A Good Student

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WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design: Shereads Photo © Saturar A Good Student © 2008 Elliott Mabeuse eXcessica publishing All rights reserved

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A Good Student By Elliott Mabeuse

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Chapter One

You give up a lot when you try to be a writer. Money, the things other people have, even family—you can pretty much kiss all that goodbye. But there are compensations. Your life's maybe not as wide as most people's, but it's deeper, and sometimes it’s more interesting. You're always trying to explain and describe things to yourself, and so you see things other people miss and feel things most people are too busy to bother with. I used to think about that every morning when the El would go by. When this story takes place, I was living in a semi-converted loft in an interesting part of the city, right smack up against the L tracks. So close that I could stand at my kitchen window and stare eye to eye with the people riding to work in the morning and coming home at night and I could see their eyes didn’t go very deep. I was writing mostly porn at the time, and I knew these were the people who were reading it, but you couldn’t tell from their eyes. I was also teaching a survey course in poetry at Crane Community College to help pay the bills, and that’s where I met Emma. It was a summer session, a small class of maybe twenty students in a funny kind of miniature lecture hall, a semester's worth of work crammed into six weeks, and I was just there as temporary help—an adjunct instructor—because none of the real faculty wanted to waste their summer teaching kids who were just trying to blow their way through a survey course. Emma was a returning student in her mid-twenties. She'd dropped out of her regular four-year college for whatever reason before graduating, had done whatever

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she'd dropped out for for a few years, changed her mind and now worked in an office during the day and took courses at night to finish her degree. I liked returning students. They knew why they were in college and they took it seriously. They'd also been out in the real world long enough that they came into the classroom with some real questions, but they were still naïve enough to think they'd get some real answers. Still, I never expected to connect with Emma. She seemed a bit too vain, too good-looking and fashionable to have any intellectual ambitions, and her glowing, cultured tan didn't inspire a lot of confidence in her academic dedication. She was tall, very nicely built, with a lush and sumptuous womanly body—long brown hair and brown eyes—and she always dressed well. She took care of herself. She looked like a girl whose main interest was men, who knew her own worth and thought pretty highly of herself. I had her pegged for an upper middle-management husband in a few years, two kids and a McMansion, and incipient alcoholism starting about age 40 when she learned about her husband’s affair. That is to say, she seemed like a perfectly normal suburban girl to me. In light of what happened between us, that's important to keep in mind. She wasn't weird, or a loser or a geek, or neurotic in any meaningful way, and in fact the work she turned in was very good. She could spell and she could write and she knew how to use semicolons, which is a rarity these days bordering upon the freakish. She was a very smart girl and could have coasted through the class but, as is true of so many students these days, she really wasn’t interested in being smart and apparently had never found

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much use for it. What she was, was something else I still don’t know how to define. Sensual? Sexual? Submissive? Obsessed? Some of my former students tell me I'm intimidating at the beginning of the semester, and I do like to start out pretty tight and relax as I go along, so maybe that's what got her. Or maybe it was when we started talking about poetry of the Beat Generation and the sexual license and drug-use of the Beats. Maybe my own acceptance of these kinds of behaviors came through. But soon Emma was coming down the steps of the lecture hall after class to hang around the lectern with a few other students to continue the discussion or just schmooze as I put my notes away. Sometimes I'd end up walking her out of the building. Emma liked poetry. She really did, and that surprised her and surprised me too. You know, the way they teach poetry now, they have the kids start writing in third grade and everyone's a poet, and that's nice. Their hearts are in the right place, but what they learn is that any bunch of words you put down in vertical form is a poem and so people end up thinking poetry is crap, which most of that kind of poetry is. We don't study crap in my class.—because not all poetry is equal and there is such a thing as bad poetry and most poetry falls under that heading. More importantly, there really is such a thing as good poetry, profoundly good poetry—exquisite, thunderous, magical, fantastically beautiful poetry, and that's the kind of poetry we covered in my class, and that's the kind of poetry Emma liked. And, of course, so did I. When Emma heard there were people around who were still writing that kind of poetry and not only did I know where they hung out but I hung out with them, she was

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rather stunned. But this was towards the end of the great Chicago Poetry Reawakening, and the scene was still going rather strong in the bars and clubs I went to. We talked about other things I wrote, and one night after class I mentioned I wrote stories as well. When she asked me what kind of stories, I didn't even stop wiping down the white board. I automatically gave her my stock reply: "Romance." That wasn't entirely true because, as I said, what I was really writing at the time was pornography, BDSM mostly, savage and passionate and very graphic, pouring all my own sexual frustrations into it. I wasn't proud of this, and normally I avoided the question altogether, but that night's lecture had been about Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, drugs and sex and homosexuality, and Emma seemed to have a breathy, spellbound look about her that I wanted to be a part of, so I told her. A community college poetry instructor doesn’t get many chances to impress his students. Then she asked me if I published under my own name and I did the unthinkable. I gave her my pen name—my porn name—and I told her my stories were on the web. I even told her where to find them It was an idiotic thing to do and I'm not sure why I did it. Wait. That's an ingenuous thing to say and a lie. I know damned well why I did it. I was a middle-aged, adjunct instructor at a crummy community college and would never have the money and prestige someone like Emma would respect and I wanted to impress her. I wanted her to know who I was inside. I wrote porn and I pretended to look down on it, but when I wrote, I poured my heart and soul onto the page and I knew it showed. It was powerful stuff.

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In any case, I was there for the summer only, so what did I care? If she read my stuff and got shocked, then the hell with it. At least I'd have the pleasure of scandalizing her. Odds are she wouldn't even remember my pen name or wouldn't bother looking up my stories anyhow. There happened to be an hourly exam during the next class session, so I really didn't get to talk with her before then. I just passed out the blue books and they got to work. She kept her head down and began writing, and I leaned against the lectern and kept a casual eye on the kids, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off those long legs now, or the heavy thrust of her breasts against her cotton tee, the way she twisted her hair in her fingers as she concentrated. One time she looked up and caught me staring at her, and she seemed to hold my eyes a bit longer than necessary before returning to her test. There might have been a slight smile on her lips or I might have imagined it. The students turned in their bluebooks one by one and filed out, and Emma kept her eyes down discreetly as she slid hers onto the pile, but when I got back to the office I was using, I turned to hers first, and on the second page, outlined in a square of pencil, it said, "I read your cheerleader story! It was incredible!! Is it for real? –Curious! E." The "curious" was underlined three times. I sat there in the office with my heart in my mouth. I knew the story she meant, of course, and now I ran through it in my mind, assessing the damage, wondering just how much I’d revealed. I was both ashamed and wildly thrilled—thrilled she'd seen my dark imagination at work, ashamed at the hack job I’d done on that particular story. It was a toss-off piece—no real plot, written for a BDSM site: a teasing college cheerleader is 9

abducted and tied up in the deserted gym by the domineering football coach who slowly strips off her clothes and does all sorts of thoroughly rude and nasty things to her, all of which she of course secretly loves. It wasn't my greatest piece of work, but the parallel to our current student-teacher situation gave me chills. I graded the other tests quickly, hardly concentrating as I turned over various responses in my head. By the time I got to Emma's test, I went to her little message, and where she'd written, "Is it for real?" I folded it over. I uncapped my red pen and felt my jaw clench as I wrote, "As I've been telling you all term—write what you know…" I was sorry as soon as I wrote it. I felt sick and demented—predatory. I was glowing. She'd written a good test but no better than a B. I gave her a gift, an A minus. She'd know it was a gift too—payment in advance, a joke. With my hand almost trembling, wrote. "This grade is negotiable." I debated a long time whether or not to put a smiley face winking next to it. I finally decided not to. Why pretend I was kidding? I left the tests outside my office where the students could pick them up. The next class, she came in wearing a short sleeve blouse that was a bit snug and opened perhaps just one button too low, revealing the slopes of her breasts. She was wearing a skirt too. That wasn't unusual—a lot of the kids came to class straight from work, as did Emma. Maybe I’d just never noticed before? She didn't sit in her usual place either, high up near the aisle. The lecture hall was a miniature auditorium that had seats and tables bolted to the concrete floor which

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rose in steep tiers like an operating theater, and Emma slid into a seat in the center of the fourth tier up so her knees were on a level with my eyes. Her placement was so blatant it was almost comical, and I might have laughed had we been alone or further along in our relationship, but at this point there was no relationship between us, and so when I looked up from my lecture and saw her knees casually apart and the hem of her skirt sliding up as she idly scratched her thigh, I actually started to stutter. Of course, I could see right up her skirt to the white crotch band of her panties, stuffed tight with the flesh of her sex. She wasn't taking notes, though she pretended to be. I could tell. She doodled on her pad, or leaned back and stretched and pushed her shoulders back, straining the buttons on her blouse. She crossed her legs and pulled her skirt up, and her knees and the bottom of her thighs seemed to itch a lot. Whenever I looked up, her head would be down, but she did everything except fellate her pen and thrust her hands between her legs. It was a wonderful performance and I saw I'd seriously misjudged her. She might or might not be submissive, but she definitely wasn't shy. When the class ended, I said, "Emma? Could I see you for a few minutes?" She had to wait while I explained some other students' grades to them, and then she gathered up her books and slid out of her chair and came down to the podium. Maybe my description of her behavior and clothes makes her sound cheap, but I assure you, she didn't look cheap. She was a beautiful girl—perfectly made up, with just the faintest hint of perfume. "Yes, Mr. Devlin?"

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I collected my notes. "So you read that story?" Her eyes lit up, a smoldering glow. "Yes. I read more too. You have a lot. That beach one and the one about the girl in the basement, and the clothes, and the one with the girl who gets kidnapped…" I nodded, then looked her in the eye. "You know, I only told you about those stories because I trust you." As I said, people tell me I'm an intimidating guy. I don't notice it. I'm big and strong, and I know I have a lot of anger inside, and maybe that shows when I'm being serious. But I'm not mean, and I don’t intend to scare people. Something inside me felt Emma starting to respond. I couldn’t say what it was—whether her breathing changed or something in her eyes or the attitude of her body, but she seemed just a little bit scared. "Of course," she said. "I wouldn’t tell anyone else, Mr. D. I mean, I don’t think anyone else would understand." "No. They wouldn't." I snapped my briefcase closed and gestured for her to follow me. "But you understood, didn’t you, Emma? What did you think of them?" We walked up the stairs of the lecture hall. She was just behind me. "Well, they're very good stories. I mean, you know… They're very good. I just wondered… I mean, they're not real, are they? Those things the men do in there, the things they do to the women…"

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We were at the head of the stairs now, at the exit. I snapped off the lights, leaving just the spotlights shining down on the empty lectern. Maybe that had something to do with it—the darkness, the dramatic lighting. I turned to her. "They're real enough, Emma. They're all based on things I've done. Things I do. I've changed the settings. I've changed the characters—their names, their ages. But they're real. Why do you ask?" We stood by the open door to the corridor. It was late, almost ten o'clock and there was no one around. Even the parking lot was deserted. Emma stood with her back to the cinderblock wall, not knowing where to put her eyes. "Darkness stirs my soul," I quoted. "Desires whose name I cannot speak. His body is within me, his spirit is upon me, and I am his anger and his joy. I am his sickness and its cure. He shames me with my pleasure; my surrender conquers him. All dissolves between us and he sees me as I am." There was a long moment of silence in which nothing stirred between us but our breath. I put my hand on the door frame, blocking her way. I don’t know why I did. I did it without thinking. I was waiting for an answer from her. "Who wrote that?" she asked nervously. I ignored her question. "Is that how it is?" She didn't answer. In the darkness, I saw her chest rising and falling. "Did you have a question for your teacher, Emma?" Again, no answer. That was answer enough.

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I put down the briefcase and pushed the door closed. The hydraulic door-closers hissed softly and then the lock caught and clicked firmly shut. I knew no one would be coming in here until after midnight. We were alone in this empty lecture hall together, alone in this vast, enclosed and vacant space, a magical space suddenly filled with sexual threat. Things began to work between us that we had no conscious control over. A certain amount of light still spilled from the glass panel of the door into the darkened auditorium, but that just made the real world feel that much farther away. I put my hand on the wall next to her head and leaned over her. I had no doubt about her now, and I knew my eyes were glowing as I stared at her. I knew who she was, like a fox knows a rabbit. I could feel her. That was the thing. I could feel what she felt. "You've been like this all your life, haven't you?" I asked. "The things that were in those stories, they’ve been exciting you since before you even knew what sex was." The rabbit looked at the fox and saw there was no point in lying. "How did you know?" she asked. “Because I’m the same way.” I took the books from her hands and tossed them on a table. "Come here. Away from the door." I led her a few feet into the auditorium, away from the square of light. She was still standing with her back to the wall and I leaned over her again, keeping her trapped. Her eyes were shining with something between fear and excitement, her lips parted and glistening.

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It's a strange and thrilling feeling to know what a woman's feeling, to be in two places at once—to be the fear and the cause of the fear, to be the strength and the weakness. It was happening to me with Emma. It was happening very clearly. "Lift up the front of your skirt." "What?! Mr. Devlin—!" She looked shocked. "Just do as I say. Lift it up and hold it at your waist." There was a moment when our wills collided and we just stared at each other, but I knew in my heart she wanted this. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. I knew it because I was both of us. I felt my will overcome hers like my hand closing over her fist, like an embrace, and I felt her give in. Her hands went to her skirt and she began to gather up the fabric. "All your life you've been waiting for someone to find out," I said to her. "You've been dying for someone to know. You've needed someone you could tell and you've prayed for it. You've ached for it. Haven't you, Emma?" Her skirt was gathered above her panties now, and I lowered my right hand and touched her bare thigh, midway between knee and hip, smooth and warm as the summer sun. She stared at me in the dark. Her nostrils flared. "No," she said. "No." "You've dreamt about a man who would show you what's inside, who knows what you can feel, because you know there's so much more, just waiting. So much more you're just waiting to give, to have taken from you, don't you? That's it, isn't it, Emma? To have it taken…"

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My fingertips slid up her thigh, slowly working around to reach the soft and sensitive insides where the skin seemed to tremble, stroking first one leg, then the other, caressing her as if she were a frightened animal. My body was very close to hers now, almost touching her. Her breasts rose and fell in the dim light. Suddenly she put her hands on my shoulders and her skirt dropped over my wrist like a curtain. I kept my hand where it was between her legs. "No," I said quietly. "There are rules here, Emma, and the first one is—you don’t touch me. Not without permission. I touch you, but you don't touch me. Understand? Now pick up your skirt." She took her hands off my shoulders and lifted her skirt again, revealing her snug panties and the smooth plane of her belly, tanned as dark as her legs. I brought my hand up and boldly stroked her between the legs through the smooth synthetic fabric and she shuddered. I felt her legs quiver. She was warm and soft and humid and I could feel her anatomy perfectly through the thin material—her swollen labia, the awakened bump of her clit. "It's good to be touched, isn't it?" I asked her. "It feels good to have someone else touch you, someone who cares what he's doing? She likes me. She likes being touched. I can tell because she's getting wet. She's getting wet and she's opening like a little flower." I pushed my finger against her and felt the fabric give over her opening. Emma mewled, a piteous little sound that excited me. She was warm down there and a hot, sticky oil began to moisten the thin material. Emma leaned against the wall and pressed

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the back of her head against the bricks, breathing fast and shallow, holding her skirt up as I'd ordered, exposing herself to my touch. She had no choice and we both knew it. She had beautiful hands and elegant nails, and they squeezed the skirt so hard her knuckles turned white. It was very quiet. I could almost hear her clothes move as she breathed. "What are you going to do?" she asked nervously. "What are you going to do to me?" It was fairly obvious what I was going to do, standing there with my fingers on her pussy, but I knew she wanted to hear the words. That was no problem. Words were my specialty. "I'm going to play with you, Emma. I'm going to play with your pussy and make you come, right here in this empty auditorium, just by touching you with my hand, just because you need it so incredibly fucking much and you feel so incredibly fucking good. Do you understand?" She swallowed as if her throat were very, very dry and nodded, eyes closed. "Good, good." I slid my fingers up and down her slit, forcing the fabric against her. I found the bud of her clit and bore down on it, then eased up and let my fingertip flicker against it like a little flame, back and forth, closing my own eyes and letting the actuality of what I was doing wash over me for a moment, giving myself time to fully and entirely realize I was body-to-soul with this beautiful girl to whom I was a stranger, her skirt up, legs apart, making her give herself to me. Emma moaned and then took a deep, shuddering gasp.

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"Oh please!" she hissed. "There! Right there!" "Who's giving the orders?" I pretended to be offended. I stopped flicking and started a slow, coaxing massage of her clit, as if beckoning her out, calling her to follow. "This is between me and her, Emma," I said. "You're just along for the ride, because you happen to be attached. But me and her, we have an understanding. She likes what I'm doing and she knows I'm going to make her come, and she wants to come very much. She wants to come right in my hand as I play with her, and that's what we're going to do, right here, right in this classroom. I'm going to play with this little whore pussy and make her come, Emma—make you come, too. Understand?" "Oh God!" She moaned and clenched her teeth against the pleasure as I touched her. It was terribly lewd, just filthy, this beautiful young woman leaning against the wall of the darkened classroom with her legs apart, holding her skirt up for me as I masturbated her. I pushed the crotch band of her panties to the side and my fingers touched naked flesh, soft and wet and vulnerable. Emma was panting now, and I felt her buttocks flexing unconsciously in a reflexive fucking motion as I fingered her clit and teased the inside of her cunt. "Take your right hand," I said, "and unbutton your blouse." Her fingers were shaking as she did as I said. "Another button." The second button was at nipple level. The inner slopes of her breasts were visible now, full and ripe, encased in a smooth white bra. My fingers were still playing in

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her pussy, holding the crotch of her panties aside with my ring finger while my middle finger played in her hole and my thumb and first finger slid around her clit. I leaned my head down so I could smell her perfume and began to lick the warm smoothness of her breasts. Emma was perfect—perfect. She stood there and let me play in her soaking pussy and lick her tits, holding her skirt in her hands, either too afraid to move or too enraptured—too thrilled by the way I toyed with and manipulated her. I'd been right. My feelings about her had been totally right. She was a woman who needed to be used, pleasured, violated, one of those women who can only give when it's taken from her— the kind of woman who drove me absolutely crazy. "How is it, Emma? How is it?" I slid my fingers into her cunt. "You're going to come, aren't you, darling? You're going to come for me, right in my fucking hand." "Oh God," she moaned. "No! No!" But her hips were bucking up at me now as I fingered her and her thighs were flexing, pushing that soft hairless pussy onto my plundering fingers, giving it to me, a perfect whore for what I was doing. "You love it, don’t you, Emma? You love it!" She looked at me in panic and I saw she was losing it. The excitement of being fingered and played with like a hot little tramp was more than she could stand, and the hidden slut was coming out, wild, hungry and uninhibited. It's magic when you have a woman like this—absolute magic. The hotter she gets, the more you want to do to her because you know it's turning her on, the shame,

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the loss of control. I wanted to give her more, so I reached behind her with my other hand and lifted the back of her skirt, worked my hand under the back of her panties and pressed a finger against her tight and private anus. "Oh, Mr. D! Don't!" Her eyes were wild, the whites showing like a frightened mare's. She gasped, pressing her head back against the wall, but I felt her buttocks clenching on my finger as she punched her pussy against me in helpless excitement. "Give it to me, bitch!" I hissed as I leaned my weight against her. "Give it to me! Look at what I'm doing to you. Go on, look!" I moved back enough to give her room so she could look down and see the way her hips were pushed out and pumping obscenely while my fingers slid in and out of her cunt. "Oh God!" she moaned, shamed by the sheer lasciviousness of her own degradation. I took my hand from her ass and grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, making her arch her back as my fingers stroked her cunt. I studied her, seeing her lose it, seeing the look of raw animal lust on her face. "Hold onto me now, Emma! Hold onto me as you come!" Her thighs trembled, her legs growing weak. She dropped her skirt and held onto my shoulders, one hand crushing the fabric of my shirt into a ball, the nails of her other hand digging into my muscles. "Yes!" she screamed. "Yes! Yes! YES!" I was afraid her screams would attract attention, so I kissed her, holding her head back by her hair and devouring her mouth with mine, muffling her cries as she shrieked

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out her pleasure, her pussy pumping, her internal muscles pulling at me as she humped and jerked and came.—and came and came and came.

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Chapter Two For a long moment, Emma clung to me in the darkened auditorium, still shaking in the aftermath of orgasm, her eyes closed, reluctant to let it end. I was reluctant to let it end too, because I knew what was going to happen now and I really wished I could keep her from going through it. I felt her astonishment and her guilt and embarrassment, and stronger than those was her feeling of deep, deep relief, not only the sexual kind, though that was considerable and that's what had her leaning against the wall and panting, but the relief of having her secret revealed, of having her submissive side exposed and witnessed. I could almost feel it, this sense of being unburdened at last and the breathing space it gave her, and I knew it wouldn't last. Anything she took such pains to hide couldn't just be revealed so easily and she was bound to close up again. She leaned against the wall as she caught her breath, and at last she put her hand to her head as if to check for a fever. I watched her. When she opened her eyes, she just glanced at me, afraid of what she'd see. Here came the guilt and the shame and I knew if at that moment I'd told her to lie down on one of the tables and I'd just fucked her blind, like my body was urging me to do, she probably would have accepted it, thinking she deserved no better. She looked like she was expecting it. And actually, if I hadn't been so shocked by what had just happened and so moved by the whole experience, I might have done some idiot thing just like that, because I was on fire for her. But had I done it, that would have been the end of things between us. She'd have seen the whole thing as nothing more than a seduction and semi-rape by a sexual predator looking for some easy ass, which, to be honest, is what I'd been when we started out, but it's not what I was any longer. 22

Something had happened between us that was more than mere sex, more than a little hand job in an empty classroom. Maybe she wasn't aware of it, but I was. In that battle of wills or drama of male push versus female pull we had struck some magic spot where ego had dissolved and, for a few moments, Emma and I were fused into one being and that's very rare and quite incredible, and I was just stunned. I mean, I didn't know her. We had nothing in common, and I certainly hadn't been expecting anything like this. How had it happened? This one was too good to let get away. I had to have more of her, that was for sure. "Are you all right?" I asked her. She nodded uncertainly. Her hand was still clutching my shirt, and now she released me slowly. The fabric was crumpled and damp with her perspiration. I reached up and she flinched as I started to button her blouse, then she took over for me and finished it herself. "Are you ashamed?" She shook her head in denial, but I saw tears in her eyes. To have said anything more at the time would have been wrong, would have seemed patronizing. To have held her against me and let her feel my erection and need would have been even worse, but to hold her protectively, to shield her from her own feelings—to at least try—that much I could do, and I put one arm around her and cradled her head against my chest. She was stiff and brittle and I felt her heart racing against me.

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"This isn't the casual thing you think, Emma," I said. "You don’t know how long I've been thinking about you, wondering if you might be like this. It's a gift." "Gift?" Her voice was small and uncertain. "Yes. Gift. What you gave me tonight was a gift, and it means a lot to me. It's not something I take lightly at all. I don’t want this to be a one time thing. I don’t want this to be the last time." She lifted her head away from my chest and looked at the floor. "No," she said. "It's wrong. There's something wrong with me and I know it. I shouldn’t be like this." "Like what?" "Liking what you did to me. Wanting it. I shouldn't want these things and I try not to. I try not to think about them because I know they're wrong." "No." I grabbed her head and made her look at me. "It's not wrong. It's not wrong at all. You read my stories. They're real, Emma. Maybe not what happened in there, but the feelings are real. Like poetry. Is there something wrong with me too, then? Is there something wrong because we feel so deeply?" "But no one else—" "Fuck everyone else. What do they know? You've seen those zhlubs in class, how the words go right by their heads. What do they know? What do most of the people in the world know? You feel, Emma. You feel much more deeply than most of the people in the world do, and it's a gift. You think it's a sickness but it's a gift, and I want to show you how to use it. You don’t know what kind of treasure you have inside, but I do. Look—grab your books and come with me. Come on…"

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I picked up my briefcase and Emma took a moment to wipe her eyes and straighten her clothes, then she retrieved her books and I held the door for her. We walked out into the hallway where the lights were mostly off for the cleaning crew. Far down the corridor they were already vacuuming and emptying trash cans, small gray figures against the college's insistently optimistic blue carpet, and now that we were out in public, our recent intimacy seemed to tie us even more closely together. I walked her over to one of the plate glass windows that looked out onto the woods beyond the parking lot and the glow of the suburbs, the strings of highway lights leading off into the darkness. The moon was up, looking pale and confused. "You look at that and what do you feel?" I didn't wait for her to answer. "You feel the night inside you, something dark and delicious, full of secrets and beauty, something beyond words or your ability to express it, don't you, Emma? I know you do." She stared out the window. I could see her reflection in the glass. "I don’t know. I see highways and houses. Malls. Traffic." "No, Emma. Don’t give me that. And I suppose all that just happened is I shoved my finger inside you, huh? You see more than that." She looked at me and I met her gaze, then she looked back out the window. Her eyes grew large and luminous. "I've always loved the night," she said. "But then, I've always been weird." "Yeah. And I've always been weird too. But those feelings are real, and I can show you how to reach them, how to experience them. I can bring the night inside, Emma. All those things you've dreamed of? I can make them real, and you know what?

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They're even better in reality than they are in your imagination. They're much, much better." I took her arm and led her down to my office and unlocked the door. She stood in the corridor looking nervously inside, and I knew all I had to do was order her in and she'd follow. I'd lock the door and keep the lights off and tell her to lean over the desk and she would. Then I'd open my pants and take out my aching prick, push her skirt up over her hips and pull her panties to the side and thrust it into her. God, I'd go in so smooth! She'd still be wet and ready and she'd gasp. Her knuckles would grip the edge of the cheap metal desk and she'd start to rock back and forth as I fucked her, moaning softly, and she'd drop her head in female submission as I held her hips and guided her up and back, plundering her pussy with my thick tool before I threw my head back in rapture and shot my heavy load into her... Yeah. I could have had all that, right then and there, and I was aching for it, but that's not what I wanted. I realized I wanted something more than that. Something had happened between us in the auditorium. We'd made some kind of connection and I wanted more of that, more than just her body. I wanted a lover, not a piece of ass. I wanted someone who was in this as deeply as I was, and for that, I needed for her to want me too. I had to leave her wanting too. I put my briefcase down on the desk and stepped out of the office, closing the door behind me, and saw the trace of disappointment on her face as the lock clicked shut. She wanted it, even though she knew she shouldn't want it, and that was perfect. "Come on," I said. "I'll walk you to your car."

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"I'm parked right outside." "That's okay. I just have something to tell you." The lots were empty for the evening classes during the summer, so we were pretty much alone. Emma drove a nice car, yellow and sporty. The summer air was warm and balmy and the wind rustled through the poplars. It all looked so normal and suburban and collegiate. "Next class," I said. "Wear a skirt and no panties, understand? If you want to go further with this, if you want me to show you what I know, wear a skirt with no panties and sit where you've been sitting so I can see. That's how I'll know you've agreed. Will you do that?" She looked at me and I saw her nostrils flare slightly. "You're serious?" "I'm very serious." "But you don't know anything about me." "I know enough. The rest I really don't care about. Who do you live with? Your parents?" "No," she said. "A girlfriend. We share an apartment." "Well tell them you'll be late next Thursday. You're going out for drinks after class." Emma opened her car door and stopped. "I don’t know anything about you either." "Like what?"

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"Are you married? Have a girlfriend?" "No and no." "How can I get a hold of you?" "You can't. I don’t want to be chatting on the phone and trading life stories, but here, I'll give you my address and cell number. Just don’t use them except in emergencies, okay?" I wrote them down in her notebook as she watched. "You live in the city?" she asked. "Yes. In a loft. It's nice. Maybe you'd like to see it sometime?" Emma closed her notebook and gave me flirty smile. "Yes. Maybe I would." I watched her red tail lights as she drove away, then I went back into the building and into my office. I kept the lights off, spun my chair away from the door, unbuckled my pants and pulled down my zipper. The fingers of my right hand still smelled like Emma's excitement, and the memory of her soft, slippery flesh was still upon them. More, I clearly saw her face as she struggled to hold onto her composure as I masturbated her, saw the female animal within her struggling to break through the inhibitions and the smooth, American-model California-perfect make-up. I saw the dark female need behind that sunny artificial wholesomeness—the even, white teeth that needed to bite, the painted and glossed lips that needed to suck and open in a scream of ecstasy, the sloppy, throbbing cunt beneath her cute, right-on-time clothes. That was it—the savage, wild, feral female, lust-crazed, dizzy with orgasm. That's what I wanted, and my hand pumped my cock as I thought of her arched in pleasure, 28

tied hand and foot, surrendering to the sensations I caused in her, pushing out her orgasms at me one after another like something she had to get rid of, and then the burning, tingling, ecstasy was on me and I gave her my cum in hot, impotent bursts, catching the jets in my other palm to keep it from splattering all over my pants. My impatient ecstasy followed her wherever she was now, driving home on those black, moon-ripped highways.

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Chapter Three

I wasn't really nervous about the next class session. It wasn't that I was feeling cocky or especially sure of myself. It was more like I was sure of Emma, sure of who she was and what she was like, and I knew it was going to happen, maybe not then, but then next session, or the session after. I'd seen inside her. I'd been her for just those few seconds, and I was pretty sure she'd felt it. Once you feel it, you don't forget it. So we'd shared ourselves, and that's an intimacy that went beyond the merely sexual. Furthermore, my acceptance of her bound her to me in a way she couldn't easily walk away from. If I'd just played with her and then fucked her, she could have blown it off as a one-time affair, a kind of mistake, and used my own guilt against me. She could have expected I'd spend the rest of the semester avoiding her, and she would have cozied up to her own feelings of being sick and perverse and accepted my rejection as the price of her perversion. When I met Emma, I was two years into my big novel and I knew I was lost. I was a mediocre poet, a decent short story writer and a pretty good teacher, but I was a lousy novelist, and the book had dribbled off into a meandering stream of the usual intellectual crap. It wasn't good—and it wasn't good going home and hanging around with a group of other mediocre poets and lousy novelists and living such an emotionally flat life. I know everyone lives an emotionally flat life, but still, it's not good. Emma came in. She was wearing a salmon pink tank top with the bra straps showing, which was the fashion that summer—though I doubted she'd worn it that way at work—and a black skirt. She was also wearing a big pair of sunglasses, which she'd

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never worn before. She played the sunglasses well and the top did great things for her. I wasn't the only one who stared or, rather, who pretended not to. She took a seat in the fourth row up and crossed her legs so I couldn’t see if she'd followed my instructions or not, although her position in the infamous fourth row suggested she was going to show me something. It was the first indication I'd seen that Emma was adept at playing this game too, that maybe she wasn't the innocent victim of her own uncontrollable desires, but that she was entirely capable of inciting them in others. She knew what she was doing, and now that the game was afoot, she was showing me she wasn't exactly defenseless. I knew then and there she had nothing on under her skirt. It wasn't the longest lecture of my life but it seemed like it, and Emma said little, sitting there inscrutable behind her sunglasses, as if daring me to guess what was on her mind. I had to stay behind the lectern to keep from showing the incipient erection that began the moment I laid eyes on her and continued throughout the class. It was a great relief when, towards the end of the period, some of the kids got involved in a discussion of a Robert Frost poem and I could shut up for a while. I glanced at Emma and she slouched down in her seat and uncrossed her legs. I was leaning on the lectern and the light was bad. In fact, I couldn't see all the way up her skirt, but then, I didn't have to. There was no reason a girl would sit like that, with her knees open under the table, unless she was showing you something, and she certainly wouldn't choose that moment to take off her sunglasses and look at you, nor would she raise her skirt and rub her knee.

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And that's what she did—nothing so corny as sucking on her sunglasses or licking her lips or preening—she just opened her knees and looked at me. This is me. This is what I have. She apparently saw in the color of my face or the clench of my jaw that her message had been received. She pushed her skirt down and suddenly sat up in her seat, looking at her notes as if they were the most interesting things in the world and crossing her legs demurely upon her salacious secret. I felt physically dizzy. All my blood rushed either to my face or my crotch and my cock sprang violently to life like a fist trying to tear through my shorts. I thought I'd wanted her before, that I'd been aroused just when I saw her, but now I felt like a charging bull who'd just caught sight of a matador's red cape. I had to dig my fingers into the side of the lectern to hold on against the rush of pure testosterone. The conversation continued but I had no idea what they were talking about. Emma studied her notes and put her sunglasses casually up on her head so she looked typically suburban but, to me, even more devastatingly erotic for its plainness. Her arms were across her breasts—the lecture hall often got too cold from the AC—and I don’t know how she knew I was looking, but she spread her knees apart again, her thighs straining the fabric of the skirt, and this time I saw her lurid nakedness, the shaved cleft of her pussy within the shadows of her skirt. For a moment I had the insane idea of reaching down and masturbating behind the lectern, but that was sheer madness—although the idea of turning this class into a group of naked, masturbating, students had a certain erotic appeal. Besides, the object

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with Emma was to establish control. Yes, she was beautiful and desirable and aroused the hell out of me, but without control this would be just another unremarkable relationship, and I wanted more than that. I wanted much more than that. At last the conversation drew to a close. I handed out the homework assignments. Some of the kids came down to talk to me and I got rid of them as quickly as possible. Emma stayed in her seat, writing furiously as if transcribing notes. I hustled the last of the kids out, telling them I had to give Emma a make-up quiz and physically walking them out the door of the lecture hall so I could watch them go and be sure we were alone. Then I closed the door and turned off the lights. The dark seemed our natural element. "Emma?" She finished her writing, put away her pen, gathered up her books and stood. She walked up the steps to where I stood, right where we were the other night, her face expressionless. I could see the pulse beating in her throat. Her eyes flicked up at me, then down. She was waiting. I let her wait. This was about control. "Here," she said at last. "Do you want these?" She dug in her bag and took out a pair of tiny black panties and put them in my hand. "Well, I couldn't very well go to work without them, could I?" I held them to my face. They were so small. I'm always amazed at how women get themselves into things so small. They smelled like powder and perfume and only faintly of her body. "Turn around," I said.

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She looked confused but turned around, and I straightened out the crumpled panties. Then I pulled her hands back and slipped them through the leg holes and twisted them ‘til they tightened on her wrists like a tourniquet. I turned her back to face me, still holding her wrists trapped in her panties. The sight of a bound woman is terrifically, almost unbearably erotic to me, even if she's bound only in play. It's been that way ever since I can remember, even before I knew what sex was. Emma was standing in front of me now with her wrists bound behind her, her breasts straining against the tight pink tank top. I pushed her back against the wall and leaned over her, my shadow covering her like a blanket. Her eyes were unusually white in the darkness. "Anyone ever do anything like this to you before?" I tightened my grip on her bonds. "Yes. Once. A long time ago. We were only playing. We were kids. We didn't know what we were doing." With her arms behind her, she was like a sculpture, all curves and defenseless softness, offering herself to me. I was already breathing fast and my cock was hard. I pressed it against her hip so she could feel very well what she was doing to me, then caressed her face with my hand, feeling the feminine warmth of her skin. I traced my way down her throat, her chest, over the swell of her breast, feeling the exact point where the edge of her bra confined the fullness of her flesh. I felt the firmness of her nipple under my palm. "Did you like it?" I asked.

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"Yes. I loved it. It still scares me how much I loved it." I don’t know what else she could have said that would have aroused me so much or driven me so absolutely mad with desire for her. It was the mention of fear that did it, that told me she was the genuine article, because where we were going was scary, a place where you can lose yourself, where you can find out that you're not who you thought, a place where the night takes over and swallows you up and all you have is your lover to bring you back. And as if that admission of fear were her last defense, she opened her mouth to my kiss and met me with a desperate, sucking hunger, giving herself and showing me how she wanted to be plundered and used. I held onto those twisted panties and felt her arms strain against them as she tried her strength against mine because she had to know I was serious. She had to know I wouldn't let her go and she had no choice but to surrender. I kissed her violently, making her take my tongue, teasing the inside of her mouth. My hand slid down and closed on her chest and I felt that maddening firm softness of a woman's gravid tit, heavy and filled with sensual comfort. I found her nipple through her bra and pinched it, and that seemed to set her off even more. Oh yes, I was right about her. I was right. I was right. She loved my roughness, my passion and hunger, the pleasure that bordered on pain. I held her wrists and played with her tits and kissed her, then pulled the neck of her shirt down ‘til her breasts spilled over the top. I bit and licked them as my hand found its way down to her crotch and I began to lift her skirt. "Oh no! No!" she moaned, but I knew she had to say that, just as I had to refuse to hear it. 35

"Listen," I whispered into her ear. "This is Thursday and there's no one here. The cleaning crew isn't even in this part of the building on Thursdays. Understand?" "No," she said. "No…" But her hips were already moving in an urgent and suggestive invitation even though her skirt was still stretched several inches below her naked pussy. I pressed my lips against her throat and continued to inch her skirt upwards, wanting her to feel every millimeter of thigh as it was exposed, until finally there was no need to go any higher. I touched her between her legs and she turned her face to me, begging for a kiss, desperate to hide her emotions as my fingers slid along her exposed wetness. "Please," she gasped. "Don't make me! Don't!" A little plea for dignity, but dignity would be the first thing to go, was already gone. Emma's arms were tied behind her in her own panties, her top was pulled down and her tits were crowded together, almost popping out of her bra, nipples peeking over the edge like rising suns, her chest shining in the dark with my saliva. Despite her protests, her hips humped and revolved against my fingers with lascivious urgency as she tried to bring them into contact with her clit. It was way too late to ask me to stop—way too late—and I played with Emma's pussy like it was a handful of pearls, toying with her and strumming her like a harp. If I needed any more proof of her level of excitement, I only had to bring my mouth close to hers and feel her feverish kiss, a kiss that begged and pleaded with me one minute, then bit me in savage impatience the next. Her tongue fluttered in my mouth like a little

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bird in a burning house trying to get free, and it drove me mad, because something was inside Emma trying to get out, and I wanted it. I wanted it with every fiber of my being. I wanted her to give it to me and me alone, and I wanted all of it. And suddenly then she did give it to me. She tore her lips from mine and cried out, choking on her own breath and arching her body away from the wall, shoving her pussy out onto my hands. I saw a brief look of panic in her eyes, as if she couldn't believe this was happening to her, and I grabbed her panties tight and used them to press her body against mine with all my strength, as if she might fly apart. I shoved my finger into her deep, deep—deep—and held it there. Her thighs quivered and trembled and orgasmic spasms made her bear down on my finger in waves of peristaltic pleasure that made me absolutely dizzy with desire. The sight of Emma coming was so intense I felt my own orgasm start and only stopped it by sheer force of will, pulling my cock away from her body and just holding her as her body snapped like a whip with each convulsive release. I was trying not to think, trying to keep my mind a blank. I held her up, let go of her panties and just held her against me as she shook and trembled and her orgasm faded like distant thunder. She worked her hands out of the crumpled garment and held onto my shoulders, panting. "You okay?" I asked. "God!" she said. "I was just so turned on all day, thinking about it. That was intense." "Can you walk?"

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"Of course. Yes. Why? Where are we going?" "My office," I said. "It's my turn."

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Chapter Four

Emma put herself together and got her books and picked up her panties from the floor, and we didn't say much as we walked down the hall to my office. The corridor was deserted, and only every fourth light was left on, making the place look especially forlorn. I'd originally thought about taking Emma to a motel, but that seemed wrong somehow, and my place in the city was too far. Besides, this was not a simple love affair or sexual tryst. There was a wrongness, a transgressiveness, that was a deep part of the very fabric of this relationship at this point. Maybe we could have done it in a car, or behind a dumpster, or in some basement boiler room, but that's the way it had to be—furtive, secretive, perverse and illicit. My office would do nicely. As an adjunct instructor at Crane, I didn't have my own office. I had a desk in an office used by two other, full-time instructors, but that was all right. No one was around after three p.m. anyhow—ever—so the office might as well have been mine. The narrow window in the office door had been covered with construction paper by one of the fulltimers so he could sleep unobserved, and although one wall was all window with a view of the parking lot, if the office lights were off you couldn't see in. I'd already brought in what I needed before class in a box and left it under my desk, and now, as Emma stood uncertainly in the darkness, I set about my business. "Take off your clothes." I spread a blanket over the top of the steel desk. "What?"

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"Come on. Take off your skirt and your top. No one's coming in." Despite the darkness, I saw her uncertainty. Fear of the teacher's office dies hard, even in adults. Besides that, I realized I was being rude, ordering her around like a paid prostitute. It was my own arousal talking, but that wasn’t really my way and that wasn’t how I wanted her to feel. “Come here,” I said gently, reaching into the box and pulling out a length of white nylon rope, finger-thick and soft as silk. I turned her around and began to wrap it around her wrists. “I’m not going to tie you,” I said. “I’m going to lash you. There’s a difference. Lashing doesn’t use any knots. You can always work your way free with enough effort. I don’t want you to panic.” “I’m not afraid,” she said. “I’m not. I trust you.” Somehow she knew just what to say to bring me to the boiling point. I quickly finished lashing her wrists with the thick white rope and spun her around. I took her in a bruising kiss, crushing her against me, one hand on the back of her head, the other on her ass. I was devastated by her trust and her willingness, by the gift of herself. I’d often heard other doms talking about the gift of trust but I’d never felt it like this, this intensely. The other women I’d played with had to be coaxed and reassured, were nervous and skittish. Emma wanted it. She wanted to be helpless for me, and the realization just destroyed me. I could have fallen to my knees at her feet at that moment, conquered by her submission.

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I held her face in my hands and kissed her feverishly, her mouth, her cheeks and eyes. It was so incongruous yet so beautiful, standing in that dark and ugly office with this woman tied up for me, letting these waves of carnal excitement wash over me in this place of intellectual dedication. My hand went to the waist of her skirt and I fumbled about, looking for the zipper. It was in the back, and I opened it and unbuttoned the button and tugged the skirt down her thighs. It puddled around her ankles like a shadow and she was naked from the waist down. At that point I was overcome and I pushed her back until her ass hit the edge of the desk. I got on my knees and held her ass and began to lick and kiss her hips and thighs and belly, tasting the salt of her sweat and her female musk. Emma gasped. “Mr. Devlin! Oh, Mr. Devlin!” “Conner,” I said. “Conner.” Though this was no time to exchange names, and I didn’t care what she called me. “Please! What are you going to do?” “What am I going to do?” I dragged my tongue up her thigh. “I’m going to eat you, my dear. I’m going to suck that pussy ‘til you come in my mouth, ‘til you turn into a pile of quivering female jelly, and when you do—when you simply can’t stand it any more, when you can’t live another instant without my cock inside you—then I’m going to fuck you, Emma. I’m going to fuck you hard and deep like you’ve never been fucked before. Do you understand?” “Oh God!” she moaned

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I stood up and lifted her onto the narrow side of the desk and Emma leaned back on her bound hands. I lifted up her tank top and pulled it over her head, but because her hands were lashed together, I had to leave it hanging from her wrists. Her bra opened in front—clever girl!—and that met the same fate, hanging from her bound wrists as I began to suck and kiss her tits while I opened my own shirt. We were both in a fever of excitement and Emma’s head fell back in pleasure as I sucked her nipples into aching hardness, lashing them with my tongue, then peeled my shirt off and threw it aside. I got to my knees and took her ankles in my hands. She still wore her shoes, smart little sandals, and I left them on. As I lifted her ankles, she started to fall back on the desk and I stopped and helped her lie down. “Put your hands under the small of your back,” I said. “That’ll help raise your hips.” Emma twisted around on the blanket until she was reasonably comfortable and I got back down on my knees and took her ankles again. I love holding a woman’s ankles. It feels so possessive and powerful, not to mention absolutely sexy, and you can squeeze hard without hurting them. Emma had beautiful ankles and I held them tight, bending her knees up. She raised her head to look down at me with a deliciously fearful look on her face. I must have been formidable to behold. I was aflame with lust, absolutely afire, and I hovered above her pussy like a lion above his kill. The mere proximity to her sex had the hormones gushing in my body and the muscles in my arms and shoulders were swollen and tight as I lowered my face and licked the insides of her thighs, all the way

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up to her pussy. Emma whimpered and twisted her hips and her scent drove me mad. I stuck out my tongue and dragged it up her slit. Her juice was like honey on my tongue. “Ahhhhh!” She arched her back and I felt her toes curl as I circled her clit with my tongue and began to suck. I already knew her most sensitive spot and I threw her legs over my shoulders and began to suck her clit in and out as I finger-fucked her. She squeezed my head with her strong thighs and began to pump, hungry for another come, and I let her use me, reveling in her female lust. She rose to it quickly, and suddenly her hips were shaking against me, vibrating against my face as her clit twitched and her pussy squeezed my fingers. She choked and gasped, writhing on the desk. I slowed and stopped, giving her time to come down, not yet knowing how much she could take or how much recovery time she needed, but she’d barely caught her breath when her hips began moving again, twisting and rocking, shyly asking for more, more. “Hot bitch!” I snarled. “You got more for me?” “Oh yes, baby. Please! Please, it’s so good!” I smiled as I reached over her thigh and spread her cunt apart, exposing her hot swollen clit in its little nest. I fluttered my tongue against it and sucked the sweet inner tissues of her pussy, tongue fucking her, then spitting on her clit and licking it off. Looking up at her, I could see those gorgeous tits rising like islands in the moonlight, crowned with stiff rosy nipples pointing at the ceiling. They trembled with each shuddering breath.

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I was like a satyr, a devil, sucking her between her legs, feeding on her cunt like a hummingbird at a pool of nectar, and Emma came and came, one orgasm blending into another in an endless stream until finally she was gasping and moaning. “Oh God, no! No more! Fuck me! Please. Just fuck me!” I got up and stood over her, my eyes burning, my face smeared with her pussy juice. I must have looked like a madman. “You want to get fucked, Emma? Then you’re going to have to agree to my terms. I want you, Emma. I want you to be mine. I want to train you and have you and use you and fuck you. I want you to be my slave and my lover. I want to teach you to do all the things I’ve always dreamed of doing. Do you agree?” She looked at me fearfully, alarm breaking through the spell of lust. “What are you talking about?” “You’re something very rare, Emma. Something rare and precious, something I’ve been looking for for years now and I don’t want you to get away.” “I don’t understand.” “Listen. I don’t care about your life outside, about who you see and what you do, if you have a boyfriend and all that crap. But I want you—two nights a week at least. I want to show you what you have inside, what you’re capable of feeling. I’ve never seen anyone as sexual as you, Emma. I don’t want you to just think this is a couple nights of fun and that’s it, understand? There’s something here. Something deeper than just sex.”

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She looked at me as if no one had ever said these things to her before, as if she really believed the desires she had were sick and perverse and something to be ashamed of. Like she had no idea of what they would do to a man—or to the right man. “What do you want me to do?” “You don’t have to do anything now," I replied. "I’m not a stalker and I’m not going to chain you to the radiator. This is something you have to enter into of your own free will. But I need for you to know that this is more than just some quickie studentteacher affair, Emma. This goes deeper than that.” She didn’t know what to say so I saved her the trouble. I leaned over and kissed her. I dropped my tongue into her mouth and fucked her with it until she began to suck on it and caress it with her own, responding instinctively to having her body penetrated. Everything she did was so maddeningly female, so giving and accepting. Her nipples pressed against my bare chest and her legs closed reflexively around my ass, pulling me against her. She was still horny. She was still ready for more. I broke the kiss and smiled down at her, knowing we had an agreement. “Back to business,” I said. “Now let me show you something.” I went to the box and got more rope, then tied several turns around each ankle as she watched me from the desk, her breasts heaving with excitement as I bound her. I turned her on her side and unlashed her wrists. Then I pulled off the tangle of her tank top and bra and tossed them on a chair, tying cuffs of rope around each wrist. I strung lengths of rope through each cuff and down to the corresponding ankle and pulled them snug so Emma’s arms were drawn down and her ankles pulled up against her ass, her

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knees forced open in an , froglike position, totally exposing her sex, leaving her open and helpless. “Ever heard of hog-tying?” I tied the ropes tight. “Well this is called frog-tying and it’s one of those things I talked about wanting to show you.” Emma whimpered. She tried to close her knees but the ropes were too tight and the strain too much. Her legs trembled and then fell helplessly open again as she panted from the effort. I reached out and caressed her breast, running my hand down her body and roughly massaging her pussy. I began to finger fuck her and there was nothing she could do. It was like I owned her totally now—my own private little cum-slut, unable to do anything but lie there in the ropes and take it. She began to pant, excited by her own helplessness, and her pussy sucked greedily at my finger. At the heart of the BDSM experience there is always a moment like this, at least for me. There's a moment when woman as icon—all the attraction and longing and desire she inspires—has been stripped away, and the man feels, however rightly or wrongly, that he's reduced her to his level, to the class of sexual beast, a creature of pure sensuality. That's something he understands. That's something he feels he can master. He'll never conquer his longing for her or the weakness she makes him feel when he looks at her, but in conquering her body and in taking charge of her sensations, he at least feels he's gained some control of his heart. He feels like a man again. Or at least that's the way I felt with Emma tied and exposed on that desk— something primal and primitive and more basic than even love or affection, a kind of deep sexual polarity of male and female, blind and biological. 46

“This is the way I keep a bad girl exposed,” I said in a hoarse whisper as I caressed her pussy and studied her face. “This way I can fuck her or play with her or eat her or do almost anything to her. Like spank her when she needs spanking. When she's a greedy little cum-whore and needs spanking.” I slapped her lightly on the clit and Emma jumped. I spanked her again with the same result, and now she bit her lip to keep from crying out. “Ever come from having your clit spanked?” I asked. “Too bad I didn't bring a whip. I could make you come like that. Emma. Sounds pretty nasty, doesn’t it?” I stood up and at last I began to take off my pants, opening my belt and pulling down my zipper. I kicked off my shoes and socks, then stripped off my pants and threw them on a chair. My shorts were soaked with pre-cum, a wet spot the size of a dollar bill covering the fly where I'd been leaking during our play. From her awkward position, Emma raised her head to watch me undress and see what was in store for her. I didn't care. It just felt so fucking good to let him loose at last. I won’t lie. I’m not hugely hung or massively endowed—nothing to stare at—but I was harder then hell. Those veins were pumping, and he was red and drooling like a rabid cobra, straining to get inside her like a mastiff on a leash. He looked like I felt— mad, evil, and swollen to bursting with power and lust. “You ready, Emma?" I growled. "You ready to get fucked?” I pulled her ass to the edge of the desk and pushed her knees apart. My cock arced like a missile over the open trench of her cunt.

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She didn’t say anything, just tugged at the ropes and mewled, so I stuck my thumb in her pussy and started fucking her with it as I thrummed her clit, giving her one last tease. “Come on, baby. Are you ready? Do you want it? Or do you need to come some more?” “Oh please,” she said. “Just do it! Fuck me!” “No. I think you’ve got more. I think you’ve got more for me, don’t you? You’re holding out, Emma. You’re holding out.” I pulled my thumb from her cunt and spanked her clit with the back of my hand, just flicking my fingers against it. Emma groaned and tried to close her legs, but I had one hand on her knee and there was nothing she could do. I did it again, then again and again, setting up a regular rhythm, my fingers splashing down in the wet trough of her pussy, rudely spanking that turgid little nub. She was hypersensitive by now, and every spank made her jerk and twitch, her cunt thrusting up, her asshole contracting. The muscles on the insides of her thighs trembled and she moaned feebly, too ashamed to admit that even this crude punishment felt good. “Come on, baby,” I hissed at her. “Give me that come, Emma! Give me that one last come. I want to shove my dick into you while you’re spitting out that hot juice. Look at you all tied up like a fucking slave! You can’t even move, can you? I’m going to stand here and slap that hot little cunt ‘til you give me that come, bitch, ‘til I see the juice running down your ass. So come on. Give it to me! Give it to me, Emma!”

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“Oh! God! No! No!” she grunted as I spanked her pussy. Her hands twisted desperately in the bonds, her stomach tightening convulsively and her tits quaking on her chest as spasms of painful pleasure wracked her body. I grabbed my cock in one hand and opened her cunt with the other, beginning to slap the head against her clit. My dick felt like it weighed a ton and the sound it made as it splashed into her wet trough was like a log splattering into a muddy swamp. I beat her cunt with my prick and each blow was a jolt of pleasure for us both. Splatt! Whapp! Smackk! Splapp! I bent over and grabbed her hair as if I could pull the come out of her, pulling her head to the side ‘til she opened her teeth in a grimace of pain. "Give it to me, bitch! Give it to me, you hot cunt!" Slapp! Whackk! Whapp! Plapp! Faster and faster, I beat her with my cock, and Emma wailed and screamed so loud I was afraid they'd hear her at the other end of the hallway, so I quickly grabbed her rumpled panties from the chair and stuffed them into her open mouth. That seemed to be the last straw, the final indignity she needed. She wailed behind the black gag of her panties and arched her back and started to come again—the big one this time, the soul-killer—and at that moment, I stopped slapping her with my dick, pushing the head down with my thumb so it found her hole, and shoving the whole length into her with one thrust of my hips, right at the height of her climax. "Oh Jesus fucking Christ!" I moaned, throwing my head back in ecstasy. She was coming hard inside, her pussy clamping down and fluttering around my shaft, her thighs

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squeezing me convulsively as I invaded her. She was all soft and tight inside, slick and hotter than hell, and I could feel those secret feminine muscles milking and pulling at me as she howled through her panty-stuffed lips. I grabbed hold of her tits and held them like handles as I started fucking her, swinging my ass like a wrecking ball against her, using the big muscles in my thighs to send my cock thundering up into her against the resistance of her spasming pussy again and again, the salacious squelching sounds of cock in pussy and the sharp violent slap of loins against thighs like pistol shots in the room. With her hands pulled down almost to her feet, Emma was able to just reach my thighs as I fucked her and she scratched and clawed at me in her frenzy as I fucked her with savage power. I let go of her tits and grabbed her thighs so I could hold her steady because I was shoving her across the desk with the force of my thrusts. "Ugh! You fucking bitch! Do you like this cock, Emma? Do you like this fucking cock?" I reached up and pulled the panties from her mouth and threw them aside, but all she could do was wail, head back, eyes open wide and sightless as I fucked her, tits sloshing on her chest from the force of my blows. She seemed stunned by the force of her last orgasm, out of it, in a state of semi-shock, her body limp, but when I slid my thumb against her clit and started playing with her, she suddenly came alive again, her head jerking up to watch my thick cock sluicing in and out of her pussy. "Oh God yes! Yes!" she cried. "Make me come! Make me come! Make me come!" She chanted it like a breathless mantra as her body rocked on the table and it drove me mad. I felt my orgasm start and I grabbed her ass in my hands and squeezed, 50

holding her buttocks and cramming that dick into her, fucking her so fast I was like a jackhammer, fucking her so fast I couldn't even breathe. There was only the feeling of her cunt on my dick, the pressure in my balls, the feeling of her body in my hands. "Oh fuck yes!" I cried. "Gonna come, baby! Gonna come in you, Emma! Jesus! Jesus, baby!" I loomed over her now with a look of absolute rage on my face, muscles swollen, fingers digging into her ass—the rage of orgasm, the helpless gush of seed. Emma was hysterical, squeezing me, twisting her hips, trying to pull it out of me. I rose up on my toes as I felt it start, trying to cram the last inch of dick into her as the thunder shot from the soles of my feet and blasted from my balls and cum blew out of my dick with the force of a fire hose. "Fuck!" I cried, "Fuck, Baby! Take it! Take my hot cum!" I leaned back, hips out, fingers clawed into her ass, holding her against me like some cum-receptacle as my ass flexed and body twitched in powerful contractions, sending my semen shooting in hard, heavy gouts deep into her quivering belly, one after another, each one accompanied by a burst of mind-shattering ecstasy. I could picture the hot white seed splattering into her soft pink insides and dripping from her tissues, coating her with my thick ejaculate, and the image just brought fresh bursts of cum boiling up from my balls. I came so hard my legs started to tremble, and then my arms, and my belly—all of me, wracked by a post orgasmic weakness like I'd rarely known. The girl had sucked

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it all out of me, had made me come like a hydrant. With trembling hands, I untied the ropes holding her wrists to her ankles and her legs flopped over the desk. "Can you move?" I asked. "I don't know," she replied. "I don’t think so." I laughed, moving to the side of the desk and grabbing her waist, pulling her up until she was lying on the desk. It was big enough that I was able to climb up there with her and put my arms around her. She seemed uneasy. "You don't have to," she said. "Don’t have to what?" "Hold me." I looked at her. "What if I want to?" She made a face and shrugged. "Most other guys don't." "You've done this before?" "Not like this. Not so… elaborate. But I told you, there's something wrong with me. I like it too much. Men don't like girls like me. I seem to have a lot of one-nightstands. They always think they have to hold me afterwards, but it's okay if you don't." I stared at her now as she lay there. I'd left bruises on her tits and the rope was still on her wrists. She was full of my semen and more of it was even now leaking out between her legs and drying on her thighs. "It's a fucked-up world," I said. "Filled with fucked-up people. But I don't think you're one of them. I think those other guys were the fucked-up ones. I want to hold you

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because I want to hold you, not because I feel sorry for you. We have an agreement, remember? This is only the start." Emma looked at me and brought her hands up over her breasts, as if to protect herself. Her eyes in the dark were luminous. "You're serious?" "Yes. Dead serious." I slid my arm under her head and pulled her to me and she rolled partway so that she was pressed against my side. I kissed her shoulder and caressed her hair and she put her leg over mine. "It feels good, being held," she said. "It feels good holding you." Outside the office and the dull, plain community college building, the parking lot ran down to a patch of grass where a copse of trees separated the campus from the highway that led to the dreary grid of suburban streets and fast food places, most of them eerily empty at this hour. The sordidness of where we were and what we'd done sank into me and left me feeling ashamed but I refused to give into it. I believed what I'd told her. She was beauty to me. She was ecstasy. She was mystery. I held her tighter, lying there on that stupid desk. I had promised her connection and intimacy, and instead had delivered sexual pleasure, with ropes and violation and overt perversity. I hoped there'd be time to find out if they were perhaps one and the same.

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Chapter Five

A friend of mine says that a woman's biggest fear is abandonment and a man's biggest fear is responsibility. I don't know if I believe it, but I suppose that's as good an explanation as any for why I was living alone at the time I met Emma. I was twice her age and I’d had my full share of relationships of all shapes and sizes. While I'd found them interesting in a morbid kind of way, I'd come to accept the fact I was pretty lousy at them. I was a spectator, not a participant. To be honest, I was selfish, irresponsible and immature. I still am and suppose I always will be. I was no longer looking to change. No matter how my relationships started out, they always seemed to end up the same way, as a burden and an imposition. I know living with someone and loving them is a co-operative effort, a two-way street, but for some reason it seemed the things I had to give up and sacrifice in order to keep the peace were never worth it in the long run. I'd been married twice, once for two and a half years, then, twelve years later, for four, and in both cases my wives had big plans for me. I couldn't live up to them. I tried, but making them happy by making myself miserable just wasn’t sound emotional economics. They tell me I probably wasn't really in love then—that when you love someone, you'll do anything to make them happy. I don't buy it. In fact, that seems like a pretty good working definition of slavery to me, but this is the kind of stuff I’d hear from women, who seemed to have the moral high ground when it came to definitions of love and relationships. They certainly seemed to know what they were talking about, so I had a tendency to keep my mouth shut and avoid the whole subject.

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So when I met Emma, I wasn't really looking for anything, or if I was, it was maybe the exact opposite of what was generally accepted as a normal relationship. If anything, I wanted to strip away all the jockeying for moral superiority and sense of social obligation and get down to the raw, primal genital imperatives of male-female attraction. I didn't want to get into a situation where I'd have to meet her friends and listen to her music and get involved in her life any more than was necessary, and I didn't want to impose all my crap on her either. I wanted to be her lover, not her friend, and meet in that place where our bodies and minds felt nothing but raw animal pleasure. From there, we could see where the emotions led us and possibly develop some kind of arrangement that wouldn't become suffocated under a mess of domestic trivia, crushed by interpersonal fatigue syndrome. I wanted to see how long the two of us could keep this thing at the boiling point without getting overcooked. Of course, it's impossible to have a sexual collision like Emma and I had that night in my office and come out of it emotionally unscathed. I spent that entire weekend sitting around in my loft in my cut-offs, thinking about her and aching. It was hotter than hell but I wouldn't even turn on the AC because it meant closing the windows and that felt like cutting myself off from her somehow, as if she might be sending me thoughts and pheromones on the breeze from way up in the ‘burbs wherever she lived. Instead I just drank bottled water and sweated and remembered the feel of her skin and the way her muscles trembled against the ropes as I fucked her and she came on my cock. I could still smell her sex in the sweat of my body.

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My novel was almost finished and it was entirely bullshit, I could see that now. The intensity of emotion I'd felt with Emma made me realize how false and contrived everything I'd written was. Yes, sex is sex and always intense. Sex deals with immediate sensation and literature deals with abstract ideas and they really can't be compared, but it was becoming clearer to me all the time that ideas were what you played around with when you couldn't get any sex. Intellect is eighty percent of the mind trying to figure out how to get the body laid. Whether it's writing books or solving quadratic equations, it's all loneliness and we're all stuck with it. So I sat around and obsessed about Emma. She was upsetting all my theories. I mean, it was only sex after all, and sex wasn't the same as love. The problem was, I knew what sex was, but I was never sure about love. My own personal guide to love was that it was measured by how much I wanted to be with someone. By that definition, I was pretty much wildly in love with Emma. I had her number and thought about calling her, but the last thing I wanted was to bother her. It wasn't just a case of not wanting to look uncool or needy, but it also went against my new non-relationship relationship rules. Besides, I was supposed to be the dom, and in my ignorance at the time, I thought that meant I should be cold and aloof and unfeeling. That was nonsense, but what did I know? At eight I went out to the bar down the street to get a beer and some cool air, and when I came back there was a message on the phone. "Hi, it's me. Emma. I was just bored and wanted to talk but it was nothing important, and I guess you're out. You can call me if you get home like before eleven or so. Bye." 56

My hands were shaking when I sat down and picked up the phone. She got it on the third ring. "Hi, Emma? It's me. Conner." "Oh, hi." She sounded a little fuzzy, sleepy, but came alive at the sound of my voice. "It's nice you called me back. I didn't think you would." "Of course I would. Why wouldn't I? How are you? Everything okay?" "Mmm, yeah. I guess so. Just bored." It was the first time we'd spoken since I'd walked her to her car after tying her wrists to her ankles and fucking her raw on the desk in my office at the community college where she was in my poetry class. The event hung between us like a huge weight we had to cautiously feel our way around. "Bored? Me too. You should have come over here. I could have found something for us to do." I could hear her sly smile over the phone. "Oh? Like what?" "You know what." "No," she teased. The sound on her end changed, as if she'd cupped her hand around the phone or moved it closer to her lips. "Tell me," she whispered. "I want to hear you say it. Please?" I couldn't resist. She made me want to do it, and the words just spilled from my mouth before I could stop them, my voice low, my urgency real. "I want to fuck you, Emma. I want to tie you up and get my cock inside you and make you take it, every fucking inch, and I'm going to do it. There's no way you can stop me, Emma, there’s nothing that can stop me, baby. I'm going to come over there and kick down those doors 57

and find you, Emma, tear off your clothes and take you. I want you to come for me ‘til you can't stand it anymore. You understand?" I heard the dry sound of her breath. "Oh God," she said. "No one's ever talked to me like that before." "It's more than talk," I said. I was actually a bit dizzy. What had happened to me? I had to turn away from the phone and take a breath. "Do you like it?" "You must think I'm horrible," she said. "A real slut." I smiled. I couldn't remember when I'd cradled a phone like this, like I loved it. "I don’t think anything like that." She didn't say anything for a while, and then: "Conner, I have to tell you something. I've got a boyfriend. We're engaged. Well, almost engaged." I'd already suspected as much. A girl like Emma didn't go around unattached. I'd thought I was above it and wouldn't mind, so the brief stab of hurt surprised me but I pushed it down. I had no right to it. "Congratulations," I said. "Doesn't that make you hate me?" "No. What does that have to do with me?" She was quiet for a while, then said, "He's really a great guy and he's got a great job. We're just waiting for him to finish his training. He's with—" and here she mentioned some outfit I guess I was supposed to have heard of—UniServe or TeleCom or UniTel or something— "and he's doing three months of training in Atlanta. Then he'll be

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assigned to San Diego and we'll probably move out there. If we get married here first, then the company will pay to move me too, but I'm not real sure yet. I don’t know if we'll get married here or there, or maybe somewhere else, like in Mexico, you know? I mean, I'm not really sure of the details yet, but I thought you should know." "Un-huh. And when's he done with his training?" "About six weeks." Silence. I wasn't sure what she wanted me to say. I had no plans for her that extended beyond the length of my dick. I was determined not to lie about that. "He doesn't know about me," she said. "The kind of things I like. I mean, I tried to get him to do some of that stuff but he just laughed. He couldn't believe I was serious. He thought it was sick, 'cause I guess he's kind of straight. That's not good, is it?" I shrugged but she couldn't see it. "You're not married yet, right?" "No." "Not even engaged." "No. Not officially." "Do you love him?" The pause. The fatal pause. "Of course. I mean, we're practically engaged. He comes back and sees me every couple of weeks." "Well what do you want me to do, Emma? You want me to not see you anymore?" "No," she said. "No." There was no pause now. "I just thought I should tell you."

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"Un-huh. Well, it bothers you. I can understand that, but you're an adult, honey, and you have to decide what you want to do. Just let me say I don’t want to interfere with your happiness or your life. I have no intention of asking you to break up with your boyfriend or do anything else you don't want to do. This is a physical relationship, Emma, physical and sexual, and beyond that, I don't expect anything from you and I'm not asking for anything. I want your body, Emma. I want you as my lover, that's all." I was surprised to hear my own words, so clear and unambiguous, so reasonable. I was even more surprised to hear the response from her lips a few heartbeats later—the hurried whisper, almost a sigh: "God! Why does that make me so hot?" **** We didn't talk much more that night. A roommate came home and she didn't want to use the phone, and we hadn't yet exchanged e-mail addresses. I didn't hear from her again until the Monday night before class. "Hi, it's me. Emma. Did you miss me?" "Like the sky misses the stars." I smiled, and in truth I had. The last phone call had only increased my desire, and now that I knew she loved being talked to over the phone, I let the words pour out of me. "I miss the feel of you on my cock, your body writhing against mine, your hair in my hands, the way you shiver when I shove my dick into you, the blinding ecstasy as I jet my cum into your hot pussy." I laughed as I heard her catch her breath. She hadn't been expecting anything like that. "Am I going to see you after class?" I asked.

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She suddenly grew grave, her voice quiet. "Oh God. I don't know, Conner. I really don't know. I've been thinking about this all weekend and I don't know what to do." I felt like an idiot for my dirty talk and it came out as coldness. "It's your decision, Emma," I said. "But, 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'." "What?" I recited: "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day Tomorrow will be dying. "Robert Herrick, seventeenth century poet, 'To the Virgins, to Make the Most of Time." "I get it," she said. "But I'm not a virgin." "Oh yes you are," I replied. "More than you know. A lot more than you know." I hung up and got a beer and went out on the roof. Despite my smart-ass little sign-off, I was really upset. I'd meant what I said about keeping our outside lives out of this, but I didn't want to lose her. I didn't have much at that point, and Emma was the most exciting thing in my life. I didn't like being at her mercy but there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. When she walked into class on Tuesday, it was impossible to tell from her clothes what her decision about us had been. She wore a white cotton boat-neck top and a short denim skirt, unusually casual attire for her, and I didn't know if that meant she was comfortable with me now or she just didn't care. She kept her sunglasses on

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during class, but again, that might have meant she was hiding from me or it might have meant she was trying to conceal her lust. In any case, I'd already decided to try and ignore her as much as possible during the lecture. What else could I do? But at the same time, it was impossible not to be aware of her and what had happened between us. Thankfully, I'd rescheduled things so the lecture was an easy one for me, just playing recordings of various poets reading their own work. It was legitimate—I wanted the kids to hear the poems as the poets heard them when they wrote them, the cadence and music of the language, something that doesn't always come across on the printed page—but I didn't have to do much. I'd have the students read a poem to themselves from the handouts, paying attention to how they heard it in their heads, and then put on a recording of the poet reading it in his or her own voice—the elderly, scratched brogue of Yeats, Eliot's eerie prissiness, the roiling madness of Ezra Pound, the ecstatic jazz of Kerouac, Gregory Corso's exuberant word salad, Edna St. Vincent-Millay's repressed and sublimated sexiness. The words rolled out and at the end I just turned down the lights and played recordings at random and we sat and listened. The power of the spoken word seemed to turn the cold auditorium of that third-rate community college into someplace special— a kind of campsite or temple or clearing under the stars where magical things happened, where evanescent feelings were captured and preserved in words and things were shown to us we'd otherwise never see. The poets were magicians or priests giving us things we hadn't had before simply by seeing and describing them. It always

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humbles me how they chisel emotions and ideas from the raw stuff of the world using just words and imagination and the intimate sound of their voice The poetry ended, the voices faded away, and the silence seemed like a vacuum left in the room, as if a big train had just passed by. In the silence, I heard someone softly snoring from one of the upper rows but I didn't mind. These kids worked hard. Most of them had jobs. But sitting there and listening, I was reminded of why I'd chosen to try and write myself, and I was proud of my decision. That didn't happen very often. I had goose bumps on my arms. I didn't want to break the spell by turning on the lights, so I just stayed where I was and announced, "That's all for tonight. Class, you're dismissed." I turned off the CD and the class gathered up their things and shuffled for the exits. I looked up and saw Emma sitting in her usual place, four rows up. She was slumped slightly in her seat as if she'd been thrown there, as if stunned. Her shoulders were back, and even in the darkness of the hall the shadows of her erect nipples were visible against the thin white fabric of her top. Her sunglasses were pushed up on her head and she was looking directly at me with a weird intensity, as if trying to cast a spell on me or maybe just capture my attention. Beneath the table her knees were spread apart quite plainly and her denim skirt was hiked up to mid thigh. It was too dark to see all the way up her skirt but there was no mistaking that gesture. She was offering herself to me, awaiting my instructions. The room emptied as I took my time, winding up the cord on the CD player, putting my notes away. Emma stayed in her seat, motionless until the door closed on the last student and their voices faded in the hallway. I looked up at her. 63

"Are you staying?" "Do you want me to?" "Yes," I said. "Very much." I put the CD player away beneath the lectern. "Lock the doors. Take one of those folding chairs and jam the legs under the push-bars." I'd discovered this trick on my own. The doors could still be forced from the outside, of course, but it wouldn't be easy. I liked the feeling of being locked in and the added security , and I liked the idea of making Emma do the locking. She stood up and smoothed down her skirt. I watched the tight roll of her ass as she climbed the broad stairs towards the back and almost disappeared into the shadows near the exits, then picked up a chair and slid it into place. She turned, pushed her hair back behind her ears, and started walking back down. "Slowly." My voice echoed in the empty room. "Walk slower. I just want to look at you." I could adjust the lights from the podium, and I set them now so the auditorium was in complete darkness. There was only the spotlight over the lectern and on the whiteboard behind it. There was just enough light to see her. Emma walked slowly down the steps, her shoulders back, her eyes flickering from the stairs before her up to my face to see my reaction as I watched her in the simple act of approaching me, an act suddenly so full of portent. She was getting excited. I could sense it from her, the way she had to restrain herself as she stepped down the stairs, pausing at each one, and the sense of power I

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felt was turning me on just as much as the sight of her. She was bringing herself to me at my command, and the very act was arousing us both, alone in that vast empty space. She descended the last stair and came to the podium and I was going to talk to her, ask her if she'd made her decision, when I realized it was best not to say anything. She was here. What else was there to say? I looked into her eyes and took her hand and brought her close to me, so close I could feel the warmth from her body and smell her, so close that our bodies touched. I let the impending kiss hang in the air for what seemed like forever, ‘til the tension became too much, over-ripe and swollen, and then I brought my lips down on that warm mouth and took her sweetness. This was Emma—who belonged to another man now. Emma—who was going to marry someone else in six weeks. I had asked her for her body and that's what she was giving me, and inside I knew that wasn't enough but I wouldn't let myself think about that. I'd taken enough women for their bodies, surely I could do it again with her, and in the midst of sex, that's all you think about anyhow, isn't it? In the midst of sex, everyone's in love. She kissed like she was in love. Or rather, she didn't kiss so much as she just surrendered, just melted under my lips. I don't mean she went all loose and slack. I don't know how to describe what she did except to describe it as a surrender, a capitulation, an invitation, something devastatingly female, and my first thought was a surge of resentment over whether her fiancé would appreciate her kiss. Her surrender brought forth a surge of male hormones in me, a rush of blinding sexual desire that made me feel like a conqueror—an emotional acceleration that turned me into an animal who seized her hair and held her mouth to mine like it was some life-saving cool

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and nourishing fruit in the middle of hell's own desert. She shuddered before my onslaught and melted still further, leaning into me as if her bones were dissolving, as if passion were making her weak, and the more I took, the more she wanted to give until I felt like I was ready to crawl into her mouth and have her from the inside. She drove me insane. Call it love or call it lust but it was good enough for me–it was more than good enough. It was exactly what I wanted and it was exactly what Emma wanted taken from her. I pushed her back until I had her pressed up against the whiteboard, never breaking that kiss, and I grabbed her wrists and held them against the board to let her know I owned her now and she was under my control. I leaned against her to show her how hard she'd made me. It was her fault she was being treated like this. The whiteboard was covered with my own scribbles of the poetic emotions we'd been discussing—love, hate, joy, fear, sadness, anger, desire, shame—and now I held Emma against it and worked her white cotton top up over her naked tits as she turned her face to the side to gasp for breath. She grabbed my hands to try and stop me and I shook her off angrily and grabbed her wrists again, pressing them against the board. "You know the rules," I growled. "You don't touch me without permission!" "I thought we were just going to talk," she said fearfully. "Someone could still come in." "I don't give a fuck who comes in. When we're together, I'm in control. You don't touch me or interfere, understand?"

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She nodded and I went back to lifting her top over her tits. I wanted her naked and exposed under the spotlight, pinned against the whiteboard, but the top was snug. Halfway up I slid my hands under her breasts and ran my thumbs around her nipples, kissing her, and again Emma opened her mouth to me in submission, closing her eyes and sucking on my tongue with meek supplication. Her nipples were wildly sensitive in a way I didn't remember from last time, possibly from being braless all evening, and rubbing my thumbs against them caused her to push her hips out at me and moan into my mouth. When I pinched them, she gave a little shriek. I knew I was going too fast for her, making her confused and dizzy with my sudden attack, but I liked it this way. I shoved her top up and lowered my head and took a nipple into my mouth, sucking and lashing it with my tongue. She knew now she wasn't allowed to touch me, but she didn't know what to do with her hands, so all she could do was hold them up and squeeze them into frustrated fists or spread her fingers wide—lovely fingers with beautiful nails, the kind of nails that got a lot of attention. The shine of her nails got to me. For some reason they made me want to bite her breasts. She was all so perfect. I squeezed her tits in either hand ‘til the nipples stood out, then I licked and nibbled them ‘til she hissed like a cat, arched her back and gave a little cry. I reached down and grabbed the hem of her skirt and started working it over her hips but it was snug, too, and she had to help me, moving her thighs together and rolling her hips. Soon enough I got it high enough I could feel her panties between her legs. I was surprised. I thought we had a kind of agreement she wasn't supposed to wear underthings to our sessions. I touched her pussy and she stiffened. So she'd been right. She really hadn't known whether she was going to go through with this tonight.

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"Panties?" I asked. "You wore panties tonight?" "I wasn't sure," she said nervously. "I wasn't sure if I was going to…" I leaned back and looked at her, my anger flaring. "You weren't sure? You really weren't sure? Are you sure now, Emma? Or do you want to think about it some more?" "No. I'm sure. Really, I'm sure. Conner, don't…" I pulled her skirt up and shoved my hand down the front of her panties, hooked my finger beneath the soft crease of her pussy and parted her lips. She was smooth and wet and I could feel her greasy little clit lick at my finger like a tongue as I rubbed back and forth. Emma moaned and gasped and dropped her hands to her sides, clawing at the walls as if trying to hang on. I leaned against her and the feel of her pussy in my hand made me hot with lust and hunger and a feeling of ownership, a sense of power and control. I loved the way she came alive at my touch, the way she responded. At the same time, the idea that she'd even considered denying me what was so clearly mine filled me with anger. I slid my finger into her as if to remind her who she belonged to, pushed into her without apology as my thumb played with her clit. My face was right against hers and I stared directly into her eyes, daring her to tell me no, just daring her—almost hoping she would. The idea she could have someone else—a boyfriend, a lover, a fiancé, even a husband—who could touch her the way I did or feel about her the way I did, just infuriated me. She looked at me fearfully but didn't say a word. Her legs parted slightly and I pushed my finger in deeper, violating her, penetrating her, trying to hurt her and she

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closed her eyes and grimaced but accepted it. There had to be no doubt here who owned whom, and yet inside I wondered whose heart was beating faster? Who was more excited? Who had the power? Who was surrendering to whom? I pulled my finger out of her and she relaxed slightly, daring at last to breathe. I took her arm—"Come here"—pulled her over to the lectern and pushed her face down over it. "Here, on your elbows, ass up, legs straight. That's it. Now spread them. Keep your face down." Emma did as she was told, leaning her forearms on the wooden lectern, keeping her knees straight so her trunk was almost parallel to the floor. Her top was still up under her armpits, her tits hung beneath her, heavy and free, distended by gravity. I undid her skirt and pulled down the zipper, then yanked it down over her hips and let it slide down her legs. She stepped out of it, giving a little mewl of embarrassment at appearing so naked and exposed in so public a place as an auditorium, but she didn't protest. Her panties were thin, robin's egg blue, stretched across the firm globes of her buttocks and low enough so the top of her ass crack was visible, tight enough so the ripe bottoms of her cheeks emerged from beneath as well. I ran my hand over her ass, feeling the warmth of her skin through the thin, slick fabric as she looked nervously back at me over her shoulder. "Eyes front," I said as I caressed the humid pit of her sex between her legs. "So you weren't sure? You weren't sure you were going to give me this ass tonight?" "Connor, I—"

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I drew my hand back and gave her a good hard slap on the underside of her right buttock—a loud one, a slap that echoed in the empty auditorium like a gunshot and made her squeal and rise up on her toes in surprise. "Owww! Conner! No! No! That's not what I meant!" "Keep your hands on that lectern! Don’t you dare take them off, Emma!" Whapp! I slapped her on the left cheek, just as hard, hard enough to make her drop her head and gasp, her fingers digging into the edge of the lectern as if she had to hang on. Smackk! Slappp! Two more blows, one on either cheek, hard and sharp, and now my hand was starting to sting and her ass was jiggling and beginning to redden. The sting felt good and, as I spanked her again, Emma gasped and jerked her head up, her mouth open in shock and something else—surprise maybe, but surprise at her own reaction, at finding she liked it, liked being spanked like this, treated like a naughty little high school slut. I spanked her again. I was standing behind her and just to her left so I could swing my right hand back and land my blows squarely on the center of her ass, right on top of her innocent blue panties as her buttocks quaked and trembled and clenched together in reflexive avoidance. Her hands were holding onto the top of the lectern and she lowered her face and rested her cheek against it, her brows knitted against the pain as she awaited the next blow, and how the emotions tore at me as I spanked her! Her fragile beauty and the way she offered herself up to my punishment brought out something both savage and tender

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in me, and I stopped the spanking, reached in front of her with my left hand and found her pussy and began to caress her, massaging and stroking her the way I knew she liked, washing away the pain with soothing tenderness. I caressed her ass as well, sliding my hand over her slick panties, feeling the heat from her beaten flesh through the fabric. The softness felt good, soothing against my tingling palm. Emma began to grind herself against my hand, tentatively, as if checking to see whether the storm had passed. When she received no further spanks, she grew bolder. She began to search for pleasure, rolling her hips and ass as she pushed her pussy against my fingers, working herself off. She became hungrier, more desperate. My fingers pressed the fabric of her panties up into her sticky slit and it felt as though she might somehow actually open up and take me inside, and at that point I realized she was about to seduce me with her need. I drew my right hand back and started spanking her again—Slapp! Whapp! Crackk!—smacking her ass as I continued to massage her pussy, mixing pleasure and pain, sweetness and thunder, until Emma was clinging to the lectern and almost sobbing, humping and writhing like a bitch in heat, not sure which way to turn. Now I was sweating too, my hand numb, my dick throbbing and oozing in my pants. I stepped back and pulled off my necktie as Emma writhed and moaned against the lectern, swiveling her ass shamelessly. I grabbed her wrists and used the tie to bind them behind her back. She didn't resist, just lay there with her face pressed against the hard wood as I roughly tied her wrists together and she panted with urgent excitement. Even as I pulled the knot tight, her ass continued to weave and undulate in lascivious

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invitation as if it had a mind of its own and was hungry now for more punishment, more pleasure, for whatever I wanted to give her. I pulled down her panties—pulled them down until they were stretched just above her knees—and exposed her naked buttocks and the swollen and glistening pussy nestled between them. I played with her and spanked her some more until her ass was a bright red and her moans turned into a hoarse and urgent panting. Her hands twisted in the bonds and her thighs trembled, her copious lubricant seeping over my fingers in shameful excess and dripping onto the floor, a sight that only made me spank her harder. I aroused her and punished her for being aroused at the same time. She stopped trying to protect herself or avoid the spanks, sticking her ass up high and humping savagely at the hand invading her pussy, desperate to get off. It was bizarre, . We were like the centerpiece in some classroom demonstration of carnal depravity, the overhead spotlight illuminating us on the dais as she bent slavishly over the lectern with her cheek pressed against the wood, her hands tied behind her, naked ass in the air while I spanked her and fingered her cunt and she moaned and writhed and gasped, the sounds echoing off the darkened walls. I was feverish with desire and couldn't resist her anymore. I fell to my knees behind her, grabbed the fronts of her thighs and pulled her ass back to me and buried my face in her cunt like an animal "Oh! God!" she cried at this new outrage. My nose pressed against her asshole and my tongue pierced her lips, sucked greedily at her flowing juices, slurped at her cunt, the , slushy sounds enough to give

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even me goose bumps. I was sick, insane with lust for her. She clenched her ass and I felt it trap my face in the hot valley of her crack. I just slapped her again to make her let go, then reached around and began to frig her, beating her off and spanking her clit like it was a naughty little monkey, slapping my fingers into the wet sticky trough of her pussy. Her cheek pressed into the lectern, her face rolling back and forth so her voice was muffled, but I heard her groans and entreaties and her nervous pleas. "Oh God! God, Conner! Someone could come in! Someone could come in!" "Yeah. Let 'em," I said, my mouth full of her flesh. Before us was the entire auditorium, all these empty seats facing us as if peopled by ghostly observers, all of them watching us, watching Emma having her cunt eaten out from behind by a man squatting on his haunches like a lunatic ape. I got my pants open and pulled out my cock as I ate her, started beating off, my wrist rocking easily on that big stalk, working the skin up and down as I sealed my mouth against her pussy, piercing her with my tongue or letting it slither along her juicefilled crease. When I pulled my mouth away, her mucus coated my lips and I pressed my mouth against her ass and flicked my tongue maddeningly against her tightly clenched asshole, making her squeal and lift her foot reflexively as if to push me away, as if this final outrage were just too much. It wasn't too much for me. I grabbed her ankle and planted her foot right back down on the floor. Yes, I licked her asshole. I spread her ass cheeks and tried to work

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my tongue into her and she screamed and clenched until I slapped her again to make her relax, to show her there was no part of her I wouldn't take if I wanted to. And once we established that—once she accepted that every piece of her was mine—I stood up with a look of grim satisfaction on my face and opened my belt and let my pants drop, my cock springing fully free. I looked down at her—that beautiful body, bound and bent before me. I knew then she was mine—mine to have, mine to fuck, mine to do with as I pleased. The previous sessions had been seductions on my part— I'd taken her—but this time I'd waited for her to come to me, and she had. She'd come to me and that made all the difference. She was complicit in this affair. She'd accepted the terms, and she knew very well what they were. Emma waited breathlessly as I moved into position behind her. My handprints were all over her ass, her juice dripping from the pouting, swollen lips of her pussy. She didn't move, didn't breathe as I ran my hands over my property, then shuffled forward with my pants around my ankles, shuffled forward and pressed the head of my cock against her opening. I felt her stiffen for an instant. Her pussy seemed to suck inward in sudden, automatic reflex, then I took hold of her hips and leaned back like a cowboy on a bucking bronco, and slid that long shaft into her cunt. I could almost hear it sizzle like a bar of white hot iron quenched in a trough of wetness. "Ohhhhh! Conner! Conner!" "Fuck!"

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The pleasure was so intense I felt like I'd been punched in the gut, and already I felt my balls churning, ready to spit. She was so hot, so tight, so perfect, and it was her—Emma—she was mine. So she had a boy friend, she had a fiancé. So she'd had men before and would have them again. But for tonight, in all the universe—all the people who walked the planet this way and that—this one was mine. She was my slave, my beauty, my lover, my woman—and she was all I could ever want. I pushed in deeper and felt her hot ass press against my belly, heard her moan of fulfillment as she slid forward on the lectern. "Oh yes!" I could look down to see my shaft spreading the tight ring of muscle at the entrance to her pussy. I could picture that hard meat inside of her, pressing against her tissues, stimulating her secret nerve endings, sending hormones gushing through her bloodstream and hot, shuddery ripples of pleasure along her nerves, along her legs and her spine, up to her brain. She was tied, helpless, naked in that auditorium, panties pulled down around her legs—there to be fucked and to take it, there to be used, to be filled with my cum. "Jesus!" I swore. "Oh fuck!" I grabbed her hips and started fucking into the slick clutch of her cunt, punching my hips into her and pulling her back on my thrusting shaft, hearing the wet slap of her ass against me, her helpless moans. Her tits swung back and forth. My balls swung too, and as I pumped her against me, I felt viscous strings of our commingled juices sticking to my thighs as they seeped from her pussy.

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"Good, isn't it?" I snarled at her. "You like being fucked like this, Emma? You like driving me crazy so I fuck you like this?" She just moaned, too overwhelmed with the ness of her position to speak. I reached over and grabbed her hair, pulled her head up so she arched her back as I suddenly increased the tempo, double-timing her, fucking her so fast thatthe slap of her tits against her chest joined the salacious chorus of sexual noises we made. Her long, constant moan of carnal pleasure was punctuated by sharp, involuntary, animal-like grunts as I punched into her, sending my tool slithering deep and knocking the wind out of her. Through the hot red haze of my primal fuck-lust I remembered her clit—that hot, swollen love bud nestled between her lips—how she loved to be played with, and I reached down into her swampy cunt and spread her apart and forked my fingers around it. I squeezed just enough to make her whine, then started beating her off as I fucked her, sliding my hand up and back while holding her hair in one hand and pulling her face up like a headsman's trophy. "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" she chanted mindlessly, overcome by the double sensation of being fucked and played with. I could shove my dick into her and hold it there and then vibrate her clit so fast I felt it in my shaft, like she was a human vibrator. It felt good. It felt insanely good. There was nothing Emma could do but scream. My hand was in her hair, her chest was pressed against the podium, her wrists tied behind her back. My cock pumped in and out of that sweet little cunt, my fingers digging and vibrating against her engorged clit as her juice poured and slopped over my fingers. 76

She screamed—screamed in pleasure and total submission, screamed as I took her and rode her hard and gave her just what she wanted. Screamed as I felt her cunt convulse and her body begin to hunch and jerk against me, out of control as she came, legs shaking, choking on her own cries of release, hands twisting in her bonds. I pulled up on her cunt, pulled it tight like a glove around me and shoved deep, rising up on my toes to make her take every last fucking inch of cock, then I grabbed the back of her neck and pushed her down against the lectern as I felt it start. I wanted to hold her right there as I shot it into her—right there—mine, mine! I threw my head back in ecstasy and growled like a lion with his kill as I felt the thick bolts of cum gush up from the well of my soul and thunder down my cock to spew hard and heavy into Emma's quivering sheath, one after another, each a burning jolt of fiery bliss and absolute triumph, an explosion of fulfillment, sending my soul into her— my need, my strength, my love. I poured it into her—marking her, branding her, making her mine—standing above her on the podium like a king over his slave, watching my cock jerk and spit into her body as if it weren't even mine, as if our bodies spoke directly one to another. Even in my moment of triumph, I felt her take possession of my soul, just as she took possession of my cum. I felt her conquer me with her very submission, and I knew, as the final pleasure of climax seeped through my body like warm honey, I was totally lost. **** There was no place else to go, so I opened a folding chair down in front of the lectern and sat there with Emma in my lap, naked except for her top. I was dressed, and

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that was part of it, a sign of her status. She didn't seem to mind, and in fact, she found my desire to hold her afterwards strange but terribly gratifying. Apparently she'd always felt that revealing the wild and submissive side of her sexuality would somehow disqualify her from receiving affection afterwards, as if she were no more than a whore. My need to hold and caress her and keep her close almost seemed to embarrass her at first, and it took her a while to realize I was serious and not just doing it to patronize her. I loved to hold her, though. I especially loved to play with her and feel my cum dripping from her pussy. It was like a mark of ownership, and it made me proud in a terribly selfish, embarrassingly male kind of way. So she sat there in my lap with my left arm around her, her legs slightly apart as I kissed and nuzzled her breasts and slid my fingers around, smearing my cum over her thighs, lost in that post-orgasmic sense of peace and fulfillment. "Conner?" "Yes?" "This is dumb, but do you mind if I talk?" "About what?" "You know. About him?" I never stopped licking her breasts. "If you want." I really didn't care. She seemed to be gathering her thoughts and, whether consciously or unconsciously I don't know, I started playing with her pussy. Emma's arms were around my neck, and she tightened them slightly and leaned back a bit so she could open her legs more. That made her breasts more accessible and I slipped a nipple between my

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lips and began to suck as my hand, of its own volition, started to seriously massage her pussy. I didn't do this on purpose. I wasn't trying to shut her up or distract her, but Emma's extremely orgasmic. It's one of the amazing things about her. She turns on extremely quickly and has a very short latency period between orgasms. It was something I was just discovering at the time but had not yet fully realized. "What?" I asked. "What did you want to say?" She was already breathing faster. "Never mind," she whispered, her hand gripping the back of my neck. "It's not important." I lowered her until she was more nearly lying recumbent across my lap and continued playing with her, sliding my fingers over her cum-slick clit and up and down her crease and Emma seemed to go limp and tense at the same time. I could look down at her face and see the pleasure of my hand take her and render her helpless. Her hips started to move. "God, when you touch me!" she gasped. "God, Conner! What are you doing to me?" I found her clit. I already knew what she liked. Her hips started to move with purpose now, , purpose, pumping, lifting against my fingers, the muscles in her stomach knotting. She opened her eyes a slit and looked at me. "You make me so bad!" she whispered.

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"I love you this way!" I said. "Now give it to me, Emma. You know what I want. Give it to me!" "Oh!" She bit her lip but she couldn't refuse. I could almost see her nipples tightening on her breasts, her labia swelling. I definitely could feel her clit becoming turgid and rubbery and resisting my touch. She was wonderful to watch—a lesson in female sexual response. "Oh… Oh, God, Conner!" When Emma comes, she gives it to you. It's like something she has to get rid of, something she has to eject from her body, through her cunt and her skin and her mouth and her eyes—a terrible coiled up ferocious pleasure that starts somewhere inside and bursts out of her. My urge is always to hold her, to wrap my arms around her and hold her tight so she doesn't fly apart or explode as the pleasure rips from her. And that's what I did. I pulled her against me with my left arm, crushed her against me so hard neither of us could breathe as my right hand continued to coax the orgasm out of her and I felt her shudder and twitch like a rag doll as she moaned and sobbed helplessly in my embrace. I held her so hard I felt tears squeeze out of my eyes and roll down my cheeks, catching me by surprise as she came and came and I thought through my joy how absolutely foolish I was. This was only sex after all. This was only sex, to hold a woman's heart and soul in your hands and know she wanted you to do whatever you wanted to her and have her respond like this. This was only sex, when you touched

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each other in places no one else had ever touched and made you feel things beyond your ability to describe. Only sex where, for one brief instant, no matter how short and fleeting, the barriers fell away and you were somehow one with her—this stranger—and you weren't alone anymore. It was only sex. Only sex.

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Chapter Six

The night was just setting in, the sky in the west was a forlorn and tattered pink under low gray clouds as I turned off the blacktop and pulled into the motel parking lot. A glance into my rearview mirror showed Emma's headlights behind me, dipping and rising as she made the turn and followed me in. We were out in an unincorporated no man's land, stuck between the far end of the airport runways and a suburban industrial park, heading to a strip of motels and weedy fields squatting in the shadow of the expressway, a place where no one stayed, where nothing was permanent. I slowed down and cruised beneath the motel's huge and garish neon sign and past the front office, then back through the sparsely-filled parking lot. When I slid down the car window, I heard the distant whining of jet engines and saw the strobing of the runway landing lights reflected in the low cloud cover. It looked like heat lightning. My tires crunched on the dry gravel as I pulled into a spot and Emma pulled in right next to me. When we cut our engines, it was quiet enough to hear the crickets in the weeds and the soft hum of the motel's air-conditioners. This night was soft and close and smelled of Midwestern earth and fertility. The place was so nowhere, Emma and I might as well have been the only people in the world. I got out of the car and grabbed my briefcase with my school papers. I'd already stopped here before class to set up some things and this was all I had. Emma popped her trunk and got out of her car, locking it. She didn't even look at me as she got a tote bag out of the trunk and then closed it. She'd taken off the blue sweater she'd worn in

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class and draped it around her shoulders, revealing the tight, pink tank top she wore beneath. She wore a pair of khaki shorts and sandals and her long chestnut hair was pinned up on top of her head. I'd made her go into the ladies' room and put her hair up before we'd left the campus. I'd also made her take off her bra and panties and put them in her bag so she was naked beneath her shorts and top. With the arms of the sweater hanging over her breasts, I couldn't tell for sure whether she'd followed my instructions, but I had no reason to doubt it. Emma never disagreed with me. When I'd called her the night before and told her I'd be taking her to a motel tonight, she'd agreed as well. It wasn't easy for her to talk at home because she had two roommates who didn't know about us, and she couldn't take calls on her cell because she had to keep that clear in case her boyfriend called from Atlanta. He was very jealous. I took her arm. "We're on the second floor." I'd intentionally picked this forlorn, anonymous motel, not because she didn't deserve better, but because at this stage in our relationship, it seemed appropriate— someplace seedy and furtive, a place that used its proximity to the airport as cover for what it really was: a rendezvous for people who wanted to have sex or meet for other small-time illicit activities. The nice downtown hotels with the rich carpets and silk sheets could come later. For now I wanted something more from Emma than I'd been able to get from meeting her after hours at school. So far, for all we'd done, it had still been basically a student-teacher affair and I wanted it to be more. This seemed to be the logical next step and I was excited, my excitement showing in the tight control I kept on myself.

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Emma was excited too and I knew her well enough to recognize it. She showed it the same way I did, hardly saying a word, barely looking at me. I gestured to the stairs and she started to climb. I followed, aware she was naked under her clothes, aware she must know very well what she was getting into. Her face was passive, but I noticed a glint of excitement in her eyes. Somewhere between here and the school she'd found time to adjust her makeup because her face was flawless despite the harsh, yellow-tinted lights. I'd never seen her looking more beautiful, placid and perfectly composed. I directed her to the left. We passed by silent, firmly closed doors, the stucco walls tinged a sickly green from the motel's neon marquee. I stopped in front of 232 and swiped the keycard, pushed open the door, and we stepped into a typically generic motel room, so bland and featureless as to be almost invisible, the carpet brown, the walls orange. It looked clean enough, everything orderly and tidy—two beds, tightly made up, a closet, dresser with mirror, chest, television. It was only on second look that Emma noticed the end of a rope hanging over the top of the closet door, the collection of sex toys neatly arranged on a towel on the dresser. I watched her face as she looked at the dresser. I'd laid everything out earlier— cuffs and chains, rope and clips, vibrators and dildos, clamps, whips and floggers—all neatly arrayed like a surgeon's instruments. Emma's expression didn't change as she looked at the dresser but I felt her sudden surge of tension and excitement, and I saw it in her eyes and in the brief flare of her nostrils. I knew that for all her submissive proclivities and native talent, Emma was

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relatively naïve when it came to the actual tools and practices of BDSM. These things held a horrid fascination for her. A jet whined overhead, so close the lampshades vibrated, the light trembling against the walls and ceiling, and that seemed to break the spell. I felt a sudden surge, realizing now why this was so important to me. All our other meetings had been acts of passion. This was something else. Alone like this, with my little toys on display, I was showing her who I was and what I wanted from her, and she could have rejected me on the spot and there would have been nothing I could have done about it. Despite what they say, D/s is always a co-operative affair. You can't force anyone to submit to you. It has to be given willingly, otherwise it's nothing but rape. Emma didn't reject me. She didn't turn and walk out or tell me "no". She looked at those things and got excited, and I knew then she was willing. I knew then I'd been right about her and there was a connection between us beyond coincidence and happenstance. She’d had her own reasons for following me out here, and while neither of us might know what we were involved in, we both sensed it was something bigger than either of us and we approached each other with a sense of caution, of fear, a feeling that things might happen here we wouldn't be able to control and would change things for us—change everything. I felt as though we both stood on some huge and elaborate machine that was suddenly starting to move, shuddering to life and bringing us closer. It made me dizzy, as if the floor were actually moving beneath my feet. "Come here," I said.

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Emma turned and came to me, arms at her sides, eyes lowered. I was aware of her femaleness as something deep and profound and totally opposite to my own masculinity, something necessary and complementary—the curves of her body and the delicacy of her face, her soft fluidity against my hard eagerness. I was aware of the urgency of my need for her. It was something that went far beyond the desire to just get laid or get off. So far it had been all sex between us and it had been wonderful as far as that went, but I now wanted more, and I didn't know what that was. I undid the sweater and threw it on the bed. Her breasts were lush and vulnerable, her nipples were already pressing against the thin fabric of the tank top. The sight of the toys had aroused her, or maybe it had been my simple command. She kept her eyes down and didn't say a word. I took her breasts in my hands and felt their weight, then rubbed my thumbs over her areolas and she sighed and closed her eyes in acceptance, instinctively pushing her chest into my palms, offering herself. "We're alone now, Emma, and we're going to see if you like the things I think you'll like. You know I'll never push you too hard. I'll never make you do anything you really don't want to do. All you have to do is tell me to stop and I'll stop. I don’t want you to ever be afraid." Her eyes were closed and she nodded, but I knew she'd never tell me to stop, no matter what I did to her. It wasn't in her nature. The one thing she could do was give her body, totally and without question. I just wondered whether that was enough anymore.

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I slid my hands from her breasts and around her back, pulled her to me and kissed her, pressing my lips against hers. She was soft and warm and had a kind of trembling readiness, eager for more, and I wondered if she could feel my own anxiousness as well and how her kiss aroused me. I had to fight the sudden desire that threatened to overwhelm me and make me weak, that turned my strength against me and made me crush her to me and plunge my tongue into her mouth in my sudden fever to possess her. Emma took my force and bent back like a willow in a gale. She knew the rules, that she wasn't allowed to touch me without my permission, and her arms hung nervously at her sides, but as my hands spread across her back and I pressed her to me, she seemed to melt against my body like sugar in the rain and her mouth opened to my kiss in a total and instinctive surrender, offering all she had. She inflamed me, and even as her body softened against mine, her nipples seemed to harden and push into me with a sudden blind urgency. I broke the kiss and looked at her, my eyes searching her face. Submission isn't passivity and it isn't laziness. It's a kind of active surrender, a willing acquiescence and sexual invitation and Emma just radiated it with every fiber of her body. She drove me wild by not doing anything at all. "You can touch me," I said. Her hands came up and held my cheeks as she looked at me. I wasn't prepared for the power in her eyes, the depth and the clarity, the absence of any doubt. She looked at me like I was something beautiful, almost godly, her eyes studying me from chin to forehead, memorizing me. Then she closed her eyes and let her fingertips glide 87

over my face, giving them their turn. She put her hands on the side of my head and opened her mouth, held my face like it was a bowl she wanted to drink from, then she tipped my mouth into hers, kissing me. I kissed her back and pulled her against me, overcome by what she'd made me feel. She was such a strange mixture of angel and animal, almost spiritual one moment and filthy and the next. Is that what drove me so wild about her? Because I had no doubt as to what I was. Like a beast, I pushed my cock against her so she could feel my erection and she moaned in acknowledgement. Her hands tangled in my hair and she held me tighter. Her ass flexed beneath my hands as she ground back at me. She had a luscious mouth, a mouth that teased and promised and took its time, that invited my tongue in and sucked on it, licked it and dared it to do more, and already I sensed she was way ahead of me, more excited than I'd thought. She'd looked so calm and composed when we'd entered the room, but Emma was a girl who was able to keep up a cool front, and she'd obviously been excited for some time. All it had taken was this kiss to set her off and she was instantly on fire. I slid my hand down her back, down between her buttocks, pressing her shorts up between her legs. She groaned and pushed back against me, grinding her crotch against my leg. She was caught between my finger and my leg and wanted them both and meanwhile her kiss never stopped. I increased the pressure and she bit my tongue and moaned with obsequious pleasure, her thighs quivering as she tried to center her clit over the bulge in my pants. I could feel her muscles working through her shorts and knew she was ready.

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I let go of her and stepped back to the equipment on the dresser. Emma stood there looking suddenly cold and exposed and momentarily confused. "Your wrists, Emma," I ordered, and she held out her hands. She looked at the cuff as if having trouble focusing, and when she held out her hands, they were shaking slightly. I'd bound her before—with rope, with her own panties—but those had been spur-of-the-moment affairs. This was different. This was intentional, by design, with leather cuffs and metal buckles, implements meant for restraining someone. This was me telling Emma I was taking deliberate control of her. She watched in mute fascination as I slid the leather around her wrist. She was all curves and softness and shadow and I'd never been so aware of a woman's femininity as I was when I slid the ends through the silver buckles and snagged them into place. I did one wrist and the other, then fastened the cuffs together in front of her with a sturdy chrome clip. She raised her hands and the rings jangled softly as she studied them, at the way the leather looked against her skin. There was excitement in her eyes, but also shame, and a bright blush had spread beneath her carefully maintained tan. I'd never seen Emma looking so nervous or so excited. I led her over to the closet. Earlier I'd fastened a length of nylon rope to the inside doorknob, tied a loop in the end and passed it over the top then closed the door. Now I passed another length of rope through this loop and fastened the free end to Emma's cuffs, hauling on it and lifting her wrists over her head. I tied it off around the doorknob, leaving her standing there so her arms were raised, her elbows at eye level, her breasts crowded together.

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"Yes," I said. "Yes, that's good." Emma had lost her expression of cool equanimity now. Her lips were parted and swollen, her eyes wary, guarded and more than a little afraid. She was seriously helpless and naked beneath her clothes, strung up against a closet door in this little lowrent motel with a man she didn't know very well, a man she'd decided to give her body to and now she must be having her doubts. I could see her pulse in her throat and it was racing. My stillness made her nervous but I was in no hurry. Just looking at her was getting me insanely aroused. She raised a leg and pressed a foot against the door, then put it down. She shifted her hips, trying to get comfortable. "I can't move," she said. A silly thing to say. I smiled. "Yes. I noticed." I went over to her and leaned over her, admiring her in her helplessness one more time, then I just let my passion overwhelm me. I grabbed her hair and pulled her head back and slowly licked her lips. Emma shuddered with relief and opened her mouth, expecting a kiss, but I avoided that. Instead I just tasted her—her lips, the slickness of her lipstick, her yielding warmth and the nervous heat of her breath. I ran my other hand down over the doe-soft skin of her face, down her throat, between her tits, over the waist of her shorts and down between legs where I began to rub her, showing her just how defenseless she was tied like this. She moaned a little, her fingers closing on the rope as she pulled, but the rope held. I could touch her anywhere, take anything I wanted, and there was nothing she

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could do to stop me. I reached up into the leg of her shorts and caressed the smooth, tender skin on the insides of her thighs and she whimpered. She pulled at the rope and brought her elbows together as if she could hide her face behind them. "Mmm…" I sighed as I kissed her. Her thighs were like silk and I loved her helplessness, loved the fact she couldn't move. I leaned against her so she could feel my hard cock pressing on her hip and pushed it against her, slowly dry-humping so she'd know I was ready and she could be taken any time. When I slid my hand under her tank top, closing it on the warm globe of her tit, she groaned. "God, I love you like this," I whispered. "Mine to use as I please. You make me so fucking hot, Emma!" I kissed her, thrusting my tongue into her mouth and she whimpered, the back of her head softly hitting the closet door as I continued to massage her breast so hard her body swung back and forth. I let go of her hair and slid my other hand down and began to rub her pussy through the shorts and she gasped into my mouth at the feel of the rough khaki against her naked flesh. She thrust against me, wanting me to touch her with my finger, but I held off. "Let's get these off, shall we?" I asked. She closed her eyes and said nothing as I crowded her against the door, resting my forehead against hers. My hands went to the waist of her shorts and I slid the button through the hole, the backs of my fingers brushing lightly against her belly and making her jump. I felt her trembling as I touched the sensitive skin below her navel, and then I slowly—very slowly—lowered the zipper on her shorts, tooth by tooth. I took her lower

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lip between my teeth and held her there, pulling up on her shorts to keep the zipper taut and making the crotch dig into her delicate pussy as I unzipped her. It was mean, I know, but I loved being mean to her. Emma moaned and moved her hips back and forth, trying to work herself off against the fabric, and her tight, liquid motion made the blood pound in my veins. She was such a hot little piece, the way she came alive under my hands, dangerously sexual. You'd never think it to see her in school, walking down the street, sitting in class—a girl like any other girl, nothing special—but entirely sexual. It was her medium, her natural element, the only place she really came alive—and how she came alive! I got her shorts open and I knew she was waiting for the touch of my hands on her bare flesh but I stopped, left the shorts hanging open with the V of bare skin showing, all pink and vulnerable. I slipped both my hands up under her tank top and started squeezing and kneading her breasts. Her warm, pliable flesh was like human dough in my hands and my mouth was close enough to hers that I could taste her breath. "Oh! Oh yes!" she sighed. Her hips rolled in tight, impatient circles and I pressed my cock against her so I could ride her urgency. She twisted against me, trying to bring her pussy into contact with the hard bar of my dick, hungry for something to rub against, the imperative of her own pleasure taking precedence over everything else now. "You like this, Emma? You like being tied like this?" I asked her, and she moaned impatiently, too busy concentrating on her hips to give me a full answer.

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She worked frantically, trying to get herself off on her own shorts, but all she managed to do was make them slip farther down until they hung uselessly low on the saddle of her hips. I helped her get them off, pulling them down then holding her so I could feel her work her thighs and pelvis to make the shorts slide all the way down her legs, undressing herself for me. It was a beautiful display, selfish and , a nasty little girl just dying to get her panties off for the bad boys. Still, I didn't touch her, didn't give her what she wanted. I pushed my knee up hard against her pussy, lifting her slightly and giving her something to rub against. She was only too grateful for the ride and I felt her moist warmth searing through my jeans as she rubbed against me like a bitch in heat. I pinned her against the door as I peeled her top up and over her head, but because her wrists here clipped together I couldn’t get it all the way off, so I left it dangling from her arms. The heavy globes of her breasts were now exposed, covered with a sudden rush of goose bumps. More than losing her shorts, losing her top seemed to make Emma truly naked. Her tits were gorgeous—generous, giving, vulnerable. No doubt part of the appeal of having her hands tied over her head was the way it left her tits so flagrantly exposed, so deliciously defenseless. I grabbed her bound wrists in one hand and pushed them up even higher, raising her breasts so I could bend my head and suck and lick her nipples. I nuzzled against her tits, pushing them around with my face. licking and biting as they jiggled and bounced against my cheeks like ripe fruit. I wanted to devour her, just eat her up, and the more excited I got, the more excited she got. She was ready to be devoured. I could feel it.

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She was panting as I reached up and started searching for the pins holding her hair in place, removing them one by one until her hair tumbled over her face. The long silky strands hid her breasts like a curtain, parting just enough to let the pink-brown nipples poke through. She opened her eyes and looked at me through her hair like an animal through a jungle brake, wild and feral, waiting for me to strike, waiting to see what I was going to do next, ready for whatever I wanted. I kissed her then, letting all my the passion just flood over me and take control. I kissed her and lost myself in her mouth as I held her hair in my fist and my other hand roamed all over her naked body, squeezing, caressing, possessing her, the heavy softness of her tits, her tight belly and the sweet flare of her hips. My hand went between her legs and she moaned and pressed her thighs tightly together as if suddenly afraid, a gesture that infuriated me. It was too late for that now, way too late to play shy and modest, and without pausing an instant, I slapped her thighs—two sharp little slaps on the insides of her thighs to make her open them and keep them apart— surprising her and making her cry out in alarm, right into my mouth. I owned her now and we both knew it—how dare she try and refuse me? I slapped her thighs again and Emma trembled as she spread them wider. She whimpered and pulled on the rope as if suddenly having second thoughts but I was having none of it. I slid my finger against her naked crease and when I kissed her again I could taste her hot, shameful excitement, her nervous arousal. "Don’t you close your legs for me, Emma!" I snarled. "Don’t even think of it. I own you now, baby. All of you. Or do you have a problem with that?" "No," she gasped. "No. I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking." 94

"No, you were thinking. That's the problem. Don’t think. Understand?" She was naked, her wrists tied to a closet door in this seedy motel on the edge of nowhere, but the things going on between us were deep and real and profound and I wasn't fucking around. I was in charge. When I grabbed her hair and pulled her head back and kissed her hard, she groaned. Her tongue shot into my mouth in eager invitation, showing me what she wanted my finger to do to her below, fluttering in my mouth, thrusting, teasing, and she hummed with pleasure. I leaned against her, kissing her, playing with her pussy, and in a matter of moments, the smooth muscles of her belly were clenching, rolling with hungry and barely controlled urgency as she tried not to fuck back at me. She wanted to get off— her body wanted it—but she resisted, she fought. I felt the lady fighting with the whore inside, and it drove me wild. I knew which one I wanted right then. She knew it too. She groaned when I slid my finger against her pussy, pushing it up into her. I felt that hot, tender tightness spread before my crude invasion and Emma kissed me, then dug her sharp white teeth into my lower lip and hung on as I fingered her. She was trying not to hurt me but I could feel the pain and humiliation as I fingered her like a cheap little sex toy, reaching high into her secret heat. Her tits shook as she trembled in the cuffs but there was nothing she could do. It hurt her but it felt good too, I knew it did. I knew just how it felt. "Who owns you, Emma? Huh? Who owns you, baby? Whose bitch are you?"

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I shoved my finger up deep inside her so my knuckles crushed against her labia and Emma let go of my lip and grimaced, pulling herself up against the door. She didn't answer. Her eyes were closed. She made me crazy like this because I knew she loved it. I knew she loved the pain, the feeling of being used, of being tied up and violated. She loved it as much as I loved doing it to her, and it made me crazy. She was so fucking beautiful like this. "Come here when I'm talking to you," I said, and I used the finger inside her to pull her towards me. I drew her towards me with my finger inside her pussy, but with her wrists tied to the door she couldn't really move, could only take a shaky step, her hips thrust forward—a cheap, sleazy gesture that filled me with an obscene sense of power. "I asked you who owned you, Emma. Who owns this pussy?" "Oh," she breathed. I pulled my hand to the side and she followed, drew her back and she followed again. I squeezed her, one finger inside her and my thumb on her shaved pubic mound and I turned her sideways. I spanked her on the ass and she pushed herself onto my fingers trying to escape the blow. She hid behind her raised arms. Slapp! "Now who owns you?!" "You do!" she cried. "You do. You own me." I pulled her back so she was standing in front of me, her breasts rising and falling, her face hidden in her fall of hair, and I began to finger her, rubbing her clit as I did. Emma was on fire and there was no hiding it. She trembled and made little mewling 96

sounds as I touched her, and then gasped and shook and I heard her swallow what sounded like a scream. It might have been a little climax. I had to get control of myself. My cock was hard and throbbing and already aching for release and we hadn't been at it for more than ten minutes. I had to calm down. I stepped back and went to my equipment, leaving Emma hanging from the rope, panting and covered in a sheen of perspiration. I picked up some ankle cuffs and a spreader bar and came over. I knelt and buckled the leather cuffs around her ankles, making a conscious effort to ignore the proximity of her pussy, then clipped the bar to the cuffs so her feet were held apart at about shoulder width. By now I had no doubts Emma loved what I was doing to her. She loved the rope, the submission, the possession, the passion and the roughness. But now we were getting into something new, something that went beyond just spanking and hot sex. There was something humiliating about the spreader bar, the way it held her ankles apart, exposing her and keeping her that way. There was no way she could close her knees or hide herself. This was a little piece of equipment designed specifically to make her into something entirely sexual, and I could tell it excited her. I grabbed an 18-inch riding crop and a vibrator and put them on the closest bed where I could reach them. Emma leaned against the closet door, her feet held apart by the bar, her elbows up by her face, watching every move I made. I turned off the far bedside light and threw a red cloth over the remaining lamp to give us a suitable hellish and murky atmosphere, and then I walked over to her.

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I pushed her hands back and lowered my head, sucking a nipple into my mouth and taking her pussy in my hand like I owned it. I touched her gently, aware she’d just come, but Emma recovers very quickly, and as soon as I touched her she sucked in a quick little breath and bit her lip against the pleasure. I stroked her like she was a nervous cat, soothing her, soaking up her warmth. My thumb slid slowly around her clit. She was very wet. "Nice?" I asked her. "Nice being all tied up and held open like this? Nice having your pussy played with?" She didn't answer, but I could tell by the fast, shallow way she was breathing she liked it. "Nowhere to go, is there?" I teased. "All mine—that pussy—everything you've got is all mine." I took my finger from her cunt and brought it to her lips. "Taste it, baby. Taste what you're like when you're excited. Your own juice, Emma. Come on, don’t pretend you never tasted it before. Suck it. Suck my finger like it's a little cock." She resisted for just a moment, then opened her mouth and sucked my finger inside. Her eyes closed and her cheeks hollowed as she sucked, and she was so fantastically beautiful at that moment, tied and bound and sucking my cum-smeared finger like a little slave. I had to taste her too. I wanted to taste that pussy too, her excited female juice.

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I dropped to my knees and she gave a little squeal of alarm. I grabbed her buttocks in my hand and licked her belly, licked her thighs, bit them softly until I felt her tremble. Her mound was hairless and looked like a little girl's, all sweet and innocent, but I knew different. I felt her eyes on me as I knelt at her feet. I felt her trying to keep her cool—one part of her attempting to resist while the other part wanted to shove her pussy into my face like a little whore and have me eat her until she came. I knew how hot she was, how coming once was never enough for her and how much she must need it, and I knew what torture it must be to be tied up and spread open like this and not be able to do anything about it. I felt her quiver as I dragged my tongue across her belly and teased the very edges of her pussy, bit her thighs and blew my breath on her clit. I knew how mean it was for me to spread her pussy apart with my fingers and reach my tongue for her and yet not touch her, to bitch-slap her cunt with the backs of my fingers like it was an insolent little punk until she moaned and started to beg me, pleading with me to do whatever I had to do to make her behave. I knew it was mean, but God, I loved it! "Come here," I growled. I reached through her legs and grabbed one of her buttocks and pulled her hips towards my face so she was thrusting her cunt out like a common whore. With my other hand, I parted her labia and held her spread for me, watching how her legs shook as she tried instinctively to close her thighs. I leaned forward so she could feel my breath on her and I could bathe in her pure female heat. Then, when I was sure she was watching, when I knew I had her total, undivided attention, I leaned forward and touched my tongue to her clit.

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"Ohhhhhh!" Just the tip of my tongue, the tip of her clit, the coalescing of my saliva with her female secretions, just that intimate and that obscene, so when I drew my tongue back, a viscous little strand formed between us, a clear little thread of mucus that finally snapped like a broken heart. As if that were the signal, I finally leaned forward, took a deep breath and began to lick her clit with long swipes of my tongue. I sucked it between my lips and tongued it as my middle finger plunged into her cunt and began to fuck her. It was heaven, heaven. Heaven to have her tied up and spread wide and helpless before me, mine to use as I wished. Heaven to have her sexual soul between my lips and the tight channel of her cunt speared on my finger, feeling her shudder inside with filthy sexual pleasure, feeling that tight belly beginning to work, to cramp and bunch in a greedy search for more pleasure, feeling her melt and dissolve into a lascivious, sex-driven whore. I loved those feminine muscles—hot, hungry, sucking, pushing that pussy onto my mouth and fingers without shame or compunction, desperate for her selfish little come. I flashed my eyes up at her as I ate her cunt, opening my mouth wide and sucking her soft flesh in. Her tits still hung like heavy fruit, the bottoms now covered with goose bumps, nipples stiff and projecting like bullets through the curtain of hanging hair covering them. Her eyes were closed, mouth open in rapture, her fingers spreading and then clenching as she hung from the rope in abject helplessness, the willing victim of my lust.

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The muscles on the insides of her thighs quivered occasionally as she still tried to instinctively close her legs against the maddening probing of my tongue and fingers, but as I'd told her, there was no escape. Her ankles were held open by the spreader bar. My tongue swirled around her clit and plunged into her pussy. I sucked her clit between my lips and spit it out, pumping my fingers into her as Emma's head bumped against the door and she stiffened in a sudden spasm of overwhelming pleasure. "Oh God! Coming! Oh! Coming!" she squealed, and I lashed her clit with my tongue. I held her pussy pressed to my mouth as I felt her loins tighten and pump against me and she gasped and moaned and jerked in her bonds like a marionette. I licked deep, scooping up her juice, then licked again and swallowed her down— essence of Emma, as powerful an aphrodisiac as I'd ever tasted. My dick was hard and aching and oozing in my pants, throbbing to get at her, but I wasn't done yet. She collapsed against the door, quivering and gasping, half-turning as if to shield herself from more abuse. I stood and stripped off my shirt. It was hot in there by now and both of us were sweating. I wanted to feel her skin against me, and I would have taken my pants off too except I knew that would just lead to me fucking her sooner, maybe just taking her as she was against the door, bending my knees sand sliding my dick right up into her as she hung from her wrists, holding her ass and humping her like an animal ‘til I shot my load into her. It would be nice, but I had other things to try. Control. It's all about control. So she liked the ropes. She did well in bondage. Okay. That was a start. Now what about the whip? What about the vibrator?

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I had no doubt about the vibe. There are some women who are embarrassed by their reaction to it, but I've never found any who didn't really like it. I turned Emma to the front and brushed her hair back from her face. The flush of orgasm was still on her face, her eyes closed, lips parted. I kissed her because I wanted to, because she was so beautiful. Then I rubbed the vibrator across her lower lip. "Suck it for me, darling," I whispered. "Pretend it's my cock. Show me how you suck it." She opened her mouth like a baby bird and her pink tongue came out as I slid the tip of the vibe inside. Emma closed her lips over it with a look of deep satisfaction and sucked. I could feel her tongue swirling around it and I smiled. She was a natural. I slid it slowly in and out of her mouth and she moaned softly. Her lips were sensitive enough so she found the friction erotic in itself. That was good. I removed the vibe and turned it on, then slid it down her tits, over her nipples, slowly awakening her from her post-orgasmic haze. She sighed. I alternated working on her nipples with first the vibe and then my mouth, sucking and teasing them into sensitivity again, and then, when Emma seemed recovered, I slid it down to her pussy. "Ohhhh! Oh, yes! Oh God, that's good!" she moaned. "Is it, baby? You like that? Around your clit like that? Back and forth? Slow?" "Yes. Yes. Just like that." It didn't really matter. I just held it against her clit and she moved her pussy over it as she wanted—pumping slow, then faster, faster, then pushing, then backing off and starting over. I studied her face, the way she licked her dry lips, the sound of her breath

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as her hips worked, the sound of the vibrator, the pitch changing as it was engulfed in her hungry, searching pussy. Again—heaven. Just standing there, leaning over her, so close she could arch her back and press her naked tits against me, holding the buzzing vibrator as the bound Emma worked herself off on it, getting herself more and more aroused, and making me hotter and hotter ‘til I thought I couldn't stand it any more. I ached for her, needed her. I wanted to fuck her, shove my cock in her and hurt her with it, make her cry out for me. She was driving me wild—driving me to that state. Her hips pumped steadily, no more slowing down. She was getting close—very close—and she pursued her come with a fierce and single-minded dedication, almost ignoring me. I reached down on the bed and picked up the crop, never moving the vibrator. I picked up the crop and leaned back and slapped the end against her right breast. "Oww!" Her eyes flew open in surprise. "Don't stop," I said. "I want you to get off." "But—" "Don't stop! You're going to come for me, understand?" Her hips started moving against the vibrator again but tentatively this time, because her eyes were on the whip now, watching in disbelief as I brought the crop back. It hovered threateningly in the air and then struck, slapping her left nipple—a hard, flat sound, rude and nasty, just enough to make her feel she was being driven, being driven like an animal under her master's hand.

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Emma was a good girl, a nice girl, and she'd never seen anything like this, let alone had anyone actually do it to her, use a whip on her own ripe and virginal tits. Someone was doing it now, though, and she understood exactly what it meant—the sharp slap of leather on innocent flesh, the sting, the defenselessness. She twisted in the ropes and pulled at her bonds, her excitement growing as I pressed the buzzing vibrator between her legs. "Oh! Oh! Oh!" I spanked her tits with the whip, one then the other, the tops, the undersides, the nipples, the areolas. They peaked, grew even stiffer and seemed to be reaching for the whip on their own, reaching for the abuse as if they wanted it, as if they wanted to be broken and punished. Emma looked down at her tits in shame and confusion as if she couldn’t believe their betrayal, as if this body couldn't be hers. I knew what she was thinking—she wasn't like this, she didn't like being whipped or treated this way—but the look on her face said otherwise and the sounds escaping her clenched teeth were sounds of frantic excitement. She began to arch into the whip, pushing her chest at it, wanting it faster and harder. Her hips pumped hungrily at the vibrator. I began to whip her thighs, the insides, the outsides, holding the vibe in place and working around it, increasing the force of the blows so they made a vicious sound as they landed on her skin and began to leave red marks. Emma loved it and her hips worked hard, fucking the vibe, fucking the whip, trying to make love to them both, giving herself to the pleasure and cloying pain as her ass bumped softly against the closet door and she grunted and groaned with the effort. It was the final indignity, being 104

buzzed and beaten to orgasm like she was nothing but an animal—a racehorse being driven down the final stretch by a feverish jockey using spurs and whip, foam-flecked, panting. God knows why she drove me so crazy, why I wanted this so much. It wasn't to hurt her. It wasn't because I hated her. It was because I just wanted her so much— everything she was and everything she had. I felt like I held her heart in my hand, her body and soul quivering at the touch of that whip. "Oh! Harder! Harder! Harder!" She began to tremble uncontrollably and she grabbed the rope with both hands, staring down at her own pussy as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing. At the last second, I dropped the vibrator, just dropped it on the carpet and shoved my finger into her. I pulled her towards me and turned her so I could slap her behind and I held her with my finger in her pussy as I lashed her ass with the crop, swearing at her, begging her, imploring her—"Come, baby! Come for me, Emma! Come for me, damn it! Give it to me, you gorgeous whore! You bitch!"—and that was all it took. She threw her head back and screamed and I dropped the whip and grabbed her, crushing her against me as if I could feel her right though her skin. I held her tight and shoved my finger deep inside her, looking for that special place, the heart of her femaleness, the center of her come. Her hips lurched and jerked in an uncontrolled orgasmic dance, her contractions so intense I felt her internal muscles bear down on me, felt the hot stream of shameful lubricant ooze from her pussy and run over my fingers like a secret confession, a private gift I knew she'd given no one else in her life. I

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held her and held her as if I could somehow absorb her into my body. I felt her trembling inside. I couldn't stand anymore. As soon as it was decent but before she'd even stopped twitching, I untied her wrists from the door. I picked her up in my arms and carried her over to the dresser. She couldn't walk because the bar was still chained to her ankles so I just carried her in my arms as she kept her eyes closed and pressed her bound wrists against her breasts as if in prayer, still trembling with the aftershocks and looking like a frightened deer. I carried her over to the dresser and put her down in front of it. Both of us were shaking, me with need, and Emma from the force of her orgasm. I turned her around and gently bent her over the dresser so she was leaning on her forearms, her legs straight and knees locked, ass up like a bitch waiting to be mounted. I stepped back and looked at her and began to tear off my clothes, kicking off my shoes and socks, pulling down my pants and shorts in one motion and throwing them aside, my eyes never leaving her. Aside from the rapid rise and fall of her breathing and the occasional helpless tic or tremor in her thighs and ass, Emma was perfectly still, as if the slightest movement might set her off again. The image that came to mind was she was waiting to be mounted, like a heifer or mare, waiting to be inseminated by her bull or her stallion, and that's what I felt like—something wild and bestial. My cock was hard and swollen, aching with need and sore from being bruised inside my clothes. It felt like a fire-breathing dragon standing out from my loins, a rocket tethered to the earth only by the enormous weight of my balls. Emma stole a glance

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back at me and down at my cock and quickly looked away, dropping her head between her shoulders as if she was sorry she'd seen. I was too naked, stripped too bare. My lust and my need were too apparent and I must have been terrible to look at, like looking into the face of the sun. She moaned softly as I approached her, a soft, almost beseeching sound. I could see the marks of the whip on her ass. I put my bare foot on the spreader bar between her ankles and stepped on it. There was enough play so I could press it solidly against the floor and Emma adjusted her stance. I moved both feet so I stood squarely on the bar, holding her in place so she couldn't move her ankles. The head of my cock was inches from the wet vertical slit of her pussy. I could see the juice oozing out of her. She was drooling for me. I put my hands on her hips, felt her softness, her warmth. I slid my hands up and under until I cupped her naked, hanging breasts and then down again, luxuriating in the feel of this body I owned. How many woman had I had in my life and how much sex, always confused and compromised, complicated and hedged with conditions and permission, tangled in words and explanations and apologies, or part of some emotional deal or trade, a reward or prize or part of a package? How many women had I lusted after and wanted with a pure and simple desire, just to know their softness and beauty and the sweetness of their embrace, their kisses? How many had I ached for and resented, compromised myself for and tried to please? How twisted and contorted I'd become and how lonely, how wounded and angry, choked with complicated lies and rationalizations over women and my love for them. 107

And now, with Emma helpless and bent before me, waiting for my thrust, how very fucking clean I felt—how strong and alive and unashamedly male. I felt like Poseidon, like the Bull from the Sea, pure and bright, everything as perfect and obvious as male and female, light and dark, cock and pussy. She was something I wanted, something I wanted so deeply I had no words for it, only this raw hunger, and suddenly I wanted to hear her say it too. I wanted to know we were here for the same thing. I ran my hand down her flawless back, from her shoulder to her ass, then back up. She arched beneath my hand like a cat. "What do you want, Emma?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "Tell me. What do you want, baby?" Her pussy was open, inches from me. She didn't know what to say. I repeated it. "Tell me what it is. Do you want me, baby? Do you want my cock?" "Yes. Yes. I want your cock, Conner. Please." "Why?" "Why?" She turned her head and looked back at me. "Oh God, Conner! You’re asking me why?" I smiled. I was enjoying this. "I'm asking you why." She said nothing. I leaned forward. The red dome of my cock touched the sticky ring of her hole and I felt her flesh give. She twitched inside and shocks of pleasure raced to my brain.

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A kind of sensual darkness began to absorb me and the words began to spill out beyond my control. "Because you want to be owned, Emma? Because you want someone to use you, to find their pleasure in you? To take it from you, take that pleasure?" I looked down. I was slowly pressing into her without even meaning to, leaning forward. Her cunt was dimpling inward as my thick head pushed into her, tucking her flesh inside. The heat was growing, the pressure, her grip on my cock. "Because you want to feel me? Feel me inside you, all over you, fucking you, making you my whore, my fucking whore, my sweet, filthy, fucking whore? That's what you want? To be mine, my slave, my bitch, my lover? My cumslut, my dirty fuckdoll, my sub, my goddamn fucking cunt? To be everything to me? Is that it? Is that what you want? You want my filthy fucking love? My heart and soul?" "Oh Conner! Oh God! God! Conner!" She wailed and I pushed my cock into her and pulled her onto me at the same time, leaning back and grabbing her hips and holding her like a water skier holds his rope as I stood on that bar to keep her feet fixed on the floor as I made her take me. I was like a maniac as I fed my prick into her, entering her, taking her, filling her with it, beyond rational thought. I kept my eyes locked on her face as I did, and I felt chills as I realized I was part of her now and she was part of me. This was bigger than any sex I'd ever known, and I was closer to her than I'd ever been to another human being in my life, this stranger, this girl I hardly even knew.

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"Oh Jesus, Emma!" I grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, making a bow of her back. "Oh Christ!" She gasped and she must have known how I felt just from the way I fucked her. I could see her face in the mirror, her eyes flying open in shock as I finally lost control and shoved it all the way inside her in one huge stroke, mashing her pussy flat and trapping my balls against her clit. I rose up on my toes and grabbed a double fistful of her hair and pulled her even tighter on to my aching cock, pushed harder, wanting every millimeter inside her. I wanted it deep. I wanted to hurt her. I felt her grab and suck on me with muscles I didn't even know women had. "Oh God!" I moaned. "God, you are so fucking good!" She was still throbbing and trembling from the vibrator orgasm, little tremors and twitches in her legs and her internal muscles, so I just stood there and tried to control myself, waiting for her to calm down. I let go of her hair and tried to relax, tried not to move, and Emma clutched at the edge of the dresser with her bound hands, resting her face against the cool surface. I waited. It was hard, but I waited. I waited ‘til I felt her move, ‘til I felt her seem to firm up beneath my hands and around my cock, ‘til she got some strength back, and then I reached over and got another vibrator from the towel next to us on the dresser. I could have just fucked her, but honestly, I was afraid to move. I was afraid that if I so much as pumped once or twice I would come like a fucking fountain inside her so I decided to play with her some more instead and make her do the work. I decided to make her my slave and my toy, to turn her own sexuality against her. I waited ‘til she was starting to push gently against me, testing my hardness, and then I turned on the vibrator and pressed it against her 110

pussy and Emma reacted with a start. Emma jumped. It was as if someone had hit a button and Emma cried out and came alive. I stood behind her, my feet planted on that spreader bar, reaching around her and holding her pussy open with one hand while the other played that buzzing dildo lightly over her aroused little clit and Emma moaned, she groaned, she snarled and began to move her ass in abject surrender, not even trying to control herself anymore. She squeezed her pussy around me and pumped with her thighs. She rocked back and forth, sucking my dick inside her and spitting it out, her tight cunt sliding along the shaft like a ring of slinky steel. "Fuck me! Fuck me!" she spat, savoring the filthiness of the word. "Harder! Fuck me harder!" And I did, I did. I dropped the vibe and grabbed her hips and started to slam into her so hard that she grunted like an animal, her tits slapping against the flat top of the cheap dresser. I reached between her legs and started to play with her again, knowing how it drove her crazy, how she loved being touched. I masturbated her as I fucked her, beating her off like some naughty little boy as my big pole slid in and out of her juicy cunt like the giant drive shaft of a runaway locomotive. "Come on, baby!" I hissed. "Come on, Emma! Give me that come, bitch! Give me that filthy fucking come, you little slut! Give your daddy what he wants, baby! Give it to me! Give it to me! All over me, baby. All over my big fat cock!" I frigged her, slapped her, spanked her clit, fucked her ruthlessly as she clung to the dresser and whined and snarled like an animal, and then I just pressed my hand

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against her cunt and shook it, frantically, shamelessly making her cunt vibrate around my straining cock like she was nothing but a goddamned vibrator built for me and me only. I beat myself off using her pussy as my machine, frantic with lust. That was too much. That was just too much for her, and through the red haze of my own incandescent climax I heard her gasping wail—"Yes! Yes! Coming! Oh God! Conner! Conner! Coming! Coming!" "Oh fuck yes! Coming too! Here, baby! Here it is! Take it, Emma! Take it!" She clung to the dresser and lifted her ass like a bitch in heat as I threw my head back and felt that scalding release start deep in my balls, the soles of my feet, roaring up for her like a torrent of magma. My body was at her command now and I think she must have known it, she must have felt that too. I had no more control then than she did and had no choice but to give it to her, my dumb stupid cock sunk deep in her pussy, my body clenched as I spewed my cum into her in agonized, paralyzing pleasure, one jolt after another. For a moment I was totally free, far beyond thought, pure sensation and energy, with Emma coming and hunching beneath me with sighs of luxuriant and breathless pleasure, her ass rolling as she sucked my seed inside her. I could feel the heat coming off her body, my sweat seeming to sizzle as it fell on her skin just as my cum seemed to sizzle as it splattered inside of her, like water on red-hot steel. I fell forward onto the dresser, cock still sunk inside of her, catching myself on my hands as I continued to come, growling and moaning as I poured that cream into her in one flawless, gushing stream.

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There was a satisfaction in the way she took it. She lay flat on the dresser with her ass in the air, the slightest smile on her face, almost a smugness, as if she had some secret arrangement with my body that I'd never understand, something dark and feminine and private and it excited me to think that she might know some part of me so well, so instinctively. My orgasm left me weak, almost a child, and yet it seemed to give her some strange strength and sense of fulfillment. She was terribly beautiful, even down to the recumbent, feminine line of her back, her satisfied lips, her eyelids now heavy and filled with peace. I was reluctant to leave her, but really, she was lying on the dresser and I was on top of her, so I lifted myself up. "Oh Conner, don’t move…" I managed to kneel and unclip her ankles from the bar, then pulled her over to the bed where I collapsed onto the duvet, pulling her down with me, both of us covered in sweat. Instantly, she nestled into the crook of my arm and formed herself against me, her thigh over mine, breasts against my ribs, her body like a salve against my raw nerves. I held her and ran my hands over her skin, and when I felt the welts on her bottom I winced. Emma didn't say anything. She just rubbed her cheek against me, proud of her marks. Strangely, I felt proud, too, and held her tighter, my heart filled with her. She'd earned everything I could give her. I felt in her debt. She lifted her hand to stroke my chest but then hesitated. She lifted her head. "May I touch?" She was only half teasing. I smiled. "Of course. We're just people again. No rules. People touch."

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She laid her head back on my shoulder and played with my chest and I dropped into a feeling of deep peace. I felt as if I were lying on a beach and Emma was the sun and the sea and her fingers were the waves breaking over me. I thought how I'd never felt so fulfilled from an act of sex, drained not only of tension but of a kind of fury I hadn't even been aware of, something I carried around with me as a constant companion, this hunger for a woman's softness and comfort. I felt a terribly deep and perverse pride knowing Emma was filled with my cum, that I could feel the warm stickiness oozing from her pussy as she ground herself contentedly against my leg. I closed my eyes and thought of how she was still being fucked as my sperm still beat their way inside her, looking for that target. I knew she was on the pill, but I liked to think of them finding her egg, entering her again in another cellular fuck, fusing with her—my essence and hers, genes and strands of delicate nucleic acids unwrapping and wrapping around each other like lovers' limbs with blind chemical passion. The idea was getting me aroused—the simple, basic biology of it, like a force of nature, like gravity or heat or light—and though Emma couldn't possibly know what I was thinking, she must have been able to feel me stir and she instinctively responded, pressing against me, already offering herself to my reviving need, ready for whatever I might want. There was a sudden burst of melody from her bag—her cell phone, some classical rondo played too fast, annoying and absurd and clamoring for attention, and my first reaction was to swear at her and tell her to turn the damned thing off, but then I remembered how scrupulous she was about answering her boyfriend's calls, and how

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I'd promised her never to interfere in her outside life. That applied even here in this motel where I'd just tied her and whipped her and fucked her and come inside her. "Go ahead and answer it." I started to rise. "Let me get my pants on and I'll go outside and leave you alone. I'll grab a cigarette." I didn’t want to embarrass her. "No," she said. "No, not now. I don't want to talk to him tonight." "I thought he gets all suspicious if you don't answer." She raised her head and looked at me. "Do you think I can talk to him right now? Do you really think I'm that good a liar?" The phone rang six times and then stopped. Emma put her head back down on my chest and I felt like an asshole. "He calls every night?" I asked. "Usually, yes. Unless he goes out with his friends." "He's jealous?" Her voice was flat and regretful. "More like possessive." "Can I ask…?" It was awkward, but I wanted to know. "Are you like this with him? Sexually? Does he know about all this?" She didn't seem upset. She spoke calmly, her face against my chest. "No. But then, I don’t think I knew about 'all this' myself—before you. This is all new to me, you know that, don't you, Conner? You don’t think I'm like this normally?" She lifted her head and looked at me and I felt embarrassed yet shamefully proud. I kept my face passive, but inside I burned with terrible male ego.

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This was what I'd wanted from her all along, wasn't it? Not just sex, not just physical sensation, but conquest, ownership, a place in her heart—something I might think of as love. I wanted to be the first. I wanted to be the one she'd always remember. I was ashamed to admit it to myself after I'd sworn to keep it physical, but I wanted her love. "I never thought about it," I lied. She rolled over onto her stomach and looked at me. "What am I to you, Conner? Do you have a lot of girls you do this with? Am I just one more? I want to know. I think it's fair you tell me. You owe me that much." I was slow in answering. I'd been waiting for this but I still wasn't sure what to say. "I thought we had an agreement. We keep our private lives out of this." "No," she said. "It's too late for that. I want to know. Look at me, Conner. Look at me." She raised herself up on her elbows, gathered her long hair and swept it back behind her head, then arched her back so her breasts stood out. They were crisscrossed with lines and marks from the whip, some no more than faint pink lines, some of them raised and angry-looking welts against her smooth, innocent flesh. "Look at me. Do you think I'd let just anyone do this to me? Do you really think I've done this before? That I just give this to anyone?" Guilt welled up inside me, guilt and a sickly pride, a dirty kind of lust and selfsatisfaction, and I knew she felt the same thing, showing off her wounds, shaming me with what she'd suffered at my hand. I did owe her, and not just for the whipping.

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"His name's David," she said, sinking back down. "Naveed, actually. He Americanized it to David. His family's Lebanese and he has no idea I'm this way. He'd die if he found out and I don’t know what I'm going to do. I never suspected either, never thought I'd get off on this so much. At first I thought it would just be fun, like a fantasy. I've always had these fantasies—being kidnapped and tied up, made to do things—but I thought they were just fantasies, that the reality wouldn't live up to the dream. It does though, doesn't it?" Her eyes searched my face, looking for an honest answer, for confirmation. "Yes." It was what I'd discovered too. It was even better than I'd thought it would be. She nodded. "Yes. And now I don't know. I don’t know what to think. Now it's like I don’t even know who I am. Conner, no one's ever done these kinds of things to me. No one's ever made me feel this way. Can I tell you something? Can I trust you?" "Yes." "I'm scared." She was beautiful, heart-breakingly beautiful—her eyes and her lips, the stripes on her naked breasts, her vulnerability. I was scared too. I was unsure about what I'd gotten into and I didn't want her to see, so I reached up for her and pulled her down against my chest and held her close, felt her press against me. I'd never had a woman make me feel so much.

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"There is no one else, Emma" I whispered. "There are no other girls, and I haven't done this kind of thing or felt this way with anyone for a very long time. A very long time. Believe me, Emma. This is something special, and I'm kind of scared too." My words brought her relief, brought her comfort, and we huddled there together, protecting each other from our fear, soothing each other—then feeling it, wallowing in it. Is that what love is at the start? Being able to scare yourself, being willing to let someone else scare you with what they make you feel? Being afraid excited me and it excited Emma too. It made her rub against me like you might rub against a shark even though you knew it was dangerous—sheer madness, playing with the danger and loving the fear. She teased me, provoked me, kissing me soft and hot and deep and stretching and writhing against me like a cat. Her arousal was sharp and urgent and in her excitement, she reversed our roles, grabbing my wrist in her slim fingers and making as if to hold me down as she kissed me. She lifted her leg and rubbed her smooth thigh over mine, ground her sticky cunt against my hip as if to remind me what she was there for. She moaned as my sweat stung the welts on her tits. A jet roared overhead and Emma raised her mouth from mine, her hair spilling over her dark face, her eyes glowing. She touched her nail to my lower lip, looking at me in wonder. "I feel like two people," she said. "One of me's the good girl David knows in Atlanta. The other one's your whore right here in this motel. How did you do this to me?" I grabbed her head and kissed her, biting at her ripe lips. My hand slid down to her whipped ass and squeezed possessively. I parted her cheeks and my finger played at her anus. She groaned. 118

I let go of her lip. "Which one do you want to be?" "What do you think?" We melted together in a kiss, her nostrils flaring, her breath hot on my cheek as her hips pumped against my leg with slow, steady force. She was going to get herself off with or without me and was already well on her way. I could tell by that little shudder in her rhythm. Her finger circled my nipple, teasing it to erection, daring me to do something, and then she raised her thigh still higher ‘til she was sliding the soft inside against my turgid cock. I didn't need any more arousing. Without a word, I slid out from under her and got behind her as Emma laid down on her stomach, spread her legs and raised her ass. I got between her thighs behind her and got myself in position, then bridged over her and grabbed her wrists and held against them against the mattress. She was on her chest now, ass cocked up, legs spread. I was on my knees and hands, holding her wrists, my prick waving around over the wet cleft of her pussy like some grotesque boom swinging in the wind, looking for her. I lowered myself and found her easily, like sliding into a funnel. "Ohh…" Another jet flew overhead, shaking the lamps. They seemed to be coming hot and heavy now as I slid my cock into her and she parted her legs even farther, her knees sliding against the bedcover, her ass pressing eagerly up into my belly. I levered myself up over her so I could watch her fingers tighten into fists as my prick sunk home into that tight meaty channel and I started fucking her. Her long hair obscured her face

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like a thousand strands of silk and she writhed on my cock like a butterfly on a pin, delirious with pleasure. She was so good, so fucking good, and crazy with the feel of her and her tight grip on me, my thoughts suddenly turned inexplicably to all the people in the jets overhead—people with plans, with briefcases full of papers and contracts, money and photographs, people coming and going with lonely and hungry eyes or eagerly running back to families and lovers and dying relatives and newborn nieces and nephews. And I thought of all these people out in the dark and looked at Emma beneath me grunting and snarling as she took my prick and my flesh and she worked herself off on me and squeezed me with her body and I started fucking her hard, hard, squeezing her wrists and rocking the bed, my loins slapping against her ass. I fucked her and I gave myself to her and I melted into her and fused with her—this beautiful girl and gorgeous whore, this woman and cunt and source of life and joy and pleasure. I fucked her and I fucked her and I never wanted to stop, my ecstasy all the more intense because of the filth it grew out of, like a diamond found in the muck, a pearl plucked from the slimy ooze. "God I love to fuck you!" I gasped. "I fucking love it! And I love you, Emma! I fucking love you, you know that? I don’t care what you think. I love you, you bitch! I fucking love you!" They were words. They weren't promises, they weren't agreements or negotiations. They were explosions of breath—ejaculations of the soul—but they said how I felt. They were true. They were truer than most things I'd ever said in my life. I was close. I was close. It was all I could say. Her name, holding her wrists and fucking her, gasping, almost sobbing—"Emma! Emma! Oh God, Emma!" 120

"Oh yes, Conner! I love you too! Give it to me! Give it all to me! I love you too, baby! Fuck me! Fuck me hard! I'm going to come! Take me, Conner! I love you too! God, I love you!"

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Chapter Seven

The roads are pretty deserted out here in the suburbs. An occasional car slides past, but mostly I'm alone and I can think about her as I drive. One road links to another and pretty soon I'm on the expressway and headed for the city. There's a little traffic— hardly any because it's very late, and it's late because I stayed late in that motel where Emma and I made love, that motel where I tied her and whipped her and made her come and come again and then fucked her and fucked her again too. And even after she left I laid on the bed and masturbated thinking about her—masturbated and sucked her juices off one of the vibrators I'd used on her, sucking it like it was her cock and I was her sub as I jerked off and my dick jumped and spat like it was her little puppet, filling me with a weird mixture of bliss and shame, the white cream flowing over my hand and me moaning out loud and getting off on the humiliation of playing that role as I slurped that plastic dildo like a satisfied baby. I shift in the car seat and lean my elbow on the sill so I can feel that hot wind like water on my skin as I drive. It's an old Pontiac and all the gears and cylinders know each other so well they just kind of glide against each other, oil dripping, pumping… Everything is sex tonight as I eye the rearview and hit the signal, drifting over into the center lane where I can just cruise and not worry about passing and being passed. There's a big Ford Explorer coming up fast in the left lane and I'm about to pass a Lexus on the right and I don't want to have to concentrate on that because I just want to think. I'm trying to be objective about this and serious but all I can think about is what it was like to be inside her and how it felt when she lifted against me when she came, the

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way she tried to refuse me and how she fought and how she lost and how she looked as she surrendered—surrendered utterly, her back arched, mouth open, shuddering, begging, giving herself to me—how I wanted to claw the soul from her body and just rip it from her and eat it whole and dripping like some insane Aztec sacrifice… Something catches my eye to the left and I glance up, surprised to see the moon's still up. It makes me smile because of course it's so big and it's so obvious and it's something we don't understand at all, even though it always looks like it understands us so well. Tonight it looks especially knowing and so I ask it something and of course I get no answer. I'd told her I loved her and she'd said the same to me, but what did that mean? I'd been inside her, on the verge of orgasm, and at the moment I meant it with all my heart, but we still hardly knew each other. How could it be we could be that close sexually— fused so closely it felt like the barriers between us had totally disappeared and I held her naked soul in my hands—but then when she dressed and I lay there and smoked and she ran a brush through her hair and straightened her clothes, I felt this wall settle down between us again, this discouraging silence. I'd gotten up and seen her to the door and turned her to me and kissed her on the forehead and she'd stopped. For just a moment she'd leaned against me, as if for strength or as if there was something she'd wanted to say, and immediately my body had responded, something inside me trying to elbow myself out of the way and grab her again, something telling me not to let her go, but I knew that wouldn't be right, so I'd just kissed her and smiled and she'd smiled and I said, "I'll see you in class," and she nodded and I opened the door for her and let her out into the night.

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I'd followed her out and stood on the balcony, leaning on the railing and smoking, watching as she walked across the parking lot. I thought about that part of me she carried inside her. I felt this insane, sudden surge of possessiveness, as if she belonged to me now, but I made it go away, and as I watched her, I wondered what she thought of herself. She got into her car without looking back and as she did I couldn't help but admire it. I'd come to learn suburbanites have a special relationship with their cars, one that city boys like me don't understand. It was a language I was trying to master, and already I knew enough to know that Emma had way overbought. She had a gleaming, brand new yellow convertible with a sharp, high ass, proud and sassy—a silly word, but totally appropriate. It was a car to turn heads, and it was a car she could only afford if she assumed David would be picking up the payments once they were married. She could never afford it on her own. She strapped the seat belt over the tits I'd just been licking and fondling, checked her eyes in the rear-view mirror, and did something with the stereo as she pulled out, perfectly at home behind the wheel. Barely an hour ago she'd been tied in the doorway, gasping and convulsing in stomach-clenching orgasms, reveling in her shame as I whipped her naked cunt and held her hair in my hand like she was some trophy animal, begging me to strip her bare both mentally and physically and take everything a man could take from a woman, strip her down to the bone. And now here she was, insulated from the world by her yellow convertible and another man's love, safe behind tinted glass and steel and climate-controlled air-conditioning, like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. She made me smile. She made me hunger.

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She looked in the mirror and fixed her hair, running her hand through it and fluffing it out in a vain, feminine gesture, turning herself back into a gorgeous heartstopping young girl, and I felt a sudden, unexpected, masochistic thrill. I would never have that beauty. I could chase her, catch her, tie her up and beat her and fuck her, but I'd never have her. The closest I'd ever get was when she orgasmed for me, coming and dissolving in my hand like a handful of jewels. She drove to the edge of the parking lot and stopped. Her taillights flashed once, the equivalent of a female flouncing her skirts—a kind of automotive kiss-off—then pulled onto the highway and was gone. I turned back and watched the runway approach lights at the airport strobing in the dark in a kind of silent, insistent come-on, listening to the sounds of the crickets in the weeds beyond the motel, then I turned and went back into the room. It was still thick with the smell of our passion. The stain of our mixed secretions was there on the sheets. The spreader bar lay on the floor, the leather cuffs that held her ankles apart were still affixed to it. The ropes hung over the door, the toys were still spread on the towel on the dresser. Supposedly I'd been domming her. Supposedly I'd tied her up and forced her to do shameful and degrading things. And yet now she was driving home in her yellow convertible, body lax and satisfied, sated with pleasure. I went around the room and started straightening up, picking up the toys and dropping them into my bag, cutting down the rope and throwing it away, wrapping the toys up in the towel. The whip smelled of her. The vibrators were sticky with her lubrication.

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I start seeing more cars now but it's still late enough—or actually early enough— that the expressway's all but deserted and it's like a special privilege to be out driving now, seeing a different world, the world of cops, ambulance drivers, drunks, dreamers, cabbies, and it's sweet to be able to lie back and just cruise—like dreaming—winding through the sinuous turns as if the car's on rails. The old sights and landmarks roll by, the expressway lights sweeping over the cars. The buildings look half asleep and adream, stark-lit and shadowed and naked and exposed, and I hit the radio looking for a human voice. This is my city and it's been a long time since it's felt this way, alive and aglow like this, rich with menace and promise. Every car looks like it knows me and knows where I've been and wants to get next to me like a dog and smell me. Yes. Menace and danger. That's what passion is—dangerous love—love that puts you at risk, that gets a hold of you and makes you do things you wouldn't normally do. It's the only love worth having and it's the kind of love that's been missing from my life. I'd forgotten the danger of this place. In the last few years and the hell I'd been through, I'd decided to play it safe and I'd forgotten the excitement and the potential, all the doorways and the windows and the places they led, the curious streets and the way they lay and the sound of voices as you walked past the alleys. I'd forgotten all of it. Like I’d forgotten the thrill of having a woman like Emma, of having her tied to a chair waiting for you, knowing she wants you to take her, knowing she expects it and she's waiting for it, and knowing where taking her takes you as well. The big green highway signs pass overhead like guillotines and I don’t even read them any more, don't even notice. I check the rearview, hit the signal and drift over to 126

the cutoff for 294, where the lanes swing out to the west and dip down. At the bottom of the little spur where the dome of that funny Polish church is on my right, "Wild Nights" comes on the radio and I twist the volume way up, push my back against the seat and punch the gas to send the car swooping down and up onto the great broad merge where the highway joins like an artery with 294 to form one vast broad vista, ten lanes of mercury-lit concrete gazing straight down toward the buildings and towers of downtown, hovering like a jeweled crown in the blackness of the night. And as Van Morrison wails away about his jukebox thunder I slam the dashboard and cover my mouth with my hand so no one will see my stupid grin. I laugh in sweetness and in real pain, frightened and amazed: "Oh Jesus fuck! You poor bastard! You sorry son of a bitch! You're in love!" **** But how could I talk about being in love? I was twice her age, burned out, bitter, from a different world. What did I know of her? Sexually we were fantastically compatible. There was no doubt about it—it was almost uncanny the way we got along, the way we seemed able to read each others minds and hearts and feed on each other's passions. But otherwise we seemed to be about as different as two people could be. And that was the problem. I wanted more now. I wanted more than just the sex. I wanted all of her, or at least I thought I did. I didn't even know what I wanted. I didn't even know how to find out.

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The way I thought of it was like this—the sexual roles we played of dom and sub were like masks we hid behind. And because we could hide behind them, they freed us. But who was she behind the mask? And who would I be for her behind mine? Would she still want me and would I want her? Would it matter? In the face of this fantastic sexual richness we had to play with, did anything else matter at all? **** I called her the next night. "Hello?" Her voice was flat and non-committal. "Emma? It's Conner. How are you?" A pause. The longest one-second pause in the world as I waited for her reaction. "Conner? Oh! Hi! I'm fine. How are you?" A bit of sudden breathiness. I didn't know if it was for real or if it was affected, but either way was all right. "I'm fine," I said. "Or no. Really I'm not. I'm not, Emma." I held the phone like it was her and I spoke to her ear, not to her: "I can't stop thinking about last night. I can't get it out of my mind. It's like it haunts me, like it did something to me. You were incredible, Emma, do you know that? Do you understand?" Silence for a moment. Then, whispered: "Oh, Conner…" "I have to see you tomorrow night." "After class?"

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"Yes. I have to see you." "Yes. Yes, all right." "But listen, I want to do something. Can you talk?" "A little. I'm alone right now, but they're coming home pretty soon. Any minute. What is it?" She was talking about her roommates. As far as I knew, they still didn't know about us. "I want to bring you into my place in the city. Now wait—before you say anything, just listen to me. I'll drive you in and I'll drive you back the same night so you don't have to worry about your roommates. We'll leave your car out at school so you don't have to worry about driving into the city and parking and all that. I'll give you my keycard and you'll leave it in the faculty garage so it'll be safe and no one will see it. Okay?" "The faculty garage? You can do that?" "Yes. It's no problem at all. And then—I'm going to kidnap you." A silence. "What?" "I said, I'm going to kidnap you. From Crane. Abduct you." "What are you talking about?" I laughed. "Shhh! This is a fantasy I've had forever, something I've always wanted to do. I want to pretend to kidnap you from campus. Throw you into a van and tie you up and drive you off. Abduct you. I'm going to rent a van, and tomorrow night after class is out, you'll move your car into the faculty lot, then you'll start walking across

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the lot between D and G buildings, across from the duck pond? You know where that is? By the construction?" "Yes?" "I'm going to be parked there. As you walk by I'm going to drive by and grab you, throw you into the van and tie you up. You're going to be my victim." "Conner, you're crazy! What if someone sees us?" "No one will see us! And if they do, then we're just screwing around. What can they do? We're just goofing off—a prank. No victims, no one to complain. Just do it, okay?" "Conner, I don’t know! This sounds crazy." "Emma, think about it! You in the back of a van with a desperate maniac, running his hands all over you, all tied up and helpless, making you do all sorts of nasty and perverse things, slowly undressing you …" "Oh God, Conner! You're insane!" "Tell me you've never had fantasies like that yourself!" "But I never really thought of doing them." "Well you should. Don’t you see what we've got here, Emma? A chance to make all these fantasies come true. How many people ever get that?" She made a low sound of disapproval into the phone. "You're really serious?" "Yes." "You really want me to see your place?" 130

I laughed. "Yes." "What do I have to bring? What are we going to do?" "Do you really have to ask me that? You don't have to bring anything. Believe me." I could hear her smile. "Oh, all right." "Good. Tomorrow then." I hung up and started trying to clean up the place. Luckily I don't own enough stuff to make a mess anymore, but still—a bachelor in the city… Two hours later the mood had changed. She called me back, sounding thoughtful. "Conner? Conner, it's Emma." My stomach knotted. "Yes?" "Conner, I just want to make sure of something, because of what we said the other night. Because of what I said." I braced myself. "Yes?" "I said something I shouldn't have, the other night when we were making love. You know what it was. I shouldn't have said it. It was something you said we shouldn't talk about. You know what I mean?" "Yes. I know." What she was talking about was when we said we'd loved each other in the midst of making love. It was true enough at the time. Now, who knew? "Don’t worry about it. Passions were running high. I understand."

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"I mean, I know this sounds stupid but I don't want anyone to get hurt. I know I shouldn't be doing this, but I'm not really engaged, I mean, not really, and I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to do this again in my life. You said it was just about sex anyway, and it is, right?" It was a good thing she couldn't see the look on my face as I answered, the gall I was biting back. "Yeah. That's what I said." "So as long as we keep it on those terms, it's just like a game, right?" I turned to the window and there was the moon again, seeing everything, judging everything, suffering so. "Right. It's just like a game." "Good. Good. I just wanted to make sure we understand each other, because I really don't want anyone to get hurt." "No. No one's going to get hurt." I pushed it all back down inside. We still had the summer and part of the fall and there was no telling what might happen by then. Certainly by then the novelty would have worn off and we'd be sick of each other—probably way before then—and until then he really didn't have to exist for me. I could fix it so he wouldn’t exist for me. I could probably fix it so he wouldn't exist for her too, if she'd just give me the chance. In any case, there were more important matters at hand. There was tomorrow night for one thing. "So we're on for tomorrow after class?" I asked her. I heard her smile. "Do you want me?"

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**** It was fascinating to see how Emma had changed in the few short weeks we'd been together. She knew how I wanted her and she suspected I wanted her as a sub, which was partially true but not entirely, because the truth was, I never wanted her as a slave. I never wanted her to grovel or be less than me. In fact, as the incident in the motel parking lot had shown, my urge to dominate her wasn't without its masochistic side, a certain sick liking for the feel of a stiletto heel sliding against my dick, and she'd always had a stubborn streak of arrogance and pride from the first day met her. She used it defensively, as a kind of barbed-wire fence. But she also had a way of crossing her legs just so, of casually stretching so her shirt pulled across her breasts with just the right amount of tension, of turning her head so as to display the sculpted column of her neck to the best advantage, that showed she could use it offensively as well. She played with her beauty like it was an edged weapon, and she wielded her submission the same way—using it to cut both ways, offensive as well as defensive. I was aware of that and that's why I'd decided on this little kidnapping game. It would give her a chance to participate, and I wanted to see how far she'd go, whether she'd just be entirely passive or whether she'd really get involved. I wanted to see how much—if anything—she had invested in this relationship, or whether I was the only crazy one. I was worried at first. Her second phone call with her caveat about her boyfriend stuck in my mind like a drowning fly at a picnic and wouldn't go away—it had the potential to contaminate the whole thing. Late afternoon turned gray and blowy with a strong wind sending grit and papers swirling in the parking lot, threatening rain and worse. There were thunderstorm warnings on the radio, and it looked like that long-

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expected front was coming through, finally bringing relief from the heat that had settled upon the upper Midwest like a pot lid for the last ten days. It didn’t bode well for a night of outdoor abduction games. Emma avoided my eyes as she took her seat, wearing one of the most unattractive pantsuits I've ever seen on this side of a fast food counter, so unflattering I half-expected her to tell me that not only was our little game off for tonight, but she'd thought things over further after her phone call and decided to end the whole sordid affair. But Emma was too good an actress and I soon saw what she was up to was playing the part of the little night school ingénue for our upcoming drama, even down to simulating a job at an eat-it-&-beat-it joint. All evening she did a wonderful job of looking normal and wholesome—even helping the hateful Mrs. Gonzales write down the reading assignment and bustling about like some Future Teacher of America candidate. I caught her glancing up at me to see if I was enjoying the act and I couldn't repress a smile. She was good. As the class emptied out she picked up her books and approached the lectern. "You have something for me, Professor Devlin? A parking permit?" Even in that pantsuit, her barely repressed excitement made her radiant and she got to me. I felt something stir inside, like a sleeping beast just starting to wake, and I thought, this must be what a hound feels like when he first catches scent of a fox. She moved closer and I felt the last extraneous minutiae of the class fall away as the beast stretched and took notice, felt my body begin to tighten in anticipation, prepare itself for its one true function, the animal reason for which it was placed on earth. 134

I gave her the pass and glanced around but no one was watching. They were all shuffling out. "You'll wait for me, won't you?" she asked. "I have to change first into my special abduction clothes but it won't take a minute. Did you like my outfit?" She showed me a quick curtsy. "It's awful," I said. She smiled. "We wear these for inventory. Can you believe it?" She lowered her voice and asked, "You'll be between C and G buildings, right? Where they have the overflow parking? What kind of van is it?" "A Dodge. Dark green, no windows on the sides. You brought special clothes?" She slipped the keycard into her pocket. "Of course I did. This was always a fantasy of mine too and I always pictured how it should be. But I should warn you—I'm not much of a fighter. You're not going to get all violent?" "No. Not like that, no." I smiled. "I can't guarantee what I'll be like when I get you inside, though." She gave me a knowing smile. "I'm not worried about that. I just want you to do it." She turned to go but I called her back. "Emma? I want to give you a safe word. You know what a safe word is?" "Really?" She looked like she was going to say something but then changed her mind. Her eyes were glowing. "What is it?"

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"Your name. Emma Fiore. Just say your real name. And if you can't talk, tap, bang, hit me 3 times, over and over." "You think I might have to use it?" "No." She grinned at me. "Then maybe you're not doing your job, Conner." **** It was pitch black and blowing hard by the time I was settled in the van, facing the new faculty parking garage and dying for a cigarette. The big cottonwoods were bowing and swaying in the wind and there was no doubt a big storm was coming. The radio crackled with bursts of static and there was vicious lightning in the southwest. It made me nervous. From where I was parked, I could hardly miss her yellow convertible as it pulled into the ramp. Emma's bare arm emerged and fed the card into the slot and the gate rose up obediently as she drove inside. Even though it was all pretend, my hands were sweating. There was a lot of construction going on over the summer, especially at this end of the campus, and the new faculty garage was part of it, all clean fresh concrete and bright fluorescent lights. Down where I was, they'd already started tearing up the old parking lot and the lights had been disconnected, leaving it very dark and deep in shadow. Looking at the new garage from the darkness was like staring at some old Donkey Kong game with its maze of ramps and levels.

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I saw her car come into sight and disappear as it climbed upwards, wending its way through the empty structure. Why would she be going so high except for the dramatic effect? I'd been waiting there for almost half an hour already and I was eager to get started before it began to rain, and eager to get a glimpse of her. At last I lost sight of the car and knew she must be parking, and when I saw her again she was on foot. The wall of the garage blocked her from the shoulders down, but she seemed to be wearing a white shirt or light jacket, and the way she walked told me she must be wearing heels. That was all it took to make my stomach tighten, knowing she'd dressed for me, she'd chosen her clothes knowing I'd be taking them off her. That always did it for me. I sat up behind the wheel and looked around. There was no one. She got into the elevator and I lost sight of her. And at that moment it started to drizzle, the first drops spattering against the windshield. Damn! It wasn't bad yet, but if it got worse I'd have to forget the abduction and just drive over and pick her up. I didn't want her getting drenched. In a few moments she came walking out of the doorway at the foot of the structure, stepping out onto the sidewalk where the lights bleached the brick all bright white and yellow and pale green like some artificial electric beach. I could see her now—long legs and a short, pale blue sundress kind of thing with a white shirt over it, a white canvas bag over her shoulder, looking as fresh and clean as dew on summer grass. Christ, the girl knew her business, what buttons to push. Shadows spilled at her feet and raked over her as she stepped brightly off the sidewalk and entered the

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darkness of the lot, back erect, tits out, long legs eating up the distance with smooth, unhurried grace. As if it had been waiting for her, the rain began to fall. She looked stunningly sexual. Not sexy, not cheap, but sexual—a woman in the full pride of her beauty alone in the dark on a hot summer's night, and to cap it off, the whispering rain and lightning sizzling in the background. The wind had stopped and the rain stopped for a moment as it does just before a downpour as if the clouds are taking a breath. In this perfect stillness, the crickets took this last opportunity to sound their plaintive calls and Emma walked into the darkness, all lips and tits and ass and long, sinuous leg, walking right out of the world of living men and into the world of my perfect fantasy. She was mythic, she was a dream, and I was absolutely stunned with desire for her. I was parked on the east side of the lot, hidden in with a few other cars, and if she knew where I was she deliberately chose not to look because she walked right past the van maybe some twenty yards distant and kept on going, head held high, bag on her shoulder. I saw the tight lines of her thighs beneath the fabric of her dress, the proud thrust of her ass, the gentle bounce of her breasts, the secret suggestion of everything she promised. She looked like a ghost—like one of those ghostly images of phosphorescent sea creatures you see on television documentaries who appear at night, pose for an instant and then sink back down into the ocean's subconscious again. The rain began to patter down as I watched her, and suddenly the game we were playing began to take on a life of its own. I felt the big empty space of the van behind me, the thin, cheap mattress on the floor, the ropes and tape and scarves all laid out. I saw Emma's tight, lush body glowing in the dark, felt the aloneness and isolation of the

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night, and realized I'd perhaps set things up too well. This was more than I'd bargained for. This was more than I'd expected. The beast she'd been flirting with before had now entirely awakened and had taken over. I suddenly wasn't in my right mind. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. Mixed up in the lusting beast I'd suddenly become was a good portion of the green-eyed monster—David was involved, her status as David's woman—somehow I had the idea she wouldn't be out here in the dark like this if she were really David's woman. If she were really David's woman, she'd be back with David in David's cave, and the fact that she wasn't made her fair game. No. More than that. In my sudden, lustdrenched and desire-wracked mind, her being out here was like a sign she was trying to escape. Somehow I decided Emma's agreeing to this game of abduction was a sign that she wanted to be with me. The skies suddenly split and the patter of rain became a roar. It began to pour—a deluge of water falling from the sky and thundering on the roof of the van and obscuring the windshield, filling the air so completely that I totally lost sight of her. I started the van, hit the wipers and yanked on the lights then threw it into gear, hit the gas and roared around in a tight U-turn, the tires sizzling on the steaming tarmac. Emma turned and looked at me and this time I could tell she wasn't acting. I don't know what she'd been expecting—maybe she thought I'd call the whole thing off because of the rain and just pull up along side her and tell her to hop in—but apparently she hadn't been expecting a maniac roaring down on top of her at forty miles an hour in a tight U-turn in this oversized van with his brights on. She was already good and wet, the rain was streaming down her face, and now the sensation of being lit up in

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the dark by a pair of five-thousand candlepower headlights must have sent some primal wave of fear surging through her body and she froze like a deer on the highway. She quickly gathered her wits and looked around for cover, but there was no place to go except for the weeds at the edge of the parking lot some twenty yards away and I angled the van to cut her off. She turned back, hesitated just a moment, and started to run. In my fantasy I'd dreamed of pursuing her in the van, running her down in the relentless glare of the headlights, but that had been fantasy. Now I was consumed with this weird obsession of stealing her away and I didn't have time for games. One part of me felt foolish but the beast was in control and the beast just stomped down on the accelerator and ran up along side her and squealed to a stop. I threw the lever into park and tore the door open, jumped out and grabbed her by the arm even before the van stopped rocking. She was soaked now and her hair was stuck to her face, the dress clinging to her body. She got one glimpse at the look of insane desire in my eyes and she blanched with fear. "Oh wow, Conner! No!" She was really scared. Somehow she knew exactly what was going on. She could tell from my face just what was racing through my mind, and she knew our little game had turned into some private and demented caveman ritual far too close to the real thing. If she went along with me, there would be consequences. She could see that now. She could see it in my face and she could feel it in the way I held her. She could

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sense it in the way I stood over her with the lightning flashing over my back and the rain streaming down over both of us in the dark and deserted parking lot like some crazy Cro-Magnon tableau. "Shut up!" I shouted. "Just be quiet! Come on!" I used my strength on her, pulled her to the side of the van and wrenched the door open, and Emma dug in her heels. She wasn't very big and I'm a strong guy. I could have thrown her in easily, but I stopped, one foot inside the van. I knew I was acting crazy and I tried to calm down. I looked inside the empty van and then I looked at her. "You know your safe word," I said, daring her. I held her arm so tightly she was half bent over and I could see the tops of her breasts where the bodice of her dress hung loose, the pretty lace bra she'd worn. She tried to pry my fingers off her arm, and then looked at my hand and at the grip I had on her. She looked up at my face but she didn't say anything. I hauled her up into the van and pushed her inside, lowered her to the floor, then climbed in and slid the door closed behind me with a loud thump. It was dark in the van and the rain thundered on the roof, a constant roar. The yellowish light seeping into the back had a wavy, greenish, undersea cast. Emma cowered against the wall of the van, her skirt riding halfway up her thighs. My heart was pounding in my ears and when I looked at her, she looked scared, but her eyes were glowing like coals.

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I'd tacked strips of duct tape against the inside of the van and now I grabbed a piece and used it to bind her wrists behind her back, then I took another and wrapped it around her ankles. I grabbed a scarf from the box behind the back seat and blindfolded her, then wrapped another around her mouth for a gag. "Are you okay? Can you breathe?" I whispered. "Give me two if you can breathe okay." "Mnh! Nnh!" she groaned. "Good. Three times is your safe word, okay? Two more if you understand." "Mmmpff! Mnngh!" I slid behind the wheel and threw the van into gear and drove around toward B building. In all, it had taken me less than thirty seconds to get her into the van and I don't think anyone had seen, not with this rain coming down. I drove back by the parking lot by B, over by the far end where there were big trees, back by the duck pond. The rain was pouring down and already the van was splashing hubcap deep through big puddles; water was dripping down the back of my neck. I pulled into a spot and turned off the engine and crawled into the back where Emma lay against the wall—bound, gagged and blindfolded, breathing fast, her legs bent and knees together. The sight of her inflamed me and I felt wild and desperate and dangerous. It didn't matter that it’d been a game and I'd planned it. I'd become an outlaw for her, I'd broken the law for her and I felt it in a burning lustful cock-centered rage. I'd had some plans about keeping her here for a while, about playing with her—feeling her up

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and teasing her, maybe making her blow me, taking my time—but now my blood was up and I forgot all about that. I felt desperate. Huddled in the van with her as the rain poured down, it was like we were two animals in a cave, reduced to the most elemental level of existence. I pulled her against me like I'd won her and felt her panting with excitement. I ran my hand over her body, touched her between the legs and heard her moan. I got to my feet and untied the gag and tore it from her mouth, grabbed her hair and pulled her up and held her head in a death grip. She gasped, afraid to move, arching her back and groaning, trying to ease the tension on her hair, waiting while I held her and fumbled with my pants with the other hand. I pulled at my belt and clawed at the zipper, shoving them down and pulling out my dick, then I pulled her head up and pressed my cock against her expectant lips. She knew what I wanted. She already knew the price she had to pay. "Take it!" I hissed, tightening my fingers in her hair. "Take it, Emma! Take it! I'm not fucking around!" I was standing there bent over, almost trembling with need, and if she hadn't opened her mouth and sucked me inside the way she did, I don't know what I might have done. As it was, the pleasure of her mouth was like some scalding relief to me, so intense I had to brace my hand against the roof of the van to keep from falling over, and Emma moaned and sucked hard, obsequiously, with slavish joy and abandon, glad to be conquered and glad to be used. The sensation was so intense I lost my grip on her hair and braced both hands on the roof. Emma remained fixed to me by the sheer force of her powerful suction, like some sort of cum-starved leech. Even the spastic reflexive

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jerk of my hips as her tongue rubbed across my hypersensitive glans couldn't dislodge her. My hips punched forward at her in a powerful thrust but she hung on, hands tied behind her, hanging on to me like a fish on a line. It was good she was blindfolded and good she couldn't see because I didn't want her to witness the naked animal ferocity on my face. I was all beast now, all savage, and I was glad, too, I couldn't see her eyes, whether they showed fear or pleasure, either one, any sort of sign that she wasn't totally involved in what was happening right now because all I needed her to be was just this—a sucking mouth, a cunt, a woman in the crudest, most basic sense. I needed it because I needed the freedom to be just as cruel and inhuman as I felt . This wasn't about love and this wasn't about tenderness. This was about the crushing ferocity of sex and desire. This was the rock everything else grew from, and I didn't need anyone reminding me of everything I was repressing and throwing away. I took one hand from the ceiling and slid my fingers through her hair again, tightening my grip. I slid my hand across her cheek and felt the way her jaw was distended to take my prick in her mouth and I kept my hand there against her face, grinding my hips around in tight, wicked circles. I wanted to feel the tip of my prick press against the inside of her cheek, feel it there working in her mouth, touching her teeth, her palette, the private places where she made her words and ate her food. I wanted her full of me, choking on me. I loved fucking her mouth, violating that beautiful face with my big, brutal dick… I tightened my grip in her hair and held her head, bent under the roof and, turned her so I had her pressed up against the side of the van and began to fuck her mouth

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with short, savage strokes, my heavy balls slapping against her chin. The pleasure was intense, unutterable, the feeling of possession. The rain thundered down against the roof but still I could hear the thump, thump, thump of her head as it hit the side of the van from my blows and hear Emma's cries of protest and acceptance, and then as my stomach clenched in the warning spasms of pre-orgasmic pleasure and the world started to fade and get blurry and indistinct, I suddenly realized she was crying out in groups of threes and stopped, pulled myself back from the edge—stopped, drew my cock from her mouth and let go of her hair. "My arms," she coughed. "It's my arms. They're too tight." I pulled off her blindfold and she blinked and looked at me. Something in my face must have alarmed her, because she added, "They're just too tight, that's all. I didn't mean for you to stop." I pulled the tape off her wrists. She couldn't see me smile. "You bitch." I taped her wrists together again, this time in front, but the break had drained the ferocious insanity out of me, had brought me back to reality, albeit altered. We'd crossed some bridge and she was mine, at least temporarily. We had time now. This cave had become a temporary home. I pulled her into the center of the van and put her on her side. I shucked my shoes and pants and shorts off and got on my knees. I held her bound wrists above her head in one hand as I slid my cock into her mouth again and started to fuck her, slower this time, without the savage desperation, feeding it to her and letting her show me what she could do, how she could love me with her mouth, just how good she was.

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And she was good. I knelt by her head and rolled my hips in a steady, even pace. Emma kept her jaws apart, her cheeks hollowing and filling as my cock slid in and out. She hummed softly, a kind of tender chant of pleasure as she let me have her mouth, sucking me and chasing me with her tongue, offering me her slavish devotion for whatever I might want. She was ready to accommodate me in anything, and when I pulled my cock out and bent the shaft up against my stomach and leaned forward Emma immediately pushed her face forward and began to lick and fondle my balls with her tongue. Such a good slave deserved something of her own. I rose up on my knees and rolled her onto her back so she was arched over the pile of blankets, her body entirely on display, her rain dappled dress stuck to her skin, then I reached down and peeled the tape from her ankles. Emma sighed as I returned to my position at her head and the steady pumping of my cock into her softly sucking mouth. Her body was rich and lush and, as I held her wrists over her head with one hand, I used the other to roam over her breasts and body like a conqueror taking possession of his territory. I pushed down the bodice of her dress and pulled her bra up out of the way and filled my hands with the ample flesh of her tits, then slid my hand down beneath the dress and over the warm, smooth skin of her belly. Lightning ripped through the sky and illuminated her lying there half naked, my cock dipping into her mouth, my hand ravishing her body, her legs parted in abject surrender. I began to fuck her faster, leaning forward and thrusting straight down into her throat, loving the soft, sudsy sound my shaft made as it churned up her saliva. She could sense my excitement now and must have felt the clenching spasms of my cock and known I was

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getting close. Still it was very quiet in the van—the sound of my cock in her mouth, our deep breathing, her soft, airy moans of pleasure—the tension, the sounds of two people intent on one person's pleasure. I slid my hand down between her legs. She was wearing cotton panties, the kind little girls wear, sweet and innocent. They went with her entire outfit and that allusion to innocence and naiveté was just too perfect, too wickedly brilliant. It spoke to that basic sweetness and purity women aspire to, the difference between girls and women, between pretty and sexy, and it spoke to the basic reason Emma had come to me—to have that purity defiled. She knew us too well. I ran my finger up the soft cotton crotch and looked down at Emma as she was lost in sucking and laving my cock in whorish pleasure. I grabbed the panties and locked them in my fist, slowly and steadily tightening my grip. Emma groaned and shifted her hips as the fabric bit into her sex. I pulled and her voice rose in alarm. Her sucking increased as if she were trying to appease me. I pulled harder and the cotton began to rip, and Emma whimpered submissively, trying to calm me, trying to stave off the all but inevitable rape that was certainly coming, a silly thing to do given the nature of our relationship, but instinctive I suppose when a man starts ripping your innocence off. The panties ripped wide and Emma fell back with a cry. I yanked and tore at them and Emma raised her head and stared down at herself as I pulled them off, shredding them to pieces until nothing remained but a few scraps of cotton and elastic hanging forlornly around her waist and thighs. Then her head fell back in surrender. She was exposed now. She had nothing left to defend anymore.

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She turned her head and sucked my cock back into her mouth, as if what happened to her pussy was none of her concern. "Raise your knees," I whispered. She moaned around my cock and slowly lifted her legs—too slowly, so I slapped her between the legs and she squealed with alarm and lifted her knees all the way up to her breasts, leaving herself totally revealed. Another bolt of lightning lit out the inside of the van and showed her lying there luridly exposed, knees up, arms stretched over her head. I traced my finger down her slit and began to finger her, playing in the soaking slit of her sex as she sucked me, nursing on my cock like a starving child. She moaned and her knees jerked when I touched her. "Oh! Conner! No! Don't! Please!" I slapped her pussy and she jumped. "Keep your knees up and apart," I warned her. "Understand?" She was mine, my toy, all of her, and I played with her tits, her pussy, caressed her face, but mostly I lorded it over her—let the sensations of her slaving mouth satisfy me and drive me higher as I reveled in the pleasure of having her naked body right there to use with and enjoy, having her so ly and shamelessly exposed for me. I put my fingers inside her and thumbed her clit, pumped her and took her to the edge as she panted and begged and gagged on my dick—begged me not to make her come, not like this, so wickedly, so nakedly, so luridly on display. I knew she wanted to hide and I knew she wanted to refuse and I knew she wanted to resist but I wouldn't let her. I wouldn't let her hold back or deny me anything, and as she lay there with her knees up

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and her legs spread and her feet twisting nervously in the air I felt her excitement pulling my own orgasm out of me. I felt an electrical quiver of violent release gathering in the center of my body and I started fingering her harder, my hand slapping against her pussy as I pushed her up and over ahead of me. "Ugh!" she groaned. "Oh! Ugh! No! Ohh! Conner! Oh! God!" Her own shame was making her come. It wasn't my touch. It wasn't my dick in her mouth. It wasn't being kidnapped and thrown in the van. It was the fact that I knew she loved it—she loved it all. That's what was doing it, that's why she was begging me to stop, but I wouldn't. I played with her pussy and I pumped my cock into her mouth. I held her arms over her head so she was my captive and I felt it start—hot, rich, thick, filthy—"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"—the harsh load of my seed churning up from the depths of my depraved soul in a wash of blistering ecstasy and I snarled like an animal and threw back my head and I just let it go—just let go of everything and let it come. I pushed my fingers into Emma's rich and spending pussy and felt the very center of her and I let myself come. "Oh God, Conner! Yes! Yes! God! Yes! Give it to me! Give it to me!" Her voice was a tight, frantic plea, squeezed out as she turned her head to watch and my steely-veined dick twitched and began to spew out his thick gouts of come, thick jets slurring down her cheek and lashing over her lips and chin in viscous strands and webbing. Emma squealed in frustration as she came too, and her trembling made her too spastic to get my dick back into her mouth so she grabbed and searched for it with open

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mouth like a baby bird frantic for food as I continued to ejaculate all over her. Meanwhile her tight pussy clamped down on my fingers and quivered and her own juice spilled out and wet my hand as if she were weeping and begging for mercy, as if it were simply more pleasure than she could stand. "Ugh! Yes! Fuck! Fuck!" I spat, hunching my hips with every jolting eruption, holding her down, almost lying on top of her as I finished—thrusts getting weaker, spasms more prolonged—pouring the rage into her, the anger, the need and the deep, draining sense of relief—pouring it all into her, and conscious of Emma pressing up against me, her thighs squeezing my hand tightly as she too drained herself and took her reward, feeding off my pleasure and swallowing it into herself. Slowly I stopped. My motions got less frantic and urgent as I squeezed the last bits out and ground to a halt, then pulled my softening cock from her swollen lips. I got down and stretched out next to her and we both lay there in the darkened van, panting for breath and listening to the rain drumming on the roof, the thunder pealing someway off into the distance now. Emma let her knees fall to the floor and closed her eyes and I saw her throat working as she swallowed. She brought her bound hands down and brushed some stray hair away from her face. The air inside was very still. She seemed totally relaxed, totally fulfilled. I reached over to untape her wrists and she pulled her hands away and looked at me. "Leave it on, please, Conner?" "You like it?" "Yes," she said. "I do."

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I leaned over and kissed her, and I wanted to stay in that kiss. I had so much to say in that kiss I hardly knew where to begin, but I remembered the pledge about love and her worry about entangling emotions. She seemed so at peace now that I didn't want to ruin it, and lying together and being aware of our shelter from the rain was enough, so I just held her and moved close and listened to the rain fall. There was no peace though. She was against my chest and I could almost feel her thoughts and the words trying to break free. "You don't want to talk?" I asked. "I can't," she said. "It wouldn't be good, Conner." I nodded. "Okay. Well, then, let's get straightened up. We should go." "Where?" I sat up and started pulling my pants on. Everything was damp now and it didn't feel good. "The city. I'm still taking you to my place. The plans haven't changed." That seemed to please her. She sat up and started arranging her clothes. I had to redo her wrists. I tethered them with a ten-inch strip of tape which left them connected but gave her enough slack to use her hands, and that made her happy enough. As I pulled out of the lot, Emma looked in the rear-view mirror and tried to salvage her make-up and fix her hair, using her bound hands as if it were entirely natural.

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It wasn't natural for me though, and driving along with this girl who loved slavery so much had me in a state of simmering arousal. The wipers lashed the rain from the windshield and the van felt like an ark. I nodded to her hands. "Tell me about it." She'd finished her make-up and she looked as normal as could be achieved for having been caught in a downpour. I'd given her my jacket for warmth and she pulled it around her and looked at her hands. "I don't know. I just always liked it. It makes me feel secure, kind of, and sexy, and like adventurous. Don't you like it?" "Yes, I like it. I like it a lot." She looked at the tape cuffs as if they were jewelry. "I always used to play I was being kidnapped and tied up, and that's how I used to masturbate, tying my knees and ankles together and rubbing against something. I was very young when I started. It always got me off." "And what did you think about?" "When I was little? Nothing really. Just men tying me up. I didn't even know what boys did with girls then, back when I first started." "And now?" She ducked her head and looked at me from beneath her hair. "It wouldn't be any fun if I told you. You have to kind of guess." Then she laughed and said. "So far you've done a pretty good job."

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I pulled onto 51, the old four-lane leading to the expressway, about as scenic a road as runs out here, skirting the edges of the suburbs through some forest preserves. The rain had let up to a steady soaking summer shower, the kind the farmers love, and you could almost feel the grass and the trees sucking it up in pleasure. The wipers could handle it easily and it was nice to be in the van. Even with the memory of the wild sex we'd just had, it was almost cozy. It felt sheltered and safe. She leaned back in the seat and tried to stretch but couldn't because of the tape. "But that's enough of this for now," she said, and started peeling it from her wrists. I made a sound of disappointment and she smiled. "You take it all so seriously. It's just sex, you know. Just fooling around. There's more to life than sex." She smiled. "There is! I'm serious!" She tuned on the radio and hunted around for a station, found something I didn't recognize and left it there, turned way down. "Tell me about where you live," she said. "Is that the place you talked about in class, where there's that bar where they have poetry readings? Where do you live?" I stopped at a light and tried to think of how to describe it without alarming her. "How well do you know the city?" "Not very well. David—" she caught herself at the mention of his name but only for a second, "—his brother has season tickets for the Bears and Bulls and sometimes we go into the city when he's in town, and go out to dinner and stuff—Michigan Avenue—but other than that… He says it's kind of dangerous. Hard to park."

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"Yeah. Well, you'll see. I live in a kind of strange neighborhood. Little Saigon they call it. Mostly Vietnamese, but it's still pretty affordable." I didn't want to insult her by telling her it was people like David who'd driven up the rents to the point where people like me couldn't afford to live there any more. "The El runs right by my place. The elevated train?" I laughed at the look on her face. "You never took the El? Don’t worry. I'll protect you. You'll be fine." I pulled away from the light. "So what else is there besides sex, then?" I was teasing. "Movies, shopping." She was teasing too. "No. You know, the usual things. I don't know. Well what else do you do? You don’t just do sex all the time, do you? I mean, I hope not. Or poetry. You're into other things too. Sports and things. You're into sports." "Actually no. I'm not. I've got no use for them." She looked at me like she'd never heard such a thing. She must have thought I was jealous of David's brother's tickets. "What do you mean, 'no use'?" "Just that. They don't do anything for me. Don't interest me. They used to, and then I got tired of them. It's always the same thing. Winning and losing. I got tired of it and now I don't bother. I don't miss it." I looked over at her and smiled. "You don't really like football either, do you? I mean really? " "Well, no. But it's all the other stuff—going to the game, tailgating, being with friends, going out afterwards, seeing the players, talking about it. It's something to do." I nodded. "Yeah. I guess so. It's a spectator thing."

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She was silent for a while as we drove past a stretch of road lit with overhead lights, the edge of the village of Park Forest. Thunder still pealed in the distance, sounding almost apologetic. The rain was gentle now. "No," she said. "There's the normal things. Family and friends and a career; community, where you live and making it better—helping others. And your own family, of course. That's very important. Raising one. Having kids. A nice house and bringing them up right, a home—you know. A garden. A car." Her voice trailed off and she was silent. We came around a descending curve at the base of a hill where Half Day Road ran into 51 at a brightly lit intersection with a big traffic signal and extra lanes, totally deserted in the rain. On the other side of Half Day was a slight rise, and atop this rise was a park, a wide swath of grass set with ball fields and benches and picnic huts separated by big trees and illuminated by neatly spaced halogen park lamps. In the bright white light of the lamps, the rain was falling like strings of silver tinsel, shining against the green-black of the trees. I pulled up at the red light and we sat there. It was a spellbinding sight. It almost looked like ice. "I can't believe I just said that," she said. We sat at the light with the wipers thunking rhythmically, and suddenly Emma wrenched the door open and leaped from the van and out into the rain. She slammed the door shut and ran across Half Day Road up the hill towards the park, her bare feet slipping in the wet grass.

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There was no one around. I ran the red light and pulled over at the base of the hill, hit the flashers and jumped out of the van to run after her, slipping as she had in the rain-slick grass, falling to my knees, the warm rain soaking me. "Emma? Emma!" The hill couldn't have been more than eight feet high but the wet weeds were slick as glass and I was breathless by the time I got to the top and looked over the brightly lit park stretching out before me. The rain was pouring down like cascading silver in the lamplight, and Emma was running aimlessly towards the darkness of the trees—not fast, running like she wanted to be caught. I took off after her, my feet splashing in the soaked turf. I could hear her laughing as I got close and I started laughing too, not knowing why. I was angry and annoyed. Her dress was as wet as tissue paper now and plastered to her skin. Without her panties I could see her buttocks flexing as she ran and even the muscles of her back. I reached for her and she screamed in excitement, dodging. I almost fell on my face, but I maintained my balance and slid on the grass then took off in a new direction and cut her off by a little stream that the rain had formed through the field. I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her down to the ground. She laughed and screamed and fought with me and I fought with her and once again my sense of what I was doing and what was real totally left me. Somehow I ended up sitting on my ass and she was straddling me and her tits were soft and warm against my chest and she was kissing me and urging me on with her tongue and her body and the sounds she made. Then somehow I had her down on all fours with that wet dress pushed up around her chest and I was kneeling behind her with my pants around my 156

thighs, leaning over her, kissing and biting her back and milking her tits like she was an animal. The rain was dripping from her hair and her lips were red as blood and the water was dripping from her lips and running down her ribs and dripping like milk from her nipples too. "Oh yes! Yes, Conner! Give it to me! Make me your whore! Do it to me! Fuck me, Conner! Fuck me!" I raised my head and looked around at the little park drenched with rain and the lampposts standing like silent witnesses. The van was down there with the blinkers on and at any moment someone might come to investigate. The patch of grass we were in was soft and wet and we'd already churned it up into a puddle of mud with our thrashing and Emma was kneeling in mud and had mud splattered on her body. She was shivering and her skin was covered with goose bumps and the water was steaming where it splattered against her skin. She was humping her ass at me, grinding it like she was some barnyard animal, naked out in the rain and the muck and the mud. I think I growled as I grabbed the back of her neck and pushed her down into the grass—pushed her tits down into the mud and the wet grass and held her bent down like that, ass-up, slavelike before me as I took my dick and parted her folds with it and punched it into her hot crease and heard her snarl with feral satisfaction. Yeah, I knew what she wanted. I knew exactly what she wanted—that raw, hot cock, the one hard, warm thing in this cold, wet world—and I rammed it deep, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her back onto it, stabbing her with it as she dug her fingers

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into the muddy dirt and screamed again in savage bliss. She was hotter than hell inside—hot and tight and already trembling on the verge of orgasm. "Oh fuck, Emma! Fuck!!" I stared down at her in disbelief as that sweet soothing rain fell down upon us both, soaking us to the bone. Already Emma was rolling her ass in tight little circles, egging me on, begging me to unload inside her, begging me to get rough with her and let her have it, her sweet little tongue peeking from between her white teeth. "Fuck your bitch, Conner! Fuck her like a slut! Take me, you bastard! Ride me good and let everyone see!" I didn't know what she wanted. I didn't know what kind of crazy thoughts went through her head. All I could do was take what I wanted, do what I wanted, and that's what I did. I awkwardly got up on my feet with my prick still inside her. I spread her cheeks apart so I could see my dick piercing her body and her labia stretched in protest around it, see the raindrops gliding down the slopes of her ass. I reached out and grabbed her hair—grabbed a big handful in each hand like they were a pair of reins—and used them to pull her head back, making her arch her back and thrust her tits out like she was the figurehead on some boat cutting its way through this dark, rainy park. Then I started riding her, slamming my dick into her, fucking her so fast and hard I could hear her tits sloshing on her chest, hear her breathing cut into a series of involuntary animal grunts by the slapping blows of my belly against the meat of her ass, fucking her so fast I could

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feel the heat of the friction of my cock moving in her tight sheath and the wild swinging of my heavy balls as they slapped wetly against her turgid clit. And finally it was too much. Finally she couldn't take the force of my blows and she collapsed, fell face down in the mud and the cold grass and I had to pull her up and hold her against me, hold her pressed against me as I punched my dick up into her and squeezed her tits and shot my load straight up into her sopping pussy. "Oh!" she sighed as I came. "Oh!" That's all. She turned her face up to the sky and pressed her hand down so she could feel my cock where it entered her body and feel the semen jet along my urethra, as if she wanted to make sure it got there safely, as if this whole thing were about me. I sat there and held her, and when I let her go, she was shivering. "Cold?" I asked. "God! Freezing." "Yeah. It's cold." I didn't move. "Conner? Can we go? I'm really cold now." "In a minute." I looked around at the falling rain. "You were right. It is pretty here. A nice place to stop." We were both of us soaked to the skin. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know what got into me. I just had this sudden urge to run. To escape. I guess those thoughts depressed me. Can we go now?" "Well I have this sudden urge to stay. To remain. You understand?"

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Emma got up and stared at me for a moment, then marched angrily away, arms wrapped around herself. She went maybe twenty feet, then turned. She was really shaking with cold. "All right, Conner. I'm sorry. I apologize. Please, Conner. Please!" She wasn't a stupid girl. I think she understood what had happened and I think she'd learned a lesson. I don't know if she accepted it, but she'd learned there was a difference between what happened sexually and what happened outside of sex. She'd learned I liked to be manipulated within limits—but I had limits. I stood up. "You're lucky I like you." I went to her and straightened her tattered, muddy dress and helped her down the rainslick hill to where the van stood with its blinkers flashing. Inside there were blankets she used as towels and to keep herself warm, and inside was a change of clothes that, with some instinctive prescience, she'd brought along just in case. For all that had happened, it was still fairly early, and ahead of us everything I'd prepared at my place still was waiting. I helped her in, climbed into the driver's seat and we took off.

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Chapter Eight

Emma was quiet the rest of the drive into town but perked up as we exited the expressway and started driving through the city. The rain had stopped and as we neared my neighborhood, things started feeling more urban—the buildings, the lights and neons and action in the streets—and pretty soon she was sitting up and looking around. I wasn't exactly angry with her but I was a bit guarded, and I felt better that we were at last on my turf. Running from me in the rain had probably been no more than a little tease—a way to provoke my lust—but it had reminded me of the trickiness of the game we were playing and of the difficulty of trying to decide what was real and what was pretend. It also brought to mind something that had been simmering in the back of my mind about this relationship, the old consumer warning—beware of deals that seem too good to be true because they usually are. So far Emma had given me everything I'd wanted while taking little in return, and while it was possible she was in this just for the sex, I was beginning to doubt it. I was beginning to sense some shadows moving behind the veil. I pulled off the expressway and the tires splashed in the potholes full of water as we hit the city streets. Emma stretched. The ride had been boring and I was bored too. My neighborhood's known as Chinatown North but it's not Chinese it's Vietnamese and so it's also called Little Saigon. It's close to the lake—officially known as Lakeview. Back in the 20's, it was a very nice area with big apartment buildings and 161

lots of shopping and a couple of huge ornate movie palaces and the El—which was new then—running right along Broadway, straight downtown. It had become a slum in the '40's and stayed that way ‘til the Chinese and Vietnamese started colonizing in the 70's, and it still had the feel of an immigrant ghetto in parts—a weird, eclectic mix of all sorts of people. But now the gentrifiers and developers had smelled money and construction barricades were going up. You could still find some good, reasonable places, though, and the neighborhood itself was full of little jewels—great restaurants and tiny bakeries, weird herb shops huddled under the El tracks next to hi-end boutiques and rehabbed deco buildings next to brand new blister-pack condos. I'd been here for seven years now and it was home to me. Even after that deluge there were still people out—always people here, going out to eat, to and from the El, standing outside smoking, hanging around in little doorways getting some air—and it felt kind of good after the drive from the suburbs. The streets looked slick and shiny with the reflected neons, the little Chinese groceries blinking cryptically in the dark. Emma stared out the windows with guarded fascination, the lights shining on her face, and she looked beautiful. I couldn't tell what she made of it, and I wasn't sure how I felt. On the one hand, I was glad there was so much activity. On the other, I'd kind of hoped I would have had her to myself. I didn't want to have to compete for her attention. "Oh wow," she said as we drove by a bus stop. "Look at him. That guy's nuts."

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He was. Some tall thin man in a tattered Cubs jacket was yelling "Fuck Youuuu!" at the top of his lungs and throwing both arms up in an exuberant double bird at the moon. "Yeah, well… You see that occasionally around here. Cubs play today?" She shook her head and we drove on. I knew she wasn't exactly comfortable in the city and I was trying to make things easy on her. There were a lot of weird characters in this neighborhood. I pulled down Carmen and took the alley running in front of a viaduct covered with graffiti from the Ghost Tiger gang and Insane Gangster Nation and others. Some Viet boys glared at the lights, hid their joint and gave me the finger. The alley led to an enclosed parking lot behind Lakeview Hardware and the Three Happiness Restaurant, and here I parked the van, where the air smelled like hot garlic and sesame oil. We could hear the sizzle of water hitting a hot wok, oriental music from a radio and the distant roar of the El. Emma rummaged around in her bag and started to pull out her phone, then stuffed it back in. She took out a silver bracelet and glanced at it, then pushed that back into the bag too. "What's that?" I asked. "Nothing. A watch." "A watch? Can I see it?" She sighed unhappily, retrieved it and handed it to me. It was a very handsome watch, the band made of brushed silver, the watch face a deep, featureless blue,

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slightly iridescent, and covered with a thick crystal dome. It was very masculine in a very feminine way. "Why don’t you wear it?" "I don’t want to. It reminds me of a ring." I looked at her. "But it's a watch." She took it back and put it in her bag. "It's round. It goes around me. It's almost the same thing. I don't like it." She looked around. "Where are we? Are we here?" "Oh. Yeah, we're here. Almost. Come on, it's just around front. I'll show you." She took her bag and I locked up. Carmen's a side street running right off Broadway in the heart of Little Saigon, lined with shops—groceries, noodle shops, dry cleaners, a little pharmacy—all local, all jammed together. I live upstairs above First Service Auto Parts and as we walked down the street, the rich, foody smells from the front of Three Happiness suddenly reminded me of how hungry I was. I was cold too, soaked to the skin from being out in the rain. Emma stopped by the window of Ho Ho's grocery, transfixed by the roast ducks hanging there illuminated by the blue neon sign. "Those things still have their heads!" "Come on, Emma. I'm freezing." "Do they eat the heads?" She looked at me. "Come on." I grabbed her arm when a voice accosted me. "Hey Conner, man! How you doing? "

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Jimmy Vu stepped out of the doorway of Ho Ho's, wearing his green fatigue jacket and drinking a juice box. Jimmy's uncle owned First Service Auto Parts and he was always around. He was a big Baby Huey kind of guy with a bad buzz cut that made him look like a baby chick. "Hey Jimmy." I saw right away his eyes fixed on Emma. The straw of his juice box stayed in his mouth but didn't move. I smiled. I don't know that he'd ever seen me with a woman before, at least, not one like Emma. "Emma, this is Jimmy Vu. He knows everyone in this neighborhood and can fix anything, right Jimmy? If you're ever in trouble, Jimmy's the man to see." This was total bullshit. Jimmy does know everyone and is a very sweet guy but he's totally ineffectual, but I knew Jimmy would like it, and he was clearly knocked out by Emma. He shifted hands so he could keep the juice box in his mouth and still shake. "Pleased to meet you." he said. "Pleased to meet you, Jimmy." I knew Emma was embarrassed by how she looked. "We got caught in the rain," I said. "Terrible. Almost drowned. Clinging to tree limbs, houses washing by in the tumultuous flood. We thought we were goners. Got to go change before we both get pneumonia. Excuse us, Jimmy." "Yeah sure. It was a bitch, huh?"

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"Global warming," I said. We turned and pushed through the street door. I opened the double lock at the bottom and we started up. I live up a long, dark flight of stairs, and halfway up an El went by. I won't lie. It's very loud. The building shook a little, the stairs trembled. Emma froze, grabbing onto the rail, her mouth open in fear. I'm used to it so I just kept walking until realized she wasn't with me. I turned back and smiled at her. "IT'S JUST THE EL TRAIN." I had to scream at the top of my lungs to be heard. "YOU GET USED TO IT." The train rumbled off into the distance and we continued up to the apartment door. I unlocked it and pushed it open, letting her step inside, watching her, trying to see the place through her eyes. I closed the door and locked it behind her. It's a semi-converted loft. What that means around here is that it's a big, even vast, unfinished industrial space with a kitchen and two bedrooms and a bathroom tucked into one corner and I did most of the dry wall on those myself. But other than that it's pretty much the same as the auto parts storeroom below me, only smaller. I have half of this floor, a restaurant supply outfit has the other. I've got the same plain wooden floors and raw exposed brick walls, the same crude wooden beams. Of course, I sealed my walls to try and keep the dust down and did the same for the beams so they have a bit of finish and shine, but other than that, it's pretty much like living in a factory. It gets better towards the back, towards the living part where the kitchen and bedrooms and bathroom—and El tracks—are. Back there I have a sofa and a few chairs, all my books and my desk and TV. That's where I work, but up in front where you

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enter, where the windows overlook Carmen, it's just a big, empty space with a kind of industrial grimness, a harshness, maybe even a cruelty. You could play hockey in there. I don't know how much the vases of willow buds and Chinese silk screens and movie posters do to alleviate that emptiness. I didn't know how a girl from the suburbs would react to it. Emma stepped into the space I thought of as my living room and looked around. The front windows are big and arched. They look down on Carmen and then out onto the diminishing blocks of the city. The streetlights from outside painted her shadow on the floor behind her and elongated her into the darkness. It was like standing in the mouth of a cave. "Wow," she laughed. "Conner, this is really cool…" Her pleasure made me smile. "Yeah. I know." She raised her hands as if she could feel the space, then she started spinning. All this room usually makes people do things like that. They either spin or they yell. "Here, I'll show you the kitchen." I led her towards the back and, as we crossed the front room, Emma noticed the chain hoist Jimmy Vu had helped me mount on an eight-foot length of Unistrut just that morning. I'd bought it from Just-Right Auto Parts and we'd attached it into one of the solid oak beams that spanned the front of the loft just that morning—lifting capacity 1500 pounds. I told Jimmy I was getting into metal sculpture and he'd believed it. The hoist slid like silk on its four solid steel ball-bearing-loaded wheels up and down the length of the I-beam with the touch of a finger and stopped solid with a handheld brake.

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I watched Emma as she examined it. She looked at me and then the hoist but I didn't say anything. She didn't say anything either. She looked down and saw the deck shackles I'd installed in the floor. These are like screw eyes but made for floors. They fold flush with the surface when you're not using them. You get them at yachting supply places and they're expensive and hard to put into old, oak flooring because the have to be countersunk with hammer and chisel. I know my hardware. She looked back up. My ceilings are ten feet high. Even from where I was standing I could see her breathing increase. Any residual anger I held towards her from the episode in the park faded after that as the spell started working between us again, just like that, with just that look she gave me as she examined the hoist and knew I had something planned for her. I showed her the kitchen with the back door leading out to the fire escape and the roof beyond, the windows looking out onto the El tracks. Past that, across city blocks, there was a wall of high rises by the lakefront and little squares of lighted apartments where people lived their lives. Yet farther beyond was the great blue-black immensity of the sky over the lake the moon had vacated. I showed her my bedroom with the four-poster bed freshly made up, the chains already attached, and then the other bedroom, the spare room with the door closed and locked. I saw her sudden curiosity and impatience. Everything had been swept and tidied and cleaned with a bachelor's pitiful attention to a woman's company.

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I had things planned for us so I wanted Emma to hurry in the shower. I even wanted for us to take turns, her going first to avoid any funny stuff, but it was no use. I have a great shower, a fantastic shower—a room within a room with a marble floor, glass walls, dual shower heads, my one luxury—and of course I had to go in and show it off, and once I decided to get in with her, all thoughts of a quick rinse just disappeared. I peeled off my wet clothes, dropped them on the floor and stepped into the shower to turn it on. I moaned as the water came on and I just stood there, head into the spray, leaning against the wall and letting that blessed warmth soak into my bones. After a while it occurred to me I was alone. "Emma? Aren't you coming in?" "Did you want me to?" "Of course I want you to! What do you think?" Silence. Through the foggy glass I saw her putting her hair up, then taking off her clothes. She seemed uncertain. The bathroom was filling with steam. Then the door opened and she stepped into the stall. "I didn't know whether you wanted me to or not." I was going to say something smart but she stepped into the shower with her hands held up over her chest like a child, blinking against the spray, looking shy and vulnerable and I held my tongue. "Come here under the water. I'll soap you."

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Her skin touched mine as she slid past. She was cold and she seemed small. I took the hand piece down and trained it on her and she grimaced as the hot water struck her body. She closed her eyes and I ran the water all over her, washing her front from the neck down—her breasts, her chest, her belly. I gently pushed her hands down until she stood in front of me naked and exposed, trusting, hands at her sides. She was embarrassed, I could tell, and it struck me how she could stand in front of me naked if she were tied and not be embarrassed—she could stand in front of me and take the whip—but to stand here and be washed was something else. I was seized with some powerful feeling I can't explain—some need to both violate her and protect her at the same time. I started getting hard and hated myself for it. "Turn around," I said. "I'll wash your back." "Shouldn't I do you—?" She looked at me and then dropped her eyes. The attention made her uneasy. "Sorry." She turned around and pressed her forehead against the tiles. Her hands crossed over her breasts again. It occurred to me she still carried my semen inside her. I'd have to leave so she could wash herself. "I'm sorry I ran from you," she said. "It was a silly thing to do." It took me a moment to remember what she was talking about, and then I just shrugged. "Don't worry about it." I didn't ask her why she did it. I really didn't feel like I had to know. I’d honestly meant to wash her off and get out. I was like a social director. I had things planned, things I wanted to show her, places I wanted to go with her, but none of

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them seemed very important now. Here we were warm and wet and my hands were moving over her body and she was getting soft as I touched her. "Lean against the wall," I said. I was worried the soap might dry her skin but she was content to let me do what I wanted with her. I soaped my hands and began to rub her down, kneading her muscles as the water streamed down upon us. She rested her cheek against the tile and she suddenly seemed so small and delicate, fairylike, a sylph in the falling water. I was hard now, hard and red and throbbing, some sort of ogre. I leaned against her and my cock slid beneath the globes of her ass and pressed up against her pussy. She automatically thrust her bottom out in invitation, spreading her legs. I sighed and began to move, dragging my prick against her wet slit, back and forth, holding her hips. Emma gave a little whimper, a kind of questioning sigh, a kind of "Yes? Is this it?" She was ready for whatever I wanted, and once again, her complaisance, her willingness to give herself to my pleasure, just drove me mad with desire. I began to fuck her, never entering her but pumping, sliding my cock back and forth. The pleasure, the friction, was excruciating. I reached up and took her breast in my hand and she covered mine with hers and showed me to squeeze, to take her. "Emma—" "Ah…?" Again that little questioning sigh: "Whatever you want…"

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I reached for her hair and pulled it free and down it came, catching the water and falling wet into my hand where I seized it. I pulled her head back, pulled her away from the wall—she leaned back against me and I took her mouth in a bruising kiss and she melted against me, opening her mouth and surrendering, offering herself, giving it all. My fingers slid around and slid up into her pussy and I felt the thick residue of my own earlier ejaculation still incubating in the heat of her body. I grabbed her breast and, holding her tight, I backed awkwardly into the shower, as she arched against me lost in that hungry, sucking kiss. God, she just got to me again—the way she yielded, like anything I wanted to do to her was fine, anything I wanted to take from her, that's what she wanted to give. She even felt that way in my hands, as if she were swollen with some sort of womanly sweetness, bursting with it —her tits, her hips, the tightness of her thighs—and if I didn't relieve her of it, if I didn't squeeze it out of her of pierce her or make her come—she'd just explode. "Emma!" "Oh, Conner!" It was insane, holding her pressed against me as the water streamed down against us. It ran over her face and down her body, dripped from her eyelashes and chin and nipples. It reminded me of come, like she was being bathed in come. "Put your hands up around my neck, Emma. Hold on to me!" "What—?"

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I showed her, taking her arms and putting them up around my neck so she was standing, leaning back against me. I reached up and got the hand piece from the shower. "Don’t let go, Emma." "Oh, Conner! No! Don't!" I spread her pussy apart with my left hand and trained the showerhead on her clit with my right, flicking it across her so the spray whipped across her exposed flesh and made her jerk and cry out as if struck. She instinctively closed her legs and brought her arm down to protect herself. "Don't you dare, Emma!" I warned. "Keep those hands around my neck like I said!" "Oohhh…" She whined and locked her fingers around the back of my neck, seeing she had no choice but to close her eyes and hang on. I got a better grip on her, pressing her against me with my forearm and spreading her labia apart and down to expose her turgid clit, my fingers sliding in her swollen and slippery flesh. I whipped her with the water again and again and each time she jerked spastically, lifting her hips to the spray and crying out without restraint, her voice echoing off the hard, tiled walls. She was coming, coming with each lash of hot water, hardly even struggling, helpless to resist giving herself to me again and again as if this were her only function in the world. I felt like a master musician must feel, one with his instrument, joined with it, holding Emma in front of me like a cello, like a string bass, bowing her with the lashing

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water and feeling her vibrate with orgasm, feeling every stab of pleasure and every ounce of her joy and, before I knew it, Emma was sobbing and shuddering and I dropped the spray and let her slide from my arms. She fell to her knees and I stood tall over her with my head up and back arched, grabbed her hair and pulled her up. I took my cock in my hand and pressed it against her face and with one stroke, then two and then three—I exploded against her. I exploded, God—thrusting my hips out, my eyes rolling back in my head as I felt the force of the fury of release I had to give her. I pulled her up against me with the strength of my arm, pulled her up and made her take it, my cum splashing all over her, spurting all over her face as I held her there and she rubbed her cheeks and mouth all over my erupting dick, moaning and panting in a transport of bliss. I couldn't get enough! Jesus, I just couldn't get enough! **** We were famished after the shower. Emma wanted to stay in because she thought her hair looked awful and felt her clothes were too muddy but in fact her hair looked fine and I found an old boat-necked sweater that worked well enough to cover her clothes and I knew she really wanted me to force her to go outside. Already this was taking on the giddy up-all-night feeling of a teen-aged sleepover and she was glowing with excitement. We skipped down the stairs and out into the street and I took her across to Long Viet, which is this tiny hole-in-the-wall place I've always dreamed of taking a girl to, pitch black on the inside and as wide as a closet with tiny portholes for windows and lit only

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by the blue neon sign. It had a ridiculously narrow mirrored bar in the back like a sliver of glass that made the whole place feel like an aquarium. Down on the street we ran into Jimmy again, this time with Uncle Stanley, a little, round-headed, sloe-eyed guy I didn't know very well, and Ricky Sun, who I did know and liked. Ricky'd been in the poetry course I'd taught at Lakeview College, which was just a few blocks down, and was a funny kid with bleached blond hair combed into a sculptural brush that gave him an unfortunate resemblance to Beavis or Butthead. It was unfortunate because I think Ricky did it intentionally out of the mistaken belief that people thought Beavis and Butthead were cool, which they did, but not in the way Ricky thought. "Conner, Conner, it's an honor!" The other thing about Ricky is he wrote poetry by lifting strings of words out of the rhyming dictionary. I smiled. "You guys still around?" "Where we supposed to go?" Ricky smiled. "Tell us, do you know?" Emma stepped out where they could see her and the boys, taken by surprise, stood up a bit taller and gave her polite little bows. I introduced her around and they all shook hands, and I was touched to see this sweet formality and Jimmy's showing off as he told the others, "Oh, we've already met, haven't we, Emma?" I gave her my arm as we crossed the street and she took it. I hadn't felt so fucking proud in years. As I pushed open the door of Long Viet, I looked back across

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the street and saw Jimmy and Uncle Stanley smiling at me, their heads almost touching, and Ricky Sun with eyes wide, giving me both thumbs up. **** It was time for us to talk and there were things I wanted to tell her, very important things, but they were all confused and only half clear and I'd really hoped for better than that. For someone of my age and for where I thought I'd be in life by now in terms of maturity and in terms of knowing my own mind, I'd really hoped I'd have better than what I did, this confused mess of half-baked ideas and half-formed thoughts and emotions. And sitting there in that dark and intimate restaurant with Emma right across from me, waiting for me to say something, it seemed impossible for me to find a place to start, or a way to begin, and so we sat and we ordered these lovely drinks in red glasses they serve, and ordered food and chatted about this and that and I never did say what I really should have said. But what I really should have said was this: I'm a writer, Emma, and a bad poet, and I'll never have the money your David does. I don't know what I've gotten myself into here. I started an affair with you because I wanted your body. I wanted to fuck you and do terrible things to you and I thought that's all I wanted. Now I seem to have fallen in love with you and I don't understand how and I don't know what to do about it. I don't even know you very well, and I'm almost afraid to know you better. Maybe I love you because I don't know you. Maybe if I knew what you were really like and what

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you wanted out of life and what you think is important, I wouldn't care for you at all and that would be the end of this. You're a lot younger than me and we see things differently. Things matter a lot more to you—material things—and I gave up on those a long time ago, probably because I know I'll never have them, but also because I think I found something more important in my writing. I don’t talk about this much because I feel silly when I do, but when I write, I feel like the most important man in the world, because when I write, I give meaning to things. I create significance, and I create meaning, and as hard as that may for you to believe, that's really even more important in the long run than life and death. You're sitting here with me now, and we were just up at my flat and I was holding you and making you come in my arms, and what does all this mean? We're both here now telling ourselves stories, trying to find the one we like best to describe what's going on. Are we just playing with each other sexually? Are we in love? You're wondering if I'm just using you, if I think you're just a whore. I'm wondering if I'm just some cheap thrill you know you can string along and then dump before you settle down with your boyfriend. We're writing this story, Emma. Everyone's a writer. We all write our own lives and the lives of those around us. It's just that I do it all the time and I think about how I do it more than most people. I do it large. I'm aware of it. There are stories within stories within stories, Emma. We live in a sea of stories and meanings and symbols. When I first fucked you in that cold empty lecture hall, don’t you think I knew what it meant? The echoing emptiness of that auditorium, a place where students gather to learn from a teacher, your aloneness in the dark as I touched

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you, as you wordlessly begged to be touched? It was cold in there and dark. It was hard. I wasn't kind. Do you know why it had such an effect on you? When I chased you down in that rainy park and took you in the mud like an animal, do you know what that meant? How you were burning to be free yet needed to be captured and ridden to the ground and fucked in that field in the rain and the grass and the mud with no pretense and no apology and nothing but raw animal passion? I nailed you to the dirt with my cock, Emma. Pulled your hair back ‘til the rain was in your face and rode you like a bitch. It was just what you wanted, wasn't it? Do you see, Emma? This is what I can give you. This is why I brought you here. Because tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, I'm going to take you around the city and I'm going to show you other stories, magical stories, impossible stories and unbelievable stories, and I'm going to show you how they connect to you and to what you feel and how they reach deep and connect us to unimaginable things. Unimaginable things—the emeralds in the gem room at the Field Museum, the Gods of ancient Egypt, the opium dens of colonial China, the Kabalistic Tree of Life, the gold of the Incas in Pizarro's treasure Ships, the magic of the Italian renaissance, the Italian beef sandwiches of Taylor street and the swaying of the willows by Diversey Harbor. They're all linked by erotic imagination and the power of poetry and that's no small stuff. That's the very fire and chains of love right there, Emma, and I'm offering to give it to you. I'm offering to lay all of this at your feet, to bring it to you, bathe you in it. We'll live in it, because that's what I can give to you, Emma. Do you understand? I can give you what your love means. Telling someone you love them is one thing but

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discovering what that means, learning what that feels like, turning that into a story you live—that's a job for a poet, Emma. And just where are we in all of this? In all this meaning and talk and all this thinking and explaining. Do I even have to say it? It's the one thing that's obvious, that I've been saying all along. I've been saying it all along, the only way it can be said. Not even a writer can say it with words, because it has to be felt, and it has to be felt because it's not even an idea, it's a sensation, an emotion. A certainty, Emma, that's what it is—that sheer presence of me in you, of me against you, of me with you, melting into you, possessing you, having you, being you. It's that one certainty too important for words. It's where we start. It's where we end. This is what I need you to understand, Emma, more than anything, and this is what I can't even say. When I started this I thought it was some naughty fun—a game about D/s, BDSM, whips and chains. I never knew this would happen to me, that you would open up this floodgate of emotion, break down this dam of passion. You think I'm playing games, and I almost wish that were true, but what I'm feeling is real. It's real and now I don't know how to convince you it's real – and if I can, I’m terrified I might find out it isn’t real to you. You devastate me, Emma. You destroy me with what you give me. I'm supposed to be the master, I know, and yet you make me weak and helpless, fill me with rage and

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strength, turn me into a man like I've never been before. It's sick, insane, maybe pathological, but I don’t know if I can live without it anymore. When you give yourself to me the way you do, you take me apart and put me back together into something new and strong and clean. You empty me of my rage and anguish and take it into yourself and turn it into something beautiful. I don’t know how you do it. I've never known anyone like you. And yet I know how it must be for you too. Maybe I'm wrong but I swear I can feel what you feel, how you seem to swell with this sweetness as if you're going to burst, your breasts and your pussy and your whole body all filled with this languorous heaviness. Forgive me Emma, but what you want then is not more sweetness and gentility but to have that pleasure pulled from you, beaten from you and taken, your body pierced and punctured, crushed and squeezed by the arms of desire, bruised by fevered kisses and punished by passion. You want to know a man wants you enough to go mad to have you, will kidnap you and tie you and spend himself upon you and batter you both to pieces in his need to possess you. That 's how it feels, isn't it? Because that's how it feels to me, and I know when we're together like that, when it's good like that, we're feeling exactly the same thing. Two people don't get any closer, Emma. You don't know how rare and precious it is, for that one brief instant to be you and feel your own love So that's what I know, Emma. That's all that I know. All of us live most brightly in our lover's hearts, and in mine, right now, you have a palace that shines like the sun.

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I can't even make you an offer yet and I don't know what else to say. Just take what I've told you and think about it, and know you're much more to me than what you might think, and this is much more to me than a game. Much, much more. **** That's what I should have said to her at Long Viet as we ate our bowls of noodles and our barbecued pork and pot stickers and drank our tiny cups of tea. That's what I should have said, but I didn't. She looked so beautiful as she sucked up the noodles, the ends whipping around and splattering drops of broth before disappearing between her pursed lips. She laughed at the delicious suggestivity. I didn't say anything because I was afraid she really was in it just for the sex, just sowing her wild oats before her marriage to David, and that if I bared my soul to her I'd only make a fool of myself and embarrass us both and lose whatever authority as a Dominant I already had. But mostly I didn't say anything because I'm such a stupid man. **** From Long Viet we went right over to Dee's, one of a chain of weird discount clothing stores scattered around the city and close-in suburbs. I'd discovered Dee's before with a friend but never had an opportunity to shop there myself. They specialized in trendy cut-outs and fashion knock-off stuff, hot one day and cold the next, and ended up selling at Dee's for six dollars for a pair of pants and four for a tee shirt, eight dollars for an entire outfit. They specialized in clothes a bit too hip or with a few too many hanging threads, but every so often my friend said you could find an outrageous

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bargain, and at those prices you could wear the stuff once and throw it away, which is pretty much what I had in mind. Dee's was in an over-illuminated over-chromed mini strip mall on Broadway that also contained a blindingly bright fruit market/grocery whose stacks of grapefruits, apples and bananas extended out into the street. Everyone there wore sunglasses round the clock. They had to. The mall was frequented by a bunch of pretzel-thin hipless, breastless Asian and young Chicano girls who looked faintly green under the powerful fluorescent lights. The girls were so rail-thin they made Emma look especially voluptuous, almost meaty. Thankfully Dee's itself wasn't so bright. Emma had no idea what we were doing there ‘til she rifled through some of the racks and saw the Lurex, velvet, Spandex, mesh, vinyl, and then looked at the price tags. "You've got to be kidding!" she said. Several of the pretzel girls looked up. "I know they're kind of flashy." I leaned over a rack of iridescent tops the size of dinner napkins. "But I like flashy. Sue me. I want to buy you some clothes, Emma, my treat. I want to play sugar daddy so you can't say I never got you anything. I know this isn't the highest-end stuff in the world, but still, just for the hell of it. I've got a hundred dollars I don't want to walk out of here with. Okay? So humor me." But Emma's face suddenly got dark and sad, and I realized I'd done something wrong. "No, Conner. That's okay. I couldn't."

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"What's wrong?" "Nothing. It's just… I'd rather not. Is that all right?" I'm very stupid when it comes to women. Vaguely I sensed something swimming around between us like a fish in the dark again—that same business about what was real and what was a game. "No, look, Emma," I said, grasping at straws. "It's not like I'm really buying you something. These aren't really clothes. They're props. That's what they are, get it?" She smiled and shook her head but I think my earnestness must have gotten to her, or she realized she'd hurt my feelings, or something, because she relented. "Props," I repeated. "And at these prices, I want you to shock me with your lurid and whorish purchases, understand? And check it out—they have underwear too. Behind you." She looked at me and then looked behind her at a display of demi-bras—my friend had told me their underwear was especially good, their stockings too—and she surrendered. "Well, these bras aren't bad…" Who was the poet who wanted to be a pair of his lover's panties? I walked up to the counter and made a show of giving the cashier two fifties. "Don't give these back to me no matter what. I'm an irresponsible madman and will only spend it all on books. Make sure she spends it all. I'll be right back. I have an urgent need for a grapefruit." I thought Emma might be more motivated if she knew she could surprise me with her purchases, and I secretly liked the corny domesticity of the idea of the woman 183

surprising her mate, so I walked outside and stood in the parking lot and had a cigarette while she spent my money on sexual enhancements. It was a gorgeous night and I was right where I wanted to be—both satisfied and aching for more, secure and feeling like I was on the edge of a dangerous precipice, almost feeling like I was loved. My failure to tell her how I felt in the Long Viet restaurant felt like it might yet have a chance to be redeemed in some shadowy doorway. I should tell her, and yet things were going so well. It would be so easy to ruin everything at this point. Besides, she knew what was going on. We hadn't really made love yet. She knew I hadn't brought her all the way into the city just for a quick shower and a bowl of noodles. She'd seen the hoist and the locked room and now here I was buying her clothes at Dee's and she knew I had something planned. The main event was still to come. There was time. I was worried about leaving her alone so I walked back in. The cashier nodded towards the changing booths in the back and I walked over, hearing her voice coming from one of the stalls, tight, low, urgent, talking on her cell phone. "…Well see? That's why I didn't want to tell you! If you didn't know, then you wouldn't have to lie! You're the worst liar in the world, Angela, and David knows it too! … (pause) … Well— Well— Well, just turn it off! Just don't answer it anymore! Angela— ? Angela—? Angela! Would you listen to me—!?" I turned and walked out, went outside, face burning, dizzy.

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Supposedly no one knew where she was. Her roommates didn't know. Her fiancé didn't know. It was our secret affair, private, our own little game, something we shared. If anyone got hurt it would be just us. And now here it was—the tone of her voice, tight, pinched, pleading, manipulative. Strange how my face burned. Throbbed almost—the part of me I show the world—as if I'd been slapped. I leaned against a car and watched her through the store window, through the mannequins as Emma came out of the dressing room, putting her phone away. She didn't look at me, she didn't feel me looking at her. She looked at the outfits she'd taken in with her. I tried to see her for who she was. But was it really so weird, I asked myself? What had I heard? I'd heard her having words with Angela her roommate about David's calling her and that was really all. So Emma had lied to me when she told me her roommates didn't know about us. Was that such a big deal? It kept me from pestering her at home. It kept me from dropping by or trying to make more of this thing than it was. Was that so unreasonable? Still, the doubt remained. Her tone of voice on the phone wasn't the tone of voice I knew. She'd stepped out of character and I hated that. I wasn't sure who she was anymore. The idea that maybe I was playing a part in her game wouldn't leave me—that I was a minor character in the story she was writing featuring her and David—wouldn't leave me. The lights in Dee's suddenly seemed too

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harsh and too flat at the same time, and Emma seemed to pick up some of that green cast to her skin as well. We paid for her stuff and went back to my place. "Should I model what I bought or do you just want to—?" "No, let me see. Let's see it all." We were back in the bedroom surrounded by the white and black bags from Dee's and I started going through them as if David might be inside. That was my obsession now, that Emma was having this affair with me just to make him jealous and goad him into adopting D/s as if it were nothing more than a lifestyle like yoga or vegetarianism—"Oh, come on, David! You know that Conner Devlin in Chicago did D/s with me and we had a great time! You should really try it!"—that she was making mental notes of what I was doing so she could report to him as if it was a technique he could learn off 3x5 note cards. I felt like my recipes were being stolen. I started drinking. I was tense and angry and it started to hit me right away. She'd bought nice things. Fairly conservative, handsome clothes—skirts of inexpensive fabrics that still hung with simplicity, tops of soft and elegant cut. Amidst all the flash and glitter and whorishness at Dee's, Emma had managed to find clothes that remembered a woman's beauty and made me ashamed of the particular kind of hotpants lust I was looking for. That only irritated me more. "That's it? That's as slutty as you could find?" She looked at me. "I bought more. I was saving them for later."

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I picked up a gray skirt. It was some synthetic I suppose, soft, like cashmere, not unusually tight or short. It wasn't what I'd been expecting. It wasn't what I'd been hoping for. "Fine. Let's go then. Get dressed. One more place I want to take you and then we can come back and get down to business. I've got some stuff to get ready while you change." "Do you want me to wear that skirt?" "Sure, yeah, whatever. Wear the skirt. No, wait a minute. I got something else you can wear." I went over to my dresser and opened the top drawer, I'd been saving this for later, but I was a little drunk now and it seemed to me this was as good a time as any. I took a gift-wrapped box and gave it to her and I should have known—I should have seen the look in her eyes that said, "Don't do this to me. Please don't do this to me," and maybe I did. Maybe I saw that look and I gave it to her anyhow because I had the feeling at this point things were somehow already over and maybe I just wanted to hurt her. But I gave it to her and made her take it and stood there while she unwrapped it and tore the paper off and then opened the box. It was a collar. A silk-lined, leather collar, cushioned with velvet, set with motherof-pearl studs and tourmaline cabochons and three stainless steel rings. It had a stainless steel buckle and a lock and key and four silver bells hanging free. They chimed so I'd always know where she was by the sound. I'd had it custom made and it had cost me four hundred and sixty-five dollars.

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Her face went pale. She lifted it out of the box and said, "Oh Conner. I can't wear this. You know I can't." "It's not a fucking ring, Emma. Okay? It's a collar. It's a fucking collar! It's just a piece of jewelry. It doesn't mean anything more than what you want it to mean." I took it from her hands, shoved it in the box and threw the box in the drawer. **** The Blue Moon is the oldest bar in continuous existence in the city of Chicago. What that means is they've been drinking there since 1923. Al Capone drank there, actually owned it for a while. The booth he sat at is still there. The basement room he and his flunkies gambled at is still downstairs but stripped now and used for storage only—but there's still a tunnel that runs beneath Broadway and comes up on the other side of the street a block away, for use in case of police raids, of which there were none, because Capone owned the police. The Blue Moon is the quintessential private eye bar, forever stuck in the era of hard booze and fast women, garish green lights and red juke boxes, men in fedoras and women in low-cut dresses. The people who go there know it and they dress the part, so going there is half night-out, half costume party. It's always kind of surreal. Harvey the bouncer met us outside and we squeezed in through the crowd at the door, making our way down the long bar towards the bandstand in the back where the booths were already occupied. The place was dark and crowded as usual, but there was always some space you could slide into. It was noisy without being loud, bubbling and alive, crowded without being crushing.

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It was a perfect bar, exciting and relaxing at the same time, a sense of anticipation always in the air. You walked in and looked around and there were people looking for you. The dim booths, shadowy corners, colored spotlights reflecting in polished brass instruments, rows of bottles standing against cloudy mirrors. It was here that they'd started the poetry slams in the early 80's, opening up the mikes to any poets who wanted to read, and suddenly the word went out and people started crowding in to hear this new, spoken music and things took off. That's how I found this neighborhood and found this life, and that's why I'd brought Emma down here to this place I'd told her so much about, to meet my other mistress. But now that we were here, I was feeling strange and confused, still upset about that phone call and the collar and so many things. And it was early yet, not even midnight. We found a place at the far edge of the bar, almost next to the bandstand, under a bust of Plato. The band was a big band called Retro Metro– eighteen pieces, three singers in 40's outfits with camellias in their hair, great brass, all professionals. They suck up a room and spit it out, and for someone like Emma, who'd never heard live big band, they were a revelation, like discovering music for the first time. There was one stool at the end of the bar, right next to the band stand, and I slid Emma onto it as the band was playing "Night in Tunisia," and her eyes just went wide. We were so close you could almost feel the blast from the trumpets and hear the keys on the saxophones slapping, the musicians laughing and kidding each other and ordering drinks from the bar. The air smelled of beer and sweat and gardenia and people were dancing in a way you don't see anymore—jitterbugging, foxtrot, twostep,

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really good dancers, dancing out of sheer joy. But I was irritated and confused and ordered a double whiskey for myself while Emma had a rum and coke. I'd made it a point not to really look at her when we left my place, but now I did, when I took off her sweatshirt and threw it on a stool, not caring whether anyone took it or not. She was wearing the gray skirt, which hung on her without pleat or wrinkle, an exquisite, mistlike curve showing where space stopped and Emma began. Above the skirt she wore a white top with a square neck and long, tight sleeves that was gathered between the tits in a way that was both innocent and suggestive. It was made of some material that looked very tactile—the urge to touch it was almost overwhelming, and I guess that was the point. Her entire person was made for holding, I realized—her shape, her scent, the colors she'd chosen, the way she moved, the textures of her clothes. In the mood I was in, it was maddening, not just that she was made for holding, but that she had designed herself to appeal this way to me. Why did she do this to me if she didn't want me to hold her? I was trapped now and confused, angry and humiliated about the collar. The band rushed up to a close, hit the note and held it. The dancers stopped, fell away in happy applause, whistles. I noticed the clock. Midnight. I turned to her. "Aren't you expecting a call?" "Who?" "David. He should have called you by now." Emma looked at me cautiously. "Sometimes he doesn't call."

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I nodded wisely, as if in sympathy. "Good thing he didn't call tonight with us being in a bar and everything, huh?" The Band started playing and Emma put her drink down. "Conner, what's wrong? Why are you so angry? What have I done?" "Who says I'm angry? It's just a lucky coincidence he doesn't call tonight while you're out with your other boyfriend." I looked at her. It was terrible. I was hurting her and it was like I was cutting my own stomach open but I couldn't stop. "He doesn't know you're out with me, does he, Emma? No one knows you're out with me, right? That's what you told me, and you wouldn't lie to me." I saw the fear in her eyes then. She knew I'd found out. She spun so she was facing the room, sideways to me. She was so incredibly beautiful. Even with what she was doing to me she was beautiful. "No," she said. "No one knows about us." I took a sip of my drink as the band started up the next number. I leaned against the bar so I was a little behind her. I put my drink down and leaned over her, slid my arm over her chest and caressed her breast. "You're a terrible liar," I whispered in her ear. "You must even be a worse liar than Angela." I felt her stiffen. I kissed her on the side of the neck. She smelled wonderful. Like flowers.

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She pulled away and turned around. "Conner? I think that's enough. I think it's time I went home. I want a cab. You're too drunk to drive." I looked at her for a moment and then smiled. "Sure, honey. Fair enough. One dance, okay? One dance." The band was playing a slow, campy version of Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill", bloated and overdone, a grotesque, rollicking parody of itself. A lissome girl in a black velvet 40's evening gown stepped up to the microphone and started belting out the lyrics with super exaggerated enunciation, wrapping her lips and tongue around each syllable with cock-sucking, clit-licking enthusiasm. I took Emma's hand and dragged her off the stool. I don't dance and Emma doesn't either, not to a song like this, but she was too shocked to resist, and too frightened. I was frightened myself, with no idea what I was feeling or what I was trying to do. I grabbed her and put my arms around her and held onto to her and she had no choice but to follow. The room was a garish green, the music swollen and staggering. The singer sounded like she was having sex with the microphone, and in my arms was the girl who was killing me with the love I felt for her. I pressed my face into her neck and crushed her to me like I wanted to kill her. "I found my thrill…" I held her in my arms and she was already a million miles away, she was already a memory, a ghost, and this would be all I'd have of her, this stiffness I held in my arms. "Call me 'master'," I whispered.

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Emma sighed and I squeezed her against me. It felt good to use my strength. It felt good the way she yielded. "Master!" Emma whispered. I twisted her wrist behind her back and pushed it up, up between her shoulder blades—up until she gasped and her breast pressed into me. "Again!" "Conner! God! Master! Oh! Master! Conner!" I pushed her back into a dark little corner, behind a phony column where shadows hid us and only one beam of sickly yellow light could get through and slash across her face and in that light I saw her looking at me fearfully. I kept her arm twisted behind her back. "You're a liar, Emma. You're a liar but you're going to give me what I want anyway, understand?" "No, Conner. No, I—" "Master!" I corrected. "—Master! I—" "Shut up! I'm tired of playing games, Emma. I'm tired of being yanked around. You're not going anywhere tonight. I'm not taking you back to campus. I'm not taking you back to your car. You're staying with me tonight and you're staying for as long as I want you to stay. I'm not playing with you any more, Emma. Do you understand? You're

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coming home with me and you're going to give me what I want. You're going to give it to me if I have to fucking crawl inside your mouth to get it!" "Conner! Conner! Master!" I grabbed her face in my hands and I kissed her. I kissed that lying mouth. I kissed her and I bit her lips and I felt the tears spilling down her cheeks. I was on fire and my cock was hard, stabbing her like a dagger as I held her face in my hands and leaned my weight against her, pressing her back against the wall. The band was playing and the singer finished her verse and the trombone player must have stood up because as I kissed her and sucked the air from her lungs, I heard the first golden blast of that pure, fat horn on my back and it seemed to drive me harder on top of her, pushing her into the corner ‘til it was like we were in a world of our own, just me and Emma, unseen by anyone. I dropped one hand to her leg, her thigh, and slid it up under her skirt, lifting, and Emma was biting me frantically, and I don't know if she wanted me or she hated me and anyhow I didn't care because it didn't matter anymore either way. Tears spilled down her face. I abandoned my assault on her thigh and my hand went around to her behind, where I started lifting her skirt, my hand gathering up the soft fabric. I gathered it up until I felt her naked ass. She was wearing some kind of thong and I spread her cheeks apart with my fingers and began to run my finger up and down her crack. Emma moaned and put her hands on my cheeks and now apparently she decided she wanted it because she kissed me, holding my face as if she were trying to hold me steady or make me slow down—

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"Don't touch me, slave!" I hissed at her. She pulled her hands away as if struck and pressed them against her shoulders, clenching them into tight, nervous little fists. I pushed my finger against her asshole and she whimpered. "Oh God, Conner! I don't know what to do! What do you want me to do? Master! Master! What do you want me to do?" I didn't answer. Standing in that little alcove with the shadows of the dancers sweeping over us, I pressed her against me and pushed my finger against her asshole while in front my hand slid under her skirt and found her pussy. She had managed to find some naughty things at Dee's after all—a g-string with a gauzy, invisibly fine little panty that clung tight to her little mound like a shadow, no thicker than a piece of cellophane—and split around her pussy so that her labia were revealed to the air and the night. How interesting… I pressed my weight against her and pushed her into the wall as I slid my hand under her skirt and continued to investigate as if I were learning all this for the first time. The panties were split, and hanging down in front was a little string of beads or pearls, I couldn't tell, but they hung down so they'd slap against her clit as she walked, as she moved, spanking herself, keeping herself aroused and ready. It didn't matter that I'd made her buy them, that I'd insisted she buy slutty underwear and that she wore them just for me. They made me nuts for her, filled me with rage and excitement. They must have been spanking her all the time we were walking to the Blue Moon—and now as I

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fingered and fondled her clit she totally forgot my no-touch order and totally forgot my rage and anger. She turned on and lit up like a little flare as I touched her, igniting and melting against me, rubbing her hot, open mouth against mine and dissolving into a buttery pool. "Conner, please! Don't make me… Don't…" "Come, Emma! You're going to come for me right here you little slut! You're going to come for your Master to show him how much you love him! To show him you love him more than anyone!" Her face was screwed up into a tight little mask of shame and denial and her body trembled as she fought me but I wouldn't let her win. I refused to let her win. I needed her more than she needed herself, much more than she needed herself, and I played with her clit and pressed against her anus and felt her shudder and sob. "Conner! Please! Master! Oh God! Master! I can't! I can't!" But already she was gone and as soon as my middle finger broke through her tight little sphincter in back, she sobbed and pushed her pussy at me and I felt a hot little stream when she came, a hot little dollop of her lubricant dripping out into my hand, so utterly filthy. I loved it—all dressed up in her sweet little outfit, yet you play with her pussy and stick your finger in her ass and the cum drips out of her like juice from a peach. She'd squirted before when she'd come but never like this, never in this precious little drop, and she shuddered deeply, trembling so violently I thought she might fall, so when she

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grabbed onto me I didn't object. She buried her face against my chest, mouth open, gasping for air. "Master, Master!" "Again, Emma! Again, damn it!" "No! Please, no!" The trombone player was still soloing, the rest of the brass limbering up, preparing to dive back in and see the song home, and I felt Emma's thighs quivering, the wad of come sliding off my finger as I pushed her towards another orgasm. She was helpless when she got like this. She couldn't stop coming. She dug her nails into my shirt. Opened her mouth and bit me. I shoved my finger up into her ass. "That's it, slut! Bite me, Emma! Bite me! Fucking make me bleed!" She snarled like a feral cat and her ass squeezed tight on my finger, her snarl becoming a high squeal of release as she came again. My shirt was wet where she bit me. "Conner, no more! Please, no more! Not here. Please!" I looked at her—tiny, helpless, her eyes closed tight . The music washed around us in a river of rich golden sound and Emma was caught like a beautiful little tropical fish on the hook of my fingers. I wanted to crush her in my fist and I wanted to take her in my hands and cherish her next to my heart. It was a place she always put me— paralyzed between boiling sexual rage and weeping tenderness—and in the eye of this testosterone-fueled hurricane, Emma stood and hid against me from my own rage and shivered in constant orgasm. It was more than I could stand. 197

"Come on!" I grabbed her hand and led her out through the front of the bar. The band was just getting to its feet and lifting their instruments, all standing and putting their horns to their mouths and blowing—the solid, hard-driving, good-rocking-tonight wide-open final chorus, down the streets of the city and over the roofs of Chicago and out into the darkness over the Lake. I grabbed Emma and led her stumbling with her tear-stained face and shaking legs out through the press of people—some my age, some hers, some who looked at us, some who didn't—out the door and out onto the heat of Broadway in the summer night, across the street, dodging cars and down the block, neither of us speaking, neither of us saying a word. In the wake of the rain, the air had died and grown stifling and hot and I began to sweat as I led her along by the hand, her having to trot occasionally to keep up, until we came to Carmen and we turned down my street, passed the now-dark windows, came to my door. I opened it and led her into the hot dark inside. "Come on," I said. "Upstairs." I remember my mind was unusually sharp as I followed her up, although I'm not quite sure what that means in this context, because I really didn't know what I was doing anymore. Or maybe that was it. I didn't have to worry about sending the wrong message or being misunderstood anymore, so that made things very clear and simple. I didn't have to be careful and try and see things through her eyes and wonder if she'd misinterpret or misunderstand. I didn't have to think about anything at all. I'd taken Emma and she was mine—for the night at least—and at this point there was no tomorrow and no fucking around. I was going to have my way with her. 198

The front of the loft was totally dark when we entered. There was just enough light coming in from the street so you could make out the chain hoist hanging there from the beam, looking as ominous as a hangman's noose. There was a plain white wooden trunk standing nearby I'd put there earlier while Emma'd been changing. All my gear was in there, things I'd been collecting against this night. "Go stand over there." I gestured towards the wall near the hoist. "Conner, what are you going to do?" "Just shut up and do it!" She did as I said. Despite all the windows being open, it was so hot and sweltering in the loft the place was giving off its ancient smell of musty wood and machine oil. It was almost enough to make me feel bad for her, seeing her dressed up in the clothes I'd bought for her. Almost. But then what did I care? It occurred to me how stupid I must have looked to her, taking her to Dee's. She had no sense of irony when it came to things like clothes and material goods. This was David's girl. She probably thought I'd been serious when I'd taken her there, and as I watched her cross the floor now in that skirt and her white top, the foolishness of this entire affair hit me. I turned to ice inside. I went to the trunk I'd pulled out earlier and dragged it over closer. I got what I needed—a spreader bar and anklets, the suspension cuffs, a metal carabineer. I went to Emma and stood in front of her and began to buckle the cuffs on.

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They weren't simple, having fours buckles each ,and it took some time. Her tits rose and fell with each breath and she kept her eyes closed, waiting. As I worked, I spoke to her. "You know, this emptiness, it's a female thing. The space in here. It's female." She said nothing. "I'm telling you what this means, Emma. I'm telling you what everything means from now on, because I don't think I'm getting through to you." I finished the one cuff and started on the other. It's funny I hadn't noticed her scent in the bar, or earlier, or ever before in our relationship as far as I could recall, but now I did, very subtle and opulent and sexually arousing, so that I really wanted to bury my face in her neck and inhale her fragrance. And how had she done that? Had she brought perfume in her bag? Had she applied some while I was dragging her down the street? Or was her nervousness making her emit some natural pheromone meant to soothe a male attacker and deflect his wrath into thoughts of sex? "Darkness is female too," I said. "And silence and quiet and all things that receive and take in and that are passive and horizontal and wet and soft and cool and sweet." I snugged the last buckle in place and clipped her wrists together with the carabineer. "And with all this femininity at work, the poet in you asks, where are the masculine influences to counterbalance them? Because in poetry class we certainly learned how important it is to maintain a balance between masculine and feminine elements, between light and dark, passive and aggressive, hidden and overt. Well, here they come…"

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I grabbed the chain hoist and slid it over and we both looked up as the cast iron demon swept in smoothly above us on its steel wheels like one of the four horseman of the apocalypse. A 1500-pound capacity chain hoist isn't a huge piece of machinery but it's still handsome and menacing, all manly and metal and dripping chains, and what male doesn't get off on seeing a nice powerful piece of industrial machinery at work? I locked the brake on the hoist and pulled down the lifting chain, opened the toggle on the stainless steel hook and clipped it to Emma's wrists. When I pulled on the hauling chain, the lifting end ran through the block with a smooth, clocklike whirr, and Emma's hands lifted up to eye level. "Conner…!" I bent down and attached the spreader bar to her ankles, buckled the anklets in place, then attached the short chain to the bar to one of the floor shackles and stood up. Emma stood there and looked at me with her eyes wide in the darkness, her breasts rising and falling. I could feel the emptiness of the loft stretching around us. The hoist had a thirty-to-one mechanical advantage and as I ran the chain through my hands, Emma's wrists starting rising inexorably, up, up, up over her head. Up ‘til her hands were extended like the hands of a diver and she was standing straight and reaching up, then on her toes, then reaching high. The chain to the spreader bar pulled taut and she started to fall back but the chain caught her and held her, suspending her from her arms. She cried out in alarm. She stood there rocking slightly, feet apart, arms extended, looking straight ahead, helpless.

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She was still dressed though, still wearing her clothes from the bar. I stood behind her and reached into my pocket. The knife was about three and a half inches long and opened with the smoothness of silk upon silk. I pulled out the hem of the white top she was wearing. It was too bad—it fit her so well, "Don't move." In the dim light of the loft it only took a few seconds to cut off the top, running the knife up from the hem to the collar, and then along the arms. Her skin beneath was flawless. I was very careful. As I cut her clothes off her, I talked to her. "There's something I read that says that this is all a form of worship, Emma, that in a funny way, I'm worshipping you. I think that's kind of right. Because when we worship something, we're trying to get control of it, aren't we? We're trying to tell God or whatever, be nice to me, give me a break. We're trying to say, I adore you, you're fantastic, but take it easy on me too, aren't we? And yeah, I'd say that about sums up what I'm trying to do with you, Emma. That comes pretty close." I'd cut through the skirt and yanked it off and she cried out. She was scared now, hanging in that chain, and I knew her arms wouldn't take much of this. I had to hurry. I went up behind her. I whispered in her ear. "I have to take your bra off, baby. Your pretty panties too." She nodded nervously. I slid my hands along her skin. She was warm and soft and so ready to be fucked just like this. And I was so on fire for her.

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I slid the knife under the straps of the bra and sliced through them, then unhooked it and let it fall. I pulled the sides of her panties out and sliced through those as well, then pulled the garment through her legs. "Are you ready, Emma?" "Yes." I took up the little bit of the slack in the hoist, pulling ‘til her body was bowstring tight and the heels of her shoes started to rise off the floor. She cried out and gasped. Her rib cage lifted and her stomach sucked in and she started to pant like a dog. "You all right, baby?" "Yes. Yes!" I stepped behind her. "I'm afraid I have to gag you." "All right. Do it. Do I get a safe word? What's my safe word? Three times?" I moved behind her and slid the ball between her teeth and buckled the gag into place behind her head. I finished and took a moment to just run my hands down her perfect body, over her breasts and her swollen nipples, her ribs, the dramatic in-tuck over her waist and flare of her hips. I stepped back and tested the balance of the flogger in my hand, "No, baby," I said. "I'm afraid I can't give you that. This time there is no safe word." I raised the flogger and brought it down hard on her ass and then again and Emma yelled—a desperate, muffled sound in the loft—and I had to stop myself because

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I didn't want to end up beating her. That's what I'd been afraid of and I didn't want that, so I backed off and walked in a circle a couple of times just to cool off. I was too hot, too on edge, still pissed about the whole David business. I started in again, this time just brushing her ass with the flogger, aiming it so the fall just singed her buttocks and tickled them with pain and I saw her flex her ass and arch her back. That's what I wanted. To arouse her. To drive her crazy with it like she drove me crazy. That was how to use my anger. Emma threw her head back and bit into the gag. Her hands gripped at the chains, then she dropped her head again and closed her eyes as the whip fell. I knew she was concentrating on the sensation, that teasing, stinging, driving sensation. Conner's telling you you're a slut, honey. Conner's saying it. Conner and his nasty whip. Is he right? Is he? I began a steady, rhythmic series of figure eights, bringing her senses alive. The flogger came down in the darkened loft with a wicked scything sound, and soon I began to hear Emma's muffled moans. “I am right, aren't I, Emma? Yes, I am. You like it, don't you? You love it. Nipples getting hard. Pussy starting to throb. You love it, Emma. You love being whipped.” Her head went back, eyes closed. Starting to feel good now. The pain's starting to buy her something, a certain kind of freedom, a permission to own a part of her sexuality I can only admire. God, she's fucking beautiful when she gets whipped! Just incredible! The flogger first stings, then burns, then numbs and raises a deep, throbbing, endorphic hunger. As I whipped her, I fixated for some reason on her foot in her shoe,

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on the delicacy of her ankle and the way it moved as the whip came down—the little twitch and surrender, as if eager to get going, the pull against the anklet holding her bound to the spreader bar. Strange how we fix on such little trivial things and find such incredible heat in them. After a time I stepped in front of her and grabbed her hair, pulled her head back and saw the fear and excitement in her eyes. If she was faking, I couldn't tell—fear and excitement, and she wanted more. I put my hand between her legs, pushed up, and my palm came away smeared with wetness. She stared at me and dared me to go on. I started whipping her chest, her breasts, the same figure eight, upper left to lower right, upper right to lower left. Emma let her head fall back at first and then raised it again, tucking in her chin to look down at her chest as the flogger fell, watching the marks appear on her skin, watching her breasts as they shook and recoiled under the flogger's blows, watching what was happening as if it weren't happening to her, as if it were someone else, as if she could almost believe it until, every few strokes, I'd have to stop and reach out and caress her breasts and feel how hot they were, feel her nipples, how swollen. I switched to her thighs, swinging the flogger back and forth as if I were scything weeds, feeling the leather slap against the firmness of her legs, the stick and drag over her sweat-slick skin. It was as if she had something of mine. She had something and I wanted it back. I didn't know what it was, or maybe that wasn't even it. There was just something, something she did to me I couldn't stand. She just tore me up, this girl, this woman. She tore me up and did things to me and I felt like I was fighting for my life

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here, fighting for my sanity, pitting my 235 pounds against her maybe 135, and me with my whips and hoists and chains and ropes— and I never had a chance. Outside in the street a car had stopped, subs cranked, bass booming through the deck, you could feel it in your chest, the muffled rattling, impotent boom. "Damn it, Emma! Damn it!" The whip sizzled and hissed as I flogged her tits, her nipples. She gasped and wailed but there was nothing she could do to escape or avoid the blows, stretched as tight as she was, crucified almost, caught in mid air and suspended between the spreader bar and the hoist, rigid, gagged, exposed. Despite her shuddering and her protests, the sheen of her own obscene juices smeared on her thighs by the blows of the whip showed how excited she was. She was driving me mad, and her own quivering excitement was making me hit her harder, whip her faster, going for the essence of her, reaching for the bone. Emma was shaking. Saliva began to ooze from the corners of her mouth. Slapp! Whapp! Smackk! Whackk! "What the fuck have you done to me, Emma?" I snarled. "I want to know what you've done to me!" I aimed the flogger at her cunt, bringing it up between her legs so the fall slapped against the flesh of her pussy, the strands slapping against her buttocks from below. She howled behind the gag, her eyes clenched tight. Whapp! Whackk! Slapp! Smackk!

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"You've taken something from me, bitch! You've fucking taken something from me and I want it back! Understand me? I want it back!" She's flying now, her body rigid like a diver's—arms stretched overhead and wrists together, legs flexed and taut and held apart by the spreader bar, long hair flowing over her tits, her eyes clenched tight in painful endurance as the flogger slaps up against her pussy again and again. Emma's muffled cries of rising excitement get higher and higher and more and more urgent and hysterical, out of control… Whackk! Flackkk! Smasshh! Slasshh! "Come on, Emma ! Come on bitch! Get it, Emma! Get it for me, baby! Give it to me! Get it for me, Emma, damn it! Get it! Get it!" I could see she was starting to come, see she was starting to lose it. I saw it in the way she trembled, her stomach heaving, jerking, her breath rushing in and out of her dilated nostrils like the snorting of a bull, her fingers spreading wide as if they'd break off and then clenching tight into trembling, agonized fists. The muscles on the insides of her thighs quaked with the strain of fighting it off and her eyes closed tight, clenched in the pain of overwhelming ecstasy… I dropped the flogger and rushed to her, terrified she'd pass out, yanked the gag from her mouth and tore slack from the hoist to lower her. She started to crumple, falling into my arms like a sack of wheat. She gasped for breath, sucked in a piteous lungful of air and turned to me, eyes still closed—"Conner! Conner—!" "Emma! Yes, baby, yes! I've got you! I've got you now! I've got you." "Connerrrrr!"

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I held her as she jerked and spasmed in convulsive orgasm as if a thousand volts of electricity were ripping through her in total sensory overload and I crushed her to me as if only I could keep her from exploding into pieces out of sheer ecstasy. She hung half in my arms and half in the hoist and jerked and twitched and came and came and came. It was like heaven, it was glorious, it was like it was me myself who was doing it, who was coming like that, and I actually felt the thrills rip through my own body in waves of concentric bliss, as if there were parts of her I had somehow internalized or ingested that now responded to the pleasure in her like the ocean responds to the pull of the moon and they rushed to her, feeling what she felt. But no, it was better than me myself doing it because it was her, and I'd taken her there. It was the place I'd taken her, the story I'd told her, the heart I'd given her. I stood there and held her and squeezed her and took everything back from her—anything she'd taken from me and anything I'd given her, anything she'd stolen and anything she'd borrowed. I got it all back from her right then, it all came flooding back in overflowing. I unhooked her from the chains and sank to the floor with her in my arms and sat there holding her and rocking with her and thinking this was only sex, this was only sex and that's all this was, only sex. And I thought: if I take her back tomorrow, we’re even. **** "Conner, please—" "Quiet, Emma"

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"Conner—" She was standing under the hoist, completely naked. The cuffs were gone, the spreader bar and anklets were gone. The gag was lying on the floor. Her wrists were lashed behind her, and I was fastening my collar around her neck. "It doesn't mean anything, okay? It's just a piece of decoration, a piece of jewelry I happen to like. Can you think of it that way? Does it have to be some big fucking deal? It looks good on you, that's all. It turns me on, Emma. Isn't that enough?" She looked like she was going to cry. It had been a long fucking night. "Come here." I pulled her towards me, took her in my arms and kissed her neck, inhaling her scent and the smell of the leather, burying my face in her hair. I couldn't help it, the thing did turn me on. It's a shameful secret of mine—the sight of a collar on a woman is a powerful aphrodisiac to me. It's ridiculous but true, and Emma was still mine for the night. I took her ass in one hand and massaged her breast carefully in the other. I was cautious in the way I touched her. She was red and hot from whipping and I'd already salved her down, but Emma was Emma—upset or not, she melted against me and flowered beneath my touch and my kisses, pressed herself into my hands and began to purr. "That's better," I said. "That's better, better..."

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In all this time I hadn't come, I hadn't had any relief. I'd been up and I'd been down and I was aware of the ache in my groin and the wetness in my shorts but I hadn't even allowed myself to think of relief. But now it was time. Now it was time. I went to the trunk and pulled out a bunch of things wrapped in a towel. I was already prepared for this. The last thing I took out was a big blanket which I folded in half and spread over the trunk for a bed. "Come here, Emma. Come here." There in the darkness in the middle of the big empty floor, I had her sit on the edge of the trunk as I kneeled between her legs. It was late now and there wasn't much noise off the street as I leaned forward and closed my eyes and lost myself in the softness of her tits again, that shy and generous sweetness. Breasts would be fantastic even if they weren't erotic. The fact that women love to have them played with just makes them miraculous, a reason to be glad to be alive. As I nuzzled and kissed her flesh, Emma sighed and her face took on an innocent look of sensual pleasure, She closed her eyes and touched my cheek with her fingers as if welcoming me to her boobs, as if I'd been a stranger. I understood. After all this time of being focused on her, it was as if, who was this man? Who's coming to use this body? But it was my turn. It was time. I stood up and slid off my shorts. I was hard and ready. I kneeled back down on the floor and picked up the silver chain and found the clamp, slid it around her nipple and screwed it on. We both watched. Not too tight. I didn't want to distract from the main event. I just wanted her to be aware. We both watched as I affixed the hardware to her

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body, the jewelry, putting my mark on her, no matter how temporary. First one, then the other. She winced, then relaxed, moving her shoulders back and forth. For now, these were Conner's. She was letting me use them. Her breathing increased. We still haven't talked. In all that's happened between us, we still haven't talked, and it's important you know this in light of what happened next. Am I spoiling my story by telling you what an idiot I am? I hope not, because I think you should probably know that by now. At this point, after all that's happened, I still think Emma's going back to David tomorrow, and so does she. We have a sexual affair so perfect we can't get past the sex. I lowered her down onto her back on the trunk. I brought her ass to the edge of the trunk and I stood up. I was rock hard and aching. She was absolutely beautiful lying there wearing my collar, despite the lash marks on her breasts and thighs or perhaps because of them, despite the uncertainty on her face, the trace of sadness and threat of tears. I touched her knees to spread her legs. "Please, Conner. I want you so much!" "Yes." I bent my knees slightly. I didn't even have to touch my cock. He seemed to know the way, and she was so swollen and wet and open it was like they were magnetized. He found her and touched her and, with the slightest move from me, he parted her and she opened. He slipped inside, just barely, because I was holding him back.

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Even so, Emma arched as if struck, gasped, her hands seized my forearms and her nails dug into my skin, Her knees rose. Despite my need, I forced myself to stop there just to torture us both. "Are you ready?" "Oh yes!" I slid into her. Despite all the attention and foreplay and bondage and whipping and orgasms and all the baroque and bizarre sex, Emma was still tight, hot, fresh, and quivering with need for this simple act of love. She spasmed when I entered, cried out with painful satisfaction, greeted me with animal heat as I plunged all the way into her with a pure, primal hunger of my own, pushing my weight into her. "God, Emma! Christ, you're good! God, I forget how good you are like this!" Her face was all sweet and creamy with lust. She smiled as she squeezed me with her buttery pussy. She made me groan. "Fuck me, Conner. Fuck me!" I pulled out of her and plunged back in, my loins whapping against her upturned thighs. Emma arched and squeezed me again. I started to fuck her then, pumping into her, riding her, my ass rising and falling in steady rhythm, brushing her hair away so I can see my collar on her neck, that beautiful collar against her swanlike throat. She tought it was decoration. She doesn't know what it meant to me.

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It would have been so beautiful, so easy. It fit her so well and she looked so fucking beautiful in it Anger made me fuck her faster, knowing it could be the last time. My hands close on her whipped and beaten ass and I dug my fingers in. Emma winced, then squealed and wrapped her arms around me, her hips began to slap up at me. "It could have been so good, Emma!" I whisper. "It could have been so good. I couldn't give you what he could, but there's other things, Emma. He can't give you this, can he? He doesn't do this for you, any of this—what I showed you in the dark and in the rain, the stories, the secrets between us…" I get up on my knees and then on my feet. I picked up her ankles and hedld them in the air as I fucked her, held them as if she were a post-hole digger and I was the mad driller. She felt so good and I wanted her so much and I began to fuck her hard, slinging my hips at her, trying to hurt her with my cock, hammering my words home. And suddenly I'm not sure what I'm doing, because I'm fucking her and I'm talking to her and I'm watching my prick run in and out of her, entering her and pulling out, over and over, but it's like I can't stop talking to her, can't let her go like this, and so I'm talking and fucking her and fucking and talking— "Because I don't think you understand Emma, goddamn it! I don't think you know what we have between us or how special this is, to feel what I feel for you, you bitch! To go crazy for a woman like I go crazy for you, Emma. —Ugh!— To want to whip someone and hurt someone and love someone and die for them and fuck them to death like I do for you, Emma. — Jesus! — Do you understand me? — Fuck! — Do you know

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what I'm saying, you bitch! Do you know how much I fucking love you, Emma, — Oh GOD! — You beautiful goddamned slut!? —CHRIST!—Jesus, Emma ! God! I'm close, baby! Emma! Fuck, I'm close!" I'm hanging over her with my cock sunk all the way in her and her legs draped over my arms, absolutely at the point of tears and Emma gets up on her elbows and stares at me astonished and says, "Oh God, Conner, Conner! What are you saying? God, what are you saying? I don't understand this! I don't understand any of this! All I want is for you to love me! That's all I want. That's all I ever wanted. Just tell me what I have to do for you to love me, Conner! Please! Because I can't stand this anymore. I don't want him! I want you, Conner, oh, God! Don't you know? Don't you know! Oh God, Conner! I just want you! You! You! Oh, Conner!" And then she started crying, hard, which made her squeeze me inside with every sob. "No!" I said. "No crying! Not now! Not now when I'm going to come, damn it! Not now damn it fucking shit fuck ass cock ball cunt dick! Oh, God, God! No, No!" But she wouldn't stop, and so she lay there with her hands over her eyes crying with my dick inside her on the edge of orgasm and I'm on the verge of tears, and what can I do? My body, stupid thing, starts to come, to ejaculate, like it's weeping too, and I feel it and I'm delirious and I'm coming and holding her and weeping and snarling and filled with chills, shuddering, dissolving into her, spilling myself into her, because I had her, I had her at last. Emma! Emma! She was mine and she hardly noticed either what was happening sexually because we were just so all over each other, devouring each other and she was having some kind of emotional orgasm of her own, her arms 214

wrapped around me, kissing me, inhaling me, and then she really started sobbing and I was suddenly drowning in the sweet salt of her tears and I'm drinking them, licking them, eating her—God, I could never have enough! And then I'm holding her and I have the world in my arms, soft and peach-faun colored and shivering and breathing with me and life is surging with me, so much life I feel like we're both going to explode so all I can do is hold her tighter her and knots of things are dissolving inside of me and exploding in great tears of relief and warmth. Emma's touching my face like it's something precious and she's trying to tell me how frightened she was, how very frightened. "Frightened? What? What?" I ask. "That I'd hurt you? The whip?" She shakes her head, choking back tears. She can hardly get the words out. Her mouth doesn't want to say them. "That I'm a slut. A whore. A sub who's just good for this. For beating. For using like this. You'd never love a girl like this. Not really. Not really." "Oh my God, my God!" And I wrap her in my arms so tight, so tight I wanted to die with her there, wanted to squeeze her until she fused into my chest and I die with her there. "And how many times have I been telling you how beautiful you are to me? How you bring me life, and joy, and excitement, and everything that's good and bright and brilliant and worth living and dying for? Oh my precious! My precious, precious, baby! God, you rip my heart out!"

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I hold her and hold her, and she tells me how ashamed she's been, certain I only wanted her because I thought she was a sub and a slut and a whore. And that's why she thought I'd offered her the collar and why I'd taken her to Dee's, and in fact, that's why I'd ever bothered with her, because I'd thought all along all she was good for was tying up and whipping and fucking. She says she's loved me from the start but she's been afraid to tell me because she knew I'd never want to have anything to do with a worthless sub. And I tell her I thought all she wanted me for was as a master, someone to tie her up and whip her, that I thought she'd find me too old and weird to have as a real-life lover, and if I ever told her how I really felt she'd get horrified and run. And so there we were, trapped in these ritualized sexual roles of Master and slave, unable to show our genuine feelings, afraid we'd scare the other one off. Suddenly we're looking at each other without the masks now, and there's me, and there's Emma. She wants to know if this means she can't still be my slut, if I still won't tie her up, and I smile and say, "Don't be ridiculous."

**** It's really late now, like three-thirty in the morning, and the streets are quiet and empty, the lights all off. I'm sitting in an arm chair in the living room with my pants on and nothing else, a bottle of tequila about half gone, one end of a rope in my hand. What's on the other end of this rope is my heart. She's naked, lying face down, hanging from a block and tackle attached to a beam in my ceiling. Her ankles are tied

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against her thighs, her elbows are tied together behind her back. There are ropes around her waist, her legs, her wrists, her breasts, her arms, her chest. They're placed along her body so as to distribute her weight evenly such that no rope cuts into her skin and causes discomfort. In this way she can hang suspended for some time facing the floor as she wishes, her hair hanging down obscuring her face, anonymous but unmistakably female. She might be an ornament, or a captive, or a fruit grown in my home, a gift of my own imagining, or perhaps just a mystery, suspended between heaven and earth. I sit and admire her, watching as she revolves very, very slowly in the darkness, like a dream in the mind of the sleeping city. I’m feeling all sorts of things, my heart and my mind filled with her, not sure what she is, thinking she must be everything to me. I never want to stop looking at her. In the background, John Coltrane plays, "My One and Only Love." It's a heartbreakingly beautiful song. In a moment I'll go and untie her and help her down, help her stretch and massage out any cramps she might have. I might make her dance with me because I so love this song and I so love to dance with a woman I love. Moving your body together with someone you love through artistically structured time is one of the more beautiful things human beings do. Dancing is one of the ways we do that. BDSM is another. I think we live our lives in other people's hearts and minds. Alone by ourselves we're not very much good at all. But when we let someone else in with their stories and all their sights and sounds and songs and smells and sensations, we suddenly start building up libraries, filling boxes and drawers with them, books and albums, shelves and chests,

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Some of these books are pretty thin reading with faded ink, hardly any pictures and dull stories. And then others are nice, heavy little volumes filled with stories of whippings and weird, perverse sex, dark Vietnamese restaurants with strange food and drugs being dealt in the back, hot women coming in your hand in loud bars with brassy music playing. It's nice when one of these books falls into your hands. It's nice when you read through the first few pages and realize it's going to be a good one, and you settle down, knowing you've got pages and pages to go. You settle into the sofa and put your feet up, feel all that thickness in your hand, and just wonder what it's got in store for you.

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Chapter Nine

Sleeping with Emma that first night, I was assailed by dreams like a bunch of gate-crashers, as if the guardians of my sleep could no longer hold the lines against the hordes of omens and specters clamoring to get in, and why not? They'd been lining up like gawkers outside a nightclub opening ever since I first saw Emma in my class a month before, waving at me to catch my attention and pointing at Emma and at the stars and now it looked like all their auguries and prophesying had come true. I lay there sore and blissfully fucked out with my arms around her and my face in her hair, embraced in the arms of sleep, suffused with dreams of her, soaked in the ambience of Emma. How does it come to pass that you find what you need without knowing you need it? Touch speaks to us on levels, so much deeper than the intellect can comprehend, going to the root of us, to levels of comprehension we can't ignore. This was my sexual inamorata, the girl of my conquest, and as I slept with her ,the gate-keepers of my dreams let these apparitions through one by one to pay homage to my changed life. I saw how things would be with Emma now, how I could make room for her, how she would become a part of my schedule, a part of my days and nights. The dreams formed a feverish collage, almost sappy in its procession of TV images of clichés—misty beaches and flower-strewn fields, forests, a shot of us strolling

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through an open air market, the piles of fruit and vegetables representing the domestic fulfillment that lay ahead. But then there we were in my old Pontiac slowly idling down the dark industrial alley behind my loft, the harsh light from the flickering sodium-vapor lamps revealing my hand as it worked between her spread and naked thighs, her pants pushed down to her knees. This was something I hadn't seen on TV or in any cultural dream—the delicious wickedness of what we did and how we loved, the way she held tightly to the rain gutter of the car with one hand and to the edge of her seat with the other, trying to obey my order to keep absolutely still as she let me ravish and use her this way, insanely excited by the way I shamed her. What kind of dream was this? "Do you like it, Emma? Do you like it like this?" With dream logic I knew we'd been going out to a movie but we hadn't gotten far. We were already headed back to my place. "Oh God, Conner! God! Stop!" She turned her head to the side and buried her chin in her chest, but at the same time she thrust herself out at me, clenching her buttocks. Again, it's like she's two people, the lady on top and the whore on the bottom. "Come for me, Emma. You're not getting out of this car ‘til you come on my hand!" "Oh Conner! Connerrrrrrr!" Her head snapped back, eyes open and glazing over, her lower lip trembling as she bit off her cry of orgasm. I felt her internal muscles snap at me like an angry dog's,

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fierce in her pleasure. Her tits shook as her whole body trembled, and then she gasped great lungfuls of air, rude, indignant, shocked by the way I treated her. This is the Emma I want—desire that's almost violent, love that's almost violation. All my emotions are tied up in her, the sweet and the bitter, the scared and profane. I wake up slightly and look at her breathing softly, the sheet stretched over her breasts. Salsa's playing from some bar with a four o'clock license, the vainglorious stubbornness of an exhausted night when all the ghosts have gone home. Those trumpets won't rouse any more hot blood tonight and they sound lonely in the cavern of the night. Solitary egos will sink in the murk but here I have Emma beside me, mystery of the night, of the heart, the darkness. All the little lights that dance over the lake whisper above her head in her dreams. What is a woman but the beauty of the human form, the hard edges removed, the restful darkness, the wet entrances to warm comfort and acceptance? I knew in my dream that Emma was not your bootlicking submissive, nor did I want her to be. I loved her pride and her vanity and I could envision the way she'd use them to arouse and manipulate me. I'd have no desire or need to start giving her orders just so I could feel like I was in charge. I already knew from listening to her in class that I wanted her opinion and admired her wit. I knew that accepting who she was would give her a sense of place and identity, and with that would come confidence. I could see how this all would work out. I could see it so well. We were different, and yet at the core we had the same hunger, the same thing brought us together and held us. Emma had grown too big for her world and was looking to expand beyond what her job and her fiancé could offer her, while I was trying 221

to shrink away from mine. . I was looking to contract, to withdraw from things. We were passing each other at just the right time. I could see all this in my dreams. I could see how we'd slip easily from one mode of being to another, instantly closing the distance between our social relationship and our sexual one, and when we entered that sexual realm there was no telling what would happen. It was like sailing into terra incognito, always a bit scary for the both of us. I pictured a typical hot July night as we sat on the sofa and I graded papers and watched the news. I was wearing gym shorts and a tee shirt and felt wilted in the heat, sweating beer as fast as I drank it, but Emma managed to look fresh and cool in her crisp brown shorts and light cream top, behind which her breasts rested in generous repose as she leafed through a magazine, not even breaking a sweat. The windows were open but there was barely a breeze, and maybe it was the heat that did it, or maybe the news, the sense of futility, watching scenes of the war and trying to make sense out of the essays I was grading. Emma paid no attention to the news, turning her dark eyes away. She sat curled on the sofa playing idly with her hair, the light spilling over her shoulder as she turned the pages of her magazine one by one, grasping each between manicured nails. She was looking at an article on the Greek Isles. The pages were all of cool greens and blues. Since she'd come over, she'd hardly said a word, just sat and waited while I finished my work to see what I wanted to do with her tonight, and that thought stuck with me, gnawed at me—she was waiting for me, with that inviting coolness, that smooth, tanned skin. She'd come straight from work, still fresh from her office air-conditioner and 222

the tedium of her daily grind and now she was waiting as the darkness gathered outside the windows and the sweat gathered on my chest. I put down my papers and lapboard and stretched. She looked at me, not exactly quizzically—more like a challenge, still holding the magazine—and I knew she'd been thinking about me, sending thoughts my way and provoking me. She'd do that sometimes. I stared at her and smiled. "What?" She looked at me from beneath her hair and she couldn't hide her smile. She knew she'd been found out. "Come here." "What?" Complaining now, protesting her innocence. "I said, come here." I got up and leaned forward, and before she could respond, I took her under the arms and pulled her over on top of me as I sat back down. I was sitting, slouching low in the corner of the sofa and she was on her knees leaning over me, her hair falling forward, swinging like a bead curtain as I slid lower and pulled her down for a kiss, her heat immediately enveloping me, her mouth opening. Just like that we were ready—just that quickly, that easily. One instant we were at separate ends of the sofa, me with my lap board and papers, her with her magazine, and the next we were like this, me almost lying on my back, she on her knees above me, hovering over me, her breasts grazing me, mouth locked to mine, the sweetness of her perfume spilling over me.

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This is what she'd been waiting for all evening, so patient on the surface—my call, the evidence of my desire. Just this little push to start the ball rolling, the avalanche, something she couldn't do on her own but now here it comes, here it was, and God it was so good, unstoppable I held her face and kissed her, suddenly frantic for her and I don't know why. My cock was already hardening, and it was as if I licked some sweetness from her mouth which fed me but only left me hungrier. That hunger kindled some seething anger inside because I could never get enough and so I bit her lip and Emma gasped, pulled her lip from me and kissed me back, tender, conciliatory, her kiss trying to calm me and placate me and beg me not to go too fast. This is how things were between us—dangerous, explosive. One minute sitting on opposite ends of the sofa lost in our own little worlds, the next in danger of fusing together in some sort of puddle of molten sexual slag, a nuclear reactor gone critical. And yet we loved that acceleration—going from normal people in full possession of their faculties to these lust-crazed sexual beasts. It was a physical sensation, not just some metaphor. It was a physical rush, an injection of testosterone or adrenaline I could feel in my stomach and shoulders and balls when Emma kissed me or melted in my arms. I could feel the beast rise up in me, just like taking a drop in a roller coaster. I knew she felt it too, and that was the game she played—arousing me, provoking the beast, then trying to control it, or maybe not, maybe throwing away all control and facing the consequences. She liked doing that too. And sometimes she had no choice.

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Like now. Her sweet kisses were nice but they lied. They were hungry too, and they were too deep, too long, too provoking, her soft lips sliding along my rough skin as if looking for comfort but I knew it wasn't comfort she wanted. The way her tongue played against my face was designed to provoke me. I knew what she wanted, and it was what I wanted too. I closed my hand on her hair and pulled her face away and she winced with pain. "Up." I pulled her up and she rolled to the side enough so I could lift my hips and push my shorts down. I wasn't wearing underwear. I'd known she was coming over and hadn't bothered. I worked my shorts down with one hand while I held her head in the other like she was some trophy, held her so she could see my cock as it flopped loose against my belly. "Come on." I pulled her down to it. "Suck it!" Of course it was crude. You had to see her to appreciate how crude it was—how fresh she looked, how clean, the delicate line of her jaw, her complexion in the brownish light of the apartment as I brought her face down to my straining cock. Emma opened her lips and took me inside as I thrust up into her mouth. Her hands formed around my cock as if she were praying and I held the back of her head and thrust viciously towards the back of her throat as she began to make those soft swallowing sounds she does—somewhere between protest and contentment. I picked up the remote and turned off the TV, put one arm under my head and watched her. I wanted to be able to hear the sound of my prick in her mouth, churning up her saliva.

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"Do it, Emma. Suck it, baby. Harder. Harder. Get on the floor. On your knees. Get on your knees." She was too beautiful. I didn't know what to do with it, with her beauty. I wanted her kneeling by me sucking my cock. I couldn't touch her beauty and it drove me nuts. Couldn't dent it or dirty it and it drove me crazy. Emma got down on her knees and threw her hair back impatiently, eager to get my cock in her mouth. The chain around her neck glimmered and she held my dick in her manicured nails as she went down on me, delicately, being sweet, waiting for me to get rough. I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to grab her hair and mouth fuck her, so I did, pushing her hands away and sliding mine through her soft hair and pumping her head up and down on my dick until she dug her nails into my thighs in protest. This was what she liked. She liked it rough like this. This was when she felt it. I stopped moving her but I didn't take her mouth off me. "Take your clothes off," I said. "Keep sucking but take your clothes off." She looked at me dubiously for a moment but did as I said. It wasn't easy. She opened her pants and unzipped them, worked them down over her hips, then had to stand and bend at the waist, keeping her mouth on my cock as she skinned the slacks down her legs and stepped out of them. I could tell it bothered her that she couldn't fold her clothes. It made me smile, but she finally just threw them on the sofa, one leg inside out. Her panties followed. "That's enough," I said. "Just get the top and bra off. Enough fucking around."

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She stood up and stripped off her top, unhooked her bra and slid it off. She liked this part, undressing in front of me, even if she was bent over like this. She knew what it did to me and she had a way of doing it as if she were alone, as if it were natural and her body weren't something beautiful and provocative, ripe with sinuous curves and tight involutions, her tits high and luxuriant, but she gave herself away after she was naked. When she was naked she stood up straight and pulled her hair back with her hands in a way that brought her breasts up and pushed out her hairless little pussy and all but shoved it in my face so I had no choice but to grab her wrist and pull her down into my lap and twist her around until she was draped over my knee. "Jesus, Emma! Jesus Christ!" "Ow! Conner!" That silly complaint, as if she wasn't expecting it, as if she didn't know what she'd done to be treated this way. I swacked her ass hard, the firm flesh under my hand heavy like clay but warm, alive, flexing with muscle. I hit her again and she reached back behind her and grabbed at me, grabbing my tee-shirt with her nails. She wasn't the passive little sub she'd been when we'd first met but a fine piece of American ass and she didn't sell herself cheap. When I hit her again she put a good rip in the old tee shirt I wore. "Bitch!" I grabbed for her wrists and there was a confused struggle, a ridiculous sight, both of us naked but for my ripped tee-shirt, her smooth hip pressing against my dick. She started to slip from my lap and I pulled her back, got both of her wrists in my hand

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and wailed on her ass, hitting her hard and Emma screamed. It felt good to hit her, the flat sting of her flesh against my hand was solid and satisfying, the sharp smack was thrillingly loud in the room. I have a problem, a real problem. I respect women. I stand up for them. Equal rights, equal opportunity. But I need this too. When we're in the bedroom, when we're making love, I need to feel my strength. I need to use it, like another erogenous zone. I hit her ass ‘til I was sweating and she'd stopped jerking and fighting me . When she was lying there, pushing herself against me, I wasn't hitting her so hard anymore. I was rubbing her instead, squeezing her, shoving my hand against her. My hand slid between her legs and she spread them for me. I bent down and pressed my face against the back of her neck and bit her. I held her like that, like a tomcat holds his tabby as I rubbed her ass and her pussy and felt her heat, the warmth where I’d hit her. She was on fire. "Come here," I said softly. "Here. On the floor." I helped her up and put her back on her knees on the floor, kicked my shorts off and spread my legs so she could get to my cock. I was calm now, the spanking over, dispassionate on the outside, and I swept her hair back so I could watch her work as she sucked me off. I just wanted to watch. I just wanted to see the spectacle of my brutal prick disappearing into that beautiful mouth. I grabbed the back of her neck and guided her up and down as she worked, her head bobbing, my dick making lurid squishing sounds in her mouth. It was so , so thrilling to have her beauty involved in the earthy ugliness of

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cock and juice and spit and desire, and Emma understood. She knew what I wanted. She knew how to play the whore. She loved playing the whore. She started to move her head. I corrected her. I pushed my leg out, my left leg, pushed it out straight so it was between her thighs, pressing against her pussy. "Get yourself off on my leg," I said softly. "Go on. Hump my leg. Fuck me like a little dog, Emma. Do it for me." "Oh God, Conner. No…" "Do it." I made a soothing face and combed my fingers through her hair. I understood. It was degrading, but that was okay. We had no secrets she and I. "Just do it, baby. Hold my leg against your pussy and do it." "Oh, Conner—" "Do it!" It was an order this time. She wrapped her hand around my calf and pressed my leg against her crotch, then rose up and sucked my cock into her mouth. She began to move her hips. She moaned, a little groan of protest against the pleasure, degrading pleasure, shameful, but her body wanted more, her pussy wanted more. She began to move. "Yes. That's it. That's my baby." Oh, she was good. She sucked so good. She sucked for the pleasure of having my prick in her mouth, and she sucked because it felt so good to slide herself against my shin and rub her hot cunt on me like that, like a little whore, getting herself off, rubbing her hot snatch on me.

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I love to watch her work, her greedy pleasure and natural lust, the smooth working of her stomach muscles as they tightened and rolled, little spasms of sensory overload, sliding her clit against me and seeking release. "That's it, baby. Just like that. Get it for me, Emma. Come for me, baby. Get me good and wet. Get that hot juice all over me, whore!" She moaned and started riding me hard, getting into it. God, I love how she turns on, just like that. She got up on her feet to make it easier to press against me and swing her hips, and she began to roll her pelvis and squeeze me with those tight thighs. I felt her muscles trembling with her urgency. She knew I was watching too, my eyes boring into her and seeing just what a hungry little slut she was, and that had to get to her, that had to be what was doing it, driving her over the edge so quickly, getting her so hot she couldn’t even suck my cock anymore, couldn't even concentrate. She held my leg with both hands, humping me, grinding herself against me, my dick just hanging in her mouth like a forgotten pacifier between a toddler's lips. "Come on, Emma," I teased. "Suck me. Suck my dick, slut. Get me off. Aren't you going to get me off? I thought you were going to make me come." "Mmmm," she moaned. "Nnnnngghh wwwnnn rrrrnnn…" I would have smiled if I hadn't been so fucking on fire. Emma tried to focus on blowing me. She tightened her lips and bobbed her head a couple times but she was too far gone now, too far gone, and she let my dick fall out of her mouth trailing big strings of spit and drool as she began to gasp for air and shudder on the brink of

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orgasm, thrusting hard at my leg, punching her pussy at me, clawing at my leg, eyes closed, mouth open. "Come on, bitch!" I hissed. "Get it, Emma! Get your filthy come, slut! Give it to me! All over me, whore! That's what I want! That's what I want! Your dirty juice running down my leg! Come on, baby! Come on, bitch!" I lashed her on with my words like a jockey whips his horse and she dug her nails into my leg, riding it hard, her hips snapping against my shin in a greedy, spastic crescendo of lust as she stretched out for that orgasm, mindless of everything around her. I leaned forward and grabbed her nipples in the fingers of one hand, pinching and rolling, twirling her areola like the combination on a safe. With the other hand, I began to slap her cunt, smacking her with the backs of my fingers like I was trying to shoo her away, giving her the back of my hand, a cruel, dismissive gesture, smacking her right in the pussy, right in the soft juncture of her labia where her swollen clit was reaching for the ceiling, and that was the last straw. Emma froze, breathless, her body quivering. She stared at me in sightless disbelief. I felt her go, felt her shove her sopping pussy against me, twitching, jerking, trembling, as her orgasm took her and wrung her like a rag doll, and Emma threw her head back and howled in delirious ecstasy. "Do it, Emma! Give it to me, baby! All of it!" Her body snapped like a whip. "Yes! Oh yes! Yes!" She sobbed and the pleasure ran from her like a wave, so intense I could feel it too—I could feel her come too and she knew it. I grabbed her hair and leaned forward and kissed her in a blind rage of

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passion, overwhelmed by her orgasm, and Emma let herself be kissed, let herself be worshipped—all hips and tits and gushing cunt as she squatted and came on my leg like some abject odalisque, rubbing her pussy on my shin. She wanted me to see. That was it. She wanted me to see everything, no matter how or degrading. She wanted me to see it all, the worse the better. In part, that's what I was for. I was there to be her confessor, and maybe that's why she wanted to be punished. "Stand up," I said. I leaned back and tore the ripped tee-shirt from around my neck. "I can't," she said. "Not yet. Conner, give me a minute." I stood up and pulled her to her feet and used the tee-shirt to tie her wrists together as she stood there still panting, but there was something in the way she was breathing that told me it was not just from her orgasm. She was excited—ready for something and tense with anticipation and her excitement fed my own. No, it wasn't just excitement—it was fear, a delicious kind of dread. Standing there naked in my loft as I tied her wrists behind her back with strips of my torn cotton t-shirt, Emma was afraid with an erotic kind of fear I could feel in my belly. ****

"Where did it start?" I'd ask her one day. "The whole thing?"

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"As far as you can tell, yes. The urge to be tied up, your interest in sex, the feeling you were different. There must have come some point where you decided you were different, that you were ashamed or worried about what you thought you were." I can see her now, the clear brown eyes, the serious look. The lips always needing to be kissed, always. "I don’t know when it started," she'd said. "I've been like this for as long as I can remember. Does playing nurse count?" We were at that stage where you have to know everything about each other, where all you do is intercourse—sexual and social. "Sure. Start with playing nurse." I knew her story. I'd made her tell it to me so many times—how young she'd been when she discovered the sensations and her secret, private masturbatory moves. She didn't know anything about sex, only that it felt good and that it was certainly wrong. She'd liked playing nurse, because it worked both ways. She enjoyed imagining the wounded boys she attended to, and when the boys were off to war or playing sports, she had a friend with whom she could experiment with bandages. "I always liked the feeling of being wrapped up in bandages," she said, smiling shyly. "Just feeling them compress my body was nice, but being splinted or tied down for an operation was even better. I was too young to even know what sex was, but still, I liked the feeling of being wrapped up." She was every Indian's favorite cowgirl, she dreamed of being the maiden in distress in all the games she played with boys. She wanted to know what happened

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when the cat got Mighty Mouse's girlfriend alone, was fascinated with the idea of being tied to the train tracks. She wanted to be captured and abducted. She wanted to be tied as well, tied so tight she'd never get loose and she'd get to find out what happened when the lights went out and the bad guy had the girl all alone. Her introduction to sex hadn't been spectacular, nothing that lived up to her masturbatory fantasies. She knew she liked it but she didn't like the boys much. They were dull and uninteresting and they didn't really reach her inside, to her imagination. There was some part of her that was private that none of them touched and she didn't like to talk about this part of her life much. I got the feeling the freedom of college was too much for her and she started indulging her passions, spreading herself around, becoming a bit of a party girl. That changed when she met James, a part-time student who also sold real estate. He moved in a fast crowd and went to fast parties, and Emma was swept up in his fast world. He always had money and he always had dope, and Emma fell in some kind of love. James taught her to let go and she did, surrendering everything to him and luxuriating in sexual excess, all the way until the market dried up, his cocaine use became more than he could handle, and he failed out of school. He turned on her then and accused her of things, of being sexually insatiable and "sucking him dry". In the coke-deprived dawns of Champagne, Illinois and in the all-night restaurants, they played out their endgame of coke burnout and whore and she lost everything. That was the end of them and the end of Emma as she'd been, as a girl. She left school and went straight and started working in offices, always attracted to the men in suits, the ones who seemed to have it made. They took her to parties and

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were glad to have her on their arm, and by this time Emma had learned to keep her mouth shut and just look beautiful. Other women hated her and she hated herself. She knew she was different inside. She liked it too much and she knew she was one of the girls she heard about, the kind the men talked about in the mail room and the corner offices, the kind they partied with but never married. When David came along and offered her respectability, she jumped at it. He'd been an intern doing a work-study at the bank she was working at and they hit it off. He was nice and he had plans. He had ability. He didn't push her and she knew he never would. His family was large and conservative and his sexual demands were quick and furtive and dirty. The dirty she liked. The quick and furtive she didn't. But still, what did she have? She had a shameful secret and the knowledge men would never accept her for what she was. She had a chance to be David's wife and go someplace with him. How important was sex when compared to the security of a life together. the chance to be a mother and a part of an extended family that had elaborate rituals for Christmas and Thanksgiving? David offered Emma a place to hide where she wouldn't have to face any of those troubling questions about what she really was anymore. But engagement had, if anything, seemed to drive them farther apart. It was as if she were already being absorbed into the nameless clutch of faces that comprised the female part of the family, helping to cook the meals and decorate the tree and pose as the new generation of Safirs. She rebelled. She needed to finish her degree, she decided, and much against David's wishes, she went back to school. She had no major. For David, she said she 235

was going for a business degree, but for herself she quietly took courses in literature, coming late and nervously to the discovery that people wrote because they meant it, because they had things they wanted to say. She was gratified to find not everyone else was happy. It made her feel less alone. She had to curtail her hours at the bank, and that meant she had to give up her apartment. David found her lodging with a cousin who would keep an eye on her while he was out of town and that's where she was when I met her. All that was left from this picture were Emma's hours alone with her journal, wondering at the feelings she had inside, the desires that wouldn't be still, the slow distillation of nights alone that used to pour down upon her like some nocturnal acid and fill her with a quiet despair. She didn't have the words for it, but then, who does? That's why we turn to poets and writers, to give shape to the wordless longings we feel. But in Emma they were simple, really. She wanted to feel that candescence of love that matched what was in her own heart—she wanted her feelings to be understood and her hungers satiated. She wanted to know she wasn't alone with her unfulfilled desires, that somewhere in the night there was a man who was looking for her too, and looking for the same things she was, who didn't feel what she wanted was wrong or sick or disgusting but something to be treasured and cherished. What she was looking for was me. ****

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Back again in my dream of her, I saw us recovered from that little session in front of the TV. I saw myself tying her wrists with the torn tee shirt, my lust unslaked, still on fire for her. "That was a terribly slutty thing to do, wasn't it, my dear?" I asked as I cinched the knot tight. I stood close enough she could feel my cock pressing against her ass. "Do you make it a practice to go around rubbing yourself on men's legs? Don't you have any shame?" I felt her tensing as I spoke, her body going rigid. She was warm and after I finished the knot, I slid my hand down her back and caressed her ass, hot from her spanking. She felt like she was glowing. I stood close and whispered in her ear: "What am I going to do with you, I wonder?" "Conner…" "In the bedroom." She started to walk to my bedroom and I stopped her. "Not that one. Tonight you get to see what's behind door number Two. It's time." She looked at me. I'd kept the second bedroom door closed and locked for as long as I'd known her. It was, in fact, what a more serious BDSM master would probably call his dungeon, a room dedicated to bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism as I practiced it, a room I'd designed specifically for Emma.

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It wasn't really ready, but it had occurred to me some time ago it never ever would be "ready" in the sense of being finished. It's incompleteness spoke not only to the fact that I would never have everything I wanted in order to experience everything I wanted to experience with Emma, but also to the fact that the deeper I got into BDSM, the more I realized I would never approach owning Emma in the way I longed to own her either—that the whips, the chains, the toys and apparatus I built and collected in many ways only signaled my frustration at never being able to hold her essence and possess it in the way I desired. I went in my room and got her robe, a short, robin's egg blue synthetic I always think of as her color, the color of Venus, and I brought it out for her. "Put this on. I don't want you going in there naked." It was true, though I couldn't say why. The things in there required a certain amount of respect. You undressed in their presence—you didn't walk in naked. Emma slipped the robe on and I opened the locks—there were two—swung the door open and turned on the light. As far as dungeons go, it wasn't much, I suppose. No faux stone block walls or flagstone floor. No rows of menacing torture equipment hanging from the wall. Nothing to catch the blood. There was a small bed from one of those apartment-furniture places—small but expensive and well made, with a thin mattress backed by a thick plywood board. There was a rail bed, which I'll describe in a minute. There was a sturdy old Goodwill armchair bolted to two huge pieces of four by six, the upholstery ripped off and replaced with my

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own crude tacking: vinyl and stuffing. There was another chair for me. There was a stepladder that reached almost to the ceiling. There was a mirror leaning against the wall for use from the bed. The ceiling had been set with two by fours lag-bolted to the ceiling joists which ran the length of the room. I like overhead work and do a lot of it. I had more Unistrut up there with wheeled rollers, another chain hoist that could roll back and forth. There was a block and tackle over the bed. There was a small dresser that held a bunch of toys and towels and things, two lamps and a vase of dried flowers on the floor. The top of the window was covered with a double layer of black fiberglass, which allowed air to circulate but would keep anyone from seeing in. It looked out onto an air well anyhow, so there wasn't much chance of anyone looking our way, but the windows across the way were from the shower for the Royal Dragon Hapkaido Karate Dojo and you never knew when some sweaty martial artist might want to have a peek. It was summer in Chicago and hot, and we'd need the air. The bottom of the window had a double window fan, and right now we could hear the vague thump of disco rock from the late night exercise class being held in the front of the dojo. I was going to tell you about the rail bed. It's a simple piece of equipment really, just an elongated box made out of steel tubing. Technically it's a square prism, about six feet long, and each side is a stainless steel rail or pole. They attach to a square platform at each end, a headboard and a footboard. It's about the size of an old telephone both, laid on its side. There's a thin, vinyl-coated pad on the floor, and the rail bed rests about an inch over the pad, supported on metal legs.

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The great thing about the rail bed is the attachments. There are a bunch of clamps that attach to the rails that can be slid along its length and adjusted here and there. Then there are rods that attach to these clamps, and more clamps that attach to the rods, so you can pretty much rig the rail bed up to hold whatever you want, however you want it to hold it. There's like nothing it can't do. Emma looked around at all the equipment the way you look at a gift you've received from the planet Mars, wanting to like it, but having no idea what anything was, or what the stuff would be used for. Of course she knew what a bed was, and a chair, but she didn't understand what the ladder was doing in there, or the rail bed, and why the chair was stripped of its upholstery and redone in crude vinyl and bolted to the floor. I suppose she'd been expecting some sort of fabulous salon of red velvet and rhinestones, something whorish like that, and for a moment I felt disappointed for her too. After all, I'd done the room myself. I'd selected everything for the express purpose of using it on her. It was a little embarrassing, revealing all my fantasies in what I'd assembled, and as she gazed at it, I considered. Why do we do this? Why do we take people we love and tie them up and take whips to them and spank them, put collars around their necks and make them do things, call them names and mistreat them, let out these dark urges and show them this savage side of ourselves and demand they show us theirs? It's a question I think most people don't even ask themselves, the impulse is just so deep and instinctual. It's like asking why we get hungry or why we want sex in the first place. It's something built into us, like the urge to kiss or caress. In many ways, it just seems like these things taken to the extreme—the kiss becomes a bite, the caress 240

the flash of the whip. So in one sense it's simple extremity—touch taken to its exaggerated conclusion. But surely there's more to it than that. There's some primal satisfaction that goes along with the capture and bondage, as if this kind of behavior is hard-wired into us, an atavistic memory of ancient mating patterns still seeking expression. Some of us long to subdue, others long to be subdued. It excites us, like foreplay. It is foreplay. For some of us—for me, I know—the sight of a woman in rope is insanely erotic, and it's always been like that for me, even before I was old enough to know what sex was. So it's primal as well. And in addition, it's a demonstration of the depth of one's passion and love, isn't it? It's a trial by ordeal, a way of showing what one will suffer for one's lover and one's love, right there without any doubt—love made manifest, stripped of the poetic finery and psychic ambiguity and pared down to the most basic and obvious emotions. I left Emma in the room for a moment and walked into the kitchen. I filled a pot with warm water and brought it into the room, then took a towel from the dresser. Inside the towel was a small piece of heavy chromed steel chain, only five links, each about an inch long, scrupulously cleaned. I placed the chain in the warm water as Emma watched. There was another reason we played these games. So far, all the things we'd done together had been more or less spontaneous, or at least, rather haphazard. True, the session in the motel had been planned, but it had taken minimal equipment, and I'd gone in there with no clear plan in mind of what I was going to do. But here I'd assembled a room full of furniture and equipment for just one purpose—the control of 241

Emma's sensations. That's what I was after. Control of her body was only important insofar as it allowed me to control her sensations. By taking control of her sensations, I'd be taking command of her. I'd make her an instrument on which I communicated my feelings. I was going to play her, that's what I was going to do. I was going to play Emma's body and her feelings and her emotions like a harp, like a symphony orchestra. I was going to take over her emotions and make them my own, make her an instrument in my hands, humming, throbbing, singing to any tune I wanted to play, to any feelings I wanted to transmit. That was my goal. That's what I intended to accomplish, to make Emma Fiore ring with the music of Conner Devlin and make her feel exactly what I felt. I would become one with her like an artist becomes one with his violin or his piano or his saxophone or trumpet, the music of emotion pouring from her, from my soul through my fingers to my whip or my cock—into Emma, into her body, her nerves, her mind, and then out, out into the world, my every experience filtered through the sensorium of another living, breathing, human being, a woman sexually in tune with me. For that's what sex is about ultimately—communion, ultimate communion, the fusing of two beings into one, their feelings, emotions, hearts, minds and souls, and whether it's done with kisses and caresses or whips and chains, it doesn't matter in the end. "Come here." I was suddenly excited and eager to get started, and Emma came to me, glad to be able to do something she understood. She didn't understand the room, the railbed, the ladder, the chair, but she knew their use was sexual and she'd be expected to use them and she was willing, so already, the magic was starting, the mood was changing. This was one of the uses of this room. It was a special place for us, a 242

place where Emma put on her role as giver and I assumed my role as taker. This was consecrated ground. I pulled her to me and took her in a kiss, surprising her with my excitement. I held her with one arm, my other hand holding her right wrist as I kissed her, parting her lips with my tongue. I kissed her and she responded, kissing me back grudgingly at first, as if she had to be convinced of the worth of this place, as if she knew this wasn't a wholesome place to be. And it wasn't. It wasn't at all, and I made no pretense of that. It was my sleazy spare room, loaded with BDSM furniture, and that's exactly what it looked like. As I kissed her, I backed her up, turning her around so I had her sitting in the armchair with the crude, tacked-on vinyl upholstery. She sat down heavily and tried to pull her little robe down over her lap without losing my kiss but I was already reaching into the dresser nearby, getting the cuffs. "Mmm… nnnn…" She tried to talk against my lips as I opened the cuffs and fixed them on her wrists. There was no helping the robe now, which slid up to the top of her thighs, revealing her little crease, her knees pressed tightly together. Two metal clips from the top drawer fit nicely into the screw eyes in the bare arms of the chair. The clips snapped tight as she tried to free her arms, but too late— Emma was caught. I stood up and hit the switch on the wall. The ceiling fixture went off, leaving the room bathed in red light from the lamps. It looked like the light of hell in there and felt just as hot. I turned the window fans on and the they started up with a twin drone,

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sucking the air out with scarce enough breeze to move the hair on Emma's head, drowning out the monotonous thud of the disco music, smoothing it over with a low, sensual hum of white noise. I had some dope in the room too, and I could have lit some up, but really, I wasn't interested in that now. What I was interested in was the exact human dynamics of what was about to occur between this beautiful, nearly-naked girl chained in my BDSM playground under a red light, destined to be fucked tonight probably within a very few minutes, and myself. I wanted to watch how it happened. I wanted to see the changes occurring. I wanted to be aware of everything transpiring in her and between us. I wanted to watch myself and watch her, see ourselves objectively and participate too, be a specimen in my own seductive experiment. I got up and leaned over, kissing her mouth again and letting my lips on dwell on hers, feeling her reach towards me and open like a flower in the sun. "What have you got for me tonight, Emma?" I teased her lips with mine. "What have you got for me tonight, baby? Huh? Something good? What is it, baby? Tell me." "Oh Conner, whatever you want. You know that, Conner. Whatever you want." I leaned over so I could play with her breast through the sheer silky synthetic of the robe, rubbing the fabric back and forth over her hardening nipple. "Mmm, yes. But what if it's not enough, Emma? What if you should run out? What if I should maybe need more than you've got, baby? That would be terrible, wouldn't it? What would we do then, precious?"

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As I spoke I dug around in the dresser drawer ‘til my hand closed on a crop. I took it out and held it where she could see it. "But then, that would never happen, would it?" I dragged the tip of the crop along her long, smooth legs. "That would never happen because I always know where to get more, don't I, Emma? I always know how to get more from my baby, don't I, sugar? Don't I, you gorgeous slut?" The leather crept along her legs with an almost imperceptible drag, sliding over her knee and the top of her thigh and then the inside of her leg. Emma let her head fall back against the chair in wanton surrender. As always, her reaction to my touch was almost beyond her ability to control. She was lost as soon as I made contact with her. "Look at how you react," I said. "The whip is like a magic wand for you isn't it, Emma? It's like it's enchanted. Wherever I touch you, you just melt, baby." "When you hold it, yes. I don’t know how you do this to me." I used the end of the whip to flip the tails of her robe back, exposing her sex. Emma pressed her knees together and balled her hands into fists which she twisted in the cuffs. The clips clanked against the metal screw eyes. Her wrists looked so frail. "It's shameful how hot you get when I play with you like this, you know that? It's just shameful, Emma. You just came a few minutes ago and you're already set for more. You're just primed and ready to go." I pushed against her knee with the whip and she opened her legs, exposing herself for me. She closed her eyes in humiliation and bit her lip. "Don't…" she begged.

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"Don't what?" She sighed deeply. "Oh God, I don’t know. I hate it when you stare at me like that." I stroked her pussy with the crop, up and down. Her legs were apart now and it was easy to get to, the pussy lips set together. "You hate it when I stare at you? But you're so nice to look at, baby. I like staring. I love staring at you, Emma. I could stare and stare…" She was still wet from her orgasm and her attitude as she sat cuffed in the chair was one of deep, crimson humiliation. I calmly leaned past her and opened the drawer of the dresser, then I unclipped her right wrist. I placed the crop on her knee as a warning not to move. "I want you to do something for me, Emma, so listen. You're going to take that chain from the warm water, and you're going to put it inside you. There's towels and lube in the dresser—" "Oh God, Conner—" "Don’t interrupt, baby, please. There's towels and lubricant in the dresser. It's only five links and you can do it. Put on some ankle cuffs first, then insert the chain and take off the robe and call me when you're done, okay? Can you do that?" "Oh Conner, I don't know…" "Try it for me, Emma. That's all. Just try it for me. This is something very special or I wouldn't ask it, baby. You know that."

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I leaned over and kissed her, my mouth lingering over hers as if I might plunge back down and take her right then and there. That's what she wanted, I could tell. It's what I wanted too—instant gratification, and why not? Why not just take her then and there? The thought crossed my mind. Why wait and go through this nonsense? Because—control. Because I wanted my sensations running through her body. I wanted her heart ticking to my time. I wanted my blood in her veins, the crazy love crossover that haunts us all where we want to be so close to our lover, so excruciatingly close it almost hurts to breathe. I went in the kitchen and looked out the window at the night sleeping over the hot summer roofs. Strange how it felt cooler out here than it did in my "dungeon", as if the sexually charged air were itself hotter. I thought of Emma putting the cuffs on her ankles. They wouldn't take long, a matter of seconds. It would be the chain,, putting the chain in her pussy, that would take time and care. I thought of how she'd have to lie down on the bed and open her legs, grease the thing up. The chain was heavy. She'd feel it immediately pressing inside her womb, like she was pregnant with metal, gravid with steel, giving birth to chain. An El rumbled by outside, the wheels shooting sparks on the tracks as if the night were electric. What kind of mad sickness ran in my brain? What did I want from this woman? What did I want from life? I knew what it was. I wanted to know how much she wanted me. I wanted to know how much she'd endure for me, that she was really mine, and there would be no room for dodging or evading things when she had this chain inside her.

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I had heard of it somewhere—supposedly excruciatingly erotic, especially to those enamored of the symbology of chains and bondage in the first place. I had no idea what it would feel like for her but I wanted her to do it anyhow. Sometimes you just feel the need to impose your will, to make someone do what you want to show that they're yours. Sometimes just the sight of their face when the whip comes down is sufficient reason to use it—the act is sensation itself. I wanted this because it would be her ordeal, and because I just wanted to make her feel me like that, with that intensity, that closeness. "Conner?" She called me from the bedroom, a mild voice like she might use to ask me to bring her some water or a slice of cheese. Crazy is the moon over the rooftops of Chicago. Walking into the dungeon was like walking into a darkroom, the red lights making everything look monochromatic and bleached out. Emma sat in the chair, naked and pale, a film of sweat on her forehead, her knees drawn up slightly. I was about to ask her if she'd done it when I saw how superfluous words would be. "It's weird," she said. "It's so weird. Every time I move, every breath…" I fell to my knees and kissed her, grabbed her hair and pulled her head back and kissed her, raped her mouth with my tongue. The proof of her love, her trial by ordeal—I put my arms around her and crushed her to me and that must have made the chain move because she moaned deeply and furrowed her brow. "It's heavy," she said.

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"Yes it's heavy. It’s heavy as love, isn't it? Heavy as what you carry for me, filling you, weighing you down…" That's just what I'd wanted, the way I'd imagined it—a great weight inside her, her own love of bondage inside where she could feel it. I knew how she was shamed by her addiction to this kind of love, and now I wanted her to feel it acting on her inside, her own demon making sick love to her, and as if she suddenly realized this herself, she responded to my kiss now by kissing me back ferociously, opening her mouth and extending her tongue, opening her body, her entire self to me, admitting her whoredom, her shameful weakness and adoration for this steely lover within. Her nails dug into my back and she bit my lips in her fierce excitement. "Take me! Oh God, Conner! Take me! Tell me what I am! Tell me!" I knew what she wanted. It was a cue that meant I was supposed to say one certain thing and I said it: "You’re my whore," I breathed. "You’re my slut and all you want is to be fucked like the dirty bitch you are. That's what you are, Emma, you're just a filthy whore, my whore, that's your secret, Emma, and now I know it too!" She uttered a strangled cry as she sucked my tongue into her mouth and slid sideways in the chair, instinctively trying to make herself horizontal and pull me down on top of her. "Oh no," I said. "Oh no. Up. You're getting up. Get up!" I stood and grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet, naked except for her sandals. Her breasts shook distractingly but all I could think of was that heavy steel

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chain coiled in her vagina, pressing into her as I grabbed her forearm and pulled her over to the ladder. "What—? Conner, I can't hold this thing inside me, it's too heavy! Conner?" But I was on fire for her now, pushing the impossible like this, making her strain, exert herself. "Hold it, Emma!" I said. "Hold it!" And I meant that—hold it. Hold it like I was holding it, holding the urge to take her, the urge to fuck her and possess her, the urge to release myself in her body. Hold it, hold it. For this was that control of sensations I'd been talking about. This was how I communicated to her what she felt like to me. This was what it felt like being in love with Emma—a pressure inside, a weight, constantly having to hold it, to keep it in as it fought for release, that excruciatingly delicious pain and longing, the desire to go into her and feel her around me, pressing my face in her hair and feeling her body against me arching towards me. "Here, here!" I said, "Here!" I pressed her back against the ladder and snapped her wrists to the eyebolts in the frame at shoulder level, quickly getting down and attaching her ankles to the bolts set into the bar that spanned the feet. That forced her legs apart slightly and made it harder for her to hold the chain inside, I knew that, but that was okay. I didn't care whether she failed or succeeded. The important thing was that she struggle. Slappp! I fetched her a sharp slap across the thigh with the crop and Emma groaned, tossing her head back. Her stomach quivered with the exertion of holding the chain

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inside but she'd been expecting the blow and didn't make a sound. She already knew what the game was. Smaackkk! I hit her again and she twisted away, hissing like a cat. The fan droned in the window but the sweat was starting to gather between her breasts. I leaned against her and put the whip in her teeth and Emma took it. She was standing with her hands up, clipped to the ladder, her feet spread, and I was leaning against her with one hand on her breast, the fingers of the other hand curled down to tease and tickle her cunt. "Come on, Emma," I said into her face. "Are you holding that chain for me? You see how that feels? That's what you make me feel like, you know that? That's what I feel like when I'm around you, like I've always got to hold myself in, like I'm going to explode if I don't. That's how you make me feel, baby, and I wanted you to feel that. I wanted you to know what that's like. See? See? Turnabout's fair play, right? Now you see what it's like being me, right?" She was so beautiful like that, suffering for me, straining for me, hurting for me, filled with my sensation, the sensation I'd put there for her. I spread her labia and slid my middle finger inside, feeling the end of the chain. I felt those hard metal links warmed from the heat of her own body nestled inside her like a sleeping serpent, felt the tightness in her muscles as she strained to hold them in. I flicked the end link with my finger and she snarled like an animal, baring her teeth around the shaft of the crop in her mouth.

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"Oh? What's this?" I asked. "I think this belongs to me, doesn't it? This is my hardware, slut! What have you done with it? Whore! Bitch! God! Look at you. Pussy stuffed full of chains! You are a whore, Emma. A regular bondage slut. Give it to me, slave! Give me my chain!" I seized her hair in my other hand and was just able to grab the end of the chain between thumb and forefinger. It was all greasy and slick with her oils and lubricant but I got a grip on it and saw her nostrils flare in sudden indignation as I began to slowly pull. One little tug and the thing began to move, began to slither out of her like a snake from a tree, uncoiling, dropping from its sheer weight from her pussy, link following link in invariable progress, one after the next. Emma cried out and slumped in the cuffs and I let go of her hair and wrapped my arm around her, grabbing her before she could fall, holding her up as the chain slid from her body and landed on the floor with a solid thunk like a monstrous afterbirth. I held her and pressed her against me and kissed her, wildly, passionately, her skin hot and sweaty beneath my lips. "Oh baby! Oh Emma! Beautiful, baby, beautiful. God, how I love you, how I love you, to do what you've done for me." She pressed herself against my chest, breathing fast and ragged and I barely gave her time to recover. I unclipped her ankles from the ladder and then her wrists and pushed her back to the bed, pushed her down on it, arranging her on her hands and knees. I got out of my clothes without even touching them, or so it seemed to me. They just seemed to evaporate. I pushed her neck down, wanting that final sign of subjugation, and then I was in her, in her at last, on my knees behind her, one hand 252

holding her waist, the other with her hair wrapped around it, and I took her like that. I just took her with a ferocity and a selfishness that was gemlike in its brilliance, it was so pure. There was no thought on my part, nothing to interrupt the rich swill of sensation feeding directly into my core—her flesh rubbing against mine, her soul against my soul. It hardly took me any time at all. I already owned her, already had her as securely as I had her hair wrapped around my hand and it was as if my body knew it. She belonged to me, mine and for my use, and all that was left was the explosion of release that sealed my ownership and left me hanging over her back, my face contorted into a mask of pain—the ejaculation was that intense. It hurt. It hurt to give her myself like that, to break myself into pieces small enough to fit into her, to squeeze myself out through my own cock. It hurt, but it hurt with radiant joy, like it must hurt the sun to rise or a cloud to feel the spear of lightning—that one great shock and then the rains came. I poured everything I had into her, great gouts of deluge, hanging over her, gasping for breath, my hands holding her tight against me. That's how it seemed to me—that's how it would be—connected to Emma through bonds going beyond mere love and sex—to these fearsome violations of spirit and body and eradications of boundaries. That's what I wanted, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, so we were nothing apart from each other but only existed in the furnacelike intimacy of outrageous love. She was a female to me as no one else had ever been—my vaginal counterpart, my slut and my goddess. That's how it would be. I'd make it be that way. I didn’t want anything less anymore.

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Waking again in the gray hours of early morning, not knowing now dream from reality, intoxicated, enchanted, she opened her eyes and looked at me, saw where she was, and smiled. "I was having the best dream," she said. And so was I. She lay back down and slept, entering those golden rooms where magic happens, where all of us are alone with everyone we've ever known, with everything we've ever done, or thought, or desired.

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Chapter Ten

In the morning, there's a girl beside me in bed, sharing the pillow with me. She's lying on my left, lying on her left side, facing away from me, her head on my left arm, her long brown hair thrown across the white pillow like a scattering of seaweed, like she's been cast up by the ocean. It's warm in there and the sheet's fallen from her in the night, and her breasts are reddened and marked from the anger of the whip and it fills me with guilt and a twisted kind of pride, knowing what she took for me. Her knees are drawn up and she looks small and elflike and totally incapable of the pleasure and depth of emotion she gave me last night, and yet she fills the loft with the peace of her sleep. I know, because I lie there and just feel for a while, my senses like antennae, and everything feels different. I have a lover. Everything feels different. I got out of bed and threw on some clothes, trotted down the stairs and went out on the street. It was a dull day, bright but overcast. I'd slept later than usual and felt kind of guilty. The trucks were unloading meat and produce at Ho Ho and Viet Long, the men well into their day, and there was Jimmy Vu, standing on the sidewalk and slapping at a parking meter, bopping up and down like a happy buddha, keeping an eye on things. "Hey, Conner!" "Hey, Jimmy, how's it going?"

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"Oh great, man, great. So who is this Emma, man? She your new friend?" Jimmy didn't waste any time. "I think so, Jimmy." I tried to wipe the sleep out of my face and smiled. I felt like I still had her all over me. "What do you think of that?" "Very nice, man. Is she the sculptor? Is she the one we put up that thing for?" "Yeah, that's right. She does metal sculptures. Great big things. Funny, isn't it? Little thing like her can make such big heavy things?" He smiled and nodded. "I liked what you told her about me. That was nice, man. Tell her that again, okay? Anytime, that I'll take care of her." "Sure." He nodded, satisfied, and I headed down Carmen to Broadway and over to the Brite-Way. My plan was to get Emma some toiletries. That's what I said to myself, thinking I sounded pretty knowledgeable—"toiletries". I might have even thought, "ladies' toiletries". I had no idea what they were. The place was freezing cold. I got her a purple toothbrush with a serious looking rubberized handgrip and some brand-name girl-type face wash and then I looked down the aisle, wondering what else I should get. There were miles of bottles and tubes and creams lined up and marshaled there, serious products with the might of American cosmetological know-how behind them, and I was no match. There were ads hanging from the shelves and the ceiling and even on the floor, and I was swept by a great wave of joy and terror.

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Suddenly I saw Emma as the very tip of a great funnel of goods and products and services about to descend into my life, and I wondered if I was ready. Just what did a twenty-something year-old use to take care of herself these days? And these were just basic maintenance products, not make-up and enhancements. But then, what did she need beside a toothbrush and face soap? I went and paid. I stopped in at the Saigon Bakery. They were already selling lunch. The Vietnamese have insanely great French bakeries, and I got some croissants and this great kind of submarine sandwich they make called a banh me, and two iced Thai coffees. They sold chunks of fruit in little plastic containers and I got a couple of those too. Out on the street again, I took a few steps and stopped—a habit, get your bearings, check where you are, explain yourself to yourself. The city's always changing and it has a life of its own, just like the woods did to the Indians or the snow does to the Eskimos, and today I found a tender city under a bruised sky ready to accept me and Emma. It had a feeling of growth and I knew somehow it wouldn’t be like this much longer, that these were precious days. That made me briefly sad, but I knew they were precious and that was something in itself, knowing that. I hurried back to Emma. I felt her immediately as I climbed the stairs. An El went by as I opened the door—a blinding rush of sound—and then I heard her voice talking on the phone, low, reasonable. As I approached the bedroom in the back, I could make out what she was

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saying: "No, well that's fine. Fine, but there's no point. I know. I know. I know all that and I'm sorry, David. David? No, I don't want to talk to Abba Yosef." I turned and went back into the front and sat by the windows, giving her some privacy. I could still hear her voice. It echoed in that big place, but all she was saying was, no, no, it's no use, I don't want to talk, and it seemed obvious this break-up had been a long time coming. A lot of familiar material seemed to be dredged up again, and apparently it was a family affair. David kept on wanting her to talk to his brother, his sister-in-law, his father and God knows who else until, in time, even I was worn out. Another train went by. It sliced the late morning silence like an axe, and by the time it was gone, Emma had stopped talking and the place was absolutely silent. I picked up the bags and went into the back. She was sitting up in bed naked, the sheet around her waist, the phone in one hand, the other hand covering her face. "You want me to talk to him, Emma?" She dropped her hand and looked at me. She wasn't crying, but she was about to, and she was angry. "They'll never leave me alone," she said. "There's fourteen of them, a whole clan. David, his brothers and sisters, their wives, in-laws, uncles and cousins, his mother and father, even his grandfather and grandmother. All of them together. You get the whole package and they all get on you. They work you over, one after the other.

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"Oh God, Conner! They have plans for me. It's like I'm upsetting their precious plans. It's so sick! I've been trying to get out of this for weeks, months, but you just can't shake loose of them." I put the bags down and sat down on the bed. Emma sat there, totally unconscious of her naked breasts, which were beautiful, in spite of or because of the whip marks. She made me feel old, and I kind of liked it. I think she did too. She leaned forward to peek into one of the bags and let her breasts swing. "What'd you have? Anything good?" She took out an iced coffee. "Is this coffee?" "Yeah. Want it?" "Oh, thank God!" "It's Thai coffee. Cold and sweet, they—" "What else did you get?" She was already in the bag, handing me her coffee. She took out the fruit and opened it, began to greedily eat the melon balls and strawberries. "I'm sorry," she said through a mouth full of fruit. "I'm just really hungry. I must be like the only person in the world who really has to eat breakfast or I die. Ooh! What's this? A sandwich?" The banh me was the size of her forearm. "Conner? Would I, like, seriously disgust you if I ate a sandwich for breakfast? It's what I usually do at home." "No, baby. It's what I do too. I have no use for cereal."

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"Oh Conner, you're beautiful!" I made her throw on a shirt and button it. It didn't hide much. I could still see the whip marks. She sat at the kitchen table and tore into the sandwich while I had a croissant to keep her company but I wasn't really hungry. I was too busy watching her, too busy trying to absorb this daytime Emma, figuring out who she was, and at the moment she was all appetite, fascinated with the sandwich, and then with the loft, the window and the view, the trains going by. She took some convincing that, with the lights off, the people on the platform couldn't see in but we could see them. They were that close, close enough you naturally wanted to keep your voice down, except of course when a train came by, when it was impossible to talk loudly enough. "And you live here alone, Conner? Just you? It's so big. You don't get lonely? Not even a cat? "No. I mean, it happened kind of gradually. I was living with someone. It got ugly. When she moved out, it was a relief. It went from being a relief to this. I never thought of it being lonely." "Do you ever have parties?" she asked. "I'd have parties if I had this much room." "For a while I had readings. Sometimes I still do. Sometimes people come over and we work on things. There's usually something going on. You like parties, Emma?" "No, not really. I don't. Not much. I think I'd like the kind of party I dream about, though. The kind filled with interesting people where people actually know how to drink out of a glass."

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I laughed. "We can have parties. I'll make sure everyone has a glass and knows how to use it. Tell me about your roommates. How's Angela the liar?" She took a bite of her sandwich and pouted at me, then smiled, remembering last night. "Angela's actually okay. It's Christina who's bad. She's a cousin." "Your cousin?" "No. David's. Everyone's a cousin. Christina's…I don't know, a third? fourth?— rear echelon, pressed into service. She had the apartment and David got me in there so she could keep an eye on me. She's a bitch. Even goes through my mail sometimes, my drawers." "Jesus." She drank some coffee. "If you're worried, don't be. They're not violent. Just crazy as hell. Honestly. Like the mafia. Everything's property to them. You must think I was crazy to get involved, but I actually liked it at first. I have a small family. Older sister, my younger brother died in a motorcycle accident and my mom never got over it. My house was always really quiet after that and I couldn't stand it. When I met David— Do you mind if I talk about him, Conner? Do I talk about him too much? I don't want to talk about him all the time." "No. I don't mind. There's a lot of him in there. He's going to have to come out." She wanted to believe me so she nodded. "Because I don't love him, you know. I really don't. But like I say, when I met him, his house was always full of people, lively, and I really liked that. They have this big house and they were always cooking, and someone always seemed to have a baby or a birthday and I was just caught up in this

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whole thing. And once I got caught up, there wasn't even time to stop and hear yourself think. You were always doing something…" She didn't say anything for a while, so I asked, "You were really engaged?" She gave a weak laugh. "I don't even know. They have all these different arrangements. You're 'serious', then 'committed', then David's father talked to my father, and I didn't even know that meant anything until David told me we were now 'pledged'." She threw her head back as if letting something wash out of her hair. She laughed. "Oh God, it's so bizarre! I just want my life back!" She let her chin fall forward so she was looking down at her breasts and the marks. I suppose they reminded her of me because she looked up at me. "I mean, I just want to be able to choose my own life, Conner. I want to choose, and you know what I want." I hoped I did, and I was still afraid to ask. On impulse I asked, "What about your car?" "David's car? He gets it back, of course. I don't want it. I wish I'd never taken it. See, Conner? That's why I was so careful last night when you wanted to buy me things. You should never take gifts from people unless you're absolutely sure and you're never absolutely sure. You should never take anything." "Oh. Well that's too bad then." I reached into the bag and brought out the toothbrush. "I already bought you this, Emma. I thought you might need it." I handed it to her and she took it. "Oh." She gave a little laugh. "A toothbrush. Yeah." 262

She looked at it and turned it over in her hands, then looked up at me again and put it down on the table by her plate, adjusting it so it was neat and straight. She pushed it aside an inch or two and sat there for a moment longer just staring at it, and then she started to cry. She shook her head as if she really didn't want to cry, but she was looking at the toothbrush and she just couldn't stop, and then she really started to cry hard, the tears coming, sobbing. She covered her eyes with her hands, put her elbows on the table and started weeping, her shoulders heaving, her whole body convulsing in wracking spasms as all the hurt she'd caused everyone came gushing out—all the hurt that goes with trying to stumble along and follow your heart, the confusion, the fear and pain and rage, all those things that go with love just like the noise went with those damned El trains that kept on sweeping past the kitchen as she sat and wept and shook and wept and I stood and watched her and didn't know what to do, watching her, all alone with her pain. I got up and went behind her and put my hands on her shoulders, and Emma grabbed on to my hands with hers and held onto me for all she was worth, hoping I could somehow save her, and I tried. I did what I could, but my love was weak right then. I was strong at sexual desire but I didn't know what I had to give this girl who was hurting now but to hold onto her and feel bad along with her, so that's what I did. I held her against me and just hurt with her. I didn't know if that was enough. "Emma, Emma," I asked. "What's wrong, baby? What is it? What can I do?" Her head was against my stomach and she picked up the toothbrush. "Why are you giving me this?"

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"I thought you might need it, no? Aren't you going to stay with me, Emma?" "Oh God, Conner! You want me to? But what am I going to do here? I don't know anyone. I don't know the city. I don't fit in it. You have your life and everything. What am I going to do here?" I knelt down next to her. "Emma? Weren't you here last night? Was that someone else I was with? Was that someone else who was tied up and whipped and hung from the ceiling at three o'clock in the morning?" She blushed and dropped her eyes to the floor. "Oh, Conner. See? That's what I mean. All that, all those things you say you love me for. It's not good. It's not something I'm proud of, Conner. It's like I'm sick and I'm ashamed of it. It's not what you build a life on. It's just sex. It's not real. That's what I thought David could give me, something real. I need a real life. Not just that kind of thing." I stared at her for a moment, not comprehending. "No, Emma. You're wrong. You're exactly wrong. That stuff is real. Entirely and exactly real. The things you think you can get from David, that's what's sick. That's what's shameful, and you know it, and that's why you're here with me. The things we did last night, the things we've been doing all along—Emma, it doesn't get any more real than that. I mean—Emma, no offense, but are you crazy? That kind of thing is exactly what I want, damn it! I mean exactly! And I understand you're confused and you're ashamed of it and you think it's sick and wrong and weird and fucked up but I'm telling you, you don't know what it is, how remarkable, and what a tremendous gift it is, Emma. It's exactly the right thing and

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exactly perfect and exquisitely female and it's exactly just what I want—what we all want, the whole sorry planet full of us. It is! It's the very heart and soul of why I'm so crazy in love with you, Emma! "Because you can do that. Because you can do what you do. Because you're a goddamned goddess made flesh and blood, the link between my poor ass—all of our poor asses—and the very erotic soul of the universe. Without you, precious, and every woman like you, and without the incredible gift of femininity you bring to us, we’re all of us about to shrivel up and fucking die. And with you, we—again, all of us, every poor sucker on this planet—we can expand and grow into something grand and beautiful and magical that takes back the heart of this poor beaten and defeated earth and makes it live again. Emma, don't you understand that? Don't you even understand what you are?" I was going now, standing up in the kitchen with both arms half spread as if I were on stage at the Green Mill in full declamation mode with the green and red lights upon me, all the thoughts and emotions of the past weeks pouring out of me, suddenly roaring and I couldn't stop. "Emma, look at me! In the past month you’ve made me fucking soar! And you've soared too, I know it! I've tied you up and I've loved you and I've whipped you and I've held you in my arms and wept with you as you came and I just thought I would die because you made me feel so much, and Emma, that stuff was real. And now you're telling me you're sick and you're ashamed and you want to throw this all away and go back to David and be a clerk's wife and shop at Wal-Mart for the rest of your life? Is that what you're telling me, Emma?"

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I stopped then because I'd run out words. I couldn't say anymore because it sounded stupid when you talked about it. That's the way you ruined it was by talking about it and that's what I was doing. "It's not just sex, Emma. You might feel it in your pussy and your tits and the sway of your hips but I know it's something deeper and you know it too. It's dark, feminine, hungry, giving—it's erotic, Emma, the way the poets use the word, the kind of thing the world is starved for. You're saturated in it, dripping with it, and it's a gift. It's something the world needs, baby. It's something I need. It's serious stuff. You can't just peel it off like it's some kind of dirty clothes and walk away from it!" "Conner, would you stop? Would you just stop playing the poet for once?" She looked at me and the tears were threatening again, mixed with rage this time. "You know they have another word for girls like me." "Well you know what? Fuck them!" "Yeah. Fuck them. You're a man. You don't know what it's like, to be told you're oversexed, insatiable. It's not a game, Conner." Emma put her hand over her mouth as if she couldn't say the words. She looked out the window and in the daylight I saw the tears. "Is it that way with me? Do you think I feel that way about you?" She shook her head. "But you're crazy too." She started to cry and laugh at the same time. "That's the problem. Oh, Conner, you're just as sick and crazy as I am…"

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She picked up a piece of napkin and held it against her eyes as if she were in pain. She looked terribly small and frail there, the shirt falling from her naked shoulders, her half-eaten sandwich in front of her. Outside across the roof, an El train pulled into the station and rumbled to a halt, making the building vibrate and bringing twilight to the kitchen as the cars cut off the light. We could hear the doors open and the passengers shout, the scuffle of feet on the platform as people headed for the stairs. I had such a clear vision of what she meant to me, of the intense intimacy of fucking her and feeling her rise to her pleasure on my cock, superimposed on the image of the anonymous crowds leaving the train and fanning out into the city. I didn't know what to make of it, how to explain it to her, or what it meant. "Stand up, Emma." She looked at me. "Stand up. I want to show you that it isn't a game. It isn't a game at all." "Conner—" I picked her up by the arm and brought her to the window. She came reluctantly and I made her face the platform. The kitchen sink was in the way, so she stood back from the window a few feet, away from the cloudy daylight. She seemed so much smaller than me and she was nearly naked in that oversized shirt, so she was like a doll or a sacrifice, but it wasn't that she was really that small. It was my anger that made me feel big. My anger that she didn't even know what she was. She didn't appreciate herself or know how precious she was.

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We watched the train pull away and the light return to the kitchen as the remnants of commuters milled around on the platform. No one noticed us. They couldn't see inside the kitchen where we were. I stood behind her, reached over and unbuttoned her shirt. "Conner! Don't!" "Shh! Don't interfere!" I pushed her hands away and unbuttoned the shirt and stripped it off her, leaving her naked. I angrily pushed her arms down when she tried to cover herself so she stood naked in front of the window, her breasts exposed. On the platform across the way, a man bent over and looked down the track. A girl leaned against a billboard listening to an iPod. A woman worked a crossword puzzle. A train worker yawned and scratched his ankle. I held her there naked in front of the window looking out at the people at the El station. Emma's tits were rising and falling in a panic and she was starting to shiver. I knew in my mind they couldn't see us, but still, holding this naked girl in front of me, it was hard to believe. I felt totally visible, even obvious. But none of them seemed to be looking. "Conner don't! What are you doing?!" The people on the platform were a good twenty yards away but it seemed like they should be able to hear, so she whispered. She was terrified, rigid with shame. "You're afraid of what they say, what they think of you? Let them look!" "Jesus, Conner! For God's sake, stop!"

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She turned her head back, trying to hide in me and I grabbed her face, felt the heat of her blush upon her cheeks. I kissed her, plunging my tongue into her mouth, and she tried to pull away, screaming with protest. I grabbed her breast and pulled her against me, smothering her mouth with my kiss as she struggled to break free, but I was angry now and crushed her to me. My other hand slid up her smooth thighs, finding its way against the cloying softness of her pussy, and I began to stroke her. Emma cried out, pulled her head back and tried to bite me, desperate to get away, but I had my arms wrapped around her and was holding her tight. Despite her struggles, I could already feel her nipples getting hard against my palm. "Stop it! Stop it, Emma! They can't see you, damn it! I'm just trying to show you something!" "Oh God, Conner! Please!" "Just calm down! Now stay here!" I put her down and went into the bedroom, got some rope. When I came back, I quickly lashed her wrists behind her. She let me. For some reason, she let me. Maybe the ropes made her calm, or absolved her of responsibility, or maybe she trusted me, but she let me tie her wrists behind her and take her to the window again. Outside, all was calm. Nothing had changed. The people still lounged against the platform, stared down the tracks, paced up and down, worked their crossword puzzles. I stood behind her and held her against me, my hands on her arms, my face in her hair. "Your world, Emma. My world. Look at it."

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"Yes." There were the people, the buildings, gulls flying in from the lake, the mysteries of infinity on a Chicago afternoon. My hands circled her breasts—warm, firm, yielding. The flush of arousal seeped through me. I closed my eyes and felt my cock stir, felt my body begin to ache for her. She grew heavier against me and leaned back. "Is it good?" I asked. "Yes." My finger traced circles around her nipples, slow, gentle rings on the margins of her excitement, and I tapped her there as a vintner taps a wine cask, as if testing for fullness. My lips sought the surrendering curve of her neck, and all over she began to dissolve, like sugar stirred into hot water, making it thick, making it sweet. Though my lips were on her neck, I felt her smile. "Yes it's good. You know it's good, Conner." My right hand left her breast, slid down her body and found her belly, the soft skin over her muscular core. She leaned back harder against me, a tree without roots. On the platform, the people were frozen in time, looking at their watches, popping mints into their mouths. A man with a coat over his arm glanced at our window. If he saw me fondling and kissing this bound and naked woman in the shadows of my kitchen, he didn't give any sign, and for me the entire scene outside began to take on a surreal and erotic haze, a kind of sensual, intoxicated depth. Emma moaned softly as she breathed and her bound hands

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moved at my jeans, her fingers searching for my prick, wanting to feel me. My hand slid lower, over her pubic arch, teasing her, then down to her legs. I raked my nails over her thighs and she gasped and parted her legs in invitation, shameless now. I kissed her ear and licked the fine outer shell, feeling goose bumps wash over her breasts. I breathed in her ear and whispered, "Look out the window, Emma. Look at the world I've brought you. Look at what I'm giving you, Emma. Tell me what you see." My hands slid down into her pussy now and Emma sighed. As my fingers curled beneath her, into her wetness, she met me with a subtle lift of her hips and I saw her half open her eyes. A lascivious smile spread on her lips, "Oh, baby. It's beautiful just like you said. But you make it like that, Conner. You make it like that when you touch me." "No, precious. You do. This is how things are for us, Emma. This is what I'm trying to show you. This is your gift. Don’t throw this away. Don't ever throw this away." She closed her eyes as if it was all too much and she started to move her hips. Her body wanted it. I knew how it was with her. She might think it was just sex but she wanted it all, everything that was outside that window and more. I knew because I was the same way. I wanted it all too but the closest I could come to having it was through sex, through these inchoate sexual yearnings, and I could feel Emma suddenly overwhelmed, faint with longing. I pulled her away from the window and unlashed her wrists, taking her in my arms and kissing her, standing in the kitchen as a train roared into the stop and blocked the sun. Bars of light cut between the cars and fell on us like hammer blows as we

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kissed. I was dimly aware of the sound as the people from the platform climbed on the train. When the train pulled out and the light returned, we were still there, still standing in that kitchen locked in that kiss, Emma naked with the ropes hanging from her wrists, pressing her body against mine, our mouths wet and hot, totally blind to the world. I was breathless, lost, enraged with her, filled with her. I couldn't get enough, would never get enough. I pushed her away and fixed the ropes so they were tied to her wrists with a good two feet hanging down from each one, then I pushed her back, making her stumble ‘til her bottom bumped against the edge of the kitchen table and I crowded up against her. We didn't notice the trains now, or the people on the platform. My hands were on her breasts and I was squeezing her, kissing her, and she was kissing me and showing me her teeth, biting at my mouth and whimpering, pressing her chest into my hands, holding onto the edge of the table. "Do you see now, Emma? Do you finally understand?" She didn't answer. She was frantic. Naked, overpowered, just the feel of the rope on her wrists set her off. She knew by now not to touch me when we were like this, but she clung to me like a punch-drunk fighter, knowing instinctively if she let me get away, things would get worse for her. So she pushed herself at me, kissing, biting, licking. But I did get away. I pushed her back against the table and held her there as I got down on my knees and started to bite and lick her thighs in my frenzy. Emma gasped and threw her head back. She tried to close her legs but I got my hands between her knees and spread them apart, finding the ropes to her wrists. I pushed up, taking the weight of her thighs on my forearms and resting my hands on the table so 272

that she was spread on my arms, her hands pulled behind her back, and then I shoved my face into her pussy. "Oh! Oh God!" she wailed. She was spread wide, her back arched as she fell back on her shoulders, her nipples still standing up like minarets, her knees coming up and clamping around my head to try and hold me, but she was entirely at my mercy. I found her pink and juicy slit, puffy and bruised from last night's sin, wet with her hot flash flood of excitement. Try as she might to protect it, her clit couldn't hide and emerged like a berry sticky with dew to be sucked between my lips. Emma was like summer fruit at the peak of ripeness, existing only to be enjoyed. It was her destiny, her purpose, and it was all I could do to restrict myself to just licking the sweetness oozing from her surface and keep from devouring her entirely. "Tell me you understand, Emma! Tell me!" I pulled on the ropes holding her hands, making her arch even further and forcing her body into a twisted bow. Her stomach fluttered in prelude to orgasm and she moaned, trembling on my tongue. She gasped and twisted and I felt her thighs quiver, and then without warning she was there. She cried out in protest, in denial, as if she could stop herself or refuse her body's demands but she couldn't. Her cry choked off into a sob of shame and frustration as she jerked against me and gave me what I wanted, spilling a tickle of her hot release into my mouth, her whole body shaking. And again, it was her responsiveness that did it, that female helplessness reacting to my male aggression with total surrender, offering herself, inviting me in spite

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of all the barriers she tried to put up. She wanted them knocked down, she wanted the windows smashed, the doors kicked in. She wanted me to find her and drag her into the light. She wanted this rage and I wanted it too. No sooner had she stopped trembling than I was on my feet, my face a mask of intense lust. I let go of the ropes and grabbed her and roughly flipped her over onto her stomach, then took the whole table and pulled it out from the wall, the legs grinding against the floor making the breakfast dishes dance. Emma looked at me in fear as I went to the other side and grabbed her wrists and hauled her across the table, yanked the ropes tight then bent and tied them off to the legs with no more respect than a cowboy ties off a rodeo calf. When I stood up, she was stretched across the table widthwise, her toes barely touching the floor. I walked back and her eyes never left me. Her ass flexed nervously, twitching in fear, tensing and relaxing. I started taking my clothes off. "Don’t even say anything, Emma, because you know there's nothing to say. You know you're in this as deeply as I am. We're in this together. Both of us." I was hard, aching, dripping. I planted my hands on the table on either side of her and set my bare feet on the floor between hers to lean over her and there was nothing she could do but wait. The ropes held her wrists to the legs and her toes barely touched the floor. She tried to look back over her shoulder but she couldn't. She put her head down on the table and made a pitiful whining sound of frustration and impatience, then I shuffled forward and touched the head of my cock against her and she cried out, yanking at the ropes so they snapped tight as guitar strings.

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I paused, froze, and she froze too, her body rigid. I didn’t dare breathe, then I exhaled, shuddering with the exertion of control. I pressed against her slit so I just opened her, just barely spread those tight lips and felt their hot, sticky adhesion against my flesh, the expectant trembling of her inner passage and Emma mewled again, tightening her buttocks convulsively, trying to draw me in. I held myself there, paused on ecstasy's doorstep, throbbing against her at the very entrance to her body, quivering like an arrow in a drawn bow, waiting for her, waiting for her to tell me. I wasn't going to move. "Whenever you're ready," I whispered. The cloudy sunlight poured in as Emma trembled beneath me, breathing fast, and it seemed like the whole world hung on the very tip of my prick. She squeezed her legs together and moaned through her teeth, pressing her forehead against the table and pushing her ass up at me but I didn't move a muscle, setting my jaw against the urge to thrust into her quivering cunt. Then, when she couldn't stand it any longer, she raised her head. "Oh fuck, Conner! Fuck me! God damn it! Fuck me already!" Breathing a prayer of relief, I shoved forward, moaning as my prick slid into her tight, wet, fleshy sheath, into her tense and quivering body. Emma gasped. She groaned. She rocked back and forth to feel my prick as it entered her, then slowly she managed to relax. Her legs fell gently apart. Her pussy softened. The tension left her back and shoulders and her face relaxed, her nostrils flared and her eyebrows lifted. All of her softened, opened, accepted, blossomed to take

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me and her fingers found the ropes, curled around them, gripped, and pulled them tight as she held on and prepared to get fucked. I watched my prick slowly slide into her and I leaned forward, whispering in her ear, "For God's sake, Emma, in the whole fucking world, what else is there but this?" I grabbed her buttocks and spread them apart, holding them like handles and pulling my hips back then snapping them forward and sending my cock ripping up into her, thrusting deep and filling her with myself, overpowering her and taking her totally so her head fell forward and she banged her forehead against the table and screamed and came at the same time, one great fusion of body and feeling: "Do it! Fuck me!" Then there was just the hard, violent friction, the pounding of flesh in flesh, her feet leaving the floor, the legs of the table leaving the floor as I fucked her with the strength of both of us. I stood behind her and shoved it into her as if I were just following my cock into her, following it down every dark and twisted place it might have to go to follow her and Emma flew on ahead, always ahead of me, stopping and exploding in ecstasy and showering me with her wetness but always fleeing, always caught and always escaping, that part of me I could experience but never possess. **** It should have been enough. I thought, showing her what I'd shown her, it would have been enough to make her see what she thought was something shameful was a gift and it meant everything to me, that it was enough to build this relationship on. But it wasn't. I could tell it wasn't enough.

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I could tell as soon as I untied her from the table—always an awkward business, having to clean up the aftermath of passion. I took her in my arms and we kissed. I was truly grateful, astonished as always by the things she did to me, and Emma was moved too, I could tell. You can't live through the kinds of emotions we did and not be moved, but it was still just sex. It was still just those parts of us below our necks having their way, and we already knew how dumb and unreliable they were. I sent Emma to the shower while I took care of the kitchen and then went into the front. The chains were still hanging from the hoist on the ceiling. The chair where I'd sat last night and held the rope that sent her rocking gently was parked nearby. At three in the morning, after a night of passion and emotion, having Emma tight and hanging like a spider's prey had made such perfect sense to me I thought she'd understood too, and she had understood something. She'd gone along with it eagerly, hungrily, and she'd derived some deep satisfaction from it. But now in the light of day there was no way to put those feelings into words and present them to her. It had just been some bit of deviancy, some bit of perversion. I could hardly hold that up as a reason we should be together. But it was these kinds of feelings, these kinds of images and experiences, this kind of meaning and depth she brought to things—that was the entire point. Emma was my link to a whole new erotic realm and that's why I needed her. She was like a lens I could see things through, a filter coloring everything, and that's what I had to make her see.

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And just before, in the kitchen, as the train came through and my lust for her had flooded me, the way my desire had enfolded and interrelated with the change in light and the arrival of the train, the people moving on the platform… In some way I was dimly aware of, some sense outside of my normal senses, my feelings towards Emma were spilling over and reaching out, connecting with the world outside, weaving and interlacing in some sort of web of connection so everything was becoming charged with this delicious erotic energy. As I sat at the keyboard, I called up the word processor and heard Emma yell in glee from the shower as the powerful jets cut loose and I just couldn't write. I couldn't. Joy. Happiness. I felt things boiling up from the streets outside the windows, from off the rooftops and the bricks of the buildings outside and the confused currents of life. I walked over to the big windows and looked down to where Jimmy Vu stood down in the street looking this way and that, bobbing his head to an invisible tune, looking for something, something, and I knew what he was looking for now. I knew because I had it in my shower. I could hear her singing, and I thought—has it all come down to this? Has it all come down to this? **** I had to take her to the museum, the Field Museum of Natural History, downtown, down by the lake. I knew I had to do it. I'd planned on it since before I'd brought her into town. I wasn't sure why or what I thought it would accomplish, but I knew it was essential, almost like a mission. Emma was amused, told me she hadn't been there since a grammar school field trip, but she was willing to go along, happy to do whatever

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I wanted. For her, it was a sightseeing trip and I was still showing her around. At least it would get her mind off David and his clan. At the time, I was doing some freelance work for the museum, mostly catalogs and bulletins for shows, but I'd gotten to know some of the staff there too, and they let me poke around and help out in the collections on the grounds that I was a writer and I might actually write something about what they were doing there. The bottom line was I had a pass that could get us in free and get us behind the scenes. The Museum had always been special to me, almost sacred, and I'd always been enthralled by the place. As a child, it had seemed like the most important building in the city to me, the place where they kept all the information and all the stories, the entire history of the planet and man's time upon it. That's what had always seemed important to me, not tax records and lists of voters. I suppose I still felt that way, and many days I went down there even when I didn't have to, just to browse and hang out, soak up the smells and the atmosphere of the collections and books. Thousands of years of human effort and dreams and guesswork, and I had a pass. Clouds had moved in and the sky was low. I took Emma back to Dee's and bought her a raincoat and umbrella to protect her, looking her over critically, admonishing her as if I were outfitting her for some great expedition. She wore it over a linen skirt and a little top. I worried about her. "Look, you know, we're going to the museum, Emma, and you're traveling with me now. You've got to be aware." "Conner, give me a break? I can take care of myself."

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"That's not what I'm talking about. You're traveling in poet's country now, Emma, moving in erotic space, and you're loaded. Everything means something now. I'm going to be your guide, but there's no telling what might happen when we travel in erotic space." She laughed and I smiled too, but I was serious. I held the door for her and locked it as we headed out onto the street. "Okay," I said. "But just watch it, and see if I'm not right. You just watch what things look like when you're expecting them to mean something. It's a different world, Emma." It was good to get out and go. She was excited to finally mix with the people and get on the El and find a place to stand near the back, feeling the train lurch forward and start to roll past the rooftops and buildings, over streets and alleys. She was eager see it all unfold, the views over the neighborhoods, the startling closeness of the windows of stores and apartments, the little vignettes of urban life caught like snapshots from the windows of the train. People got on and got off, and I saw Emma's eyes take on that city wariness, alert and distant at the same time. She slipped on her sunglasses and turned beautiful and mysterious, urbane and knowing. I found us a seat and gave her the window, slid in and pressed my thigh against hers. She took my arm and leaned to whisper in my ear, "Conner, I've got a confession. I've never been on the El before. This is so incredibly cool!"

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I smiled and looked at her. She was positively gleeful, clinging to my arm and hunching her shoulders as if her excitement had made her as small as a six-year-old. When I laughed, she pinched me. "Don’t laugh at me! Tell me everything! Where are we? Which way are we going? What train is this?" I pointed out the map above the door. "I'll show you the map later. We'll get a copy and study it. Right now you should be looking out your window. We're going right through town. In Vegas now, they have a hotel that does this as an amusement ride. I mean, this is it, Emma. Look, we can see in everyone's window, down every street. The kids, the college kids who used to live along the El, they used to put on shows in their back rooms when the train went by, try to freak out the people on the train—stage murders, sex scenes, all kind of things. It was a show." She looked at me, then out the window. Maybe they did back in my day, or years ago, but probably not anymore. Even the apartments backing onto the El weren't cheap anymore. The days of the college ghetto were gone. It was all changing. But it was still the city. In a nation gone flat and bland, it was still wildly vertical and vertiginous and dense, the energy pouring down from above and surging up from below, the train cutting through caverns of brick and steel. The vistas were vertical, the scenes served in slices, snatches, and I was ecstatic and proud that Emma responded to it just the way I'd hoped. I hadn't even known how important it had been to me. At Armitage, the train slid underground like a hand under a skirt and there was nothing more to be seen. Talking was impossible in the roar of the subway tunnel and the windows became black mirrors. I saw our reflections, me and this young girl, and I 281

wondered just what hope did we have? Once the novelty wore off, what hope did we have? But on State Street the store windows took her attention and that was a relief. It was a relief to see Emma the consumer return, the critical eye. She was in her element here and this was a language she understood. I could just tell by her expression, she must have heard about the "downtown stores" and she looked at things as if she were in a foreign country, comparing the clothes to what she knew from her own shopping grounds. "What do you think?" I asked, waiting for her to catch up. She looked at me but withheld comment, knowing I wouldn't understand. "Where do we go from here?" "Number twenty-four bus takes us right to the museum. Over here." We heard the thunder and thought it was construction, turned a corner and ran into some street musicians—bucket drummers. Four black kids, ages maybe twelve to sixteen, drumming on overturned five-gallon plastic buckets, the kinds of things you get plaster and spackle in at building supply stores, and one old man in bum clothes who didn't quite look a part of them standing a few yards away playing an alto sax. The kids were fantastic. There was no other way to describe what they did. Three of them had buckets set on bricks like drum sets, the other two held them between their legs and danced and spun around, and they never stopped. They played ensemble and they played solo. They conversed, they argued back and forth. The rhythms were complex, multi-layered, shifting and impossible to pin down, dazzling, turning in upon

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themselves and then rising and rolling into rhythmic illusional tricks like flocks of pigeons in flight. They made you want to laugh out loud when you understood what they were doing. Meanwhile the old man's alto sax soared above the din or dipped down to deliver trenchant, loopy comments that made even the kids laugh. They were obviously ghetto kids, and where they learned this language was beyond me, but they were simply brilliant. The sound of the joyous thunder crashing down off the cold concrete towers had a weird, humanizing effect, like Carnivale come to the city. It was all just perfect. Emma grabbed my arm and stared. For the second time in two days she was getting an object lesson in what live music was supposed to be and taking it to heart. I stood there and enjoyed her enjoyment. There was a younger kid, maybe eleven, bopping around with a coffee can filled with change and some bills, shaking it like a tambourine, begging for change, and he came right up to Emma. She looked at him, bewildered, but so caught up in the joy of the music the kid must have seen something in her face, probably the same thing I always noticed as well, that openness, the emotion. I'd already reached in my pocket and peeled off a dollar and was peeling off another and would have given them more—was ready to give them more, that's how grateful I was—when he just stuck his fist in the can, ignoring the money I was pushing in. He pulled out a handful of silver and held it up for her and let the change just spill into her open hands like a gift from the lord of music, the dimes and nickels and pennies splashing into her hands and bouncing onto the sidewalk as he grinned from ear to ear.

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Emma stood there, dumbstruck, and I did too. Then the kid just turned and danced back to his friends, beating on his can with a stick. She looked at me and I shrugged. Our bus was coming. "I think he liked you," I said. I pulled her away and she stumbled after me, looking behind her, reluctant to go, confused. The kid waved at her, waved his stick. Another drummer waved, smiling. They all noticed her. We got on the bus and I found us a seat and pushed her in. "What was that, Conner? Why'd he give me money? That was so weird!" "You're charmed, Emma. Magical. I keep telling you and you don't believe me. We’re in erotic space here, Emma, and everyone recognizes you. You're a queen here and everyone knows you." **** By the time the bus let us off behind the museum, it was drizzling and not as auspicious as I would have liked. On one side, across Lake Shore Drive, the lake stretched out in an infinite gray haze, the sails of pleasure boats lost in the mist, and on the other, the towers of downtown disappeared into the low clouds. In front of us, the huge bulk of the back of the museum looked down on us in the neoclassical grandeur of another era, long, imposing rows of shallow stairs rising up to the entrance, a heavy roofline supported by enormous columns and the figures of giant women who appeared to be holding the huge mass over their heads. I led Emma around the side to the west doors where my pass got us admitted through an elegant little marble entrance near the private museum offices. I led her

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through some out-of-the-way routes, dark corridors and neglected galleries, the noise and buzz of the crowds getting steadily louder, until finally we stepped unexpectedly into the vast, dizzying space of the central hall. This was a place where worlds collided, where the bones of dinosaurs reared into the air next to thirty-foot-high tribal masks from New Guinea, beyond which was a pair of preserved African bull elephants locked in combat, totem poles from the Pacific Northwest, Incan Gold from the Peruvian Andes cascading in a two-story display, upended Maori war canoes, and a massive stand of 150 million year-old tree trunks dug out of the earth in the process of being turned into coal. And around this collection of impossibilities, smaller exhibits, kiosks, directories, crowds of prehistoric birds, tours forming, and a swirling, buzzing sea of people— somewhere between a crowd, a mob and an audience—looking, touching, feeling, running back and forth. Coming from the shadows, it was like stepping into a circus. We'd arrived. "Wow. What are we going to see, teacher?" "I'm not sure, Emma. Come on. I'll show you around. I'm sure it'll come to me." All along I'd been wondering why I'd brought her down here. I knew it was important. It was part of the pilgrimage, just like the Blue Moon had been, but this was different. This wasn't a piece of my life like the Moon was. This was more like a religion, like taking her to church, and now, standing in the main gallery, I thought I understood why I'd brought her down here.

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Emma and I were connected by this little sexual link, this thing we did together that seemed so trivial to her, silly almost. I'd brought her down to the most serious place I knew to show her it wasn't silly. I was going to show this little girl with the whipped ass that what we did together was every bit as serious as these dinosaur bones and the cycads turning into coal and the rise and fall of civilizations and even the evolution of life itself, because somehow, in my mind, it was. I was going to show her that the things she made me feel when she gave herself to me the way she did, were every bit as important as comets in space and the raising of the pyramids. How I was going to show her this, I didn't know. It was just something I felt, and I felt it strongly. "Come on," I said. "We have a lot to see." I won't take you through the whole tour. I won't take you through all the dark and shadowy galleries, down the marble stairs, and let the museum's atmosphere of eternity filter down upon you. We grew quiet and we grew close. Even the young kids there succumbed to the feeling of quiet and awe as they walked through the galleries and shifted back in time. There was so much death, so much solemnity, so much preserved behind glass, so many stories that weren't told any more. Walking up on the second floor among the crowds of people who weren't there, we walked on invisible floors in a time before the earth existed. There were pictures and film clips and diagrams, abstracts and models in forms the human eye could comprehend, distances unimaginable, stars accreting from clouds of gas, atoms forming from boiling clouds of plasma, dust, particles, impossible concatenations of events, coincidences, inconceivable rivers of time.

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I held her hand and felt the warmth of her skin as we were blown up from winds of chaos and our planet took form beneath our feet, and at last we stepped from behind some cosmic curtain into a dramatic exhibit where, in darkness, the fragile elements of life shyly took form and I could feel Emma actually rooting for them, just as I did, just as we all did, praying for the blind little nucleic acids to assemble, to push back the night, to find their partners and grow. And they did, through billions of years of slimes and soups and missteps until finally, when you got to the first basic blind, bald and hungry primitive little cells, it was such a relief you wanted to laugh out loud and weep for joy. Life! Life! And then came sex and things started happening fast. I took her hand again and we stepped into the next room. Here was an explosion now as the seas were abloom in an obscenity of living things fucking and eating each other, and sometimes doing both, the whole sea a great vast paradise-sewer-stewpot burning with hot energy and clouds of eggs and semen. We stepped into an environment set beneath the Ordovician sea where creatures lived and died in an unconscious imperative without head or hand and nature feverishly threw one outlandish design after another into the mix. You could almost feel the heat of creation, the feverish hurry. And then the vertebrates—spinal cords appeared, and bones, and heads, and something like faces, and we were seeing things we almost recognized. It was strange, this exhibit, our excitement—what was it?—it was like something personal. We were caught up in it. It was like being in a foreign country for too long and finally hearing your own language spoken, seeing these cold, stupid fish faces, and the dead eyes of lizards hauling themselves onto the land.

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Emma pushed up behind me, staring over my shoulder into the cases, peering through magnifiers at tiny fossils, her warm, motherly breast pressing against me through her raincoat. I wanted to squeeze her. I was horny. I wanted her, and when she looked at me, her face was flushed too. There were extinctions, huge and cataclysmic, like the fall of nature's guillotine, cleaning the slate and wiping everything clean. I'd noticed them as we walked through the exhibition but hadn't told her. I knew she'd be upset and she was now. She took them personally. Seventy-five, eighty percent of all species wiped out. She was horrified. It happened again and again. She wanted to complain, as if the museum staff could do something about them. But by then, we were in the dinosaur gallery with hundreds of excited kids and I took her hand and led her out. We'd seen enough, and besides, the point had been made. I'd wanted to show her where we'd come from, where those beautiful tits and legs and ass and pussy had come from, where our minds had come from. How extraordinary we were. How amazing it was that, at some point in all that time, the universe had created a miracle that had sat up and noticed itself, and we were those miracles. I don't know how successful I'd been. It's a hard thing to make someone see the miraculous when they've been seeing it every day. But that was my job. "Am I supposed to be getting horny or something, Conner? Because I'm not."

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We were out on the concourse on the second floor. I led her over to the rail where we could look down on the crowd below. Two giant figures—Wisdom and Knowledge— guarded the south end of the gallery. "No, I didn't expect you to get horny." "Are you going to make me take my clothes off?" I smiled. "Should I?" "Then what's the point?" "The point. That it was a long time, I guess. And complicated. And terrifying. And yet it happened, and look how it turned out. With you and me standing here today." She thought about that and said, "We could have gone to the movies, Conner." Emma turned and looked down at all the people. "It is amazing, though," she said. "To think that of all the people in the world, or in the city, we would have ended up together, you and I. What are the odds?" She turned to me. "Do you believe in fate?" "No." "Then how do you explain it?" I laughed. "If I weren't here with you, I'd probably be here with someone else. The same is true for you, and for all these people. Don't kid yourself, Emma. We've just been given a gift is all. We lucked out." She stared down at the crowds for a moment and then looked at me. "That's a shitty thing to say. Are you saying I don't mean anything to you?" 289

"No. That's not at all what I'm saying, baby. I love you, Emma. But do I think we were brought together by fate? No. What if you hadn't signed up for my class that day? You see that girl down there by the elephant? Maybe she would have. Maybe I'd be here with her today and you'd be off with someone else. Life is full of close calls and weird coincidences, Emma, and the best we can hope for is that we end up with someone worth being with, because in the end, we only really exist in our lovers' regard." "What? What does that mean?" "It means that when all is said and done, you’d better be loved by someone who thinks very well of you, because they make you what you are, and they become the way you see the world. You want someone who holds you highly in their regard, because that's all you have. What you think of yourself doesn't really matter when you have something like that." Emma was staring down at the girl by the elephants. She was quite lovely, really, with long red hair and fashionably dressed. "Do you hold me in high regard?" "Yes, Emma. I hold you in very high regard. Very high. And you know that, and that's why you put up with me and do all those crazy things I ask you to do." I put out my hand and caressed her beautiful face and I was really moved, because I think for once she realized how fragile it all is, how easy it is to lose, or to miss altogether.

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"I hold you in high regard too, Conner. You know that, don't you? God, I really do!" She put her arms around me and squeezed and I felt her arms shaking she held me so tight. People walked by and looked at us but we didn't even notice because we were on erotic time and they were just shadows. "I want so much to be what you want!" "You are what I want, Emma. You're exactly what I want." But she looked away and I knew she still didn't believe it. **** We went downstairs then, into the Egyptian gallery, and quickly slipped back into that time, three thousand years ago. It was impossible not to be moved by the things we saw, the signs of the people's humanity, their combs and make-up boxes, their jewelry and prayers for love, the cups these people drank from. In a case against the wall stood the mummies of their bodies and the bodies of their children, even their pets. And here sat their gods regarding them. I didn't say much. I just let her look. She held my hand or peered over my shoulder into the cases. Sometimes her hand went to the buttons on her blouse and she played with them absent-mindedly or she stroked her hair, and though there were people all around us, walking past and glancing at what we were looking at, we were all alone, alone in our regard for one another, alone as student and teacher. I knew she understood what I was showing her and I knew she understood perfectly. We were alone in erotic space.

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We took a break and I led her out into the hallway, to the bathrooms. "Do you have any money? "Some. Yes, why?" "Give it to me." She reached into her pocket and gave me some bills. "No, go inside and take off your underwear, precious. Bra and panties. Come out and show them to me." "Conner…!" She looked like she was going to say more, but by now I think she was getting used to me and learning I told her things for a reason. Or maybe she was getting used to following orders, or maybe she was just tired. Museums are emotionally exhausting. In any case, it was taking her money that did it, making it impossible for her to get home on her own. She had to do as I said and she didn't like being blackmailed. She leaned against the door of the ladies' room and then pushed it open with her back, went inside. I sat down on the bench and waited. People came and went. They were invisible to me. I waited. "Did you do it?" She reached in her pocket and showed me her bra. I could already tell she'd done it though. She stood differently, more erect, more conscious of her body. "Panties too?" She nodded.

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"Good. Then let's go." She excited me now. Just the knowledge that she was naked and available under her clothes made all the difference in the world. Strangely, it made her aloof. She no longer stood so close, as if my touch had become dangerous. Towards the end of the Egyptian gallery, we came across an exhibit on their religion, and Emma seemed fascinated. I said, "Women are the source of all magical power but they can't use it by themselves. They need men to help them make use of it. And men are great at using it, but we can't get to it on our own. We need women for that. That's the way it always is, Emma. We need each other." She looked at me and smiled. "You're just trying to get in my pants." I nodded. "Well sure. There's always that too. But it's true, baby. That's how it works. You have these feelings inside and you don't know what to do with them. You bring them to me and I do all these terrible things to you and get you excited and that excites me, and we build up a feedback from there. Isn't that how it goes, Emma?" She ignored me, looking at the exhibit, so I took her arm. "Come on, love. Now I've got something special to show you. Something most people don't get to see." From down in the basement we had to go to up to the second floor, and from there I led her to a doorway by a stairwell. I used my pass, the electronic lock opened, and we stepped into a corridor lined with old offices, unchanged from when the museum was built. Just like that we were behind the scenes, back where the curators and

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conservators worked, a place where the specimens and exhibits were prepared and cataloged. "Conner!" Emma whispered. "Are we supposed to be here?" "Sure. I work here. This way." I led her down some more stairs, to a shipping room where I used my pass to call the elevator. We got on and headed down. Emma was nervous. Her nipples were showing clearly beneath her blouse. "Where are we going?" "Where the gods go to die, lover. Where we all go when you women don't love us. When you don't give us everything you possibly can." The elevator bumped to a stop and the doors opened with a snarling sound onto utter darkness and the smell of dust and disuse. We got out and I found the lights, snapped them on, and banks of fluorescents blinked on, marching off into the distance. We were in a vast, windowless warehouse lined with row upon row of identical giant steel filing cabinets, running almost the entire length of the museum. "This is the museum's out-of-collection collection," I said. "These are pieces that have been taken out of the regular collection because they're no good any more. Poor quality or falling apart and past preserving or one thing or another. They've been retired, so to speak. Come over here. Look." "What is that?" Up against one of the banks of cabinets a kind of ancient sculpture—a column of marble about four feet high with a man's head carved into the top, badly decomposed 294

but clearly classical Greek, and about a foot below the head, mounted on the column and standing straight out, was an erect phallus. That was all. A head and a dick on a column of marble. I let her look. I watched her face, trying to imagine her coming upon it alone in the wilds in the Greek countryside maybe 2,200 years ago. "It's called a herm," I said. "The ancient Greeks used them as boundary markers to mark the edges of their property, or their city-states, where the civilized world ended and the wilds began. That's the head of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, the god of thieves and tricksters. Also the god of boundaries and edges, where the unknown begins. That other thing is just what you think it is. A cock. A hard-on. An excited male organ. There's a lot of wise-asses who work at the museum. The herm was being retired, so someone probably just left it out here, outside the out-of-collection stuff as a joke: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.' It's kind of a mess in there." "But what's it mean? Why does is he…like that?" "You tell me, precious. Why would the Greeks mark the beginning of the unknown with an erect cock? Hm? What do you think they were trying to tell us? It's kind of interesting, isn't it?" I smiled at her. "What would you have chosen, Emma? A skull and crossbones, huh?" I led her past the herm and down one of the aisles, through the giant cabinets towering over us like cliffs, over the old wooden floors, back away from the elevator, back into the darkness. I didn't bother turning on any more lights. I wanted it dark.

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"This is creepy, Conner. This is like the place where people get killed in monster movies. So what am I supposed to see here?" Way towards the back was a break in the solid wall of cabinets where several had been removed to form a work space, a few tables and chairs and rolling work lights, some carts and supplies for sorting and labeling. There were some boxes and packing and all around stood figures of Egyptian gods and goddesses, some recognizable, some not. I'd left them there weeks ago when I'd volunteered to box up the McCutcheon collection for storage, an indifferent amateur collection donated to the museum wrapped in newspaper and stuffed into shoeboxes. I sat down in one of the chairs. "This is my little army of Gods," I said. "No one worships them anymore, but at one time they did. At one time, the universe was full of their energy. It came in two kinds, male and female, and people who had it were considered very special. A lot of them were priests and priestesses and they lived in temples and talked to the gods because this energy they had was a gift from the gods. When they felt it, people figured they weren't generating it inside, but feeling it from the outside, like they had a special kind of sight or sense. Like they could see something no one else could see. I've been teasing you on the trip down here, telling you we were in erotic time and space, but that's really an old pagan idea, that there's another world we're in that some people can see." "Uh huh. And where are we going with this, Conner?" "I'm trying to show you something, Emma. I'm trying to explain something to you. I told you before that women are the source of this energy that men need, but they can't do anything with it. They can't use it without a man's help. And a man—" 296

She sat down. "Can't we talk about this outside? This place is getting to me." I didn't say anything. We could hear the sounds of the museum faintly from outside. Emma slumped in her chair and looked at me. She jammed her hands into her pockets. "Stand up," I said. "Conner," she began wearily. "Stand up, Emma. Take your coat off." "Someone could come in—" "I don't care what someone could do. If you don't want to talk about it, then we'll get right on with the object lesson. Now stand up and take your goddamned coat off, Emma." I reached back and turned off the overhead fluorescents so the only light was what reached us from the elevator area, the lurid red light from the emergency exit sign over the door at the end of the aisle. The little figurines cast long shadows. Emma stayed in her chair. I didn't hesitate. I got up from my chair and crossed the distance between us in two steps, grabbed her coat and pulled her to her feet so quickly she gave a little bark of fear. I held her in one hand and spun her around and backed her against a cabinet. "What do you think this is, Emma? What's this little game now? Did I just tell you to do something?"

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She grabbed at my hand. "Conner! What's wrong? What did I do? Why are you like this?" "I just told you to do something. I didn't tell you to sit there and think about it." Her eyes searched my face and I dared her. I dared her to keep on looking at me. "Sometimes you forget who I am, Emma. I'm the one who knows you, remember? I'm the one who knows who you are, and you need me just as much as I need you, because without me, you can't do anything with it, Emma. Without me, you just ache and ache. You need me to get it out of you, baby, don't you? I'm the one who knows where it is and knows how to get it out, so you need me. You should remember that.” She dropped her eyes and I held her for a moment longer, then I let go. "Now take off your fucking coat." She stripped it off and threw it on the table and stood before me like a chastened schoolgirl. Because she wasn't wearing any underwear, her nipples were plainly visible all the way down to the puffy areolas, and the way she stood with her arms at her sides and her shoulders just slightly back strongly suggested she was already offering herself. The entire scene was like some weird pagan sacrifice. "I was telling you Emma—I was trying to tell you, but I don't think it matters now—how women and men work together, males and females, because I know what you're wondering. You're wondering whether it's worth it, whether this thing you do, the way you are, whether it's really shameful or not. Whether I just lead you on and use you,

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take advantage of you. Well yes. I use you and I take advantage of you, and that's just the way it works. That's just how it's supposed to work. You have something I need, and you can't use what you have unless I make you, see? That's the way it's done. That's the way it's always been." I took her arm and pulled her towards me, my hand closing on her breast, soft and warm beneath her blouse. I brought her close so my forehead touched hers and my lips were near hers and I said, "We're safe here. No one's going to come in. I'm going to show you." "Oh Conner, please! I'm scared here." "Shhh. No. This is perfect. I hadn't even thought of this place, but it's perfect!" I kissed her, open mouthed, my tongue flashing inside her cheek and Emma jumped as if I'd shocked her, but my hand massaged her breast, and as I massaged her breast, I felt my strength come to me, my certainty of who I was. The feel of her body made me real and made me know who I was, and I was with her who I always was. I knew all that just from feeling her. I still held her arm, afraid if I let her go, she might run, but I knew exactly who we were now. "That Herm I showed you? In Greece, they said virgins would go out at night and make love to them, make love to the god and give him their virginity—" "Oh Conner! No!" "Shhh! We're not going to do that, Emma. I'm not going to make you fuck a statue. I'm going to be your herm. I'm going to be your god. You're going to make love to me!"

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"Oh God!" I laughed. "That's right, baby." I pushed her back against the cabinets and started unbuttoning her shirt as I kissed and bit her throat, my cock hardening in my pants. Emma turned her head to the side as if trying to deny what I'd said, but her nipples were hard and growing harder, and she couldn't resist my mouth and hands upon her. I knew her too well, knew how she liked to be sucked and bitten, but even more than that, I knew what turned her on. I knew how her mind worked and what excited her, and despite what she said, she loved it when I got an idea in my head. She loved it when I had plans for her. It was just like I'd been trying to tell her—she walked around with all this free floating erotic energy, but she needed me to help her grab it, to filter it through my own wicked imagination and concentrate it into something hot and dirty she could feed on, something that burned with a jewel-like flame. Even in that weird environment, down in the depths of the natural history museum, surrounded by those dead and decaying gods from eons and eons ago, she couldn't resist. In my excitement, I threw her skirt up so fast it ballooned up and parachuted down over my wrist as I reached for her. In the little interval, I'd gotten a glimpse of her total nakedness and God, that got me hot. It was an even bigger thrill to touch her and find nothing but smooth, warm skin under her skirt and think about her walking around with the air caressing her unprotected sex, her legs, the tops of her thighs, the crack of her ass. Suddenly it seemed so appropriate, what we were going to do. It was a kind of

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sacrifice, a religious rite, and maybe that's why I'd come down here. I slid my fingers along her pussy and she gasped. I felt her moisture gather between her lips. She never let me down. Touch her, she responded. "Conner, don't—" She tried to lean away from me but I held her arm. I stroked her under her skirt. "Emma, you've got to let go. You can do this, baby. I know you can. It's just going to be a simple demonstration of how this works." "What works, Conner? What? What are you talking about?" I knew she was going to start thinking I was nuts. Everything was a demonstration, a lesson, but it wasn't like that. It was just love the girl, that's all it was. Just love her and make her aware of all the love means, that's all it was. I continued stroking her, holding her arm, my fingers working in her slit, my thumb brushing her clit. If I closed my eyes, I could be her and feel myself being held and touched. I knew what it was like to be touched like this—I don't know how, but through Emma, I knew, I felt it through her. She was getting wet now, flooding with moisture. I felt her softness like the ghost of my hardness. I knew her. She was me, my echo, my compliment, I ached for her. "Shhh, Emma, shhh. Just come here. Just let it go, baby. Be the way you are with me. You know how I love you. That goddess inside you, Emma. You know what I mean." "Oh God," she moaned.

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She threw herself back against the cabinet as if trying to escape, trying to deny me, but she couldn't deny what I was doing to her body—the fire was already on her. When I bent to kiss her, she turned her head away, so I sucked her breasts instead, and when I finished with her tits, I went back to her mouth. This time she was ready for me, reaching for me, needing me. Her mouth was a hungry flower waiting for her bee, and she seized me, mixing her hot breath in my mouth, panting like a little bellows, fanning my desire and igniting her own. Her chest heaved and the fire of her passion came down upon her just like that, like a dam had broken, the waters gushing forth. I felt it. I felt her go. One minute she was fighting me, trying to hold on to her selfpossession, biting at me to keep me away, and the next she was mine, a victim of her own wild passion, her mouth sucking me in, offering her breasts to me, spreading her legs and pushing her hips out, biting me again—not to keep me away now, but with feral excitement, whining and squealing as I kissed her mouth and her nipples and massaged her clit. "Conner, don't make me, don't make me! Conner, don't make me! Please don't make me…" She chanted it over and over in a mindless, breathless litany as I kissed her and played with her and her juice ran hot into my hand and she squeezed me between trembling thighs. I had no rope to bind her but she'd learned her lessons by now and she knew not to touch me. Her hands were balled into fists at her side as I held her and loomed over her and played her like an instrument, driving her on beyond her capacity to endure. "Yes, Emma! That's it. Get it, precious, find it for me! This is where we want you, you beauty, you goddess. Right here! Right here, baby! Now give it to me, Emma! Show

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it to me. Let me see you, baby, all of you, everything you are, Emma, every fucking thing you are, slut…" And I knew—this is what she wanted and didn't want, this is what she needed me for, to push her up and over, to make her get it and push her out of herself and love her enough to do this to her. It was just like I told her, she couldn't do this herself and neither could I. We needed each other. "God! Conner—!" She broke just like that, like a stick, like a bottle. She broke and it all came pouring out and I held her as she came but I didn't give her much time. I didn't take all of it, just fast, just enough. I just wanted to prime her. Even as she was shaking from orgasm, I was yanking at my belt and pushing my pants down, pulling her over to the chair. "Come on now, Emma. I'm going to show you something dirty. I'm going to show you something so fucking filthy…" It was garish down there in the red light. It was perfect. I sat in the chair with my cock standing straight up and I pulled her over. She was stumbling and shaking, completely disoriented, but I finally got her in position between my legs, facing away from me and I helped her push her dress up and made her hold it around her waist. "What—? What are you doing?" "I told you, baby. Like the virgins and the Herm. You'd going to fuck me. You're going to get me off, Emma. You're going to do me, baby. I'm going to show you your power. Your goddess power."

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"Conner… What—?" I got her in position and slid my ass forward in the chair, then I held onto her, one hand on her hip, the other on the bottom of her ass, and I pulled her down ‘til her pussy just touched the tip of my cock. "Ooooh!" "Hold onto the arms of the chair!" I snarled. "Hold on, Emma! I don't want you to fuck me! Just take the tip, understand? Just the head! Oh Jesus! Christ, Emma! Are you listening to me?" I didn't think so, because she was holding her skirt knotted around her waist like she was wading into deep water, sticking her backside out and trying to sink onto my prick and that wasn't what I wanted. I slapped her ass and lifted her up and made her lean forward so I could see the dark trench of her cunt. "Only the tip, understand? Just the tip, Emma! Just barely take me inside you. This is Orpheus in the underworld, the power of your pussy. Make me come, goddess!" "Oh God, I can't! It's too good, Conner!" "Tease me, bitch! Make your master suffer!" Emma wiggled her hips. She reached out and gripped the edge of the table, looking over her shoulder at me and repositioned herself, then slowly lowered her ass. I held her buttocks apart so I could see her use the dome of my prick to split herself, her wet inside gliding over the glans. She managed to hold herself there, right there. "Oh Christ, Conner!"

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"Yeah! Like that, baby! Just like that! Now up! Up!" She rocked forward, pulling herself off me and her pussy closed like a purse, the walls sliding off the head of my cock. It was incredibly arousing. "Oh, baby! It feels so dirty, Conner! Is that what you want? You want to make me feel dirty?" "Yes, you bitch! That's exactly what I want. I want you to be my filthy dirty whore, Emma! Just for me, baby! Do it for me! Show me what a slut you are. Show me!" I slapped her ass and she groaned with obsequious pleasure. She bit her lip, held on to her skirt and dipped down, taking the head of my cock inside her again and gasping with pleasure. She worked her hips around in a tight, hungry circle and squeezed me, then rode up again, and my eyes just about rolled back in my head with ecstasy. "That's it, baby! That's it! Just like that! Now more, Emma! More!" She put her hands on her knees and lowered herself again and let me penetrate her just that much, then raised herself up again, then repeated and repeated ‘til she had a steady, rocking motion going, her ass bobbing gently. The strain on her thighs must have been terrific, but once Emma knew what I wanted, she was like a possessed woman. It was all she wanted too. I kept her skirt pushed up to the small of her back so I could watch the sight of my cock head disappearing into her, and meanwhile Emma was moaning, chanting, her teeth chattering as she caressed herself, running her hands over her hair, her breasts, down her body, her things—"Is it good, baby? You like your whore now? You like me

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like this? You like me when I'm your whore, your slut, your bitch? You like seeing me take you, Conner?" This is what I wanted from her and this was what I was trying to show her— having her wallow in her sexuality, having her claim it with both hands, acknowledge and use it and call it her own, and never be ashamed of it again. That's what I felt in the basement of that museum under the eyes of all those decaying little gods and goddesses—the power of a man and the power of a woman united in love and sexual savagery. "Oh Conner! I can't! My legs—! I can't do this anymore!" "Then do it to me!" I said. "Come on, baby. Fuck me! Do it!" Emma straightened up and leaned against me but I'd already passed my arm around her waist and half-risen out of my chair in my excitement, thrusting my hips up and impaling her on my cock, shoving all the way into her. She threw her head back and wailed with satisfaction, thrilled to be so taken after all that teasing. I sat back down on the chair and she hooked her feet around the legs, using the leverage to grind herself down upon me, crushing me into the seat with the strength of her legs as she braced her arms against the arms of the chair and pushed back against me. She was hot inside and deep, tight on me, and she sucked hard with currents she didn't control. "Jesus, Emma! God, yes!" I grabbed her tits to hold her against me, her flesh bulging through my fingers. She covered my hands with hers and squeezed until it had to hurt, forcing my fingers into her breasts, but it only seemed to excite her. She squeezed me possessively inside

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her, making me groan against her back. I already felt spent, overstimulated by the headfucking she'd given me. Though my prick was aching for release, Emma seemed to have just found her wind, and no sooner had she gotten settled than she gave a wicked little snarl and started fucking me, using her legs and smooth rolls of stomach muscles to lift and slide her hips in a quick and belly dance, working me inside her. I held onto her tits and pressed my face against her shoulders as she threw her head back in savage joy, determined to show me what she could do. It was hard—her cunt was sucking at me like a vacuum, massaging me, her tight vaginal sphincters pulling at my stalk like a peristaltic pump, and she was doing it entirely on purpose, getting her revenge, giving me a lesson in how a woman fucks. "Christ, baby! I'm going to come!" "Come on, Conner! Shoot it in me! Give it to me, baby! Give it all to me!" I grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, frantic to kiss her but I couldn't reach her face. She was bouncing on me, just bouncing up and down, her hands on the arms of the chair, her ass slapping against me, tits flopping, all sense of decency and decorum gone, nothing but an animal out to milk her mate and take his seed inside her—savage, biological, beyond affection. I reached around and found her pussy and slapped her, making her grunt like an animal; slapped her again and made her cry out; started slapping her steady, as fast as she was bouncing on me and Emma wailed, throwing her head back.

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"Oh yes! Beat me! Slap my dirty clit! Make me come, Conner! Make your whore come for you, baby! She wants to come, you know she does! Make her give it to you. Hit her, Conner! Hit her! Hit— Oh God! Oh God! Oh Conner! Oh God! Oh God! Ohhhhh…" And they were looking at us, all the little gods, shocked, stunned to see these humans fucking with the passion of animals three thousand years into their future—the man in the chair with his pants around his ankles, the woman half-naked, bouncing on top of him—looking at us as I began to fuck up into her, fuck up into her hot cunt, almost lifting her off me, holding her down with my hand in her pussy and shove-fucking up into her until I did lift her off me. I braced my arm against the arm of the chair and levered both of us up, slamming into her with the hard flexing of my ass and thighs and belly. Emma started losing it, falling all over me like a rider on a mechanical bull and I had to grab her around the waist and hold her against me as I fucked her hard, violently, wanting to do her beautiful damage. I heard her cry out that she was coming and I knew I was too, but all I remember was slamming into her and slamming into her as if I could some how force us together by sheer power of will and not thinking anything, being totally clean of thoughts. All I was, was sensation and the sensation was entirely her. "Oh God, Conner I—" "Yes! " "Conner I—"

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"Yes!" "I—" "Fuck, Emma, yes! " There should be a big detailed description of my climax here, and hers, but I don't really remember. I was too far gone, too exhausted, and the next thing I can really recall is Emma’s hands over my head, clinging to my neck as she gasped for breath, and then sliding off me and falling to the floor, her arms still around my neck, and me bending to grab her, pulling her up. There hadn't been such passion in that place ever, I don't think—such roaring of hearts and rushing of blood through tattered bloodstreams, such gushing of hormones and dripping of salacious fluids onto the board floors marked with the dust of these decomposing figurines. Thoth, Best, Anubis, Ishtar, Inanna, the gods themselves were born out of feelings like these and it was sad they couldn't have all stood up and applauded. It was sad they couldn't have all stood up and given us high fives or whatever they did because I know they would have. Out of the raggedness and shadows of human existence and the chaos of this world and the uncertainty of the next, to dwell on the edge of passion like that, connect with a woman like that, know the difference between the both of you and overcome it with that filthy fucking joy is surely something the gods would take notice of. It's surely something they'd understand. As it was, I know they must have approved. I know they must have sucked up our energy and blossomed forth with their own energies in a way they hadn't in some

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three thousand years. On that day from the basement of the museum, a burst of energy went out over the city, filling the skies and the clouds and the streets and the entire city with a rare and powerful beauty the likes of which the world hadn't seen in eons, a brilliant erotic energy picked up from what an oversexed orgasmic girl and her perverted poet lover did in the basement of the museum, the sheer savage power of our raw and joyous, marvelous human loving, filthy holy fucking. **** I waited for Emma outside the ladies' room, looking at some of the museum's meteorites. One meteorite had fallen from the sky in February of 1939 and plunged through the roof of a house in Joliet, Illinois, striking the thigh of a Mrs. Margaret McWilly as she was taking a nap on the downstairs sofa at four p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. There was a photo of Mrs. McWilly's bruise and a photo of the damage the meteor had done to the roof of her home. There was another photo of the hole it had burned into her sofa after it hit her. Burned, because it had been fiery hot. I thought of that meteor hitting her and Mrs. McWilly crying out, then the meteor rolling off her and burning its way into the sofa like a spent lover who was just too hot to quit. Strange to think of a chunk of rock drifting for millions of miles in interplanetary space for God knows how many eons and then falling through the atmosphere, falling through your roof and hitting your wife on the thigh as she naps on the couch. Why was she sleeping at four p.m.? When Emma came out of the ladies' room, she'd changed. Her face had changed and the look in her eye, the way she moved and carried herself, the way she 310

walked. She looked calmer, and at peace, as if some war within her had stopped. She'd put her hair up and washed her face and she looked younger. She looked new. She came over and we sat on a bench and she asked, "Conner, do you love me?" I watched her as she sat down. "In all the ways there are, Emma, yes I do. I love you" We sat there and I put my arm around her and noticed she hadn't put her underwear back on. I guess she was getting used to it or learning to like it. She leaned against me and I felt her relax. I felt her relax just totally. We watched the people for a while, all the people we might have been, and then she said, "Let's go home." **** The bucket drummers were gone from the plaza in the loop, and in fact the whole of downtown seemed strangely deserted for a weekday before rush hour. It had the feel of a resort town at end of season. The overcast had burned off and the sky was high and blue, with tall white clouds sailing in from the lake, and Emma put her raincoat on. She was still naked beneath her clothes and seemed to have adjusted to it. The late afternoon shadows were deep and satisfied, as if they relished their jobs. Why not? In the Realm of the Erotic, shadows have wonderful things to do. We descended to the subway and caught the train going north. It was crowded, so I steered Emma to the front of the car and we stood facing each other, inches apart, our hands touching on the pole. The train took off and we roared through the dark

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tunnel, the car rocking and lurching, and I watched her eyes as they moved around the car, touching on the different people, the windows, me. A station—the vertical doors slid open. People got off, people got on, the doors closed and the train started up again, hurtling through the dark, our bodies swaying. Emma's eyes fixed on a map of the subway system, and in the double reflection in the dark windows, I could see the map superimposed on her body, the tangled and intertwined lines tracing over her breasts and her heart and face and stomach. I wondered if she caught this image too and made a note to tell her about it. The car took a jolt and my arm swung and slapped softly against her thigh, and then again. She didn't look at me. I left my hand there, touching her leg. We were so close no one would notice, and her rain coat shielded us. Another stop and more people got on and off, and when the train started up again I started to caress her, moving my hand back and forth on the inside of her leg. Emma said nothing, gave no sign. By moving to my left slightly, I was able to shield her from the closest passenger, so I did. I held onto the pole with one hand while I continued to move the back of my hand on the inside of her thigh, feeling her warmth through her skirt. Emma knew what I was doing but made no move to stop me. She was just there for me now. She seemed to be ready for whatever I wanted. She held onto the pole and stared over my shoulder, her face impassive. I delicately took her skirt and started lifting it using just the one hand, my other on the pole. I lifted it until the hem was just high enough to get my fingers under, and then I

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let it fall over my wrist and I was in, like a spy inside the enemy's tent, my fingers pressed against her naked thigh. The train rumbled along, the noise deafening. People jostled against us shoulder to shoulder but to anyone looking at our faces, Emma and I might be perfect strangers. I doubt they would have seen the slight flare of her nostrils signaling the moment when my middle finger slid against the lips of her pussy. What a good girl she was now, though, I thought! How much she'd learned and how much she knew. She held onto the pole and studied the subway map. Her nipples jiggled beneath her blouse as the train shook and jounced, but she gave no outward sign of what I was doing as I began to fondle her, masturbating her right in that crowd of people. Someone bumped into her and murmured a quick, "pardon me." She flashed him a polite acknowledgement then looked quickly at me to make sure the link hadn't been broken, dropping her eyes and biting her lip, resting her head against the pole as I continued playing with her. She didn't challenge me, didn't ask me what I was doing or why, didn't tell me to stop. We were beyond that now. We'd left all that at the museum. I moved closer to her and began to masturbate her there in the El car, standing amidst all those people. Because I couldn't see what I was doing, my fingers became my eyes and I felt my way around her. I felt the moisture gathering and I spread it over her, buttering her with her own juice, opening her up, handling her like a handful of pearls. The people around us had their backs to us and so no one saw my hand beneath her skirt and Emma kept her eyes down, not looking at me. She leaned towards me though, and I 313

could hear her soft little moans as I slid my finger along her slit, or penetrated her, or tapped her clit. I could see her knuckles getting white as she held the pole, and feel her nipples pressing into me as she leaned against me, hungry for the reassuring hardness of my body. "Conner!" she whispered as the train made a stop. "Conner, I'm going to. I'm going to…" "All right, sugar. That's all right. Move back Emma, let's get against the wall." "No Conner, I can't. Not in public like this!" "You'll be fine, Emma. Just step back, baby. That's it. There you go…" I cleared us a path to the back wall of the car and turned her around so my back was to the wall with her facing me so I could keep an eye on the passengers. With her coat screening me, no one could see, and with no one facing her, Emma could let her face collapse into a look of expectant rapture as I went back to playing with her, my hand under her skirt. It was crazy, nuts, absolutely insane. We'd just screwed that morning, then again in the museum not an hour ago, and now here I was, doing it to her again on a crowded El car. What was with me? Why couldn't I leave this girl alone? I pulled her close as the train stopped again . We waited patiently as the people got off, the doors closed, the train started up again, and my hand reached up to the damp crease between her legs. "Oh, God…" Not a soul looked, not a person stirred, lost in their newspapers and thoughts they might as well have all been on another dimension. I pulled Emma over so she

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stood in the middle of the aisle, one hand on a pole on each side on the aisle, blocking it. Her coat hung open, totally screening me from sight, and behind its shelter I had my finger up inside her and was squeezing her breast, just openly mauling her, my hand pumping up and down as she hung from the poles as if being crucified, crucified by pleasure. I had the insane image I was driving the train, that Emma's body was the control panel and I was driving the train with my finger inside her and my thumb on her clit, my hand on her breast, stroking her face, running my thumb over her lips. She was in a trance, delirious with pleasure, the juice dripping in my hand. "Oh yes, Conner! Conner, yes! Conner, I'm coming! Baby, I'm coming!" No one even saw. No one even paid any attention. Suddenly the light was breaking through the gaps in the tunnel ceiling as the train started rising at Armitage and Emma let her head roll back and moaned. I felt her lose it into my hand, her sweet, hot orgasm, just as the roar of the train became a loud staccato clatter and we burst out into the sunlight and the raucous life of the city. Emma hung from the poles with her head back and I stood in front of her and milked the come from her body, looking down into that beautiful, giving face as she poured it out for me, let it go into my hand. "For you! For you, Conner!" "Oh Emma, Emma! I know! I know, baby!" I pulled my hand from her and held her shaking body, then pulled her over to an empty seat, pushed her in by the window and slid in after her, putting my arm around

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her and holding her close. She was gasping and panting and I turned to shelter her, holding her close. We didn't say anything. I just held her and held her as the train rose above the streets and up to elevated level. I gave her a kiss on the head and she snuggled back against me, satisfied and sleepy, but I couldn’t keep my hands off her. She just drove me crazy. In all my life I'd never come across anything like her—sexual, female, transparent, and sensitive to everything. She just gave and gave, and in giving she made a place for me, became a part of me. I still couldn't keep my hands off her. She had her coat in her lap and I slid my hand under it and found her pussy. I just put my hand on it like it was our treasure, our doorway into another world. I didn’t even have to stroke her or play with her anymore. It was like she was something entirely erotic now, as if she'd left this world and become something magical, a creature made entirely of love and sexual energy. I held my hand over her pussy and felt her throbbing. Maybe it was the train, but I swear, I felt her throbbing or humming with a kind of energy. She put her head against my shoulder and we started ahead with a little jerk. It was a sunny day and late in the afternoon. The city never looked better. The El rode along and we passed streets and alleys, schools and factories, empty lots and grocery stores, schools and warehouses. We passed by windows of apartments where we could see families inside sitting down to early suppers or kids doing homework or watching TV or—in one case—some kids in a rock band sitting around smoking dope.

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They laughed and waved at us and one gave us the finger. There were people climbing stairs or going out shopping, hanging out on the corners or working on cars. Emma seemed to glow as I held her with my hand between her legs, her head against my chest. She just gazed out the window with a smile on her face, taking it all in, completely relaxed and humming with a wondrous satisfaction, as if all the world was playing out for her now, as if it were all there for her to witness, a constant stream, an unending show, life forever, world without end. We rode past windows and we rode past rooftops, we rode past walls of brick and concrete and past giant neon signs. People flashed by the window and faces too, all smeared together and I sat with my arm around her and we just glowed. I couldn’t get over how beautiful she was, watching the world being beautiful. She made the world beautiful for me. Everything she saw was beautiful by virtue of her eyes seeing it, and the pleasure I found in her body was like the pleasure waiting out there. It was all connected, and I saw that now. The trip was over. When the train reached our station I was almost sorry. I could have ridden like that with her forever, I think. Instead I sat up, looked around and took her hand. "Emma. Come on, precious, let's go. We're here, baby. We're home."

The End

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ABOUT ELLIOTT MABEUSE Dr. Mabeuse is an award-winning author with four books published by Ellora's Cave, including Overcoming Abigail, nominated for a 2005 Cupid and Psyche Award for BDSM from the Romance Studio, and A Game of Dress-Up, winner of a 2006 EcataRomance Critic's Choice Award. He's also published with Renaissance, eXtasy, and makes his debut with Harlequin in May of this year. Links to his novels may be found on his webpage at and he maintains an open Yahoo group. He also publishes extensively at Literotica.com where he can often be found hanging around instead of writing. Write him at [email protected]. (NOTE: underscore between the 'r' and the 'M') He likes getting mail and does his best to answer.

Of his biography, Dr. Mabeuse says: "Everyone connects to the world in some way, and I seem to connect through sex. I'm drawn to the extreme and the extraordinary in all things, and I like to explore the farther edges of passion and desire in what I write. What interests me now is not so much the things people do, but how they feel about what they do— male and female dynamics, how we connect to ourselves and each other and to the world at large. I tend to be intense and my writing shows that, but I really value my sense of humor above all, and I expect it to sustain me should the fires of sexual passion ever burn out."

If you enjoyed A GOOD STUDENT, you might also enjoy:

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THE LOVE DOCTOR AND THE PHANTASM By Dr. Elliott Mabeuse In Renaissance Florence, the ripe and lovely Lady Elena Testarosa has been felled by a crude enchantment, compelled to offer her body and soul to the evil Antonio Castigliono as his love slave. Her family has one chance, to hire Griego Robinetti, the mysterious and roguish Love Doctor, to remove the spell. But to do this Robinetti will have to make her his own slave and set free her female Phantasm—the sexual beast that dwells within every woman—taking her to heights of love and depths of depraved debauchery such as no woman has ever known. Told with charm, wit, aching beauty and incandescent passion, The Love Doctor and the Phantasm is a costume drama of love, magic and sex like nothing you’ve ever read, told by Elliot Mabeuse, Doctor of Erotica. Warning: This book contains graphic language, sex and elements of bdsm.

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