on me. As my erection grew I began to wonder if I was either insane, or mistaken, or still asleep. Unable to stop myself, I spoke her name aloud. “Katy?”
“Do you like being inside?” she breathed.
And, in that moment, I knew it was her. I didn’t know how she was talking to me. I didn’t know why she was talking to me. But I knew my own imagination could never have supplied such a perfect Katy-esque innuendo. With that one question I was beyond being skeptical that the voice was the product of my own diminishing faculties. I knew that Katy was back by my side.
“I’ve missed you, lummock,” she confided.
“I’ve missed you too,” I admitted.
Her words were a balm, soothing and massaging away the tension I had suffered since incarceration. She hadn’t said anything overtly sexual, yet already she had excited me to the point of full arousal. An appreciation of my responses told me that it would only take another couple of sentences and she would have me ejaculating like some over-excited schoolboy on his first real date.
I closed my eyes and easily pictured the way she had looked when she was speaking. The fullness of her lips was easy to recall, the sensuous pout of her mouth was invariably glossed each time she trailed the tip of her tongue across her Cupid’s bow. When she had used her tongue on my length I always remembered the thrill of pleasure that came from hearing her words and feeling them reverberate through my shaft. On this occasion, when she first spoke to me from beyond the grave, the pleasure was every bit as intense as it had been during those fondly recollected times.
“I’ve come to help with your release,” she giggled.
It was another of her double entendres and hearing that sly humor made me simultaneously excited, relieved and delighted that she was back in my life. I had missed her and I had quietly mourned her passing. But the pressing demands of death row and impending execution had urged my focus to slip away from such important things. “How can you help?” I asked. I wasn’t doubting her ability: I was simply curious to know. “My lawyers are qualified and alive,” I pointed out. “At the moment, you’re neither.”
She laughed. With my eyes closed I could picture the way her breasts always trembled with mirth and her entire body shook. If I kept my eyes closed I could have believed she was in the room with me. It was all too easy to imagine she was struggling to lie by my side in the cell’s single bunk and squeezing her body close to mine. With only the effort of a little concentration I could feel her bare flesh pressing against me. She had one long, muscular leg curled around my waist, and her bare crotch kissed at my thigh. The scrub of her pubic bush scratched wickedly at the top of my leg and rekindled the eager thrust of my arousal.
“I’ve been talking to the state’s governor,” Katy explained. “He has the power of clemency – the right to say whether you live or die – so I thought it best to go to the man who makes those decisions. I made a special plea for him to personally consider your case.�
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The statement was too unexpected for me to comprehend. I was still being enchanted by the lull of her words and teased by the seductive lilt of her voice. The meaning behind what she said took a full minute to register. Disembodied, with no more presence than her voice, she was still able to excite me more fully than any other woman I had previously met. My body ached for her and the threat of climax throbbed in my groin. If she’d had a physical presence I knew I wouldn’t have been able to resist. Passion would have overwhelmed me and we would have revisited the halcyon days of our brief time together. Because I was only listening to her sultry whispers I managed to contain my impulse – but it was still a challenge.
“You’ve spoken to the governor?” I repeated. “How did you manage that? You’re dead.”
Again, she laughed. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed the sound of that merriment. As comforting as the sex, as exciting as the most daring of her propositions, Katy’s laughter was almost enough to make me cry for what we had lost. “I know that I’m dead,” she agreed. “But I spoke to the governor the same way I’m speaking to you now, you lummock: with words.”
My mind glanced over the technicalities with a simple rationalization. If the disembodied voice of my lover could speak to me, why couldn’t she also speak to the governor? “What did you tell him?” I asked. “Is my sentence being commuted? Are the charges being dropped? Or am I being released?”
Katy didn’t get the chance to respond. The crashing of gates being thrown open, and the hollow stamp of boots from the corridor outside, announced the arrival of my attorney. I leapt from my bunk and pulled on my uniform of garish orange overalls. Judging from the heavy clomp of feet I could hear there were three of them. And, after Katy’s revelation, I wasn’t surprised to see my attorney and the guard were accompanied by the state’s governor.
Our meeting was surprisingly swift.
The guard was dismissed.
My attorney started to speak.
Then the governor drove his fist into my nose. He called me a murdering son-of-a-bitch, turned around and left the cell before I had finished falling to the floor. On his way out I heard him say I was going to fry. Unnecessarily, he added: and fucking soon. Clearly startled, my attorney shrugged an apology and hurried off to pursue the chief executive.
“That went kind of well,” Katy said guardedly.
“Yeah!” I had a hand over my nose, collecting a stream of blood while I struggled to decide whether I was angry, surprised or simply confused. All three emotions were vying for control of my reaction but sarcasm eventually won. “That went so well I think the governor’s going to go and check the wiring on the electric chair so there’s no danger of a mistake. What did you tell him, Katy? I thought you said you’d explained what happened on the night you died.”
“I didn’t stick to the truth,” she mumbled. “I said you’d killed me in a vicious and deliberate attack. I mentioned that your diabolical assault has left me walking in limbo for all eternity. And I demanded that he avenge me, or else I’ll haunt him forever.” She laughed, the sound tinged with nervousness this time. “None of it is true,” she said quickly. “But I didn’t think it would matter if I lied a little on this occasion.”
Closing my eyes, trying to show patience and restraint when all I could really feel were confusion, disappointment and betrayal, I asked, “Didn’t you think that sort of statement would be likely to make him believe I was guilty? Didn’t you think that sort of statement was likely to expedite my execution?”
“But that was my plan, lover,” she whispered. “I thought you understood.”
For the first time since Katy’s death a smile stretched along my lips.
“You’re going to get out of here,” she promised. “And, this way, we’ll be together again, where we should be.”
As the understanding continued to dawn I realized exactly what she was telling me. I wasn’t just going to get away from death row: I was going to be with Katy in the good place.
Dangerous Games with Competent People
Kim Wright
The last thing you want when you’re going to see your boyfriend’s hooker is a helpful man. But this man is determined to help. He has the look – you know the look – he has the look of a helpful man. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. You’re standing in the lobby of a surprisingly nice high-rise in a suburb of DC, typing numbers into a security pad, waiting for a woman to come on the line and tell you her apartment number. Her instructions were quite specific.
The money is in a plain white envelope inside your purse. She has instructions about this in the zip file too: “I never discuss payment in person, nor do I wish to see cash. Please place the envelope discreetly on the table as you enter.” It strikes you as strange that a woman with such delicate sensibilities that she cannot bear the sight of money would be prepared to repeatedly bury her face in the genitals of strangers, but your boyfriend described her as “nice”. Perhaps this is what he means.
You key in the numbers and wait for her voice. You get a busy signal. When you try it a few minutes later, you get the busy signal again. The man sitting behind the marble desk calls out pleasantly, “Who are you here to see?” That’s the problem. You don’t know her name or her apartment number, you only know that she calls herself alexandriaandrea and that your boyfriend is sleeping fitfully somewhere in Paris. I’ll be fine, you tell the man. My friend must be on the phone. I’ll give her a minute and try again.
But he wants to help. He waves you over to the desk. If you give him her code he can go into the computer and find her apartment number and ring you in himself. Which seems the opposite of what a security guard’s job should be, but you know that everything about you – your age, your gender, the way you move and the way you dress – makes you unthreatening to other people. Makes you seem like a bastion of respectability. The wall behind the man is mirrored; you can see yourself, your long knit dress with the slits up the side to the knee, your strap sandals, the knockoff Gucci sunglasses pushed back on your head, your real Dooney and Bourke purse over your arm. There is no reason why a man like him shouldn’t help a woman like you enter this building.
But her instructions said nothing about conversations with security men, nothing about struggling to think of a plausible explanation for why you are visiting a woman whose name you do not know. You smile at him, mutter something, go back to the intercom system, type in her code again and this time she answers. She gives you her apartment number and, shooting a smile at the security guard, you head toward the elevator.
When she opens the door she is prettier than you expect. Your age, close to fifty. Her hair is blonde, cropped in a stylish manner, longer in the front than the back, slightly damp from a shower. Andy has said she’s a jock, so you’re a bit surprised she has on full makeup, that you smell perfume, that she’s teetering on bronze slingback heels. She is wearing a very tight slip, burgundy in color. She is about your height, she has a quick laugh, and she further surprises you by saying that you are pretty.
Your coloring, she says. You have beautiful coloring. He didn’t tell me you were pretty. He said you were smart.
And although you are happy to see that she is pretty too, and pretty in a way that means she might be a friend to you, happy that no one would take notice if the two of you walked into a restaurant, even though you are relieved to see that she is much as he described her, something about it all throws you and you forget to leave the white envelope on her table. She has dressed to seduce you – as if you were a man. The cups of her slip thrust her breasts forward. When she raises her arms to brush back her hair, the slip slides up her thighs. Her legs are muscular, an athlete’s legs, and indeed ropes and climbing shoes are all over her small apartment, as well as oars and a racing bike. Perhaps you tell her that she’s beautiful. You think it. Perhaps you say it aloud.
Then there is nothing to do but to go on through the den into her bedroom and to lie down on her bed, to prop yourself up c
asually on one elbow and watch her as if you were a friend come over to help her get ready for a date. There is a bookcase beside the bed and full of travel guides . . . Tibet, Peru, Turkey. Were you scared about coming? she asks. No, you say, not until a man down in the lobby tried to help me. She laughs. She laughs easily. She has laughed a half dozen times since you entered her door.
You say something about her travel books but she isn’t in the mood to chat. You’ve only hired her for an hour and she knows you didn’t drive all this way to talk about Peru.
She begins to stroke your leg, stopping her hand just above your knee. She notes that you are not wearing any panties. This is not an affectation – you rarely wear panties – but she runs her hand farther up your thigh and whispers Bad girl. It’s a bit like the high heels and the perfume, vaguely off in some way you can’t define. She has undoubtedly called any number of DC lawyers and politicians and bankers “Bad boy.” She has undoubtedly said this to your own boyfriend. You reach down and slip off her shoe, you cup the instep of her foot. You catch her eye and you both laugh for no particular reason and when you slide your hand up you find that she is pantyless too and you say, You’ve got a lot of nerve calling me a bad girl. It’s easy to roll around with her on the bed. It’s easy to nuzzle her neck and breathe in the perfume and ruffle the slightly wet hair. I was a little nervous, she tells you. This is the first time I’ve had a woman by herself. But you, you’re so pretty. I didn’t expect you to be pretty.
Truth be told, you’re not all that pretty, but these things she says seem to be part of the deal and you’re willing to go along with it. You run your index finger along her pussy lips and find she’s wet and you push your finger into her, feeling the slight sucking quality of a woman, something half-forgotten that pulls you in. But you’ve been with women? Sure, she says, but only in threesomes. Have you ever done a threesome? You shake your head. Her breasts, you decide, are incredible, better than yours, and you reach into the burgundy slip and lift out one and then the other. It’s all quite nasty, the way the lycra pushes them forward. You bend forward to suck her left nipple, feeling the puckered roughness on the flat of your tongue. She moans. You almost laugh. The moans are like the slingback shoes and the compliments – a little excessive. She wants to make sure you’re getting Andy’s money’s worth.
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