“Can I sit down?” I asked, less to sit than to do something to cover up my loud breathing.
She didn't say anything. I waited awhile, then asked her again. Still silence. Had she left the room? I crossed my left leg behind my right and began the process of lowering myself to the floor, which was much more difficult than you'd imagine without visual cues.
“Don't do anything unless I tell you.”
I stood awhile more. Sweat was emanating from me, not from one particular place but in a kind of suffused oozing. The floor creaked.
“What's your name?” she asked.
“Chris.”
“Chris
what?
”
“I don't want to say.”
“Is Chris your real name?”
“No,” I admitted.
“What's your real name?” I was silent.
“Oh, you're one of
those,
” she said. “You'll learn soon enough.” A long pause. “Chris,” she said, exaggerating the Chris, “it's warm in here, don't you think?”
I shrugged. “It's okay.”
“Well, I'm warm.” Pause. “Would you like to take off your shirt?”
“Uh. Sure.”
I began unbuttoning my shirt. As I had never worn this shirt before, I had trouble getting the buttons out of the button holes, which made me self-conscious (lest she think I was nervous), so I tried to move faster, which made me more clumsy. Finally, I got it off. Not wanting to discard it, I held it in my left hand. How much did it weigh? Six ounces?
I was conscious of my erect nipples.
“Drop it.”
“It'sâ¦clean.” (I didn't want to say “new.”)
Snicker. I let go. “No bra.”
“No. Iâ¦I used to be small. Not that I'm big now, exactly, but I keep forgetting.”
“You forget?” She sounded incredulous.
“In the store I mean. I haven't bought a bra inâ¦so long.”
“I see⦔
What
did she see? Oddly, I felt almost sleepy.
“You work out?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
She continued questioning me in this calm and impersonal manner, as if at a doctor's office. The calmness was reassuring,
though it gave me the feeling she was disappointed in my appearance. But perhaps she was merely nervous about how I'd feel about hers.
I could both hear and feel the floor move as she approached. Her breath sent little waves of warm air at my face, waves that must have smelled nice, since they did not repel me. I smelled armpit smell too, not so nice, but that could have been me.
I waited, but she did not touch me. If she had, perhaps I would not have begun to get wet.
“Can I take the blindfold off now?”
“No.”
“When can I?”
She moved away, with her breath and warmth. “Please finish getting undressed.”
Please: What did that mean? I didn't know the rules. Would she say, in the same neutral voice, please bend over so I can shove a dildo up your butt?
Slowly I unbuckled my brown leather belt, unbuttoned the top of my shorts, unzipped the zipper. The shorts began to slip off me, and I held them so they wouldn't.
“Let go,” she said.
As my right hand let go, my shorts tilted and I heard my keys drop out. I restrained an intense urge to pick them up.
“What's the problem?” The fingertips of my left hand still clutched my shorts.
I didn't want to put the idea of running off with my clothing into her head, if it was not there already. “I've never done anything like this before,” I finally said.
“You've never taken off your shorts in front of another woman?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
We were silent awhile. The tickingâwas it my watch? “I⦠I'm scared,” I said.
“Of course.” Silence. “What are you most frightened of?”
“I don't know.”
“I'm sure you do.”
“Being hurt, I guess,” I finally said. But that wasn't it, exactly.
“Chris.” She said it reproachfully, almost sadly. “You do know that some of the things we might do together might hurt you, don't you? That's partly why you're here, isn't it?” she said in an insinuating fashion.
“Now let go of those shorts, and take off your underpants too.”
This was difficult, as I could not raise my foot to take my sandal off with my shorts around my ankles. Nor could I kick the sandals off. When I tried to bend I got dizzy. Finally I had to sit down, pull off the sandals, and then remove the underpants.
“This is really embarrassing,” I said, then stood up.
“The little femme,” she said, I suppose in honor of the lacy black underpants I had bought from Victoria's Secret in honor of our “date.”
“I'm not sure what I am,” I replied.
“Perhaps we'll find out.”
I was now barefoot and naked, my hands over my breasts. For all I knew, the windows were wide open, and people in the apartments across the street could see me.
“Turn around so I can see the rest of you. Slowly.”
As I turned I felt awkward and unattractive, the parody of a model.
“Move your legs apart.”
I did this slowly, as the gunk was creating a suction between my thighs. It made a slight noise as it broke, which I hoped she could not hear.
“My, my,” she said. Very lightly I felt her fingers brush the hair around my vagina, or rather (as hair has no feeling), I felt
the pressure of the hair moving the follicles. Then it seemed to stop, although I felt (or thought I felt) the warmth of her hand above my skin. At times I can be aroused by anything, and I felt gunk moving down my legs. Moving slightly, as if to shift weight, I moved my legs farther apart, willing not just her fingers but her hand inside. Instead, she moved her hand and ran her fingers down my face. With the light breeze (open window? fan?) the gunk dried into a mask.
If I was excited (and I was!) it was not so much because of what was happening as because it reminded me of something I had seen in a porno movie. The predictability of my responseâas if I were your standard male voyeurâirritated me.
She stuck her fingers in my mouth.
“Do you like to taste yourself?”
I shrugged. “'Sokay.”
“Just okay?” She moved her fingers in my mouth until the soapiness was gone, then returned them to where they had been before.
“Keep them apart,” she commanded. I had started, or perhaps had just started to think about, contracting my legs around her hand.
“God,” I said. “Oh God.”
“Surely you're not going to come,” she said.
“Jesus.”
Jesus.
I bit my lip. I was dripping. I haven't felt like this before, went through my mind, though of course it wasn't true. I wanted to howl. I was moaning. She withdrew her hand.
“God, please don't stop,” I begged.
“Don't,”
she said. “I don't want you to.”
“I can't help it. Oh God...” I grabbed her hand and tried to shove it in my vagina.
“Please.”
She grabbed my left arm and twisted it behind my back. I fell onto her, felt her solid muscle.
“Who makes the rules around here?”
She turned me so my back was toward her. Her right hand moved around my body to grab my right nipple. She squeezed it between her thumb and finger. At first the pressure felt good, because the pain distracted me from my desire, then the pain itself became the problem. “Ow,” I said. “Owâ¦ow.” She put her left hand around my neck and yanked. My feet slipped and I was leaning against her, her body supporting me. Once I stopped fighting this I relaxed and let myself sink into the pain. The pain was so deep it was no longer connected to the nipple but spread in waves. But somehow it didn't matter. Then she began twisting her hand, and the pain was again sharp and discrete, as if a pin were going through the center of my nipple. I became worried, not about the pain, but that she might do permanent damage to my nipple.
As I tried to pull away, she grabbed my left nipple with her left hand. This fresh pain distracted me from the old one. Then she squeezed more sharply with her right hand and the lower part of my torso twisted in that direction. Soon this alternation of pain became a rhythm, and I again relaxed.
At that moment she dropped my right nipple, grabbed my hair, pulled my head back, and sucked, really hard, on the side of my neck. It would be a gigantic hickey. Then it became a bite. I felt like she was eating me. Like she was an animal. “Ow. Oh. Ow.” Her teeth dug into me. What if she drew blood? Wasn't she worried about AIDS?
She stopped for a minute. She pulled back my hair, so my throat was exposed to her.
I wanted her to bite it, suck my blood, make me part of that strange race.
She pulled my hair harder. “So, Chris, does it matter what I look like?”
“No.”
Seduction
Terry Wolverton
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Night drew a filmy curtain of darkness over the city, a veil of cinder that blotted the stars. Kendra unbolted the door to the crumbling warehouse, and the sky disappeared, giving way to a thin, watery light cast on walls of scarred concrete.
As the young woman led the way up five steep flights of musty stairs, Lee grumbled, “I'm too old for this.” Inspired as she tried to be by the undulation of Kendra's ass ascending before her, she found the setting put a damper on her lust. Her knees ached from the climb, and the squalor of the dank old building did not fuel the aura of romance.
The loft they entered after Kendra released three locks was large and filthy, full of decrepit furniture scavenged from curb-side and strange configurations of objects arranged in a manner that was meant to be artistic. Perhaps there had been a time when Lee might have found the scene exotic, the proverbial walk on the wild side, but now it only wearied her. She longed for the neutral luxury of her hotel room, its gleaming tub outfitted with Jacuzzi jets, the chocolates left on the pillow like a lover's departing kiss, crisp sheets turned down, inviting.
That's where she'd intended for them to end up, after a quiet, elegant dinner in the Village, but Kendra had refused. “It'll be so uptight, so straight!” she'd whined in protest. “Come to my placeâit'll be more fun.”
It was a tactic Lee had used herself, a fatal blend of reprimand and promise that had proved effective in countless situations. Now here she stood in this grimy loft on the edge of what was once the Bowery.
Sound was blasting from some walled-off corner at the far end of the room, the same robotic, vicious beat Lee remembered from the club the night before. She cocked an eyebrow in question.
“That's just Arturo,” the young woman explained with a breezy wave in the direction of the noise. “One of my roommates. Don't worry, he's cool.”
At this news, Lee slumped into a chair, raising a swarm of dust from the hideous polyester spread that draped it. The frantic bass called forth an echoing throb behind her eyes.
“Isn't that a riot?” Kendra giggled, pointing to the bedspread's lurid pattern. “Nimo got it on Orchard Street for three bucks.” There was marvel in her voice for someone who could glean such treasure with such economy.
Lee could only imagine how this gamin would regard her own Malibu hideaway, its careful landscaping, its lavish Southwest decor. She had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to make her home exactly the way she wanted it, but these kids could only have disdain for such display, reveling instead in the tacky, the banal.
“Just how many roommates do you have?” she questioned, trying to keep the sourness from her voice. They might as well make love in Grand Central Station, for all the privacy afforded by this loft.
“Four,” Kendra answered, slithering onto the arm of the chair, pressing herself next to Lee. In lieu of a shirt, the girl was
wearing a long-line bra, recycled from a thrift shop and dyed black, the bra cups cone-shaped, pointed as missiles. Perched as she was, she afforded an enticing view of her cleavage. “It's the only way we can swing the lease. You'll probably get to meet them. Except for Trina; she's the video artist, remember? But she's out in San Francisco for a week.”
Lee made a halfhearted stab at an expression of regret over the missing Trina; Kendra must have spoken about her but Lee remembered nothing. She was determined to maintain a semblance of charm, though a dark mood stalked her, shadowed her nerve endings with bared teeth and hungry eyes. She needed to regain the upper hand. Lee Bergman had accomplished her first seduction at the precocious age of ten; the object of her attentions, Delores di Carlo, had been twelve at the time, with a body that had burst abruptly into maturity only months earlier. Lee had had forty years of practice since that sweet initiation, and in that time had rarely met refusal.
Fingering the soft hollow at the base of the young woman's throat, Lee inquired huskily, “Where's your room?”
Kendra met her gaze and, with a breathless “This way,” led her in the direction of the screaming sound. At the far end of the loft, both corners had been walled off; Kendra headed for the room that was not Arturo's.
A bare bulb in a wall socket illuminated the bleak space and its random contents. Lee had tried to prepare herself for the aging mattress on the floor, but when she saw it, sheets knotted in a lump and somewhat less than clean, her spirits wilted. Aside from the mattress, there was a trunk, from which spewed an assortment of underwear; a portable clothing rack hung with various confections in leather and spandex; some piles of books, mostly art criticism and translations of French philosophers; a portable CD player; and a rough-hewn crate that served as nightstand and dressing table. Next to the bed,
half-hidden by the tangled blanket, lounged a long, thick dildo the color of licorice, attached to a leather belt.