“I wish you would talk to me,” he’d said one night that first year out of high school, hungry for conversation, wishing for something more than the endlessly physical.
Allison and Stephanie gazed up at him. “We belong to you,” Allison said. “You can do anything you want with us,” Stephanie said. “We love you,” they both said. Just like he’d taught them to.
Max lay in bed and fondled his cock and balls, thinking of Kira, fantasizing about the softness of her belly against his cheek, the weight of her body upon him, imagining birthmarks and freckles – he’d been with the wish girls for so long that he’d begun to fetishize blemishes. He stroked and tugged himself towards orgasm, the first time in years he’d jerked himself off – why masturbate when at a moment’s whim he could have a perfect, sweet-faced cheerleader giving him a hand-job or sucking him off? But now he was thinking of Kira, and he imagined her face, those green eyes, that half-smile, as he came, spurting hot come over his fingers and on to his stomach.
As he lay in the dark he thought, Maybe it’s time I started dating.
A week went by, and before Max could work up the nerve to ask Kira out, she asked him if he wanted to get a bite after work. “Sure,” he said, and they went to an Ethiopian place near the bookstore, where they ate spicy and savoury food, scooped up with hot soft pieces of
injera
, Ethiopian fl atbread. They talked about working for the bookstore, why she’d transferred to his branch (hers got downsized), about books, and Max managed more or less to think of her as a person rather than a woman, and gradually his anxiety diminished. She was cute, funny, and interesting, and he did his best to keep her entertained and interested in talking to him. It was surprisingly easy to do. They liked the same books, hated the same movies, and Max eventually realized she was flirting with him. They started talking about fantasy novels and stories, and without much conscious thought Max steered the dialogue towards wishes. “What would you do with three wishes?” he asked.
Kira sat back against the cushioned booth, hands laced across her stomach, under her breasts. “I always thought three wishes were too many. With three wishes, you can ask for wealth, eternal youth and top it off with world peace, and feel like a big hero for the last one. I think it’s more interesting to ask what you’d do with one wish. That’s how you can tell the selfish from the generous. So tell me, Max, if you had one wish, what would it be? World peace, or strippers and blow?”
Max thought it over. He knew what he’d done with his one wish, but he’d been fourteen at the time, and by definition almost sociopathically self-centred. If he had the wish again, now . . . “I’d wish for happiness,” he said, and it felt true, like something he wanted very much.
“Selfish, but abstract,” Kira said. “I’d probably go for the strippers and blow myself. I’ve read too many stories to think that even well-meant wishes would turn out the way I wanted.”
They finished the meal, and Max walked Kira back to her car. “We should do this again sometime,” he said. “Soon.”
“We should do more than this sometime,” she said, and leaned up to kiss him. Her breath tasted of
timatim fitfit
and after-dinner mint, and his surprise made the kiss awkward, but there was something behind it, a warmth and pressure of a sort he’d never felt with the wish girls. “Soon,” she said, and that was goodbye for the night.
Max wanted Kira, wanted to make love to her, but he couldn’t. He had other means of release, however. He drove home from dinner and found a package on his doorstep. He took it inside and opened it on the kitchen counter, smiling as he drew out the tangle of leather straps and D-rings. It was the strap-on harness he’d ordered from an online erotica catalogue, along with a nine-inch black silicon dildo. “Girls!” he called, and after they appeared he directed them to shave, put on red cocksucker lipstick (they appeared fresh-faced and without make-up by default), and be back in the living room on their knees in ten minutes. “We’re doing scenario twenty-one, variation c,” he said. “Stephanie’s top, Allison’s bottom.”
“You heard him, you little bitch,” Stephanie said, and slapped Allison’s ass. “Get in there and get your clothes off.” Allison hurried away, eyes downcast, hands held behind her back.
Max leaned in the bathroom door and watched them get ready, Stephanie cajoling Allison, slapping her tits, and promising her humiliation and violations. For her part, Allison was obedient but frightened, her lower lip quivering as she put on mascara, which she would cry off in act two while Stephanie flogged her.
“Come get dressed, Stephanie,” he said, and took her into the bedroom. He laced her into a black leather under-bust corset that lifted her tits even higher than normal, and she put on knee-high leather boots. He gave her a wicked riding crop, which she lashed through the air experimentally. “I just got this for you today,” he said, and showed her the new strap-on harness. She oohed and ahhed appreciatively, the way she always responded to the sex toys he brought home, a sort of automatic erotitropism. He helped her into the harness, taking great pleasure in pulling the leather straps tight around her hips, the black dildo rising impressively erect from her crotch. “You like being top, Steph?” he said, and she nodded. He grabbed both her wrists, wrenched her arms over her head, and forced her down to her knees. He twisted her wrists, and when she gasped he shoved his cock into her mouth, thrusting hard. “Just remember, I’m the one who’s really top,” he said. “Tell me you love it. Tell me you love the taste of my cock.” He adored the way she sounded, trying to speak while he fucked her mouth, and it took all his will power not to come then. He pulled out, and looked down at her, where she knelt, breathing hard, breasts heaving prettily, arms still held over her head.
How could she be so perfect, with her teeth never brushing his cock no matter how hard he used her, never sweating, never belching, never having a headache or having her time of the month? Never . . .
Never surprising him. Perfect, and perfectly familiar. She was exactly what he’d wished for, and every night he spent with his wish girls was a night of incredibly sophisticated masturbation, and nothing more.
Well, fuck it. Pleasure was pleasure, and there was something to be said for the familiar. At least Allison and Stephanie didn’t make him nervous.
“Get up,” he said. “Let’s get Allison trussed up. I’ve got a new mouth harness I want to see her in. I’m thinking, after we whip her, we can lay her out on her back across the dining room table, and you can fuck her ass while I fuck her throat. Sound good?”
“Whatever pleases you, Max,” she said.
“I can tell you’re the shy type, Max,” Kira said, pouring him another glass of sangria. “And I don’t mind being aggressive, but I want to know my advances are welcome. I don’t want to make an idiot of myself. Are you interested in me?”
Max sat on Kira’s couch, and she passed him his drink, then sat beside him, tucking her legs beneath herself with casual grace. “You move so beautifully,” he said, the two glasses of sangria already inside him relaxing him enough to say such things. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, sipped, and said, “I studied ballet when I was a kid, but I didn’t have the body to keep it up – not thin enough, too zaftig by half. I was crushed at the time, but in retrospect, I’m glad I don’t live a life of glamorous starvation and crippled feet.”
“I think you look wonderful,” Max said, but he looked down into his drink, shy. This was nothing like talking to the wish girls. “I’m sorry. I do like you a lot. I just . . . haven’t gone out much. I’m nervous. I’ve only been with a couple of women in my life.”
“That’s OK,” she said. “That just means you won’t have as many bad habits to unlearn.” She grinned, a twinkling, mischievous look of a sort he’d never seen on the faces of the wish girls, and she plucked the drink from his hand and set it aside.
Kira leaned into him and they began kissing, and she took his hand and pressed it against her silk shirt, against her breast, which was large and full and shaped differently from those Max was used to. Her hand touched his thigh, then slid up to squeeze his cock. She kissed his neck, stroked his leg, slipped a finger into the waistband of his pants, her fingernail brushing through his pubic hair, making him shiver and tingle all over. Max’s heart hammered, pulse throbbing through him and making his cock twitch, and he felt weightless, unmoored – he didn’t know what she was going to do. Kira was an independent operator, an ongoing surprise. Her hair smelled of strawberry shampoo, and there was a hint of sweat, and her skin – the wish girls smelled almost of nothing, a little bit of baby powder, nothing else. This was intoxicating and, for the first time, it occurred to Max that sex could be a collaborative act.
“Bedroom,” Kira said, and tugged him by his waistband into her cluttered room, walls decorated with painted kites, a double bed with a white comforter. They fell into bed together, touching one another urgently, and she stripped off her shirt and bra, revealing pale breasts with large brown nipples. Her left breast was slightly larger than the right, and this amazing human variation made Max moan and push her down on the bed, bowing his head to take her nipple in his mouth and suck. She made a sound like a contented cat and lifted her hips against him. He stopped kissing her breast and pulled down her skirt, taking a moment to admire her panties – black lace, hardly there, she must have planned all along to take him to bed — and then he pulled them down, too, and buried his face between her legs. Oh, the smell, sweat, and wetness, and something unmistakably feminine – the wish girls were nothing like this. He’d gone down on them countless times, and they’d never had a scent like this, just that baby-powder neutrality.
What had he been missing all this time?
He tongued her, slipped a finger inside her, was surprised to find she wasn’t very wet yet. Another way she differed from the wish girls. He licked her, bottom to top, and she said, “Oh, that’s right, warm me up, Max.” When she was wetter, he slipped a finger into her and moved it while tonguing her clit, and this went on for a minute or so before she touched the top of his head. “Max, sweetie,” she said, “your heart’s in the right place, but your finger isn’t.”
He looked up at her, his hand unmoving, and realized that all the thousands of hours he’d spent fucking the wish girls had taught him nothing at all about women. “Tell me what to do,” he said, and she gave him that grin again.
She guided him. “There, press your fingers up towards the, yes, right there, now swirl your tongue, to the right, no, my right, yes, there, keep it up.” Max did as she said, though his wrist got sore and his tongue got tired. He’d never spent so much time going down on Allison and Stephanie, just enough to satisfy his own urge to taste and finger them, but this was something different, something more worthwhile, and after a while Kira got much wetter and bucked against his hand and tongue. She trembled, almost silently, with none of the theatrical orgasms Max had seen in porn fi lms and taught the wish girls to emulate.
He kissed her belly, and she stroked his hair, and he said, “Can I fuck you now?”
“You ’d better,” she said, and he rose up and pushed her legs apart, and she said, “Whoa, Max, not so fast, condom first.” She reached to the bedside table and lifted a square foil-wrapped packet.
“Ah, right,” Max said, suddenly terrified. He’d never worn a condom in his life.
“I’ll put it on you,” she said, and rolled him on to his back. She grasped and tugged his cock, then put it briefly in her mouth, and he swelled to full hardness. She tore open the package and deftly rolled the condom – cold, strange – on to his cock, then swung one leg over to straddle him and eased herself down, guiding his cock up into her warm wet cunt. She rocked on top of him, reaching down to tweak his nipples, slipping a finger into his mouth for him to suck. Her weight, her spontaneity, the way she moved, it was all so different and, if not for the condom acting to dull the sensation a bit, he might have come in her right away. A euphoria grew inside him, spread through his body, suffusing his limbs with out-rushing lightness. Max had never felt so good. She lowered herself, breasts against his chest, cheek against his cheek, her breath in his ear, and he reached down to take hold of her ass in both hands, thrusting his hips against her. Her breath quickened as she thrust back, and soon they were rocking together, headboard slamming against the wall, moving faster and faster, until he felt himself starting to come. He squeezed her ass harder and thrust away, the two of them moving in wonderful concert, and she gasped in his ear and shuddered, trembling. He couldn’t tell whether his orgasm had excited her into her own, or vice versa.
Afterwards, she didn’t disappear, and he was glad.
“We should do this again sometime,” he said, tentatively, afraid she’d turn away.
“Soon,” she said. “Take me to your place next time?”
“Of course,” he said.
Max knew better than to think it was true love. Oh, maybe it was, but Kira could just as easily grow bored with him, or more likely he would fail her in some way, since he had no experience with romantic relationships. But he’d turned a corner. Even if he didn’t stay with Kira for ever, there would be other women, other relationships. He’d discovered how things could be, now, and there was no going back. He’d finally grown up. But he hadn’t grown up so much that he didn’t want one last fl ing, for old time’s sake.
The next morning Max called in sick to work, and summoned Stephanie and Allison. He dressed them in black stiletto heels and knee-pads and nothing more. “Stephanie, kneel there, legs spread, and reach behind you and grab your heels. Don’t let go of your heels, no matter what.” She did as she was told, and he fastened a leather and plastic ring gag around her head, a mouth-harness that held her jaws open for constant access. She gripped her heels, breasts jutting out beautifully, and he slipped his cock through the gag into her warm wet mouth, sliding it back and forth. “Keep looking up at me with those wide eyes of yours. And you, Allison, kneel behind me and lick my asshole.”