Just then there was a knock at the door. My first reaction was to ignore it, but I was seized by a perverse whim, and went over to take away the chair and open the door. I expected Tocco or Susan, but Joan, the mother of Jean, walked in. I was completely surprised. "I just came by to say hello," she said. "Hello," I answered, somewhat coldly. We stood there for a moment and then I motioned her in. I closed the door and went to sit in the easy chair. For a long moment she looked at me, then came over and knelt at my feet. "Actually," she said, "I came to do more than say hello. I came for something special." And she reached forward and pulled down the zipper on my pants.
By this time I was suspicious of everyone and I moved to stop her. She grabbed my hands and said, "It's all right. This is something I want to do. And you can go right on drinking your coffee and smoking. It's your cock I want to be involved with, not with you." I looked into her eyes for any sign of duplicity but saw nothing but lust; her mouth seemed to glisten with desire. The old familiar tingling ran up and down the insides of my thighs, and I leaned back, waiting to see what would happen next.
I wondered at the honesty of the woman. There were many times when I just wanted to suck a cock or eat a cunt, and let the interaction be between me and it, not the person. There seemed to be some essential quality of sex in that attitude, and some words of Tocco's ran through my mind: "There is no one meaning of sex. It is as changing, as mysterious, as obvious as life itself. What we are doing here is learning the steps of the dance so we can experience all of its moods and challenges and fears and glories without tripping over our own psychological feet."
As I lapsed into a kind of reverie, my body became aware of the gentle, precise nibbling going on at the head of my cock. Joan was exploring the intimacy of tongue and penis, licking, kissing, pressing. With each touch she not only felt her own pleasure, but reverberated to the pleasure that coursed through me. And because I knew she wanted to do it, was doing it for no other reason than her own desire, I could relax completely. There was no need for me to perform, or feedback, or make sounds, or tense in any part of my body. I also knew that she would suck until I came, that her entire action was a work of art, a single complex unified gesture whose aim was the taste of sperm on her tongue. And so wave after wave of uninhibited pleasure swept through me. I was neither active nor passive: I simply was.
When she had worked over every bit of the head with her tongue, she pressed it between her lips and began making small smacking movements. I felt the blood rush through my cock and into the rim and inflame the entire shaft with heat.
Then she moved down and began licking the entire length of my cock. Her head made long graceful curves as it moved up and down, and her rough tongue tingled the soft underbelly of the now-stiff prick. She worked down to the base of it and licked at my balls, sending a jet of concentrated thrill into my bowels. She licked slowly at first and then furiously, taking the balls into her mouth and providing a thorough massage. She nosed down into the crevice between my buttocks, and gulping a little, ran her tongue down until she reached my anus, and then cautiously inserted just the tip of her tongue. I slid down in the chair to help her, but she had already moved back and up, sniffing and licking the tender junction between cock and thighs, and then back up the shaft to the blood-engorged head.
Losing no time, she moved forward and took the cock into her mouth in one gesture, pressing her tongue in counter-pressure from the inside as I moved down into the back of her mouth. At once the tip slipped past the opening to her throat and I felt her gag ever so slightly as she swallowed the entire length of me. By this time every muscle in my body had gone slack and I slouched deeper in the chair. Then, with a finger she must have prelubricated, she pushed easily and firmly into my asshole. The sensation was overpowering. I understood the full existential impact of the saying, "I didn't know whether to shit or go blind." She found the prostate gland, and began gently prodding it, so that excitement came from inside and outside, until I was one great well of warmth and pulsation.
I looked down and saw her working with the utmost concentration and care, looking as though she were performing some holy rite. And then I realized that this must be some form of worship for her. Not that she was worshipping me or any nonsense like that, but that she was worshipping the act, the very fact of kneeling and drawing sperm from my body. I burned to know what went through her mind at that moment, but as I went to speak to her, I felt the come well up in me. I reached for her in gratitude, for the beauty of what she was doing, and with that I spurted out jet after jet of thick spunk onto her lapping tongue. She pushed her mouth forward and sucked hard, drawing the last drops out of my cock.
She stayed there for a long while, sporadically squeezing my cock and licking the residue from the tube. Then she put my cock back in my pants, closed the zipper, stood up, and licked her lips in a parody of a salacious cocksucker. I snapped myself out of my slouch and began to get up, but she motioned for me to stay seated. "No, I don't want to talk or anything," she said. "I just came to suck you off." And with that she turned and walked out of the room. She stopped at the door, glanced back, and said, "Bye. See you later."
I wanted to call her back, but I realized that she knew her own mind too well for me to get her into the game I wanted to play right now. I had agreed to a blow job, and that is what I received. Perhaps I should have contracted for a half-hour conversation before I let her go down on me.
It was amusing and exasperating, and as I sat back down my mind began racing around the old familiar turf. What is sex, after all? There is the reproduction, and the mystery of birth. But what about all the rest of it? The pleasure? The role-playing? The variations? Is the sexual act itself symbolic of a higher truth? Or is truth simply a sublimation of the basic sexual drive? Perhaps sex, despite its intensity, was just like everything else: a complex, ill-understood, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, reflex. It seemed at times that the whole problem was hopelessly muddled, and at other times crystal clear.
Something clicked in my mind and I backtracked. At which times was it crystal clear? I scanned my entire sexual history in a glance and saw the obvious. Sex was clear while I was in the middle of it. At that time there is no questioning, there is simply acting, whether the acting be confused with fantasies or not. Only afterwards did the difficult questions arise. It would seem, then, that the only time to do research on sex was while one was actually doing it.
Without being aware, I had begun pacing. I walked up and down the room and suddenly realized that I badly wanted to see Tocco. Forgetting my earlier resolve to stay shut in, I went out into the hallway and headed for his study. Boldly I opened the door and went in without knocking. To my chagrin, he sat there unruffled, as though he had been expecting me for some time.
He smiled grimly. "I hadn't expected to see you today, Michael."
"That's probably a lie," I answered.
He made low
tsk-tsk
sounds with his tongue. "Now, now, doubting the guru will get you nowhere." He laughed. "What brings you here in such agitation?"
"You know that as well as I do," I said, "but I don't want to go into what happened last night. I need to talk to you about something."
"That's what I'm here for," he said, with only a trace of sarcasm.
I pulled up a chair, losing all feelings of enmity in the excitement of the ideas. I spilled out all I had been thinking in the room this morning. He listened patiently, nodding from time to time, and after I finished, waited a few minutes before answering.
Finally, he said, "Very good. But you stopped before the next question."
"Which is?"
"Which is, how to keep awareness of action from interfering with the full flow of that action while it is taking place. You see, if you think about sex after it is over, you are examining a dead memory. But if you think about it while it is taking place, then you are splitting your attention and that ends in conflict and frustration. It is necessary to go beyond the stage of knowing that you know."
"I understand the words," I said, "but they don't connect with anything vital inside me just now.
He fixed me with a long stare. ''You are very bright and it is tempting to give you further verbal clues, but that would not be to your benefit. The only thing at this point is to keep working. It isn't easy, but it is not impossible, either. Keep working, without becoming compulsive, and I will give you little pushes from time to time, or, as you saw last night, heavy jolts. And one day you will realize that you have known all along what it is you are yet to discover."
"Tocco," I said, "are you sure you're not a refugee from a monastery?"
He chuckled. "You seem to have recovered your good spirits, Michael. I had a little surprise for you which I wasn't going to give you for a few days, but I think you may be ready now." He reached under his desk and seemed to be pressing a button.
Suddenly a side door to the office opened, and two huge men stepped out. There were dressed in black tights and black hoods. I looked at them and smiled. More costumes, I thought. Tocco barked at them, "Enrico! Thomas! Take this fool to the dungeon!" I barely had time to be surprised, for they came at me with lightning speed, and they didn't look too friendly. I half rose from my chair and they roughly grabbed my arms. My reflex was to draw back, but one of them reached forward and gave me a sharp quick chop across the bridge of my nose. I saw stars explode before my eyes, and felt myself slumping forward. A blow landed on the back of my neck, and I slipped into unconsciousness.
When I came to I was naked and tied securely to a wooden post. My arms were bound with a thick rope behind me and my ankles were strapped with leather. My eyes cleared and from the mist Sylvia emerged, no longer looking like a schoolteacher. She was dressed in almost total stereotype: black leather pants with an exposed crotch that allowed her cunt to hang out, the pubic hair curling around the edges of the material; a black silk blouse, opened to her navel. Boots and gloves completed it. Her hair was swept back in a severe bun, and in one hand she carried what looked like a six-foot whip. My first response was that this was a joke, but one look into her opaque black eyes quickly convinced me otherwise.
She walked up to me, paused a moment, and spat full in my face. "More than anything," she said, "you want to grovel at my feet. You want to lick my boots and have me grind your face into the ground. You want to suck out my asshole and have me sit on your mouth while you lick my cunt. Then you would like to have me pee all over you." To my chagrin, I found myself getting excited at her words. She looked at my erection with a grim smile. "And past that, you want to rise up and throw me to the ground. You want to force my ass to the floor and pry my legs apart. And then you want everything hard about me to melt into a pleading puddle while you jam your large cock into my tender cunt. You want me to plead for mercy and finally to fling my legs around you and beg you to fuck me and fuck me. Isn't that so?"
I quickly calculated that she was on a peculiarly heavy trip, and considering my situation, the best thing to do was inject a note of normality. "Look, Sylvia," I said hurriedly, "just the other morning when we were having breakfast . . ."
My sentence was cut short by a sharp slap across the mouth.
"Silence," she snapped. "I don't want any of that stupid patter. You are much too glib for my liking, and you need to learn a new reality. You understand that you are completely at my mercy . . .
completely?
" She looked at me very hard. "Of course not. You have no inkling yet. So I shall have to teach you."
With that, she stepped back, and began, slowly and methodically, to whip me. The first slashes so shocked me that I didn't really feel the full pain of it. But by the fifth lash, fear gripped my limbs and tongues of fire seemed to be threading through my body. Again the whip fell. I looked down. Blood began to seep from the cuts. I tried to twist away, but the bonds were tied by experts. There was no escape. I looked up and saw Sylvia's face, now flushed with excitement. She was just beginning to get warmed up! The blows now fell faster and I found myself screaming, shouting for her to stop. I didn't believe it was actually happening, and foolishly I expected Tocco to step in at any moment and put an end to it. But there were no signs of that.
"Sylvia," I pleaded, "stop, please stop." And the minute I said the words, a dam seemed to burst in me. Suddenly I was crying and begging, asking her to have mercy, to please stop whipping me. The pain had become an agony, and each time the whip landed I let out a high pitched scream. Panic overtook me. The reasoning part of my mind told me that this is how most people probably react, and it only fed the flames of her madness. For a moment I told myself to be brave, and then the whip hit again, cutting through already torn flesh. I started sobbing and my head fell forward on my chest. And then, almost miraculously, the whip stopped.
Sylvia came up to me, and I raised my head to look at her. Her eyes were shining wildly and her breast rose and fell with deep breaths. "You are going through the necessary changes in reaction, Michael," a voice said. It was Tocco, speaking from somewhere behind me. "But Sylvia is a true master. She knows when her slave is merely in pain, and when he is really broken. She won't stop until you are totally in her power."