by Sasha Grey
I’ve seen those words before.
An inscription is carved around its upper lip, and stained in red like a tattoo:
Audācissimē Pēdite.
The ogre’s mouth is open wide, as if it’s laughing or screaming, I can’t tell which... And then again in a picture in my hand that wasn’t a picture; it was a key. It was an answer that raised even more questions than before.
I squint and zoom into the spot just above Inana’s left shoulder. It’s the view of a two-way mirror looking out—and it looks out into the VIP club below La Notte—I recognize the bar from this angle even though the people in it are faded like ghosts and insubstantial.
I feel like if they were in the room beside Inana they’ d still appear washed out next to her.
But the picture. The window. The mirror. It’s a doorway, and now I know exactly where to go to find what comes next for myself.
I’ d almost miss the words on the wall behind Inana.
Audācissimē Pēdite
Those places were keys on the journey to whatever this place is. I’ve just flown past the door and am inside.
I’ve finally arrived.
I say the words aloud, likely butchering the pronunciation, but Penelope smiles.
“Yes. We are here.”
I’m quaking inside, yet my hands are steady.
A driver picks us up and Penelope shows me to her house—a gorgeous Spanish-style villa. The ceilings are at least twenty feet high; the tiles gleam beneath my feet. There’s lush carpeting that leads up the stairs to a second smaller great room and the master bedroom where the en suite is larger than my apartment.
Hell, the walk-in closet is larger than my apartment.
“Your home is lovely, Penelope.”
Penelope laughs. “This isn’t my home.”
“Whose is it?”
“It’s yours.”
“Mine? What is this place?” I mean the island, not just the home.
“That is knowledge you must earn. But I will tell you that it belongs to The Juliette Society. Everyone here is a member. More importantly, it’s safe for us and you’ll have privacy.”
I pick at my cuticles, trying to express my frustration while being granted…paradise. “I’m so grateful for the break, but my career has been taken and I want revenge on the bastard who’s done it. I can’t let him destroy my reputation and credibility.” I can’t bear to even say his name.
“More than a career is at stake here—and you can earn the life you want if you’re willing to work for it. You’ve got a few days before the conference you came here for. I suggest using them to try this on. We’re not letting the one who exploited you go unpunished, if that knowledge helps?”
I nod and relax a little. Penny always had a way of making me calmer, more settled. The conference isn’t for a few days. A slow shiver rolls through my body. I’m on an island with only Juliette Society members.
Somehow I don’t think they’re here just to golf and lie on beaches.
I smile at Penelope and take a step closer to her.
TWELVE
THE THING ABOUT PENELOPE IS that she has next to no body hair, almost as though she has neck-down alopecia. It can be a little unsettling at first, encountering no hair, not even peach fuzz, but after that initial surprise, you start thinking of ways to experience it.
My favorite was to make love to her in the shower, our bodies slipping over each other, my hands meandering over her impossibly smooth skin.
Those fine hairs you barely notice actually have a lot of texture and you don’t realize that until they’re gone. I also liked smoothing lotion onto her body, feeling it seep into her skin.
Penelope and I were always more about sensuality than fucking, taking our time undressing each other and laying kisses across the planes of each other’s bodies.
She always smells so expensive and I don’t know what exactly it is, but truly wealthy women have a certain scent, almost as though it’s a pure, clean powder, but also perfume. It’s not just their cosmetics, though they certainly add to it. Maybe it’s more of an absence. The average person’s clothes absorb the scents of life along their day, especially anything they cook. Elite people barely step foot inside a kitchen. It’s rare to encounter one of them smelling of onions and garlic.
Penny smells clean but barely perfumed, as though that scent radiating from her is her unadorned skin. It’s never offensive, but it makes you want to press your face against her and inhale deeply.
We’re lying on our sides in bed, looking at each other. Naked, except for the crisp, cool sheets covering us from the waists down.
Penny’s in great shape, but there’s something about the way her skin stretches over her tiny collarbones that always makes me feel protective of her. This one delicate part of her body somehow makes me feel strong and vital in comparison.
She brushes my body softly with her hand in smooth, gentle strokes. I close my eyes and soak in the tenderness, letting her sweep away the tension of the last few days.
Her fingertips trace patterns over my skin, raising goosebumps all over my body. Her hands find my breasts and she massages them, lavishing care on them too, coaxing every last drop of pleasure she can from one erogenous zone before moving on to the next.
She likes to look you in the eyes when she makes you come.
It’s not the hurricane of pleasure I felt with Dominick, but it’s deep and strong, more like a whirlpool drawing you away from the shore and spinning you around and around in slow circles before pulling you under. Deep under until it’s hard to breathe.
My hands join hers in a dance across her body, urging her breaths to come faster to match my own. Soon we’re both wet and panting and writhing together.
I come first—Penny always found that a source of pride—and then lets me get her off when I’ve finished shaking with pleasure and release.
The best part of making love to a woman is that you don’t have to wait for a cock to get hard before you can go again.
It’s just orgasm after orgasm after orgasm until one of you—or both—passes out.
It’s a great welcome to the island and a cap on the week.
I’m lying still when I wake up, not opening my eyes yet in case last night was a dream.
If I could choose a place to wake up from, if I could pick a point in my life to erase up until, I’m not sure where I’d choose. Erasing the leaked footage would be nice, but things would be the same unless I went back to that night and didn’t participate.
And yet, that night was important, a catalyst. It also meant I lost Jack, but I know now that we were never destined to be together like I’d naively thought. I’d just have been fooling myself, dissatisfied for longer before the inevitable happened and we drifted further and further apart.
I could go back in time to before I’d met Jack, but I don’t want to erase all of what we had together. If you take things back, you don’t know what parts of yourself you have to return too, lessons won during the hard times that happened, the things you thought you’d never live through when your soul is lying in tatters on the floor.
Every experience makes us who we are. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
And somehow, I am in this place, this beautiful home that Penny says is mine and I’m trying to fathom what it all means. Have I arrived at a new place in my life, erasing everything else outside of it? Could I stay here forever and begin anew?
Could I let the things that happened in America be the ones that define who I was, and fade away from sight forever, wallowing in this community, whatever it is?
What is this place?
That’s the thought that opens my eyes and I roll over to ask Penny. She is gone, but there’s something on the pillow beside me, almost like a reward for getting where I’m supposed to be.
I sit up, fully awake.
I’d recognize that worn, dull red book anywhere.
I touch it, running my hands over the cover for a moment before flipp
ing it open to see the familiar blue writing, slightly more faded than the last time I read the words.
Hitting like a sharp, cold, punch of an early snowstorm. Skin’s still inside the sunlight, remembering that warmth, and it feels every flake on itself like the edges are serrated.
Knives of pain that radiate. Radiation that turns inward, transforming into pleasure.
I am transformed.
And yet, the same.
I flip more pages.
How long can I go on? How far would I go? Eight’s as good as seven. Twelve is as good as twenty. What’s one more hour when you’ve gone for seventeen?
The orgasm is as devastating as the asteroid hurtling toward earth with our names on it—it’s just a more pleasurable way to die.
Inana Luna’s diary in my hands again feels like coming home to a person I used to be.
We’re stuck deep inside, but the best way to feel connected to your body is to fuck someone else’s. And yet, that act in itself, when done right, is the thing that frees us from our bodies, shows us our souls. Reminds us of our essences and we can once again see the face of gods.
There are more than we even fathom.
Sometimes gods walk around in human bodies, fooling us into thinking we’re the apex of evolution when there’s so much more staring us right in the face, watching, waiting.
Hungrily waiting for us to become more than what we are.
For them. For ourselves.
I close the book, hugging it to my chest, overwhelmed at being reunited with Inana’s personal thoughts and feelings. When the diary was taken from me I let it go, but never forgot the loss of it. How could you ever truly get over losing a part of yourself someone else found and wrote about? It was like finding myself.
But I accepted it when it was taken and replaced with the USB. Still, when I published Inana’s story instead of reading the USB, it was like losing Inana. My memories of her words weren’t good enough and all I had were the pages people had published online. A tiny fraction of the puzzle.
Had Penelope been the one to take the diary from me before?
I don’t know. I don’t think so, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. I had to take the journey I’d taken to get here now, ready to embrace it. Did Inana ever make it here, or did her journey end at La Notte? Did she know about this place?
We run from ourselves trying to find someone else. We embrace the darkness hoping for the light to shine on us and illuminate the truth when it’s not that simple. It’s not one or the other, it’s one and the other.
Dualities.
Dualogies.
Dynamic duos.
Superheroes need a villain. They need the shadows to see the light. What is music without silence? Pain without pleasure. Black without white, water without wine, movies without movement.
Stasis is death.
Static is death.
Let go of intention and just be.
Maybe things are predetermined. But I’m here now.
I’m here now. It doesn’t matter what’s happening on the news in America. It doesn’t matter what people think. I’m far away for a moment and I will get the last word. Right now I need a break. So for a little while, I’m just going to be.
THIRTEEN
BDSM HAS BECOME MORE AND more mainstream within the last few years as people aren’t as histrionic and shockable as they once were. There’s still that strange dichotomous taboo attached to sex that isn’t there with violence. You can show someone’s head being blown off, but more people are outraged when a woman breastfeeds in public.
We’ve become desensitized to violence. It makes sense that when attaching it to sex, it’s still shocking. But kinks start out in the closet, and then come out into the mainstream, and just like every other fad, people want to try it. You don’t want to be the last one to see that new blockbuster. You can’t be the only one who hasn’t read the “it” book of the day.
And that doesn’t even broach clothing, shoes, and accessories. We are a nation of consumers, always looking toward the next hot ticket item, always saving for the next big thing that will drain us dry. See, people need goals to be happy. People need to be taught that they have to attain things, or society as we know it will collapse. You hear people speak about a zombie apocalypse while munching on madeleines, but think if that actually happened.
The internet goes down, which means banks and commerce are done. Communication is gone except with people in your area. It wouldn’t take long for the world to implode into anarchy, but that wouldn’t last forever. It behooves people to be moral. If the majority of people were running around killing each other, civilization wouldn’t work. Deviant behavior is deviant from the norm. And most people are innately good and don’t want to hurt each other.
But some people do.
And some people want to be hurt.
I read once about a couple of men who found each other in an online ad. One put the ad up, saying he wished to be tortured and killed. The man who answered the ad wanted to torture and kill someone.
It seems like a match made in heaven until you take the laws into account. It was argued that the man who wrote the ad was mentally disturbed and not in his right mind, and the other took advantage of the situation. He went to jail despite the victim leaving behind a detailed letter absolving the other of any responsibility.
But was he truly a victim? We’ll never know what happened, if at the end he had regrets but was too far gone—or the man who killed him was too far gone and didn’t listen when told to stop.
I’m pretty sure cannibalism was involved.
Sometimes from the outside, something seems strange and harmful when really it’s exactly what people are looking for.
This is especially true when it comes to sex. We’ve all heard about something that raised our eyebrows. Infantilism, pony play. Furries. Sure, the first time you hear about anything new when it comes to sex can be strange, laughable even. There was a heavyset man who made headlines for preferring the holes of Swiss cheese over a woman’s. I think about that often. I wonder if the fetish was more texture or scent based. I’d have to imagine scent maybe it brought him to a special place in his memory.
I mean, do you remember the first time you hear about being eaten out? “You want to lick me where? Why? That’s gross!” Then when you were older it happened and goddamn, suddenly you understood completely why people would do that.
Even kissing sounds strange when you break it down. “I’m going to put my lips against yours, and we’re going to move our heads around. Tongues will touch and rub together and maybe nibbling will happen. No, it feels good, trust me.”
Sometimes describing the mechanics falls woefully short of the acts themselves.
But back to BDSM.
There are a lot more toys and tools than you’d think, and varieties of each. Even your favorite online store sells sex toys now. People used to have to go inside seedy little shops to get tools to help them get their freak on, and look people in the eye while buying a vibrating, two-headed, spiked dildo.
Some people are embarrassed to step foot inside a sex shop, which I find as ridiculous as the people who are too embarrassed to buy tampons or toilet paper at stores. They’re tools we all use. Who’s to say you’re not going to take that cucumber or carrot and cram it in your ass later on a quiet Tuesday night? Facts are facts. We all shit, and we all masturbate. If you’re going to masturbate, you might as well use a tool that makes it the best experience it can be.
If you’re going to fuck, you might as well try to give your partner the best experience of their life. BDSM is the same.
Penelope finds me still reading the diary, and gently smiles and tells me she wants to show me something. I follow her to a room down the hall that’s larger than I expected with hunter green walls and light hardwood floors. There are cabinets on the walls with no doors, but it isn’t until Penny flips a second switch on the wall that the cabinets light up as well and reveal their contents.
Whips, chains, restraints, crops, lubes, dildos, vibrators.
It’s a kinkster’s wet dream. Possibly literally.
I do a slow perimeter walk around the room, gazing into all the cabinets as Penelope talks.
“These are all yours, to do with as you wish. You can choose not to use any of them, simply keeping it body to body with no toys. But you must learn how to use all of them. Some I know we’re both familiar with, but now you must master them all to please your lovers—if you want any. You know what we are, Catherine. Hopefully, you’re learning who you are too.”
I nod.
She smiles and rubs her hands together. “Let’s start with one of our favorites…butt plugs?” She poses it as a question instead of an order, a great way to get me comfortable.
I understand people’s aversion to anal play. Anything where poop is involved isn’t innately sexy—unless you’re into that, which I’m not. Guys seem to have a fascination with it right off the bat which seems strange, but I saw a guy fucking a tailpipe in a car in a video on the internet the other day, so not much shocks me anymore when it comes to the things guys want to stick their dicks into.
I’ve never gotten why they don’t teach more about exploration and pleasuring yourself in sex education in school. My experience may be different from yours, but it was very much a vanilla, heterosexual, normative narrative with very little deviation from the missionary script. Why do we teach teenagers all about wars and quadratic equations, but not let them know that it’s okay to explore their own bodies? I understand not wanting to encourage sex when they’re young, but masturbation?
If you want to be scared, use a blacklight in a teenage boy’s bedroom. I’m pretty sure you could see that shit from space if you did it at night. Besides, if people were regularly—and effectively—getting themselves off, they’d know how to get each other off when they’re ready to have sex.
But even within the “safe” topics in school, they never talked about anal sex, or gay sex at all. Hardly anything for oral as well, which is a shame. If they’re trying to educate teenagers, they should be educating them about everything without excluding non-heterosexual norms. I mean, what message is that sending to LGBT kids?
