Then suddenly he moved over my body, reaching in the drawer again. After a moment, I felt something different, something which I recognized instantly as a feather, caressing and playfully tickling the bottoms of my feet, my inner thighs, working right up over my clit, which still hummed from my first orgasm of the night.
“You trust me, right?” he murmured. “Right, Gracie?”
Deep breath. Did I trust him? Yeah. Of course, I did. I nodded.
“Say it.”
“I trust you, Gabriel.”
“Mean it.”
“I do,” I said quickly. “I do trust you. Of course I do.”
“Then confess to me—”
“What—” I stuttered. “What do you mean?” All at once, the fact that I couldn’t see him made me feel off balance. This idea of being captured, a concept I had explored in my head for years, took on a deeper meaning. I couldn’t see him with the blindfold in place. I couldn’t get free without his assistance. What expression was on his face? Precisely how intently was he staring at me?
“Now, tell me the secrets you’ve been keeping.”
My breath came faster now. I tested the binds with my wrists and my ankles, for some reason feeling intensely confined when before I’d only felt erotically captured. He brought that feather back into play, so that I was wildly squirming and laughing even as my mind scrambled desperately to figure out what he wanted me to say.
“I read your journal, Gracie,” he said—the one to actually confess—“so I know. I know all about it, baby. So now you tell me.”
Oh, Christ. Oh, Jesus. Oh,
fuck.
“I know what you think about when you take that naughty little hand of yours and bring it between your legs late at
night. I know you wait for me to fall asleep, listen for my breathing to go soft and heavy, and then the sticky sap starts to flow down your thighs as you crest the waves of those silent orgasms. I know everything. But I need you to tell me. I need to hear you say it.”
So he
did
know. Knew more than I was willing to tell even myself. That what I wanted was this. But more than this. Far beyond this. What I wanted was for him to take control. Total control. Not to ask me anymore if this was okay, or if that was okay, but to just do it. To do everything. To do whatever he wanted to with me. Using me. Taking me. Forcing me. No more nice and sweet and gentle lovemaking for his pretty girlfriend. But real and hard and fast and raw. And I understood even more than that: before he started, I had to say it all out loud. Creating truth from fantasy. Making it all real.
“Say it,” he insisted.
“I want—” but the words died right there.
“Say it, Gracie.”
“I want to be yours.”
“You are mine.”
“More than that.”
“Say it.”
“I want you to do things to me.”
He sighed. “Oh, yes, baby, I know.” My request unleashed a torrent from him. As if he’d been waiting forever for me to say the words that would set his own fantasies free. “You want me to fuck you hard. Isn’t that right? Harder than I do now. Harder than I’ve dared. You want me to take you doggy-style, my hand in your hair, holding you steady for my pace. You want me to slam you up against the wall and just fuck you, holding your wrists over your head, keeping you right where I want you. You want me to make you touch yourself when we’re caught in traffic, right there in the car, where everyone can see you, if they’d only look. You want to
have
to do what I tell you. Is that right? You want me to make you do things.”
I nodded.
“Is that right?” he said again, his voice more softly menacing than I’d ever heard it before.
“Yes, Sir,” I managed to respond. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“But what if you fail me?”
And now we were at the part of the fantasies that I’d written down quickly in my journal but refused to reread. The parts that gave me the most pleasure as well as the most shame.
“Then—” I started.
“Yes, Gracie? What, then?” His whisper was almost scaring me. A hiss. A demand for more information.
“Then I want you to punish me.”
“Punish you how?”
I couldn’t turn back now. I had it within my grasp to get everything I’d ever wanted. I had to come clean. I had to do exactly what Gabriel insisted. Confess. “I want you to spank me with your hand and your belt. With a Ping-Pong paddle. With whatever you need to use. A wooden spoon. A ruler. A hard-backed hairbrush. I want you to make my ass burn from the blows, and then I want you to stand me in the corner with my panties dangling around my ankles so I can think about how I might better please you in the future.”
“What else?” Gabriel asked me. “What else should I do to you if you disobey me?”
I took a deep breath. “I want you to call me names, to slap my face, to use clothespins on me.”
“Clothespins?”
“You know, on my nipples, and my pussy lips, and my clit—” Now, I was grateful for the blindfold, so I wouldn’t have to see the look on his face. Would he leave? Was he disgusted with me? “I want you to make me beg and—”
“And—”
“I want you to make me cry—”
“Oh, Gracie. Who would have thought? Who would have thought that my good girl could be such a bad girl at heart?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I didn’t have an answer for anything. I was waiting, my breath held, to see what he’d say next. To see how he’d deal with all I’d just confessed to. He’d read my fantasies, but could he handle them now that I’d said everything out loud? Now that I’d really come clean. Now that I’d confessed.
“Of course I will,” my good-guy boyfriend said. “Anything you need, baby,” my all-American man promised me. And I suddenly realized that maybe you don’t need to date a rough-and-tumble guy in order to find a Master. You only need a kindred spirit. That maybe Gabriel was looking the whole time for someone like me, a good sort of girl, fine and upstanding, sweet and even-tempered, who wanted only to serve and obey and be disciplined for failing her Master.
And so here I am, exactly where I always wanted to be, all tied down and nowhere to go….
Dinner at Eight
Marilyn Jaye Lewis
Tonight I’ll be at another dinner party with my husband on the Upper East Side. All of us dining in style together smug and safe, rich lousy white fucks. I’ll wear the black DKNY cocktail dress, the Gucci high heels. I am getting so fucking clichéd, even I can’t stand myself anymore. I need something concrete and decisive here, like a divorce. I need to do that. When am I going to get my shit together, exactly—when it hits the fan?
“Jesus,
Mami
, you amaze me,” he says, breaking in on my never-ending pseudo-psychotherapy pep talk. “You’re too much.”
It’s the wine that triggers this assessment of me again, my need to have a good bottle of red within arm’s reach whenever I’m getting ready to get screwed. And right now I’m taking a bottle of very decent ’94
Gran Reserva
out of my oversized shoulder bag. The bag that now feels considerably lighter, minus the bottle of imported Spanish wine. I’ve brought the right wine for the occasion once again, even though we’re in a very sleazy, pay-by-the-hour motel in some godforsaken
concrete hellhole corner of Brooklyn and it’s the middle of a bitingly cold December afternoon. There is
maybe
a trickle of heat in this room. I am so fucking freezing and in a matter of minutes, really, I’m going to be stark naked in here, all of my own volition.
“How are we supposed to open that?” he asks. “It has a cork.”
I retrieve the handy corkscrew from my bag. “This is how,” I say and I hand it to him. I’m smiling. I’m so fucking excited to be in this piece of shit room with him, alone. A roof and four walls all to ourselves for twenty-five dollars an hour. Hardly what you’d call paradise, but any place where I can get myself alone with him becomes paradise on some level. The fact that there’s even a bed in here, crummy as it looks, is just icing on the cake.
He hands the corkscrew back to me. “I’m not too good at this,” he explains. “You do it. I don’t drink much in the way of wines that have corks in them, you know that.”
I’m still smiling. Not in that patronizing way, I hope. Not that “isn’t it cute how he’s so coarse and from the street” way. I’m smiling because I love everything about him. It’s always so refreshing. He would never last a minute at one of our dinner parties. I’m not sure how much that matters to me in the long run. For now, it matters not one iota. I couldn’t care less if I attend one more stinking dinner party.
“How did you know about this place?” I ask, unscrewing the cork from the bottle.
“I grew up not far from here.”
“Here?” I’m shocked but I try to hide it. “You grew up around
here?
Was it always this horrible?” I backpedal a little. That sounded insulting. “I mean, with this elevated subway and all, it seems so dark. Even in the middle of the day.”
“It’s shitty, I know. But I grew up here. This is the old hood.” He examines the bed doubtfully before sitting down
on it. The blanket is full of stains but it looks washed, at least. He’s still dressed. “I always wondered what it was like in here, in this fuck-motel,” he says. “It’s been here since I was a little kid. For as long as I can remember, men were taking hookers in and out. It sucks in here, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not the most glamorous place we’ve ever come up with, but at least we can be together for an hour. Make love.”
He grins sheepishly. “You make love, Mami. I fuck.”
“Yes, you fuck,” I agree easily. “I know you fuck.” And it makes me so crazy when we fuck—and when we can’t fuck, I continue on in my head. It makes me crazy when I can’t be with you. I’m crazy about you, Ricky. You, as a man. Not just your cock up my ass for a few stolen moments or your incredible mouth on me, but all of you. I love you. I want to be with you forever.
But first I have to decide on that divorce, before I say anything like that out loud.
The wine is open, the cork is out. I set the bottle on the scarred hunk of wood that passes for a night table. I’m letting the wine breathe but I’m not going to tell him that. He makes fun of me. He couldn’t care less about wine. Next to the bottle on the table there’s a clock that actually works, methodically ticking away our precious fuck-minutes.
“Christ,” I say. “Look at the time already.” Forget about letting it breathe. I take a healthy swig of wine from the bottle. I begin to undress. It is absolutely frigid cold in this room.
“I think I can actually see my breath,” he says at the same moment.
“It’s not that bad.”
He gets up and fiddles with the radiator to no avail while I strip out of everything. Everything but my shoes. I don’t have any idea what’s hiding deep in the fibers of this filthy carpeting, and I don’t want to know. And I don’t want my feet touching it, either.
“
Ooh mamacita
,” he says, laughing. “You look freezing.”
Stark naked except for a pair of killer high heels, I take another swig of wine from the bottle. I don’t say anything now, I just let everything happen. I surrender to the rhythm that I know is coming because we’ve already done this so many times before. He knows it and I know it.
“What else have you got in your bag?” he asks, dragging it onto the bed now and rifling through it.
I’m standing next to the bed, shivering. I keep on drinking the wine. I feel pressured to make some serious progress with it since we’re racing against the clock here. Every time he goes through that bag of mine, I feel a little invaded and defensive. It’s not like I don’t want him to go through my bag, or that he hasn’t done it countless times, but I always feel exposed. My wallet comes out on the bed, my hairbrush—the “icky brush,” he calls it, because I never clean it. There are so many strands of my long, dark hair tangled in its bristles. The greasy, well-used bottle of lube comes out next. The glistening silicone dick comes out, too; the one that always, without fail, goes up my ass and no place else. He usually sticks it up me early on in our trysts because he’s going to want his cock in my ass eventually. I can’t easily accommodate the size of his cock without a little help getting my hole open first.
At last the two items we both know he’s really been looking for come out. The stocking. (He doesn’t know it but when that stocking was new and part of a pair, it cost three times as much as the entire tab for our lunch earlier at the diner, tip included.) And the blindfold. The handy, light gray one that American Airlines was so kind to supply for me the last time I flew to London first-class—a sleeping mask, really. I seem to have no limit to my supply of handy airplane sleeping masks.
“Turn around,” he says. And I do. My hands are already behind me, waiting for the nylon stocking to tie them together. Not too tight, but tight enough to feel the restraint will hold.
“Okay, turn back around,” he says. And I do, my pussy already engorged. It happens that fast. Tie me up, even just a little bit, and I’m instantly a slick, sopping swollen ache down there between my legs. My clit is at eager attention under a perfectly trimmed thatch of pitch-black hair that’s right at his eye level now. I imagine that he can smell me from where he’s sitting, I’m already that aroused.
It would be so perfect if he moved his head just a little closer and put his tongue on my clit. Right on it. It would feel electrifying. But he puts the bottle of wine to his lips instead and takes a quick swallow.
“You want some?” he asks, holding the bottle up at me.
“Yes,” I say.
He stands up next to me and helps me drink from the bottle. Then he puts it down. He retrieves the blindfold from the bed and slides it snugly over my eyes. It’s a perfect world now. “Sit down,” he says, helping me find the edge of the bed.
My soaking pussy meets the blanket and I wonder how many other slick cunts have wiped against it over the years. It doesn’t matter. Right at this moment, I couldn’t care less about anybody’s slick cunt but my own. Now my acute sense of hearing is my lifeline to the entire world. I am only a waiting mouth, a clit, and two very eager holes. And for some reason, as the wine and hormones battle for supremacy in my veins, I feel absolutely alive. Following the mystery of this man is now my only goal.