Contours of Darkness

CONTOURS OF DARKNESS

She lay across his lap, her head and feet dangling, her dressing gown pulled up over her waist. She squirmed and clenched her buttocks, revelling in the position of exposure to his silent gaze. There was an air of febrile expectation in the room, a kind of sophisticated sniggering which spiced the simple structure of the act with intimations of the wicked. She arched her back and offered her arse for his use.

7
must not succumbshe thought.
7
must remember to stay conscious/

Also available by Marco Vassi:
THE GENTLE DEGENERATES THE SALINE SOLUTION MIND BLOWER

CONTOURS OF DARKNESS

Marco Vassi

This book is a work of fiction. In real life, make sure you practise safe sex.

First published in Great Britain in 1990 by Nexus Books 332 Ladbroke Grove London W10 5AH Reprinted 1991, 1992, 1994

Copyright © The Olympia Press, Inc. 1972

Phototypeset by Input Typesetting Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

ISBN 0 352 32573 9

Lyrics of
Wild Horses
copyright © 1970 by Abko Music, Inc. Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard Used by permission. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book would not be complete without acknowledging those who helped it reach this form. Foremost are Irene and Evelyn, who lived with me successively through three drafts and bore the brunt of my confusions. Then Maurice, who would not be satisfied until it was as good as I could make it. I owe thanks to Larry, for his technical advice on smuggling; to Beverly, who provided the title for chapter eight; to Bill, my S&M instructor; to Frank, for many, many conversations and the title for chapter four; and to Muriel, for her Aquarian graciousness.

The work is dedicated to Wilhelm Reich.

The relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. From the quality of that relationship, the whole level of development of the species can be assessed.

Karl Marx

But he never had this chance to be alone. His body was in the service of others. There was no pause in life. A man was picked up in the tempo of this life, and couldn't get off it. The body had no time to reflect. It spent its energies working for other bodies. It developed cooperative reflexes instead of expressive ones.

Alan Harrington

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Rainer Marie Rilke

Trapeze

They had their words and their deeds; and the relationship between the two functions of their being formed the pattern of their lives. They sought the eternal through the passage of time, and searched for love in the rubric of sex. They huddled beneath their private solutions to the vast problems of their age until they saw that history was a director that used them ruthlessly and without asking permission to include them in its play.

She lay across his lap, her head and feet dangling, her dressing gown pulled up over her waist. She squirmed and clenched her buttocks, revelling in the position of exposure to his silent gaze. There was an air of febrile expectation in the room, a kind of sophisticated sniggering which spiced the simple structure of the act with intimations of the wicked. She arched her back and offered her arse for his use.

'I must not succumb/ she thought. 'I must remember to stay conscious.'

Aaron stroked the damp groove between her cheeks with a limp right hand, watching her tremble as his fingers trailed the entire length of the valley. No expression showed on his face. He operated her body with the bored ease of a locomotive engineer holding the throttle full open across a moonlit prairie. His hand moved insolently back and forth, and with each pass she grew more excited, like a child jumping up and down in anticipation of a treat. It was his greatest pleasure to rouse her to a frenzy of wild thrashing while he maintained his distance and control.

Suddenly he lifted his arm and brought it down sharply, the palm of his hand striking across the centre of her buttocks. She cried out once, a sound of relief, as though a splinter had been pulled out of her skin. The shock was like a slap delivered during an attack of hysteria. It underscored her sexual cycle by punctuating it. Again his hand flew up, and again slammed down, stinging the full firm globes of flesh. He began to hit her in earnest, until her skin grew pink and her legs kicked up and down, and the noises she made were tinged with desperation. He hurt her to the point where she had to scream.

'Do you like that?' he said. He hit her with all his strength. 'Do you like it?' he repeated.

In reply she cocked her pelvis back and shook her head from side to side, acting out the ambivalence of her condition. She hated the pain, especially as each blow fell upon progressively more tender flesh and became excruciating to bear. But being spanked thrilled her; her cunt moistened at the very thought of being upended and handled so rudely. Also, there was a kind of liberation to be found in the intense stimulation of her rear, more so as she yelled loudly each time he hit her. It had been many months before they were confident enough with one another to attempt other forms of quasi-sexual contact; the first time Aaron had slapped her buttocks with any force was when she was straddling his cock, pumping her pelvis into him with sustained fury, and he began to beat a tattoo on her cheeks. The step to spanking as an activity related but not integral to fucking was a short one; and at that it had taken several more months before he could wade into her unabashedly while she wailed in response.

Now, each time they did it, she discovered emotions that she was not ordinarily in touch with, bubbling from her chest as each slap added heat, released energy in her body. It was one of the few times she was able to feel and express her anger.

When she raised her rump towards him, he stopped, and looked down at the form before him. The woman lay in an attitude of utter abandon. Her arse glowed a dull red. The proud deepbark arsehole held only the smallest pucker of tension. Her cunt gave off heavy odours of secretion. She never seemed so desirable to him as at moments like this.

'Beauty is a bawd,' he said. He bent forward and kissed her on the base of the spine. 'Cynthia, how wanton you are.'

She wiggled around and smiled to herself. Aaron spread her cheeks apart with the fingers of his left hand, and with his right began to spank her vertically, slapping the whole length of the crack. A higher-pitched moan escaped her lips, an expression from a different area of her need. Each whack produced a hollow sound until he had opened her buttocks fully and could hit her cunt and arsehole cleanly. She parted her legs to expose herself even further, and again he increased the force of his blows, bruising the tender centre between her thighs.

She began to lose her breath, her self-consciousness, and dived into the waters of ecstatic surrender. She knew he might hurt her but would not damage her, so she could give herself up to the structure of their act, letting him control its content. She struggled against swooning altogether, for in a mindless state she had a tendency to grovel, and afterwards she would have trouble realigning herself with her sense of dignity. She needed to remember that what they did was a mutually agreed upon involvement, and her role as object of punishment was purely arbitrary. She had a vision of his balling his hand into a fist and punching her cunt, and she melted as the image was reinforced by the increased tempo of his slapping. Her mouth fell open and saliva dripped from her tongue onto the floor. She grabbed his ankle and licked his foot. She hovered at the brink of total acceptance, filling up on the energy released by his power.

'This is what I want,' she thought, 'this is what I really want.'

Abruptly, he stopped. A gasp of disappointment escaped her lips. She wanted it to go on forever. She had fallen out of time into the continuum of endless gratification.

'Do you want more?' he said.

The question was not a real one. It was part of their ritual, their tacit agreement to pander to one another's inner agendas. If she wanted him to continue, she would have to beg. He spoke again, his voice low and insistent, suggestive of things that were vile and base, forcing her, through her own greed for sensation, to listen and assent to everything he said. His need to reduce her to a twitching anonymity was only partially motivated by his unconscious fear of women; more cogently, it was the only method he had of transcending the level of ego.

'You don't care, do you?' he said. 'You're just an open hole.'

'Only for you, Aaron,' she told him, which was not at all what he wanted to hear.

He brought the middle finger of his right hand against her outer cunt lips, holding enough pressure just to intimate penetration. He knew that the desire to be entered, to be filled, grew voracious as it was teased, as a hungry animal grows frantic when food is held just beyond its reach. Over the years he had come to understand woman's brute capacity for fulfilment, and he toyed with that propensity as she inched upward, straining to touch the finger with her cunt. Again and again he allowed her to think she was going to have it, and then pulled back a quarter of an inch, listened to her moan in exasperation, and then watched her lift her arse once more to reach for him. She clenched and tightened the muscles in her vagina so that her cunt opened and contracted as it sought to capture its prize, like a goldfish mouthing the surface of the water for food. And when she had raised herself as high as was physically possible, he lifted his hand and with no warning slapped her quivering cunt.

She shouted out in shock and sorrow, and then burst into deep sobbing, the immediate pain of the blow reviving in her all the suppressed pain of a lifetime, breaking through the muscular blocks of resistance, calling up memories whose engrams were covered over with the grey pall of repression. He held himself aloof from her tears, letting her enjoy the fullness of her experience without interference. And when her crying subsided, and she had had enough time to integrate her reactions, he slowly began to arouse her once again, touching lightly, holding out promise of entering her cunt, and then drawing her out, seducing her into baring her shamelessness once more. He hit her again, and repeated the cycle a half dozen times until she lay limp from exhaustion.

She was heavy across his thighs, cutting off circulation to his knees and calves. His cock was crushed against his belly and his back was sore from the strain of holding her. His pleasure was abstract, a blend of visual, tactile and olfactory impressions which merged to shape an entity in his mind, a form he admired for its utter uniqueness. For him, woman was a perennial source of beauty, but in a way that would have astonished any woman he spoke to about it. The female body was a palette from which he derived the colours to create the intensely personal paintings in his soul. He lacked the conceptual means to articulate that to himself.

Cynthia wondered what he would do next. She was having a strangely enjoyable time< With each wave of abuse she discovered deeper layers of truth. She had paid therapists as much as thirty dollars an hour to help her delve into areas of self-perception she was now learning to explore with more directness and thoroughness through sexual encounter. And none of

the psychologists had ever fucked her afterwards, as Aaron always did. She was becoming capable of linking her apparent degradation with powers of surrender that subsumed the whole petty world of conquest.

She felt herself sliding off his legs and she twisted her body in order to land on her knees. She stared with twirling eyes at the picture before her: the insides of a man's thighs, black coarse hair, two wrinkled pouches of roughly textured flesh, and the sleek tender tube dominating the entire montage. For an instant the tableau went dark, and a bolt of terror shot through her. At the speed of thought she recalled an incident from when she was two, lying on a rug, her grandfather kneeling over her, dripping his flaccid penis towards her face, and she reaching for it as she would for a toy, and then holding the paradoxically dry succulent skin. The image blended with the reality in front of her. Part of her was still that infant, wanting the intimate touch that bore such enormous connotations of guilt; and part of Aaron was throbbing with the same indiscriminate sexuality that had possessed her grandfather.