by Jeremy Reed
Red Hot Lipstick
Erotic Stories
Jeremy Reed
Red Hot Lipstick: Erotic Stories
Copyright © 1996 and 2013 Jeremy Reed
First published by Peter Owen 1996
This revised ebook edition published 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Acknowledgements go to Erotic Stories and For Women, where some of these stories first appeared.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 0-7206-0943-7
For John and Denise
So I said, 'But I'll do it. Let's do all the things we ever wanted to do or have done to us. We have the whole night. There are so many objects here that we can use. You have costumes too. I'll dress up for you.' 'Oh, will you?' said Marcel. 'I'll do anything you want, anything you ask me to do.'
Anais Nin
Delta of Venus
It is only by admitting night physically that one succeeds in doing away with it morally.
Lautréamont
Contents
The Slave
Lauris's Stockings
Red Hot Lipstick
Devil's Paradise
A Boa Constrictor Tamed by a Flower
Alice through the Looking Glass
Surf and Sensuality
Blue by You
Flying Kites
Blue Bra Straps in a Bookstore
Lima Blues
Lana's Adventure
Catching Stars
Tainted Love
He Was a She
Hunt the Sequin
Blues to Eat Your Heart Out
The Slave
Jim had always wanted to write about the bizarre sexual fetishes he had cultivated since childhood, but there was somehow a screen dividing experience from words; he could remember the act, but it dipped out of focus when he attempted to put it into language. For a long time he walked across the city carrying his problem uppermost in consciousness. And sometimes he walked out at night when it was raining, greatcoat collar turned up in his blond hair, his footsteps taking him to the river with its slow traffic of litter, dead dreams and huge coiling currents snaking beneath the surface like lianas. He was solitary because he couldn't get it right. He could free-associate and recount anecdotes for friends, but he couldn't get it to come out fluently on the page.
Most of his young life he had worked as a gigolo, he had given his body to men and women and his androgynous sexuality was an integral part of him. It was easy for him; he'd never put up gender barriers and regarded himself as male orientated towards female, or male attracted to male. He liked both and considered it perfectly natural to have this bipolar attraction.
Jim sat on a bench by the Embankment. He took out a red-covered notebook from his pocket. It was already blotched, with a worked-up texture of inclusions and omissions, so that the pages looked like ink drawings rather than writings. He liked to scramble words on the page, and one thought crashed so disconnectedly to the next one that often there wasn't time to link them, and he just wanted to get the whole lot down rather than isolate and select how one perception identified with another. He was speedy and restless, and he hoped writing would slow down his manic rhythm. He watched the water, but it was travelling fast in glaucous runs; a barge went downriver with the tide, leaving a grooved furrow in its wake. He had time, but the words didn't; they always came at him with speed.
He remembered that the day before yesterday he had been called by an elderly Italian countess, and had gone over to the hotel suite in Mayfair where she was waiting for him in a leopard-skin catsuit and black spike heels. She had worn a black face veil to hide her age, and was heavily made up with impasto strokes of foundation. Her front teeth were gold. She had wanted first of all to give him head, and his expansive member had fitted between her gold teeth, as she cat-licked him to excitement. In his mind he had pretended it was a leopard which was sucking him off, and the surreal concept had made him hard. He had run his hands all over her leopard-skin body, searching for a tail at the join between her crotch and bottom. And that thought had really excited him. He had resisted coming, for he knew the countess would wish to be ridden long and hard and he feared he might not regain his enthusiasm so easily if he saw her out of her catsuit. And to his delight the suit was held together across the crotch by three fastenings, and when they were teasingly released he was able to enter her as a leopard. He had enjoyed himself playing with this Italian cat, and her prolonged purrs beneath his undulating body had told him that he was giving fulfilment. She had even bitten him on the shoulder to express her felinity.
Jim had known so many encounters. There was the man he visited who liked to dress up like Marilyn Monroe in a blond wig, floating white dress, and wear a lipstick gash which was the red of a strawberry crushed into a white sheet. This man wanted to be elaborately courted. A dinner table would be prepared with champagne and candles, and his black servant would wait at table, supplying every form of delicacy. Jim had to act out the role of starstruck suitor. He would play footsie with the transvestite beauty, she at first acting coyly towards his tentative advances, and by degrees progressing to the encouragement whereby he would slip off one of her stilettos and she would place a stockinged foot in his lap. This was all to be (lone circumspectly and under the pretence that the servant had no notion of what was going on under the table. The ritual also demanded that Jim stroke Marilyn's legs, again with surreptitious, fugitive gestures; he made an occasional ladder in her glass nylons to add to his subject's pleasure. And orgasm was achieved by this slow ritual of advances made over a dinner that lasted up to three hours. No other services were demanded of Jim. The evening culminated with his hand slid up Marilyn's skirt; it stayed there until orgasm had been achieved.
He could remember so many other clients who entertained extravagant needs. There was the woman who insisted on being dusted with long plumed feathers. Tied to the bed, and dressed, according to some obsessive fetish, in nothing but army boots, he performed his task, which was to flick feathers over her nipples and pussy. The woman would build by stages to ecstatic orgasm. One day she had asked Jim to coat her body in honey; he had done this with the pot and paintbrush she had supplied, and then he had placed exotic feathers in the viscous sheen on her skin. She had looked like a tropical macaw, and that time she had reached orgasm just like that, her voice imitating bird-song as she rippled convulsively in spasms across the bed.
Jim got some of this down. He looked at the river and attempted to give his words the water's directional fluency. There was no reversing its course, the current headed inexorably downstream. He must do the same. He tried to envisage the process as holding a mirror to his thoughts, and by examining each image as it appeared in a reflective surface, he was better able to slow his stream of consciousness. He began to enjoy the process of writing, rather than suffer frustration at the opposing speed of thought and language. And the whole city looked better as a consequence. Even the fissured, superannuated South Bank complex opposite took light and appeared to be a meaningful fixture in his personal landscape of the city.
Sunlight was breaking over the river; it lay in white stripes on the water's green coat, and was a sort of sign to Jim that he was getting there. Writing was such a difficult process, but he was beginning to find a way to unlock his memories. He wanted to write a book of sexual memoirs which would be both poetic as well a
s scandalous in its revelations. He thought about it a long time, not forgetting that he had a client that afternoon, or that the woman had provided no specifics other than that she wanted to be a slave. He was used to bondage devotees, and expected to find the usual sort of private dungeon that such women kept in their Kensington apartments. He was almost casual about the prospects, and noticed that in his morning's communion with the river he had managed to fill four pages of his notebook with only minimal crossings out. He was no longer treating the page as a work text to be scored by contradictions, but as a surface on to which he projected lucidity. He was pleased with the architecture he had imposed on mental chaos. A little bit of his life had been re-experienced, and it was like erecting a building block on the page. If it continued like this he would find the means to write his book. He would end up going back to places he had forgotten and reliving experiences he had thought buried in nervous substrata Jim was pleased with himself. He hoped the method would continue into the night after the afternoon visit he would pay his client.
When he arrived at the woman's flat, situated off Kensington High Street, he was elated, and his client was unusually pretty: tall, with a luxurious density of black hair, green eyes and the sort of figure owned to by catwalk models. He expressed no surprise that she should contact a gigolo, for experience had taught him that many people were too embarrassed to relate their sexual fantasies to their partner. Their needs often remained like a shipwreck inside the psyche. Jim knew instantly that this was the case with Dolores, as she called herself, and that she was doubtless happily married, and probably lived out an obligatory but unimaginative sex life with her husband.
Jim sat down on the deep red sofa, and Dolores, dressed in a very short skirt, sat down in a blue armchair opposite. Jim was totally relaxed, and he waited patiently for her confession as a prelude to her particular fetish. And he had listened to so many confessions. Women and men placed him in the role of sexual therapist, and he in turn assimilated their most intimate confidences. And in a perverse way he would come to recycle the disclosures given him and convert them into fictions.
'I'll be direct,' she said. 'It's not that my husband's not interested in sex, it's more that he's straitjacketed by convention. It's like he doesn't have an imagination. If I told him what I wanted he would run out into the street proclaiming my indecency.'
Jim smiled. 'And what is it you want?' he asked. 'You can't shock me. Nobody ever has, and besides I've seen everything and done the lot. I'm fluent with both sexes.'
'I'm a painter,' said Dolores. 'And my husband never ventures into the studio upstairs. I've constructed something up there for my use. It's a cage. I want you to place me inside, and read out a list of things I've prepared to excite me. I want to be a captive, a woman who temporarily belongs to a submissive harem. And when I'm fully excited I want you to enter the cage and make love to me, again locking the door behind you, so that we're imprisoned during the act.
Much to Jim's excitement, Dolores slipped out of her skirt before leading him upstairs. She was wearing seamed stockings and black suspenders and tiny black silk panties. Jim felt his erection spontaneously trigger as Dolores led him up a flight of stairs to her studio. He noticed how she had frescoed the walls and ceiling, and blue, pink and green implosive whorls had imparted a strong energy field to the spacious area. And there was the cage. It had narrow bars and was draped with a black hanging. There was a purple mattress inside, and what looked like a bird-perch facing an oval mirror.
'Here is your text,' Dolores said. 'And please lock the door after me. It will increase my excitement.'
Jim was amazed at her trust; he could, after all, go off and leave her locked inside the cage for her husband to discover. She hopped in with alacrity, and to his surprise sat on the perch like a bird and looked in the mirror. 'Start reading,' she commanded.
He stood back and watched her sitting squat in her black panties, the divide between her legs moist with desire. He took up her script and read out a series of imperatives.
1 Slip your forefinger into your crack, and repeat after me: 'Lick me until I'm silver, and until in my perversity I imagine I've grown a hard cock.'
2 I know you're a bird. Swing on the perch with your legs wide open. I want you to peck the bars. I shall feed you grapes, and you will polish these on your mound.
3 Say after me, 'I want to be taken from behind in a cage. I want to grip the bars with my red talons while you fuck me.'
4 Say after me, 'I'd like to grapple with an eagle, while my husband looks on. I'd like to feel its claws on my back, and as I pulled out its feathers it would turn into a youth.'
5 Say after me, 'I want to be whipped with my wet panties. I'm your slave. You can take me in any way you like, and I'll still give you more.'
6 Say after me, Tie me to this perch, and fill the crack of my bottom with black grapes.'
7 I can feel your excitement increasing. Finger yourself fast, and let me hear you howl when you come.
8 I want you to imagine giraffes mating. Their spots are falling on the ground from passion.
9 Say after me, 'I'm as slippery as a banana skin inside. I want your cock to go so far up it comes back out of my mouth. That way I can be fucked and suck you at the same time.'
10 You need to be punished. I'm coming inside and I won't let you know where I've concealed the key.
Jim was shaking with excitement as he took off his clothes, unlocked the cage door and ducked inside. Dolores went down on all fours, and moved up to the bars and rattled them with her fists. Jim was certain that this incident would take high prominence in his book, and he crawled over to her, with a baguette of an erection. Dolores arched up against the bars as he entered her and thrust deep for the interior. He could feel how she intended this act as a vengeance on her husband. Her repressed passion was volcanic. And in order to lever himself deeper into her, he gripped the bars just above her hands and listened to her commands to tie her with cord. 'Tie me, I'm your slave!' she pleaded. 'Quick, tie my wrists and my feet.'
Jim withdrew and found the cord lying on the purple mattress. He came back and tied her wrists to the bars, and then secured her ankles. 'Tell me I need to be abused as a slave,' she importuned. 'Do what you want with me.'
Jim slid right back up her and began to work her towards a first orgasmic crescendo. The bars were rattling furiously as the force of his thrusts drove her up against the metal. He had never heard a woman's voice pitched to such urgency as she contracted in circling spasm after spasm, coming with a ferocity that drained him.
'Now flog me,' Dolores requested. 'Cut me sharply across the bottom.' There was a bullwhip inside the cage, and Jim noticed that Dolores had her gold initials stamped on the handle: DLR. He took it up and flexed the coil, hearing the whistle with which it unleashed itself on the air. He struck the cage several blows in order to develop a flexible hand, and then laid lash to Dolores, his practised aim leaving a thin red welt on her perfectly proportioned bottom. She had asked him to strike six times, and he spaced each lash to allow her time to recover her breath. She never once complained or cried out, but rather pushed her bottom in the air so that his target was made more vulnerably available. After the sixth stroke he untied her. They were both exhausted.
They went back down to the living room and she poured champagne. It was difficult snapping back to reality, and neither of them was able to switch roles successfully. They had known each other with intensity and under extraordinary circumstances. Jim closed his eyes and she did too. His professional code of detachment prevented him from falling in love with this beautiful woman whose husband was clearly so disinterested in her body that he would never see the red and blue welts he had placed across her buttocks.
'You'll come again to my cage, won't you,' she said. 'What about this time next week. The same arrangement?'
Jim promised to return, and took a bus across London back to the river. His mind was still clear. He wanted to write about the slave. He wen
t and sat within view of the river. The tide had changed, and an architecture of grey marble clouds was roofing the city. But he knew he would write. In his recreation of the afternoon he gave Dolores red hair and the name Genevieve. But the rest of it he got down without too much departure from the facts. He again steadied his thoughts in the reflective surface of the now lazier river. He wrote, and his consciousness of time disappeared, and when hours later he looked up there was a red-haired girl sitting on the bench next to his own. She looked French and could well own to the name Genevieve. Writing is magic, he told himself, as he went over to ask her the time. There wasn't anyone else around, and when he called her Genevieve she laughed. It wasn't her name, but she was lonely and gladly accepted his invitation to walk by the river in search of a cafe.
Lauris's Stockings
Lauris collected stockings. Perhaps the obsession dated back to the time of her first serious boyfriend, and his eagerness to see her unroll a black silk or nylon cocoon the length of her leg, and have the darker area at the top snap tight under a suspender button. And she too had grown to receive sensual pleasure from the unbunching of the silk concertina as it slipped over her painted toenails, and was slowly, sinuously, almost like a lover's caress, brought to a tautness along her thigh. And then there was the alignment of the seams travelling up from the opaque heelpieces, and the dark crescents of the toe pieces through which her nails twinkled scarlet. That act had become a fetish, a ritual she performed in privacy for herself as much as for the trained eye in the crowd who could instantly spot he freer play of a stocking from the comparative immobility of' tights in their deader set at the knees and ankles. Her first boyfriend had told her that a stocking breathed on a leg like a ripple traced through still water.
